Cloud Road

by John Harrison

  The police drove him to the pyramid where dozens of men, women and children were swarming over it with kitchen colanders and fly-screens, sieving for treasure. It took hours to persuade them to leave. This gift from their ancestors belonged to them, they argued, not to smart men in suits from the city. It required four policemen with machine guns on twenty-four-hour guard to keep them away. Dr Alva and his colleagues excavated the burial, but found little left intact. It was gutting to have missed so much by so little. In June, more objects began appearing in the Lima antique markets; the robbers had successfully hidden loot, and their families had started to sell it. Much was recouped.

  The bus which bounced us down the baked earth road was basic even by Peruvian standards. Elaine winced: ‘I see you’re going to toughen me up quickly.’ Over the millennia, the level valley floor had been farmed billiard-table flat. As far as we could see, there was only one crop: sugar cane, bursting fifteen feet high. At the edges of the plantations, horses stood in meagre shade, bicycles were strewn in the grass and men, who had begun work in the dawn’s chill greyness, lay resting on the banks of irrigation ditches, pricking the blades of their machetes against the cushions of their thumb to test the edge. It is hard, uncomfortable work. They take the scratches, bites and infections for granted, and keep a sharp eye out for snakes. The bus filled with shy uniformed schoolchildren and their mothers. In one village a traction engine was becalmed in the sandy square, another had a tiny locomotive that once steamed into the desert where they mined the nitrates left in the parched beds of ancient lakes.

  The bus stopped between two green cliffs of sugar cane, and the driver shouted, ‘The ruins!’ We entered the site between the two mounds of bare dry dirt, which rose like the stumps of giant termite hills from the green valley floor. They looked like natural hills, but they were the remains of a huge temple complex of adobe pyramids.

  We climbed what would once have been massive formal ramps rising from a large plaza to a raised ceremonial platform. Now and then, we passed a fissure running deep into the ground, where squadrons of huge wasps droned in and out. Like fighter planes and military helicopters, they had that look of efficient evil. My skin flushed with sweat whenever one came near. The sun was cuttingly hot, but even the Incas had moments when they doubted its true power as a being. Tupac Inca Yupanqui once said, ‘If the sun were a living thing, it would tire as we do, and if it were free it would go to visit other parts of the sky that it has never touched. It is like a tied-up animal that walks round and round its stake.’

  The Moche people are little known outside Peru, but, before the modern era, the largest structure in all the Americas was not Inca or Aztec, but Moche. The richest burial excavated in the Americas was not that of an Inca prince, but a man from this village of Sipán. It was Peru’s Tutankhamun. The Moche flourished from the time of Christ up to AD 800. They rose to power and prosperity along 350 miles of coast in northern Peru, inhabiting one of the harshest environments on earth. Their western boundary was the Pacific surf, their eastern, just thirty miles away, was the zone where the great Andean rivers emerged from their arid canyons into the coastal valleys. They traded far and wide. Amazonian toucans and snakes are accurately depicted in their art. They are famous for their pottery, especially their erotic figures. Lima’s Rafael Larco Herrera Museum has rooms of ceramic couplings, little copper-coloured men and women fornicating, fellating and buggering, or enjoying cunnilingus, sixty-nine, troilism and all manner of gay sex. I found them utterly charming, because they all look so happy; sometimes looking up at you smiling, as if it is a peep show, and they want to check that you are having a good time too.

  But if I could choose a piece to take home it would be something more moving, one of the ceramic models, nearly life-sized, of the human head. They are realistic portraits of individuals, almost always men. The clay is close to the colour of Peruvians’ coppery skin, and, in different portraits, there are expressions of jollity, haughtiness, power and even uncertainty. Some look with anxiety into the future, lines tense at the corner of their mouths, eyes contracted. You feel you are gazing into the eyes of someone who was once warm flesh and blood, like you. I had the same sensation when I looked at China’s terracotta army at Xian, the dense ranks of individually modelled soldiers. This wasn’t art, it was humanity frozen in the moment. The past was saying, ‘Yes! We were like you.’

