Camp in Alf Stubble-Field. 11 December
Between Andahuayalas and Abancay the carretera wriggles wildly, taking 100 miles to find a way across territory covered by our redura in 50 miles or less. Here one fancies the Andes are making a last mighty effort to bar all outsiders from the sacred city of Cuzco. Pedro Sancho, Pizarro’s secretary, wrote of this area: ‘We had to climb another stupendous mountainside. Looking up at it from below, it seemed impossible for birds to scale it by flying through the air, let alone men on horseback climbing by land. But the road was made less exhausting by climbing in zigzags rather than in a straight line. Most of it consisted of large stone steps that greatly wearied the horses and wore down their hooves even though they were being led by their bridles’.
The conquistadores worried as much about their horses as we do about Juana, and for the same reason. On these irreplaceable animals depended the whole success of their expedition. It was the Spaniards’ mobility as cavalrymen, rather than their superior weapons, that defeated the Incas. Only their horses enabled this tiny group to cross terrain such as no European had ever dreamed of, wearing sixty pounds (minimum) of armour at energy-draining altitudes, and to conquer a vast and well-organised empire. Whatever humanitarian liberals of the late 20th century may think of these ruthless adventurers of the early 16th century, no one can dispute the courage needed for their first penetration of these mountains. And by now, after months of following in their hoof-prints, sampling some of the same deprivations and anxieties, we cannot help having a warm fellow-feeling for them. When Juana’s condition forced us to by-pass Vilcashuaman, we remembered how in much the same area Pizarro’s cavalry had to turn back from an attempt to secure an all-important bridge because of their horses’ exaustion owing to lack of fodder. And this afternoon, during a two-hour descent of an almost vertical redura, when our thigh muscles were burning with the strain of keeping the brakes on, we remarked how lucky we were not to be wearing armour …
The flavour of today’s trek was quite unlike the flavour of a puna or river gorge trek. Although we were all the time on a redura, and passed few dwellings and no village, this seemed a region with a complex and active past. Such an aura of decline is not of course uncommon in the Andes; but hereabouts it’s particularly marked and lays a patina of melancholy over the whole area.
By 8.30 a tough climb had taken us over a low(-ish) mountain onto sunny miles of smooth pastureland being over-grazed by too many flocks and herds. Below us lay an irregular bottle-green lake, some two miles by one, reflecting a semi-circle of round brown mountains. Our track passed close to a Co-op (ex-hacienda) stretching along the shore, its main buildings decaying, as usual, but with a newish adobe church and school nearby. At present the school is closed: another unpaid teacher. Innumerable farm animals of every species were being tended by elderly-seeming Indian women with blank worn faces: younger women were standing waist-deep in the lake cutting reeds for fodder. The incidence of gringoes using this redura must be low, yet nobody even glanced at us; we might have been invisible. Staring into various sections of the farmyard – an untidy, dirty shambles – we remembered the lady Professor’s troubled comments on Agrarian Reform, which in theory she supports. “How can the campesinos be expected to run large estates? Nothing in their tradition helps them to think for themselves – they don’t even have a living oral literature. Yes, it would be nice to see them managing their land and all having fair shares. But in fact rural Peru is now much worse off than it was before Agrarian Reform. You’ve found you can’t often buy milk, cheese, eggs – even in the middle of naturally rich farmland. Ten years ago this was not so. And look at the state of the fields and animals and implements!”
As we walked on between rows of young eucalyptus (at least trees are planted) I again saw the Andean Indians as a doomed race, a people past being rescued by ‘Outside Aid’ because their death-knell rang 450 years ago and all their subsequent miseries have been part of an inexorable process of dissolution. This sounds negative, pessimistic, defeatist – even horribly patronising. But it seems to me a harsh truth, decipherable between the lines of the history books. Granted, the Indians are breeding fast – from less than a million 150 years ago to several millions now (well over half the population of Peru). And many of their customs and their main language have survived Christianity and the Conquest. An estimated million and three-quarter Indians speak only Quechua, which has recently been granted official status. But their literacy rate is the lowest of any comparable group in Latin America; and their diet is forty per cent below the minimum nutrition level acceptable in the First World. Virtually the entire rural population and sixty per cent of Indian town-dwellers have no drainage or running water. And the vast majority are, as we have seen, outside the money economy and despised by their mestizo compatriots. (Being outside a money economy could be an excellent thing if Peru were still ruled by the Incas: but it isn’t.) Of course there are, and have been and will be, thousands of Indian migrants who can flourish in the modern world as ‘adopted’ citizens. My sad contention is that these are the exceptions and that the Andean Indians’ way of life, as a thriving culture, was doomed the day the first Spanish horse set hoof on Inca soil.
