Patrick O'Brian - The Wine-Dark Sea

An Aymara Indian of a superior kind with a red worsted cap struck him sharply on the knee, speaking in a severe, disapproving tone and pointing. 'Don Esteban,' called Eduardo again from some little way ahead, 'we are almost on the edge of the puna. If you would like to dismount I believe I could really show you something this time.'

Stephen looked up. Immediately ahead was a low red cliff and on its top the rounded crest towards which they had been travelling so long, now suddenly quite close. They must have mounted another two or three thousand feet, he reflected, taking notice of the still thinner air, the sharper cold. 'We will join them round the next bend,' said Eduardo, leading him towards a shaley path up the cliff while the llamas carried on along the trail, quite broad and distinct at this point.

'This was no doubt a mine,' observed Eduardo, pointing to a tunnel and a spoil-heap. 'Or an attempt at a mine.' Stephen nodded. They had passed no mountain, however bare, remote, waterless and inaccessible, without the mark of men having been there, searching for gold, silver, copper, cinnabar or even tin. He said nothing. His heart was already beating so as to fill his bosom, leaving no room for breath. He reached the top, but only just, and stood there controlling or trying to control his violent gasps while Eduardo named the great shining snowy peaks that soared on either hand and in front, all rising like islands from an orange belt of cloud, one behind the other, brilliant in the cold transparent air. 'Now,' he said, turning to Stephen, 'I believe I shall take your breath away.'

Stephen gave a weak, mechanical smile and followed him carefully over the tufts of coarse yellow grass. Trees had been left behind long, long ago, and here there was not even a hint of a bush, not even of a prostrate bush, only the near-sterility of ichu grass stretching away and away for ever over this high stark plateau. The ground looked flat but in fact it rose and fell, and pausing by a rocky outcrop Eduardo gave Stephen a significant, triumphant look. Stephen, half blind by now, followed his gaze down the slope and to his utter amazement he saw a scattered grove of what for a moment he took to be thick-stemmed palm-trees about fifteen feet high: but some of them had a great solid spike rising as much again above the palm-like crown.

He ran unsteadily to the nearest. The leaves were like those of an agave, fierce-pointed and with hooked thorns all along their sides: the great spike was an ordered mass of close-packed flowers, pale yellow, thousands and thousands of them. 'Mother of God,' he said. And after a while, 'It is a bromeliad.'

'Yes, sir,' said Eduardo, delighted, proprietorial. 'We call it a puya.'

'Ruiz did not know it. Nowhere is it described, still less figured in the Flora Peruvianae et Chilensis. What would Linnaeus have made of such a plant? Oh, oh!' he cried, for there, as incongruous in this severity as the bromeliad, flew or rather darted minute green hummingbirds, hovering at an open flower, sipping its honey, flashing on to the next, taking no notice of him whatsoever.

A week later and two thousand feet higher Stephen and Eduardo walked out across the flank of a quiescent volcano at a fine brisk pace: on the left hand a chaos of rocks, some enormous; on the right a vast sweep of volcanic ash, old settled ash, now just blushing green from a recent shower. They were carrying their guns, for in the puna beyond this chaos there was a possibility of Eduardo's partridges; but their main purpose was to contemplate a lofty rock-face with an inaccessible ledge upon which the condor had nested in the past and might well be nesting now.

They threaded the chaos, and although the north-facing boulders were coated with old ice they found several interesting plants among them as well as some droppings that Eduardo pointed out as being those of a vicuna.

'How do they differ from those of a guanaco?' asked Stephen.

'Apart from the fact that they lie separately rather than in a family heap, I should find it difficult to say,' replied Eduardo.

'But if you were to see the two side by side you would distinguish them at once. This is low for a vicuna, however; he must have come down for the fresh green on the other side."

'Perhaps we may get a shot at him,' said Stephen. 'You yourself said that you were tired of fried guinea-pig and ham.'

'So I did,' said Eduardo, and then, hesitantly, 'But, dear don Esteban, it would grieve me if you were to kill him. The Incas have always protected the vicuna and even the Spaniards leave him alone in general. My followers would take it very ill.'

'Sure, he is safe from me. Yet my best poncho is made from vicuna's wool."

'Certainly. They are killed from time to time, and by certain people... There is our condor.'

There he was indeed, black in a dark blue sky, wheeling towards his still-distant cliff. They watched him out of sight. Stephen did not return to the vicuna: Eduardo was embarrassed and there was obviously some question of the old ways here. He and his followers were no doubt practising Catholics, but this did not prevent them from dipping one finger in their cup and holding it up to thank the sun before drinking, as their ancestors had done time out of mind; and there were other ceremonies of the same nature. 'As you know,' said Eduardo, 'the chick cannot fly until his second year; so if he is there, and if the light is what I could wish, we may see him peering over the edge.'

'Could we not climb up and look down on him?'

'Heavens, no,' cried Eduardo. 'We should never get down before sunset; and it is terrible to be caught by night on the puna. Do but think of the terrible evening winds, the terrible morning winds, and the wicked cold - nothing to eat, nothing to drink, no shelter at all."

Stephen was thinking of these things as they walked across an accidented stretch of country when, rounding a tumble of rock, they heard the squealing neigh of a guanaco. They stopped short, and there on the left hand stood the guanaco they had heard, while still farther to the left a string of others fled at a great pace, vanishing down the slope.

The guanaco neighed again, louder, still more shrill, stamped the tall spiky ichu grass with his front feet and began rearing and waving his head in a great passion, never yielding a foot as they approached.

'He is challenging you,' said Eduardo. 'He has been fighting -look at the blood on his sides. He may attack you presently. You could not ask for a better shot; nor a better supper.'

'But I must not shoot him?'

'Why, don Esteban,' cried Eduardo, 'how can you speak so? He is no vicuna - he is much too big for a vicuna, and the wrong colour - he is a guanaco, and a perfectly fair quarry for you.'

Stephen's piece had one barrel loaded with shot, the other with ball: he knelt, which enraged the guanaco, took careful aim, and fired. The animal, struck in the heart, gave a great bound and disappeared, apparently collapsing in the long grass.

'The first day we eat steaks, minced very fine,' said Eduardo as they hurried up the slope. 'The next day, in the sun, his shoulders grow quite tender.' Eduardo could be as cheerful as any European, but it was clearly part of his ancestral code to show no adverse emotion: a Stoic calm. Yet now his look of eager expectation changed to one of plain blank undisguised dismay. The guanaco had in fact been capering on the edge of a chasm and its convulsive leap had carried it over.

Two hundred feet below them he lay, and the cliff dropped sheer. They pondered, searching in vain for any way down; they measured the declining sun, the shadows rising below them; unwillingly they turned, and as they turned first the male condor and then his mate began their first wheeling sweeps high overhead.

Another day, on the high puna yet again, coming back from a small alpine lake, the source of a stream that eventually flowed into the Amazon and so on to the Atlantic (though from here on clear mornings they could make out the gleam of the South Sea), a lake on whose frozen bank Eduardo had shown Stephen that handsome goose the huachua with a white body and dark green wings, they paused in still another group of puyas, some of them growing among rocks so conveniently placed that Stephen was able to gather seed from the lower flower. It was late, but for once the evening was as calm as the day, and the llama-train was clearly in sight on the trail below.