  But Moche art is sometimes more perplexing. In 1974, archaeologists saw a pattern in certain figures who appeared repeatedly in drawings and paintings. They deciphered a narrative. A battle was fought, then prisoners were taken and brought back to temples where three priests and one priestess appear on a platform. One priest appears part bird, part man. Another is dressed as both a warrior and a priest, and always seems to be in charge: lord of men and chief of priests. The prisoners are presented to them; their throats are cut, and the bodies dismembered. The narrative was consistent. The birdman priest suggested that these were mythological scenes. An apparently minor detail was investigated, and it led them down a macabre path towards the truth.

  In the background of these drawings, sometimes forming a border round the edge, were tear-shaped objects. To European eyes they seemed merely decorative, but locals looked at them and identified them as a particular type of papaya, called ulluchu. ‘Do they have any special properties?’ asked the archaeologists.

  ‘Yes, they stop blood clotting.’

  Dr Walter Alva continued work on the rest of the site. Soon, they found more chambers in the same pyramid, and then, a large wooden box bound with metal clasps. Only the most powerful individuals could afford metals. Alva wrote, ‘If it was indeed a coffin, it could contain the richest Moche burial ever excavated. What we never imagined at that time was that it would contain the richest burial ever excavated anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, and would be one of the most significant archaeological discoveries of our generation.’

  One grave contained a group of five people. One was a male, around forty years old, and about five feet five inches high, tall for a Moche. The remains of cloth, ornamental flamingo feathers and other tributes were untouched around him, with silver and gold knives and ingots. Jewels decorated every object. There was something familiar about these regalia. A unique gold sceptre with a box-like top sealed it. Such regalia belonged to just one person: the all-powerful warrior priest who presided over the human sacrifices that followed battle. They had discovered the tomb of the Lord of Sipán. The banners by his side were covered in gilded copper plates with a border of embossed papaya fruits. Underneath each one was sewn a real fruit, dried and shrivelled, but still recognisable. They were all ulluchus, bearing the anticoagulant drugs that made the blood flow freely for the gods.

  The prime purpose of their wars was to obtain men for sacrifice. On these elevated places, where we now stood, captive warriors were stripped, their hands tied behind their backs and their clothes and weapons bundled onto the victor’s club. The prisoner walked before his captor, with a rope round his neck. As the warrior-priest began to kill, drums and whistles built up an atmosphere which blended religious awe, the euphoria after a successful battle and the terror of the captives waiting to die in the service of another man’s religion. They were presented to the warrior priest, the Lord of Sipán, and their throats were cut. The priest and his attendants drained the blood into vessels, mixed it with the juice of the magic ulluchu papayas, and drank great draughts. The bodies were then dismembered, and the heads, hands and feet removed, and tied as separate trophies. There was even a special god of decapitation; depicted as a spider, because spiders also capture their prey, bind them and drink their fluids. A special axe-like blade was used for sacrifices. It was shaped like a crescent moon, with a central handle on the inner curve. In the grave of the Lord of Sipán, there was one of silver and one of gold. All his regalia were designed to blind with splendour. The cloth of his coat was covered with gilded copper plates that shimmered in the sun. Above his head blazed a gold mirror plate
, encircled with the dancing pink plumes of the Andean flamingo. From his ears hung discs of turquoise and gold, four inches across, and on each was a miniature gold warrior fashioned in exquisite detail. The restoration work is breathtaking. These, and other ornaments in the nearby Lambayeque Museum, gleam as if they were made yesterday. But the original craftsmanship defies belief. Round the neck of the two-inch high warrior on the earring is a minute necklace of golden owl heads. If such necklaces were simply strung on a single thread, the heads would rotate to different positions, so each minute bead was double strung, with one thread through the top and another through the bottom.