The unexpectedness and violence of the Conquest – especially the Spaniards’ treacherous and blasphemous (in Indian eyes) treatment of Atahualpa, and the sacrilegious sacking of the sacred city of Cuzco – administered a shock to the Indian psyche from which it has never recovered. This seems to be one of those historical tragedies painful to contemplate yet preordained. Nature insists upon the survival of the fittest; and the Spaniards represented a race that was mentally, though not morally, fitter than the Andean Indians. Blame and sympathy are equally out of place when one looks at it all from this perspective. Also, ‘Never the twain shall meet’ applies even more to the Europeans and the Andean Indians than to the Europeans and any Asian race – including the Chinese. So there was no possibility that the conquerors might try to heal the psychic wound they had inflicted on their subjects. Miguel Agia, a perceptive and eloquent chronicler, made a comparison as valid – and poignant – now as it was in the 16th century. ‘The Spaniard and the Indian are diametrically opposed. The Indian is by nature without greed and the Spaniard is extremely greedy, the Indian phlegmatic and the Spaniard excitable, the Indian humble and the Spaniard arrogant, the Indian deliberate in all he does and the Spaniard quick in all he wants, the one liking to order and the other hating to serve.’
This basic incompatability, added to the usual political motives for denigrating the culture of the conquered, deterred even the most pro-Indian Spaniards from attempting to understand and appreciate the society they had shattered. It was of course a primitive society, for all its ingenuity. Yet like every social framework it had a unique value for its creators, fulfilling their needs as no imported culture, however ‘superior’, could even begin to do. It was a symptom of the ‘instant-demoralisation’ of the Indians that the Spaniards were at once able to recruit native curacas to collect tribute from the encomiendas, the curacas themselves being exempt from payment. Many Spanish commentators were repelled by the cruelties these men practised against their own race and quoted them to ‘prove’ that the Indians had been no better off under the Incas. They missed the point that such behaviour was a result of the Spanish demolition of the Inca Empire’s built-in ethical and legal restraints.
When thinking back a few centuries, one has to guard against ‘transposed values’. Many of the early encomenderos behaved barbarously by the standards of any age and their excesses deeply shocked the King and the Council of the Indies. Yet John Hemming reminds us that the Spanish authorities showed ‘a genuine concern for native welfare throughout the colonial church and government. However much they exploited or abused the Peruvian natives, they left the Indians on their lands and stopped short of the slavery or extreme racial prejudice that has occurred in other European colonies’. Many chroniclers, including Alfonso Messia, were scandalised by conditions in the mines where the mitayos endured ‘four months working twelve hours a day, descending 350-600 feet to perpetual darkness where it is always necessary to work with candles, with the air thick and evil-smelling, trapped in the bowels of the earth’. But all 16th-century European mines were worked under similar conditions; and the ‘civilised’ governments of present-day America, Britain and France are indifferent to the fatal diseases slowly developed by hundreds of African and Amerindian uranium miners.
By early afternoon we were approaching the crest of what seemed to be a long grassy ridge; many Andean mountains don’t feel like mountains as one climbs gradually towards the summit over a series of lesser heights. On that summit we received another of those shocks of joy that no familiarity can lessen. Below us the mountainside dropped away for 4,000 feet into a narrow gorge from which came the rushing of an invisible river – uncannily loud in the thin air. (Our map shows the gorge but no river.) On the opposite mountain – much higher and some four miles wide – naked grey-blue precipices were scored by dark red vertical gashes, thousands of feet long. We could just discern a zigzag scratch, extending from base to summit like a pencil doodle – tomorrow’s path. “Seeing it from here, you wouldn’t think we could get up it!” exclaimed Rachel, unconsciously echoing Pedro Sancho. But first we had to get down, frequently a more tiring operation.
Below the bare escarpment our path plunged into a green twilight where for an hour and a half we were scrambling through exotic shrubs and flowers and ferns, and ancient low twisted trees wreathed in mosses and creepers. Then all was harsh hot brightness, on the stony summit of what would be a considerable mountain in Ireland. The next stage was complicated by a landslide. We were now directly above the river and a few months ago that landslide would have seemed to me an insuperable obstacle. But I’ve become Andes-hardened; and so has Juana, who as a beginner created major scenes about far less challenging perils. She calmly followed Rachel diagonally across and down that 500-yard expanse of loose grey slates and shale. Rachel has a monkey-like flair for coping with such slopes but I myself couldn’t keep upright on this mixture. As I fatalistically slid on my bottom across the shifting debris, overlooking what can only be described as a raging torrent, it occurred to me that I may have a suppressed death-wish …
During the descent, we’d glimpsed hacienda-buildings in a ravine at the foot of the opposite mountain. As we climbed from river level towards the rim of the ravine, between straggling cane plantations, we could smell the Co-op’s antique sugar refinery. This is the biggest hacienda we’ve seen: once a completely self-sufficient community but now run-down and populated (we fancied) by uneasy ghosts as well as moronic and/or sullen Indians who either can’t or won’t speak Spanish. They refused to sell us any fodder – even paja, of which there was an abundance in view. I longed to explore but we both sensed hostile vibes and suddenly that evening-shadowed ravine seemed a place of dark and heavy memories. So we hastened away.
