Trail of Feathers (7 page)

Ariadne regarded me with eyes fired by fury on the journey back across Titicaca to Puno. She felt certain that Hector and I had dreamed up a scheme to keep secret knowledge from her. Gathering the bulk of her hair in her wiry hands, she teaselled it through her long ebony nails. I ignored her, hoping that she would latch onto another unsuspecting traveller.

I trawled my hand through the water and thought about the meeting with Hector. What had he meant when he said that the textiles from Taquile could make one invisible? Perhaps flight and invisibility were the same experience to the Inca. The boatman jerked me back to the present. He was docking at the jetty and expected payment.

‘Senor Hector is an old fool’ he said as I gave him the fare.

I was taken aback by his remark.

‘How do you know that I met Hector?’

The boatman tied the tether to the jetty in a bowline.

‘I am from Isla Taquile’ he said, as if answering my question. ‘I remember when the Senor was not blind, when he could dance and drink all night.’

He handed me my change.

‘His feet no longer dance’ he went on, ‘but Hector likes his
chicha
. It makes his tongue wag like a dog’s tail.’

To step ashore at Puno once again, was to leave the mysteries of the great lake to another boat load of travellers. I wondered whether I would ever stand on its shores again. A stray nerve nudged me in the spine. Somehow I felt certain that I’d never return to Titicaca. I left the boatman with a common phrase,
‘Hasta la vista’
, until we see each other again. As he passed my canvas bag up to me he winked.

‘You will not come back’ he said.

Over a dinner of
ceviche de truche
, raw trout marinated in lemon juice, I explained to Ariadne that henceforth I would be travelling alone. I did not say it was because she was driving me mad, just as she had done to Sven. Nor did I tell her that I was heading for Sillustani, or that I had already hired a llamateer.

Picking a bone from her mouth, the Frenchwoman said nothing. Perhaps she was thinking of her turbulent childhood, or of the invented pain which encircled her life. When she had finished eating, she removed something from her oversized handbag and placed it on the table. I recognised the tatty plastic wrapping.

‘I wish you luck to find the Winged Ones’ she said tenderly. Tm sure that you will’

I thanked her. It was an awkward moment.

‘You will need strength,’ she said. ‘Make a broth with this and drink it at dawn.’

As Ariadne slid over the dried llama foetus, I felt a jab of pity in my ribs. What a tragedy, I thought, that such a proud person should believe in such nonsense.

Manuel arrived, as planned, before the first rays of almond light had broken the horizon injecting life into the
Altiplano
. His shadowy face was locked in a frown, even when he was laughing. He owned three llamas. They seemed uninterested in the twenty-mile walk northwest to Sillustani. Woken early by their master, they were ready to start grazing. Whipping the largest of the beasts with the back of his hand Manuel demonstrated their sturdiness.

‘They’re strong as oxen’ he said, smirking.

‘How long to the towers of Sillustani?’

The llamateer cleared his throat and spat at the dust.

‘Four hours’ he said, ‘perhaps less.’

Taking the reigns of Julia, the smaller female, I walked at the rear.

I had left the dried llama foetus with Ricardo, as an extra amulet to bring good fortune to his home. He had put it on the mantelpiece, beside a figurine of Christ.

Most visitors to Sillustani take a taxi or tourist bus. I wanted to slow the pace, to deviate from the beaten track. I had much to think about along the way. Rather than arriving at any solid answers, my journey so far had been a string of irresolvable questions. Stumbling along with llamas would, I hoped, put me in the right frame of mind to notice a breakthrough when it came.

A fog of llama dung smoke hung over Puno. We were soon out of the town, climbing up the escarpment. Higher and higher, above the silent waters of Lake Titicaca, onto the
Altiplano
itself. Pancake flat and the colour of Brazil nuts, it extended forever like East Africa’s Great Rift. The first blend of clouds was stirring, brewed afresh in the limitless sky. Llamas were grazing in small groups, their petulant faces searching for food. Thesiger would have been proud of me, I thought, for making the most of animal transport.

Manuel tugged at the male’s reins. Despite his pretence of machismo he was a kind-hearted man. He told me that his grandfather or great-grandfather, he wasn’t sure which, had worked for Hiram Bingham. He’d been a muleteer in the 1911 season when Machu Picchu was rediscovered.

