This Thing Of Darkness (54 page)

FitzRoy came in response to Bynoe’s shouts; he said nothing, but drew his sword. Without removing his coat, he plunged into the water up to his chest, cutting back the kelp fronds. He raised Edward Hellyer’s white, lifeless body up high, and lifted it out of the creek and on to the shore. There, he fell to his knees, wrapped the boy’s pale form tightly in his arms, and he began to heave, uncontrollably, with great, shaking sobs. Tears coursed down his cheeks, running unchecked, until they mingled with the seawater that streamed from his uniform into the cold Atlantic.

The tiny settlement of Patagones, defended by nothing but a wooden palisade, huddled against the crumbling bank of the Rio Negro. Only the fortified stone church stood out and beyond the defences, atop the bank, as if daring the godless Indians to do their worst. Just a few years back, there had been no white settlement this far south, but the fort at Argentina had held, and now more and more settlers were pouring across the Rio Colorado, fired by greed and bravado, ready to risk all they possessed to join the great land grab. But Patagones felt alone and exposed. Every whisper, every waving grass-stalk in the plains to the north, west or south occasioned a twitch of fear from its inhabitants. The east, where the blue Atlantic formed an implacable bulwark, was the only direction upon which they could safely turn their backs. The Horse Indians never attacked across water. They did not care for water. So the arrival of the
Paz
on this August morning was an unremarked event. The little village lay hushed in its inconspicuous hollow as James Harris, Charles Darwin and his new servant Syms Covington rode the tide in through the estuary.

In truth, Darwin was glad to be off the
Beagle
. Since Hellyer’s death, a vexation of the spirit had seemed to settle upon her company. FitzRoy’s agony had been almost unbearable to watch. Unable to deal with his own helplessness in the matter, he had surrendered to the foulest of tempers instead. The officers had a code for it: ‘How hot is the coffee this morning?’ they would ask each other. The crew had learned to be more unstinting in their efforts than before, more exact in their work, to avoid their master’s terrible displeasure. FitzRoy had wrestled with his faith, trying to come to terms with the act of God that had robbed an innocent, well-meaning boy of his life. The more he tried to convince himself that the tragedy had been part of some greater plan, the more uneasy Darwin had become. The moral certainty of Christianity was starting to exasperate him. He was a Christian, of course, but he was not
certain
of anything.

The only joy of the preceding few months had been the universal hilarity with which the crew had acclaimed the return of Lieutenant Wickham. Wreathed in a huge beard, every part of his face so bronzed and blistered by sun and salt that he could barely speak, Wickham had stepped aboard with the air of a crazed Byzantine hermit rescued from his pillar. He had been too bemused to see the joke at first, for his fellow officers on the two small boats looked little different, but Sulivan had clapped him on the back and made a fuss of him, and soon Wickham had found himself laughing with the rest. Despite conditions that had caused even the most experienced of them to feel continuously seasick, he and his men had completed their task ahead of schedule, even discovering a new river — the Chubut, the Indians called it - in the process. They would now transfer to the
Adventure.
That vessel was currently floating alongside the
Beagle,
before being warped to her, heaved ‘keel out’ and coppered below, to protect her from the shipworms of the Pacific. It promised to be a dull, claustrophobic August. For Darwin, the wildlife and geology of the pampas loomed large as an interesting, exciting alternative.

Harris, who was still contracted to the
Beagle
for another six weeks, had offered to accompany Darwin on an overland expedition from the Rio Negro all the way up to Buenos Ayres, a distance of more than five hundred miles. As for the servant, well - why not? FitzRoy had a steward. The officers had a steward. Why shouldn’t he, Darwin, have a servant too, to do the messy tasks like skinning animals, carrying heavy fossils or retrieving shot ducks from wet kelp? The only slight difficulties had been in actually locating a servant and paying for him. FitzRoy had relented and donated Covington, the ship’s fiddler, on the basis that he was by far the most promising student in his Sunday reading and writing classes, and that, as a horse-butcher’s son, he knew something of animal anatomy. Darwin could not say he cared unduly for his new helper: although reasonably handsome of face, he was big-boned, mulish and ginger, and had nothing to say for himself. There was an odd, almost accusing look in the boy’s eye. He was expensive too: as to the six-hundred-pounds-a-year cost, Darwin had decided that his father - in due course - would undoubtedly see the wisdom of his decision, and would forward him the money. In the meantime, he had secured another loan from Mr Rowlett, the purser. He was aware that his increasing requests for funds were causing him to resemble the midshipman in
Persuasion,
but there was no doubting that the addition to his status served him well. Covington had even packed his master’s equipment for the trip: clasp knife, preserving spirit, specimen jars and corks, pencils and notebooks, guns and ammunition, compass and geological hammer, a spare pair of stockings and - a little touch of civilization - his cotton nightcap and a selection of silk handkerchiefs.

