Cloud Road

by John Harrison

We began the slow drudgery of walking a zigzag path up the last of the soft ash. In the dark, you had no feeling of where you were on the mountain, but the path felt recklessly steep. Each breath out formed a little cloud of ice crystals. Each cloud expanded with a minute crackling sound like distant static. My eyes were glued to my feet. I only saw what came within my vision without lifting my head. Needles of falling snow entered the enchanted circle of the lamp. Our lights produced the strange impression that we were walking on a rounded but narrow ridge, and that the ground fell away steeply on both sides.

  It was over an hour before we reached the edge of the ice, and put on our crampons and roped up. Hoeni, the doctor, was rehearsing the symptoms of acute mountain sickness to the guides: ‘And if I vomit you are to take me down straight away, that is a very dangerous sign.’ They nodded in agreement. John roped himself to Elcita, and then Elcita to me. ‘You have to keep the rope off the ground but not taut. If it’s taut, you can pull the other person off balance. If it’s too slack and someone falls, they’ll build up too much speed before the rope bites, and pull everyone down. You must always have the ice-axe on the uphill side and the rope on the downhill. That way, if you slip you don’t land on your own axe and stab yourself to death, and the rope falls away from you not under your feet.’ We listened like hawks, but there was no more. He marched into the blackness.

  Crampons do everything you want and more: the only thing that might fail is your nerve. From time to time, we came to fields of horizontal crevasses and zigzagged between them, at one time walking an eighteen-inch-wide bridge between two deep blue chasms. Had I been alone I would have frozen with fear but Elcita crossed without pausing and I followed, gluing my eyes to her crampon bites in the snow, then looking ahead to the beauty of a row of icicles beneath a lip of ice, like a stringed harp.

  The next section seemed more or less straight up. I could not work out whether facing the slope, feet splayed, was better than turning a shoulder and stepping up half-sideways, feet parallel: I fidgeted between the two methods. We came round a shoulder, and the snow seemed to dive away deep into darkness below and right. I felt every step was a risk, and looked up to keep my mind away from the fall. There were other groups, higher up the mountain, little chains of lamps vanishing above us. Hoeni, who had been ahead of us, stood bent over at the next hairpin, gasping for air, Fabián’s arm around her shoulder. ‘Down,’ she said, ‘down.’

  The next stretch was much steeper. We entered a gully and each step needed a light kick into the face of the ice to make a foothold. Every single step, I bedded the ice-axe in the slope above me, becoming a three-legged animal in a monotonous routine: kick, breathe; axe, breathe; kick, breathe; axe, breathe. The huge mountain was reduced to three feet of iced snow in front of me, the crunch of the crampons, the rasping of my breath, the punch of the axe. It was aerobics from hell, my calf muscles screaming with lactic acid they were unable to disperse. I thought of half-remembered lines where Faustus swears that if his only route from hell to heaven were barefoot up a ladder of ten thousand rungs, each one a knife blade, that would be some consolation for his soul. I felt I was doing his penance. Elcita and I took turns to call for breaks and swig greedily at our water bottles. John paused and stood talking to another guide whose group we had caught up. In the east, there was a band of light over the cloud sea a mile and a half below. Elcita’s legs trembled uncontrollably. I thought she was near to exhaustion. The two guides swept the slope ahead with their torches. ‘It’s gone.’

  I found the breath to ask, ‘What has?’

  ‘There has been a big avalanche. The path we use is gone, the snow is fresh and soft and will slow us down.’ We walked on a little longer and the sky began to lighten, showing us the ridge above. In a few minutes, grey light turned to daylight. I punched my axe into the snow and sat down. Cotopaxi was one of three tiny islands in an archipelago. The snow field below us was full of crevasses I had never seen. Over pathless snow, the top was still two hours away; we only had forty minutes before the hard snow crust began melting. I felt gutted. I knew I could have walked for two more hours. Two hours we didn’t have: this was it. We walked on until the sun rose, then, at nearly 18,000 feet, stabbed our axes into the snow and sat down holding on to them. The slope was about forty degrees, which feels like sixty. I looked down on that view of seventy, eighty miles, impressing it on memory. It was beautiful, utterly beautiful. The white snow was cut by turquoise crevasses and the sky around us was swimming pool blue. The sun would not tiptoe down into the valleys below for another forty minutes. Until then, we alone owned the sun and stood on the ice kingdom in the sky, a place ordinary men and women could only glimpse through the filament gaps in the morning cloud: gods on Olympus. Soon we had to turn and go down, and become mortal once more. Soon.

