The Complete Collection of Travel Literature

by Tahir Shah

  “Of what?”

  “Think how quiet and terrible Machu Picchu must have been before the ruins were discovered! Now there are helicopters and hotels and shops selling nice little things, and tourists... so many lovely tourists!”

  We were on the verge of entering the jungle to make contact with the Machiguenga tribe, but my conversation with Walter somehow soured my eagerness for the search. I sat gloomily in the sunshine, away from everyone else, fending off the ferocious dogs. I am outspoken against missionaries, who force an alien framework on people who don’t need it. But, as I see the world, there’s one element that’s even more corrosive than missionaries: tourists. It’s not that I feel above them in any way, but that the very places they patronize are destroyed by their affection.

  Suddenly I understood the great curse. It was the real curse of Paititi, which will be activated only when the lost city has been found. The virgin jungle will be opened up, vast towering trees hewn down to make room for hotels and themed restaurants. Highways will be laid, crammed with a snake of gridlock traffic, all the way to the mountains. As for the tribes, their culture will be erased within weeks. Within a year or two, they will all be studying tourism at a local university, just as they are in Cusco.

  I left the dogs in the heat and rushed to the rank-smelling bathroom at Walter’s hotel. Standing there, sweat running down the edges of my face, I stared into the mirror. How could I be so stupid? How could I yearn for glory if its price was so high? I ran out of the bathroom and down the corridor to the room where the film crew were huddled, wrapped in wet towels. “I know the future,” I said bleakly. “I’ve seen it at Machu Picchu.”

  The crew must have thought the heat was getting to me. They didn’t say anything.

  “You must promise me something,” I said. “If we find Paititi, when we find Paititi, we’ll take a good hard look and then we’ll walk away.”

  “No pictures?” asked David.

  “None.”

  “What about GPS co-ordinates?”

  “We’ll erase them,” I said. “It will be hard, but we’ll go to great lengths to pretend we didn’t find it at all.”

  The tin-roofed market at Pillcopata was the last chance to stock up on kit. Most of the items on sale had been shipped in from mainland China. The developing world is flooded with such gear: functional, durable and tantalizingly cheap. When it comes to affordable Chinese goods, I’m a shopaholic. I can’t help myself. I cadged some pocket money off Marco, and snapped up two dozen enamel mess cups, adorned with views of the Great Wall. I bought cheap sewing kits, too, to hand out to the tribe, and a sack of salted pork bellies. They looked vile and smelt even worse, but I remembered how the Shuar had lusted after salted meat.

  Then I went to the health post, where a doctor sold me a box of fifty morphine vials and a handful of syringes. I had a good medical kit from London’s Hospital of Tropical Diseases, but it didn’t contain anything strong enough to keep an injured man comatose. From reading accounts of other lost city expeditions, I had learned the high risk of snapping ankles while wading through rivers and traversing steep jungle.

  Richard sloped into the hotel at noon. His neck had been badly bitten, but there was no sign of the bus driver’s wife. He joined Rodrigo upstairs for a “smoke bath”. The shaman had spent most of the night engaged in the mysterious smoke ritual. I’m all for shamans doing their ceremonies, but as a diehard anti-smoker, I found sleeping in the room next to the makeshift smoke tent too much to bear.

  “Rodrigo is being taunted by the Curse Lines,” Richard said later. “The invisible spirits are firing darts at him. The only way to keep them at peace is to smoke those bastards out. He says he’s brought seven spirits from Nazca. They’re looking after us, and if we’re lucky they’ll point the way to the ruins.”

  We spent most of the afternoon, and that of the next day, trying to find transport to the end of the road. It seemed to extend about another thirty miles, twisting close to the east bank of the Madre de Dios River, ending at a village called Shintuya. I had heard that the settlement was a point of contact for the Machiguenga tribe. The problem was that there were no vehicles at all.

  Being becalmed in a small Peruvian town is possibly the worst feeling in the world. We were soon getting on each other’s nerves. The Swedes felt it necessary to document my frustration, filming from every angle, as I sat in the shade, swishing away the packs of malicious dogs. The odd couple stayed in their room for more than twenty-four hours, smoked out to the very limits of life.

