Cloud Road (25 page)

We perched on a bank above a set of descending hairpins, and wolfed bread, biscuits, fruit and water. Brutal-looking mountains dominated our view left. The land was made from big simple things, like the Creation might have been at the end of the fourth day, before whales swept the oceans, birds cut the air or man burnt a tree or sank a plough. It was tempting to stay, put a fishing-line in the lake and enjoy a few hours of rest. But it was time we no longer had if Elaine was to make her
flight. The Inca trail was still clear, although damaged. It ran along the contour and was easy walking for an hour. We looked down on scattered stone huts made from untrimmed boulders, roughly thatched: a glimpse back to the Iron Age. While we maintained our altitude, the river cut a steep gorge and fell rapidly away, turning left into a tenebrous canyon, along whose sides buttresses interlocked like closing teeth. Our trail swept right, up to a notch in a high ridge. It looked tough. We topped up our water in case we became too tired to make it down to another valley. Sluggish, bull-headed fish turned balloon eyes on us. The climb was steep, with stretches of broken stairs that reduced all three of us to a near-standstill. Cloud fell, the temperature dipped, the wind cut. Out of the gloom came ruined walls, an Inca
tambo
sat astride the pass. An Aplomado falcon glided by, just yards away: warm brown back and slate-grey wings. For a few blissful seconds its beauty took me out of myself and the pain fell away. Below the descending trail was a single smallholding with a sign beginning,
We sell
. It was deserted. I saw a man far up on the mountain, and called, ‘We buy!’

From a tiny loft, he brought toilet rolls, biscuits, aniseed liquor and a mint liqueur. On each bottle, it said 30 per cent. He pointed, ‘That’s the percentage of drinkers who survive.’ I bought both. He sold us corn, which he insisted on tying on himself, putting a knee in Dapple’s side to tighten the rope.

‘We need to hurry,’ I urged Elaine, ‘and lose altitude before we stop, it’s turning nasty.’ The wind was rising up to a storm. Perfume from a field of peas in flower drenched us. We jogged down the next steep section into a small village. Just as rain and hail began, we found the
only scrap of land big enough for a tent. There wasn’t much room for two to work effectively. Once the outer skin was secure I said, ‘Go inside and clip on the inner lining, and sort out beds and food. No point in both of us getting wet.’ By the time I finished, it was dark, and there was sleet, snow and a bitter wind. I tethered Dapple below a bushy bank out of the worst of the weather; the crunch of her jaw on the corn was like a heavy man walking on frozen snow. I dived gratefully into the tent. Elaine said, ‘I put all the spare fodder underneath the inner tent. It’ll stay dry, and she can’t steal it.’ The tent was a calm haven with a luxurious cushioned floor. There was no chance of cooking; we munched biscuits and slugged at the aniseed liquor. I think the sugar in the biscuits gave us a bigger lift. Hounds guarding livestock on the opposite hill yapped all night. The air froze. We slept wearing scarves and balaclavas.

Just before dawn I went outside to boil a kettle. Our main water bag had split, probably when the man at the shop had lashed the wheat to Dapple, but there was enough left for a hot drink. I teased the stove into a fierce blue roar, and made lemon and ginger tea. Hugging the mug to my face, I watched the dawn reveal frozen raindrops; casual pearls scattered over the tent. The sharp tang of the ginger tea was exquisite. Two hawks cruised over our campsite, and followed us down to the small town of Ayash in the valley, an hour below. From above I could tell: ‘Every house has a shiny metal roof, there’s a new mine here.’

We entered the town watched by cold, war-zone eyes as if we were mercenaries of unknown allegiance. The mine had done this. In the rubble at the road’s edge, a teenage
girl sat grinning like a Halloween pumpkin. Her hair was dirty and badly tied. She was dressed in careworn traditional skirts and a cotton sweatshirt plastered with meaningless English phrases:
Top Sport Disco, World Quality Number One.

A new river bridge was being lowered by crane. I put my head inside a prefabricated workmen’s hut. ‘Is there a café in the town?’

‘Welcome to the City of the Dead,’ a young woman said cheerfully, ‘that’s what Ayash means. One of the Inca’s virgins was on a journey and fell ill here, and died. There’s no café. I’m Marlena. Sit down, the company doesn’t know who’s drinking its coffee.’

