The once splendid building opposite has magnificent wood and wrought-iron doors that tower fifteen feet high in poisonous dark blue. The building is a crude checkerboard of whatever paint was left standing in unattended lorries. Carlos Santana: ‘Samba Pa Ti’ pulls at the heart, his guitar builds wild Antonio Gaudí facades. Music lives in the passing vibrations in the air, these tremblings which ripple out from the lonely bar, over the dusty grey roofs, along the empty coast road, over the salt-tanged shore and quarrelling gulls, the glinting terns, flying over the cold waters of the Humboldt Current out into the blue void, quieter than the ear can sense, already the record of something past.
On the other side of the hotel there is an alley leading to a single wooden pier running out through the shallows looking for the deepwater Pacific. It is seven hundred yards long and appears to be growing longer as the sun falls. In the dark rooms above me, the emaciated General San Martín, his eyes glowing like a panther’s from opiates taken to control the pain of his rheumatism, plotted the fall of an overblown empire as showy and flimsy as these peeling façades. They landed here to free the slaves of the coastal cotton and sugar plantations and enlist them in their army of liberation. But the landowners had taken them all inland; there were to be no reinforcements. Soldiers who had waited too long and seen too much to sleep well sweated out strange foreign fevers in the arms of half-drunk mistresses tired of trying to put young men back together between the luminous, moonlit sheets. They watched in amorous sorrow as the men spilled rum from crystal glasses or dropped cigars from confused lips over the frail balconies to fall fizzing into the fountain.
Sometimes the past presses in close, tonight there is just a dark pane which holds it pinned back in the dusty cool of tall languid rooms. Memories like moths’ antennae press against the glass, driven forward blindly, destructively, by their soft wings’ insistent beat. You feel you could reach out and unfurl the memories and look at their tiny secrets, but like the feathery genius of the antennae, they would break and crumple to nothing, leaving faint grey blemishes on your fingertips.
I turn to look at the sun, growing larger to the eye as it falls nearer the earth. The Incas believed it actually fell into the ocean, consuming huge cataracts of water, then travelled beneath the earth to appear again in the east. The guitar solo is collapsing in gentle fragments. The low bank of cloud far out over the ocean is the rich grey of the back of an Inca tern and is pressing flat the lower lip of the sun’s disc. The sun is going to set exactly opposite the end of the pier, which is becoming a near-black silhouette of abandoned hoists, drunken stairways, flagpoles and davits. The long boards lead down the pier and out to sea, trodden smooth by the century’s feet, the planks begin to glow red in the seconds that remain. The sun is the pier’s vanishing point and if I throw down my things now, and go, arms open, suspended by these lumpen timbers above the ocean’s slow rollings, maybe, in this instant, I could cross over this bridge, and walk to the sun.
Sun lost in the sea.
Darkness.
Homecoming
It is impossible to come home and tell your friends what you have been doing for five months of your life. You carry the life with you like a secret, until there are times when a small part can come out in conversation. It was easier to bring Elaine up to date about the final two months, because she had seen some of this amazing country. She listened, turning the carved gourd from Cochas Grande over in her hands and finding Por Elaine, Mi Amor.
I began writing the week I got back. I was keen to write while recollection is fresh, and I finished the first section of the book swiftly. Ironically, my back, which had withstood so much walking and carrying, could not cope with sitting at a computer for ten hours a day. My lower spine began to come apart. Injections helped for a while, but the last one had no effect, and I had to ration my writing to keep the pain under control. I continued, wondering whether I would ever be able to make a journey like this again.
In the end, my lower back disintegrated, and I could not work at all. I lay spaced out on painkillers and dreamed of walking all day through the mountain spaces. Elaine toiled on her PhD, her completion date receding like an Andean skyline: three years, four years, nearly five. The date for the operation to rebuild the base of my spine was continually postponed because of National Health Service backlogs; I waited two years. By coincidence our two deadlines converged. In hospital, Elaine came to visit. Afterwards, the man in the opposite bed, knee replacement (in hospital, we become our deficiencies), said in a fine Cardiff accent, ‘Your missus doesn’t fuckin’ stay long, do she?’
I shifted in bed, creating electric pain. ‘She was awarded her PhD yesterday. She’s waited a long time for this. We both have.’ But while she had sat by the bed, she had never touched me. I went home and slowly bent the new, reconstructed back to take clean socks from my drawer. It was full of her things. So were the other drawers. All my things were in the spare room.
The same month she admitted she was dating another woman. She looked me in the face with hard eyes I had not seen before. ‘It’s your fault. You were never there for me. Those trips, they were just for you.’
Now my back is fine. Strong enough for anything.
Further Information
More pictures, a full bibliography and recommended reading all appear on my website: www.cloudroad.co.uk
Acknowledgements
This book has been greatly assisted by two grants, from the Arts Council of Wales and the Academy, the first to meet some of the expenses of the reconnaissance trip for the journey, and the second to buy me six months’ time, on my return from the main trip, to write it. During that time I was able to almost completely finish the first draft, while the events were fresh, avoiding the fatal distraction of undertaking unrelated work to pay bills. Special thanks for that to Tony Bianchi, Peter Finch and Lleuci Siencyn.
