by Tahir Shah
Kiato and I climbed into the back and breathed in the odour of the cool leather seats. A young man was at the wheel. He pulled up in front of a bar at the edge of town.
Maria went inside, and soon returned with a fat, bald man who was very drunk. He was pushed into the back with Kiato and me, his face slouched against the window. He writhed and muttered as if in a state of delirium.
“Okay, now we can go to the prison,” said Maria.
“Who’s the drunk?”
“He’d the head of security.”
Five miles from El Dorado we tore across a wooden truss bridge, as the young driver demonstrated the full capacity of his machine.
“This is La Colonia, as the prison is known,” said Maria. “It’s surrounded by the man-eating river: there are so many piranha in these parts.”
At the checkpoint, the police chief was prodded and he managed to salute with his left hand before throwing up over the white leather upholstery. A row of uniformed guards saluted back and raised a barrier.
Eight hundred men were serving sentences at El Dorado Prison. They hung about, chatting and making little souvenirs to be sold to the few tourists who visit El Dorado.
Some cheered when they saw Maria and she blew them kisses. Various sections of the prison were pointed out. One wing was set aside for homosexuals, another for the most dangerous men: that was where Papillon had been. A couple of rather unenthusiastic offenders were painting the high-security area bright yellow.
Maria said that one man in particular would like to speak to us. We walked through gates with iron bars and locks that clicked behind us. Under the wide branches of a tropical tree we met Leroy. He had been sent here thirteen years before, convicted of murder, and was the only prisoner who spoke English. His voice wavered as he spoke to us. Now and again he chuckled loudly and his head shook from side to side.
“You can’t imagine how it is for me to speak English,” he said. “To use these words is like being able to breathe again. At first when I was locked up, away from my home country, Trinidad, I used to talk to myself in English. Even, oh, until a few years ago, then I gave it up. There’s seven more years left, but I should get out before that for good behavior. The guards here like me and are kind. I brew them fermented drinks and they sometimes give me cigarettes.”
“Is there anything we can bling you, Reloy?” Kiato asked.
“Nothing I need, I’m used to it here.” Then he thought for a moment and said gently, “But there is one small thing that I’ve been craving for a very long time.”
“Anything; what is it?” I asked him.
“It might seem strange, but could you say the word “melodramatic” out aloud?”
Giant moths flapped like bats above our heads at El Dorado’s most popular bar. The insects tried in desperation to obtain camouflage on the walls. Music blared from two colossal speakers. I hoped it was below the decibel level necessary to perforate eardrums. The habitat had been created by the ruthless clientele native to El Dorado.
When a teenager of a more refined aspect sauntered over, declaring that he knew a quieter place, we needed no further persuasion to follow. His name was Hubert.
El Dorado seemed an unlikely place for luxury to exist. The last thing I had expected was for the door of a discotheque to be swung open by a white bouncer in a dinner coat.
He stood square in the door frame like a peg in a hole, taking the last drags from a very pungent cigarette with no filter. The room was dark and insipid. Air conditioning units rumbled in each corner, producing an arctic environment.
Hubert, Kiato and I made for a corner booth and sat. Hubert snapped his fingers and a forty-dollar bottle of Bacardi arrived on a silver tray.
Kiato and I glanced at each other in surprise as Hubert threw down a wad of new bolivar notes and motioned the waiter away. We had been living on no more than two dollars each a day. Hubert swallowed a glass full of the neat white rum and left. He said that he was going to get some women. He never came back.
The elite crowd of El Dorado swanned languidly about on the disco dance floor which dominated the nightclub.
Kiato started talking to a man at the bar, whose friend was also out hunting for women. We offered him some of Hubert’s rum and he sat with us. His head was bald; a thick red beard sprang from his face and bounced against his chest when he spoke. It impressed Kiato enormously as his own beard was very sparse.
The friend, who had been looking for women, returned. He looked like a desperado, and dragged me out, telling me to keep an eye out for under-age girls.
