‘They were steam until recently, 1940s Pennsylvania-built, then they bought nine French engines, but in Ecuador we don’t make the specialist lubricants the manufacturers specified and the Government wouldn’t grant a licence to import them, saying it was not necessary, just a scam to milk poor countries. Seven out of nine engines are now useless.’ He pointed into the toneless grey cloud behind the moors, ‘There is Chimborazo, but we haven’t seen it all day.’
The only other guests were four Frenchmen; two of them were acclimatising before attempting Chimborazo. The mountain’s peak is a nice trophy for moderate mountaineers because at 20,700 feet it is the point furthest away from the centre of the planet. Everest is over 1.5 miles higher, but, at 28° north, sits on only 9.3 miles of the earth’s equatorial bulge, while Chimborazo, little more than 1° south of the equator, stands on a 13.5 mile-high bulge, elevating its peak 2.7 miles further from the centre.
After supper, Rodrigo gave a slide lecture on the great peaks of the Andes, and afterwards we chatted about the first man to investigate Chimborazo: Baron Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt. Rodrigo flung a hand towards the cloud-shrouded monster. ‘Here, at the foot of Mount Chimborazo, he began the Essai sur la géographie des plantes. You know he preferred to write in French but was also fluent in German, English, Spanish, Russian and Italian!’
This essay invented plant geography, and encouraged fully documented collection of specimens. For the first time plants and animals were accurately related to their environment, allowing Alfred Wallace and Charles Darwin to perceive the physical adaptations of animals which led them both to conceive the law of natural selection by survival of the fittest. At the beginning of Humboldt’s trip he wrote down the guiding principle that underpinned all his future achievements: ‘I must find out more about the unity of nature.’ He often said, ‘Rather than discovering new, isolated facts I prefer linking together ones already known.’ One of his typical innovations was the isotherm, a line on a map joining points experiencing equal temperatures, so that the overall patterns of weather and climate could be described.
Rodrigo had a coffee-table catalogue from a recent exhibition on Humboldt, in Quito. The great man gazed with confidence and composure from the many portraits which he sat for during his long life. Humboldt was five feet eight inches tall, with light brown hair, grey eyes and old smallpox scars on his forehead. Rather vain, in a self-portrait he looks considerably more handsome than in other artists’ portraits of him. Trained in geology and mining, he became a polymath free to make his own path once he received an inheritance from his mother when he was twenty-seven. Within two years he was in South America, from 1799 to 1804, re-writing science. Humboldt displayed a broader variety of scientific interests and intellectual concerns than any other explorer before or since.
A key problem in the philosophy of the late eighteenth century was how people’s sensory information about the external world could be used to describe and investigate the ultimate reality of things. Immanuel Kant argued that our sensory data limited our investigations absolutely. Others argued that trained aesthetic sensitivities could transcend pure reason and explore intuitively the underlying unities. Humboldt fervently believed so. He was fascinated by the emotional dimension of the natural world: that the physical world could move the soul. To be true to nature, he argued, natural science must, like nature itself, be aesthetically satisfying. Poetry and science should work in harness to describe and explain reality. However, this was not an excuse for subjective or impressionistic science; the range of his instruments shows the thoroughness of his methods. There was even a cyanometer to measure the blueness of the sky, something the poet Byron satirised.
Humboldt’s team took his battery of instruments up into the clouds on Chimborazo to measure anything that would stand still long enough to be measured. In Humboldt’s day little was known of the effects of high altitude on the human body. Like seasickness, altitude sickness is capricious in its effects on individuals, but they all began to suffer in some degree from nausea and uncertain balance. Their local companion, the revolutionary Carlos Montufar, suffered horribly, struggling on despite bleeding from his nose, ears and mouth. When it seemed the summit was in reach, they found themselves standing on the edge of a chasm. Their route led to a dead end. They calculated their height at 19,286 feet, and estimated the summit at around 21,400, lower than later measurements. When they got down and looked in a mirror, they recoiled from the ghastly scarlet eyes staring back at them. Tiny veins in their eyes had ruptured, leaving them gruesomely bloodshot. Until Alpinists went to the Himalayas, this was a world record ascent; Humboldt bragged ‘of all mortals, I was the one who had risen highest in all the world’.
