Free Cloud Road by John Harrison Page A

her vegetable garden towards me. I thought how kind it was of her to come out in the uncomfortable conditions to help me. She stabbed a shrivelled finger at my pack. ‘What are you selling?’
    ‘Nothing, it’s my tent and clothes.’
    ‘Hah!’ she said.
    I glanced at my map and looked up to ask her a question. She was gone, rolling back through the dust-caked potatoes. I turned round to look back up the trail, and there, at last, a dozen miles behind me, was the mountain I had slept under the night before: Chimborazo. It had thrown off the cloud, and was shining. It is a very high volcano: the top seven thousand feet lie under permanent snow and ice; but the sheer bulk of it was overwhelming. It belongs in another, vaster, landscape but has been lent to us to remind men they have souls. For Humboldt, such sights must have clinched his theories that the whole could be intuited from such Olympian examples of nature. I took my tired feet into the town, with many long backward glances. In town, there was a bonus: the volcano Tungurahua was erupting.
Riobamba
    Like most Andean cities, Riobamba has been flattened by a natural disaster, in this case, an earthquake in 1797 which levelled much of Ecuador and killed 40,000 people.A contemporary, González Suárez, captured the peculiar terror that earth-changing events commanded in an era when Christian men believed the earth was made in seven days, and had remained unchanged ever since:
    and some mountains, letting go of their foundations, turned over on grasslands and smothered them completely, changing the face of the earth: the Culca Hill descended over the city of Riobamba, and buried a large part of the population; in some places the ground split apart swallowing trees, gardens, homes and cattle.
    Having been rebuilt over two centuries, Riobamba lacks the look of Ambato, that it was all built by the same company, or, worse, Latacunga, which looks as if it was all made from the same batch of cement. In the handsome main square, the old Colonial façade of the cathedral was side-lit, throwing the heavily carved columns, doors and panels into high relief. Behind it, the side-streets looked east, up to the mountains where large cumulus and cumulo-nimbus clouds were building. As the afternoon grew late, their whites and pale dove-greys were picking up tints of lemon, rose and gold, when, suddenly, as the clouds rolled back for a few minutes, I could see black dust boiling out of the crater of Tungurahua: a glimpse of a devil’s kitchen under those celestial clouds.
    At 16,475 feet, Tungurahua, meaning Black Giant, is not one of the tallest Ecuadorian volcanoes but it is one of the most active, almost continuously belching out steam and dust, creating its own mantle of cloud and vapour. The latest eruption began in October 1999, and initiallyprompted temporary evacuation of the entire town of Baños, on the north side of the volcano. I climbed to a small park which overlooked the whole of Riobamba. To the north, the snow and ice of Chimborazo was glazed in the delicate pink of water seeping from cut strawberries. To the south, Tungurahua poured coils of dense black clouds up into the fluffy gold and white cumulus. The Local Puruha people of Pastaza valley believed Chimborazo was male and Tungurahua female, and they were the gods who had created their people and the cosmos: no wonder. I stopped, mouth open; but no one else gave it a glance. Just another day living with volcanoes.
    A few blocks above the main square, there is a famous Museum of Religious Art at Riobamba’s convent. The Andes produced some superb woodcarvers, and Riobamba had works by the very best: a native Ecuadorian called José Olmos who was active in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The anatomy of his figures is superb, and the carving approaches perfection. The limbs have an eerie sheen to them, like that on a body hovering between life and death. It was produced by rubbing animal fat into