My lungs seemed to seize up when we entered the humid evening air. Two whale-like creatures approached us. My companion kissed his fingertips and nudged me in the ribs. I wondered for a moment if we were looking at the same women. They ambled up, both looking as if they might be suffering from the latter stages of some unpleasant, nameless and virulent illness.
Both had revolving, roving eyes.
The desperado leapt about with joy. He started to pull the heftier woman towards an overflowing gutter. Protesting, I returned to the disco.
A few minutes later the wild man returned to the icy air-conditioned atmosphere and came over to where I sat. The huge women loomed behind with unsure steps. Kiato and the red-bearded man were horrified, and blamed me for the desperado’s choice.
The larger woman pulled me up to dance. As she acclimatized to the arctic surroundings — romping about — the nature of her movements began to alarm me.
But the dance ended very suddenly. The record was removed and the strobe turned off. Without any words, everyone from the disco moved outside. The time was exactly three A.M. People were walking towards a dark back street from all over town.
A man shepherded everyone into one of the shops. I recognized him: it was Princess, the laundry-man. An audience had assembled, all eager to get a glimpse of the action. S till not understanding what was going on, I asked the bald, red-bearded man.
“Don’t you know?” he said. “You must be from far away; Princess’s fashion shows are famous.”
“Are they always held at this time of night?” I asked.
“Of course they are!” said the mouth swamped in red bristles.
Girls more beautiful than I had seen before paraded about in dresses of red and green. As they twirled around, the crowd clapped and whistled and Princess beamed with pride.
When I was leaving the shop, Maria came over to me and whispered:
“Now you have seen El Dorado. Now I think you know why I stay here.”
We were woken late. A little urchin girl brought word from Roberto, the pilot, that the weather had cleared and he was ready to fly to the Angel Falls. Kiato and I entered the bright sunshine and the innocence of day. There was no sign of the prostitutes and alcohol. Princess was darning socks again; and pots of spaghetti were being brought to the boil at the café.
At the airport Roberto slipped from his hammock and stretched.
“It’s a great day for flying,” he said, pulling on a pair of worn Levi’s jeans.
We spoke for a while. I asked how he came to speak such good English. In El Dorado, few seemed to know the language.
“I’m from British Guyana. Started flying in Canada back in sixty-six. There isn’t much call for a pilot these days. I ferry gold-miners around mostly, to the less accessible areas of the jungle.”
“Have you seen the Angel Falls before?” Kiato asked.
“Yup, but not for about twenty years. They”re beyond the Devil’s Teeth-, shouldn’t be too hard to find.”
We walked to the plane. Three men were hoisting two forty-gallon drums of petrol up into the fuselage.
Roberto put out his cigarette and muttered, “Probably best not to smoke around those babies. You don’t mind if we drop them off at the Mission along the way?”
There was no choice. I climbed into the co-pilot seat, which was jammed at the most forward position. This made it impossible to use the foot-operated rudder controls
if I had wanted to. Kiato was wedged in the rear of the aircraft, his face squashed against the window, and with a slow-leaking oil drum between him and the exit. We exchanged looks of dismay as Roberto turned into the wind, pushed in the throttle, and slid back the stick. The Cessna 206 felt very heavy indeed. As my seat soaked up the petrol like a sponge, I forced myself to stop imagining a gloriously explosive end. Kiato hummed. His face was tight and paralyzed with fear.
The Cessna’s controls were still very familiar. When I was seventeen, my father had sent me off to learn to fly. Biff, the most relaxed pilot in history, had taught me to solo a similar Cessna over the swamps of northwest Florida. The one hard rule Biff had ground into me was that one must always have an emergency landing-spot in mind. Roberto set the direction indicator and adjusted the altimeter. Two thousand feet below, the jungle sprawled out in all directions. One tree’s canopy merged into the next. Where would we land if there was a crisis? I plucked up courage and asked Roberto. Pulling out a silver hip-flask from his back pocket, he opened it with his teeth, and drained it dry. Then he cackled with deranged laughter.
