Cloud Road (26 page)

We tipped hats, they rode away.

I did as he said. Dapple crossed without much fuss, and then, when he got to the other side, ran off sideways and had to be cornered and chased down, and the luggage resecured.

‘Next time, horses,’ I said.

‘What next time?’ said Elaine.

The river went through a small canyon where ducks rode the rapids. The road became a narrow causeway before emerging onto a high bare plain. We suffered the usual fun of driving Dapple across a plain with no path, while dogs ran half a mile downhill from tiny huts to snarl and foam and snap at Dapple’s heels. The dogs’ owners stood watching like scarecrows. With relief, we reached another pretty canyon where ibises’ surgical beaks delved the soft banks, and a heron frowned into the still pools. We came into a hamlet of half a dozen houses and a schoolhouse. When the teacher heard we had been unable to cook, he set us down on the grass, unloaded the donkey, then brought us half a bucket of hot potatoes
boiled in the skins, with chillies and a tin of tuna. As we ate, surrounded by all six children from the school, we found out this was taken from the school’s own supplies. They would accept nothing in return, except us telling them about life in the city, and giving them biscuits. I took out my notebook and they gave me the local names for some flowers and birds I had sketched. He retied the bags for me, untying the woollen cinch from the loose ring. ‘You don’t need this knot!’ He pulled the loose ring six feet in, and folded the spare length over itself three times, and laid it across the bags. He passed the rest under its belly and tied it off. It was so neat. He patted it, ‘Nothing will shift that!’

‘Thank you for your food and your help.’

‘That’s okay, we get lots of tourists here now.’

‘Really?’

‘Two Spanish last year, two Frenchmen the year before. They stayed in the schoolhouse, you’re sure you don’t want to?’

‘We have to get on.’ I got to my feet. We were filthy, mud splashed to our knees, we smelled of donkey and sweat. Without thinking, I said, ‘I am looking forward to getting to La Union and cleaning up.’ He looked himself up and down: he was dirtier. He slapped me on the back, laughing. ‘You’re fine, real country people!’

Poverty can make simple things very difficult, like keeping yourself clean. I began the trip thinking people were grubby in their persons and their clothes. I soon wondered how they stayed so clean. As the house is dark and has little furniture, you spend the day outdoors unless it is raining. The children play in dirt or mud. You handle animals much of the day and pick up the grease from their
wool, the sweat from your horse. Your handshake tells the other person what animals you own. In the morning and evening the temperature at altitude is close to zero, and you can only warm water on the fire, filling the house with smoke, and your clothes stink of whatever you are burning, which includes dried animal dung. Dirt is ground in, and cold water doesn’t shift it unless you scrub long and hard, and even then you cannot get it out from under your nails. On warm days you can bathe in the river, but it is icy. I found I could keep little cleaner than the locals. Carrying just one change of clothing, I wore clothes until they were filthy, or until it rained and freshened them up. When I checked into hostels in the small towns, the first thing I did was hand-wash my clothes to get my hands properly clean.

The children watched us walk away across the green space where the road became the village square, and back to the trail. The last little boy to leave us looked like a Tibetan; his smock stitched together from dozens of different rags, his cheeks, cracked red marble. His eyes were unreadable.

The next village was larger: twenty houses. We entered the only shop, ducking low under the door, into total blackness. A tiny crone emerged out of the inky gloom behind the counter. She tapered from broad skirts to a conical hat. Behind her was a huge silver ghetto blaster. When she saw me looking at it she switched it on, very loud. Now I couldn’t hear either. We lit our torches, and gleaned stray items of food and drink from her meagre stocks. A short distance below the village was a grassy ledge, between two abandoned houses reduced to the stumps of their walls, like the stubborn teeth of old ewes.
Elaine put Dapple inside one. I pitched the tent and sat just inside the door, drinking wine and watching the changes in the sky. It was our last night together in the tent; time thieves away at your lives.

‘Well?’ asked Elaine, still organising her pack. ‘What’s the apple wine like?’

‘Nice afterburn.’

‘You just don’t want to share it, do you?’

The white cloud over the mountain opposite pumped itself up into a Romantic pillar. Catching the light from a sunset out of our view, it rapidly flushed red, then pink, before intensifying to a furnace of golden-orange. Time hesitated in the sudden crisis of the sun’s flood. The cloud broke into grey fragments. We climbed into our sleeping bags. She kissed me and turned her back.