Nancy Watson was a steadfast friend in tough times, and a tireless terrier in tracking down material.
Much thanks also to: Charles and Pat Aithie, Shirley Cuba Aliaga, Margaret Anstee, Armando Lecaros de Cossío, Sixto Durán-Ballén, Peter Frost, Gloria Fuentes, Marilyn Godfrey, Mari Griffiths, John Hemming, Amanda Hopkinson, Jonah Jones, Máximo Kateri, Judy Lane, Jacqueline Mijicic, Jeanette Minns, James Moore, John Pilkington.
Celia Ansdell gave love and support during final editing, when I am least sane and reasonable.
Thanks also to Elaine, for the good years.
Sources
The following works were quoted from.
José de Acosta, Historia natural y moral de las Indias, Seville, 1590.
Walter Alva and Christopher B. Donnan, The Royal Tombs of Sipán, Fowler Museum of Cultural History, UCLA, 1993.
Cusco Weekly, 9 August 2002.
Réne Descartes, Philosophical Works, translated by Elizabeth Haldane and G. R. T. Ross, Cambridge University Press, 1911, I, p. 363, quoted in Stephen Greenblatt, Marvellous Possessions, The Wonder of the New World, Oxford University Press, 1988.
Carlos Fuentes, The Buried Mirror, Andre Deutsch, London, 1992.
Friedrich Hassaurek, Four Years Among Spanish-Americans (Later Four Years Among the Ecuadorians), Hurd and Houghton, New York, 1867.
John Hemming, The Conquest of the Incas, Macmillan, London, 1970.
Diary of Alexander von Humboldt, 5 June 1799, La Coruña, Spain, on corvette Pizarro, quoted in Alexander von Humboldt, Personal Narrative, historical introduction by Malcolm Nicolson, Penguin, 1995.
Alexander von Humboldt on Simón Bolívar, quoted in Robert Harvey, The Liberators, John Murray, 2000.
Is Peru Turning Protestant?, Pastor Luis Minaya Ballón, interviewed by Lucien Chauvin in The Peru Reader, edited by Orin Starn, Carlos Iván Degregori and Robin Kirk, Duke University Press, 1995.
Pedro de Cieza de León, The Incas, Orion Press, New York, 1961.
Gabriel García Márquez, El Coronel No Tiene Quien le Escriba, translated by John Harrison, Ediciones Orbis, Buenos Aires, 1982.
John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I, lines 648–9.
Cristóbal de Molina of Santiago, Relación de muchas cosas acaesidas en el Perú … en la conquista y población destos reinos, c.1553.
Felipe Huaman Poma de Ayala, Letter to a King, Written 1567–1615, Published 1936, this edition 1978.
Pedro Sanchez, Relacion etc., 1543, translated by P. A. Means, New York, 1917, and quoted in John Hemming, The Conquest of the Incas.
Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes, T. Nelson and Sons, 1879.
Edward Whymper, Travels Amongst the Great Andes, introduction by F. S. Smythe, John Lehmann, London, 1949.
Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Longmans Green and Co., London, 1927.
Agustin Zárate, The Discovery and Conquest of Peru, Penguin.
The Quechua Language
Quechua varies throughout the route I followed, and spelling conventions have changed in recent years. There is a Cuzco Quechua, the equivalent of Oxford English, but I met few who spoke it. I have usually followed local spelling unless I had reason not to. Quechua scholars will no doubt discover errors and inconsistencies. Let me apologise to them now, and invite corrections, via the website.
Further travel writing by
John Harrison
Footprints: Lost Stories in the Discovery of Antarctica
Epub ISBN 9781908946218
Kindle ISBN 9781908946225
Where The Earth Ends
Epub ISBN 9781908946126
Kindle ISBN 9781908946133
‘Slowly in my life, I have learned that I was born to be a
wanderer. It has simply taken time to lose the fear, and do it.’
From Cloud Road
www.parthianbooks.com
About the Author
John Harrison’s award-winning travel writing with Cloud Road and Where the Earth Ends has featured journeys in South America and Antarctica. He has won the Alexander Cordell Prize twice and the 2011 Wales Book of the Year. His book Forgotten Footprints is the untold story of the unknown sailors, sealers and eccentrics who really discovered Antarctica. His next project is 1519: A Journey to the End of Time, following overland the route of the Cortés expedition which destroyed the Aztecs. When not guiding and driving powerboats in polar regions, or travelling for his own interests, he lives in London.
Copyright
First published in 2010
by Parthian
The Old Surgery
Napier Street
Cardigan
SA43 1ED
www.parthianbooks.co.uk
This ebook edition first published in 2012.
All rights Reserved
© John Harrison 2010
Cover design by www.theundercard.co.uk
Cover photo by R. E. Brennan
Typeset by [email protected]
The right of John Harrison to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
ISBN 978–1–908946–15–7
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Epigraph
Dedication
Table of Contents
1. Walking the Forgotten Country: The Equator to Ingapirca
2. To Kill a King: Ingapirca to Cajamarca
3. The Land of the Lost: Cajamarca to Cuzco
4. Sacred Valley: Cuzco to Pisco
Further Information
Further travel writing by John Harrison
About the Author
Copyright
Cloud Road Page 34