Between Extremes

From a friendship born out of adversity comes an extraordinary story by two extraordinary men. For four years, Brian Keenan and John Mccarthy were incarcerated in a Lebanese dungeon. From the blank outlook of a tiny cell, with just each other and a few volumes of an ancient American encyclopaedia to sustain them, they could only wander the wide open spaces of their imagination. To displace the ugly confines of their existence, they envisaged walking in the High Andes and across the wastes of Patagonia.

Five years after their release, Brian and John chose to travel together again to see how the reality of Chile matched their imagination and to revisit their past experiences. Between Extremes is the story of that journey, which once more found them far from home, in an unfamiliar landscape, but which for the first time allowed them to live by their own rules.

Bill Scott-Kerr who, with great charm and patience, did so much to realize our accounts of our Chilean experiences. Jane Parritt, who picked up on a brief mention about Patagonia and yaks. Without her our great adventure might have remained a captive daydream. Katie Hickman and her parents, John and Jenny, who gave us much advice on where to go and what to see and introductions to their many Chilean friends. Tom Owen Edmunds, who as well as sharing his own insights on the country joined us for our time in and around Santiago and on the horse trek high into the Andes. Not only did he take many fine photographs but his companionship and good humour eased our saddle sores. Chris Parrott and Sally Rich at Journey Latin America for turning our outline plans into a feasible itinerary. Frank Murray and Noni McClure for their hospitality and generous loan of a quiet haven in Santiago. Jorge López Sotomayor and Jueni Valdés López, who opened up their hearts and home to us. Alfonso and Isabel Campos, for welcoming us in Patagonia and appreciating the genius of Keenan’s yakic inspiration. David Ottewill for his valuable comments on John’s text. A special thanks to Noleen Gernon, who traipsed around Chile on her fingertips to type up Brian’s story.

From our bird’s eye perspective the first ridges and valleys look rusty and dusty, the hide of an elephant close up. Then we are among snow-capped peaks for a minute or two before starting our descent on the other side. Above us, clear blue sky, and from the plane’s wing-tip a small vapour trail streams, an effete cigar whiff compared to the monstrous clouds that swirl like steam from a boiling cauldron.

As quickly as they appear, the mountains vanish and we make our final approach to the capital, Santiago de Chile. The land is flat and wide with roads, irrigation ditches and fields as neatly laid out as any in Europe except here they are on a vast scale. There are no houses, as though the place has been planned, basic development started and no-one has taken up the estate agent’s offer.

Chile’s physical boundaries – the Andes in the east, the Pacific to the west, desert in the north and the ice of Antarctica to the south – create a natural island. Certainly these borders, before the advent of big ships and aircraft, meant that only the most determined came here. Although Magellan discovered in 1520 the channel from the Atlantic to the Pacific that now bears his name, it was not until 1536 that the first Europeans entered Chile.

Led by the Spanish conquistador Diego de Almagro – who with Francisco Pizarro had conquered the Incas in Peru – a force of 400 men made their way over the Andes into Chile. The expedition was a disaster and many died or suffered cruelly in the harsh, cold, mountainous conditions. Looking down from the plane, I wonder at the ambition of people like Almagro. Had they known what lay ahead, would they have persevered?

I know that we are heading for an arid region, indeed one of the driest places on earth, the Atacama Desert, but I was expecting the transition from the green plains around Santiago, in Chile’s lush heartland, to the brown hills and valleys of the north, to be more gentle. Yet, almost as soon as we have changed planes and left the capital for Arica, green becomes nothing but a memory. The scene is utterly lifeless, scalded and scorched, with slivers of road wandering here and there. The mountains below stretch away to my left where I can see the shoreline and the Pacific breakers rolling in.

For a long while we follow the coast, a seemingly endless succession of wide bays and small coves. Low cloud hugs the shoreline, blurring the distinction between land and water. Mostly, though, the ground looks quite barren, with no settlements, no boats and just the occasional track. I feel a sudden, unexpected respect for this uncompromising landscape.

