We entered the valley and zig-zagged on the walls. It was hardly a valley. It was a cut in the rock, a slash so narrow that the diesel's hooter hardly echoed: the walls were too close to sustain an answering sound. We were due at Huancayo at four o'clock; by mid-morning I thought we might arrive early, but at noon our progress had been so slow I wondered whether we would get to Huancayo that day. And long before Ticlio I had intimations of altitude sickness. I was not alone; a number of other passengers, some of them Indians, looked distinctly ghastly.
It begins as dizziness and a slight headache. I had been standing by the door inhaling the cool air of these shady ledges. Feeling wobbly, I sat down, and if the train had not been full I would have lain across the seat. After an hour I was perspiring and, although I had not stirred from my seat, I was short of breath. The evaporation of this sweat in the dry air gave me a sickening chill. The other passengers were limp, their heads bobbed, no one spoke, no one ate. I dug some aspirin out of my suitcase and chewed them, but only felt queasier; and my headache did not abate. The worst thing about feeling so ill in transit is that you know that if something goes wrong with the train - a derailment or a crash - you will be too weak to save yourself. I had a more horrible thought: we were perhaps a third of the way to Huancayo, but Huancayo was higher than this. I dreaded to think what I would feel like at that altitude.
I considered getting off the train at Matucana, but there was nothing at Matucana - a few goats and some Indians and tin-roofed shacks on the stony ground. None of the stops contained anything that looked like relief or refuge. But this altitude sickness had another punishing aspect: it ruined what could have been a trip of astonishing beauty. I had never seen cliffs like these or been on a railway quite so spectacular. Why was it, in this landscape of such unbelievable loveliness, that I felt as sick as a dog? If only I had had the strength to concentrate - I would have been dazzled; but, as it was, the beauty became an extraordinary annoyance.
The pale rose-coloured mountains had the dark stripes and mottled marks of the shells of the most delicate snails. To be ill among them, to be slumped in my seat watching the reddish gravel slides stilled in the crevasses, and the configuration of cliff-faces changing with each change in altitude, was torture so acute that I began to associate the very beautiful with the very painful. These pretty heights were the cause of my sickness. And now my teeth hurt, one molar in particular began to ache as if the nerve had caught fire. I did not know then how a cavity in a bad tooth becomes sore at a high altitude. The air in this blocked hole expands and creates pressure on the nerve, and it is agony. The dentist who told me this had been in the air force. Once, in a sharply descending plane, the cockpit became depressurized and an airman, the navigator, screamed in pain and then one of his teeth exploded.
Some train passengers had begun to vomit. They did it in the pitiful unembarrassed way that people do when they are helplessly ill. They puked on the floor, and they puked out of the windows and they made my own nausea greater. Some, I noticed, were staggering through the cars. I thought they were looking for a place to puke, but they returned with balloons. Balloons? Then they sat and held their noses and breathed the air from the balloon nozzle.
I stood unsteadily and made for the rear of the train, where I found a Peruvian in a smock filling balloons from a tank of oxygen. He handed these out to distressed-looking passengers who gratefully gulped from them. I took my place in the queue and discovered that a few whiffs of oxygen made my head clear and helped my breathing.
There was a boy in this oxygen car. He had an oxygen balloon, too, and wore a handsome cowboy hat decorated with a band of Inca pokerwork.
'If I had thought it was going to be anything like this,' he said, 'I would never have come.'
'You took the words out of my mouth.'
'This oxygen's an improvement. Boy, do I feel shitty.'
We sipped from our balloons.
'You from the States?'
'Massachusetts,' I said.
'I'm from Minnesota. Been in Lima long?'
'One day,'I said.
'It's not that bad,' he said. 'I was there a month. It's one of the cheapest places in South America. They say Cuzco's even cheaper. I figure I'll spend a month or so there, then go back to Lima - get a job on a ship.' He looked at me. 'You're smart to have those warm clothes. I wish I had a jacket like that. All I have is these Lima things. I'll buy a sweater when we get to Huancayo - they make them there. You can get alpaca ones for practically nothing. Jesus, do I feel shitty.'
We entered a tunnel. We had been through other tunnels, but this one was long, and it had a certain distinction: it was, at 15,848 feet, the highest railway tunnel in the world. The train was loud - deafening, in fact, and I don't think I had ever felt sicker in my life. I sprayed the last of my balloon gas into my mouth, swallowed, and got another one. 'I feel like throwing up,' said the fellow from Minnesota. In the weak yellow light, with his cowboy hat over his eyes, he looked limp and fatally stricken. I did not feel so v/ell myself, but when we emerged from the Galera Tunnel I knew we were past the highest point, and having survived that I was sure I would make it to Huancayo.
'This ship,' I said. 'The one you're going to get a job on. Where do you plan to go?'
'Home,' he said. Til get one to the States. If I'm lucky I'll be back the end of April. I really want to see Minneapolis in the spring.'
'Is it as pretty as this?'
'It's better than this.'
We were now high enough to be able to see across the Andes, the whole range of mountains which, on some curves, were visible for hundreds of miles. They are not solitary peaks, but rather closely packed summits which, surprisingly, grow lighter as the distance deepens. I asked the Minnesotan how he planned to get to Cuzco. He had been in Lima for a month; his information would be good, I thought. He said there was a bus and if I was interested we could take it together. It didn't cost much, but he had heard it sometimes took four or five days to reach Cuzco. It depended on the road. This was the rainy season: the road through Ayacucho would be bad.
At La Oroya, where the line branches - the other line goes north to the tin and copper mines of Cerro de Pasco - our train was delayed. La Oroya itself was desolate and cold. Children came to the platform to beg, and sacks were loaded. Walking made my throat burn, so I sat and wondered whether I should eat anything. There were Indians selling knitted goods - mufflers and ponchos - and also fried cakes and burned bits of meat. I drank a cup of sour tea and took some more aspirin. I was rather eager to get back on the train, so that I could get another balloon of oxygen.
When we boarded, an old Indian woman stumbled on the platform. She had three bundles - cloth, packets of greasy newspaper, a kerosene lamp. I helped her up. She thanked me and told me in Spanish that she was going to Huancavelica, some miles beyond Huancayo. 'And where are you going?'
I told her, and then I asked her if the people here spoke Quechua, the Inca language.
'Yes,' she said. 'That is my language. Everyone speaks Quechua here. You will see in Cuzco.'
We crawled the rest of the afternoon towards Huancayo, and the longer we went the more I marvelled at the achievement of this mountain railway. It is commonly thought that it was planned by the American Henry Meiggs, but it was actually a Peruvian, Ernesto Malinowski, who surveyed the route; Meiggs supervised and promoted it, from its beginning in 1870 until his death in 1877. But it was another twenty years before the railway reached Huancayo. A trans-Andean line, from Huancayo to Cuzco, although proposed and surveyed in 1907, had never been built. If it had been, my arrival at the muddy mountain town would have been more hopeful; as it was, I felt too sick to eat, too dazed to go on or do anything but lie shivering in bed, still wearing my leather jacket, reading the poems and devotions of John Donne. It was comfortless stuff for a cold night in the Andes: 'As sickness is the greatest misery, so the greatest misery of sickness is solitude; when the infectiousness of the disease deters them who should assist from coming; even the physician dares scarce come. Solitude is a torment which is not threatened in hell itself.'