  The longer you looked at the large hill, the more you could see the subtle evidence that it was indeed a building. Occasional collapses gave glimpses of intact brickwork, or a supporting buttress. Soon, the wasps would move in and colonise the niches of the dead. The small pyramid is much more degraded, but it contained the richest burials. The largest pit, lined with mud-bricks, was more or less a cube, sixteen feet along the sides. Archaeologists have used replicas of the skeletons and tomb-goods so that it looks as it did during excavation. We looked down on the five adults and a child who had been laid out in cane coffins around the wooden coffin of the Lord of Sipán. The two men may have been attendants sacrificed to accompany him in the afterlife. The burial has been radiocarbon dated at around AD 260, placing it around the time when the Goths were snapping and snarling at the borders of the Roman Empire. Sometime around AD 800, an extreme El Niño event wiped the Moche away. In the wall above the burials was a small niche. In it crouched a male skeleton, looking down, guarding them. For over 1,700 years, he did his job well.

  I was impatient to return to the heart of the Sierra. It was only one day’s journey to Cajamarca: the town where the greatest empire then on earth collapsed in an afternoon, when a litter toppled, and a prince fell to earth.

  A Friend and Brother

  The road passed between grey barchans: the classic crescent-shaped desert dunes that signal an almost unchanging wind direction. The onshore winds drive them forward like crabs, claws first, scuttling across the sand-whispered plains. The Cajamarca coach swelters south along the coast for forty-five miles through a southern finger of the Sechura Desert, then turns inland to climb eighty miles into the cool of the mountains.

  In 1532 Francisco Pizarro had skirted the Sechura desert on its landward side: a wise move. Further north, in modern Ecuador, they had suffered terribly. The flies and heat became so unbearable that they buried each other up to the neck in sand to try to escape from their misery. Many caught Clarion’s disease, a rare infection confined to a few west-facing valleys, which caused an infestation of deep warts causing terrible pain, disfigurement and death. Malaria and other fevers claimed up to three or four men a week. Food and freshwater could be scarce. Trying to fish, they encountered ferocious caimans. Three men caught and ate a snake; two died, and the other was greatly weakened, and lost all his hair. They counted themselves lucky to get to muddy waterholes before the pigs they had brought with them stirred them into undrinkable paste.

  Their horses were a source of great wonder; native American horses had become extinct in pre-historic times. One skirmish was going badly for the Spanish; a normally impregnable cavalryman fell from his horse. He expected they would instantly bludgeon him to death, but he got to his feet to find the Natives cowering back in horror. They had thought that man and horse were one animal, like a centaur. With indescribable disgust, they watched both halves of this broken animal get up and reunite.

  Hens were also new, and although not frightening, they were just as marvellous to the natives. When a cockerel crowed, they asked the Spanish, ‘What does he say?’ Some skirmishes with aggressive natives were vicious and hard-fought. In one, Diego de Almagro, Pizarro’s partner, received a wound near the eye and lost it through infection. Not every tribe was impressed by the visitors. They taunted them: ‘You are the scum of the sea and can have no other ancestry since the sea has spewed you up. Why do you wander the world? You must be idle vagabonds since you stay nowhere to work and sow the earth.’

  Many of the ill and exhausted men agreed. They had seen gold trinkets and stones that might or might not be emeralds, but nothing to repay them for the terrible hardships. The riches for which Almagro and Pizarro had spent all their money and mortgaged their estates remained another mirage conjured by this awful land, receding at every step. Pizarro turned inland from the coast, either here, in the valley followed by the modern road, or in the next one to the north.

  Where the modern road leaves the coast, there is a triangle of land laden with stalls, cafés and the stench of lavatories. Turkeys on their way to market were tied in plastic bags with a small hole for the head to come out and peck rhythmically at a handful of grain. We continued into a pretty valley and began to climb, and went on climbing for five hours. Sheep suffered the heat in pastures bordered by fields of chilli-pepper bushes, bearing the fruit’s scarlet commas. At first, the irrigated valley floor was cultivated from side to side, but soon, only the land inside the river’s meanders was green. The riverbed was a band of boulders a hundred and fifty yards wide but this broad bed was made by the wet season floods. Now, with the dry season well advanced, the water was contained in a channel just twenty-five yards wide, picking its way among the white stones, and shining turquoise with fine silt. We crossed the valley beneath a hydro-electric plant damming a long lake. After so much desert, the sight of the water was hypnotic. The whole bus stared.

