Running Down the Cliff

Snow and ice, blinding. Black rock where the slopes are too precipitous for the snow to cling.

A scattering of animated specks against the white: hominids like fine-ground black pepper grains, imperceptibly minute if not for their jerky progress at the base of the dwarfing wave of snow.

Noon, neither high nor low in the Sierra. Location uncharted.

Uncharted, that is, by the New People and their synthetic Associated Republic. The “grains” know exactly where they are.

Zooming in, there are three smaller, darker motes and three larger and lighter. Zoom another stop, and one of the larger is resolved into a white camelid glistening, only a shade less dazzling than the snow behind her. A rough sidesaddle is strapped on the beast’s slim frame, and perched on it is a tiny female form, staying stable without apparent effort as the llama-like animal picks its way through the jumbled debris left by an ice field’s recent retreat.

Zoom in one more stop and her nonchalance in the saddle becomes more impressive, for she is an elder. The three smaller motes are her son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter, all on foot, leading two more dazzling white camelids heaped with the family’s gear.

Now we are in the nucleus of this Ollatambo family, outsiders privileged to observe without intruding. It is up to us, as representatives of our own cultures, whatever they may be, to absorb this moving picture as objectively as a landscape or still-life, leaving idealization or denigration in the cold rivulets of meltwater flowing under the gravel.

“Nayaraq, catch up! The birds will come later!” Nayra had raised herself off the side saddle, pushing off from a stirrup with her left foot as she leaned forward to emphasize her instructions, while her right foot wrapped around the belly of her mount for balance. As she settled back easily, her granddaughter, studying a rivulet descending from the snow at the rear of the seven-creature caravan, straightened from her crouch and hurried to join her mother in leading the smallest of the three camelids.

“What did you see in that water?”, Pilpintu asked her daughter as the nine-year old ran up to her. “Bugs and a little bird, Mommy. The bird was swimming!”

“Yes, that's a yuraquma. She walks on the bottom of the stream and CATCHES the bugs!” As she said “catches!” the young mother made a playful grab at her kid. The girl giggled and squirmed away.

The pair caught up with Chambi, who had reined in his animal to take the opportunity to instruct his daughter. “Nayaraq, we're trying to get to the farm before the sun sets. Do your bird watching later, when we're not on the move. You don't want to get lost out here!”

The girl's black eyes grew wide as she contemplated that possibility. She took her mother's hand and ambled on with a downcast gaze. The party resumed their plodding progress, picking their way carefully between boulders. Never in a hurry, they stopped frequently on the lee side of the larger monoliths to shelter from the constant east wind. At these stops, Chambi pulled a large hollowed gourd out of his animal's saddle pack, removed the rolled bark plug, and dispensed chuno, a dried and salted chopped tuber, to all. He was careful to shake Nayaraq’s portion out of the special smaller kids’ gourd, so that she would not be overactivated by the energizing “ally” with which the adult snack had been liberally dusted.

Thus, energized and rested, the family continued switchbacking up to the next pass, following no trail, because, although they had taken the route many times, their travels were not frequent enough nor their parties large enough to make any impression on the titanic landscape. Being more or less unacculturated Ollatambo, no one in the group even considered the fact they and the five extended family members they were traveling to visit were the only hominids currently to be found in what the New People would consider a prodigious area. In fact, if a line were drawn from a point representing the little band and their nearby kin (for our group was now less than a day’s journey from the farm, essentially in the same place as their destination relative to the scale of the gigantic range) to the nearest group of unrelated Semirideans (as it happens, a military group on a “routine” patrol in the Western foothills, 102 kilometers to the Northwest) and then that line were rotated, the resultant swept-out circle would bound 32,385 square kilometers. In the desolate world of the Sierra Descuidado, this felt crowded.

An indeterminate time passed, a time long enough for Nayaraq to be tempted to relieve boredom by running off the trail to investigate this, that or the other intriguing sight, sound or smell. She restrained herself, for the second incident would certainly draw a sterner response from her father.

