‘I see,’ said Don Emmanuel, ‘that you have found a fine young man to remove yours.’
‘Your eyes do not deceive you, Don Emmanuel, though unlike your fine self I wash often enough to prevent them from accumulating.’
In the whole gathering there were only two people who felt at sea with strangers, Antoine and Françoise Le Moing, who only really knew Farides, who had been their cook. In the changed circumstances of the exodus it somehow did not seem appropriate to have servants, and so they stuck with Profesor Luis and Farides, doing their half of the work in order to avoid isolation. Profesor Luis found the French couple well educated and interesting, so he and Farides devoted much conversational time to improving the others’ Spanish and knowledge of local history.
They had ascended through two quebradas when Pedro spotted a cave up on the right, to the north, and he and Aurelio went up to see it, because Aurelio said he had a notion of what it was. When they entered it was almost immediately dark, and so Pedro left to fetch his lamp.
When it was it they penetrated far into the shadows by the glimmering of the yellow light, and saw that there were niches cut regularly into the walls, and that out of the rock were carved fishes, serpents, symbols of the sun and moon, jaguars, and grimacing guardians. Pedro held up the light to a niche and drew back, startled. He held it up to another niche and gestured to Aurelio to look.
They were in a catacomb. In foetal positions the ancient mummies, their skin stretched angularly over their bones, their lips shrunk back from their teeth, their hair still sticking up in ragged tufts from their dusty scalps, sat the dead in a parody of life, their jaws sagging open in eternal, frozen surprise. There were spiders and blind insects living among them, and in one of the niches an eyeless silver-white snake uncoiled from the neck and disappeared in alarm into the belly of her home, where she hissed in the hope of peace.
‘We should not tell the others,’ said Aurelio. ‘This is a sacred place, and besides they would think it a bad omen.’
‘I think it a good omen,’ said Pedro. ‘That one can be dead for so long and rest undisturbed. Do you think there is gold here?’
‘If there is,’ said Aurelio reprovingly, ‘it is not ours, and it is no use to us. Leave them.’
‘I have never seen so many dead,’ remarked Pedro, as they scrambled down the loose shale.
‘Of course you have,’ said Aurelio. ‘At the Battle in Chiriguana.’
‘Maybe one day those boys will be found,’ said Pedro, ‘and people will say, “I have never seen so many dead,” and wonder why they are there.’
‘There will be bullets among the shattered bones,’ said Aurelio. ‘It will be very clear.’
‘But no one will ever hear the true history of it,’ said Pedro.
‘We must ask Profesor Luis to write it,’ replied Aurelio, ‘and then bury the paper in a box with the bodies.’
They rejoined the plodding column and rose over a low ridge on to one of the long high plateaus that are known as ‘pajonales’, which surprise mountain travellers by their unnatural flatness and the length of their grasses. It was decided that the animals should be allowed to feed so that the people could gather in fodder, and rest.
They were now quite near to the snowline, at the exact altitude where most people suddenly feel very ill with soroche. Only Aurelio and Don Emmanuel out of all the two thousand had been to this height before, and they had already seen the signs of sickness.
‘We should stay here at least three days, maybe more,’ said Don Emmanuel, ‘or we will have a lot of trouble.’
Aurelio agreed, so he and Don Emmanuel went and talked to groups of people to tell them about the soroche, and that they had to stop in order to minimise it.
Almost everybody already had terrible headaches and some were suffering from diarrhoea and vomiting. It was a superhuman feat to lift one foot and place it in front of another, and it was necessary to stop every fifteen paces to draw deep breaths. An insuperable fatigue, irritability, and apathy had descended on animal and man alike, and even the cats were too disgruntled to stalk each other in the grass.
Don Emmanuel explained to the people. ‘You will all be ill for a while because there is less air up here to breathe. If you think you are dying, do not be deceived, you will soon feel better. Each of you must find their own way to deal with it. Some people eat a great deal and drink a lot of alcohol, but for others this only makes the soroche even worse, so they have to eat and drink very little. Again, some people should get used to it by keeping busy, and others should lie in the dark and do nothing. My advice is to eat a lot of panela, chew coca if you have it, and fuck as much as you can. You may have already noticed that the mountains make your loins itch worse than a laundry-girl in Iquitos!’
