I leant on the steering wheel, with the car door open, my legs outstretched, facing the road. My friend sat crossed-legged, using his jacket as a cushion against the dusty white, gravel-covered ground. In the far distance, shimmering, were the mountains. We had come a long way, I thought, through interminable desert, to get here, where a few miles down the road, the sand would give way to prairie.

Weeks before, I had gone three days without sleep, such had been the fury of the wind, but as we sat there by the side of the road, everything was still. I bent down and plucked from the earth a dry stalk of straw-grass; I rolled it between my fingers, placed it between my molars, and began to chew. My friend fiddled lazily with a fly which had landed on his knee. It was hot, and the air heavy with silence. Amid that nothingness, the sound of the fly’s wings seemed terrible, like thunder rolling in the distance.

Then there was another noise. A low humming, coming from far away, getting gradually louder. My friend heard it too. I saw him sit up straight and cock his ear, like an animal listening hard for a threat. The sound intensified. It was coming from the east, from the mountains, and minute by minute seemed to take up more and more of the desert. It was the sound of an engine, the sound of a car. A few minutes passed, then we saw a vague shape, a glinting ball of light on the far edge of the horizon. It got larger and louder, until suddenly it was on top of us, screeching, and whipping up wind, dust and fumes. Our heads swivelled in unison as we watched it speed past, then slowly disappear again, towards the west. Before long, all was silent again.

‘Imagine what it must have been like here before cars,’ said my friend.

‘You mean, imagine how long it would have taken to get anywhere?’ I asked. 

‘No. Imagine what it must have been like to have had nowhere to go. I can’t imagine that before cars, anyone out here, in a place like this, could have been going somewhere.’

My friend was talking, not about practicalities, but rather a state of being, and he was right. There was a timelessness to that desert, a purgatorial constancy, as if it had never known change, nor ever would. At first glance, it seemed the antithesis of a human environment. It was a place people sped through and did not stop in, since what lay outside the window was simultaneously bland and empty, yet uncomfortable and confrontational to the senses. The mind, understanding experience only as something fleeting, struggled to grapple with the infinite, uncaring desolation.

‘How funny’, I said to myself, ‘to have travelled so far, from half the world away, to arrive in a place like this.’

I first became interested in the Patagonian Desert reading historical accounts of traveller’s past, who had described an unquantifiable attraction to its barrenness. Initially repelled by it, in most cases, they had discovered that, years after they had left, it had remained with them, having marked indelible traces on their memories.

Charles Darwin had arrived here, two centuries before us, looking for strange plants and animals on his way around the globe. He had found nothing except stunted, thorny bushes and angry lizards, before the Mapuche tribes had chased him back to the Beagle, anchored off the coast. Years later, back in London and writing the book which would make him famous, he had made the following note:

‘In calling up images of the past, I find that the plains of Patagonia frequently cross before my eyes;

yet these plains are pronounced by all wretched and useless.

Why then, and the case is not peculiar to myself, have these arid wastes taken so firm a hold on my memory?’

Darwin’s words had contributed to the prevailing understanding of Patagonia as a place of mystery, monsters and outlaws. Since The Middle Ages, there had been wary interest in the unknown south, and cartographers had marked Medieval maps simply, with the phrase ‘here be dragons.’ Antonio Pigafetta had fanned the flames of intrigue when he had landed here in the early 16th century, and had found, in the sand, footsteps of giant proportions. It had led him to coin the name Patagonia, meaning ‘Land of the Big Feet’, from the Spanish word for foot - ‘pata’. By the turn of the 20th century, it was, depending on who you had asked, either a hotbed for criminals or a fantastical land where dinosaurs and giants roamed the hills.

As the country had been colonised, the Argentinean state, through a series of bloody campaigns, had banished its native tribes, seeking to replace them with agricultural workers to homestead the desert. Needing people to achieve this, they had delved deep into their coffers to fund a vast propaganda campaign, advertising swathes of land to those in the urbanised centres of Europe and North America. Pamphlets had been distributed from Kiev to Kansas, promoting an agricultural dream of fertile soils, and a temperate climate, suitable for people and livestock. For the disaffected, disillusioned, and downtrodden, living in the slums and tenements of the old world, the risk had been worth taking.

Germans, Italians, and Welshman had arrived in their thousands, only to discover that they had been sold a lie; instead of sunny and verdant pastures, they had been greeted with a barren desert. Still, for the most part, they had stayed, and had squirrelled away their pasts and cultures into valleys and ramshackle little towns, withstanding the climate, and the raids by the tribes.  

