Cloud Road (12 page)

I picked up the trail on the other side of the boggy ground. It was a trench, only fourteen inches wide and eighteen inches deep, and I seemed to be clumsy, tripping
over my own feet, or scuffing the sides. This was tiredness, so I stopped to rest and eat, although it was still only late morning. I opened a tin of tuna, without draining off the olive oil, as I usually did. I eked out a few additional calories by dunking the bread in it. It tasted wonderful. I drank the remaining oil from the tin. Ordinarily it would have nauseated me, but my body was starved of fats; it was nectar. The tuna was followed by an orange, and as I peeled it, I noticed the flowers in the grass. Yellow stars like lesser celandine studded the ground, hugging the soil ever more closely at higher altitudes, until, up here, they were stalk-less. One plant grew in cushions of tightly packed small leaves. They looked inviting to sit on, but were sharp, and as hard as plastic.

As I stood up to go, a man in sheepskin chaps rode by, driving two donkeys ahead. We tipped hats. As I watched them trot briskly ahead I realised the trail was not made by feet but horses and donkeys. Locals did not walk this, they only rode it, and animals keep to a precise line, and wear a trench, not a path. That’s why there wasn’t quite enough room for my big boots; only a foolish Gringo would walk over the mountain.

Pretty and active soft-grey birds, like small thrushes, bustled ahead of me, feeding in the long grass. The path rose until I could see a tarn on the far side of the valley, below the peaks called Tres Cruces, Three Crosses. It was grey-green, cold as charity. The GPS plotted my ascent. At 12,500 feet I slowed to cope with the diminishing oxygen. At 13,000 feet the Inca highway curved left and led me across the corrie wall above the back of the tarn. However, like much of my journey, it was an Inca route, but not an Inca road. No remains were visible; the stones had been
buried, quarried for building or washed away.

Cold rain came, and still there was no sign of the top. The path seemed to be taking me straight at cliffs, but then it wound across the foot of them and began to rise again. I passed 13,800 feet, which the map assured me was the top of the pass. The mountain begged to differ. The grey birds deserted me, and the rain turned to sleet. The backs of my hands were a rather fetching pale purple. I had lost my gloves down a crevasse on Cotopaxi, and not thought I would need more.

At over 14,000 feet, the road finally levelled at a dismal corner, like an abandoned quarry. Lapwings settled on a tiny lake in black and white semaphore. A burly rider appeared coming the other way and saluted me. He was just a poncho, a hat, a scarf and a pair of dark lively eyes. When I told him where I was going, he said, ‘It’s mostly level from here.’ The path was level for a while, then, to my dismay, began to climb the flank of the hill to my left. Much of the next section was bare rock, frequently steep. I had been skipping rests, partly because I got cold as soon as I stopped. But from here on, I had no choice; every half-hour I ground to a halt, and sank to the ground. Each time, getting up became harder. I sat looking at the beautiful flowers making a living in the crevices and hollows of the rocks; growing wherever they could find a nook out of the wind, and a pocket of rubble and a hint of soil. They belonged here; I didn’t. I came up on a rising ridge and finally, at 14,600 feet, the path went round a sandy bare knoll, and began to fall. To the left, fifteen miles off, was a ring of dark mountains flecked with snow. Beneath them lay a grassy valley where a rainbow arced down to a round tarn. A squall detached itself from their
flanks and raced my way. Ahead, the treeless valley was exactly as I had pictured the land of Mordor in
Lord of the Rings
. A sinuous lake was surrounded by dull and lifeless shades of green. Comfortingly, the Inca road was clearly visible, running absolutely level just above the shore. Tomorrow would begin pleasantly.

