Cloud Road (39 page)

To follow in his footsteps, I had to change buses at Yucay, where the oldest avenues are lined with majestic
pisonay
trees. They are naturally a high jungle tree, but the Incas thought their waxy, brilliant, scarlet flowers so beautiful they introduced them to the Sierra. The minibus that took me the last fifteen miles to Ollantaytambo dropped me in the small square. The Hostal Chaskawasi
was a short walk up a dark, cobbled street eight feet wide: enough for two laden llamas to pass. Maintaining the original Inca layout, many houses did not have a door onto the street. A gate gave into a yard shared by two houses, where, like a miniature farmyard, geese and ducks splashed in galvanised steel baths, or slapped their soft feet over the muddy stones. My room, in the original Inca part of the hostel, overlooked the street. Opposite was an ancient, tiny green door, almost twisted and crumpled by its own massive lintels with jambs, whose stones seemed to be swelling like tree boles to close up the entrance.

Ollantay was a chieftain who fell in love with Inca Pachacuteq’s daughter, was denied her hand, rebelled to win her and was crushed. The town named after him is very different from Calca; a natural defensive point, well positioned to deal with insurgents coming up from the Amazon. Its strongest defences face Cuzco. Hernando Pizarro assembled his best men and rode out to take Manco, without making any reconnaissance. Pedro Pizarro recalled, ‘When we reached Ollantaytambo we found it so well fortified that it was a horrifying sight.’

My hostel’s new building had a roof terrace above the second floor, which gave views across the whole town. In the neighbour’s vegetable garden, a cherry tree was in flower, scattering pale pink petals on the back of a black cow. Above me, on the almost inaccessible cliffs of Flute Mountain, were old Inca storehouses, very narrow with tall gables. On the other side of the Patacancha valley were more, on a slope so steep their rear eaves were at ground level and their front walls two storeys high. Above this towered a huge pyramidal peak, which sent a ridge snaking down towards the Urubamba. Before it plunged
the last three hundred feet to the valley floor, it levelled out, and turned a little upstream, cradling a tall steep skirt of land below that turn. That skirt has been modelled into immaculate terraces, with a central stairway. On the ledge itself, the Incas began a temple that would have surpassed in quality all others. On the very top, I could make out six blocks of rose-coloured rhyolite, a
fine-grained
rock chemically the same as granite. They stood side by side like tall rectangular shields. They map the magnificent ambition; behind them lies the compromise forced on them as events overturned their world.

Next day I clambered round the small ruins in the
side-valley,
but saved the famous temple site for late in the day. I came in along a small path clinging to the valley side, often just masonry work cantilevered out over the void. In the gusty wind, it was scary work. It brought me out at the top of the staircase that rose through the skirt of terracing, and onto a kind of parapet, between two walls of exquisite quality, the upper one incomplete. I climbed to the top of the ridge where the six great stones stood, the largest thirteen feet high, seven feet wide and six feet thick. Uniquely in Inca architecture, small stones are fitted between the larger ones, like fillets. Their delicacy set off the precise masses of the great stones to perfection. Some master architect-engineer experimented with an innovation that never developed further than this prototype.

A slew of scree on the far side of the valley, thousands of feet above, marked the place where they quarried them. A ramp below me showed me how they were dragged up to this ridge. One of the central ones still bears the recognisable shape of three Andean crosses, one above the other. The other animal carvings that guides point out to
visitors are now works of the imagination; even Squier’s nineteenth-century drawings show no other recognisable images remaining. Scattered around were finely carved monoliths, lintels and facing stones. In several, masons had cut a T-shaped channel, the base of the T touching the edge of the stone. This innovation is probably adopted from similar examples I have seen in the much older Tiwanaku temples on the Bolivian side of Lake Titikaka. Two such stones were fitted together, so the T’s touched foot to foot and made one I shape. When liquid metal was poured in, it solidified and contracted, clamping the pieces tightly together.

Yet a peek behind the six founding stones of the temple revealed panic. The sidewall has been made by laying a line of finely cut stones that were never designed to fit each other. On top of this base, the wall is finished in rough cut stones. The patient artistic development of an innovative religious structure has turned into a scrabble to erect basic defences. Manco Inca fortified the town and put slingshot men on the hills all around. He recruited archers from neighbouring jungle tribes, fanatics who, even as they lay dying, continued to loose off arrows as long as they still had strength to draw a bow.

