The cliffs leaned towards each other until the river was more of a creek. Even so, I didn’t expect to see what we did when it tipped us round the last, sharp bend, past the deep caves with their salt stalactites and scatterings of glass boulders.
Where there used to be a bridge of land, the river had worn through and made three towering stacks. Clem worked out later that they were six hundred and twelve feet high. I couldn’t see the tops of them properly, but around the bases were wharves, arranged like spokes, and then stairs and stairs and stairs, up to a tangle of wooden scaffolding that supported the corners of houses and spiralling gantries. As we came closer, I could see people moving; there was a man with a wheelbarrow full of pineapples.
The sun came out suddenly. Greenish blue shadows fell across the boat and turned the riverwater turquoise. The light was shining down through translucent parts in the stacks, which weren’t rock but glass. It had been worn shiny and clear by the weather and the river. When I put my hand out to the coloured shadow beside me, the light was hot. The boatman steered us away from it but he didn’t quite move quickly enough. Where the tip of the boom swung into the light, the grass sail caught fire. The boatman squeaked. Raphael, who had been drinking something from the cup of a flask, lobbed the contents at the little fire and put it out before it could spread. He didn’t seem worried by it, but the boatman looked shaken and steered us square down a line of unlensed sunlight.
‘My God,’ Clem said. ‘That’s obsidian. Blue obsidian. It’s formed in a strata over the – that isn’t possible.’ He said it in a nearly accusatory way towards Raphael, who was either too tired or too graceful to take him up on it.
‘Black swans,’ I said, fighting to stay mild. Raphael knew why we were really here. That he hadn’t told anyone so far didn’t mean he might not lose patience if we blamed him personally for one too many geological unlikelihoods or linguistic abnormalities. I would have told Clem to shut up if he had been Charles, but I wasn’t afraid of Charles’s temper. I’d forgotten I was afraid of Clem’s. ‘You know. More in heaven and earth. You don’t know it’s there until it pecks you.’
Clem snorted, still too annoyed with me to laugh. Raphael looked back slowly as if someone had walked over his grave. I frowned, but he shook his head to say it was nothing to do with me.
Where the light made the water clear, there were ruins on the riverbed, chunks of old masonry. I looked up again. The two bridges that connected the first and third stacks to the land were stone, but the middle ones, between the stacks, were wooden. They were recent. The whole great structure must have been eroding always.
I stood up by the prow as we reached the wharves. The river had carved out combes and caves that sang with drips as we passed. It smelled cleanly of hot salt. Rather than flowing straight between the stacks, it had cut deep gullies in the weak places and made a glass beach, almost the same as the rocky ones at home. But here the glass had been smoothed and worn into twisting shapes and dips that whirled the light and played perspective tricks. Nothing was sharp.
The trader steered us to a flat outcrop. Raphael stepped across easily. Clem struggled with it more, still pale from altitude sickness and wet from the river. The boatman held my elbow to help me down. I thought he would get out too to unload, but he only gave the beach an uneasy look and started back straightaway.
‘He wasn’t coming here, then?’ I asked, confused.
‘No, there’s a warehouse back that way. Keep out of the sun,’ Raphael added. He didn’t sound like he thought we would listen.
We followed him in the cooler, safer, unlensed path of sunlight between the left-hand and middle stacks. On the far side, the river was much stronger and foamed over rocks and little crevasses, and from further away was a quiet roar that sounded like waterfalls. The cliffs stayed close after the stacks; a kayak would have made it through, but nothing substantial. Though I could just make out the green of trees at the top, it was impossible to see what sort they were or how dense.
I tripped into a well in the glass beach and thought for a long suspended instant that I was going to fall, but it was an illusion. The dip itself was only a few inches deep, but the glass was clear for about twenty feet. The bottom was a frozen riverbed. There were fish caught mid-turn around weed caught mid-furl. None of it was burned. I leaned down, but the surface was warped into wave-shapes, and everything blurred and distorted. It sharpened again when I straightened.
Nearer the wharves, the smooth glass turned pebbly and green-blue shells lay heaped everywhere. Most of them were stuck to rocks just like ordinary shells would have been. The rocks themselves were all either obsidian entirely or half-vitrified, great chunks of glass and stone all twisted together. The granite made shapes like ink unwinding in water. The boat had been cold, but the beach was so warm now that I had to take off my coat. When I strayed into a stronger patch of sunlight, having drifted sideways trying to get out of one sleeve, I had to jerk away. The heat was fierce there. The glass stratum was about two hundred feet high in the stacks and up to that point the cliffs were pockmarked with black spots and burns, like another waterline where the light was magnified. Birds, little black coot things, had all made their nests well above it. Except for the places exactly beside the stacks, where they were glass, the cliffs were ordinary rock. The obsidian had poured down in its own narrow stream when it was first formed and drawn a great glass stripe across the land. One of the mountains must have been a volcano.
