In search of Inti

Inti, the Sun, burns brightly in the clear, rarified atmosphere of the Peruvian Andes. The Indios fear him and cover their heads and bodies against his attack. I and my companions, too, approached his kingdom with our heads covered as we climbed the stairway of the Cordilleras.
The journey began early one morning at Arequipa. The railway station teamed with people, thousands of them, far too many to cram into the train. But we found our places in the dilapidated carriage and began the swaying, jerking ascent of the Cordillera Ocidental. For hours the train sidled through the deserts around the volcano El Misti. Each curve seemed to show the way ahead for the next half hour. We travelled peasant class, among sacks of potatoes, women with passive, berry-eyed infants strapped to their backs in brightly striped blankets, and conductors in peaked caps and denim boiler suits. At a dusty mining camp high in the mountains the train paused alongside tables at which thirty women in bowler hats were cooking tagliatelle.
We crept across the Altiplano, and at each settlement where the train paused, women in blankets, crinolines and bowler hats squatted in the shade of peppermint-green walls, observing us intently. The train stalked three quarters of the way around a lake, following every crenellation in the hills, along a shelf just wide enough for the rails. The line squirmed every possible way that would avoid the need for a tunnel but still gain height. At intervals the locomotive came into view as the train bent back onto itself to negotiate curves. Its front end was painted orange and yellow, but the rear half was quite black. The explanation for this was graphically displayed at the first sign of a gradient, when a burst of acceleration sent flames shooting from the roof, accompanied by a dense pall of black diesel smoke.
Outside, the cactuses were tall and spiky amid the baked red earth of the ravines and gullies. Dust and fumes clogged our eyes and throats, while altitude sickness made our heads spin. Opposite us in the compartment a young Peruvian woman from a town on the coast north of Lima vomited abruptly into a polythene bag.
At Juliaca the railway line formed a street along which the open market crowded. In the town there were few shops, but almost anything could be bought off tarpaulins spread out on the ground. Indian ladies squatted next to their wares, eating pig's trotter broth amid the dust of the ground. Behind them stood a wall on which was written in gigantic letters "Forbidden to Urinate." The centre of town was a rugged highway crowded with tricycles, trucks with high wooden sides and buses with smashed windows and flowery writing on their sides. The trucks and buses were crammed with standing passengers. The outskirts of town were broad avenues of dark earth and rising dust, lined with half-finished buildings whose upper floors sprouted reinforcing steel. These boulevards were almost too potholed and rutted for traffic to move along them, which it did with much weaving about. Juliaca has the appearance of an Old West frontier town, but it has grown on the proceeds of turning coca into cocaine, and there were corners of Lake Titicaca nearby where not even the police and army could contemplate going. A pink Cadillac with black-tinted windows motored up and down the main street to show people who ruled the roost.
At Puno we staggered into the Hostal Italia, a place that had no connection with Italy. It was our first experience of coping with altitudes greater than 3800 metres, and the few steps up from the street to the lobby felt as if they would cripple us. We had spent the last hour of the train journey in darkness, rounding the shores of Lake Titicaca, and our only light had been a faint glimmer reflected on the smooth surface of the water. We were cold as well as exhausted.
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Next morning we paid a small man to arrange us a visit to the "floating islands" of the lake. One and a half hours later an ancient and dilapidated taxi collected us and took us to the port. We crawled across green seaweed and into an equally dilapidated motor boat, whose timbers were half-sundered. A man with holes in his shoes started the motor and we pottered feebly out into the lake, past a monstrous new hotel that sat in a state of apparent abandonment astride a knoll of rock and a folk museum perched uninvitingly on another.
The Uro Indians sat listlessly on a large floating mattress of tortora reeds. There were reed huts, reed boats, blackened cooking pots and Uro handicrafts, but it seemed clear that the Uros no longer lived on the islands and instead arrived there from the lake-shore at dawn, before the first tourists came. The children begged for five-Inti notes, sweets or chewing gum. Four Dutchmen went solemnly for a ride in a reed boat, punted by a docile Uro in a knitted Kubla Khan helmet. A Frenchman went too near to the edge and stumbled up to his knees into the black peaty water, cursing. These islands do not float, they founder and decay upon a bed of still living reeds in water of shallow but uncertain depth.
