Cloud Road

by John Harrison

  Continuing next morning, I rolled down the Pan-american for five miles, then down the lanes into the Cutuchi Valley, where a stone bridge crossed a rowdy stream. Here, among the new eucalyptus plantations, were the headwaters of the Cutuchi River, which descended to the next town: Latacunga. I rested on the parapet. Behind me to the east, a bank of clouds hid the mountains. Then suddenly I saw, high in their folds, another land, an ice kingdom in the sky. The clouds closed. But, still higher, another rent opened in my ordinary world and revealed snowy slopes that looked like icing smoothed by a knife. I was glimpsing the flanks of Mount Cotopaxi, the world’s highest active volcano. The clouds broke again to reveal the lip of the crater, slightly dished, higher at the edges. It stood like a colossal barnacle, the feathers of cloud feeding in the thin cold air. In a moment, the curtain closed. I was alone on the empty road.

  Lower down, plantations of mature eucalyptus overarched the lane in magnificent avenues, like the nave of a church. Eucalyptus and Spanish pines are the only trees now cultivated in any numbers in the mountains, and they are both introduced species. The eucalyptuses, or gum trees, are by far the most popular. No local tree performs like these Australian imports. Dr Nicolás Martínez, Governor of Tungurahua province, first planted Eucalyptus globulus in Ecuador in 1865. He found they could grow at great speed, attaining heights of fifty feet in six years. A section of that first tree now stands in Ambato Museum. It was said to have reached a height of two hundred and fifty feet, and a circumference of twenty-six feet. The trunk and limbs naturally grow straight and produce dense, strong wood. Where roadside lopping had taken place, smaller branches had been left, and I cut myself a long walking stick that came up to my chin.

  In the hedgebanks were strange succulents whose narrow, spiked leaves curved upwards to form a sphere. The stems grew long and sinuously, and blackened when the plant died, looking disturbingly like burnt elephants’ trunks. Behind these armoured hedges were large farms growing cut flowers in huge polythene greenhouses. Millions of roses and gladioli, a native plant here, come out of this valley every month, mostly for the $60 million annual export trade.

  A small football stadium announced my arrival in the village of Mulaló. The small square looked as though no one could decide whether to look after the plants better, or carry out mercy killings. From a small bar came Eric Clapton playing the song to his dead son, Would you know my name, if I saw you in heaven? A five-year-old boy played football with his big sister, shouting ‘Goal, Barcelona!’ every time he kicked it past her, and crying every time she tackled him. There was little to Mulaló except the square. New roads had been built in anticipation of growth, but there had been few takers for the building plots; hope was on hold. It was a village with its hands in empty pockets, looking down at the holes in its shoes.

  In the morning, I took a track beneath another avenue of huge eucalyptuses. When a shower of rain came, not a drop got through, but a heady scent rose from the leaves bruised by my boots. The leaves are still used to allay rheumatism, and to help cuts and bruises to heal. At the roadside men were trimming cabuya cactus, each blue-green leaf a heavy sword blade, serrated with sharks’ teeth. Then two flashes of incendiary orange-red brilliance flying across the field drew my eye away. They were Andean Cocks-of-the-Rock, the national bird of Peru. The tail and lower wings are black and light grey. The rest is a startling tangerine colour, exploding in a crest over the head that almost completely covers the beak.

  The track became a lane, then a road. Buses bellowed by. Soon I was in Latacunga, where catastrophes have become a habit. The 19,340-foot high volcano Cotopaxi destroyed Latacunga in 1742, 1768 and 1877, and it shows. Derived from the Quechua, Llacta Cunani, ‘Land of my Choice’, the town’s name is one of the few beautiful things to survive. La Condamine saw the 1742 eruption throwing flames 2,000 feet into the air. He wanted to ascend to study it; but he could find no scientist or local guide to go with him. I crossed a litter-strewn gorge at whose foot the River Cutuchi, which I had seen rising as a swift, bright brook in the national park, crawled in shame. Below Latacunga it is one of the most polluted rivers in Ecuador, although still heavily used for irrigation and domestic supplies.

