House At The Hole In The Sky - P + Ch 1

HOUSE AT THE HOLE IN THE SKY

- a novel in time -



by

© Guy Cox

21 November 2010

Prologue

Deep in the forest the night wind came, gusts of wind like waves of water, blowing yasi racing through night-white clouds.

Below, the clearing was dark save for a single firelight through an open doorway.



Hurry.  The old man’s hard, knotted fingers shook, not though fear, but with age and exhaustion as he emptied the herb and tobacco into his hand from his pouch and filled the pipe bowl with the mixture.  Enough for one person, enough for one final flight.  The walls of the octagonal hut glowed deep orange as, at his signal, the five naked men sitting round the close walls lifted their tacuaras.  The sacred rhythm of tokai would sound out now for the last time.  One last time the rhythm would sound out on the hard-packed ground.  But would they all escape, these last few warriors of the old time?

Who could know?  Yaneramai is great but the forest is greater.  Some things, even Yaneramai cannot know.



Hurry Aramana, thought Luis.  Caiguasu cannot hold Viudez and the soldiers back for long.  Though we still have some hours of darkness, our warriors are few and have almost expended their arrows.

The old man, fixing his eyes on the pipe in front of him, lifted his chin without looking up.

Remember Luis, the old man said as he packed the mixture down with his thumb and presented it to the other; as before, the smoke spell will help us move you forward in time.  You must make contact one last time with the karai who will help the Guarayo in times to come.  Luis lifted his chin in assent.

You have done well, Luis, he is close now.  He is close to us and he is looking for you.    Find him and do it quickly.  We still have to make our preparations to leave this place.

Aramana picked a glowing coal from the fire, ran it round his hand and dropped it into the pipe bowl.

Luis held the old man’s eye for an instant then looked over his shoulder as an explosion sounded out in the distance.  He held out his two hands, palms up, to receive the pipe.  The thumping rhythm increased, sweat glistened on brown skin.  Luis lifted the pipe to his lips and inhaled.

Chapter 1{/left}

Arrival

Vultur gryphus

42 inches.  Wingspan about ten foot.  Head and neck bare, purplish flesh with comb on top of head, white ruff at base of neck; rest of plumage black except for large patch of silvery gray on wings.  Andes mountains.

Condors have the largest wingspan of any South American land bird.  Robert paused, tapping his pen on his lips, then an idea came to him and he wrote in the lone beam of his cabin reading light, Andean Condor Bolivia’s widest bird.

Letting his mind wander for a moment he remembered that, as well as being the largest and most majestic of the New World Vulture family, Andean Condor is also the Bolivian national bird.  In recognition of its importance to the highland culture, the species, perched with open wings, occupies the point of honour atop the oval shield of the Bolivian coat of arms.  In this way, condors also make appearances on the national flag, hung in all schools and government buildings, and on all Bolivian coins and banknotes.  Thus, despite their decreasing numbers in real life, if you included these pictorial representations, Robert reasoned, Andean Condor would be by far the commonest bird in Bolivia.

He smiled.  He’d always liked little games like this.  He finished off his page of birdy scribblings with the words, and commonest!



Having a vulture as your national bird says something about a country, he thought, then his eyes went to the seat-back in front of him where he was instantly granted a good quantity of condor sightings, or condor’s heads at least, in the stylized logo of the Bolivian national carrier, Lloyd Aereo Boliviano.

Rare bird spotted on air-sickness bag.  He almost smiled out loud.  Then he imagined himself standing up in front of his group asking, OK, who can tell me, what’s the widest bird in Bolivia?

Would anyone get it?  People would guess Greater Rhea, which would be right based on body size.  He would say rheas count as Bolivia’s fattest birds.  They wouldn’t have a chance with his commonest bird question.  Pity the answer was the same.  Maybe he should combine the two and make it, why is Bolivia’s widest bird also the most frequenly seen?  Something like that.