We visited a second island which seemed vaguely more authentic. Small fish had been cut in half and left in the sun to dry, looking like mussels that have been prised apart. Propped up against the wall of one of the reed huts there were two flintlock muskets, one of which had a lime-green painted stock. White feathers scattered around suggested that these ancient firearms were still in use. There were also signs that something had been cooked in the black pots over a brick hearth built precariously on the reed matting. Yet the same handicrafts were for sale. A German bought a huge model reed boat, and two Japanese bought stylized figures of the Uros dressed in violently coloured costumes.
The main with worn-out shoes steered our boat to a small adobe village on the shore of the lake, nearby. At the back of a tiny mud-brick church candles were flickering on a stepped altar. Peruvian flags fluttered in the breeze: it was a fiesta day. Dancers appeared in brilliant costumes. A Japanese tourist raised his camera and the girls, in perfect formation, covered their faces with their wide-brimmed straw sombreros. Peasant women shrouded in striped blankets sat passively on the nearby railway line. A small boy wandered around selling candy-coloured ice-creams inserted into a sort of peg board. They looked too perfect to be hygienic. On a square of dirt in front of the church a troupe of dancers assembled. A brass band in sober costumes struck up a Latin melody with ragged syncopation. The dancers moved economically in simple steps that raised spurts of dust. The melody became repetitive and pulsating. Across the square of ground a second brass band began to play a different melody, and a second dance troupe began its simple, dusty steps. A third band leaned upon its dented instruments and watched impassively, without favouring either party.
We returned to Puno in the motor-launch. It was two days before Peruvian Independence Day and according to the law all homes had to be repainted for the celebrations. Householders were out in the sun, daubing their walls with pink, green or yellow wash. It was a clay-based paint, and the first rains would make the streets run with colour and the walls bleach again.
We drove our Jeep to Juliaca along the only stretch of paved road in the region. At 3 a.m. I was woken from my sleep in the Hostal de Turistas by a loud explosion. Next morning I found the street outside covered with shrapnel and splinters of glass, and no façade to the Banco de Credito Popolár. Dynamite is one of the principal domestic products of Perú, and perhaps because of this at the Banco de la Nación they would not change more than $100. There was very little cash around, it being too risky to keep much on the premises. On the steps outside the soldiers with machine guns appeared nervous, but the scribes typing letters for the illiterate seemed utterly untroubled.
We drove as fast as possible to Cuyocuyo, a village in the province of Sandia, 225 km from Juliaca. At Huancane the Guardia post had been abandoned since the Senderistas had attacked it with machine guns eight months previously, killing two soldiers. The road was a dirt track and very uneven. Thirteen years of driving on such roads had almost worn out the door latches of our vehicle, so that the doors rattled incessantly. We passed along rocky causeways between the bright blue and green shallows at the western end of Lake Titicaca. At intervals small plots of firm ground held adobe huts in the shape of beehives. Eventually we encountered a whole village of them. As we moved ahead the brown earth changed gradually to a brilliant red, sharply defined in the clear air. At Putina the main street had been dug up and looked as if it would remain so indefinitely, for we followed a well-travelled detour into the swirling waters of a nearby river.
Gradually the road surface worsened, although as we rattled along in the Jeep this scarcely seemed possible. Climbing a series of switchbacks we entered a more heroic sort of country and finally emerged, breathless on the Altiplano at 4650 metres above sea level. The broad yellowish-brown expanse of the plain was populated by herds of alpaca and llama and ringed by mountains, some of which had snow on their peaks.
Beyond the plain we descended into a gentle, glaciated valley occupied by a long finger-lake, with a surface as smooth as a mirror. At the far end a modest stone chapel, in which candles flickered, stood at the head of a zig-zag descent into a deep valley whose sides were covered with enormous masses of rock debris. Thick cloud obscured the full grandeur of the scene, and out of the mist loomed the wreckage of a truck that had gone over the edge of one of the hairpin bends. A large group of Indians in woollen helmets stood in gloomy silence around it.