In the morning, two contorted
queuña
trees stood in a high hollow, awash in undulating mist. Loose horses cantered the rising trail in liquid motion; no riders to break the line of each rippling mane, muscular back and flowing tail. Up they flew, a chestnut, a dark grey and a deep slate stallion. Gravity could lay no hand on them. We were away by eight, past men standing like muffled statues in every porch. Our path climbed while the river fell into a narrow gorge. Schoolchildren coming the other way pointed at us and took higher paths to avoid meeting us, whispering cloudlets in the air. A stone got in my boot; I stopped to empty it while Elaine plodded on with Dapple to the next local crest. The slope was heavy red mud; I scraped lumps from the soles. Then I heard Elaine screaming.

I found her half-crouched, her stick extended, covering two berserk dogs encircling her. ‘That bastard bit me!’ The dogs had lashed themselves into a fury, lips back, gums exposed, hurling themselves at her. I pitched rocks at them, and took Dapple’s rope. By the side of the trail, outside a hut, two men and a woman stood staring: saying nothing, doing nothing. Worried about rabies, which is endemic in the countryside, I was prepared to kill the dogs rather than risk another bite to either of us. I attacked them with my stick and heavy stones. The dogs backed away into a field.

Elaine was shaking with rage, ‘I managed to keep them at a distance until Dapple tried to walk into the
court-yard
and pulled me off balance; then one ran behind and bit me.’

This wasn’t an accident: it was organised stupidity. The dogs had not molested the schoolchildren we had just passed; their owner had trained them to attack anyone they didn’t know. I strode at the two men and a woman, who were still staring silently. A man with heavy features, and his eyes and mouth turned mournfully down at the corners, said, ‘Good day.’

‘No it isn’t. Whose dogs are these?’ By faint motions, he indicated the other man. ‘These are your dogs?’ I put my face in his. Close up he looked older, maybe sixty. His eyes offered no resistance. I realized he expected me to hit him. This shamed me. ‘Why didn’t you call the dogs off? My girlfriend was walking along a public road and your dogs attacked her and bit her, and you stood there and watched, you son-of-a-bitch! She didn’t come on your land
or property, but you saw your dog bite her and you just watched. Why? Why!’

‘What can we do?’ he asked, as though he was talking about the weather.

‘Shoot the god-damned dog!’ The man with heavy features went in the house and came out with a dirty bottle of water and an old rag, to clean the wound. He was pathetically aware of their uselessness.

I snapped ‘We have medicine,’ and turned to Elaine. ‘Can you walk?’

She nodded. ‘The insect relief cream in my pocket has antiseptic in it. I’ll put some on now, then we’ll find the medical kit. First, I want to get away from those dogs.’ She reached behind her leg and spread it on the wound, without looking at it. I could see the wound, and I winced. ‘Let’s get round the corner and patch it up.’

She hobbled a hundred yards, sat down, rolled up her trouser leg, took one look and burst into tears. ‘Oh Christ!’ In her lower calf, just to the side of the Achilles tendon, was a one-inch rip in the flesh and a hole I could have put my finger in. She wailed, ‘I thought it was only a nip.’

I had to unload Dapple to get at the medicine bag: poor planning. The knots all snagged, I tore it open. I cleaned up the wound, put antiseptic liquid on it, and gave her some aspirins, before taping over the wound and bandaging the lower calf. ‘See how that feels.’ We were still at least six hours’ walk from a road. In ten minutes, she began walking gingerly down the hill. The walking was mercifully easy for a while, and we came down short, springy turf to a side valley leading to La Union.

The path eventually led us to the head of an Inca stair, so spectacular it took our minds off things. Inca roads
were ‘Such a gigantic achievement that no single description suffices to describe them,’ wrote Garcilaso de la Vega. When the Inca travelled them in his litter, his bearers sometimes stopped at special viewpoints, to permit him ‘to enjoy the imposing spectacle offered by the mountains. Here, one’s eye took in at a single glance fifty to one hundred leagues, with peaks so high that they appeared to touch the sky, and valleys deep enough to open into the earth’s centre.’

