The Cloud Forest

by Peter Matthiessen

  By the last day I have given up entirely. In the cantina a small boy is polishing my explorer’s boots, and out in the street a stricken pig, diseased or mad, lurches into the ditch and topples over. A few children gather to contemplate its final moments, but the rest of us, sitting there, haven’t time. An Indian in an extraordinary costume of feathers and red silk, wearing high sneakers, hurries through the cantina on an unknown errand, arousing a brief murmur, like a swirl of flies.

  Having aroused a brief murmur myself, I am seen off at the airport by my admirers. The plane follows the narrowing Río Pachitea into the foothills, sliding briefly into the village of Tournavista, then climbing to the mountains. Below the wing a vulture slips past, buff-colored with black primaries, the king vulture. This is the last creature of the selva, for now the heavy rain clouds sink, and the forest wavers in the swirling mist and disappears. An evil limbo, and the plane surges up into the sun. Across the rolling waves of clouds off to the westward stands the great snowy cordillera of the Andes. Frost forms on the window glass, and behind it a world blue and clear and cold, and a sun so bright, and so violently unlike the shrouded sun of Amazonas, that it is like coming up out of the darkness.

  3

  Sierra

  CROSSING THE PERUVIAN Andes, from the jungle to the sea, a plane must fly at an elevation of well over twenty thousand feet, and one thus obtains a striking first impression of the sierra. The rivers sink, the cloud forest gives way to chaparral, and the chasms and dark gorges of the upper slopes loom in wind-driven mists. Then sunlight flashes coldly on the silver wings, and a bed of bright white tufts quite unlike the gray shrouds of the eastern slope stretches away westward toward the snow peaks.

  The Andes form the Pacific face of South America, from Colombia south into Tierra del Fuego, and consist of a series of parallel ranges, or cordilleras; between these ranges lie wide, high plateaus, the altiplano. In central Peru the altiplano is a rolling barren of thin greens and somber browns, traversed irregularly by ridges and sharp ravines, and pocked by odd black ponds. Under the snow peaks a series of blue glacial lakes occurs, lakes in the sky. One gets an impression of vast emptiness and air, but then a settlement breaks a corner of the wasteland, like an outcropping of dull red rocks. Here and there a hut, a stray bead on the thin string of a road leading east and west.

  The plane passes between peaks of the western cordillera and immediately noses downward, so sharply that the heart leaps to the throat. The descent to the coast is very steep, and on a clear day one is able to see from the crests the misty blue of the Pacific and even, incredibly, a broad scalloping of white which proves to be the ocean surf. Beneath the plane, the mountain flanks differ markedly from the green maelstrom of the eastern slopes; they are bare and brown, a consequence not only of the sierra’s eastward drainage but of a rainless climate induced by the Humboldt Current, passing northward along the coast. The Pacific here is cold and deep—the southern tip of the so-called Milne Edwards Trench, not far to sea from Lima, reaches a depth of well over three miles—and the Island of San Lorenzo, now visible to the northward, may be thought of as a foothill of this great mountain chain which rises so abruptly from the sea.

  The desert aspect of the Andes is the one which confronts travelers arriving by the usual routes, by sea or by air from the north; the western foothills which compose the coast are part of the great Atacama Desert which extends some fourteen hundred miles, from Ecuador far into Chile. Driving south on the shore road from Lima, one sees it at close hand—a lunar world, a dead, windless world of giant dunes and cones, half sand, half dust. The vague mist which hovers on the coast—in the winter months, from April to September, it forms an overcast, an unbroken pall—contributes to the unreality. Out of this mist, beyond the surf, rise the ghostly shapes of the sea-bird islands, dead white with guano.

  The road passes the pre-Inca ruin of Pachácamac, half covered by the creeping tongues of dust; beyond, the precious green fringes of a rare westward-flowing stream. The Pachácamac people must have used this stream, and the Quechuas use it still; these mountain Indians, wandered down from the sierra, inhabit huts built of the ruins.