Condors have been observed by pilots up at cruising altitude of a seven forty-seven.  All birds have secrets.  Unlike the chattering songbirds, the silent condor passes his secret down with a glint of the eye, with a tilt of the wing.

Mallku, king of birds, from his station above the highest snowcapped peaks, sees all. Armoured men with fearsome whinnying animals leave their boats by a rocky shore and march inland over wide plains.  One who walks in front, dressed in black, carries a cross.  Towns and cities, built up of stone on cut stone brought down in ruin.  Smoke, the stench of burning corpses tasted from a hundred miles.  Screams.  Cries.  Sickness.  Desolation.  Death.  A lonely band of dark-skinned wanderers on a mountain track.

The deadly-attractive smell of death, the death of others, had brought them in number, but who could guess what the birds of carrion would behold from above as they made for the feast.  They watch in silence the flight of he who was born on the sacred island.  Of the Royal bloodline.  True Son of the Sun.



Robert blew his nose and, as a kind of hopeful sympathetic magic for breakfast to be served, began to clear up various bits from his folding table.



Fingertips holding the air, from snowfields to warm forest slopes an effortless morning glide and so they followed, curious, tracking from above, that tiny band of escort, most trusted followers, escaping the Spanish siege of the walled city, making for the safety of the great unending folds of green below the mountains.

Over snowrise and rock, clad in alpaca and gold he walks by day, rests and makes his bed knee-deep amid moss cushions and rough sunken boughs by night, this king, last Sapa Inca, empire in ruin, whose feet once never touched the ground.  Guided by the priest with towering brow they head toward Inti rising through a mist of enveloping clouds.  Days of rock and puna, scrambling, climbing and fearful looking back.

Making the pass at last they descend into the warm humid air of the far-seen land.  Wheeling birds above, higher than the sun, the travellers find refuge with a forest people, warriors, of the Golden City of the land to Inti Rising, grandchildren of Abaangui, the one of the fallen-down nose.



He clipped his pen into his pocket and looked out the aircraft’s porthole.  Amazonian forest at five o’clock in the morning: complete blackness.  They must be over Bolivia by now.

An image came to mind of the physical map of the country he'd had on his bedroom wall during his student days in London.  The huge contiguous expanse of Pando and northern La Paz departments in the west had been one solid area of mid-green which, according to the Holdridge Life Zone key, denoted Southern Amazonian Humid Forest.

From hours of standing on his bed in silent study under a fifty watt bulb, he knew the delicious-sounding Indian names of the rivers now below him by heart.  They were names he loved to roll round in his mind, like Pacahuaras, Tahuamanu, Itonamas, Manuripi, Madidi, Yacuma, Tuiche.  The only settlements in this vast flat forested area, scattered and minimal black dots on Robert’s map planted alongside the courses of these sluggish blackwater giants, were the far-flung evangelical missions with private airstrips and hopeful names like Libertad and Conquista.  Robert is above the Fields of the Lord.

He was about to turn back to his notebook and Bolivian bird riddles when, almost directly below him, he saw a single light, a lone bright point almost lost in the dark sea of blackness.  Robert tried to imagine being there on the ground, beside this light.  It would be deep forest; warm earthy smells and quiet strident night insect sounds.

Most likely it’s a pequi-pequi, one of the few slow, low river boats that ply these distant waterways carrying basic supplies; the stern-light of an ancient whitewashed, plank-built, square-cabin craft, with sacks of salt, sugar and yuca flour stacked on the covered deck, moored up on the bank, or making its seemingly endless way round a long bend against the current, a boy out in front watching for snags.  Or maybe it’s a hunter’s camp; two or three seasoned backwoodsmen up early, huddled round a small fire sharing sour coffee, out to hunt tapir meat to salt and dry in the sun on the narrow poles they cut and tied yesterday, to feed the crew of a sawmill.  Or possibly it’s one of the missions; tall American goes out in the early morning from his thatched adobe in the jungle to piss, opens screen door quietly so as not to wake his wife, hears roar of distant aircraft overhead, looks up.