Now the air was raucous with flocks of screeching, swooping green parrots, who always become semi-hysterical as bedtime approaches. Again we climbed steeply between cane-fields to this gigantic ledge overlooking the hacienda. Here we have a splendid view of the stately home, a magnificent colonial mansion, dignified and elegant and externally in perfect condition. Two zigzagging flights of steps lead down to acres of walled garden where clumps of giant bamboo mingle with tropical fruit-trees, and poinsettia, bougainvillea and climbing roses send fountains of colour cascading over grey walls. At home such a garden would be Open to the Public. Here it seems a pathetic, improbable footnote to the archaic splendours of the Creole centuries.
This field offers Alf after-shoots, an irrigation channel of clear water and ample eucalyptus firewood. There is however one snag: swarms of tiny vicious ants. As I was blowing the fire they swiftly attacked in their thousands – up my arms, into my socks, through the split in my jeans. (I’ve had pubic lice in Ethiopia but never before pubic ants.) Taken individually ants are not exactly scary, yet the pain of such an all-out attack can be almost unendurable. Luckily there were no passers-by to see me rolling naked in the irrigation channel.
Now Rachel is asleep and beneath an almost-full moon our black-and-silver world is held in a stillness that seems holy. On this ledge we are completely and closely surrounded by peaks and ridges, towering far, far above us – some sharp against the sky, some shrouded in moon-luminous cloud masses. I’ll have all my life the memory of the beauty of these nights on the mountains – each so different, though it’s hard to convey that difference in words.
Camp on grassy high Plateau. 12 December
We were on our ‘pencil-doodle’ path by 5.50, a heat-dodging device that didn’t work. By 7 I was sweat-sodden. At 8.10 we reached a vast, turfy bowl-ledge suspended, as it were, between three peaks and holding a straggling village of shy but friendly Quechua-speakers. Two strenuous hours later we were on the pass overlooking a network of vividly green, shallow valleys beyond which, on three sides, stretched new ranges. One mighty nearby summit was composed entirely of colossal overlapping rock-slabs all sloping gently in the same direction. To the south-east a solitary snow-peak – Jayuri – flared whitely against the cloudless dark blue sky. That intense blueness is one of the simple daily pleasures I’ll miss most when we leave the Andes.
By 2 p.m. we could see the ancient little town of Huancarama, far below us. Here Pizarro spent the night of 8 November 1533 and on entering the town was alarmed to find two dead horses belonging to his advance force. But a note from his brother Hernando reassured him. The horses had not been killed by attacking Indians but ‘had died from the extremes of heat and cold’. Or so the Spaniards thought. It’s more likely that these European animals died of over-exertion at high altitudes, despite the fact that the conquistadores rarely rode up steep paths.
We had a late lunch (noodles and sardines!) in Huancarama’s one-table mud-floored ‘restaurant’. There was no tethering-post so Juana followed us inside, as is her wont when left loose, and while we ate she contemplated a selection of garish commercial calendars with apparent enjoyment.
For the next three hours a traffic-less jeep-track took us along the edges of profound forested chasms, each with a spectacular waterfall leaping and glinting through the trees at its head. We rounded four mountains before coming to a high green plateau where our camp-site – a roadside strip of lush grass – is the answer to a hungry mule’s prayer.
Camp in neglected Hacienda Field. 13 December
Depending on whether you see a whiskey bottle as half-full or half-empty, this has been our lucky or unlucky 13th.
When we set off at dawn the sky was clear after a night of heavy rain. An hour later we were descending from the plateau into rising clouds that half-hid a maze of cultivated valleys and spurs. An old man riding a rotund dun pony showed us a redura – rocky, narrow and very steep between high hedges armed with two-inch ‘darning needle’ thorns. Neat little dwellings stood on ledges and as we lost height the temperature rose like a rocket. By 8.30 I was dripping sweat. Then my left ear became impaled on a ‘darning needle’ and I fell some way behind the others. When I overtook them I saw Juana wedged in an odd stretch of track between two six-foot banks of red-brown earth. She was resisting all Rachel’s efforts to back her out but from where I stood, slightly above them, an alternative animal-path was visible running along the top of the outside bank of this ‘tunnel’. Numerous hoof-prints proved its function, though the bank was less than two feet wide. Intending to coax Juana back to the point where this top path branched off at the entrance to the ‘tunnel’, I hurried along the bank and took the leading-rope from Rachel. Seeing me up there, holding the rope, Juana at once realised that this was the ‘recommended route’. Obliging as always, she quickly backed a couple of yards, to where the tunnel was broader and the bank lower, and then jumped to join me. But of course she couldn’t know this was only a bank and Rachel screamed with terror as she crashed over into a dense tangle of thorny scrub some eight feet below me. As I stood staring at her struggling in the scrub I felt that time-suspending mixture of disbelief and heart-sick horror produced by imminent disasters which one cannot avert. Below the scrub safety-net a precipitous maize-field sloped down to the edge of an unfenced cliff. Rachel joined me on the wall – tears streaming down her face – just as the scrub support gave. We watched Juana falling into the maizefield and rolling over and over and over – faster and faster – with no hope of being able to check herself on such a gradient. Then, miraculously, she came up against the only obstacle on that whole vast slope – a young eucalyptus tree, planted in mid-field. It seemed impossible that she could have escaped serious injury and I found myself praying for a fatal neck-break rather than a smashed leg. Then, as she lay on her back against the tree, we saw that the load was intact: which somehow accentuated the unreality of the whole episode. “We must help her!” sobbed Rachel. I had been standing rigid with shock; now I dropped recklessly into the scrub tangle where for long, horrible and bloody moments I was fighting my way through onto open ground. As I emerged, Rachel shrieked semi-hysterically – “Mummy! Mummy! She’s all right! She’s standing up! She’s eating the maize!” I stared, then felt weak with incredulous gratitude as I saw our most beloved mula on her feet – guzzling as enthusiastically as she always does when the opportunity arises.