Harris, who was evidently a familiar face in Patagones, had managed to hire an armed escort in the shape of five gauchos. They were tall, leathery, swaggering men, with luxuriant moustaches and long black hair that snaked down their backs. They were reverentially, grinningly polite from the start to Don Carlos, their
naturalista,
although their extravagant manners were clearly no more than a patina with which to coat a life lived at the edge of extreme violence. Each was badly disfigured by knife-cuts, a testament to the gaucho habit of settling even the pettiest disagreements with slashes to the nose or eyes. They looked, thought Darwin, as if they would cut your throat and make a bow at the same time. They wore white-striped ponchos and white boots, they rode white horses, they even smoked strange little cigars wrapped in white paper, which they called
cigaretos.
Before they knew that Darwin had learned Spanish, he listened to them conversing with a sixth gaucho, newly arrived in Patagones: was Don Carlos a
gallego,
the man wanted to know - was he worth robbing and murdering? No, they replied. This one is rich. This one is worth protecting. The rewards will be better.

The intelligence brought by the new arrival was encouraging for their prospects of a safe passage. General Rosas had been appointed by the government in Buenos Ayres to launch a war of extermination against the Indians, and to cleanse the countryside between the Rio de la Plata and the Rio Negro of their presence. To this end he was encamped eighty miles to the north, on the Rio Colorado, and had established a line of
postas,
or sentry-posts, between there and the capital. This would be the safest trail for Don Carlos to follow. Without further ado, that very afternoon, the party set out for the Rio Colorado, the gauchos in line ahead, their robes flowing, their spurs and swords clanking. They did not need supplies: they would eat on the hoof.

The countryside beyond Patagones was baked, lifeless, as bare and bristly as pigskin. What few grass-stalks eked out an existence here were brown and withered, the solitary bushes stunted and spiny. Bright splashes of colour, though, were provided by flamingos, poking about for worms in the
salinas,
great beds of salt five inches thick and many a league long. The gravel around these salt-flats was scattered with marine shells. The sea had been here, all right. But a single flood, of forty days and forty nights? Could it have left such thick salt deposits? Darwin knew in his heart that Lyell was correct on this point at least, that the ground hereabouts had been uplifted from the seabed.

Some twenty-five miles into the journey a lone tree appeared on. the horizon, the solitary, neighbourless inhabitant of the arid plain.

‘Walleechu,’
said Esteban, the gaucho leader.

‘I beg your pardon?’ said Darwin.

‘Walleechu
— the god of the Indians.’

‘The local Indians worship this tree,’ explained Harris. ‘It is the only one they have ever seen.’

As they drew closer, Darwin could see that, although bare of leaves on account of the season, the tree was festooned with offerings: cigars, bread, meat, strips of cloth, flasks of precious water and other offerings hung from its branches by lengths of coloured thread. About its base were strewn bleached horse-bones, the remnants of religious sacrifices.

‘The Indians call it god. We call it dinner.’ Esteban grinned as he unhooked the food and drink from the tree and placed it in his saddlebag for later consumption.

‘Um ... should we really be doing that?’ asked Darwin guiltily.

‘It makes them happy’ Esteban shrugged his shoulders. ‘They think God has paid them a visit.’

The gauchos spurred their horses northwards once more, their robes rippling. The Englishmen headed off in pursuit, Darwin with a degree of é
lan
gleaned from years of experience, Harris’s horse straining under the immense weight of its rider, Covington bringing up the rear, mute and ungainly on his long-suffering mount, saddlesore but uncomplaining.

That night they lay out under the stars in the boundless stillness of the plain, the Milky Way wheeling gloriously above them, its myriad uncountable pinpricks blurring into a soft arch of light that Darwin wished he could reach out and touch.

