Vilcashuaman sits on a ledge commanding two great valleys. In Inca times, it had seven hundred households and palaces so magnificent that forty men were employed solely as gatekeepers. The main square has been modernised; a passable statue of an Inca in full regalia commands the centrepiece. It supposedly has 4,000 inhabitants, but if they had told me eight hundred, I would find it easier to believe. On the far side of the square stood the ruins of the temples of the sun and moon. The golden image of the sun that stood here was one of the most splendid in all Peru. The complex rises through four irregular terraces, the lowest of which is a retaining wall made from exquisitely fitted polygonal stones. On top of the terraces, tawdry and cheap, is the parish church of John the Baptist, a stone shed with a stick-on façade facing the plaza. If the Catholic Church had any sense of shame, it would tear it down.
Small children ran to me and asked if I had seen the monkey or the llama: faint carvings scattered around the site. They towed me around by my sleeve; it was a pleasant town to walk about, with sudden glimpses of terracing which used to surround the much greater Inca square. By one, an ancient woman reached up to pull scraps of grass for her donkeys. I could reach much lusher grass, and stopped to help. She spoke only Quechua and an imperfect palate gave her a severe speech impediment. She chatted away while I smiled and filled her red apron with green.
You learn degrees of poverty. Vilcashuaman was very poor. Most people wore clothes that were worn ragged at the cuffs. Holes in woollens were not darned, shoes were scuffed and split. Some men lounged against walls, sunning their bones, or moved firewood on thin donkeys; but many just stood and stared like cattle. There was nothing for them to do. A few soles would buy a bottle of oblivion. A drunken soldier tottered after me, his swollen face the colour of a freshly punched eye. His cracked baritone voice, honed with cigarettes and spirits, bellowed at me to stop and talk, kill some of his time; crush out a stub of his boredom.
I slipped into a grocery, and drank a beer at the counter with the forty-year-old man who owned it. He tried to keep his daughter’s pet parrot out of the sacks of grain.
‘There doesn’t seem to be much money here,’ I said.
‘There’s much more now than there used to be.’
‘What is it spent on?’
‘Well, they’ve renovated the square and put up the statue,’ he looked a little rueful, ‘that’s it.’
Next morning I rose in darkness, and walked along the bottom of the square. In a black alley was a cobbled yard, called Ima Sumaq, beautiful place. An old man in a poncho crouched, half asleep, at the foot of a gateway. I passed through it and up a steep stair to the top of the only step pyramid in Peru preserved intact. Fifty feet high, it is complete in almost every detail. The high stone steps were made slightly too large for mortals. On top, facing due east, was a plain double seat cut from a single slab of stone: the throne of the Lord Inca. It was once covered in gold, and decorated with precious stones, for Pachakuti Inca Yupanqui, who raised this temple about two generations before the conquest. He was a tall and round-faced man with a vile temper, who loved war, and was a glutton for food and drink. He personally added this area to the empire, besieging the locals who had fortified their position on this high, easily defended ledge, and had to be starved out. Cieza de León heard two conflicting traditions about their surrender: he either killed them all or spared them all.
Darkness was easing, cocks crowed, but the sun was not yet over the high hills to the east of the town. I could now see the breath of cattle in backyards, snorting the morning air. I waited, quite alone. I sat in the Inca’s cold seat and watched the rim of the hill begin to blur, and burn. More than 180,000 dawns have passed over this sacred seat. Soon, the sun god came. I closed my eyes and welcomed the heat.
Before returning to Ayacucho, I stopped at the village of Vischongo, just a few miles up the valley. There was a short street with a tiny square at one end, like a topiary maze. I needed a local guide to take me up the hillside above, to the mountainside of Titankayo’q. I drank lemonade outside a shop, sitting on furniture homemade from strong round poles pocked with teardrop markings. It wasn’t true wood; it came from Puya raimondii, one of the world’s oldest plants, and the world’s largest bromeliad, a group that includes pineapples. They carry the biggest flowering stalk of any plant on earth. The plant takes a hundred years to mature, before throwing a giant flowering spike over thirty feet high into the air, with 20,000 blooms on it. It lasts three months, surrounded by clouds of hummingbirds, then dies, its energy spent on one titanic flowering. It was discovered by the nineteenth-century Italian geographer and naturalist Antonio Raimondi, a man who famously highlighted the gap between Peru’s rich past and current poverty, calling Peruvians ‘beggars on golden stools’.
