by Tahir Shah
At the end of the experience there was a beach, no more than a few yards of oily claylike silt. We lay on it outstretched, exhausted, tearful and triumphant. I thanked the men for their endurance, but my words were scant payment for their efforts. They disliked me very much, but we had bonded, whether any of us wanted it or not.
Those who had the strength raised their heads a fraction and peered back at the Gateway. The chaos of rocks, grit and white foam, the waves and the ferocity of nature were overwhelming. I marvelled at it, as perhaps a condemned man might be awed by the workmanship of his noose.
As ever, Héctor read my thoughts: “The executioner will get us on our return,” he said.
His words were to haunt me over the next weeks: each mile I dragged the team on was a mile further to be covered on the way home. Only God knew how we would ever get through the chasm again. But then, if I was to believe Héctor, the Gateway to Paititi was nothing compared to the journey ahead.
That evening, as we all crouched around a great bonfire, set back from the river on a plain of needlegrass, the old man spoke again about the danger. His words drifted into the night with the sparks. “Paititi will rob our souls,” he said. “It will feast on our guts, spit them out and laugh at our inanity!”
“We are getting near,” I said.
Héctor spat into the fire: an unlikely gesture for such a refined man. “What do you know of Paititi?” he snapped.
“That we have a chance at finding it.”
“Huh!”
“We have Pancho,” I said firmly. “He knows, you told me so yourself.”
“I said that long ago,” Héctor replied, “when the river was an angel.”
“And now what is it?”
The Maestro wiped a tear from his left eye. “From here on, the river is Death,” he said.
The first night beyond the chasm was humid, despite the increased altitude. No one slept well. I heard the men talking to each other, and shouting out in their dreams. I let them lie in until eight, to make up for the hardship of the previous day. They were uneasy at breakfast. I could sense that something was wrong.
“What is it?” I asked Julio.
“Oscar saw a ghost,” he said, “in the trees... It’s there whether you like it or not.”
“I do not like it,” I said curtly. “Ignore it!”
We put on our clothes, loaded up and moved out. A tense, anxious air hung over the procession. I would have rallied the team and urged them with words of support, but my rallying talk was spent. I knew that, from that point on, no amount of coaxing would work. If I wanted the men to stay with me, I would have to drag them forward an inch at a time.
The way ahead was a monotony of shallow water, sandbanks and heavy rain. Every tree looked like the one beside it, and every bend like the one before. I marched on without thought. It was the most dangerous way to continue. When I could be bothered I worried about the threat of shattered ankles, but most of the time I didn’t waste my energy.
Boris started to moan about deadlines. He said something about having shot enough film. He suggested camping at the edge of the river, and waiting for us until we came back. I wouldn’t have it, and forced him to continue. On a harsh expedition there’s no space for anyone who does not intend to finish. In the army such men are shot as deserters. I told Boris, jokingly, that I would have him shot. We looked at each other when the threat had passed through the air from my mouth to his ear. The Bulgarian’s face was taut. “You would do it, wouldn’t you?” he said at length.
“Perhaps,” I replied.
We carried on and each day melted into the next. It was a routine of getting up, putting on damp clothing, eating stew, trudging in agony, eating Pot Noodles, more trudging, building camps, sleeping and getting up again. The days were filled with painful movement upriver and the nights with fever.
We all dealt with the hardship in different ways, and clung to obsessions, in the hope they would help us through. I sought salvation in preoccupation with my bowels, the Swedes were devoted to keeping the Arriflex dry, and Marco thought of nothing but the well-being of his cigars. As for the porters, they became universally obsessed with collecting the spent Pot Noodle tubs, and invented a thousand ways to use them. Back in England, I had given little thought to the snack’s flavours. Most of what I had brought were Chicken and Vegetable, and came in a standard white pot. But a few were spicy curry flavour, called Bombay Bad Boy, and came in a black pot. A black-market developed between the men, in which the rare black tubs were regarded as equal in value to a pair of rubber boots. I would have stamped out the trade, but allowed it to continue because it kept them occupied.
On other journeys I had found myself craving the luxuries of home, but not in the Madre de Dios jungle. I did not miss having clean water to wash in, a flush lavatory or laundered clothes. As time passed, I rarely thought of home, except of my wife and our baby daughter, whose first birthday I had missed.
As time progressed we all developed a crude routine. It enabled us to endure what might normally be considered unendurable. Each morning I would put on my wet clothing just before setting out, and stay wet until breaking for camp each evening. I had become obsessed with keeping a single change of clothes bone dry. I would wrap the sacred dry shirt and shorts in multiple layers of plastic when not in use. I never washed them; clothes hanging out to dry invariably got soaked in an unexpected shower. My dry outfit was black with dirt and it stank.