‘It is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen,’ he thought, then realized he had spoken aloud.

Harris, who had guzzled most of the food from the tree and was labouring at his night’s rest, adjusted his bulk for a better look.

‘The Indians believe that the stars are old warriors. That the sky is the field where they hunt ostriches. All those milky clouds of stars are the feathers of the ostriches they kill.’

How blissful, Darwin reflected, to be able to believe such a thing.

‘Don Carlos?’

‘Yes, Esteban?’

‘May I ask you a question?’

‘Of course.’

‘Is it true that if you made a hole in the ground, if you dug far enough, you would come to a country where there was six months of day, and six months of night, and where the people walk upside-down?’

‘One question with about twenty answers,’ murmured Harris.

So Darwin discoursed at length about the rotation of the earth’s axis in relation to the sun’s light, about the earth’s gravitational field, and about the broad make-up of the planet’s various peoples. Harris came to his rescue whenever his Spanish faltered, until finally Esteban seemed satisfied.

‘Don Carlos?’

‘Yes?’

‘May I ask you another question?’

‘Of course.’ Darwin wondered what great scientific or theological principle he would have to translate into pidgin Spanish next.

‘You have travelled to many lands. Is it not true that the ladies of Buenos Ayres are the handsomest in the world?’

‘Charmingly so,’ Darwin reassured him, as solemnly as he could.

‘Do ladies in any other part of the world wear such large combs?’

‘No, they do not.’

‘Look there!’ said Esteban to his fellows. ‘A man who has seen half the world says it is the case. We always thought it so, but now we know it!’

‘Now may I ask
you
a question, Esteban?’

‘Of course, Don Carlos.’

‘Do you and your friends believe in God?’

Esteban laughed.

‘In God, Don Carlos? There is no God. As you saw yourself - if you give your most precious thing to God, you might as well throw it away.’

 

The next day they passed the ruins of
estancias
— once-substantial farms, built by courageous but foolhardy settlers who had pushed just a few miles too far into unsecured territory. The buildings were blackened ruins, their corrals smashed down, the remains of their vegetable gardens parched and lifeless.

‘The Indians always fire the farms,’ explained Esteban, ‘so that they cannot be reoccupied.’

‘What happened to the farmers?’ asked Darwin.

‘What always happens to farmers. The young girls are taken as slaves. The rest - the men, old women and children - are tortured to death. They have their faces cut off and their throats slit.’

Darwin shivered. ‘Are there any Indians here now?’

‘Do you see any?’

Darwin scanned the empty horizon. ‘No.’

Esteban laughed. ‘Don Carlos, even if there were Indians here, you would not see them. They are too clever. But do not worry — we are not farmers, waiting like stupid fat ostriches to be put to the slaughter. We have fast horses, and guns, and knives, and we know how to use them. And you will see, Don Carlos, before the year is out, General Rosas will have destroyed every single Indian between the Plata and the Negro.’

‘Have you and your men ever been attacked by Indians?’

‘Of course. One time at Punta Alta there were four of us. We were surprised by Araucanians - raiders from across the mountains, to the south of Chili. They are the most dangerous. They use
chuzos
— long lances. I was the only survivor. I had the fastest horse.’

Darwin scanned the horizon once more, his stomach fluttering.

‘Tell me, Don Carlos, do you like beef?’

‘Do I like beef? Yes. Why?’

Esteban indicated a solitary Friesian cow, wandering the umber plains against a sky of the palest blue. ‘Dinner for tonight,’ he replied, and gave one of his fellow gauchos the nod to run it down. The man pulled his
bolas
out of his belt and set off after the animal, the three stone balls blurring into a perfect circle above his head as he thundered in pursuit. The cow gave a great moo and turned to flee, but the
bolas
whizzed with deadly accuracy from its assailant’s hand: the speeding arc of the stones intersected with the graceful, rhythmic parabola of the animal’s gallop, each bringing the other to an abrupt, chaotic stop. The cow lay pinned in the dust by the thongs, thrashing helplessly. Its distress cries were cut short in an instant, as the hunter dismounted in one swift move, drew his knife from his belt and slit the animal’s throat. Then, before its death throes were even complete, the dust around it a red slick, its bulging white eyeballs staring up in terror, the gaucho sliced into its rump, cut out a block of steak sufficient for eight men, and wrapped it in his saddlecloth.