Cloud Road (3 page)

The final months dragged terribly. The astronomer Godin was seldom well, another man died of fever and their doctor Senièrgues meddled in a society love-affair and was lynched. The draughtsman, Morainville, who had designed a church, was climbing the scaffolding to inspect progress when it collapsed and crushed him to death. Depressed by the toll on himself and his party, La Condamine laboured on. He faced one final task: to mark the original baseline with permanent monuments, both to record their efforts, and so that the crucial first measurement could, if necessary, be re-examined by future scientists. He decided to build two modest pyramids, one at each end. It was months before this labour was complete and he was able to carve the French fleur-de-lis on the pinnacles and, finally, the names of himself, Godin and Bouguer. Crassly, in an age when etiquette was all, he recorded neither the role of the Spanish Crown in granting permission for the work, nor the participation of the two Spanish overseers. The Spanish authorities were furious. La Condamine pompously refused to admit he was wrong. The Spanish demanded that the pyramids be pulled down altogether. A court ordered him to add the missing Spanish names and strike off the fleur-de-lis. Six years later, the Council of the Indies, Spain’s Foreign and Colonial Office, sitting in Seville, decided that this was insufficient, and ordered the pyramids destroyed. The
order was despatched, but La Condamine appealed, and won. News of the reprieve arrived too late; the pyramids were already rubble.

La Condamine’s results proved the earth did indeed belly out at the equator, with a circumference around eighty-five miles greater than that around the poles. Voltaire, a champion of Newton, boasted, ‘They have flattened both the earth and the Cassinis.’

One of the demolished pyramids was re-erected in 1836, by local landowner Vicente Rocafuerte, in fields near Yaraqui. When the Alpinist Edward Whymper was here in 1880, he found one of the inscribed stones standing in a farmyard, the centre of its legend worn away, where the farmer had used it as a block to mount his horse. The pyramid at the south end of the baseline was re-erected at the order of a president of Ecuador, but was moved several hundred feet to one side so that it could be seen to better advantage. The original position is lost; all La Condamine’s efforts to preserve his work were in vain.

Nowadays, finding your location is easier: I had brought my GPS. The size of a mobile phone, it contacted satellites and confirmed that it was currently accurate to thirty-four feet. There was a slight problem. It gave my latitude as 0° 0.129′ south, nearly eight hundred feet from the equator. I looked down at a tiny Japanese woman tiptoeing along the painted yellow line like a tightrope walker, striking balletic poses and giggling. It wasn’t the equator, or even close. Why?

I showed the guides my GPS readings, and they smiled coyly at each other. There was a kind of ‘You tell him, no you’ conversation and then one of the women said, ‘It’s
true, we are close to the equator but not on it. The Government was offered some land that was flat and convenient. The equator runs along a ravine and it was not possible to build on the actual equator without great expense.’

I followed my GPS north, skirting the small steep-sided ravine, and found myself in a privately run open-air museum, Museo Inti-Ñan. The name means Path of the Sun, in Quechua, the language of the Incas, which still has more speakers than any other native language. Fabián Vera, a handsome pure-blooded Indian, showed me round. They had set up a few equator games: the sink where the water doesn’t rotate, and ‘balance the egg upright’. It took me a couple of minutes but I did make it stand on end. Fabián said, ‘It is much easier on the equator because there is no Coriolis force’ (the rotational force which everywhere else makes draining water spin). I couldn’t see why this was relevant to a stationary object, but sure enough, when I got home, I couldn’t do it. Mind you, at home, I have better things to do.

Fabián led me along the path through the centre of their site. ‘This was a religious route for the local tribes even before the Incas came. It is exactly on the equator,’ he waved with good humour at the tourist village, ‘not like that. The original inhabitants built a stone cylinder here, sixty feet in diameter and twenty-six feet high to mark the true site.’ I took out my GPS and walked on through the garden and into the dusty potato patch behind it, and came out of his back gate onto a road. In the middle of the road I got a full set of noughts, accurate to within thirty-four feet. The official monument was no longer in sight. I walked another fifty feet to make sure I was in the
northern hemisphere, then I turned round and began to walk south. I walked back through Ciudad del Mitad del Mundo and skipped over the yellow line. My journey had begun.