Personal hygiene was equally hard to maintain. Like most of the men, I washed in the river each afternoon. The cleanliness of the water depended on whether it had rained. If it had, then the river’s silt would be swirled up into it like lamb broth, and rinsing yourself did more harm than good.
Despite the Vaseline our feet continued to suffer. To make matters worse, a few of the porters developed alarming sores on their backs. They were as wide as coffee cups, with dead white skin round the edges and shiny pink in the middle, like an exotic species of anemone. I experimented with a range of treatments, but none proved satisfactory. I would have handed out antibiotics, but our stocks had been ruined in the rapids.
Ten days after he had passed through the great chasm, Héctor ranted on about a curse. He was always going on about curses and sin, exclaiming how Adventism was a defence against evil, so I didn’t take him very seriously We were traipsing through the river, making adequate headway, Pancho at the rear, Héctor somewhere near the front. For once it wasn’t raining; the sky was a great canvas of indigo, ribbed with cirrus clouds. Better still, the plague of sweat bees had vanished. I was about to give voice to my satisfaction, but the old man suddenly shouted out from the front: “¡Paren! ¡Paren! Stop! Stop!”
“What is it?”
I ran forward, stumbling across the rocks, and passed the porters, who had come to an abrupt halt. “What is it?” I repeated, in a low voice.
The old man wiped a hand over his mouth. “We cannot go on,” he said.
“Of course we can!”
“And risk such danger?”
“What danger?”
“Las líneas malditas, the Curse Lines,” he said.
Rodrigo had often taunted me with talk of the lines. He had said that only an embalmed cadaver could reveal the safe path between them. Héctor’s knowledge of the Curse Lines took me by surprise, for I had thought they were a figment of the shaman’s expansive imagination.
My worry was not for Héctor and his fears, but for the men. If they got a whiff of the new invisible danger, they would drop everything and run back to their village. Again, I pleaded with the Maestro to keep the hazards to himself.
“If we cross this point,” he said, jerking his thumb at the ground, “we may not return here alive.”
Danger is the companion of hardship. I was prepared to bear risks, but unwilling to be beaten by hysteria. Héctor’s greatest strength, his humanity, was now working against me. Whenever he spoke, the porters listened. They trusted his judgment and believed every word
that slipped from his lips. But I sensed that his usefulness was coming to an end. He was invaluable, but his ability to incite mutiny made him worthless.
We camped early so that I could quiz Pancho and get the old man back on my side. Some of the men took advantage of the remaining light and went to hunt birds in the marshes that formed a floodplain to the river. They returned with a number of straggly-looking ducks, which they plucked and cooked.
I had stopped eating Giovanni’s stews because of the fish bones. A great variety of fish could be found in the high jungle, some of which looked primeval. Their common feature was an astonishing skeleton, fragments of which would tear into your cheeks and gums as you struggled to get at the meat. All the others thought I was mad to pass up the nightly blend of fish, game and rodent.
While the men prepared the camp, I went over to where Pancho was sitting. His expression was calm, like that of a mannequin, neither happy nor sad. He was making flights for his arrows from bristly black feathers. I asked him for his opinion on the Curse Lines. He didn’t reply.
“Do you know about them?” I asked, again.
“Sí,” he said, at some length.
“Do you believe in them?”
Pancho preened half a feather through his lips. “No los puedo ver, I cannot see them,” he said.
“But do you fear them?”
The warrior did not answer. In the world of the Machiguenga it was considered polite to ignore a foolish question. After several minutes of silence, he turned to me and, staring out over the river, he said: “Paititi no existe. There is no Paititi.”
Across from where we were sitting, I could see Héctor rallying the men. I could not hear his words, but it was evident that he was whipping up their fears. I rushed over, and took him aside. “We can find Paititi!” I said earnestly. “You must believe... If we believe, we will find it!”
The old man shook his head. “No, my friend,” he said. “Paititi is a fantasy. It is a dream. It does not exist.”
I found myself incensed by Héctor’s inconsistency. The hardship was dragging him down. He was trying to come up with excuses to pull out, and to take the porters with him. The worst aspect was that we had no idea how far there was still to travel. I started to ration the Pot Noodles, encouraging Giovanni to serve up as much of his devilish stew as possible. There was still enough dried food for a few more days, but I had to take into account the return journey We had stashed supplies en route, but almost certainly too little.
During the night Oscar jumped up and ran off into the jungle, screaming and waking us all. I thought we were under attack. Before I could give an order or find my lamp, two or three men went after him. I could make out the sound of limbs ripping through the dense undergrowth, of panting, and shouts of desperation. Eventually they brought the boy back. He was sweating, and hyperventilating. There was pasty white spit around his mouth; his eyes were dilated, and he was trembling.
“What is wrong?” I asked sternly.
Oscar’s mouth chewed at the air. He swallowed hard.
“He’s gone mad,” said Francisco.
I asked Oscar again what was the matter. He said nothing. His eyes streamed with tears.
