Cloud Road

by John Harrison

  We arranged to meet in Chiclayo in Northern Peru. I would have to reach Ingapirca quickly and then take a string of long-distance buses. There was nothing more to do in Alausi, except walk up and down the main street, sit on one of the concrete benches and watch other people sit on concrete benches. Bus-boys called ‘A-Quito-a-Quitoa-Quito-a-Quito!’ and ‘A-Ri’bamba-a-Ri’bamba-a-Ri’bamba-Ri’bamba!’. Every hour of the day, the population was encouraged to leave, and go somewhere bigger and better. On a hillock above the town was the single thing which most encouraged me to leave: an enormous colour statue of St Peter. It looked like a lost piece from a garish Vatican chess set. If only a huge hand would descend and move it out of sight. At least it would soon be dark. But, as night swept down the hill on soft wings, there were three audible pings, and St Peter was lit by floodlights. There were days when I missed not having a bazooka.

  I took a look round the old railway station. It was all locked up, but a clerk ran up to me and seized my arm, ‘Do you want to ride the train tomorrow? There is a special excursion down the Devil’s Nose! Come early for a ticket, the office opens at nine.’

  The Devil’s Nose

  The Devil’s Nose is probably the most hair-raising piece of railway construction in the world, so dangerous that trains seldom use it. I settled down on the wooden bench outside my room, to catch up on my diary and a bottle of Zhumir lemon rum. It tasted like air freshener. Soon I had to fetch my pillow. I didn’t have any buttocks left.

  The railway line comes right down the middle of the road, across the end of the main street, to a station sitting in the angle between the main line and an old siding, which housed a few antique railcars. At least I hoped they were antique curios, and not working rail-stock. At nine fifteen, I climbed the stairs to the ticket office. Inside was the young clerk who had told me they opened at nine. ‘Come in!’ He ushered me into an office, which contained a lime-green steel floor safe, closed with a cheap Chinese padlock. On the desk was an antique Adler typewriter, an English-made Bakelite phone with a cranking handle and no dial, and a brass Western Union Morse code tapper.

  ‘The train left Riobamba a day late because a section of track was washed away. It has been repaired but she is travelling slowly in case there is any more damage. She will leave here at eleven, the ticket office opens at ten.’

  As he had an open door, a passenger and a roll of tickets, I thought sales could commence now, but you don’t ask. I returned at ten, not because I expected punctuality, but because there was nothing else to do. He came in at ten fifteen and discussed Ecuador’s World Cup hopes with Paul, a forty-year-old Englishman travelling on a westbound round-the-world air ticket, next stop Easter Island. Had Ecuador been drawn against Easter Island, population 3,000, they would have been in with a shout. But, like a lot of the rank outsiders, they were organised in defence, but unable to create clear chances against experienced opposition. The crucial weapon in their qualifying strategy was simple. They played all their qualifying matches at 10,600 feet, an altitude at which the International Federation of Sports Medicine has banned track and field athletics events as too dangerous for the athletes. The largest city, Guayaquil, on the coast, didn’t host a single game. Bolivia used the same tactic and nearly squeezed Brazil, the eventual winners, out of a qualifying place.

  Eleven o’clock passed. An informal game of football began in the street; the pitch included the railway line. Paul and I ate plate after plate of delicious cheese and ham toasties. The footballers grew tired, and disbanded. An old man with short, very bandy legs hobbled down the hill, in the centre of the railway line, too old to believe a timetable. Not long after two a head popped out of an upstairs office, ‘It’s coming! Five minutes.’

  There was a shuddering, grinding, growling, ringing noise; a bellow of a horn; then a silver diesel engine with a chevron of red, yellow and blue on its nose felt its way down the rails. It looked like a bull, hooves splayed, sparks flying, being pushed forward from behind. Paul and I had decided that if we were going to ride the most terrifying railway in the world, we should do it in the most dangerous way, and we swarmed up the ladder to the roof. By the time the first, uncontrolled lurch shunted us into motion we were packed in. Some local girls, who had made the journey all the way from Riobamba on the roof, all six hours of it, were looking tired, and decidedly insecure.

