In the Dunes

The Dune

            It was supposed to be an all-inclusive tour but, in fact, you were nickle-and-dimed every step of the way.  Geordie was irritated.  Lunch was provided.  But little kids wearing stocking caps with earflaps and playing pan-pipes circulated between the tables.  “Panhandling,” Geordie said. “It’s a disgrace.”  Melissa gave one of the boys some coins from her pocket.  This attracted other children to their table.  “I told you not to pay him,” Geordie said.  Melissa smiled helplessly.  “How would you feel if they were your children?” Geordie asked.  Melissa just fumbled in her purse for more coins.

            The tour-guide didn’t finish the food on his plate.  He asked for a styrofoam box and carried the leftovers out to the bus waiting in the gravel parking lot.  He handed the leftovers to a ragged woman sitting on the pebbles in the shade of the bus, holding a baby at her breast.

            “Too much poverty,” Geordie said.  He put a tip on the table – it was never clear what was expected.  It left an uneasy feeling in the pit of your stomach, although maybe that was the unfamiliar food and the onset of traveler’s diarrhea.  Leaving the restaurant, Geordie blinked at the heavy trucks and battered jeeps coursing up and down the Pan-American Highway.  Some of the tourists from the bus were trying to talk to the old women peddling scarves and trinkets.  Across the highway, in a green irrigated field, a whole family was bent over some kind of crop.  Brown desert spilled down from the barren hills encircling the little cultivated acreage where stagnant water shimmered in dusty furrows.  The pan-pipe kids were coming again, always playing the same thing – Don’t cry for me Argentina.  This was Peru but that was the music played everywhere: in the airport lavatories, piped into elevators, someone stroking a piano in a hotel lounge.  Already, Melissa was rooting in her purse for more coins.    

            “We will be nickel-and-dimed to death,” Geordie grumbled.

            Things had gone wrong from the outset.  The plane to Lima had been delayed in Miami-Dade by storms rolling in from the sea and didn’t reach Peru until the middle of the night.  Then, the van or car that was supposed to pick them up didn’t show – Geordie and his wife, Melissa, had to hail a cab.

            The night-time city was vast and smelled bad.  It was as if an enormous carcass was rotting somewhere in the sultry darkness.  The cab driver drove recklessly, making abrupt unaccountable turns, a cell-phone tucked under his jaw and against his ear.  Sometimes, he put the phone down to gesture at landmarks.  At one deserted intersection, big Victorian mansions loomed over a traffic circle where a liberator on horseback stood on a graffiti-smeared concrete plinth.  “Here is where the communists had their offices,” the man told Geordie and Melissa.  “Very bad.” he added.

            Nightclubs along the road were still open and crowds of people stood in the yellow light pooling around chicken-stands.  A woman in a long, dirty dress was herding small children across a rugged, potholed intersection.  All the buildings looked unfinished two or three stories of concrete, stone shells with old dogs sleeping in them or alcoves lined with cardboard where families were living, re-rod staves blossoming along the tops of walls. 

            A big house, shuttered with iron bars, and constructed like a French chateau stood on an island between streets ribboned with streetcar tracks.  “Is haunted,” the cab driver said.  “People go in and come out...not right in the head...how you say?... insane.”

            “Really,” Melissa said.

            They whirled around the building.  Many long, gloomy avenues intersected in that place.

            “Just a story,” the man said.  “Made up by the CIA – to keep people away.  Interrogations were done there.  Police.”

            The hotel looked heavily fortified.  Men with carbines were patroling the sidewalk.  Across the street, a ruinous Hall of Justice oozed baroque terra-cotta putti and scrolls.  Inside, it was last call for Pisco Sours.  The pianist was improvising jazz variations on Don’t Cry for Me Argentina.

            The cab ride was expensive.

            “That was supposed to be included,” Geordie grumbled to Melissa.

            The bellman was insistent that he carry their luggage.

            “Another tip,” Geordie whispered to his wife.

            But that was two days earlier.  The last old people straggled out of the restaurant, shielding their eyes against the light.  The tour-guide signaled that the Americans should get on the bus.

