into the sun
The sun sets over Huandoy, leaving behind a crimson and orange trail that slowly fades to blackness.
The moment the sun drops behind the last mountain range the cold becomes intense: another shuddering, mind numbing twelve hours of darkness that crawl their way towards morning.
The sleeping bag cocoons me but I can’t move. I hug my leather boots to my chest to stop them from freezing. I can’t feel my feet.
Thoughts of frostbitten blackened toes float through my mind. I move my toes around to try to get some sensation into them. Half waking, half sleeping I shiver through the thoughts and pictures that spiral inside my head.
One again Ashi and I are standing on the summit of Chopicalqui, thumping one another on the back and I feel only the pain of the first bivouac, the weight of my pack destroying me as I struggle with the shattered rock, two steps up, one step down. It was then that I began to hate that pack. As my body rebelled, refusing to obey my mind, I wept tears of frustration.
The soft snow on this col has frozen into sharp points of ice that prick the fabric of my sleeping bag as I shuffle around. I lie on a flat expanse of snow between the looming masses of Huascaran’s twin summits, neither of the earth or the sky but caught between, suspended, staring out into the blackness of space, trembling, a helpless point of light in a terrible emptiness, stirred by the solar winds.
I hide from the blackness behind colour pictures, travel photographs carefully composed from our wanderings through Peru.
On one, a night train is groping its way along the shores of a lake. Forks of lightning gleam on the sleet that blows across the water. Gobs of water splatter onto the glass windows then run away into the blackness.
Another picture, of an unsteady priest falling over outside the Cathedral, dripping saliva onto his greasy cassock, replaces it. And with it a half man growing out of the gutter, tugging at the rags from around his waist to show the raw meat of his stumps. I again smelt the stagnant water that drifted upon the town through the totora reed banks that edge Lake Titicaca.
Photographs froze the mists rising out of the Urubamba valley, out of the tangle of tree creepers falling away from the jungle covered granite pinnacles. Machu Picchu, the lost Inca city, lay below us.
The first rays of the sun lit the silent stone terraces that hung above the headwaters of the Amazon. But the picture of the beggar intruded, reaching for the two wooden blocks with worn handles on them. He began to move, rising up so that his body was free to swing above the ground.
I shuddered and blinked, opening my eyes to the stars.