The coastal range looks like a giant skeleton picked bare by the vultures of sand and wind. The absence of even a hint of water, let alone anything green, conjures in my mind an image of a colonist, hopeful of founding a great estate, being defeated by nature and gradually going insane. In his dotage, believing that his slice of nowhere is really bountiful earth after all, he carefully plots it out and farms stones.

Nearing the start of our Chilean journey, we fly along a narrow coastal strip of dull brown earth. A road, glistening and wandering like a filament of treacle, spins along near the sea, the few vehicles on it like beetles scuttling for safety. The sun beats down a hot warning. As we descend, and the plane’s shadow shrinks to a tiny, toy size, a small terminal building shimmers in the heat. This is Arica, the real start of our Chilean experience. I am excited yet tired and, now we are here, a little apprehensive.

The flight into Arica airport should have filled me with some kind of anticipation or even excitement but for some reason that wasn’t the case. I spent most of the journey intrigued by a woman passenger sitting to the left of me. Her features were classically South American. Her skin and hair seemed to be shellacked. Her face and arms were a tone brighter than milk chocolate and her hair, pulled back tightly from her face, was so lustrous that you couldn’t define its separate strands. I tried to make conversation but failed miserably, my Spanish being almost non-existent. I watched her glance towards John, who had a book on his knee, Isabel Allende’s novel The House of the Spirits. She looked closely and not inconspicuously at it.

John noticed her curiosity and smiled. She smiled back and leaned across, pointing at the book and saying simply, ‘This is a very good book.’ Unfortunately her English was as poor as my Spanish and she could add little to her statement. I knew the story and could imagine what she meant by its being a good book, but I would have loved to be able to talk to her about it. Would her native perspective be very different from my alien one? But that was one of the reasons I came to Chile, to find my own particular House of Spirits.

Like many encounters, this one was all too brief and as swiftly as the small aircraft landed she was gone with a polite smile of acknowledgement. As we took down our belongings from the luggage racks I glanced again at Isabel Allende’s novel as it lay on the aircraft seat. Looking at the face of the woman on the book cover, I was momentarily struck by the fact that it could almost have been the face of the woman who had just left. It was one of those quirky moments you try to brush off but it lingers with you. To a weary traveller in a strange land, coincidence takes on a curious significance.

Whatever I was beginning to make of this seemingly ghostly encounter was soon dispelled as we descended the aircraft steps to the tarmac. I looked about me. In the hot sun the landscape shimmered, bleached and bone white. It was barren, desolate and empty. Even the sea on one side could not relieve it. For a moment I wondered, what in the name of Christ are we going into? But my musings were noisily interrupted. Steaming towards us was an open-topped blue tractor of a dubious vintage with two very badly buckled front wheels. It lurched from side to side with all the grace of a demented bull. It looked like a mechanical animal puffing huge draughts of black smoke into the white-hot sky. When I considered it, I realized that no other kind of creature could survive in this landscape. It belonged here, buckled and huffing, roaring with a parched groan.

As we made for the shade of the airport terminal we were confronted by a gaggle of passengers milling about. Everywhere men, women and children were carrying bags of goods purchased in the tax-free shop. The scene had the feel of a Sunday school outing. I looked back towards the aircraft, hoping to catch a glimpse of the spirit woman once more.

Instead I saw a huge and very gaudy lampshade marching jerkily by. It was being carried by a small child who had hoisted it over his head so that only his legs protruded from under it. Behind the lampshade in single file came the rest of his family, each of them loaded down with colourful bags or boxes. They looked for all the world like a column of ants in clown costume parading across the tarmac. It was the only colourful relief from the bleakness of this place.

The sign says ‘Arica International Airport’. For the size of the place, this seems a joke, but it is just a couple of miles to the Peruvian border and half of Bolivia’s trade passes through Arica. I see a signpost, ‘Arica 16 km: Santiago 2,058 km’, and I think, Christ, we’ve just come from there, and now we’ve got to go all the way back. We have just touched down in a place of dreams and I am twitchy and cross. I look at Brian who, though I know he must be tired too, looks in good spirits. The bastard.

The drive from the airport to Arica did little to dispel the feeling of emptiness of this place. Everywhere about me, desert scrubland rolled down into the boiling sea. Here were two salty wastes meeting on this bitter coastline. One hot and burning, the other liquid and coolly inviting.

