'I want to see LSU knock the stew out of them,' says Mr Hammerman.
'You'd think they'd at least open the doors,' says Mrs Goodchuck.
At last the station doors open. There is a general surge forward. The elderly tourists shuffle but do not push. A mob is awkward, and they feel they are being tested, as if too violent a response on their part will turn them into Peruvians. Shame and disapproval make them exercise some restraint, and it is only an Argentine honeymoon couple - a dark unapologetic man and his skinny clinging wife - who shove their way to the front. It is easy for them. They elbow past the gentler Americans and are probably surprised that they are through the door so quickly.
'Just sort of lean back,' cautions Charles P. Clapp. 'That way you won't get trampled.'
Hearing this, the Americans lean back.
There were seats for everyone except three Indian women with papooses and cloth bundles, and two freebooters dressed as Indians, in slouch hats and ponchos. Thè rest of us sat with our box lunches on our laps. An hour of this, and as it passed the timid speculation as to whether the train was going to leave at all became loud discouragement. There was a general sigh of relief as the train started out of the station. It was still cloudy, the mountainsides softened in greeny mist. The motor road is high, but the train stays low, circling the mountains through a series of gorges in which rushing water runs alongside the tracks. There were few vistas here: we were too deep in the mountains to see anything but overhanging cliffs. Where a gorge floor was flat there were mud huts built near the ingenious Inca walls, the careful stonework of neatly fitted boulders, Inca terraces which had become Indian villages. The mud-block huts were recent, the Inca walls were old, and yet the walls had been built without the use of wheels, the surfaces smoothed and joined with stone tools.
Seeing this stonework, Bert Howie chants, 'Inca! Inca! Inca! Everywhere you look - Inca!'
'Now this reminds me of Wyoming,' says Harold Casey. He directs our attention to the rocky bluffs, the falling water, the green hillsides.
It reminds the Lewgards of parts of Maine. The Prells say it is nothing like Indiana and raise a laugh. Someone else says it is similar to Ecuador. The rest are annoyed: Ecuador is their next stop.
Bert and Elvera Howie listen to these comparisons and then say it is like Africa. Parts of Africa are just like this. We look out of the window and see llamas and smaller fluffier alpacas and very hairy pigs and women in tall hats and shawls and kneesocks gathering firewood. Africa! Elvera insists that it is so. She is surprised, she says, because Bert was saying that morning that their hotel - out of the window of the cocktail lounge on the top floor - reminds them of Florence, Italy: all the orange-tiled roofs, all the churches, the light.
‘I’ve always wanted to go to Africa.' This is Hildy, who looks fresher, having sat down.
Bert says, 'We were the last people out of Uganda.'
'It must have been terrible.'
Those poor Hindus. Took their earrings off at the airport.'
Elvera says, 'It was scary. I liked it.'
'You saw mountains like this, and African women walking down them with things on their heads.'
'Bert went fishing.'
'In the Nile.' As he says it, and smiles, the Peruvian river running beside the train, the funny little Anta River, looks homely: what is this to the Nile? 'I caught huge things - Nile Perch they call them. The water was as black as that seat there.'
Mr Upbraid says, 'Look at the poverty.'
This is a village beyond the town of Anta: some mud huts, some pigs, an alpaca with matted fur, small girls carrying infants, and children with their hands out crying, 'Monis! Monis!'
'Haiti,' says Bert. 'Ever been to Haiti? That's poverty. That's squalor. This is nothing. These people have farms - everyone has an acre or two. Grow their own food. Roof over their heads. They're all right. But Haiti? They're just starving there. Or Jamaica? Even worse.'
No one can contradict him. We look out of the window. Bert has made it seem all rather prosperous.
Bert says, 'That's not poverty.'
It is no good my telling him that these are tenant farms and that these people own nothing but the clothes on their backs. The huts leak. The plots of vegetables are high on the hillsides, some on Inca terraces, others, like light green patches stitched against the cliffs at a sixty-degree angle. I am tempted to tell him this, that no one owns anything here, that these Indians themselves are owned. But information confuses these tourists: they like to guess at the meanings of things. 'Looks like a kind of cave -1 suppose they lived in places like that, years ago' and 'Sort of a stairway- must lead to a kind of look-out.'
'It's a sunny day, but it's real dark here.'
'That's because we're in the valley.'
The conversation, pure Thornberry, went its rackety way as we slid past the rumps of these squatting mountains.
'Look. More Indians.'
There were two, in red pie-plate hats and shawls; one tugging a llama out of a field, the other - perhaps for the benefit of the tourists -ostentatiously making yarn from a spindle of rough wool and twisting the stuff in her fingers.
'Did you get a picture ofthat, Bert?' asked Elvera.
'Just a minute.'
Bert took out his camera and snapped a picture of the two Indians. A man named Fountain was watching him. Bert saw Mr Fountain and said, That's the new Canon -just on the market.'
He did not say how much he paid for it, or stress that it was his. It was an oblique piece of bragging: That 's the new Canon.
Mr Fountain took the camera, weighed it in his hand, looked through the viewfinder and said, 'Handy.'
'Compact,' said Bert. 'I wish I'd had one of these when we were on our Christmas trip.'
There were a few murmurs, but not much interest.
Bert said, 'Know what a Force Twelve gale is?'
Ignorance often seems wrapped like a package. The murmurs were like the rustlings of the wrapper ofthat plain thing. No one knew.
'It was a cruise,' said Bert. 'We're one day out of Acapulco. Nice sunny day. Suddenly it clouds up. Pretty soon it's a Force Twelve. Everyone was sick. Lasted forty-eight hours. Elvera went over to the bar and sat there-just held on fortwo days.'
'It was my security blanket.'
'Couldn't sleep, couldn't eat. See, Dramamine only works if you take it before you start to puke. It was awful. I walked around for two days saying, "I just don't believe it. I just don't believe it.'' '
There was more. For ten minutes, Bert and Elvera Howie told their hurricane story, and even in their monotonous narration - they took turns, interrupting each other to add details - it was a terrifying report, like a page of Arthur Gordon Pym. It was a story of high waves and wild winds, sickness, cowardice and loss of sleep. The old people on the ship (and this alarmed the old people on this train) were thrown around so badly they suffered broken arms and fractured legs. 'And one old fellow - nice old guy - busted his hip. Some people were hurt so bad we didn't see them for the rest of the trip.' Bert said it was chaos; Elvera blamed the English captain: he hadn't given them any warning - 'He must have known something’ Afterwards, the captain had said that in all his years at sea it was the worst storm he had ever known.
Elvera had been glancing at me with a kind of sour mistrust. Finally, she said, 'You English people.'
'I'm not English, actually.'
'Actually,' she said, and made a face.
Bert was still talking about the hurricane, the wind, the broken bones. The effect of his tale was to make this light rain falling into a canyon in the Andes seem a spring shower, and this railway journey no more than a joyride. Bert and Elvera had known days of storm in the Pacific; this train ride was a Sunday outing and almost beneath notice.
'I want a drink,' said Elvera. 'Instead of telling these people about our other trip, why don't you concentrate on this one and find me a drink?'