There were more frozen mules by the wayside now, and clusters of wooden crosses alongside the track. Condors wheeled in and out of the icy clouds above. They were forced to stop every fifty yards for the mules to catch their breath. The lack of air produced the same sensation, Darwin noted, that he used to feel after a school run on a frosty day. The footprints of the mules crushed the snow crimson - not blood, as he first thought, but the tiny spores or eggs of some primitive organism, measuring less than a thousandth of an inch in diameter beneath the all-seeing scrutiny of his microscope. Finally the party arrived between the enclosing walls of the Portillo Pass, the ‘little door’ in the mountains, and gazed in awe upon the flat, featureless plains of the pampas below: a vast, sleeping expanse broken only by the rivers that ran away like silver threads in the rising sun, before losing themselves in the immensity of the distance. He had achieved his ambition.
They began their descent towards the border-post of the Republic of Mendoza. At their second halt Darwin laid animal-traps, and succeeded in catching another mouse.
‘This mouse is different from the mice on the Chilean side.’
‘Of course,’ said Mariano, taking a cursory look. ‘Chilean mice are different from Mendocino mice.’
‘All the animals on the Chilean side are different from all the animals on the Mendoza side,’ explained Gonzales, as if he were addressing an idiot.
‘All of them? Are you sure?’ He had to be careful here. Mariano and Gonzales had already failed to distinguish themselves on the natural philosophy front.
‘Everybody knows this, Don Carlos. The condors, well, they can fly across from one side to the other. But the animals - they will not cross the passes. It is too cold. So the Chilean animals and the Mendocino animals, they are all quite different.’
Darwin reeled. This meant that the animals had come into being after the Andes had risen - and the Andes were still rising. So they could not, in fact, have been created by God on the sixth day. The two sets of animals were either new creatures, or — the terrifying enormity of the possibility raised the hairs aloft all the way down his spine - they had somehow transmuted, or metamorphosed, from original, common ancestors. At once, he felt puny and insignificant before the vast and scarcely comprehensible scale of such changes; one man alone, in the vastness of the cordillera. But at the same time he knew that the whole edifice of Christianity must heave and shake before the remorselessness of his logic, like an Andean pinnacle crumbling before the simple power of an earth tremor. If I am right, he thought, if I am right - then my findings will be crucial to the theory of the formation of the world.
‘If you please sir - would you like me to kill and skin the mouse, sir?’ enquired Covington, politely and resentfully.
How Darwin burned for a FitzRoy or a Henslow to be present.
The Mendoza customs and border-post proved to be a grubby hovel, staffed by two unshaven soldiers and a pure-bred Indian tracker, who was retained as a kind of human bloodhound in case any smugglers should attempt to give the post a wide berth. The three men were jumpy, and utterly bewildered by the concept of a naturalista. In an attempt to ease the administrative deadlock, Darwin produced his passport signed by General Rosas. One of the soldiers, a lieutenant who could read, perused the document and shot Darwin a look of disgust.
‘If you are protected by the general, then you may proceed. The man who would deny passage to a servant of the general is not long for this world, as you are most probably aware.’
Darwin decided to let the accusation that he was anyone’s ‘servant’ pass. ‘The general has influence in Mendoza?’
‘No, the general has no influence in our country. But it is only a matter of time. He has seized Buenos Ayres. He has taken control of most of the United Provinces. Many people have died. He is cleansing the country of Indians as far south as the Rio Negro. Now his armies are massing on the Mendoza border. We Mendocinos shall not be able to stop him. It is only a matter of time before we all become part of your general’s empire.’
The last few words dripped from the officer’s tongue like bad wine. Darwin remembered FitzRoy’s caustic assessment of the general’s motives, and reflected uneasily that perhaps his friend had been right, after all. He adopted his most soothing tones.
‘I am not a personal acquaintance of the general. This passport was given to me as a representative of His Majesty King William IV of Great Britain.’
At this the other soldier perked up.
‘Heh - Great Britain. That is near England, right?’