This was the sort of field we’ve often marvelled at, wondering how anyone could plough, sow and harvest on such a gradient. We slithered and stumbled to and fro, for once heedless of the havoc we were wreaking on precious foot-high maize. Then at last we were standing beside our miraculously-preserved Juana: today it’s hard not to believe in guardian angels. She ear-twitched impatiently when I interrupted her delicious snack to congratulate her on her escape. The only visible damage to the load was the final rupture of our pannier-bags which are no longer Siamese twins. Rachel remarked cheerfully, “If there was a mule-loading contest in the Olympics you’d win a Gold Medal!” Occasionally one’s offspring says the right thing at the right time.
We were wondering how to get Juana out of this trap – there seemed to be no possible mule-exit – when someone shouted from above. A young campesino woman, going to fetch water, was standing on the fateful bank and we later discovered that she had witnessed the whole drama. She pointed to a thick eucalyptus wood in a far corner of the field, at track level – then waved and disappeared
During the next hour and a half I felt like one of those wretches in the Inferno who are condemned to push boulders up mountains throughout eternity. Because of the gradient we unloaded Juana, who after all had had a shock – though she was affecting to think nothing of it – and stacked our gear and tack under that miracle tree. Then Rachel slowly zigzagged upwards; apart from the near-vertical slope, she was leading a mule most reluctant to leave this banquet of young maize. I followed, carrying the first of five instalments of gear; on such a hill, with loose soil underfoot, it was impossible to carry a big load. At the edge of the wood Rachel took each item from me and humped it up the final difficult stage to the path, showing her usual resourcefulness. Yet to my shame I yelled angrily at her when she dropped the last pannier-bag. By then I was reeling with exhaustion, blinded by sweat and suffering from reaction: and Rachel was the obvious target. Oddly, there’s never any temptation to vent spleen on an animal. Is this because a dumb beast can’t afterwards take part in a verbal, rational reconciliation and accept apologies?
As we were reloading the campesino lass reappeared, accompanied by three other barefooted young women, and presented an armful of new-cut Alf to Juana. She would accept no payment. I tried to find out who owned the damaged field; our mishap had destroyed so much of the young crop that now my conscience was writhing. But that maize belongs not to a local individual but to some remote Co-op away down the valley.
Our friend insisted that we must rest and eat at her home; I daresay we both looked what Rachel graphically describes as ‘Whacko’. We were led around the edge of another enormous maize-field, mercifully level, to a two-storey adobe house, red-tiled and substantial – though what we glimpsed of the interior was filthy and chaotic. For the visitors, wobbly home-made cane chairs were placed outside the kitchen-hut in the small yard, overlooking an untidy but gay flower-garden. Through the door-less entry to the kitchen we could see and hear the fire being blown by our kneeling hostess. Her dirt-encrusted young, aged two and four, were playing rather half-heartedly on a floor strewn with maize-husks and egg-shells. Their two-month-old baby brother died recently of dysentery. As we ate mounds of boiled maize, topped by two fried duck eggs each, our hostess apologised repeatedly for having no rice – the prestigious grain – but we assured her, truthfully, that we prefer maize. Meanwhile several hens and ducks, and a large brown dog and a small black kitten were in hopeful attendance on us. By the time we’d finished eating the sun’s rays were so fierce that one kind girl, seeing us dripping sweat, moved our chairs into the shade while our hostess was brewing mugs of delicious herbal tea that gave us an extraordinary ‘lift’ – God knows what was in it. None of these girls spoke more than a few words of Spanish, yet we were restored as much by their caring attitude as by the sustenance they provided. We have become so used to being ignored by campesinos that our gratitude for this cherishing was extra-keen.
After such a start, the rest of today had to seem easy. It was downhill all the way, into the furnace of the Abancay valley. The last stage of the descent overhung the Rio Abancay – shallow, swift and emerald green. Just downstream from a fine old stone bridge (defaced, like so many structures in Peru, by political graffiti) the river is confined to a short canyon between sky-filling mountains of sheer rock. Here the shadowed water undergoes a sudden metamorphosis, flowing deep, quiet, smooth and jade-green.
