Reynaldo read it slowly. I took time to look around: something was different. It was the first village where all the houses were adobe and grass thatch. No one here had made the small amount of money needed to build in stone, or concrete, or brick, or buy metal sheeting for the roof. The children wriggled to the front and stared up at me. Reynaldo handed the letter back. ‘The village is celebrating, there has been a christening, a wedding and an engagement. Everyone has had a few drinks. It was a misunderstanding.’
I dropped my silly idea that someone ought to say sorry, and explained my navigational problem. He took the map and said, ‘Give me a minute to orientate myself.’ Wonderful! A man who used the word orientate in preference to Aargnngh would be able to help. He pointed and said, ‘That’s north,’ and carefully aligned the map, then told me the road it showed to Achupallas did not exist. He advised me to return down the road I had climbed. I pointed up the mountain where the map road went. ‘There is no path up over that mountain?’
‘No.’
I sighed and continued up the mountain. He had been holding the map with north pointing south. Around the bend was a man face down on the bank, dead drunk. Further along, I hailed three youths riding horses bareback. They could not name any of the prominent local peaks or rivers and when I pointed to the map they did not recognise a single name. ‘You see, this map was made by the military, and when they came to do the surveys and asked questions all day, the people did not trust them. They made up many names.’
I said, ‘Aargnngh.’
I reached a side valley leading in the direction I needed to go. Three separate people told me to follow the left-hand side of the valley. For once, I was getting consistent advice. At half-past four, I had been climbing or wrestling for the last three and a half hours. My shoulder and neck muscles were sore; I needed fresh food but none of the villages had a shop. Suddenly the only flat land was marsh in the valley bottom. It seemed impossible, but, for the next hour, there wasn’t a piece of flat, dry land large enough to take my little tent.
The sun was down below the mountain and I had been walking for nine hours. There was another half-hour’s daylight. I got to what seemed to be the last hut before the bare mountain began. There was a scrap of half-level ground above it: a man came down. He was friendly enough, but his many children screamed and hid behind their mother’s skirts or ran into the house. ‘The Achupallas road?’ he said, shaking his head, ‘You should have taken the path on the other side of the valley.’ He nodded casually across what was now a steep-sided valley, narrowing like a funnel, difficult to cross. ‘To cross the valley you must go higher.’ I stumbled on. At last I saw a small meadow on a ledge of level land. I scrambled down a muddy path, then was held up at the stepping stones over the river by a donkey coming the other way, belonging to a young couple with a baby. After a minute, when the donkey had neither moved nor drunk, I looked at the father. He lifted the donkey’s tail and shoved three stiff fingers forward. The donkey winced, and moved on. So did I, without giving myself similar encouragement.
The three huts next to the flat land looked like a Stone Age camp. The elderly parents spoke only Quechua, but their teenage boys had learned Spanish at school. I asked their permission before, in near darkness, I began to pitch the tent. When the burly nineteen-year-old crept forward to watch me work, I stood up and put out my hand, and he ran back towards the huts, petrified of me. When the tent was up, and my pack inside, I tried the stove. It wouldn’t fire. It looked like supper would be six forgotten, dried prunes which had fallen loose in my jacket pocket.
I paused to stretch my aching back and shoulders, glanced west to the edge of the hill and froze in horror. Just fifty yards off, silhouetted against the last light, in a hooded black cloak, was a seated figure with a long scythe over his shoulder. From the shadows of the hood, the Grim Reaper’s eyes turned slowly until they fastened on mine. After a few minutes he rose unsteadily to his feet, and walked towards me. The scythe swung easily in one hand, his lips twisted in a crooked grin. As he came closer one of the teenagers called to him. He cawed like a crow. The cloak was a dark blue poncho; the hood, a loose woollen hat; the man and the scythe were real.
I greeted Death, and made a last request: to die with a full belly. ‘I had fruit and some nuts for breakfast but nothing since. My stove does not work so I cannot cook my food.’
‘Do you like potatoes?’ inquired the Reaper.
‘Yes,’ I said, touched by this kindness. The day would end on an upbeat note.
