In the morning, I found the cat had crapped on top of my boot. I was wondering how to clean it when the dog ate it. I hired Nicolás and his white mare to guide me and Dapple across the valley to the Inca highway. For breakfast, I was given the only large trout. My protests that it should be shared were ignored. It was fried: delicious. I managed to give them money for their time and trouble, but only after they had looked anxiously at each other, uncomfortable at accepting cash for hospitality. As we were saddling up, Alejandro brought out a flagon-shaped jar about ten inches high. ‘We found it in the houses you visited yesterday.’
‘It doesn’t look Inca,’ I said.
‘It is,’ he insisted, but I wasn’t convinced. There was a motif showing a feline figure, probably a puma, standing on a recumbent moon: an image more typical of a coastal civilisation, where the tide-controlling moon is important. It might be a crescent-shaped reed boat, like those used on Titikaka. Either way, it was a motif I have never seen in any textbook. ‘Don’t sell it, except to a museum or university.’ Not likely, but I wanted them to understand they should get a good price. I mounted the horse; Nicolás walked. I turned to wave to the family, but they had already dispersed, to work or play. We forded the streams and small rivers that merged lower down to form the river that had boxed me in. I rode into the river and Nicolás leaped down and waited for Dapple to follow.
‘How long have you got?’ I grinned.
He coaxed, clucked, made soft shooing sounds. Dapple did his giant squid impersonation: all eyeballs and flailing limbs. I was glad he didn’t save it just for me. I rode the mare back to the bank and took Dapple’s rope. Alejandro gave him a shove on the backside and sent him sliding, kicking and panicking down into nine inches of water. Once ashore, Nicolás was masterful. He had brought a twenty-foot cane rod to go fishing, and he let Dapple loose in front, guiding him by holding the rod at the corner of his vision, blocking any turns.
Before he left, I said, ‘I would like to buy the horse, are you sure you do not want to sell?’
‘It’s the only horse I have.’
‘I’ll give you enough money to buy another.’ It was something I could ill afford, but the prospect of simply tying Dapple to a well-behaved animal was ravishing.
‘I can’t sell.’
I gave him his money for guiding me and a pack of fishhooks, the most practical thing I could spare. Alone again. The trail was narrow and well-worn, and Dapple followed it well. Like Nicolás, I let the rope fall and followed behind, encouraging, tapping a flank to steer. The ground rose to nearly fourteen thousand feet before the narrow pass arrived. For the last few yards the route crossed long grass and divided into several parallel paths, which I did not notice, as, tired from the climb, my eyes were on my feet. When I looked up, Dapple had taken a lower path. I stopped to wait for him to move on. He stopped too, trembled, shot around and galloped back down the hill. I chased. Within fifty yards, my lungs were empty, and he was disappearing over the brow of the hill with everything I needed to stay alive.
Night Walk
I had all but given up catching him, when he reached a bare bit of ground with several paths out. Needing to make a decision, he froze. I got right behind, out of his sight, and used the last wisps of oxygen in my body to run at the trailing rope and dive on it. It was five minutes before I could breathe well enough to get to my feet. Another five passed before I could speak. I pulled its eye to mine. ‘Why do you hate me?’ Had I had a machete, I would have made camp and had a three-day barbecue, and gone back to carrying the stuff myself. I vowed I would never let go of the rope again. We passed over the col into a new valley, one starker, more forbidding, than any that had gone before. The road fell only briefly before beginning a long ascent. It narrowed to a mere nick in the right-hand wall of the valley. I could see far ahead; the land was starkly beautiful, but bare and strangely uninviting. There wasn’t a house or human being in view. The further ahead I looked, towards the final, highest path, the darker it grew. About three hours’ walk away, the valley veered to the left, still rising, and the trail ran out of sight.
From noon till one, the cliffs above me killed any breeze. I slowly began to pick out children far above me, watching over sheep whose black wool was splashed with white. After months out of doors, my senses were heightened to a degree I had never known, discerning tiny divergences from the background. Two miles in front, a man moved his hand to his face: the only other man in the landscape. Far away and faint, soft thuds, like a shotgun.