It was during this period that Argentinean identity, still then in its colonial infancy, had begun in earnest to define itself. The Gaucho - now so synonymous with Argentina – had evolved from working on settler ranches, themselves coming from immigrant stock, eating nothing but meat, living by the saddle, and sleeping in the open air. His character had lent itself to romanticism, and his mythology had spread like wildfire, up through central America, to the western United States, then undergoing rapid modernisation. The days of the Wild West had dwindled; sheriff-led posses and a newly formed Federal Bureau of Investigations had all but killed off the outlaw, and industrialised agricultural techniques had reduced the need for cowboy labour. When the outlaws and cowboys had got word of the freedom and untamed lifestyle of the Gaucho, many had turned their attention southwards. Belonging to the most well-known group, subsequently known in Argentina as the ‘Banditos Yanqui’, had been a middle-aged Mormon, with sandy hair, called Robert Leroy Parker, widely known as Butch Cassidy.

As a child, my fascination with Cassidy’s story had bordered on obsession, but it had existed purely in the imaginary realm of Hollywood; Cassidy and Sundance were Paul Newman and Robert Redford, not real, breathing people with backstories or troubled pasts. It wasn’t until I had begun research into Patagonia’s history and had read - as anyone interested in the area will inevitably do - Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia, that I discovered that Cassidy, in 1901, had fled south to Argentina, to escape the law, having had his plea for amnesty rejected. With Harry Longabaugh and Etta Plaice, he had bought a modest parcel of land, sandwiched between the desert and the Andes, and had made a go of it as a rancher.

Chatwin’s book includes letters, allegedly sent by Cassidy to his companions - then still in America - describing his lot, the land, and its potential for farming. Crucially, one letter had been marked with the date and the sender’s address:

Cholila, Ten Chubut

Argentine Republic, S. Am,

August 10 1902

With this information, Chatwin had traced Cassidy’s ranch to Cholila, a small town, in the foothills of the Andes, surrounded by grasslands and glacial lakes. He had found little more than a log cabin, inhabited by a single woman of middle age, with vague childhood memories of the original owners.

For me, Chatwin’s book had not only conjured up the longing for Patagonia’s plains that I had read in earlier descriptions, but had snapped in two, the line separating myth from reality. By the time I had finished the book, I had decided that I, too, would travel there, and find for myself that mysterious quality which had made its prose remarkable.

My plan was straightforward; I would follow in Chatwin’s footsteps, choosing as my destination the modest log cabin near Cholila.

With his book in my pocket, thumbed into a state of dirty softness, Chatwin would come to be my own personal guide, a sort of spiritual Saint Nicholas, whose words defined the places and people I met, and against which, I pitted the differences between his experience and my own.

So it was that I found myself on the edge of the desert, looking west to the mountains, contemplating the vastness of it all, and trying to imagine it before cars.

‘We should keep going,’ I said.

My friend said nothing. I sensed that he was not quite ready to move, to reassume the conditions required of the living, but would rather have lingered longer in the liminal emptiness of the desert. I said no more, and instead, turned on the radio. I skimmed through the crackling frequencies, till I heard distant voices come through the speakers. I knew that they would break the spell, that they would seem jarringly human against the hot, unflinching silence, and hasten our departure from it.

In the desert, there had been no sense of season. We had dropped from hot to cold, and from day to night, but in Cholila, nestled amongst grassy hillocks, and shaded by trees whose heavy leaves hung delicately from branches, we arrived to autumn. It was a Sunday. The sky was a dizzying, electric blue, and a biting wind from the mountains made me shiver. Whilst we had been stopping to take a photograph, I pulled out the woollen vest I had bought from a lady in Neuquén, and threw it on. Knitted with thick bunches of guanaco fur, it was oily to the touch and smelt of animal.

We crossed a river over a shaky wooden bridge, and whipped up piles of leaves as we drove into town, on the deserted main street. We were hungry, and grateful for the one restaurant that was open. On entering, however, we found no one there.

‘Hello?’ I called out.

A heavy, elderly woman with a bad limp, emerged from a backdoor. She eyed us suspiciously.

‘Where is everyone?’ I asked.

‘Fútbol’, she answered, then turned on her heels, and disappeared again.

Out the front, we could hear the distant clamour of a cheering crowd, and following it, we came to the football pitch, where the town’s population was gripped by a match between children, none older than ten years old; leathery-skinned men in dusty jackets and baseball caps held beer cans aloft and hurled abuse at the referee; mothers, pressed tightly to the railings, cheered wildly, seemingly at random, and bored-looking teenagers, loitered in the background, rolling their eyes, with Maradona and Messi shirts draped on their shoulders. We stood, for a while, and watched from a distance.

