by Joe Kane
That was Quebrada Calomoroco, and there—the true source?—the Ccaccansa, flanked by two steep, bouldery walls that looked exceedingly difficult to climb or descend. I was glad that we had chosen to follow the easier Apacheta.
Behind me, a Quechua family had worked its way into our line, but I could not spot any place from which they might have come. Their dark, hunched figures kept quiet pace with us. Half an hour later, when I looked back again, they were gone.
Suddenly the sun came on so strong that within minutes my eyes stung and I was stripped to my undershirt. Pastor and José overtook me as I removed my clothing. For the next hour we hiked together.
“Where are you from?” Pastor asked in Spanish.
“The United States.”
“Miami?”
“California. San Francisco.”
“That is near Chicago.”
“No.” I was surprised. The Peruvian peasants I’d met knew Miami, New York, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas; that was the United States. But Chicago? “Not exactly,” I said. “I suppose it is if you are from Peru.”
“That is where I am from,” Pastor said. José nodded his head in vigorous agreement. “But Alkapohnay is from Chicago.”
“Alkapohnay?”
“With the pistol.” He made a shooting motion.
I said, “He has been dead a long time.”
“He was a great man.”
Our conversation lagged until we stumbled across what appeared to be a llama shank, picked clean to the bone, the hoof intact. During our hike we had spooked one herd of the domestic beasts, which are related to the vicuña. That and the mysterious Quechua family (it dimly occurred to me that they and the llamas were connected) were the only living creatures we had seen. Pastor suggested that a fox had eaten the llama, but I could not fathom any wild animal surviving in a land so barren.
Pastor said we should cross the little valley. Leading the burros, he and José waded into what the map said was now the Lloqueta River. It came to mid-calf. I threw my pack across and leapt to the far bank, a feat that winded me but drew applause from my fellow travelers. For a moment I reveled in the ridiculous notion that I had leapt the breadth of “the greatest of all rivers.”
Pastor said, “Media hora.”
“Fine,” I said, and figured on at least four.
Both men stuck close with me through the afternoon, chattering away in Quechua and switching to Spanish whenever I indicated a desire to converse. Unfortunately, that wasn’t often. We were still above fifteen thousand feet, and the hiking exhausted me. Black clouds built up behind and above us, overwhelming the hoodlum peaks. If the men back at the source weren’t moving quickly, they were in trouble. The sun broke through briefly, the temperature jumped twenty degrees, the sun departed. I erupted in fits of hacking that split my head.
“Look!” Pastor hissed.
He pointed to our left, to a slate-gray lake about half a mile long. On its far shore stood a low wall of blazing pink. Pastor shouted, and the wall flapped up from the earth: Andean flamingos, their unanticipated beauty hypnotic against the stark gray landscape.
Blue-white lightning flashed behind the birds, followed by a peal of thunder and a sudden dizzy squealing. An army of frantic rodents scurried in and out of the rock pile along the right side of the trail. They looked like a cross between a rabbit and a squirrel, with long fluffy tails. Pastor identified them as vizcacha (a relative of the chinchilla), and added, rubbing his stomach, that they were good eating.
Beyond the lake the valley opened to waves of rolling, snow-dusted hills. I asked Pastor how much farther we had to go. He hesitated, and we spoke at the same time:
“Media hora.”
He was lost. We were lost.
The day still held about an hour of light. We huffed up and down hill after hill. At the top of one I stopped to catch my breath. The effort was, as always, useless, but a mile distant I saw a tree, leafless and completely out of place. I hadn’t seen a tree in two days.
It was a weather vane, and beneath it the station, a dreary two-room affair manned by a single soldier, Roberto. His fortress held a small wooden table and a stone bench. Landscapes from a three-year-old calendar decorated one wall, along with a photo of Peru’s national soccer team. Hanging like a shrine on the biggest wall was a poster of Miss Inca Cola. Her blond hair and thin bikini made the hut seem even colder.
