Cloud Road (7 page)

I liked Ambato without ever really finding anything to do there, so I moved base one town south to Riobamba. Getting out of Ambato was tricky. Following locals’ enthusiastic directions, I walked circuits of the centre and eventually left in a spiral, like a rocket only just escaping from gravity. For six hours it was all uphill, but the line of the Inca road soon left the noisy main highway and followed a parallel country lane where every dog had been trained to regard pedestrians as illegal. I reached a sandy plateau where dusty plants choked in dusty gardens. Farmers were planting young trees in what looked like vacuum cleaner dust. I crossed a new highway under construction. Half-naked turbaned labourers flung dirt from ditches, flung it in heaps or just flung it in the air for the wind to carry away and cake the fields deeper. They pointed at me, then went back to the dirt.

I was hurting from the climb and the miserable conditions; squinting, head down, with little to look at, each moment dragging: all I could think of was how sore I was. In the litter at the roadside, I saw a doll’s severed head and grimly jammed it on the head of my stick, giving it a voodoo air. When I was begging for the gritty wind to drop or to have some real countryside to look at instead of this dustbowl, a long-tailed hummingbird appeared, darting in swift semi-circles from blossom to blossom, and
lightening my spirits. But I nearly jumped out of my skin when a hand seized my elbow.

‘My name is Caterina,’ she whispered. She was thirteen years old, and she held three washed apples in her hands, the water standing in little globes on the waxy skin. ‘For you,’ she said shyly, and began to walk with me. ‘I saw you walking, and thought that fruit would refresh you.’ I was more moved than I could explain. I realized that she had stopped me feeling so lonely in my solitary exertions. She walked with me to where the Inca highway crossed the modern road. ‘There is a fork in the path ahead, ignore the obvious road, it is the wrong one. Cross the irrigation channel and follow the small path.’ It proved good advice; without it, I should have lost my way. Gradually, the land became greener, until, by late afternoon, at a hamlet called Santo Domingo de Cevallos, I stopped at a well-built two-storey farmhouse. A woman and her two daughters helped me find a level spot for my tent between a large polythene greenhouse and a small orchard, then went into the fields to cut maize for their evening meal. As dusk came, small children appeared silently in the undergrowth on the bank above me, like the hidden figures in a Douanier Rousseau painting. Later, the owner’s husband, Luis Rojas, came with her to my tent door, and we chatted.

‘I have my own bus, I have just finished work driving.’

‘The traffic must be very tiring.’

‘It’s the police and the passengers that get my blood pressure going. Are you married?’

‘I live with my girlfriend.’

‘You can get away with that on the coast. Here in the Sierra it’s more conservative,’ he said. Both of them were
grinning. ‘If you don’t sign up in church, you don’t get any.’ I went to sleep wishing Elaine were at my side. She had begun a PhD on the European Discovery of the Americas and our discussions of source materials that overlapped our interests had helped me so much in seeing fresh and novel ways of interrogating old accounts. Her skills in critical theory helped me tease out what was said and unsaid; and what could not, across the gulf between two cultures, be said at all. She didn’t have to look so good to be so beautiful to me; the brain is the sexiest organ.

The next day I felt tired when I started, and spent a lot of the day shifting my pack on my shoulders, trying to ease the muscles. Lunch was chicken broth in a village called Mocha, where all the able men seemed to have left to look for work. An old man approached me. His mouth was an open black oval, like a face you throw wooden balls at in a fairground booth. He held his hand out and gurgled for money. I gave a little. Two other men asked, ‘Are you American?’

‘English.’

‘Good! On your way home could you take a message to my friends in Washington and Toronto? Would it be so very far out of your way?’

When I returned to the road a long and very steep ascent began. It was more like climbing a ladder than walking, and went on for an hour. The path went into tight sunken S-bends which still had the Inca cobbles. A young man gave me water and he pointed at my GPS: ‘I am not ignorant like many people here. I know that is a
cell-phone
, and you use it to speak to your guide, who walks ahead.’ The cultivated land was giving way to pasture as the road continued to climb. Gauchos in cow-leather
chaps, with the red hair still on them, rode by with a blanket but no saddles or stirrups, the labouring horses snorting clouds into the cool air. White-collared swifts, the largest of the Andean swifts, with a wingspan over eighteen inches, were zinging through the air above me. When I stopped to drink I soon became cold, but the shelter of the long grass nurtured violets, and a bright yellow orchid. Looking closely, I saw each flower was a miniature horse skull.