            “About another ninety minutes,” he said over the loudspeaker, as the tourists settled into their seats.  The air-conditioning had been off in the bus and it was warm and smelled like a sewer.  Something was wrong with toilet in the back of the bus. 

            “We stay at a very nice resort,” the tourguide said.  “It is an international conference center.  Very famous in all of South America.  The 2005 monetary conference for the whole world was held there.”

            The bus lurched forward.

            Someone asked if the resort was on the beach.

            “No, it is a few miles to the water,” the guide said.  He shrugged.  “The Humboldt current makes the sea very dangerous, much too cold to swim and too foggy.”

            The bus pulled slowly out of the truck stop parking lot onto the Pan-American highway. 

            “There is a big sand dune one of the biggest in the world on the property,” the guide said.  “If you like, you can rent a dune-buggy.  It is extra, of course.”

            “Of course,” Geordie muttered to his wife. 

            It was warm and many of the tourists fell asleep.  The tour-guide spoke to them on the PA.  Some of the people protested and said that they wanted to take a siesta.

            “We’re paying for this,” Geordie said.  “He ought to be telling us things.”

            Melissa leaned her head on Geordie’s shoulder and closed her eyes.

            The tour-guide said during the war with the Shining Path, there had been many kidnapings and machine-gun attacks in Lima.  Martial law was declared and the nightclubs were under a ten p.m. curfew.

            “Every weekend, we came down the coast,” the tour-guide said.  “We partied down here.  There are vineyards where it is irrigated and the best wine in the world and very wonderful music in the clubs.  It is music invented by the black slaves who were numerous in this part of Peru.  I had many, many excellent adventures in these places when I was a young man.  It was the best part of my life.”

            “He should let us go to sleep,” one of the tourists said loudly.

            “We take a little siesta now,” the tour-guide said.   

            The resort was in a desert town that stretched for several miles along the two-lane highway.  The town was made of raw concrete and adobe, a procession of motor oil (aceite) and transmission shops nudging up close to the pot-holed asphalt road, chicken shacks, shabby-looking restaurants that served some kind of fusion of Peruvian and Chinese food, flat-topped tenements on the pebbly ridges above the highway, dusty alleyways full of gaunt dogs and children.  The bus turned after crossing a long low bridge above the glittering gypsum-white bed of a river.  The watercourse was lined with bamboo and willows and a half-mile wide.  A trickle of water wiggled like a snake across the gravely river-bed, running between low, tapering dunes of sand.  Another height of tawny sand hung like a kind of curtain against the sky at the end of the narrow road.  They passed eight-foot cinder block walls topped with concertina wire, passed a checkpoint manned by boys with machine guns, and, then, entered onto the resort grounds, the road curving between fairways and greens punctuated with fountaining arcs of water. 

            The resort buildings were arranged haphazardly, a colony of small flat-roofed buildings that seemed to huddle in the shadow of the big, wind-sculpted sand dune. 

            The tour guide handed out keys in the lobby.  “You are on your own until six o’clock,” he said.  Water spilled from a ceramic vase into a pool bright with Spanish tiles.  Dilapidated rubber plants in pots made a bower around the concierge station. 

            In the corridor between ballrooms, a glass case held artifacts.  Most of them were little fist-sized jugs shaped like men’s heads.  There were some scalpels made from manta-ray stings and razor-sharp sea-shells.  A gold necklace dangled tiny stubby figures of dancing men and women like a charm bracelet.  The labels identifying the artifacts were grey and dusty and written in Spanish. 

            “It is Moche,” someone said as they walked past the display.

            “Sounds like a coffee,” a man from New Jersey told his wife. 

            Several of the ceramic heads seemed to be wearing goggles.  Protruding eyes glared out at the corridor inset in an eye-socket encircled by a dark circle.  The lips of the effigy head were also outlined with a groove indented in the fired clay.  The faces with goggle eyes and lips outlined in a ridge of ceramic clay seemed strangely inert and expressionless.  Geordie glanced at them, paused for a moment and, then, looked more closely.  Something was wrong with the small faces, but he couldn’t quite clarify in his own mind what caused the disquiet in him.  It was something he had seen before, but where?  The truckstop’s greasy food, he thought, that’s all.