Arica itself was something of a curiosity, clinging desperately to that defining line between the desert and the ocean. I had imagined Arica to be like any frontier town, small and seedy and existing simply because it was just that, a marker delineating the border between Chile and Bolivia. A place where perhaps history had passed by and people survived because mankind, like animals, must have territories and borders and needs places like this to mark out the defining lines.

But Arica has a history. During the Inca period, it was the terminus of an important trade route. Even then the Indian peoples exchanged corn, fish and maize for potatoes, wool and whatever other produce might arrive there. With the Spanish colonization this small trading port was upgraded to the status of a city in 1545. But more importantly, the discovery of a huge and fabulously wealthy silver mine near Potosí, in present day Bolivia, greatly increased the size and importance of Arica. It is difficult, but intriguing nonetheless, to imagine that by 1611 the town and the area surrounding Potosí was one of the most densely inhabited cities in the whole of the western hemisphere, and Arica was the equivalent of some Los Angeles suburb.

I thought how McCarthy and I had marked out territories for ourselves, both literal and metaphorical, during our long sojourn in Lebanon. The lunacy of dividing up the planet in some squalid basement in Beirut suddenly struck me. For years we had survived on dreams and now here we were entering the reality of them.

Most people suggest one should leave dreams where they belong, back in the never-never. But here we were, dreamers to the end, pursuing the never-never like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Perhaps we both needed our heads examined or perhaps, as my mother always used to say, ‘Be careful what you want because if you want it hard enough you will get it.’ As the bus chugged through the town traffic into the heart of Arica, I could still hear McCarthy’s voice defiantly stating, ‘You can’t have the Caribbean, that’s mine, and I’m gonna roof it!’

Our hotel was a stucco construction, a kind of mock-Spanish adobe. It was surprisingly lavish for a nondescript desert town. Having registered and had our bags taken to our room, we were offered a pisco sour, a local brandy-type spirit mixed with sugar and lemon juice. Two of these were more than sufficient.

It begins to sink in that we have two months of this, and that, though we are tired now, it might not be so bad after all. We are here and settled and all the months of planning are about to pay off. We have spoken much on the phone about the details of the trip but haven’t actually seen each other for quite a while – what with Bri being in Dublin and me in England.

I felt the same thrill as always when we met at Heathrow. Hugging Brian’s solid frame inevitably lifts my spirits in anticipation of laughter, affection and discussion of any number of topics and the likelihood of intense debate. Yet since Beirut we have only ever met for short periods, at most two or three days. Now we are committed to months on the road together, dealing with unknown problems, sharing brand new experiences. Since Lebanon our relationship has moved on, becoming more relaxed yet not losing its intensity. The captive days are far enough behind us now not to dominate, happily wrapped up as we are in our separate lives.

I wonder to what degree, if any, we may have lost the ability to read each other’s feelings and react in tandem to situations without the need for explicit communication. But such musings will resolve themselves in the days ahead so for the moment I put them aside.

Given the fact that we are very evidently in a desert it comes as no surprise that the bathroom is plastered with signs urging minimal consumption of water. I rinse some socks and myself in the feeble shower, then dress and go for a drink on the terrace while Brian freshens up.

I had a shower and made the obligatory phone call home. Then I sat and read, but my mind was too preoccupied to be attentive. Instead I watched the desert sparrows flit to and from the balcony. For some time I sat trying to resolve with myself what this was the beginning of. There were 3,000 miles in front of us, always heading further south, from the foothills of Bolivia and Peru to the wastes of Tierra del Fuego. It was a dizzying thought. Contemplation of this journey might have filled up many months of our captivity but the actuality of it was another thing. I looked around the room and then out into the vista from the balcony to confirm the reality.

When I joined John on the terrace, I wasn’t surprised to find that he had dressed for dinner. I recalled the day John arrived at Lyneham air force base after being released from his captivity. As I stood watching him descend from the aircraft, I remember remarking quietly to myself, ‘Well, he would have to look like a film star, wouldn’t he!’ The memory, combined with his immaculate appearance, now confirmed who was to be Don Quixote and who was to be Sancho Panza on this trip.

