Elusive land of light.

• Author: McIntyre, Loren
• Position: Ecuador - Includes related article

ON A MISSION TO UNCOVER ECUADOR'S HIDDEN DIMENSIONS, PHOTOGRAPHERS FROM FOUR CONTINENTS MAPPED THIS NATION'S DIVERSITY IN OVER SIXTY-SIX THOUSAND IMAGES

Years ago I traveled in Ecuador for four months on assignment for National Geographic magazine, taking thousands of pictures and seeing all I could see from peasant to president, from diving underwater with sea lions to climbing Snow peaks under starlight. Often during those days, when Quito was sunny, I would go to the airport, hoping to fly and capture on film a panorama of Ecuador's snow peaks--all but one of them volcanoes--with a single exposure.

All of the great mountains were holy places worshipped by the Incas, who called their ruler Intipchuri, or Son of the Sun, and they honored the sun as the leading deity under Viracocha, the creator of all life. The most spectacular of the six active volcanoes, Sangay, the southernmost, has never been known to cease erupting--although because of heavy clouds laid upon it by Amazonian winds, its Mount Fuji-like cone is seldom visible. Once, somewhere along the southern slope of Cayambe, I stepped from summer into winter--and that is not a play on words--since the equatorial line actually crosses a glacier there. Cayambe is the only place on the earth's surface where both latitude and temperature reach zero. The sierra is the very spine of Ecuador in more ways than geographical: the nation's cultural past and present are inextricably linked to the central highlands in ways akin to the central nervous system of vertebrates.

But as I tried to capture this image from the air, time and again clouds from the Amazon side of the highlands would wreath most of the peaks. As my pilot said, "The mountains are very coquettish. Seldom do they all unveil themselves at once." Then, on the seventeenth try I got lucky: September 6, 1966, dawned cloudless throughout Ecuador. I lay prone in the Plexiglas nose of a Canberra, my heartbeat accelerating at takeoff since my eyes were only a few feet above the runway. Upon reaching forty thousand feet altitude, I heard on the intercom an almost ancestral chant as the copilot recited the array of mountains visible from north to south: "Cayambe, Sara Urco, Antisana, Cotopaxi, Chimborazo, Tungurahua, El Altar, Sangay." I could not only see the mountains he named but also the plantations reaching west to the Pacific, and to the east, the carpet of treetops that unrolled to infinity. To see from the sky the mountains named for gods, however, does not truly reveal the land, or its people.

In 1547, only fifteen years after Pizarro captured and executed the Ecuador-born Inca Atahualpa, bringing about the fall of the empire, an alert and literate Spaniard rode down the Inca highway with paper, ink, and quill pen in his saddlebags. Pedro de Cieza de Leon was not only the most reliable of the chroniclers but also one of the first discoverers of Ecuador since (according to Webster) "to discover" is "to make...