For several hundred yards we crawled through the blackness and I gouged lumps of flesh out of myself on the broken cave walls. I could feel my hands starting to smart from the chemical salts that made up the surfaces over which we were scrambling. I knew there would be no water to wash the sting out of them and I cursed again, then called back to ask John if he had brought gloves.
‘Of course,’ he answered.
‘Bastard.’
There was nothing for it but to grunt and bear it, occasionally punctuating the silence with an exclamation of the saviour’s surname as I left another piece of skin on the rock. The place was devouring me inch by inch. To my relief, the guide called out, ‘Almost there, soon fresh air.’ A poet, a torturer and a traveller all rolled into one, I thought to myself, as he emerged from the cave’s mouth and the daylight flooded down to me. Soon we were all out, and our guide told us that we would have to climb a little distance.
‘Climb?’ I said, looking at John with a face that told him I was ready to decapitate both him and the guide on the spot.
‘Only a few feet,’ said the guide, assuming my exclamation was harmless.
The climb was simple and within minutes we were looking across the Valley of the Moon. I was impressed. The cave had acted as a kind of ladder. We had been climbing as we had been crawling. We stood surveying the majestic lunar landscape unfolding in the distance. After a few minutes the guide commented on the time and the imminence of sunset. We had to move more quickly and he was off at once with us following sheeplike after him.
I was feeling exhausted but didn’t want to admit it, though my huffing and puffing concealed nothing. Sir Edmund Hillary McCarthy seemed unruffled as he patted the dust off his shoulders. I decided to keep my mouth shut until this trial was over but when we finally arrived at the foot of a massive sand dune and were told we would not only have to climb to the top and then walk along its steeply ascending ridge, but also scale the plateau high above us where it met the ‘sediment’ cliff face, my response was, ‘Holy fuck!’
I have two problems: one, I am terrified of heights; and two, at forty-six and after the exertions of the last few days, I was feeling seventy-six years old. I had no intention of bringing on a coronary collapse and being left here as the proverbial Man in the Moon Valley. I gabbled all this to John in a state of defiant panic. He knew I was serious and told me to wait and catch my breath. I looked along the ridge of the mammoth dune. Other climbers were ploughing their way towards the plateau. They were ant men from where I stood. I really didn’t think I could make it. Humour was no longer sustaining me. What was staring me in the face was no joke. ‘I’m going for a little walk while I think about this,’ I said. John simply nodded in agreement. He knew I was very, very anxious. Our guide too sensed my apprehension and politely said nothing.
I walked only a few feet from my companions and looked again at the looming dune. This was Sisyphus’s own hill of torment and I was standing in a sublunary Hades. I was Brian Keenan, not some sado-masochistic Greek hero obsessed with pushing great boulders endlessly up and down mountains. Without being fully conscious of it, I walked further away from the monster confronting me before turning to view it again.
I watched the progress of the climbers who had set out before we arrived. They were even more insect-like than before. I was about to return and tell John to go on without me when I looked again at the demon dune.
But it wasn’t a demon. I was looking at that imaginary desert I had wished for. With its soft curve and upward flow, it had all the sensual exoticism of my mystical desert. In this hard, brutal, unrelenting land I had found a feminine soulscape. The dune was voluptuous and inviting. My eyes scanned the luxurious flow of the dune to the plateau. I wanted to be up there.
However, even as I walked back to John, my enthusiasm was rapidly waning. I had to commit myself before I lost my nerve. ‘OK, let’s go.’ The others said nothing and we walked to the foot of the dune. To my total astonishment the guide announced that we must climb barefoot.
‘Barefoot?’ I exclaimed. ‘Is this some kind of penance or something? Who’s up on that plateau, God Almighty?’
Don John disregarded my pathetic remarks and began undoing his laces, commenting, ‘I suspect boots full of sand would make the climb more difficult and uncomfortable.’
I couldn’t argue and began the barefoot slog heavenward thinking what a supercool smart-arse McCarthy was.
