Cloud Road

by John Harrison

  The painting Infierno, completed in 1620 by Hernando de la Cruz, spells out the cost of sin. The unjust boil in a pot, some still wearing their crowns. A rumour-monger is in a hole with a snake. Professionally, I check to see if it is a true or false coral snake: can’t be sure, he could get away with this. The burlesque show depicting homicides looks like the night a knife-thrower took LSD. A male adulterer is suffering in the places he enjoyed his sin: in a nice touch of local colour, a monkey vomits molten lava onto his genitals. A grinning devil pours more into his mouth, using a funnel to ensure none goes to waste. Plainly he likes his work, and wants to get on.

  Until recently, Santo Domingo church seemed on the edge of ruin; an emergency roof looked ready to totter and fall at the next thunderclap. Steel beams had been put across the nave and a suspended steel ceiling was in place. I edged my way by the vendors of candles, texts and icons of the saints, past the smart man hawking a luxury edition of the Bible, past a bundle of rags with a single, brown claw extended for alms. Mass was finishing. The faithful spilled out into the square, many wiping tears from their eyes.

  The main square was a pleasant park flanked by the old cathedral, rambling down the hill on my left-hand side. Colonnades with small shops stood behind me and to my right. The top was commanded by the long, graceful Government Palace. The square is a great meeting place in the short evenings, somewhere to stroll and sit, for lovers to meet and sit on the rim of the fountain, for men to take a shoe-shine, read the newspaper, smoke a cigarette. Tonight the thunderclouds, which had been crackling over the surrounding hills in the late afternoon, had cleared, and a warm honey-coloured light bathed the palace’s stucco extravagances. The craftsmen who made them were called ‘silversmiths in plaster’. On the next bench to me were twin sisters, wearing denim skirts, pearl tights and salmon-coloured cardigans. They fiddled incessantly with their hair: combed straight back, with a single metal grip to hold up the fringe. Maybe thirteen years old, they were already stocky, with broad peasant hips, deep rib cages. Their heads were large, with heavy features. They were the shape of women who have had two children; and please-God-I’m-only-late. They have blinked and gone from children to miniature adults. Adolescence went missing; childhood, when was it? Above, in the tree’s white limbs, a bird sang sweetly; from the next, another responded.

  One night the peace was shattered. Suddenly the square teemed with riot police and soldiers with automatic weapons at the ready. Orange tape barred people from the garden, and an armoured vehicle stood on the pavement. An old, blind lady, with a pyramid of black hair falling from her shoulders, tapped her way across the street, and met a strange lump of iron blocking her usual route home: a tank. Her white stick groped its way over the armour plate, down the side and along the caterpillar tracks with a rat-a-tat-tat. Suddenly floodlights had drowned the front of the palace in light. Perhaps I was witnessing the beginning of a revolution. I asked a sergeant what was happening. ‘They are filming an American movie!’ he said. ‘Proof of Life, a kidnap story starring Meg Ryan and Russell Crowe. We’re all extras!’

  Next lunchtime San Francisco Square was again full of soldiers and military police, surrounding the ministry building next to the church. One called me over, conspiratorially: ‘Get closer, you’re a journalist, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ seemed to be the right answer, and I took out my notebook. He placed me in front of the wall of guards, with the officers. ‘Who are we waiting for?’ I asked, looking down at the waiting motorcade: two police cars, a Lincoln Continental limousine with black windows and seven Chevrolet four-wheel drives.

  ‘The President and Vice-President.’

  In a few minutes a tall man with a grey beard but no moustache passed down the steps next to me. President Noboa was thick-waisted and moved slowly and deliberately, with a slight stoop. He wore a grey suit with a maroon tie. My overall impression was of an avuncular academic, which, in a politician, always makes me cautious. Stalin looked avuncular. Amongst other things, Dr Gustavo Noboa was actually a career academic before taking up politics; again, not necessarily good news. So was Peru’s ex-President and disgraced embezzler, Alberto Fujimori. But his quiet manner was reassuring after Ecuador’s experience when President Abdula Bucaram celebrated his 1996 election by releasing a record of himself singing ‘Jailhouse Rock’. He was nicknamed ‘The Nutter’, and after further bizarre public behaviour he was removed from office for mental incapacity, and went to jail.