            The rooms were located in adobe bungalows decorated with windowboxes overflowing with big, oily-looking flowers.  The bungalows were scattered about a lush garden where water from fountains splashed and trickled and seeped.  Orange and lemon trees lifted their bulbous heads all spangled with fruit into the hot air and little ornate gazebos with steeples shaped like the finials of elaborate tea pots decorated the green shade.  Between the bubbling fountains, small ponds lined in agate drizzled cool rivulets of water along concrete channels painted sky-blue.  In the ponds, big, brilliantly-colored koi grazed mops of algae. 

            The ladies oohed and ah-ed at the garden and the bungalows hidden in the jungle greenery.  Several big parakeets, livid with red and green feathers, chortled at the tourists from their silver cages hanging between wind-chimes in the willow trees. 

            Geordie’s bungalow was hot and moist and smelled of mildew.  The air conditioner labored fitfully puffing out swamp-smelling vapor and rattling loudly as it cycled.  The room was gloomy, curtains drawn against the desert sunlight.  There were two twin beds side-by-side.  In the toilet, Melissa noticed a lavish faucet and basin made by a company in Wisconsin.

            “This is the place with the singing sand dune,” Melissa said.  She had been reading the guide-book in the bathroom.

            “What is that?” Geordie asked.

            “I don’t know,” Melissa said.  “It just says that the sand dune makes a singing sound if you walk on it.”

            “I’ll bet,” Geordie said.

            He stripped to his underwear and lay down on the narrow cot of his bed.

            The air conditioner clattered and blew hot, then, cold.  Melissa fell asleep but Geordie couldn’t get comfortable.  After twenty minutes, he got up, quietly dressed and went outdoors, taking the big room-key with him.  The garden path gracefully curbed between lemon trees.  Geordie took out his wallet, found some small change for the beggers and put the money in his breast pocket.  He didn’t like exposing his cash in this climate and so he shoved the wallet into his pants pocket. 

            The garden was very still.  Near the lodge, where they had checked-in, a portable bar on wheels had been shoved out onto the patio and a silent, brown girl was serving Pisco sours to a couple of tourists.  Some Peruvian girls in bikinis lounged around the oval pool, watching some small children splashing in the tepid water.

            Geordie thought he might try a drink, but he was afraid.  There were egg whites in a Pisco sour and it didn’t seem prudent to consume something like that.  And what about the ice?

            He went into the lodge and walked down the still hallway to the case containing the archaeological artifacts.

            The little goggle-eyed clay heads looked out at him.  He shuddered.  They reminded him of a figure he had glimpsed in a horror film on cable TV.  The faces were masked.  That explained the indented lines encircling the eyes and lips.  What was it?  Friday the 13^th or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Halloween?  The heads were wearing flayed human faces.  Geordie looked more closely and saw how the little effigies ears emerged from behind the mask of someone’s face, peeled from the skull, and draped over the warrior’s head. 

             Geordie went into the public toilet by the lobby.  He sat on the toilet for awhile but nothing happened. 

            In the garden, the Peruvian girls had vanished and the pool was empty.  The big cliff of sand dune towered over the flowers and ponds and little fruit trees, taller than a skyscraper.  Geordie walked through the grounds, passing over little arched bridges built over the trickles of water running between the fountains.  Beyond a putting green and the moldy sockets of some abandoned hot tubs, he came to the compound’s rear gate.  An old man was sleeping in a kiosk and there were a couple of pipe and fiber-glass watchtowers reared up over the concrete block wall.  A man in the tower holding a carbine waved to Geordie.  He made a twisting motion with his hand, simulating someone turning a key.  Geordie fished the key out of his breast pocket and displayed it for the guard.  The man waved him through the back gate and onto a paved path that lead to the sand dune. 

