The rate of flow of the Rio Mala drops to 3.8 cubic metres per second by the first weekend in June, according to a public website run by the water ministry. Data from La Capilla on the Rio Mala, and 31 more measuring stations on 25 other rivers in Peru is live online. Graphs show the annual variation for this and the past three years, highlighting the dramatic rainfall and floods in early 2017.
I catch a bus out of Lima on Friday afternoon, arriving in Mala just as the sun is setting. The next morning I wait behind the market for the one daily bus that heads up the valley to Minay. The bus is half full, as I can see from the parcels placed on seats. Here there are no fears of theft, as people place their sacks of rice under the seat and their bundle of personal possessions above, and head off to the market to get a few essentials. The 8 o’clock bus leaves at 9.15, with a host of bags and boxes lashed to the roof, and more filling the spaces between the seats. We stop to pick up more goods on the way, so that it takes almost an hour to reach La Capilla, seventeen km up river. Here we wait ten minutes for someone who had missed the bus, calling her friend on her mobile, to catch us up. There is a relaxed and friendly atmosphere, no-one appears to be in a hurry, and many passengers know each other. It feels like a community bus.
By the time I get down in Retama, it is almost 11, but I have saved a two hour walk. Heading up the road I look across a vast area of white boulders, pebbles and gravel through which the path of the flowing river seems narrow and calm. As the road descends towards the river I can see that much had changed. When I had last visited in October, before the water level rose with the summer rains, the river separated into two strands around a central island, or more truly, a low bank of pebbles in the centre of the river. Here I had crossed on my first visit, walking diagonally across and downstream to the bank, and then balancing my way across a simple bridge of branches lashed together which stretched four metres to the far bank.
Today the river flows entirely on the far bank. The channel has cut deep into the orchards around the stones. There is no sign of the brick pillars built to hold up vines, or the paved area below them, the walled building, the concrete block where the overhead cable across the river had been tethered. Walking across the now dry left hand stream, I see that I am looking down on the stones from a different angle. The rampaging water has torn away the land on the right, and piled up a moraine of great boulders to a height of perhaps two or three metres. The new channel runs fast and deep. A flow of 3.8 cubic metres per second, spread across the wide and shallow old river, would perhaps have been fordable, but I am looking at a torrent of water just five metres wide. There is a rickety bridge, lashed across, balanced on a central boulder. The current beneath is foaming and furious. I explore upstream where the stream is broader and begin to walk over the unseen, rounded boulders, searching for a good footing. As it gets deeper the current drags at my legs and unbalances me, and I just manage to fall back into the shallower water.
On the far bank, a great boulder that had previously been surrounded by man high reeds is now easily visible. There is no sign of the drawings on its upper surface, round eyed figures and patterns of dots. The stone now looks stained and scarified. It has probably been under water for several weeks, abraded by the thrashing waters.
A farmer is walking across his bridge with a crate of apples on his shoulders. I go to greet him.
” It has changed a lot since I was last here,” I say.
“Ah yes”
“Your buildings and the abrigo, all gone. “
“I lost seventy trees,” he replies, ” and my sons and nephews lost a thousand. I was lucky. Most of my trees are higher up.”
“What happened?”
“The river came down very high, with boulders tearing at the earth. It was very quick, in an hour it broke everything. Afterwards the river was high, it was full of mud and rocks too strong to follow the curve of the stream and it cut away at my walls. On the other side it destroyed the road. The roadway fell into the river. They cut a new path, higher up the hillside, so that the buses could pass. This is how it happens.”
The major part of his orchard stood on higher ground above and behind the stones. The great twin-peaked rock now stood above a steep slope to the riverside, where before it had backed buildings , patio and orchard. One more huaco like that and the rock and others would drop into the riverbed, as perhaps others had before. Three boulders were there already.
“The patio where I had planted the vines was swept away. For five months, we could not cross the river to water the trees, I tell you.”
The abrigo, the basket suspended on a wire which they used to cross when the water was high, had been swept away when the waters were at their highest.
“Twenty days ago I built this bridge with my sons. We walked far upstream to find the five tree trunks. I stood chest deep in the waters to reach the rock and lash them together.”
“We built the bridge twenty days ago, me and my sons.”
Up and down the length of the valley, it is the same, the arroyos, the slings crossing the river, have been swept away. Walking back I meet Emily, leaning over the wall of the yard in front of her house by the Retama stone. She is seventy, she tells me, and has lived in the same house her whole life. “In fear of the falling rocks” she says, pointing upwards to where the mountain cliffs loom above the house, giant boulders seemingly hanging loose. She is very poor and has a bad heart, she says, and much of her land on the opposite side of the river has been swept away.
Her son is working across the road in a walled orchard and she calls out to him to pick some pacay, its long green pods hanging from the upper branches of the tree, whose soft white flesh tastes of vanilla. I accept an armful of the pods and head down the valley.