  Vice-President Calvites, a smaller man in a black suit, emerged with his head bowed deeply, talking to his feet while the men around him nodded continuously. He sported the President’s missing moustache, and a ruby birthmark, splashed across his right cheek.

  The problems they face are profound. Ecuador had recently suffered the collapse of its currency and per capita income is less than a third of the Latin American average, while it labours under one of the heaviest debt burdens. Presidential power is weakened by the prevalence of many moderate-sized political parties, who group and re-group in shifting coalitions and alliances. With some exceptions, the economy has done badly for twenty years, often going backwards. Most children will suffer protein deficiency, which, if unrelieved for the first five years of life, will permanently destroy a quarter of the intelligence they would have enjoyed. For many of Ecuador’s citizens, each day is a struggle to find food, their bodies leached of energy by long-term under-nourishment.

  The demonstration of fraternal flesh-pressing with the ordinary man and woman in the street rang hollow. Doctor Noboa’s other job is being a banana billionaire. Many of his citizens survive on $1 a day. By comparison, every cow in the European Union receives a daily subsidy of $2.25.

  I entered the silent haven of a barber’s shop and stepped back thirty years. From the linoleum beneath my feet to the bevel-edge mirrors, it was a double for Blenkinsop’s in Falmouth. I picked through the old sports magazines and last week’s papers, while two men in white coats snipped away the shocks of hair around the ears, and whispered the news. When my turn came, my hair, falling as if sound was suspended, was brown and grey like my father’s nearly four decades before, when I first put my finger to the picture of Machu Picchu and wished the impossible wish.

  I stood outside fingering hair clippings from my collar. It was time to hit the road. I decided, to neaten things up, that I would bus north out of the city to the equator itself, and begin my long journey south at the earth’s middle.

  The Earth’s Belly

  You would have thought the equator was a difficult place to lose. One hundred feet below me, the circular lawn was laid out as a giant compass with paths leading along the four cardinal points to the pyramid on which I stood. Above me was a bronze globe fifteen feet across. A plaque on the monument told me I was standing 78° 27′ 08″ west of the Greenwich Meridian, and my latitude was 0° 0.0′ 0.0″. I was on top of the monument in Ciudad del Mitad del Mundo, the City at the Centre of the World, admission 50 cents. It is not a city or even a village, but a collection of modern tourist shops and cafés, single-storey whitewash with pantile roofs the colour of pencil lead. Further away, below the sprawling car park, ice-cream coloured buses growled over the smart grey paviours of the new boulevard and up the belly of the earth, to deposit their passengers on its imaginary belt. Ecuador is only one of twelve countries on the equator, but for two reasons it has prime call on it. Firstly, it is named after the line, and, secondly, it was here that a famous and bitter argument about the shape of the earth was finally settled.

  It may seem strange that some of the greatest minds of their day spat feathers over whether or not our planet is fatter round the middle or the poles, but, firstly, the answer had a vital theoretical significance, and split the scientists of two great rival nations, more or less on national lines. In the British camp was a good candidate for the title of the greatest intellect that ever lived, Isaac Newton, or rather his ghost, as he had died eight years before the expedition set sail. He argued, from his own gravi
tational laws, that the rotation of the earth would flatten it at the poles and fatten it at the equator. Newton had shown that the gravity of a large object, like the earth, behaves as if all its mass were located in a single point at its centre. Since gravity diminished with distance, if gravity was less at the equator, it was because it was further from the centre.

  In the French camp was the cantankerous shade of Jean Dominique Cassini, a talented but conceited Italian, headhunted by Louis XIV to be head of his new Observatory in Paris. He had an impressive pedigree, having discovered four more moons orbiting Saturn, plus the gap in its rings which bears his name. Cassini argued, from measurements taken in his adopted France, that the size of a degree of arc diminished as you went south.