  Pizarro climbed these interminable hills with a hundred and two foot-soldiers and sixty-two horsemen, and he followed the Inca roads. For some time, he saw no fortifications, but this network of immaculately maintained roads spoke just as eloquently of power, organisation and obedience. Local chiefs told Pizarro how Atahualpa had gone through their land like a firestorm; they whispered his name, sometimes in hatred, always in fear. They learnt of his war with his brother Huascar, over who should inherit the empire. Later, the Spanish would feebly try to justify their assault on an empire that had so far offered them only the courtesies due to the ambassadors they pretended to be. They would argue that the Incas had conquered by force, and that Atahualpa was not the eldest son and was therefore a usurper. One Viceroy of Peru even commissioned a history from one of the rare literate soldiers, Pedro Sarmiento, to prove it. He had a problem: no European monarch, including Philip of Spain, had any better credentials to their thrones. But even Sarmiento’s biased account reveals a system for choosing the next ruler which was far more competitive and effective than primogeniture. Priests and royal sons – and there might be dozens of the latter – would either agree a successor or fight for the throne. Likely rivals might be murdered before they could organise support. This cut-throat palace Darwinism had produced a series of talented and ruthless rulers devoted to two goals: stability at home and victory abroad.

  When Spanish expeditions first crept down the coast, Atahualpa’s father, the handsome, pale-skinned Wayna Capac, was king. He was the youngest of three legitimate brothers, and had murdered the other two to smooth his path to the throne. His long rule ended when an assassin swept overland from the Caribbean, bringing utter annihilation. The assassin was 0.3 millionths of a millimetre long: the smallpox virus. Europeans brought it to the Americas and the natives had no resistance. Mortality may have been as high as 70 per cent. In Quito, the democracy of smallpox caught up with kings; Wayna Capac fell ill and nominated his son Ninan Cuyoche to succeed, providing the priests found favourable auspices. If not, the throne should pass to another brother, Huascar. In the temple, a living llama lamb was held, facing east. Because llamas have dark muzzles, a dark brown lamb was used because it was seen as unblemished. Priest Cusi Tupac Yupanqui swiftly cut down the ribs of the left flank and pulled out the heart and lungs. They were not still palpitating: he frowned. He blew into the lungs, and watched the pattern made by the blood as it dispersed through the veins. The signs were bad. The lords and generals
became nervous. The priest repeated the rite for Huascar. The signs were equally poor.

  Unwilling to endorse either heir, and fearful of Inca Wayna Capac’s wrath, they returned to tell him. They need not have been afraid: he was dead. Priest Cusi Tupac Yupanqui told them to follow the old king’s first wish, and pass his mantle to Ninan Cuyoche, who was in the luxurious royal palaces in Cuenca, to the south. When they got there, he too was dead from smallpox. To prevent unrest, Wayna Capac’s corpse was carried back the length of his empire to Cuzco in a closed litter, as if he were still alive, and greeted in triumph. Huascar was given the throne. Huaman Poma, a native source, gives him a bad press, describing him as swarthy, long-faced, graceless, ugly with a character to match, brave but miserable. Soon he was clashing with Atahualpa, who was supported by their father’s best generals, and claimed governorship of the north. Like his father, Atahualpa killed two other brothers to help clear the air. Civil war was declared between north and south, Atahualpa and Huascar. Armies of tens of thousands clashed. Fortunes ebbed and flowed. Just as Atahualpa was beginning to get the upper hand, into this weakened and unstable empire limped 164 Spanish troops. Atahualpa’s spies observed them. His generals tracked them but did not deign to attack such a rabble.