by John Buchan
The Gobernador frowned. “What incomprehensible folly! That is a matter which shall at once be set right. I cannot think how the mistake has arisen. Your hotel? The Constitucion? Permits shall be sent round to you this afternoon, and you have only to fix the day of your journey and we shall make arrangements. What must you think of us, Sir Archibald! Believe me, we are not accustomed to treat distinguished strangers with impoliteness.”
The manner of the Gobernador was so open and friendly that Archie’s distaste for the Gran Seco and his memory of Don Luis’s talk straightway vanished. The resident observed that in old days the Gran Seco had been a closed country, and that, as Sir Archibald would realise, it could not be thrown open in a day.
“I am positive Sir Archibald will understand,” said the Gobernador. “We have established, as it were, a Sheffield and a Birmingham in a rude hill-country, and we must limit our administrative problems. The sixteenth century and the twentieth can co-exist only if the latter is given in small doses. Slowly they will harmonise — but slowly. You have the same problem in your India. I understand that you do not permit tourists, however well accredited, even to enter some of the hill-states.”
“That’s true,” said Archie. “When I was there, they wouldn’t let me put a foot across the Nepaul border.”
“Also we are a big business, with our secrets, and we cannot have agents of our rivals prowling about the place, which is, so to speak, all one workshop. But — we welcome visitors who recognise our difficulties and submit to our modest rules.”
“It is the Yanquis who give trouble,” said the President darkly.
The Gobernador laughed. “Some Yanquis. I do not share his Excellency’s distrust of the whole of that great nation. The bright special correspondent on the look-out for a ‘scoop’ is the most dangerous of created things. But we welcome the reasonable journalist. You may have read a series of articles on Olifa in the Saturday Evening Post. There you had the Gran Seco accurately portrayed with our full assent. Yet on the whole it is not the journalist who perplexes us most. It is the Yanqui tripper on a circular tour. We cannot have them making drunken fools of themselves in a place where the prestige of the white man is his only security.”
“There was an American party at the hotel,” said Archie. “Noisy young devils from a yacht. I think they went up to the Gran Seco a week ago.”
The Gobernador shrugged his shoulders. “We do not antagonise the great, we who are business men. But those young people will not be given the privileges which await you, Sir Archibald.”
Archie felt as if he were being treated with especial frankness and friendliness, and his susceptible soul was in a pleasant glow. Then the conversation became general and he had leisure to observe the company. The Gobernador said little, the Olifero statesmen much, but it seemed the Archie that they all talked under his eye and for his approbation. After an argument there came a hush, as if the deferred to him for the ultimate word. But he scarcely spoke. He sat silent, watchful, now and then smiling tolerantly. Once only he intervened. The Minister of Finance was discoursing on some aspect of the policy of the United States, and his comments were caustic. The Gobernador looked across at Archie and spoke in English.
“Yanquis are unpopular in England?” he asked.
“No. I shouldn’t say that. Americans are popular with us, as they always have been. You see, we get the best of them. But the abstract thing, America, is unpopular. She always seems to have a rather left-handed Government.”
A spark seemed to kindle in the other’s eye.
“That is right. No section of humanity deserves blame. It is governments, not peoples, that offend.”
Then the spark died out.
As Janet and Archie walked back to the hotel they spoke of the luncheon party. They had taken the road through the old town, and were in the market-place among stalls.
“That man Castor doesn’t belong here,” said Archie “He has nothing in common with those bland Oliferos. He’s nearer to that lot,” and he pointed to a group of Indians in shaggy ponchos squatted by the fountain.
“He is one of the most extraordinary people I ever met.” said Janet. “Can you guess what he talked to me about? Ossian-Papa’s bete noire, you know — Lord Balfour, and Marcel Proust! And I believe he could have talked just as well about clothes and Paris models.”
“I never in my life got so strong an impression of all-round competence...I like him, too. I think he’s a good fellow. Don’t you?”