  When explorers get home from a trip, they always bask in the wonder of it all. But they forget to mention hours, days, weeks of sitting around waiting for something to happen. In the West we expect time to be filled with events. Not so in the Peruvian outback. Entire lifetimes begin, mature and end without a single major event happening.

  Walter must have taken pity on us. He staggered out of his bedroom from a long siesta with a cardboard box weighing heavy in his hands. He placed it on the hotel’s dining-table. “This stuff was left by another expedition,” he said. “Help yourself.”

  I sifted through the contents, a variety of notebooks, printed booklets and maps. The notebooks were packed with tight black handwriting, interspersed with sketches of birds and details of flora. All the writing was in Czech, a language none of us understood. We studied the maps. They had been prepared by the Peruvian National Institute of Geography to a scale of 1:1,000,000. They showed the Pillcopata area, the Madre de Dios river and the jungle to the north-west, where the oil exploration was going on. They were extremely useful, the only drawback being that vast swathes of white cut across the green. These were marked with the words datos insuficientes, insufficient data.

  I asked Walter who had left the notebooks and maps.

  “La expedición grande, the great expedition,” he said. “They came through about four months ago.”

  “How many people?”

  He slapped a hand to his cheek. “¡Fue magnifica! It was tremendous!” he claimed. “I’ve never seen anything like it. They were like an army, their supplies glistening in the sun. They were like warriors heading to battle. There must have been fifty men: scientists, anthropologists, engineers and porters. They had computers and special tents that self-inflate, and food from New York City.”

  Where were they from?”

  Walter thought for a few moments. “From Czechoslovakia,” he said. “They were led by a man who seemed to have a confidence like no other man alive. He was dark-skinned and handsome. The women in town went wild when they saw him. They begged him to sit in their homes and take a drink. But the man waved a finger in the air. “No, no,” he said to them all. “I am on a mission, a mission sponsored by my government, for the benefit of all free men!” And, with that, he waved his army forward, and it rolled on out of Pillcopata into the jungle.”

  The Czech explorer sounded like the kind of man who makes a mockery of ordinary adventurers. We hadn’t been feted or invited into anyone’s homes. The only attention we had attracted was from a married monster of a woman with raging syphilis. The Czech expedition might have been overloaded with gear, but they hadn’t found Paititi. The lost city was still out there, still hiding in the foliage.

  Eventually we negotiated a ride to Shintuya on the back of a truck full of pigs. The vehicle was in truly terrible condition, destroyed by the weekly runs from Cusco. On Thursdays it drove with pigs to the end of the road, and returned with bananas each Monday. Richard and Rodrigo, the odd couple, were both gasping for breath after the marathon smoke session; they spread out across the floor planks and tried to sleep. They didn’t seem to mind the pigs charging all over them.

  In one corner of the truck, away from the pigs, there was a knot of people, a mother with her twin daughters, and an old man whose arm was paralyzed. A young Chilean man called Jorge was squatting near them. He had a hooked beak of a nose, big teeth and hazelnut eyes, which made you feel warm inside when he looked at you. I trusted him at
once. Like every other foreigner passing that way, he was searching for the last refuge of the Incas.

  He explained that he had hunted for the ruins for a decade or more, mounting regular trips into Madre de Dios, from his adopted home of Cusco. “You don’t need fancy equipment to find a lost city,” he said, “you just need time. Don’t expect to find anything if you don’t put in the time.”

  I asked if he’d heard of the Czech team. “Yes, of course,” he said quickly, “everyone knows about Count Josef Capek. He’s an aristocrat who likes to put on a big show. It makes him feel important. He’s nothing but a Boy Scout.”

  “The taste for glory can make ordinary men behave in extraordinary ways,” I said.

  Jorge held on tight as the truck speeded up to ford a stream. “There are easier ways to find glory,” he replied. “If you want glory then stay out of the jungle.”

  “What about the Machiguenga?

  “Be wary of them,” said Jorge. “They are sick of people searching for ruins in their lands. Haven’t you heard of the French expedition?”

