Dear all,

From time to time, like Odysseus, a wanderer will come across something so astounding that they are rendered speechless.

I want you to come back with me to 1970, when something truly awful occured.

The place is Yungay, in the Peruvian Andes, about forty miles north of Huaras.

Huaras is one of those frontier towns, a place where a gumbo of souls gather for their own reasons; to escape, to widen their horizons, to challenge themselves.

Huaras for example, is one of the places where the Peruvian armed forces form a redoubt against their faceless and implacable enemy.

The Cordillera Bianco and Nero in the Andes.

Their vehicles cannot stray too far from this frontier town, all roads rise to impossible terrain for mechanical transport.

We're talking Shining Path territory here, their logos are still freshly painted in blood against the white walls of the scattered proud houses.

All frontier towns have a manic, surreal edge about them.

There's a tangible bite of tension and unease among the pollution, dust and dirty fumes from ancient cars.

The boots on your feet are worth about two years wages.

People look at you hungrily yet warily.

It's not that easy to mug someone when there's a tank on every street corner.

But leaving Huaras and climbing into the Andes, it's impossible not to stop and consider the tragedy that occurred in Yungay.

On the last day of May, 1970, some thirty thousand people perished  in the small town of Yungay.

Three people survived.

An avalanche, some fifteen miles as the crow flies from this sleepy town, swept towards it with a wall half a mile high of liquid rock and ice.

The people did not stand a chance.

When you look at the landscape, see the gardens of wild flowers, dipping butterflies and the gentle hum of crickets, it's hard to imagine this paradise being anything other than benign.

Yet the terrible, beautiful countenance of Huascaran still gleams menacingly on the horizon.

Like golden crowned and jagged teeth, these peaks some 22,000 feet high hover calmly over the valley, peering down like cold Gods from on high.

And like Vulcans hammer Huascaran tore a side of herself off and hurled it at the earth below.

The landscape makes the imagining worse.

Although you can see the monster of the Andes in the distance, as you'd expect, the land is rolling and waving as it weaves it's way up to the foothills.

People may not have seen the mountain slip, though they would certainly have heard its awful bellow, as this terrible calving staggered and lurched its drunken way towards its final cataclysm.

The last thing that they would have seen was the actualisation of a dreadful rumour spawned mile upon mile away.

The wall of ice and rock would have swept over the brow of a steep hill and descended with dreadful fury upon the hapless people beneath its inexorable tread...

...it's very quiet here.

It's hard to imagine those final shrieks and cries of despair, or the realised silence of those that simply stood and watched their doom embrace them.

All there is is the odd tug of wind in your hair, the small zips that whistle and whir in your ear, and the perfumes of busy weeds.

There are no birds.

And then your eye catches the remains of a vehicle, filled with liquid rock, stuck improbably some fifty foot above you, a frozen cameo of the horror of that day.

And then you realise that it is a shocking sculpture, everywhere are towers and troughs of twisted metal, bone and improbable trees that rise grotesquely out of sheer rock.

Each and everyone like a crucifixion.

Your head turns a little more, and then you behold the mass graves of those that perished that awful day.

A huge mausoleum towers above this quiet idyll, with thirty thousand graves puncturing your sense with its dreadful roll-call.

To the left Cordilerra Nero, to the Right Cordilerra Blanco.

And then the head turns again.

It is drawn to the one building that withstood that dreadful tempest.

The Church.

It still stands.

Within it were three people privately praying when the land became liquid and drowned the light of Yungay in one crushing embrace.

They were the ones that stood in the new dawn, as it faded and settled, and beheld the cataclysm that had somewhow spared them.

The whole valley is a cemetery.

Later, I looked down from Huascarans dizzying heights and tried to spot between the stabbing and hard won breaths the wreckage and tomb that is Yungay.

I couldn't even see it, deep down there on the insignificant earth beneath the scudding clouds.

Such is the view from the mansions of the Gods.

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....I think this grotesque cameo scored the core of my soul so deeply because of something that had occurred here in Wales in a town called Aberfan, a small stones throw away:

'It was a tremendous rumbling sound and all the school went dead. You could hear a pin drop. Everyone just froze in their seats. I just managed to get up and I reached the end of my desk when the sound got louder and nearer, until I could see the black out of the window. I can't remember any more but I woke up to find that a horrible nightmare had just begun in front of my eyes'

I was but a child, myself.

Imagine a small town with no children.

None.

They're all dead, buried under this slipping slag.

There's no-one to play with, not any more.

Every man and woman, able or otherwise threw their coal shovels into their sacks, and their children their pointless plastic spades and buckets and battled their way to the village to try and help; by car, by donkey by foot and by damn.

It was all too late.

All they were able to do was to dig up the dead.

We're a tiny and ancient country, on the hinterland of Western Europe.

Not many people know about us.

We're not especially famous, we're fiercely proud, love food and wine and poetry and song and battle and...our children.

To lose such a treasure as your children in one fell moment is hard, very hard to bear.

It still hurts.

It still seizes the heart and grips until the tears flow especially when deep within our cups.

And there's a hole in our hearts.

And after all these long damned years we still grieve.

Seeing those shrieks of tortured life thown up and frozen in the liquid river of ice and rock in Yungay only served to remind me of Aberfan.

I don't think anyone else will care much, but that's to be understood.

The thing is, that I'd never heard of the place until I trod on the soil.

It was almost an accidental, incidental, by the way sort of excursion as we were heading for the peaks in the Cordillera Blanca.

But I'll never forget the tortured sculptures that still loom.

'When I went to Bavaria with a few from my German class we had an opportunity to tour Dachau, but were too tired and broke to do so. We noted the faces of the other kids who went when they returned, though. That was almost as poignant as having gone there ourselves'

Oldsoul

I've never seen a concentration camp.

Did you know the British invented them by the way?

And no birds sing.

I remember visiting ground zero in New York, shortly after the attacks on the twin towers.

I paid my repsects, but I'll never forget catching the eye of a not so elderly American man; we locked for the briefest of seconds, and I'll never forget the pain, the loss, the bewilderment and confusion in his soul in that sad devastated glance.

How could this happen?

I had no answers.

I couldn't even begin to understand his pain, or that of my girlfriend and her personal loss.

The ruins were still smoking.

Not many people realise that so many other buildings around the twins were devastated.

You'd even idly kick away at a piece of glass on the floor and suddenly wonder if...

...at Yungay it was a deeply differentl shock, I'm convinced that the earth echoes the loss of so many souls.

The tortured structures, shrike-like impaled on muddy thorns.

I imagine that Dachau, Belsen or any of the other pits of human arrogant excess are also filled with silence, as thought the land remembers.

And no birds sing.

I've seen Culloden, and many other battlefields here in Britain.

I've read 'Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee' but cannot remember quite the author.

But my heart heard.

'And I've roamed through dead neighborhoods where race riots took place in the 60's, still standing like a graveyard of buildings, burned out skeletons abandoned and forgotten by their owners, yards turned to fields where mice and rats play amid rusty nails and weathered scrap'

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Now this is spooky.

I wrote the original post about two days before I became aware that there is now an alert around Huascaran for another avalanche of similar potential.

I think it was on Saturday that I read about growing concerns of glacial slippage.

Now why would that be?

I've always been aware of the dangers in the glaciers (you pass simple crosses indicating where an avalanche has buried the foolishly or unluckily intrepid. The most moving I came across was the mass grave of some twenty Argentinian climbers, there are no names on that lonely cross among those lofty heights), how could you not when the consequences of these beasts of grinding ice are all storming slowly around?

They defined the earth, they made the earth and they shaped the earth.

And we cower beneath their consequence.

yechydda,