by Tahir Shah
“These are the first ruins,” said Pancho, wide-eyed.
I looked back at the wall. It was hanging with liana, jagged and oblique. Halfway up there was a very large hornet’s nest, vigorous with life. But there were no carvings or petroglyphs. It was clear the wall had nothing to do with the Incas.
“This is a natural wall,” I said.
Pancho seemed not to have heard my remark. He pointed a thumb at the rock. “Las ruinas,” he said.
I am rarely gripped by violent rage, but I felt my veins swell with anger. For Pancho the journey upriver was a jaunt, a pleasure trip; for the rest of us it was an experience charged with responsibility. The warrior moved away from the granite and gazed into my eyes, one of the first and only times we ever achieved full eye-contact. It was as if he was laughing at me inside.
Back at the river the men were lolling about, wondering what was going on. Héctor took Pancho aside and enticed him to reveal the truth.
“He says these are the small ruins,” said Héctor later. “The great set of ruins is upriver.”
But when I asked Pancho again if he could take us to them, he jolted his head to the left, and then the right. In a whisper so faint as to be barely audible, he said he did not know where the ruins of the lost city lay. If he did, he said, he would gladly take me.
We pressed on, although I no longer knew why we bothered. The expedition had developed a pace of its own, moving ahead through inertia alone. I fell into a state of deep despair, unable to go on. I sat on a stone and could not lift myself up. There was no point in advancing any further, but I was too fearful to turn back. The Swedes filmed me, bent down, broken with dejection. It was good material for them: an explorer shattered by the experience of exploration. They seemed revitalized by my gloom, as did the porters. They headed off hunting in a pack, and killed an endangered sachavaca, a giant tapir.
The animal was as large as a small donkey, with a long snout and speckled coat of gray-brown hair. Julio used a machete to chop off its head and limbs. Then he cleaved steaks from its thighs. The meat was flame-scarlet, shining as if it had been lacquered. Pancho spent two days smoking it over a burning termite nest. He said the roasted termites gave it flavour. The animal was cooked until it was so hard as to be almost indigestible. The porters said that only a madman would eat a tapir rare because of the worms.
The Swedes were delighted with the meat. It reminded them of elk steaks from Lapland. I did not have the stomach for overdone tapir, so I sat by myself away from the others. Héctor patted me on the back. “No te preocupes, don’t worry,” he declared. “Paititi está allá arriba, Paititi is up there.”
“My belief is flagging,” I said.
“Pancho is playing with you,” he replied. “He is playing with your mind.”
Again, the old man cautioned me on the price of doubt. It could cost us everything, he warned. The only way to succeed was to believe, and to keep moving upriver.
Héctor’s steadfast belief, that Pancho did know where the lost city lay, made me realize how short-sighted I had been. I kicked myself for doubting: how could I expect to succeed if I had any doubt? I took Héctor’s advice, placed total belief in Pancho and vowed to go on until we found the ruins of Paititi, or until we met disaster.
The cloak of despair was suddenly lifted, and I awoke the next morning feeling like a new man. The porters were in high spirits, too, having feasted on huge quantities of tapir meat. They had picked the animal clean, and had even roasted its bones for the marrow.
Two days later we were at the place of negative energy once again. Despite witnessing the curious atmosphere of the zone on the previous trip, I put down any bad feeling to coincidence. Héctor lined up the porters at the start of the day and told them they would soon be fighting like dogs. “You will feel discouraged and tired,” he said, “and will gladly tear at each other with your bare hands — but resist!”
The warning, quite obviously, seeded animosity in their minds. We hadn’t gone a mile when the first fight broke out. Oscar accused his best friend, Carlos, of trying to trip him up. They started punching each other. Then Julio spat insults at Boris. This time even Francisco did not escape the zone of negativity. He attacked me, declaring I was paying extra low wages and forcing the men to work in impossible conditions. Héctor called the busybody to heel.
