Chapter 5 teaser:The worry helped distract him from the road. Not that Lupe’s driving was bad – it was, well,
fearless, but then, she’d been born in the Andes and would probably find a wide, straight, flat road unnatural and alien. The truck careened around the curves and roared up the grades, with ever-higher cliffs crowding them on one side of the road and ever-longer drop-offs plummeting away on the other.
But the view was worth the strain on his nerves. As the road wound its tortuous way higher and higher into the Andes, Mac’s own inclination to talk faded away to nothing. On this side of the ranges, the climate was nearly desert, the towering peaks brown and severe, harsh and uncompromising; but barely two hundred miles to the east, the spine of the continent would collapse and fall away into the deepest, lushest jungle in the world. The impossible raw beauty of the mountains had sunk its teeth into him again.
His visits to Peru had always been prompted by the immediate needs of one friend or another – there was always a mission, a need on a simple human scale – but he could never enter the country, or even think about it, without feeling the grip of the
sierras tugging at him. The crazy anomalies fascinated him – the high, dry mountains that bore so little snow, the terrain that lunged incredibly from seaside desert to sky-cracking peaks, only to plummet suddenly into tangled rain forest. The watershed of the Amazon began only a few hundred miles east of the Pacific coastline, all that endless network of twisting water taking the long way round to the other ocean. It was June here – winter – but this close to the Equator, the only seasons were wet and dry.
He wished Sam was there with him. He’d have liked to be there when his son first saw these mountains. Instead, Sam would travel through them with Pete – and they might not even drive; they might hop over by plane, too far above the raw bones of the ranges to really see them for what they were. Maybe on the way back, he and Sam could cross together. That would be good.
Follow the link for the full chapter:Chapter Five: Transitive