After witnessing oppressive Spanish rule, Humboldt encouraged the young Simón Bolívar to help liberate South America, but he pronounced Bolívar himself unfit to lead the task. ‘His brilliant career shortly after we met astonished me,’ he declared, adding stubbornness to misjudgement. Bolívar was more astute about Humboldt: he ‘was the true discoverer of America because his work has produced more benefit to our people than all the conquistadors’.
When Humboldt sat for his last portrait, he asked the artist to place Chimborazo’s snowy cone in the background. He died soon after, in 1859, the year a great admirer published a book called The Origin of Species.
In 1861, the American Ambassador Hassaurek saw Chimborazo’s triple peaks and wrote ‘no human foot ever profaned them, no human foot ever will’. Within eighteen years, Edward Whymper dared, and succeeded. In his book Travels Amongst the Great Andes of the Equator Whymper attempts a self-portrait as the consummate professional. Between the lines one plainly sees a curmudgeon, a man for whom fellow expedition members are not companions, but handicaps to his genius. He sounds middle-aged, but he was only thirty-nine years old. Drinking had taken its toll. When, at the age of sixty, he took elite Swiss guides to the Canadian Rockies, their main job was to carry crates of whisky on long hikes. In 1911 he was taken ill at the Couttet Hotel, Chamonix, refused treatment, locked himself in his room and died alone.
I went to bed early. The room was freezing; I slept in my sleeping bag inside the bed. In the morning, Chimborazo was still invisible. I was away by seven in light rain. Rodrigo waved me off: ‘Don’t follow the railway route. There is a very bad family in the village of San Andrés; a foreign cyclist was robbed of everything.’ I followed an irrigation ditch along the contour then dropped down a lane that wove between fields. Labourers looked up like nocturnal animals surprised by a spotlight. In three hours, I was coming over the crest of mature eucalyptus plantations, willing Riobamba closer. It didn’t come. The wind caught the map hung round my neck and slapped me in the face with it. My sandals were filling with grit, and I could scarcely open my eyes for the dust. One knee was stiffening, and dogs circled me, snarling and barking. On the corner of two dusty lanes, by a smallholding that looked like a set for the dustbowl farms of The Grapes of Wrath, I stood checking my map. An old woman pulled a black shawl over her bent back and made her way across the dirt of her vegetable garden towards me. I thought how kind it was of her to come out in the uncomfortable conditions to help me. She stabbed a shrivelled finger at my pack. ‘What are you selling?’
‘Nothing, it’s my tent and clothes.’
‘Hah!’ she said.
I glanced at my map and looked up to ask her a question. She was gone, rolling back through the dust-caked potatoes. I turned round to look back up the trail, and there, at last, a dozen miles behind me, was the mountain I had slept under the night before: Chimborazo. It had thrown off the cloud, and was shining. It is a very high volcano: the top seven thousand feet lie under permanent snow and ice; but the sheer bulk of it was overwhelming. It belongs in another, vaster, landscape but has been lent to us to remind men they have souls. For Humboldt, such sights must have clinched his theories that the whole could be intuited from such Olympian examples of nature. I took my tired feet into the
town, with many long backward glances. In town, there was a bonus: the volcano Tungurahua was erupting.
Riobamba
Like most Andean cities, Riobamba has been flattened by a natural disaster, in this case, an earthquake in 1797 which levelled much of Ecuador and killed 40,000 people. A contemporary, González Suárez, captured the peculiar terror that earth-changing events commanded in an era when Christian men believed the earth was made in seven days, and had remained unchanged ever since:
and some mountains, letting go of their foundations, turned over on grasslands and smothered them completely, changing the face of the earth: the Culca Hill descended over the city of Riobamba, and buried a large part of the population; in some places the ground split apart swallowing trees, gardens, homes and cattle.