Most people felt too bad even to smile, but Farides looked coyly at Profesor Luis and smiled, and Gonzago and Constanza had already been following this advice and were feeling very well. Felicidad, who had not known chastity since early puberty, had never felt less like making purple earthquakes in her whole life. She lay in a defeated heap, her temples pounding, her breath rasping in her throat, with a mochila over her eyes to block out the light, groaning. The animals, beyond reach of advice, lay in the grasses chewing wearily, feeling as bad as the people they accompanied, but suffering more stoically, for it is a truth that if you have no words with which to express anguish, your anguish will be proportionately diminished.
Misael felt his ankle begin to hurt, and announced that it was going to rain. Those who knew him and the infallibility of his ankle moved far off on to the slopes and rigged up rough shelters between the rocks. The rest looked up at the brilliant clear skies and saw that there was not even a cloud upon the peaks; they laughed sceptically and stayed on the pajonale, where in the middle of the night they found themselves drenched suddenly with paralysingly icy rain and lying in a rapidly mobilising bog. Cursing and bemoaning their misfortune they gathered their sodden possessions and squelched their way to the slopes, whilst the cats, which in the morning would be the size of jaguars, prowled amongst the mountainsides looking for caves, where they licked the freezing water from their hides and lay together in luxurious tangled heaps for warmth and company.
Morning brought little comfort to the miserable people huddled together, wet through, feverish with tercianas and soroche. For the first time they were demoralised, and filled with dismay, regret and hopelessness; they missed desperately the dusty plain that formerly they had cursed as too hot and humid; they were beginning to feel the terror of their unknown destination and the life of exile that awaited them. Few of them had slept, and not one of them liked the rain to be freezing and numbing when they had remembered it as warm, welcome, friendly, and sensuous.
With the first grey light of the day there was a new miracle which would have caused much wonder if it had not caused more misery; for a cloud came rolling and churning towards them along the pajonale, billowing and swirling, and at the same time a cloud descended rapidly from the sky so that they were enclosed in a conspiracy of wet mist that seemed to be indulging in some gratuitous act of personal malice. It was impossible to see beyond the length of one’s own arm, and people fell over boulders as they called to each other or tried to gather together their possessions in order to try futilely to dry them. Moreover the cats were nowhere to be found, and since the people had become accustomed to their presence as a good omen and a sign of supernatural favour, now that they had vanished it seemed that good fortune had vanished also. It was not until bitter blasts of wind had made the people yet more wretched, but blown away the sea of cloud, that the cats were seen emerging from caves and crannies to stretch and yawn in the weak sunlight, and set about washing themselves. They had not only grown to the size of jaguars, but now, whereas before there had been huge tabbies, huge blue and white fluffy cats, and huge black and white cats, and deaf white cats with odd-coloured eyes, there were only jaguars, most of them silky black, but some with tawny coats and dark rose
ttes. For the first time some of the people were afraid of them, for the jaguar is the most ferocious of the American cats; but when they played as usual, brought guanaco for the people to eat, it was found that they could still purr when pleased, and so it was as if the supernatural favour had returned.
That day and on the following day the people stayed on the pajonale to acclimatise and let the animals feed. At night they joined the cats in their caves and crannies, grew warm in the musky feline heat, and recovered from their sickness lulled by purring, only to be awakened in the morning by the rough tongues of the cats, who had taken to cleaning their human companions when they had finished cleaning themselves.
‘I remember when she only used to tickle my ears,’ said Antoine to Françoise. ‘Now she abrades my entire face!’
‘We are her kittens,’ replied Françoise, shivering now that the warm cat had gone off about her business. ‘I just hope that she does not try to carry us around by the collar!’
When the epidemic of soroche and depression was over, and there was a fine bright morning in which to travel, the voyagers packed up their animals with unspoken accord, and set off westward once more. At the end of the plateau, where it divided into three quebradas, one ascending, one descending, and one level, they came across a ruin.
