Cloud Road

by John Harrison

  Cajabamba

  The dawn air was stirred into life by the deep thrum of large hummingbirds. Down the trail, still with Pups in tow, we met a tiny woman who said she was seventy years old, but looked to have been here since the Flood. A cataract fogged her right eye. Four sleek black goats followed her like dogs. She carried a slender eucalyptus pole, twice her own height. ‘Ah!’ she said, flinging her arms wide, ‘You are of the race of the people of the Gringos! May God bless you! There are Germans in town who have given me spectacles.’ She broke off to stroke the goat at her side, and knock down acacia pods with the long pole. ‘The Gringos are so kind. I am an orphan, I’ve never married, I have no family, I live alone. These four goats are my only friends.’ She spoke with affection, not self-pity.

  Within forty minutes we were in San Marcos. Expecting a sleepy village, we turned a corner to find a two-acre dirt square cacophonous with the weekly livestock market. Trucks from the Lima meat markets journey 440 miles north along the coast to Trujillo then up into the mountains. Fifteen of them were filling with cattle, sheep, goats, horses, mules and donkeys. The smell of charcoal, seared meat, hot potato soups and frying fish mingled with odours of rope, leather and animals whose coats and fleeces grew hot in the sun. The streets were thronged with people threading their way between the stalls. Blankets blazed with tomatoes, limes, oranges, sheaves of spring onions, the wrinkled phalluses of fir-apple potatoes and multi-coloured chillies, shiny as plastic.

  Elaine looked up and down the street. ‘Why don’t we stay?’

  She was absolutely right. It was easy to get obsessed about putting miles under our belt. But, I asked, ‘What about Pups?’

  We looked. He’d gone. ‘It’s good that he’s gone home,’ said Elaine dutifully.

  I said, ‘I miss him already.’

  ‘Me too.’

  Ten minutes later our packs were in the Hostal Sol Nasciente, The Sun Being Born Hostel, and we were drinking in one of the shanty bars in the livestock market. Some peasant farmers and their families moved over to make room at their trestle. ‘We are from the mountains,’ said a red-eyed man with gap teeth, and he swept his arm around an array of peaks visible from the open-sided stall. His wife ate enough for two, he drank more than enough for three. ‘You are rich,’ he said, pointing to the bottled beer. ‘Three soles.’ He slapped the table with the flat of his hand. ‘We drink chicha, for one sole. That is the only way we can afford to get drunk.’

  Most of the animals were sold by one-thirty, so they could reach the city abattoirs that evening and be in the markets next morning. The street stalls came down soon after. By late afternoon, Brigadoon had gone, and we were just two more tumbleweeds in the main street. A café produced lamb so tough that I ate half before realising the pieces I had pushed to the edge of the plate were not bones but meat. We went back to the room to wash clothes and write diaries, fuelled by a bottle of ‘Superior Aniseed’. Elaine sipped and, when she finished wincing, whispered throatily, ‘What’s the alcohol content?’

  I consulted the label. ‘Doesn’t say. I bought it on the strength of the logo, which showed a condor crashing into a mountain.’

  We stayed another day but it wasn’t the same without the market. The few people who appeared wandered disconsolately, as if searching town for the missing. The following day we wound out of San Marcos and over high moor until we came to the head of the path down into the next valley. It was a vast view, one that few places on the earth can offer. Five miles ahead, still in the foreground, was the junction of the Cajamarca and Crisnejas Rivers; both ran in huge trough-shaped valleys. The mountains flanking the Cajamarca River seemed to go on forever, in pale watercolour washes. We slithered and lunged down a steep, rough, rocky trail. The shoulder of the hill cut us off from the breeze; it was tough, hot, uncomfortable walking. When we sat down to rest by a pool, black and purple butterflies drank at our sides. In the grass was an olive stick insect with a hood like a Ku Klux Klansman.

  With relief, we finally came down onto the valley floor by a field where a man in a sky-blue shirt stood in a circle of wheat running a light grey horse over it to separate the grain. We went down a long, dusty, straight road into La Grama. It was the most disturbing town I have ever visited. It reminded me of one place only, a spot just north of Pisagua in the Chilean desert: a cemetery where dried corpses grinned from collapsed vaults. Pizarro spent his third night here; the locals still seem to resent it. People who had been standing in doorways turned inside into the shadow; a guitar playing a light melody trickled into silence. We stopped at a small shop where a mother served us bottles of lemonade. We asked about her three children, staring at us from the corner shadows. As we left, two more climbed out of the fruit boxes where they had been hiding out of fear.