The road levelled at last. It was late afternoon, cold, and the walking had been almost entirely uphill. I had been planning to stop and camp soon, but decided to go on to a red roof I could see in the distance. It turned out to be the old railway station of La Urbina. At 11,940 feet, it is the highest point on all the Ecuadorian railway system. It is now an inn run by Rodrigo, a mountaineering guide in his early fifties, with a long thin beard and a ponytail. I went inside and drank coffee in front of a wood stove. I asked Rodrigo about the trains which were still in service.

‘They were steam until recently, 1940s
Pennsylvania-built
, then they bought nine French engines, but in Ecuador we don’t make the specialist lubricants the manufacturers specified and the Government wouldn’t grant a licence to import them, saying it was not necessary, just a scam to milk poor countries. Seven out of nine engines are now useless.’ He pointed into the toneless grey cloud behind the moors, ‘There is Chimborazo, but we haven’t seen it all day.’

The only other guests were four Frenchmen; two of them were acclimatising before attempting Chimborazo. The mountain’s peak is a nice trophy for moderate
mountaineers because at 20,700 feet it is the point furthest away from the centre of the planet. Everest is over 1.5 miles higher, but, at 28° north, sits on only 9.3 miles of the earth’s equatorial bulge, while Chimborazo, little more than 1° south of the equator, stands on a 13.5 mile-high bulge, elevating its peak 2.7 miles further from the centre.

After supper, Rodrigo gave a slide lecture on the great peaks of the Andes, and afterwards we chatted about the first man to investigate Chimborazo: Baron Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt. Rodrigo flung a hand towards the cloud-shrouded monster. ‘Here, at the foot of Mount Chimborazo, he began the
Essai sur la géographie des plantes
. You know he preferred to write in French but was also fluent in German, English, Spanish, Russian and Italian!’

This essay invented plant geography, and encouraged fully documented collection of specimens. For the first time plants and animals were accurately related to their environment, allowing Alfred Wallace and Charles Darwin to perceive the physical adaptations of animals which led them both to conceive the law of natural selection by survival of the fittest. At the beginning of Humboldt’s trip he wrote down the guiding principle that underpinned all his future achievements: ‘I must find out more about the unity of nature.’ He often said, ‘Rather than discovering new, isolated facts I prefer linking together ones already known.’ One of his typical innovations was the isotherm, a line on a map joining points experiencing equal temperatures, so that the overall patterns of weather and climate could be described.

Rodrigo had a coffee-table catalogue from a recent
exhibition on Humboldt, in Quito. The great man gazed with confidence and composure from the many portraits which he sat for during his long life. Humboldt was five feet eight inches tall, with light brown hair, grey eyes and old smallpox scars on his forehead. Rather vain, in a
self-portrait
he looks considerably more handsome than in other artists’ portraits of him. Trained in geology and mining, he became a polymath free to make his own path once he received an inheritance from his mother when he was twenty-seven. Within two years he was in South America, from 1799 to 1804, re-writing science. Humboldt displayed a broader variety of scientific interests and intellectual concerns than any other explorer before or since.

A key problem in the philosophy of the late eighteenth century was how people’s sensory information about the external world could be used to describe and investigate the ultimate reality of things. Immanuel Kant argued that our sensory data limited our investigations absolutely. Others argued that trained aesthetic sensitivities could transcend pure reason and explore intuitively the underlying unities. Humboldt fervently believed so. He was fascinated by the emotional dimension of the natural world: that the physical world could move the soul. To be true to nature, he argued, natural science must, like nature itself, be aesthetically satisfying. Poetry and science should work in harness to describe and explain reality. However, this was not an excuse for subjective or impressionistic science; the range of his instruments shows the thoroughness of his methods. There was even a cyanometer to measure the blueness of the sky, something the poet Byron satirised.

