Tintin Forums

1. On page 12, Tintin reports that Calculus and his captors have boarded a train at Santa Clara having purchased tickets for Jauga (frame 6). Tintin and the Captain plan to catch the next train, but that will be a couple of days later, since the Santa Clara to Jauga train only runs every other day (frame 8).

[Apparently - and perhaps surprisingly - there is no quicker way for them to get to Jauga. They clearly want to get there as quickly as possible, but are obliged to wait for the train. Travelling by car is apparently not an option. (Curiously, there is not a single depiction of a car, bus, or other motorised road vehicle in the whole book.)]

2. Two days later (P.12, f.11) Tintin and the Captain get on the train at Santa Clara. The train departs (P.13, f.5) watched by Huascar - who is clearly not on the train.

3. The journey between Santa Clara and Jauga takes several hours. (P.13, f.8) The journey is clearly a long one.

4. In Jauga, later that day (P.17, f.8) Tintin and the Captain speak to a senior police officer. The interview is clearly brief. After Tintin and the Captain come out, they quickly (i.e. that same day, probably within minutes) agree to question locals and meet back at the station within an hour (P.17, f.13)

5. Within that hour (give or take a few minutes), Tintin is observed by Huascar (P.19, f.2), attacking Zorrino's tormentors.

So - how did Huascar manage to get to Jauga so quickly?

Did he hop on the moving train after it pulled out? This, on the face of it, is the most likely explanation, but it seems to me pretty clear from P.13, f.6 that he is looking at the last coach, which has pulled away. Hence he could not have jumped on the moving train.

Did he travel by fast car? It seems that fast cars were no more frequent in the Peru of Prisoners of the Sun than they were in the time of Atahualpa. And even if they were, the roads would not have made for speedy motoring.

Did he travel by foot? The fact that Tintin and the captain waited a couple of days for the train, indicates that this was not a speedy option. Can we really believe that the train was so slow that the journey, which took several hours by train over extremely difficult terrain, could be completed on foot in the course of a single day?

Did he use some sort of Inca magic?

Is the Indian that appears on pages 12 and 13 not actually Huascar, but simply someone who looks very like him?

Or did Hergé simply slip up?

After all that analysis I think a slip-up on Hergé's part is the most logical explanation. Good analysis, this inconsistency never occurred to me.

Hergé probably just wanted Tintin to be stalked by the same Inca agent rather than a different one in different locations. I read somewhere that some readers do get Huascar and Chiquito mixed up.

From the point of view of the story, without doing thorough research into the Peruvian transport system of the late 1940s and how they handled mountainous villages, I'd hazard a guess that maybe Huascar did have access to a car designed for rough roads. An early type of jeep for instance.

The Incas certainly have the means. They have enough influence to put a whole ship under so-called quarantine and make a whole village, including the local police, keep quiet about their activities - "No se", "No se" - with only Zorrino defying them out of gratitude to Tintin.


Even if a car was available in the area, Tintin and Haddock appear to be short of money. Tintin cannot afford a train ticket on his own and they've given up on assistance from the police. This was at a time before ATMs and getting a money transfer via a local bank may have been a tricky and lengthy process.

Even if they did find a car in Santa Clara they'd probably be charged too much and Huascar may already have blocked all attempts to hire one - in a way similar to how he coerces the railway guard into committing sabotage.

Waiting for the next train may have been the only option even if they were in a hurry.

The Incas have influence - but, it seems to me, only in certain places. The police chief from Callao appears to be completely ignorant of the Inca influence over the Quichua population - see P.5, f.7. He saw no significance in the fact that the doctor was a Quichua, despite being a top police officer in a large city. Had the doctor not been an Indian - and surely a lot of Peruvian doctors were not - the ship would not have been quarantined.

How did it happen that it just happened to be an Indian doctor on duty? My guess is that it was either co-incidence, or that this doctor volunteered. In the Peru of Prisoners of the Sun, it seems to me that people of Spanish descent are in all the top positions - and I would imagine that the Indians were in no position to dictate that a Spanish doctor checked out the ship.


I put a different interpretation on the fact that Tintin could not afford a train ticket. In most Tintin books, money is no object, and he can afford anything. I therefore would assume that on this particular occasion, Tintin having gone out at night with the intention of swimming out to the Pachacamac, only carried a small amount of money on his person - but that he and the Captain had their usual large supply (undoubtedly sufficient for not merely renting, but actually buying a car) somewhere else - like back in the hotel safe.


Here, the question is the geographical. Callao (where the Pachacamac was docked) is a suburb of Lima. The population of the Lima/Callao area was over half a million in 1940, and would have been heavily Spanish, rather than Indian. When Tintin and the Captain meet up (page 12) they are clearly within walking distance of Lima/Callao (because they have walked there from the beach near the Pachacamac), and could surely have walked back there (to a Spanish city, where Inca influence was negligible, and cars relatively easy to obtain - rather than to Santa Clara) in order to get a car. The fact that they did not do so suggests to me that travelling by car to Jauga was not really a realistic option - or at least not if one was in a hurry.

Well - that's my thinking, anyway!

When Tintin and Haddock first meet the Callao Police chief in his office, there is the scene when Tintin rushes to the balcony when he spots an eavesdropper. That must have been Huascar who then follows them through the streets to the hotel.

This would indicate that the Incas knew for some time that Calculus's friends were on their trail, probably from a sympathiser in the police who had seen the report sent by their colleagues in Europe about the suspicion that Calculus was aboard the Pachacamac.

Huascar could then warn Chiquito by radio and they could set things up for the ship's arrival in Callao: announcing that the ship has a contagious disease on board and arranging for a sympathetic doctor to be the official who puts it into quarantine.

If you still think that unlikely, well consider the fact that a few threats and little bribery can take you a long way.


Well, he's hardly the brightest star in the galaxy, is he? After the balcony incident he ought to have had the garden checked rather than dismissing it as of no importance.

Either that, or he was the one who informed the Incas!

The driver of the car into which Calculus is transferred during the kidnapping in "Crystal Balls"? I don't think he is referred to as an Indian, so it follows that the Incas do have help from some section of the Hispanic population. As we see in the last page of the book, they do not lack the means to offer bribes.

Yes - that makes a lot of sense.


I'd forgotten about Fernando Ramirez. As you suggest, all the evidence points to him being Hispanic. His involvement with the kidnapping of Calculus is interesting.

But as to why he got involved, I guess we will never know. It could have been merely bribery. But one suspects that it goes deeper than that, since he was risking arrest by the Belgian police for involvement in kidnapping. I wonder if he is actually more Indian than he looks.

Well, I have always assumed that being an Inca and one of the main priests at the Inca temple, maybe Huascar simply had another route by which he arrived faster-much faster-than Tintin! Well that was my explanation for how he managed to reach the Inca temple faster than them...

As for how he reached Jauga, a good point made by you..even I never thought of it before!! :D

Well, we do see in many instances in the book how many officials are manipulated and controlled by the Indians..and are clearly afraid of them..its possible Huascar got one such official to arrange a fast mode of transport especially for him to reach as soon as, if not earlier, than Tintin and the Captain..its even possible he knew a road or mountain route that reached Jauga faster than the train...its very much a possibility...