Roberto said no truck had arrived. I hustled outside to reconnoiter in the dying light. The hut stood on a hill directly above the point where the Challamayo River becomes the Hornillos. Below, a dirt track ran along the river, and a mile downstream I saw a dusky beige bulb that stood out only because it had launched itself into the one ribbon of contrasting color—the green Hornillos—that ran through the endlessly gray landscape, now fading to white with snow.
Condorito.
I waved and shouted, but the wind threw my pleas back in my face. Condorito turned downstream and drove away. My heart sank—though I had known Leon, Durrant, and Truran less than three weeks, I missed them.
I sat with Pastor and José and even the obliging Roberto, who brewed me a cup of tea and said I was welcome to stay for as long as I needed to. My loneliness paled by comparison to Roberto’s—he had been on duty at the shack for almost three months. His village was a six-day walk.
An hour later, like cavalry to the rescue, Condorito burst over the top of the hill, a wild-eyed Durrant at the wheel, Leon and Truran beside her. “Bloody useless maps!” she yelled out the window. We piled into the hut, lit our stoves, boiled water.
Minutes later a white mass blasted through the door: Chmielinski and Odendaal, covered with snow.
“Bottom of the hill,” Chmielinski sputtered. “The others.”
Durrant grabbed her medical kit and flashlight and followed him back out. Odendaal stayed in the hut.
“Got lost,” he said, warming his hands over a stove. His teeth chattered and his face was blue. “Zbyszek and Pierre split off from the rest of us. Defied my orders. We were to stick together at all costs.” Beneath his fatigue burned an intense anger. As night had fallen Bzdak and Van Heerden had spotted the fires of a small settlement off the trail. Realizing the team was lost, they had left the other hikers and gone to the lights, where they had found a man willing to guide the team to the weather station.
Freezing, hungry, and dehydrated, the rest of the crew now stumbled into the hut. We melted snow and boiled soup and searched in vain for camaraderie, each of us too tired to think beyond himself.
We pitched camp outside, in the snow. That night I couldn’t sleep. My breath came in gasps, and my tent and bag seemed to surround and squeeze me. I tore free of them and launched myself into the gelid night.
The moon, mother to the Inca nation, sister-wife to the sun-god Inti, had come full and scaled the blue-black sky. To the Quechua, in the months of late winter and early spring it is the moon, not the sun, that dominates life. I didn’t find it hard to understand why. The snow that lay on the rolling puna like a glossy skin reflected the moonlight so brightly that I felt I could see farther there, in the dead of night, than I had during the day.
Apu, in Quechua, means “lord”; the Apu Rimac was the Lord Oracle, or the Great Speaker. Considered the most powerful of the Inca oracles, he spoke through the river’s tremendous rapids. It is said that approaching the Apurimac on foot during the rainy season, one can hear the rapids from miles away.
It was the Apu Rimac who foretold the coming of the bearded white gods, the viracochas, who would take command of the Inca nation. So it seemed faintly ironic that on the day we were to set off in search of the oracle’s river, Tim Biggs gathered us—nine bearded men and one woman—and asked our permission to say a group prayer, that day and each Sunday thereafter. The Afrikaners and Leon agreed, and though the rest of us were noncommittal, Biggs bowed his head and, speaking loudly and with a slightly nervous stutter, delivered an invocation on all our behalfs.
Then, in the clear, cold
morning, we said thanks and good-bye to Pastor and José, who would return home with their burros. They seemed happy to have traveled with us, and displayed no residue of the venom that had accompanied our departure from Lari. I regretted not having gotten to know them better. Bzdak and the cameramen left, too. They would drive Condorito around the mountains and meet us downriver.
We waded the Hornillos, which was little more than a canal, and climbed to a ridge above it. A mild argument erupted. Odendaal and Biggs maintained that to claim to have “run” the entire river, they must follow its every inch, never losing sight of it. They wanted to walk low, right next to the water. Their argument contained an admirable purity, but also a disheartening literalness: It defined a river as separate from its watershed, from the land it drained, from its people and wildlife.
We split up. Odendaal, Biggs, and Truran hiked low, Chmielinski, Durrant, Leon, and I high. The absurdity of our disagreement struck home within an hour, when the trails converged. But we were ahead of the others by then. We would not meet again until late that night.
