The Cloud Forest

by Peter Matthiessen

  At the settlement the padres were building a chicken coop for Sister María. Andrés was listening to his radio, and Alejandro was occupied, as he usually is when not eating, in providing his huge mountain lungs with oxygen. A few Machiguengas loitered about, including one pretty girl who had recently let one of her twin babies starve to death and would have done as much for the other had not the Dominicans interceded. Her maternal negligence, cruel and unnatural by our lights, is by no means uncommon among the jungle Indians, who are more practical about such matters, especially when a shortage of food or even a simple disinclination to assume the burden make children undesirable. Behind her, the jungle encroached upon the little clearing and the two small open sheds, and charred skeletons of the huacrapona or pona palm, with its strange swelling half way up the trunk, stood black against the last light of the sky.

  April 23. Sepa.

  Today we made the longest journey of the trip, nearly one hundred miles of river between the Picha and a point on the lower Urubamba just above the penal colony at Sepa. In the morning we stopped briefly at the hacienda of Señor Antonio Basagoitia, who lives with his Machiguenga and Piro Indians near the confluence with the Mishagua; the Mishagua flows in from Madre de Dios, to the east. Señor Basagoitia is an old friend of Andrés from his jungle days. He was extremely courteous and kind and tended to bear out Andrés’s feeling that the jungle patrones are of a higher and more hospitable sort than those of the montaña. We were given a fine meal of pork, eggs, yuca, and papayas, served up by a fetching little Indian whose name, appropriately, was Lolita, and Señor Basagoitia presented me with a curious wasp nest of wattle and daub as well as a pretty bracelet made by his Piros.

  Señor Basagoitia is a friend of César Cruz and, to Andrés’s surprise, spoke highly of him. Cruz visited Basagoitia during the winter and mentioned then that he expected to meet some people upriver, which would suggest that he took our project seriously. Basagoitia referred to Cruz as an “hombre muy serio” and said that his ruin on the Picha was more than a creature of Cruz’s imagination, though it might well be a multiple hallucination: Basagoitia admitted that no white man had ever seen it. He said it was supposed to be about fifteen days up the Picha, that it was located in a kind of pajonal, or swamp, and that no Indian would go there willingly because a great pool in the place was said to have been used for human sacrifices.

  Whether or not Basagoitia is an “hombre muy serio” is now the question. Andrés thinks he is, and, in any case, he is an hombre muy simpático. And I must confess that I wish Cruz were here and ready to go; at this moment he could take me in with even the weakest sort of argument.

  We arrived at Sepahua (like Coribene, Timpia, and Picha, this headquarters of the Dominican missions is named for the tributary of the Urubamba on which it is located) in the early afternoon and were greeted on the bank by a mixed band of Piros, Amahuacas, and Machiguengas. These people were not, alas, in tribal dress and were thus more or less indistinguishable: the place looked less like an Indian village than like a kind of charity fresh-air camp, which of course it is. In saying this I wish to indicate no disapproval of Padre Manuel Diez and his cheerful staff of brothers and sisters, nor of the other good Dominicans who have kept our bodies and souls together for nearly a week: these are all good people doing a good job, however distasteful the effects of that job may appear to people like myself. It seems very sad that the individual characters of these Indians are disappearing so rapidly into the great blender of the white man, holy or otherwise, no matter how beneficial this may be to the belly and salvation of the individual brave: the people at Sepahua are no longer Indians, but ignorant and indigent Peruvians, and their cousins back in the small interior rivers, in their long hair and paint, make a far better appearance. In South America, with few exceptions, the tribe which permits itself to come into complete contact with the white man, on the white man’s terms, has perhaps a half-century of existence left to it.

  The beatification of César Cruz at the hand of Señor Basagoitia was tarnished somewhat by the people at Sepahua, who are more explicit about his vagaries than Padre Daniel: Cruz, they say, does not consider money in the bank a necessary perquisite for signing checks and is not known for keeping his word. He is a bird, as they put it, who never tarries in one spot very long, and is referred to here as “nuestra Cruz,” in the sense of “the cross we have to bear.” Since César was now on the suspect list once again, I questioned Padre Manuel about the fossil expert, he of the great jaw, Señor Vargaray.

