Cloud Road (13 page)

Rain soon followed in cold drops the size of marrowfat peas. My jacket was soaked in two minutes. Icy water ran down the stick onto my hand. My leather boots had not dried out for two days and were now sodden. I could see no more than twenty feet ahead, my path guided solely by the compass bearing. The distinctive rock arrived slowly, as things tend to, when your life is partitioned into twenty-foot sections. Soon after it, according to the map, the path took a kick to the right. But I was learning not to treat the map as a literal representation of the land. It was not gospel truth, more gossip and hearsay. I was not optimistic about finding the turn in this murk, nor did I fancy huddling beneath a rock waiting for it to pass over. When I got to the spot where I expected the turn, there it was. I looked at the new bearing: it was just right. I found a little shelter behind a tor, to use the GPS. I also had to take another toilet stop. I couldn’t help thinking what I looked like, clad head to foot in red waterproofs with my
backside a white moon in the middle. The path would be invisible for a while; then I would meet three, coming in from all sides. I decided to make my own path and rely on the compass, walking the right bearing on the map, ignoring the paths, if necessary. After an hour the rain and cloud eased and I saw a broad turf road running clear ahead of me up to a nick in the hill. A shepherd on horseback rode along the ridge to look at me, decided I was harmless, and disappeared. I envied his swift movement. On a rock astride the crest stood a bird of prey, a mountain caracara, black wings folded. The wind ruffled the ripples of black and white feathers on his chest. His yellow and white beak opened silently. He waited until I was no more than twenty yards off before peeling away onto the currents of the wind.

On the other side of the ridge was a welcome sight. The moorland gave way to short-cropped sheep pasture, and, two or three miles off, there were adobe houses and cultivated fields. There were more caracaras, digging up the turf for grubs, and, as it had stopped raining, I dropped my pack on a rock and stopped to watch them. They stand about twenty inches high, and have crisp neat striations on the chest, contrasting with long, bright yellow legs. They live only above 6,500 feet, and can be found over 13,000 feet: true birds of the high Sierra.

I was looking down a fertile valley leading away from the wild remote moors. I couldn’t be sure how far away Ingapirca was; there were too few landmarks to pinpoint my position. But I guessed that with a smooth path, I could make Ingapirca, a bed and a hot meal. The pasture gave way to arable fields and the turf path turned to a smooth gravel lane. On either side, deep red clay was
worked for potatoes, which a cheerful group of villagers, from teenagers to old men and women, were fertilising with chicken manure dried to brown splinters, like old pine needles. They asked me, ‘Where have you walked from?’ Instead of saying from Achupallas, I said proudly, ‘From Quito!’ Each face wore a different mixture of astonishment, admiration, disbelief and pity: including mine, I expect.

The sky was overcast. By five o’clock, it was so dark I thought something was wrong with my eyes. My knees were complaining at the hardness of the surface, and the road went through a section like a roller-coaster track. I arrived at the top without a wisp of oxygen in my lungs. While I was recovering I admired the winding valley ahead, lush with eucalyptus, and richly coloured lozenges of red earth and green crops or pasture; and, best of all, a mile and a half ahead of me, was a village which had to be Ingapirca. I walked three-quarters of a mile and saw the road disappear left. There was a hidden valley to be crossed, a five hundred foot descent, and a similar climb out on the other side. In compensation the cloud lifted a little, but the sun was setting and Ingapirca seemed to be slipping away from me. The shoulder of the hill ahead was silhouetted against the sunset. Then the road went beneath an avenue of trees and plunged me into darkness. Deprived of sight, my mind busied itself reminding me of exhausted leg muscles and aching shoulders, but my spine was in good shape. In gaps between the trees, I glimpsed the few village streetlights hanging in the air like candles. They were just a quarter of a mile ahead, until the path veered left and into another side valley.

