| Via New York, | |
| Senor Don Edwin C. Ashby, | |
| 19, Harpur Street, | Casa Inglese, |
| London. W.C. | San Lorenzo, |
| Inglaterra | Rep. of Colombia, |
| January 25th 1906 |
My dear Ned
I wrote to you last from Cartagena just before we left. So there’s a great deal to catch up on and I give you fair warning, this is going to be a fearfully long letter. You’ll have a headache by the end of it I shouldn’t wonder!
Here we are then, safe and sound in San Lorenzo, which is quite something, isn’t it? The Mater isn’t so chipper, thinks she’s dying and all that. But apart from being rather sunburnt and having our digestions permanently ruined, I really think we’re none the worse for wear.
According to Da’s instructions, we left Cartagena by train early on the morning of the 13th – and what a train! – a miserable little engine half the size of nothing, and just two carriages with seats ‘vis-à-vis’ like a London underground train, and an open door with a little balcony at the back. As soon as we were under way the dust just poured in on us from the line! In minutes my hat was a miniature Sahara, I promise you – and what with that and the cigar smoke, I don’t think Mother stopped coughing and spluttering for the entire five hours it took us to reach Calamar. There we were invaded even before the train stopped by a dozen or more beastly great Colombians, all fighting madly amongst themselves and with us for the privilege of carrying our luggage to the river boat. One of them even tried to get the Mater’s sealskin bag off her. But she hung onto it like grim death, screaming like a banshee; although it wasn’t until I brought my parasol handle into play that the fellow could be induced to relinquish his grip. Thank goodness for hockey and fencing lessons at school, that’s all I can say! You have to be so firm with foreigners!
The river boat, when we finally reached it was quite furiously hot, with hardly a breath of wind to disperse the heat from the funnel. So as you can imagine it was quite a relief to get out onto the water. The Magdalena River is still the only means of reaching the interior of this country. So anyone bound for almost anywhere must resign himself to at least a week on one of these slow old tubs. Ours was called the Enriqué, and was very picturesque to look at; a real Huckleberry Finn paddle steamer, if a little short on comfort. It was built on three decks, with paddles at the rear and an enormous wood store in the bows to keep the boilers going. The cabins were quite tiny, with tin floors, like rows of little ovens and totally uninhabitable from eight in the morning until after sunset! So our seven days on the river were mostly spent on deck, gasping in the heat and watching the forest slide by.
I can’t tell you what a strange feeling it is passing through uninhabited swamps and forests for days and days on end. Out here in the back of beyond you sometimes feel as if you’ve lost touch with civilisation altogether, and with everyone you’re fond of. It’s hard to believe now that I’ll ever get back to dear old chilly England. I will though, you may be sure of that!!
Meriel stopped for a moment, frowning and gnawing at the end of her pen. How to put it without giving too much away?
Really I’m all at sixes and sevens just now, I have to confess, and feeling horribly uncertain about my own future…
Well that should set him thinking anyway!
Not that there aren’t distractions out here. You should just see the Rio Magdalena, Ned. In some places it’s almost a mile wide. But when the boat came close enough in to one bank or the other, it quite often sent up flocks of green and yellow parrots shrieking their heads off. There were lots of little squirrel monkeys too, leaping amongst the forest lianas, and literally hundreds of huge alligators lying in rows along the sandbanks, motionless as logs.
But the sunsets were the thing, Ned! The Magdalena’s famous for them, and I so wish you could have been there with me to see just one of them. I’m not that good at writing (now don’t contradict me!), but try to see me standing at the rail in my white tropical outfit, looking out across a sheet of crimson water to a great flock of pink and white flamingos wading in the shallows, with behind them a sun like a blood orange slowly sinking down into the forest. Or come out to stand beside me with the moonlight on the water, with the fireflies they call ‘candelelias’ moving like tiny lanterns all along the river banks. Or listen with me to the rhythm of the paddle-blades, and the strumming of Spanish guitars from the crew deck down below…
And if that didn’t get him going nothing would, she thought, returning the cap to her pen and shutting up her writing slope with a satisfying snap. There’d be plenty of time to finish the letter after dinner – and no sense in telling him about mosquitoes the size of elephants, or the perspiration, or the blisters on one’s face and arms. Or the Mater’s diarrhoea. In fact the less said about the tiresome parent the better!
No, she’d write instead about their train journey up through the mountains from the Magdalena landing stage to the half-way rest house Da had rented for them at San Lorenzo. She would describe herself with Da’s inventaria in her hand, standing beside each little railway truck, to check each item on and off with proper British order and efficiency.
