by Levison Wood
22
The Darién Gap
I was lying in my hammock strung between two palm trees. All around I could hear through the darkness the faint whispers of Scottish highland accents. They were talking about tomorrow and the fact that they’d get started on the fort in the morning, if only they could find fresh water. Even though it was dark, I could see the outline of the Caledonia with her rigging up, moored in the bay. It was 1698 and I was the captain of the ship. I was happy to be here in the New World, away from the cold and on a true mission of exploration in this unexplored region called the Darién. I was going to make Scotland rich. My hammock was white, made of old sails, but it was comfortable. Better than being on the floor of that infernal boat.
Hang on. Why was my hammock white? My hammock is normally green, and how had I reached the coast already? I didn’t understand what was going on. Suddenly, there was an explosion. I sat up with a jerk and then almost fell out of the hammock as I rolled over. I couldn’t get out. What was happening? Was it the Spanish? Were they attacking us already? Or was it the Indians? We hadn’t seen any yet. What was going on?
‘Deadfall!’ shouted Alberto.
I opened my eyes. A tree had come crashing down ten metres away. I was sweating and terrified. Thank God for that, I thought to myself. I thought I was about to be speared by a Choco tribesman.
‘What are you talking about?’ came Alberto’s voice from the blackness. ‘Didn’t you hear me? It was a tree.’
‘Nothing, I was just dreaming, that’s all.’
I looked at my watch. It was five a.m., and the sun would be coming up in an hour. I tried to go back to sleep, but after the nightmare it was impossible and I found myself shuffling deeper into my cotton liner in the early morning chill.
At first light, I got up and went down to the river. Leo and Ernesto were already up and huddled round the fire. They’d been fishing in the night with their machetes.
‘How do you catch them?’ I asked.
Ernesto replied, ‘You hold a torch in one hand and wait for the fish to come to the surface. They are stupid and think its daytime. And then …’ He raised his knife. ‘Whoosh. You just hit them and they die.’ He grinned and handed me a crispy black fish that he’d grilled on the smoky fire. It tasted good and was a nice break from dehydrated rations. Alberto came wandering over in his underpants and flip-flops, yawning.
‘Sleep well?’ I asked.
‘No, I did not,’ he said. ‘That tree fell right next to my hammock. I thought I was going to die. And all you could talk about was Indians and spears, or some shit. I thought you’d gone mad.’
He shivered and knelt by the fire.
‘Honestly, Lev, if I survive this jungle and get to Colombia, you know what I’m gonna do?’
‘No, tell me.’
‘I’m gonna go home to Mérida and meet the mayor and tell him I want a statue in the main plaza. Me … the only Mexican to walk to Colombia.’ He patted his chest.
‘In fact, no, fuck the statue. The birds will shit on that. I want them to name a leisure centre after me. That way, the kids will know my name.’
We set off, following the course of the river. We’d given up worrying about getting wet feet now and spent the whole day wading upstream; slipping and sliding over rocks and boulders, sometimes having to swim across the deep parts. Kingfishers swooped for their prey as we ploughed through the virgin waterway, unnavigable since time began. Either side of the river, the jungle arched up in vertical cliffs that were impossible to climb. If there was a flash flood now, we’d be swept away in an instant, but for the time being the rain had abated.
Leo led the way again, with me, Alberto and Ernesto trying to keep up. Segundo and the porters kept a steady pace behind, lugging baskets on their heads. Compared to us, they seemed to glide over the rocks with relative ease. The deeper into the jungle we got, the hotter and steamier it became. By eleven a.m., the temperature had soared to over thirty-five Celsius, just as we reached a bend where a gorge made it impossible to keep wading up the river.
‘It’s too deep ahead,’ said Leo. ‘We’ll have to go over the ridge.’
He pointed up to what looked like an almost sheer climb of vertical jungle. There was no choice but to leave the river behind.