By mid-afternoon I had made good progress. The Inca highway then dropped to a marshy valley floor, and I had to climb up above it. Some nightmare came from one of the many dark recesses of Dapple’s psyche. Trickles of water began to worry him. It took only one slight give in the turf for him to refuse to cross a rivulet no bigger than he could have made himself. We climbed sideways to where the trickle was four, rather than five, inches across, and he made it, leaping into the air as if it were a chasm. I heard more soft thuds, each a little closer.
False summits appeared, a few stray farms scratched a living, but, despite my greetings, no one came down to talk. The trail became a wide, grassy road, the original steps and edgings still intact here and there. Approaching four o’clock, I could see a broad col a mile ahead. I was within a few hundred yards of the highest point of the whole journey, the grassy road levelling out. I looked again. On top of the col, quite bizarrely, were blue marquees. There was a detonation. Rocks flew into the air. A team of men were building an electricity pylon. I had been hearing explosives blasting out the base. The marquees, surrounded by snow patches, were the sleeping and eating quarters for the workmen and their families. I tied Dapple up and went inside. ‘Any chance of a cup of tea?’
There were three women and their children. They squealed with amusement to see me. ‘Come inside and sit down,’ said the cook. On the curtain leading into the kitchen, she had painted two palm trees and the name of her field kitchen, A Taste of Paradise. The wind whistled under the marquee walls. Tea arrived.
‘Would you like soup?’
‘Heaven.’
An enormous hen chased a lamb with a bow of red wool tied to its ear. The cook returned with a bowl of spaghetti and potato soup, and a dish of rice, onions and lentils. I ate myself to a standstill, and still couldn’t finish it.
‘My husband is working on the pylon, we are from Ayacucho, in the south. It is a big city, lots of people, but very little work.’
‘How long have you been working on the line?’
‘Three months, I’ve had enough. They can build a pylon in three days, if the ground is good, so we are moving on all the time.’
‘I suppose you all have a few beers in the evening, and relax a little,’ I said, shamelessly angling for an invitation.
‘No, nothing like that, very quiet, really. They all have to go to work in the morning, and it’s dangerous work; you don’t want a hangover. Where are you staying tonight?’
‘Andahuaylas, if I can.’
‘Let me show you the trail.’ Ominously, she did not point at the nearby grassy col, which I had taken to be the head of the pass, but at a blade of rock high above us. A caravan of sprightly chestnut llamas were picking their way down between the boulders. I asked the drover, ‘Is this the trail to Yanahuanca?’ His brown finger traced the steep zigzags. Far from being at the summit, I had several hundred feet of tough climbing ahead.
The thought of this col had been haunting me ever since I had lost my clothes. The sun was dipping low, and even this brief pause to talk had left me cold. We came to a stream; the hard stony banks were to Dapple’s liking; he stooped to drink and ambled across. The air was very thin; I managed twenty steps at a time. There was ice in the hollows, and sheets of snow in the shade. Among rocks, Dapple was a strong and willing climber, and we progressed steadily, winding in and out of the sunshine. At the top was a rocky knoll, looking back down the valley. I tied Dapple by a patch of long grass, and walked through snow to
the top of the knoll.
I was the same altitude as the summit of the Matterhorn, and higher than any other land for maybe ten miles, overlooking the tops of the hills that usually commanded my walks. The brute size of the range dumbfounded me. To the left, crumpled ridges rose like long waves on a stone ocean, frozen in time. Under the slow eye of the aeons, the mountains are rising, buckling the rocks to their will. They lie comatose like monsters from another age, the tremor of each earthquake a fitful pulse. The waves of mountains went on and on, grey-green combers rippling away, disappearing from view but never ending. Pools and lakes shone all along the valley floor. Above the valley, the shark’s fin summits of the Waywash were still clearly visible, and more peaks, misty-vague, faded behind them. My sight and understanding, my vision in its widest sense, had been steadily heightened by immersion in this titanic landscape. I could almost feel the textures I saw on a sheet of rock, or the canopy of a lone tree, or the torn paper of its bark. Colours sang to me. I thought of the line from William Blake’s A Memorable Fancy: ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear as it is, infinite.’ My senses were cleansed. The sun fell behind the mountains, throwing star-rays. I shivered. Only the late hour and fear of cold could drag me away. The valleys filled with ink. I pocketed a piece of black shale encrusted with fossil seashells: mountains made of seabed.