  When the Earth Trembles

  It was a two-day walk to the next town of Ambato; I began walking the morning after coming down from Cotopaxi. I was reassured that my insane theory that Spartan living would cure my back was paying off. It was feeling better already. Walking, even up mountains, was healthier than sitting staring at a computer screen or ploughing through three-inch thick histories.

  Shortly after seven thirty, I found a gravelled country road which gave no sign of once being a highway of empire. It soon became a green lane, which wound down to a stream with no bridge. The bank on my side was higher and I took as much of a flying leap as one can with a fifty-pound pack and crash-landed on the far bank. There were colourful birds all around, the tangerine cock-of-the-rock and the yellow and black flashes of siskins.

  At midday, I reached a fork in the road that wasn’t on my map. The more promising road led to a prosperous house, protected by a large pair of locked gates guarded by a young Alsatian. Its efforts to eat me through the wrought iron were watched with idle disdain by a fat hearthrug of a dog, camped in the shade of a tree. The Alsatian’s paroxysms of rage eventually brought a lady from the house. Perhaps concerned at seeing a lone man at the gate, she walked so slowly towards me that, like a character in one of Xeno’s paradoxes, it seemed she would never arrive. She held out her hand, ‘Señora Isabela Castillo. Yes, the Inca road runs through here. Please come through. We have been here two years but, being a little remote, we had to fence ourselves in; there are many thieves.’ She walked me through her neat garden, at the back of which was a deep ravine. She pointed far below, ‘The real bridge fell down, but there are some logs across.’ I picked my way down, filled my water bottles, and took a look: three slim tree trunks propped up at a thirty-degree angle. I crawled across: safety before dignity.

  The path rose again and clung to the side of a steep-sided valley where a large river, the road and the railway all squeezed into the same canyon. I detoured from the Inca road to visit a sleepy town named Panzaleo, which preserves the name of the tribe which once ruled the area that is now Quito. There was a neat square topped by a long, low, whitewashed church, whose freshly painted dark green doors sported gold detailing. I went into a small grocery. The old woman wore traditional heavy multi-layered skirts and was onioned in cardigans. The two other customers fell silent. She served me first so they could all see what the Gringo would buy. I bought bananas, bread and cheese, and lunched under a young monkey-puzzle tree in the park. The grocery shops were time capsules for me, like the poorly stocked shops of inner-city Liverpool in the early fifties.

  The Ambato road continued very steeply out of the back of the square. Rough cobbles gave way to a sandy rural lane. There were clouds of butterflies in the drying pools along the path, feeding on the salts which help them regulate their hormones. I felt I could do with a little myself. In the late afternoon I reached the village of Laguna Yambo, and called it a day.

  The next morning, four boys, around eleven years old, stopped their bikes to interview me. I explained what I was doing.

  ‘Why don’t you just get the bus, you can be in Ambato in an hour, and if you are going to Peru, you can be at the border in twe
nty-four hours.’ They even priced the ticket for me.

  ‘But I couldn’t see the country or talk to people like you.’ The leader pursed his lips; this didn’t strike him as much of a plus.

  ‘So, did you walk here from England?’

  ‘No, I came by plane, the Atlantic Ocean is between Peru and England.’

  They mounted their bikes to get back to school. One stood up on the pedals pointing across the valley. ‘The bus stop is over there.’

