The Complete Collection of Travel Literature

by Tahir Shah

  An army of assistants appeared with tapes in their fingers and pencils behind their ears. One took away our disco clothes at arm’s length, his face contorted with disgust.

  We strolled about the town in crisp starched shirts, and gaped in disbelief at the components of this almost European capital.

  The buildings might have been in Paris or London, the farrago and bustle of people like that of New York. I felt more at home there than in any other place. An almost eastern courtesy enveloped the society, as did a sensation that one could live there in contentment forever.

  Argentina’s enormous former prosperity based upon meat and wheat — which had existed until the middle of the century — was reflected in the extent and grandeur of the avenues, and the facades which run along them. Ladies strutted about in wide-brimmed hats or with parasols and their escorts held open the doors to small cafés. But the signs of a former malevolent totalitarianism abounded.

  Tea was poured into china cups with real saucers beneath at the Richmond Tea House on Avenida Florida. A young lady took off her tweed coat and slowly stroked back her rich auburn hair. Lipstick was fresh on her lips. Her dilated eyes gazed lovingly, across the green leather-topped table, into those of her date. We had seen such sights but rarely, if at all, for many months.

  Foxes ran from dogs and from horsemen clad in red, in paintings across the walls. The young couple fed each other crumbs of teacake and whispered secrets from mouth to ear. Beside them two gaunt women clutched at their cheeks and swapped their gossip across the green leather. Kiato leaned back into the rounded chair and smiled. He rubbed at the bezel of his cornelian band and said, “My wish of paladise has come. You learry are a magicar ling.”

  Below the tea-room Argentines of all ages were playing chess and drinking beer. The air was thick with cigar smoke, as slouched figures, old and young, pushed carved pieces from one square to the next.

  At the far wall a crouched but somehow imperious figure was moving two queens in succession towards a sole black pawn. He was large and familiar. Opposite him Luigi, the Irishman from Shepherd’s Bush, pushed his single chess piece in random terrified movements.

  Luigi saw me and bounded up like a Great Dane, embracing Kiato and myself warmly. Rudolf van den Boch-Drackenburgh seemed astounded to see us. Then he produced a set of manicured nails for me to shake.

  “Bet you never expected to see me again,” Rudolf began in a very confident manner. “You left me with that drunk witch!”

  “Did she cure you?” I asked.

  “Cure me?” said Rudolf. “I couldn’t get rid of the damn woman. She was besotted with me. There was only one thing to do.” He stopped speaking and I bent forward to hear the secret.

  “What was that?” asked Kiato.

  “I gave her a bottle of my musk aftershave which she took a liking to. She drank half of it and poured the other half over her head. I had to give her my Swiss Army penknife with sixteen blades as well.”

  “Actually,” butted in Luigi in a frail voice, “it was my Swiss Army penknife.”

  “Shut up, you Irish idiot!” said Rudolf.

  Luigi’s face dropped for a moment, then he nuzzled up to Kiato, elated that he was with friends once again.

  Rudolf led the way down Avenida Nueve de Julio, one of the widest streets in the world. He seemed to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of Argentine history and events. Plucking up courage, I asked how he had acquired such a gigantic amount of information, challenging him at the same moment on his always flawless English. Rudolf caught me in his steely stare, pausing for a moment. His jaws parted, and he said coldly:

  “I read.”

  Oswaldo’s tales of Patagonia and its ice mountains were more vivid in my mind than ever. I had told them over and over to Kiato and he, too, was heartened at the prospect of a new adventure.

  I longed to walk in Patagonia and see my old friend Oswaldo. Resisting Luigi’s whines that we should all go to dance at the Hippopotamus Club, we went to buy train tickets for Bariloche instead.

  Rudolf looked up from a hardback copy of The House of Dread, by Dostoevsky, and said that he had no intention of being cold. Luigi looked at his master in clear anticipation that he might be allowed to make the trip.

  “You are forbidden to go anywhere without my permission,” said the Dutchman.

  Luigi cringed deeply and asked:

  “Then do I have your permission to go with them to Patagonia?” Rudolf looked the stooping masochist up and down. He narrowed his eyes and slowly mouthed the word, “No”.