Not even Aurelio knew exactly what it had once been. All that remained were four massive walls banked into a square mound. Everyone gathered around it, wondering at its presence in this ethereal wilderness, as though its function was merely to state that there is nowhere that no one has ever been. The stones interlocked with such precision that Francesca, drawing a knife, could nowhere insert it between the stones, even though they were all kinds of polygonal and rhomboidal shapes.
‘How on earth did they do this, so perfectly?’ asked Don Emmanuel. ‘Without even iron tools to cut with?’
Aurelio smiled. ‘They did not use tools at all. Every stone already fitted perfectly.’
‘How?’ demanded Pedro. ‘Nowhere are found stones like this.’
‘We had herbs to soften the stones so that they could be worked like clay,’ said Aurelio, ‘and we had herbs to harden them again into stone. That is why they are perfect and for no other reason.’
‘I do not believe you,’ said Don Emmanuel. ‘That is not possible.’
Aurelio stamped his coca leaves in his gourd, and sucked the pestle a moment, like an old Frenchman smoking a pipe. ‘If you believe it is impossible,’ he said, ‘then you will never find the secret, and you will always have to toil with iron in order to make it always less perfect than this.’ He placed his hand on the stone and patted it lovingly. ‘We knew the secret of the Stone,’ he said proudly, ‘and you never will.’
‘We make good houses from tapiales,’ riposted Sergio. ‘What is the use of making stone like clay, when clay is already clay?’
‘It lasts longer,’ said Aurelio, ‘so long that it outlives those who built it.’
‘Then why,’ demanded Hectoro, ‘do the cholos live in dirty little chozas?’
‘Because the secret is dead. Our priests and our nobility who knew it were all killed in the name of the god who wanted our gold and silver. We lost everything to civilisation. These stones are like a body that decays slowly when the spirit is flown, and those of us who are left are like the hair that still grows on the body when it is dead.’
‘I do not believe that either,’ said Don Emmanuel, who clapped the melancholy Indian on the back. ‘Those of you that are left are like the last seeds of a great tree that is cut down. The seeds will grow to great trees, nourished by the ash in the ground from the old tree that was burned.’
‘When seeds are widely scattered,’ replied Aurelio, ‘they grow up, but they do not make a forest.’
‘When those trees in turn scatter their seeds, the spaces are filled up,’ said Don Emmanuel, ‘and then there is a forest.’
Aurelio looked more hopeful. ‘It is to be wished for. But all the same we will never know the secret of the stones, forest or not.’
‘You will have to use tapiales,’ said Sergio, and everyone laughed at his easy reasoning.
At the end of the valley the choice of three routes had to be made: to continue level into the middle branch, to descend by the leftward one, or to ascend into the snows by the rightward one.
‘Federico says upward,’ Sergio told those at the front.
‘Then he is mistaken,’ said Don Emmanuel. ‘That way goes up a glacier and ends nowhere, as one can plainly see.’
The argument that followed was resolved by the decision that Don Emmanuel and Aurelio should ascend the glacier to reconnoitre the possibility of a route, and to see, if they reached the top, how lay the land ahead.
The two men tied a rope between them, and Don Emmanuel took the leather garra from a mule, much to the puzzlement of the other. Both men agreed that the ascent was highly dangerous and quite pointless, for there could be no question of taking the cattle up there, and moreover it was clear that the glacier led up a long ridge, possibly only very narrow, that connected two peaks and probably had a precipice the other side.
Convinced that they were about to explore a hazardous cul-de-sac, the two men approached the glacier and clambered over the moraine of boulders that it had been lazily pushing before it over the centuries. At the base the snow was dirty and packed into ice, but as they progressed upward the shell of fresh snow sparkled brilliantly in the sunlight and caused them to narrow their eyes and wince. However, the shell was weak, and Don Emmanuel suddenly disappeared up to his armpits. He floundered forward to regain the surface, and on they struggled, sweating despite the freezing snow, and often finding themselves sinking deeply. Aurelio went in front because he was the lighter, and found this policy vindicated when his weight broke the snow-bridge over a narrow crevasse. His fall dragged Don Emmanuel flat on his face, and Aurelio glimpsed bottomless blue walls of ice below him as the other hauled him out. They sidetracked to find a crossing place, but in all Aurelio fell into four crevasses, and Don Emmanuel into two as he broke through in Aurelio’s wake.
