Cloud Road (20 page)

The first view of it was promising, a lush forest park with bougainvillaea spilling over the walls. But, across the road, families scavenged from a smouldering tip. Rebuilding has been hasty. It looked as if a huge chainsaw had been swept across the city, between the first and second storeys, leaving the ragged edges open to the sky. Guard dogs were everywhere: ears clipped and
barrel-chested
, fit and bored, they’d kill you for something to do. A pall of fishmeal odour lay over the town, like a dirty coat on a tramp: filthy, familiar. It was a smell a brick would bounce off.

‘So,’ said Elaine, ‘are we stopping for some authentic seafood?’

I didn’t think that needed an answer.

The route back to the Sierra, up the Cañon del Pato, is not the shortest route, but it is one of the great scenic drives in all Peru. By running, with our backpacks, to the ticket office, and then to the bus, we might just make the next one, and save three hours. We arrived breathless at the Moreno bus company’s vehicle. It was a small coach, in even worse condition than the Cajabamba jalopy. When we took our seats, they were so close together that no person over five foot five could fit in without sitting askew. I am nearly six foot. Book for back surgery now. But we were moving on, more quickly than we could have hoped for, to Huaraz through the Cañon del Pato, Duck Canyon.

The bus rattled round the block and stopped at a
tyre-fitter
for an hour. A tyre with little tread left, and a huge gouge out of it, was replaced by one totally bald. I reassured Elaine, ‘Think of them as racing slicks.’

The V-shaped gorge began above the dust-blown truck stop of Chuquiscara where sedimentary rocks have been tilted up seventy or eighty degrees, then contorted by pressure. The road was often single track, punching holes in buttresses, weaving back and forth across the river, searching out scraps of flat land. At times, there was nowhere to go, and the road dived into a side valley and forged tight hairpins a thousand or two feet up before swooping down to the base of the canyon again. The silver-bouldered river ran clean and swift with curling waves, the banks devoid of vegetation. No ducks. The sun came bouncing down the slopes, funnelled by the gorge. We only escaped it in the short tunnels. Occasionally coaches came the other way, and the drivers stopped to ask anxiously about the road ahead.

The scenery impressed by extremes: the tortured rock, the absolute bareness, the precariousness of our road, the blinding light, the ribbon of cloudless blue sky above, the height of the circling buzzards. They know someone will die here; if not today, tomorrow, or the day after.

In motion, the temperature inside the coach was 95°F. When we stopped, the red line on my thermometer stretched upwards. Our insect bites exploded with irritation; my flesh felt pulpy. Elaine’s skin was a sheet of perspiration. We drank water constantly. Behind us, and far above, on the tips of the peaks above the canyon, fires
burnt, as if even the earth could not tolerate the heat and was sweating fire and smoke. The locals just wiped their brows and pasted grins to their faces: no getting away from it.

Down into the canyon again, creeping round a corner built out into space and held up by drivers’ prayers. Suddenly, in the heart of the furnace, there was a row of adobe cells, a mean hellhole of a village. All the men wore cheap football shirts. Their hair was thick, cut by knife in crude shocks. Women leant at the doors, only their faces in the light, hands shading eyes, searching our passing faces. Life here is not what happens in the day, in the thermal suspension when the body is immobilised by the mercury’s rise. It is snatched in short spaces, in midnight breezes, in the minutes of morning coolness, watching the stars dim and swallow themselves. The sun’s steel will pin the people to the earth for twelve more hours, while the river laughs below. ‘What do they do down here?’ I asked local passengers. ‘How do they make a living?’

They shrugged. ‘They are the poorest of the poor.’

At Huanallanca, highly armed sentries lolled outside a compound of comfortable bungalows set around a swimming pool and a basketball court. This is a small corner of North America for its residents, who run the Duke hydroelectric power station. A sign says
Do Not Stop Here
.

