Cloud Road (38 page)

One day in 1533, Spaniards came crashing through the doors of these holy spaces, prising apart everything most sacred, and carrying it off. Rape, as always, came with the other violence. Grasping hands fell first upon the moulded gold plates which decorated the inside and outside of these temples. Each weighed four and a half pounds; there were seven hundred of them. The centrepiece was a golden disc six feet high bearing a face surrounded by rays. When the main Spanish force arrived, it had disappeared, though a man from Biscay, Mancio Sierra de Leguizano, claimed to have looted it and gambled it away the same night. Such private prizes were not permitted, but the lie gave rise to a Spanish expression of profligacy: ‘to gamble away the sun before it rises’. Once word of these riches reached the Caribbean, Spanish possessions were swept by a new disease: Peru fever. Officials in Puerto Rico feared the collapse of their own colony as men charged south: ‘there will not be a single citizen left unless they are tied down’. The actual discouragements to leaving were even more basic: flogging and cutting off feet.

In these rooms, a history, a culture, a people, were also dismantled. Much treasure was spirited away by the Incas: not for financial reasons, for in a land that had no money or private trade, gold and silver were of symbolic value, but to prevent sacrilege. It was thrown in lakes, or sealed in caves. There was an Inca saying that gold does not stay long in the hands of the undeserving. After the seizure of Cuzco, Qoricancha was given to Juan Pizarro, but he had only three years to enjoy it, before perishing in the assault on Sacsaywaman. Those who succeeded in getting money home often blew it on showing off at court,
to the amusement of the old moneyed families. How much money came back in all will never be known. In the sixteenth century, imports of New World silver increased European reserves by 700 per cent. Yet precious metals were not the richest source of income. Even at the peak of mining, Mexico and Peru contributed four times as much to Spain through agriculture. A fifth of everything went to the king. Columbus campaigned fruitlessly for him to use it to pay for expulsion of Moors from Jerusalem. Philip II, then Charles V, spent it as foolishly as the peasant conquistadors, hiring armies to fight Protestantism and resurrect the moribund idea of a Holy Roman Empire. The money washed through the still primitive economy of Spain, and stopped in the advanced trading and manufacturing economies. By 1629, three-quarters of all the New World’s gold and silver had found its way to London, Amsterdam, Rouen and Antwerp: the cities of Spain’s enemies.

Cieza de León delivered the plain and irrefutable rebuke: had Spain acted prudently, it would have as much gold and silver as Peru once did. By the 1560s, Spain had spent all its loot, exhausted all easily mined precious metals, depopulated the country and borrowed against future income. By then, León had died, aged just
thirty-two
years, his health broken by the diseases of the New World. He seems to have been a very decent young man, in a time and place when corruption was the norm. He was also conscious of the power of the written word, and he quoted with approval Cicero: ‘Writing is the witness of time.’ He committed his 8,000 page manuscript, begun when he was twenty years old, to a chest and the keys of the two locks to two different executors, ordering it to be
sealed for fifteen years until the chief protagonists were beyond hurt. He died in 1553, the same year as Rabelais, his once lively hand so paralysed that he could scarcely sign his will.

Just over the hill from Cuzco is the Sacred Valley of the Urubamba River. Sleepy stallholders at Pisac village market unpacked their sheaves of brilliant weavings, oranges and reds full of sunshine and warmth, among heaps of fruit and vegetables, knitting and pottery, fake antiques and a few real mixed in among them.

The path to Pisac’s real treasures winds out of the back of the square, beginning as a broad stair, but soon reduced to a narrow steep path. A few hundred feet up, tiny guardrooms sit on ledges overlooking the Urubamba valley. They were so skilfully modelled to the land that they look as if they are a natural outgrowth of the rock. I like nothing more in Inca architecture than this facility to make stone buildings look like organic outgrowths of the land. Higher up were forts from where soldiers could have seen all the way up the Urubamba valley, and into the side valley, above which stood Inca Pisac. I stood in sentry points in the broken walls; beneath my feet, the roofs of the market stalls were blue and lemon deckchair stripes.