“I’m not so sure,” said Janet. “I should like to see him clean-shaven. I’ve an idea that the mouth under that beard of his might be horribly cruel.”
VI
The Gran Seco has not often appeared in the world’s literature. Francisco de Toledo first entered it in the sixteenth century, but after that there is no mention of it till Calamity Brown wandered thither from the coast in the late years of the eighteenth. That luckless and probably mendacious mariner has little good to say of it; it was the abode of devilish insects and devilish men, and, if we are to believe him, he barely escaped with his life. In the nineteenth century it was partially explored by the Spanish naturalist, Mendoza, and a Smithsonian expedition investigated its peculiar geology. Its later history is written in the reports of its copper companies, but Sylvester Perry visited it in his celebrated journey round the globe, and it has a short and comminatory chapter in his Seeing Eyes. Mr Perry did not like the place, and in his characteristic way has likened it to a half-healed abscess, sloughed over with unwholesome skin.
Mr Perry was partially right. The Gran Seco is not built to the scale of man and it has no care for his comforts. But it has its own magnificence. Its gate is the town of Santa Ana, in whose market-place stands the colossal figure of the crucified Christ, first erected by Pizarro, many times destroyed by earthquakes, and always replaced, since it is the defiance of the plains to the mountains. But the gate is far from the citadel, for the avenue is a hundred miles long. The Gran Seco railway, now a double line most skilfully engineered, and wholly controlled by the Company, runs first up a long valley where only in mid-winter a river flows. Then it passes over tiers of high desert, sinks into hollows where sometimes there are waters and forests climbs again in tortuous gullies, till at length it emerges upon the great plateau; and always beside it can be traced the old highroad where once rode Toledo’s men-at-arms, and only the other day the ore from the mines jolted down country on mule-back. But there are still many miles to go before the city of Gran Seco is reached, sunk in a shallow trough among its barren and blistered hills.
At first sight Sylvester Perry’s phrase seems to have certain justice. Twenty years ago in the hollow there was only a wretched Indian puebla roosting among the ruins of an old city, for the copper from the distant mines was exported in its crude form. It was chiefly what is called virgin copper, with a certain amount of malachite and azurite ores. Ten years ago a new city began to rise, where the sulphuretted ores were first mined, and smelting was started. There was a furious rivalry among the companies till they were united in a great combine, and the whole mineral wealth gathered under a single direction. Process succeeded process, furnaces were multiplied till they coven many acres, wells were sunk and pumping-stations erected, great dams were built in the hills to catch the winter rail and street after street rose in the dust. The Castor method of calcination and electrolytic refining soon quadrupled in size. To one looking down from the surrounding ridges the place seems a hive of ugly activity: on one side a wilderness of furnaces and converters, with beyond them the compounds where the workmen are housed; on the other a modern city with high buildings and clanking electric trams. By day it is an inferno of noise and dust and vapours, with a dull metallic green the prevailing tint; by night a bivouac of devils warmed by angry fires. Mr Perry is right. The place has the look of a gangrening sore, with for the surrounding skin the pale shaly hills. And the climate is in itself a disease. In winter the hollow is scourged and frozen, and in summer the sun’s h
eat, refracted from naked stone, strikes the face like a blow.
In the streets the first impression is of extreme orderliness. The traffic is methodically conducted by vigilant police in spruce uniforms — for the most part of the Indian or mestizo type, with European superintendents. They are a fine body of men; too good, the spectator decides, for such an environment. The main street, the Avenida Bolivar, is broad and paved with concrete, and along it rise structures which would not disgrace New York. The Regina Hotel is larger than the Ritz, and there are others; the offices of the Company’s administration form a block scarcely smaller than Carlton House Terrace; there are clubs and many apartment houses, all built of the white local stone. But the shops are few and poor, and there are no villas in the environs, so that the impression grows that the Gran Seco is a camp, which its inhabitants regard as no continuing city. Hourly the sense of the bivouac expands in the traveller’s mind. The place is one great caravanserai for pilgrims. These busy, preoccupied people are here for the day only and to-morrow will be gone.
