strongly-flavoured coffee. She even made a good meal, in spite of her lack of appetite on the flight out the previous day.
She was glad of the opportunity it had given her to change. The jersey suit she had worn in London was stowed in her case, and out came cotton pants and a short-sleeved cotton shirt. Even her hair felt heavy in the humidity of the coastal plain, and she listened with interest when the elder English man who sat beside her in the Boeing explained that it was much cooler in Caracas itself.
‘It’s the altitude,’ he explained, ‘or in this case, the lack of it. Caracas is over three thousand feet above sea level. They call it the city of eternal spring.’
Domine was intrigued and tempted to ask whether he knew Lima as well, but she decided against it. She would see the city for herself soon enough, and besides, she would not be staying there. Her destination was Puerto Limas.
Luis had left instructions that she should communicate the date and time of her arrival to a firm of solicitors in Lima, who were acting on her cousin’s behalf. They in their turn would make the onward arrangements for her trip south, and no doubt Lisel herself would meet her at the airport in Arequipa.
The flight from Caracas to Lima was the most spectacular stage of her journey, and she could understand any pilot not wishing to make the trip without having complete confidence in the reliability of his aircraft. Climbing out of Caracas, the awesome majesty of the Guayana highlands gave way to the foothills of the Andes, looming before them like an insurmountable barrier to the west. Range upon range of the most treacherous mountains in the world, their snow-capped peaks possessing a terrifying fascination, a cruel beauty, that both excited and repelled. The high plateaux and deep gorges were clearly visible once the shield of rain-cloud rising from the Amazon basin in the south had disappeared; but their size was encapsulated, their vastness condensed, so that the scene was represented in miniature, a compact landscape of mountains and valleys, hiding the jagged rock formations, the icy citadels, where man was as helpless as a lamb in a snowstorm.
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