  North of the fishing village of Pucusan a road leads off to a settlement of summer houses overlooking a neat cove between two headlands. The place is called La Honda, and while its terrain of dust and shale, broken only by gray cactus, is at first oppressive, the sense of mystery of the place, the ominous juxta-position of sea and desert and pale mountains rising one upon another toward a cordillera invisible in the haze soon seem very beautiful. A pair of vultures slide back and forth across the cliff faces, riding the gentle air currents in the fierce sun, and some large gray porpoises rise silently and sink again in the outer bay. One day an osprey fished beyond the rocks, and on another day I saw a solitary oystercatcher. But the great sight on this coast is the multitude of sea birds, which feed on the swarming sea life of the Humboldt Current—the small, whining gray gull or torero, the kelp gull, Belcher’s gull, and Franklin’s gull (a North American species, and the only gull to migrate to the southern continent), the Humboldt pelican, the small red-legged cormorant, but especially the famous guanay cormorant, cleaning up after which, on the guano islands, is a most profitable industry in fertilizer, and the piquero booby, still more numerous: in the numbers of these latter species, whirling in like locusts on a shoal of anchovies beyond the cove, may be seen one of the last spectacles of wild natural profusion left on earth. (In recent years a slight increase in the temperature of the Humboldt Current has threatened the ecology of its plankton communities and, by extension, the huge populations of fish and birds, and the guano industry.)

  I made several trips to La Honda, in January and again in March, as the guest of Alfredo Porras, and though I kept an eye out for the Humboldt penguin, the delicate Inca tern, and the Andean condor, that largest of flying birds, these three species eluded me. But I went often in the late afternoon to the headlands down the shore, where pelicans glided past beneath the cliffs or sailed on the still sea like plastic toys, and the piqueros and red-footed cormorants clustered on an offshore skerry; the latter bird, unlike other members of its dour family, emits a cheerful chirp, quite audible across the wash of ocean on the sea rocks. Beyond, guanays and piqueros by the thousands moved up and down across the gold reflections of the setting sun. The great piles of crumbled shale which form the cliffs are full of fossil shells (Darwin found sea shells carried up by the emergent Andes high in the peaks of the Chile-Argentine frontier), and an Inca or pre-Inca wall, now all but subterranean, trails along the cliff edge. Once, returning homeward with a friend, we descended the steep back slope of one of these mighty dunes in the twilight shadows. A week later our tracks were still visible from a mile away, and in that strange rainless and windless land where everything seems at an end, they may be there still.

  In the middle of January I left Lima, bound for Cuzco in the mountains. Before turning inland, the plane travels out over the sea to lessen the steep angle of the climb. It struck the coast again high over La Honda and climbed the brown mountains to the snow-splotched peaks. Below lay a wild region where thin streams trailed off disconsolately from the snow pools, sliding down barren slopes into the gorges. A small Indian village perched among andenes, the ancient agricultural terraces of the Incas, still in use, which are civilization’s most notable imprint on this landscape. There was no road to be seen, and one supposes that these Quechuas live very much today as they did five hundred years ago, under the Incas, tilling the small bitter chuño potato which is the chief item of their diet.

  The valley of Cuzco is an oasis in the altiplano, wide and fertile; one sees immediately why it became the center of Inca civilization. The city itself, more than eleven thousand feet above sea level, is beautiful—it has a clean terra-cotta quality reminiscent of Italian hill towns—but its essence lies less in its architecture than in its setting in the valley, in the cold mountain sun reflected from its Inca walls and Spanish steepl
es, in the mute Indians and haughty llamas, in the relentless bells. The walls and foundations excepted, the architecture is colonial Spanish, handsome enough from the outside, but with that Spanish interior clutter which, in the churches, drags any sense of exaltation and transcendence back to earth. Here, as in Spain, one is startled by the vulgarity of the trappings, and the violence. An especially gruesome Christ, in the cathedral, is covered from head to toe with sores and lacerations and a veneer of filth, the whole decked out in a bright cheap purple skirt.

