At one town there was a bar; it was called The Blue Danube' in Spanish, this bar near the much-mightier Magdalena. Outside it was a hitching post, with three saddled horses tied to it; the riders were at the window, drinking beer. It was an appropriate wild-west scene in this poor empty land, the settlers' shacks and the pig-pens and the rumours of emeralds. It was no better in the train. The passengers were either asleep or sitting silently, traumatized by the heat. Half of them were flat-faced Indians in shawls or felt hats.
In the late afternoon, we had word at one station that near Bogotá there had been a derailment, probably caused by a landslide. The Frenchman confirmed this, but said that he didn't mind - he was getting off at La Dorada. The news of this derailment did not really surprise me. In Barranquilla, Dudley had put me in touch with anAmerican who was working on transport problems. This fellow had shown me the latest statistics for derailments on the line between Santa Marta and Bogotá. He only had the figures up to 1972, but these were enough: in 1970 there were 7,116 derailments, in 1971 there were 5,969, in 1972 there were 4,368. He said the situation was getting worse; so I set out from Santa Marta expecting to be derailed, or to be held up by one. (It is also said that bandits stop this train and rob the passengers, but the Colombians on the train denied that this was so.)
'You think we're going to make it?' I asked the conductor.
'You will be in Bogotá tonight,' he said. 'That is the truth.'
Soon after, the mountains appeared, the cordillera of the Andean chain; and with them the brown Magdalena River on which men paddled dugout canoes or fished from the shore with contraptions that looked like butterfly nets. The mountains were at first scattered buttes and solitary peaks, and some were like citadels, squarish with fortress-like buildings planted around the summits. But it was an illusion -there were no buildings. My eye, unprepared for these heights, was misled, and made the strangeness into familiar shapes. The train rolled straight at these blue, grey, green peaks, and what I took to be loops of cloud - faint tracings in the sky - were mountains, too; and everything around me which had seemed no more than vapour had substance.
The train started to climb towards the vapour and fog. Here, it was still hot and dry; there, it was raining. We entered the rain, which was a cold zone in a drenching downpour. The fields and gardens were bright green, and here were villas the likes of which I had never seen before. They were on the hillsides, behind hedges and walls, with names like 'Seville' and 'The Refuge'. They had swimming pools and flower gardens and lawns as evenly-coloured as carpets. Some were like castles, and some were built like Swiss chalets, and one was made entirely of orange tiles, like a fairy-tale house with conical roofs. The Indians and the ragged people in the Expreso de Sol, who had come from the coast, watched these houses pass with astonishment and something like alarm. I wondered whether they realized that single families occupied these grand houses on the mountainside. The houses seemed fantastic to me; what, then, would a person from a Magdalena village think of them?
I asked one of the passengers. He gaped through the window, his face was wet with rain. It was cold, but he was in his shirt-sleeves. 'Who lives in these houses?'
'The bosses,' he said in Spanish.
But this was Colombia. There was no swamp without a mountain, no mansion without a cluster of huts. The huts were nearer the tracks, and in the villages hunched-over peasants hurried through the rain. It was cold, but we had moved from the plain to the mountains with such rapidity that my shirt was still damp with sweat, and now it chilled me to the bone. I put on my leather coat and still I shivered.
Then, on this mountainside, the train stopped. As if by a prearranged signal everyone got off. There were buses waiting. No announcement had been made about the derailed train ahead, the landslide; but everyone knew. We went the last few miles in an old bus, skidding on the rain-slick mountain roads. For the first time on this trip I felt I was in mortal danger. We arrived in the high rainy city in darkness.
The mournful countenance of Bogota's antique buildings is pure Spanish, but the gloom of its setting is Andean and all its own. Even on a sunny day, the three peaks - the convent, the cross, the Christ statue - are wet and dark; the city is spread across a gigantic shelf of granite. Over a mile and a half high, it experiences mountain weather; it rained for most of the time I was there, and this cold drizzle imprisoned it in dreary solemnity. My mood was no better. The height gave me the staggers. I tottered from one end of the city to the other, slightly dizzy and feeling palpitations.
Before the skyscrapers were put up, Bogota's church spires must have given the place a sullen beauty. They are the best examples of the golden age of Spanish architecture, and what with a climate like that of north-west Spain it is not hard to believe in some parts of the city that you are, as Boswell puts it, 'perambulating Salamanca'. Bogota's contact with Spain was considerable, since for hundreds of years it was easier to get to Spain - sailing down the Magdalena to the sea - than to anywhere else in Colombia. Culturally and geographically, Bogotá was aloof from South America and its own hinterland. It remains so, a lofty city with an unscalable class system. Cows crop grass in Bogota's parks, but this hint of the pastoral is all but obscured, like the church spires, by Bogota's ugly office buildings.
With the sight of my first Indian in Bogotá, my Spanish images quickly faded from mind. There are 365 Indian tribes in Colombia; some climb to Bogotá, seeking work; some were there to meet the Spanish and never left. I saw an Indian woman and decided to follow her. She wore a felt hat, the sort detectives and newspapermen wear in Hollywood movies. She had a black shawl, a full skirt and sandals, and, at the end of her rope, two donkeys. The donkeys were heavily laden with metal containers and bales of rags. But that was not the most unusual feature of this Indian woman with her two donkeys in Bogotá. Because the traffic was so bad they were travelling down the pavement, past the smartly dressed ladies and the beggars, past the art galleries displaying rubbishy graphics (South America must lead theworld in the production of third-rate abstract art, undoubtedly the result of having a vulgar moneyed class and the rise of the interior decorator - you can go to an opening nearly every night even in a dump like Barranquilla); the Indian woman did not spare a glance for the paintings, but continued past the Bank of Bogotá, the plaza (Bolivar again, his sword implanted at his feet), past the curio shops with leather goods and junk carvings, and jewellers showing trays of emeralds to tourists. She starts across the street, the donkeys plodding under their loads, and the cars honk and swerve and the people make way for her. This could be a wonderful documentary film, the poor woman and her animals in the stern city of four million; she is a reproach to everything in view, though few people see her and no one turns. If this was filmed, with no more elaborate scenario than she walking from one side of Bogotá to the other, it would win a prize; if she was a detail in a painting it would be a masterpiece (but no one in South America paints the human figure with any conviction). It is as if 450 years have not happened. The woman is not walking in a city: she is walking across a mountainside with sure-footed animals. She is in the Andes, she is home; everyone else is in Spain.