‘Senor Bingham was a good man,’ explained Manuel, as we trudged along. ‘He gave his men good food …
American
food. And the mules were not beaten. But …’ he said, pausing to pee, ‘Senor Bingham claimed he
found
Machu Picchu.’

Manuel scratched his head with a broken fingernail. ‘I don’t understand it,’ he said. ‘You see, the local people - they had never
lost
Machu Picchu.’

As we walked along, Julia dragging her feet beside me, I began to understand the fascination for the llama. Camels and men have a mutual loathing for one another, but llamas are different. I put the peculiar bond down to shared height. A llama, which usually stands as tall as a man, will swivel its head and peer at you on the level -psychopathically. I got the feeling that if she had arms, Julia might throw them around me one minute, but stab me in the back the next.

I bragged to Manuel that I had a sixteen-inch, nickel-coated Alaskan moose knife, brought along in case one of the team went lame and hunger set in. He was unimpressed, and used the opportunity to harangue me.

He said that llamas are man’s greatest friend. They keep the people of the Andes alive. Their coats are used for wool, for rugs and for ropes; their meat is eaten, their fat is used to make candles, and their dung is burned on stoves. Slipping me a sideways glance, the old llamateer added that some deranged people even dried their foetuses and made soup.

Eventually, I spied a lake stretching out to the north, its surface shining like watered steel. Known as
Lago Umayo
, it’s unconnected with Titicaca. On a high promontory in the western quarter were dotted a number of strange cylindrical towers, built from smooth-sided blocks of stone.

‘Bienvenido
, welcome to Sillustani,’ said Manuel.

The
chullpas
, round-sided towers, are thought to have been constructed by the Ayamara-speaking Colla tribe, between the 14th and 16th centuries. Shortly before the Conquistador invasion, the Collas were overthrown by the Incas. Their most celebrated families had been buried in communal tombs, in funereal towers. Some rise up as high as fifty feet, overlooking the pristine waters of Lake Umayo.

Leaving Manuel to tend the llamas, I made my way up to the tallest of the
chullpas
. The ground was rocky, the grass long and flaxen. The tower’s stone blocks were flush together like mosaics, its funerary contents ransacked by
huaqueros
, grave robbers, centuries before. It was here, from these great towers, that Hector said the Birdmen had flown. With the right wind, and a wide canopy of textile as a wing, I could see no reason why a man might not have glided from the greatest
chullpa
, safely down to the margin of the lake. He might have sacrificed some cloth, breathed its smoke to make him bold, thrust his arms sideways, and jumped. As a messenger he would have been in the air, aloft, if only for a few seconds, to deliver a message to the gods. Perhaps death would await him on landing; maybe that was the point - a suicide flight.

Despite Hector’s certainty, I have found no written sources to connect Sillustani to the Birdmen. To the experts, the
chullpas
were merely towers where an ancient people interred their dead. But then again, I pondered, rubbing a hand over the curious masonry, perhaps the Birdmen never existed at all.

History is abundant with tower-jumping episodes. Medieval Europe saw hundreds of respectable young men with home-made wings, or billowing robes, hurl themselves from towers, in their desperation to fly. No one is sure why, but tower-jumping was to medieval man as great a craze as bungee-jumping has been in recent years.

In his
History of Britain
, Milton records the fate of Oliver of Malmesbury who fixed wings to his hands and feet in about 1070
ad
and leapt from a tower. He’s said to have flown for more than a furlong before crashing to the ground. He lived but was maimed. Another famous jumper was the Marquis of Bacqueville. He announced that he would fly from his riverside mansion in Paris’s rue des Saints Pères, and land in the Tuileries Gardens. A great crowd gathered. The Marquis jumped with wings attached to his arms and legs. He didn’t make it as far as the gardens. But, fortunately for him, he landed on a washerwoman’s barge and only broke a leg.

Giovanni Battista Danti, a contemporary of Leonardo da Vinci, jumped from a tower too. He’s said to have glided over Lake Trasimeno in 1490. A few years later, in 1501, another Italian adventurer called John Damian was taken in as a physician to the royal household of Scottish King James IV While at the castle he practised alchemy and made a celebrated flight. Bishop Lesley, in his
History of Scotland
(published in 1578), wrote: ‘He causet make ane pair of wings of fedderis … he flew of the castell wall of Striveling, but shortlie he fell to the ground and brak his thee bare.’