Each of the equators makes sense. Native interest in astronomy reflected the dominance of agriculture in their economy. La Condamine’s interests reflected the economic importance of navigation in his. The new pyramid is a monument to tourism, and is located where it collects the most dollars.

It was warm and sunny with a light breeze ruffling the flowers. It felt so good, after all the preparation, to actually be on the road, walking. I bought fruit from a small grocer’s, and chatted to the dumpy lady with just two long thin teeth, one at either side of her lower jaw, like an abandoned cricket match. It seemed unfair to start without a soul here knowing what I was attempting. ‘I am walking to Cuzco,’ I said. ‘I’ve just started.’

‘That’s nice,’ she said. ‘My son likes walking.’

It was just after midday and I sought out the scraps of shade. I knew the old Inca road was buried underneath modern tarmac. The road turned into dual carriageway, and I walked the tree-lined central reservation enjoying the grass underfoot, the shade and the continual flow of boxy, pugnacious trucks ferrying sand and gravel to the ever-open mouths of the cement mixers of Quito. My lungs and leg muscles were coping well, and I soared up my first long hill. Then, after two-and-a-half hours, I felt sandpaper patches tingling next to the ball of each foot. I was getting blisters. I made a painful mistake: I did not get on a bus and ride back to the hotel. I carried on, believing I was close to the city edge and could find a
hotel there: wishful thinking. I must have walked the only route into Quito where you are not surrounded by cheap hotels. Eventually I limped round a corner and found the airport taxi rank. After a twenty-minute drive I booked myself back into the room I had left only that morning, a long time ago. The staff whispered and conferred: the lunatic was back.

I pulled off my boots. There was a large blister in the middle of each foot and the tops of my toes had all been cut by a seam running across the toe of the boot, and were bleeding. The heat and perspiration had softened my skin. In Wales, in winter, heat was something I could not train for. I lay on the bed cursing the socks, the boots, but most of all, myself. I read
Don Quixote
. He and Sancho Panza had been beaten up and were licking their wounds and rubbing their bruises. Was my project just the male menopause? Couldn’t I just have stayed at home, grown a silly ponytail and bought a motorbike? Until now I had never before been for a walk of more than four days. Don Quixote knew why: ‘One of the Devil’s greatest
temptations
is to put it into a man’s head that he can write and print a book, and gain both money and fame by it.’

In the morning, I went to the flower market and asked the herb sellers if there was a traditional medicine for blisters. ‘Stinging nettles,’ he said grinning, and took out a sheaf. It came complete with a butterfly; the bottom of its wings inlaid with mother-of-pearl. It flew to my shoulder. When I passed a flower stall, I put it down on the tip of a bouquet. The woman looked at me as if I had clouds of them to give away. Back in the hotel I mashed up the nettles and strapped them round my feet. It took my mind off the pain of the blisters. I punctured the most painful
one and yellow pus oozed out. After that, it felt more comfortable.

I had time to kill. Most television programmes consisted of fat middle-aged men working with blondes dancing in bikinis so small you could make three from an average hotel sewing kit. I returned to fellow middle-aged fool, Don Quixote, and started to consume my single, precious, English-language book. On the second evening, I went down into La Marín, along a lane fizzing and spitting with stalls charcoal-grilling parts of animals that are normally pulped for pet food, or buried in a simple but moving ceremony. Peeking down into one pot my gaze was met by another, yellow eye, staring accusingly at me for a few seconds, before drifting out to the edge of the stew, and subsiding into the depths again.

The city was waking up after the siesta; traders hustled and huckstered. A wheelbarrow bounced with coconuts from the coast, trimmed by machete. Firewood sellers burned samples of their hardwood in little iron incense bowls, glowing red and black in the dark. A five-year-old boy was so angry at life that he was stamping both feet at once. Mother tired of the tantrum, picked him up and told him how to behave, and punctuated the lecture with insistent slaps about the head and face. I picked one of a row of bright plastic-and-vinyl cafés. Tiny children selling sweets asked permission to come in and beg the leftover knuckle joints from the plates. They slurped off the skin and chewed the gristle off the joints. The customers were courteous and helpful in putting aside what they wouldn’t eat. They themselves were only a rung or two higher on a rotten ladder.

