Cloud Road

by John Harrison

  I fell out of the bus as my back had stuck in an interesting helix shape. Elaine pulled our luggage and pretended not to be with me until I could at least stand up enough for my knuckles to clear the ground. On the roof of our hostel, the Residencial Los Jardines, we could look one way to watch the sun spread a strawberry light on thirteen snow-capped peaks running away down the Cordillera Blanca. In the other direction, a full moon rose over the town. Fires clearing dead vegetation prickled the darkness on far-off hills. On the other side of the Cordillera was an extraordinary place. Just reading about it had sent shivers down my spine. Older than the Incas, older than the Moche, ancient before any of them were thought of, built into the rock of the Andes themselves, was the fabulous temple of Chavín de Huantar, where kings kneeled to hear the oracle roar from the heart of the forbidden chamber. Their culture, and the cultures it influenced, shaped Andean beliefs for one and a half millennia. Although it is one of the most important of all archaeological sites in the Andes, it is hidden in a remote valley in the high cordillera, and is seldom visited. Could we get there? We spread the maps on our knees and plotted.

  Huaraz

  The man in front of me in the bank queue wore a brilliant green scarf. After a minute, the scarf got up, turned around and lay the other way. It was an iguana. Just outside Huaraz, at a site called Wilkawaín, was a ruin from another early culture: the Wari. It dates from AD 1100, and is believed to be a small model of part of the temple complex at Chavín. The bus driver set us down above a small field where a freshly killed pig was laid out over charred stones and a low brushwood fire. The two married couples working on it beckoned us down. ‘Before gutting it, we burn off the hair, that is what we are doing now,’ said Ladislao. He nodded to his wife, who slowly poured water over the skin. He gave it a minute, and began rasping a small scraping knife across the shoulders, making smooth cream patches on the burnt skin as he went. The sow’s nose, always so supple before, feeling for roots and tubers, was burnt stiff and black. A docked brown puppy pulled at it, and burnt its mouth. At the top of the field, the pig’s brother and sister lay full length, their heads face down on their trotters. We hired a shy guide whose father had come here twenty years before to work as a labourer on the dig. Wilkawaín was a squat, heavy, stone rectangle with entrances at ground level and, via external stairs, above. Human bones of all social classes were found scattered in it. It is incredibly strong. In the 1970 earthquake, when Huaraz was flattened, Wilkawaín suffered only one cracked stone lintel, and a minor ceiling collapse.

  Waiting for the bus back we met Marco Barreicochea, and his wife Marcela, both in their fifties, he a teacher, she a nurse. Elaine said, ‘You must have been here in the 1970 earthquake.’

  ‘The thirty-first of May at thirty-five minutes past three in the afternoon,’ Marco said, without pausing for thought. ‘In forty-eight seconds, our lives and our town changed forever. All the old houses were adobe, just one or two storeys, with thatched or tile roofs. Their balconies practically touched across the street: they said if you wanted an affair with your neighbour you could kiss without ever leaving the house! The narrow streets made it more dangerous because you couldn’t escape falling masonry and roof tiles. When the tremors began, many ran into the church; it collapsed, killing nearly everyone.’ He had a face like a boat skipper, grizzled, tanned, clear-eyed; but his eyes began to darken with memory.

  ‘Were you at home?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, we had small children. We ran out into the courtyard at the back, and our house collapsed behind us.’

  ‘How did it feel standing there, trapped in the courtyard?’

  Marcela was very dark-skinned, with wavy dark-brown hair, neatly cut just above her collar in a western style. ‘I was waiting to die. Only ten per cent of the city was left standing. In the centre, most people rushed into the narrow streets where balconies, roofs and walls fell on them. We lost close family, and some friends, but all our children survived, thank God. When we knew it had stopped, we all went up to the hospital where I worked, because it was a modern building, with a steel frame. It was hardly touched.

  ‘It was an earthquake like we had never imagined; the epicentre was here, right beneath us. I worked through the night. More than the injuries themselves, I remember the corpses being brought in. I never thought to see the townspeople laid out in their hundreds and thousands. There was nothing we could do, no space, but people kept bringing in the bodies, not knowing where else to take them. No one wanted to stay in the town. They fled to the country and sought out friends and family, or just camped. This all happened on a Sunday; by Monday, help began to arrive. The Russians were the first; they flew over a complete military field hospital. They sent all their staff over in one plane, and it crashed, killing everyone. The Cubans sent their best clothes and shoes. We had a military government at the time, and we thought that the distribution of aid would be organised and efficient. It was, but none of it came here. In twenty-four hours it was on sale in the black market, in Lima. It was easy to identify; it was the only decent stuff available.’

  Marco took up the story. ‘A year later the city centre was little changed from the day it happened. Some had got used to the countryside, others went down to the coast, there was still lots of fishing in Chimbote. No one could face moving back in.’