‘After a fashion,’ Darwin replied.
‘You are a pirata?’
‘No ... no, I am not a pirate. As I told you, I am a naturalista. The two are really quite different.’
‘Naturalista ... pirata ... Why do you Ingleses not keep to normal occupations?’ the soldier grumbled to himself.
By nightfall, relations had improved sufficiently for Darwin’s party to join the soldiers for supper around the rudimentary table of the border-post. His bed, which they had accepted without demur as part of a naturalista’s travelling accoutrements, had been installed in the back room. The border guards ate in silence, chewing slowly on hunks of boiled beef, while Mariano and Gonzales finally induced the recalcitrant potatoes to succumb to their fate. Halfway through the meal, a large black wingless bug fell from the thatched roof with a plop on to the table, where it sat, paralysed with confusion.
‘What is that?’ asked Darwin.
‘It is a benchuca bug,’ said the lieutenant. ‘A bloodsucker.’
Experimentally, Darwin extended a fingertip towards the bewildered beast. Instantly, it seemed to come to its senses, seizing the digit between its forelegs and sinking its sucker into his flesh. Over the next few minutes it grew slowly fatter as it gorged itself with blood, until eventually it resembled a huge distended purple grape clamped to the end of his finger. Finally sated, it fell off, whereupon Darwin whipped out a little jar of preserving-spirits and swept the creature into it.
‘Ha! You may have brought your own bed to avoid the lice, Don Carlos,’ guffawed Mariano, ‘but the benchucas live in the ceiling!’
That night, he discovered exactly what Mariano meant. As Covington, the soldiers, the muleteer and the two guasos slept swathed in blankets under the stars, he lay besieged between his crisp linen sheets. There seemed to be a whole army of benchucas. It was the most disgusting feeling to wake in the night, and sense their huge, soft, wingless bodies crawling all over him, sucking at his flesh. He lit a candle and burned several from his skin, but the supply seemed limitless. A plague of benchucas, he thought to himself. How Biblical. Perhaps the Lord bas visited them upon me, on account of my presumption.
The next day they set off for the city of Mendoza, a two-day ride across baking, deserted plains. At one point a huge swarm of locusts flew overhead, heading northward in the direction of the city, a seeming harbinger of the destruction due to be unleashed by General Rosas. The swarm began as a ragged cloud of a dark reddish-brown colour, like smoke from some great plains fire, billowing several thousand feet into the air. Then a curious rushing noise made itself heard, like a strong breeze swishing through the rigging of a mighty ship-of-the-line, and countless millions of the insects whirred overhead. Occasionally, confused outriders crashed blindly into the slower-moving mule train below: more than one dazed locust hurtled into the yielding softness of Darwin’s feather pillows, then marched testily up and down the bedlinen in search of food.
Mendoza’s spires rose listlessly from the open plain ahead. They found the city forlorn and bereft of spirit, its inhabitants dazed like cattle, stupidly awaiting their fate. Robbed of all energy, one or two gauchos lounged drunkenly in the streets. Mariano and Gonzales tipped their hats politely to a fat negress astride a donkey, her face disfigured by a huge goitre. Darwin bought an entire wheelbarrowload of peaches for threepence. They did not stay. Mendoza could await General Rosas without them.
They recrossed the Andes by
a different route, taking the Uspallata Pass, a long, barren valley populated by innumerable wretched dwarf cacti. After a hard day’s ascent through crumbled rocks, at a height of seven thousand feet, they came upon another marvel: an entire grove of petrified fir trees, jutting out from the mountainside at an acute angle. There were perhaps fifty marbled columns in this ghostly forest, as snow-white as Lot’s wife, their trunks a stout five feet in circumference, their leaves and branches long since lost to history. They were perfectly crystallized: the tiniest details of the bark were visible, and the rings within the wood were as easy to count as those of a living tree. They projected from a sandstone escarpment, which meant that they must once have lain at the bottom of the sea. This eerie grove high in the freezing mountains, Darwin realized, had once waved to the breezes of the Atlantic shore. The trees must have become submerged and petrified before they were uplifted into the mountains. The land had sunk before it had risen. The surface of the earth must be in a state of continuous agitation, no more than a thin crust over a viscous layer, that heaved and buckled throughout countless millions of years. Once more his whole being thrilled to the enormity of his discoveries; once more he had to bite his lip in frustration that there was no one present to discuss them with, no one to sit back and whistle at the size of the fire he would light beneath orthodox opinion.