  By early afternoon, I was on a ridge overlooking Ambato, five miles further on. It was a long, gentle descent: easy walking with the destination in sight. Life felt good. The Inca road enters the bustling city from a bluff high above the river. As it reaches the shanty suburbs, it suddenly becomes a fine cobbled Inca road. Ambato’s 175,000 people live on slopes so steep that the boring gridiron, which city planners try to impose on every location, couldn’t be made to work. The result is a more interesting place, with twists and turns, and views opening and closing. The few people out in the heat were as mad as I was, in their case from drinking caña, the dirtcheap pure alcohol distilled from cane. One stood on an orange box and lectured an invisible audience; another was conducting an orchestra with great precision and seriousness. A third lay unconscious, dangerously close to the embers of a fire, holding his penis through his trousers and smiling, winning something in life, if only in his dreams. The road went over a high bridge above the river where a hundred or more people were washing their clothes and laying them out to dry on the grass, a mobile abstract painting.

  Commercial streets are often themed, containing only one kind of business. The next hill was dedicated to automobiles. Each specialised: wheels, batteries, bumpers, diesels, suspension, lights, tools, gaskets and seals, bodywork, hi-fi, grilles, tyres, paints, custom paintwork, decoration, bull-bars and chrome. One sign simply said: ‘We make and repair everything.’ I found a hostel near the main square and sought out the civic archives. I found the edition of the daily paper, La Cronica, for 5 August 1949. It was the day time stood still in Ambato.

  The new 1949 census proudly reported a prosperous and thriving new city. Its 34,378 inhabitants had no fewer than 1,267 lavatories, one for every 27 people. Cocoa production had grown, and, another headline predicted, tourism would bring millions to Latin America. There were some local and foreign concerns. The sucre was being devalued and the movement of 4,000 troops in a far-off Asian peninsula signalled, the newspaper recognised, the start of the Korean War. But the general tone was cheery: the Hollywood column noted Bob Hope was deserting radio, but only for the new-fangled medium of television.

  There were no more editions of La Cronica for nine days. Their offices, like most of the town, lay somewhere in the stinking debris, flattened by a massive earthquake whose epicentre lay beneath Mount Cotopaxi. The most prominent advertisement in the next edition was placed by the Red Cross, giving the address of their headquarters for the duration of the emergency. Work was continuing in the ruins of the cathedral to dynamite the huge blocks of masonry that had tumbled into the nave. The bodies recovered included the priest, Dr Señor Segundo Aguirre. The electricity plant would be out until the conduit, which provided water for cooling the turbines, had been cleared. Tent-towns surrounded the rubble. Over three thousand lay dead; no family was unscathed. A tribunal was trying to place orphaned and abandoned children.

  I left the archive office and walked out into a city paralysed only by a children’s parade, holding up the choking traffic, giving the drivers a moment to look up at the sun’s silk on the encircling hills. There was a small museum at the Simón Bolívar Institute. Its opening times are an amusing fiction; admission is best gained by breaking and entering. When I eventually got inside, there was an interesting display about natural herbal medicines, and a section from the first eucalyptus planted in Ecuador. Otherwise, there were the usual collections of badly stuffed things in an animal hall of shame, and a corner for people whose idea of an afternoon out is to peer at stillborn monsters in glass jars. People like me. A brown calf had come to full term with a very kindly expression on both its faces. The back of the skull was more or less normal but two noses and jaws left it, one face looking forty-five degrees left, the other forty-five degrees right. Four eyes stared with quiet curiosity, trying to puzzle it out. It looked like a Picasso, a turn of the head recorded in the start and finish of the movement. Pickling jars exhibited the foetuses of frowning piglets, their brows eternally wrinkled against unborn worries.

  Chimborazo

  I liked Ambato without ever really finding anything to do there, so I moved base one town south to Riobamba. Getting out of Ambato was tricky. Following locals’ enthusiastic directions, I walked circuits of the centre and eventually left in a spiral, like a rocket only just escaping from gravity. For six hours it was all uphill, but the line of the Inca road soon left the noisy main highway and followed a parallel country lane where every dog had been trained to regard pedestrians as illegal. I reached a sandy plateau where dusty plants choked in dusty gardens. Farmers were planting young trees in what looked like vacuum cleaner dust. I crossed a new highway under construction. Half-naked turbaned labourers flung dirt from ditches, flung it in heaps or just flung it in the air for the wind to carry away and cake the fields deeper. They pointed at me, then went back to the dirt.