As before, I was certain the tension was nothing more than fluke. The burden of such a colossal amount of equipment was quite sufficient to turn inseparable friends into enemies. Two miles on, and the men appeared to be back to normal, if there was any normality in the wretchedness. But it was now Héctor who was causing alarm. He was talking about witches and wickedness again, hinting that the spirit of the jungle would bear down upon us and consume us all.
“It is written in the Old Testament,” he said. “The jungle shall rise up and slay each man who walks upon it.”
Unable to remember any mention of cloud forest in the Bible, I begged him to resist the urge to frighten the porters. His belief in Paititi was a driving force, but it was outweighed by the talk of imminent disaster. That night, as a shark-gray eddy of cloud pushed across the crescent moon, Héctor addressed the men once again. They sat at his feet, like the disciples of a guru, on the riverbank. A light breeze cut through the valley, sweeping his tirade downstream. From time to time the wind changed direction, and I caught the odd word: “terror”, “diabolical”, “revenge”. The porters were crouching low, like tigers waiting to pounce on a gazelle. When Héctor had finished his harangue, he slunk under the canopy, where I was scratching out my notes.
He glanced at the men, who were now whispering to one another, like convicts on a chain-gang. Then he looked over at me. His characteristic air of humility was gone; he seemed visibly shaken, as if an unbearable secret had been confided to him.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
The old Maestro pressed the tip of his index finger to his mouth, holding back the secret. I repeated my question. “No te lo puedo decir, I cannot say,” he replied.
“Tell me.”
The Maestro bit his upper lip in shame. “The porters will return home at dawn,” he said.
SIXTEEN
PORTABLE FOOD
The kinds of food that are the most portable in the ordinary sense of the term are: Pemmican; meat-biscuit; dried meat; dried fish; wheat flour; biscuit; oatmeal; barley; peas; cheese; sugar; preserved potatoes; and Chollet’s compressed vegetables.
The Art of Travel
A journey of considerable hardship requires a strong team, a team with the physical strength to persevere in dreadful conditions, and the mental stability with which to stare danger in the eye. Years of sawing down the jungle had given the porters muscles that would put body-builders to shame, but their reserves of mental strength were pathetically lean. Before the night had been tinged with the subtle blush of first light, I crawled out of my moist sleeping-bag to confront the men. Their spirit was broken, shattered by the fantasy conjured up by Héctor.
Giovanni was stewing up the last of the tapir, along with an agouti he had found dead on the forest floor. He would not look at me. When I approached, he pretended to be inspecting the sores on his feet. I had always been touched by Giovanni’s humour, his honesty. If any man would tell the truth, I felt it would be he.
“If we push hard,” I said, “we will reach the Gateway to Paititi by late afternoon.”
The cook did not look up. He was poking at a slender white worm issuing from his thigh.
“Please make sure the men eat well, and fast,” I added.
Giovanni swallowed hard, his face tilting down. “We are going back,” he said.
“We are going upriver,” I snapped.
“You are,” he retorted.” We are not.”
A moment later the men were gathered around Giovanni, standing shoulder to shoulder like planks in a fence. They were not smiling, and when I took a step forward, they shuffled back as if I would harm them. I didn’t know what to d
o, what to say. Ordinarily I might have turned to Héctor for his advice, but it had been he who had fanned the flames of mutiny.
I ranted on for a time about dreams and aspirations, preaching a sermon that a man must follow what is in his heart. The porters’ heads were low and their spirits not bolstered by my discourse. I said that Paititi was the magic wand that could transform our lives. It was there, I exclaimed, to test us, to unite us towards a greater glory. The porters stood motionless as I raged with an invented philosophy. I threw my arms heavenward and promised them that the invisible, all-seeing force of nature was looking over us.
“It will kill us,” Julio quipped.
“El Tigre,” muttered Oscar.
“No somos estúpidos, we are not stupid,” said another.
I turned to gaze upriver, taking in the screen of chonta palms perched at the next bend. Six pairs of green macaws flew overhead, wings flapping, beaks tweeting as they went.