The light slides by beneath and disappears into the night.  On the other side, to the east, if any windows had been open, Robert would have seen the first bright-centered, pink violet glimmer of the morning sun spreading on the flat horizon.  In front of him, at eye level, the ghostly line of mountains coming ever closer ahead yet not seeming to move, would glow ephemeral white.



He was preparing to lead the annual Nature Conservancy donors’ group two-week trip to Noel Kempff Mercado National Park.  This time Robert had decided to do some homework, fine tune his tour into something special that the group would really enjoy, never forget.

For the first time the trip was to start in La Paz, spend one day there, then go on down to Cochabamba in hired four-by-fours, again spending the night in a hotel, do the cloud forest in a morning, and then drive all the way to Santa Cruz where, next day, the fourth day of the trip, they would pick up their light planes and fly out to Noel Kempff Mercado National Park.  The protected area in the northeast corner of Santa Cruz department was their main destination and the jewel in the crown of TNC-aided Bolivian conservation efforts.



Robert shelved the birding trivia and got back to an earlier idea.  He’d been preparing some material he could refer to on those long evening hours over suppers ahead, or on the road with the group if there was a delay, by making a list of all the world records he could find concerning Bolivia.  He’d been surprised to find how many there were.  After reading through relevant sections of, among others, Deanna Swaney’s Bolivia guidebook, he’d learned that Titicaca was the highest navigable lake in the world, about Uyuni, which turned out to be the world’s largest and highest salt-lake, and that he was about to land in La Paz, the world’s highest airport with the longest runway in normal commercial use.

Now he dug through the daypack at his feet and scanned an older edition of Geoff Crowther’s Shoestring guide, soon coming across some not quite so flattering records resulting from Bolivia’s tumultuous political history.

Bolivia declared independence in 1825 and has long held the garland for the most internal revolutions of any country in the world. It has lost territory in border disputes to all  five neighbouring countries and has never won a war.  Besides this, economically, Bolivia is the poorest country in the Americas, with a per capita GDP second only to Haiti, even after, ironically, those two Inca scouts happened on what would turn out to be by far the world’s richest mine; Cerro Rico, a find that made Potosí, or La Plata as it was called, for a time into the world’s wealthiest city and the largest in the western hemisphere.

Bolivia has America’s greatest indigenous population, roughly sixty-five per cent, the lowest population density, who collectively have the lowest life expectancy, both for women and men, of any American country.  This last figure is still mainly due to the mines, where over a million black slaves died in the course of three centuries and where African and native miners worked side by side for the Spanish in shifts of up to three months in such conditions that, on coming up, their eyes had to be bandaged against the light.

Crowther also had La Paz as the world’s highest capital city but Robert knew that to any Bolivian, Sucre was the constitutional capital of Bolivia, even though it was now only the seat of the Supreme Court.  World’s highest administrative capital didn’t sound so good so he decided not to write it down.



A few minutes later cabin lights came on in a wake-up, electro-shock therapy kind of way and cheery stewardesses were soon plying plastic breakfasts to waking passengers with tea or coffee.

The view out on Robert’s side, front-lit by an early sun, now presented a stunning sight.  Smoky blue pre-dawn light had replaced the darkness.  The line of white mountains showed ahead in the distance as an irregular wrinkled array stretching to the horizon.  As always Robert’s attention went down to the mat of green vegetation below with its infinity of shapes and that quiet undulating texture intertwined with misty flat rivers that traced towards the hills.

Looking down on the unending unfolding of forest, he sighed.  There was something about tropical forest, even just the words sometimes, when he said them, that caught him and tied up his throat.  His forehead went to the window and he lost his thoughts in the green.



Bolivia.  It was ten years since Robert had first come, then as a wide-eyed twenty one year old, for a gap year vacation that turned into a lifetime obsession.  And at the time he had had no idea how it had happened, really.  He recalled now that first time, the first time he'd felt the magic, in a place between the flat lowland forest and the mountains.

