The mountain mummies

Before the Incas, Chachapoyas reigned over the High Andes. Stanley Stewart unravels their enigmatic past.

From The Sunday Times - Report Filed June 30, 2002

We reach the Lake of the Condors at twilight, the horses straining on the last ridge. From the top, we gazed down at mountain peaks with haloes of clouds reflected in the lake's polished surface. This was the still centre of ancient Chachapoyan World, the Eden of their sacred geography.

The grave-robber, Lazaro, pointed out the tombs he had looted. They appeared has small, square openings in the cliffs opposite. Back at the scene of the crime, he seemed to shrink into himself, shuffling self-conciously among the sweating horses.

On a wet day in October 1996, Lazaro and a fellow ranch hand were clearing land on this ridge, in the cloud forest of Peruvian Andes, when they spotted the telltale openings on the far side of a lake. Abandoning their work, they tramped round the shore and climbed through the dense foliage to a ledge, where they were confronted with six ancient chullpas (burial houses). The openings were small windows. Peering inside, in the aqueous light filtering down through the forest, they saw scores of mummies. Embroidered on the grubby wrappings were the images of faces gazing back at them.

The Chachapoyas mummies had lain undisturbed above the Lake of the Condors for 500 years. Their eternity began when these regions were the centre of a highly developed pre-Inca culture. But over the long centuries, the world has moved away, and the mountains around the lake has become one of the most remote parts of the Peruvian Andes. Lazaro was a pioneer here, clearing lands that had returned to dense forest centuries before.

With the innocent aplomb of men who had never seen the Bandaged One seek his revenge in Curse of the Mummie, the two men slashed open the mummie wrappings, searching for loot. The dead were exposed. Their limbs, covered with leathery skin, were drawn up in a foetal position and their mouths gaped in silent screams.

Some months after the discovery, in early 1997, when a good deal of material had already found its way to the black market in Lima, the news reached the authorities. Lazaro and his companion were arrested, and a savage operation was mounted. More than 200 mummies, among withcrates of burial gifts -ceramics, wooden carvings, gourds, tapestries, headdresses- were transported to the nearest market town, Leymebamba, 12 hours away by mule. Plans were formulated to build a museum to house the dead and their divine offerings. The tombs represented one of the most spectacular finds of this enigmatic pre-Inca culture.

Even our name for them is an Inca word. Chachapoya means "people of the cloud forests". As a culture, they arose about 800AD. They had a reputation as warriors, weavers and shamans. Like most of the peoples of the Peruvian Andes, they were eventually subsumed into the Inca empire in the 15th century. With the arrival of the Spanish, a century later, disease and forced resettlement in colonial towns spelt the end of the Chachapoyan world. With time, they were forgotten. In years past, this region, on the eastern flanks of the High Andes in northern Peru, was thought to be too steep, too wet and too thickly forested to offer much hope of big archeological finds.

The most famous Chachapoyan moument in the great. fortress of Kuelap, often hailed as one of the most magnificent ruins in the Americas. I reached it on a fine sunny day, with clouds, scudding eastwards between fields so steep that the farmers must have lowered themselves into their crops on ropes.

At almost 10,000ft, the magnificent walls of the fortress rose from their summit. The rebel Inca Manco wanted to make a last stand against the Spanish in this impregnable fortress. Sadly, he never reached it.

The exterior walls are huge -experts have estimated that 40 m cubic feet of masonry were used in the construction of Kuelap, three times the amount used in the Great Pyramid. On the raised terraces are more than 400 buildings, most of them houses. All but five are round. The shape had a religious significance, and the early missionaries struggled to get the Chachapoya into square houses with the same steely determination that their colleagues set about trying to get the Amazonian tribes into boxer shorts.

The cloud forest has succeded where enemies failed: in invading the city. Trees laden with orchids and bromeliads sprout from the houses, bamboo grass and ferns adorn the masonry, and parakeets and hummingbirds inhabit the old rooms.

Like all the best addresses, Kuelap is about location. From the flat head of the citadel tower, one gazes over a vast universe of Andean ranges, marching away on all sides towards distant provinces of sunlight and dark thunderheads. Between their velvet flanks, valleys drop like deep wells. Immediately below us, epic grandeur turned to pastoral detail -twisting paths climbing between bright, irregular fields, red-tiled roofs shining in the sun, a man herding sheep. The only sound was the wind in the wings feathers of a condor gliding overhead.