  We crept down an incline below the town, where workmen had just finished digging mudslides off the track. Dogs ran out to bark at the brakes’ screaming metal. Our speed built up as we dropped down into a gorge and over a river. This section of railway was begun in 1901, designed by Archer Harman, John Harman and William Shunk, and built by Ecuadorians and imported Jamaican labourers. The descent of the Pistichi Hill, which we were approaching, took two years, and cost half a million dollars and dozens of lives; no one is quite sure how many. At times, there was a vertical drop from my boots, resting on the carriage’s eaves, to the foaming water, six hundred feet below. Aplomado falcons shot past our ears and out above the chasm; the drop held no fear for them.

  Soon we slowed and emerged at the junction of two valleys, in the acute angle of a Y-shape. The daring and skill of the engineers was breathtaking. The track found itself on the top of a rounded spur, 6,250 feet high. It was too steep, unless they dug away half the mountain, to make room for the turns on a hairpin. Instead, they used a switchback. At the point in a hairpin where you would expect a turn, the track levels and crosses a set of points. When the train has cleared the junction, the points are thrown, and the train reverses back and descends on a line cut below the first one. This is repeated, again and again, with one-and-a-half-mile long sweeps, all the way to the valley floor, more than a mile below. We swung our way down and then back up.

  Next day I headed back to the trail. I looked for a bus to take me back to where I had finished my last walk. San Luis Transportes was a small truck with no benches, and only me for a passenger, until, after two hours, we went for a bounce round the town to drum up trade. The driver whistled at any unaccompanied fat girl, and picked up two young evangelicals in suits just the colour brown that psychologists say signals dishonesty. They sported large tin badges saying ‘If you want to know the meaning of real happiness, just ask.’ I decided to stay miserable. After finding a middle-aged couple who had finished their shopping, we tore off up the hairpins. A bright morning had turned to a grey afternoon, and, in an instant, I was freezing cold. The couple got down at a small hamlet, the evangelicals at the foot of a bleak, bare hill, which they began to climb.

  I was alone on the truck for the last half-hour, and stood down in the square of Achupallas, the sole object of curiosity. It is now no more than a tiny country town with a busy fruit and vegetable market on Saturday. But it was once an important tambo, or Inca staging post, and the small church in the corner of the square was built on the foundations of the Temple of the Sun.

  The Inca road was just another country lane out of town, sad in the rain and the lowering light. I bought as much food as I could carry, and promised myself that I had to be hard. If anyone begged food I would have to say no. I could not let myself run out of fresh food and rely on the cooker and the weather. As the arable land gave way to rough grazing and moorland, the valley narrowed to a pinch point between two dramatic crags, and dense cloud rolled down swiftly from the mountains and drifted in easy grandeur down the valley. Visibility fell to fifty yards. I saw a pleasant-looking little riverside meadow below the path, and climbed down. The ground was deceptively wet but the rain had eased. I found a small knoll and pitched tent. It was only three feet above the water level, which was far less than I liked, but the river was now just a stream running in two channels around a little mid-stream island, and, unless there were a cloud burst, it was unlikely to rise too quickly for me to retreat.

  By the time the tent was pitched, my fingers were numb from the rain. The heavens opened, and the stream began to rise. I crouched in the tent, chewing hungrily on fresh bread rolls and ch
eese.

  As soon as I finished a bottle of water, I found I had diarrhoea, which my dehydration had concealed. Coming back from the third visit up the slope, I saw a horseman and a man on foot standing against the sky, just visible in the murky dusk. The man on foot came down to the meadow on one side of me, while the rider came down the other side, which made me uncomfortable, but as they grew closer, I saw the rider was young, around fifteen. ‘My son,’ said the man, bowing. They were thin, wet and freezing; poorly clothed apart from their thick ponchos. ‘We cross the river here, because of the island. I don’t suppose…’

  ‘Of course.’ I brought out two bananas and some rolls of bread.

  ‘¡Caballero!’ he said, touching the rim of his hat. The hand I shook was rough with the dirt of a day in the field.

  I said, ‘¡Suerte!’ – good luck. They picked their way across the river and climbed into the cloud on the other side, never once looking back.