  Chavín

  The Chavín Express bus emerged from the depot like a barnacle with agoraphobia. We rumbled south alongside the cordillera to the village of Catac, then turned straight towards the mountains and began to climb. The wind chased white horses across Lake Querecocha, rippling its indigo waters below the triangular snowy peaks of Yanamarey and Pucaraju. A tunnel leads through the headwall of the valley and into the Mosna River system in which Chavín nestles. A drop of rain falling behind us would cross the desert and reach the Pacific, fifty miles away. A drop falling in front would pass through tropical forests and into the Amazon and journey over four thousand miles to the Atlantic. It took fifteen miles to descend to the base of the valley, through a Sierra wilder and more remote than I had seen before. Icicles lanced the shadows. Guinea pigs and chickens ran in and out of Stone Age thatched huts. Small children stared up, white eyes in dirty copper-red faces. I couldn’t imagine what it was like to live that life. Later, when I was alone, and things went wrong for me, I would find out.

  Dusk fell as the bus shuddered into Chavín, now no more than a village lying in the shadow of the ancient temples. At the bottom of a narrow broken street was a small square and the massive carriage doorway of the Colonial Inca Hostal. We fell into clean sheets, slept hard and rose early. In the faint morning mist an old woman, bent horizontal under a shawl-load of dew-laden meadow grass, carried breakfast to her pony. It waited, still and round-shouldered, snorting cloudlets into the chill air. Chavín de Huantar sits where the waters of the rivers Mosna and Wacheqsa tumble down from the sacred mountain of Huantsán and mingle beneath a huge sugar loaf of rock. The coast is six days’ walk to the west, the jungle is six to the east. The father of Peruvian archaeology, Julio Tello, discovered this crossroads on the roof of the ancient world. His own history was as amazing as the mysteries he unearthed. He was a pure-blooded Indian from the tiny village of Huarochirí, where each year they re-enacted the murder of Atahualpa. Tello was the tenth of thirteen children, brought up to believe he was a direct descendant of a deity who lived in the snows of the majestic peak of Paria Kaka.

  One day his father, the mayor, received a request to pack up some skulls found in the area, and send them to Lima. He showed little Julio where ancient surgeons had drilled small holes in the skulls to relieve pressure on the brain. Seeing something precocious in him, his father sold silver heirlooms to pay to send him to school in Lima. Soon after, his father died, and Julio was alone in the capital. He was twelve years old, but he wouldn’t abandon his education. He sold newspapers, and portered at the railway station. One of the men whose bags he carried was Ricardo Palma, director of the National Library. When he hear
d the boy was working to fund his education, he paid him to collect his mail from the Post Office each noon. ‘Many years later,’ Tello recalled, ‘I realized that he chose that hour so I would return at lunchtime, and always have something to eat.’ He became a library assistant. His salary was sufficient to finance him through university, where his thesis won him a scholarship to Harvard. He wrote it about the trepanned skulls that he had helped his father send to Lima.

  In 1919, the quietly spoken native of the highlands discovered this site at Chavín de Huantar, and gradually revealed it was of fundamental importance to Andean history. Around 1500 BC, it had developed a system of rituals, beliefs and designs; a theocracy which came to dominate the region. Pilgrims did not come empty-handed. Chavín exported culture, and imported obeisance and tribute. With the wealth, they built one of the greatest temples of the Americas.

  Tello realized Chavín was old; but before radiocarbon dating, he could not accurately determine the relative ages of his sites. He incorrectly championed Chavín as the cradle civilisation of the Andes. We now know that around 500 BC there was a huge El Niño event that destroyed the dominant coastal civilisations, and created a vacuum into which the Chavín steadily and peaceably expanded until 200 BC.

  We followed the route that pilgrims would have followed, as they arrived to petition the oracles. They might question disturbances in the expected order of things: What had caused that late frost, killing the young shoots? Did someone offend the gods by committing adultery?

  They would be directed to the back wall of the temple. Accustomed to a landscape in which the grandest structures were small low huts, they crept below a 150-yard long wall rising four storeys above them and studded with grotesque half-ton stone heads. A human face on the first tenon head would, on the second one, be subtly morphed: less human, more feline. On the next, the eyes bulged, the canine teeth became fangs and the nostrils streamed a mucous discharge caused by mescaline from the San Pedro cactus. At other times the priests took the more toxic seeds of vilca or epena, laden with tryptamine; and transformed themselves into jaguars. They leaped into that other world, where things on earth were decided, to communicate with celestial forces and negotiate with the supernatural.

  Pilgrims would gather in a large rectangular plaza, closed on three sides, with a sunken courtyard in the middle. Here they were embraced in the arms of a sacred U-shape that focused the natural forces of the heavens and earth, and maintained them in harmony, with the help of intercessions from the priests and the offerings of pilgrims. At night, they would see the Pleiades descend to set 13.5° north of west, exactly where the shining white granite from which the left side of the temple met the black limestone of the right-hand side. In Quechua, the star cluster is called Qolqa, or the granary, and their rising was associated with the planting of crops. If they appeared clear and bright, like a handful of seeds, the crop would be good. We know this from the witch-hunter, the scourge of idolatry, Francisco de Avila. His diligent records of investigations into heresies preserved the ancient religion forever. He recorded this detail in Huarochirí, the village that three and a half centuries later gave birth to Julio Tello. Perhaps this was all many of them were ever permitted to see: like being allowed into the nave of a cathedral, but not to approach the altar or seek communion. Nobles were granted more. After fasting, they could continue, and enter a much smaller circular sunken court with a frieze of jaguars running towards a central staircase. It led to the heart of the old temple, and to a chamber where not even kings might tread.