Thanks to the combination of our own weariness and excitement and the strangeness of the place, our conversation over dinner was inconsequential, circling around the fact of us being here and the reason for it. Could anyone believe where this trip had its origins, when two half-naked men, blindfolded and chained to a wall, discussed with fevered enthusiasm the possibility of setting up a yak farm in Patagonia?

We discussed the various travel books we had read as if trying to fit ourselves into the appropriate mould. John has a particular fondness for travel writing and is much more widely read on the subject than I. I felt somewhat out of place. As we discussed what travel writing should be I remember remarking that the travel writer has to engage the reader with a new and imagined present. He has to convey the essence of an incident or a place rather than the fact of it. The history of the continent we were in and indeed the history of Arica, as we were to learn, had shown how the facts of history were transcendent.

John seemed to be listening intensely but was obviously in no mood for such academic debate. In a broad Belfast accent he mocked my words with a taunt: ‘Ah, would you ever go and give my head peace.’ We both laughed and decided to retire to the patio near the pool.

Arica is a holiday resort for wealthy Bolivians and there were some people still swimming in the pool or sitting, like ourselves, to enjoy the evening. We were intrigued by the faces of our fellow guests and tried to discern the signs of Indian, colonial Spanish or other European ancestry in the people about us. There is something distinctly lovely in faces that display a mixture of bloodlines. They have a beauty that is their own.

That night I lay on my bed listening to the monotonous drone of the fishing boats and in the subsequent hours those ships roared through my sleep. For a while I lay awake thinking of the faces in the hotel and I remembered something of what D. H. Lawrence had said in his dismissal of what he called a ‘Dead Europe’. He spoke of the ‘passion’ of Catholic countries where women had not lost their identity in the gender-bending emotional and sociological war of the sexes. Lawrence’s own sexual confusions were no panacea. I remembered looking at his paintings in the desert of New Mexico and I thought, Here I am also in a desert but a lot less sure of myself. I was far from home and feeling lonely, my thoughts maudlin, and I suspect trying to find a first foothold for our oncoming expedition.

In Arica there is a long wall facing the sea. Someone had painted a mural outlining that colonial history. Here were images of the native Indian culture, the Spanish colonial conquest and through to the present day, including what is called ‘the War of the Pacific’ in which Arica was taken from Peru and became Chilean national territory. But there was one glaring omission. There is nothing to denote the events of the Pinochet regime, one of the most ruthlessly fascist governments in the history of South America.

Near the harbour were the beached remains of a shipwreck which looked oddly like a gingerbread cake. Beside it, a Spanish fortress sat crumbling on a promontory into the sea, circled by and infested with what the locals call TVs or turkey vultures. The gingerbread shipwreck and the turkey vultures nestling in the ruins of Spanish colonialism seemed to be an apt comment on the history of this place.

Overlooking the town was a hill, El Morro, on which stood an old fort housing the Arms Museum dedicated to the War of the Pacific and the taking of Arica from Peru in 1880. There remains to this day some dispute between Peru and Chile about the rightful status of Arica. This was interestingly summed up on that hill.

Just off from the museum was a plinth-like structure, something like a miniature Mayan temple. Our guide Katia told me it is awaiting the erection of the Christ figure when all the political problems are solved. This confusion of faith with politics is one I still fail to understand. But it remains a means which every right wing and arch conservative organization has used to subjugate the minds and imaginations of their people. I speak with some authority, having been on the receiving end of minds poisoned by such thinking.

Katia is quietly spoken with fluent English and an engaging giggle. ‘Local legend says that the fifty-five Chilean heroes prepared for their final attack by drinking strong liquor fortified with gunpowder,’ she tells us and Bri mimes pouring a drink and handing me a glass.

He lights up and puffs furiously – unusual for him as he smokes only occasionally. He is right about the smell: it is so thick you feel you could touch it, cut it with a knife. With the heat and humidity the effect is suffocating and my head feels as though it has been submerged in a bowl of warm, rancid glue.