As Elaine tethered the donkey, a smart four-wheel-drive drew up. A tall, bespectacled man stood rooted to the spot when he saw us. He burst into smiles and strode across to us. ‘Eliseo López Correa, I work at the Altamina mine. Are you having a coffee? Come in! The mine is quite new; it’s one of the biggest in Peru, in fact, in all of South America. There’s copper and zinc, molybdenum too, it’s used in light filaments and high-strength steels.’

‘Are you from Lima?’ asked Elaine.

‘I live in Lima, but I’m Argentine, and I work for the Canadian company BHP. It works Altamina in partnership with the Peruvian Government and a Japanese firm. Lima’s a long drive, so I work twenty-one days on, seven days off. This really is the City of the Dead. Up until five or six years ago, before the mine came, the village was so primitive. They never saw any whites, and they stared at us like aliens. Some locals sold land to the mine company. Once they’d drunk the money, they started agitating to have the land back, saying it belongs to the community.
They can’t understand that they took the money and the land is gone. They threaten our drivers now and again, but they’re usually too drunk to hurt anyone. Our contract stipulates that we provide a certain number of jobs for locals, but they have had no education, and few had ever worked for wages. Even with simple jobs like sweeping up, it was difficult to get a day’s work out of them. We have provided them with everything, mains water, a proper road, a trout farm and a bridge, but most of them resent us.’

‘Has any money been spent on the school, so that they will be able to compete for proper jobs in the future?’

‘We’ve given it a new roof, but there is no one from the community to teach them. If they ever existed, they left. Outsiders won’t work here, it’s too remote and primitive.’

He climbed into his shiny four-wheel-drive. ‘Five more days and I go back to Lima, look me up if you’re there.’

We found the trail in a narrow defile, climbing behind the houses and into a meadow by a small stream, where a hummingbird was bathing in a pool. We stopped for lunch. I joined the hummingbird in the stream. Elaine took a photograph of me bathing. I was skeletally thin. My stomach had shrunk so much there were deep shadows under my ribs. In the picture I am laughing. As we ate, two horsemen stopped to talk. The older introduced himself as Umberte. ‘Ah! The Inca Road! You need La Union, good luck!’

The pretty side valley took us high above the main river to a moor, where we came to a fork in the trail, not shown on the maps. We checked the orientation of the paths on the GPS, scouted ahead, waited in vain for someone to ask and eventually concluded we had no way of knowing
which one was right. Elaine scanned each route through her binoculars. ‘Odd that Umberte didn’t mention it; he knew we wanted the Inca Road and La Union.’

‘He can’t put himself in the shoes of strangers and imagine what it’s like not to know this land.’

The left-hand trail swept smoothly up one valley and had some edging stones in place. The right-hand one shot straight up a much steeper valley, and Elaine, after walking ahead, called back, ‘There are definitely remains of built steps.’ I agreed, we went right. The climb was hard. The tight valley trapped all of the sun and none of the wind. We sweated and gasped our way upward. Every hundred yards we had to stop and get our breathing under control. At the top was a hamlet sheltered among
queuña
trees.
Queuña
looks like a tall hawthorn, but has small fleurs-de-lis leaves and a distinctive fox-coloured bark that peels away in papery sheets. It loves the high land, and can survive right up to the snowline. A group of elderly people stopped hoeing a field to observe us. I leant on my stick waiting for enough breath to ask, ‘Is this the road to La Union?’

‘La Union? La Union!’ they whispered among
themselves
. ‘No!’ said one of the men striding towards me. ‘You are on totally the wrong road, at the bottom you should have gone left. That road goes to La Union; this one goes somewhere else entirely. You have made a mistake, the other road was your road, this one is not. You must go down to the bottom, that is the right road.’ Although I didn’t say a word, he continued as though someone were arguing with him. Sprawled on the grass, by his horse, was Umberte. ‘La Union?’ he said sagely, rolling a stalk of grass from one side of his mouth to
another. ‘You are on totally the wrong road. You have to go back down. Why did you not stay on the Inca Highway?’

‘But is it possible to cross this ridge and return to the other road?’

