them
seemed to regard a car as a symbol of
their machismo and behave accordingly,
Rachel possessed a driving licence, but
she doubted her ability to compete, and
now that she had seen the standard of the
road up to Asuncion, she was glad she
had not tried. She tried to imagine
meeting one of these buses on one of
those bends, and shuddered inwardly.
The window she was sitting beside was
covered in dust, but she couldn't really
be sorry. At least she was being saved
those stomach-turning glimpses of some
of the valleys they had passed—a sheer
rocky drop down to a wrinkled snake of
a river. And snakes were another feature
of the journey that she did not want to
contemplate.
This whole trip was madness. She knew
that now. What the hell did she think she
was doing charging up a mountainside in
company with a religious maniac
masquerading as a bus driver, several
crates of chickens and a goat?
She had seen the look of horrified
disbelief come into the hotel clerk's eyes
when she had asked him which was the
nearest town to Diablo, and the most
direct means of getting there. He had
done his level best to dissuade her,
protesting that such places were not for
the senorita. Then he had tried to
persuade her to hire a car, but had made
the basic mistake of pointing out that at
least then she would be under the
protection of the driver. Something in the
way he had said this had needled Rachel
unbearably.
She had said clearly and coldly, 'I can
look after myself, thank you, senor.'
It had been a briefly satisfying moment,
but he still thought she was mad. She had
seen it in his face as he turned away to
deal with another guest. And now she
tended to agree with him. She had never
sat on a more uncomfortable seat, and
she doubted whether the bus itself had
any springs. If she survived the journey,
it would probably be as a hopeless
cripple, she decided, as the base of her
spine took another hammering.
It had been easier than she expected to
persuade the Arviles family that she
intended
to
return
to
England
immediately, in pursuit of the errant
Mark. Isabel had been disappointed that
she would not even spend a couple of
days with them, and Rachel regretted the
necessity of deceiving the girl. But she
wondered secretly if the Senor and the
Senora might not have been quietly
relieved at her departure, or could they
genuinely have wanted yet another
English visitor upsetting the smooth
tenor of their life? Certainly she could
not have faulted their hospitality.
She had tied a coloured handkerchief
over her shoulder-length honey-coloured
hair, and donned an enormous pair of
sunglasses, but even so she knew that her
fair hair and skin were attracting more
attention than she desired from the
mainly mestizo and Indian passengers,
and she guessed that few tourists must
travel
by
this
route—particularly
blonde, female English tourists.
She wondered if Mark had taken the
same frankly death-defying route before
her, and had tried to put a few halting
questions to the driver before they had
set off, but he had stared at her
uncomprehendingly, so she had given it
up as a bad job.
The bus seemed to be descending again,
and slowly as well. Peering down the
bus, Rachel could detect a huddle of
buildings ahead of them, and guessed
they had reached Asuncion.
At first it seemed to bear a depressing
resemblance to other small settlements
they had passed along the way, with
groups of tumbledown shacks lining a
small rutted highway, but with a
triumphant blast of its horn the bus
wound along the road, avoiding groups
of children and animals apparently
attracted from the shack doorways to
watch its passing, and turned into a large
square. Here some attempt at least had
been made to paint and generally
refurbish the buildings and there was a
small market in progress. Presumably
this was the final destination of the
chickens and .the goat, Rachel