Descending the hill towards the centre of Arica one had to pass through a shanty town. The whole of this rudimentary community was pockmarked with tiny Methodist, Mormon and Seventh Day Adventist churches. These buildings were not much bigger than some of the appalling shanty homes, indeed, some of them may well have housed a family before becoming a structure of faith. In the middle of all this reformist zeal there was a small but robust Catholic chapel with a stubby steeple. It stood defiantly, declaring that it alone was at the very centre of people’s suffering.

Back in the town, standing in stark contrast to these small churches was the church of San Marco or the Iron Cathedral of Eiffel. As its name declares, the church was designed and built by the same gentleman who constructed the great iron tower in Paris. It was built entirely in prefabricated iron. Even the walls and ceilings were lined with stamped, moulded iron plates. Only the door was made of wood. As this is a desert climate and it has not rained here in the memory of the oldest inhabitants, the builders of this cathedral were assured that it would never rust or decay. Entering it, one felt immediately its coldness, its impersonality and even its sterility. Metal is not the medium of passion, and in this hulk of a God house I could feel no movement of the spirit. Only standing in the patio of the grotto at the side of the church did I have any sense of religion, as I watched one little bird hop and dance around a bent old woman as she moved about sweeping leaves.

Although I rejected the whole notion of an iron church, I was nevertheless intrigued as to why Gustave Eiffel should have bothered to design and ship one out in prefabricated sections to a remote corner of South America. Did he imagine that in this new continent he could eclipse the majesty of those medieval cathedrals and churches that litter Europe? Did he perhaps see himself as a visionary in iron? He had also designed the little Customs House, the Aduana, which now staged exhibitions. Whatever his motivation, I was completely unmoved by his cathedral. I wanted to be where living people were.

We walked on quickly towards the harbour where big, skulking pelicans pushed and jostled among the boulders on which it was built. I remembered seeing such birds in fairytale picture books but these were an ugly and brutal travesty of my childhood imagination. Everywhere about me was the putrid smell of fish processing. My stomach was rising to my throat and I wanted to be away from the place fast. Walking back towards the town I was thinking, was this the essential dichotomy of Arica, the empty, fusty-smelling iron church in a desert city that reeked only of fish?

Back in the town proper I was glad to be confronted by the deep reds, yellow and violet of hibiscus bushes and the soft reddish blush of lobelia flowers. I lingered by them for a while, but it was a mistake. We were quickly surrounded by some gypsy women and their children. They hobbled after us, pulling at our arms and pleading, proffering their hungry babies. We ignored them and walked on in silence. They persisted, then after some moments gave up, making some remark, no doubt, cursing the gringos. I said nothing to John but I remembered feeding the desert finches on my balcony and I remembered the little bird at the cathedral. I hate this mea culpa thing that wells up in me. Rather than say anything of how I was feeling, I stopped and took a close-up shot of a clutch of hibiscus flowers.

A beggar woman comes towards us, muttering and pulling at our sleeves. ‘Gypsies are the same everywhere, I think,’ says Katia. Her comment strikes a strange chord. Although we are on the other side of the world, surrounded by deserts and faces with high cheekbones suggesting Indian ancestry, where everyone speaks Spanish, a language I hardly know, I am surprised at the lack of culture shock. Everything is new to me but seems familiar.

In Colón Square there is a monument erected in 1991 by the local Socialist Party to commemorate its members killed in General Pinochet’s 1973 coup. Brian goes over to take a photograph of this and I say to Katia, ‘I’ve read that the Socialists were very strong in the north. There must have been big celebrations in ’88 when Pinochet handed over to a civilian government.’

She looks blankly at me, muttering something about ‘the military period’ and changes the subject. This comes as a shock. I wander off a little and take a photo of the square. Brian comes up and, seeing my perplexed expression, asks, ‘Something bothering you?’

Hidden away among all the brown earth and rock Arica has two fertile valleys: the Lluta and the Azapa. Katia takes us to visit the archaeological museum of the University of Tarapaca, the name of the province we are in. It is very hot and our surroundings make us thirsty. On the way we pass shanties built of packing cases with burned-out trucks and skinny dogs in the yard. The course of the river is little more than piles of stones. There are smallholdings, oases of olive and fruit trees and corn. It looks a hard life with the desert reaching right up to the back door. Katia, once again her effusive self, tells us, ‘They are expanding the cultivated area with Drip Watering Schemes. The land looks dead now but some green will come up.’