Just as she was about to throw caution to the wind, Nayaraq looked up at the mountain spur they were ascending and spied the remnants of the ancient fortress. Her heart leapt up in happy anticipation. Despite her youth, she had been this way enough times to have learned that the fortress marked the top of the last climb, and on the other side of the crest, the trail dropped like a stone to her aunt’s farm.

She looked forward to the dizzying descent. If she was lucky, her parents would let her run down it. Where there was room alongside the path, her camelid would stick with her, leaping from boulder to boulder in parallel with his mistress. Nayaraq envisioned her exhilarated arrival at her aunt’s and uncle’s, where she would certainly get to eat and drink treats while she waited for her parents and grandmother to catch up.

At the top, the party stopped in the shadow of the ruined fortress. Even if they had not been tired from the final ascent, they would always rest there. It was a sign of respect to the ancestors who, millennia before the intrusion of the new people, had interlocked a multitude of polished stones without mortar to create a shelter into which not a drop of meltwater fell even if snow were heaped on the roof to twice the height of Chambi. They also needed to pay respect to the view over Apolaki, a view that would be petrifying to anyone outside the indigenous Sierra cultures. For the Ollatambo, a group from which acrophobia had been totally eradicated by selection operating over the millennia they had spent in the planet’s most vertical environment, the immense crater inspired an awe completely uncontaminated by fear.

Chambi looked straight out over the caldera, intent on the opposite rim, gaze leaping over 110 kilometers of free space, even further to the peaks rising beyond. He searched for clues about the on-coming weather.

Pilpintu fussed with her beasts’ bridle, while Nayra watched Nayaraq affectionately. Among the females, only the nine-year-old joined her father in examining the view, as she did on every journey to her aunt’s. But rather than gaze to the horizon like Chambi, Nayaraq looked straight down, standing at the very edge of what to flatlanders would have been a stomach-churning abyss.

She felt no fear. Her parents did not gesticulate or warn.

Looking down at the tiny mote that was her aunt and uncle’s farm house, Nayaraq could easily imagine she was riding on the shoulders of one of the giant soaring birds of prey that nested in the Sierra. For from her cliff-edge vantage point, the sight-line straight down was as unobstructed as it would be for a bird. It was as though she was on a stone magic carpet floating over the caldera below.

This was because the cliff below her was concave. It was a wave of rock, and if a plumbline were shot towards the zenith where its base intersected the caldera floor to the cliff top platform on which the little girl stood, it would emerge several meters behind her. At an undefined time in the future the outsized overhang would surely sheer off and bombard the floor with its fragments, but the rock of the Sierra in this part was derived from an exceptionally monolithic ancient batholith, without the junctions and unconformities of more complex rocks that enabled stressful conditions to weaken the matrix to shattering point. Although the Ollatambo showed not even a soupçon of worry about this eventuality, if they had, it would be totally reasonable to reassure them that their children could continue perching on it for the foreseeable future and beyond.

Chambi had absorbed what he needed from his cloud-study. As soon as he lowered his gaze, Pillpintu prepared to depart. The little caravan moved along the threshold of the cliff for a few hundred meters, then seemed to disappear over the edge. However, an observer stationed at the point where they “vanished” would have seen the group slowly sink into an artificial defile in the rock until the sides hid even the head of the tallest animal. Had this observer had the courage to creep close to the cliff face she would have seen this huge groove, the width of which accommodated Nayra mounted sidesaddle on her camelid, do a hairpin turn and debouch onto a clearly artificial ledge which sloped steadily down the cliff face. The walkway narrowed as it emerged from furrowing the platform of the ancient fortress, and as a ledge it was just wide enough to accommodate the width of a camelid’s stance.

When Nayaraq saw they were about to emerge, she nimbly passed those in front of her and began running down the ledge quickly enough to make her hair stream back. “She can't wait to see her aunt,” Nayra chuckled to her daughter, as the girl disappeared around the first hairpin turn. “She’ll have Jallu all to herself for a whole hour at that rate!”

The family continued down the cliffside, always aware, but never fearful of the abyss to their left.