  Next evening Kiato and I left the Hotel Ushuaia. We went to the railway station for the eleven o”clock train to San Carlos de Bariloche. I crawled down onto the floor to sleep beneath the seats. The wheels ground on the tracks a few inches below my head. And the faint smell of shoe leather and cigarette ends made me cough as I lay stretched out. Feet of all kinds tripped over my legs during the night.

  At six A.M. the sun rose and a waiter in crimson garb rushed through the carriage calling,

  “Cafay-Cafay Oy-Cafay! Cafay-Cafay Oy-Cafay!”

  Juggling an urn and cups like skittles, he moved down the aisle. Children scampered from one seat to the next, avoiding the floor. Their mothers sat about sucking mate through a bombilla, straw. The tea-like drink is made from the leaves and green shoots of the yerba mate tree — Ilex paraguayensis, a kind of holly which grows in northeastern Argentina. A sealed cup, with a bombilla tube often embedded in it, is passed from one person to the next.

  Out on the pampas, cattle ran from gauchos; and the sun rose high above the scrub, which had replaced the greenery of Buenos Aires in the night. The train hummed as we sped across the boundless plains of Argentina.

  From time to time it would pull to a stop and various characters would climb aboard. Some would sit before descending a few miles on. Others would stand at the front of the carriage with bags of marvels and cry their wares. The audience was captivated by frequent demonstrations of useful objects. One man exhibited a device to stamp patties from a pound of minced meat. Another sold knitted tablecloths covered in geometric designs.

  At one such stop an elderly gentleman with red sideburns, and a flat cloth cap, climbed aboard. He removed his checked green overcoat and a very worn pair of rubber galoshes, then sat next to me. I smiled and he began to read a book in English. I tilted my head unobtrusively, so as to be able to make out the small lettering on the spine. It read, Eskimo-English Dictionary, and was by Rev. Edmund J. Peck. The gentleman noticed my interest. I cricked my neck in straightening it, guiltily, at speed; he peered over his half-moon bifocals and introduced himself as Morris Meadowcroft, from Grimsby.

  Now retired, Mr. Meadowcroft was indulging in his favourite hobby of fifty years: train-spotting.

  “There’s nothing better than taking a long train ride with a good book,” he said.

  “Is an Eskimo-English dictionary as interesting as it looks?” I asked politely.

  “Interesting?” he said. “This is a marvellous edition, simply marvellous! Of course, we must now bear in mind that it is not Eskimo, but Inuit.”

  “Are there any simple phrases that you could teach me, should I ever need them?” I asked.

  Morris Meadowcroft beamed with joy that I was showing a regard for his marvellous edition. He scanned a page and his forehead crumpled into troughs.

  “What about Passijaksavngijutiksarsivok, to start with?” he said.

  “What on ealth does that mean?” Kiato asked.

  “He finds cause for an excuse,” was the answer from the train-spotter from Grimsby. He continued...

  “Pattingovokit, means, he is tired of eating marrow. Iglovikamepok, stands for he is in the snow house. Or what about Kannilerungnarpok?”

  “What does that mean?” I inquired.

  Morris Meadowcroft looked serious for a moment and then said:

  “It may snow.”

  The cabin lights were switched on when it became dark. Morris Meadowcroft stepped down
the ladder in the middle of nowhere. With the checked green overcoat coat on his shoulders, rubber galoshes on his feet, and the Eskimo-English dictionary under one arm, he seemed prepared for anything.

  It was Kiato’s turn to sleep on the floor. He stretched out and murmured disjointed syllables, apparently in Eskimo and Japanese, before falling asleep.

  As I lay on my back and watched the moon shine from above the flat Argentine landscape, I thought for a moment about all the unusual characters I had met. What surprises were there still in store? The next day we would sleep in Patagonia.

  Kiato woke up in the middle of the night and said he could smell snow. An icy wind gusted down the centre of the carriage. We peered through a frosted window: there was a blizzard outside. I went to the lavatory and slipped about on the skating-rink floor. Kiato’s knees seized up with cold and we huddled together in our starched cotton shirts: as always, unprepared for what was about to come.

  Bariloche sits on Lake Nahuel Huapi, and is mirrored within her waters. We walked from the railway station towards the cluster of wooden houses of Swiss design, a few miles from the Chilean border. Oswaldo’s village was a little higher in the mountains. I went to the post office and rang his house. When he heard my voice, he screamed with laughter. Within the hour, Kiato and I found ourselves bundled up and sitting in front of a crackling log fire. Oswaldo crushed my ribs and chortled three times. I had never seen him happier.