Eduardo, aged fourteen, and Francisco, twelve, agreed to take a rest from street football and show me the greatest forest of Puya raimondii in the world. We climbed to a hidden gulch called Cceullaccocha, and bore up it, following an irrigation channel perched high on its side. The air was heavy with insects, including some very large bees. After an hour Eduardo called out, ‘There!’ High on the other side of the valley, on a ridge eerily reminiscent of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, was a plant the size of a young palm, silhouetted against the sky. A single globe of sabre-like leaves burst from the top of a stumpy trunk.
It was early August, the height of the dry season. We had climbed three thousand feet, much of it in heat unrelieved by a breeze. Twenty minutes more, climbing a slope as steep as a ladder, brought us to the first seedling. It was the size of a football, and still to grow a trunk, but razorwire spines already covered the red and green leaves. Eduardo climbed ahead, but young Francisco and I were struggling with the effort and the altitude. Above us, we could now see groves of these strange plants with their elephant’s trunk boles, and sea-urchin crowns.
‘Do you want to go further?’ called Eduardo. ‘They don’t get any denser than this.’
Interesting though all the other facts about the plants might be, there was one reason I had climbed painfully up here to look at them. ‘I’d like to see one in flower,’ I said.
Eduardo sank me with a word: ‘September,’ he called, ‘they don’t begin flowering until September.’
I knew they flowered in waves, one plant triggering ripples of flowering and fruiting in the dry, open glades around it. But I did not know this was seasonal. If there were to be no flowers, I thought I might as well enjoy a real view of the forest. We were soon above the steep valley sides and emerging onto the gentler top slopes. Occasionally in Peru, it took no effort at all to imagine you were surveying an alien planet, and alien life. We were on a broad finger of high land linking up with many others. They were covered with the 200,000 specimens that survive here. Like date palms, the outer part of the plants’ trunks consists of the stumps of the fallen leaves, overlapping like fish scales. The insulation this provides is highly resistant to its main enemy: fire. But man has discovered the fibrous core is flammable. In a land with little timber, this unique reserve is being cropped for fuel.
Through this open forest came a noise I had never heard before. When the breeze was low, it was a whispering of desiccated tongues. When the wind swept down from the bleak bald mountaintops, the rustling of the hard, sharp fronds suddenly surrounded us; a long-dead army trying to unsheathe brittle swords.
Then Eduardo and I called out together, and pointed. ‘Flowers!’
Three of them. Despite the altitude, I swear I ran.
‘So early! They were not here last week, we came for a walk, there was nothing!’
The highest spike had reached ten feet, the flowers still tightly closed, but I had my sight of it. The emerging flower stalk was the colour of young whitebeam leaves. I looked around and saw the kind of view that I would soon be leaving behind, mile upon mile of mountains. The route down: reluctant feet.
The Great Speaker
From Ayacucho I made trips to the old Wari cap
ital, sprawling ruins on a bald hill, still only partly excavated. At its heart is a strange D-shaped temple, including a courtyard that may have been flooded. The original local Wari people formed a substantial local culture, but foundered, probably because of disastrous El Niño years.
A further bus ride brought me to the small village of Quinua. Late in 1824, superior Spanish forces were stalking the republican army led by Sucre, one of Bolívar’s ablest and most loyal generals. When he reached Quinua, Sucre was tired of running. On 9 December 1824, he turned his 5,800 patriot troops and a single cannon to face 9,300 Spaniards with eleven cannons, who had seized the hill above a small ledge on the valley-side, called Condorcunca: Worthy of the Condors. The Spanish army was under the direction of Viceroy La Serna himself, answerable only to the king. The Spanish battle plan was sound. Their infantry would attack the weakest patriot troops: the right flank. Then when Sucre moved troops from the centre to shore up the flank, the Spanish cavalry would charge the weakened centre.
