An Aymara Indian of a superior kind with a red worsted cap struck him sharply on the knee, speaking in a severe, disapproving tone and pointing. 'Don Esteban,' called Eduardo again from some little way ahead, 'we are almost on the edge of the puna. If you would like to dismount I believe I could really show you something this time.'
Stephen looked up. Immediately ahead was a low red cliff and on its top the rounded crest towards which they had been travelling so long, now suddenly quite close. They must have mounted another two or three thousand feet, he reflected, taking notice of the still thinner air, the sharper cold. 'We will join them round the next bend,' said Eduardo, leading him towards a shaley path up the cliff while the llamas carried on along the trail, quite broad and distinct at this point.
'This was no doubt a mine,' observed Eduardo, pointing to a tunnel and a spoil-heap. 'Or an attempt at a mine.' Stephen nodded. They had passed no mountain, however bare, remote, waterless and inaccessible, without the mark of men having been there, searching for gold, silver, copper, cinnabar or even tin. He said nothing. His heart was already beating so as to fill his bosom, leaving no room for breath. He reached the top, but only just, and stood there controlling or trying to control his violent gasps while Eduardo named the great shining snowy peaks that soared on either hand and in front, all rising like islands from an orange belt of cloud, one behind the other, brilliant in the cold transparent air. 'Now,' he said, turning to Stephen, 'I believe I shall take your breath away.'
Stephen gave a weak, mechanical smile and followed him carefully over the tufts of coarse yellow grass. Trees had been left behind long, long ago, and here there was not even a hint of a bush, not even of a prostrate bush, only the near-sterility of ichu grass stretching away and away for ever over this high stark plateau. The ground looked flat but in fact it rose and fell, and pausing by a rocky outcrop Eduardo gave Stephen a significant, triumphant look. Stephen, half blind by now, followed his gaze down the slope and to his utter amazement he saw a scattered grove of what for a moment he took to be thick-stemmed palm-trees about fifteen feet high: but some of them had a great solid spike rising as much again above the palm-like crown.
He ran unsteadily to the nearest. The leaves were like those of an agave, fierce-pointed and with hooked thorns all along their sides: the great spike was an ordered mass of close-packed flowers, pale yellow, thousands and thousands of them. 'Mother of God,' he said. And after a while, 'It is a bromeliad.'
'Yes, sir,' said Eduardo, delighted, proprietorial. 'We call it a puya.'
'Ruiz did not know it. Nowhere is it described, still less figured in the Flora Peruvianae et Chilensis. What would Linnaeus have made of such a plant? Oh, oh!' he cried, for there, as incongruous in this severity as the bromeliad, flew or rather darted minute green hummingbirds, hovering at an open flower, sipping its honey, flashing on to the next, taking no notice of him whatsoever.
A week later and two thousand feet higher Stephen and Eduardo walked out across the flank of a quiescent volcano at a fine brisk pace: on the left hand a chaos of rocks, some enormous; on the right a vast sweep of volcanic ash, old settled ash, now just blushing green from a recent shower. They were carrying their guns, for in the puna beyond this chaos there was a possibility of Eduardo's partridges; but their main purpose was to contemplate a lofty rock-face with an inaccessible ledge upon which the condor had nested in the past and might well be nesting now.
They threaded the chaos, and although the north-facing boulders were coated with old ice they found several interesting plants among them as well as some droppings that Eduardo pointed out as being those of a vicuna.
'How do they differ from those of a guanaco?' asked Stephen.
'Apart from the fact that they lie separately rather than in a family heap, I should find it difficult to say,' replied Eduardo.
'But if you were to see the two side by side you would distinguish them at once. This is low for a vicuna, however; he must have come down for the fresh green on the other side."
'Perhaps we may get a shot at him,' said Stephen. 'You yourself said that you were tired of fried guinea-pig and ham.'
'So I did,' said Eduardo, and then, hesitantly, 'But, dear don Esteban, it would grieve me if you were to kill him. The Incas have always protected the vicuna and even the Spaniards leave him alone in general. My followers would take it very ill.'
'Sure, he is safe from me. Yet my best poncho is made from vicuna's wool."
