“Andes” by Michael Jacobs

“ANDES,” by Michael Jacobs (Counterpoint. 580 pp. Paperback, $24.95)

As Inca legend has it, every mountain is a god. Each rise of earth, each tectonic exuberance, harbors a reigning spirit, an apu. Unlike the God of Abraham, the apu offers no commandments, no lessons, no revelations. For all its power, it does not speak. It is spoken to.

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So it is fitting that, for centuries, a Babel of words has been written about the Andes: that string of geologic high spiritedness that spans the entire length of South America and is the longest continuous mountain range in the world. For every writer who has waxed lyrical about the Andes, there is an intrepid soul who has striven to conquer it. Over the years, the apus of the Andes have felt the tread of conquistadors, priests, explorers, scientists, liberators, insurrectionists and ink-stained travelers who have gone on to write about them — from Inca Garcilaso to Che Guevara, from Charles Darwin to Paul Theroux.

Now comes Michael Jacobs, an Englishman living in Spain, to tell of his adventures along the spine of this 4,500-mile leviathan. Traversing the cordillera on planes, buses and trains instead of mules, canoes and horses, he traces the revolutionary journey of Simon Bolivar from Caracas to Potosi, and then goes on to Tierra del Fuego, where the Andes trail out to the sea. Although his journey is a bumpy one, the book is not without its rewards.

The writing, to be sure, doesn’t have a bump in it. Jacobs is a natural wordsmith with an easy style and an engaging manner. He is the quintessential alien adrift in a quirky land and, like many a 19th-century English traveler before him, relishes telling us just how strange South Americans can be.

In Merida, the Left Bank of Venezuela, he meets the city’s presiding genius, a Marxist painter who lords it over two acolytes: “One was young, black and cherubic; the other swarthy, scarred and middle-aged. Scarcely registering our arrival, they seemed mildly irritated that we had interrupted their consultation with the master, who reclined in a deckchair at the other end of the tiny room, bathed in the light of a bare bulb. He was a tall, prematurely aged forty-year-old, with a sallow peaky complexion, dry lizard-like skin and a shabby pinstriped suit and tie.”

In a seedy bar in Pasto, the Colombia heartland, Jacobson’s pockets are searched by bouncers in balaclavas. “We were brought a plastic jug filled with a spicy alcoholic drink ‘made from the bark of the yusa.’ . . . The smiling man at our table was giving us our first lesson in Quechua. You had to listen carefully. ‘Achichay’ meant ‘I am cold’. ‘Achichuy’ meant ‘I am hot.’ The words conveyed a world reduced to elemental feelings and sensations.”

In a transvestite dive in Ayacucho, a town that was once the roiling epicenter of Peruvian terrorism, Jacobs hears about the terrorist group Shining Path from a native who spent his childhood nights hidden under the floorboards: “They used to kidnap children at night and take them off to be brainwashed. . . . My elder brother used to put his hand over my mouth to stop me making a noise.”