Cloud Road
Authors: John Harrison
‘Cuzco will be the head and defence of my
kingdom to one end, and Quito at the other.’
Inca Wayna Capac
To both Tom Harrisons,
father and grandfather,
for
love of learning and love of travel
A JOURNEY THROUGH THE INCA HEARTLAND
John Harrison
I awake in pitch blackness, a knot of tension in my solar plexus. Without looking, I know the time: 4:03 a.m. I have woken sweating at this same hour every morning for six weeks. The dream varies. Sometimes the knife slits through the tent’s thin fabric. My arms are trapped inside the sleeping bag. Before I can free them, the blade is at my neck. The second cut opens my throat and senseless whispers come from my new mouth. Cold air flows in through the wound, followed by a pool of blackness. So this is death, the undiscovered country. Other times I realise, with that hideous certainty of dreams, that I don’t have enough water to get me back to the last stream. If the crest ahead of me does not lead down to a river, I will die. The crest comes; a weary plain opens up in front of me. The dust smells of bone meal, and gnaws at the kerbstones of an ancient road whose edges converge on the empty horizon.
The joy of waking from nightmares is that in seconds you shake off the darkness, realising these foolish fears have no power to hurt you. However, I know all this and worse is possible, and in some areas, likely. I stagger to the bathroom, coughing. My chest is rigid with tension. I am afraid of the journey I have planned for myself. I cough until I vomit: it is bright red with the wine I drink to try to sleep through these dreams. Back in bed, wide awake, I worry about money, navigation, robbery, injury and illness. In the country regions, human sacrifice is still practised. For preference, they choose the young, the beautiful, the most perfect; I may yet be safe. Dawn brings a sliver of light at the curtain’s edge. With anemone fingertips I put feelers out into the dark. There is another creature, here, at my side, breath coming and going, small snuffles in her nose, a wisp of fine hair tickling my face. Elaine is a pool of warmth. When I touch the smooth skin of her shoulder, her breathing hesitates, resumes its rhythm, familiar as habit. My closing eyelids brush her back. In such love, we come and go.
When I got off the plane in Ecuador I was still two miles above sea level. Lungs panicked, gasping for oxygen that wasn’t there. The taxi pulled out into Quito’s thinning night traffic; at nine, the capital was already shutting down. The weak headlights gave sudden glimpses of streets awash, and the driver swerved round sheets of ribbed sand. He gave me a nervous grin, one gold tooth glinting. ‘Hey, Gringo, you speak good Spanish! Where did you learn it?’
‘At home in Wales.’
‘Why, do they speak Spanish there too?’
‘No, I learned because I wanted to come here.’ Deluges smashed down from the encircling hills, over the roads and into the squares, forming pools, rounding street corners in choppy eddies. The young conquistador historian Cieza de León looked down on Quito, and noted that on such a small plain it would be hard for the city to grow. He was right. To squeeze in the 1.4 million people who now live here, shanties have been thrown up on the hills around the city. After prolonged heavy rain those slopes are unstable, and this week, the afternoon thunderstorms had been pitiless. The vehicles which hadn’t drowned spewed skirts of filthy spray over the pavements. Side roads were caked with foot-high clay ridges autographed by truck tyres. Away left were the skyscrapers of the new Quito; offices and high-rise apartments springing up from well-lit streets. We sped below the twin spires of the nineteenth-century cathedral, a mound of soulless stone, and entered the half-lit narrow streets of the old town. I checked into the Hotel Viena International, two blocks below the main square. Its handsome, three-storey, nineteenth-century courtyard sported a stone fountain topped by a blue plastic Virgin. In the dark bathroom, I glared balefully at myself in the mirror to examine my state of mind. The old glass warped my face into a Francis Bacon portrait. I took myself to bed with a book.
To save weight, I could only afford one book for leisure reading. It might have to last me months. I had decided on
Don Quixote
. One opening passage was a sermon. ‘Reader, you must know that when our gentleman had nothing to
do, (which was most of the year), he passed his time in reading books of knight-errantry; which he did with such application and delight that in the end he abandoned his usual country sports, and even the care of his estates; he grew so strangely besotted with those amusements that he sold many acres of land to purchase books of that kind.’ Like me. Don Quixote is usually portrayed as an old man, who, in senile dementia, leaves his home and steps into the world of his delusions, and builds a fantasy space in which to survive. I discovered in the first few pages that the old fool was close to fifty: same as me.