I do hope that you don’t find this too ‘egotistical’ an account. But it’s so difficult to keep oneself out of one’s own letters, don’t you think?
Whether she cared to admit it or not, a fundamental change had taken place in Meriel since she had started writing to Ned Ashby. Back in England, or at least before the ball in Grosvenor Crescent, it had been nothing for her to go for weeks on end without giving the way she looked more than a passing thought. But now she was continually aware of her appearance; of what he’d think if he could see her.
‘If only he could see me NOW! ’ The wilder and the more exotic her surroundings, the more persistent was the thought. Whenever she knew that she must make a pleasing picture – on the beach at Cartagena looking soulful underneath her sea green parasol, or on the river-boat in moonlight – Ned’s own lack of substance was almost insupportable to Meriel. In fact she never seemed to enjoy anything so much these days as when she was describing it to him, with suitable embellishments, in one of her long letters.
They had arrived at San Lorenzo the previous afternoon, to find a pleasant mud-built hacienda, the ‘Casa Inglese’, all ready and waiting for them on a little rise at the edge of the village. A Union Jack fluttered bravely above the door; and on the verandah, a Negro cook with two Indian maidservants, waited to receive them. It was just like the story of Beauty and the Beast, with everything in readiness, but no Master. Just a letter in Da’s handwriting lying on a cane table inside the door.
‘But I thought he was going to be here to meet us, and Garry too!’ Harriet protested for the umpteenth time since they’d alighted at the station. ‘A nice example I must say, a very nice example!’ She was building up steam for another outburst, and to forestall her Meriel ripped open Da’s new letter.
‘He says there is some difficulty up at the mine. He can’t get away, but… but wait, Mother, he’s sending Garry down with some horses, and mules for our baggage! They’ll take about a week to get here. But Da says we’ll be quite comfortable until they arrive. He says the cook is very good and the maids willing, and that they’re all to come on with us when we leave to join him.’
‘But he’s no right to send your brother down alone; a boy like that on a man’s errand. It’s sheer folly, Meriel! Why anything could happen to him; cut-throats, sunstroke, anything! And to think your father expects us to ride on to him unprotected, while he sits on his mountain like some kind of a tin god! Well I’m sorry, but I’m not a strong woman, and I can’t! I’m quite decided…’
‘But that’s the whole point, Mother, you don’t have to yet.’
Patience had never come easily to Meriel, but she did her best. ‘All we have to do just now is to sit tight and wait for Garry to arrive, while the rest of our baggage is sent up from Cartagena. Da’s even thought to have a bullock waggon ready in the village to fetch it from the station for us. He’s….’
But she was too late, the waterworks had started. ‘You always take his part,’ her mother sobbed, ‘never mine. But you’ll learn, my girl, you’ll learn one day that your precious Da gives not a rap for any of us; not a rap, so long as he is doing what he wants!’
Meriel looked down at her mother’s heaving shoulders – at her outdated teapot-handle bun and over-frizzed grey fringe, at the lace handkerchief she held up to her streaming eyes – and felt an unexpected twinge of pity for her. It must be very tiring, she supposed, to be permanently balanced on the far edge of despair. And when you thought about it, the poor Mater was probably no sillier than thousands of other silly females, who’d been undermined from infancy by other people’s ideas of how weak women should behave!
‘But if you feel like that about Da, why do you stay with him, Mother? Why did you insist on coming out to him in Colombia, when you might as well have stayed in London with Aunt Alice?’
‘Why?’ Harriet looked up at her with wet cheeks and a pathetic dewdrop on the end of her large nose; and even Meriel could see that she was groping for an answer. ‘Why? Because I’m married to him, that’s why. Because my place is by your father’s side – whether he wants me there or not.’ And at the thought of her own undesirability, she’d burst into another flood of tears.
‘So poor old Da,’ thought Meriel, ‘pursued to the ends of the earth by fat, faithful, weeping Mater!’ Never thinking for a minute that her own pursuit of Ned could be comapared in any way with anything so depressing.
Harriet cheered up remarkably with the discovery that one of the hatchet-faced Indians had been assigned to her as a lady’s maid; a luxury that was not to be afforded back in England. And as she closed her writing slope, Meriel could hear the Mater instructing the poor girl in loud and ringing tones, as if nothing more than emphasis and volume were required to drill the King’s English into any Indian. The older girl, Maria, had been sitting in the hallway while Meriel was writing. Now as she rose, so did Maria like a dusky shadow.