'Certainly. They are killed from time to time, and by certain people... There is our condor.'
There he was indeed, black in a dark blue sky, wheeling towards his still-distant cliff. They watched him out of sight. Stephen did not return to the vicuna: Eduardo was embarrassed and there was obviously some question of the old ways here. He and his followers were no doubt practising Catholics, but this did not prevent them from dipping one finger in their cup and holding it up to thank the sun before drinking, as their ancestors had done time out of mind; and there were other ceremonies of the same nature. 'As you know,' said Eduardo, 'the chick cannot fly until his second year; so if he is there, and if the light is what I could wish, we may see him peering over the edge.'
'Could we not climb up and look down on him?'
'Heavens, no,' cried Eduardo. 'We should never get down before sunset; and it is terrible to be caught by night on the puna. Do but think of the terrible evening winds, the terrible morning winds, and the wicked cold - nothing to eat, nothing to drink, no shelter at all."
Stephen was thinking of these things as they walked across an accidented stretch of country when, rounding a tumble of rock, they heard the squealing neigh of a guanaco. They stopped short, and there on the left hand stood the guanaco they had heard, while still farther to the left a string of others fled at a great pace, vanishing down the slope.
The guanaco neighed again, louder, still more shrill, stamped the tall spiky ichu grass with his front feet and began rearing and waving his head in a great passion, never yielding a foot as they approached.
'He is challenging you,' said Eduardo. 'He has been fighting -look at the blood on his sides. He may attack you presently. You could not ask for a better shot; nor a better supper.'
'But I must not shoot him?'
'Why, don Esteban,' cried Eduardo, 'how can you speak so? He is no vicuna - he is much too big for a vicuna, and the wrong colour - he is a guanaco, and a perfectly fair quarry for you.'
Stephen's piece had one barrel loaded with shot, the other with ball: he knelt, which enraged the guanaco, took careful aim, and fired. The animal, struck in the heart, gave a great bound and disappeared, apparently collapsing in the long grass.
'The first day we eat steaks, minced very fine,' said Eduardo as they hurried up the slope. 'The next day, in the sun, his shoulders grow quite tender.' Eduardo could be as cheerful as any European, but it was clearly part of his ancestral code to show no adverse emotion: a Stoic calm. Yet now his look of eager expectation changed to one of plain blank undisguised dismay. The guanaco had in fact been capering on the edge of a chasm and its convulsive leap had carried it over.
Two hundred feet below them he lay, and the cliff dropped sheer. They pondered, searching in vain for any way down; they measured the declining sun, the shadows rising below them; unwillingly they turned, and as they turned first the male condor and then his mate began their first wheeling sweeps high overhead.
Another day, on the high puna yet again, coming back from a small alpine lake, the source of a stream that eventually flowed into the Amazon and so on to the Atlantic (though from here on clear mornings they could make out the gleam of the South Sea), a lake on whose frozen bank Eduardo had shown Stephen that handsome goose the huachua with a white body and dark green wings, they paused in still another group of puyas, some of them growing among rocks so conveniently placed that Stephen was able to gather seed from the lower flower. It was late, but for once the evening was as calm as the day, and the llama-train was clearly in sight on
the trail below.
'Let us walk down wide,' said Eduardo, looking to his flint. 'I still have hopes.'
'Very well,' said Stephen, and they went down the slope abreast, twenty yards apart. When they were a stone's throw from the trail a fair-sized bird sprang from a tuft with a whirr of wings. It was clearly Eduardo's bird and he fired, hitting it so hard that it bounced again. 'There,' he cried, as happy as a boy, 'here is my partridge at last: or at least what the Spaniards call a partridge.'
'A very handsome bird, too, so it is,' said Stephen, turning it over and over. 'And to be sure there is a superficial resemblance to a partirdge: though I doubt it is a gallinaceous bird at all.'
'So do I. We call it and its cousin tuya.' 'I believe it is one of Latham's tinamous.' 'I am sure you are right. A very curious thing about the tuya is that the cock-bird broods the eggs, sometimes the eggs of several hens, like the rhea. Possibly there is some connexion.'
'Sure the bill is not unlike... But you will never tell me you have rheas at this exorbitant height?"
