'Your worship will find it next to the Dominican church,' said a brown man.
'Sir, sir, it is just before Joselito's warehouse,' cried a black.
'Come with me,' said a third. He led Stephen through the tunnel into an immense unpaved square with dust whirling in eddies about it. 'There is the Governor's house,' he said, pointing back to the seaward end of the square. 'It is shut. On the right hand,' he went on, holding out his left, 'your worship has the Viceroy's palace: it too is closed.'
They turned. In the middle of the square three black and white vulturine scavengers with a wingspan of about six feet were disputing the dried remains of a cat. 'What do you call those?' asked Stephen.
'Those?' replied his guide, looking at them with narrowed eyes. 'Those are what we call birds, your worship. And there, before Joselito's warehouse, is the hospital itself.'
Stephen looked at it with some concern, a low building with very small barred windows, the flat mud roof barely a hand's reach from the filthy ground. Prudent, no doubt in a country so subject to earthquakes, but as a hospital it left to be desired.
'The hospital, with a hundred people at the least, lying on beds raised a good span from the ground. And there I see a vile heretic coming out of it, with his countryman.'
'Which? The little small fat yellow-haired gentleman, who staggers so?'
'No, no, no. He is an old and mellow Christian - your honour too is an old and mellow Christian, no doubt?'
'None older; few more mellow.'
'A Christian though English. He is the great lawyer come to lecture the university of Lima on the British constitution. His name is Raleigh, don Curtius Raleigh: you have heard of him. He is drunk. I must run and fetch his coach.'
'He has fallen.'
'Clearly. It is the tall black-haired villain who is picking him up, the surgeon of the Liverpool ship, that is the heretic. I must run.'
'Do not let me detain you, sir. Pray accept this trifle.'
'God will repay your worship. Farewell, sir. May no new thing arise.'
'May no new thing arise,' replied Stephen. With his pocket spy-glass he watched the birds for a while, their name hovering on the edge of his mind. Presently, as don Curtius' coach rolled into the square, silent on the dust, they flew off, one carrying the desiccated cat, and the other snatching at it. They flew inland, towards Lima, a splendid-looking white-towered city five or six miles away with an infinitely more splendid series of mountains behind it, rising higher and higher in the distance, their snow at last blending with the white sky and the clouds.
The carriage rolled away, drawn by six mules, don Curtius singing Greensleeves.
Stephen approached the remaining Englishman, took off his hat, and said, 'Francis Geary, a very good day to you, sir.'
'Stephen Maturin! I thought for a moment it looked like you, but my spectacles are covered with dust.' He took them off and peered myopically at his friend. 'What happiness to see you! What joy to find a Christian in this barbarous land!'
'You are just come out of the hospital, I find.'
'Yes, indeed. One of my people - I am surgeon of the Three Graces - has what looks to me very like the marthambles, and I wished to isolate him, under proper care, until it declares itself, rather than infect the whole ship. It is as deadly as measles or the smallpox to islanders, and we have many of them aboard. But no. They would not hear of it. So I went to see Mr Raleigh, who had travelled out with us, and who is a Roman, in case he could persuade them - he lectures on law at the university: an influential man. But no, no and no. They gave him a bottle or two of excellent wine, as I dare say you noticed, but they would not yield. On the way from Lima he told me that he did not expect to succeed, their memory of the buccaneers, the sacking of churches and so on being so very vivid; and he was right, I suppose. At all events they do not choose to have anything to do with me or my patient.'
'Then I am afraid my case is hopeless, for my patient is not only a Protestant but a clergyman too. Come and drink a cup of coffee with me.'
'I should be very happy. But your case would have been hopeless had he been the Pope. The place is so low and airless and fetid, the numbers so great and indiscriminately heaped upon one another, that they would never have left your parson there.'
Geary and Maturin had studied medicine together: they had shared a skeleton and several unclaimed victims of the Liffey or the Seine. Now, as they sat in the shade, drinking coffee, they spoke with the uninhibited directness of medical men. 'My patient,' said Stephen, 'is also my assistant. He was as devoted to natural philosophy as you, particularly to birds, and although he had followed no regular course, attended no lectures, walked no wards, he became a useful surgeon's mate by constant attendance in the sick-berth and frequent dissection; and since he was a well-read, cultivated man, he was also an agreeable companion. Unhappily, he recently came to suspect that he had contracted a venereal disease, and when during an exceptionally long period without fresh water to wash our clothes he developed salt-sores, he thought his suspicions were confirmed: it is true that his mind was very much perturbed at the time for reasons that it would be tedious to relate and almost impossible to convey - the distress of jealousy, imagined ill-usage and homesickness entered into it - and that his lesions were far more important than any I have seen at any time. Yet even so, how a man of his experience could persuade himself that they were syphilitic I cannot tell; but persuaded he was, and he dosed himself privately with calomel and guaiacum. Naturally enough these had no effect; so he took to the corrosive sublimate.'
'Corrosive sublimate?' cried Geary.
'Yes, sir,' said Stephen, 'and in such amounts that I hesitate to name them. He brought himself very low indeed before he told me: our relations were by then far from cordial, though there remained a deep latent affection. Fresh water, the proper lotions and a conviction that he was not diseased have improved the state of his skin remarkably, but the effects of this intolerable deal of sublimate remains. Young gentlewoman,' he called towards the dim recesses of the wine-shop, 'be so good as to prepare me a ball of coca-leaves.'