            A couple of battered-looking ATVs were parked around a tin quonset hut and there was a gas tank tightly padlocked.  In the shed, Geordie saw a couple of jeeps with bent roll-bars.  No one was around.  It seemed very hot.  The sand dune was exhaling warmth like a huge predatory animal.

            The path was made of bricks and lead over a few slumping drifts of pale brown sand to the big dune itself.  The dune was like a vast theatrical backdrop, floridly shadowed and complex with deep smooth folds.  The sand’s convolutions and serpentine twists of sand were motionless at the dune’s base but at the summit, Geordie saw a little pennant-shaped plume of blowing white particles. The towering dune, taller than a skyscraper, looked like the draperies that renaissance artists painted or engraved around the thighs and ankles of the virgins that they depicted.

            Geordie walked along the brick-paved path.  The dune loomed overhead.  The path climbed the dune where a big brown knuckle of sand crouched on the tar-colored and gravel desert.  Planks anchored in the sand by vertical stanchions of PVC pipe stapled the walkway to the side of the dune.  The plank walkway zigzagged up the face of dune to the crest overhead.  It looked easy enough to climb the dune to its peak. 

            Half-way to the top, Geordie paused.  The walk wasn’t worth the effort.  The sand was hot and it was steamy work ascending the dune. Some of the plank platforms were buried in avalanches of sand sifting down from above.  Sand on the wood made the planks slippery underfoot and, several times, Geordie slipped off the steep walkway, plunging ankle-deep in the pale brown dune.  The path criss-crossed a ridge sculpted in the side of the dune, passing from blinding light – all the sand particles shining like mirrors – to cool, blue darkness in the shadow. 

            Shadow was where Geordie paused.  He thought that he should have brought some water, but, then, remembered that the tap-water, at least, was dangerous to drink.  He was panting heavily and his fingers felt numb.  The dune was a lot taller and steeper than it had seemed from below.  From this height, the green tract of land in the resort compound was like a small, verdant welcome mat lying on the threshold to the disorderly grey and brown mesh of the village huddled along the long, undulating strip of Pan-American highway.  The river bed was a plain of pebbles with a tiny thread of water braided between ripples of borax and gypsum. 

            He had come this far and thought that the peak couldn’t be that distant.  Geordie squinted upward.  A little lathe cross had been stabbed into the crest of the dune.  Below, he saw that jeeps and ATVs had scribbled loops and infinity-shapes, figure-eights, in the sides of the dune.  But the sand restored itself; it was drifting down into the marks on the dune, erasing them.  It reminded Geordie of a magic writing pad that he had owned when he was a little boy – you wrote on a sheet of plastic with a stylus and, when you lifted the plastic from the black, gummy pad, the letters vanished.

            Geordie took a deep breath and climbed some more.  At the top of the dune, the planks ended in a flight of thirty wooden steps tilting dangerous to one side and about to slide like a crooked toboggan down the dune.  Geordie paused, wished he had brought something to drink, and hustled up the steps to the crest of the dune.

            The cross was made of two-by-fours and stood about chest-high.  On the cross-beam, someone had painted letters in red: Amor es Dios.  A sultry wind kicked the sand on the knife-edge of the crest.  Below the great dune tapered down into a burnt-looking valley, extending flat as a Walmart parking lot toward some heaps of tarnished, pock-marked slag.  The brown patina of the valley was all scratched with tire-tracks.  Sand cupped a brackish pool of water at its base and there was a thicket of lance-shaped bamboo with several huts made of corrugated tin at the dune’s base. 

            Geordie sighed.  The view was just more of the same.  Far away, some brick walls and a scaffolding of iron barricaded a barren ravine – it was a mine of some sort.  Black spots spun overhead.  At first, Geordie thought that it was specks whirling in his eyes.  But the spots were really there, outside in the world – vultures or condors of some kind.

            A figure stood on a bench-like protuberance of sand, perhaps a sixty-feet below the crest.  The figure was clad in black rags and held a staff made of spiraled, crooked wood.  A little dog was nested in the sand at the foot of the ragged figure. 