The early 16th century saw dozens of tower-jumping episodes. It was a time not long after the
chullpas
of Sillustani were built. For all we know, the Birdmen were jumping at Sillustani at the same time as their tower-jumping cousins in Europe were plunging to their deaths.

While the llamas grazed, I paced around the ruins. Manuel pulled a few coca leaves from a pouch and started to chew them. He was lying on a great slab of trachyte, gazing up at the turbulent mass of clouds.

‘What do you think?’ I asked. 

‘About what?’

‘Do you think once, long ago, men jumped from these towers and flew?’

I had expected Manuel to laugh at the question. Instead, he put a coca leaf on his tongue and closed his eyes.

‘They may have jumped, and they may have flown,’ he said. ‘But why did they wish to fly?’

‘As messengers from one world to the next?’

‘Of course,’ he replied. ‘They wanted to reach the real world, to leave the illusion.’ ‘This is an illusion?’

Manuel sucked at the quid of coca in his cheek.

‘Look around you,’ he said, his eyes still closed. ‘None of it exists at all’

‘That’s a question of philosophy.’

‘To reach the
real
world you must die first’ said the llamateer. ‘Jump from the
chullpa
and even with the best wings you’re likely to die,’ I added. ‘There are other ways to die, other ways to fly.’

‘How?’

‘In your head, in your thoughts’ said Manuel. ‘You mean by taking coca?’

‘No, not coca.’ Manuel let out a breathless chuckle. ‘Stronger stuff than coca.’

‘What about by inhaling the smoke of llama wool?’

‘No,
mucho mas fuerte
, much stronger.’

‘What could be stronger than llama-wool smoke?’

Manuel opened his eyes. ‘Search and you may find it,’ he said.

The Israeli couple sitting opposite me on the bus from Puno to Arequipa were locked in a passionate embrace. Their bodies were contorted around each other in a double helix, the sound of their mouths sucking, like Japanese blowfish. The Andean ladies with pigtails and multiple skirts did their best, like me, to avert their gaze. They slurped at cups of orange jelly, soaked up the blaring salsa music, and giggled spontaneously at bumps in the road. And there were many bumps, for the dirt road from Puno to Arequipa is one of the roughest on the continent.

Every twenty minutes the bus driver would slow his vehicle, sound the Klaxon, and grind to an uneasy halt. The entire contingent of old women with bundles on their backs, students and dancers, theologians and salesmen in threadbare suits, would troupe out. All were searching for the same thing - pots of orange jelly. Their demand for it was seemingly insatiable. The man sitting beside me asked whether I might keep an eye on his cardboard box, full of live guinea pigs. As he scrambled for the door, desperate for jelly, he twisted his nose towards the Israeli sweethearts. In the unwritten lore of the Andes, such people were not to be trusted.

Peruvian bus journeys are always eventful. Whereas in other countries a long ride in a disintegrating bus is a vile prospect, in Peru it’s something to relish. Like children ecstatic for a fairground ride, customers fight each other to be the first aboard. They clutch their tickets with anticipation, thrilled at the idea of a jolting, dust-choking, twelve-hour trip.

Part of the hysteria was due to the date. It was the 27th of July the day before Peru’s day of independence. Everyone was hurrying back to their villages in time for the
fiesta
.

Digging a white plastic spoon into his sixth tub of phosphorescent jelly, the man thanked me for looking after his
cuy
so ably. The cunning Israeli guinea pig thieves, he hinted, had been thwarted.

He slapped his hand in mine.

‘My name is Manolo,’ he said. ‘We are brothers. Come with me to my village, come to celebrate!’

I explained that I was en route to Arequipa, where I had heard a man was building a glider of traditional Incan design. A throwaway remark, made by a backpacker in Cusco, was gnawing away at my mind. After Arequipa, I was heading up the coast to Nazca, to inspect the desert lines. I was searching for Birdmen, I said.

Manolo seemed displeased by my choice of destination.

‘Come to my village,’ he urged again. ‘Come and see
Yawar
… we have caught the condor!’

At first I didn’t understand what the man was going on about. I feared that the excitement of the bus ride, and so much jelly, had taken a heavy toll on his sanity. But then, as he told me more about the planned celebrations, I realised my good fortune.
Yawar
was something not to be missed at any price. No other festival in the Americas is as significant to the folklore of flight.