Cloud Road

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Cloud Road Page 24

by John Harrison


  The Inca road once crossed the marsh on a causeway, but no one knows where. My trail expired in the yard of a house, where a friendly old woman, with teeth like a broken xylophone, sat smoking a pig’s head over a wood fire. ‘Your only path is down this side of the valley, and then, a la vueltita,’ a phrase which in ordinary Spanish means something like, ‘do a little return’. After crossing a mile of dry meadow, I was trapped in the confluence between two rivers. One ran swiftly through vertical turf banks, impossible to cross. The other was forded by stepping stones useful only for two-footed animals: I couldn’t blame Dapple for refusing to have anything to do with them. For an hour, I thought I would be forced into a major detour, but I finally found a gravel shoal that frightened neither of us.

  I was still pinned to the wrong side of the valley by the marsh. Worse, I could not see an Inca road on the far side. A month later I found out that the expression a la vueltita is used by country people to mean ‘on the other side’. But I soon worked out for myself that there was a mountain between me and the true route. As long as my valley bore left, I would be able to return to the Inca road in five miles or so, when both routes descended to the Taparaco valley. We toiled up a long gravel road and up onto a plateau. We had already walked one of our longer days, about sixteen miles, and were both tired. It was twelve more miles before I reached Antacolpa, perched on a terrace high above the River Taparaco.

  Antacolpa had been a hamlet, but a nearby mine brought in labourers who were expanding it into a mining village overlooking an absurdly large square. Miners were coming in at the end of the day’s work to buy liquor. I bought some too, and bags of fresh fruit, the first I had seen for days. I camped on a lick of land in the bend of a pretty stream, well out of sight of the village. There was long grass for Dapple, and I fried my remaining boiled potatoes with onions and tomatoes, and tipped a tin of tuna into it. It was delicious and I ate enough for two, knowing how much I needed it.

  The morning was cool and bright. I nearly got away without being bothered, but a man from the hut above came up at the last minute and insisted on helping load the last few things.

  I walked down the valley, until forced to choose between following the stream into a dark knife-cut in the hill, or climbing the hill and looking down into the Taparaco valley. It turned out that no matter which I had chosen, the day was going to go wrong, and get worse. Near the top of the hill was a lone hut where a grandfather was minding four tiny grandchildren. ‘There’s no bridge over the river, none for miles.’

  ‘Can I descend through the canyon?’

  ‘Impossible!’

  Across the valley I could see the Inca trail rising like a swallow, tantalising me. The river was hidden below. ‘How do I get to the Inca trail?’

  ‘Go to Lauricocha.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of it.’

  ‘There is a large lake. Below it the river is small; you can cross the valley safely.’

  I looked at the map. The Inca highway went east of south, Lauricocha was west of south. ‘There’s no other way?’

  He shook his head.

  I didn’t quite believe him, so I walked on, beneath new electricity pylons, towards the next hamlet of Patahuasín, climbing down, then up, a steep side-valley on the way. There was a strange noise in the air, a thin, dry squeal. Dapple grew nervous, though that was never an infallible sign of danger. When I led, he pulled me back. When I followed, he ran amok, heading in random darts, throwing the luggage about. The sound came from the air above. I saw the wires on the pylons moving. Looking ahead, I saw they sagged to the ground. They were hanging the wires of a new powerline, and the wheels on the arms of the pylons squealed as they turned.

  When we were clear of the eerie noise, Dapple began another tantrum, trying to run back the way we had come. I turned round to check the luggage, and ensure it was comfortably loaded. The canoe bag, attached by two triple-pronged clips, which I found hard to undo when actually trying, was gone. It could have been kicked off during one of Dapple’s tantrums, or detached by someone while my attention was distracted: the uninvited helper with my packing, or the kindly grandfather. If it was the former, there was no point going back, it would be long hidden. I checked everything else was secure, and retraced my steps. Now that I wanted to go back, Dapple wanted to continue. I could not help thinking of the animal as malicious, and told it so, in a special screaming voice. It took over an hour to make a fruitless return to the grandfather, and find his hut empty.