'We certainly have, and higher still. Not the blundering great rheas of the pampas, but fine grey birds that stand no more than four feet high and run like the wind. God willing I shall bring you in sight of some on the altiplano, soon after we leave the monastery.'
'How good and kind you are, dear Eduardo. I look forward to it with the keenest anticipation,' said Stephen; and having felt the bird's skeleton under its plump breast, 'I fairly long to dissect him.'
'That would mean fried guinea-pig again,' observed Eduardo.
'Not if we confine our attention to his bones,' said Stephen. 'A bird, very gently seethed for some hours, will always leave his bones in the pot. You will say that his flesh is not that of the same bird roasted, which is very true; but how much better, even so, than our eternal guinea-pig.'
The monastery of which Eduardo had spoken was five days journey to the south-east, but the prospect of the altiplano rheas, the salt lakes with their different kinds of flamingo, and the unending deserts of pure white salt itself lent Stephen Maturin wings and, helped by unnaturally kind weather, they reached the high lonely mission in four although they were loaded with the spoils of Lake Titicaca - the skins of two flightless grebes, two different species of ibis, a crested duck and some rails, together with plants and insects.
Eduardo and his train appeared well after what little dusk there was in such a latitude and at such a height. They had to hammer on the outward gate and bawl a great while before it opened; and when at last they were admitted, worried and discontented looks received them. The building had been a mission belonging to the Society of Jesus until that order was suppressed; now it was inhabited by Capuchins, and the friars, though no doubt good-hearted, pious men, lacked both the learning and the dissimulation often attributed to the Jesuits. 'We did not expect you until tomorrow,' said the Prior. 'Today is Wednesday, not Thursday,' said the Sub-Prior. 'There is nothing to eat,' said a friar in the dim background. 'Juan Morales was to bring up a roasted pig tomorrow, and several hens - why did you not send to say you were coming today?' 'If you had sent yesterday morning we could have asked Black Lopez to tell Juan to bring the hog up today.' 'Black Lopez was going down in any case.' After a silence the Brother Porter said, 'Well, there may be a few guinea-pigs left in the scriptorium.' 'Run, Brother Jaime,' cried the Prior. 'Let us lift up our hearts. And at least there is always some wine.'
'"There is always some wine," cried the Prior, my dear,' wrote Stephen, 'and I cannot tell you how well it went down. Nor can I tell you how much I look forward to the next few days, when my amiable companion promises me the wonders of the altiplano, perhaps even of the edge of the Atacama, where rain falls but once in a hundred years. He has already shown me little bright green parakeets in the desolation of bare rock at fifteen thousand feet, mountain viscachas, fat creatures like rabbits with a squirrel's tail that live among the boulders, piping and whistling cheerfully, and many other delights in those prodigious solitudes with snowy peaks on every hand, some of them volcanoes that glow red by night; and he promises more to come, for extreme conditions beget extremities in every form of life. I could however wish that one of the extremities was not the guinea-pig or cavy. He is neither beautiful nor intelligent, and he is the most indifferent eating imaginable -barely edible at all, indeed, after the first half dozen braces. Unhappily he is readily domesticated; he dries, smokes or salts easily; and he can be carried for ever in this dry, dry cold air - a cold air in which the native potato too can be and alas is dried, frozen, dried again and so packed up. I have tried to make this dish a little more palatable by adding mushrooms, our ordinary European mushrooms, Agaricus campestris, which to my perfect stupefaction I found growing here in alpine meadows: but my dear companion told me I should certainly drop down dead, his followers too assured me and one another that I should swell, then drop down dead; and it angered them so when I survived a week that Eduardo had to beg me to stop - I might bring misfortune upon the whole company. They look upon me as an unwholesome being: and I must admit that I cannot congratulate them upon their looks either. At this height, in this cold, and with the incessant effort, their faces grow blue, a dull and somewhat uninviting leaden blue.' He reflected upon these Indians and upon Eduardo for a while, dipped his pen again and wrote, 'Will I tell you two things now before I forget them? The first is that there are no ill smells up here, no smells at all. The second - ' He dipped his pen again, but now the ink had frozen, which did not surprise him; and gathering his vicuna poncho round his meagre form he walked off to his bed, where, when a certain slight degree of warmth had gathered round him, he lay thinking of Eduardo and their conversations all that afternoon as they climbed steadily from La Guayra.