Since we were in no rush, we decided to amble down a dirt track leading away from the town, past run-down wooden buildings and rusting pickup trucks. We came to a copse of trees, and sat down at the base of a conifer. From there, the land stretched flat in front of us, and in the distance, the desert from which we had come. I looked back over my shoulder, across the river, to the dark yellow uplands that spread all the way to the snow-capped inky mountains. A white-cloaked horseman rounding his sheep, and wisps of smoke from Cholila, gave human measure to the scene.

‘The ghost of Butch Cassidy?’ said my friend.

‘Maybe.’  

I lay down amongst the tree’s exposed roots, and the earth’s wetness spread across my back, but I was drowsy and did not care. Whilst leaves floated on the breeze and scattered like litter around us, I thought of Butch Cassidy and Bruce Chatwin; ghosts I had been chasing from half the world away, first in my mind, and then in person.  Perhaps they had sat here and looked out across the same plain. So much had changed since Chatwin had come here, more still since Cassidy had, but perhaps there was still something shared between us.

From my pocket, I once again pulled out Chatwin’s book. It was as if he had been with me at every juncture of our journey, and by bringing him back to Cholila, I felt that I had made him live again. Lying under that tree and the autumn sky, with the cheers of the football match in the distance, I re-read the letter Cassidy had written to Etta and Sundance, pausing now and then to look out over the land where they had lived.

Finally, we headed back to the car and set off. The dirt track did not take long to find; it was marked by an old wooden stake on which was nailed a rotting sign, and on it, the words ‘El Rancho de Butch’ were crudely painted, with no other suggestion that this was a place of significance. On foot, we followed the track to a rusted metal fence. A modest footpath wound its way around the edges of a field, unkept and alive with wildflowers; passing through the gate we took the path up to a small uncluttered wood, where the sun cast long evening shadows through the trees. In their shade, stood a cluster of abandoned wooden buildings, immediately distinguishable by being chinked with mortar, as is common in North America. The main cabin stood squat, in the centre. Time had swollen the beams, but the signs of strong foundations were still there. To the side, were smaller, store buildings and a long, rectangular barn, big enough for horses.

Now deserted, this was the ranch that Cassidy had built, and where, for a time, he and his friends had led honest lives. The sunlight, getting ever golden, shone on a clearing to the side of the buildings; it was, we presumed, an old corral, for the earth was compacted and stamped with hoof marks. Nearby, ranching tools rusted in the tall grass, and hanging from branches were animal hides starched by the sun. 

A short distance from the cabins, we found a stream running straight from the mountains. Following it around a corner, we startled half a dozen wild horses at the water’s edge. We watched as they took turns lowering their heads to the stream to drink. I left my friend there, and headed back to the cabin alone, with Bruce in my pocket.  

When I walked in, with the unease of trespass, I had the overwhelming impression that the last person who had lived here, had, one day, simply stood up, and walked out. It was austere, but the heavy pine table was still there, covered in a tablecloth, and chairs had been left, neatly tucked in, under it. I paced around, and ran my fingers over the dusty cloth, and along the stone fireplace, crowned by a mounted bull skull. The floorboards creaked.  

I sat down at the table, facing the fire, with an eye on the window. Again, and for the final time, I opened Chatwin’s book, and once more, turned to Cassidy’s letter, which this time, I read out loud. In my mind’s eye, I saw the cabin and its land restored to life. I saw Cassidy building walls, warming himself by the fire, and drinking at the table with Etta and Sundance. I saw them on the prairie, working their cattle and sheep, saddling their horses, and casting their lines downstream. Seventy odd years passed and there was the lonely figure of Chatwin in my view, strolling up the grassy path outside the window. I saw him pause before knocking at the door and being greeted by the owner. Then, as I had done, I saw him pull up a chair from the table, to face the fire with an eye on the window, to draw from the lady her childhood memories of Cassidy.

I had been living Chatwin’s words for so long by then, that my world had blurred with his; it was as if my childhood vision of Cassidy, which I had applied to my own canvas with such care, had been altered and deepened by the added layering of Chatwin’s images. It seemed fitting then, that, in this little cabin, where three runaway spirits had gathered, one chasing the other, I should allow Chatwin’s and Cassidy’s ghosts to settle down together. So, marking the page on which the letter was printed, I closed my book for the very last time, and there, on the table, I left it.