Next morning, the television anchor man catalogued the destruction: twelve people had been killed in the city, mostly by mudslides, £4 million of damage to schools, 500 miles of highway unusable, slowing distribution of the 53,000 food parcels they had prepared. River levels were four feet above the previous record levels. There were grainy colour pictures of homeless people linking arms across brown streams running down filthy earth-slips, slithering obscenely where, ten minutes before, their houses had stood. A man was being hauled out of a swollen river. A paramedic pushed a paperclip up his nose until he vomited up filthy water.
Flooded backyards bred billions of mosquitoes. Quito is too high for malarial species, but these can carry dengue fever, which causes fever and agonising pains in the muscles and joints. There are no drugs to protect against it, and none to cure. Mortality among ill-nourished children, like those of Quito, is high.
From time to time, trucks carrying firemen and soldiers into the hills passed in a blur of sirens and red lights. The men’s eye-sockets were dark circles of exhaustion: the
whites showed all round the iris, globes of fear. They were trained to face flames and bullets, not burial alive: the anoxic glory of having their mouths stoppered by red clay.
I walked towards Santo Domingo Square along Flores Street, where crumbling colonial houses were opening their tall, heavy doors to reveal small sewing and tailoring businesses. Men settled tinny typewriters on spindly tables, and waited for customers who needed a letter written or a bill typed. In one door, a young spiv sat on the step. A coarse-featured woman in a gaudy maroon mini-dress stood over him eating sponge cake from a fold of greaseproof paper. The man nodded at me, ‘What about him?’ She took two steps towards me, nearly losing a stiletto, struck a pose in front of me and yelled ‘Fwocky, fwocky!’, spraying me with cake crumbs. I stepped round her; she shrugged, hitched up her dress and pissed in the gutter.
Things hadn’t changed. In 1861, the young Friedrich Hassaurek arrived as US Ambassador to Ecuador, a reward for his campaigning for the newly elected President Abraham Lincoln. Judging by his memoir,
Four Years Among the Ecuadorians
, he seems to have had his handkerchief to his nose the whole time: ‘Men, women and children, of all ages and colors, may be seen in the middle of the street in broad daylight, making privies of the most public thoroughfares; and while thus engaged, they will stare into the faces of passers-by with a shamelessness that beggars description.’ Nor was he keen on the carnival week habit of dunking passing strangers in the sewers.
That night, the first explosion terrified me. I groped for my alarm clock: 04:03. Another huge bang shattered the silence. Was it heavy firearms or explosives? A volley shook the city and echoed round the empty streets. It
went on for nearly twenty minutes, sometimes creeping nearer, sometimes retreating, but always coming up the hill from the poor district of La Marín. Just before dawn, around six o’clock, the street below my window blared into life. With car horns, shouts, laughter and catcalls, the market traders began to set up in the street. I went out to look for breakfast. The stalls were homemade from poles and plastic sheets, and stored in nearby lock-ups. A wiry old man, with three yards of rope he could wrap round anything, helped ferry the stalls and the stock to their pitches for fifty cents a time. He could carry fruit boxes stacked six high, with the rope looped across the front of his shaven head: a stagger-legged samurai.
Beggars arrived for business just as promptly. One man laid a mat and a megaphone on the pedestrian side street. He undid his belt and trousers, exposed his backside, and lay face down. His buttocks were covered in syphilis sores, red-raw, eating holes in his flesh. He picked up the megaphone and described his life of sin, frequenting prostitutes, neglecting his family for the sins of adultery and fornication. He called on St George, the patron saint of syphilitics, to witness how God had punished him for his evil. He did very well. It was a story people wanted to hear.
Returning to the hotel, I asked the receptionist about the early morning gunfire. She looked puzzled. ‘At 4 a.m.,’ I prompted. ‘Oh,’ she smiled, ‘you mean the fireworks, it is the feast of the
Virgen Dolorosa
on Saturday. All week the faithful go to Novenas at four o’clock and let off fireworks. Did it wake you up?’
