'Where are you from, sir?'
I told him.
'Very far,' he said.
'And you are from?'
'Armenia.' He gestured at the sky. His poncho was folded on his lap. It was very hot.
'Do you think we will get there?'
He smiled, he shrugged.
I said, 'I wish I was home. I have been travelling, but I keep asking myself if it is worth the trouble.'
The man laughed. If my Spanish had been better I would have translated what I had just read: He never passed that week in his life which he would wish to repeat.
We talked about the men painting the bridge. For this trivial chore the traffic in Girardot had halted and no vehicle was allowed across the bridge. Painting was difficult, said the man; was it not? They were trying to do a good job. He sat and sweated and mocked. The coastal Colombians had been loud and effusive, but these mountain people were stoical and sometimes wry.
'It doesn't matter,' said the man. 'I'm going home. I will be inside my house tonight.'
'You are lucky,' I said. 'You could walk home if you wanted to.'
'No. I could not walk through the Quindio Pass.'
More waiting, more Boswell. 'Mr Elphinstone talked of a new book that was much admired and asked Dr Johnson if he had read it. Johnson: "I have looked into it." "What, (said Elphinstone) have you not read it through?" Johnson, offended at being thus pressed, and so obliged to own his cursory mode of reading, answered tartly, "No, Sir, do you read books through!" '
We began to move - slowly, but I was grateful for the motion after this purgatorial waiting in the sun. It was not only the painters who had held up traffic, but a police patrol, boarding buses and inspecting trucks for drugs. Or it might not have been drugs. They climbed onto our bus and walked up and down the aisles with their hands on their pistols. Then they singled out half a dozen people and made them empty their suitcases at the roadside. This happened four times in the trip from Girardot to Armenia, and one of the times I was asked to empty my suitcase. 'What are you looking for?' I asked. The policeman did not reply. Inside the bus, the man next to me said, 'You should not have asked the policeman that question. You see, he is not looking for anything. He is just making trouble.'
The mountains were as yet still distant. The stretch between Girardot and Ibagué was surrounded by green hills and shady meadows and farms: corn, cattle and well-watered valleys. It seemed idyllic, and at every house the bougainvillea was in blossom, purple and orange. The colour alone seemed a form of wealth. The landscape was gentle, and the deep green grass made me feel mellower: to have seen this was to have discovered a part of this poor, country in which people lived in contentment, with space and a mild climate. I was still reading, looking up from time to time. Boswell was just right for this trip, and often in these uplands of Colombia I was given clarification by the book, or emphasis; or - as it happened in this pleasant valley - a kind of deflation.
'The modes of living in different countries, and the various views with which men travel in quest of new scenes, having been talked of, a learned gentleman . . . expatiated on the happiness of a savage life; and mentioned an instance of an officer who had actually lived for some time in the wilds of America, of whom, when in that state, he quoted this reflection with an air of admiration, as if it had been deeply philosophicaclass="underline" "Here am I, free and unrestrained, amidst the rude magnificence of Nature, with this Indian woman by my side, and this gun with which I can procure food when I want it: what more can be desired for human happiness?" . . . Johnson: "Do not allow yourself, Sir, to be imposed upon by such gross absurdity. It is sad stuff; it is brutish. If a bull could speak, he might as well exclaim, - Here am I with this cow and this grass; what being can enjoy greater felicity?" '
It was true; I could not presume on the contentment of these Colombian peasants. It helped to have Doctor Johnson nearby to strike a cautionary note.
We stopped in Ibagué to endure a police search, and then headed out of town. We had not gone a hundred yards before we started to climb a mountainside. We turned and turned again, gaining altitude; and in minutes Ibagué was beneath us, rooftops and steeples and chimneys. We had entered the Quindio Pass.
In my travel-weary frame of mind, it took a great deal to tear me away from the charms of Boswell and Johnson. But at the Quindio Pass I put the book aside and did not pick it up again for several days. I had seen nothing to compare with this, well, rude magnificence of nature. Not even the Central American chain of volcanoes, or Death Valley near Zacapa, or the wild heights of Chiapas were as grand as this. In this green canyon, deep down, ran a river; but the river was white and unreachable. What houses and small farms there were in the canyon were fixed somehow to the cliffsides; and the cliffs were so steep the huts seemed painted there, primitive two-dimensional splashes of huts and plots. The straight-down precipice meant that the bean furrows ran one above the other, like the grooves on a vertical washboard. I saw no people venturing out; it looked as though they would simply fall down as soon as they left their front door, and how they hoed their washboard gardens I could not tell.
There were only the gardens; there were no animals - there was no room for them, nothing flat enough to hold a chicken, much less a pig. And the farms were few - a dozen vertiginous small-holdings and the rest green steepnesses and plunging ravines of thin air. The road was cut into the mountainside and it was so narrow that the buildings which faced onto it - nearly all of them were bars - were propped over the ravine, underpinned by timber scaffolding. Birds nested in these lofty beams.
The one town on the way, Cajamarca, lay on a small ledge. I could not see it until we were in it, but a moment later the houses dropped away, and Cajamarca was rusty roofs and hat-brims, a hamlet magnetized to a cliff. The tortuous road helped to explain Bogota's remoteness. This was the only way south and west, to the coffee regions and the main port of Buenaventura. Flying back and forth over Colombia, one would have no idea of the difficulty in getting petrol and food to Bogotá, and the longer I travelled overland here the more Bogotá seemed a fastness in the Andes which bore no relation to the other towns. And it was still a country in which river and mule-track mattered. In the rainy season a road like this through the Quindio Pass - it was only partly paved - seemed unthinkable. Even on this dry bright afternoon five trucks lay wrecked on the road, and the drivers perhaps sceptical that any help would arrive had built small camps beside the trucks, the way pygmies do when they manage to kill an elephant they cannot move.
It was probably less the splendour of the heights than the depthless terror of the empty space beside them that silenced the passengers. Most were Indians, with dark sulky faces under porkpie hats and wrapped in ponchos for the cold. They were impassive and did not move except to stuff bits of goat's cheese into their mouths. After the disgusting meal at Girardot, I had got hungry, and as we waited on a bend for a truck to pass us a boy had come up to the bus yelling, 'Cheese! Cheese! Cheese!' The word echoed against the ravine walls. Lumps of it, the texture of unrisen dough, were wrapped in banana leaves. I bought a lump and ate it, pinch by pinch. It was salty and tasted of goat, but it was no worse than Gorgonzola.
Four hours passed in this way in the labouring bus: cheese, curves, and occasionally glimpses of the ravine that took my breath away.
At the highest point in the pass we were in cloud. Not tufts of it billowing in the genie-shapes I had seen near Bogotá that morning, but a formless white vapour we had entered and become lost in. It was a void and it had taken away the road. It dripped into the bus and it obscured the ravine; it veiled the peaks in some places and obliterated others further on. It shut out the sun, or rather dimmed it, giving it a bulbous pearly stare. The vapour changed from white to grey and there was no road, no valley, no mountains, no sky, only a grey sea-kingdom of mist, like the horror scene that greets Arthur Pym at the end of his voyage. It was a species of blindness, of blind flight, like a children's tale of a rattletrap bus that takes to the air, of enchantment so pure and unexplainable - and now we'were buffeted by wind - that I lost all sense of space and time. It was most of all like an experience of death; as if, try as I might, I could see nothing beyond the silly immediacy of this bus but a grave featureless vapour, my senses in collapse.