'It is my food,' said the woman.
The passengers continued to stare at her.
'I forgot it this morning,' she said. 'That was my son.'
'He is a fast runner!' said the drunken man next to me. 'That soldier is pretty quick, too. Hyah!'
The soldier had tucked his rifle under his arm. He took up his position by the door and glowered at the man. You might have thought, from the way the soldiers scanned the huts by the track side and kept their rifles ready, that they expected to come under heavy fire. But nothing more lethal than a banana peel was aimed at the train.
These huts, and some in a horrific slum outside San Salvador, were the worst I saw in Latin America. Rural poverty is bad, but there is hope in a pumpkin field, or the sight of chickens, or a field of cattle which, even if they are not owned by the people in the huts, offer opportunities to the hungry cattle rustler. But this slum outside Guatemala City, a derangement of feeble huts made out of paper and tin, was as hopeless as any I had ever seen in my life. The people who lived here, I found out, were those who had been made homeless in the last earthquake-refugees who had been here for two years and would probably stay until they died, or until the government dispersed them, and set fire to the shacks, so that tourists would not be upset by this dismal sight. The huts were made out of waste lumber and tree branches, cardboard and bits of plastic, rags, car doors and palm fronds, metal signboards that had been abstracted from poles, and grass woven into chicken-wire. And the slum, which remained in view for twenty minutes - miles of it - smouldered; near each house was a small cooking fire, with a blackened tin can simmering on it. Children rise early in the tropics; this seemed to be an entire slum of children, very dirty ones, with their noses running, waving at the train from curtains of yellow fog.
The train passengers on their way to Zacapa did not take much interest in this slum, but one could hardly blame them. They were as ragged as the people in the huts.
And then there was nothing. No shacks, no trees, no people, no smoke, no barking dogs. The ground gave way and there was emptiness; the sound of birds and insects was eclipsed, and in that silence was a thin echo of crows. It was a startling experience of space. We were on a bridge and crossing a deep gorge. 1 looked out of the window; the sight took my breath away - my legs went numb and a buzz began in my ears. Hundreds of feet down, at the rusty struts of a bridge, a gash of rock lay beneath us. We were leaving Guatemala City's plateau and making our way across this rickety bridge - but a long one: I could not see the far side - to the mountains on the northeast of the city. It seemed a particularly dangerous traverse for this train, not only because it was so old and trembled on the bridge, but also because all the windows were open.
Steeling myself for the shock, I leaned out and took another look at the gorge. There was no water in it. There were pinnacles of rock which had snagged scraps of fog, as country hedges and thorns snag bunches of fleece; and through this streaming whiteness a pair of crows flew and steadied themselves. I looked down upon the crows' backs, and this sight, with the white behind it, was like a glimpse of sky - the birds' silhouette in the clouds - as if the train had turned upside down. There was nothing but fog above the train, but below it were broken clouds, and birds, and a glint of sun. This topsy-turvy sight made my head swim. I shut the window.
'Open the window!' A boy of about eight or nine hit me on the knee.
'No,'I said.
'I want to look out!'
'It is dangerous,' I said.
'I want to see!' he yelled, and tried to get past me.
'Sit down,' I said. People were staring at me. 'It is very dangerous.'
The boy spoke to his father - the drunken man. 'I want to look out of the window. He will not let me!'
I smiled at the old man. 'He will fall into the valley.'
'You,' said the old man, pushing the child aside, 'you will fall into the valley!' The boy sulked. The old man said to me, 'He is always causing trouble. One day, something terrible will happen to him.'
I could see that the old drunken man was angry. Trying to calm him I said, 'Your son is a good boy, but this train is very dangerous - so - '
'This train is not very dangerous,' said the man. 'It is an old useless train. It is worth nothing.'
'Right,' I said. The Indians nodded. It gladdened me to know that these people recognized that the train was a piece of junk. I had thought, from their silence, that they had not noticed.
There were more bridges, more gorges filled with cloud and fog, but none was so frightening as that first one. And yet this part of the trip reminded me of the route through the Khyber Pass taken by the battered train to Peshawar. It was more than the view from a similarly beat-up car of rocky mountainsides; it was the sight of a dozen sections of track - ahead, across the valley, and one beneath that, and one over there, and another lying parallel, and more above and below all the way to the valley floor. Not a dozen railways, but pieces of the one we were on, sections that would lead this wheezing engine around four mountains to a descent, another bridge, another climb to the winding sections that ringed those far-off cliffs. Round and round we went; sometimes the engine was silenced by its distance from us on the far side of a ridge, while at other times the curves were so tight it roared past us on a hairpin and seemed like a different train altogether, going in the opposite direction.
The valley floors were stony; the fog had lifted here. The sun revealed the landscape as dead and brown, and the plants which appeared as pale green woods from on high were thorn bushes and bunches of cactus, so thin they cast no shadows. I had thought Guatemala was green - the whole of it like the jungly part around Tecún Umán - but passing from west to east and then pushing north-east to Zacapa, the country had become barer and poorer and stonier. Now in the Motagua Valley - shown on the map as hilly, with a river running through it - we were in a waterless desert: no sign of the river in this parched wasteland. The mountains were stone, the riverbeds rocky; no people. And it looked even worse up ahead as the empty land stretched dustily into the sun.
Every ten or fifteen minutes, the train halted. The soldiers jumped out and positioned themselves in a crouch on the ground, a firing posture. Then a few people would hop to the ground and, without looking back at the train, begin walking into the desert - gone, lost behind the boulders, before the train started again. Most of these stations were not listed on the ticket; they were signboards, a clump of cactus, nothing more than that. Aguas Calientes was one of these: a sign, some cactus, a heap of rocks at the foot of a dry mountain. We started, and I saw a dry riverbed that mimicked a road, but near the riverbed an odd sight - great spurts of white steam from the hot springs that gave this place its name, bubbling from beneath that mountain which was a volcano. There were hot pools around the shooting steam, and women were doing their washing in them. Not even cactus could live among these geysers - the boiling water foamed in the bare rock and drained through the cracks; and the only live things visible in that dead corner of desert were the bent-over women scrubbing their laundry.
The first large station was not a station at all, but a row of shops, a school, and some tall dead trees. People watched from the porches of the shops and children ran into the schoolyard to look at the train (there were only two trains a week). Here, a number of people got off the train, but no one got on. And the train was so infrequent and unde-pendable that not even food-sellers bothered to show up at this station. A boy with a case of tonic hollered to ask whether anyone wanted a drink-that was all. But one Indian in the opposite seat from mine had got off, so now I could stretch out my legs.