‘It comes from up there. Those mountains are all volcanoes. There are streams of it all around these hills, if you dig.’
By the time we were near the top, the view back down the river must have been fifty miles long. Further up, where it disappeared into steep turns and spars in the cliffs, the water churned white and was soon lost. Away in that direction, the mountains were flinty. Waterfalls made fine white lines down their faces, so far off that I couldn’t see them moving.
The gantry was built just in front of a rock that had been carved into the shape of the nearest mountain, a sawtooth monster capped with what must have been permanent snow.
‘Don’t snigger too much,’ Raphael said, ‘but people are going to ask if I introduced you to the mountain and they’ll think it’s strange if I haven’t.’
‘Introduce us to the . . .?’ Clem said.
Raphael motioned over his shoulder at the replica. ‘Consider it an introduction to the local lord. If I have, everyone will know you’re all right. Leave him an offering.’
‘Like what?’ I said. ‘What do mountains like?’
‘Silver. Shells. Salt. Nothing stupid; people will look to see what you left.’
I put down some of the glass shells I’d found and Clem turned out his pockets for his shinier coins.
‘People believe the mountain is alive?’
‘Mm.’ He watched us. ‘Stand straight, look polite. Cultural experience,’ he added when we exchanged an uncertain look. ‘This is the Inca tour.’ He glanced towards the mountain and said something quiet in Quechua, which made Clem squeak.
‘Did you call it Father?’
‘Yes,’ he said, drawing out the sibilant in a way that didn’t in the least encourage any more questions. ‘Shall we go? Before you freeze.’
As soon as Raphael had turned away, Clem beamed at me and made a hallelujah gesture at the sky, and then a little apologetic bow at the mountain. I laughed. Raphael was waiting at the corner where the path turned, not for us but for a pair of men and a wooden cart with one front wheel coming the other way. The cart was the one I’d seen from the boat, full of pineapples trussed down with a lattice of rope. One of the men had a withered arm and without being asked, Raphael pulled down the hook of the winch to loop it under some of the rope straps.
‘Thanks very much, Father,’ the carter said in what I only just recognised as Spanish, but he was speaking carefully, and he had only started after a glance towards us. ‘Who are these gentlemen, then?’
‘They’re just visiting,’ Raphael said. He was so much clearer than the carter that he might as well have been speaking English. ‘Exploring. We were just introducing them to the mountain.’
‘Oh, lovely,’ the man said happily. He and his friend both glanced up at the mountain and then away again, just shy of an obeisance. He smiled at me. ‘He’s a good still mountain,’ he explained. ‘Not feisty at all. People here are very kind and steady.’
‘Oh, right,’ I said, feeling like an idiot. I’d understood all of the words and none of the sense. ‘Thank you. It was . . . good to meet you.’
‘Yes, yes,’ he beamed.
Raphael helped them both on to the lift platform beside the hanging pineapples. They sank gently out of sight and lapsed into Quechua once they were away.
‘Padre?’ Clem echoed. ‘Are you something to do with the mountain?’
Raphael held up his wrist to show him the rosary. ‘I’m the priest.’
‘You’re a priest. Right. Good. These poor people.’
The path was a white line, the only flat place the snow had been able to settle properly. We passed houses set on broad steps hacked into the rock, and tiny gardens where goats watched us go and fishermen sat mending nets, and then there was a bridge to the next stack, which was a jumble of gantries and crooked buildings with red windmills spinning on the roofs. The bridge was so high that we were well above even the birds playing on the wind. The river was hardly anything but a shiny ribbon, curving steep off to the south and our right. A young condor was sitting on the banister of the bridge and hooted interestedly when we came by. It shuffled along with us and I went closer to see how tame it was. Very tame; it let me touch its feathers, then did a little happy dance. I laughed. It must have been someone’s pet.
Clem thumped my arm and pointed up ahead of us. The condor flew away.
‘What?’ I said, disappointed.
‘Look at that.’
On the opposite bank, beyond the stacks and the crooked spire of a small church on the mainland, was the forest. We were too high for tropical things; the trees were immense pines. They were almost like sequoia, but the trunks were, even in the gathering twilight, not red, but white as silver birches. They stood in a rank perhaps forty feet away from the edge of the cliff. There was no scrub or tangle of smaller plants – only the pines, hundreds of feet tall and with trunks as broad as the church. They were so different that it took me a long time to understand they were the same as the one we had at home. This was what they were supposed to be, at their natural altitude instead of stunted at the Cornish sea level. I’d never imagined they would be so vast, or so many. They sheared away down towards the next valley and then on and on into a thready mist which seemed not to care that it was sharing space with the snow. It looked like the sort of place where you should have heard wolves, but it was monkeys that were howling.
I had never really wanted to come to Peru, never been excited about it. There had been too much to worry about: walking, the journey, Clem, the altitude, and all the hundreds of stupid things that could have killed us before we even began. I’d thought that something was gone in me and I would never be uncircumspectly pleased with anything again. But all at once it came back. The place where my father had stood and my grandfather, a place that was in my bones and stories and home but had been as lost to me as Byzantium for years – here it was. I felt like I’d drawn a door on the wall at home in chalk and gone through into an imaginary place where the river was a dragon and somewhere in the forest was something stranger than elves.
‘Come on, it’s freezing,’ Clem said.
‘Yes . . . right.’
The forest was dark, the canopy having completely blocked the daylight. A trail of soft light flared between the trunks. I stopped again.
‘Did you see that?’
‘See what?’
I pushed my hand over my eyes. ‘Probably nothing.’
ELEVEN