We reached the ridge faster than I had expected, but the effort nearly killed me. I had no breath to curse, though my mind was reeling with expletives. I suspect God on the mountaintop forbade it and left me only sufficient energy to climb. We rested at the beginning of the ridge and looked down. Now the ants were below us. The guide glanced at his watch and said we must move on. I had expected this section to be easier but it wasn’t. We seemed to sink deeper on this level than on the incline. I stopped every few paces to rest and breathe. It became more difficult with each stop. Throughout the long traverse John stood behind me saying not a word, stopping when I stopped and starting when I did. By following in my footsteps he was taking the evil eye off me. Others passed us on the trail and John could easily have gone ahead, but he chose to wait patiently. In every way he was a very ‘parfit gentil knyght’, as Chaucer would say.
As we neared the last leg, I could see the climb up on to the plateau was a short one. I rounded on Don John and, with my chest heaving asthmatically, complained, ‘First you have me slithering up the devil’s arsehole on my hands and knees, then slogging over this great hump on his ugly back! Do you have any plans for later?’
From the top of the plateau the undulations of the desert escarpments seemed endless and gave the impression that one was looking out over the cloud floor. The visual feast made the climb seem trivial. At this height and at this hour the sun and moon hung above us in perfect juxtaposition. In the deafening silence that came booming across hundreds of miles of desert we could see as clearly as if the horizon was only a few feet from us. You could believe you were in another world. In a way you were. I looked down on the valley beneath us. It seemed a long way away, yet I was not intimidated by it. The guide pointed out what he called the Inca Theatre, a natural amphitheatre cut into the earth. It was an incredible monument to nature’s powerful artistry. For a long time I looked at it and the eternal land mass beyond. I imagined I was looking down on one vast celestial city. John and I sat in our separate quiet, relacing our boots, feeling like tiny microcosms caught up in a cosmic moment that we could only gape at, dumbfounded.
The sun was beginning to set and I was starting to hallucinate. The earth was glowing in the queer trance-inducing sunset. The landscape below me became a living thing, breathing different shapes and colours as the sun descended.
I had found myself an eyrie-like cranny in the wall of the plateau to shelter from the cool wind, and was feeling like a young eaglet trembling as the breeze fluffed its feathers. The panorama was changing with a slow intensity. For a brief moment I wanted to lean out and let the thermal carry me away, to soar and swoop in this endlessly intoxicating radiance. Instead I got up to walk and catch what I could of the magical cinematography of land and light.
My eyes scanned across again to the Inca Theatre. I thought of the vastness of that empire. I had wondered why anyone would want to conquer and claim such emptiness, but now I knew. The Inca worshipped the sun, and I was standing in the sleeping quarters of this magnificent deity. I now understood why the empire’s messengers would run for days on end, stopping only at sunrise and sunset to praise their king who was the earthly representative of their golden god. Into the glowing evening I called out, ‘“Atahuallpa, Sapa, Inca, Inca, Capac. I am Atahuallpa Capac, Son of the Sun, Son of the Moon, Lord of the Four Quarters. Who does not kneel to me?”’ They were the half-remembered words from Peter Shaffer’s play about the conquest of Peru, The Royal Hunt of the Sun. I saw John look at me curiously as I mouthed out the words. I quickly explained their origin.
I had forgotten them completely until now. But in the prescient evening they came flooding back. Inside me I heard the voice of the Sun God:
‘Atahuallpa speaks! Atahuallpa needs. Atahuallpa commands. Bring gold. From the palaces. From the temples. From all buildings in the great palaces. From walls of pleasure and roofs of Omen. From floors of feasting and ceilings of death. Bring him the gold of Quito and Pachamacac! Bring him the gold of Colcanota! Bring him the gold of Caolae! Of Aymaraes and Arequipa! Bring him the gold of the Chimu! Put up a mountain of gold and free your Sun from his prison of clouds.’
And here it was in front of me, a land turned luminous as if there was some alchemy in my subconscious memory. As the last arc of the sun hung over the edge of our horizon, Atahuallpa, Son of the Sun, spoke his last words:
‘There is my father sun! You see now only by his wish; yet try to see into him and he will darken your eyes for ever. With hot burning he pulls up the corn and we will feed. With cold burning he shrinks it and we starve. These are his burning and our life. Do not speak to me of your god. He is nowhere.’