They had come overland from Lima, Peru, the cheapest ticket of the time, to mid-continental South America, him and a group of friends.  They had been gringo travellers in South America, travelling by bus from one large town to another, drinking cerveza, staying in hotels, buying purportedly local hand-made souvenirs and getting their moneybelts stolen in the flea markets.  They tried chewing coca in La Paz.  It tasted like grass cuttings.  They got as far as Santa Cruz and everything had been fine, normal.

In Bolivia’s flat, cultureless lowland capital, still fat and happy from times of petroleum  and cocaine, the group wandered around a few days, visited the English Bar and the zoo where Robert saw curassows and Andean Condors for the first time.  Then the group had gone their separate ways.

Robert and one companion had wanted to see some wildlife, go to a national park, one called Amboró, while the other three, they were five by now, were more interested in Sucre and maybe on to Uyuni before the long trek back and the inevitable flight home from Lima.

They were all free spirits, so Robert and Emma packed their rucksacks and made their way to Buena Vista, the town near the northern park limit where, according to the guidebook, they could arrange a trip into Amboró.  The others were going south.  They said their farewells at the bus station as the two got on the crowded microbus to Montero.

In Amboró something happened.  Nothing outwardly dramatic, but it was something that would change and define Robert’s life for a long time to come.  He had never been very religious, he didn’t even believe in God, really, till then.

On their first day into the park they went bumping down the rutted road in a rusting taxi to the Surutú river on the park’s northern border, passing by the scattered shacks of immigrant highland farmers, crossed various small rivers, and finally arrived at the guard camp on the edge of the high forest.  They had now reached a point first seen from the ridge of Buena Vista, where flat lowland terrain turned impetuously and dramatically into the chain of steep foothills which stretched away under forest for who knew how many miles, past Cochabamba and all the way to La Paz and beyond.  They had reached the tangible divide between lowlands and mountains.

The Andes mountains.  The Andes range.  He had to keep repeating it to himself as they walked through the heat of the day towards the steep green hills so close ahead.  The words felt remote, otherworldly, almost.  Then they would pass by dried-up maize fields and campesino pastures of thin cattle and, where the road dipped down through black willows, they waded through shaded streams and stooped to drink cool sweet water running from these same Andes mountains.

At the guard camp they’d thankfully eaten the lunch of tuna sandwiches made before leaving Buena Vista then, following the quiet guide along on the path, it was like walking into a cathedral.  So clean.  Robert felt he could lie down, bury himself deep in the leaves and go to sleep in the moss so clean and green and the eye, looking up, became fascinated by the structures of the trees, the sussurating stillnesses punctuated by sudden cicadas  and clouds white on blue behind high-reaching trees.

The moment they had entered the high forest Robert felt an all-enshrouding warm feeling, a perfume almost, filling the air in certain pockets along the two-hour prepared tourist trail that led them out to a lookout over the Saguayo River and back to camp.

They hadn’t seen much, but it didn’t matter.  And Robert wouldn’t even have called himself a birdwatcher at the time.  He carried binoculars of course, but more to see anything that went by than to spot the difficult birds that were to be had by the plateful in the thick guide book, the Carmiol’s Tanagers and Black-throated Antbirds that the bearded English guide, calmly excited at every slight movement in the undergrowth, had tried to point out to them.

All the same, something huge was moving inside him.  He could not have said what, but the trees, the great magnificent abundance all around him, seemed to spell it out.  This, finally, was it; untouched, pristine virgin forest.  Its power, beauty and indifference to him,  tiny human who dared enter the timeless realm, completely took his breath away.

That evening they ate pasta, played gin rummy by candle light, heard nightjars and saw alpha and beta Centuri pointing toward the Southern Cross.

Next day, waking in a dewey-grey light, and after a breakfast of coffee and porridge, they had gone further in.  On reaching the lookout point over the main river they spotted a Crested Eagle sitting disdainfully on a snag over hanging oropendola nests.  A pair of bluegreen Military Macaws skulled over clouds of trees that stacked to a high horizon.  They followed the path down to the river then jumped boulders up the Saguayo till they reached a little stream well inside the inner protected reserve.