Twenty minutes later my torchlight caught something to
one side: fine masonry. I was in the middle of strings of Inca walls standing in short turf. I had blundered into the middle of the ancient ruins of Ingapirca. Stars peppered a clearing sky. I walked slowly along touching the stones, finding the old Inca roadway restored to near perfect condition, including the lined stone ditch which carried freshwater for the travellers to refresh themselves. In front of me was the Temple of the Sun, its dark stones flecked with starlight.

During the night I enjoyed being woken by the rattle of rain on the roof, and curled up tighter, happy to have more than two slender skins of fabric between me and the sky. In the grey morning, I was lying on the hotel room floor in my long-johns doing back exercises when the maid walked in, blushed and walked out. I hope it didn’t put her off marriage for good. My spine was holding up well, though my body felt generally exhausted. After two breakfasts I strolled round the village, feeling light as air without the backpack. The town was a rough gridiron just four or five blocks long. Street vendors fired up oil-drum stoves with logs to cook stew, or blew on coals under iron grills. In the lanes, a boy whistled a clear melodious tune, and stalked songbirds with his catapult. A large sow scratched herself luxuriously against a frayed steel cable supporting a telegraph pole. It danced and swayed to her rhythm. A blind beggar came up the hill blowing a yellow
plastic whistle, feeling his way with two long and slender white poles, like a rescuer after an avalanche, probing for life. He stopped precisely opposite the shrine of the Virgin, crossed himself and moved on.

There is little written in English about Ingapirca, and not much more in Spanish; yet its existence has long been known; it wasn’t a hidden mystery like Machu Picchu. Young Pedro de Cieza de Leon saw it less than twenty years after the conquest. The La Condamine expedition visited it in 1748, and Humboldt in 1801. They all looked at its terracing, massive stonework and powerful defensive position, and concluded it was a military fortress. But now we know the truth is both more complex and more interesting. Ingapirca was not founded by the Incas; they had conquered the area just three generations before the Spanish Conquest, defeating the Cañari nation, who put up fierce resistance before recognising they would not win, and negotiating peace. The Cañari had been here a long time. Recent linguistic studies have suggested they came from central America, and shared origins with those mighty masons, the Toltecs. They were dark-skinned, said Leon, and much given to shouting. They had a southern capital at modern-day Cuenca, but here, for their northern base, which they called Hatun-Cañar, they selected this fascinating site where the natural route from the highlands curled down into old and rich volcanic soils. Here a promontory commands all the rich farmland below where the Cañar River begins its long fall to the sea. On the end of that promontory stands the Inca temple, and, on the connecting neck of land, the houses of the rich, and the storehouses of the wealth of empire. Descending from it, into the little valley, is a ladder of stone-lined baths for
bathing and ritual cleansing. All this is surrounded to the north by tall hills with rippled flanks.

There is no intact Cañari architecture, here or anywhere else. A waist-high holy stone stands by an oval of river boulders that mark a Cañari tomb. These meagre remains are now flanked by circular Inca storage pits, where wealth was collected and distributed. But the Cañari themselves were adventurous traders, acquiring alluvial gold from the Amazon, and trading with rainforest tribes, including the infamous Jívaro, who measured prestige by the number of shrunken heads a man possessed, struck from enemies taken in battle, their lips sewn together, the threads pulled out through the nostrils. The Cañari submitted to Inca rule but did not forget, becoming willing allies of the Spanish against Atahualpa.

Beautiful llamas grazed the site, their coats a deep brown with hints of purplish black. Some noise, inaudible to me, came from the village. The dominant male ran to the highest terrace and stood there, all courage and concern for his family. The others followed, stayed respectfully behind him and stared past his quivering flanks. I walked towards the temple. The Incas organised space to express and wield power. I wanted to explore the core in order of increasing sacredness, finishing at the small temple of the sun, on the very top of a feature like a low oval keep. Firstly, I entered the gridiron precincts of the apartments of the elite; then I crossed a small square, where the public would be admitted only on great feast days, to a ten-foot high trapezoidal door. The lintel stones had been drilled to take locking bars. Each step I took was a greater sacrilege. Had I, as a poor scribe, five hundred years ago, tried to enter, I would have been killed. These
were the quarters of the sun virgins. When girls reached nine or ten years old, the prettiest and most personable were selected and taken into convents (using the equivalent Christian terms, for convenience) such as this, where nuns would educate them in religion and all manner of domestic duties. When they reached thirteen or fourteen years of age, inspectors came from Cuzco to select the most beautiful and accomplished to go to the capital, and be presented to the Inca. He would choose those he wanted for his own household, as servants or concubines. Others would go to reward his supporters in the same way; the remainder would enter the religious houses, especially the Temple of the Sun, and some would be trained to be the next generation of teaching-nuns.