“What do you want to change your minds?” I asked.
The men looked at each other, swapping quizzical side-glances.
“There is one thing that will make us happier,” said Julio.
I readied myself for an appeal for more money or increased rations. “What is it?”
“Queremos una ceremonia, we want a ceremony.”
The ritual was a crutch by which the porters could prop up their floundering spirits. I did not condone it, but if that was what it took to continue, I was powerless to stand in their way.
Héctor flew into a rage when he heard the team’s demand. “It is the phantoms inside them,” he shouted. “Don’t you see it?!”
“Let them have a ceremony,” I said, “if it will keep them with us.”
It had been the Maestro who had worked them up into such a state and now I was justifying the remedy. I strode over to where the porters were huddled, all cosy and warm, beneath shreds of coarse blanket. “You can have a ceremony,” I told them virtuously, “as long as you are ready to move out first thing in the morning.”
There were no smiles, no glimmers of cheer, just a gallery of scowls. I went back to my nest of damp clothing and attended to my feet. The full day of rest would allow me to dry out the rotting skin between the toes. Meanwhile, the diet of Pot Noodles and bad jungle meat had given me terrible constipation. In recent days I had become obsessed by bowel movements. I had once read that Livingstone was similarly preoccupied, and had been plagued by bad bowels throughout his great African journeys. In my diaries I noted each movement in increasing detail, with estimations of weight, notes on firmness and color. It seems like a sordid preoccupation to mention, but in the jungle, close inspection of one’s stools makes for valuable research.
The day progressed with little sound from the porters. They lazed about, leading me to suspect that the ceremony was merely a stalling device. But then, as the half-light of dusk turned into night, their ritual began.
Oscar had trapped a black pig-like creature in a net. From a distance, it looked like a paca, a solitary nocturnal rodent that was always a welcome addition to the evening pot. The others had cut one of the blankets into thin strips, put them into enamel mess mugs, poured in a little kerosene and set them alight. The effect was of a dozen impressive torches, blazing with secret light. Once the mess mugs were burning, the porters called me over. They had gathered in a circle, stripped to the waist, their torsos washed in yellow and orange, their faces haunted by charcoal shadows. Carlos rapped the back of a spoon against a metal bowl, in a sharp Morse code. The rhythm rang out across the veil of trees, warding away the spirits and luring the attentions of superstitious men.
Héctor, Pancho and the film crew watched from a distance. I was planning to do the same, but Julio pulled me from the sidelines. “This ceremony is for you as well,” he said.
The first phase continued for an hour. The spoon-rapping was joined by a chorus of grunts, the kind a rugby team makes before a match. Then a sharp knife glinted in the moonlight, and the paca’s life ended. Its blood was drained into a Pot Noodle tub, which was passed round. We each rinsed our faces in the crimson liquid. Then Juan hacked off the creature’s feet. These were passed around as the blood had been. In the uncertain atmosphere, the men spent a moment or two sucking a foot, before passing it on. I cannot accurately describe the sensation of sucking a rodent’s foot. I wondered who had thought up the ceremony and how it could have anything to do with the placation of evil. Once the sucking was at an end, and our faces had been daubed with blood a second time, the men squatted on the riverbank and whined like sows being led to slaughter. I followed their example, for fear of being ostracized.
It was at that point that Francisco told me to go back and sit with Héctor. I walked over to the tent and watched from a distance. The ritual continued for another hour, with each man addressing the others in a peculiar high-pitched tone. Then, each one threw something into a low fire, burning between a tripod of stones.
“What are they burning?” I wondered aloud.
“Su honor, their honor,” replied Héctor, “y su dignidad, and their dignity.”
Next morning we rose early, packed up the camp, and set off before anyone could protest. It had not rained, but the river had risen mysteriously during the night, most probably caused by rain falling on the leeward slope of the ridge further upstream. The porters’ faces were rusty brown with dried blood, and their hair was curiously matted. I had not stayed awake to watch them, but Marco told me they had continued long into the night. The ritual, he said, had involved rubbing silt from the river into each other’s scalps. Whatever the details, the ceremony seemed to have had the desired effect. The men were moving upriver.
