Patrick O'Brian - The Wine-Dark Sea

Jack told Sam of a fine great sago-palm forest in the island of Ceram in which he had walked with his midshipmen and how they had laughed at the spectacle - a sago-forest! These trifles, barely worth attention, were soon dispatched; the cloth was drawn, the port set on Jack's right hand, and Grimble was told that he might turn in.

'Well, now, Sam,' said Jack. 'You must know that when the Doctor goes ashore it is not always just for botanizing or the like. Sometimes it is rather more in the political line, if you follow me. For example, he is very much against slavery; and in this case he might encourage people of the same opinion here in Peru. Certainly, by all means, very praiseworthy: but the authorities might take it amiss - the authorities in a slave-state might take it amiss. So when he said it would perhaps be impolitic for Dutourd, who knows his opinions, to be set ashore he may very well have seen the man as an informer. And there are other aspects that I will not touch upon: shoal water that I am not acquainted with, shoal water and no chart. But to come to the point at last - Sam, you must forgive me for being so slow, roundabout and prosy: I find it hard to concentrate my mind this evening. But the point is this: Dutourd has contrived to get ashore. I am very much afraid he may do the Doctor harm, and I mean to do everything I can to get the fellow back on board. I beg you will help me, Sam.'

'Sir,' said Sam. 'I am yours to command. The Doctor and I understand one another very well where his present activities are concerned. He has consulted me to some extent. I too am very much opposed to slavery and to French domination; so are many men I know; and as you say there are other aspects. As for the miserable Dutourd, I am afraid he is beyond our reach, having been taken up by the Holy Office last Saturday. He is now in the Casa de la Inquisicion, and I fear things will go very badly for him, once the questioning has finished; he was a most publicly violent blasphemous atheistical wretch. But he has already done all the harm he could do. The Doctor's friends had arranged a change in government, and since the Viceroy was away everything was moving rapidly and smoothly towards the desired end, troops were being moved and bridges secured, all the necessary precautions for a peaceful change, when Dutourd appeared. He said the Doctor was an English agent and that the whole operation was set a-going with the help of English gold by purchased traitors. Nobody took much notice of such an enthusiast, a Frenchman into the bargain, stained with the crime of their revolution and Napoleon's against the Pope. But a vile official, one Castro, the black thief, thought he might seize upon it to curry favour with the Viceroy, and he made a great noise, hiring a mob to shout in the streets and stone foreigners. The whole city was alive with it. The chief general cried off; the movement collapsed; and his friends advised the Doctor to leave the country at once. He is in the far mountains by now, travelling with a sure experienced guide towards Chile, which has a separate government. We consulted together before he left, and it was agreed that I should tell you he would do his utmost to be in Valparaiso by the last day of next month, staying either with the Benedictines or with don Jaime O'Higgins. Obviously he cannot travel so far over such a country in that period, but once he is in Chile we hope that he will be able to travel on by a series of small coasting vessels from one little port or fishing village to another and so reach Valparaiso in good time. We further agreed, sir, that until the Viceroy's return, which will be in three or four days now, you need have no fear for the ship, and even then direct seizure is unlikely. But we were told on good authority that you would be well advised to move her out of the yard - as indeed Captain Pullings has done - to avoid any vexatious measures, such as detention for some alleged debt or the like. For example a woman is prepared to swear that Joseph Plaice, a member of your crew, has got her with child. Then again our confidential friends, men of business, all assert that you should sell your prizes directly, or if the offer do not suit, send them down to Arica or even Coquimbo. Or even Coquimbo,' repeated Sam in the all-pervading silence. 'But I will tell it you all again, so I will, at half eight tomorrow,' he whispered. 'God bless, now.'

Sam was an even larger man than his father, but he could move even more quietly. Rising now he moved back towards the door, opened it without a sound, stood there for a moment listening to Jack's long, even breathing, and vanished into the shadowy half-deck.

After a week or ten days of steady up and down, but very much more up than down, Stephen was of opinion that his head and lungs had adapted themselves to the thin air of the mountains. He had, after all, walked and ridden all day from their last night's resting-place, rising through the high alpine pastures to perhaps nine thousand feet without discomfort. Admittedly he could not have kept up, hour after hour, with the deep-chested Indians - several of them Aymaras from Eduardo's native Cuzco - who led the train of pack-llamas up the interminable slopes, many of them so desperately barren; yet when he dismounted and walked out with Eduardo over some promising stretch of country he did so as nimbly as if he were treading the Curragh of Kildare.

Three times that day, and at ever-increasing heights, they had left their mules in the hope of a partridge or a guanaco, and three times they had caught up with the llamas not indeed empty-handed, since Stephen carried a beetle or a low-growing plant for the pack of the animal that carried their collections, but without any sort of game, which meant that their supper would be fried guinea-pig and dried potatoes once more; and each time Eduardo had said that this was a strange, unaccountable year, with weather that made no sense and with animals abandoning customs and territories that had remained unchanged since before the days of Pachacutic Inca. To prove his point on the third occasion he led Stephen to a heap of dung, wonderfully unexpected and even homely in so desolate a landscape, a heap six feet across and several inches high in spite of weathering. Stephen looked at it attentively - ruminants' droppings without a doubt - and Eduardo told him that guanacos always came to the same place to defecate, came from a great way off - it was a natural law among them - but here, in this ancestral heap (so useful as fuel) nothing whatsoever had been deposited for months: the whole surface and the periphery were old, worn, and perfectly dry.

This subversion of all that was right, and the shame of promising birds and beasts that did not appear, made Eduardo as nearly morose as his cheerful, sanguine nature would allow, and for part of the afternoon they rode in silence. During this long stretch, when the faint track rose steadily through broken rocky country towards a far high rounded crest, the train moved on with barely a sound. The Indians, whose high-arched noses and large dark eyes made them look quite like their llamas, talked little, and that in low voices: during all this time Stephen had not been able to establish human relations with a single one of them, any more than he had with their animals, and this in spite of the fact that they were together day and night, since Eduardo kept to remote trails far from all towns and frequented roads, the llamas carrying everything needed for their journey. It is true that they had seen two very long caravans carrying ore down from the isolated mines right up just under the snow-line, but these only accentuated their loneliness, not unlike that of a ship in mid-ocean. One slight consolation was that by now only a few of the more froward llamas spat at him. Up and up: up and up: with his eyes fixed, unseeing, on the gravelly soil and thin grass of the track as it flowed steadily beneath his larboard stirrup (a great hollowed block of wood) Stephen's mind floated off ten thousand miles to Diana and Brigit. How did they do? Was it right in a man to marry and then to sail off to the far side of the world for years on end?