The exiled Inca’s final redoubt of Vilcabamba bears a name that combines the words huilca and pampa. This was what Hiram Bingham, a historian, not an archaeologist, was actually looking for. Pampa means plain and huilca is a very interesting sub-tropical tree. Its seeds were used as an enema, or powdered and sniffed as a hallucinogen, in which form it was known as cohoba. Priests used it to see spirit worlds, doctors to diagnose bewitchment. A second clue to the importance of this plant is now hidden by a change of name. The Urubamba River is a Quechua name, but it is not the original Inca name for the river, which was Vilca-mayu: the Huilca River. Thirdly, the climate of Cuzco is too cold and dry for this tree, but the nearest sub-tropical habitat to the capital where it can grow is on the slopes below Machu Picchu. The location of the area, the naming of the rivers and citadels, all point at a ceremonial use centring on contact with the gods through drug-induced trances. Machu Picchu and adjacent late Inca sites may well have been spiritual investments by desperate rulers seeking a way to regain control of their world. It was magnificent, but maybe not of any military importance to the last of the Incas, except as a place that was out of the way, and not yet fitted out with the precious metals that interested the Spanish. Here, ritual could continue without interference.
Like Stonehenge or Easter Island, enough remains to fascinate, but so much has gone that the truth may never be known. The field is open for the annual publication of a book or Discovery Channel programme subtitled The Final Answer to the Riddle of Machu Picchu. The end of the occupation is as enigmatic as everything else. There is no damage from warfare, siege or demolition. The site was evacuated in such an orderly way that no house yielded any goods at all. There were rich pottery finds below the Temple of the Three Windows, by which I stood, and where I found the rock which seems to mimic in miniature the skyline of the mountains behind it, across the river gorge. But the pots had been ritually smashed. No gold was found, not even in the burial of the High Priestess. For a long time, skeleton after skeleton was exhumed and determined to be female: 150 out of 173. Archaeologists deduced a convent society attended by a minimum staff of male attendants: more fantastic visions of a distant life glimpsed darkly through a veil. But when the bones were revisited with the help of modern pathology, the skeletons were found to be a normal mix of men and women. Only two objects dating after the conquest have been unearthed, both minor items. It is likely that Machu Picchu was spared a Spanish rape.
My walks led to one last place, a lawn just below the high point on which the Intihuatana casts its shadow. On the lawn was a single tree, the tree my teenage self had put a finger to, on the page of a magazine. I picked up a dried leaf from the tree. Its neat oval is before me now.
In the hotel, I re-read the final chapters of Don Quixote, all except the last. Because I know what happens to him then. He comes home defeated in combat, sworn to stay at home in penance. He falls ill, and in the final chapter, renounces his knight-errantry. Sancho Panza realizes, like Gabriel García Márquez’s fictional general, that while illusion won’t feed us, it will nourish us. He begs the bed-ridden Quixote to resume the romances which, for nine hundred pages, he has been trying to dissuade him from. This recanting looks like cowardice from the character and the author, but Cervantes had to cover his back. He was a humanist, and his religion far from orthodox. The novel takes great risks portraying events as quite different when seen through different characters’ eyes, or by the same person at different times. In the second part, published much later, our heroes meet people who have read the first book and know who they are: they become celebrities within their own book. None of these subjective and relativist views appealed to a church that insisted on one correct view of the world: theirs. So I stopped reading while he still holds on to that rich pluralism, while he still dreams of living through books and ideas.
It was Sunday 25 August. I had a ticket to the coast on the overnight bus. I still had to see some of the strangest, and largest, archaeological remains on the planet: the Nazca lines.
I was leaving the Sierra for the last time. It had been my home for five months. Dr Johnson said, ‘Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea.’ I think I had always thought meanly of myself for not having made a journey of real endeavour. I am sure many people go happily to their graves without making one. I am glad for them. I could not have. Slowly, in my life, I have learned that I was born to be a wanderer. It has simply taken time to lose the fear, and do it. Let Don Quixote speak for me one last time: ‘For the maddest thing a man can do in this life is to let himself die, just like that, without anybody killing him, but just finished off by his own melancholy.’ I had walked 700 miles, about two million footsteps, and completed another 1,300 miles of travel. I had been an alien to the people I met, sometimes leaving a trail of incomprehension behind me. I had picked up a little understanding, seen some of this secret country, the undeclared Andean nation, this archipelago above the clouds.
