Walking up the valley from La Capilla on the modern road, you pass through riverside orchards with occasional houses and farm buildings. There are workers in the fields, farming their own lands. Behind a simple brick building with a few chickens inside, there is a round boulder as high as a man. On the south face are animals, perhaps quadrupeds, scarcely identifiable. Lizards climb the rock, low down on the right there appears to be a shark. Looking over the boulder you can see down to the river below, and on the other side, half a kilometre ahead, scattered on a flat terrace between the river and the moutain side, there are four or five great black boulders the size of houses.
In August or September, you can descend to the river from the Retama stones, and walk across the stony bed of the river, with the slow flowing water hardly reaching your knees. Following the opposite bank you will see the first giant black boulder. You can walk onto the broad and undulating upper surface from the orchard of miniature apple trees planted around it, but it drops sharply and is undercut on the Eastern face towards the river, so that it seems to be balanced on the terrace. Approaching from the south you will see a curious and beautiful stylised bird, with broad wings and a thin curving tail, and a train or crest of triangles curving over its head, with a round eye and sharp beak pointing upwards. It is a remarkable fantasy that resembles nothing in nature. It does recall figures moulded in baked clay on the walls of Chan-Chan, the great citadel of palaces – twelve or more – of the Chimu, who dominated the northern coast for five hundred years before the Incas.
Slightly above, and to one side, stands a thin faced creature that could at first be taken as a camelid for its feet and body. But it has a short neck, three sharp ears and a tail curving over its back in a spiral.
Looking up the sloping face above you there are several groups of llamas or camelids – with a distinctive shape, the neck almost as long as the body and legs, and a short straight tail, slightly raised.
Beneath a smooth natural ridge there is a narrow band of almost vertical rock, a panel running horizontally across the face. Here we see a man with a rope or a snake in one hand and grasping a llama by the neck with the other. A line of five llamas follows the man. At the rear, possibly with another human, is a four legged camelid, this last drawn crudely and apparently over the first line. The band and the ridge form a virtual road across the rock, along which the llamas and the men are walking.
As you walk up from the river bank to the terrace, following a path round the stone, you will meet another group of six llamas, walking in a line, towards a man who holds a T-shape in one hand.
The rock ascends in smooth waves, of water-worn black and grey towards the north and at the top it flattens out, so that is more than ten metres long. You can walk five metres across the top of the rock to look over the drop onto the lower terrace. This lower exposed side facing the river must have been under the ground when this rock lay on the bed of the river being shaped by the waters, for it remains rough surfaced and flat.
The surface of the boulder facing the sky has a group of beautifully drawn rounded Ts, one almost a metre across, and dozens more, smaller, cruder, scattered across the upper folds. This is the Rock of the Tumis.
Twenty metres ahead is another great rock rising above the terrace of apple trees, Its visible face could be interpreted as a scene of two figures on a pathway towards a mountain peak, where lobster figures with fox head belts hold up, or touch, the glaciers. Three small llamas scamper across the upper slopes of the mountain, whilst to the side are four full bodied llamas, faint, and much overdrawn by other images.
These are strange misshapen beasts, showing all four legs. They may not even be llamas, but they have much in common with three similar animals on a rock ahead, a rock whose main image as you approach is a two headed serpent writhing across the upper surface.
The bicephalic serpent is common enough in Peruvian iconography, and is often seen on rocks, though nowhere as fine as this. Chavin engravings over two thousand years pulsate with writhing serpents, almost always in pairs. In el Museo de Larco in downtown Lima, a fine Moche ceramic from a thousand years later shows priests drinking the blood of sacrificed warriors, a two headed serpent forming the diving line between the world of men and the world of gods. It was a particular favourite too of the Nazca, a double headed serpent often extending from the mouth of a feline headed flying god.
Low down towards the water is a long flat rock with one side at ground level, and the other dropping to a sandy terrace which overhangs the river bed two metres below. On the upper face is a line of five llamas led by a human figure, close down to the gravel, damaged where a flake of rock has broken off, and a sixth lower down. These are right angled, thin line figures.
Circling around the rock and down towards the river you see three llamas with a man before and a man behind, apparently freshly drawn at eye level, and of very poor quality.
Looking up then at the sloping face from below, a man stands with two llamas, above a crack running horizontally across the face of the boulder. Further along the same crack, stand two more llamas. The structure of the rock has been used to show these four as if they are walking a trail on a mountain side.
