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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781908946126 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Parthian Books |
| Publication date: | 02/01/2006 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 424 |
| File size: | 722 KB |
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Where the Earth Ends
By John Harrison
Parthian
Copyright © 2000 John HarrisonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-908946-12-6
CHAPTER 1
Patagonia
A Landing
December. Three in the morning. The plane shuddered down through the turbulence in the low cumulus and banked. The most southerly town on Argentina's mainland came up out of the black: Rio Gallegos. The plane abruptly fell another three hundred feet and I could see down the narrow aisle and over the pilot's shoulder, and watch the earth saucer back and forth, trying to dodge our outstretched wheels. In all the earth this was the last continental land which mankind reached. In Central Africa tool-making early humans roamed the plains 2.5 million years ago but there is no evidence of people here on the tip of South America until twelve thousand years ago.
Studying the street maps in the guide it was easy to forget which town I was looking at, each bright gridiron named after the standard set of generals. In Argentina they are San Martín, Roca, Belgrano; in Chile, O'Higgins, Prat, Montt. The orange-lit lines of dead heroes tilted and came to meet us.
I asked the taxi driver to find a mid-price hotel. He said, 'No problem.' The Punta Arenas, no vacancies. Further down the street, the Liporace sounded and looked like a skin complaint. The taxi driver pounded the locked door. Red light was making weak rents in the eastern sky, four mongrels besieged a cat in a small tree. A man appeared and talked to the driver, shaking his head. The driver came back, 'The town is full. The hotel is full.'
When a hotel named after a skin disease has no empty beds, I can believe the town is full.
The pavements were broken, and sheets of water lay in the road. We did the rounds. Sleepy faces came to doors, tired bodies leaned on the jamb. They shook their heads and cut their hands horizontally across each other. At the Laguna, a stooped thin man with a ten-month-old haircut and a pensioner's cardigan declaimed 'No room' as if there was surely a Second Coming and anyone with a stable should clean out the manger.
'I know another place!' the driver exclaimed.
The Colonial was pink low concrete. It had two doors; no one answered either. The driver said, 'I am sorry, this never happened before. I'll stop the meter.' The street was nearly light.
'If I find somewhere now, will they charge me for tonight?'
'They charge eight to eight, if you book in at five to eight you pay for the night's sleep you just missed.'
'Take me to a café, the one we passed at the crossroads in the centre.'
The Monaco was at the intersection of two heavy-weight generals, Roca and San Martín. It was glass-walled and brightly lit, open twenty-four hours. A third of the tables were taken, many by couples winding up the evening, talking quietly. I drank large milk coffees. 'Nothing to eat, sir?'
I had been awake forty-eight hours and three time zones. So tired I no longer knew if I was hungry.
'Nothing to eat.'
The dawn began to fix the street in place, like a photograph being developed. People drifted away, the rest were drunk, quietly and gently drunk. A tired waiter broke a glass and smiled ruefully at the applause. Everyone took turns at looking at me, the only sober customer, the only non-smoker, the only person alone. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid once held up the bank here. When the shops opened, I would buy a Colt 45 and free up some hotel beds.
Sometime after six I walked to the estuary, past the building designated an historic monument to record the visit of the first president to come to Rio Gallegos: Julio Roca. He spoke from a balcony and urged immigrants to populate the south and exploit the wealth of the Magellan Straits. The historic monument is a wooden balcony hanging cock-eyed from a big shed. I am sorry, but it is. The shore was a concrete esplanade, grey and perspectiveless as childhood. A red balustrade. The sea wall dropped ten feet to shingle, which shelved to sharp-smelling mud that glued down flimsy supermarket bags. Pigeons and gulls pecked a path across the mud. The water of the mile-wide estuary lay polished, ceramic. I was looking north; low flat-topped hills on the farther shore hinted at the majestic monotony of the plains which went north, horizon after horizon. This was the last country man found, this strand, this hill, the sky shining like wet paint; the dust already sticking to the fresh wax on my boots was made from flecks of legend. This was Patagonia.
Patagonia! The origin of the word, still a byword for being off the beaten track, has been much argued over. The Oxford English Dictionary, which has time to ruminate on these things, is content that there is a Spanish word patagon meaning a large clumsy foot, and that it derives from large clumsy shoes worn by natives. Spanish regional dialects still use patacones for big-pawed dogs, and the depth of the footprints the dancing natives made in the sand was remarked on by the first visitor, Magellan.
A second theory involves the Incas, who explored the Andes a long way south of the territory they formally conquered. Their empire was not ancient. In 1532, when Pizarro rode his horse through its golden halls, the realm was little more than a hundred years old. In the Incan language, Quechua, the south was called Patac-Hunia, or mountain regions, and as Spanish does not pronounce 'h' the sound is very close to Patagonia. But why would men from an empire of the high Andes describe the lesser peaks of the south as mountain regions?