  “I know of him,” said Padre Manuel. “You mean the man who has a chacra near Atalaya.”

  “That’s the man, I think.”

  “I see,” the padre said.

  “Do you know anything about him?”

  “Yes, I do,” the padre said. “He’s dead.”

  Padre Manuel was not certain that the defunct Vargaray was the man I counted on, only that a certain Vargaray of Atalaya had gone to his reward since January; as to how he met his end, the priest was uncertain, and the question remains up in the air—how the plot thickens!

  We have arranged to go on downriver this afternoon in the mission canoe, in the hope that we will find Cruz at his ganadería tomorrow morning. But despite my hopes, Vargaray’s fossil now seems very remote, and the one ignominious aim left to the expedition, as Andrés repeatedly assures me, is retrieving its money from César Cruz.

  There is some thin satisfaction in the fact that Padre Daniel of Timpia, a born scoffer, displays us proudly to one and all as Don Andrés Porras Cáceres and the American ingeniero, Señor Matthiessen (in order that my presence on the Urubamba seem no more bizarre than absolutely necessary, Andrés long ago hit upon the device of identifying me as an “engineer,” and I am called by this title by one and all), who have passed through the Pongo in the “time of waters.” And Padre Manuel, like the rest, has never heard of a trip made at this season, though he himself is a veteran of the Pongo. Padre Manuel, a tall bearded man who looks like Fidel Castro but is by no means as noisy, was aware of our coming long before we got here. He had known Andrés in the latter’s term as governor of Madre de Dios, and when he learned by short wave from Padre Matamala at Quillabamba (who had learned it from Abraham Marquez) that we meant to descend the river, he radioed back immediately that we should wait at least two months. By this time, of course, we were on our way. Padre Manuel’s transmitter was the first contact with the outside world that we had had since leaving Black Drunken River, and Andrés took advantage of it to send a message to his wife that he was still among the living.

  We were given another meal at Sepahua, our last largesse from the Roman Catholic Church, and soon were on our way. I am bringing this journal up to date in the canoe, for the Urubamba has widened now into a flat, slow jungle river. The palms have increased, and the flowering trees: there is a variety of pea tree with red sprays of flowers, the amasisa, and the bolaina has become common. Pyramids of vines smother some of the larger trees, and the huge lupuna, or silk-cotton tree, with its magnificent wide-domed crown, is the dominant feature of this landscape.

  But it is the birds that change the most. Parrots and macaws remain plentiful, but the hawks have increased in number and variety. There are a crow-sized bird, yellow fore and aft, with a brown mantle and pink bill, and a small, striking lapwing, and two large fantastical water birds—an ivory-crested white heron with a bright blue face which I have seen only once before, along the Amazon, and the great cleaver-billed white stork with the scarlet throat called the tuyuyu; it is called tuiuu in Mato Grosso, and is thus one of the few species known by the same name in both Brazil and Spanish South America. And finally, there are five common species which are also found in North America: the black vulture, snowy egret, roseate spoonbill, osprey, and spotted sandpiper. Spectacular as the spoonbill is, the osprey and sandpiper affect me more, reminding me as they do of my own North Atlantic coasts; it occurs to me now, after five months of wandering this continent, that I must start thinkin
g about going home.

  It is after dark when the lights of Sepa’s penal colony gleam down the river. We decide to camp on the beach a mile above, and the beach is a lacework of tapir tracks, though the large shy sachavaca itself remains hidden.

  Bats and a strange silver nighthawk flit nervously against the river’s oily gleam. The moon rides in a spectacular night of stars, and as I lie here, on the cool comfort of the sand, writing by flashlight, the Southern Cross soars directly overhead.

  April 24. Inuya.

  A pink jungle sunrise through the early mist, and fair weather for the second consecutive day. We were on the river by 5:45, hoping to catch Cruz before he could take flight; the guard who ordered us to the bank as we passed Sepa thought we might find Cruz at his ganadería, as he had been seen at Atalaya three days before. (The guards inspect all passing boats, probably for escaped prisoners: escapes here are periodic, though the convicts almost invariably return gladly of their own accord if they are still able to find their way.)