We climbed over the watershed of the bus journey. To our left was the Cordillera Blanca, the White Range, always snow-capped. Over ten miles wide, and more than a hundred miles long, the Cordillera boasts fifty peaks over 18,700 feet high: the whole of North America has only three. In the centre of our view was the towering rock slab of Huascarán. At 22,200 feet, it is the highest
peak in Peru and the highest in all the tropical regions of the world. We passed through the small town of Yungay, once flattened by a type of natural disaster that these mountains specialise in, called an
aluvión
. Powerful glaciers form moraines of rock debris which pond up lakes behind them. The moraines are massive but weak. An
aluvión
occurs when a lake bursts its dam and unleashes a flood of rocks, mud and water. But, in 1970, something even worse happened. A terrible earthquake, measuring 7.7 on the Richter scale, shook the region. Throughout Peru it killed 70,000. In Yungay, the survivors were picking themselves up from the earthquake, unaware that it had caused huge masses of rock and glacier to break off Huascarán. This avalanche burst a lake and created an
aluvión
which smashed the town flat. Where it had stood was a ten-foot deep sheet of mud. Only the tall palm boles in the main square survived to tell the pitiful survivors where they were. Nearly all the town’s 18,000 inhabitants died.

I fell out of the bus as my back had stuck in an interesting helix shape. Elaine pulled our luggage and pretended not to be with me until I could at least stand up enough for my knuckles to clear the ground. On the roof of our hostel, the Residencial Los Jardines, we could look one way to watch the sun spread a strawberry light on thirteen snow-capped peaks running away down the Cordillera Blanca. In the other direction, a full moon rose over the town. Fires clearing dead vegetation prickled the darkness on far-off hills. On the other side of the Cordillera was an extraordinary place. Just reading about it had sent shivers down my spine. Older than the Incas, older than the Moche, ancient before any of them were
thought of, built into the rock of the Andes themselves, was the fabulous temple of Chavín de Huantar, where kings kneeled to hear the oracle roar from the heart of the forbidden chamber. Their culture, and the cultures it influenced, shaped Andean beliefs for one and a half millennia. Although it is one of the most important of all archaeological sites in the Andes, it is hidden in a remote valley in the high cordillera, and is seldom visited. Could we get there? We spread the maps on our knees and plotted.

The man in front of me in the bank queue wore a brilliant green scarf. After a minute, the scarf got up, turned around and lay the other way. It was an iguana. Just outside Huaraz, at a site called Wilkawaín, was a ruin from another early culture: the Wari. It dates from
AD
1100, and is believed to be a small model of part of the temple complex at Chavín. The bus driver set us down above a small field where a freshly killed pig was laid out over charred stones and a low brushwood fire. The two married couples working on it beckoned us down. ‘Before gutting it, we burn off the hair, that is what we are doing now,’ said Ladislao. He nodded to his wife, who slowly poured water over the skin. He gave it a minute, and began rasping a small scraping knife across the shoulders, making smooth cream patches on the burnt skin as he went. The sow’s nose, always so supple before, feeling for roots and tubers, was burnt stiff and black. A docked brown puppy pulled at it, and burnt its mouth. At the top of the field, the pig’s brother and sister lay full length,
their heads face down on their trotters. We hired a shy guide whose father had come here twenty years before to work as a labourer on the dig. Wilkawaín was a squat, heavy, stone rectangle with entrances at ground level and, via external stairs, above. Human bones of all social classes were found scattered in it. It is incredibly strong. In the 1970 earthquake, when Huaraz was flattened, Wilkawaín suffered only one cracked stone lintel, and a minor ceiling collapse.

Waiting for the bus back we met Marco Barreicochea, and his wife Marcela, both in their fifties, he a teacher, she a nurse. Elaine said, ‘You must have been here in the 1970 earthquake.’

‘The thirty-first of May at thirty-five minutes past three in the afternoon,’ Marco said, without pausing for thought. ‘In forty-eight seconds, our lives and our town changed forever. All the old houses were adobe, just one or two storeys, with thatched or tile roofs. Their balconies practically touched across the street: they said if you wanted an affair with your neighbour you could kiss without ever leaving the house! The narrow streets made it more dangerous because you couldn’t escape falling masonry and roof tiles. When the tremors began, many ran into the church; it collapsed, killing nearly everyone.’ He had a face like a boat skipper, grizzled, tanned,
clear-eyed
; but his eyes began to darken with memory.

‘Were you at home?’ I asked.

‘Yes, we had small children. We ran out into the courtyard at the back, and our house collapsed behind us.’

‘How did it feel standing there, trapped in the courtyard?’

