Cloud Road (30 page)

I traced with my finger. ‘This is the way I walked.’

He got on his horse, ‘I will go and look for them.’ He was treating it very seriously; I reflected how important the loss of good clothing would be to them.

I washed clothes in a stream, spread them on a wall and lay down out of the wind to write my diary. Once the sun fell below the hill, I needed my warm trousers and
thermal underwear. I was already missing the fleece. I went into an outbuilding to change. Although newer than the stone hovel Alejandro’s mother was cooking in, it was used only for storage. The floor was dirty with the droppings of various animals. I could not stand up straight without butting my head against the ceiling. I was forced into a crouch that was just perfect for sending my back muscles into spasm. I pulled my clothes from a stuff-bag, and my flannel fell out and into a bucket of water. As I bent over in the gloom to retrieve it, I found gutted trout staring blandly back at me. I hopped around, trying not to put my shoeless foot into something exotic.

The single door to the hovel was a tin sheet nailed to a crude wooden frame. There were no windows or chimney. To the left was a kitchen, a low mud oven fired with dried cow-dung. On the right was a sitting area, with a stone bench built into the wall, and covered with sheepskins. I sat down next to a heap of them and read by the light of my head-torch, the smoke stinging my eyes. After a while, the pile of sheepskins yawned, and a little rubber boot came out. I had nearly sat on the baby of the family, having a nap.

When it grew dark, the mother lit a small, home-made kerosene lamp, which gave no more light than a candle. Alejandro returned, stamping his feet against the cold. ‘I went back to Patahuasín, and questioned the grandfather you spoke to. He said you still had the pack of clothes then. He described everything, including the canteens of water and fuel.’

It was unnerving to know I was so closely observed, my goods tallied.

‘Tomorrow you can ride to Antacolpa with Nicolás, and
he will ask there if anyone has found anything. If you go on your own, they will tell you nothing.’

‘I suppose it will do no good to tell the police?’

He shook his head. ‘Everyone will clam up.’

Alejandro’s father appeared; he’d been high in the hills. We ate potato soup and a bowl of potatoes, with no butter or salt. At eight o’clock, they prepared for bed. They owned the hut we were in, three well-thatched storage buildings and a fourth under construction, but they slept in two tiny, thatched shelters in the fields.

‘Why?’

‘There are many livestock thieves in this area. If they come, you can hear them much sooner, and act much more quickly. If you don’t do it,’ he added, ‘you lose animals.’ In such an incredibly remote place, they were too anxious about crime to sleep in their own beds. He carried the youngest, fast asleep, and still wrapped in a sheepskin, out into the star-scattered night. He brought in the cat to keep the mice from the food hung on nails in the walls. Nicolás and their father slept on the kitchen floor.

I laid sheepskins on the floor and read, enjoying the isolation, the silence. The rough timbers of the roof had been pickled by the fire-smoke, and shone like bitumen. Stray straws hanging from the thatch had collected long blooms of soot like sprays of black millet; a goblin lair. My six a.m. morning alarm was Nicolás and his father going out, leaving the door open. A white mare was saddled for me. Nicolás strode ahead on foot. Although thirty years old, he walked with a stoop, like a bashful teenager. He had a self-deprecating smile, a receding chin and a mild manner. Sierra women would have him for breakfast.

The horse coughed and laboured up the hill. It was
worth losing the clothes just to ride at dawn across a landscape that had slumbered ten thousand years almost unchanged. We crossed a stream where ice had rimed dark grasses, bending them over the sparkling water. This was a steeper, more direct route than I had walked, over the top of the mountain. As we gained the crest, the sun lay just below the ridge, behind a hut where a twisted tree was silhouetted like a gale-punched thorn. A tethered horse waited, head bowed, while a man muffled to the eyes flung a blanket and saddle over his back. Their breath joined the morning mist, back-lit by the ascending furnace of the sun.

Nicolás counselled me. ‘Keep out of the way when we reach Antacolpa. Let me do all the talking. If they talk at all, it will be to me, and they will not talk at first. We will have to talk of other things until we get round to the matter of losing your luggage.’

We began at the campsite. In a house just above where I had camped lived an old lady. She was spooning liquid into the beaks of her hens.