I can’t believe it, Robert said as they sat down for another packed lunch on a rock under the shade of a fruiting bean tree.  They were surrounded by towering cliffs, bromeliads tucked in impossible places, steep slopes covered with huge throws of forest; great vertical trees, others fallen across, full of ferns and fruits and orchids.

What? asked Emma, dark-skinned, independent, having her own experience of the rainforest.

She rubbed the ankle she had twisted on one of the river boulders on the way up, then picked up one of the long yellowish pods from the ground and, pressing, split it.  Robert tried to include everything he was feeling in a single gesture with his arm.

All this.  The same sweet stillness Robert had felt before was in the air as he tried to continue.  All this, I mean, he observed a column of leaf-cutter ants moving purposefully over the sand just in front of them, their little green banners held high.  I mean, there’s so much, isn’t there?  It’s incredible.

Mmm, said Emma.  This is really nice and sweet.

Robert noticed an unusual geometricalness to the leaves on the far bank.  They seemed to be waving at him in a gentle breeze and he sensed again the sweet vanilla chocolate scent coming somewhere from the overhanging trees behind.  Similar plants and groups of leaves were stacked up like pyramidal foxy faces, each grinning at others across the way, moving, shimmering, symmetrical, too radiant and brilliantly green.

The Saguayo idled by with clear, sweet-voiced sound, like mocking playground girls if you listened long enough, and the insect sounds, the heat, the light, surrounded him.  A fluting song sounded behind and continued for two long minutes; slow, deliberate notes, a piper, always slightly ascending, to steady trills, then all repeated, in a silence he had never known, beside a quiet stream.

They looked at each other afterwards.

Now that was incredible, Emma finally sighed.  What do you think it was, some kind of bird?

She offered Robert half of the sticky-seeded bean pod.  It’s alright; he’s eating them, she said, nodding toward the guide who was sitting away from them upstream on a flat stone.  They’re really sweet.



From that moment every day in London or the States, where he had variously lived till then, he would feel as time wasted.  Or at best, it was time to be spent in libraries and museums, forever studying the land that had captured him: the land of the Guarayo, Chiriguano and Yuracaré, Harpy Eagle and Jaguar.  The Bolivian Amazon.

He managed to get back twice during university summer vacations.  They had been a couple of all too brief flying visits when a few more names on his map turned into real places and his spoken Spanish slowly improved.  He hiked for days alone or with a single local guide and his bird list began to grow as he talked to others, swapped notes and followed up on trip reports.

Finishing his degree, Robert hooked up with a field research station in Venezuela where he netted birds and helped catch Hoatzins in the marshes of the Llanos before moving on to Costa Rica with a friend to see if they could break into the freelance bird-guiding business.

Robert stayed six months, learning birds, meeting agents, lodge-owners and resident guides before returning to England to begin promoting his own tours under the name he thought up on the plane home - C-Birds Tours.  He never did decide what the “C” stood for, but CBT was easy to say and soon became a budding business.

Since then he had worked with a number of tour agencies and followed the growing demand to move his groups every year progressively southwards from Central America through Colombia, Ecuador and Peru until, three years ago, he had found himself back in La Paz on a one-month reconnaissance to scout routes for a possible four trips a year to Bolivia.

To date he’d done six two-week birding trips back here, two a year, with regular groups, along with some shorter specialist tours.  The two TNC donor trips had come in on top as welcome extras but now Robert would be working to make sure he became a regular fixture there too.  He imagined it advertised: the Annual Nature Conservancy Bolivia Tour, led as usual by Robert Painter.  There would be a headshot photo of him looking rugged and confident, binoculars poised at the ready.

Finishing his coffee, Robert looked out again.  The flight was about to make the complete ecological life zone transition from hot lowland forest to frozen glaciers in ten minutes, in what Robert knew to be a gruelling two day jeep ride from Rurrenabaque to La Paz on precipitous roads.