The coach pulls away over the rim of Cuzco’s bowl. We drive at the setting sun, the sky all copper and lead, snow-capped peaks far right. The earth is a red and green patchwork: familiar today, but soon becoming to me part of an alien past I can hardly believe I lived. But for now, people and animals are coming home, centred, simple, self-sustaining, ancient, unforgettable. We crest the hill; five months fall into the dirt blown up behind us.
Nazca
I shuddered awake in blackness; the bus was juddering horribly. The whole frame strained to hold together, rivets vibrating like furious cymbals; as if the bus were trying to shed a painful skin. The drumming came up through my pelvis, up my spine and into my skull. I snatched the curtain aside, and looked with disbelief at the small circle I could see at the edge of the headlights. The bus was throwing out a wake; we were travelling through water. I could now just pick out land to our right, fifty or sixty yards away. We were driving down a broad river. In a quarter of a mile, the driver slowed and went down through the gears. There was a lurch, and we tipped backwards. Boulders spun under the rear wheels; at last, they gripped, and we groaned up onto the bank.
At six twenty, in growing light, we crossed Dead Bull Bridge, and began descending a bare, uninhabited landscape, watched by cautious llamas bunched on the ridge. The first three houses we saw were little more than hovels, their tin roofs held down by stones. Three well-dressed passengers got out and let themselves into one. The hills were still bare and expectant, as if something was coming to colonise them but was inexplicably late. Lower down, cactuses appeared, including some very dark ones that lay prostrate on the floor, like expiring tarantulas.
Parched cotton plants struggled on the irrigated valley floor. A pink church beyond the fields marked the centre of Nazca, framed by acacias, eucalyptuses and palms. I shared a taxi into the centre with a red-haired young man from County Cork. ‘Hotel Algeria,’ he said to the driver, and, seeing his confusion, added ‘Jesus!’ and stabbed a freckled finger at the street map in his guide. The driver nodded. Red-head sighed ‘These people!’ In a few minutes he was dropped at the Hostal Alegría: the Happy Hostel.
Nazca was a prosperous coastal civilisation, famous for its textiles and multi-coloured pottery. The modern town of 30,000 people is drab, except for the pink church and the clouds of gaudy bougainvillaea, but for mysteries, Nazca is up there with Stonehenge, Easter Island and Machu Picchu. The hieroglyphs can only really be seen properly from the air. I took a flight in a Cessna 172, my stomach sinking whenever we dropped off the edges of strong thermals. We saw the whale, the hummingbird, spider, monkey and, yes, the figure that looks like an astronaut. Although some of the animals, the monkey in particular, do not live anywhere near Nazca, they all represent animals of symbolic importance to shamans. The spider represents weaving and the ability to ensnare enemies, and whales fight powerful spirits under the oceans. There are also Nazca pots showing faces whose nostrils are streaming, like those of the hallucinating shamans of Chavín. The shama
ns used these creatures to work for them in the spirit world. It is likely they also made a psychoactive brew from the San Pedro cactus. The famous lines are made by turning over oxidised stones to reveal a dull purple surface. They survive for two reasons. The first is that it never rained here, until the nearby Marcona mine blasted so much dust into the air it formed clouds and rain discoloured the surface and obscured the lines. The second is a woman called Maria Reiche.
Needing a taxi to visit the museum that was her house, I searched out Juan Pineda, who had known her for many years. We hurtled over the near-white desert beneath bare, rocky mountains, along a modern highway. ‘They drove the Panamerican right through the middle of the lines,’ he waved his long thin hand either side of the car. ‘Imagine what else would have happened without Maria.’