A father could only refuse to let his young daughter go into the nunnery if he could prove she was not a virgin; no help, since the punishment for adultery or fornication was death. If found guilty of either, she would end her life next to her lover, both hung naked by the hair to die from thirst or attacks by birds of prey. Despite the terrible punishments, lovers still spurned the rules. One lament comes down to us; a poem sung by convicted fornicators:

I looked round the simple rooms, where the girls served and waited below the temple wall, in hope or fear, for the call to the Inca’s bed.

The site was plundered up until 1966, when the Government and the Museum of the Bank of Ecuador created a local commission to care for the site. Today it gets little or no state money, and the five-dollar entrance fee for foreign tourists does much to keep it secure. The building which dominates the site is a rare thing in Inca architecture: an oval structure. They are usually sacred spaces, and this 140 foot long enclosure was no exception. Its wall has the best stonework on the site: better than the temple itself, above. There had been subsidence, but the resulting rise and fall of the courses had the elegance of the brim of a well-turned hat. From the end view, it looked like the base of a powerful lighthouse, curved to take the buffeting of the endless waves of the passing years: time’s injury. The face of the rock was spalling slightly, flakes coming away, but there were still many places where you could not get a penknife blade between the stones.

On the opposite side to the house of the sun virgins, the land was close to being a cliff. It descended in four tall terraces, each just three feet wide, sloping outwards to a fall of 150 feet. On the highest, an old gardener with a small sickle, its split wooden handle wired together, was unconcernedly weeding. Back near the entrance to the house of the virgins was a broad stair, which turned right to face another trapezoidal doorway. Passing through it, I was faced by a narrower stone stair, leading to the oval’s flat summit, and, in the centre of it, a small rectangular temple, now plain, once weighted with gold. The holy of
holies was just large enough for the priests to make their sacrifices and pin down the mystery of the turning seasons, the fleeing years.

The Incas’ plotting of the sun’s movements is well known. But the movement of another feature was more fundamental to their map of the heavens: the Milky Way. They called it
Mayu
: the celestial river. The Milky Way is the soft cloud of innumerable stars which we see when we look towards the centre of our spiral galaxy, into the greatest depth of stars. The earth’s equator is not parallel to this plane, so, as the earth turns, we see it from a continually changing angle. To us, the Milky Way seems to oscillate in the sky, daily changing its orientation between NE–SW to SE–NW. Every year it completes a cycle of movement, which makes an X in the heavens dividing it into four quarters. The solstices of these movements occur at the start of the dry and the rainy seasons. This X provided the framework for the Incas’ map of the heavens, and for the empire of the son of heaven, which was called
Tawantinsusyu
, the land of the four quarters. The Incas were such careful observers that they not only recognised groups of stars, but also dark shapes in the Milky Way caused by inter-stellar gas clouds blocking out the light from the stars beyond. They named them the Llama, the Toad, the Fox and the Serpent. Lunar cycles dictated when to plant, and other heavenly bodies gave the times for various agricultural tasks. In a modern community near Cuzco, ethnographer Gary Urton found that the farmers still measured out the year as their ancestors did, marking the movement of key stars against the hills and buildings around them. Young men complained that crops had been left to decay in the field, because respected village elders
would not give permission to harvest until the correct celestial positions had been reached.

