08 – Llama trails past La Capilla
Chupe de camarones is a thick soup of river prawns with maize, poached egg, carrot, chard and celery, broad beans and soft cheese. Pink crustaceans boiled whole, as thick as your index finger, poke their claws above the surface, and their eyes peer out from the vegetables.
The prawns are emblematic of the valley where visitors drive inland from the coast to lunch at one of the riverside restaurants. “Welcome to the District of Calango” says a roadside sign under a large pink prawn moulded in clay, while restaurant signs list their dishes (arroz con camarones, ceviche de camarones, camarones fritos, camarones salteados…) under a chalk drawn prawn. Higher up the river, beyond the shops and restaurants, it may be the same creatures that are engraved high up on the face of a great black rock. Mythic lobster men, holding up the sky.
From the riverside terrace of La Capilla restaurant, you can look over the balcony at the river below. In late August or September it is a limpid green pool in whose clear waters you can see fish swimming. If you raise your eyes to the opposite bank a path can be seen ascending, crossing an increasingly steep incline, and continuing towards what seems an impassable rock face. This is an ancient trackway that threads up the valley, often contouring sheer rocky hillsides, rising and falling.
The modern road runs along the south eastern side of the valley, a little higher than the river, often through orchards and groups of houses. In places an older road can be seen, narrow between stone walls, following a similar path. But the ancient track is on the opposite side of the river, apparently built into the cliff face high above the river. In places the line of stonework is clearly defined, tidy dry stone walling built upon steep rock faces to support the road surface. In other parts it disappears.
There is finely preserved short section on the left bank of the river, high above the Puente San Juan, facing the ruins of Corre Viento just two kilometres below Calango. It reappears higher up, rising from the remains of a substantial village to 260 metres above the river, then descending down the hillside in a series of zigzags to the river facing present day Calango. There may have been a bridge over the river here – one is shown in a hand drawn map dated 1586, created by the Corregidor, the Governor of Huarochiri, in response to a demand by King Phillip II for details on all his possessions.
Certainly the road re-appears on the opposite side of the river five kilometres higher up. At La Capilla it rises from the remains of a settlement, amongst whose walls and stones a piggery now stands. A vineyard is being planted amongst the ruins, and bones, gourds, pieces of cloth and broken ceramics lie scattered amongst the vines. Several of the boulders around are marked with so-called cupules, small round depressions of uncertain purpose, a centimetre or two in diameter and a centimetre deep. One rock has a fan of three lines of cupules, another has four or five on the shoulder of the rock looking across the river, another liad flat has twenty or thirty round holes.
Walking up the valley upstream from La Capilla on the modern road, I can follow the track of the path on the far side, climbing from the modern bridge, crossing the rocky face of the mountain as a thin line before dropping towards the river again. It appears intermittently, at times clearly visible with foundations of layered stones, then disappearing as it reaches impossible cliffs, or perhaps climbing higher and away from the river to cut across the mountains where the river bends.
Following on Google Earth we see the track climb and then edge round the sheer cliff, only to vanish. From this perspective, there are dozens more paths visible along the ridges on either side of the valley. They head off south and north towards parallel valleys, a network of paths, apparently left by people and their grazing animals, with the particular pattern of multiple tracks contouring along a slope. At times there are also circular enclosures, like corrals for penning animals, sometimes two or three together, where paths join.
The track up the valley was probably built to transport goods by trains of llamas, perhaps from the coast to the highlands. Goods have been moved this way in Peru for thousands of years.
The Incas are frequently credited with creating one of the wonders of the ancient world in the Qhapaq Ñan, the road network stretching 5000 kilometres from present day Colombia to Chile and Argentina, the length of the Inca empire at its height.
A main highway along the Sierra, the highlands, was paralleled by another along the coast of Peru down to Chile, with interconnecting routes down the valleys. The network is said to total 40,000 kilometres of roadway, through coastal deserts, over ravines on rope bridges, up stone stairways over mountain passes at a breathless 5000 metres, across marshes on pontoons, and through humid tropical forests.
For many years this was all assumed to be Inca work. But the Incas above all created their own history, and as with stonework, irrigation, metalwork, weaving, they synthesised or transferred skills across their empire. Their talent was managerial, they made things happen, but it was not all their own invention.