My journey began in a long-ago half-hour, waiting in a queue with my father in an old-fashioned barber’s shop at the foot of precipitous Killigrew Street in Falmouth, Cornwall. It must have been one of the last times I went to the barber’s with him, before becoming a teenager made me self-conscious about being seen with my parents. The shop still had a red and white striped pole. Two white granite steps took us up from the street into the gentle crypt of their salon. A surgeon’s knife lying in a porcelain bowl full of blood would have completed the décor.
They wore white coats and stood with patient
gravitas
; like umpires testing the weight on their feet in the slow afternoons. They seldom spoke, and then softly, the lips scarcely parting, a gentleman’s code. It was an ordered game; we knew the rules.
I teased out a battered copy of
National Geographic
from the stack of week-old newspapers and opened it at a picture of a city that grew out of the very rock of the wild peak on which it perched. Machu Picchu! It looked as if the stones had been cast down from the sky with the casual genius of gods. Only later did those temporary encumbrances arrive: people. In the centre of the picture was a level lawn. To one side of the lawn stood a single tree. I put my finger to the lawn and whispered, ‘I want to be there.’
‘Next, please!’
I waited, and watched Mr Blenkinsop’s cool hands glide the clippers’ chromium antlers around the trellised creases of my father’s neck. Soft brown and grey curls fell to the green linoleum floor, like songbirds stunned by frost. The
room had absorbed the restfulness of church into its mahogany fittings. The combs, razors, brushes and clippers were gleaming and ordered. A sweep of white sheet made choirboys of us all. My turn. The scissors began their crisp march across my fringe: the sand-edged sound of blade cutting hair. Straight black locks fell into the white
cwm
between my arms.
That night, as I lay down to sleep, and the white worm in the eye of the light bulb faded away, I breathed through a tiny gap between my pursed lips, practising survival in the thin air of the Andes, and imagined against my legs the prickle of the lawns of Machu Picchu, lost Inca city. The journey evolved in my mind.
In every atlas, there is a country missing from the maps of South America: the Andean nation. It runs from southern Colombia, through Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, right down into Chile. The world’s longest mountain chain threads it together. The people who live there call it the Sierra. Their culture, economy and beliefs are Andean. Physiologically they are far more like other Andean groups, however distant, than their neighbours lower down the mountain. For a brief spell, an eddy in time’s river, it was unified politically; not as a nation, a people with shared origins and ambitions, but as an empire. Like an industrial conglomerate, the Inca Empire was built by growth, voluntary take-over and aggressive acquisition. Bloated by rapid expansion, brittle with internal tensions between the state and the conquered nations, it was torn apart by two royal sons fighting for the crown. When strangers appeared on its shores and blew, the house of cards fell down.
I wanted to journey through this secret country, to put
my ear to the ground and hear the beat of the heart of the Andes. To experience it in the raw, I planned to walk the most remote sections and penetrate rural areas where outside influences had scarcely touched a way of life that continued as if Columbus had never sailed. There was an ancient road running along the spine of this secret country. It was the first great road of the Incas: the
Camino Real
, or Royal Road. It was hand-built over five hundred years ago, to cross the most difficult and dangerous mountains in all the Americas. It’s still there, sometimes little different from the days when the Inca was carried in his litter, curtains drawn, sweeping past fields where every face was pressed to the soil in veneration. Other sections are now degraded beyond recognition, sometimes buried under modern asphalt. But the line may be followed, and my eyes would see highlands little changed from the views seen by the last great native ruler, Inca Wayna Capac. He decreed, ‘Cuzco will be the head and defence of my kingdom to one end, and Quito at the other.’ I would travel 1,500 miles between his twin capitals, beginning in Quito.
I spent the next days walking across the sprawling city getting used to the altitude. Flat was easy, but a few hills soon reminded me that a third of the oxygen was missing. Carrying a backpack would double the effect. When training for the trip, I had kept a secret from my doctor, but been unable to hide it from Elaine. My lower back would sometimes disassemble itself, muscles stiffening
and cramping, bones pinching nerves into violent pain, like spider-threads shot out into the wind, laced with delicate venom. I hoped, with no medical evidence at all, that a Spartan life would straighten it out. However, my feet seemed tough enough, and there was no pain from the new boots I had been breaking in for two months.