  “The one that was wiped out?”

  “Yes, the French-American group, headed by Nichols. They ran out of food, entered a Machiguenga village and found it deserted. So they helped themselves to some of the tribe’s food. While they were eating, the villagers came back from their hunting trip, and shot them all with their three-foot-long arrows.”

  On either side of the track, the undergrowth was seething, insect wings echoing like the whine of a radio searching for a station. From time to time we glimpsed the mighty Madre de Dios, its furious current boiling with life. The pigs rattled around us like white mice in a box, as I took stock of our situation. Things were falling into shape, I thought. We must be in the right area, because everyone we met seemed to be looking for Paititi, or had something to say about it. The jungle was dense and, with each hundred yards, it grew denser. Like a giant web of concentric silk spirals, it became more perfidious the closer one got to the centre. At the outset of the journey I had worried about the film crew: their mountain of luggage was a great concern. But as we moved closer to the tribal lands of the Machiguenga, my anxiety shifted from them to the shaman and the Vietnam vet.

  Rodrigo had started moaning about missing his family, even though he had little to return to. His children were grown up, and his wife had recently taken a lover, who had moved into their shack upstream from Iquitos. She had kicked Rodrigo out, along with his cauldron, and the ever-present bag of psychotropic vines. As I understood it, Rodrigo had become the laughing-stock of the Upper Amazon after a love-spell he had cast had gone horribly wrong. His patient had been treated with a potion to increase his sexual desire. The potion worked, but instead of lusting after women, the man found a new and insatiable urge for men. Our expedition provided the shaman with a chance to lie low for a while, to earn some money and have his shamanic skill taken more seriously again.

  As we descended, closer to the river, Richard became increasingly unstable. We had hardly arrived in the jungle and he was picking fights with us all. His brief flirtation with detoxification was over. He now chewed coca leaves incessantly, took hallucinogenic snuff each morning, and spent the afternoons passed out after guzzling a bottle of jungle juice”. The preparation, brewed up fresh by Rodrigo each night, contained a variety of hallucinogens. In his waking hours, Richard behaved like a petulant teenager. But the danger was that he was armed with a Brazilian riot shotgun, its magazine packed with enough ammunition to dispatch us all.

  At Shintuya, six or seven houses clung to a ridge above the riverbank like molluscs on a sea wall. They were built of upright planks, gaps between them, with ragged tin roofs, amber brown with rust. We unloaded our immense assortment of equipment and food, and erected a tarpaulin over a makeshift wooden frame, following the diagram in Galton’s book, The Art of Travel. As we prepared the camp, the pigs were hounded out of the truck by its driver, and corralled in a crude pen at the water’s edge. They knew instinctively that something of importance was about to take place. I think they could smell it; either that, or they had caught a glimpse of the crazed eyes of their assassin. Without wasting a second, the truck driver stormed into the pen, wielding a sharp-pointed knife. The pigs screamed loudly, as you would have expected them to do, their final, frantic cries dissipating into the descending darkness like the exclamation of condemned men. By the end of it, the truck driver was drenched. His face, bare arms, hands and clothes glistened with scarlet blood. It was a horrible, yet beautiful sight.

  The only place to buy anything in Shintuya was a shop owned by a large, boisterous woman with warts, called Gloria. She was covered with them. They ran up and down her arms, and across her face, like the miniature bumps on Lego. I entered her shop to relieve the instant boredom conjured up by the community. She greeted me loudly, smiling, eyes creased.

  “¿Has venido por Paititi? Have you come for Paititi?” she asked, as if it was a funfair ride at the water’s edge.

  “We’ve come to meet the Machiguenga,” I said.

  Gloria scoffed. “Son piratas, they’re pirates,” she said knowingly. “They will kill you and steal your stuff. Watch out!”

  I thanked her for the advice and bought a can of tuna, not that we needed it but it seemed like a way of showing that we had come in peace.