  It rained hard, I slept little. On my enforced sorties I tracked the stream rising and washed my numb hands in the freezing water and realised the only higher piece of flat land I could possibly move to was the place I had been using as a toilet. As I struggled to get to sleep I repeatedly dreamed my feet were wet until I woke up and found out they were. I rushed outside the tent, but the stream was still a safe distance away. I found the sodden guy ropes had slackened, and water had ponded on the roof and dripped through. As I mopped up, my only toilet roll jumped out of the pocket in the side of the tent, and into the only puddle. I lay down again and set the alarm for two hours ahead, to check on the stream. The ground shimmied beneath me: another Andean lullaby.

  The Colour of Sorcery

  In the morning, the tent fabric was saturated, making my pack even heavier. The cooker wouldn’t light and I delivered a lecture on the quality of American manufactured goods to the morning drizzle. Huddled shapes began to come and go on the hill above, taking animals to pasture. The path was simple to find but little fun to walk. For three-quarters of a mile the path disappeared into a bog-meadow grazed by highly strung horses and cows whose stares ponded their eyes into hypnotic pools. Tiny thatched beehives dotted the hillsides. In hut doorways, tea boiled over small fires, women rubbed their eyes and small children ran back and forth, freezing like statues when they saw the stranger toiling up the valley. I walked on into the empty spaces.

  I picked up the trail on the other side of the boggy ground. It was a trench, only fourteen inches wide and eighteen inches deep, and I seemed to be clumsy, tripping over my own feet, or scuffing the sides. This was tiredness, so I stopped to rest and eat, although it was still only late morning. I opened a tin of tuna, without draining off the olive oil, as I usually did. I eked out a few additional calories by dunking the bread in it. It tasted wonderful. I drank the remaining oil from the tin. Ordinarily it would have nauseated me, but my body was starved of fats; it was nectar. The tuna was followed by an orange, and as I peeled it, I noticed the flowers in the grass. Yellow stars like lesser celandine studded the ground, hugging the soil ever more closely at higher altitudes, until, up here, they were stalk-less. One plant grew in cushions of tightly packed small leaves. They looked inviting to sit on, but were sharp, and as hard as plastic.

  As I stood up to go, a man in sheepskin chaps rode by, driving two donkeys ahead. We tipped hats. As I watched them trot briskly ahead I realised the trail was not made by feet but horses and donkeys. Locals did not walk this, they only rode it, and animals keep to a precise line, and wear a trench, not a path. That’s why there wasn’t quite enough room for my big boots; only a foolish Gringo would walk over the mountain.

  Pretty and active soft-grey birds, like small thrushes, bustled ahead of me, feeding in the long grass. The path rose until I could see a tarn on the far side of the valley, below the peaks called Tres Cruces, Three Crosses. It was grey-green, cold as charity. The GPS plotted my ascent. At 12,500 feet I slowed to cope with the diminishing oxygen. At 13,000 feet the Inca highway curved left and led me across the corrie wall above the back of the tarn. However, like much of my journey, it was an Inca route, but not an Inca road. No remains were visible; the stones had been buried, quarried for building or washed away.

  Cold rain came, and still there was no sign of the top. The path seemed to be taking me straight at cliffs, but then it wound across the foot of them and began to rise again. I passed 13,800 feet, which the map assured me was the top of the pass. The mountain begged to differ. The grey birds deserted me, and the rain turned to sleet. The backs of my hands were a rather fetching pale purple. I had lost my gloves down a crevasse on Cotopaxi, and not thought I would need more.

  At over 14,000 feet, the road finally levelled at a dismal corner, like an abandoned quarry. Lapwings settled on a tiny lake in black and white semaphore. A burly rider appeared coming the other way and saluted me. He was just a poncho, a hat, a scarf and a pair of dark lively eyes. When I told him where I was going, he said, ‘It’s mostly level from here.’ The path was level for a while, then, to my dismay, began to climb the flank of the hill to my left. Much of the next section was bare rock, frequently steep. I had been skipping rests, partly because I got cold as soon as I stopped. But from here on, I had no choice; every half-hour I ground to a halt, and sank to the ground. Each time, getting up became harder. I sat looking at the beautiful flowers making a living in the crevices and hollows of the rocks; growing wherever they could find a nook out of the wind, and a pocket of rubble and a hint of soil. They belonged here; I didn’t. I came up on a rising ridge and finally, at 14,600 feet, the path went round a sandy bare knoll, and began to fall. To the left, fifteen miles off, was a ring of dark mountains flecked with snow. Beneath them lay a grassy valley where a rainbow arced down to a round tarn. A squall detached itself from their flanks and raced my way. Ahead, the treeless valley was exactly as I had pictured the land of Mordor in Lord of the Rings. A sinuous lake was surrounded by dull and lifeless shades of green. Comfortingly, the Inca road was clearly visible, running absolutely level just above the shore. Tomorrow would begin pleasantly.