Once we were well out of the hot shadows and in ordinary sun, Raphael stopped and waited.
‘Right. Don’t come down here around midday if it’s sunny, you’ll catch fire. In the forest there is a border marked with salt and animal bones; don’t cross it. There are Indians in the woods and they do not like wandering foreigners. You’ll never see them but they’re there. Just stay away from them and they’ll stay away from you.’ He waited for us to nod. ‘This place is a hospital colony. Most people up there are sick or deformed, so don’t expect help carrying and lifting. You see to yourself, as much as you can. There are no servants.’
‘We didn’t expect to be waited on,’ Clem said.
Raphael made an unconvinced sound and turned away towards the last stack and the wharves there.
‘How quickly can we start out?’ Clem said. ‘For the coffee, I mean.’
‘I’m interested to know when you’re going to admit you’re lying about the coffee and ask me where the cinchona woods are,’ Raphael said over his shoulder. Like it often did, his voice came quiet at first and then strengthened. ‘You’re going to need to. This place is full of coffee but it isn’t full of cinchona. Look around.’
‘Now,’ I said. ‘Where are they?’
‘Merrick,’ Clem snapped.
Raphael looked back. ‘This was shut down as a supply region years ago. Everything that could be harvested has been. Anything left is in Chuncho territory. I can take you round on the road they used to use, but it’s old now and you might not find much even if it is passable. Why did you come here?’
‘We have reports from a few years ago that imply there’s something here worth going for,’ I said.
He frowned. ‘You’re talking about the Dutch. And Backhouse’s expedition. He brought an army battalion, and half those men were killed. You could have gone north. There’s boatloads of the stuff up there.’
I shook my head. ‘Those varieties have a two per cent quinine yield. What you have here is nine per cent at least. Look, we can pay. It will be worth your while, even if it is a trek.’
‘As I say, I’ll show you the path. But I don’t think you’ll find anything.’
‘And if we do?’
‘If you do – then there’s going to need to be some negotiation.’
‘Well, let’s have that out now,’ Clem said. ‘How much do you—’
‘We’re not talking about it now.’
‘Come on, man, a rough figure would be—’
‘I said,’ he interrupted, not loudly. He had never been loud. ‘Not today. It would be a long talk. I’m tired enough already.’
‘All right, all right,’ Clem said. His crossness had taken on an edge of alarm. I felt it too. I had to step back. Raphael was too sharp and too strong, and he was standing side on to us as if he meant to punch one of us in the face. It might only have been how he happened to stop, but I was nearly sure he knew exactly what it looked like, and whether or not he was really thinking of hitting someone, standing close to him had made my spine fuse up. The need to back off was there in the air, like negative magnetism.
‘Mr Martel will burn this place down if anything happens to you, and it’s not safe for you to go off by yourselves,’ he said quietly, more to me than to Clem, like I was an almost acceptable halfway mark. ‘Do you understand? You don’t go anywhere alone. I will take you round on the supply road in the morning. And you can see for yourselves that there’s nothing left, and then you can get out of here before anyone guesses why you came.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
He didn’t look as if he believed me, but he started towards the wharves again. We had to rush through the blue shadows of the stacks in the shade of boulders. The smell of steam hung in those places. The air writhed and the water boiled as it came in over the glass beach.
Chiselled on all the wharves were notices to keep out of the sun in Spanish and that odd, Spanish-phonetic Quechua. There was a barnacle-rough ladder and a set of steps. When we reached the top, there were more steps, far more, spiralling up the stack. They were stone for only a few yards, then the stone crumbled and was replaced by weatherbeaten wood. I thought Raphael would start up them, but he stopped instead by what I thought at first was a cargo winch whose pulley was a dot hundreds of feet above us. There was a loop at the end, the knot cemented into place by age and run through a straight metal bar to make a flat step, broad enough for two or three people to stand on or one to sit down on it like a swing. He nodded us across.
‘On there and don’t fall off.’
‘Really?’
‘It’s higher than St Peter’s. Walk if you like.’
I stepped on and wrapped my arm around the rope. Clem followed me, more unsteadily. He had never been a rigging sort of sailor. Raphael kicked a lever. As we started to rise, he stepped up with us. His weight made almost no difference to the speed. His clothes smelled of burned honey now, from the wax he had used on the statue.
After a few seconds we were well above the docks and passing the great twists in the glass. The winch had been built just where the strongest sun never reached, but there were still intensely hot patches, as hot as open ovens, while snow still feathered only forty feet away downriver. When we rose up beside the falling counterweight, it was an old Spanish cannon stamped with a pomegranate sigil.
‘How big is the obsidian flow?’ Clem said. He was still shivering from the river. ‘If you ever stirred yourself to find out.’
‘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.’