Free Trail of Feathers by Tahir Shah Page B

Japanese capital: the bad old days, kept alive by a diet of ornamental cabbages, stolen from Ueno Park. But Peru’s second city couldn’t have been more different from Tokyo except, that is, for its fear of earthquakes. Its low buildings were constructed from sillar, a local pumice the colour of bleached whale bones.
    Arequipe
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as had the time to be sophisticated. They sat in cafés off Plaza de Armas, discussing politics, reading the papers, having their shoes shined. Gone was the scruffy, honest clothing of the Andes. Gone, too, were the dark, furrowed foreheads, born of worry and overwork.
    The manager of Hotel El Conquistador offered me a room for a third of the normal price. In many countries I would think twice about turning up at a deluxe hotel and offering a pittance for the best quarters. But in Peru, where wheeler-dealing dies hard, ruthless bargaining is expected. I asked the manager if he’d heard of a local man who was building a glider. He nodded earnestly.
    ‘Si, si Senor!' 
he clamoured. ‘Everyone knows Carlos. I will telephone him for you.’
    Once my bags had been dragged to the room by the manager’s son, I inspected the bathroom for spiders. I never quite understood why, but Peruvian bathrooms were awash with them. In one hotel, a cleaner told me they came up from the sewers.
    For an hour I waited for the telephone to ring. It did not. There was a delicate tap at the door. I opened it. In its frame was standing a lanky young man with pale skin, sullen eyes, and a mole on his cheek. He looked Russian. He said that his name was Fernando and that Senor Carlos had sent him to collect me. His master was, he confirmed, building a traditional glider. But, he went on in a gravelly voice, his real passion was bringing Juanita back. ‘Who’s Juanita?’
    Fernando smiled nervously at my lack of knowledge. ‘Juanita, the ice woman,’ he said.
    Once aboard his dilapidated red Lada, Fernando insisted on telling me all he knew about Juanita and the campaign to save her. The story began in 1995 when the mummified body of a young Incan girl was discovered on Mount Ampato, not far from Arequipa. The girl, who was entombed in a block of ice, was thought to have been sacrificed to the mountain spirits, some five centuries before. But no sooner had her mantle of ice been chipped away than Juanita, as she became known, became a political hot potato. Like a rock star hurled into the big league at a tender age, Juanita began her world tour. For three years she criss-crossed the United States, shuttled about in a giant deep freeze. At an engagement in Connecticut she was even presented to President Clinton. She was currently appearing at venues across Japan.
    ‘Arequipe ñ as have had no opportunity to enjoy their mummy,’ said Fernando dolefully. ‘We don’t understand why she’s in Japan … we want her back!’
    The scarlet Lada rumbled east from Arequipa, towards El Misti. The fields, terraced by the Incas centuries before, were thick with garlic. Crooked
viejitas
, old women, were busy with bringing in the crop, wide hats shielding them from the winter sun. Fernando explained how the soil was suited well to the cochineal cacti as well as garlic. The female cochineal beetles, he said, are brushed from the cacti and pulverised. It takes seventy thousand of them to make a pound of the red dye.
    Ten minutes later we were pulling into the drive of a spacious wooden house, encircled by a fence of tall cacti. Before I could get out of the car, an elderly man came out to greet me. It was Carlos.
    A pair of bifocals balanced on his nose, magnifying his teal-coloured eyes. He must have been over seventy, but had a youthful energy. His face was refined, edged by un wrinkled cheeks and an angular jaw. A bald patch at his crown was expertly concealed by a wave of oyster-grey hair. Like Fernando, whom he appeared to treat as an adopted son, Carlos spoke good English.
    He led me into the house. The panelled walls of the