  The road ran at the foot of a bare cliff. A few houses straggled along the other side; below them was a dust-blown bare plain, a ramshackle collection of half-shaped twisted poles, like the crutches and props in a Salvador Dalí. Standing in the middle was the hotel-restaurant La Casona, lifeless as the husk of a wasp at the foot of a hot window. A tiled shed leaned like a drunk whose outstretched arm had just missed the lamppost. To the right of this was a tree cemetery: heat-blasted trunks lopped into ugly club shapes. When someone had to get to the other side of this space, without exception, they walked around it.

  We kept going and crossed the river on a high steel bridge. Below, a naked girl swam with the current, her skin shining like a fresh horse chestnut. The land was harsh, parched, bare, broken ground. We asked a woman how many streams there were in the miles ahead. She shook her head. We stocked up with as much water as we could carry. Throughout the next day, the landscape slowly returned to greenery. It warmed the heart to see fat, blue-grey piglets running from a pond, gleaming like baby elephants. The sun sank towards mountains untold miles away across the Condebamba valley. The scene was delicate and balanced: a landscape on a Japanese fan. There were eucalyptus trees, and the sculptural blades of cabuya cactuses, the occasional one sending up a towering twenty-foot flower spike before dying, its hundred-year life consumed in this final frenzy of procreation. The native species, Furcraea andina, is green, but these beautiful blue-green monsters, Agave americana, have been introduced from Central America. As well as providing fibre for ropes and sandals, they yield soaps, medicines and an evil liquor. The lane became a street; we had reached Cajabamba.

  The town sits on a ledge ringed by peaks, like the dress circle at a theatre. There was a hostel on the small square, and we took a corner room overlooking the gardens. In the morning, we found it also overlooked the departure point of the 02:30 bus to Cajamarca. The only other guest was a young American woman who was carrying her own toilet seat. ‘You need a toilet you can trust.’ We saw her two days later; she was pale yellow. ‘I think it’s dysentery.’

  We looked round the covered market. Outside, three horses were tied to a No Parking sign. We breakfasted on fruit juices blended from fresh fruit. The alfalfa came highly recommended for its vitamins, but tasted as it looked, like lawn clippings. The meat section of the market fascinated us. Many people cannot read, so a recognisable part of the animal is left next to the carcass to identify the meat: a sheep’s head, a cow’s hoof or the tail of a goat with a tuft of hair on the end like a fly whisk. One pig’s head had a raffish smile and a curl at the corner of his lip as if he had just removed a fat cigar.

  Traditional medicine is still widely used in a society where few can afford a doctor and many have never put aside old beliefs, only added new ones. For millennia, Andean peoples have traded with the Amazon, the biggest store of natural medicines in the world. Just down the road from the chemist was a stall stacked with bottles, herbs, scented wood, red seeds for necklaces, dried phallic fungi and the three-toed feet of wild deer. No one knew where the stallholder was. A lady wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat with a huge flowerpot crown said she could help. I pointed at brown stones, apparently covered with fine fur. ‘Haematite,’ she said
. ‘The fur is iron filings, to prove it’s magnetic.’ Elaine picked up the sad body of a small toucan, scarcely bigger than its grey and yellow beak. ‘What are these used for?’

  The woman shrugged. No one else knew. There was a pile of ten of these fabulous forest birds. You come to a medicine man, as you do to a doctor, not simply to buy, but to consult: he will tell you what you need. Elaine held up a scallop shell containing a seed like a nutmeg, a segment from a necklace, a plant tendril, two red beans and two pieces of crew-cut haematite.

  A man’s voice said, ‘For good luck!’ It was the returning owner, eating mincemeat fried in dough. He was young, and dressed in western clothes.

  ‘How much does good luck cost?’ asked Elaine.

  ‘Twenty-five soles’ – five pounds.

  ‘No wonder most locals can’t afford luck.’

  We did not believe. He lost interest.

  It was a nice little town, which came alive in the evenings. An old man sat at the foot of a high wall, playing guitar. His quavering voice recounted poignant stories of young love. We sat at his side, chatting between songs. In the square another voice sang out, a man dead fifty years, but I would know him anywhere: the Italian tenor Beniamino Gigli. We joined the children below the open doors of a second-floor balcony, and listened to Massenet’s ‘O dolce incanto’ on an old 78 r.p.m. recording.

  ‘Who lives there?’ I asked a group of boys.

  ‘A young person.’

  ‘No! An old lady, she owns the property.’