‘It’s a distillation of garlic and onion. They have bronchial trouble, one has died already.’ While Nicolás went off, I sat against the wall of her house, watching her drive her sheep from fold to field. She boiled a kettle on a grass fire, over a couple of stones in the yard, and made me tea, and brought soup. ‘You should have stayed with me instead of sleeping out in the open. There are some very bad people round here,’ she said, nodding at the man across the gully, the man who had come to fuss with my pack.

Nicolás chatted his way round the village but when he came back he said, ‘Nothing, no one knows anything.’

‘Do you believe them?’

‘The mine has brought many strangers to town.’

We returned to Lauricocha. Nicolás said, ‘I think we may hear some news, once people start talking.’ He smiled that reticent smile. But I had already given up the clothes as lost. In the afternoon, we walked up to Lake Lauricocha. It was a large, long lake like a Scottish loch, with mountains rising from both shores. In the distance, its blue waters wound out of sight as the valley curved left. A soft wind brushed through the reed beds and brought the splash of wavelets to our ears. Nicolás held out his arm to the lake, as if introducing me to royalty, ‘Lauricocha!’ We fished for rainbow trout in the stream below, beginning at an ancient stone clapper bridge: a dozen stone piers bridged by single stone slabs. He said it was Inca, I didn’t doubt it. A llama train came over the valley floor and across the bridge, a small black sack strapped to each flank; their reflections dancing in the smooth pools beneath the bridge, their brisk step shaking the thick, brown wool of their coats.

The fishing net was a skirt, its hem fringed with lead weights, and a strong cord attached to the centre. It weighed twenty-two pounds. He held the end of the cord in his left hand, and the centre of the net and two
edge-weights
in the other. When he cast it, he spun it gently, so it fell outspread. When he hauled it in, the weights closed, trapping any fish inside. It took twenty casts before he caught one tiny trout, which he threw back. He caught nineteen more, all but one of which I would have thrown back, but he kept them.

On my first attempt to throw the net, I lost my balance, and nearly threw myself in after it. It took three attempts
before I could throw it so it opened. It was very tiring; I caught nothing. After half a dozen more failures, I gave it one last chance, and brought up a kicking rainbow trout. The mottled silver flanks bore a glaze of faint lemon yellow, subtly tinted with grey ovals, like bubble trails.

‘We’ll go back a different way, I want to show you something special, a secret place.’ He took me around the opposite side of the great island of rock I had first seen from above. Hummocks rumpled the fields, hinting at something buried. Further on, low stone walls broke the turf, until, in the centre of the site, we could see we walked among ruined houses. They were very small, and curiously laid out. They were semi-detached, single-room dwellings, each with a structure like a fireplace; under one was a concealed underground storage area, big enough to hide people in times of trouble.

‘No one has investigated these,’ said Nicolás. ‘It’s older than the Incas, much older.’ The area’s history is truly long and obscure. In 1958 an archaeologist called Cardich found animal bones, particularly deer and guanaco, jointed and gnawed, in profusion on the floor of a cave in Lauricocha. Some bones were charred, and the first layers revealed slender leaf-shaped arrow heads going back five thousand years. Below them the stone points were larger and rounder: spearheads. The spear is a more primitive weapon for hunting by stealth. Archers can draw a bow inch by inch, from a kneeling position, and release the arrow by a minute movement of the fingers. At some point, a spear-thrower has to rise, and make a violent movement. These spear heads were from remote antiquity. At the base of the deposits, from 8,000 to 9,500 thousand years ago, is a still darker time, when the animal
remains were uncooked. Mankind has lived in Lauricocha for much of the time that humans have occupied the Americas.

Alejandro’s wife was back, a beautiful woman, dressed in her best clothes, and plainly suspicious about me. I guessed her family was better off than her husband’s and coming home and seeing a stranger in her modest home grated. I think one of the first things I said to her was, ‘I’ll be leaving tomorrow.’

In the morning, I found the cat had crapped on top of my boot. I was wondering how to clean it when the dog ate it. I hired Nicolás and his white mare to guide me and Dapple across the valley to the Inca highway. For breakfast, I was given the only large trout. My protests that it should be shared were ignored. It was fried: delicious. I managed to give them money for their time and trouble, but only after they had looked anxiously at each other, uncomfortable at accepting cash for
hospitality
. As we were saddling up, Alejandro brought out a flagon-shaped jar about ten inches high. ‘We found it in the houses you visited yesterday.’