Quite quickly, although the snow-topped mountains themselves never seemed to move, flat forest gave way to rounded wooded foothills, which then split into an infinity of rising three dimensional intersecting ridges and steep valleys, cliffs and half-hidden waterfalls.

Steep, angular rivers and different, smaller trees appeared, the ground becoming intricately creased up like a landscape-sized rumpled rug till the whole mass of land lifted up and the tops of the highest ridges showed bare and treeless.  Then, suddenly, all was lost under a flat cloud layer that enshrouded the higher slopes away to the horizon.

Robert was looking down on the permanent cover of the mysterious and enchanted cloud forest.  Above this zone, on the highest wet ridges, still hidden by cloud, would be the elfin forest; rose-leaved, paper-barked khewiña, the haunt of quetzals and spectacled bears, golden tanagers and hanging orchids.  He remembered the time he’d gone to this elfin forest below him looking for Giant Conebills.  He’d sunk up to his knees in moss on an Inca path, bathed in icewater streams and slept in ancient huts with stone walls a metre thick.

A minute later the bank of cloud cleared to reveal a different, higher landscape.  They were crossing the mountains that had been visible from the lowlands.  After a glimpse of some last shrubby slopes and a sinuous black tarmacked road leading back into the cloud, they passed between the peaks of two mountains and Robert suddenly saw, close below, the bare and open ochre plain of the Altiplano.  Walled fields of quinoa and potatoes, each with its hand-picked pile of stones in the middle, square alpaca corrals with single-room dwellings in one corner, all stood in miniature before the angular white shapes of the Cordillera Real.

Desert landscapes traversed by impossibly remote tracks meandered over mountain ridges to snowline and out of sight.  Tiny houses stood proudly below the last vast reaches as if challenging the great forces of the mountains themselves to advance and engulf them.

Now the great azure lake of the Andes spread out beneath; floating reed islands, then Sun and Moon in a shimmering sapphire sea, the high and watchful sentinels of Huayna Potosí and Illampu like white gods catching the early sun on the skyline.  Next moment they were on final approach.  No descent into this, the world’s highest airport, which was almost up at normal cruising altitude.  The pilots had only to cut back the engines slightly and dip down over ever more densely packed stonewall corrals, then they were passing closely over the jerry-built rooves of the outer shanty regions of El Alto.

La Paz is not the capital of Bolivia, and the airport is in El Alto, not La Paz.  The new city, as it is called, once no more than a few buildings clustered round the airport, was now a separate municipal entity in itself of over half a million people, with more arriving each day to scratch out a future in the city above the City in the Sky.

The new conurbation of El Alto, spread out irregularly on the flat plain surrounding the deep gorge where the old city lay, was inhabited almost entirely by displaced Aymara miners and subsistence farmers come in search of a better living which they found on arrival by selling used truck tires and blackened engine oil on endless dusty streets of unfinished concrete block houses.

Some boys were already out playing football in a dusty yard.  Behind them, syndicalist slogans marked every wall.  Robert whizzed by all this at about a hundred kilometres an hour, and slowing down at about half the normal rate.  In El Alto water boils at seventy degrees Centigrade, there is less than half the oxygen compared with at sea level, and the very lack of substance to the air makes taking off and landing in El Alto a tricky business.

Two Puna Ibises lifted off the grassy end of the runway just before the plane touched down and then, to his right, the city of La Paz was framed for a second in its montane cradle by dusty eucalyptus trees.  Houses and skyscrapers of the Old City crammed into the base of the sheer valley while smaller dwellings clung to near vertical sides, with the snowy peak of Illimani a constant passive backdrop to this hectic piling-up of buildings.

There was a bump, some squeaks and a long rolling to the dumpy single-storey terminal.  The airline company thanked the passengers for choosing them and welcomed all those on board to Bolivia.  The local time is six-thirty and the temperature is seven degrees Centigrade.