The road became excessively bumpy and we lurched through a village in which the houses were interspersed with fallen rocks that dwarfed them. The air was cold and damp. At length we turned the corner into the Awiawi valley, in which the road occupied a narrow ledge above a steep drop that was shrouded in mist. Where cataracts crossed the track there were deep ruts and the jeep foundered and swerved alarmingly. Eventually we turned into the Cuyocuyo valley and descended along a crease in the steep flanks 375 metres above the valley floor, which suddenly appeared out of the mist as if it were directly beneath our left-hand wheels. We arrived in Cuyocuyo at dusk.
Our accommodation was a former hacienda that had massive slate walls plastered with mud, wooden floors, verandas with no guard-rails, and an ill-fitting corrugated steel roof. Kerosene was the only available fuel and it took half an hour to light the hurricane lamp and primus stoves. There was no source of heating. The toilet was a subterranean chamber doused with lime, and fresh water was obtained at a spring down the road and boiled for twenty minutes to ensure its purity.
The communities of the Cuyocuyo district are made up entirely of Quechua-speaking Indians. Mestizos once formed a separate class but have now migrated to Juliaca or beyond, where opportunities are greater for those capable of utilizing them. The 5500 people left in the valley have no piped water, sewerage, electricity, gas, telephones, televisions, newspapers, doctors, hospitals, cars, petrol, or public transport. However, there are two houses on the Altiplano that have battery-powered televisions, and the Cuyocuyans will sometimes make the six-hour journey up-valley to see an important televised soccer match. But for most inhabitants the only way to the outside world is via a swaying ten-hour journey in the back of one of the wooden-sided trucks that pass en route from Sandia to Juliaca.
Life expectancy in the valley is 36 years at birth and 55 years if and when the tremendous obstacle of infant mortality is surmounted. Unwanted members of the community are surreptitiously murdered: excess children are quietly strangled or suffocated at birth (all the same, the impression is one of a superabundance of infants), and recalcitrant wives may be pushed over cliffs. This was vividly brought home to me when a local man walked into our kitchen. With no trace of emotion on his deeply lined face he asked for all the nails we could find and a loan of 300 Intis in order to buy some wood. He wanted to make a coffin for his daughter-in-law, who had fallen into a ravine under circumstances that the village gossips held to be highly questionable, for she had been a most unco-operative wife.
The Cuyocuyans merely scrape by; they live a life devoid of luxuries. When dealing with each other they are contentious and suspicious. And when dealing with foreigners they adopt a 'development mentality', relying on loans and gifts of money, food, medicines, roofing steel or other commodities.
The climate of the valley is harsh. At midday the sun burns one's skin ferociously: the Cuyocuyans fear and respect it. At midnight the temperature may fall well below freezing point, and as morning breaks the condensation of one's night-time breathing unfreezes from inside the roof and drips onto the bed. In the bottom of the valley in August the sun rises at 8.15 a.m. and sets at 3.15 p.m., so steep are the sidewalls. Yet earlier in the morning and later in the afternoon the distant crests and peaks are bathed in a clear, golden light. After midday, the valley may be invaded by clouds that creep silently in from the north, guided by a breeze that wafts diagonally across the canyon and carries the mists up onto the Altiplano. From November to April come the rains. In 1983 they swept a mass of gravelly debris into Cuyocuyo village. The people had been warned in time and had evacuated their houses, many of which were swept away. Four years later rock and gravel still buried some of the shells of these buildings. At the height of the storm an old lady, accompanied by a small child, returned to search for some gold hidden under the floorboards of her house. The building collapsed and the two of them were killed.
Next year the rains saturated the debris left by the great flood. Water bubbled up out of the gravel and inundated the houses again. Showing great initiative, the mayor of Cuyocuyo went to Lima and toured the foreign embassies to ask for assistance. He received enough money to canalize a short stretch of the Rio Jilari, where most of the debris came from.
But little can be done about the ever-present hazard of rockfalls. The valley is one thousand metres deep and its sides are steep and unstable. Past landslides have involved almost a million cubic metres of rock in one single event; and the agricultural terraces arrayed up the slopes frequently collapse into a heap of debris. Rolling boulders recently smashed through a house occupied by missionary nuns, fortunately without injuring anyone.