In fact, we saw almost no one. Once, we heard shrieks from behind a boulder, and rushed over to find two Quechua matrons sitting as serene and implacable as the rock itself. Only much later would we learn that their unsettling ululations had been Quechua song.
As we worked our way down the Hornillos, caught one moment in a blast of snow and the next in a burst of sun, the puna’s washed-out dun tones took on a green patina. Tiny cactus flowers dotted the minimalist landscape, their reds and yellows screaming against the treeless brown hills. Verdant Spanish moss vibrated along the banks. A squadron of Andean geese glided upriver, low to the water. We saw a trio of cormorants, a klatch of squeaking terns, some coots, and two tall, stalking waterfowl, black and white … “Brings babies,” Chmielinski said.
A horse and rider charged across the puna and reared up before us, blocking our path. The horse was huge—my head barely reached the bottom of its shoulder—and its bridle, inlaid with gold and silver, stood out regally against the scoured landscape. The rider wore a florid llama-wool poncho, a wide-brimmed sombrero, and a wool skull cap pulled down low over a Quechua face red as the volcanic soil. His cheeks bulged, and the wind had blown a green line of saliva and coca juice across his face.
But it was the man’s eyes that startled: Spanish eyes, as pale and distant a blue as the icefall at the source.
The ghost rider stared at us but said nothing. Finally he let fly with a shrill, manic laugh, as if we were the most absurd thing he had ever seen. Then he wheeled his heaving beast and barreled across the blank puna as urgently as the wind.
Two days below the weather station we met Condorito at La Angostura (“The Narrow Place”), where the Hornillos joins the Apurimac, and where the river first becomes deep enough to support kayaks. The last five miles of our trek traversed a broad alluvial plain flanked, like almost every part of the high plateaus, by menacing volcanic peaks. In my notes I had come to refer to these peaks as “The Enforcers.”
At the slim confluence Bzdak and I climbed a lava spire and saw, on the rock wall opposite us, chalk markings and hardware for a dam and reservoir that will be part of the far-flung Majes project. If the dam is built as scheduled, much of the country we had hiked over the preceding two days will be flooded behind the first, and only, dam on the entire 4,200 miles of river we hoped to follow to the sea.
“How long have you been coughing up blood?” Kate Durrant asked Pierre Van Heerden that night at La Angostura. We were in my tent.
“Two days,” he said. He took a long drag off his cigarette. “It’s spasms. Once I start I can’t stop.”
Tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap. Probing knuckles led a stethoscope across his back.
“It’s the altitude,” she said. “And the dry air. Smoking doesn’t help.”
“I know.” Inhale, exhale, smoke ring, hack. Van Heelden tilted his head back on my lap while Durrant worked the scope along his chest.
“Crackling on one side. We’ll try antibiotics.”
Van Heerden exploded in a fit of deep coughing that quickly built to spasmodic retching. Though he seemed to be suffering the most, we all had similar problems. A deep draft of the thin, cold, dry air, a puff of dust, and an invisible hand doubled one over, lungs burning, throat trying to rip itself out. Each night ferocious hacking erupted from the camp like death cries.
Loud voices and laughter drifted to us from the big South African tent nearby, into which the rest of the team had crowded to share the pisco the cameramen had found in the tiny mining town of Cailloma, a few miles up the Apurimac from the Hornillos confluence. Durrant packed up her gear and she and Van Heerden left to join the party. I stayed behind to work on my notes.
Or so I tried to tell myself. In truth, after nearly a month with this crew I still felt like an outsider. In a way, it was my role. They were the expedition, I the observer. But that role had been designed in a different world, a world from which I now felt completely removed, and in the lonely puna those lines seemed cruelly artificial.
Wind blasted the tent. My thermometer read five degrees Fahrenheit. I blew on my fingers and scratched a few more lines.
I heard scraping at my tent door, then, “We come to visit Château Joe,” and Bzdak and Durrant tumbled in. I lit a second candle and fluffed up the foot of my sleeping bag to make a seat. Bzdak offered a bottle of anisette.