  The squall hit me like a fist, ripping the elasticated rainproof cover off my pack. It lashed around on the end of a karabiner clip while I tried to pull it back on. Then I thought, What are you doing?, and wrapped it round my own head and shoulders. In a sudden cocoon of warmth and windlessness, I started down the mountain, and into Mordor. 1,600 feet lower, the clouds were breaking and the wind dropping. I had a lush green valley floor in my sights when two mad dogs tore down the hill and circled me, snarling and snapping. It was ten minutes before their owners appeared; a handsome elderly couple, striding through the grass. The man wore his long hair plaited and in the shadow beneath the brim of his black hat his eyes had a dreamy look. They both called softly to the dogs, which totally ignored them. I greeted the couple; I had noticed that when dogs saw their owners talking to you, they calmed down. These didn’t. I moved my stick to defend my legs. The man looked round the hills. The sun was slipping shafts of light onto their flanks, making pools of golden green light. ‘Five o’clock,’ he said, then took a pocket watch from his woollen waistcoat: ‘Two minutes to.’ The only noise audible above the whisper of the grasses was the pandemonium of his dogs attacking the person he was chatting to.

  ‘Could you,’ I asked, as if it were not too important, ‘quieten the dogs?’

  ‘Ah!’ he said, his voice a sleeping balm. ‘You must realise they are animals, they do not understand!’

  I moved on before the dogs could fashion a clear chance to begin supper. To avoid the incessant zigzags of the path, I cut straight downhill and enjoyed the soft pillows of the grass under my feet. As I approached the valley floor, I began selecting where, in all the comfortable meadows, crossed by shining streams, I could enjoy the evening. Suddenly the ground beneath my feet sagged like a mattress, and rippled in front of me. I had blundered onto a floating bog. Kind of the man to warn me. Perhaps the dreams in his old eyes were of strangers drowning her
e, fertilising his pasture. I backed off sharply. The whole of the valley floor was a marsh. In one stride the land changed from a hillside too steep to camp on, to a valley floor too wet to camp on. After several attempts, I crossed the deep streams safely and reached the level road I had seen from above. There were banks of the hard plant that formed spiky cushions growing a few inches proud of the bog. They were dry. I found one just big enough for the tent, which had a smaller one nearby that I could hop over to for cooking. The light was falling. I pitched the tent, which was still wet, and cleaned the cooker. I suspected dirty fuel was causing the problems. It stayed lit long enough to make lemon and ginger tea. I savoured the hot, sharp taste. Cooking could wait until morning. I ate bread and bananas, and chewed some more of the leaden cheese from Achupallas. I sat in the tent entrance, looking across the dark valley at magnificent hills. Directly opposite me, a slender waterfall fell a thousand feet into a landscape strangely devoid of detail. It was so remote the animals didn’t need to be corralled at night. As dark fell, the near-total silence was lifted by frogs lobbing calls at each other, like water-bombs.

  It was a cold night and the air was damp, so I slept fully clothed using my spare socks as gloves. After a short nap, I woke sharply at ten o’clock. The tent was bathed in light so bright I could read by it. I went outside and found a full moon, bounding into the sky. The tent shone like metal in the dew. I shivered at the beauty of it all.

  In the morning, I caught up on calories: pasta and soup. Halfway through, I read the packet and reflected that a man hosting a twenty-a-day toilet habit could have better things for breakfast than cauliflower and broccoli soup. I was just about to go inside the tent to change clothes, when I laughed at myself. In this empty land, whose modesty was I protecting? When I was stark naked a group of horsemen came round the corner, gave me a cheery ‘¡Buenos Días!’ and rode on.