Grasping onto a vine, we pulled ourselves up onto a rock, where Leo started hacking away at the foliage to create a new trail. It took some time before a sufficient gap could be made so that all the team could follow on. From there, we encountered one of the most brutal, skin-tearing, lung-busting jungle climbs I have ever endured. For hours we scrambled up through the bushes and trees, battling with thorns, razor-sharp grass and spiders’ webs, and getting covered in ants, termites and millipedes. Sometimes we’d have to scale waterfalls, clinging onto the rocks for dear life, and at others we’d descend into chasms of swamp and quicksand. Evil-looking insects crawled up our legs and even the very flowers appeared malevolent and bent on our destruction. This was the Darién Gap of my dreams, and now, it seemed, my nightmares.
After an eternity we crested the ridge, although the only way of knowing this was that there were occasional glints of sunlight at head level on two sides. That was the clue we had reached the top. But I wasn’t about to congratulate myself just yet. There were plenty more ridges and mountains to climb ahead. By my reckoning, we’d managed to cover only fifteen miles in the last two days. At this rate, we’d run out of food before we could get to Carreto and the coast.
‘We need to push on,’ said Ernesto, as we began the descent to another river. The little chief took the lead ahead of Leo and began a steady jog down the steep decline, flailing his machete at the dangling vines. There was a sapling in the way, which he swiped and sliced almost at the base, leaving a lethal-looking spike poking out of the ground. I turned around to warn Alberto of the danger below, and then suddenly I slipped.
I felt my left foot give way to the squelching mud and before I knew it, I was horizontal mid-air and then … Bang! I landed straight on my back. At first I couldn’t feel any pain, I was just winded, and thought it would be best to get right back up, which I did.
And then it hit me like a lorry. A shudder of searing pain flowed through my entire body, starting with the base of my spine. I looked down to see the spike below me. I’d clearly fallen directly on top of it. My first reaction was one of relief. If I’d landed an inch further up, the spike would have rammed itself straight up my arse. As it happened, it had jarred against my coccyx instead. I flopped to the ground.
‘Are you OK?’ came a voice. I felt so faint, I didn’t know who it was.
The pain was now so acute that I wanted to vomit. Alberto offered to carry me, but I knew that I had to sit still for a while and wait for it to pass. It had been a lucky escape. It could have been a lot worse, but even so, I knew that it was going to slow me down even more. After fifteen minutes, I got up and slowly made my way down the hill, this time with more caution and each step with deliberate restraint.
‘I have something that will help.’ I looked around and saw Leo. He had a dirty plastic bottle in his hand.
‘What is it?’
‘Medicine,’ he said, handing me the bottle and unscrewing the cap.
I smelled the stuff and almost puked up.
‘What on earth is that?’
He raised his eyebrows, ‘It’s kerosene, of course.’
‘What do you do with it?’ I asked.
‘It gets rid of the pain. We rub it around the area that hurts and then drink some, just to make sure.’
I politely declined.
For four more hours I walked on, my spine still hurting with each step. Alberto, despite falling over every ten metres, managed to somehow avoid any serious injury, but he was slowing down by the day and found himself covered in insect bites. At one point his hand had swollen so much from a spider bite that it looked like a balloon and he couldn’t get his watch on his wrist. When we stopped for food by the rivers, we’d check our f
eet and the scene was grisly. Almost everybody looked like they’d been sitting in the bath for a week – which is basically what we had done. Trench-foot was beginning to set in with some of the team, as the soles of people’s feet wrinkled and cracked into bloody pulps.
All the gear was wrecked. The cameras were completely destroyed by water damage. Our boots were sodden, our clothes torn and our skin ripped to shreds. But we had no choice other than to carry on. We climbed another two or three ridges and crossed more rivers than I can ever remember. No wonder this place had taken so many lives, I thought, glad at least that we’d got the Embera. I couldn’t imagine attempting something like this without a guide. The colonel was right, it would be suicide. Even Segundo was struggling. The man-mountain had been silent for forty-eight hours now. He was plodding along like some sort of giant sloth. I suppose that even the locals were only human and this kind of terrain wasn’t picky about on whom it chose to inflict suffering.
