The Cloud Forest

by Peter Matthiessen

  The plane passes over one village, pinched between water and mountain; the pilot, who has been flying low, hurls the inhabitants a roll of newspapers. We are near the Bolivian border, and at one point cross an outcropping of dense, hilly jungle. One wonders if any white man has ever come there, and if it supports a community of Indians. There is still so much in South America which nobody really knows: a completely unknown tribe was discovered in Brazil only a few years ago, and there may be others.

  The Paraguay rolls north in big soft bends, sculpting the marsh inlets and canals. At Corumbá, the low bank rises to a bluff, and the pastel town, its cleanliness and bright demeanor quite as unexpected as the pantanal itself, gazes northward across a shining wilderness.

  Corumbá lies only a short distance north of Paraguay, where I had never been, and I arranged with a pilot named W. Porto to take me down the river and out across the pantanal in his small plane. We took off at 6:30 one morning, before the heat. The day was perfect, clear and shimmering, and as the rains have been slight this year, the savannas were emergent everywhere, like tundra. There were flowering bushes and marsh plants, the flower colors predominantly lavender and yellow, but the flowers do not contribute much to the beauty of the region, as they do in barren places—here the beauty lies in the soft harmonies and stillness.

  We followed the Paraguay eastward, cutting across the bends and diving low on the numerous flocks of wading birds. Of these, the most common is the white stork called the tuiuu, but there are also ducks, blue herons, white egrets, and a white ibis, and, trading back and forth between tree islands, bright flocks of green parakeets and parrots. A number of the red lake deer could be seen, including several fawns and one buck with lovely antlers, and on a dry knoll, a solitary rhea.

  Near the river at Pôrto Esperanca we saw the marble quarries in the sudden hills; here the railroad crosses, en route from Santa Cruz and Corumbá to São Paulo. At Fort Coimbra, farther south, W. Porto deposited our two other passengers; these men were dressed in the low “accordion” boots and the combination money-and-cartridge belt characteristic of Goiás and Mato Grosso, and the gear they removed from the plane included a long-barreled revolver, loaded, and a long knife, which one man slipped beneath his shirt. Later I asked W. Porto why these men were armed, and he said it was just a habit, very “wildowest.”

  Fort Coimbra is a border station, a punishment post for Communist officers and other difficult people who are better off out of harm’s way: the fort on the hill, overhanging the river, is a relic of old wars with Paraguay. Just south of Fort Coimbra, Bolivia has a small foothold on the river, extending fifteen miles or so to the Otuquis River; there is no port or road here, however, nor even a hut. Beyond the mouth of the Otuquis, known also as the Rio Negro, lies the corner of northeastern Paraguay.

  We flew down the main river and out across the Bolivian pantanal of southeastern Santa Cruz; here, in the canals and river edges, floated the dark shapes of jacares—the black caiman. There was one group of six or more together, the largest of which gave a great thrash and sank away as we banked down upon them. Their size was difficult to judge, but the wading birds on the banks nearby provided a fair yardstick: there were three or four of these ominous crocodilians which, though not huge, could not have been less than ten feet long.

  At the Otuquis the three countries meet—for Mato Grosso lies east of the Paraguay—and we swung down over the Paraguayan settlement of Bahía Negra, a collection of huts largely occupied, according to W. Porto, by Indians. One remarkable thing about this place is the sharp dividing line drawn by the rivers between open savannas with scattered wooded islands—Bolivia and Brazil—and the solid forest of carandá palms on the Paraguayan shore. We flew westward over Paraguay, and a little inland the palm forest turned gradually to mixed woods. This is the edge of the Gran Chaco, as it is called, a low forest which begins northwest of here in Bolivia and marches all the way across Paraguay and several hundred miles into Argentina. On the way back to Corumbá we remained to the west of the river, crossing the Otuquis and the state of Santa Cruz, and returning to Brazil again at a point of the pantanal where rock islands, some a hundred feet in height, jut out of the savanna. Beyond these lie several good-sized lakes, and beyond these the ridge of low mountains, with their red and black cliffs of manganese, behind which lies Corumbá.

  March 15.

  Travel west from Corumbá, across the Bolivian jungles to Santa Cruz de la Sierra, is decidedly a sometime thing. Once a week there is a train, but this week it left the day before I arrived. And each week there are several planes, but this week there are strikes. Most maps of South America, including my own, reveal a road to Santa Cruz, but in fact no road exists. Why a map should show a non-existent road is beside the point: one may as well ask why the two competing movie houses in Corumbá are presently showing the identical film, or why the Bolivian official here made me pay dearly for a visa stamp in my passport, when his colleague at Guaqui, only two months ago, required no visa at all, or why, in order to catch a plane leaving for Santa Cruz at eight in the morning, from an airfield less than four minutes from town, one must be picked up at the hotel at six. Though I should know better by this time, I questioned the logic of the latter, and immediately the whole airline office became extremely excited and upset, as if I were some sort of anarchist. “Aduana, aduana!” they all shouted, rushing forward to the counter. But in fact the customs, outward bound, is never more than a five-minute affair. The taxi drivers know this perfectly well, of course, and will appear at six forty-five if they decide to appear at all. Nevertheless, for fear of being stranded another four days in Corumbá—the same fear which permits the Bolivian consul to pocket my cruzeiros—I will rise on the day of departure at five-thirty and be waiting at the hotel door at six a.m., in need of coffee. By seven a.m. my bag will have been checked through customs, and I will then wait from two to twenty-four hours for the departure of the plane. (The departure depends less on the machine’s state of repair than on the number of passengers: flights on this continent are stalled off for hours and at times canceled altogether, with the most absurd excuses, when the manager considers the number of passengers insufficient.) This protocol is invariable and inflexible throughout South America, where the punishment of airline passengers is, if possible, even more cruel and unusual than that inflicted in the United States—except that after a while the senselessness of it all is no longer infuriating. One becomes stolid and resigned as any dray horse, aware that an infusion of logic, honesty, and efficiency into this world would create a chaos impossible to imagine.