‘It doesn’t look Inca,’ I said.

‘It is,’ he insisted, but I wasn’t convinced. There was a motif showing a feline figure, probably a puma, standing on a recumbent moon: an image more typical of a coastal civilisation, where the tide-controlling moon is important. It might be a crescent-shaped reed boat, like those used on Titikaka. Either way, it was a motif I have never seen in any textbook. ‘Don’t sell it, except to a museum or university.’ Not likely, but I wanted them to understand they should get a good price. I mounted the horse; Nicolás walked. I turned to wave to the family, but they had
already dispersed, to work or play. We forded the streams and small rivers that merged lower down to form the river that had boxed me in. I rode into the river and Nicolás leaped down and waited for Dapple to follow.

‘How long have you got?’ I grinned.

He coaxed, clucked, made soft shooing sounds. Dapple did his giant squid impersonation: all eyeballs and flailing limbs. I was glad he didn’t save it just for me. I rode the mare back to the bank and took Dapple’s rope. Alejandro gave him a shove on the backside and sent him sliding, kicking and panicking down into nine inches of water. Once ashore, Nicolás was masterful. He had brought a twenty-foot cane rod to go fishing, and he let Dapple loose in front, guiding him by holding the rod at the corner of his vision, blocking any turns.

Before he left, I said, ‘I would like to buy the horse, are you sure you do not want to sell?’

‘It’s the only horse I have.’

‘I’ll give you enough money to buy another.’ It was something I could ill afford, but the prospect of simply tying Dapple to a well-behaved animal was ravishing.

‘I can’t sell.’

I gave him his money for guiding me and a pack of fishhooks, the most practical thing I could spare. Alone again. The trail was narrow and well-worn, and Dapple followed it well. Like Nicolás, I let the rope fall and followed behind, encouraging, tapping a flank to steer. The ground rose to nearly fourteen thousand feet before the narrow pass arrived. For the last few yards the route crossed long grass and divided into several parallel paths, which I did not notice, as, tired from the climb, my eyes were on my feet. When I looked up, Dapple had taken a
lower path. I stopped to wait for him to move on. He stopped too, trembled, shot around and galloped back down the hill. I chased. Within fifty yards, my lungs were empty, and he was disappearing over the brow of the hill with everything I needed to stay alive.

I had all but given up catching him, when he reached a bare bit of ground with several paths out. Needing to make a decision, he froze. I got right behind, out of his sight, and used the last wisps of oxygen in my body to run at the trailing rope and dive on it. It was five minutes before I could breathe well enough to get to my feet. Another five passed before I could speak. I pulled its eye to mine. ‘Why do you hate me?’ Had I had a machete, I would have made camp and had a three-day barbecue, and gone back to carrying the stuff myself. I vowed I would never let go of the rope again. We passed over the col into a new valley, one starker, more forbidding, than any that had gone before. The road fell only briefly before beginning a long ascent. It narrowed to a mere nick in the right-hand wall of the valley. I could see far ahead; the land was starkly beautiful, but bare and strangely uninviting. There wasn’t a house or human being in view. The further ahead I looked, towards the final, highest path, the darker it grew. About three hours’ walk away, the valley veered to the left, still rising, and the trail ran out of sight.

From noon till one, the cliffs above me killed any breeze. I slowly began to pick out children far above me,
watching over sheep whose black wool was splashed with white. After months out of doors, my senses were heightened to a degree I had never known, discerning tiny divergences from the background. Two miles in front, a man moved his hand to his face: the only other man in the landscape. Far away and faint, soft thuds, like a shotgun.

By mid-afternoon I had made good progress. The Inca highway then dropped to a marshy valley floor, and I had to climb up above it. Some nightmare came from one of the many dark recesses of Dapple’s psyche. Trickles of water began to worry him. It took only one slight give in the turf for him to refuse to cross a rivulet no bigger than he could have made himself. We climbed sideways to where the trickle was four, rather than five, inches across, and he made it, leaping into the air as if it were a chasm. I heard more soft thuds, each a little closer.