‘Oh yes!’ said the first man. He shouted after a young woman walking out of the village. ‘The señorita is going that way.’ The señorita marched at full speed up the hill, then stood and watched us struggling red-faced after her. We were over 14,000 feet, it was after four o’clock and we had planned to cross the next watershed and descend to warmer levels before nightfall. We were not going to do it. We followed the contour, wading through waist-high grass, and eventually met the Inca Highway coming up a smooth grassy valley floor: perfect walking. Had we kept to it, we would now have been over the watershed and pitching the tent. For us, these open grassy sections were easy walking; we could find a rhythm and double our speed. Dapple, on the other hand, was thoroughly confused about where to go unless led by the rope, in which case she would not go at more than two miles an hour unless one of us walked behind, tapping her every ten yards. Even then, every fifty or a hundred yards she would veer off sideways, or turn round and start back the other way, her step suddenly like a ballerina’s. She knew it was wrong; each time she did it her expression changed, her ears picked up and her eyes bulged. I tried steering her along the row of stones marking the road’s edge, to give her something to follow. I followed behind, holding the rope, and clicking my tongue in encouragement. Ten yards later she skipped over the edge stones, and started to canter away at right angles to our path. As a sideline,
when we passed buildings, she would run into the first courtyard, provoking the dogs to come out and attack us.

We neared the col as it drew dark. There was a long knoll on our left between us and the higher ground. Behind it, we would be out of sight of the trail. The sun had gone and the air was bitter. We tethered Dapple in a sheltered corner; it had been a long day for all of us. I took water from a bog pool, teeming with larvae and tadpoles. The scene behind us was lit by the last of the light. In the clearing air, snow-capped peaks shone pink for a few minutes; an unspeakable grandeur to reward us for being here. Andean lapwings piped on the hill above. We had to cook a proper meal to stoke up on food, so we piled on all our clothing, and set to work in the dark. At higher altitudes it was harder to balance the pressure and the fuel flow. The stove kept fading and going out. Making do with the cool yellow flames which it produced when not firing properly, we boiled mounds of fresh cabbage and lathered it with butter and salt. Then the stove expired.

‘I can see how you lost weight,’ said Elaine.

I put together my thoughts about the donkey. We were no longer in pain from carrying the packs; however, there seemed no way to tie the load on Dapple effectively because there was too much give in the cinch. When she descended uneven ground, she always turned the same shoulder forwards, and dropped down with a lurch, working the luggage loose over that shoulder. Next day, the animal would pull out its biggest surprise.

The morning took us, warm with coca leaf tea, across haunting limestone hills. Each exposed rock, its fissures bright with the delicate orange flowers of
huamapenka
,
seemed to bear the chisel marks of its own construction, but they were the solution runnels made by trickling rain, century by century. It was glorious walking over springy turf, the trail clearly visible over the hills ahead. A small stream fell in miniature waterfalls to pools of white boulders. We stripped off and washed from head to toe, taking turns, since there was nowhere to tie Dapple. Two naked white people chasing a donkey across a plain could change the myths of a generation. Dapple’s contribution to the toiletries was to stand upstream and piss, sending me scuttling until the yellow flow had passed.

‘Did you see how she did that?’ I asked Elaine.

‘Are there two ways to pee?’

‘In a way, yes.
She
used a large grey penis: we have a castrated male. Perhaps that accounts for its great suspicion of humans.’

Elaine bent down, ‘You’re right.’

‘Men know about these things.’

The walking had been fast and comfortable, and we were able to stop a little after four. The stove would not light. I took it apart, cleaned it and put it back together. It still didn’t work. The best we managed was to half-cook some eggs for tomorrow’s breakfast. In the morning, I couldn’t see the point of wasting more time on the stove, so breakfast was slimy, half-cooked eggs and cold water. We began walking and in half an hour, our breath still condensing, we reached an isolated smallholding where a mother and two small children were milking sheep and cows in a paddock by their two-room hut. The beautiful, self-confident mother gave us enamel mugs of steaming cow’s milk; it was like cappuccino. ‘We have to work hard, we are too far from the town to sell milk, so we
make cheeses. My husband went to La Union to sell them.’ She paused to chase a lamb that was nibbling at curds of cow’s milk sitting on a muslin cloth.

‘Have another cup!’ It was as good as a second breakfast.

We came to a broad shallow stream, and were pulling at Dapple to no effect, when a couple in fine woollen ponchos rode up, erect as dressage riders, with stylish trilbies. He sat in a rough wooden saddle, but hers was splendid in black leather and silver. ‘Let go of the rope and drive him across,’ called the man. ‘He will find his own way.’