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Chapter 13

From the high rock where he had climbed, Hamal Anwarzai watched with pleasure the spectacle of the caravan of animals advancing along the narrow ledge path behind which opened a deep cliff. The six indigenous guides were slowly driving the llamas away from the cliff, and it was good that they did so because each beast carried a very valuable load on its back.

Anwarzai recalled when he, too, was a muleteer guiding other merchants´ animals in his native Afghanistan. The landscape was similar to that found at the Andes except that the animals were camels or mules, and not llamas, those strange Andean camelids that the locals handled with efficiency, product of countless generations long before the Inca Empire transiting with their loads from the southern forests to the Pacific Ocean. Another difference was that the content of the load were not opiate derivatives as in his youth but high purity cocaine.