Further up the valley, beyond even these spartan outposts, we get a mysterious sense of the people who were living here centuries ago. High up on the hillsides you spot what could be a pattern; you almost dismiss it before you realize it is a definite form. They are geoglyphs, figures either carved in the rock or marked out by large stones.

The most exotic geoglyph was Cerro Sagrado, ‘Sacred Mountain’. The images of a pregnant woman, a phallus, monkeys, serpents and lizards are all clearly visible high on the bluffs above us. We stand looking in silence, a small group in a vast area, the only sounds the wind and an occasional bird cry. I feel a strange mix of the familiarity and the fear that such ancient monuments often inspire. You can imagine walking beside a trader from the mountains 600 years ago, looking up and seeing Cerro Sagrado and knowing we are near the coast and at our journey’s end. Then you realize that that world was quite alien, and mysterious; that that site was not Cerro Sagrado to the trader, for he spoke another language, had never heard a word of Spanish and had no concept of Europe. He lived in another world as well as another time. Here is culture shock after all.

I was half listening and half sleeping when mention of the word ‘geoglyphs’ woke me. One can only wonder at the energy and imagination that it took to construct these images. The people who created these things would have had to stand at a distance from the hill, and there, in their mind’s eye, design the outline of the shape they sought to build, then trudge three, four miles up the hill, spend weeks clearing the rubble and create with perfect configuration that creature of their imagination or that animal of their reality. The further we travelled into the hills the more we saw of these visual messages from a people and a civilization long since disappeared. Everywhere were representations of llamas and alpacas. On one particular hill some artistic genius had described the outline of a huge lizard that bore no resemblance to the geckos that constantly stirred at the edge of the road. And beside the lizard, the outline of what was obviously a monkey. Yet there were no monkeys in Chile, so the image demonstrated the huge distances that the Inca civilization had spread itself from central Peru. I asked Katia about the lizard. Was it a native creature of Chile? She told me that the lizard was only representative, a symbol of water.

Around the images of the lizard, the monkey and the other animals were figures of hugely pregnant women and tumescent men. The hill was a holy place, our guides explained, and all the images together represented the circle of birth and death and rebirth.

On another hill we had pointed out to us the images of men dancing to a shaman playing his pipes. I was drawn to this figure. I thought of our own dancing days in those tiny sweaty cells in Lebanon. Like that shaman on the hill, I too believe that dancing is divine. It is the great liberator.

My wife of a few years was at home carrying our first child and I was desperately missing her. This wasn’t just mawkish sentiment. The dancers on the hill made my loneliness back at the hotel seem foolish and adolescent. They were mocking me yet simultaneously giving me passage into the landscape. Several thousands of years after they were built they still served their original purpose, as a guide for travellers and a place for the spirit.

We continue to the archaeological museum along a very bumpy road. The buildings there form a tranquil oasis. We look at the huddled mummies dating from the Chinchorro culture; they are believed to pre-date those in Egypt. There is also a good exhibition of ancient artefacts demonstrating the lives and links between the hunter fishermen of the coast area and the farmers of the Altiplano. I knew that horses were unknown before the Spanish but had not realized that knives were similarly absent. This seems highly unlikely but Katia confirms it.

‘These people were obviously good hunters,’ I say to Bri, ‘so how did they manage that without a cutting edge? With drugs or hypnotism?’ I squat down and squint up at him as if at a bird in a tree. ‘Hey you, bird! Listen to me: you are getting very sleepy . . .’

I was struck by a group of mummies, which had been carbon-dated as being 8,000 years older than the mummies of Egypt. Yet this amazing fact could not dispel the poignancy of this dead tableau. Mother, father and children had been buried sitting in an upright position with all the accoutrements of their household. At first I could hardly bear to look in on this family, and one particular relic made the whole scene even more moving. It was a small box a little larger than a snuffbox. It contained the foetus of a stillborn infant. It was a powerful testament of life and of life after death. Even this stillborn child was assured of an existence in the afterworld. This was real passion, more meaningful than D. H. Lawrence’s egotistical ramblings about it.