The drive to Kuelap may be a dizzy business, but it is as nothing compared to the journey to the Lake of the Condors. Above the market town of Leymebamba, the road ends. Horses had been arranged by my guide. We were accompanied by a policeman, El Capitan, who was riding to the lake to investigate rumours of yet another tomb robbery; a watchman sporting a yelow hard hat, a status symbol in these parts; and his wife, barely out of her teens. Strapped to her back was Sandi, their 18-month-old daughter, who accepted 10 hours' jolting on horseback as if it was a spin in a pram through the park.

We started early. The morning mists were still untangling themselves from the stands of maize along the trail. The first stretch lay along a cobbled Inca highway, the old road to the provincial capital. Beyond a fierce stream, we branched away on a trail rising steeply though fields of castle. Tiny thatched houses were set into the slopes, and the gates of pastures were locked as jealously, and probably as ineffectively, as a Mercedes in Moscow.

After an hour or two, the fields and the cottages fell away, and we climbed into cloud forest where the trees were bearded with moss and vines. From her mother's papoose, Sandi chatted happily to gangs of green parrots as they wheeled over the forest canopy. El Capitan, more used to slouching in a pair of Ray-Bans on the main square of Leymebamba, looked as if only a multiple homicide could cheer him up. The trail wound upwards bogs of deep mud and slippery boulders. On this difficult ground, the horses were heroic, one moment clinging to steep rocks, the next sunk in primaveral ooze.

We paused at midday beneath an overhanging rock as the rain swept us from the valleys beneath us. Lunch was manioc, a sort of cold polenta for masochists, wrapped in banana leaves. Then we rode on into an empty bogland croaking with frogs. Stunted trees trainling lichen rags turned their backs to a wind that howled down from the Amazon´s watershed. At the top of the pass, 12,500ft above sea level, we gazed over Andean summits folding away into mountains of cloud. Then we turned downward, three hours through dripping forest to the Lake of the Condors, a bright jewel in the lap of mountains.

We spent the night at the ranch by the lake, the only inhabitation in the district. It was a log cabin with an earthen floor and tin roof. We slept on platforms covered with straw that the horses, ankle-deep in muddy pasture, eyed enviously. A great Chachapoyan city, a centre of Andean civlization, had once stood within yards of this solitary pioneer cabin.

The next morning dawned clear. We rowed across the lake to the tombs, our bow disturbing the relfections of forest and steep escarpments laced with silver waterfalls and dark mountain summits.

Nobody knows what the Lake of the Condors meant.Its beauty alone may have been enough to draw the dead. Perhaps it was a sanctuary of the gods, so that mummification here brought one close to one's maker. Or might have been the place of origin, the paqarina, whrere the first Chachapoya emerged into the world at the beginning of time. Whatever its meaning, the lake is an extraordinary place to be interred, a green paradise of mountainous cloud forest.

On the far shore, we started the ascend through thick forest. Lazaro, who is now a watchman at the site he once looted, led the way. Ladders has been bedded into the slope to aid the climb. Like the trees, they were overwhelmed with an exuberant growth of creepers and vines.

After half and hour, we gained the burial terrace, where the chullpas stood beneath an overhang in the cliff. With their contents now transferred to the new museum of Leymebamba, only the litter of death remained -some mummie wrappings, a few bones, a couple of forgotten skulls and the stange ochre pictographs of stylised figures and animals on the stone walls.

In their protected cleft, the tombs enjoy a dry microclimate in a region that is notorious for its rainfall -more than 150 inches a year. It is this, as much as the mummification, that has led to the remarkable preservation of their contents. The enclosing forest is seething with life, a chaos of irresistible growth inevitable decay. The tomb platform is desiccated and lifeless, the timbers of the chullpas white and cracked, a skull in an empty window frame bleached white. Being careful to avoid the waterfall that hangs like a dripping sheet from the cliffs above, you can stand with one foot in oozing mud an a tangle of vegetation, and the other in dust, straddling the line, here at the beginnings of the Chachapoyan world, between life and death.

Back in Leymebamba, two days later, I went to visit the dead. In their new museum, they now enjoy the care and respect that was intended for them. Most of the mummies, in new wrappings, are stored in a climate-controlled room.

One of their number, whose wrappings have disintegrated, is on display. His skin is like old linen. His hands cradle his face. The jaw muscles have vanished and his mouth is open in the familiar death scream of mummies. He is in the foetal position, his knees drawn up, his long feet curled beneath him. A wisp of black hair survives on his skull. He is clutching a band of unfinished weaving.

Textiles are the great Chachapoyan art form. Weavings, tapestries and brocades fill the walls of the museum with their bright geometric patterns and their strange stylised figures. The colours and the motifs are exquisite. The work is timeless. Here is Chachapoyan inmmortality.

Stanley Stewart travelled as a guest of Cazenove & Loyd Expediciones.

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