The pass itself was a chaos of huge mountains, criss-crossed haphazardly by profound ravines, a place so cold that the water froze solid in their bottles. The guasos called it Las Animas - the souls - in memory of all those who had slipped and plunged to their deaths. The mule train, piled high with bulging sacks of geological specimens, snaked the whole length of the treacherous pass and across the Bridge of the Incas, a flimsy arch dripping with icicles; a seemingly bottomless abyss yawned invitingly below. Darwin’s bed sashayed at the back, its swinging motion caricaturing the gait of the animal that bore its weight; but the mule, like its companions, stayed surefooted throughout.
Shortly before they reached the top of the first ridge, they came upon low walls - the ancient ruins of a long-forgotten Indian village.
‘Who lived here?’ asked Darwin.
‘Nobody lives here, Don Carlos,’ explained Gonzales. ‘Nobody can live here. It is too cold. There is puna. And there is no food, no water. Only snow, for the whole year.’
‘I know that nobody lives here now, but obviously, somebody once did.’
‘¡Quien sabe, Don Carlos?’
‘How old are these ruins?’
‘¡Quien sabe, Don Carlos?’
It was incredible. An entire mountain village, its walls thrown down by countless earthquakes no doubt, situated in a location where human life was completely unsustainable. There was only one possible conclusion: that the whole village had been jolted high above the snowline over thousands of years, by the monstrous, churning, grinding, heaving forces at work far below.
A golden dusk was settling on the lush green fields above Valparayso as Darwin marched down the valley, striding out in front of his mule train, bursting with energy, life and confidence for the future. The boughs hung heavy with glowing peaches, and the scent of drifting woodsmoke infused the air. A sweetly competing aroma of drying figs wafted down from the flat rooftops and out across the sunlit fields, where weary labourers could be seen walking home from their day’s toil in the orchards. A church bell tolled lazily in the warm summer air. After the freezing, barren heights of the Andes and the stifling, deathly stillness of Mendoza, there was something welcoming, something ... well, almost English about the scene. Perhaps a certain pensive English stillness was missing from the mood, but otherwise the similarities were unmistakable. As Darwin stood admiring the view, Covington, who was leading his master’s horse, caught up.
‘My water bottle, if you please, Covington.’
‘Aye aye sir.’
I do wish he would leave off the nautical responses, thought Darwin irritably. He’s not on the ship now.
Covington shuffled round to the horse’s flank to retrieve the water bottle, placing his left hand clumsily on the animal’s withers as he did so. Suddenly, with a strangled cry, he leaped back as if stung by a wasp.
‘What is it?’ snapped Darwin.
‘There!’ was Covington’s garbled shout.
An indistinct black shape flapped unpleasantly between the animal’s shoulder-blades.
‘What on earth — ?’
Mariano came up and shooed the creature away. It vanished into the dusk in a rustle of leathery wings, leaving two small bloody wounds where it had sat.
‘Vampire bat, Don Carlos,’ said the guaso matter-of-factly.
Darwin shuddered. No, this was not England. This was a very, very long way from England, a very long way indeed. And it was time, frankly, to be going home.
They attained the sanctuary of Corfield’s mansion on the afternoon of the following day, to be greeted by the master of the house with his customary unflappable, immaculate style. White wine was brought, a great fuss was made of the explorer, and Darwin sat back in the garden to regale his host with tales of geological castles in the air: the beaches in the mountains, the river bed that flowed upward, the two sorts of mouse, the petrified forest, the deserted village in the clouds.