We climbed steeply – again accompanied by clouds of fruitflies – through unkempt cane plantations and fertile but idle farmland: something never seen where traditional farming patterns have been left undisturbed. A neglected cactus hedge allowed us access to this dismal ex-hacienda where sickly crops are surrounded by overgrown pathlets, creeper-strangled orchards and blocked irrigation channels – either dried up or wastefully flooding. Swarms of black midges, no less dementing than the fruit-flies, were mercifully dispersed when a strong warm wind sprang up at sunset. This is one of our most penitential sites. The tent is surrounded by a long bristly weed that stings mildly and many large sharp stones are deeply embedded in the lumpy earth. Nor is the abundance of firewood any compensation; our coffee-tin was burst during this morning’s misadventure, making a hideous mess in one pannier-bag. For a moment I was baffled on finding everything stuck together with black glue … Four of our books must be thrown away: a devastating blow. Also Rachel’s torch was smashed and our maps badly stained. Yet when we look at Juana, happily devouring that horrid weed, we still feel today was our lucky 13th.
Camp on very high grassy Ledge. 14 December
Last night I woke repeatedly to scratch inflamed bites. The heat was oppressive, though we left the tent wide open, and at 5.30 the valley lay still and humid beneath an overcast sky. While striking camp we were attacked continuously and simultaneously by clouds of black midges, tiny grey flies and our old amigos the brown fruit-flies. They swarmed so densely on our faces that we could scarcely see what we were doing; and they even got me on areas not normally exposed when I was generously fertilising the hacienda. We were a burning mass of new bites as we continued through that sad estate, remarking on how lovely it must have been when well tended. Soon we came upon the melancholy ruins of the mansion and paused to admire its handsomely carved verandah pillars and the delicate floral frieze all around the balcony. Nearby a gigantic water-mill still revolves on a tumultuous tributary of the Rio Abancay. The simple chapel has been newly whitewashed and repaired; a few candles flickering in front of the Virgin’s altar represented the only sign of life about the place.
From the courtyard we followed a broad, tree-lined track – part of the Camino Real. Rachel was leading and I was walking level with Juana’s rump. Suddenly I yelled – “Rachel! STOP!” She had been staring up at a flock of parrots, swooping noisy and green across the now-blue sky, and had almost trodden on a tarantula. The full significance of this encounter will be appreciated only by those who know that I am mortally afraid (it’s a true phobia) of the tiniest spider. Even to write the word makes me shudder slightly and to come face to face with a tarantula early in the morning on an empty belly after a bad night was almost too much; one relishes local colour but there are limits … The creature was unbelievable, walking slowly across the track from left to right; the size of a rat – but a rat with eight legs – so huge and hairy and malevolent-looking that when I realised the implications of our tent having been open all night, in this monster’s territory, I nearly fainted. On reaching the right-hand verge it had second thoughts, turned and went back to base more quickly, then crouched in the dead leaves with glaring eyes, looking like all the nightmares I have ever had come true … But then, as we hurried past, I suddenly felt non-phobic; precisely because this thing was so enormous it seemed more a beast than an insect. (Or, as Rachel would have me call it, an arachnid.) This does not of course mean that I would ever happily share a tent with it.
The people of this region are, by Andean standards, extraordinarily friendly and hospitable. Is it a coincidence that we are now in the ancient heartland of the Quechua tribe? As we breakfasted in Abancay, where an excited throng of children gathered outside the eating-house, one little girl came in and earnestly advised us to rub lemon-juice on every inch of exposed skin, as an insect-deterrent. Most of the population registered shock, horror and sympathy on seeing our bites. Several people told us that the valley’s insects explain why one never sees local children going bare-limbed, despite Abancay’s notorious heat. (The town stands at 8,500 feet but its encircling mountains make it an inferno.) Yet the insects don’t explain why so many people of all ages wear thick woollen garments, often both a sweater and a cardigan! In the town centre a mestizo woman, standing at her shop door, sent her little daughter running after us waving two bottles of Fanta. When we stopped to buy coffee, sugar and ship’s biscuits, the tiny wizened Indian shopkeeper gave us several glasses of a refreshing homemade fruit cordial. Then, on the outskirts of the town, an old woman beckoned us into her shebeen and gave us each two bowls of powerful chicha – indignantly refusing payment. This potation was too much for Rachel so I had three bowls and continued in a merry mood, uninhibitedly scratching my bitten bottom en route, to Rachel’s mortification. In some ways she’s inexplicably conventional.
Today’s climb was a non-stop lung and muscle endurance test, without any of those gently sloping ledges which usually provide respites between the more severe gradients. But it was also optional; six times our redura crossed the carretera, so we were spared the psychological pressure of having to keep going. When we stopped to rest on a soft turfy bank a tiny campesino woman, herding sheep with her ragged grandson, studied us for some moments from a little distance. Then she approached shyly, to present us with part of her picnic lunch: a portion of cold potato stew on a cabbage leaf.
Towards sunset we came upon this wide ledge, close to a summit, which offers lush grazing, a miniature well of bubbling fresh water and scrub firewood – a rare bonus at this altitude. As for the view, it ranks among our Top Three. The eastern snow-peaks are on a level with us across a narrow gorge too deep for its floor to be visible. Far below, to the north, the river gorge lies at the base of that grey rocky range we crossed yesterday. Beyond are many other lines of peaks and one perfect powder-blue triangle stood out against a blood-orange sunset. For half-an-hour the western sky was such a glory of changing colours and cloud-shapes that we couldn’t concentrate on fire-making.