  ‘Don Miguel. He is sixty years old. No one ever sees him.’

  Finally: ‘Ask her, she lives there.’

  A girl about eleven years old stood among others her own age, but, somehow, not with them. She held a golden angel which she spun round on the end of a thread. She held it to her neck, as if it were jewellery she was thinking of buying. The other girls could look, but not touch. Her clothes were a cut above her friends’, but a little old-fashioned, as if chosen by conservative grandparents. Gigli was filling out the great notes of that most lyrical of arias, Ponchielli’s ‘Cielo e mar’.

  I said to her, ‘It’s beautiful music. Do you know Don Miguel?’

  ‘I am his daughter.’ She looked at the ground and hugged the angel to her chest. Through the open balcony doors, I could see only the blue ceiling, crossed by varnished beams, and a man, pacing.

  ‘I would like to meet him.’ But as I looked down she was gone, slipping into a narrow doorway, closing the heavy old door, thud, behind her shiny, black, sensible shoes. I stood listening to the last notes: Adieu, adieu!

  We were ready to move on, but we had a problem. There were no longer any bus services southwards through the Sierra. We were struggling to carry all our gear, and there were no pack animals to be had. The next section of Inca road was neither the easiest to navigate nor the most scenic. We decided to bus down to the isolated hill town of Huari and pick up the Royal Road there, and walk for two weeks. We would have to go back to Cajamarca, then take another bus to the port of Trujillo, then a third along the coast and a final one up to Huari, travelling three sides of a rectangle.

  The coach was bad, even by country standards. The whole interior looked like a dinosaur that had died in moult. The road was hard and rough. In a straight line, it was thirty-eight miles. It took five hours. We fell down the steps into the bus yard and waited for our bags. They were the last things out. Next to last were two very frightened sheep. Our bags were covered in sheep urine. A sympathetic cleaner let us hose them down.

  We bought tickets for the overnight bus to Trujillo, and braced ourselves for another tough journey, and a sleepless night. At ten in the evening, we went down to the yard, and stepped on board. It was a coach outside, and the club class section of a 747 on the inside. The digital quality screens were playing the video of John Lennon’s Imagine with hi-fi quality sound. It was the most luxurious bus I have been on anywhere in the world. We tilted the seats back into astronaut launch positions, and, lulled by the rhythm of the hairpins, slept all the way down to Trujillo.

  At Trujillo bus station we bought tickets for the six a.m. bus down the coast to the fishing port of Chimbote. ‘From there, you can buy tickets to Huaraz, and from Huaraz to Huari,’ said the helpful clerk. I turned to Elaine, ‘Chimbote is a big fishing port, it might be fun to stay a night, get some fresh seafood.’

  The Chimbote bus took us across the town, and into the desert. Elaine pointed to a brown silhouette, like half a ziggurat, already undulating in the hot air rising from the sand. We had visited the Temple of the Sun two years before. Below it was the smaller, but better preserved, Temple of the Moon. They were the work of the Moche people, and, until their fall around AD 800, this was the glorious capital of the civilisation which created the Lord of Sipán. The Temple of the Sun was the largest building in the native Americas, covering thirteen acres. One hundred and thirty million bricks once raised it over ninety feet high. Spanish gold-fever ruined the temple. It was too big to excavate, so they diverted a river into the side of it, washing the adobe bricks into mud and sieving the waste. Little was found. Wisely, the Moche lived in the desert and farmed the coastal plain. Modern Trujillo sprawls all over the plain, and they try to irrigate the desert. They are now using all the known water, and no one has any idea where to find more.

  We rolled south, hugging the straight and sandy coast. Shore, sea and sky shivered in a grey dance. Huge cinder-grey engineering sheds and smelters announced Chimbote. It sits on the shore of what was once the richest fishery in the world. Trembling anchovies poured into iced wooden cases in rivers of shimmering chainmail. In the sixties, overfishing began to take its toll. In 1970, an earthquake flattened the city.

  The first view of it was promising, a lush forest park with bougainvillaea spilling over the walls. But, across the road, families scavenged from a smouldering tip. Rebuilding has been hasty. It looked as if a huge chainsaw had been swept across the city, between the first and second storeys, leaving the ragged edges open to the sky. Guard dogs were everywhere: ears clipped and barrel-chested, fit and bored, they’d kill you for something to do. A pall of fishmeal odour lay over the town, like a dirty coat on a tramp: filthy, familiar. It was a smell a brick would bounce off.

  ‘So,’ said Elaine, ‘are we stopping for some authentic seafood?’

