Cloud Road

by John Harrison

  In three weeks, Atahualpa learned chess and basic Spanish. He was fascinated by writing, and, unlike Moctezuma in Mexico, quickly grasped its method and power, and saw how it would help him rule. He had one soldier write D on one fingernail, I on the next, and O and S on the third and fourth. He took it to another who read out Dios, God. He showed it to the unlettered Pizarro, who shrugged and turned away. Afterwards, he never had quite the same respect for Pizarro.

  Slowly the treasure began to come in. The Spanish still had little idea of the extent of the empire or the length of the journeys being undertaken to bring the treasure to Cajamarca, and they grew impatient. They thought Atahualpa was dragging his heels. Five months later, just before Easter 1533, Pizarro’s partner and Atahualpa’s nemesis, Diego de Almagro, arrived. Short, ugly and scarred, he was another illiterate foundling. Foul-mouthed and quick to anger, he was a partner of Pizarro for money, not love. He disliked all the Pizarro brothers and, typically, he most disliked the best of them, Juan. Almagro arrived to find that all of the treasure flowing in was contracted exclusively to the Spaniards who had fought at Cajamarca. Even an illiterate could understand this equation: while Atahualpa was alive, Diego de Almagro was excluded from the treasure. He would have to sit in Cajamarca and watch the Pizarros and their henchmen scoop the loot.

  Almagro’s men spun rumours of a great Inca army, summoned by Atahualpa. In this climate of fear, Atahualpa’s liberty was eroded: a golden collar and chain were placed around his neck. Although the decent-minded de Soto scouted the land and called the lie, there was a sham trial, and Atahualpa was sentenced to be burnt alive in the main square. At first he begged and wept, then suddenly he seemed to accept it, and carried himself with great dignity. They told him that if he would convert to Christianity he would be strangled instead. He refused.

  At the stake he was questioned by Friar Valverde, and agreed to be baptised. There are many reasons he might have changed his mind, but one heartened his followers. If his body was buried intact, underground it would begin to restore its force and at the end of one of the great ages of man, when, in a pachakuti, the world was periodically turned upside down, the Lord Atahualpa would rise again to lead them. Atahualpa converted from being a god in his own religion to being a poor sinner in a stranger’s faith. Then they strangled their convert.

  Two of Atahualpa’s sisters came in mourning to their brother’s old chambers, and asked Pedro Pizarro’s permission to enter. The youth graciously ushered them in. They went to his favourite room, and, recalled Pedro, cooed like doves, ‘and called for him very gently in the corners. Then, perceiving that he did not reply to them, and uttering great moans, they went out.’

  Looking at the simple quarters that became Atahualpa’s prison, I saw that all my attempts, from Santa Apollonia hill, to discern the much greater, older square, in the modern road pattern, had been wasted. The only surviving Inca building stands at an angle of twenty degrees to the colonial courtyard in which it sits, and to the modern streets. The angle is a kick in history’s seismograph; a cultural earthquake shook the land, and life would continue savagely askew to the way it had run before. In this angle, two civilisations diverge, with Atahualpa at the axis of revolution.

  Long after his death, the treasure rolled in, the ransom to buy his life exceeding all that was promised. Among the cold stones of the Rescate, the sisters’ stilled birdsong for their brother still pulls at the heart.

  3. The Land of the Lost:

  Cajamarca to Cuzco

  A New Eden

  From Baños, we began to walk forty-five miles south to the small town of Cajabamba, climbing a road hedged by eucalyptus trees and dramatic cabuya cactuses. Red clay mixed with straw made sumptuous adobe for houses whose walls shone in the sun like old gold. Halfway up a hot hill we bought oranges from a local store. I asked the lady, ‘How many tourists do you see on this road in a year?’

  ‘On average?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Roughly?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Taking all things into account?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘None.’