Other things will soon strike him. There seem to be no peasants. No neighbouring countryside obtrudes itself into this monastic industry. Every man — there are few women — is regimented by the Company. If the traveller is escorted to the area of the smelting and refining plant (and his passports must be very high-powered to ensure this privilege), he will see the unskilled work done by Indians and mestizos — men with faces like mechanical automata — but the skilled foremen are all European. He will puzzle over these Europeans, for however wide his racial knowledge, he will find it hard to guess their nationality, since their occupation seems to have smoothed out all differences into one common type with a preoccupation so intense as to be almost furtive. In the streets, too, in the clubs and hotels, he will be struck by the waxwork look of some of the well-dressed employees. They are inhumanly pale, and so concentrated upon some single purpose that their faces are expressionless and their eyes unseeing.
He will be much shepherded and supervised, and, though his permission de sejour is for only a few days, he will be apt to find these days pass heavily. If he is a mining expert he will not be allowed to indulge his curiosity, for the Castor processes are jealously guarded. If he is the ordinary tourist, he will find no sights to repay him, and for the only amusement an occasional concert of austerely classical music given by the Administration staff. He will probably leave the place with relief, glad to have seen the marvel, but thankful that his lines are cast among ordinary humanity. At the station, on his departure, he will be presented with a wonderful booklet, containing an eloquent speech of the Gobernador, and extracts (with illustrations) from the recent articles on the Gran Seco in the Saturday Evening Post.
The young party from the Corinna did not appear to find the time hang heavy on their hands. There were ten them, five of each sex, with no older person to look aft them, though a very moderate chaperonage seemed to be exercised by a tall girl with fine eyes and a pleasant Southern voice. That their purchase was considerable was shown by their entertainment, for they were shown everything and went everywhere; that they were unwelcome visitors, unwillingly privileged, was proved by their close oversight. Indeed they were uncomfortable guests, for they made patch of garish colour in the drab of the Gran Seco and discord in its orderly rhythm. The mere sight of them the streets was enough to send the ordinary policeman the Commissary to ask for instructions.
They were patently harmless, but deplorably silly. The Regina was turned by them into a cabaret. They danced every night in the restaurant to the disquiet of the diners, and they chaffed mercilessly an unsmiling staff. Bedroom riots seemed to be their speciality, and it was an unlucky official of the Company who had his quarters in the corridor. When they were entertained to luncheon by Administration they asked questions so sublimely idiotic that the Vice-President, a heavy sallow man, called Rosas, of Mexican extraction, actually coloured, thinking that he was being made a fool of; and their visit to the smelting plant was attended by the same exasperating buffoonery.
Presently it appeared that their idiocy was congenital and not a pose. Their jazz chatter and jazz manners were the natural expression of jazz minds, and must be endured because of the prestige of Mr Burton Rawlinson. So “Baby” and “Bawby” and “Honey” and “Gerry” went their preposterous way, and the Gran Seco shrugged outraged shoulders and spat.
Nevertheless there were signs, had there been eyes to note them, that the yacht party was not quite what it seemed. In unguarded moments, as Janet had already observed, they could be betrayed into sanity and good breeding. At nights, too, when their ragging was over, there were odd discussions in the privacy of bedrooms. At least one of the young men would sit far into the dawn working at notes and plans.
Presently, as if they had had enough of the city, they extended their revels into the surrounding country. They procured two touring cars, and, after some trouble with the Commissary of Police, embarked on long excursions. The mines lie in three main groups — the San Tome, the Alhuema, and the Universum — and they visited all three. There they seemed to find much to interest them, and the managers feverishly telephoned to headquarters for instructions. These children were imbeciles doubtless, they reported, but they were poking their noses into forbidden places. So on their return the troupe had to interview the Commissary of Police, who politely cautioned them against breaches of the regulations of the province.