At dusk we were joined by a ragged twelve-year-old shepherd boy. He warned us that tomorrow’s redura is very difficult, then produced from amidst his rags eight boiled potatoes; having watched us climbing for hours this afternoon, he thought we must be very hungry. One remembers such kindness long after the elaborate hospitality of elegant friends has been forgotten. Ten minutes later Jose’s father and small sister arrived to pay their respects: they live in a hovel around the nearest corner. Father endearingly insisted on leaving one of his three large Heinz dogs tethered nearby to guard us against thieves – as though we were his precious animals!
I’m writing outside the tent, lying on smooth turf beneath a full moon. Often I pause to gaze at the nearby snow-peaks, radiantly silver above the ebony abyss of the ravine. It saddens me to think that this is our last Andean full moon – but that’s ungrateful. We are fortunate indeed to have lived for so long with so much beauty.
Camp on Floor of Village Post Office. 15 December
We awoke to hear heavy rain on the tent. Then, out of the sodden, grey, cold dawn, Jose reappeared with a chipped enamel bowl holding four hot maize dumplings with savoury fillings. We unwrapped these goodies from the maize leaves in which they had been steamed and relished the luxury of a hot breakfast while Jose sat cross-legged in the shelter of the front flap, his hard-soled bare feet tucked under him, and questioned us about Ireland. When the rain eased off he pointed out the first stage of our redura, an unmistakable section of the Camino Real, its paving still discernible, running across a bleak expanse of puna into the clouds. The restricted visibility worried me; unless one can see far ahead, gaps in puna reduras can be hopelessly confusing. This morning however we were confused not by a gap but by a landslide at the base of a steep 500-foot embankment. I did a solo recce and at the third attempt found a way to the top, which was also the summit of a mountain. I whistled and waited. Then a sudden wind rose and as the others joined me the clouds ahead were blown away. Together Rachel and I stood surveying a wide jumble of peaks and valleys – all blue-grey and golden-brown – beyond which lies the Apurimac gorge, our last major challenge (as it was the conquistadores’) on the Royal Road to Cuzco.
Beyond an immense grassy bowl-valley, treacherous with boggy patches, we were on a faint goat-trail that wound level around four scrub-covered mountains. At its best this path was eighteen inches wide and the drop into a densely wooded ravine varied from one to two thousand feet. To add to the tension, we had a load problem. This morning an incipient girth sore prompted me to place the load slightly forward: and if it isn’t precisely placed it’s insecure. When it began to slip during the descent our sagacious Juana stood statue-still; she has more common-sense than a lot of humans I know. One would have said it was a physical impossibility to load a mule on such a path but the Andes have taught us that anything is possible if you’re desperate enough. The only casualty was Rachel’s Diana-bag, which is having quite an adventurous trip. It went rolling down the bare slope – faster and faster, jumping higher and higher – and came to rest 1,500 feet below. Rachel altruistically volunteered to retrieve it and a very breathless daughter rejoined me some considerable time later. Meanwhile I’d led the unloaded Juana to a slightly less perilous spot, and taken the load and tack onwards by instalments. I then reloaded in the normal way, having made a protective pad, dusted with antiseptic powder, to go between the girth and the tiny sore.
That descent (Stage One on the way to the Apurimac) took us into quite a thickly populated area; our next and final climb will be out of the Apurimac gorge onto the Cuzco highlands. Soon after 2 we paused to examine the famous rock of Sahuite, a huge boulder standing isolated on a grassy cliff and carved with animals, houses, agricultural implements and other unidentifiable objects. This has been described as an Inca relief map of a pre-Conquest village, but nobody is certain about its origin or significance.
Beyond Sahuite we slithered steeply into a broad, long, cultivated valley. At 4.45 we rejoined the carretera and a sweaty hour later entered this little village of Lucumos, having paused on the outskirts to buy an enormous bundle of Alf. The usual throng gathered around as we sat outside one of two shops gulping chicha and eating bananas. I was feeling uneasy; soon it would be dark, and I dislike camping near a village. Then Hernan appeared, bustling self-importantly down the rough, dusty village street: a slim mestizo, aged thirty-ish, with bright, quick eyes and an organising manner. He invited us to stay in the Post Office and repeatedly emphasised in a loud voice that he would charge us nothing for our lodgings. Before we moved he retrieved the 290 soles I had just spent on tinned sardines and buns and insisted on paying himself. (In the other shop a plump youth behind the counter had already refused payment for our drinks and laboriously written a note to his mother in Cuzco asking her to help us.) We have arrived at the ungrateful conclusion that Hernan enjoys showing off his affluence. He is of some consequence here, as Post Master, Alcalde and the area’s only entrepreneur.