  I checked into the Hostal Jackeline, a grubby pile of bare rooms: there were floorboards, a bed, a table and a chair. At a first glance, that seemed to be all, but I was promptly colonised by fleas. Hassaurek called them ‘the chief production of the place’. The mountaineer Edward Whymper was more offended by the daughters standing by their doorways, over their seated parents, apparently stroking their hair. On closer inspection he saw they were picking out lice and eating them.

  But in front of my window, somewhere above the forest of television aerials and the reinforcing rods forming steel thickets, somewhere behind the dense clouds, hid Cotopaxi. The most interesting accounts of the volcano are those of Whymper, the first man to climb the Matterhorn. As a child, I read about him in The Eagle Annual, where, naturally, he was portrayed as a clean-cut Edwardian hero, conquering the Alps in hobnailed boots and plus-fours. The reality was a little different. The mountaineer Francis Smythe wrote of him: ‘There is nothing to show in his correspondence that he ever loved anyone. He never loved any women, not even his wife.’ A wood engraver by training, Whymper was, by chance, commissioned to make woodcuts of the Alps. The trip began his strange, cold relationship with mountains. They never moved him emotionally: ‘Saw of course the Matterhorn repeatedly; what precious stuff Ruskin has written about this. Grand it is but beautiful I think not.’

  His Matterhorn party included Lord Francis Douglas, the brother of Oscar Wilde’s lover and nemesis, Lord Alfred Douglas. On the way down, one of the novices slipped. Douglas was one of four men dragged to their death. In England, the fatalities were seen as pointless. Queen Victoria even consulted the Lord Chamberlain, with a view to banning mountaineering altogether. The tragedy did not break Whymper, but it wreaked a slow alchemy on his heart, and he began to drink.

  His Andean expedition was launched fourteen years later in 1879. Its main objective was not to conquer peaks for their own sake, but to study the effect of altitude on the human body. If men could not camp without danger and discomfort at heights over twenty thousand feet, he wrote, ‘It is idle to suppose that men will ever reach the loftiest points on the globe.’ The deadly effects of extreme altitude were well known. Memory was still fresh of the disastrous ballooning experiment conducted in 1875, when three aeronauts ascended from sea level to 26,000 feet in just two hours. Two, Crocé-Spinelli and Sivel, were found suffocated, with their mouths full of blood. The sole survivor, Tissandier, was in too poor a state to give a coherent account of what had happened. Most contemporaries wrongly believed it was low air pressure, rather than lack of oxygen, which was so damaging to the human body.

  Whymper started his attempt on Cotopaxi from the village of Machachi, and, travelling through countryside still in ruins, heard tales of the eruption of two years before. He was told that in 1877, a black column of fine ash had towered three and a half miles above the cone. That night, the cone could be seen glowing deep red. At the hamlet of Mulaló, beneath the very skirts of the volcano, locals had briefly seen lava pouring over the lip of the crater, bubbling and smoking, before the snow and ice encasing the entire summit melted, releasing huge vapour clouds that enveloped the mountain. From its core came a deep and terrifying roar. Whole glaciers were blown into the air, raining an apocalyptic brew of ice and fire on the terrified people below. Some ice landed thirty miles away. The eruption was creating one of the most destructive phenomena on the planet, a lahar. Ash and fines blown out by the eruption had become saturated by melted snow, and were flowing across the country at astonishing speed, much faster than lava. One cut north, scything a 300-mile furrow of disaster to the port of Esmeraldas.

  Cotopaxi is a straightforward climb for a mountaineer. Whymper climbed roped between two guides he had worked with in the Alps. He completed an ascent to the crater rim, aiming successfull
y for an area of loose ash without snow. They camped overnight, hampered only by the smell of burning rubber, telling them they had put their rubber ground sheet over a hot-spot. Next day, Whymper had himself held by the legs and leaned over the lip of the crater to gaze down twelve hundred feet into the cavernous funnel below, where worms of lava still crawled out of the volcanic pipes. He climbed back down to Machachi to find the expedition’s work had already been transmuted by the gossip of their porters. Whymper, they said, had collected gold from the mountain and his guides were so afraid of him that they tied ropes to his waist to control him, one walking before, and one behind.

