Cloud Road (27 page)

At the first corner, a strong grey mare champed under a streetlight. The darkening streets were crowded with stalls frying cheap meats: chopped intestines sizzled over charcoal. Kerosene lamps lit shining faces leaning over sweet fruit teas steaming in chipped glasses. I bought wheat and carried it to Dapple. His feet hadn’t moved, but there was already a ring of short grass around his head. The grey mare had been moved, and was once more waiting at the corner ahead. The pain was slowly leaching out of my body, and the evening had a nice bustle to it. In a bar across the road from our hotel, I bought two litre bottles of beer. The woman cried, ‘You have the donkey!’ Already we were known all through the town. As I left she called ‘Wait!’ She came after me with a small glass, ‘The señora will want a glass. Give it back to me before you leave La Union.’ As I entered the hotel, the ghost mare was waiting outside.

La Union’s
Banco de la Nación
did not cash travellers’ cheques or even change dollars to soles. The nearest bank that did was four hours’ coach ride away, back in Huaraz. ‘You could come with me down to Lima, that’s only seven hours,’ said Elaine. ‘We can have a whole day sightseeing before my flight.’

‘It’s the first time you’ve put the word
only
in front of
seven-hour coach journey.’

There seemed to be only one bus company in La Union. I bought two tickets. When I saw how relieved Elaine was, I was ashamed not to have offered to go down with her in the first place. My trip was becoming obsessive, blinding me to more important things. Everyone who met Don Quixote was amazed at the ‘mixture of wise and foolish arguments, and at his tenacity in devoting himself to the search for his luckless adventures, which were the whole aim and object of his desires’.

‘How is the ankle?’

‘It’ll last until I can see a doctor back home.’

‘We can go to the American Hospital in Lima.’

‘I’ll be fine.’

The overnight coach brought us, at six in the morning, into a sleazy-looking district a few blocks from the old centre of Lima. We drank tea in a rough café and walked into the great Plaza San Martín, and through the Olympian doors of the Hotel Gran Bolívar for breakfast. The hotel is so huge it occupies an entire city block. We visited the Cathedral, peering at the lead box which contains the head of Francisco Pizarro, killed in his own chambers by a rival Spanish faction. A skeleton, said to be Pizarro’s, was displayed for several hundred years until refurbishments to the crypt uncovered this lead box bearing the name of Francisco Pizarro next to a quite different skeleton. Cue change of exhibit.

In the taxi to the airport, we stared ahead, clutching hands, as if travelling between a funeral service and the burial. And why are we parting? So that I can write these books while she handles, alone, her work, PhD studies and the household. She doesn’t want to be with someone who never took risks to succeed at the thing they most
cared about. Tears streamed down my face.

Once we were at the airport, I had a role, checking information for her, and I cheered up. She, left alone with her thoughts, burst into tears. I hugged her. How often, as we struggled along, had I wondered whether she loves me in the helpless, lost way I love her? Her sobs shamed those thoughts. I held her tight and lifted her off her feet, remembering the shape of her in my arms. I watched her, walking down the long perspective of the lines of check-in desks. Empty, empty, hollow.

At four in the morning, the return bus dropped me in the flooded streets of La Union. Although I had told the owner I would return on the night bus, the hostel was in darkness, and padlocked shut. I knocked with my knuckles, then the edge of a coin, then a rock. A lady hurried by in the rain. ‘They live higher up, I will show you.’ Until then, I didn’t know that we had been sleeping in a hostel without staff, the only exit locked each night.

I spent a day preparing for a fifty-mile walk to the next small town, Yanahuanca. As well as food and fodder, I bought plastic canteens for water and fuel, a sack to allow me to divide my luggage in two and a new dog-scarer: a powerful catapult. Next morning I was up just after five, keeping busy to forget the empty bed and the quietness of the room without her warmth. Breakfast was sheep’s head soup in the market, served with half a split skull. I bought eggs and fresh meat. They put a huge steak on the scales and ignored all requests to reduce it. It still cost only sixty
pence. Masked teenagers in fancy dress were gathering in the streets to celebrate the anniversary of the local college with dancing and a beer breakfast. I led Dapple across the square and up the hairpins that led to the great Inca city of Huánuco Viejo, my first stop on the road to Yanahuanca.