Marcela was very dark-skinned, with wavy dark-brown hair, neatly cut just above her collar in a western style. ‘I
was waiting to die. Only ten per cent of the city was left standing. In the centre, most people rushed into the narrow streets where balconies, roofs and walls fell on them. We lost close family, and some friends, but all our children survived, thank God. When we knew it had stopped, we all went up to the hospital where I worked, because it was a modern building, with a steel frame. It was hardly touched.

‘It was an earthquake like we had never imagined; the epicentre was here, right beneath us. I worked through the night. More than the injuries themselves, I remember the corpses being brought in. I never thought to see the townspeople laid out in their hundreds and thousands. There was nothing we could do, no space, but people kept bringing in the bodies, not knowing where else to take them. No one wanted to stay in the town. They fled to the country and sought out friends and family, or just camped. This all happened on a Sunday; by Monday, help began to arrive. The Russians were the first; they flew over a complete military field hospital. They sent all their staff over in one plane, and it crashed, killing everyone. The Cubans sent their best clothes and shoes. We had a military government at the time, and we thought that the distribution of aid would be organised and efficient. It was, but none of it came here. In twenty-four hours it was on sale in the black market, in Lima. It was easy to identify; it was the only decent stuff available.’

Marco took up the story. ‘A year later the city centre was little changed from the day it happened. Some had got used to the countryside, others went down to the coast, there was still lots of fishing in Chimbote. No one could face moving back in.’

The Chavín Express bus emerged from the depot like a barnacle with agoraphobia. We rumbled south alongside the cordillera to the village of Catac, then turned straight towards the mountains and began to climb. The wind chased white horses across Lake Querecocha, rippling its indigo waters below the triangular snowy peaks of Yanamarey and Pucaraju. A tunnel leads through the headwall of the valley and into the Mosna River system in which Chavín nestles. A drop of rain falling behind us would cross the desert and reach the Pacific, fifty miles away. A drop falling in front would pass through tropical forests and into the Amazon and journey over four thousand miles to the Atlantic. It took fifteen miles to descend to the base of the valley, through a Sierra wilder and more remote than I had seen before. Icicles lanced the shadows. Guinea pigs and chickens ran in and out of Stone Age thatched huts. Small children stared up, white eyes in dirty copper-red faces. I couldn’t imagine what it was like to live that life. Later, when I was alone, and things went wrong for me, I would find out.

Dusk fell as the bus shuddered into Chavín, now no more than a village lying in the shadow of the ancient temples. At the bottom of a narrow broken street was a small square and the massive carriage doorway of the Colonial Inca Hostal. We fell into clean sheets, slept hard and rose early. In the faint morning mist an old woman, bent horizontal under a shawl-load of dew-laden meadow grass, carried breakfast to her pony. It waited, still and round-shouldered, snorting cloudlets into the chill air. Chavín de Huantar sits where the waters of the rivers
Mosna and Wacheqsa tumble down from the sacred mountain of Huantsán and mingle beneath a huge sugar loaf of rock. The coast is six days’ walk to the west, the jungle is six to the east. The father of Peruvian archaeology, Julio Tello, discovered this crossroads on the roof of the ancient world. His own history was as amazing as the mysteries he unearthed. He was a pure-blooded Indian from the tiny village of Huarochirí, where each year they re-enacted the murder of Atahualpa. Tello was the tenth of thirteen children, brought up to believe he was a direct descendant of a deity who lived in the snows of the majestic peak of Paria Kaka.

One day his father, the mayor, received a request to pack up some skulls found in the area, and send them to Lima. He showed little Julio where ancient surgeons had drilled small holes in the skulls to relieve pressure on the brain. Seeing something precocious in him, his father sold silver heirlooms to pay to send him to school in Lima. Soon after, his father died, and Julio was alone in the capital. He was twelve years old, but he wouldn’t abandon his education. He sold newspapers, and portered at the railway station. One of the men whose bags he carried was Ricardo Palma, director of the National Library. When he heard the boy was working to fund his education, he paid him to collect his mail from the Post Office each noon. ‘Many years later,’ Tello recalled, ‘I realized that he chose that hour so I would return at lunchtime, and always have something to eat.’ He became a library assistant. His salary was sufficient to finance him through university, where his thesis won him a scholarship to Harvard. He wrote it about the trepanned skulls that he had helped his father send to Lima.