Humboldt’s team took his battery of instruments up into the clouds on Chimborazo to measure anything that would stand still long enough to be measured. In Humboldt’s day little was known of the effects of high altitude on the human body. Like seasickness, altitude sickness is capricious in its effects on individuals, but they all began to suffer in some degree from nausea and uncertain balance. Their local companion, the revolutionary Carlos Montufar, suffered horribly, struggling on despite bleeding from his nose, ears and mouth. When it seemed the summit was in reach, they found themselves standing on the edge of a chasm. Their route led to a dead end. They calculated their height at 19,286 feet, and estimated the summit at around 21,400, lower than later measurements. When they got down and looked in a mirror, they recoiled from the ghastly scarlet eyes staring back at them. Tiny veins in their eyes had ruptured, leaving them gruesomely bloodshot. Until Alpinists went to the Himalayas, this was a world record ascent; Humboldt bragged ‘of all mortals, I was the one who had risen highest in all the world’.

After witnessing oppressive Spanish rule, Humboldt encouraged the young Simón Bolívar to help liberate South America, but he pronounced Bolívar himself unfit to lead the task. ‘His brilliant career shortly after we met astonished me,’ he declared, adding stubbornness to misjudgement. Bolívar was more astute about Humboldt: he ‘was the true discoverer of America because his work has produced more benefit to our people than all the conquistadors’.

When Humboldt sat for his last portrait, he asked the artist to place Chimborazo’s snowy cone in the
background. He died soon after, in 1859, the year a great admirer published a book called
The Origin of Species
.

In 1861, the American Ambassador Hassaurek saw Chimborazo’s triple peaks and wrote ‘no human foot ever profaned them, no human foot ever will’. Within eighteen years, Edward Whymper dared, and succeeded. In his book
Travels Amongst the Great Andes of the Equator
Whymper attempts a self-portrait as the consummate professional. Between the lines one plainly sees a curmudgeon, a man for whom fellow expedition members are not companions, but handicaps to his genius. He sounds middle-aged, but he was only thirty-nine years old. Drinking had taken its toll. When, at the age of sixty, he took elite Swiss guides to the Canadian Rockies, their main job was to carry crates of whisky on long hikes. In 1911 he was taken ill at the Couttet Hotel, Chamonix, refused treatment, locked himself in his room and died alone.

I went to bed early. The room was freezing; I slept in my sleeping bag inside the bed. In the morning, Chimborazo was still invisible. I was away by seven in light rain. Rodrigo waved me off: ‘Don’t follow the railway route. There is a very bad family in the village of San Andrés; a foreign cyclist was robbed of everything.’ I followed an irrigation ditch along the contour then dropped down a lane that wove between fields. Labourers looked up like nocturnal animals surprised by a spotlight. In three hours, I was coming over the crest of mature eucalyptus plantations, willing Riobamba closer. It didn’t come. The wind caught the map hung round my neck and slapped me in the face with it. My sandals were filling with grit, and I could scarcely open my eyes for the dust. One knee was stiffening, and dogs circled me, snarling
and barking. On the corner of two dusty lanes, by a smallholding that looked like a set for the dustbowl farms of
The Grapes of Wrath
, I stood checking my map. An old woman pulled a black shawl over her bent back and made her way across the dirt of her vegetable garden towards me. I thought how kind it was of her to come out in the uncomfortable conditions to help me. She stabbed a shrivelled finger at my pack. ‘What are you selling?’

‘Nothing, it’s my tent and clothes.’

‘Hah!’ she said.

I glanced at my map and looked up to ask her a question. She was gone, rolling back through the
dust-caked
potatoes. I turned round to look back up the trail, and there, at last, a dozen miles behind me, was the mountain I had slept under the night before: Chimborazo. It had thrown off the cloud, and was shining. It is a very high volcano: the top seven thousand feet lie under permanent snow and ice; but the sheer bulk of it was overwhelming. It belongs in another, vaster, landscape but has been lent to us to remind men they have souls. For Humboldt, such sights must have clinched his theories that the whole could be intuited from such Olympian examples of nature. I took my tired feet into the town, with many long backward glances. In town, there was a bonus: the volcano Tungurahua was erupting.