Yet the community does possess some things of which it is proud. For instance, the villages of Ura Ayllu have installed an enormously powerful public address system which runs on batteries. At 6.30 a.m. local leaders give a summary of news, events and instructions for cultivating the terraces: "Comunidad de Uro Ayllu, Buenas Días!" says the announcer with grave solemnity and the municipal trombonist cuts in with a solo as impassioned as it is inexpert. The sound bounces off the rock walls of the valley like lead shot and cannot be ignored. Despite the shortage of flat land there are two soccer pitches and they are intensively used. There are also several brass bands. If there is any cause for celebration (perhaps a series of weddings) they will play for weeks, day and night, fuelled by their own drunkenness. Sadly, their musical skill is negligible, amounting to a syncopated fugue on half a dozen notes in C Major. Nevertheless, they have the lung-power to make music. Shepherds will frequently play the trumpet high on the valley flanks, walking over difficult terrain and never stopping to rest, such is the physical adaptation of their lungs to the rarified atmosphere at over 4000 metres above sea level.
In Cuyocuyo water boils at 90 C. Atmospheric pressure is insufficient to keep the fizz in Coca-Cola, which bubbles all over one's knees if the bottle is opened carelessly. Bread is as flat as paper and cakes do not exist. Local agriculture produces mainly wool and vegetables. A typical meal may consist of vegetable stew followed by a large plate of small, hard Andean potatoes (it is as well to remember that before the Incas began to breed it, the potato tuber was no larger than a pea). The potatoes, boiled and skinned, are garnished with raw onion and sliced tomato, and there may also be a helping of boiled, starchy roots. Little meat is available, but when it is served it may consist of a tough steak of some llama or alpaca (in other words, a cameloid) that has died of old age. The better substitute is a wild, or (slightly larger) domesticated, guinea pig. At Cuyocuyo it has its fur (but not its head, tail or claws) removed and is deep-fried in cheap, gritty cotton-seed oil that has been reused innumerable times until its smell is powerful enough to knock one out. Although cows and sheep can sometimes be seen in the area, they rarely provide a source of meat.
The pre-Columbian cultures built terraces in the Cuyocuyo valley on almost all slopes of up to 42 degrees inclination. There are still superbly impressive flights of these constructions everywhere on the valley flanks. Settlement and terracing appears to have shifted from the Altiplano downwards and later extended from the valley floor up in the direction of its shoulders. Some terraces are rock-fronted and some are of earth, but all show a very sophisticated organization and architecture. The rock terraces use soil that was painstakingly brought to them from the valley below by their builders. Terrace complexes have overhanging rims, huts, sets of steps and dividing walls. Although many have been abandoned or devastated by rockfalls, a surprising number are still in use. Individual families hold titles to specific plots, but the villagers meet to cultivate certain sectors of the slopes at certain times of the year in a form of communal crop rotation.
An old Inca roadway runs through the valley. Where it ascends steeply, well-engineered flights of steps have been cut in the slate rocks of the area. Some distance up-valley from Cuyocuyo village, at a place called Chejecheje, the old, pre-Inca terraces incorporate the remains of a large settlement that was probably the nerve-centre of agriculture in the valley in the years before the Incas absorbed it into their empire. The Spaniards arrived at Cuyocuyo long before the end of the sixteenth century, for there is gold at the head of the valley. It is now being strip-mined and the land is rapidly being devastated into deep crevices and runnels that send waves of earthy sediment into the local rivers every time it rains. It is said that the fabled gold lode of the Incas has been found here but the Peruvian Government has refused to confirm or deny it.
Although nominally Catholic, the Cuyocuyans are frankly pagan. Crosses appear at roadsides and on mountain crests everywhere. The roadside ones are often set up after fatal road accidents; and where brake failure or a steering error has sent a crowded truck plummeting over the edge, the event may be commemorated by a veritable forest of crosses. They are redecorated frequently with coloured plastic ribbons. Even more numerous are the small rock cairns in which offerings such as cans of sardines are left. Towering above Cuyocuyo is a precipitous peak called Ch'u-chu, which interferes with the prevailing wind flow by directing clouds to the other side of the valley. Hence it is credited with the power to control the weather and is the site of frequent, though miserably arduous, local pilgrimages. The top is surmounted by one white cross, but there are also more than twenty cairns which contain offerings--a ballpoint pen, a can of sardines, other trinkets.