While I was busy with all this thinking, John was intent upon his own jigsaw. He has an insatiable curiosity about things. I’m sure if I ever possess a cat I will name the creature McCarthy after my travelling companion. While John was extracting information from our guides, I sat silently asking my own questions, trying to fathom what specifically had brought us here. The idea of the yak farm was certainly a means but were there other things compelling me?

All travel is, after all, a journey in time and in mind. Like many people I believe that physical landscapes are a mirror of, or perhaps a key into, our inner landscape. It wasn’t simply chance or good luck that brought us to Chile. The silent messages from the images on the hillside and those unearthed from the desert had assured me of that.

I had brought with me the collected poems of Pablo Neruda, the fabulous Chilean Nobel prizewinner. Curiously it was the first gift I was given when I returned from Lebanon. Was that just a coincidence too? In any case I had chosen Neruda for my spirit guide, though if anyone was to ask me I wasn’t sure why.

I also wanted to know if there was any resonance in this real landscape for the imaginary landscape I had concocted while incarcerated. Neruda’s intoxicating verse somehow seemed a familiar echo of that thinking so long ago. Why, I began asking myself; and would being here answer my questions?

‘My country has the shape of a great albatross with its wings outspread,’ wrote Neruda in 1972. The association of the land with the albatross is an intriguing one, for it carries with it notions of destiny. The fact that we were here was for me more to do with a fixed destiny than an act of chance. Our 3,000-mile journey between extremes of Chile’s land mass was our own albatross flight.

We lapse into silence, eating and sipping. The market is strangely proportioned, the roof high above – as you would expect – but everything at ground level, while being the right height, seems to have been constricted in width and depth. The narrow, cluttered passageways bustle with people selling all manner of things. About three feet from our little table is a kiosk of esoterica: candles, incense, maté tea, herbs and many mysterious packages. It looks wildly superstitious but is doing a brisk trade. The man behind the counter has an aquiline nose and thick spectacles. He looks other-worldly in his drab black trousers and nondescript shirt – not evil but, half closing my eyes, I can visualize his tall skinny frame draped in a dark cloak. The place is noisy, fun and friendly; it just feels as if you are eating in a hall of distorting mirrors.

Everything from alabaster saints, special potions and curses to ready-made prayers, dried animal parts and God knows what else was there. This kiosk unreservedly served every religious inclination imaginable. The owner seemed to have plenty of customers and listened priest-like as they explained their needs to him. He had something in his tiny shop no matter what they requested. I was slowly beginning to understand why the iron cathedral was empty and why the statue of Christ might take longer to be erected than anyone could have imagined.

Back at the hotel that evening I slept fitfully as I usually do in strange bedrooms. The noise of those infernal fishing boats toing-and-froing across the ocean outside the window, combined with the ever-present odour of fish, did not help. The next morning I was too tired to do anything but sit and consider the journey in front of us. We were headed into the Altiplano towards Lago Chungara, one of the highest lakes in the world, some 5,000 metres above sea level. The thought of this place encouraged me. At least there we would be well away from this insidious stench of fish.

As we finished breakfast the waiter informed us that our two guides were waiting. There was little more to do but head for the hills. We collected our baggage and loaded it onto the four-wheel drive. Karlen, who had met us at the airport, was in her middle to late twenties and was studying law at university. Her companion, Eduardo, a man in his late thirties, had come to live in Arica to get away from the smog and unhealthy conditions in Santiago. I couldn’t really imagine anyone choosing to live in Arica, but for our guide it was not a matter of choice: rather doctor’s orders. The air in this area was good for him, he told me. I might not live there, but I had breathed in enough fishy air to have doubts about the veracity of his remark.

Heading inland from Arica, a dirt road runs up and down, sweeping across high ridges between mighty valleys. We stop on a salt flat, the sandy-looking surface firm and crisp to walk on. My spirits tingle in such space and solitude. Taking off my hat to feel the sun on my face and the breeze in my hair I stretch out my arms, welcoming a sense of great freedom.