  If one has to be stranded, one could do a lot worse than Corumbá, though Julian Duguid, the author of Green Hell, calls it “without dispute, the most unpleasant place I ever saw. A low range of limestone hills rears up out of the cattle-plains, and the sun devours the yellow streets. The whiteness of the houses is blinding, the heat comes up in a haze, and a vast, heavy stillness broods over the terraced town. By day the porous stone sucks in the hot savagery of the tropics, and breathes it out like an evil odor at night.” Be that as it may, the town’s location on a hill overlooking the Paraguay and the pantanal is striking, and, for my part, I found the heat moderate enough and the odors no more evil than those come upon elsewhere in this redolent land. I may have arrived at a more auspicious season, however, and doubtless Corumbá has improved somewhat in the last decades, though, as I recall, both Colonel Fawcett and former President Theodore Roosevelt had a good opinion of the place. The food is not quite what it might be—I don’t believe there’s a fresh fruit or vegetable in the whole town—and a huge moth with two white spots like eyes staring out behind is a permanent resident of my wall, but otherwise the place seems cheerful and prosperous enough. In addition to the charque industry, there is also production of manganese and marble.

  March 16.

  The pantanal continues westward from Corumbá into Bolivia, but there it shortly turns into low, smoky forest; a small river winds, and the t
rail of another, marked by the break in the trees. Then there is only a vast, unbroken green—this is the “green hell” of Duguid’s inspiration, a term applied by every writer since to the particular jungle he chanced to visit. A species of pale, boney tree stands higher than the rest and from the air appears as a kind of lint on the broad mat. I wonder at first why this low jungle—the north end of the Chaco—seems so much more formidable than the rain forests of the Amazon, and then I realize that there are no visible rivers or streams, no water of any kind in sight, for miles and miles. This jungle desert is inhabited by the Ayorés, a very fierce tribe much chastened in recent years by the New Tribes Mission.

  The land ascends gradually toward Santa Cruz, turning a deeper green; the Guapay, or Río Grande, slides below, irregular and ungraceful in its broad dry bed of parched backwashes and ungainly islands. One by one, huts and roads appear, gathering quickly and accumulating at last in the town of Santa Cruz de la Sierra: beyond, the Andes rise in dusty silhouette out of the heat.

  6

  Beyond Black Drunken River

  WITH ITS MUD Streets, thatch roofs, and raffish waterfront, and its barefoot Shipibos with their nose ornaments and bright clothing, the Peruvian river town of Pucallpa is as colorful as it is hideous. The trading post for thousands of square miles of wilderness, it attracts a motley fleet of cargo craft and long canoes; these swarm like a hatch of flies on the broad brown Ucayali, drawn out of the water courses of the vast selva or Amazon jungle, which, lying there in steaming silence across the river, stretches away for twenty-five hundred miles to the Atlantic coast.

  The cultural center of Pucallpa is the bar of the Gran Hotel Mercedes, which serves coffee and liquor and gaseosas, or soft drinks, from dawn until after midnight. From its open doors and windows a splendid view may be obtained of the hogs and vultures which pick over the orange quagmire of the street. Here, in January of 1960, I had first encountered Vargaray, an intense dark man with that South American badge of white blood, the mustache, and the man who first told me of the monstrous fossil jaw near the Mapuya River. The Mapuya does not appear on maps, but was identified as a tributary of the Inuya, which is in turn a tributary of the Urubamba; the latter joins the Tambo near Atalaya to form the Ucayali, which, flowing northward, joins the Marañon about five hundred miles downstream, forming the main body of the Amazon. The Mapuya is located in the flat rain forest, eastward toward the frontier of Brazil, and therefore seemed a most unlikely site for paleontological discovery; in fact, no man in the Mercedes had ever heard of fossil bones found in the open selva. Flood, humidity, and voracious ants were among the numerous factors presented to poor Vargaray to assure him that his fossil could not exist. But Vargaray became very angry when he was doubted, and his passion about the huge mandíbula was impressive.