In the centre of the patriot army Sucre’s youngest general, Córdoba, waited on horseback, in front of his infantry. The battle began as planned, until the Spanish cavalry, eager for glory, charged before Sucre’s transfer of troops to the flank was effected. Seeing the game, Sucre ordered his central men to remain, and his weak flank to fight to the death. In a breathtaking show of leadership, young Córdoba dismounted in front of his infantry, and killed his own horse, declaring ‘I want no means of escape from this battle. Advance to victory!’ The Spanish cavalry charge was not met by cowering, weakened infantry, but by a phalanx of men advancing on them, long lances ready to spear the horses. Those brave men marched through the heart of a cavalry charge, and came out the other side. In half an hour, they fought their way up the hill and seized the Spanish artillery. The battle fell to Sucre and decided the fate of Spanish America, giving unstoppable momentum to the liberators. An empire surrendered; independence was theirs.
The village of Quinua has gone back to sleep. In a bare room in a modest house on the pretty village square was a broad stone post on which the Spanish surrender was signed; it is dark with the grease of affectionate touches. I added mine. The South American liberators took their ideological inspiration from the European Enlightenment: from Montesquieu, Voltaire and above all Jean-Jacques Rousseau. They crudely tried to apply European solutions to emerging nations encompassing many races, tribes and cultures, each with its own history. Local bosses soon held great power. Many were thugs; when the parents of strongman Juan Facundo Quiroga refused him a loan, he set fire to them. Men like him wanted more power, not democracy and liberty. As for the Indians, there was nothing in the well-thumbed Enlightenment works sitting on the desks of the liberators to help them: Montesquieu, Hume and Bacon all denied Indians were human. Consequently, the first constitution prohibited them from learning to read and write, owning land or practising any profession with a title. Slavery was abolished briefly, but restored in fear that Peruvian industry could not sustain both profits and wages. For the ordinary Sierran, little changed in the century of liberation, or in the next.
After four and a half months’ travelling, I was only two days from my final destination, Cuzco, the sacred city. At 6 a.m. I stood in the dusty yard of Chankas Transportes, and watched a peerless blue sky become tinged with pink in the east. We were still in town when we stopped for clutch problems solved quickly with a hammer. Soon we pulled over to extract a bolt from a tyre as smooth as a billiard ball. As we left town, an old man at the roadside stared at the bus. When he saw me, he drew his finger across his throat.
We climbed on and on, above precipices which only reminded me of the smoothness of the tyres. The southern Sierra is rich in cactuses. Specimens of Opuntia floccosa looked like baby hedgehogs wrapped in cotton wool. Alpacas were more common, the least elegant of all the camelids of South America. A tourist asked me, ‘How do you tell llamas from alpacas?’ I suggested, ‘If it looks like a llama, it is a llama. If it looks like a man in a bad llama outfit, it’s an alpaca.’ In late afternoon, we climbed through the base of light alto-cumulus cloud, then out into the sunshine above it. The nearer mountains were green, the further peaks faded to a cool forget-me-not blue and, beyond them, perhaps thirty-five miles off, were glimpses of lone fortresses glowing delicate purple. Descending back through the cloud, we entered the night.
I spent a day in Andahuaylas just because the hotel was comfortable. There was nothing to do there so I re-read my notes of the chroniclers, and dreamed of Cuzco. Another dawn, another bus yard. The young driver arrived forty minutes late, hair uncombed: ‘Sorry, overslept!’ He pulled straight out. We climbed above a fertile valley where a woman stood in a green diamond of grass, a baby in the shawl on her back. Only her fingers moved, spinning brown wool. A man and a boy cleaned clods of earth from an irrigation channel. Dark wet adobe bricks lay drying, like hairy liquorice. I looked down on them all, the lid taken off their lives for a few moments, then, over the shoulder of the hill, the high brown plains.
The ride from Andahuaylas to Abancay took in such violent changes of altitude that many locals were vomiting. This could be the only place in the world where you risk deep vein thrombosis on a bus trip. At one stop, a mother and daughter ran breathless down a hill to flag down the driver. Grubby from fieldwork, they carried a foot-plough and a jug stoppered with the core of a maize cob. At the next stop, a young mother climbed aboard, in spotless traditional clothes, her baby wearing a white lace bonnet, and strapped into a modern western baby-carrier. We were passing from the old countryside to the new tourist dollars of Cuzco.
