I said that the Spaniards had arrived at a period of civil war. Ata-huallpa had usurped the Inca throne from his brother. The people were fatalistic - they thought the Spaniards had been sent to punish them. It wasn't hard to conquer people who believed they were guilty already.
They were a degenerate race,' said Mr Medina.
The Incas had a system of social security that was a damn sight better than anything Ecuador has produced.'
They were what y ou see - lazy people with a different mentality. '
'Different from yours, you mean?'
'And from yours. This talk about the Incas in Ecuador is nonsense -Ecuador history is Spanish history, not Indian history.'
That sounds like an epitaph,' I said. 'Whose grave will it be written on?'
Mr Medina was growing impatient with me. He gathered his fingers together and rapped the table and said, 'Do you know what fetishism is? That is their religion - fetishism. They have to see the statue and touch the cross. It comes from their own religion and it is horrible to see. They do not believe what they can't see. That is why they touch the holy things and grovel in the church.'
I said, 'People do that in Boston, Massachusetts.'
'Stay in Guayaquil,' he said. 'You will change your mind.'
But I could not think of any reason for staying in Guayaquil. Moreover, the Autoferro on which I was supposed to have a seat remained booked up. If I went back to Quito, I was told, I could then take the Autoferro back to Guayaquil and fly to Peru. I decided to do this and left the very next day, and it was arriving in Quito on that planethat reminded me of the hopelessness of air travel and how futile it would be if every arrival and departure were recorded in the out-of-the-window glimpse: Beneath us, lay the folded fabric of ploughed fields, the toy-town appearance of a city in the Andes . . . No, anything but that. If I was to travel it would be overland, where every sight and every place had its own smell; and I knew that if I wrote about what was minuscule out of the window of a jet I would sound like a man on the moon.
Back in Quito, the people I had met the previous week welcomed me as if I was an old friend. The temporariness of travel often intensifies friendship and turns it into intimacy. But this is fatal for a man with a train to catch. It sounds, as I write this, as if I am coyly hinting that I enjoyed a passionate affair that was keeping -me from moving on. ('Just one more day, my darling, and then you may break my heart and go . . .') It wasn't that. It was a simpler, tidier business, but it still meant delay. I could handle strangers, but friends required attention and made me feel conspicuous. It was easier to travel in solitary anonymity, twirling my moustache, puffing my pipe, shipping out of town at dawn; and South America was a problem in geography that could only be understood if one kept moving: to stay put was to be baffled. People complained of the barbarism of the places, but as far as I was concerned they were not barbarous enough.
'Ecuador is nice, in its tiny way,' the writer V.S. Pritchett had told me before I set off. It is, and I felt certain that I would return, for when at last I got my train ticket, the Autoferro left without me.
16
THE TREN DE LA SIERRA
The name of the lovely cream-coloured railway station in Lima is Desamparados, which means 'forsaken'. But the word seems a piece of baseless gloom until the Tren de la Sierra has crossed the plains to Chosica and climbed the pink walls of the narrow Rimac Valley; here, the passengers begin to fall ill. I knew from my palpitations in Bogotá and my wheezy indolence in Quito that I was a candidate for altitude sickness; the rising gorge I experienced on the way to Ticlio was as much a feature of the landscape as a physical symptom: I suffered as we ascended the Andes, and I decided that no railway journey on earth can be so aptly described as going on ad nauseam.
A strike was threatened by the railway workers in Peru, but though this was no more than a rumour, the warning was substantiated by streaks of graffiti dripping from the mellow outside walls of churches and cloisters: Down with the Imperialists and Oppressors, Support the Railway Workers and More Money! Repeatedly in this large impromptu script was the word Strike, but the Spanish word for strike is also the word for rest or leisure, so all over Lima the exhortation could also be read as Relax! If the railway workers had been undeserving louts using a period of political confusion in order to make unreasonable demands, I would have been more confident of my chances to see the strike forestalled by the intervention of some sweet-talking arbitrators. But this was not play-acting; the railways workers -indeed, workers all over Peru - were grossly underpaid. Elsewhere in Latin America, the provocations or simple pleas of workers had been checked; where the charade of elections failed, the soldiers and police succeeded. Peru, once a golden kingdom occupying a third of the continent, had taken a mighty tumble and in defeat looked incapable of supplying those muttering workers with any hope. Few great cities in the world look more plundered and bankrupt than Lima. It is the look of Rangoon, the same heat and colonial relics and corpse-odours: the imperial parades have long ago marched away from its avenues and left the spectators to scavenge and beg. Ever since Mexico, the description 'formerly an important Spanish city, famous for its architecture' made me stiffen in apprehension, but no city had fallen as far as Lima.
Like a violated tomb in which only the sorry mummy of withered nationalism is left, and just enough religion to console a patient multitude with the promise of happier pickings beyond the grave, Lima -epitomizing Peru - was a glum example of obnoxious mismanagement. Official government rhetoric was dispirited and self-deceiving, but the railway workers' anger was sharpened by their sense of betrayal, and their hunger.
I felt that any strike here would be a protracted affair, and so I left Lima on the train to Huancayo the first chance I got. After arriving at that railhead in the mountains I would make my way by road via Aya-cucho to Cuzco and there begin my long descent through Bolivia and Argentina to the end of the line in Patagonia. It was a hasty plan, but how could I know that in three days I would be back in Lima trying to find another route to Cuzco?
The Rimac river flowed past the railway station. At seven in the morning it was black; it became grey as the sun moved above the foothills of the Andes. The sandy mountains at the city's edge give Lima the feel of a desert city hemmed-in on one side by hot plateaux. It is only a few miles from the Pacific Ocean, but the land is too flat to permit a view of the sea, and there are no sea breezes in the day-time. It seldom rains in Lima. If it did, the huts - several thousand of them - in the shanty town on the bank of the Rimac would need roofs. The slum is odd in another way; besides being entirely roofless, the huts in this (to use the Peruvian euphemism) 'young village' are woven from straw and split bamboo and cane. They are small frail baskets, open to the stars and sun, and planted beside the river which, some miles from the station, is cocoa-coloured. The people wash in this river water; they drink it and cook with it; and when their dogs die, or there are chickens' entrails to be disposed of, the river receives this refuse.
'Not that they eat chickens very often,' explained the Peruvian in the train. The river, he said, was their life-line and their sewer.
Travelling across this plain it is not immediately apparent how any penetration can possibly be made into the escarpment at the far end - it seems too steep, too bare, too high; the valleys are no more than vertical cracks and there is no evidence of trees or men anywhere in these mountains. They have been burned clean of vegetation and have the soft bulge of naked rock. For twenty-five miles the mountain walls remain in the distance; the train seems deceptively quick, rolling along the river, and then at Chosica it stops. It resumes after five minutes, but never again on the trip does it regain that first burst of speed.