Life and Death in the Andes by Kim MacQuarrie

Author:Kim MacQuarrie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Early in the morning on the seventh day of her journey from Cusco, at 16,200 feet on the lower flank of Ampato volcano, Juanita woke suddenly with a start. She’d slept only fitfully ever since she and the rest of the procession of llamas, priests, and assistants had left Cusco the week before. Four months after learning that she’d been chosen by the emperor as an “aclla-capacocha,” whose destiny was now to be joined with the gods, Juanita was told by a priestess that she was to prepare herself for a journey the following day. That night, Juanita had not been able to sleep. It had been months since she’d last seen her friend Quispe, who was now married to an Inca noble and could no longer visit the Acclawasi. It had also been four months since she’d last glimpsed her father, on Cusco’s sacred square. It had been a year since she’d last seen her father, a brief interlocking of the eyes when she’d spotted her in a crowd.

The morning of her departure, Juanita had said good-bye to those acllas she had lived with and also to the mamacona, or head priestess. The mamacona had placed both hands on Juanita’s bowed head and had whispered for her to be strong—for she had been chosen and was blessed to be with the gods. Juanita’s memory of the following week was blurred—sometimes she’d ridden on a litter, borne by members of the Rucana tribe up and down stone roadways that twisted like snakes along sheer cliffs. At other times, when the ground was not so steep, she’d walked in the middle of the procession, through valleys rimmed by ice-topped mountains and past small villages whose inhabitants bowed or sometimes fell to their knees when they saw the procession pass.

Just yesterday, Juanita had glimpsed for the first time the mountain that was their destination—a sheer black, upswept cone with a white cap of ice on top. When they’d first came in sight of it and a priest had told her what it was, her heart had seemed to stop beating. The procession of priests and the train of llamas carrying supplies had come to a stop, and the priests had stretched out their arms and bowed. There, besides Ampato, rose another cone-like mountain, but from the top of this one a stream of gray-white smoke rose skyward and then flattened and formed a gray mantle above. “Apu Sabancaya,” one of the priests had told her. It was the god who dwelled within this volcano who had shaken the whole region. Even now, Juanita could feel his sudden movements through the ground.

That night, the volcano had glowed red in the distance, and they could hear the apu roaring and grumbling, the mountain god enraged, with flames sometimes bursting from the volcano’s mouth. Because of the roars and the red glow and because of everything that had happened since her meeting with the emperor, Juanita had been unable to sleep. Now, in fact, she ate very little: some roasted corn and a few other vegetables.

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