            Geordie felt queasy.  Perhaps, it was the diarrhea.  He thought that he would turn and descend the dune as quickly as possible, before the figure turned and saw him.  The man, if that’s what it was, seemed to be lost in contemplation of the wasteland spread out below the dune.

            Then, the figure turned and looked up at him.  Geordie saw a charred-looking hairy face, the glint of yellow teeth, dark shadowy eye-sockets.  The man beckoned to him, extending a long, skeletal hand from the torn black wings of his garment. 

            Geordie shook his head and stepped off the wooden plankway.  The sand shifted on the steeple-like ridge of the dune and a faint reverberation throbbed in the air.

            – What is that?  Geordie kicked another little avalanche of sand down the hill.  The dune seemed to throb and a faint deep booming sound, hard to discern like a heartbeat, echoed across the empty landscape.  He took another step downhill and the sand seemed to hum once more, a wavering faint roar like surf beating on a distant seashore.  The sound fascinated Geordie – it was at the very threshold of what he could hear, but it was, nevertheless, perceptible...in fact, once perceived, the sound seemed to occupy all valley and sky. 

            He took a few more tentative steps and heard the dune throb and moan.  – This is quite wonderful, Geordie thought, and it occurred to him that he probably owed the dune or God or the man in rags some sort of tip.  He slid down a few more feet, listening to the dune reverberate, then, paused, off-balance on the forty-five degree slope, digging in his pocket for his wallet.  He found the wallet, fumbled with it, and, then, lost his footing – suddenly, he was toppling downward, hot sand spurting out from under him, rolling down to the black figure on the ledge of the dune.

            The little dog’s ears were ragged and it seemed to have only one eye.  It licked at Geordie’s face.  The man in black rags stooped and fished Geordie’s wallet out of the sand.  Geordie tried to stand, slipped, and fell again so that he seemed to be kneeling in front of the man.  Slowly, floundering in the sand, he rose to his feet.  The dune boomed, crying out indignation across the cinders of the plain.

            “Senor,” the man said.  “Are you okay?”

            “You speak English?”

            “Of course,” the man said.

            “I’m okay,” Geordie said.

            The man was holding Geordie’s wallet in his bony fingers as if it were a rat that he had trapped and killed.

            “You from the States?” the man asked.

            “Yes,” Geordie said.

            “Where?”

            “You wouldn’t know the place,” Geordie said.

            “Where, amigo?”

            “Minnesota,” Geordie said.

            “Oh, your Minnesota Vikings,” the man said.  “Go, go Vikes!  You like?”

            “I guess so,” Geordie said.

            He remembered that he had cash in his breast pocket.  Geordie wondered if he owed the man a tip for retrieving his wallet.

            “I know the Vikes and the hockey North Stars...ice hockey,” the man said.

            The North Stars didn’t exist any more.  Geordie nodded his head.

            “You come to see the lines?” the man asked.

            “At Nazca,” Geordie said.

            “Yes, most wonderful.  These people, they must have flying machines to make such lines.”

            Geordie nodded his head.

            “Why does the dune make these noises?” Geordie asked.

            “Who knows?” the man said.

            “Very strange,” Geordie replied.

            “All of these hills...many caves...” the man said.  “I show you some caves with treasure in them.”

            The man extended the bony hand that wasn’t holding Geordie’s wallet.  He vaguely brushed at the remote, sun-scorched horizon.

            Geordie shook his head.

            “I guide you...” the man said.  “To see treasures.”

            Geordie wasn’t sure whether the man hissed “see” or “seek”.  It was hot on the dune and Geordie felt the skin at the nape of his neck burning.  His forearm looked bleached in the bright light, but he could feel heat working its way into his flesh.

            “No, no time,” Geordie said.

            The man put his hand in his ragged trousers.  He opened his fist and showed Geordie a handful of chalky white stones. 

            “They are beautiful crystals...I explore caves and find them deep underground.”

            Geordie looked at the stones.  – Just gravel, he thought.

            “Very pretty,” Geordie said.