A final climb brought me out onto more level land. A blade of land swooped from the mountains, dipped and rose again to where I stood. One side of the blade faced east, the other west, a perfect Inca location, controlling sunset and sunrise. In the hollow was a complex of
buildings on a tiny green apron, like a miniature Machu Picchu. In the heart of them was a D-shaped observatory, the same design as the one at Machu Picchu. On a ledge lower down was a quadrant of buildings with views east across the side-valley: the quarters of high status officials.

The path led on up the blade threading an increasingly precarious route until it was reduced to two feet wide, a cliff rising to the left, a precipice falling to the right. I crossed this to a mere fissure in the rock, both sides polished smooth by rubbing shoulders. The short tunnel led out onto an equally exposed section. A flight of very irregular steps led down the face of the cliff. I made way for an American tourist coming the other way, on his hands and knees, crawling as far away from the drop as he could. I knew just how he felt. Not even writhing on your belly would make you feel safe, somehow you could still fall. You had to get lower, inside the rock; maybe then this terror would pass. His teenage son walked up confidently, then, arriving at the top and seeing where he was, went very still. His hand reached out to the rock of the cliff, so smooth, no holds.

The path brought me to Kalla Q’asa, Parrot Pass, named after the parrots which use the dip in the ridge to fly through at the beginning and end of the day, going to and from their roosts. A strange assortment of very narrow buildings rose up a hillside so steep that the eaves of the lower buildings were level with the foundations of the structure above. The author of Cuzco’s best guidebook, Peter Frost, believes these eyries were erected when Pisac was still a frontier post, with defence as a priority. Later, peace more assured, it was consolidated into a high status ceremonial centre. The sky was darkening, a storm
threatening. I ate lunch studying the line of cliffs in the head of a gully. It was honeycombed with tombs, all,
however
inaccessible, looted long ago. I spent several more hours exploring, but returned to this spot late in the day.

I imagined being a guard, perched here at sunset. The sun would go down behind the banks of the tombed corpses, curled up in red cliffs dreaming the circular dreams of the dead. Below me the great amphitheatres of curved terraces would drain of workers knocking the clods from their basalt spades, scraping the rich soil from their hoes, talking quietly, tiredly, in the sibilant murmur of Quechua, as they spilled down the hill. Below, wives pushed kindling into the fire to speed the flames and cook the maize. When the cries of young children died away, the hill was left to the soldiers’ eyes, watching the fan of nobles’ houses. The dusk winds would drop, and the rustling grasses fall quiet. As I turned to go down, there was a murmur of wings; bright birds poured over the ridge. You might think there could be no more places like this to discover. But I had an appointment, in twenty-four hours’ time, to meet Peter Frost, who has proved otherwise.

I arrived at the Varayoc Café, just off the main square, at a couple of minutes to six. Exactly on the hour, the door opened and in he walked, a large physical presence, bright blue eyes and thick grey hair. I shook hands. ‘Can we sort out straight away,’ he began, ‘what’s on and off the record. I have to deal with government officials, I don’t want casual asides on the politics of working here to appear in print.’ He spoke with an English accent but his vocabulary was peppered with Americanisms. He was careful to sort his thoughts and choose his words. ‘I was born in Clevedon, Somerset, and went to Kingston College
of Arts and Technology. It’s now a university,’ he added, with the mildly bemused voice of someone finding their past morphing behind them. ‘I was a square peg, and the round hole was a Higher National Diploma in business studies, soon replaced by working as an assistant manager on a
hacienda
in Argentina. After a year, I went
sightseeing
. One day I walked into the square of Tiwanaku village, on the Bolivian side of Lake Titikaka, and saw a dance in costume, with ancient horns, trumpets and thumping drums.’ He paused to pin down something. ‘It aroused a need to know, to understand, to search. I ended up in Cuzco in June 1972 watching the
Inti Raymi,
the Festival of the Sun.’

‘What do you think about the revival of pre-Hispanic culture?’ I had a feeling I was going to annoy him, and was now picking my own words with great care. ‘Isn’t it hollow to revive ritual if you no longer believe in the mysteries underpinning it? The Inca nexus of astronomy, civil and religious power and agriculture tied the needs of body and soul together. It once seemed a coherent account of the world. For all its ills, western culture now provides the most powerful account of the world. What future is there in people here turning their backs on it, to return to a weaker one?’