Having been rebuilt over two centuries, Riobamba lacks the look of Ambato, that it was all built by the same company, or, worse, Latacunga, which looks as if it was all made from the same batch of cement. In the handsome main square, the old Colonial façade of the cathedral was side-lit, throwing the heavily carved columns, doors and panels into high relief. Behind it, the side-streets looked east, up to the mountains where large cumulus and cumulo-nimbus clouds were building. As the afternoon grew late, their whites and pale dove-greys were picking up tints of lemon, rose and gold, when, suddenly, as the clouds rolled back for a few minutes, I could see black dust boiling out of the crater of Tungurahua: a glimpse of a devil’s kitchen under those celestial clouds.
At 16,475 feet, Tungurahua, meaning Black Giant, is not one of the tallest Ecuadorian volcanoes but it is one of the most active, almost continuously belching out steam and dust, creating its own mantle of cloud and vapour. The latest eruption began in October 1999, and initially prompted temporary evacuation of the entire town of Baños, on the north side of the volcano. I climbed to a small park which overlooked the whole of Riobamba. To the north, the snow and ice of Chimborazo was glazed in the delicate pink of water seeping from cut strawberries. To the south, Tungurahua poured coils of dense black clouds up into the fluffy gold and white cumulus. The Local Puruha people of Pastaza valley believed Chimborazo was male and Tungurahua female, and they were the gods who had created their people and the cosmos: no wonder. I stopped, mouth open; but no one else gave it a glance. Just another day living with volcanoes.
A few blocks above the main square, there is a famous Museum of Religious Art at Riobamba’s convent. The Andes produced some superb woodcarvers, and Riobamba had works by the very best: a native Ecuadorian called José Olmos who was active in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The anatomy of his figures is superb, and the carving approaches perfection. The limbs have an eerie sheen to them, like that on a body hovering between life and death. It was produced by rubbing animal fat into the wood before painting. He ushered in a period where the limbs became a little longer and more slender, exemplifying a Christ in greater repose with his suffering. But even José Olmos’s best crucifixion has a Christ whose back is in ribbons: love is expressed by blood. Were they telling the Incas and the Aztecs anything new? Both had long known that the gods demanded the blood of the most perfect. There was simply an inversion: a religion in which people were sacrificed for the gods was replaced by one in which a god was sacrificed for people.
By contrast, the cathedral concealed a wonderful surprise. The exterior is classic early colonial; exuberant carving romps over the whole façade. But the renovated chapel has a series of modern murals which are native in style and subversive in subject matter. The disciples at the Last Supper are modern Ecuadorians; the ordinary people who every day bend their knees at the pews. Christ is the only bearded figure – native Sierra men have little or no facial hair – and he is not central, but seated to one side. He cups a handful of soil in which a seedling is uncurling, an image central to traditional fertility beliefs. The focus of the composition is a woman in native dress, breaking bread. She is the Inca Earth-Mother: Pachamama. Around the table, next to bowls of local fruits and roast guinea pig, a lute lies ready for the dancing which will follow. On the walls are celebrations of the richness of the life of the Andes: hummingbirds sip nectar from garlands of flowers. Men and women dance in close, and mildly drunken, embrace. Small children stand on tiptoe to hug the warm neck of a favourite llama. A businessman appears as a basin-jawed pinstriped thug. One half of his face is a skull topped by a general’s hat. He is white, of course. Judas is a reporter with a cassette recorder and microphone. Resistance to the conquest continues.
I gave my feet a holiday and took a coach day trip along the road to Baños to look for living fossils of the Inca empire: the people of Salasaca. As we left the town, street vendors invaded at every junction, walking the aisle, touting banana chips, lemonade, water, apples, mandarins, four scented pens for a dollar, sweets and ice creams. A man dressed like an evangelist made a wellprepared speech to introduce us to a particularly uplifting chocolate bar promotion he was running.
Salasaca straggled aimlessly along the dusty main road, then stopped abruptly because it had run out of ideas. The very first man I saw was wearing a broad-brimmed white hat, white shirt and trousers and a soft black woollen poncho. It is a traditional outfit that the people in this small area still wear, but it is not from Ecuador, or even neighbouring Peru. He is a political exile, and his ancestors were brought here from Bolivia over five hundred years ago by the Incas, as part of their imperial policy for pacifying newly conquered lands.