Spanish horsemen attacked the makeshift walls at the foot of the fortress. Stones hammered them, arrows darkened the sky and natives with captured swords, helmets and shields attacked fearlessly. Above, against the skyline, Manco paraded on a captured Spanish warhorse. When a heavy stone crippled a leading Spanish horse, its floundering spread confusion, natives swarmed down from all sides and a flood came down Patacancha River. The horses were floundering up to their girths in water, turning
the battlefield into a quagmire where they could not manoeuvre. It was not luck. Inca engineers had redirected the irrigation channels to flood the battlefield. The Pizarros slunk away, harassed all night along roads laid with a carpet of cactus spines to lame the horses.

It was the Incas’ only win in open battle. Francisco Pizarro attempted negotiation, but Manco would never trust the Pizarros again; he killed their envoys. He did not know Francisco had his wife-sister, Cura Ocllo, with him. The thug Gonzalo had grown tired of her and passed her around to others. She had now made herself filthy, to repulse further rapes along the trail. Francisco and his secretary had slept with her, but that did not stop them stripping her naked, tying her to a stake and instructing their Cañari allies, bitter enemies of the Incas, to beat her, then shoot arrows through her. She spat her last words at them: ‘Hurry up and put an end to me, so that your appetites can be fully satisfied.’ They made a floating basket and launched it down-river past Ollantaytambo. Manco’s servants fished it from the white waters and brought her marbled eyes before his agonised gaze, her hair a black river.

Manco began to fear that Ollantaytambo could not be defended indefinitely. His whereabouts were too well known. He retreated further into the mountains, to Vilcabamba. The end came around New Year 1545. A group of Spanish rebels had been his guests and accepted his hospitality for two years. They grew tired of exile and thought to ingratiate themselves before returning. While playing a game of quoits, one stood behind Manco and stabbed him to death in front of his nine-year-old son. It gained them nothing. Incas cornered them in a house.
They were either burnt alive or killed as they came out.

I returned to the town and strolled through the side streets, where streams tumbled down the gutters and ran underneath the bridge-stones at people’s doorways. There is something magical about crossing water to enter your house. The low sun was coming down the alleys, and the dust, and the blue wood smoke, and the steel cigarette smoke fanned it into streamers. Looking up-sun to the square, I could see the massive corner house; fat Inca stones dimpled with the stonemason’s blows of half a millennium before, the light bouncing off the rivulets where the stream turned a corner, the silhouettes of triangular skirts, hats, plaits and ribbons. I will never stop seeing that view, I was not imagining history from dusty dates, reconstructed words, frozen opinions, but looking down time’s tunnel. Beyond the women selling soups and teas, and flirting with the men, was a train of shadows receding through the generations, turning meat over, dripping fat flaring on hot charcoal, boiling tea, simmering pots. Behind the boys calling for the last bus were officials leading royal llamas, scarlet wool woven into their ears.

Cattle-trucks began to pull in, piled high with young, fit men who jumped down the slatted wooden sides and filled the trestle tables with swift, quiet chatter. The women selling food repeated their cries, altering with repetition until it turned into nasal cries, a bird-song, meaning almost gone. I bought a cup of broad bean soup, and joined a table. ‘We are porters from the Inca Trail, just finished guiding a four-day hike into Machu Picchu.’

There was a party atmosphere, another job completed safely; they stoked up on pasta-filled soups and stews. I asked, ‘Will you stay in town and party a little?’

They all shook their heads. ‘We live up in the hills, we need to live high to do this work, here in the valley is no good.’ They ate and drank rapidly, eager to be back to their families, their eyes straying up to the peaks around. Soon the trucks were filling and roaring up out of town towards the pinprick lights just beginning to glow soft yellow on the mountains: their homes.

I took myself onto the roof of the hostel. Below the ruins, the town was a blanket of pantiles from which wisps of smoke dreamed into the still evening air. A plaintive whistle: unseen, the Machu Picchu train made its way back up the Urubamba valley. I lay back low in a chair, watching the full moon rise over the ruined temple, its disc bright as brass. Clouds had gathered round the peak of Yana Orqo mountain above the old quarries, and were trickling towards me, but as they met the moon, she gobbled them up and they thinned away into wisps, into airy nothings. I swivelled the chair around, little by little. In each direction, there was delicate beauty, in the air, the susurration of small leaves. I had come to love this country.