  “Yoo crazee chappy!” he gurgled. “Yoo gooing to love Patagonia, dese ees me hoome, dese ees your hoome. Vee all gonna live together in Patagonia!”

  Oswaldo’s mother — a female version of her son — rocked back and forth in one corner of the room. She moved two long knitting needles about each other with a degree of expertise.

  “Mama gonna made yoo dee sweatering soots,” said Oswaldo, “dose seellee seetee cloothes not for Patagonia.”

  Kiato rasped his fingers over the flames; he had never once complained at having all his possessions stolen. He turned to Oswaldo and asked if we could walk amongst the ice mountains.

  “Vee walk over every one meng!” shouted the Patagonian.

  Five layers of blankets sheltered me as I slept. Yet only the hardest concentration ensured that I did not move at all, and thus remained warm.

  Suddenly, a stream of yellow light pushed into the room as the door slowly swung open. Oswaldo crept in with plates of boiled salt cod — bacalao — broth, and a heap of what seemed to be itchy horsehair sweaters. I fumbled for Kiato’s watch: it was three A.M.

  “Oswaldo, is it really necessary to get up this early?” I groaned.

  “Caramba! Everyone getteng up eerly in Patagonia. Hooray, vee gooing on expeedition. Today vee walking on dee bloo mounteens.”

  I gulped a pint of chicken broth, but my stomach was clenched asleep. And the back of my neck was rasped by the horsehair sweater as I pulled it over my head. But outside the snow was falling and we knew that warm clothes would be a necessity.

  A van with bald tires — and rusting snow-chains wrapped around them — pulled up. Kiato and I were bundled into the back. Two burly creatures lounged in the front, chain-smoking. Oswaldo murmured some syllables in a local dialect. The chains slid across the slush, and we moved out towards the mountains of blue ice.

  The driver had a peg-leg and looked like a pirate; his companion had a bird’s nest beard, which obscured much of his face. A one-legged mountaineer? Before I had seen India I would have thought such a thing impossible. Yet Maindra Pal, with one leg, at forty-nine climbed the Himalayas. He broke a world record, scaling Mount Abi-Gamin, 24,140 feet. Something in common for the two Gondwanaland extremes.

  From time to time we would have to jump out and push the vehicle for a mile or so up the steeper parts of the icy track. Whenever I moaned, a hip-flask of chicken broth was handed to me — in the apparent belief that one taste of such an elixir would cure my discomfort. The soup contained Jaborandi, a South American aromatic herb which causes, as I soon discovered, sweating and salivation.

  The Pegleg and his friend, who boasted that they were trained guides, would lead the trek.

  “Can we drive all the way to the ice mountains?” I asked.

  “No Señor,” was the pirate’s answer.

  “Where will we stop?” I asked. The Pegleg looked around. There was thick forest on three sides and an endless wall of snow on the fourth. He switched off the engine and mumbled, “Okay here, caballeros.”

  We ploughed through what seemed to be a cross between bamboo and bracken. Oswaldo told tall tales of a mythical jabberwock that was said to lurk amongst the fibrous stems. He reminded me that Zak had spoken of a colossal mythical creature — a toxodont — which was thought still to roam the highlands. Kiato believed every word. He soon spotted giant footprints which he claimed were those of a great pachyderm.

  I dared not reveal to him Zak’s description of a toxodont — which he had alleged was of the rhinoceros family — only with coarser hair. Even without these details Kiato grew very worried indeed.

  Streams ran under a layer of ice which had trapped fallen leaves as it froze. Where the forest’s canopy was tightly-knit, a carpet of fine green moss cushioned each footstep.

  So this was Patagonia, the place of which Oswaldo had spoken as we had tramped across those African lands. He had been right to be so proud of his homeland.

  One waterfall cascaded into another, tumbling down into a pool carved from the forest’s floor. Oswaldo wanted me to see everything: he seemed almost to point to each frozen berry, each twig that we passed.

  “Dees ees Patagonia!” he repeated, over and over. As Kiato put it, he was “positivery leverring” in it.

