by Norman Lewis
‘What do you suppose he wants?’ he asked.
‘Probably the house photographer,’ I said, ‘taking holiday snaps for the guests.’
He seemed unconvinced. ‘More coffee?’ he asked.
‘No, that’s fine.’
He got up. ‘Shall we go and look round, then?’ he suggested.
There was not a great deal to see in the lounge and a view through the window of unexciting modern buildings in fog did not encourage immediate exploration of Lima. Suddenly Snowdon leapt to his feet and flung himself through a barrier of large, potted ferns through which a different cameraman had been trying to photograph him. As an expert photographer himself, he knew just what to do. The man held his ground, camera defiantly levelled, and Snowdon, taking him by the shoulders, oscillated his body violently backwards and forwards from the hips in such a way that the man could not focus on him. It was natural that this extraordinary scene should attract the attention of everyone in the vicinity and we were immediately encircled by spectators. An agitated under-manager came bounding into sight, the photographer was driven away and Snowdon retired, obviously upset, to his room.
Within minutes I was called to the phone. ‘The British Embassy is on the line for Lord Snowdon, sir, and there is no reply from his room. Could you take the call?’
I found myself talking to Anthony Walter, First Secretary, who said that the ambassador had heard that Lord Snowdon was in Lima, and wished, naturally, to welcome him, and also perhaps to suggest lunch.
It was at this moment that it first became apparent to me that our trip might not be as successful as I had hoped. I went to Snowdon’s room. ‘Do me a great favour,’ he said. ‘Please get rid of him.’
‘I can’t do that,’ I told him. ‘You’ll have to talk to him yourself.’
‘Couldn’t you just say this is a strictly private working trip?’
Back to Walter, who said, ‘I wish we could do something. Mr Morgan will be terribly hurt.’
I gave up and walked out of earshot, while Snowdon stated his terms. He would lunch with the ambassador and Mrs Morgan but he stipulated that this should be in some unassuming out-of-town restaurant where the party would avoid attention. Dress was to be informal. He himself would of course not wear a tie and perhaps Mr Morgan might care to refrain from wearing one, too.
It was clear that Mr Morgan took all this seriously, arriving at the appointed time in a large, open sports car which I felt sure he must have borrowed. He was attired in grey flannels and an open-necked white shirt, appearing to be not wholly at ease in these garments. Mrs Morgan, who was Bulgarian, had clearly decided that none of Snowdon’s restrictions applied in her case. She was a fluttery, smiling, impetuous woman who had come dressed in rustling silk and an unmanageable hat. All heads turned as we passed through the packed and rumbustious streets of Lima, and when we were held up in traffic jams or by broken-down vehicles desperate beggars rushed with arms outstretched to implore our charity. An occasional glance at Mr Morgan’s aloof profile helped to an understanding of the expression ‘gritting one’s teeth’.
The restaurant was—as required—small and acceptably remote. Several women had clearly been press-ganged into tidying the place, and, hiding their faces as we drew up, they made a flurried escape. It was a small room with a row of tables down each wall, and it was clear that a policeman lurking near the entrance would see to it that we were the only customers.
Now we faced the inevitable uphill conversational slog. Mr Morgan took on the subject of the performance by English cricketers somewhere in the West Indies, of which I knew nothing and cared little—as applied equally, I suspected, in Snowdon’s case. This was followed by a desultory attempt on the ambassador’s part to dramatise an account of the parlous state of the Peruvian anchovy-fishing industry. Mrs Morgan patched a gap in the conversation with her personal criticism of the sexual laxness of the Peruvian poor, which helped to inflate the numbers of those who could not be gainfully employed. It was following an attempt to keep this wretched conversation going, that she suddenly changed tack and dropped a clanger.
‘Lord Snowdon’ she said, ‘you will not know, but your children and mine attend the same school.’
The bleakness of the look with which this news was received did nothing to quench bubbling Balkan enthusiasm. ‘At first I cannot say to you that your children were exactly popular. No, they were not liked, but after a while I think, as you say, they shook down. Now the pupils are saying, oh well, they are human after all.’