A young man in a grey rollneck jersey and corduroy trousers was coming rapidly up the trail. ‘I am Walter, I am going to Huarautambo, it’s about three hours away on the road to Yanahuanca, why don’t you come with me?’
‘The donkey is very slow, and it will soon be dark, we will only hold you up.’
‘I will take the donkey.’
Normally I could not walk at night because I was unfamiliar with the trail. The rising moon was near the full. It was a unique opportunity for me.
‘Let’s go!’
His technique with Dapple was simple. He walked at the speed he usually went, and dragged Dapple along. ‘I’ve been working on the pylons since December: a trainee. In two weeks, the line will reach my home in Huarautambo, and I will finish. Where are you staying tonight?’
‘Andahuaylas, there’s shops there, I’ve heard.’
‘No, there’s nothing! Continue with me to Huarautambo, there are shops, beer, music and women! How long have you been travelling alone?’
‘Months.’
‘You need a woman!’
The hills on either side were turning deep moss green. The sky was almost perfectly clear. We were back on limestone; it was a rough trail to walk at speed, but we did. Night was with us, I lit my head-torch. We passed between ghostly white slabs, their edges softened by the moonlight. Andahuaylas came. Walter was right: it was two houses and a medical centre. Walter waved at a woman chasing her last sheep into a stone pen. Their peppercorn droppings lay scattered over the empty pasture. We reached the pathless bare bedrock of a limestone pavement. One expanse looked like polar pack ice. The moonlight alone lit our way.
Next came a scene of utter romance. We were at the top of a twisting stair. It descended into shadows holding blackness richer than coal. On either side, vertical limestone cliffs towered over us. Above, Jupiter shone like a headlamp. Dapple was so impressed he threw the packs loose. Walter insisted on retying it, on the principle that any Peruvian could do it better than any Gringo.
‘How much did you pay for the animal?’
‘300 soles.’
‘That’s expensive, round here you pay 200.’
Dapple walked thirty yards, and the packs swivelled right round under his belly.
‘We are slowing you up. Please go on. I will go to the bottom of the gorge and camp.’
He didn’t argue. The bright lights and gaudy women of Huarautambo were calling to an eighteen-year-old’s hormones. I sorted out the pack and continued down through the moonscape until the gorge began to open out. To the right, a stream ran through a meadow at the foot of a three-hundred-foot white cliff. There was no awkward wall or ditch for Dapple to cross over, just a grass ramp. He refused. The ramp had a little moonlight shadow on either side, convincing both his brain cells that I was leading him to his doom. I had been riding for five hours, walking for eight, and was one yard away from a campsite. The animal would not move. We had a little heart-to-heart chat, then I walked him round and spied a point where the wall was broken down. Dapple was preparing to dig in his hooves to stop me returning to the ramp, I turned in the other direction, he sprang away. While he was off balance, I threw him over the wall.
The pasture was poor; I gave him half the carrots I had brought for myself, and tied him to a boulder, out of sight of the road. Tired, but exhilarated by the moonlight walk, I pitched tent and ate the first things that fell from the food bag: tuna, onions and bread. Then I froze. I had heard a noise, close to the tent. A horse was cantering down the trail, there was a gunshot. I went outside, taking my stick. In the blue-white moonlight, I saw no movement, heard nothing more. The noise might have been carried down the gorge, from high above. I slipped back in the tent, laughing at myself going out with a stick to investigate gunfire.
In the morning, I would make Yanahuanca, and the end of my long-distance walking. Much of the remaining Camino Real was under asphalt; there would be little to be gained by hiking the route while buses en route to my destination showered me with dirt. Tomorrow, Dapple was for sale.