  Pegleg knocked on the door of a shack which broke the undergrowth’s symmetry. A youth, whose beard was just starting to come through, pulled back the door, as a little fresh snow fell from the lintel. Three wolf-like dogs leapt out and sniffed around our ankles. The boy called for them to sit. Their orange eyes burned in gray-white faces, as they pranced about in defiance of all command.

  “They”re three-quarters wolf and one quarter dog,” said the boy as we sat about an open fire drying our socks. “I raised them from day-old puppies, they’re supposed to obey me, but they always pretend not to understand.”

  The Pegleg said that darkness tended to fall suddenly, and even though it was now only late afternoon, it would be wise to spend the night in the shack. My feet were freezing — water had seeped in around them — and the horsehair sweater had rubbed the skin from my neck.

  I lay back and breathed in the smell of melting plastic. Kiato fished Oswaldo’s hiking boot from the flames. Deformed with heat, a taper of noxious fumes rose from where the laces had been.

  When I asked the young man about his life, with Oswaldo translating, he responded to my questions in a lethargic manner, which seemed quite characteristic in Patagonia. It was an attitude that Oswaldo did not have: perhaps this lack of it had caused him to travel elsewhere. We gulped as much chicken broth as our stomachs could take, then bedded down for the night. One of the puppies clambered about on a set of over-sized paws, wanting to be cuddled. He crawled into Oswaldo’s sleeping bag and whined all night.

  In the morning the wolf-dogs nuzzled between the boy’s legs as he sat. He asked if I had ever visited Caleefomeeah. I said that I had.

  “I’m going there,” he replied. I perked up a little, surprised and pleased that he wanted to travel.

  “When are you going?” I asked. He thought for a moment, rubbed his chin, and replied vaguely, “Oh, any day now.”

  Oswaldo was eager to hurry out again into the forest. He had secured the damaged shoe to his sock-covered foot with string. The wolf-dogs howling behind, we pressed on into the bracken.

  Soon there was silence again, but for the crunching of our shoes on the icy ground. We moved in single file, each stepping in the footprints of the one in front. Pegleg was at the head of the party: he claimed to know the layout of all Patagonia. His
best friend, the man with the bird’s nest beard, was second. The two were inseparable, and chattered away in what sounded like a slurred and garbled dialect.

  Kiato, Oswaldo and I stumbled along behind the two professionals: we were new to the trekking business.

  The snow-covered path, that had weaved through the forest and bracken, suddenly divided. One fork led towards the sound of gushing water. We took the second branch. After five minutes the trail came to an abrupt end. A rock-face sheered upwards.

  At first it seemed obvious that the experts had brought us the wrong way. Kiato and I turned round and started to walk back to the junction. Pegleg whistled like a parrot and pointed to the top of the bluff. Then he began to climb.

  Forty feet above the ground, Oswaldo clung spread-eagled and whimpering to the rock-face. The two old Patagonians had scaled the precipice effortlessly and had left the rest of the party wobbling in their wake.

  Ten feet below Oswaldo, Kiato’s left cheek was pressed against the bare rock. His fingers grappled for niches, as he began to recite lines from a Buddhist prayer. My hands wrestled for the same nooks as Kiato’s feet and, in a moment of agony, my fingers and his boots agreed on the same holes. In my anguish I gaped upwards. Some sixty feet above, the two old professionals were roaring with laughter.

  It was noon by the time we had overcome our fear and conquered the rock-face.

  In the distance we could now see the precipitous slopes of a gigantic glacier rising even higher upwards. We stood gazing, captivated by its beauty and the brilliance of its aquamarine form. Oswaldo, who had instantly forgotten the terror of his rock-climbing experience, started to sprint towards the peak, screaming in Spanish. He ran and ran until all we could see was an ant-like speck. I was nervous that he had finally lost all sanity. Then he suddenly disappeared. No one rushed to help him.

  The snow grew deeper and more compact as we crossed a wide plain and neared the glacier. We trudged in a single line towards the ice mountain. I wondered what we would do when we got there. We tramped on, past a heap clothed in horsehair and embedded in a drift. It was Oswaldo. He lay face-down, hoping that we would take pity on him. Each of us carried on, hardened by the expedition, and united only in our belief in the survival of the fittest. Oswaldo realized that we would not stop and solemnly joined the rear of the column.