‘Do you not see, Corfield?’ he pressed home the point excitedly. ‘There can be no reason for supposing that any great catastrophe has ever been visited upon the earth, in any former epoch! The Biblical flood is a myth!’
‘I don’t gainsay it, old man,’ murmured Corfield soothingly.
As he spoke he blurred horizontally in the oddest fashion, before dividing into two Corfields, one on either side of Darwin’s field of vision. All of a sudden, a huge wave of nausea welled up from below, far worse than anything Darwin had ever experienced on the Beagle.
‘Corfield, old fellow?’
‘Yes?’
‘I think I’m going to be sick.’
A dark, fuzzy shape obscured the daylight that streamed in through the window. Somebody’s silhouette. His sister Susan, perhaps, or Catty come to read to him from one of her Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge publications. Except that this did not look like his bedroom at the Mount. Where the deuce was he? A noise burbled from the mouth of the silhouette - words, soothing words, like running water gurgling across pebbles. He tried to make sense of them. As his eyes adjusted to the light, the silhouette took on a familiar aspect. The features blurred into view. A nose, eyes, a mouth. He remembered that face from somewhere. The face was telling him that everything was going to be all right. The face was something to do with a sea voyage he had once been on. The Beagle. That was it. It was all coming back now. He was the ship’s natural philosopher on HMS Beagle. He could hear waves - waves on the shore.
‘Philos? Are you awake?’
Bynoe tried again, still softly, but with a little more urgency this time. Darwin was stirring. ‘Philos? It’s me, Bynoe.’
‘Bynoe?’
‘How are you feeling?’
‘I ... Where am I? How came I here?’
‘You are at the house of Mr Alexander Caldcleugh.’
‘Who?’
‘Caldcleugh - he is a British mine-owner. You were taken ill at Mr Corfield’s house, but he is from home. He had to visit St Jago on business last month. You were moved to Mr Caldcleugh’s house because he resides closer to the shore - I estimated that the sea air might hasten your recovery.’
‘Last month? How long have I been here?’
‘Six weeks.’
‘Six weeks? Then it is 1835! But what — ?’
‘You have had a high fever - possibly typhoid, I’m not sure. But you are much better now. Here, I have brought you some calomel. The Indian servants wanted to treat you using traditional herbs, all sorts of mumbo-jumbo, but I have been sure to keep you well supplied with modern medicine.’
‘My dear Bynoe, how long have you attended upon me?’
Bynoe’s vigil had stretched through every long da
y of the previous six weeks. ‘Not long ... just long enough to see you well again.’
‘I had some wine - I think the wine was bad ...’
‘Perhaps it was the wine. ¿Quien sabe? But you are on the mend now, Philos, and that is all that matters.’
A sudden stab of fear sliced through Darwin’s brain, as the details of his Andean expedition came jolting back. ‘My specimens! Where are my specimens?’ He raised himself weakly on to one elbow.
‘Do not trouble yourself, Philos. Your specimens are in good hands, you may be satisfied of it. Sulivan and I labelled them all up in your behalf, and had them packed into cases, with the help of your servant Covington. He is a most assiduous and intelligent fellow - I think you underestimate him.’
‘But where are they?’
‘Lieutenant Wickham said they were too many for the hold of the Beagle, especially as we are revictualling. But luckily for you the Samarang was in port, and Captain Paget agreed to take them on board. He will make sure they are delivered to your Professor Henslow, you can rely upon it.’
‘Thank goodness for that.’
Darwin sank back into his pillow, relief washing over him. Then a further shaft of clarity pierced his delirium. ‘Bynoe?’
‘Yes?’
‘Why is Lieutenant Wickham in the Beagle? He is the commander of the Adventure.’
A cloud passed across Bynoe’s sunny countenance.
‘Things have changed in the Beagle, Philos.’ He sighed, turning his face to the window.
‘What do you mean?’
‘All is not well in our little vessel, my friend. I had hoped not to bring such matters to your attention, in your enfeebled state. But you have always been too sharp for me, Philos.’