  About seven we swung in out of the mist and landed at the bank below Cruz’s hacienda. Surrounded by his curious peons, the great man himself rose disgruntled from his breakfast, clad in a pair of weary pajamas. Dark-visaged as ever, he was not glad to see us and made no real effort to appear so, though once he flashed his sudden golden smile.

  Cruz, predictably, took the position that the El Encuentro he had had in mind was the encuentro of the Tambo and Urubamba, near Atalaya. This is untrue, of course, but truth, as a thing open to infinite manipulation, has never been highly prized in the selva, whereas the saving of face is of the utmost importance: we did not bother to tell César that his friend Basagoitia had unwittingly betrayed him. We proceeded immediately to a reappraisal of the contract and worked out a new one acceptable to all in a few minutes. It was not quite satisfactory to Cruz, I suppose, since he would have got away with his advance if we had only perished in the Pongo, but I must say that he accepted his bad luck with grace. He says that he was in the Mapuya country on a lumber trip in early March, and that he has actually seen the fossil; he even has a rough diagram of it, though I could tell very little from this. The discoverer of the bone is an Indian, Juan Pablo, who works for a friend of Cruz, one Victor Macedo. As for Vargaray, he is very much alive—it is his father who has died—but Cruz claims that Vargaray has never seen the bone, and, whatever the truth of the matter, it certainly seems clear that Vargaray has been maneuvered out of the expedition.

  Cruz is prepared to leave immediately in quest of the giant mandíbula, being fully supplied with gasoline, food, medicine, and pisco. The equipment, in fact, was all ready and waiting in a large crate, and I took this to be a sign of his serious intentions until Andrés pointed out—correctly, as it turned out—that Cruz must have heard, by the mysterious and infallible jungle grapevine, of our descent of the river and gotten himself prepared at the last minute. Now Cruz is rummaging furiously about, attending to last-minute details, while we inspect his hacienda: the place is typical of this stretch of the river, with the usual litter of chickens, half-breed babies, stumps, fire smoke, bananas, and yuca, and it is amazing how exactly it corresponds with descriptions of river haciendas of a hundred years ago. There are great wooden tubs of river fish, which his peons are scaling and cleaning: the silver lisa; the sabalo, which looks like a form of trout; a thin fish, the chambira, with two great teeth; and some small sungaro, a catfish which is said to reach a weight of over four hundred pounds. The cattle which he raises here are farther off, in some clearings up the river.

  Andrés wishes to return to Lima for his thirtieth wedding anniversary, on April 30, and as he has no faith in the existence of the bone, much less in César Cruz, is considering leaving the expedition at this point and making his way home from Atalaya, which lies only a few miles down the river. But Cruz feels that we can ascend the Inuya and Mapuya and return with the bone in time to get Andrés on the weekly bush plane out of Atalaya to San Ramón in the mountains; from San Ramón, Lima is less than a day’s distance. And as I would be sorry to have him go, I am also prevailing upon him to stay. My one misgiving is the fact that I would hate to have to rush, should something of exceptional interest turn up; also, César has offered to guide us far up the Inuya to the country of a very wild tribe of Amahuacas, but this would involve a round trip of twelve days, as well as a not inconsiderable risk to life and limb. Andrés feels that for the moment we have pushed our luck far enough, and, somewhat reluctantly, I have decided to agree with him. Since we are to confine ourselves to the mandíbula, he has now decided to come along; he still has a protective feeling about me and a conviction that, without his restraining presence, I would get myself in fatal straits in a matter of minutes.

  Toward noon, turning eastward into the Inuya, we saw the Geoffrey’s dolphin or inia, that gray-yellow river porpoise common throughout the Amazon; how strange it seems to find this animal more than three thousand miles from the sea—though of course there is a theory that all the dolphins and whales of the world were originally land mammals of the Amazon basin which returned gradually to an aquatic environment, and at last to the ocean itself.