  I was hurting from the climb and the miserable conditions; squinting, head down, with little to look at, each moment dragging: all I could think of was how sore I was. In the litter at the roadside, I saw a doll’s severed head and grimly jammed it on the head of my stick, giving it a voodoo air. When I was begging for the gritty wind to drop or to have some real countryside to look at instead of this dustbowl, a long-tailed hummingbird appeared, darting in swift semi-circles from blossom to blossom, and lightening my spirits. But I nearly jumped out of my skin when a hand seized my elbow.

  ‘My name is Caterina,’ she whispered. She was thirteen years old, and she held three washed apples in her hands, the water standing in little globes on the waxy skin. ‘For you,’ she said shyly, and began to walk with me. ‘I saw you walking, and thought that fruit would refresh you.’ I was more moved than I could explain. I realized that she had stopped me feeling so lonely in my solitary exertions. She walked with me to where the Inca highway crossed the modern road. ‘There is a fork in the path ahead, ignore the obvious road, it is the wrong one. Cross the irrigation channel and follow the small path.’ It proved good advice; without it, I should have lost my way. Gradually, the land became greener, until, by late afternoon, at a hamlet called Santo Domingo de Cevallos, I stopped at a well-built two-storey farmhouse. A woman and her two daughters helped me find a level spot for my tent between a large polythene greenhouse and a small orchard, then went into the fields to cut maize for their evening meal. As dusk came, small children appeared silently in the undergrowth on the bank above me, like the hidden figures in a Douanier Rousseau painting. Later, the owner’s husband, Luis Rojas, came with her to my tent door, and we chatted.

  ‘I have my own bus, I have just finished work driving.’

  ‘The traffic must be very tiring.’

  ‘It’s the police and the passengers that get my blood pressure going. Are you married?’

  ‘I live with my girlfriend.’

  ‘You can get away with that on the coast. Here in the Sierra it’s more conservative,’ he said. Both of them were grinning. ‘If you don’t sign up in church, you don’t get any.’ I went to sleep wishing Elaine were at my side. She had begun a PhD on the European Discovery of the Americas and our discussions of source materials that overlapped our interests had helped me so much in seeing fresh and novel ways of interrogating old accounts. Her skills in critical theory helped me tease out what was said and unsaid; and what could not, across the gulf between two cultures, be said at all. She didn’t have to look so good to be so beautiful to me; the brain is the sexiest organ.

  The next day I felt tired when I started, and spent a lot of
the day shifting my pack on my shoulders, trying to ease the muscles. Lunch was chicken broth in a village called Mocha, where all the able men seemed to have left to look for work. An old man approached me. His mouth was an open black oval, like a face you throw wooden balls at in a fairground booth. He held his hand out and gurgled for money. I gave a little. Two other men asked, ‘Are you American?’

  ‘English.’

  ‘Good! On your way home could you take a message to my friends in Washington and Toronto? Would it be so very far out of your way?’

  When I returned to the road a long and very steep ascent began. It was more like climbing a ladder than walking, and went on for an hour. The path went into tight sunken S-bends which still had the Inca cobbles. A young man gave me water and he pointed at my GPS: ‘I am not ignorant like many people here. I know that is a cell-phone, and you use it to speak to your guide, who walks ahead.’ The cultivated land was giving way to pasture as the road continued to climb. Gauchos in cow-leather chaps, with the red hair still on them, rode by with a blanket but no saddles or stirrups, the labouring horses snorting clouds into the cool air. White-collared swifts, the largest of the Andean swifts, with a wingspan over eighteen inches, were zinging through the air above me. When I stopped to drink I soon became cold, but the shelter of the long grass nurtured violets, and a bright yellow orchid. Looking closely, I saw each flower was a miniature horse skull.

  The road levelled at last. It was late afternoon, cold, and the walking had been almost entirely uphill. I had been planning to stop and camp soon, but decided to go on to a red roof I could see in the distance. It turned out to be the old railway station of La Urbina. At 11,940 feet, it is the highest point on all the Ecuadorian railway system. It is now an inn run by Rodrigo, a mountaineering guide in his early fifties, with a long thin beard and a ponytail. I went inside and drank coffee in front of a wood stove. I asked Rodrigo about the trains which were still in service.