  Two days’ march ahead of me lay the highest and most exposed pass in the whole trip, a snow-draped ridge over sixteen thousand feet high. I had no fleece, if it rained I would get soaked from the waist down and I wished I had bought that poncho.

  In all, over two hours were wasted. In Patahuasín, a skinny old lady in a flowerpot hat, with one yellow peg left of her teeth, greeted me. ‘You want to cross the river? Come with me.’ She took me across a superb limestone pavement until we stood on the edge of a thousand-foot cliff, looking down to the winding turquoise waters of the river, and across to the Inca highway. It was one of the greatest vistas I have ever seen, wild, unspoiled and colossal. ‘You can cross there. Look! There are sheep crossing now.’

  My spirits rose: even Dapple might match a sheep in sheer courage. ‘Where?’ I could see no animals. She pointed impatiently. Suddenly my eyes adjusted to the huge scale: the horses on the bank were specks; the riders, mere commas on their backs.

  ‘The sheep aren’t wading the river, they are being carried on horses!’

  ‘Yes, but the water is only up to the horses’ bellies!’

  ‘My donkey thinks the morning dew is deep. He is afraid of condensation.’

  ‘Hmmph!’ she snorted. ‘That’s your lookout! Everyone else crosses there.’

  I gave up. ‘Which way to Lauricocha?’

  She gave very precise directions that would take me to a crossroads where I would go straight on. I climbed a long hill and met a single road running across me. I could only hope for a vehicle to flag down, and ask directions. To my astonishment, a truck appeared within ten minutes.

  ‘Lauricocha?’ They looked at each other, frowning. ‘We don’t know it. We are not from here, you see, we work on the electricity line.’

  I sighed; if it were easy, everyone would do it.

  ‘But,’ he continued, ‘there is a local man working on the next pylon.’ He pointed. So there was. All work stopped and they took lunch, and pointed out how I had to climb down six hundred feet, follow a canyon and go round a block of rock the size of Manhattan, and there was Lauricocha.

  ‘And can I cross the river there?’

  ‘No, but they can show you where, it’s too hard to describe, you’ll never find it.’

  I headed for the gully, which led down precipitously to the canyon.

  ‘Come back! One final thing!’

  ‘What is it?’

  He held up a camera, ‘Can we have our picture taken with you?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Half past three found me sweating my way across the airless canyon floor, through beautiful meadows where cream and coffee-coloured horses cropped the flowers. I had a glimpse of a large, well-appointed hacienda ahead, which I guessed was Lauricocha village. I might even sleep in a bed tonight. But when I walked round the two-thousand-foot fortress of rock the man had described, and passed a group of animal shelters, a barbed-wire fence blocked my route. A powerful young man dressed head-to-foot in black came running down the hill towards me. I was exhausted. I slipped the daypack from my shoulders and waited.

  Lauricocha

  The tall figure vaulted the fence with ease. He wore a blue jersey, elephant-cord trousers and wellington boots. I began my speech: ‘I am an English tourist walking the Inca highway to write a book. Today I have lost my warm clothes, or been robbed –’

  ‘I am Alejandro. You must stay in my house.’

  ‘Is it at the hacienda across the valley?’

  ‘No, it is here,�
� he pointed at the huts I had taken to be animal shelters. The brief dream of clean sheets faded.

  ‘That is very kind,’ I said.

  ‘Is it your donkey?’

  ‘Yes, I had to buy, because I am not going back to Huari.’

  ‘How much?’

  I didn’t want another lecture about paying over the odds. ‘400 soles,’ I lied cheerily.

  ‘That’s expensive; round here, you pay 300.’

  He lived there with his wife, four children, mother and bachelor brother Nicolás. His wife was away, with two of their children, visiting her parents, a day’s journey away.

  I described what had happened. He said, ‘Let me show you my plans.’ I thought it was an odd moment for him to share his future with a stranger, but he went into one of the huts and emerged with a plastic tube from which he coaxed two full colour maps published by the Instituto Geografico Militar. They were the colour originals of my photocopies.