Having said that, what I will say about the Embera is that they never lost their sense of humour. Even at the toughest times, they would chuckle and joke about the weather, the terrain and the magic of the jungle. They’d point out the dangers and laugh. They showed me the magical ‘penis’ vine: a local plant that apparently makes one’s appendage grow to exactly the size you want it, depending on how much of the potion is used. Blokes everywhere, it seems, find the same things amusing.
As we reached the watershed of the mountains, Ernesto pointed out a particularly big ceiba tree. It stood proud on top of the peak, and I remembered Keats’s poem: ‘Silent, upon a peak in Darien.’ Keats clearly hadn’t met the Embera, who didn’t stop chattering the whole time.
‘This is the limit of our Embera ancestral lands.’
He pointed down towards the endless sea of jungle, which disappeared into the clouds.
‘Everything down there is Kuna Yala.’
‘Do you ever meet with them?’ I asked, as Leo stopped beside us.
‘No, not for many years. We speak different languages and have very different cultures. The legends say that many years ago, hundreds of years before the white man came, we were the same tribe and lived in Colombia, and then we moved north into the Darién. One day there was a big war and the tribe split – into the Embera and the Kuna. We won, and sent the Kuna away, out of the jungle and towards the great ocean, where they now live by the Caribbean.’
‘Sounds like the Kuna got the best deal,’ Alberto joked.
‘No, we don’t like the sea,’ said Ernesto. ‘You can’t even drink it.’
‘But you’ve been there before?’ I asked.
‘Yes, but not for decades. Leo here has been many times. He went to school in Carreto, because there were none in our area when we were children.’
Leo smiled and gave me a thumbs-up. ‘I like to go and see the women. They have beautiful ladies in the Kuna lands.’
We followed a ridgeline down to the river. Finally, we could walk downstream as the waters flowed north-east to the Caribbean some fifteen miles distant. As long as we kept the pace, then tomorrow we should reach Carreto, but for now we needed to make camp in the jungle.
Leo led us to a stony beach by the river. I was surprised to see that there was an old shelter made of wooden poles and palm leaves hidden away on the banks.
‘Who built that?’ I asked the chief.
He shrugged. ‘Maybe narcos, or the people smugglers, this is the way they bring the immigrants.’
We were so exhausted, though, that none of us cared much about the drug traffickers or the smugglers any more. We needed a rest, so set about cutting a clearing around the shelter and stringing up the hammocks.
Suddenly there was a commotion next to the shelter. One of the porters, Rodrigo, was jumping about like a madman. ‘What’s up?’ I shouted, running over.
‘Snake! Snake!’ he said.
‘Did it bite you?’ I asked.
By now he had his trousers round his ankles and was pinching the skin at the back of his thigh. The other porters and Leo ran over to help.
I looked down at the ground to see the snake. It was a tiny viper; a baby no longer than a foot and a half.
‘Poisonous! Poisonous!’ the men chanted.
‘He smashed its head, look,’ said Leo.
‘What kind of snake is it?’ asked Alberto.
‘A fer-de-lance,’ they chimed.
It was one of the most infamous and deadly snakes in the Americas. The same that had almost killed Aron in Belize.
I looked at Rodrigo’s leg. It seemed the snake had darted out of a hole in a tree and tried to bite him on the leg, but instead had caught its fangs with their lethal poison on the material of his trouser leg, thank God. It was a lucky escape. The babies, I’m told, are the worst, because they unload all their venom when they bite. And when they do, you’ve got less than twenty-four hours to get the hell out of there and find a hospital with anti-venom. Out here, in the middle of the jungle, he would almost certainly be dead.
The snake was writhing around on the jungle floor, half-alive. But the men took no chances and proceeded to finish bashing it over the head with a stick until it stopped moving. After that Rodrigo danced over the snake in an Embera ritual, jumping three times over the dead creature.
‘Why do you do that?’ I asked.
‘So we won’t get bitten by another one,’ he explained. ‘It’s like a magic spell and keeps them calm. Maybe the mother snake is around here somewhere.’