Eduardo had given him a detailed account of Pachacutic Inca, the first great conqueror, and of his family down to Huayna Capac, the Great Inca, to Atahualpa, strangled by Pizarro, and the Inca Manco, Eduardo's ancestor, and of the many still-existing collateral families descending from Huayna Capac. It did not surprise Stephen to hear of bitter enmity between cousins, nor of feuds lasting from the earliest times to the present, nor indeed of brother murdering brother - there were after all well-established precedents - but it did surprise him after a while to find that the general drift of his friend's conversation seemed more and more to be in the direction of outside support for one particular branch of the royal line, so that it might neutralize the other Quechua clans and unite a sufficient force of Indians and well-wishers to liberate at least Cuzco, their ancestral home. It surprised him because he would have sworn that a man of Eduardo's intelligence must have seen the impossibility of such a scheme - the unbelievable number of totally conflicting interests - the extreme unlikelihood of reconciliation between the hostile groups - the wretched outcome of Tupac Amaru's rising not long since, drowned in blood by the Spaniards with the help of other Indians, some of the royal blood. He concealed his surprise, but he let the words flow past his ears, deliberately forgetting to record the genealogies, the names of those likely to support the cause, and of those already committed.
Yet as he lay there unsleeping in the cold his perversely retentive memory rehearsed these lists, and he was still with the descendants of Huascar Inca when a barefoot friar came in with a charcoal brazier and asked him whether he was awake, because if he was, the Prior thought he might like to join them in a novena addressed to Saint Isidore of Seville, begging for his intercession in favour of all travellers.
Returning to his now warmer room from this exercise Stephen fell into a dreaming sleep: Diana, sentenced to death for some unquestioned murder, stood before the judge in an informal court, guarded by a civil but reserved jaileress. She was wearing a nightgown, and the judge, a well-bred man obviously embarrassed by the situation and by his task, was slowly tying a hangman's knot in a fine new piece of white cordage. Diana's distress increased as the knot reached completion; she looked at Stephen, her eyes darkening with terror. He could do nothing.
; Still another barefoot friar, looking casually into his cell, expressed some astonishment that Stephen should not yet have joined don Eduardo and his company. They were there in the courtyard, the pack llamas already loaded and the sun rising over Anacochani.
So it was: yet the western sky was still dark violet at the lower rim and as he looked at it Stephen remembered the words he had intended to write to Diana before he put his letter to the candle: 'in this still cold air the stars do not twinkle, but hang there like a covey of planets', for there they were, clear beads of unwinking gold. He could not relish them however; his dream still oppressed him, and he had to force a smile when Eduardo told him he had reserved a piece of bread for their breakfast instead of dried potatoes, a piece of wheaten bread.
The high querulous voice of the llamas as they set off, the steady clop of his mule striding along the road, the glorious day rising huge overhead in a sky of immeasurable height, and on every hand brown mountains capped with white, the thin and piercing air growing warm as the sun climbed well above the peaks.
Nobody spoke much; nor would they do so until the warmth and the exercise had loosened their powerful chests - the breath still came steaming from them all and all seemed totally absorbed by their own reflexions. Yet the train had not gone two miles or three before a long wavering Aymara howl stopped each man in his stride.
It was a short stocky Indian just coming into sight behind them, rounding a curve in the mountain side. He was a great way off, but in this brilliant clarity Eduardo at once said 'Quipus', on either side of him his followers murmured 'Quipus'.
'I am sure you have often seen quipus, don Esteban?' said Eduardo.
'Never in life, my dear,' replied Stephen.
'You will see them presently,' said Eduardo, and they watched the far small man as he came running steadily along the track, his coloured staff rising and falling. 'They are knotted cords and thin strips of cloth: our kind of writing, concise, ingenious, secret. I am a sinful creature, but on no more than a few inches I can record all I must remember at confession; and only I can read it, since the first knot gives the clue to all the rest.'
The Wine-Dark Sea Page 24