Bruce Chatwin was tipped off by Professor González Díaz that Tehuelche Indians wore dog-faced masks, and Magellan might have nicknamed them after a character in a novel called Primalon of Greece which features a dog-eared monster called Patagon. It is an anonymous romance published in Spain in 1512 and translated into English by Anthony Mundy in 1596. As an aside, Mundy was a friend of Shakespeare, who would soon after have Trinculo say of Caliban, in The Tempest, 'I shall laugh myself to death at this puppy-headed monster.'
Three flaws are apparent in the theory. Firstly, who names lands after novels? Secondly, it seems incredible that rough and ready adventurers would pause in their journeys on the edge of the unknown to make literary allusions; and thirdly, there isn't a shred of evidence that Magellan knew of the book.
But California is named after an island in a novel. Hernando Cortés sailed up the Gulf of California believing the land on his left was an island, not a peninsula, and named it after an island called California in the tale The Adventures of Esplandián, written by Garcí Ordóñez de Montalvo in 1510.
Secondly, as Bernal Díaz records, when his men walked a causeway into Mexico City in 1520, they 'said that it seemed like one of those enchanted things which are told about in the book of Amadís'. The chivalric fantasy Amadís of Gaul was one of the real books which Cervantes slipped into the library of Don Quixote; literate soldiers carried them round in the same way that GIs carry comics.
Finally, Magellan could perhaps have known about Primalon of Greece. It was published seven years before Magellan sailed, and he spent a lot of time at court where such books were read by the chattering classes of the day. There are many odd theories about the origin of the name of the strange land of Patagonia; perhaps the oddest one is true.
In the dead of early morning the town was dreadful. Although a lot of money was made here in the livestock industries, it did not stay. The moneyed families built their belle époque mansions to the south, around Plaza Muñoz Gamero in Punta Arenas, importing everything from Europe, from the art to the architect. Here in Rio Gallegos, the post office and one restaurant excepted, there was no building in the whole centre worth a minute's pause. All the tawdriness of a dead-end town with none of the excuses. Desperate for sleep, and groggy with lack of food, I bought cakes and savouries at a baker's and walked past the pink Colonial Hotel once again. A young backpacker came out of it and climbed into a taxi. A bed.
The landlady asked me to wait ten minutes while she changed the sheets. When she had finished, I sat on the bed and took out a cheese and ham croissant. Under the cling film it had looked quite brave. Naked, the ingredients looked like naïve patriotic things which, in a rush of enthusiasm, had signed up as food but, on reflection, had realised their utter unsuitability for the task ahead. Tasted as seen.
The room was the size of a prison cell but without the amenities. No wardrobe no chest of drawers no table no toilet no basin no water no glass no carpet no rug no curtains no view. No matter, it had a bed, and a little gap down one side of it to get in and out. I walked to the bathroom in bare feet, looked inside, and went back for my boots.
What was I doing here?
Rainy Childhood Days
Voyages begin in books. Mine started with rainy childhood days and a house with one coal fire in the front room of our council house, near the Liverpool FC training ground. Wooden window frames with cold panes and tiny petals of orange mould in the corners. Knot resin weeping, pushing paint into blisters. A finger on the glass made two beads run together and zigzag down the glass collecting others, like chequers. My breath fogged the game.
We were three boys, I was in the middle. The first adult novel I read was Robinson Crusoe, when I was still small enough to curl up entirely inside the wooden arms of my mother's tiny armchair. At that time the only sea I knew was the brown of the Mersey and the racing tides of the Wirral's flat, estuarine resorts. I pored silently over the watercolour illustrations of palms and blue horizons, then took a red spade to dig my own fort in the back garden.
One damp Sunday I sat cross-legged in front of an oak utility furniture bookcase. 'Da-aad,' I drizzled, 'what would I like to read?' He tapped his faintly nicotined fingers on a green book spine, Percy Harrison Fawcett's Exploration Fawcett.
'Read this, he is a Harrison,' he said. 'Is he a relative?'
He looked out of the window at the rain, falling on the split paling fence. There was no prospect of going out. 'Yes.'
I pulled out the book. In the front was a picture of a frowning man sporting a hip-length jacket and riding boots, and leaning on a wooden balcony. His propeller moustache waited for a batman to swing it into motion. The chapter titles called to me: The Lost Mines of Muribeca, Rubber Boom, River of Evil, Poisoned Hell, and The Veil of the Primaeval. I strode into the book and came out two days later.
Percy Fawcett made impossible journeys into the interior of the greatest South American jungles, again and again. He walked the frontiers of Bolivia to map them. Maps were crucial; without them the rubber barons would not know whose country they were robbing. He was in the interior most of the years from 1906 to 1913 and met travellers who had seen potions which made rock soften so it could be cut in the butter-smooth joints of the earthquake-proof Incan cities.