When Hernan’s wizened father had removed a selection of pre-historic agricultural implements from the windowless Post Office there was just enough room for our flea-bags on the mud floor. I’m writing this at a tiny corner table on which Lucumos’s wind-up telephone constantly crackles but never rings. In a six-holed letter rack four letters await collection. My candlelight is attracting swarms of weird insects – red, brown, green, grey – which are incessantly crawling up and down the wall in front of me and across the table. Mercifully none is a spider.
Camp in hot neglected Hacienda Field. 16 December
Hernan insisted on our breakfasting before we left – a delicious meal of crisp brown maize cakes, baked by his Mamma, and several mugs of hot strong black coffee. When we set off at 6.30 the sky was overcast, after a night of heavy rain, and providentially it remained so all day, thus sparing us that extremity of heat endured in the Pampas gorge.
Soon after 8 we came to the village of Curahuasi and paused to look at the few remains of a famous Inca tambo. Pedro de Cieza de Leon recorded that here the great Ninth Inca, Pachacuti, ‘gave to a captain of the Chancas, by name Tupac Huasco, a princess of Cuzco as wife, and he held her in high regard’. This was in the middle of the 14th century and Pachacuti had just left Cuzco to conquer the Central Andes, a feat which would have been impossible but for the existence of the ‘Huaca-Chaca’ – the ‘Holy Bridge’ over the Apurimac.
At Curahuasi one enters the world of the Apurimac, a region with its own mystique, centred on The Bridge – for over five centuries one of the engineering wonders of the world. It was built c. 1350, during the reign of the Inca Roca, and became the longest continuously used bridge in the Americas. It enabled millions to cross ‘The Great Speaker’ – including the conquering Incas, who without it could not have moved an army north, and the conquering Spaniards, who without it could not have held Cuzco. Like all the many Inca suspension bridges, this Bridge of San Luis Rey hung from hand-twisted maguey-fibre cables; it was 148 feet long and in the dry season its centre point hung 118 feet above the water. (During the rains the Apurimac rises 40 feet or more.) The cables were regularly renewed every two years by the Indians of Curahuasi, to whom Pachacuti entrusted this task after his defeat of the Chancas, decreeing that all Curahuasi’s work-service tax (mit’a) must be devoted to the bridge’s upkeep. The locals’ skill and diligence were so remarkable that throughout the Colonial period the Spaniards never interfered with the traditional organisation of this labour of Hercules and it was continued after Independence. Only when modern technology made possible the use of iron chains for suspension cables, and wheeled traffic at last penetrated the Andes, was the Huaca-Chaca allowed to decay. It finally collapsed in 1890.
Beyond Curahuasi a kind youth told us that the carretera follows the Royal Road for most of the way and Pedro de Cieza de León’s comments don’t contradict this: ‘The road is well laid out along the slopes and mountains, and those who built it must have had a hard time breaking the rocks and levelling the ground, especially where it descends to the river, and the road is so rough and steep that some of the horses loaded with gold and silver have fallen into the river, where it was impossible to rescue them … It is a fearful thing to see the risks the men who go out to the Indies undergo’. Our friend showed us a redura that is no longer obvious; few people now cross the Apurimac on foot. This path rejoined the carretera on the first ‘shelf’ and we were on the motor-road for the rest of that six-hour descent. It is a narrow, dusty and very stony road. We enviously recalled de. León’s description of Pachacuti leading his 40,000 soldiers north from Cuzco some 500 years ago: ‘He set out from Cuzco in a litter rich with gold and precious stones, surrounded by a guard with halberds, axes and other arms. With him went the lords, and this Inca displayed more valour and authority than all his ancestors. His Coya and other wives travelled in hammock-litters, and it is said they carried many loads of jewels and provisions. Ahead of him went road-cleaners, who left not a blade of grass nor a stone, large or small, on the Royal Road to the lodgings of Curahuasi’. The provisioning of such an army, on the march through such barren terrain, must have taxed even the remarkable organisational abilities of the Incas.
As we began the descent we could see far below what seemed like low hills within the gorge; six hours later, gazing up at them from river-level, they seemed what they are – towering mountains. The cruel immensity of this gorge is beyond anything else we’ve seen and beyond anything anyone could imagine. It is too harsh and sombre to be called ‘beautiful’ or ‘magnificent’: a place of infinite desolation, yet so soaked in history that one walks all the way with ghosts. And the greatest of these is the ghost of a bridge.
When we first heard the ‘Great Speaker’ we were still some 2,500 feet above the invisible river and, though I’d been expecting that mighty voice, I was momentarily puzzled. Such an eerily echoing roar, amplified by the utter silence of the Andes, was unlike any other water sound I’ve ever heard. What must the conquistadores have made of this almost sinister reverberation – unceasing for aeons, indifferent to victory or defeat – when first they ventured down these precipices?
We stopped once during the descent, at a shack selling beer and coke. Nearby we passed the only dwellings seen all day: four straw-roofed bamboo hovels, separated by miserable patches of wilting maize and cane. By the roadside a few bony cattle and goats were lethargically masticating withered shreds of scrub. What sort of life can be led by the locals, who have virtually nothing to herd or cultivate? Are these the descendents of workers moved from the coastal desert of Nazca by thrifty Incas, to cultivate tropical fruits on this gorge’s few fertile ledges? Highlanders could not work near the Apurimac; they literally lay down and died if expected to exert themselves in such heat. Even today the temperature must have been near 100° F, despite the overcast sky.