Back in the hotel the prospect of the evening meal loomed like a storm cloud on the horizon. I asked the manager, ‘Do you expect photographers tonight?’
‘I think they will come,’ he said.
‘Is there any way they can be kept out?’
‘It is impossible,’ he said. ‘If we place a man at the door they will come through the windows. They are very persistent and they know all the tricks. A photographer will come in saying he is a plain-clothes policeman, and carrying an imitation police card. Or someone will say he has been taken ill and ask for a doctor. But the doctor is really a photographer and is carrying a camera in his bag. Nothing will keep these people out.’
‘Don’t you have a private room where we could have dinner?’
‘I will show you,’ the manager said.
It turned out that the hotel had an enormous basement banqueting chamber, only in use normally for the celebration of national festivals and for the reception of heads of state. It held thirty or forty tables and was illuminated by vast and elaborate chandeliers. At this time the furniture was covered by dust-sheets, but the manager lifted one of them to display the gilt and plush beneath.
‘It would be difficult to prepare the whole of the banqueting chamber for Lord Snowdon’s immediate use,’ the manager said, ‘but if this would suit we can certainly have a reasonable area ready. You would be private here, and if you approve we can send out immediately for some flowers to brighten up the place.’
Later that afternoon Anthony Walter from the embassy looked in at the hotel. It was to offer his services, he said, in any way that could possibly be of assistance in our journeying in the country. He was very affable and engaging. Snowdon, who had confided to me that in his view all ambassadors were twits, but clearly had no objections when it came to first secretaries, took to him, and by the end of the afternoon we were all on first-name terms, although the slightest of complications arose over Snowdon and Walter’s possession of the same first name. It transpired later when we were joined by Walter’s wife that her name was Antonia.
Walter, who almost certainly knew Peru as well as any Englishman, wondered if our visit might be made a little easier, and therefore more productive—without obligation of any kind, he stressed—by accepting a minimum of assistance and advice from the Peruvian government. There were parts of the country which he felt sure we would wish to visit which were virtually inaccessible to the private traveller. I brought up the Cuyocoyo area in which I was particularly interested, and he said it was a case in point: a place of endless fascination, temporarily out of bounds owing to the presence of guerrillas, although he knew someone in the Department of the Interior who was in a position to say yea or nay, and might be induced to say yea. Walter then went on to suggest that the ambassador might be agreeable to giving him a week or two’s local leave, in which case if we thought he could be useful to us he would be happy to come along.
Tony Snowdon seemed to jump at the idea, but I was more doubtful. What I had had in mind and had suggested to the Sunday Times was something in the nature of an adventure. Our goal was to see virgin territories and remote peoples, and though it was possible that the Peruvian authorities could help us to do this, it also seemed possible that, either off their own bat, or as a result of direction from the Foreign Office, the Embassy would do all that was possible to make sure that Snowdon was not placed at risk.
Next morning it was quite evident that the idea of slipping unnoticed in and
out of Lima was the stuff of dreams, for Snowdon’s presence in the capital had already hit the headlines. It seemed probable, too, that the incident in the hotel lounge had made him enemies, as well as inspiring some inaccurate reporting. The newspaper described Walter as a bodyguard, while I started off as Martin Lewis, Editor of the Sunday Times, becoming thereafter an agent of the Secret Service. The newspapers found Snowdon either inaccessible and aloof, or aggressive. My worst fears about the degeneration of our planned adventure into a flavourless conducted tour seemed likely to be confirmed when Walter announced that he had booked seats for us in a plane to Cuzco. Although this was undoubtedly an interesting city, it had been the standby of geographical magazines for so many years that it would be difficult to say anything that had not been said many, many times before.