We walked all morning, and through the first part of the afternoon, carrying the equipment up one set of rapids after another. There was no more talk of ghosts. The porters fell into a fine routine, relaying their burdens a few hundred yards at a time. In the many weeks we spent in the jungle, I cannot remember a day with less moaning and groaning, and less dissent. Even Héctor noticed the change of heart. “The spirits are resting,” he said smugly.
“I don’t believe in that rubbish,” I replied, as we greased our feet.
Héctor reached out to grasp my arm. He held it tight, crushing the bones together. “You will condemn us to death,” he said.
By late afternoon I spotted a wide bend in the river, a signal that the chasm was close. Despite the team’s exhaustion, I pressed them to continue until we had reached the Gateway. That night we camped on the rocks above the gorge. In retrospect it was a foolish choice. A downpour upstream would have flooded the river and we would have drowned, unable to escape. The water flowing through the chasm was much lower than before, but it was a treacherous passage none the less. To get to the other side, we would have to negotiate a three-hundred-yard trench of white water and rocks.
After the usual Pot Noodle appetizer and the main course of suspect stew at dinner, I rallied the team, thanked them for keeping the faith and staying with me. They pressed around me, their meek faces reflecting the candlelight, like a choir at evensong.
“Tomorrow we will pass through the Gateway,” I said, “and we will walk into the future, with our heads held high. Paititi is close now.”
The men might not have been impressed by the speech, but I raised morale by promising double wages for every day we spent beyond the great chasm. Julio led the others in a round of applause, and they broke into spontaneous laughter. Much had changed in a single day. The porters were back on my side, and we had reached the new ground. It seemed as if, once again, the expedition had a future.
Passing through the chasm required bravery and folly in equal measure. Looking back is easy, and of little help. If we had known the price of the toll, we might never have journeyed through the Gateway at all. We began at dawn, our minds lulled by a night of sound sleep, our bodies energized by a hot breakfast of roasted caramacha fish. I harangued the men for a few moments as they loaded up like pack mules. Most had b
andaged their hands with tough white tape and some had wound bandages tightly round their knees. They said it helped them deal with the strain.
The procession left camp on the dot of nine, snaking its way through the pouring rain up to the rim of the chasm. I was somewhere in the middle, enveloped in a green British army poncho, which did little to keep out the water.
Héctor was at the front, as always setting an example to the others by carrying an impossible load. Pancho, who was supposed to be guiding us, was at the rear of the procession. He kept silent all morning, even when he walked into a wasps’ nest. Like the other local people I had met, he cackled with laughter at the misfortune, and went on.
The best route through the chasm was a point of contention. No one could agree on which way to go, and each man seemed reluctant to trust his life to another’s plan. In the end, I overruled everyone, and insisted on the path with the least overt risk. Even then, it was necessary to clamber over a series of grotesquely large rocks, each more slippery than the last. After that we were forced to wade up through the white-water trench.
The ability to tell a good route from a terrible one is a valuable skill when leading an expedition. Unfortunately for us all, it was a skill I did not possess. I had failed to take into account the invisible currents. The first three men who stepped uneasily into the frothing water were instantly carried away, along with their packs. The film crew, whose precious equipment they were transporting, whimpered like distressed damsels, as their exposed film raced downriver towards rocks.
That morning Pancho had been of little use. But as soon as he heard the frenzied shouts, he glanced at the river and took in the situation. His experience of fishing near rapids had taught him the way water flows. Within five seconds, he had ripped down a stave, calculated the route of the flow, barred the way and saved the bags.
For eight hours we persevered through the white water, gaining a few feet an hour. Rarely have I felt so drained, so wretched, as on that day. The torrential rain did not cease for a moment. There was water above, below, and all around us. It shrouded us, froze us, and almost drowned us all.