‘The value of the revival is that the land has, or had been, forgotten about in western culture. Without it, we can’t exist for a second. Traditional cultures respect and care for the land. If locals stop making propitiatory gifts to the spirits of the mountains, and a hailstorm sweeps down, they’ll feel it’s something that might have been avoided. In any case, it’s also symbolic: natural disasters do follow poor management.’

Above all, Peter was famous for the discovery in the remote Vilcabamba Range, just three years before, of a city from a previously unknown culture. ‘I was leading a small group of walkers, tourists, through the area of Minas Victoria, where there’s old silver and copper mines, to Choquequirau and Vitcos. They were all good walkers. One of the group, an American called Scott Gorsuch, had observed the late sun on a ridge the evening before, and said something like “That’s the kind of place Incas would choose to build.” I thought about that during the night. Next morning, around half past six, we took a careful look through binoculars. We were above the river Yanama, looking west down a long ridge, from which one peak rose up, Cerro Victoria, and hid what was beyond.

‘I asked them if they wanted to divert to investigate it. They were keen, so we picked our way along a ledge until we were within about half a kilometre of it. From that vantage point we could see clearly that there was a platform. The morning sun also caught the site very early, and in that light we saw that the top of the peak seemed to have been levelled, and there was the suggestion of the line of a wall. There were some old constructions and tombs on a site about a hundred and fifty metres long. That was the best we could do that day. My great hope was that it had not been looted; so much has gone.

‘Back in Cuzco I told just a handful of people and bound them to silence. Very little real archaeological work has been done in the Vilcabamba area, and not a single organised dig. So we sat on our discovery and tried to put together funds. We won the support of Rebecca Martin at the National Geographic Expeditions Council, and recruited Dr Alfredo Valencia, a highly respected Cuzco
archaeologist. We returned to the site, it’s called Qoriwayrachina, in June 2001, and found that most of the graves had been looted in the 1960s or 70s, when there was casual reworking of the Minas Victoria. But two have been found untouched, and the buildings had not been dug over. We could now go below Cerro Victoria to the hidden end of the ridge, where we found not just an Inca settlement, but a pre-Inca one. It was a local culture, previously unknown, and the style of the artefacts was different from any previously found remains. There’s no reliable radiocarbon on it but it’s Early Intermediate Period, which began around 450 BC.

‘We found silver pins, querns and a complete kitchen; it was as if it had been abandoned. The best find that year was a pot, almost intact, with a human face on it. The face reminded me a little of those on the Easter Island statues, slightly protruding eyes, and a long, retroussé nose.’

‘Was the site’s existence suspected?’

‘There was circumstantial evidence. Machu Picchu famously does not have the infrastructure needed to support itself, and, at another high-status site,
Choquiquirau
, there seemed to be too few labourers. Perhaps Qoriwayrachina fills that gap; not a lost city, perhaps, but as Scott called it, “a lost blue-collar suburb.”’

‘And you, you’re here for keeps?’

‘Sure, I’m building a new house up above the city,
solar-panelled
adobe.’

I read back to him his answer to a question put to him in a profile for the
Cusco Weekly
newspaper (some modernisers of Quechua spelling prefer Cusco spelled with an ‘s’). Asked if he was a cultural misfit, he had replied, ‘Absolutely. These days, if you’re not one, you’re not
paying attention. Culture doesn’t fit comfortably any more, the world has changed too much, too fast, so you either have to work out your own culture, your own values, or else you’re doomed to get everything from television.’

‘Does it bother you that quite a few people come to Peru not to learn, but with a bag of western
mumbo-jumbo
that they think needs a home: the stone-huggers, millennium seekers, guru-hunters?’

‘Not really,’ he said cheerfully, ‘I’ve done my share of stone-hugging in the past.’

‘What do you miss most about England?’

‘English libraries and bookshops, English breakfast tea, marmalade and Marmite.’

Next morning saw me searching a small avenue called Grau for buses to Ollantaytambo, established as the country estate of the Inca Pachacuteq, and converted into a fortress for the last great stand against the Spaniards. It is an unfinished masterclass in stone. It is also the only Inca town to survive more or less intact. The bus crossed back into the Sacred Valley at Pisac, and followed the Urubamba downstream through Calca, where the rebel Inca Manco fled after defeat at Sacsaywaman. It wasn’t a strong defensive site, and soon he was retreating further downstream, to Ollantaytambo.