  This was Elaine’s first serious walking and she was going well. At the first col was a small football pitch. It exploited all the available flat land, which made it diamond-shaped. I tried to imagine tactics. Looking back down the mountain, little Baños was the size Cajamarca had been at the conquest: it was hard to imagine history decided in a village square. Looking ahead, we could see our route for many miles, up a pretty valley to a notch in the ridge. At lunchtime, we rested by a picturesque stream, eating bread and cheese, while a woman sat among her dark brown sheep, spinning dark brown wool. The stream was gouging into this rich soil. One house teetered on the edge of a new ravine; next rainy season it would fall. A grey Alsatian guarding it was in an understandably bad mood. The path had mostly collapsed, leaving a crumbling, nine-inch wide ledge. With heavy packs, it was impassable. We climbed into fields above and up to a wild house where a wilder-looking man wearing only a vest and seedy trousers with open flies called back a skinny greyhound with ribs like split palings. Elaine took out a dog-scarer; a small box that gave off ultrasonic noises. There would be three different types of reaction. This was a good one; it stopped, looked mildly pained and backed off. The man chewed on a white maize cob and guided us round the collapse.

  The path was a relatively easy climb to a second watershed where the trail became a real Inca road, with stone edging and drains. There were crescents of Inca terracing and the bases of extensive storehouses and a tambo. Around four o’clock we came to a grand old country mansion, and spoke to the owner’s nephew.

  ‘Could we camp here?’ I pointed at a level field with a clean concrete irrigation ditch running round its edge. It was a boring but practical site.

  ‘You could. But a little further above there is a small lake, it is very pretty.’

  I had seen no lake on the map. ‘How far?’ I asked. He gave that strange far-away look that I was used to when details about time and distance were required, as if I had asked him to name all the molecules in a cow. We took the risk, and continued. It was the first tough walking of the day: a steep, dry gully eroded into badlands, but at the top was a reedy lake, half a mile across. A fish leaped, and a retriever dog trotted through the trees and adopted us for the night. The stove behaved, the sun set gloriously and the new moon descended on her back, Venus following. Children’s shouts echoed over the water: they wouldn’t let the day die. We lay round the stove, fingers touching, the Milky Way hooping over our dreaming eyes.

  It was strange to share the tent, to have Elaine cocooned in her sleeping bag next to me. Women lie differently; she was a supple odalisque. At five thirty, a cockerel crowed and woke all the dogs in earshot, which then barked themselves senseless. Our retriever joined in: no need for an alarm clock. At six, making coffee and eating bread and bananas, we watched a golden light spread over the red soil. Maize plants trembled to attention in the morning’s icing sugar air. All was clear and calm, like a pool before the day’s first plunge. When the New World was first described, it was often called a New Eden, or even the Earthly Paradise. People brought their own visions here, planted and tended them. Bishop Vasco de Quiroga arrived at Michaocán, Western Mexico, in the 1530s, armed with a copy of Thomas More’s Utopia. He allowed the Tarascan Indians no private property, telling them it was called a New World, ‘not because it was newly found, but because it is, in its people and almost everything else, akin to the first Golden Age’. The vision travelled both ways: John Layfield, a Greek scholar, was entranced by his visit, as ship’s chaplain, to Puerto Rico. It influenced his best-known work, published in 1611; Layfield translated the first chapters of the book of Genesis for the King James Bible. Our familiar description of the Creation, and of Paradise itself, is filtered through eyes that have seen the New World.

  Mornings like this preserved the dream. We were special, the day’s symmetry organised around us. Ducks scol
ded each other where the young reeds prickled the lake’s glass. Bending to wash in it, I saw the sky so perfectly reflected that I lost all sense of which way up I was and put out my hands to stop myself toppling over. I scooped water from the sky to wet my face. We began to walk a sandy road, kicking up the menthol leaves of eucalyptus.

  When Pizarro finally left Cajamarca behind him, he came south on this precise route. Ironically, the quality of the Inca roads made his conquest much easier. He spent his first night at the next village, Namora. It was eleven thirty when we arrived there but we were ready for lunch. The village centre was a triangular plaza with a bandstand in the middle. In the only café, we gorged on vegetable soup and home-reared goat with spaghetti and potatoes. A black cat, thin as a paper clip, patrolled the floor, fighting back a puppy, and getting to the scraps first. We co-ordinated food drops on the dirt floor to give the dog a chance. At a grocer’s, we eyed the threadbare stock and bought more fruit. A roasted pig’s head was set up on a small wooden table outside. A tall dog seized it and ran off up the street, his new head grinning at the toothless grandmother who chased him with incoherent oaths.