            “I knew you would admire them,” the man croaked at him.

            “How much?”

            “Two American dollars for one,” the man said.  “I give you the whole group for ten dollars.”

            Geordie took some money from his pocket and gave it to the man. 

            “Can I have my wallet?” Geordie said.

            “Of course, senor,” the man said.  But he held the wallet clutched tight against his rope belt.

            “This is not enough,” the man said, inspecting the coins.

            “It’s all my change,” Geordie said.

            “These crystals are very rare,” the man said.

            He doled out a single stone to Geordie.  Between the crest of the dune and the distant mountains, all the valley was empty.  A couple miles away, a dust-devil kicked up a spinning column of cinders.

            “You give me two-hundred dollars and I find you a mummy,” the man said.

            “No,” Geordie said.

            “Thousands of years old.  There are many, many dead ones buried in caves, perfectly preserved, wrapped in fine cloth,” the man said.

            “It would be illegal for me take a mummy,” Geordie said.

            “I sell them all the time to rich Americans,” the man told him.

             “I couldn’t get it out of the airport.”

            “Oh no, senor,” the man replied.  “I ship it to you, at your house, by American Express.”

            “I’m not interested.”

            The man reached into another pocket and removed a dirty knot of bandage.  He untied the bandage.  Inside the filthy cloth, Geordie saw a brown twist of leathery skin coiled around a yellow nub of bone.

            “Is the finger of a mummy,” the man said.

            “Very interesting,” Geordie said.

            The man reached down, lifted Geordie’s hand and put the little jerky-colored fingertip on his palm. 

            “You like?”

            “Very interesting,” Geordie said.  “How much?”

            “Twenty American dollar.”

            “I will buy that if you give me my wallet so I can pay you.”

            The shred of finger seemed light as a feather.

            “Senor, for you, I throw in the rest of the gems,” the man said. 

            He handed Geordie his wallet.  It was fat, stuffed with cash and credit cards, infinitely heavier than the tiny chip of mummy.

            Geordie turned the wallet to his belly to conceal its contents from the man and handed him a twenty.

            “Gracias, amigo,” the man said.

            He spilled the rest of the chalky pebbles into Geordie’s hand as well. 

            “Thank you very much,” Geordie said.  He nodded goodbye.

            He turned away from the man and began to ascend the sand dune.  But the sand was fine and loose and it shifted underfoot.  Geordie took several swift steps uphill, but, then, felt himself sliding back toward the little ledge where the man was standing.  The dune boomed and thrummed and the sound seemed to echo across the vast, hot basin. 

            The man’s dog began to bark. 

            Geordie tried to scramble up the steep side of the dune.  Sand was splashing up around his knees as he dug and churned the dune.  It seemed impossible – for each stride that he made forward, up the face of the dune, the sand slid underfoot and he lurched back down the hill.  He was breathing hard and his face and ears felt as if they were broiling in the sun.

            Geordie thought – I look ridiculous.  I look like a fool in front of this beggar.

            He struggled upward, a foot at a time, crouched against the steep face of the dune.

            The man shouted something in Spanish.  Perhaps, he was speaking to his dog.

            Geordie dropped to his knees and began to crawl up the slope.  The sand seemed to slice into the pores of his skin.  It was in his eyes and mouth.  Sand sluicing around his ankles hummed rhythmically.

            Just below the peak, the dune became steep as a wall and Geordie had to claw at the sand.  It sheared through his fingers, slipping through them.  Finally, wriggling against the dune like a snake, he reached the top and the little wooden cross.

            Panting for air, Geordie pulled himself upright and flung himself down the slippery walkways toward the garden. 

            It was cool in the trees among the splashing fountains.  Geordie felt burned, as if the dune had sandblasted the skin off his bones.  He reached into his pocket to reassure himself that his wallet was still there.  Something else was also in his pocket.  Geordie pulled out the little snippet of mummy.  He threw it into one of the fish ponds.  The plump gold and silver mottled koi nuzzled the dead flesh with their mouths but did not eat it.