Their next escapade was more serious. They packed luncheon-baskets and departed, as they said, for a visit to the caves of Marequito — a permitted excursion. Then for three days they disappeared, the police were furious and anxious, and a posse was sent out in motor-cars to discover their whereabouts. Six of the party — five girls and a man — and one of the cars were found two hundred miles off in a valley under the high peaks called the Spanish Ladies. They told a pitiful story; they had lost their road, exhausted their food, and had had to spend chilly nights on the ground. The other car had gone off the day before to find supplies, and had not returned.
The inspector of police wrung his hands. “Do you not know that in these parts the natives are dangerous? You have narrowly escaped throat-cutting.” The party was sent back to the city in disgrace, but they did not seem to feel their position. They were inordinately cheerful and scarcely looked as if they had suffered a three days’ fast.
In spite of the police activity no word came of the other car, till two days later it returned brazenly of its own accord The occupants told the same story — a lost road, a breakdown, semi-starvation, a lucky meeting in the end with an intelligent vaquero who put them on the way to the San Tome mine. This party did indeed show some signs of privation and one of the four men had his arm in a sling, the result he said, of a fall from a rock when he was trying to get a prospect.
There was a stern inquiry at the office of the Commissary and the four were closely cross-examined about their journey. But they proved to be bewildered and obtuse. Their accounts conflicted, and when maps were placed before them they were quite unable to point out their route. “Can’t you realise that we were lost?” they repeated, “lost like a tick in a wood-pile? What d’you keep worrying about? It’s no good quoting lists of your darned hills! We can’t locate them.”
After this episode the American party showed better behaviour. For the last days of their stay they confined themselves to the city, and got up a fancy-dress ball in the Regina, into which they dragged some of the unwilling residents. The young man with his arm in a sling did not appear at this function; indeed he did not leave his room, being a little fevered — so he told the hotel servants — by accident, though he refused to see a doctor. This was perhaps natural, for in the small hours after his return there had been some rough surgery in his bedroom. One of his companions had cut out a pistol bullet from above his left elbow, and the tall girl, who had once nursed in a hospital, had done the bandaging.
Archie and Janet were very different visitors. It almost appeared as if they were wel
come ones. A special coach was attached for them to the Santa Ana train, and this was shunted on to the Gran Seco line. It contained two compartments, in one of which they were given excellent meals, while the other was on the lines of an observation car, so filled with bridal flowers that Archie looked anxiously about for rice and slippers. They were also given a guide, a well-mannered young Olifero who unobtrusively offered information. He pointed out the objects of interest on the way to Santa Ana, and during the hour of waiting there: conducted them over the cathedral, which has a famous altar-piece, and, under the great crucifix, told with pride the tale of the first Conquistadors. The long climb into the Gran Seco was enlivened by his anecdotes. He showed them the valley where Toledo’s men had been ambushed by Indians, the corner where the copper convoy had once been destroyed by a landslide, the gully which had long defied the railway engineers. At the frontier station he had managed their passes for them, and as the train crawled on to the plateau had sketched for them vivaciously the history of the mining industry.
“We can’t tip this fellow,” Archie whispered to Janet. “He’s a gentleman.” And his wife had agreed.
He saw them to their hotel, where rooms had been secured or them by the Administration. On parting, Archie and Janet warmly thanked him, and asked him his name. The young man smiled pleasantly. “That is nice of you, for I think we shall meet again. They call me Carlos Rivero.” He added, “I am a friend of Luis de Marzaniga,” and it seemed to Archie that his eyes said something confidential which he could not fathom.
The Moplahs were in the hotel, but in a somewhat hastened mood. The tall girl, whom Janet believed she had recognised, did not appear, nor did the young man in the starched linen knickerbockers, though Archie looked for him longingly. But the corybants of the Club de Residentes Extranjeros were there and greeted them with boisterous friendliness, though, somewhat to Janet’s surprise, they did not invite them to join their party.