I began to descend with Dapple, when a woman called down urgently to us, from a crag high above, ‘Use the upper path.’

We retreated and found a new, very narrow path, its dizzying, nearly vertical, drops matching Garcilaso’s description. Dapple insisted on walking on the edge of the precipice, despite there being no overhanging cliffs to endanger the load. Fifteen hundred feet below, the River Taparaco waited. When our path looped back to the Inca road, a hundred feet down, we saw the old trail had collapsed into a chute of rubble down which all of us might have vanished. I waved my thanks back up the mountain.

We took a little lunch, sitting on a pinnacle overlooking the broader valley of the Vizcarra River, dancing down to La Union about four miles downstream. I pointed to lorries and buses on the road below. ‘We’ll get you on one of those and I’ll walk in with Dapple.’

‘I’ll be fine, I don’t want to split up on the last day, I want to walk it all.’

The final section was another Inca stair, as fine as any we had seen. The boldness of the sweeping turns down the face of the hillside was breathtaking. At the foot, it
spilled us onto the riverbank where a log bridge passed high over the waters, and we headed across the fields to the road. The valley stifled the breeze; it was now early afternoon, and stiflingly hot. Elaine wouldn’t hear of not finishing the walk on foot. ‘I’ll take Dapple now we’re on the flat, give you a break.’

Dapple, who might, in his goldfish memory, have forgotten what traffic was, became hysterical. He would not walk at all unless led on a short rope and poked on the backside with a stick. Every fifty yards he tried to run over the road, stampede into a field or yard or just jump down into the deep ditch at the side of the road. When heading the right way he crawled, or just stopped, but all diversions were done at full gallop. A great criminal mind could not have plotted more effectively to ruin the walk. Since he had already lost his balls, any punishment seemed inadequate. Soon Elaine, pulled about the road, was at her wit’s end. After a particularly purple outburst of oaths, I took Dapple back. Within three minutes, I was coming out with worse. He had now shaken all the bags loose. Those four miles on a level road, by a beautiful river, were the longest of the whole trip.

When travel writers, particularly British ones, work with unfamiliar animals, it is customary to record a period of initial difficulties, where it seems as if the animal will never be tractable. This is followed by useful tips from locals, a spell of improving understanding and a realization that one’s own ignorance was causing many of the difficulties. Eventually the animal will, at a point where the success of the venture hangs in the balance, perform some act of magnificent endurance or courage. All is forgiven, and at the end of the trip there is a tearful
parting, at least on the side of the human, and, as for the animal – well – if only they could speak.

I want to say that I shall hate that little bastard until the end of time. Humboldt said the best mule was not the strongest or fastest but the one
más racional
, the most sensible. Dapple would have failed any test, except, perhaps:
The best donkey is the one that eats the most hallucinogenic mushrooms, and attempts indiscriminate sex, without ever expressing the faintest intention to walk from one place to another unless dragged or beaten every step of the way; pain being preferable to movement.
If you feel yourself incapable of violence towards animals, which I did, there are few better ways to test it than by working with a donkey which is carrying everything you need in the world to keep you alive, and only manages a speed faster than that of vegetables growing when it has slipped round behind you and begun to gallop back down a hill which it has taken you five hours to climb. Should you catch it up, you will find yourself eyeball to eyeball, trembling with fury, describing with an almost sexual gratification, why vivisection is too good for it. In between, when it makes a slight effort to move your luggage in the direction you wish to go, at one-third the pace you could carry the donkey and the luggage yourself, you will fawn on it, pat the soft fringe coming down over its nose and whisper sweet quadruped nothings in its ear. I ended up walking ahead of Dapple, the rope over my shoulder, dragging her along, as if I were one of the Volga boatmen. Having hoped, at one time, to be in La Union in time for a late lunch, we limped into town around five.

We found a hotel suitable for Dapple, with long lush grass that they were happy to have cropped and fertilised.
Unfortunately, their rooms also looked as if they were let to livestock. We left him there and stayed at the Picoflor, in characterless but clean rooms. I helped Elaine prop herself up comfortably on the bed. Today she had walked fourteen miles with a nasty dog bite and a half-recovered sprained ankle, and had never once complained. I kissed her. ‘Well done, I’ll fetch a couple of beers.’