Three youths were digging a small field with spades the height of a man. They were just like those drawn over 450 years ago by the Inca chronicler, Huaman Poma, except the basalt blade, ten inches long and four inches wide, has been replaced by steel. At shoulder level, the strong shaft has a curled wooden handle lashed to it with leather thongs. A lower crosspiece allows the foot to drive the blade into the earth. They look clumsy, but I once asked a family, digging on the shores of Lake Titikaka, to teach me how to use one. I could work standing straight, without stressing the back, and use the curved handle to roll over the cut sod without bending or lifting. It was much lighter work than using a modern spade. It reminded me with gratitude that my back continued to hold up. What I would do if it gave out, and left me alone with a deranged donkey, I dared not think. The boys pointed to a narrow path that went straight up the hill. ‘There is a short cut!’ I shook my head, I found it easier to walk long and shallow, and my research assured me that every trace of the Inca road shown on the map had gone; there was no point in searching for it off the modern road.

At Huánuco Viejo the Spanish historian Pedro de Cieza de León found ‘there was an admirably built royal palace, made of very large stones, artfully joined. This lodging was the capital of the provinces bordering on the Andes, and beside it was a temple to the sun with many vestals
and priests. It was so important in the times of the Incas that there were always over thirty thousand Indians to serve it.’ The modern historian John Hemming said Huánuco was ‘unique in being the only ruins of an important Inca city to remain untouched by later occupation’. In little more than an hour, the gradient eased, and I cut across the last hairpins and came out onto the plain. Before me was the supposedly vanished Inca road, rolling across the grass, and still acting as the village street for the scatter of houses along it. Turf had overgrown it, but wherever this had been worn away, the paved Inca road was in superb condition underneath.

Huánuco Viejo’s site warden, Marcos Espinosa Turbinicio, lived in a smallholding at the entrance. He took Dapple into his paddock, and unlocked the gates protecting the low hill. The ruins cover a square mile, housing 4,000 structures and 500 ruined storehouses, not counting workshops and residential areas. ‘Look,’ he said, leading me through a narrow gate into a stone warren, ‘how the quarters of the Virgins of the Sun were built in interlinked courtyards entered by a single guarded gate. These other buildings are round. The Incas almost never built round, but the local Wari society did. You see a local tradition surviving Inca conquest.’ He raced away to the next monument.

‘Please, Marcos, I want to take my time.’

‘Sure, take your time,’ he said, distantly. I caught up with him at the steps up to a large, plain rectangular building, a hundred and eighty feet long, and eighty feet wide, commanding the site. ‘This is the temple;
Usnu
in the language of the Incas.’

The sandstone blocks were pitted as if by rain, but the
white oolitic limestone, made of billions of tiny spherical fossils the size of a grain of sand, was in beautiful condition.

‘Just a little damage from earthquakes at the other end. Some stones fall down. The space below was all a huge square. It could accommodate two hundred thousand people. Look here, a puma!’

The wall rose nearly eighteen feet, inclining slightly inwards to a finely turned stone lip. Underneath it, in one corner, was the eroded outline of a feline, two feet long. Some architectural Inca carvings survive, often tantalising shadows; suggestive forms that come and go with the changing light. The pumas scattered over this soluble limestone had been tamed into pussycats by the centuries’ rains. A dramatic staircase led up the centre of one of the long sides, and onto a level roof with a chest-high parapet. It was not really a building; there were no interior rooms, it could not be entered. It was an open-air theatre, designed to allow priests to conduct ceremonies out of sight of ordinary eyes, or to appear dramatically, at the head of this flight of stairs commanding the huge plaza, a rippled copper sea of bent backs and bowed heads. It was one of the largest Inca ceremonial spaces, one of those expanses beloved of totalitarian regimes, whose purpose is to make the citizen feel a subject.

One corner of the roof-plaza had subsided. Marcos pointed: ‘That was once a tunnel that led far up into the mountain. Much gold was hidden this way.’ Such legends are everywhere. The Incas fuelled them. In the bitterness of conquest, there must have been a dark pleasure in telling the Spanish what had slipped through their fingers. Pedro de Cieza de León asked one Inca whether the stories
of concealed treasure were true. In reply, he took a small handful of maize grains from a granary, full to the rafters. ‘These few grains are what the Spanish got, as for the rest, we ourselves do not know where it is!’