The flying bomb proceeded for more than half an hour over dense jungle. From time to time palaeozoic rock formations jutted from the jungle floor. The Cessna buzzed like a moth between giant flat-topped cliffs, sprouting like mushrooms from between the trees. Roberto pointed to a clearing in the distance where a large white building stood. It was the Mission. Circling twice, we landed into the wind. The forty-gallon tanks were carried away.
An Indian dialect was spoken by the people who lived at the Mission. They had become used to the insects which infested everything. Slapping one’s legs would leave a pair of blood-streaked hands.
Soon the irritation of insect bites was a memory. Roberto pushed the throttle in again and we soared high above the bumpy grass strip.
Small mining communities could be spotted on the banks of some rivers; their panning turned the water yellow. Roberto pulled the stick further back and we climbed to six thousand feet. The crumbling mountains, covered in green forest, gave way to spectacular gorges.
Roberto put his hand on my knee. His voice trembling, he shouted, “Below are the Devil’s Teeth: the entrance to the canyon of the Angel Falls.”
It was as if we were venturing into a primeval land where dinosaurs and extinct monsters still roamed. The stone walls of the canyon were gray and crumbled with age. Our Cessna soared like an eagle round and around. Then, whilst banking steeply, we caught a first glimpse of the Angel Falls.
They plunged from the Caroni River down to the jungle floor. The distance of their vault was so great that the water turned into mist halfway down. I could understand how the American aviator, Jimmy Angel, might have felt on discovering the Falls in 1935.
Kiato’s camera clicked. He, Roberto, and I whooped with wild exhilaration. We circled around the canyon four times.
Roberto was now, for some reason, very relaxed. He took his hands from the control column and fumbled for his own camera. The Cessna’s nose began to fall. The altimeter’s hands started to wind downwards. The trees grew bigger and bigger. As the engine made a tortured, droning noise, I grabbed the stick — gently easing it back.
Roberto banked left, and we flew through the Devil’s Teeth and out from that prehistoric land — back into our own time.
On the return flight to El Dorado we stopped at a mining village to collect some prospectors. A cut-throat looking bunch of men, they were hardened by the gruelling conditions of their jungle work. Their hands were rough and caloused, and their burnt, worn faces were mostly hidden beneath tattered beards. Each clutched a nugget of gold. Rubbing their palms together in their relief at escaping the jungle for a time, they chatted of their favourite prostitutes who would be awaiting them in El Dorado.
When we landed, Kiato and I left Roberto and walked back into town. We were both silent. Our minds had been captured by the force of nature.
There was time for one last bowl of spaghetti before the bus bound for Kilometro 88 arrived in the square. I looked round at El Dorado — that most extraordinary place — and climbed aboard.
Kilometro 88 was about as exciting as its name suggests. The town was almost an exact replica of El Dorado. Kiato and I took shelter from the torrential rain in a cavernous drinking house. In the bar, which was hung with bunting, I pulled up a beer-stained chair. Just before sitting, I noticed the beer stains were moving. A pair of eyes amongst the stains blinked.
Almost every free surface in the room was covered with giant moths, which were perfectly camouflaged in the sordid atmosphere. The floor seemed to be littered with piles of decaying brown leaves, which twitched even though there was no breeze.
Kiato ordered a large steak with macaroni piled on top. The bus to Santa Elena, at the Brazilian border, arrived as he sucked up the first pieces of pasta. There was no hurry to bolt the food. The driver and passengers waited courteously until we were ready to leave.
For fifteen hours the silver bus labored towards Brazil. When it rained, water drenched us, seeping through a thousand holes in the ceiling. When it became dark we ploughed on at three miles an hour. The driver’s friend walked in front, guiding the way and forcing all wandering animals to clear the road.
Just before noon the next day the bus pulled into Santa Elena; the town had a sense of greater social cohesion than El Dorado or Kilómetro 88. It seemed as if people resided there because they really wanted to be there.
Old crones sat in doorways knitting, and their grandchildren played in the dirt at their feet.
