'Not at all, Father,' said Stephen. 'If I had not been so fresh from the sea, with my legs unused to the unyielding ground, it would not have seemed a great way at all, far from it indeed, particularly with so grand and high-stepping a mule as Joselito, God bless him.'
'God bless him,' said Father O'Higgins, patting the mule's withers.
'Yet the wind makes me anxious for those at sea: we can take shelter, where they can not.'
'Very true, very true,' said the priest, and the wind howled over the convent wall. 'Poor souls: God be with them.'
'Amen,' said Stephen, and they walked in.
Compline, at San Pedro's, was traditionally very long, and the choir-monks were still singing the Nunc dimittis when Stephen was woken and led through passages behind the chapel. The pure, impersonal, clear plainchant, rising and falling, moved his sleepy mind: the strong cold east wind outside the postern cleared it entirely.
The path led him and the others, a line of lanterns, over a ridge behind the monastery and down into the high but comparatively fertile plateau beyond - excellent grazing, he had been told - and so towards a large summering-house, a borda or shieling, ordinarily used by those who looked after the flocks. From the low voices before and behind him Stephen gathered that some men must have come in not only after his arrival but after he had gone to bed. Presently he saw a similar line of lanterns coming down from San Pablo, and the two little groups joined in the barn-like shieling, friends recognizing one another with low discreet greetings and feeling their way towards the benches - few lights and those high up.
First there was a long prayer, chanted, to Stephen's surprise, by the ancient prior of the Matucana Capuchins: he had not known that the movement had so wide a base as to reconcile Franciscan and Dominican.
The proceedings themselves did not interest him very much: there was clearly much to be said for admitting Castro; but equally clearly there was much to be said against it. Stephen did not possess enough knowledge either of Castro or of those who were speaking for or against his admission to form an opinion of much value: in any case he did not think it mattered a great deal one way or another. The support or opposition of so ambiguous a character was neither here nor there, now that great armed forces were about to be moved.
He listened to the general line however, sometimes dozing although the backless bench was a cruel seat for his weary frame, until with relief he heard Hurtado's strong soldierly voice: 'No, no, gentlemen, it will not do. There is no trusting a man who watches the cat so long and closely to see which way it will jump. If we succeed he will join us. If we do not he will denounce us. Remember Jose Rivera.'
'That seems to have settled the question,' reflected Stephen. 'What joy.' And soon after one line set out for San Pedro, another for San Pablo, lit by a lop-sided moon, which was just as well, the wind being now so strong that lanterns could not be relied on.
Dear bed again, a remote sense of prime being sung; then an Indian lay-brother with a basin of quite warm water; early Mass: and breakfast in the small refectory. His neighbours were the Vicar-General, who greeted him kindly but who was taciturn at most times and even more so in the morning, and Father Gomez, who was not taciturn at all, though from his impassive, markedly Indian face - a brown Roman emperor -he might well have been. He drank a large quantity of mate from a gourd, observing, 'I know, my dear sir, that it is a waste of time trying to wean you from your coffee; but allow me to pass you these dried apricots from Chile. These dried Chilean apricots.' And after another gourd he said, 'I remember too that you spoke of your wish to see the high mountain, and some of the great Inca buildings. This, of course, is not the high mountain; yet it does approach some quite lofty ground - not the puna, you understand, but quite lofty - and my nephew will be here this morning to look at one of our llama stations. If only the weather were not so disagreeable he could show you something of the country. I spoke of you when last we met, and he begged me to present him. 'Ah,' cried he, clasping his hands, 'someone at last who can tell me of the birds of the southern ocean!''
'I should be charmed to tell him what little I know,' said Stephen. 'And surely the weather is not so very severe?'
'Eduardo would not think so,' replied Father Gomez. 'But then he is a great hunter. And he creeps up mountains through ice and snow: he is made of brass. He had climbed Pinchincha, Chimborazo, Cotopaxi itself.'
Stephen had rarely taken to a new acquaintance as he took to Eduardo. To be sure, he had always liked the friendly, straightforward, wholly unaffected young on those few occasions he had met them, but here these rare and amiable qualities were combined with a deep interest in living things, birds, animals, reptiles, even plants, and a surprising knowledge of those of his own immense and immensely varied country. Not that Eduardo was so very young, either - such a mass of experience could not be accumulated in a few years - but he had retained the directness, modesty and simplicity that so often disappear as time goes on. Furthermore he spoke a perfectly fluent but agreeably accented Spanish filled with pleasant archaisms, which reminded Stephen of the English in the former northern colonies; though Eduardo's language lacked the somewhat metallic overtones of Boston.
They sat in the cloister with their backs to the east wall, and when Stephen had told him all he knew about albatrosses, which was not inconsiderable, he having sat with them for hours at their nesting places on Desolation Island, sometimes lifting them off to look closely at their eggs - all he knew, particularly about their flight, Eduardo spoke with great eagerness of the guacharo, a very singular bird he had discovered in a vast cavern near Cajamarca in the Andes, a vast cavern indeed, but scarcely large enough for the prodigious number of guacharos that tried to get in, so that some were left outside. It was one of these that Eduardo came upon, fast asleep at noon in the darkest place it could find, the hollow underside of a fallen tree, a bird about the size of a crow, something like a nightjar, something like an owl, brown and grey, flecked with white and black, large winged, fast flying. A strictly nocturnal bird, yet feeding solely on oily nuts, seeds and fruit.
'You astonish me,' cried Stephen.
'I too was dumbfounded,' replied Eduardo. 'Yet such is the case. In the season of the year the people of the village climb up to the cave, take all the young they can reach - mere balls of fat - and melt them down for oil, a pure transparent oil which they use for lamps or for cooking. They showed me the cauldron, they showed me the brimming oil-jars, astonished at my ignorance. I went far into the cave, wearing a broad hat against their droppings, and while they screeched and clattered over my head - it was like being in the midst of a huge swarm of bees, gigantic bees, and a din so that one could hardly think - I saw a small forest of wretched light-starved dwarvish trees, sprung from seeds they had voided.'
'Pray tell me of their eggs,' said Stephen, for whom this was a cardinal taxonomic point.
'They are white and unshining, like an owl's, and they have no sharp end. But they are laid in a well-shaped rounded nest made of... what is it?' he asked a hovering lay-brother.
'There is a gentleman who would like to see the Doctor,' said the lay-brother, handing a card. It bore an