Startled fully awake by the bite of cold morning air and a certain difficulty in breathing, Robert passed quickly through immigration, collected his rucksack from the carousel and made his way out to the taxi rank.

His driver was to be a venerable, square headed, old Aymara gentleman with enormous ears who, after placing Robert’s pack in the back with meticulous care, seemed to steer, change gear and generally handle his unpredictable old vehicle more with the tugging, reluctant reverence of a man droving a recalcitrant alpaca than someone driving a car.

He spoke to her gently, eased, then unexpectedly tugged the gear lever to induce movement after stopping to pay the toll, and Robert asked about the joggers as they passed a group of runners turning at the barrier.

It’s easier going downhill, was the old man’s only comment as they continued down the wide, winding toll road from the airport, a road which seemed to spiral all round the valley from above, giving spectacular views of the city that rested its head in the steep gorge.  Robert thought the driver might have misunderstood and be referring to his car.  The white top of Illimani stood behind the city like a compass.

The joggers were aspiring sportsmen who had, in the approach road to La Paz, a ready-made high-altitude training ground.  People generally exercised in the morning, Robert’s driver continued as they passed more runners going up, before work shifts or classes at the university allowed.  Hernando Siles stadium, he pointed out the round orange folded roof among the high office blocks of the city centre, was the home ground of the Bolivian football team, as well as being Bolivia’s secret weapon in international matches.  Robert imagined it must be the highest football stadium in the world.  Maybe even the highest professional sports ground of any kind, unless there was now one in El Alto.



A few blocks before arriving at Robert’s hotel they passed the large statue of an Inca standing as if on guard on the road’s central divide.

Who’s that?  Robert asked.

Tupac Yupanki, replied the driver.  Then, after looking sideways at Robert and seemingly deciding he could be trusted with the information, he confided, the Last Inca.  He made it through the Spanish siege and escaped from Cuzco with a small band of followers, he added, glancing again at Robert as they pulled up beside the hotel.  People say they got away over the hills and made it into the forest where he was taken in by a group of lowland Indians.

The implication, as the man’s knowing look clearly implied, though he said nothing more while handing Robert his backpack, was that the Incan bloodline was in temporary hiding, waiting only for an appropriate moment to reappear in majesty and take back their lands from the white man.

Robert thanked the taxi driver and paid in Bolivianos a total of about two and a half dollars, remembering to show proper respect by haggling the price down mercilessly from three.



La Paz, dirty and incongruous by day, was transformed by night into a dazzling display of coloured fairy lights.  That evening as Robert sat alone in the hotel’s darkened glass penthouse bar drinking gassy beer and listening to the drone of international CNN he watched the magical lights going on up the sides of the valley beyond his own reflection.

Of average height and build, narrow-faced, with high knobs of cheekbones, greyblue eyes, Robert had long ago adopted the out-doorsy, unshaven adventurer look so that his one notable feature, the tight curls of his short, reddish-sandy hair, were almost always hidden under a tattered baseball cap.  His good teeth were thanks to his father’s private dental plan and he’d been told he had a winning smile, which he now used to attract the attention of the waitress from behind the bar to ask for a second bottle of Paceña.  He took out some papers from the front pocket of his day pack at his feet.

Earlier in the afternoon, checking his e-mail, Robert had found out why the trip was to start in La Paz.  The Slovinsky couple were orchid enthusiasts and had particularly asked for part of the trip to include a quick look at some higher elevation Andean cloud forest and its epiphytic luxuriance, their words, forwarded, in addition to what Noel Kempff and the lowlands had to offer.  He’d also learned that day from the office that, due to some medical emergency on the part of one couple, only eight from the original ten would be coming.  The message was hurried and unspecific but TNC had, the secretary said, already contacted a reserve client to fill one of the spaces.  He was José Gonçalvez, who would be arriving some time later to meet up with the group in Santa Cruz.  Mr. Gonçalvez was to confirm his trip with the US office that day, or tomorrow at the latest.  The rest of the group would arrive in La Paz on tomorrow’s American Airways morning Miami flight.