‘And meat?’
Knowing meat was scarce, I said, ‘No, a few potatoes would be fine.’
‘Right,’ he said, ‘see you in the morning.’ No food appeared. He had just been curious about what Gringos ate.
A dog barked all night under a half moon.
Lost
In the morning, two young men walked with me up the hill through fields of beans; a five-hundred-foot flight of clay steps. A little girl in wellingtons skipped up effortlessly, looking back at me with a concern that grew as we rose. When we reached a single-track dirt road they pointed me to the right, and took their leave. Breakfast was the last of my fresh food, one limón, a kind of large, sweet lemon. I made a feast of it, cutting it in half, sucking out the sweet juice, then, remorselessly devouring every morsel of the tough pith. All I had left was dried pasta and soups, but tonight I would be in Achupallas.
Several miles further on than the map said, I reached the turning I was looking for, and followed a little dot of a girl who was hauling three ropes, each with a cow at the other end, up a broad peat-black path. The day was cloudy and the wind began to rise. I was anxious to cross the watershed and begin the descent while the weather was still fair. Some easy walking led over a wide ridge where some trick of the land made an irrigation channel seem as if it was flowing swiftly uphill. I had a brief glimpse of the road zigzagging down and down into the valley below, then a wall of cloud started to race towards me. I picked up my pace, and dropped four hundred feet before the cloud enveloped me like fog. Out of the gloom came a foghorn. Soon I saw a man sitting on the grassy verge holding a rope that looped up into the mist. From the other end, a cow lowed.
Halfway down the hill was Huayllas, the biggest village I ever saw without a shop. As I passed the school, a village meeting broke up to run out and meet me. The headmaster, a young and energetic man, welcomed me, and soon I stood in the middle of a hundred curious faces, being interviewed and taking directions. He was frank. ‘The road down from the village is awful. Two years ago, a storm diverted a stream right down the Inca road and stripped it out. When you come to the fork in the road, you must go left; do not miss it.’
I soon found out he was right. It was now a river of loose angular rocks, almost impossible to walk on. Because I travelled alone, spraining or breaking an ankle might be fatal. In an hour, I made little more than a mile. My chances of making Achupallas and its food stores faded with every slithering footstep.
However, the cloud had lifted and I could see the lie of the land. The section of path was steep and narrow, and strewn with fine gravel. Although the drop to my left was not a cliff, I might have rolled myself to death before I stopped, or bled to death on a spike of cactus. Then it happened. Falls don’t start to happen. Suddenly you are already out of control, and the time when you could have done anything about it has already passed. My front boot had become a roller-skate on the pebbles, and shot out straight in front of me. I fell flat on my back, which, in practice, meant on my pack. One arm dangled over the drop. It felt rather nice: I stayed there a minute. Then, when I tried to get up, I had a problem. The pack was so large I could not easily get feet or hands to ground and get any firm purchase. I lay there waving them all in the air like a woodlouse, trying not to laugh so hard that I fell off the track.
I searched for the crucial fork in the road, which led to the only bridge. The trail was now following a contour along the side of the valley. Up above me, the mountains were now taller,
and the sky was growing darker. There wasn’t a house or a hut in sight. I felt the land and the hour were turning against me. I hastened to find the fork, and get down to a less exposed altitude. But there was only one path, and, irresistibly, it began to climb, just as the cloud began to fall. I took my last look at the way ahead. It was clear that I should now have been on the other side of the valley, on the faint line of path curving away left round the shoulder of the mountain and up to Achupallas. The valley sides below me were now cliffs; I could not go down without retracing my steps for nearly two hours. I decided to keep to this path, which, my GPS and compass agreed, would bring me out onto the bus road to Achupallas.
Icy rain fell. I struggled into waterproof trousers but my legs were soaked before I got them on. Then it began to hail. I hunched my shoulders, flinched from the falling ice and walked to the spur ahead to see if there was any shelter on the other side. I saw a lone figure standing perfectly still. The shepherd wore only light trousers, sandals, a woollen shirt and hat and a blue poncho. He had a dozen sheep, which he was driving back the way I had come. He stood as oblivious to the rain as a tree. When he spoke, he raised an arm to point, and stood like a prophet.