  I traced with my finger. ‘This is the way I walked.’

  He got on his horse, ‘I will go and look for them.’ He was treating it very seriously; I reflected how important the loss of good clothing would be to them.

  I washed clothes in a stream, spread them on a wall and lay down out of the wind to write my diary. Once the sun fell below the hill, I needed my warm trousers and thermal underwear. I was already missing the fleece. I went into an outbuilding to change. Although newer than the stone hovel Alejandro’s mother was cooking in, it was used only for storage. The floor was dirty with the droppings of various animals. I could not stand up straight without butting my head against the ceiling. I was forced into a crouch that was just perfect for sending my back muscles into spasm. I pulled my clothes from a stuff-bag, and my flannel fell out and into a bucket of water. As I bent over in the gloom to retrieve it, I found gutted trout staring blandly back at me. I hopped around, trying not to put my shoeless foot into something exotic.

  The single door to the hovel was a tin sheet nailed to a crude wooden frame. There were no windows or chimney. To the left was a kitchen, a low mud oven fired with dried cow-dung. On the right was a sitting area, with a stone bench built into the wall, and covered with sheepskins. I sat down next to a heap of them and read by the light of my head-torch, the smoke stinging my eyes. After a while, the pile of sheepskins yawned, and a little rubber boot came out. I had nearly sat on the baby of the family, having a nap.

  When it grew dark, the mother lit a small, home-made kerosene lamp, which gave no more light than a candle. Alejandro returned, stamping his feet against the cold. ‘I went back to Patahuasín, and questioned the grandfather you spoke to. He said you still had the pack of clothes then. He described everything, including the canteens of water and fuel.’

  It was unnerving to know I was so closely observed, my goods tallied.

  ‘Tomorrow you can ride to Antacolpa with Nicolás, and he will ask there if anyone has found anything. If you go on your own, they will tell you nothing.’

  ‘I suppose it will do no good to tell the police?’

  He shook his head. ‘Everyone will clam up.’

  Alejandro’s father appeared; he’d been high in the hills. We ate potato soup and a bowl of potatoes, with no butter or salt. At eight o’clock, they prepared for bed. They owned the hut we were in, three well-thatched storage buildings and a fourth under construction, but they slept in two tiny, thatched shelters in the fields.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘There are many livestock thieves in this area. If they come, you can hear them much sooner, and act much more quickly. If you don’t do it,’ he added, ‘you lose animals.’ In such an incredibly remote place, they were too anxious about crime to sleep in their own beds. He carried the youngest, fast asleep, and still wrapped in a sheepskin, out into the star-scattered night. He brought in the cat to keep the mice from the food hung on nails in the walls. Nicolás and their father slept on the kitchen floor.

  I laid sheepskins on the floor and read, enjoying the isolation, the silence. The rough timbers of the roof had been pickled by the fire-smoke, and shone like bitumen. Stray straws hanging from the thatch had collected long blooms of soot like sprays of black millet; a goblin lair. My six a.m. morning alarm was Nicolás and his father going out, leaving the door open. A white mare was saddled for me. Nicolás strode ahead on foot. Although thirty years old, he walked with a stoop, like a bashful teenager. He had a self-deprecating smile, a receding chin and a mild manner. Sierra women would have him for breakfast.

  The horse coughed and laboured up the hill. It was worth losing the clothes just to ride at dawn across a landscape that had slumbered ten thousand years almost unchanged. We crossed a stream where ice had rimed dark grasses, bending them over the sparkling water. This was a steeper, more direct route than I had walked, over the top of the mountain. As we gained the crest, the sun lay just below the ridge, behind a hut where a twisted tree was silhouetted like a gale-punched thorn. A tethered horse waited, head bowed, while a man muffled to the eyes flung a blanket and saddle over his back. Their breath joined the morning mist, back-lit by the ascending furnace of the sun.

  Nicolás counselled me. ‘Keep out of the way when we reach Antacolpa. Let me do all the talking. If they talk at all, it will be to me, and they will not talk at first. We will have to talk of other things until we get round to the matter of losing your luggage.’