We first saw the Great Speaker at noon, some 1,500 feet below us, apparently immobile in its tortuous chasm; that was exactly four hours before our crossing of the modern bridge. At river level the road wriggles for miles along the base of friable sandstone cliffs too high for the eye to measure. Beyond the tumultuous red-brown torrent rise matching vertical cliffs, all split and fissured by elemental extremes and frequent earthquakes. Higher still rise the snow-peaks of Salcantay and Huamantay – invisible today. A sparse growth of spear cactus and spiny acacia merely emphasises the savage starkness. Walking so close to the roaring, swirling power of the Apurimac, we were oddly moved to think that it rises only about 100 miles to the south-west, in the fierce mountains of Chumbivilca, and (as the Amazon) flows into the Atlantic 3,800 miles away on the far side of a continent. “Wouldn’t it be fun to follow it all the way?” said Rachel. I disagreed, while wiping from my bitten face the now-familiar paste of sweat, blood and dust. I’d prefer to walk 1,000 miles on the puna than ten miles at this debilitating altitude.
We were standing on the still-impressive remains of the Huaca-Chaca’s stone tower when the notorious Apurimac afternoon gale swept suddenly through the gorge – a wind that made even the Huaca-Chaca’s enormous weight sway like a hammock and terrified the bravest of the conquistadores. Examining the gorge walls at this point, and remembering how the bridge was built, one understands why Victor von Hagen wrote: ‘The Incas, living on a neolithic cultural horizon tied to stone tools, still conceived a communication system that stands extremely high in comparison with the Romans who had three thousand years of experience to draw on … An Inca road is in many respects superior to a Roman road. The Apurimac Bridge, for example, was part of a highway which came from heights the like of which no Roman had ever seen. The passes the Romans conquered were as nothing compared to those in the Andes; Mont Blanc, the highest peak in Europe, is 15,800 feet high; yet here in Peru we walk over Inca roads built at this height’. The most detailed description of the Huaca-Chaca’s structure was given by Garcilaso de la Vega, the Cuzco-born part-Inca historian who wrote: ‘The Apurimac Bridge has its pillar support made up of natural rock on the Cuzco side; on the other side is the stone tower, made of masonry. Under the platform that holds this tower, five or six large wooden beams are inserted as thick as oxen – they stretch from one side to another, placed one higher than another like steps. Around each of these beams, each of the suspension cables is twisted once so that the bridge will remain taut and not slacken with its own weight, which is very great’.
Because of the violent wind-gusts, and the loudness of the Great Speaker’s voice, it took some time to persuade Juana to cross the modern bridge, a little way upstream from the Bridge of San Luis Rey. Abruptly she swung away from it and stood stiff-legged, her rump to the river, displaying every known symptom of equine apprehension. The conquistadores were perhaps fortunate that the Incas had burned the Huaca-Chaca, forcing the invaders to ford the Apurimac. As they crossed a month before us, at the driest time of year, the water only came up to their horses’ withers; yet this seems the most astounding of all their achievements, given the strength of the current and the slipperiness of the stone bed. Antonio de Herrera Tordesillas, King Philip III’s official historian of the Conquest, wrote: ‘It was remarkable that they crossed the rivers with their horses even though the Indians had dismantled the bridges, and although the rivers are so powerful. It was a feat that has never been seen since, particularly not with the Apurimac’. Our argument with Juana seemed to go on for ever and I had to exercise supreme self-control to prevent my impatience turning to anger – which would not have helped. Then at last she accepted the inevitable and, having once set hoof on the bridge, crossed it briskly but calmly. Half way across I suddenly laughed aloud at the absurdity of human impatience. From beneath my feet came the rhythmic raging of the Apurimac’s primeval music, which filled this gorge before men came and still will play when men have gone. Keeping one’s patience is really a question of remembering one’s place in the universe. But that’s easier said than done when one is heat-exhausted, fly-tormented and very hungry …
On the Cuzco side we continued upstream for four miles, then turned into the narrow valley of the Rio Colorado. Here the road has been damaged by this season’s rains, which explains why we met only three motor vehicles today. The noise of the Colorado, scarcely thirty yards away, reduced us to sign language; because of the gradient this torrent seems more like an interminable waterfall than a river. We are camping just beyond the Colorado canyon in another fly-infested and woefully neglected hacienda field. When it rained heavily after dark I stripped naked and stood enjoying the cool downpour on my sweat-prickly skin. As this is doubtless tarantula territory I’m writing under the most unfavourable conditions, lying nude on my flea-bag in a cramped, tightly-sealed, oven-hot tent. But even under favourable conditions it would be impossible adequately to describe today’s trek. There comes a time when we literary conquistadores must lay down our pens and admit defeat. I can only suggest – think of the Eroica as representing our journey from Cajamarca And then think of the Apurimac gorge as the Finale.