‘You have to cross the valley to Achupallas.’
‘Can I follow this path over the mountain to the road?’
He pursed his lips. ‘Yes, but it’s just a shepherd’s path, hard.’
‘Which way?’
He crooked his forefinger and made a tiny movement upwards. He smiled at me, and returned to his sheep. His bare toes scuffed the carpet of orchids, their red, yellow and blue bonnets bowing as the raindrops bent their faces low. The ground was sodden. In favoured corners, maize was coaxed into a crop. The wind rasped through the leaves. This was encouraging. Where there were fields, there would be paths down to houses below. Rain and hail rattled on my broad-rimmed felt hat. The trail was narrow and the slope below was steeper and bare, nothing to grab at if I slipped but slick grass, and, somewhere in the cloud below, the waiting cliffs.
After an hour, I came unexpectedly to the junction of two valleys. Either there was a side valley unmarked on the map, or, in the murk, I had walked over the mountaintop into another valley. I spent time with map, compass and GPS, huddled in the limited shelter of a rock, and decided I didn’t know. Another brief gap in the cloud brought another problem into view. The river in the side valley was also deeply incised between three-hundred-foot high cliffs. There were no paths across it. I followed it upstream looking for a crossing point, but I was now walking directly away from Achupallas. The cloud came right down again. As a precaution, I left the GPS on, to mark my route and make sure I was not walking round in circles. A slow grind of fifty minutes brought me to a bridge of tree-trunks. It was a quarter past three, but as dark as if night were approaching. I crossed and turned back down the other side. My GPS flashed low batteries; I changed them straight away. The path was becoming a muddy stream. It passed through one farmyard. Water streamed from the grass eaves into swelling pools. A boy came out, his head bent, and walked right by me, as if I was invisible. I called. He seemed not to hear me. Don Quixote was right: when you travel, devils confuse your world.
My drinking water was low. There was mud and there were rivulets, but nothing deep enough to fill my bottle. The path rose as steep as a ladder; ten yards left me screaming for air. At an irrigation ditch I scraped a pool and got a litre of muddy water. I seemed to be on a ridge, but visibility was too poor to be sure. However, above the beating of the rain I could sometimes hear, ahead and below me, a faint roar. I couldn’t tell if it was cataracts on the swelling river or, as I hoped, trucks on the Achupallas road.
It was a quarter past four and all I had eaten all day was the single limón. I was beginning to get wet, and as soon as I rested, I felt cold. A group of middle-aged women came up the trail driving donkeys and I asked if there was a village close by. They briefly raised their weather-beaten faces to the sky and rain, ‘Further down!’
The track was a river of stones and water. I came out onto a ledge of pasture and maize fields, with a large valley below. A muffled bellow came through the murk. I have never been so happy to hear a blown exhaust: it was the Achupallas road. I peered ahead, waiting for a window in the cloud. There was a lorry, crawling up the hairpins!
In between the road and me was an impassable gorge.
A Spinning Compass
I pitched the tent in pouring rain and crawled inside. Within a minute the rain stopped. To cook dried food I needed more water. I would have to take my large water bag three hundred feet up the mountain to the shallow irrigation ditch, and try to fiddle more water in, a little at a time. Then I would have to cook in the dark, in wet grass, with a temperamental stove. I was now warm, and I decided I needed to rest and drink water more than I needed to eat. I found an Oxo cube and chewed it between swills of cold water. It tasted no better than it sounds.
I didn’t feel hungry in the night, but I slept poorly. In the morning, the important thing was to get to water, rehydrate myself and try to cook a meal. The day dawned nearly cloudless, and I felt more confident as I took out the map and GPS. Immediately I remembered something, which yesterday, in my tiredness, I had forgotten. When you change the batteries in the GPS you have to recalibrate the compass or it simply picks a direction at random and calls it north. I checked. I had been navigating with north ninety degrees out.