The photocopied list Robert now flicked through, back to front, included the ten original clients’ names, ages, professions, health problems and food preferences.  He noted that Carol Weinstein could not eat fish and needed plenty of bottled water and that Mr. Slovinsky had a heart condition.

All in all, he reflected, sipping his beer, the TNC tour was a great group to lead, the one he looked forward to, because on the Donor’s Trip no expense was spared.  They flew everywhere by light plane, or at least they had till this year, which meant they could go to all the best places, visiting both Flor de Oro and Los Fierros and even spending a day on top of the plateau.  they would have lots of boat time in Flor de Oro which would allow them to see all the big and impressive things that made the trip so memorable: herons, piping-guans, monkeys, caiman, capybara, giant otters, and the cliffs of Conan Doyle’s Lost World.  All, God willing, at close hand.

He got an early night and woke to rain on the window, a bare-wire electric shower from which he could encourage no more than a cold trickle despite the show of stars in the  lobby, and an early morning taxi ride back to the airport to meet his group.

One window and various holes in the bodywork of this taxi had been covered over with plastic sheeting and adhesive tape, an arrangement which seemed designed to channel a cold wind into blasts down his neck.  The effect was not reduced when the vehicle pulled up at a junction at the top of a hill to allow a group of people to pass.

Mainly stocky hill women in dirty aprons, pleated skirts and ample petticoats, small bowler hats perched at unlikely angles on their heads, the group became a crowd which, instead of parting and allowing cars to go on ahead when the light changed, spilled out onto the road and increased.  Stony-faced men with handwritten banners appeared in with them, then a line carrying the wide multicolour chequered wiphala flag of the Collasuyo filed by, blocking the whole road in front and making up the head of a previously unseen mass of marchers.

Robert looked at his watch, sighed and looked at his watch again.  The plane was due in half an hour, plus twenty minutes to collect their bags, he should be alright.

Robert’s driver, a mountain giant of amost his height but twice the weight, wore no socks. His right car-tyre sandal rested on the brake and his taxidriver’s standard thin brown jumper was holed at the elbow.  He stared steadily ahead, big square hands on the wheel, and said nothing.  Robert pointed hopefully to the car radio but the driver rocked his outstretched hand on the pivot of an index finger, the frequently-used signal in Bolivia meaning, there’s nothing there or, just as often, it doesn’t work.

Realizing they would be waiting a while, Robert, having missed reading the early placards, sought for any indication of what these people might be protesting for, or against, but the crowd of marchers was silent, walking straight-backed and in time.  They were not yet chanting their demands, something which would be left till they reached the main city streets below.  Right now they were just getting there, using the time to practice the group’s vehicle-stopping ability and draw more participants from the crowd.

Twenty minutes passed and Robert, now checking the time every couple of minutes, began to get nervous, marvelling at the same time how patient everyone else seemed to be.  Was nobody else in a hurry?  Other drivers just sat there behind the wheel, watching with practiced resignation as the endless stream of marchers filed by.

Horrible visions began to snag at his mind.  What if the plane was early?  He hadn’t checked before leaving.  He’d get there and the group would have assumed he wasn’t coming to meet them and would already be in other taxis on their way down to the hotel.  Or maybe they’d still be sitting waiting for him beside their forlorn pile of luggage, every minute wondering if something had happened and why had they come to this land of corruption and turmoil where nothing ever went as planned.

Robert imagined a white-haired, carefully manicured member of the group looking at his watch and saying something like, well, if he can’t get to the airport on time, how does he expect to run the rest of the trip? to his frail wife beside him.  Others would nod and look again towards the plate glass doors.

The line of marchers thinned and, finally, after the last of the stragglers had been allowed to pass, the taxi carried on up the spiralling road towards the airport.  Robert waited almost an hour for the plane to arrive as takeoff had been delayed in Miami for technical reasons.