  The plot thickened with the appearance in the bar of a man named César Cruz. Cruz was brought forward by our genial host, Señor Fausto Lopez, as just the man to conduct a search party to the bone. A rancher on the Urubamba, he possessed all the necessary canoas, outboard motors, mosquiteros, guns, and men. Furthermore, he knew of a mysterious ruin on a more distant tributary of the Urubamba, the Río Picha, which no white man had ever seen. Cruz suggested that an expedition—which by now was considered a foregone conclusion in the bar—attempt to locate both mandíbula and ruinas.

  The legends of the lost cities, and especially of the Inca El Dorado known as Paititi, die very hard indeed, in part because lost cities are still being found. The most famous of these, of course, is the Inca mountain town of Machu Picchu, which was found in 1911. Since then several other important locations have come to light, and almost certainly there are more.

  Nevertheless, the great majority of those one hears about never existed, or if they did exist, their discoverers have not lived to tell the tale. Jungle legends are, in the main, absurd, and Cruz’s story of the lost city on the Picha put me on my guard, especially since there was not the slightest question in the mind of anyone in the room, myself included, as to who was expected to pay for the Picha expedition. I explained what was true, that my sponsors expected me to go to Africa directly from Buenos Aires, where I was to arrive the following month. But, as I have said, there is no world beyond the selva, and my excuse was scarcely heeded; it had already been determined, in fact, that my friend the local Army comandante, Juan Basurco, would accompany me in the discovery which was to make all of us famous. At a loss, I let an ironic smile play about my lips, in the manner of one willing to go along with a good joke, and peered cynically about the room through my own cigarette smoke. No one took any notice of this, however. Details of the trip were now discussed, and Cruz added fuel to the general excitement with the statement that a Machiguenga Indian working on his cattle farm had actually been to the Picha ruin and could guide us there.

  Cruz is a graceful, quiet man of medium height, very dark, with wary eyes pinched close to the large hawk nose of an Indian and a sudden smile which reveals three teeth of gold in the very center of his upper mandíbula. He speaks gently and has an infrequent, appealing laugh, and I took to him immediately. In the following days I had a few whiskies with him, and by the time I left I had contracted the jungle fever. Tentative plans for an expedition had actually been set up, and the journey to Africa postponed. In the early spring, when the rains had abated and the upper rivers would be navigable, I was to meet Cruz and his men at the headwaters of the Urubamba.

  In the clear air above the Andes, flying out, I wondered if I had not lost my mind, if I were not, indeed, the greatest gringo idiot that had ever fallen into that nest of thieves. At best, the existence of the monster jaw was most improbable, and that of the Picha ruin beneath serious discussion. I could only console myself with the certain prospect of seeing the jungle at close hand at last, and this had become important to me.

  The fossil jaw is there or it is not: the dearth of precedence in the finding of large jungle fossils and my own lack of education in the matter make it hard to advance any theory of probabilities. The likelihood, such as it is, of the existence of the ruin is based on the theory that the Incas retreated from the Spanish down into the Urubamba Valley, to Machu Picchu and perhaps beyond: the Picha ruins, however, would be at least two hundred miles beyond, at a lower altitude by far than any ruin found to date on the eastern side of the Andean cordillera.

  In Lima I called on Señor Rafael Larco Hoyle, one of Peru’s leading archaeologists and the owner-curator of the country’s finest collection of pre-Inca artifacts. Señor Hoyle assured me that no ruin, large or small, had ever been found in the region described or, in his opinion, ever would be. He cautioned me strongly against believing any such tale, on a theory of his own to the effect that even an honest man, after one week in the jungle, contracts strange fevers and becomes a liar. This is a charitable theory and may serve to excuse some of the jungle’s wild-eyed chroniclers; it remains to be seen whether or not I come down with the disease itself.

  On the other hand, a jungle veteran named Andrés Porras Cáceres, who worked on the Ucayali around 1944, had heard of a ruin in the Picha area. Before he could visit it, however, the river man who was to conduct him there, one Alejandro Angulo, was killed by the Machiguengas.

  Andrés Porras is the brother of Alfredo Porras, a friend in Lima whose interest and kindness have been instrumental in setting up the journey. Andrés, in fact, decided to join me, which is a great stroke of luck, for he has all the experience that I lack and is a most agreeable man besides. During the winter, while I was traveling to Tierra del Fuego and Mato Grosso, he and Alfredo set up the details of the expedition. I returned to Lima in late March and in the first days of April left with Andrés for Cuzco, in the mountains, where our journey into the selva will begin.

  I dearly wish that there were another word for “expedition,” since I could scarcely apply that term to any trip sponsored by myself: one “mounts” a reputable jungle expedition and equips oneself with pith helmets, lean white hunters, inscr
utable Indian scouts, and superstitious bearers who will go no farther. Furthermore, an expedition is backed by millionaires, museums, and foundations—either that, or the explorer (who in this case is invariably an author) sets off alone, or nearly so, and miserably equipped, into country from which, as he is told by old jungle hands in the early pages of the resultant book, he has not the slightest chance of returning alive. Since I am not an explorer, and since I have every intention of returning not only alive but sleek and well, none of these basic conditions can be said to apply to the outing I have in mind.