  It is very hard for a poor country to rebuild a city. The drab buildings of Latacunga make the disaster feel far more recent. There is a Spanish watermill, renovated as a museum and park. One square redeems the centre. It contains the town hall, a cluster of banks in fine old colonial buildings and Vicente León Park. The town hall is made from volcanic pumice, quarried from the very volcano that periodically destroys it. The design is a classical–colonial fusion. A central pediment is topped by two very dodgy stone condors, wings aloft, as if they were conductors pulling an orchestra together.

  There were phone centres and internet cafes where I could catch up on my friends. I phoned Elaine twice a day, updated her on key news, like my continuing grasp on life, and said I love you in whatever way I could. She was coming out to join me in Peru for one month in the middle of my journey. I tried not to think how long that still was, how many footsteps.

  She asked, ‘How is Don Quixote doing?’

  ‘I’m beginning it for the third time. He’s still mad, but he seems less mad each time I read it.’

  ‘Sounds like it’s time I got out there!’

  When I put the phone down, I savoured the sound of her laughter, but I couldn’t hold it in memory, and by the time I reached a colonial doorway in a street of blind buildings it was gone. It opened up onto two garden courtyards housing the town’s minuscule library. I asked the many-cardiganed librarian if I could see the artefacts from an archaeological dig in 1993 that had excavated a textile factory overwhelmed by the lahar. A half-buried Italianate tower at the entrance to the town was almost all that had been left standing. She summoned the caretaker. Raúl Ucelli was a sixty-year-old who nursed his left hand: the fingers were swollen like baby plantains. He was red-eyed and itchy-nosed, as if the dust were still falling. He unlocked a dusty room, where strange agglomerations lay in labelled plastic bags on trestle tables.

  From the ruins emerged machine tools made in Sheffield, England, and the neighbouring Don Valley, all caked in Andean ash and mud. They found the bones of a girl around eight years old, who was overcome running away from the lahar. It had rampaged the twenty-seven miles from Cotopaxi in half an hour, and smashed through the town at rooftop level. There was no time to evacuate, nowhere to run. Like a citizen of Pompeii, she was frozen in the moment of her death, sprawled flat in the street. The little girl’s bones were there in front of me. In ten years since the dig, no one had thought to bury her with dignity.

  It is a strange thing to live your life in the shadow of such destructive power. A whole city lives like those ascetics who slept in coffins to remind themselves of their mortality. But all life here is more fragile, uncertain. Next morning at ten minutes to six, the bed shook gently, as if someone next to me were turning over. Then the whole building did a shimmy from side to side: an early morning call from Cotopaxi.

  Cotopaxi

  I don’t know when I got the idea that I wanted to climb Mount Cotopaxi. I am no mountaineer, and am often afraid of heights. Real climbers say it is little more than a walk, but I believed that once before, and ended up at 16,400 feet on Mount Kenya climbing a twenty foot rock face where a slip meant a half mile sleigh ride to the top of a precipice. While my feet healed, I talked to an agency that hired out guides and equipment, and suddenly I had agreed to go and was waiting only for companions. A few days later, I was in the agency storeroom trying on crampons, choosing ice-axes and sharing out equipment with Elcita, a pretty twenty-six-year-old Ecuadorian woman, working in Hamburg as a child-minder. She wore a charm bracelet hung with tiny figures that danced as she gestured humorously with her slender hands. She was home for three weeks and had decided, and she admitted she did not know why either, she would like to climb Cotopaxi.