The tent flap opened again, and Chmielinski ushered himself in. Bodies mushed together. Amid them flew stories of Poland and the Andes and London. The flap opened yet again (“Hey, mates!”) and Tim Biggs crawled in over the bodies. Then, “Hay fiesta?”—Leon shoved in from behind, and the stories took on a tropical hue.
We talked and drank and talked. Hours later, when the party finally broke up, my thermometer read a comfortable forty-five degrees. And I did not feel bad at all.
4 • The Upper Apurimac
Running roughly northwest through the heart of the Andes, the Apurimac is a river left to herself, the wild young issue of a wild young mountain range. She is not a civilized river. There are few villages on her banks, fewer bridges. Roads cross her four-hundred-mile course only eight times, and they are terrible crossings. At the top, during her first fifty miles, she wriggles gently through the high puna in a shallow red volcanic trench fringed with golden ichu. Over her next three hundred miles, however, she drops almost thirteen thousand vertical feet, a gradient five times that of the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. Before the Apurimac collapses, spent, into the Amazon basin, she carves a gorge that for miles at a time is more than ten thousand feet deep. It is one of the deepest river gorges on the planet; many believe that it is second only to her neighbor, the Colca. Down on her boulder-strewn floor, the Apurimac’s whole untethered act of simply running, of sheer velocity, overwhelms all other life. Since the 1950s a half dozen attempts have been made to kayak her. At least two people drowned, and no one succeeded in navigating her length.
It is understandable, then, that the Apurimac canyon has always been shrouded in mystery (parts of it remain among the least-known areas on the South American continent), and yet it holds profound historical and religious significance for the Quechua. According to a widely accepted version of the Inca creation myth, it was near the village of Paccaritambo, high on the canyon wall, that four brothers and their sister-wives crawled out of their caves and at the bidding of their father, the sun-god Inti, founded an empire in the neighboring valley of Cuzco.
The deep Apurimac protected this fledgling Inca state from the mighty Chanca nation to the west until the mid-fifteenth century, when the two nations clashed at Cuzco, and the Incas emerged victorious. The spanning of the Apurimac with four bridges woven entirely of hammered grass played a critical role in their subsequent, frenetic westward expansion. (When the Spanish conquistadores arrived a century later, they regarded these bridges—their cables, two hundred feet long and as thick as a man’s body, were capable of supporting entire armies of an
imals and men—as among the New World’s most awe-inspiring sights.)
In 1533 the Inca ordered the grass bridges burned to block the viracocha invasion from Lima, but the river was uncharacteristically low that year, and the white gods managed to ford it. They sacked Cuzco but failed to settle the inaccessible Apurimac, and in 1536 the canyon became a strategic flank for what would be the last Inca state, Vilcabamba.
Two centuries after the fall of Vilcabamba, the Apurimac village of Surimana spawned José Gabriel Tupac Amaru II, who in 1780 led the second rising of the Incas. Though his revolt failed, in terms of territory, participants, and bloodshed it dwarfed one taking place at roughly the same time in a tiny, recently declared nation far to the north.
And it was the Apurimac canyon that gave birth, exactly two hundred years later, to the Shining Path movement—the Sendero Luminoso—which would grow into one of the most ruthless and clandestine guerrilla organizations in modern South America.
I awoke to the river’s easy rush. Outside my tent the frozen droppings of burro and llama glistened in the dawn’s half-light. The night before, having found no other level ground, Bzdak, Leon, and I had pitched camp right on the trail, on a thin rock ledge etched into the gorge wall a few yards above the river. The three of us had become a team. The previous day, at La Angostura, Chmielinski, Truran, Biggs, and Odendaal had put their kayaks in the Apurimac, and the cameramen, Van der Merwe and Van Heerden, had conscripted Durrant as driver for Condorito and left the river. Bzdak and Leon had volunteered to walk with me, and in that desolate country we had trekked under the giddy intoxication of being alone, unobserved, in a place no one cared about.