It was nine days before I could risk a serious hike south, beginning with an area of town that visitors are told to stay well away from. To avoid mugging, I began at dawn, planning to walk to the edge of town, a location that receded with every day of building development.

The line of the ancient Inca road to the south runs across the front of the Government Palace, skirts the hill of El Panecillo, topped by a monstrous white Christ, and leads away over a steep ridge. At ten to six, the streets were cold and foggy; the few stragglers muffled up, wearing sullen wintry faces. The darkness was thinning as I crossed the main square and turned left past the great Jesuit Church of La Compañia, where a scatter of people spilled out of Mass, bowed forward like dark ghosts. Light was seeping into the narrow cobbled streets around El Panecillo. A mute man skipped towards me, crying out inarticulate sounds, and pointing a crooked finger back at the sky over his shoulder like a ragamuffin John the Baptist. He smiled as if he were speaking in tongues.

Higher up, a young man stopped me to ask if I needed directions, and offered me a drink of clear alcohol from an unlabelled bottle he drew from his pocket. I declined. It might have been drugged, but in any case, I make a strict point of not hitting spirits before half past six in the morning. Walking up the avenue of Bahía de Caraquez was like climbing a ski-jump, but my heavily strapped feet took it well; my legs had lost little fitness and I felt optimistic. The city came to life rapidly with the dawn; buses were suddenly everywhere. Gold flakes of light now encrusted the rotting walls.

Wherever the line of the Royal Road was known, I had marked it on my maps. Their scale, 1:25,000, was good for walking, but these copies, although the most recent, were still forty years old. They said the edge of the city was two miles away, but now it might be five, maybe more. Country women were tying donkeys to trees in the grassed central reservation and selling their milk, straight from the teat. I drank the warm, thin, frothy milk, watched dolefully by a foal with a sock over its nose to stop it suckling. At nine, I stopped for a coffee and fried eggs. I asked the owner, ‘How far is it to Chillogallo?’ – the first settlement shown to the south of Quito.

‘You’re in it,’ he said, ‘swallowed by the city.’

A sow slept in a yard beneath a churning cement mixer. Country becomes town. Outside a small workshop, I talked to Victor, a grizzled 50-year-old, paint-spraying iron stoves. He was green to the elbows. ‘How many children have you got?’ he asked me.

‘None.’

‘I have eight: five boys and three girls. That’s why I’m working and you are on holiday. With the old money, you used to be able to buy something for a hundred sucres. Now you spend four dollars and there’s not enough to eat.’

He still worked to the sound of roosters: soon traffic and radios would drown them out. The temperature was 85°F; I rested in the gutter and repaired my feet. Blank walls become the pamphlets of the dispossessed: their politics and poetry. ‘Justice is sacrificed on the altar of Capitalism’ next to ‘Tenderness is passion in repose’. After seven more miles, I reached the next settlement marked on the map, Guamaní Alto, and knew I was approaching the countryside because a man raced across the road
saying, ‘Look! A fresh wolf-pelt, only thirty dollars!’ Last year Guamaní Alto was a village, now it is a suburb. When I crossed the little square, which straddled a low ridge, I could see open countryside; maize fields, pasture, towering hills and the snow-tipped mountains marching south along both sides of a huge valley. For the moment, it was the edge of Quito. Tomorrow I would enter the vale that the explorer Alexander von Humboldt christened the Avenue of the Volcanoes. My route would be lined with the richest and most destructive high volcanoes in the world.

I was unsure where I could reach by the following nightfall, since, reckless though it may sound, my maps did not always join up. It was impossible to carry original, detailed maps of a 1,500-mile journey. Instead I had photocopies of the line of march, but I had been forced to leave gaps. I could not always be sure how much land lay between them. In a few miles, I could hear the Panamerican Highway, a route running down the whole of the Americas from Prudhoe Bay, on Alaska’s north shore, to Ushuaia in south Argentina. It varies from a gravel track to what it is here: a major highway. Huge American Mack trucks rolled by, their articulated rigs as showy as calliopes. Gleaming pipes burst from the bonnet, and the horns gave off Jurassic bellows. Beneath these four lanes of tarmac was a finely engineered Inca road.