Cloud Road (29 page)

‘No, we still get oats, barley and potatoes from there.’

‘How high can potatoes grow, then?’

He put his hand to his knee, ‘About this high.’

‘What are the problems of living up here?’

‘It’s cold and dry, and the crops struggle.’ As if the people didn’t. The path went up and up. I stopped to rest
in a hollow and chew a few biscuits. It was prematurely dark and spitting with rain. The grass was teeming with black caterpillars with luminous green eyes. In half a mile, I came onto a little plateau where two stone and adobe huts huddled in a muddy yard. Dapple and I might have been Lear and the Fool staggering in from the storm on the heath, roles interchangeable. A family was saying goodbye to visitors. A boyish-faced man in his late twenties shook my hand; ‘I am José.’

‘I just need room to pitch my tent quickly, before the storm.’ I nodded at the black pall rolling down from the Waywash mountains, coming straight towards us.

‘Wherever you want.’

I could now see a modern adobe building and a number of older stone houses. I quickly tied Dapple to a veranda post on the new house, and unpacked the tent in the lee of one of the little sheds. The tent is strongest when the head points to the wind. As soon as I had pegged the outer skin, the wind changed. It began to sleet. Calculating the wind would change back after the squall, I kept going. My fingers were thick numb things; I was stupid with tiredness and cold. Simple objects became malign spirits: cords cut flesh, zips snagged on hems. The four children of the house stared at me silently, ignoring the weather until the hard teeth of hailstones sent them fleeing for cover. I secured all the upwind guy ropes, then hastily finished the other side. The hail eased, but it began to snow. I moved Dapple from his post, where he was chewing the thatched roof, took him to the lee of the building, and gave him a double portion of feed.

The falling temperatures at dusk seemed to trigger precipitation. Again unable to cook, I was worried that I
would not warm up. Massaging some feeling back into my fingertips, I sat inside the sleeping bag to work. Remembering the boiled eggs, I ate one greedily, while preparing a bowl of egg, onion and tuna. The food lit a fire in my belly. The family brought out a bowl of potatoes. I thanked them profusely, but they were small and shrivelled, the remnants of the previous year’s harvest, part of their supper sacrificed for me. I ate a few, and packed away the rest, so as not to offend by returning them.

A man rode into the yard, and came straight to the tent. I went outside to greet him. He looked pained. ‘I am Dayer, José’s father. Forgive him for not inviting you into the house. It is too cold to sleep in a tent.’ He pointed to the puddle that had formed outside the entrance. On a limestone hill that was supposed to have no water, I had my own supply. I showed him the interior, bone dry. His eyes widened. Promising to eat breakfast with them, I persuaded him I was comfortable. I swept frozen snow off the tent, tightened the guy ropes and crawled into the sack. I woke several times in the night as the wind shook the tent. I moved my pack to the side of the tent facing the wind and warmed up a little. In the morning, the temperature inside the tent was around freezing. The zip was iced up, and had to be worked gently loose. José took me across the frozen fields to collect oats for Dapple, which he had cut for his own horses the previous day.

‘This place where my house stands is called Cushuro Pata; it is a very ancient Inca name, and means the place where mushrooms grow after heavy rain.’

It was a beautiful cold morning. The snowy peaks of the Waywash Mountains rose proudly above a belt of creamy
cloud. ‘See, they are all animals. That one on the right is Jirishanka, the hummingbird. That is Anka, the eagle. That one, Waywash itself, always has snow on it, even when the other caps all melt. Waywash is a little animal with white patches on its hips, we say it always has silver in its pocket. On the left is Yerupajá, the second highest mountain in Peru, it’s 6,634 metres.’

His wife cut a fine slice from a ham hanging in the eaves, and made soup with vegetables. We ate sitting on log stools at a small table that was the only piece of proper furniture they owned: life in the Iron Age.

I showed them pictures of my house and street. ‘So many cars! No need for a car here, no roads!’

Dapple was in exactly the same position I had left him, still chomping. ‘They eat all night,’ said Dayer, ‘and do not sleep enough. If they slept more, they would live to be much older.’