The previous week had seen the heaviest rain in the region for a very long time. A major bridge en route to Manaus, the Amazonian capital, had been washed away two days before. It would be at least a month before repairs were completed.
Under a magnificent statue of Simón Bolívar, an assorted group of travelers had gathered. Kiato sat down and waited for them to introduce themselves. Like us, they were heading towards Manaus. And, like us, they had heard of the bridge which had been washed away.
The tallest was called Rudolf van den Bosch-Drakenburgh. Standing six foot two, he had a Daks tweed coat over his shoulders, and wore a paisley-patterned silk cravat, knee-length breeches, and riding boots.
“What’s all this nonsense about?” he began in a light Dutch accent, “Luigi, get my brogues!”
A monstrously large creature unpacked clothes from an antique sea trunk. Although taller than the Dutchman, he lacked any air of sophistication. His clothing was tattered, his hair was oily and unkempt, and his severely sunburnt face was peppered with grotesque sores.
“The suede ones or the black pair?” he asked gently, ducking with subservience.
Luigi was a batman and general factotum to den Bosch-Drakenburgh. Foamy saliva filtered through one corner of his mouth, dripping onto his torn shirt front. He had not adapted to the climate well. Originally from Galway, in western Ireland, he was now living in Shepherd’s Bush, London, where, he assured me, a good pint of Guinness was to be had. It remained a mystery why an Irishman, even though resident at London, had a traditionally Italian name. Yet perhaps even more mysterious was the reason for his utter subservience to Rudolf, who had gained complete domination over the Irishman. Luigi seemed to crave a sadistic master.
Kiato demonstrated how to use the solar battery-charger to another man, who sat beside him. He was thin and his face was drawn and white. He was a Russian named Yuri.
We spoke for a long time and, out of the three, Yuri’s comments and expressions were by far the most interesting to me. He had been born in Volgograd, the only son of Orthodox Jewish parents.
“My father died when I was eight,” he said. “And for my mother there was great prejudice against her for being Jewish and a widow.” He lit a Belmont cigarette before continuing in his poetic English. “I studied English and German in Moscow.
It was so wonderful to be in that city, you can’t imagine. My mother was very proud, I think. Then in 1982, when I
was twenty, the Red Army sent me to Afghanistan. The initial eagerness soon evaporated. They told us lies, they said that we would be fighting the Americans! Can you believe that?”
“Where were you stationed?” I asked.
“At first near Kandahar. I thought that was bad. The rations would often be cut in half because the Mujahedin had hit the supply convoy to our base.
“Then one spring morning my unit was moved to fight in the hopeless offensive against Commander Ahmad Shah, at the Panjshir Valley. Many of my friends were killed. Others committed suicide, or went mad because of bad treatment or drinking engine coolant: there was no alcohol. We were like rats in a cage, shaking with terror whenever the rockets fell like rain. I vowed that when I got free I would see something of this world. Twelve months later I was sent back to Moscow. There had been no news from my mother for over half that time. Then I found out that she had died from depression a month before.”
* * *
Rudolf, the Dutchman, held still as Luigi’s clumsy hands fumbled, trying to tie the plaited leather laces of his brogues. Having acquired exit stamps from a small police outpost, we walked towards the Brazilian border. A truck with no bonnet picked us up and dropped us at the frontier army post. Rudolf spelt out his various titles to an officer who wrote them all in the register.
The officer’s face was three inches from the page. Crouching with concentration, he formed each letter individually, using a blunt pencil. A gust of wind shook the tree above, and an avocado fell to the ground. The officer dropped the pencil and scampered over to the fruit. Another produced a knife and they split it in two.
Luigi hauled Kiato off to look for toads, saying that toad-spotting was a popular sport in his native town. The rest of us took shelter from the evening rains and slept our first night in Brazil.
At six the next morning clouds of blue smoke drew closer with a noise like an approaching tank. A truck with no exhaust-pipe trundled up. Two blonde German girls were riding in the back. They pulled us up and we set off for the bridge which had been washed away.