  Waterlogged meadows kept us from the line of the Inca road. Two dogs left the fun of splashing around in the flowery grass to attack us. Elaine took out the dog-scarer with a mean look in her eye, and switched it on. It totally enraged them. I threw stones and made Elaine a second dog-scarer from a five-foot eucalyptus pole. Each effort to regain the Inca road was frustrated; first by the unseasonable water, then by soil erosion gullies too precipitous to cross. Each attempt sapped energy without taking us forward. We descended a long winding lane through rich grazing land, pouring litres of icy water into our overheated bodies. We had hoped to walk for most of the day, and stop in good time to set up camp before dark. There seemed to be a law that we would pass endless beautiful, flat camping spots by picture-book streams until four o’clock, when water and flat land would either vanish or come together, as a marsh. I felt very tired. Elaine insisted she was okay, but when we reached the valley floor the pain kicked in; her legs, shoulders and back ached more than she would say. I left her resting by the roadside while I scouted round. There was flat land by a bend in the stream under a slender aliso tree, a type of alder. An old lady, Maria Segunda, said it was her land, but too wet to camp on. I found one area of abandoned ant heaps that was dry, and just large enough for the tent. We boiled eggs, and ate them with onion and fruit and tuna. I was so hungry I could have eaten the tin. But I was still losing weight. Had my sternum always protruded like that? Last seen exposed aged sixteen.

  We slept like the dead, and in the morning washed naked in the swift irrigation ditch. We climbed through fields where bullocks tended by young boys pulled long wooden ploughs. At the top, we took a break in a field. Huge butterflies three inches across, beautifully marked in brown, white and black, flew round our shoulders. A stone which, from where we sat, seemed to have a human profile turned out from every other angle to be simply a cracked boulder: sheer coincidence. The road was lined with smallholdings but there seemed to be a flight from the land. Many were for sale, including a former café. On the dark bare adobe, someone had painted white lines around the edges of the windows and doors: a spirit house, living in the same space as the mud-brick human house. The ground was becoming desiccated. The last of the corn, to our right, was streaked, like platinum and gold interlaced. A watching donkey brayed as if he had a megaphone. I pointed at him and said, ‘That’s enough.’ He stopped instantly.

  Elaine giggled.

  I said, ‘I am at one with the land. You are safe with me.’

  Cochamarca village was a road junction with two shops and six houses. In the shop which doubled as a café, the young man regretted there was no hot food, then brought us a bowl of rice, beans and green chilli sauce; part of the family’s lunch. A young woman in a lime-green cardigan had just got off the bus from Lima, and seemed reluctant to go back to her house. ‘A year after moving here I still cannot get used to life in the country.’ As she talked, she rolled her sleeves right up to the armpit and then down to her wrists; over and over. ‘There’s a bullfight up in Manzanilla,’ she said, and the man showed us a poster. Ritual bloodshed is important in the Andes. I was eager to see a bullfight in a remote Andean community, and observe what it meant to ordinary people. The Incas regularly sacrificed animals, and when an Inca was crowned, at least two hundred children were sacrificed: some were strangled, others had their throats cut, some had their hearts cut out, still beating. Many observers are convinced human sacrifice still goes on today. It certainly did under the reign of terror of the Shining Path guerrillas during the 1980s and early 1990s, but I would catch up with that in two months, farther south, in Ayacucho. However, there was no public transport, and the only lorry driver in the village wasn’t going that way. I wanted to walk it. Elaine and I didn’t exactly have an argument about whether to go, more a prolonged and emotional discussion at high volume, frequently using screaming to emphasise especially subtle points, in which neither of us was prepared to admit the other person might have a shred of reason to support their position. Reluctantly, I gave it a miss.