I felt the same about myself. We followed the trail until we rounded a shoulder and Laguna Tambococha was laid out in the wide, marshy, valley floor below. It was a small, reed-edged lake, fed by numberless rivulets, like threads trailing from unfinished embroidery. I had planned to cross the valley to the haunting Inca ruins of Tambococha. It was supposed to be walkable this late in the dry season, but the acid-green vegetation all the way down the centre betrayed impassable swamps. Where we descended, there were well-drained meadows where horses grazed, chestnut, deep brown and beautiful mid-grey. But the heart of it was strictly for geese and ducks.

The Inca road once crossed the marsh on a causeway, but no one knows where. My trail expired in the yard of a house, where a friendly old woman, with teeth like a
broken xylophone, sat smoking a pig’s head over a wood fire. ‘Your only path is down this side of the valley, and then,
a la vueltita
,’ a phrase which in ordinary Spanish means something like, ‘do a little return’. After crossing a mile of dry meadow, I was trapped in the confluence between two rivers. One ran swiftly through vertical turf banks, impossible to cross. The other was forded by stepping stones useful only for two-footed animals: I couldn’t blame Dapple for refusing to have anything to do with them. For an hour, I thought I would be forced into a major detour, but I finally found a gravel shoal that frightened neither of us.

I was still pinned to the wrong side of the valley by the marsh. Worse, I could not see an Inca road on the far side. A month later I found out that the expression a la
vueltita
is used by country people to mean ‘on the other side’. But I soon worked out for myself that there was a mountain between me and the true route. As long as my valley bore left, I would be able to return to the Inca road in five miles or so, when both routes descended to the Taparaco valley. We toiled up a long gravel road and up onto a plateau. We had already walked one of our longer days, about sixteen miles, and were both tired. It was twelve more miles before I reached Antacolpa, perched on a terrace high above the River Taparaco.

Antacolpa had been a hamlet, but a nearby mine brought in labourers who were expanding it into a mining village overlooking an absurdly large square. Miners were coming in at the end of the day’s work to buy liquor. I bought some too, and bags of fresh fruit, the first I had seen for days. I camped on a lick of land in the bend of a pretty stream, well out of sight of the village. There was
long grass for Dapple, and I fried my remaining boiled potatoes with onions and tomatoes, and tipped a tin of tuna into it. It was delicious and I ate enough for two, knowing how much I needed it.

The morning was cool and bright. I nearly got away without being bothered, but a man from the hut above came up at the last minute and insisted on helping load the last few things.

I walked down the valley, until forced to choose between following the stream into a dark knife-cut in the hill, or climbing the hill and looking down into the Taparaco valley. It turned out that no matter which I had chosen, the day was going to go wrong, and get worse. Near the top of the hill was a lone hut where a grandfather was minding four tiny grandchildren. ‘There’s no bridge over the river, none for miles.’

‘Can I descend through the canyon?’

‘Impossible!’

Across the valley I could see the Inca trail rising like a swallow, tantalising me. The river was hidden below. ‘How do I get to the Inca trail?’

‘Go to Lauricocha.’

‘I’ve never heard of it.’

‘There is a large lake. Below it the river is small; you can cross the valley safely.’

I looked at the map. The Inca highway went east of south, Lauricocha was west of south. ‘There’s no other way?’

He shook his head.

I didn’t quite believe him, so I walked on, beneath new electricity pylons, towards the next hamlet of Patahuasín, climbing down, then up, a steep side-valley on the way.
There was a strange noise in the air, a thin, dry squeal. Dapple grew nervous, though that was never an infallible sign of danger. When I led, he pulled me back. When I followed, he ran amok, heading in random darts, throwing the luggage about. The sound came from the air above. I saw the wires on the pylons moving. Looking ahead, I saw they sagged to the ground. They were hanging the wires of a new powerline, and the wheels on the arms of the pylons squealed as they turned.

When we were clear of the eerie noise, Dapple began another tantrum, trying to run back the way we had come. I turned round to check the luggage, and ensure it was comfortably loaded. The canoe bag, attached by two triple-pronged clips, which I found hard to undo when actually trying, was gone. It could have been kicked off during one of Dapple’s tantrums, or detached by someone while my attention was distracted: the uninvited helper with my packing, or the kindly grandfather. If it was the former, there was no point going back, it would be long hidden. I checked everything else was secure, and retraced my steps. Now that I wanted to go back, Dapple wanted to continue. I could not help thinking of the animal as malicious, and told it so, in a special screaming voice. It took over an hour to make a fruitless return to the grandfather, and find his hut empty.