  Egos aside, the shape of the earth was also of great practical importance. Despite improvements in maps and instruments, mariners still made lethal errors in their navigation. If the earth wasn’t round, the length of a degree would vary, getting bigger the further you were from the earth’s centre. To settle the matter, an experiment spanning the globe was devised by the French Académie des Sciences. One expedition, under the mathematician Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, would go to Lapland to measure the length of a degree in the far north. A second was sent to the equator, and, since most equatorial land was unexplored rainforest, the most practical place to conduct the survey was in highland Ecuador, then a part of the Spanish Viceroyalty of Peru. The snag was that Spain had let no foreigners enter her New World possessions for two hundred years, unless they were fighting in her armies. But political fortune was with them. The King of Spain was Philip V, put on the throne by his grandfather, who happened to be Louis XIV of France. Permission to enter Ecuador was obtained, but on condition that Spanish overseers would work alongside them. The man chosen to lead this expedition was Charles Marie de La Condamine, a 34-year-old geographer.

  Arriving in Quito in 1736, they first took readings to establish the exact position of the equator, then measured a base line along it with surveying chains. It required the utmost care; every subsequent measurement would depend on the accuracy of this first one. They then began to work south, to measure the distance over the ground of three degrees of latitude, over two hundred miles. The terrain was rough and the mountain climate uncomfortable, freezing them at night and cooking them by day. The work was brutal, hauling heavy but delicate equipment up mountains, then taking precision readings from temperamental instruments. It was two years before they finished, using the church tower at the town of Cuenca as a final triangulation point. To test the accuracy of their work, they calculated the length of the final side of the last triangle, before actually measuring it, on the ground. The discrepancy was just a few feet.

  The final months dragged terribly. The astronomer Godin was seldom well, another man died of fever and their doctor Senièrgues meddled in a society love-affair and was lynched. The draughtsman, Morainville, who had designed a church, was climbing the scaffolding to inspect progress when it collapsed and crushed him to death. Depressed by the toll on himself and his party, La Condamine laboured on. He faced one final task: to mark the original baseline with permanent monuments, both to record their efforts, and so that the crucial first measurement could, if necessary, be re-examined by future scientists. He decided to build two modest pyramids, one at each end. It was months before this labour was complete and he was able to carve the French fleur-de-lis on the pinnacles and, finally, the names of himself, Godin and Bouguer. Crassly, in an age when etiquette was all, he recorded neither the role of the Spanish Crown in granting permission for the work, nor the participation of the two Spanish overseers. The Spanish authorities were furious. La Condamine pompously refused to admit he was wrong. The Spanish demanded that the pyramids be pulled down altogether. A court ordered him to add the missing Spanish names and strike off the fleur-de-lis. Six years later, the Council of the Indies, Spain’s Foreign and Colonial Office, sitting in Seville, decided that this was insufficient, and ordered the pyramids destroyed. The order was despatched, but La Condamine appealed, and won. News of the reprieve arrived too late; the pyramids were already rubble.

  La Condamine’s results proved the earth did indeed belly out at the equator, with a circumference around eighty-five miles greater than that around the poles. Voltaire, a champion of Newton, boasted, ‘They have flattened both the earth and the Cassinis.’

  One of the demolished pyramids was re-erected in 1836, by local landowner Vicente Rocafuerte, in fields near Yaraqui. When the Alpinist Edward Whymper was here in 1880, he found one of the inscribed stones standing in a farmyard, the centre of its legend worn away, where the farmer had used it as a block to mount his horse. The pyramid at the south end of the baseline was re-erected at the order of a president of Ecuador, but was moved several hundred feet to one side so that it could be seen to better advantage. The original position is lost; all La Condamine’s efforts to preserve his work were in vain.

  Nowadays, finding your location is easier: I had brought my GPS. The size of a mobile phone, it contacted satellites and confirmed that it was currently accurate to thirty-four feet. There was a slight problem. It gave my latitude as 0° 0.129′ south, nearly eight hundred feet from the equator. I looked down at a tiny Japanese woman tiptoeing along the painted yellow line like a tightrope walker, striking balletic poses and giggling. It wasn’t the equator, or even close. Why?