It was disconcerting and intriguing to find myself remembering these lines so vividly. The little church hall in Belfast’s Cromwell Road which had served as a rehearsal centre for the Youth Theatre was a long way in time and space from the plateau of the Valley of the Moon. Somehow my memory was as incandescent as the air around me. I wandered about the place again, wanting to get a final glimpse of the pulsing chiaroscuro before me. I was looking for one image which would imprint itself on my memory and that I would see every time I recalled my visit. I could not find it, yet it was everywhere in the auroral symphony that was playing silently around me.
Too soon it was time to go and we slowly descended the plateau wall onto the ridge. It was still a long way down but our eyes were elevated into the glowing sky. If I had cursed the penitential upward climb, I began the descent subdued and awestruck.
As I stood on the topmost edge of the ridge and looked down on the incline to the valley floor, I was overcome by an irresistible urge. I was going to jump off the edge of the ridge and keep jumping until I reached the bottom. I turned to John and smiled, my eyes wide with the lunacy in me. He looked back at me, his face passive and knowing. He never spoke a word. I looked back down the dune and tried to restrain myself. I told myself I was forty-six, not six. What would happen if I broke my ankle in this fit of insanity? What would people think of this demented half-wit hopscotching down these desert mountains?
Within a second, I had removed my boots and tossed them and the rest of my belongings at McCarthy. I launched myself off the ridge and bellowed a salutation to the night. ‘BOING!’ I roared and, ‘BOING!’ again, as I landed and lifted off again. ‘BOING, BOING, BOING!’ I shouted with every leap while the laughter was choking me. Far above me on the ridge, I could see John and our guide echoing my laughter.
When I reached the bottom I was covered in red sand like the reddleman from Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native. I was sweating and breathless but incredibly happy, in the most uncomplicated and childlike way. I sat up from where I had fallen in my final leap and looked upward. I had been higher than the highest plateau I had stood on but I didn’t know how to explain it to myself, let alone anyone else.
From above, laughing at Brian’s antics, I suddenly remember him telling me about Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums. The narrator, Ray Smith, is out in the mountains with Japhy Ryder. ‘I looked up and saw Japhy running down the mountain in huge twenty-foot leaps, running, leaping, landing with a great drive of his booted heels, bouncing five feet or so, running, then taking another long crazy yelling yodelaying sail down the sides of the world and in that flash I realized it’s impossible to fall off mountains.’ Unlike Ray Smith, I do not follow suit and take flight down the mountain, preferring a more leisurely descent, but I do share the profound peace of revelation and reassurance – we should be safe enough on those horses.
On our journey back to San Pedro I confessed to John that if all his other expeditions had not impressed me, this one made up for them all. He smiled knowingly and said, ‘Yes, I had the distinct impression you enjoyed that.’ He paused. ‘Especially the last bit.’ The rest of the journey was a long drive through another section of no-man’s-land. I looked out onto it as we passed through, but I saw nothing. My mind was still in the Valley of the Moon.
‘So tell me about that mumbo-jumbo you were singing up on the plateau.’
I quoted back to John the lines of the play: ‘“Atahuallpa, Sapa Inca, Inca Capac/Atahuallpa, Son of the Sun, Son of the Moon, Lord of the Four Quarters.”’
‘Enough, enough. Now that we know you can speak Inca, you might like to stay here as a guide, given that you like it so much. I can see it all now. Specialist tours of the Valley of the Moon by the only Inca-speaking Irishman in South America. Now let’s see . . .’
I knew John was well away and I was about to be subjected to a mischievous teasing for the next few hours. I pre-empted the torture by cutting him off before he got started. ‘OK, John, roll it up and put it away!’
Outside the barren wastes drifted past us. This time they did not produce the same smouldering in me but paradoxically the thrilling moments on the mountaintop drove home to me the powerful loneliness of the place we were passing through. It wasn’t the isolation so much as the absence of anything to stimulate the mind. I tried to imagine myself existing in such an uninhabitable void. I couldn’t, I wouldn’t, my soul would perish here. The sooner we were out of this the better, I thought.