‘I’m going down to the river for a swim, Maria, un baño,’ she said, walking outside in the certain knowledge that the girl would follow with a sunhat, chair and mat, and anything else that might be needed. It was pleasant to be waited on of course. But she rather wished that Maria wouldn’t be so absurdly proud about it. You’d think she was handmaiden to the Queen of Sheba, the way she strode along behind her with her great beak in the air. (A picture that she wouldn’t share with Ned when she next wrote, she thought, for fear of being laughed at.)
But Maria apart, the heat of a San Lorenzo afternoon felt very much to Meriel like stepping back into her childhood. With her back to the ‘Casa Inglese’ and the thatched huts of the Indian village, it wasn’t hard to imagine she was back in Ipswich, riding across the polo field to surprise Da on his way home from the Dinmore mine. The glare and dust, the constant shrill of the cicadas, were so like dear old Queensland that all she felt she needed was the horse!
‘Wot-o Meri. So how’s tricks?’ The horse had shivered up out of the heat, more or less to order, just five days later; a fine high-stepping little grey, with a gleeful Gareth on his back and a long train of pacing ponies, riding mules and baggage beasts behind them – and pleased as Meriel was to see her brother looking so lean and sunburnt, she was gladder still to see the horse. She stole it from him on the afternoon of his arrival, while Mother was still hugging Garry and besieging him with questions about his father and the mine. Because whatever anyone else might think, Meriel was positive that Da had sent the grey for her. Of course he had.
They were two of a kind, she and her father, everybody said so, and now the transport had arrived, she longed to see him – couldn’t wait to surprise him on the verandah of his mountain stronghold or catch him riding from the mine – to see the recognition in his black eyes, before they creased and crinkled into the familiar pattern of his smile. ‘It’s Meriel! It is by jove – my own brave little Meriellie!’ To run to him and become again the carefree, spoiled little Daddy’s girl she’d always been.
But in the end she’d had to wait, as they had all been forced to wait, for rain. During the Colombian dry season the Magdalena river-boats were limited as to the weight of cargo they could carry for fear of running aground. The Llewellens’ baggage of more than three hundred separate items had been sent up from Cartagena in instalments; the third of which had sat for ten days wedged on a sand-bar, until a new ‘fresh’ from the mountains could lift it clear. Not that the time was wasted. Meriel had seen to that.
‘All right then, Mother, riding practice,’ she announced when they first heard of the delay. ‘It’s no use saying you can’t do it, because you’ll have to for the next leg of the journey. There’s no alternative, that’s all.’ It was the only way to handle her, she was convinced of it; and so every day after the siesta, she had the quietest of the riding mules brought round and called all hands to hoist the Mater onto the sidesaddle.
At first she’d limited their expeditions to the village and the sandy track that called itself the main road on its far side, on the assumption that the Mater would be less inclined to fall off amongst the fowls and the dogs that roved the settlement – and she was right. Harriet had moaned and closed her eyes and swayed dangerously from side to side, but nine times out of ten a basic sense of self-preservation had kept her in the saddle. So gradually they’d ridden further; down through the cane fields to the sugar factory, up into the ravines and thickets of the mountain foothills – and always through the whitewashed village of San Lorenzo, where the poker faces of the Indians all cracked into huge horsey grins as soon as la Inglesa grande lurched into view.
It hadn’t been enough of course for someone with Harriet’s lack of aptitude and excess of emotion. But it had to do; and when their expedition finally set off across the great Plain of Tolima in the direction of the Andes, the Mater had been there amongst them, perched on her mule in a huge hat trimmed with artificial cherries, with her little sealskin handbag dangling from her arm.
They made a stirring sight, thought Meriel, as she moved to the front of the convoy on her little grey – and good for several pages of the letter she would write to Ned when they had made the crossing. Immediately behind her Garry’s servant, Avriliano, strode barefoot leading a string of seven spare horses and riding mules, followed by Garry himself on a pacing horse and Harriet on her unstable mule. Behind them, an untidy file of eleven pack mules straggled out across the baked surface of the plain. Despite the heat, the two muleteers were also on foot and constantly at the run, weaving in and out of the line to adjust uneven packs and keep the animals moving. At the rear, the Negro cook tramped stoically along with a large cigar in his mouth and an impassive Indian maid on either side.
In a way it was like putting to sea again; launching out across that vast empty plain, with the snow-capped peaks of the Central Cordillera far away ahead of them like the cliffs of a distant shore. Garry and Avriliano were the pilots, having made the trip before. But Da had entrusted the baggage and the Mater to her care, which in Meriel’s opinion made her the captain of the voyage. And it was this conviction more than anything that kept her hands steady on the reins and her spurs idle. Because in other circumstances she’d have liked nothing better than to gallop free of the tedious convoy – to tear away across the savannah with the dry grass crackling beneath her, leaping creeks and dodging termite hills to make a beeline for the Andes, and for Da! As it was, she kept the grey to a fast walking pace, humming with the cicadas and trying not to look too often at the beckoning line of the mountains.