It was becoming clear, too, that there was a curious ambivalence in Tony’s attitude to the general public. On the previous night, extraordinary zeal had been deployed by the hotel staff to re-inject life into the mortuary atmosphere of the banqueting room, with an enclave of tables set with shining cutlery, burnished glass and a vase with the disgruntled purplish flowers that were the best that Lima could provide. Nothing could be done about the special silences of a large empty room—which the on-off purr of the air-conditioning did little to relieve—or about the penetrating odour of dust. We had taken our seats and waiters came into sight, trudging as silently as assassins towards us over the thick carpet through the desert of sheeted furniture. Between us, the manager, hotel staff and myself had achieved an isolation of the kind that Tony was unlikely to have known before. Alas, it did not please. Next day we reached the top of the stairs and he seemed to draw back. ‘Rather spooky down there,’ he said.
‘What’s it to be, then? The main dining-room?’
‘I think we should give it a try’ he said.
‘Let’s do that, then.’
The head waiter hurried to meet us. ‘You want a corner, don’t you?’ I said to Tony.
‘Oh, I don’t know. Leave it to him.’
Moments later we were seated in the dead centre of the room. Occupants of tables in the vicinity were shifting their positions to get a better view, and an Instamatic flashed nearby.
At Cuzco we were met by Guillermo, the stout and genial head of the local tourist office, and a beautiful young assistant called Milagros (miracles). Two large cars awaited, the second containing two saturnine men in dark glasses and raincoats. (As we were later told that it was unlikely to rain in Cuzco for another five months, I assumed that the raincoats were intended to conceal sub-machine guns.) A score of photographers ran hither and thither like disoriented partridges in the background, and a policeman who wore a peaked cap pulled down so that nothing could be seen of his face above the end of his nose, blew his whistle continuously. It was at this moment that I felt the ball and chain fixed in position around my ankle.
We set off on a tour of the town with Guillermo and Milagros, our bodyguards and a handful of resentful pressmen. We were also accompanied by a number of Quechua women wearing a great variety of hats, among them a white topper. All were nursing mothers and we were informed by Milagros that they were there in the belief that the beneficial influences transmitted by obviously affluent whites would improve their milk. Guillermo bombarded us with colourless statistics about the size and weight of the stones in the ancient buildings we passed. Milagros leapt about, face ravaged and arms outstretched in an attempt to depict the death-agonies of the Indian leader Tupic Amaru who had been pulled apart by horses in one of the squares. The performance ended with a loud and convincing groan. It was, however, Snowdon who captured the Quechua ladies’ attention. Tony was always ready to accept the advice of his friends, and he had been told by one of them, Michael Bentine, a native of this part of the world, that the high altitude of Cuzco might cause trouble with his breathing and he should carry oxygen equipment. This he did in the form of a tiny cylinder to which a mask was fitted. From time to time he took an obedient puff from this, and when he did so the Quechuas uttered small cries of delight. The white man was recharging his store of magic, which would certainly be all to the good of the milk.
It was a procedure that did not wholly avoid alarm in other quarters, for Milagros, who at the end of our visit was invited to dine with us, turned down the invitation as politely as possible. Guillermo took me into his confidence over the reason for this. ‘She is afraid that Milord is taking aphrodisiacs.’
When we returned to Lima Anthony Walter met us off the plane and more plans of action were discussed. He told us that the Ministry of the Interior had confirmed that guerrillas were indeed active in the area upon which I had set my sights, and it would be imprudent to travel there without a military escort, which—reasonably enough—they were reluctant to provide. Instead Walter suggested a visit to the Callejón de Huaylas, a remote valley in the Cordillera Blanca, to the north.
Eighteen months earlier, the Callejón de Huaylas had been the scene of the greatest earthquake-plus-avalanche disaster in Peruvian history and it was only now that its fearful aftermath was beginning to be cleared up. In a number of towns in this 100-mile-long, densely populated valley every building had been destroyed, and in Ranrahirca alone, 30,000 people had been buried in a single instant under millions of tons of rock, mud and ice. Apart from the tragic spectacle this offered, Walter thought that the huge relief effort invited description, and mentioned that psychiatrists had been sent from all over the world to help cope with the psychological problems of thousands of victims of the catastrophe who had been driven beyond the limits of endurance by their sufferings. Disasters at Huaylas, he said, had occurred regularly throughout history, even being recorded by the Incas. Apart from spectacular loss of life, these terrible events had induced their own medically recognised form of neurosis, prevalent in people doomed to live out their lives waiting for millions of tons of ice to fall upon them from the skies.