In places the local people have dug deep holes in search of treasure. It is highly unlikely that the Incas or their predecessors ever secreted gold objects in the ground around Cuyocuyo, but the myth persists. Instead, the real way to wealth and freedom from local agricultural servitude is to buy a truck and operate a haulage and transport service between the valley and Juliaca. Few men who have succeeded in doing this ever explain how they accumulated the capital (although hard graft in the gold mines is probably the only way). Thus it is generally rumoured that they discovered buried treasure, probably aided by supernatural influences of the moon and stars, as well as those of the spirits that live in the earth. In the same way, archaeologists are viewed as nothing more than sophisticated treasure hunters.
At any rate, we dedicated a day to the investigation of a large town-site on the Carabayan Altiplano at 4380 metres above sea level. This place, called Chiquini, may be 1500 years old and the third most important site of the Peruvian Middle Horizon. Only faint traces remain in the hard, stony ground, especially as local people have built a walled cemetery with rubble from the archaeological dig. But the plan-form reveals a sizeable town with broad, straight roads and wide, rectangular plazas. As we paced it out, the sun glinted on the snow-caps of the distant mountains and lit up curious yellow clumps of low, alpine tundra bushes. Across the expanse of plain herds of llamas and alpacas appeared as nothing more than moving specks. Distance was deceptive there.
After the survey we moved on to a village called Orientál to buy petrol and eat lunch. The petrol that we poured through a cotton cloth into the tank of the Jeep was filthy, and the alpaca meat on which we dined was unendurably hard. Orientál seemed most inhospitable, bathed in brilliant, burning sun and raked by bone-chilling winds. Situated at almost 4650 metres above sea level, it consisted of a double line of unfinished adobe houses. Outside, Indian men lay flat in the dust, wrapped and swaddled in brilliantly striped blankets, waiting for a ride to Juliaca.
Back at Cuyocuyo I spent several days repeatedly ascending the sides of the valley, climbing up tiny footpaths or clambering directly up the steep, debris-covered slopes. I would arrive at the top with blistered, bloodstained feet, a pounding heart and tremendous shortness of breath, but in sight of magnificent views. Streaks of silver cloud hung suspended in the valleys, summits glinted grey against a blue sky, and villages squatting far below on the valley floors or clinging precariously to the steep slopes. There were jagged rock pinnacles, alpine agaves, and hawks and falcons that hovered silently on the breeze. On one occasion, as I sat on a crag at the valley shoulder, there was a deep whirring noise and five condors flew close overhead, casting huge shadows with their wings. But few other signs of animal or human life were visible at such altitudes; the vegetation was sparse and the wind biting.
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At length I took a ride back to Juliaca in the cab of a pickup truck. Several people rode behind us in the open, and when we arrived they were so covered with dust as to be indistinguishable from the road.
When I had scraped some of the dirt off myself and my luggage I went down to the railway station to queue for a ticket to Cusco. But the imminent departure of the day's trains generated a psychopathic frenzy among the waiting crowd and I eventually staggered out of the booking hall empty handed, having been kicked and punched for my pains. There were no flights to Cusco and I had no desire to travel by bus over 335 kilometres of dirt road. So I hired an agent to buy me a train ticket.
That evening, while I was hunched over my Pisco Sour (brandy, egg white and lemon juice) in the hotel bar, he came in, hung his head and whimpered "Se or, I have the greatest desire to serve you, but..." No train ticket. It seemed as if I would spend the rest of my life paying over the odds for unpalatable fried fish at the Hostal de Turistas in Juliaca and staring out of its plate-glass windows at the jumble of dusty barriadas strung down the side of the nearby hill. Claustrophobia had replaced the agoraphobia of the Punaian Altiplano.