  I didn’t think that needed an answer.

  The route back to the Sierra, up the Cañon del Pato, is not the shortest route, but it is one of the great scenic drives in all Peru. By running, with our backpacks, to the ticket office, and then to the bus, we might just make the next one, and save three hours. We arrived breathless at the Moreno bus company’s vehicle. It was a small coach, in even worse condition than the Cajabamba jalopy. When we took our seats, they were so close together that no person over five foot five could fit in without sitting askew. I am nearly six foot. Book for back surgery now. But we were moving on, more quickly than we could have hoped for, to Huaraz through the Cañon del Pato, Duck Canyon.

  Cañon del Pato

  The bus rattled round the block and stopped at a tyre-fitter for an hour. A tyre with little tread left, and a huge gouge out of it, was replaced by one totally bald. I reassured Elaine, ‘Think of them as racing slicks.’

  The V-shaped gorge began above the dust-blown truck stop of Chuquiscara where sedimentary rocks have been tilted up seventy or eighty degrees, then contorted by pressure. The road was often single track, punching holes in buttresses, weaving back and forth across the river, searching out scraps of flat land. At times, there was nowhere to go, and the road dived into a side valley and forged tight hairpins a thousand or two feet up before swooping down to the base of the canyon again. The silver-bouldered river ran clean and swift with curling waves, the banks devoid of vegetation. No ducks. The sun came bouncing down the slopes, funnelled by the gorge. We only escaped it in the short tunnels. Occasionally coaches came the other way, and the drivers stopped to ask anxiously about the road ahead.


  The scenery impressed by extremes: the tortured rock, the absolute bareness, the precariousness of our road, the blinding light, the ribbon of cloudless blue sky above, the height of the circling buzzards. They know someone will die here; if not today, tomorrow, or the day after.

  In motion, the temperature inside the coach was 95°F. When we stopped, the red line on my thermometer stretched upwards. Our insect bites exploded with irritation; my flesh felt pulpy. Elaine’s skin was a sheet of perspiration. We drank water constantly. Behind us, and far above, on the tips of the peaks above the canyon, fires burnt, as if even the earth could not tolerate the heat and was sweating fire and smoke. The locals just wiped their brows and pasted grins to their faces: no getting away from it.

  Down into the canyon again, creeping round a corner built out into space and held up by drivers’ prayers. Suddenly, in the heart of the furnace, there was a row of adobe cells, a mean hellhole of a village. All the men wore cheap football shirts. Their hair was thick, cut by knife in crude shocks. Women leant at the doors, only their faces in the light, hands shading eyes, searching our passing faces. Life here is not what happens in the day, in the thermal suspension when the body is immobilised by the mercury’s rise. It is snatched in short spaces, in midnight breezes, in the minutes of morning coolness, watching the stars dim and swallow themselves. The sun’s steel will pin the people to the earth for twelve more hours, while the river laughs below. ‘What do they do down here?’ I asked local passengers. ‘How do they make a living?’

  They shrugged. ‘They are the poorest of the poor.’

  At Huanallanca, highly armed sentries lolled outside a compound of comfortable bungalows set around a swimming pool and a basketball court. This is a small corner of North America for its residents, who run the Duke hydroelectric power station. A sign says Do Not Stop Here.

  We climbed over the watershed of the bus journey. To our left was the Cordillera Blanca, the White Range, always snow-capped. Over ten miles wide, and more than a hundred miles long, the Cordillera boasts fifty peaks over 18,700 feet high: the whole of North America has only three. In the centre of our view was the towering rock slab of Huascarán. At 22,200 feet, it is the highest peak in Peru and the highest in all the tropical regions of the world. We passed through the small town of Yungay, once flattened by a type of natural disaster that these mountains specialise in, called an aluvión. Powerful glaciers form moraines of rock debris which pond up lakes behind them. The moraines are massive but weak. An aluvión occurs when a lake bursts its dam and unleashes a flood of rocks, mud and water. But, in 1970, something even worse happened. A terrible earthquake, measuring 7.7 on the Richter scale, shook the region. Throughout Peru it killed 70,000. In Yungay, the survivors were picking themselves up from the earthquake, unaware that it had caused huge masses of rock and glacier to break off Huascarán. This avalanche burst a lake and created an aluvión which smashed the town flat. Where it had stood was a ten-foot deep sheet of mud. Only the tall palm boles in the main square survived to tell the pitiful survivors where they were. Nearly all the town’s 18,000 inhabitants died.