I thanked Marcos and slipped away to the top of the site, where three dark puna ibises stood shoulder to shoulder like a heraldic device against the black waters of a pool. After the conquest, vicious killings were provoked here by two
encomenderos
, men with the right to exploit huge estates. The stupidity of some of these men baffles belief. One witness of the abuse reported, ‘they demand gold and silver from those who have no mines, pigs from those who do not raise them, chickens that do not exist in this country’ (they were imported by the Spanish) ‘and cotton cloth from mountain Indians who do not pick it’ (it is a coastal crop). The Indians in nearby Callejon de Huaylas rebelled, and killed both
encomenderos
. Francisco de Cháves was sent to quell the revolt and punish its leaders. He rampaged for three months, killing indiscriminately, until the natives feared they would suffer total genocide and sued for peace. Within two years, Cháves himself was dead. Among other atrocities, he killed 600 children under the age of three. King Charles of Spain seized his estate and used its income, in perpetuity, to pay for the education of 100 native children.

I followed the path that ran down the axis of the site, into a long warehouse used to store goods and shelter travelling officials, and through a series of stone gateways leading to the private chambers of the Inca. The first archaeologist to survey the ruins was the American
diplomat
Ephraim George Squier, a self-taught man encouraged to come here by the brilliant nineteenth-century historian
of the conquest, William Hickling Prescott. He wrote, ‘The perspective through this series of portals is the finest to be found in the ancient works of Peru.’ My eye could see them perfectly aligned, thirteen-foot high stone lintels still intact within matchless stonework, the edges as smooth as if they had been machined. The blocks were cut from a reddish fossil-rich limestone.

In the last, and most private, set of apartments was a stone bath set into the ground, once fed by hot volcanic springs, channelled for miles from the mountain above. I was the only visitor to that vast, deserted city. I returned to the great plaza where the stumps of small Spanish buildings lie in the grass. Begun in 1539, they were abandoned within two years, the Spanish driven out by the cold and the countless Inca insurrections. It symbolises one of the great failures of the conquest as a whole. They found order and prosperity and created disorder and poverty. They found agriculture subtly adapted to prosper in extreme conditions; they sowed only bitterness and despair. The bleat of a lamb came from a distant hill.

I collected Dapple and studied the leftmost of three valleys rising from the plain two miles away. Marcos pointed out the thin white trail rising into the mountains. ‘Follow the stream,’ he said, which was odd, as the stream rose from another valley entirely. The stream kept breaking out into numerous channels and then joining up again. When it formed one channel it was too deep and swift to cross safely. When it was wide and shallow, Dapple refused to follow me, his ears impersonating a hare’s, his eyes, an alien. Remembering the advice we had been given, I loosed his rope and waved him in, over a
firm, even, stone bed. When he was three-quarters of the way over, and had passed the only part more than two inches deep, I began to follow him. He turned around and bolted back where he had come, but at ten times the speed. He varied his pace just enough to keep twenty yards between us. I was soon out of air, and despaired of catching him, and all my worldly goods. I stopped, bent double gasping for air, thinking it was all over. Then he got to a deeper stream and couldn’t think where to go.

Back we tramped, painfully regaining ground. I desperately tried to find somewhere to cross that might, to his boggle-eyes, seem more reassuring. He was now, as near as you can tell with a donkey, insane. After six more abortive attempts to cross this small stream, so was I. In desperation I lined him up to an easy crossing and smacked the bridle across his rump. He jumped and trotted over. I followed, holding tight onto the rope and waving the stick at the corner of his eye. It had taken forty minutes to go fifty yards.

I thought it might help if I gave him a line to follow, so I went a little out of our way to follow a barbed wire fence over the otherwise featureless grass. I stayed behind on his other side to stop him turning. He simply walked into the fence, dragging the luggage along, and ripping open the side of the bag. I pulled him away and gave him a lecture that consisted mainly of screaming incoherent abuse. I turned to restart and my jaw dropped. Not only had I just held a donkey eyeball to eyeball and called it a moron, and much else; but I had been coolly observed doing it by a large family outing, picnicking by a stream.