  At the head of a canyon, a skinny Doberman pup with cropped ears was playing with some children. He ran over and trotted along at our heels. We didn’t want him to follow us and get lost, but we couldn’t chase him away. We tried ‘Ashi, ashi!’, the Quechua cry used to chase animals. This was a fun, new game: he wagged his tail and kept coming. Elaine’s Doberman had not long died, and it was very tempting to adopt this one. He would be good company, could guard the tent at night and would soon be big enough to defend us against other dogs. He would also get fed properly, and treated decently. I looked at Elaine: if I was thinking this, she must be too. There was definitely a puppy-shaped gleam in her eye. ‘It probably belongs to those kids at the top,’ she said bravely, and half-heartedly waved it away. No reaction. Perhaps it was deaf; we threw little stones in front of it. It ducked then continued to follow, limping on sore paws.

  Eyeing the maps that morning, we had hoped to reach the village of San Marcos. That wasn’t going to happen unless we walked on after dark. I said, ‘We’ll stop at the next place with water.’ Elaine nodded. At the next bend, our path headed straight away from the only watercourse and the land went dry: the four o’clock rule was in full working order. An hour later, and only half an hour before dark, we found a trickle of water and dug a pool to fill our water containers. Above the path was an apron of green surrounded by scrub, hidden from passers-by. Hummingbirds fed from the golf-balls of orange flower spikes on the Cardon Santo bushes that formed waist-deep clumps all around us. I tried to make Elaine rest for ten minutes, while I cleared the ground, flicking away thorny acacia twigs with bare hands. The ground was like concrete: I hammered two aluminium tent pegs double. Swarms of midges came out and stung us right through our trousers, or bit skin freshly plastered with repellent. Even sitting, she kept busy, checking the dog for fleas, and finding eggs. When she lifted her hand to stroke his head, he cowered, accustomed to blows. After five minutes, she began to clear a cooking area. When the tent was finally pitched, I had to rush behind a bush: more diarrhoea. Suddenly Elaine shouted, ‘God! John! Come quickly!’ with an urgency I had never heard her use in all the time I had known her. Coming quickly wasn’t easy from the position I was in. When I did get there, she was pointing at the ground.

  ‘Ants?’ I asked.

  ‘Worse, much worse,’ she said.

  I followed her finger to a small, pinky-brown form, scarcely an inch long; its soft body looked as if it had been shelled. It was a scorpion. We had been clearing the ground with bare hands and unwittingly risking a painful, possibly dangerous sting. When I bent down to look more closely, it curled up its tail, which has the sting in its tip, and fenced at me with miniature claws: impressive. I used twigs to flick it well away. ‘We’ll have to move the tent,’ said Elaine.

  ‘Why?’ I felt I had missed something. />
  ‘Don’t they have nests?’

  I opened my mouth, and nothing came out. I didn’t know. I didn’t even know they lived at these altitudes. We searched the ground and found no more. ‘Let’s stay here but be careful, particularly once it gets dark.’

  ‘Given what you were doing, it was a good job I found it, not you.’

  I thought this amused her far more than it need have.

  We cooked eggs to eat with tuna, but gave the dog nothing. It needed to go home: few dogs here are pets; someone was raising it to work for them. After we settled down to sleep, a strange noise came from close to the tent wall. It was a low growling sound, broken occasionally by a thin howl. Our nerves were on edge from the insect bites and the scorpion. I put on my boots, picked up my stick and torch, and crept outside. Another growl. Despite the warmth of the evening, sweat dried on my neck and my skin came out in goose pimples. The torch alighted on two eyes. There in the dark, doing a fair impersonation of the Egyptian jackal-god Anubis, sat the puppy, its empty stomach howling. I sighed, and took him a bowl of raw egg, some unused tuna and a bread roll. When I put the dish in front of him, he did nothing. I wondered if he had ever had a dish of decent food before. Suddenly he caught on; it was his. In a minute, it was all gone. We lay down again. Tired eyes welcomed sleep. Throughout the night came the roar of dog indigestion. The hours were chimed with loud bongs, as Pups toured round the tent like a good sentry, twanging every guy rope.