The squall hit me like a fist, ripping the elasticated rainproof cover off my pack. It lashed around on the end of a karabiner clip while I tried to pull it back on. Then I thought,
What are you doing?
, and wrapped it round my own head and shoulders. In a sudden cocoon of warmth and windlessness, I started down the mountain, and into Mordor. 1,600 feet lower, the clouds were breaking and the wind dropping. I had a lush green valley floor in my sights when two mad dogs tore down the hill and circled me, snarling and snapping. It was ten minutes before their owners appeared; a handsome elderly couple, striding through the grass. The man wore his long hair plaited and in the shadow beneath the brim of his black hat his eyes had a dreamy look. They both called softly to the dogs, which totally ignored them. I greeted the couple; I had noticed that when dogs saw their owners talking to you, they calmed down. These didn’t. I moved my stick to defend my legs. The man looked round the hills. The sun was slipping shafts of light onto their flanks, making pools of golden green light. ‘Five o’clock,’ he said, then took a pocket watch from his woollen waistcoat: ‘Two minutes to.’ The only noise audible above the whisper of the grasses was the pandemonium of his dogs attacking the person he was chatting to.

‘Could you,’ I asked, as if it were not too important, ‘quieten the dogs?’

‘Ah!’ he said, his voice a sleeping balm. ‘You must realise they are animals, they do not understand!’

I moved on before the dogs could fashion a clear chance to begin supper. To avoid the incessant zigzags of the path, I cut straight downhill and enjoyed the soft pillows of the grass under my feet. As I approached the valley floor, I began selecting where, in all the comfortable meadows, crossed by shining streams, I could enjoy the evening. Suddenly the ground beneath my feet sagged like a mattress, and rippled in front of me. I had blundered onto a floating bog. Kind of the man to warn me. Perhaps the dreams in his old eyes were of strangers drowning here, fertilising his pasture. I backed off sharply. The whole of the valley floor was a marsh. In one stride the land changed from a hillside too steep to camp on, to a valley floor too wet to camp on. After several attempts, I crossed the deep streams safely and reached the level road I had seen from above. There were banks of the hard plant that formed spiky cushions growing a few inches proud of the bog. They were dry. I found one just big enough for the tent, which had a smaller one nearby that I could hop over to for cooking. The light was falling. I pitched the tent, which was still wet, and cleaned the cooker. I suspected dirty fuel was causing the problems. It stayed lit long enough to make lemon and ginger tea. I savoured the hot, sharp taste. Cooking could wait until morning. I ate bread and bananas, and chewed some more of the leaden cheese from Achupallas. I sat in the tent entrance, looking across the dark valley at magnificent hills. Directly opposite me, a slender waterfall fell a thousand feet into a landscape strangely devoid of detail. It was so remote the animals didn’t need to be corralled at night. As dark fell, the
near-total silence was lifted by frogs lobbing calls at each other, like water-bombs.

It was a cold night and the air was damp, so I slept fully clothed using my spare socks as gloves. After a short nap, I woke sharply at ten o’clock. The tent was bathed in light so bright I could read by it. I went outside and found a full moon, bounding into the sky. The tent shone like metal in the dew. I shivered at the beauty of it all.

In the morning, I caught up on calories: pasta and soup. Halfway through, I read the packet and reflected that a man hosting a twenty-a-day toilet habit could have better things for breakfast than cauliflower and broccoli soup. I was just about to go inside the tent to change clothes, when I laughed at myself. In this empty land, whose modesty was I protecting? When I was stark naked a group of horsemen came round the corner, gave me a cheery
‘¡Buenos Días!’
and rode on.

I dried off the tent before rain began to peck away. It all made for a late start but the road ahead looked the best for some days. When I saw it close up, I felt like turning round and going back. No matter how much use is made of the old roads, no one lifts a finger to maintain them. Repairs stopped in 1532. With unlimited native labour at their disposal, the Spanish neglected everything without an immediate cash value, including agriculture and the roads. The young Spanish chronicler Pedro de Cieza de León, who came here when he ‘had scarcely rounded out thirteen years’, lamented:

On the stretch before me, small streams coming down the hill had reached a blocked drain and spilled out over the road. It would take half a day for two men to lay a new drain. No one has. Instead the streams have stripped off the turf and cut up the paving beneath. Then horses have tramped the mud to slurry. It looked like rocks dropped in a swamp. But the land below was marsh and the land above was dense scrub. So I had to stumble and slither over the road. An hour later I was a little over half a mile away, in pouring rain, telling a solitary cow that I didn’t need any of this. The cow nodded.