I swallowed tales of men who fell out of canoes in piranha-filled rivers, clung to the stern, and were removed at the river bank, skeletons from the waist down. They were killed by anacondas, poisonous spiders, flesh-rotting diseases and the cat o' nine tails. They were sold to pay their own debts. Rubber magnates living on the world's greatest flow of fresh water sent their laundry to Paris and constructed an opera house for Caruso, who came and anchored mid-river off Manaus. A cholera epidemic raged. Caruso walked the decks, and received the daily lists of the dead. Contracts beckoned, time ran out, he went home. Outside the opera house, the curved twin staircases leading up to the classical mezzanine were cleared of cholera victims each day. Dust motes descended shafts of light in the silent theatre.
The book was drafted in note form by Fawcett in 1923. There remained one dream, his search for the lost city of João da Silva Guimarões. In 1743 Guimarões had been hunting only for lost mines. A negro in his party had chased a white stag to the summit of a mountain pass. Below, on a plain, was a city of some sort. Next day they entered through three arches, so tall that no one could read the inscriptions above them. A broad street led them to a plaza. At each corner was a black obelisk. In the centre rose a colossal column of black stone on which was a statue of a man pointing to the north. The entire city was deserted except for a cloud of huge bats. Nearby they found silver nails lying in the dirt of caverns, and gold dust in the streams.
By 1925 Fawcett, discouraged by his failure to find men of his own invulnerability to hardship and disease, went out aged 57 with his inexperienced son Jack, and Jack's friend Raleigh Rimmel, on one last search for the lost city of Guimarões. Fawcett's last letter to his wife in England read, 'you need have no fear of failure'. They were never heard of again. His surviving son Brian put together the book from his father's notes and published it in 1953.
On another, interminable, wet afternoon in the school holidays, I opened a black book of narrative poetry and read The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The prologue begins: 'How a ship having passed the Line was driven by storms to the cold Country towards the South Pole.'
'Are there any others like that one?' I asked my father, when the other poems in the collection bored me. Thirty-five years on I know the answer.
In my teens I painted, again and again, the spars of the Mariner's un-named ship against livid skies. We moved to Falmouth in Cornwall, where I watched Robin Knox-Johnson tack Suhaili into the harbour and complete the first single-handed non-stop round-the-world voyage. It had begun as a race; he won it by being the only survivor.
I left Falmouth Grammar School, and went up to Jesus College, Cambridge to read geography. On the walls of the medieval dining hall were portraits of former scholars. Beneath them, Mr West, the Head Porter with the cut of W. C. Fields in his flesh and clothes, lectured us on the evils of fornication and drugs. He did not seem heavily scarred by either. Thomas Malthus, author of the essay on population, looked over our heads. Coleridge, opium addict, stared down with great baleful eyes. He had written home, 'There is no such thing as discipline at our College.' That winter I discovered a reprint of Gustav Doré's fabulous engravings for the Ancient Mariner. In 1978 I read Chatwin's In Patagonia and, looking at atlases, my eyes began to fall south.
In Hay-on-Wye I was trawling the second-hand bookshops for material on Chile, when I found a hank of pages without a cover, which had fallen down the back of the other books. I pulled it out: An Historical Relation of the Kingdom of Chile by Alonso de Ovalle, a Jesuit. It had been torn from a larger volume. Although in English, the cover said it was printed in Rome in 1649. It was in such good condition I assumed it was a reproduction. The pages were fresh and white, they were flexible and clean. I bought it and took it round the corner to bookbinder Christine Turnbull. A gravel path led me down an avenue of lavender to her cottage workshop. She looked quietly over it and compared the paper with samples from her cabinets. She stroked her fingers down the spine. 'The first English text was published in 1703. It should be full leather'
'Then I'll have full leather!'
Alonso's report is the first English account of Chile. It was dynamite in its day. The English translator confided that it 'contains secrets of commerce and navigation, which I wonder how they were published'. Ovalle advised speculators that a man with 40,000 crowns to invest, including in slaves, might earn a twenty-five per cent return 'very lawful, and without any trouble to one's conscience.'
I then found Lucas Bridges's book on growing up in Tierra del Fuego as the son of the first successful missionary, Thomas Bridges. After a few chapters I knew I would visit Ushuaia and the bare savage islands of the far south. My great-grandfather had sailed there before the mast on the great square-riggers. My grandfather Thomas Harrison, born in 1896, sailed the Horn in steam and diesel, plying the last of the 'WCSA' (West Coast of South America) trade out of Liverpool. I was the first generation not to sail the Horn or fight a war. Instead, I would go to the end of the world, beyond Patagonia, to Tierra del Fuego. I would do more, I would see the Horn and find lost tribes. The child in me could go even further and sail the waters of Coleridge's albatross and enter the watercolours' blue horizons and sit on Crusoe's imaginary shore. I had imagined these places; they must exist. All I had to do was look for them.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Where the Earth Ends by John Harrison. Copyright © 2000 John Harrison. Excerpted by permission of Parthian.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,About John Harrison,
Dedication,
1. Patagonia,
2. Tierra del Fuego,
3. Antarctica,
4. Punta Arenas,
5. Last Hope Sound,
6. The Long Pacific Shore,
Coda,
Acknowledgements,
Copyright,