  As I left the shop, I spotted a group of short, lean men getting out of a hollowed-out canoe. There were four of them. They walked without shoes, and were dressed in tattered Peruvian football strip, green and blue. Two were carrying sturdy bows fashioned from black wood; the other two were holding arrows, each well over three feet in length. The arrows ended in serrated wooden barbs.

  “There are your Machiguenga,” said Gloria, who had moved into the veranda’s shade. “They have come here to buy salt.”

  “Where do they live?”

  “Not far,” she said, “a few miles upriver, at Mantacolla.”

  I felt like rushing over and shaking them by the hand. But experience has taught me to go slow.

  At the camp, Richard was out cold. Rodrigo was staring down at him in disappointment. “He didn’t take much of the drink,” he said, “but it is very, very strong.”

  “What was it? What did you give him?”

  “It’s datura,” he said. “I found it growing over there.”

  The shaman pointed to a low tree, with thin foliage and a multitude of giant lemon-colored flowers: la trompeta del diablo, the so-called Trumpet of the Devil. I had taken that wicked plant myself as an admixture in ayahuasca with the Shuar. They use it as an agent, a way to fly into the next world — a world they claim is reality. The alkaloids in datura give a sensation of flight, of soaring above the jungle canopy like a bird. So potent is its effect that the Shuar rarely take it these days. Instead, they reserve it for their hunting dogs and their guests.

  Datura was known to the Incas, and its alluring flowers were soon noticed by the Spanish invaders, who brought the plant back to Europe in the sixteenth century. Medieval witches got hold of it and used it in their flying potions. They prepared a paste with the flowers, and applied it to their inner thighs. They would stand astride a besom, easing the ointment into the skin with the shaft, hence the idea of a witch riding on a broomstick. Within a few minutes they would pass out, and when they woke many hours later, they assumed they had been flying.

  That evening we discovered that three sacks of food had been stolen since we had got down from the truck. I cursed Richard for having become so ineffectual, and yelled at Rodrigo for feeding him so many drugs. From that moment on I outlawed the serving up of any more hallucinogens. Rodrigo was forbidden to prepare potions; he could cook potatoes instead.

  We sat under the stars on a sheet of blue plastic, brooding on Richard’s shortcomings, while the film crew rubbed sun cream into, their charred skin. The veteran was supposed to be protecting us, but was instead plunging the expedition into danger. I could not trust him with the Machiguenga. He would have to be left
at the camp.

  Sitting there, bristling with anger, I counselled myself to be harder on my employees. As the head of an expedition, you can’t pussyfoot around being polite to everyone. You have to show your teeth once in a while; a little growling goes a long way.

  The next morning Richard was still unconscious. He had soiled himself in the night, and was covered with ants, rather like a corpse abandoned in the woods. It was a deplorable sight, a grown man capable of so much and reduced to so little. We stood around him in a huddle, the film crew shocked that I had ever placed my trust in the former soldier.

  As the sun’s early rays touched the river like a wand, I questioned aloud how we would get to the Machiguenga village.

  A local man meandered over. He had long arms, a vice-like handshake and a slow manner. After introducing himself as Jesús, he looked down at Richard despondently. “I bet he’s not a Christian,” he said coolly.

  “He was in Vietnam,” I replied. “It messed him up inside.”

  I asked Jesús about the tribe.

  “I’ve got a peki-peki” he said. “Te llevaré, I’ll take you.”

  We negotiated a price, and the film crew and I clambered into the canoe. Squatting at the stern, the boatman whipped the starting cord and the engine came alive. Roaring like a steam train into the wind, the narrow canoe pushed out into the river’s current. The camp grew smaller and smaller as we gained our distance. My anger with Richard gave me strength, strength from fear of the tribesmen. We didn’t have a weapon between us. I felt strong, resilient, like a condemned man before a firing squad.

  The hum of the peki-pekis engine resounded off the steep mud banks as we inched our way up towards Mantacolla. The river quickly narrowed, and was suddenly no more than fifty feet wide, but the current was fast. A peki-peki engine, which cannot provide more than five horsepower at best, feeds a cheap aluminum propeller at the end of a long shaft. The system’s advantage is that the propeller can be swung out of the water in a split second at any sign of shallows.