She was born in Dresden on 15 May 1903, and studied mathematics at Hamburg University, before applying for a job as governess to the German Consul in Cuzco, who was also the director of the Cuzco brewery. In time, she moved to Lima, translating German technical journals at the museum, and supervising the conservation of newly discovered textiles at Paracas, between Nazca and Lima, working with the same Julio Tello who had excavated Chavín. The Nazca lines, discovered by commercial pilots in 1926, were starting to attract serious archaeological attention, but it wasn’t until 1941 that she took the bus to Nazca, and dedicated her life to the lines. To care for them, she lived in penury at the edge of the Panamerican Highway, surveying and striving to understand them, often fighting the Peruvian establishment to prevent their destruction.
Juan stopped outside whitewashed walls splashed with bougainvillaea. The bare rooms where she lived and worked were furnished as spartanly as if someone was living rough for a weekend: a Primus stove, one pot, a kettle, a sagging bed, a plain wooden desk, a wooden chair and sheets of dusty drawings of her beloved lines. ‘She was never confident speaking Spanish,’ said Juan, ‘and always spoke clearly and slowly to make sure she was understood, and almost always about the lines and their preservation. When she was forty-five, she learned to use stilts so she could see the lines better. When she was fifty-two, she persuaded the Peruvian Air Force to tie her to the strut outside a helicopter so she could photograph them.’
The geometrical lines all seem to point at a mountain from which the rains for that area will come. The most likely explanation of the animal sculptures is that they were ritually walked to invoke that spirit. Every design can be walked without re-tracing your steps. Even the finest features, like the spider’s legs, are drawn with two lines, quite unnecessary if you only want to depict it, essential if you need to walk it. She was a fanatic. Always frugal in her diet, when the big estates began to spray their irrigated land with chemicals she stopped eating fruit, and lived solely on cereals, becoming as spare and parched as the desert. Maria was a fanatic, but only a fanatic could have preserved the site.
Juan spoke with the tenderness of affectionate memory. ‘In old age, she contracted Parkinson’s, and would lie in a friend’s swimming pool, swimming with infinite slowness to exercise her muscles. Always she said, “When I die don’t take me back to Germany, bury me here in Nazca, to look after my lines.”’ She died in 1998, aged ninety-five, and lies beneath a memorial stone in a small neat lawn, not looking east, to the resurrection, but to her lines.
My final stop was Pisco, a fishing town, and home of the grape brandy used in pisco sours. When the bus arrived, I knew there had been a mistake. It was new, with reclining seats, radio, video and earphones. I was back in the modern world. Outside, gleaners in the fields were bent over like fishhooks: their white scarves the maggot bait. We ran into the modern resort of Paracas past gated luxury hotels with top-hatted commissionaires. Up the hill to our right was the old town, where Tello found the fabulous textiles worked on by Maria Reiche. We ran a few miles further south into Pisco itself, sandwiched between the desert and the fishmeal and canning factories. The name Pisco means bird in the pre-Inca language of the Auki. I was here to see the Islas Ballestas, which support one of the greatest sea-bird populations in the world. It would close another circle, one begun with my first book, tracing the route of the square riggers my great-grandfather sailed back from Peru and Chile, laden with nitrate-rich guano. Along the shore, the old wooden fishing fleet was on the beach: small family boats. Out in the mist hanging over the Humboldt Current were steel trawlers, sieving the seas barren.
I was nearly out of cash, so I booked into a good hotel that took credit cards. When I found out they had hot water I showered every two hours, and swam slowly in their pool, admiring my clean, white fingernails. Early next morning, I waited on the beach, cadging scraps from the fishermen to feed the Peruvian pelicans. A small launch took me out through sluggish, torpid water, towards the blocky, stone islets outside the bay. The boatman, Martín, told me, ‘Officially the rainfall here is 1.86 mm a year but I was twenty-two before I saw rain, and only then because I was visiting family in Cuzco.’
Sea lions appeared around us, bloodied silver fish in their sharp yellow teeth. For some time I could not see the birds which colonise the islands and whose droppings made millionaires of the shippers in the days up to the First World War, before nitrates could be synthesised. Suddenly my eyes clued in. There were dark strings lying far off on the water. More were faintly discernible in the sky. From all directions, lines of thousands upon thousands of neo-tropical, red-legged and guanay cormorants were flying to and from their nests, filling their gullets from one of the richest fisheries on the planet. Soon, two overlapping V’s of birds passed low over us, necks eagerly outstretched. Ripples passed along each string until they looked like black ribbons blowing in the wind. As the birds approached the island, they broke formation to find their own nests, collapsing in a tumble of outstretched feathers. In among the flying cormorants, I could pick out larger, paler birds, the head, neck and breast white, the wings patterned finely in creams and browns. Peruvian boobies belong to the same family as gannets, and are shaped exactly like them. A group peeled away, and, one by one, folded back their long, elegant wings, and arrowed into the water.