  We began at the campsite. In a house just above where I had camped lived an old lady. She was spooning liquid into the beaks of her hens.

  ‘It’s a distillation of garlic and onion. They have bronchial trouble, one has died already.’ While Nicolás went off, I sat against the wall of her house, watching her drive her sheep from fold to field. She boiled a kettle on a grass fire, over a couple of stones in the yard, and made me tea, and brought soup. ‘You should have stayed with me instead of sleeping out in the open. There are some very bad people round here,’ she said, nodding at the man across the gully, the man who had come to fuss with my pack.

  Nicolás chatted his way round the village but when he came back he said, ‘Nothing, no one knows anything.’

  ‘Do you believe them?’

  ‘The mine has brought many strangers to town.’

  We returned to Lauricocha. Nicolás said, ‘I think we may hear some news, once people start talking.’ He smiled that reticent smile. But I had already given up the clothes as lost. In the afternoon, we walked up to Lake Lauricocha. It was a large, long lake like a Scottish loch, with mountains rising from both shores. In the distance, its blue waters wound out of sight as the valley curved left. A soft wind brushed through the reed beds and brought the splash of wavelets to our ears. Nicolás held out his arm to the lake, as if introducing me to royalty, ‘Lauricocha!’ We fished for rainbow trout in the stream below, beginning at an ancient stone clapper bridge: a dozen stone piers bridged by single stone slabs. He said it was Inca, I didn’t doubt it. A llama train came over the valley floor and across the bridge, a small black sack strapped to each flank; their reflections dancing in the smooth pools beneath the bridge, their brisk step shaking the thick, brown wool of their coats.

  The fishing net was a skirt, its hem fringed with lead weights, and a strong cord attached to the centre. It weighed twenty-two pounds. He held the end of the cord in his left hand, and the centre of the net and two edge-weights in the other. When he cast it, he spun it gently, so it fell outspread. When he hauled it in, the weights closed, trapping any fish inside. It took twenty casts before he caught one tiny trout, which he threw back. He caught nineteen more, all but one of which I would have thrown back, but he kept them.

  On my first attempt to throw the net, I lost my balance, and nearly threw myself in after it. It took three attempts before I could throw it so it opened. It was very tiring; I caught nothing. After half a dozen more failures, I gave it one last chance, and brought up a kicking rainbow trout. The mottled silver flanks bore a glaze of faint lemon yellow, subtly tinted with grey ovals, like bubbl
e trails.

  ‘We’ll go back a different way, I want to show you something special, a secret place.’ He took me around the opposite side of the great island of rock I had first seen from above. Hummocks rumpled the fields, hinting at something buried. Further on, low stone walls broke the turf, until, in the centre of the site, we could see we walked among ruined houses. They were very small, and curiously laid out. They were semi-detached, single-room dwellings, each with a structure like a fireplace; under one was a concealed underground storage area, big enough to hide people in times of trouble.

  ‘No one has investigated these,’ said Nicolás. ‘It’s older than the Incas, much older.’ The area’s history is truly long and obscure. In 1958 an archaeologist called Cardich found animal bones, particularly deer and guanaco, jointed and gnawed, in profusion on the floor of a cave in Lauricocha. Some bones were charred, and the first layers revealed slender leaf-shaped arrow heads going back five thousand years. Below them the stone points were larger and rounder: spearheads. The spear is a more primitive weapon for hunting by stealth. Archers can draw a bow inch by inch, from a kneeling position, and release the arrow by a minute movement of the fingers. At some point, a spear-thrower has to rise, and make a violent movement. These spear heads were from remote antiquity. At the base of the deposits, from 8,000 to 9,500 thousand years ago, is a still darker time, when the animal remains were uncooked. Mankind has lived in Lauricocha for much of the time that humans have occupied the Americas.

  Alejandro’s wife was back, a beautiful woman, dressed in her best clothes, and plainly suspicious about me. I guessed her family was better off than her husband’s and coming home and seeing a stranger in her modest home grated. I think one of the first things I said to her was, ‘I’ll be leaving tomorrow.’

 

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