We crossed Panama on a cart, very slowly to keep from damaging the Wardian cases, then set off on a Pacific and Orient ship which Minna had arranged for along the west coast. When we passed Lima, only its church spires showed above the cliffs, which formed in furrows like kapok roots. That wasn’t even halfway down Peru; we were going much further south. It took three days in the little ship, and at night, incredibly, the aurora australis sang out above the wispy clouds. Clem and I had stared at it for a long time before Minna came out with a compass to show us how it was spinning. Solar storm; we had better not get lost.
There wasn’t much of a port where we landed, just a little fishing town called Islay where the only food you could easily come by was guinea pig on a stick or some variation of ceviche, which was a kind of horrible fish thing marinated in something citrus until it tasted less like fish. Though they said at the inn that I’d be robbed if I wandered about by myself at the market, I risked it for pineapples and proper coffee, which they sold in abundance even though nowhere seemed to serve it as a drink. It was good to sit still in the baking courtyard with the innkeeper’s incurious llama and a mortar and pestle to crush up the beans.
The first bigger place was Arequipa, miles inland. It was high up – the road had climbed all the way – and the sky was a blue I’d never seen in England. Minna found us a pair of Indian boys to help with the mules, then booked herself into an old inn where the foundations were made of the irregular polygonal stones the Incas had built with. Although Clem tried to make her change her mind about not coming with us, she didn’t. She went up on the roof terrace to see us off but, because the houses were dense and the tiny streets so steep, we soon lost sight of her in the jumble of bright shutters and the hanging tapestrywork in the roadside markets.
Clem watched me bleakly sometimes after that. Although he soon got his brightness back, it was thin enough to see through. I would have paid it more attention, but the boys seemed impressed and worried by the idea of going all the way to Caravaya, and it was hard to stop them telling it to complete strangers, as if Caravaya were on Jupiter. They were only twelve and fourteen and I’d promised their mother I’d look after them, and I couldn’t think the chances of that would be better if the whole of Peru knew where we were going. A vicu?a hunter rode with us for a while and the boys told him half-earnest and half-worried about how mad we were.
‘I wouldn’t,’ he said to me. Ahead of us, Clem was already flagging from the altitude and in no fit state to talk to anyone. ‘The forest there is haunted.’
‘Is it. Brilliant.’
The journey was easy enough at first. It was all long, straight, beautiful Incan roads. They were dotted with post houses and inns where you could change horses and mules or stay the night for not very much money at all, which was just as well because high summer in the highlands was still hovering around freezing after dark. The boys said it was far colder in winter. It was a bizarre climate. The days were hot and we were all always halfway into or out of jackets, but we soon learned to keep them on, because the sun was ferocious and after fifteen minutes unshaded, even my hands were sunburned. Being so pale, Clem suffered much more. The grass plains were dead, and for a reason I couldn’t understand, the local farmers had burned great tracts of it, so that the hills around us were a strange striped mix of yellow and soot black. But as soon as we came into any shade, at an inn or one of the bare twisted trees, it was hard to imagine being warm again and, being the least fit of everyone, I was shivering in a few minutes. It was fun though, until we reached Lake Titicaca.
By then, twelve thousand feet above the sea, I could feel the altitude too, a nasty pressure inside my ears as if someone were trying to crush the membrane inward. The towns became sorrier and fewer. Stopping was nearly always as miserable as pressing on. Scattered about were the ruins of much better-built places – drystone archways and tumbled pillars that led nowhere now except the water, where people bundled up in furs poled to and fro in boats and rafts made of reeds. Whatever the Incas had done to hurry along the economy was long gone now.
People in Arequipa had been burnished, but nobody looked healthy at the lake. They were all small but the poorest, the people who swept the courtyards of the run-down little inns, were tiny; some of the women barely reached my ribs and even Clem was a relative giant. We shared food at the inns, spread our money around, but I don’t think we helped much. It made me nearly angry with them, because it would have been less effort to get everything together and just walk to somewhere gentler. There must have been something keeping them there, laws or relatives, but the waste of it and the inefficiency were hard to watch. There must have been minds there just like Sing’s, people who could have been flint-hearted trader millionaires, but would never make a difference to anything because they were too occupied weaving the idiotic reed boats. Reeds, when the Amazon rainforest was just over the mountains. But there was no logging trade, or not a visible one. Three decent engineers and a proper businessman could have sorted it all out in a month, but something about the place made me think that they never would.
It took me a while to realise that we were irritable partly because of the altitude. It dragged at everything in a thick, chemical headache, but I could have lived happily enough with that if walking even for a few yards hadn’t felt like sprinting a hundred. I woke up in the nights with my heart pounding like I’d run for my life and Clem was even worse. It meant we were both exhausted always, even before setting off in the mornings, and nothing drags at a journey like being too tired to look at anything. We tried not to push ourselves or the mules. They were industrious and enterprising in pursuit of the main scheme of their lives, which was escaping. It was difficult for Clem and the boys, but since there was about as much chance of my running after mules as skipping back to England, for me it was mostly a matter of finding a comfortable rock and something to read while I watched them rush about. We only managed a few miles each day and I started to worry about getting cuttings back. We’d only have a month on the return journey before they all died.
Although everyone else we saw was Indian, white men must have been common enough because there was no particular curiosity about us. People just smiled and kept on herding their llamas or their geese along the broad road. Before long I had the impression it was unobjectionable but still funny for us to be there, like camels in London.