The heat had put most of the passengers to sleep. They were small people, they fit these seats and could be recumbent in them. I hunched forward and forced myself to take notes on the blank pages of the book I was too tired to read, Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. From time to time I smoked my pipe. I did not talk to anyone. No one talked to anyone. There was no conversation on this train.
It struck me that since leaving Veracruz the trains I had taken had not been noticeably congenial. I was continually reminded that I was travelling alone. I had not expected the people to be so dour or the trains to be in such a state of decay. I had assumed there would be the usual free-for-all - planters and tenant-farmers, Indians, hippies, ranch-hands, coastal blacks, Americans with rucksacks and road-maps, a few tourists. But the train held only the very poor - everyone else had taken the bus. And these were not just poor people, but defeated people, who wore hats but no shoes, and regarded not only strangers but each other with suspicion. They were hardly the stuff of boon companions, and though I liked the rattle of the train and congratulated myself on having found a little-known route through Central America, this made for rather lonely travel.
The penalty for this sense of discovery - who would have guessed Guatemala to be such desert? - this sustaining experience of making my way among marvels of erupted landscape, was that I was a stranger travelling with strangers. They were either oblivious to, or mystified by my presence. They stole glances at my pipe, but when addressed by me in their own language displayed (in shrugs and grunts) a marked reluctance to chat.
Across the aisle an old woman was hawking and spitting. She would clear her throat and then spit - pah! - on the floor at her feet. This annoyed me (and the passengers walking through the mess nauseated me), but there was worse to follow. A woman selling coffee out of a large clay jar entered the train at a tiny station. I had had no breakfast, and more, thought that a hot coffee would be just the thing to bring on a sweat that would cool me. In the hottest areas of Burma, the wise Burmese drink cups of steaming tea and stay cool that way. The coffee-seller dipped a tin cup into her jar and decanted this into a cup she pulled out of her pocket, and handed this to a buyer. When the person finished the coffee, the woman took the cup back and repeated the process. So everyone used the same cup. If I had not known, or if I had been able to persuade myself that I was in no danger, I might have bought a coffee. But, before it was my turn, the spitting woman called the coffee-seller over.
'How much?' she said.
The coffee-seller told her the price: two cents.
The woman spat, drank, wiped her mouth and handed the cup back.
It was my turn next.
I said, 'Do you have another cup?'
'Sorry,' she said and moved away.
Further on, a small girl boarded with some watermelon. Most of it had been sliced. I said, 'Those pieces are too big for me,' and took out my switchblade. As I cut my own piece ('This is about the right size, eh?') - my cutting was a guarantee against cholera -1 noticed that what I had taken for seeds on the cut pieces were glossy black flies.
The mountains receded into the distance. We had circled around their slopes and descended to a blighted area, a straight line of track.
For the next few hours I looked for the Motagua River, but it was nowhere in view. This was Death Valley. The earth here was finer and duller than sand; it was powder, light brown, that was stirred by the movement of the little train. There was a dusting of it on all the cactuses, which gave them the look of stumps. There is no more hopeless object than a dead cactus; it does not collapse, but rather turns grey and hard and seems to petrify. The rest was scrub or single stones, and once, not far from the track, the ribs and skull of a cow, much whiter than the one I had seen in Texas. The only odour was the dust of this pulverized plain. The chief characteristic of a desert, apart from the absence of water, was this absence of smell.
I kept thinking of what the lady in the hotel had said to me: Don't go toZacapal
But if I had not come here I would not have known the extent of this desolation. The heat was intense, but it was still tolerable, and hadn't I complained of the cold just a short time ago in Chicago? I had asked for this. And this was the route the muleteers had taken into El Salvador; it was also - though hardly used these days - the principal way of travelling to Puerto Barrios and the so-called Atlantic coast. It was bad, but if it got no worse than this - it was hard to imagine anything worse - it would be bearable.
I did have one fear: that the train would stop, just like that, no warning, no station; that the engine would seize up in the heat and that we would be stuck here. It had happened on what was regarded as a fine railway a hundred miles out of Veracruz, and the Mexicans had no explanation. This railway was clearly much older, the engine more of a gasper. And suppose it does, I thought, suppose it just stops here and can't start? It was ten in the morning, the open cars were full of people, the train carried no water, there was no road for miles, nor was there any shade. How long did it take to die? I guessed it would not take long in this boundless desert.
It was no reassurance, half an hour later, to arrive at the town of Progreso. Aldous Huxley had come this way in 1933: 'As we steamed out of the station, I noticed that the place was called Progreso. The fact annoyed me; I can detect an irony without having it underlined for me.' Progreso was huts of unbaked mud-bricks, with palm-frond roofs (odd: there were no palms nearby, no trees of any sort). And Rancho, some miles further on, was no better: no progress in Progreso, no ranches in Rancho. This was the hottest, dustiest, most derelict place I had seen outside the boondocks of northern Uganda.
But there was one great difference. The graveyard near Rancho was large and easily identifiable as a graveyard. The tombs were nearly as big as Rancho's mud huts; they were solid and looked newly whitewashed, cottage-shaped with pillars and slanting roofs. They were much stronger than the huts. But I could see the logic in this. A man spent a life-time in a mud-hut, but these tombs had to house his remains for all eternity. The mud huts were not built to withstand earthquakes - the tombs were.
In this scorching heat, I was very thirsty. My mouth was so dry I felt as if I had eaten a handful of moths. An hour later I bought a bottle of soda water and drank it warm. But the heat did not let up, nor did the landscape change. From halt to halt, the cactus and the pulverized soil were all there was to see. People scrambled onto the train, people scrambled off; people slept; the old woman spat. Every so often I thought: What if the engine dies on us - what then! And saw a skinny man, like the Angel of Death, watching us from the rag of a cactus's shade.
I had passed the point of expecting to see anything different, when a long trough of black water appeared beside the train - an irrigation ditch. It became a narrow canal and poured from spouts into fields -corn at Malena, tobacco at Jicaro. The green was dazzling and I had got so used to the desert tones, this colour seemed miraculous. But it was, after all, no more than a small patch in an immense desert.
Jicaro appeared to be in earthquake country. There were not many huts here, but those I saw all had a crack or a collapsed roof or wall. They were still lived in, however; the people had accommodated themselves to missing walls or gaps. There were houses being built here, too - without a doubt the houses planned by those American architects I had met in Guatemala City. But I could not say that the government-assisted project was a success. There were many three-walled houses, without roofs, which demonstrated the lack of inclination of anyone to finish them off and take up residence. The town of Jicaro was wrecked: the catastrophe showed, and very little of it had been rebuilt.