I feel her call in the blood. The breathiness of it is a soaring melody whispered across cloud-piercing peaks that line the Valley of the Volcanoes in southern Peru. Now it floats on a thermal, now dips low behind the green heights of a craggy butte. It rises once again, almost inaudible to my straining ears. The supplication is as urgent as the force that pulls the sun up over the horizon at dawn.
“Come,” she demands in an elusive communicative system defined more by the emotional quality of a wolf’s howl than by syntax, grammar, words and sentences. Hers is a flexible language of sensation that arrives in the form of vibration.
I am at Terminal Terrestre bus station in Cuzco’s Santiago District. This is a noisy dusty and daunting place for the inexperienced traveler, especially one who speaks little or no Spanish. The terminal is crowded with people and sales desks representing each of the different companies operating from the station. Vendors shout out the latest departure times, with Arequipa; Puno; Puerto Maldonado; Lima and La Paz, Bolivia being the main destinations.
"Jada, is that you?” This is no vibration reaching me in the language of suggestion, but a voice with a German accent hollering over the din. Incredibly, I come face to face with Carolin, Steffen, Birgit and Axel from Andean Wings Sotupa Eco Lodge in the jungle. My friends had been seated behind me on a late-night flight out of Cuzco. We are all scrambling to find an alternative means of transportation after Latam Airlines cancels our 50-minute shuttle. Rain has been torrential near the Pacific coast, and there are no connections to Arequipa to be had for days.
Spanish tends to be called Castellano in Peru. My companions are grateful that I am a fluent speaker. For 40 Peruvian soles ($10) each, we purchase the last seats on the last bus out of town. Holding on and indestructible we are finally headed to the “White City,” named for the chalky volcanic sillar rock from which much of Arequipa is constructed. Five sole foreigners on a coach filled with Peruvians, we are excited that ahead through the darkness is a 14-hour journey on rugged roads, occasionally dirt roads, across some of the roughest terrain in the country.
For at least 500 years, from about the mid-15th century, she inhabits a space drawn by wind, fire and frost – a stone-cold dominion of diamonds, crystals and sleet. Here, perfect soft snowflakes fall from pewter skies. Entire mountains disappear in mist. In a blizzard, air and land become one. Glacial tides buckle and roll with the shifting of tectonic plates. Ravishing and irresistible, the Ice Maiden of Ampato Volcano stirs and beckons me to her domain. It is she whom I have come so far to meet. Her realm mirrors the glistening pale lilac-colored architecture of the resplendent colonial city called Arequipa, her final resting place.
What must it have been like to see her red blood on the ivory snow?
In 1995, Time Magazine hailed the discovery of a nearly perfectly preserved, sumptuously dressed and adorned Inca girl as “one of the world’s top-ten discoveries.” Juanita, as she was named by the explorers who found her, lived as a child in Cuzco, two hundred and eighty miles northwest of the White City.
Conquistador chroniclers write about an Inca practice called Capac Cocha. This was a ceremony performed on the summits of sacred apus. Here, priests gave their best offerings, including ceramics, metal and wooden objects, llamas, chicha (a fermented corn beer), food, and most importantly, children. The rite transpired every four to seven years when there was a traumatic natural event in the empire (earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, droughts, floods, etc.). It began in Cuzco, the navel of the Inca universe, where preteens of noble birth from all over Tawantinsuyo were singled out to be ritually slaughtered. Were they to be fit for the Gods, not one blemish was to be detected on their bodies, not even a mole.
Girls as young as 10, like Juanita, were prepared for their destinies. They lived completely secluded lives in the acclawasi (the house of the virgins), a secretive enclosure operated by priestesses called mamaconas. By the time our Ice Maiden is no more than 15 years old, she is transformed from a p’asña, or ordinary girl, into an acalla-capacocha – a human sacrifice.
From Cuzco, in a grand procession, Juanita sometimes rides on a litter up and down cobbled roadways that coil along precipitous cliffs. Now and then, when the path is not so steep, she walks through valleys rimmed by frozen pinnacles. She crosses rivers on suspension bridges made of rope and passes communities of houses built from rock and roofs thatched with ichu grass. Priests wear intricately woven alpaca robes decorated with gold and silver beads and hummingbird feathers, their status symbolized by large golden ear plugs. Their arms are adorned with golden amulets inlaid with emeralds and other precious jewels. Juanita herself is dressed in some of the finest cloth ever created. Her tunic and shawl have more than six hundred threads per square inch. Imagine this vision of loveliness wearing only sisal sandals on her tired feet. She is provided with nothing more than coca leaves and chicha to stave off hunger and thirst along the protracted route.
Eventually, perhaps months later, Juanita spies the sheer upsweeping black cone of Ampato Vocano standing at 20,700 feet above sea level. Farther away, Apu Sabancaya growls and rumbles, glowing bright orange. Ash and smoke spewing skyward periodically obscure the sun, causing an eerie light to engulf the surroundings.
The large delegation accompanying Juanita camps on the shoulder of Ampato before the lead priest guides her to its summit. Reaching the sacrificial platform overlooking the vast range of the Andes Mountains, she is hallucinating and suffering from lack of sleep, altitude sickness and exposure. It is a part of her readiness to diminish her fear of death.
A frozen child’s body now rests in a glass-lined, temperature-controlled chamber at the the Andean Sanctuaries Museum in the Catholic University of Santa Maria in Arequipa. From CT scan imaging techniques, it is known that Juanita died from blunt force trauma that cracked the side of her skull near her right eye. DNA testing reveals that her heritage was not only Quechua/Runasimi but also of the Aymara-speaking ethnic group from the Puno and Lake Titicaca region straddling what is today the border between Peru and Bolivia. For part of the year, the Ice Maiden of Ampato is kept in the scientific laboratories, which are behind its five exhibition rooms. From May to December, however, she is presented as a real mummy bundle to the public.
This evening, Carolin, Steffen, Birgit and Axel invite me to enjoy the famous cocktail of Peru, the pisco sour, in one of the White City’s legendary lounges. A smooth silky texture of grape brandy and tart citrus kick of lime on my tongue, Steffen tells me that he finds looking at mummies uncomfortable and disrespectful. I understand and empathize with my friend, but encountering Juanita in person has a way of changing perspectives.
I came to Arequipa to meet the so-called Ice Maiden, and here, suddenly, she is, perfectly preserved with all of her internal organs intact.
We will never know her birth name. Kept in the perpetual twilight of the display room and viewed through frosted glass, she is tantalizingly beautiful. Her body remains in the crouched position in which she was discovered. Not only that, but her figure is still clothed in richly colored and exquisitely crafted garments fastened with silver broaches. Her dark hair is braided in the traditional manner maintained to this day by women descended from her kind. With high cheek bones, mouth slightly open and eyes narrowed, her elongated face has a remote look as if she were peering into the mystery of an eternal afterlife. The exhibition at the Andean Sanctuaries Museum is one of the most powerful I have experienced. Freed from the constraints of chronological time, I feel her viscerally, almost to the point of tears.
Janice Jada Griffin is a graduate of Sotheby’s Institute Of Art in London, a designer and an internationally-sold painter who owned her own art gallery in Portland, Oregon, for a decade. She lives and works in Santa Fe, and is currently writing a book based on her ongoing experiences in Peru. For more information, visit avant-garde-art.com or email her at soul@avant-garde-art.com.