We slipped in among the islands, below the crude wooden loading platforms where sacks of the penetrating fine dust were lowered slowly into holds. The Incas had known of the richness of the guano; it was punishable by death to kill the birds or to land during the nesting season and disturb the birds. Above my head flitted a very special tern, the slatey-grey Inca tern, with brilliant crimson beak and legs and curls of feathers trailing like long moustaches from below the eye.
Tonight, a pisco sour. Tomorrow, home. Elaine. I wondered how we would feel after another two months’ separation. She sometimes hides from me when I get home, once working late at a job she loathed. I try to understand why she finds reunions as hard as farewells. I think about phoning, but my money and credit are nearly spent, and tomorrow we will be speaking face to face.
Sunset
In the late afternoon I followed San Martín Avenue down the gentle hill to the shore road. I drank my pisco sour overlooking the narrow beach. The city of Pisco is physically turning its back to the sea whose riches made it possible to live here, in this Arabian Nights land, where it never rains on the shore of the world’s biggest ocean. The coastal Indians defied the Incas when they came here.
We want neither your god nor your king. The sea is a much bigger thing than the sun, as anyone can see; and it benefits us greatly, whereas the sun only prostrates us with its burning rays; it is natural for you, who live in the mountains, to adore it, because it gives you warmth. But it is also quite as natural that we should prefer the sea, which is our mother. Tell your general to return home, otherwise we shall show him how we defend our freedom, our lord and our faith.
It was an astonishing insight to realise that religion expression is cultural, growing out of a people’s circumstances, and is not an absolute truth. Europe would take another four hundred years to think like this. But insight into your enemy’s culture isn�
��t always the conclusive factor. Four months later, Inca Capac Yupanqui tired of a largely tactical and diplomatic campaign, and said if they didn’t surrender he would behead the whole nation and repopulate the land with new peoples. They surrendered.
The shore road has a few ill-starred buildings here and there along its ragged tarmac, like worn patches on an old bicycle tire. Where San Martín meets it, there is a small square on the seaward side, and a statue of Christopher Columbus, who never saw this Pacific Ocean. Just as well: it ruined his whole cosmology. He insisted that he had reached China, so the Americas, this New World, this other Eden, were just wished away. But he now stands for eternity on a pedestal overlooking it. It is the first thing he sees every sunrise, as an endless flow of dawns steals over the Andes, throwing their sun into the metallic air. It is the last thing he sees, when the sun collapses into it each night. Behind him, over his half-averted shoulder, is a circular porphyry fountain, it triggers memory, Tennyson’s line: a fin winked in the porphyry font. The lowest ring is a smooth seat; I sit and listen to the Carlos Santana guitar solo blasting out from the open doors of the empty bar to my left. On either side of me, grizzled men tap their feet. A mottled dog gives me a thorough sniffing; I am wearing the clothes I wore to the islands, and they smell of the fish bits and prawns I threw to the pelicans, an olfactory seascape. On my right is the Gran Hotel, the first hotel in the town. Now it looks as if scavengers are cannibalising it from the roof down. Even sixty years ago visitors were greeted by a monkey’s grinning gums, paint-box macaws, their soft, grey tongues shrieking like dry axles. But for years, only the ground floor has been painted and maintained, and now the windows are barred or shuttered, and life has drained down through it and evaporated. A small tower on the roof, built to capture delicate zephyrs on slow afternoons, has been reduced to a skeletal frame drawing black geometries on the sky. On the first floor, there are shallow balconies fenced with turned spindles and hardwood rails, but the windows have gone and grey pigeon dung lies like cold lava on the rafters. The carved and fretted eaves are fractured; the quality of the remaining fragments an embarrassed reminder of how far the property has fallen: a tramp with a lace handkerchief.
Cloud Road Page 33