At noon she called a brief halt for lunch in a little copse of stunted sandpaper trees. Then on they pushed again, ignoring Harriet’s objections, to ride until the light failed. Da had allowed them four days to cross the plain. But if they made good time, Meriel saw no reason why they shouldn’t make it in just three. By five o’clock Harriet was calling down every kind of malediction on her daughter’s head and seriously threatening to fall off her mule. By six it was beginning to get dark.
‘Oh come on, Meri, be reasonable. It’ll be pitch black before we get the tents up as it is, and the Mater’s dead-beat.’ It was Garry’s fourth attempt, and Meriel knew that he was right. But their route just then was passing through an outcrop of boulders with large rocks on both sides of the track, and she felt uneasy. It wasn’t just the darkness. There were bandits on the Plain of Tolima, everybody said so. ‘And I’ll feel a lot happier about pitching camp,’ she thought, ‘with a nice open space around me!’
‘Tell Mother that we’ll just keep on until we’re clear of this rocky bit then – and tell her about the banditi, Garry. That should keep her going for a mile or two.’
She tried not to feel too lonely as he turned away to canter back up the line to take the lead again. ‘Rocks and shadows, rocks and shadows that’s all they are,’ she repeated to herself and to the nervous grey as she heeled him forward. ‘Avriliano’s behind us. I’ve got my gun, I am a big girl now!’ But her heart was beating furiously as she focused on the narrow exit to the plain ahead.
‘Cuidad, Señorita! Cuidad!’ It sounded like a child’s voice – a child’s voice or a woman’s – whispering a warning from somewhere in the rocks. Already tense as a crouched cat, Meriel acted on it instantly; and when a moment later a dark, moustachio’d figure stepped silently out into her path and fumbled for her horse’s bridle, he found himself staring straight into the trembling muzzle of a shiny new five-chambered revolver.
‘Pardonamé, Señorita, pensaba que era un amigo – I thought you were a friend.’
‘A good thing for him you weren’t, though,’ Garry remarked a little later between mouthfuls of cocoa and hard-boiled egg. ‘Because any Colombian friend I’ve ever known would have shot him between the eyes first and asked him what he wanted afterwards.’
‘Well, his eyes were set so close together, I’m not sure I could have got a bullet in between them!’ She’d laughed about it then, in the relative safety of their camp out on the plain; but still insisted on Avriliano and her brother taking turns with her to sit up on guard for the rest of the night.
At first light Meriel roughed out a racy account of the adventure for Ned, in pencil in her pocket notebook. But she saw no reason to include quaking knees, and still less nausea, in the impression she intended to create.
For the next two days out on the plain, the Llewellens were called on to endure more heat than they’d experienced in the hottest Queensland summer, or even on the Magdalena with the boilers of the Enriqué going at full blast. There was not a tree or a creek or single scrap of shade for as far as they could see. The ground was baked and crazed into a network of cracks; glaring endlessly beneath their horses’ hooves to bounce the heat under their hat brims and blister their perspiring faces. Their lips were cracked, the saliva dry and sticky in their mouths. Their clothes clung wetly to their backs; and Gareth and the muleteers were soon down to vests and cotton breeks. Meriel took off her riding stays and opened her blouse to several buttons lower than the lowest limits of decency allowed. Only Harriet refused to compromise with convention, still carrying sufficient whalebone to refit a small whale; her wax cherries melted and her florid features glistening with sweat.
‘I can’t, I can’t – I can’t go on,’ she croaked repeatedly, while Meriel held in the grey beside her with one hand on the whalebone to keep her in the saddle.
‘Brace up Mother, it can’t be far to Ibagué. Then you can sleep ’til doomsday in a real hôtel bed, think of that. So just hang on a bit longer and we’ll get you there.’ (‘Dead or alive,’ she thought grimly.)
By noon on the third day, just when Meriel was contemplating rigging up some kind of a device to lash her mother to the mule, Garry had given a wild blood-curdling, dog-howling whoop from the front of their long train. ‘Waah-ow-oo! Land ahoy, Cap’n!’
He was pointing to a shiny white speck at the foot of the Quindío hills, like something out of a magic lantern show on the Eastern Empire. ‘Look Meri, Ibagué!’
‘We’ve done it, Mother. We have crossed the plain!’ Meriel couldn’t have kept the triumph from her voice if she’d wanted to, and she didn’t. For the first time in days she felt a faint breeze fan her face; and with it came the distant chimes of the cathedral bells.