The chroniclers, such as Garcilaso Inca de la Vega and Pedro Cieza de Leon, are ardent in their praise of the engineering that went into the road network. Garcilaso was an Inca born just 17 years after the Spanish invasion from an Inca princess and a Spanish fighter. He starts his masterwork by describing how his mother´s relatives would visit. “On these occasions, the conversation turned almost invariably to the origin of our kings and to their majesty. It also concerned the grandeur of their empire, their conquests and noble deeds, their government in war and peace.”
So his is not an independent voice, but he is honest about his sources, and his writing runs through with both pride and a sense of loss. “Being but a child, I came and went freely among them, and I listened with the rapt attention with which at this age one listens to fairy tales”.
When he comes to describe the Inca roads, he chooses to quote others. “These two roads constitute such a gigantic achievement, that no single description suffices to describe them.”
Augustin de Zarate describes how Inca Huaina Capac constructed “…a great wide highway, all along the the cordillera. To do this meant razing peaks and crests, or elevating the roads above chasms and valleys, by means of stone walls that sometimes reached fifteen or twenty stades [one stade being two metres]”.
And on the coast “…the indians cleared all…obstacles and succeeded in building a road that was perfectly uniform and continuous, well banked on both sides, and forty feet wide…one had to pass through vast stretches of sand constantly being shifted by the wind…” But the indians marked out the road through the sand by poles planted at intervals. “Today most of these poles have disappeared, because the Spaniards used them to make fires, but the roads the indians built across the valleys are still there.”
And Garcilaso can not resist adding his own poignant commentary.
“None of all this has resisted the ravages of time and war, and today almost nothing remains. Along the coast too, the only things left, the merest memories of the great highways of old, are the poles protruding here and there from out the wind-driven sand, to guide the traveller and keep him from losing his way.”
This is wonderful, sonorous stuff, and there are, in places, the tracks of the roads to demonstrate all that was said. But they are of course not all made by the Incas, who only created their empire in a hundred years before the Spanish arrived to destroy it.
There were thousands of years of different cultures and peoples, on the coast and in the highlands, before the Inca, each with their own ceramics, architectures, gods and rituals. And one remarkable feature is how widespread and intermingled were the goods, the ideas, the icons and the technologies.
Five thousand years ago, Caral traded not only with coastal fishermen a day´s journey away but also high into the Andes. Further north, and the four thousand year old temple at Ventarron reveals ceremonial offerings including a parrot and a monkey from the humid forest on the Eastern slopes of the Andes, 200 kilometres to the East over 4000 metre mountain passes. Almost three thousand years ago the Chavin style is evident from temples close to Lima on the coast, up to the defining stone temple at Chavin de Huantar, perhaps located here in what is still today a remote valley of the Cordillera Blanca because it straddled one of the simplest routes from the coast to the jungle. The people there ate clams and shellfish from the Pacific. They also reared llamas.
It is clear enough that roads, trading routes and extensive links between coast and highland existed long before the Incas, so the trackway contouring the cliffs of the Mala valley is of indeterminate age. But it was most likely a route for llama trains heading up the valley, two metres wide, and it passed near a group of giant black boulders, smoothed by historic river waters. Here at Cochineros, on level ground close to the river, it may even have been a suitable place to rest and feed the llamas in the afternoon. And here on the rocks are repeated images of llamas or camelids, some individual, other in groups of three of four, many of them with a human figure.
There is a ridge of solid ground heading directly north through the northern part of the orchard, used as a footpath today. It passes on the uphill side of the stones the burial niches. If it was once a road, its continuation has now been swept away by the erosion of the river just upstream from the stones. A riego or water channel, which passes the Computer Rock is now left hanging over a drop to today`s river channel. It might be possible to see the construction of such a track where the river has cut away its foundations.
There may be more than a hundred such figures, spread across fifteen stones. The camelids are unmistakeable, and, many of them, beautifully drawn, though there are different styles of drawing. What is not clear is why they are here and, dare we ask, what do they mean? Perhaps there are clues here as to who used the road, or perhaps the road can tell us something about who drew on the stones, and when.