  I showed the guides my GPS readings, and they smiled coyly at each other. There was a kind of ‘You tell him, no you’ conversation and then one of the women said, ‘It’s true, we are close to the equator but not on it. The Government was offered some land that was flat and convenient. The equator runs along a ravine and it was not possible to build on the actual equator without great expense.’

  I followed my GPS north, skirting the small steep-sided ravine, and found myself in a privately run open-air museum, Museo Inti-Ñan. The name means Path of the Sun, in Quechua, the language of the Incas, which still has more speakers than any other native language. Fabián Vera, a handsome pure-blooded Indian, showed me round. They had set up a few equator games: the sink where the water doesn’t rotate, and ‘balance the egg upright’. It took me a couple of minutes but I did make it stand on end. Fabián said, ‘It is much easier on the equator because there is no Coriolis force’ (the rotational force which everywhere else makes draining water spin). I couldn’t see why this was relevant to a stationary object, but sure enough, when I got home, I couldn’t do it. Mind you, at home, I have better things to do.

  Fabián led me along the path through the centre of their site. ‘This was a religious route for the local tribes even before the Incas came. It is exactly on the equator,’ he waved with good humour at the tourist village, ‘not like that. The original inhabitants built a stone cylinder here, sixty feet in diameter and twenty-six feet high to mark the true site.’ I took out my GPS and walked on through the garden and into the dusty potato patch behind it, and came out of his back gate onto a road. In the middle of the road I got a full set of noughts, accurate to within thirty-four feet. The official monument was no longer in sight. I walked another fifty feet to make sure I was in the northern hemisphere, then I turned round and began to walk south. I walked back through Ciudad del Mitad del Mundo and skipped over the yellow line. My journey had begun.

  Each of the equators makes sense. Native interest in astronomy reflected the dominance of agriculture in their economy. La Condamine’s interests reflected the economic importance of navigation in his. The new pyramid is a monument to tourism, and is located where it collects the most dollars.

  It was warm and sunny with a light breeze ruffling the flowers. It felt so good, after all the preparation, to actually be on the road, walking. I bought fruit from a small grocer’s, and chatted to the dumpy lady with just two long thin teeth, one at either side of her lower jaw, like an abandoned cricket match. It seemed unfair to start without a soul here knowing what I was attempting. ‘I am walking to Cuzco,’ I said.
‘I’ve just started.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ she said. ‘My son likes walking.’

  It was just after midday and I sought out the scraps of shade. I knew the old Inca road was buried underneath modern tarmac. The road turned into dual carriageway, and I walked the tree-lined central reservation enjoying the grass underfoot, the shade and the continual flow of boxy, pugnacious trucks ferrying sand and gravel to the ever-open mouths of the cement mixers of Quito. My lungs and leg muscles were coping well, and I soared up my first long hill. Then, after two-and-a-half hours, I felt sandpaper patches tingling next to the ball of each foot. I was getting blisters. I made a painful mistake: I did not get on a bus and ride back to the hotel. I carried on, believing I was close to the city edge and could find a hotel there: wishful thinking. I must have walked the only route into Quito where you are not surrounded by cheap hotels. Eventually I limped round a corner and found the airport taxi rank. After a twenty-minute drive I booked myself back into the room I had left only that morning, a long time ago. The staff whispered and conferred: the lunatic was back.

  I pulled off my boots. There was a large blister in the middle of each foot and the tops of my toes had all been cut by a seam running across the toe of the boot, and were bleeding. The heat and perspiration had softened my skin. In Wales, in winter, heat was something I could not train for. I lay on the bed cursing the socks, the boots, but most of all, myself. I read Don Quixote. He and Sancho Panza had been beaten up and were licking their wounds and rubbing their bruises. Was my project just the male menopause? Couldn’t I just have stayed at home, grown a silly ponytail and bought a motorbike? Until now I had never before been for a walk of more than four days. Don Quixote knew why: ‘One of the Devil’s greatest temptations is to put it into a man’s head that he can write and print a book, and gain both money and fame by it.’