Around twenty miles from Abancay, we picked up the River Apurímac or Great Speaker. In an arid canyon, candelabras of saguaro cactus towered above the broken rocks. At the end of the dry season, the Great Speaker was whispering. In the section of canyon immediately above here stood the most famous bridge in all the Americas: the Bridge of San Luis Rey. It was famous for being a continuation of the original Inca suspension bridge, made of ropes woven from cactus fibres. First built around 1350, it spanned the greatest river crossing between Cuzco and Cajamarca. It was 148 feet long, and suspended 118 feet above roaring water confined so closely that a mountain storm could make the river rise forty feet in a night. In Inca times, there were two bridges side by side: one for the Inca himself, and another for the rest of humanity. The cables from which it was suspended were as thick as a man’s body, and renewed every two years. They hung from rock platforms built on the canyon walls, and accessible only by tunnels. On one side was one of the empire’s holiest shrines, and a famous oracle, containing idols coated with golden robes and human blood. When the Spanish closed in on the temple, the priestess threw herself into the waters as a sacrifice to the river demon. Its reputation as a wonder of the New World was so great that Hiram Bingham, the rediscoverer of Machu Picchu, said it was one of the main reasons he came to Peru.
But the most famous thing the bridge ever did was fall down. It collapsed without warning, one hot Friday noon, on 20 July 1714, hurling five people to their death. The disaster was witnessed, from the hill above, by Brother Juniper, a small red-haired Franciscan from northern Italy. In five minutes more, he would have stood on the bridge himself. This was an act of God, and five died: why those? He decided it was a laboratory in which God’s purpose could be examined. In Thornton Wilder’s great book on the collapse, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, he wrote: ‘It was high time for theology to take its place among the exact sciences. If there were any plan in the universe at all, if there were any pattern in a human life, surely it could be discovered mysteriously latent in those lives so suddenly cut off.’ Juniper wrote a large book chronicling the minute details of those five lives over six years, and concluded that in this act of God there was no sign of reward for merit, or punishment for sin. In fact, examining their lives and other deaths, it seemed the more virtuous were taken. The Inquisition read the book with great interest, and ordered it and Brother Juniper to be burned in Lima Squa
re, which they were.
Just after five o’clock, the word Cuzco appeared, painted on the brown wall of an adobe house. We crested the hill and the whole city lay below, filling the valley floor, the suburbs rising up the surrounding hills. The western side was already in shadow, and the side-valleys were rippled with shade, but the old town’s terracotta roofs and sun-mellowed stones gleamed in the warm light of the setting sun. Beautiful, ancient Cuzco is the only city in Peru I could live in.
August is the city’s busiest month. In five minutes I saw more tourists than I had seen in five months. When I had come here two years before on a reconnaissance trip to some key sites, I had felt a rough, frontier edge to Cuzco. Now well-groomed businessmen and women chattered into mobile phones.
The street traders were all of Indian blood. At night, they departed, leaving tourists to the city-centre shops with plate-glass windows, security grilles and alarms, where their culture is re-packaged and sold by invaders and immigrants; by people in western dress, who have holidays themselves, and understand.
I was short of cash and nearly out of credit. I found an old colonial hotel and shook my head at the seventy dollar-a-night prices. When they saw me move to leave, they took me to a row of budget rooms on the roof, letting for five dollars a night, and made a fuss of me throughout my ten-day stay. I headed straight for the Cross Keys bar with a balcony overlooking the Plaza de Armas, and ordered two pisco sours. You can taste the brandy, lemon and sugar, and see the crushed ice, but the ingredient you don’t guess, which makes it work, is raw egg white. I picked up one pisco, chinked the other glass: ‘Elaine!’ I stole the idea from Raymond Chandler. I wished above anything that she could be back with me where we had sat two years before, prospecting this trip, sipping piscos, to look out over the Plaza de Armas, which, by night, is the best of all Peruvian squares. The Cathedral and two other great churches, El Triunfo and La Compañia, are floodlit; the remaining sides are filled by colonial buildings with balconies, which make handsome and convivial bars and restaurants. Car horns are banned, the fountain in the centre of the gardens dances and you congratulate yourself for simply being here. Elaine knew how much this had meant to me and had tramped long miles to be with me. She knew it mattered more than I could say, except, perhaps, in this book. It mattered more than I myself had realised, to put my romance for her on hold and live the romance of the journey, put myself on the line and push my body to the limits of pain and endurance. Something she did not feel the need to do. I drank the second pisco. Elaine was a long journey away.
Cloud Road Page 29