For the first time, I could see clearly where I was. The fields around me were perched on the side of a majestic valley. On the other side of the river, I could see through binoculars several paths going down the gorge to the bank. They were only livestock trails, not easy, but if I could cross the river and reach the road, my problems were over. A reconnoitre revealed none of them linked up with paths on my side, so perhaps the river was not fordable; from so high up, I couldn’t judge. Worse still, the water was running high after the storms. The river snaked across a very narrow canyon floor. I might get down the river and find myself on an isolated scrap of land. If there was a flash flood, I would have nowhere to go. I decided to take that risk, and make a way down to the gorge. At the bottom, I could assess the river, drink and try to cook.
Dazzling blue-green hummingbirds buzzed the field, including a new one with a tail longer than its body. When I stood up a little quickly, I felt faint; not a good omen for walking down a cliff. I drank the last of my water. My mouth held a twisted dryness. I found the least terrifying gully and picked up a goat track down, which I would normally have considered too dangerous. I tried not to look ahead to the sections below where the path had fallen away, where mud had flowed over it, or small trees fallen across it. In some places the ground I stood on began sliding down through the mud towards a drop while I tried to stay calm and choose another step forward, grab a branch, and keep going. The sheer length of it was daunting, perhaps five or six hundred vertical feet where any slip would kill. My legs tired quickly through nervous tension. After half an hour I staggered out onto the scrub at the bottom, filled my water bottle and stared at my watch for ten minutes waiting for the sterilising drops to take effect. I drank a litre in a minute, then set about cleaning the stove. The fine filament of wire in the needle valve was bent. It was something I might have missed, or dropped and lost, had I tried to fix it in the dark. I reassembled the stove; it fired, warming my spirits. Then went out. I left it to cool, then tried again; it fired and went roaring blue. Of the food I had left, the things which cooked fastest were instant noodles. Two portions vanished without trace.
I washed up, re-packed and took a long look at the river. It flowed swiftly over boulders two feet in diameter, and was about thirty yards wide. I selected a promising line, faced myself downstream, so rolling boulders would hit calves not shins, grabbed my stick with both hands, and stepped into the torrent. Standing still felt fine, but the second I moved my weight, the force of the current whipped away all control. The water was up to my thighs. I edged across sideways, like a walking tr
ipod, with sudden lunges, staggers, doubling ups. When I hauled myself out of the other side I celebrated with a dance then drained my boots.
Another seven hundred feet of climbing got me to the road. I was still getting my breath when a small cattle truck pulled up. It doubled as a local bus and was coming down from Achupallas.
‘Alausi?’ they called.
Alausi was a twenty-minute ride in the wrong direction, but it had hostels and cafés.
I flung my pack, then myself, into the back. Bouncing along, I stared straight down into the abyss I had just climbed. We rolled into the little town and pulled up in the sleepy main street. Boys from the various hostels came up touting. I asked one twelve-year-old wearing a Brazil football shirt, ‘Where can I buy a newspaper?’
He said, ‘What’s a newspaper?’
So I headed straight for the hot food stand and bought a bag of boiled potatoes and four bars of chocolate. A heavy cold I had been fighting off had made a comeback, and my lips were chapped and ulcerated, as the chilli sauce which smothered the potatoes soon told me.
I found a wooden hostel festooned with flowers. I dropped my pack on the bed, which gave a long sigh, like a harmonium whose bellows had been shot. My stomach had shrunk, and although I needed a spell of four meals a day, eating was a chore. There were two cafés. Each had only chicken, rice and chips. For lunch, I picked Danielita’s because she had more children to feed; they spilled around on the dirt floor. In the evening, I waited for my supper in front of a grainy television where an orange-faced astrologer was offering a glimpse of the future at premium call rates. I could cheerfully have pitched him into a tank of things that chew slowly. After another helping of starch and chicken, I took a stroll down the peaceful main street and e-mailed Elaine from a café: ‘Am going back in time, have got figure of an adolescent boy.’ The reply came back next day, ‘Do not pass puberty.’ I would find it difficult to do these trips without her humour and belief.
Cloud Road Page 8