At first light, I was back in the square, having more broad bean soup for breakfast, then walking down the river to pick up the railway to Machu Picchu. The short journey is not easy for, just below Ollantaytambo, the river plunges into a hot, moist gorge covered in rainforest. The Urubamba, even in low water, is a fearsome,
hundred-yard
-wide torrent of standing waves, whirlpools, and
waterfalls. At high water it is a maelstrom. The old Inca road climbs high over the mountain to avoid it. The motor road just gives up and peters out; but the railway engineers blasted a route along the valley floor, through spectacular scenery and stunning cloud forest. Because there is no road, the train is an excuse to milk the tourist dollar. It is very expensive but so poorly run that the man who sold me the ticket had a stand-up row with the guard on the train about whether the train which arrived at nine o’clock was the nine o’clock train. I sided with the ticket man and made it on board.

The mysterious site of Machu Picchu was unknown to outsiders until 1911. Despite the superb quality of its temples and observatory, it never seems to have supported a population larger than a village. The view from above, as you descend from the Inca trail, is one of the most famous in the world. I first saw it early one morning as I hiked in from the hills with Elaine, in the last year you were permitted to walk it independently. We had watched the clouds part like curtains on a stage and reveal the magnificent citadel a thousand feet below us. I wished her here by my side today: just me and her.

The clouds that had been raining on me since dawn parted and lifted, as they had for us two years before. The light revealed the terraced hill, which has been sculpted to peak as the
Intihuatana
, the hitching post of the sun, a finger integral to an altar, both carved from the living rock. Ruins of small, but exquisitely crafted, temples, priest-houses, watchtowers, warehouses and ordinary dwellings are dotted over the neat terraces which have partly re-shaped the hill-top, but could never tame it. I walked to the
Intihuatana
and felt at the heart of what the
Inca civilisation had been about: a round of ritual, like the masonry foundations of an edifice of pure power, conceived by its priests and secular rulers with a psychological intelligence and pragmatic ruthlessness that any modern despot would admire. Like life in medieval and early modern Europe, and many dictatorships since, there was no life outside the nexus of religious and political power. You stepped outside it to become a
nonperson
, an outlaw in the literal sense of having no legal right to exist. Besides, the law was what the Inca said it was. We romance the Incas and Aztecs still, because they fell in savage and spectacular fashion to Spanish rapacity. But we could not contemplate life under such societies for ourselves. In a modern society, such close control over others’ lives is now only exercised as punishment. I let my fingers linger on the stone as the sun slowly took the numbing night cold from its surface. But beneath that patina, it is always midnight.

The land falls so steeply behind the
Intihuatana
that, although I had not suffered vertigo standing on the top, when I went to descend the narrow stair behind it, I felt as if I were striding straight out into air. One house below was so difficult to adapt to the natural lie of the land in the way the architect wanted that one stone has been cut into a shape requiring thirty-two angles, all perfectly fitted. I climbed to the watchtower at the top of the site, and surveyed the whole citadel, which is laid out, as the Incas favoured, in the crook of an arm which comes down from the mountains before rearing up in a final pinnacle; here, it is Wayna Picchu, the rocky sugarloaf which forms the backdrop of all the calendar photos of the site. Nowhere else I know has an architect found such a perfect
site for his project. Nowhere else has a comprehensive architectural response to it been so completely realized. The curve of the citadel overlooks the horseshoe-shaped gorge of the sacred Urubamba River, within sight of all the major holy peaks in the area. It is at the centre of a web of lines of power and significance: every peak holy and powerful. It is as if the landscape has been designed by genius to provide a setting for Machu Picchu. The Temple of the Sun, the elegantly simple curved turret rising above a small natural cave with a spring in it, was so finely made Bingham took one look at it and exclaimed it was ‘the most beautiful wall in America’. I dipped my hand in the sacred waters and followed their dancing path down through the site, through stone channels, small fonts and splashing runnels. The site is still alive in these waters. The first thing they did when developing the site into the temple complex it was intended to be was to organise the drainage. As the
Camino Real
had taught me, water in the Andes can rip anything to shreds. Then they built the terraces, faced with stone walls. These were the features the locals had always known about. When Hiram Bingham came here he was taken straight to the site. Two young local men were cultivating small areas of the terraces on the sly, to avoid taxes and the military draft.