All these however are just a prelude to the most northern rock, the Rock of the Llama Trails.
Approaching from the South, we are greeted by a man facing us with arms outstretched on either side. Following the low flat rock round to the left we find three llamas. Further on there is a man leading a llama by a rope, four or five further llamas nose to tail walking in line above. A few metres North we have four llamas, one smaller, possibly a youngster, and then at the Northern end of the rock, we have another man facing us with arms outstretched, one holding a rope whose other end is attached to a llama´s neck.
The rock is naturally fissured, presenting five separate panels to someone walking upriver on the upper side. The rock is flat, and you can walk up onto it, and there are other designs on the upper surface – stars and series of panels dominated by groups of llamas, drawn low down, close to the ground: at the two extreme panels we have human figures with arms outstretched as if greeting the observer, in the inner panels we have individuals and groups of camelids with human figures, and a total of twelve llamas on the four panels.
If, as we approached from the South, we had instead followed the rock to the right, we would walk down and be facing a vertical rock face, dominated by images of falling water, spirals and concentric circles. The story here, on the side facing the river, is entirely different.
In the fifth panel the figure appears to be pulling the llama, one leg slightly bent. The llama has a fleshed out body, snout and ears, the rear leg is bent and there is a suggestion of hooves on the front leg. The man could be holding outstretched a giant tumi, but there are several tumi and porros around the figure, which could be later additions.
Human figures holding the camelids by the neck or by a rope to the neck, are seen on at least eleven panels on these rocks, and they often hold something in the other hand. But the iconography of ancient Peru is filled with such figures for five thousand years. Often the object is a simple staff, a symbol of authority, but it can take many forms. Village leaders today in the rural communities are called Vayayok, staff-bearers, in Quechua. Figures on ceramics and woven cloths also carry plants – maize, peppers, sweet potatoes – or digging sticks.
It is tempting to consider the four panels on the western side of the Rock of the Llama Caravans as a complete work conceived as one, using the natural breaks in the stone to tell a story or present a series of events. But there are different styles.
The man that greets us as we walk up from the South is a simple drawing, a stick man with three fingered hands. The four llamas on a different part of the panel behind him are walking in line from left to right, the smallest bringing up the rear, its hind legs below the present level of gravel against the rock. These four are highly stylised line drawings, all right angles, the two legs and neck vertical lines, the nose and back horizontal lines, the two ears at right angles to each other. Two crosses are marked on the rock behind them.
The thin legged stick creatures of the other northernmost rock, lower down towards the river, may be the same artist: stylistically similar, both are drawn on the Western faces of those two rocks, and have one llama with legs extending below the present level of the gravel.
In the second panel we have five llamas walking in line, from right to left, whilst a man holds an individual llama, just below them. But it could be two more llamas also walking right to left, and there could be other human or llamas figures, indistinct, on this rock face which is scratched and bruised.
The next natural panel of the rock undoubtedly has markings, but ill defined. There may be a man holding a llama here, and below, two or three camelids marching right to left, to the North, amongst other scratches.
The fourth panel has several clear figures, not walking in line here but facing in different directions. Three large camelids with thick bodies and legs, face to the South, as if proceeeding left to right. A smaller llama faces the opposite direction, a youngster close to and looking towards its mother.
Stylistically then these panels have two very different figures. The degree of wear and the clarity of the drawings suggests that they
were done at different times, or the panels have worn differently since they were drawn. These almost horizontal rocks could have been walked on, scoured by flood waters, or even been rubbed against by passing llama caravans. The figures carved on the upper surface on the Eastern side are different again, thin and clear.
In all there are more than 80 camelids at Chincheros. If they are in groups, then they are mostly drawn low down on the rock face, they have their feet on the ground, or they are drawn walking across the face of the rock on a natural fissure or curve of the rock face, as if on a mountain path. They respect the horizontals. But apart from the two groups of rectilinear figures, they are drawn differently. They could be created by twenty different artists.
Others, single animals, can seem more like wild animals running free, with four drawn legs, often high up on the rock and running at an angle to the horizontal. Some are wide bodied, strangely proportioned, with short low necks.. These seem to be not just different artists, but artists from a different era. And again there is one beautifully evocative graceful four legged camelid isolated, in motion, on the hidden face of the Rock of Pilgrimage, that seems, created with a few simple lines, to transcend both categories.
…forward to Desert signposts across the Atacama…