This is what I wanted back in Lebanon, wilderness untainted by man. A place where there were no guards to hiss and make you whisper, where you could shout and bellow and the world would remain mute and uncomplaining. Yet suddenly I feel uncertain. This is not a landscape you could trust. The crust of salt that extends to the horizon feels as treacherous as ice on a pond and although I marvel that the crystals sparkling in the sun create a shimmering mirage that absorbs our car parked a mile away, I shiver in the morning’s heat. I turn to look for Brian. He has disappeared! Crusoelike I follow his footprints and come to the edge of another vast valley. A little way down its rocky side, I find him poking at something on the ground – skeletons.

His face has that closed-down, pensive look I know so well. When we first met that look would make me feel excluded, as if I had done something to offend him. But I soon learned that it was his way of concentrating; though his eyes remain open he is looking inward, studying vistas and images in his mind’s eye. He is away in his own place, making sense of something, putting it into a context that he may want to share later. From under the brim of his straw hat, he looks around searching for an answer – perhaps unsure of the question that nags him. As he looks up and out across this great valley, to the valleys and hills beyond, his face remains inscrutable. Here is nature on the massive scale we had dreamed of, yet I sense that, as for me, the thoughts and feelings it inspires in him are by no means clear cut or simple.

Before we entered the mountains proper, we crossed a high desert plain. I enjoy open spaces and remote places, the solitary in me calls out to them. But emptiness disturbs me. It makes me uneasy. I love silence, but even more I like to hear it filling up with first sounds that put a sense of imminence to the day. Here emptiness was complemented only by absence. It did not encourage me for the days ahead. We have an expression where I come from for such places: ‘There is a desperate want in them.’

We stopped briefly to stretch our legs and take some fresh air. For mile after mile after mile, the empty desert’s edge surrounded us. As we left our jeep and started to walk into it, I was surprised at my reaction. I was walking on a hard salty surface. On its immense flat expanse it seemed as if you could see for ever, as if we were standing on an enormous pie-crust. Even the mountains shading out of the distance had curious indents as if they had been delicately shaped with a pastry spoon.

We stood for a moment turning slowly and taking in the emptiness. John said something to me about the silence of things. I simply insisted on stamping my foot. I was amazed that, with all the force of my feet and legs, I couldn’t break the salt crust on which I was standing. I saw John look at me as if there was something wrong with my head. Then he said simply, ‘Well, there’s certainly nothing here.’

We returned to the jeep and climbed aboard. As we drove on further into the hills we were both silently contemplating the fact that we had to cross 600 miles of the most utter wilderness in the days to come. I was about to comment on this to John when my eyes were attracted to something far out towards the horizon of this great salt plain, something shimmering and fluid. Could it be lights in the distance? Or perhaps light glancing off the bodywork of a car or truck travelling towards us, but some fifty miles away. And again I thought perhaps it was a rainstorm somewhere and the sunlight was shimmering in the downpour. Then I realized the idiocy of my thinking. This was one of the world’s perfect deserts. Perfect in the sense that in some parts of it there had never ever been any rain.

Smiling, Karlen explained, ‘It is the sun glinting off the silica that is strewn across the desert.’ I sat back feeling a little foolish and deflated. As we drove on for a few more hours, these desert lights seemed to change. On occasion they looked like small encampments glowing in darkness. I was slowly beginning to understand what the word ‘mirage’ really meant. I decided to pay little more attention to them, for, like any mirage, they had the capacity to become hypnotic.

There is a relaxed atmosphere as we drive along, getting to know our guides. Tall and thin, wearing a black stetson above a craggy, weatherbeaten face that is often wreathed in smiles, Eduardo has some English and drives tourists around in his jeep. Karlen, we learn, was born in 1974 and works as a tour guide to earn money to put herself through college. She wants to be a lawyer. We fall silent for a while as Eduardo steers the jeep over the often rutted and sometimes very treacherous roads. Brian dozes next to me in the back. Karlen turns and nods at Brian, smiling. ‘He is very tired?’