Two days’ march ahead of me lay the highest and most exposed pass in the whole trip, a snow-draped ridge over sixteen thousand feet high. I had no fleece, if it rained I would get soaked from the waist down and I wished I had bought that poncho.

In all, over two hours were wasted. In Patahuasín, a skinny old lady in a flowerpot hat, with one yellow peg
left of her teeth, greeted me. ‘You want to cross the river? Come with me.’ She took me across a superb limestone pavement until we stood on the edge of a thousand-foot cliff, looking down to the winding turquoise waters of the river, and across to the Inca highway. It was one of the greatest vistas I have ever seen, wild, unspoiled and colossal. ‘You can cross there. Look! There are sheep crossing now.’

My spirits rose: even Dapple might match a sheep in sheer courage. ‘Where?’ I could see no animals. She pointed impatiently. Suddenly my eyes adjusted to the huge scale: the horses on the bank were specks; the riders, mere commas on their backs.

‘The sheep aren’t wading the river, they are being carried on horses!’

‘Yes, but the water is only up to the horses’ bellies!’

‘My donkey thinks the morning dew is deep. He is afraid of condensation.’

‘Hmmph!’ she snorted. ‘That’s your lookout! Everyone else crosses there.’

I gave up. ‘Which way to Lauricocha?’

She gave very precise directions that would take me to a crossroads where I would go straight on. I climbed a long hill and met a single road running across me. I could only hope for a vehicle to flag down, and ask directions. To my astonishment, a truck appeared within ten minutes.

‘Lauricocha?’ They looked at each other, frowning. ‘We don’t know it. We are not from here, you see, we work on the electricity line.’

I sighed; if it were easy, everyone would do it.

‘But,’ he continued, ‘there is a local man working on the next pylon.’ He pointed. So there was. All work
stopped and they took lunch, and pointed out how I had to climb down six hundred feet, follow a canyon and go round a block of rock the size of Manhattan, and there was Lauricocha.

‘And can I cross the river there?’

‘No, but they can show you where, it’s too hard to describe, you’ll never find it.’

I headed for the gully, which led down precipitously to the canyon.

‘Come back! One final thing!’

‘What is it?’

He held up a camera, ‘Can we have our picture taken with you?’

‘Of course.’

Half past three found me sweating my way across the airless canyon floor, through beautiful meadows where cream and coffee-coloured horses cropped the flowers. I had a glimpse of a large, well-appointed
hacienda
ahead, which I guessed was Lauricocha village. I might even sleep in a bed tonight. But when I walked round the two-thousand-foot fortress of rock the man had described, and passed a group of animal shelters, a barbed-wire fence blocked my route. A powerful young man dressed head-to-foot in black came running down the hill towards me. I was exhausted. I slipped the daypack from my shoulders and waited.

The tall figure vaulted the fence with ease. He wore a blue jersey, elephant-cord trousers and wellington boots. I
began my speech: ‘I am an English tourist walking the Inca highway to write a book. Today I have lost my warm clothes, or been robbed –’

‘I am Alejandro. You must stay in my house.’

‘Is it at the
hacienda
across the valley?’

‘No, it is here,’ he pointed at the huts I had taken to be animal shelters. The brief dream of clean sheets faded.

‘That is very kind,’ I said.

‘Is it your donkey?’

‘Yes, I had to buy, because I am not going back to Huari.’

‘How much?’

I didn’t want another lecture about paying over the odds. ‘400 soles,’ I lied cheerily.

‘That’s expensive; round here, you pay 300.’

He lived there with his wife, four children, mother and bachelor brother Nicolás. His wife was away, with two of their children, visiting her parents, a day’s journey away.

I described what had happened. He said, ‘Let me show you my plans.’ I thought it was an odd moment for him to share his future with a stranger, but he went into one of the huts and emerged with a plastic tube from which he coaxed two full colour maps published by the Instituto Geografico Militar. They were the colour originals of my photocopies.