It took them five exhausting hours to reach the ridge, and they sat at the top in the thin air as a nipping wind whipped up the snow about them. Aurelio had made the ascent in bare feet according to Indian tradition, and he chafed them with snow. The vista beyond the ridge was stupendous; far below them a berivered valley curled downward from the south, green and verdant, and beyond rose peaks higher and ever higher, glistening, white-capped, and awe-inspiring. They could see no passes at all beneath the snow-line, and both of them knew that soon the travels of the people would have to end, for most would die in trying to cross the range before them.
They were still gazing across at the jagged roof of the world when a low rumbling sounded behind them. They turned to see that a vast avalanche was sliding, gathering momentum, from the peak on their right. It was as if the side of the mountain was breaking free and slipping with one graceful motion and a stentorian roar down on to the glacier. The two men watched with fascinated reverence as the thousands of tons of ice, snow and rock thundered down, throwing up a mist of snow that reached even to where they stood.
Far below in the valley the thunderstruck exiles watched the mighty white torrent descend, bowling giant boulders down the glacier, and making the earth tremble beneath them. They fell to their knees and crossed themselves, invoking spirits and angels, all of them believing that Aurelio and Don Emmanuel were surely dead and buried deep in the mighty cascade.
As the avalanche finished and the snow mist began to settle, some intrepid souls climbed cautiously to the edge of the glacier to see if they could spot the two men, and saw four hundred and fifty. Frozen solid and as fresh as the day that they had iced to death, lay Conde Pompeyo Xavier de Estremadura, fifty Spanish soldiers in full armour, and four hundred and fifty-one Indian slaves who had met their deaths on an expedition despatched by the conscientious Pizarro to locate the legendary Inca city of Vilcabamba. Released at last
by the mountain that had claimed them, they, their mules, and their baggage were washed up by the waves of the rolling sea that had drowned them in the year 1533, on St Cecilia’s Day.
The stunned witnesses to this phenomenon of natural refrigeration were awakened from their wonder by the whoops of Don Emmanuel as he and Aurelio scudded down the slope seated in tandem on the former’s leather garra. They dug in their heels to bring their makeshift toboggan to a halt, and wandered among the ancient bodies in silent amazement. Before the body of the Count, in his rich armour, Aurelio said, ‘He looks exactly like Hectoro.’
Aurelio requested that the bodies be left where they lay and covered over with snow in order to preserve them in their frozen state. ‘I have plans,’ he said, and the people did as he asked, marking each grave in the ice with long sticks cut in the valley. Then Aurelio spoke to Sergio, ‘There is nothing up there but the sky and a long fall. I was right that spirits may get lost.’
Sergio denied strenuously that his son had been lost, saying ‘He wanted to show us these dead men.’
‘We will go where I say,’ said Aurelio, ‘if my son-in-law cannot find the way.’
Aurelio, feeling proud to have been vindicated, led the caravan along the central valley that ran level until, after a long trudge, they came to the edge of the very same precipice, except lower down. Looking down over the edge they saw a sea of cloud below, rolling and breaking on rocky promontories like a great ocean in slow motion, sharply outlined, billowing and eddying. It was a great wonder, but Sergio came and stood next to Aurelio. ‘So,’ he said, with a wounded air of superiority, ‘what of the judgement of the living?’
Beneath them the sea of cloud rose swirling upward, and the people followed the curve of the chasm to the left so that the sun fell upon their backs. When the cloud rose level there was a new wonder, for each person came face-to-face with their own shadowy spirit in the mist. Each spirit had about its head a nimbus of glorious lights and rainbow colours, and when the people fell to their knees in awe and terror, crossing themselves, their spirits too fell to the earth and crossed themselves. When they sprang to their feet, so did their spirits, and aped their every movement, until at last, their terror diminishing, the people played with their spirits, and tried to see if they could catch them out with a sharp movement. Then the cloud billowed and spilled over the edge, engulfing them, and their shadow spirits with their glorious haloes disappeared.