I woke before dawn. I had camped below a huge nose in the cliff, near the foot of its skirting scree. It looked as though the sun would not rise above the cliffs for several hours. The morning was cloudless, but bitterly cold. The river water hurt my hands, and they wouldn’t warm up. The limestone was cream and pale peach when first exposed, but weathered to extraordinary soft grey sculptures. One wall was fluted like organ pipes, another was a ship’s prow. The meadow was littered with more strangely shaped blocks of wormholed limestone. I walked behind the one where I had tethered Dapple. Dapple wasn’t there. I wandered through the great stones and wondered about the horseman I had heard the night before. Had he tried to steal Dapple and, faced with a boggle-eyed tantrum instead of a swift getaway, been reduced to shooting him? It was a nuisance rather than a disaster. I could carry most of what I had with me, and stash the rest out of sight and come back for it. I was separating items to leave when, high up on the mountain, a movement caught my eye. It was stationary and eating. It was Dapple. I took the remaining carrots and coaxed him down.
The walk down the valley was the most beautiful of all the morning walks. The stream was a dream of a perfect stream; fresh, sparkling, falling between outsized boulders into quiet pools where honeycomb ripples shimmered on the surface and sent nets of amber light dancing over boulders of orange, lemon and russet. The edges of the boulders were lost, each stone reduced to a pulsating core of colour. There were ledges over which the water fell in beaded curtains of light. Rocky chutes filled stone cauldrons. Dippers pulled out of their scooped flights to display: dark, wet feet on bright stone.
Both sides of the valley pinched together, leaving one natural notch through which the river shot into a high waterfall, thundering into a plunge-pool below. The Inca road wound steeply down the side, like a spiral staircase. A brief cataract section gave way to more quiet pools and suddenly I was right out of the gorge, in an open valley covered in thick, short turf. A rider chased a loose packhorse over a low Inca bridge. Below him, two girls finished washing their clothes and lay face down in the grass among the drying rosettes of skirts, brilliant white blouses and blue forks of denim.
The river split into braided channels which we had to cross and re-cross, with all the usual performance from Four-Legs. Walter’s home village of Huarautambo was big enough to have a village square, but only just. There wasn’t much behind three of its four façades, but a narrow gap in the other led to a field where a conference was being held, waist-deep in a trench. A tall man, aged thirty, climbed out. His wispy beard accentuated a delicate cast to his face and fr
ame. ‘I am Jaíme Rivero, from the University of San Marcos, in Lima.’
‘You’re out of breath.’
‘I only come to the Sierra for a few weeks at a time; I never really get acclimatised. Digging is such hard work.’ His voice was soft, and his speech well organised and precise. ‘It’s a rich site. You can see how the hill opposite is wreathed in walls of round stones. It was a small Wari town taken over by the Incas, commanding the route into the gorge. We are not conducting an excavation, but a study of limits, to identify the area of the site. There were some apartments, they are modest in size, but stonework of this quality is reserved for the Inca himself.’ He pointed to a huge block with water running over a subtle lip into a stone bath. ‘However,’ he continued, ‘Victor will show you something more,’ and he introduced me to a quiet man whose grey trilby shadowed his features. He bowed as he shook my hand. ‘Victor Hinostroza Crispín.’
We crossed a simple low bridge. ‘The top of the bridge sometimes gets washed away when we have storms, but the pillars are the original Inca ones, they don’t move. My home is there, below the old Wari walls.’
At the side of his house was a wrought-iron gate, leading up his garden to a head-high wall pierced by a single door, and capped by a massive stone lintel. On top lay human thighbones; on either side, skulls grinned indulgently at us, visitors who were, for our brief moment, alive. Victor caught my arm, ‘These skulls know the secrets of Death; we have yet to hear his cold lips whispering in our ear.’
Six feet below the level of his lawn were four Wari dwellings, curiously shaped, mixing one curved wall with three straight ones. ‘When I dug the garden, I was always finding things. The deeper I dug, the more I found; so I kept digging.’ He showed me a sculpture of a bird, and a block of stone with two rudely modelled faces, side by side. He had two fine querns, long recessed stone dishes to grind corn. From a cardboard box he produced a copper pin, a bone needle, a sea urchin and a stone axe. It was good to hold them in my hand, instead of peering at them through glass in a dimly-lit museum.
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