Next morning, half an hour before the train was due to leave the agent slunk up to me with the ticket. I hailed a tricycle (the so-called "taxis of the poor"), heaved myself and my luggage into the commodious tray at the front of it and sped down to the station. In Perú there is little infrastructure (the Great Southern Railway does not even connect with Lima), and that which exists is starved of capital. Roads are unpaved almost everywhere, the airlines have only a few aging planes that they purchased second-hand from Alitalia; buses, trucks and collectivos are usually crammed with passengers, and the trains are taken by assault. Outside Juliaca station that morning there was a dense mass of people: women selling tangerines or knitwear out of striped blankets, ex-hippies with backpacks done up in old fertiliser sacks, travelling peasants with shawls full of potatoes or turnips. The gates to the platform were firmly shut against the crushing, shouting hordes. I burst through them, bruising my shoulders, and dashed for the platform. The Arequipa and Cusco trains were due to depart, but the coaches were quite mixed up. I staggered from coach to coach, unable to find my assigned seat, feeling as if I were in a nightmare in which every door in a long corridor led to the same trap. At length I found the seat and collapsed into it, while my heart continued to race for almost an hour, for it is dangerous to run with heavy luggage at such altitudes.
The coach was full of Italian tourists. Perú holds a special fascination for those Italians who can afford to go there. They are invariably northerners from Turin, Milan, Alto Adige, and so on. Some are rich and talk patronisingly about wanting to spend the night in one of the adobe hostals of some forgotten wayside village (which none of them have ever been known to do). Others are the failed revolutionaries of 1968, the aging sessantottini, who seem to regard Perú as an extension of Allende's Chile (which it definitely is not, although there are parallels, such as the mortar attack on the Presidential Palace in Lima that week).
In Cusco I befriended a frozen-fish salesman from Alessandria, who had come to Perú with a group of the ex-sessantottini, and was staying in a dilapidated hostal in the street-market quarter of the city (what you might call down-market accommodation). From the lobby one could look down onto the railway tracks, lined by rows of tin-roofed barriadas, the toe-hold of the desperately poor in this poverty-stricken city. My friend went off in search of a prostitute, leaving me to walk back alone to the Plaza de Armas. The way was blocked by a crowd grouped around a pair of bloodstained street-fighters. Emotions ran high and the mass of people swayed from one side of the road to the other.
In Perú it is necessary to queue for long periods of time in hot, airless offices in order to obtain any form of service, such as an airline ticket. The person at the front of the line seems to revel in the luxury of denying those who are behind him access to the counter for as long as possible, but such people often gain very little, as the answer given to their questions by the officious person behind the counter is more often "maybe" than yes or no.
For a small sum of money a local taxi driver took me to see some of the nearby archaeological sites. The wheels of his huge old Chevrolet badly needed balancing and we wobbled precariously along the Vilcanota Valley while he complained loudly about the state of the road and a samba blared out of his tape-player.
In the hope of receiving a sizeable tip, taxi drivers and tour operators in Perú will supply copious information about local ruins. Most of what they say is highly inaccurate, but they can hardly be blamed, as the guide books have allowed fantasy to mingle with fact to an extraordinary degree. This is especially true of the 'rock cult' of the Incas. Many squiggles made by the dissolving action of rainwater upon limestone have been identified as 'snake' or 'puma' carvings. Indeed, speculation is now so rife that it is high time for an archaeologist to stand up and demonstrate that, however much the Incas venerated rock, they were a pragmatic race and used outcrops of limestone for sitting on, concealing things beneath, and other severely practical purposes.
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Now I am at several removes from the Incas and their land I can look back upon my experiences with much greater equanimity than when I was actually there (is this perhaps the real benefit of travel?). Which of the many images that crowd in upon the mind is most likely to endure? Perhaps the sight of hens strutting around the top of the campanile of Puno cathedral. Or the children with passive, brown faces, scratched cheeks, snotty noses, berry eyes and matted black hair, peeping out from the striped blankets by which they were tied to their mothers' backs. Or the thick packs of pure white snow on the peaks close to the Bolivian border. Memory is kind enough to allow one to forget the dust, cold, stomach upsets, sunburn and inconvenience in favour of something more picturesque and heroic. In this respect I am more fortunate than the Peruvians. Inti, the Sun, blazes down fiercely on the Altiplano between the Cordilleras and his people are condemned to hardship and privation. More than 30,000 of them have died in the present unrest there, and sadly the path to the future is anything but shining for the survivors.