The swift streams in the main valley had merged to form a stately river meandering in silver scimitars over brown marshes. It was a fantasy landscape, bare, unreadable; the colour of sorcery. The path began to rise as I approached the main lake, sullen and brooding, below. It steepened but the ground was now walkable. Long views opened up down the tunnel of a valley lidded by cloud clamped to the peaks on either side. The road now changed character. It had unbroken stone paving and clearly defined edges: an original Inca section. I made my way up to a ruin on the horizon. It looked like a
well-preserved
tambo
. When I got close, I found I was right. Some shepherds had re-roofed and thatched a small storeroom. It was bone dry. I stepped gratefully into the dusty darkness.

The chroniclers of the conquest were united in one thing: their breathless admiration for the highways, like the Royal Road, constructed throughout the length of empire. Over difficult, often dangerous terrain, they laid the arteries of government, the means to launch their armies on distant lands. Mountain ascents were hair-raising; a saying was current: ‘Our roads are for birds, not for men.’

The Spanish built nothing as good for their sovereign. Every year the Kings of Castile and their court followers crossed a mountain pass going to and from Toledo. It was just six miles long, but they were incapable of keeping the road in good repair. Every year, wheels were broken and carriages upset. Meanwhile a ‘barbarian’, the Inca, was carried in his litter over smooth roads strewn with flowers and fragrant leaves. When he paused at specially constructed viewpoints to look down on his kingdom, his subjects called out so loudly in praise of their lord and god that birds fell stunned to the ground, and could be picked up in the hand. ‘Today,’ lamented Garcilaso de la Vega, son of a conquistador and an Inca princess, ‘almost nothing remains.’ He wrote this at the end of the sixteenth century after just half a century of neglect.

At regular intervals along the road were
tambos
such as this: storehouses, with accommodation for travelling officials. The riches dazzled the Spanish: huge reserves of essentials for the army, and luxuries for the elite. There were chests of iridescent blue-green hummingbird feathers, used to decorate cloths. Sometimes, for the finest work, they used only the tiny chest feathers. The most precious commodities, like bat skins, were reserved for the
sole use of the Inca. One Spaniard picked up a garment so fine it folded into the palm of his hand.

This
tambo’
s walls were made of two skins of roughly dressed stone with the cavity filled with rubble. Parts were intact up to the eaves, but other sections had collapsed to within a few feet of the floor. The main building was a rectangle with two small lean-to stores at either end of the front elevation. I was in one of these. Inside, there were stones for seats, and the ashes of a recent fire. The new roof was made from bamboo poles, brought many miles up from the rainforest to these cold grey heights. The thatch was made from the wiry, almost nylon-like, moorland grass called
ichu
, tied to split bamboo laths. I was admiring how waterproof it was, apart from a single drip, right above my head, when a tenant made his presence known. A bird like a large wren put its head out of a hole in the wall over my head, looked down and decided to bolt. His wings brushed my hair as he flew out, a youngster, still uncertain on the wing.

When the downpour lightened a little, I went on my way. Rain punctured the puddles, their surfaces like cloth drawn up by rising needles. I emerged onto a high plain dotted with low, small-leafed woody shrubs. Slabs of bare rock like small tors protruded through thin peaty soils. A valley to my right was a lake of undulating cloud. I stopped for bread and more cheese. I had stopped picking up the pieces I dropped, to be rid of them sooner. My stomach was shrinking and I found it hard to put away the calories and fluid I knew I needed. I had to make myself down a flask of cold chemical water before moving on. I was soon glad I did. The uncomfortable conditions were just about to become appalling.

The cloud in the valley to my right began to rock like swift tides. Suddenly the tide kept coming in. The air went very cold. I could see that in less than a minute I would be walking blind. It was easy to discern the general line of the route running away, but a yard in front of me no particular path was obvious. I had noticed that Inca roads often aimed at particular landmarks on the horizon; a nick in the skyline, a prominent rock. There was no time for the GPS to find satellites; I took out the compass. Half a mile ahead was a large tor with its right side cut away to allow the Inca road to pass without deviation. I took a bearing on it just before the wave swept over me. In the middle of the day, it was as dark as dusk; like Dartmoor, but two miles higher.