  We are traveling in a narrow canoe over forty feet in length, sharp-prowed and rakish and, like almost all Amazonian canoas, hollowed out of a single log—in this region, usually cedro, a large reddish member of the mahogany family from which Spanish or “cigar-box” cedar is obtained. Cruz has four men with him; I was about to say four Indians, since at least two are as Indian as any we have seen so far, but César, who himself is much more Indian than not, made rather a point of saying earlier that he had no indios on his place. (César is not a man too proud to contradict himself, and referred shortly thereafter to a Machiguenga working there, the man who had seen the Picha ruins.) One gets the feeling that an educated and intelligent mestizo like César Cruz has been forced by caste pressure into the position that only naked savages, or those under heavy paint, are to be called Indians, all the rest qualifying as Peruvians: a peruano is a man who speaks Spanish and wears clothes, and all mestizos are naturally anxious that this distinction be recognized, regardless of their immediate ancestry.

  The Inuya River, which flows to the Urubamba from the east, is a river of the rain forest, brown and slow. Its flora and fauna approximate that of the Amazon, and many of its birds were already familiar to me: the snakebird, quite similar to the North American anhinga; the chansu or hoatzin, an archaic burnished-bronze fowl of the river brush which vents a fantastic huff and squawk when excited; two species of Amazon swallow; two Amazon kingfishers; and a number of others. There was the red-headed soldado, or cardinal finch, black above and white below, a bird common in aviaries (W. H. Hudson, in his Birds of La Plata, says of this species, “The song has little variety, but is remarkably loud, and has that cheerful ring which most people admire in their caged pets, possibly because it produces the idea in the listener’s mind that the songster is glad to be a prisoner”), and a variety of other songbirds, swifts, and flycatchers. The hawks remain plentiful, including a sinister-looking black individual with a white tail band, and a species of miniature falcon. And finally, on that first afternoon, I glimpsed one furtive specimen of what looked like a wood rail, orange-buff beneath and straked gray above, with a long neck.

  The flaming macaws, in pairs and in squadrons of twelve raucous individuals or more, continue to dominate the avenue of air above the two lines of trees; at times one sees them perched high in the great limbs of an ohe tree, from where they loose sounds which can best be likened to the most fiendish of children’s noise-makers. Their cousins, the short-tailed fat green parrots with red patches and yellow tails, hurry in small bands across the river ahead, as do flocks of blue-green parakeets: for one brilliant instant the parakeets swarm in the red flowers of an amasisa. But the bird which has pleased me most is the large blue and black toucan. It flies in a truly comic way—it is the first bird I have ever seen which actually made me laugh—bounding and dipping, gliding an
d craning in a hesitant, prissy fashion, forever on the point of a fatal nose-dive brought on by the bulk of its great bill. One has the feeling that, should more than one toucan venture aloft at the same time, they would break every rule in the bird world by colliding.

  Butterflies are less common than on the upper river, though I saw one superb cluster of green ones and yellow ones fanning gently on the hot clay bank; apparently, these groups are gatherings of males, of species belonging to the genus Callidryas. An inevitable solitary morpho flew nonchalantly on its way, like an awkward but happy child pursuing a high bouncing ball. Though the banks are cut everywhere with tracks, and the little chito monkey whistles far back in the forest, the mammals avoid us still: Cruz feels that, because of all the floods this year, there is water everywhere in the forest and the animals do not have to come to the river banks. The lagartos, or white crocodiles, are very numerous, as are the large river turtles called taricayas, which reach forty pounds and are said to be excellent food. Some of these are piled up piggy-back on the river logs, but they are wary and sink away when shot.

  We paused to eat under the gnarled old limbs of the squat shimbillo, a river tree hoary with dead liana vines which much resembles the magic trees of fairy-tale illustrations. Late in the day, in a shimbillo, there sang a pair of black birds with red bills which I had seen once before, in Mato Grosso. I believe they are called barbets, and they have a remarkable clear wolf whistle of impressive volume.

  Once we stopped at a small encampment of Indians high on a pretty shaded beach. These were traveling Campas, one of the great warrior tribes of Peru, and the braves were in cushmas, faces painted heavily with the orange of the achote berry. They had come to this region to cut the wild cane, caña brava, from which they make their arrows, and the new arrows, still unfeathered and untipped, were drying on the sand in conical stacks. From the Indians, Cruz’s men obtained some pieces of cooked sungaro, giving raw tobacco in exchange. In addition to the fish, the Indians were cooking a large toucan. They were wary of us, though not unfriendly, and maintained a stolid silence as long as we remained.