All of the Embera did the same dance, and I did, too, just in case.
The next morning, we followed the river down through the rainforest, where Leo found a narrow track. It was the first trail we’d seen in days. ‘This leads to Carreto,’ he said, proud that he’d remembered the way.
‘God knows how he did that,’ said Alberto. ‘With no map, no trail and no GPS. All by memory. These Indians are incredible.’
As the path got more discernible, we were able to cover ground more quickly and before long we found ourselves among plantations of banana and cacao; the first semblance of human habitation since leaving Canaan.
‘We have to be careful,’ said Ernesto. ‘The Kuna can be dangerous.’
I remembered the words of John Blashford-Snell, who’d warned me that they were troublesome and hostile and their only love was of money.
Ernesto spoke with Leo in their Embera tongue and they seemed to have a heated debate.
‘What are they talking about?’ I asked Segundo, who knew the language.
‘They are arguing. Ernesto wants Leo to pretend that he is the chief, because he went to school here, but Leo says they won’t believe him.’
‘Why?’
‘Because Leo can speak Kuna since he learnt it as a child. But Leo isn’t sure he can pull it off.’
Leo stamped his feet and walked on ahead. It seems the chief, the real one, had got his way, and Leo was now the unwilling pretender.
Luckily the old porter performed admirably. After an hour of meandering between the banana trees, we met our first group of Kuna. They were three men in their twenties, all wearing dirty T-shirts and ripped trousers. One of them carried a hunting rifle. They stopped for a second on the track and then came closer.
Leo went ahead and with his biggest smile, he greeted the opposing tribesmen with a handshake and a hug.
‘See, they think he’s the chief,’ Ernesto laughed.
I saw the Kuna men point down the track and we all followed Leo’s lead, saying hello to the Kuna men as they passed us. They didn’t smile or reply, only giving us a perfunctory nod.
A mile down the track, I saw the outskirts of the village hidden amongst the trees. We passed a clearing where the remains of a military-style bunker had been made out of sandbags. Nobody was manning it, but it was hardly the most welcoming sight. The younger porters looked nervous as we entered the village, closing together as a group, and keeping a close eye on the reactions of their elders. Leo did his job well and shook hands with ev
eryone we met, as the whole team bumbled into the middle of Carreto.
Soon we seemed to be in the centre, surrounded by wooden shacks with thatched roofs. It was as if we’d been transported back into the Middle Ages. Unlike the Embera with their satellite dishes and tin roofs, there was almost nothing to suggest the twenty-first century was coming here any time soon. Villagers started to crowd around us. First there were dozens, and then hundreds of children in varying states of nakedness; and then the women, all in traditional dress: colourful red and yellow sarongs, and wearing a kind of headscarf that covered their long black hair. Their chests were adorned with reams of handmade jewellery; gold and beads and shells. Only the men wore Western clothes and a kind of straw hat, which gave them a dignified formality despite their obvious poverty.
‘Who are you?’ asked one of the old men, who was leaning on a stick.
‘I am Leo, of the Canaan Embera. I came to school here fifty years ago.’
The old man’s eyes lit up.
‘It can’t be?’
Leo grinned, ‘It is, Silas.’
The old man came forward and grasped Leo, his old friend, hugging him tightly. ‘Then you are welcome. Come and meet the chiefs.’ He nodded in our direction, ‘Who are the whites?’
Leo motioned for us to step forward. ‘They like to walk. We brought them this far, but they want to carry on.’
Silas, which meant ‘elder’ in Kuna, looked us up and down with a calculated glare. He pointed at me. ‘Where are you going?’
I told him.
‘Colombia.’
He nodded.
‘We will decide on that.’
23
New Scotland
We followed Silas through the narrow alleyways to the beach, where the Caribbean Sea unfolded before us. After the confines of the jungle, it felt surreal to be in such an open space with nothing but turquoise waters for as far as the eye could see. The young Embera who had never been here before stood as the waves lapped against their wellies. Rodrigo just shrugged. ‘It’s nice, but I prefer the jungle,’ he said.
