Tales of Mysteries & Espionage - John Buchan Edition - Buchan John

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the place, which is, so to speak, all one workshop. But—we welcome visitors who recognise our difficulties and submit to our modest rules.”

      “It is the Yanquis who give trouble,” said the President darkly.

      The Gobernador laughed. “Some Yanquis. I do not share his Excellency’s distrust of the whole of that great nation. The bright special correspondent on the look-out for a ‘scoop’ is the most dangerous of created things. But we welcome the reasonable journalist. You may have read a series of articles on Olifa in the Saturday Evening Post. There you had the Gran Seco accurately portrayed with our full assent. Yet on the whole it is not the journalist who perplexes us most. It is the Yanqui tripper on a circular tour. We cannot have them making drunken fools of themselves in a place where the prestige of the white man is his only security.”

      “There was an American party at the hotel,” said Archie. “Noisy young devils from a yacht. I think they went up to the Gran Seco a week ago.”

      The Gobernador shrugged his shoulders. “We do not antagonise the great, we who are business men. But those young people will not be given the privileges which await you, Sir Archibald.”

      Archie felt as if he were being treated with especial frankness and friendliness, and his susceptible soul was in a pleasant glow. Then the conversation became general and he had leisure to observe the company. The Gobernador said little, the Olifero statesmen much, but it seemed the Archie that they all talked under his eye and for his approbation. After an argument there came a hush, as if the deferred to him for the ultimate word. But he scarcely spoke. He sat silent, watchful, now and then smiling tolerantly. Once only he intervened. The Minister of Finance was discoursing on some aspect of the policy of the United States, and his comments were caustic. The Gobernador looked across at Archie and spoke in English.

      “Yanquis are unpopular in England?” he asked.

      “No. I shouldn’t say that. Americans are popular with us, as they always have been. You see, we get the best of them. But the abstract thing, America, is unpopular. She always seems to have a rather left-handed Government.”

      A spark seemed to kindle in the other’s eye.

      “That is right. No section of humanity deserves blame. It is governments, not peoples, that offend.”

      Then the spark died out.

      As Janet and Archie walked back to the hotel they spoke of the luncheon party. They had taken the road through the old town, and were in the market-place among stalls.

      “That man Castor doesn’t belong here,” said Archie “He has nothing in common with those bland Oliferos. He’s nearer to that lot,” and he pointed to a group of Indians in shaggy ponchos squatted by the fountain.

      “He is one of the most extraordinary people I ever met.” said Janet. “Can you guess what he talked to me about? Ossian-Papa’s bete noire, you know—Lord Balfour, and Marcel Proust! And I believe he could have talked just as well about clothes and Paris models.”

      “I never in my life got so strong an impression of all-round competence… I like him, too. I think he’s a good fellow. Don’t you?”

      “I’m not so sure,” said Janet. “I should like to see him clean-shaven. I’ve an idea that the mouth under that beard of his might be horribly cruel.”

      VI

       Table of Contents

      The Gran Seco has not often appeared in the world’s literature. Francisco de Toledo first entered it in the sixteenth century, but after that there is no mention of it till Calamity Brown wandered thither from the coast in the late years of the eighteenth. That luckless and probably mendacious mariner has little good to say of it; it was the abode of devilish insects and devilish men, and, if we are to believe him, he barely escaped with his life. In the nineteenth century it was partially explored by the Spanish naturalist, Mendoza, and a Smithsonian expedition investigated its peculiar geology. Its later history is written in the reports of its copper companies, but Sylvester Perry visited it in his celebrated journey round the globe, and it has a short and comminatory chapter in his Seeing Eyes. Mr Perry did not like the place, and in his characteristic way has likened it to a half-healed abscess, sloughed over with unwholesome skin.

      Mr Perry was partially right. The Gran Seco is not built to the scale of man and it has no care for his comforts. But it has its own magnificence. Its gate is the town of Santa Ana, in whose market-place stands the colossal figure of the crucified Christ, first erected by Pizarro, many times destroyed by earthquakes, and always replaced, since it is the defiance of the plains to the mountains. But the gate is far from the citadel, for the avenue is a hundred miles long. The Gran Seco railway, now a double line most skilfully engineered, and wholly controlled by the Company, runs first up a long valley where only in mid-winter a river flows. Then it passes over tiers of high desert, sinks into hollows where sometimes there are waters and forests climbs again in tortuous gullies, till at length it emerges upon the great plateau; and always beside it can be traced the old highroad where once rode Toledo’s men-at-arms, and only the other day the ore from the mines jolted down country on mule-back. But there are still many miles to go before the city of Gran Seco is reached, sunk in a shallow trough among its barren and blistered hills.

      At first sight Sylvester Perry’s phrase seems to have certain justice. Twenty years ago in the hollow there was only a wretched Indian puebla roosting among the ruins of an old city, for the copper from the distant mines was exported in its crude form. It was chiefly what is called virgin copper, with a certain amount of malachite and azurite ores. Ten years ago a new city began to rise, where the sulphuretted ores were first mined, and smelting was started. There was a furious rivalry among the companies till they were united in a great combine, and the whole mineral wealth gathered under a single direction. Process succeeded process, furnaces were multiplied till they coven many acres, wells were sunk and pumping-stations erected, great dams were built in the hills to catch the winter rail and street after street rose in the dust. The Castor method of calcination and electrolytic refining soon quadrupled in size. To one looking down from the surrounding ridges the place seems a hive of ugly activity: on one side a wilderness of furnaces and converters, with beyond them the compounds where the workmen are housed; on the other a modern city with high buildings and clanking electric trams. By day it is an inferno of noise and dust and vapours, with a dull metallic green the prevailing tint; by night a bivouac of devils warmed by angry fires. Mr Perry is right. The place has the look of a gangrening sore, with for the surrounding skin the pale shaly hills. And the climate is in itself a disease. In winter the hollow is scourged and frozen, and in summer the sun’s heat, refracted from naked stone, strikes the face like a blow.

      In the streets the first impression is of extreme orderliness. The traffic is methodically conducted by vigilant police in spruce uniforms—for the most part of the Indian or mestizo type, with European superintendents. They are a fine body of men; too good, the spectator decides, for such an environment. The main street, the Avenida Bolivar, is broad and paved with concrete, and along it rise structures which would not disgrace New York. The Regina Hotel is larger than the Ritz, and there are others; the offices of the Company’s administration form a block scarcely smaller than Carlton House Terrace; there are clubs and many apartment houses, all built of the white local stone. But the shops are few and poor, and there are no villas in the environs, so that the impression grows that the Gran Seco is a camp, which its inhabitants regard as no continuing city. Hourly the sense of the bivouac expands in the traveller’s mind. The place is one great caravanserai for pilgrims. These busy, preoccupied people are here for the day only and to-morrow will be gone.

      Other things will soon strike him. There seem to be no peasants. No neighbouring countryside obtrudes itself into this monastic industry. Every man—there are few women—is regimented by the Company. If the traveller is escorted to the area of the smelting and refining plant (and his passports must be very high-powered to ensure this privilege), he will see the unskilled work done by Indians and mestizos—men with faces like

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