  There were three guides. John was tall, a mountaineer, salsa teacher and bar owner; three qualifications for the dark, cobalt-blue sunglasses which he never took off. Fabián was a stocky, powerful build, always looking for a joke; Julián a lithe, wiry young man, shy and eager to please. We loaded up a battered Toyota Land Cruiser and drove up through pine forests. A forestry truck reversed into us and added another dent. The drivers exchanged details. As we drove away, I saw the truck driver throw the details from the window. We emerged onto a moorland of low grasses and pretty flowers, calling at a campsite to pick up two Dutch women, Hoeni and Anna-Mika. Hoeni introduced herself as a doctor, which I thought might come in useful. I wondered what the field cure for a screaming attack of vertigo might be: probably instructing John to give me a right hook, then telling Fabián and Julián to toboggan me back down the ice. I looked out of the window again, and the Alpine grass, flowers and even the soil had gone, replaced by bare lavas, pumices, honeycombed red pyroclasts and shining nuggets of black obsidian. The Land Cruiser pulled up where the ash and pumice became too soft to drive further.

  We were 15,200 feet high, and a stiff wind was putting a chill into air that was already down to 44°F. We trudged through soft loose gravel to a refuge hut 750 feet above. I knew the best technique was to take tiny steps, and to go far slower than seemed necessary. It was very steep, and the gravel sank beneath my feet: two steps up, one step back. This was familiar. Memory crystallized: I had climbed a small volcano on Penguin Island off the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. The gravel was the same, the bareness, and the cold. Volcanoes make their own landscapes. Wherever they are on the planet, it is volcano-land: their rules. It was hard walking, but when I rested, I recovered rapidly: a good sign. Elcita and Hoeni were walking more slowly, breathing harder and taking frequent rests. The true summit was hidden, but I could see a shimmering white cone of snow going away, like a stairway to the sky.

  The wooden and stone hut was comfortable, although I would like to have a couple of thumbscrews handy if I ever get the chance to ask the architect why he put the toilets in a separate block on the other side of an icy yard. Like marathon runners, we filled ourselves with carbohydrates for slow-release energy. We put away bowls of pasta-filled soup and basins of chicken and rice, washed down with hot sweet tea. The plan of attack was based on the fact that the snow crust hid many crevasses. These bridges were much stronger at night, when the snow froze, than in the day, when it melted and weakened. We would sleep until midnight, make the climb in the dark and continue upwards for no more than forty minutes after sunrise.

  We went out to watch the sunset from a ridge above the refuge. The temperature was down to 35°F and a strong wind made our position feel precarious, as though we could be whisked off into the night, weightless as dandelion seeds. Over a mile below us, clouds lay rippled like pack ice, stretching away as far as the eye could see, which seemed to be over half the planet. The dish of bright amber beads, almost beneath our feet, was Quito, thirty miles away. A new moon rose over the city, strangely reversed, light first finding its left-hand rim like an opening parenthesis. The Plough hung upside down, Venus blazed. The Incas knew Venus was a good friend of the Sun because it followed that great lord around the sky. To the north-east was Antisana, a classic cone-shaped volcano. Cayembe, which straddles the equator, looked like a giant iceberg trapped in sea ice, blocky and hostile. It was sixty miles away. We could also glimpse another volcano, Altar, 17,450 feet high, and nearly seventy miles to the south. There is a local tradition that it was once the highest of them all, but after eight years of calamitous eruptions the rim of the crater collapsed inw
ards. The wind began the thin song it would sing all night.

  I scarcely seemed to have dozed off when my alarm piped me awake. I felt maddening itches from fleabites. If the fleas were still on my clothes when we went outside, they were in for an unpleasant surprise. I began to pile on layers of clothing: neck-to-ankles silk underwear, then a shirt and thick trousers, next a fleece and waterproof jacket and trousers, a scarf and two layers of gloves, a hat and a hood.

  We ate again: bread, cheese and mugs of hot Oxo. We put on the harnesses and tested the lamps, and laid out the ropes and karabiners. I felt stressed about small things, such as John making me pour away my chemically purified water because it wasn’t hot, and would freeze solid in my uninsulated water bottle. As we left the hut, I realized the stress was fear, pure and simple. I was walking out at half past one in the morning into a biting wind, my way lit only by the shallow pool of blue-white light from my head-torch, wearing a harness and carrying an ice-axe, to climb an enormous active volcano. I was warm, but I shuddered. Elcita looked nervous; I straightened out her hood and joked with her; she looked very small. We all did.