  We postponed the climax of seeing the Lanzón chamber to explore the underground engine that made its god so awe-inspiring. Half-hidden in the grass was a narrow flight of stairs leading under the ground. We squeezed into the constricted passage, our bodies blocking out all natural light. There was a labyrinth of neatly finished low stone tunnels; over half a mile of them have been found under the site. To our right, a drain entered three feet above the floor level of the main tunnel. Stone lips had been placed halfway up to break the force of the falling water. Once built, much of this network was locked inside solid masonry, and could never be accessed again to maintain it. But after two and a half thousand years of Andean storms, hardly any damage is to be seen. Elaine said, ‘Let’s hope it doesn’t rain,’ and although I knew the sky was cloudless, a shudder of claustrophobia passed through me. We followed the finest tunnel down a long, precise curve to our left. Wherever the gradient was steep, there were steps or vertical lips to disperse the water’s energy and protect the tunnel’s stone lining. We came to a junction with another main channel. A black beetle with ferocious claws scurried over the bluish clay floor. ‘I can’t breathe properly walking bent double,’ gasped Elaine.

  I nodded. ‘I’m being bitten by flies and gnats. Put out the lamps while we catch our breath.’

  Underground blackness is so deep you can almost reach out your fingers and clench it. Then, we heard something. We held our breath. It was something alive, moving very quietly. If it wasn’t for the darkness, and the absolute silence of the tunnels, I would not have heard it. A movement of air caressed my face, there was a faint commotion coming down the tunnel towards us. It passed between us and continued down the new tunnel. Another followed. We lit our torches at the same time. With a wingspan of six or seven inches, the bats could only just thread their way between us, and were passing close enough for us to feel the breeze on our faces. We followed them down to where a roof fall had blocked all but the top nine inches of the tunnel. They slid through effortlessly. We could not pass without getting filthy. Besides, I wasn’t sure what type of bats they were. In a few days, something would make me rather more nervous about our time down there. We made our way back, the junctions looking alarmingly unfamiliar coming the other way. I had an unpleasantly realistic vision of getting lost while rainwater rose up the walls. We reached fresh air with relief.

  The Lanzón chamber awaited. We passed the jaguar frieze and entered a rough doorway. Beyond a tight corner, a long narrow passage led into the gloom. Halfway along was a left turn into a defile so narrow my shoulders brushed both walls. Padlocked steel gates barred my way. Through their bars, I could see a white granite blade. It was in the centre of a cruciform chamber formed of two passageways. Like the princes and potentates, we were kept back, able only to squint at the mysteries which they would have viewed by the flickering light of rushes dipped in animal fat.

  The Director of Chavín was the archaeologist Juan B. Lopez Marchena, in his thirties, with a long jaw and a flowerpot hat. He had an office on site.

  ‘Are you digging at the moment?’

  He frowned very faintly, ‘¡Bueno! No, I do not have permission. It is a World Heritage Site, you must have a fully planned project outlining what you hope to do. But in any case there is no money to dig.’ ‘None from UNESCO?’

  ‘¡Bueno! In 1998, after heavy rains penetrated the site, they awarded us $200,000. We needed money desperately to prevent further damage, but most of that money stayed in Lima.’ He patted his back pocket. ‘We had just enough to put in those new wooden props and place plastic over the roof where it was letting in water. In time we will waterproof in the traditional way, with burnt clay.’

  We talked for some time, then I took a deep breath. I knew I was asking for a great privilege. ‘I have read so much about Chavín and the Lanzón, I would very much like to enter the chamber to see it properly.’ He pursed his lips. For once, he did not begin with ¡Bueno! It had been worth a try. ‘Celestino!’ He turned to us, ‘We cannot risk damage. It is unique, quite unique. Human sweat contains acids that attack the rock. We are so lucky that it has survived intact.’ A small shy man appeared. ‘Celestino is my assistant. Please show these visitors into the Lanzón chamber for ten minutes, they must not touch anything.’

  I grasped his hand and shook it vigorously. ‘Thank you! Thank you!’

  Chavín was Celestino’s life work. He unlocked the gates and we slid into the most sacred space of all. Th
e Lanzón, which means lance, in Spanish, is a slender stone blade fifteen feet high from floor to ceiling, piercing both, uniting heaven and earth, a conduit to the sacred. It is covered in a tracery of fine carving showing a single figure. Celestino had picked up his boss’s habits. ‘¡Bueno! We have found a small chamber above the Lanzón, where a man could be concealed to provide the voice of the oracle. You see this groove? He could pour blood into a hollow on the very top, and it would run down, so.’ In the air just above the stone, he traced the groove down to the fanged face of the deity. ‘All around us the walls are full of channels for water. In experiments, we have poured water through these channels. The chamber magnifies it, and the noise is like a huge crowd roaring. We just did it with a few hundred litres. We think they could divert river water through here. Imagine! A god who talks, roars and bleeds, it would have been terrifying!’