  How affecting it is to see the Indian, unchanged by the intervening centuries, paying to Mass the same mindless coca-numbed obeisance that his forebears awarded the Temple of the Sun. There he kneels, ragged and hunched against the cold, before the same gold and silver, now long since refashioned into the panoply of the Church. (The Christians who had the Inca Huayna Capac drawn and quartered in the square outside the cathedral tore down the Inca temples, using the great heathen stones in the construction of Cuzco’s myriad churches. Even today the Church of Santo Domingo is being rebuilt with the stones of the Temple of the Sun, Moon, and Stars, some foundations of which, serene and simple, may still be seen in the weeds of the old churchyard. Of all the churches that I visited, I admired only the small La Merced, with its stonework of pink and gray, its gentle ornament and fine gold filigree.) The pale priests wave pale hands in the showcase light around the altars, and the small Indians, of the color and texture of the earth itself, crouch in the darkness, their round heads silhouetted by the trays of flickering candles. Outlandish bells resound. Around them, mysteries—the dim chapels behind bars, the old soiled paintings of forgotten saints, the heaped-up altarpiece of silver. Then the orisons of the choir, and the bells toll out across the city. Despite the gulf between poverty and pomp, one is stirred, as the Indians must be. But a child, frightened rather than moved, begins to wail, its voice rising painfully with the hosannas: its pure animal reaction, juxtaposed with its parents’ hopes and edifices, renders the latter, in the Camus sense, absurd.

  But this is a journal of the mountains, and these random notes are out of place here; I have neither the resources nor the sympathy to comment fairly on the Spanish architecture of Cuzco. There are many fine books on the Inca civilization and Spanish seizure, among which Prescott’s classic Conquest of Peru probably remains the best.

  A number of ruins lie quite near the city—the Inca baths of Tampu Machay, the small fort of Puca Pucara, the Kkenco ruin, with its amphitheater and central monolith (alleged by the guide, no doubt falsely, to have been the scene of human sacrifices), and the massive amphitheater and terraces which are all the Spanish left of the vast edifice known as Sacsahuaman.

  Sacsahuaman is mighty, even now. “Many of these stones,” as Prescott wrote of the Temple of the Sun, “were of vast size, some of them being full thirty-eight feet long, by eighteen broad, and six feet thick. We are filled with astonishment, when we consider, that these enormous masses … were brought from quarries from four to fifteen leagues distant, without the aid of beasts of burden.” Our astonishment is increased by the knowledge that the Inca, who used clocks, metal alloys, agricultural terracing, aqueducts, guano fertilizer, and many techniques of the welfare state, had failed to discover the wheel, and by the phenomenon, evident at a glance, that the enormous stones are fitted like watch parts: one cannot, as all writers agree, pass a knife blade between them. In places they even curve into one another, as if squashed together while still malleable, like clay. (The late explorer Colonel Fawcett has suggested that the Inca possessed an herb which softened stone, and this theory, which is not confined to Fawcett, makes as much sense as many of the rest.) On the uppermost terrace of Sacsahuaman stand two great tables, used apparently for animal sacrifices, a huge water clock, and some stone benches. From here one may gaze down past a shimmering grove of Australian eucalyptus—this resourceful tree is now widespread in South America—to the steeple-spined roofs of Cuzco. Farther down the ridge an enormous white Christ broods over the town, in garish competition with the ruin; it is marvelously out of place against the spare distances of the Andes. Elsewhere, the eucalyptus groves excepted, the prospect is as it has always been, a wind-swept alpine tundra of bright wild flowers, finches, and miner birds, mounting to the dark horizons of the cordilleras.

  The road from Cuzco to the village of Pisac climbs onto the plateau, passing Sacsahuaman and Puca Pucara before angling off to the eastward. This is a region of streams and soaring hillsides, thatched Quechua huts and winding valleys carpeted with blue and white potato flowers; the Indians themselves were bound for Pisac, for Sunday is their market day. They were all along the roads, moving rapidly in that trundling shuffle of theirs, bent forward, as if forever doomed to walk uphill. They peered without expression at the car—I was sharing a hired car with a missionary on leave from the jungle—for the Peruvian Quechua neither smiles nor scowls, and this deadness of face seems incongruous by contrast with the gaiety of his dress; both men and women wear striped ponchos or shawls, and their wares are tied in many-colored qquepinas, a sort of sling-sack carried on the shoulders and tied across the chest. The women are barefoot and black-skirted for the most part, with everything from white straw fedoras to tasseled black woollen disks in the way of headgear, while the men wear sandals, black Spanish knickers (their costumes at times seem almost a parody of colonial Spanish dress, which to a certain extent they are), and vivid wool caps with tassels and earmuffs. These knitted caps, earmuffs and all, are worn even on the hottest of middays; the bareheaded Quechua is almost as uncommon as the one who smiles.