As we drove into San Pedro we were confronted by the bustle of people and the smells of coffee and roasting meat. The intensity of the day’s several experiences struck home. Later that evening as I lay on my bed taking notes I remember thinking of one of the closing scenes from the play that I had recalled on those dizzying golden heights.
Francisco Pizarro was the commander of a group of conquistadors who had come to plunder Peru. But Pizarro was a man in search of something greater than gold. Age and the grave haunted him and all sense of joy was eroded from his life. Time was his prison. At the edge of despair he cried out for release. ‘There’s a jailer, there must be. At the last, last of lasts, he will let us out. He will, he will.’ Utterly inconsolable, he comes to believe that his prisoner Atahuallpa, living god-king of the Inca, is that immortal jailer. In a moving scene Pizarro is converted by Atahuallpa. The Sun King takes a handful of ichu grass and a stone. The conquistador general confesses into the grass for an hour. Then the Inca god-king throws away the grass, strikes Pizarro on the back with his stone and making a sign of purification receives him into the Inca world.
The recollection made me pause from my note-taking. I was trying to find the words to describe the supernatural atmosphere of the Valley of the Moon. I took my pen and wrote cryptically, ‘I have spoken into ichu grass and felt the blow of Inca stone upon my back.’ I paused before finally climbing into bed. Near the reading lamp sat Neruda’s poetry, my alternative guidebook. The experience of the desert had brought me closer to understanding the poet’s sometimes hallucinatory surrealism and sensuous imagery. That night I didn’t need to read anything.
I went to sleep with desert pumas panting through my dreams. My sleep was troubled, but not by nightmares. We were leaving the desert for good tomorrow. But the desert had not yet finished with me. The night was cold and my head was still compartmentalizing everything we had experienced. Sleep was pointless, so I threw on a pair of trousers and a shirt and went outside to the porch, wrapping myself in a blanket. The sky was incredible, as if a million starbursts had been frozen at their moment of explosion. It was impossible to distinguish any reference points there. Under this pre-dawn canopy I could easily believe there were as many stars in that sky as there were grains of sand in the desert. For several hours I sat losing myself in those unknown galaxies.
As the night skyscape melted into sunrise I penned a quick note to fax home first thing before we departed:
 
; Hello Sweetheart,
We have just come back from 10 hrs in the high hills on the Bolivian border, then through the relentless emptiness of the Atacama desert. I am wheezing and puffing like a colic donkey in the thin air.
I miss you very much and last night wrote this poem, under the influence of my friend Pablo.
Silent and staring I hunt the red emptiness
My feet are burned. The baked stones have
broken my claws to the quick
I am prey of this infernal sun
Great hunger consumes me
I am thirsty for your spring water laughter
I want to drink the liquid blue of your eyes
But bone-cold darkness gnaws at me, and
I await your creature call in my ravenous heart
I am the puma of the night
Sniffing starlight
We finally leave the desert tomorrow for La Serena. I will ring from there.
What do you think of ‘Joachim’ for Junior?
Love and special hugs,
Brian
San Pedro de Atacama
We packed before turning in last night. Although dog-tired I could not sleep for choking and gasping. Now I have some idea of what Terry Waite went through with his asthma. Sometimes he was up most of the night struggling for breath. The medicine he was given worked some of the time, but inevitably there were days when the attacks were too bad or, even worse, when the guards did not have what he needed. I am frightened enough here in freedom: heaven knows how much worse the panic was in those cells.
We struggle off in the filling light, Brian stopping every hundred feet or so to realign his wheely-bag device. Taking a last look at the volcano rising white we walk up the now familiar stony, sandy track escorted by a black dog wearing a rakish maroon scarf. It is very peaceful so early, most doors still closed tight but there are one or two people about. We look back down the long, straight and dusty street – there are two boys, two dogs and thin sunlight. When we reach the square, the bus is already quite full. There is a woman carrying a large child of perhaps six or seven in a papoose. She wears a full, brightly coloured skirt and her husband sports a wide-brimmed hat. A young couple board: he is skinny with long black hair framing a high-cheekboned face, ugly really; she is beautiful, with short hair, pretty face and physique and a sweet, trilling voice and laugh. They are clearly much in love. At the front of the bus a young German woman drones on and on in an impossibly dull voice.