Outside, the clouds, which had muffled the light all day, were thinning, and slender rifts appeared. The amber glow that often suffuses the late afternoons transformed the surrounding hills and deeply cut valleys into landscapes as formally beautiful as a Claude Lorraine painting. Reluctant to leave the site, I took a little-walked path away from the town. I found a huge slab of stone, whose surface was granular and coloured by lichens. The brittle eau-de-Nil flakes of one species formed a background for the orange blazes of another, so they looked like the luminous spoor of something wounded. Ledges just big enough to place an offering had been carved out of the stone. Animal shapes were jumbled among zigzags and other simple geometrical patterns, washed and weathered into obscurity,
soft-edged
, dissolving back into the rock. At the bottom of the hill I met a couple in their sixties, finishing work in their maize fields. We sat on the grassy bank with their small longhaired dog. They both wore battered trilbies; his jumper was knitted locally, with black, white and grey wools in a geometrical native pattern. They had broken off speaking Quechua to hail me in Spanish. I pointed at the ramparts of Ingapirca on the bluff above our heads. ‘How does it feel to speak the same language as the Incas who built that ancient temple?’

He gently tapped the end of his fist on his chest. ‘It’s natural, those people are my ancestors,’ he said proudly.

‘Do you always speak Quechua at home?’

They nodded, contentedly.

‘It was the first language you learned, before Spanish, I suppose?’

‘No!’ he said. ‘We were brought up speaking only Spanish, our parents knew no Quechua.’

‘How old were you when you learned it?’

‘When we were seventeen or eighteen.’ They looked at each other to confirm memories, but he did the talking. Women didn’t talk in front of men.

‘Why did you decide then that it was important?’

‘We were starting to sell produce in the town, and in the mountains, where they can’t grow maize. Without Quechua, we could not do business in the mountains. In the towns, it was all Spanish, but that culture is nothing to me. They do not care about the Indians. Did you know that Quechua was not made an official language until 1975? They did not want people like us in their culture. I decided I would not pretend the Spanish culture was mine. My culture was up there,’ he put a thumb over his shoulder to the mountain and moor I had crossed, ‘with the indigenous peoples. I would seize my culture, and turn my back on people who did not want me. I learned Quechua. Now I do business with whomever I want.’

They sang me a song in Quechua and giggled at the end of it.

‘What is it about?’

‘I can’t tell you!’

Eventually, after consulting in Quechua, he said, ‘It’s about a young man who is asking a young girl to come with him into the fields, and after a while she agrees!’

On my way back I was stopped by a woman holding a box with some encrusted metal objects and a basalt Inca axe. It was one of the star-shaped war axes, with a central hole for the shaft. ‘Where did you find it?’

I got the standard answer, ‘When we were building a
new house, we dug it up.’

I coveted the axe, but wouldn’t buy it. Aside from the weight, if it was real, it should stay in Ecuador, if it was fake, the twenty dollars she asked was too high. The price didn’t come down; so it was probably genuine. I walked away knowing it would soon be sold to a tourist, and leave the country. I consoled myself with a beer in a village bar overlooking the ruins. I thought about the couple’s stubborn, principled resistance to Spain, over five hundred years on. I asked the proprietress, a woman in her mid-thirties, knitting in the sunlight by the door, ‘Do you still feel Inca?’

‘No! Certainly not. I am Cañari. We were here before the Incas invaded.’

‘But your Cañari language; no one speaks it now, do they? Haven’t you been absorbed, as the Incas planned?’

‘Not me. I’ll always be Cañari, it’s what I am, can’t change it, I wouldn’t change it. First we get rid of the Spanish, then we get rid of the Incas!’

When I returned to the hotel, there was a blond Swiss in his early twenties, looking at the panorama through steel-rimmed glasses. He was expensively dressed, and as clean and smart as if he had just walked out of the shop. He surveyed the scene like an accountant, sent there to value the view.

‘You have been there?’ he nodded.

‘Yes, I spent all day there, brilliant, isn’t it?’

‘It looks good, but the entrance fee, five dollars, it’s bad value for Ecuador. So I walked around the edge of the site. I think I saw all you need to see.’

I hope he went home and found Heidi was dead.