An agreement was reached that we should go to Huaylas and that Walter would go with us. A permit was duly obtained, while the Ministry of Information supplied a car and driver. The first stage of the journey was on the Pan American Highway northwards from Lima, with a desert strip and the sea on one side and distant mountains building up on the other. Peru is a country of spectacular fogs, into which the road plunged almost immediately. The sun striking through produced weird colour combinations and hallucinatory effects. We plunged through the surface of a mock river. Fog in dispersion drifted away in osprey plumes over the sea, at the edge of which a wave carried a row of inert pink ducks towards the shore. The sand in between had thrown up strange white peaks, delicately chiselled by the wind, with mist hanging like fine lace from their spurs. Distantly inland, the driver pointed out the Hacienda La Madrugada built in the style of Brighton Pavilion, where until a year before a special version of the droit de seigneur had been imposed, personable young Indians being condemned to sleep with the aged mistress of the estate, who at the age of eighty-seven had still continued to exercise her sexual prerogative.
Three hours later we were in the suburbs of Chimbote, until lately a charming village by the sea, but now the world’s largest fishing port—easily outdistancing any competitor in Russia or Japan—where 16,000 ex-peasants had become fishermen living in a wilderness of identical cubic shacks. Here, each year, ten million tons of fish were reduced to two million tons of fish-meal for export to all parts of the world. The terrible effluvium of the fish-mills of Chimbote can be smelt up to ten miles away and senior staff of the fish-meal companies visiting the scene of their operations are under orders to do so with gas-masks in place.
At Chimbote we were told that the road we had intended to follow into the Altiplano was not to be recommended so we turned round and drove south to Pativilca where we turned off the highway and began the climb into the Andes. Almost immediately we saw the first dramatic evidence of the disastrous earthquake of 31 May 1970. We were on one of the lateral roads of the great Inca Andean highwa
y, which showed an almost brutal indifference to problems of gradient or terrain. Too often the view from the car windows on one side was an abyss, with the Fortaleza River curled like a bright thread at its bottom. The patches of maize and potatoes grown in these high valleys were continually showered by rockfalls from above, and those who cultivated them had been obliged to develop a technique of ploughing that involved constantly lifting the plough as the ox dodged to avoid the boulders.
The area of almost total destruction was reached under the pass at Huamba, a town which, through the munificence of some charitable organisation, had been rebuilt entirely in corrugated iron. Conococha, on the pass itself, was less fortunate. It had never been more than a street of wooden hutments, and these stood up only too well to the terrible earth convulsions that had rocked it like a ship in a heavy sea. Here, at nearly 13,000 feet and three hours from the equatorial desert of the coast, a mixture of sleet and rain was falling, and a great number of children with paeony cheeks and snotty noses came out in their soaking rags to watch us.
Two hours later, at the end of a marshy plateau, we drove into Huarez, capital of the great central valley between the two Cordilleras, the Callejón de Huaylas. It had taken the full force of the earthquake and looked like a pigmy Hiroshima; an open space with not a single building standing where once there had been a colonial town with a population of 20,000. This clear space was fringed by the hutments in which the survivors lived, awaiting the day when a start would be made on rebuilding the town.
It was this earthquake, lasting less than half a minute, that set off the dire catastrophe that followed immediately. Within seconds of the shock one million cubic metres of ice broke away from the highest point of the glacier of Huascarán and, falling some thousand feet, detached another 24 million cubic metres. The avalanche, travelling at 250 mph, reached and buried Ranrahirca in one minute and forty seconds. Throughout history, all those who could do so have lived in Yungay, in belief that security was offered by a protective hill, yet this town, too, disappeared instantly from sight under some thirty feet of mud and rocks. When we arrived there nothing whatever remained to indicate the buried town’s presence except the tops of four palm trees, still alive, protruding from the sea of debris covering its central square.