  The children too are small bundles of dirty colors, like rag dolls in elfin hats, trotting barefoot in the cold mountain mud. Unlike their elders, they still smile a little, and with their clean, neat features can be very pretty indeed. But at puberty they are no longer children. Their faces broaden, and they assume the squat stolidity of manner which marks the tribe. (Technically the term “Quechua” or “Quichua” does not denote a tribe but rather, a great linguistic group embracing some twenty million mountain Indians of Andean countries, from Colombia to northern Argentina, as well as a jungle tribe of northern Peru; it is the second language of the latter country. Agricultural peoples, they have always been far more numerous than the jungle tribes, and in Bolivia comprise well over half of the population. The mountain Indians are divided into very few tribes; almost all speak Quechua and, where they maintain their traditional dress, are known collectively as Cholos. Like the jungle Indians, they pay small attention to nationality, and are restricted less by the frontiers than by their own sedentary natures.)

  The bridge at Pisac, crossing the Vilcanota, was choked with Indians hurrying to the market in the plaza. Under two great pisonay trees women sat sturdily upon the ground, feeding babies at long brown breasts while they sold fruits, vegetables, medicinal herbs, alpaca hats, slippers, rugs, and scarfs, fake Inca trinkets for the tourists, and the crisp green coca, a narcotic leaf from which cocaine is derived, and which serves to inure these people not only against hunger and cold but against their grim existence. Meanwhile the men, lined up against an adobe wall, drowned ancient sorrows in the thick, pasty maize beer known as chicha. They seemed to find small happiness in their drinking and were, if anything, sadder and more hopeless than before.

  We left the Pisac market in mid-morning and traveled down the Urubamba valley, under long avenues of eucalyptus. Yucca cactus and the great century plant were common, but the dominant growth in this loveliest of all valleys I have ever seen is the Spanish broom, called retama here, and said by our driver to be good for the human heart: the broom choked all the road shoulders and river bars with yellow blossoms. A few doves and songbirds, and over the river a solitary serranita, or Andean gull. In many of the small villages Inca stonework was still apparent, trapezoidal doorways and all, and some of these ancient walls served to support small thatch huts of adobe. Some of the huts in every settlement had a kind of flowered mast above the door, which in
dicated that chicha had been made there and was obtainable.

  The driver recommended that we dine in a small hostel in the town of Urubamba, where he joshed and poked the fair proprietress while we washed down with beer an unidentifiable flesh served with hot peppers. The missionary did not touch the beer and toyed unhappily with the food, being distressed not only by the insanitation of the place but by what he took to be the low moral tone of its inhabitants.

  At Ollantaitambo, adjoining the modern village, lies one of the most notable ruins of the region: one passes through an Inca gateway in an outer wall and climbs to the top of the ruin on a wide stone stair. There are roofless structures of all kinds, built of a kind of yellow shale, and a ceremonial area littered with cut monoliths of reddish granite: Hiram Bingham, who located the Machu Picchu ruins in 1911, estimated the weight of these Ollantaitambo stones at fifteen to twenty tons, and yet they are dwarfed by numerous examples at Sacsahuaman. On the steep hillsides opposite perch more ruinas—schools, prisons, storehouses, it is said—and below, in the court of a modern habitation, there is a lovely fountain, fed by a mountain spring. This is described locally as a sacred bath of Inca sun virgins, and one may as well believe this.

  On the return to Cuzco we crossed a bridge at Urubamba and climbed up onto the plateaus, in the direction of Anta. In the late afternoon the puna, as the highest wastes are known, was sharp-shadowed and bleak. A church on the Anta road is beautiful in its desolate isolation; it is used for but one service a year, in the winter month of August. Farther on a shallow lake, stalked by restless rays of an obscured sun, reflected the clouds and buttes in faint pastels; along its reedy edges coots, grebes, ducks, spotted sandpipers, and lapwings cried and fed.