For as far back as we can see, Andean history has always gone through cycles of unification and disintegration. Major cultural expansion and empire building were only favoured when rainfall was reliable. Otherwise, the huge vertical changes in climate, and therefore agriculture, encouraged small cultures closely adapted to local conditions. Occasionally, opportunism and ambition united them. The most astounding expansion was that of a small hill tribe. In little more than a hundred years, the Incas expanded from their heartland around Cuzco to create what was then the greatest empire in the world, stretching 3,400 miles from the south Colombian border to central Chile. They did not, like the Mongols in Asia, operate as a purely military force. Where possible, they preferred to absorb rather than conquer, and exercised considerable diplomatic efforts to avoid outright war. Where they met military resistance, they responded with two main strategies: either conciliatory negotiation, assuring the enemy of the Inca’s kindly future intentions, or a savage assault to annihilate resistance.
The Romans kept citizenship as an honour, not a right. As long as respect was paid to key Roman deities, conquered people could fill out their pantheon with other gods as they pleased. Likewise, this expanding Cuzco tribe knew they could not make everyone Incas, nor did they want to: that was a privilege they guarded jealously for themselves. As long as the authority of the Inca and his father, the Sun, was respected, local culture could continue. Indeed, conquered peoples were required to maintain their original dress so their identity could always be seen. When people from newly absorbed nations were brought to Cuzco, they were allocated separate precincts to live in, arranged so the map of the city slowly became both a microcosm and a map of the empire. To absorb new tribes smoothly into empire, people from older, well-integrated regions of empire were moved to freshly acquired territories. This was called mitimaes, and was devised to ease the tensions and dangers of rapid conquest and expansion. If new subjects absconded and were caught, they were tortured for a first offence, and killed for a second. The man in white clothes and black poncho was a living record of this exchange. It is clothing from the shores of Lake Titikaka, 1,150 miles away as the condor flies, and Salasaca’s people are of Bolivian descent.
The Bartolomé de las Casas Secondary School spilled out its pupils at lunchtime, all the boys wearing traditional Bolivian dress. They stood chatting in front of the motto on the school wall:
El mayor bien es la cultura;
el mayor mal, la ignorancia.
The greatest good is culture;
I asked Ramiro, a fourteen-year-old with huge teeth and bigger hair, if he knew the history of the clothing. He said ‘Certainly!’ and told the story well.
‘Do you feel Bolivian?’ He and his friend Mariano smiled bashfully, ‘No, Bolivia is backward!’
I did a small walk south, to the village of Punín. Soon, I was over a small hill, Riobamba was out of sight, and I dropped into a steep-sided green canyon. It was humid, and the air was practically crackling. Still on tarmac, I was tracking up the hairpins with my head down, a bad habit that I was cured of the next minute. Suddenly, just five feet in front of me, there was no tarmac, no road, no land, just fresh air. Had I been carrying a full pack my momentum would have carried me right up to the edge, which was snaked with fissures and highly unstable. A strip fifty yards long and several yards wide along the side of the road had fallen into the valley below, leaving a vertical cliff a hundred and fifty feet high.
The whole of the rest of the walk was a depressing reminder of one of the problems facing Ecuador today: soil erosion. This is not the gradual depletion of surface soil, but the complete re-forming of the landscape. The valley floor to my left was once flat agricultural land sloping gently down to Riobamba. Now there is a V-shaped gorge cut hundreds of feet deep into it, whose sides are so steep it is uncrossable in most places. In a single river basin, you would measure the lost soil in cubic miles. Deforestation, regular burning and poor farming techniques are the main culprits. In this parish of Punín, families farm small plots and suffer many other problems, including poor soil fertility and an extreme range of temperatures. Few people have access to affordable credit, and the traditional way of life is under threat as family incomes fall. Many have gone to the towns seeking, but seldom getting, work. Catholic Relief Services are working with five hundred families in the area, teaching new methods of cultivating crops, and raising small livestock such as guinea pigs, rabbits, chickens and sheep. They are also setting up community banks to offer micro-credit: in a severely cash-poor rural economy, small sums make the difference between survival and failure.
Cloud Road Page 6