“I am sorry,” he said, weeping.
An hour later the disturbance was over and the team were asleep again, but I lay awake, worrying about Pancho, Héctor and the men. They were all much stronger than I, much more at home in the jungle, but I had the solemn duty of pulling them all ahead. It brought out the worst in me, and they began to call me El Diablo behind my back.
I didn’t like being the brunt of their jokes, the focus of their whining, but as long as they were with me, I didn’t care what insults they came out with. The more they jeered in private, the more determined I became to carry them with me to the very end.
SEVENTEEN
BIVOUAC
Bivouacking is miserable work in a wet or unhealthy climate, but in a dry and healthy one, there is no question of its superiority over tenting. Men who sleep habitually in the open, breathe fresher air and are far more imbued with the spirit of wild life, than those who pass the night within the stuffy enclosure of a tent.
The Art of Travel
By the next morning a dense fog had descended over the valley. The camp looked like the steam room of a Turkish bath but it was chilled, rather than hot, freezing us all to the bone. Héctor didn’t comment on the mist. The only things on his mind were the spirits and the Curse Lines. He called out a warning from the other end of the camp, but I pretended not to hear and gave the order to move on out.
We walked for five hours over the familiar terrain of algae-encrusted stones, criss-crossing the river dozens of times. The fog made the going slow and more hazardous than ever. I dared not mention it, but it seemed as if we had entered a new region.
The air was suddenly scented with a pungent citrus smell. At first we inhaled it deep into our lungs and blessed its existence. But as the morning progressed, the pleasure turned to pain. It burned our chests and we found ourselves struggling for breath. I asked Pancho what plant could produce such an aroma. He said it was the scent of tarapa flowers.
“I would like to see one,” I said. “Can you show me?”
The warrior blinked slowly. “If you look at a tarapa flower,” he said, “you will go blind.”
None of the porters heard Pancho’s remark, but its timing was uncanny. That night, as we camped in the blur of mist on a long sandbar, Julio called my name. There was fear in his voice. “¡Ven, ven! Come, come!” he shouted.
I rushed over. Francisco was lying on the ground, a rolled-up shirt pushed under his head for a pillow. He was speaking very fast in Quechua.
“What’s he saying?” I asked.
“He can’t see anything,” Julio said.
Francisco said that his lower field of vision had gone black, and then the upper vision had disappeared. That morning he had vomited blood, he said.
“Do you have a headache?” I asked.
“Sí, muy fuerte, very strong,” he said.
No one much liked the village busybody, but the thought of him going blind was too terrible to bear. I suspected a stroke or cerebral malaria. Héctor held a prayer session for Francisco’s eyes and I rooted through the medical supplies, but there was nothing to treat the poor man’s condition. We wrapped his head in cool, damp cloths, and took turns to sit with him, comforting him. He was calm, but terrified.
The night dragged on, beset with fog and an eerie, low-pitched echo that seeped from between the trees, like the howl of wolves. No one slept. The film crew and I crouched round the campfire reasoning what to do. Getting a blind man back through the chasm would be testing. Taking him ahead was out of the question. Pancho was the only one who was at ease. He caught fireflies in his cupped hands and rubbed them on his cheeks to make them glow. I asked him what the tribe did when a man went blind. He laughed at the question. “Los ciegos se mueren, blind men die,” he said.
All the next day, we delayed at the camp, which was perched on the gritty gray sandbar like the outpost of a vast empire. The fog was dense and seemed to get thicker with every hour. It prowled around us, inspecting our wretched congregation; it was devoid of emotion, and at the same time it was haunting, horrifying. You could taste its moisture on your tongue, feel it in your nose, at the back of your throat and on your chest. Slowly, quite pleasurably, it suffocated us. Maybe, I pondered, Héctor was right and the place was cursed.
He curled up under his blanket and read the Old Testament. He said it gave him strength, and made him feel young again. The porters hung around the camp with the fog. They were all ready for the order to retreat, to return to their lives chopping down the jungle. There was longevity in the profession, and they knew it well.
I glanced at the maps. It was a pastime that helped me to remember why our ragtag expedition was there at all. The Palatoa River was now no more than a slim streak of blue running north-west towards the Cordillera. West of it was a solid r
idge; the region to the east was a corridor of blank white paper, marked datos insuficientes, insufficient data. It seemed ludicrous, as if the authorities were trying to keep people out. The corridor of missing data was about a mile wide and twenty miles long. All around it the detail was accurate. I felt certain that the ruins were in the blank zone, along with the oil.
In the afternoon, I showed the map to Héctor, and pointed out the shaft of white. “What do you make of that?” I asked.
The old man looked down at the chart, and shrugged. “What do you want me to say?”
“That you believe in the ruins,” I replied.
“No hay esperanza, there is no hope,” he said dismally.
I slapped my hands together, indignant that the man who had driven away my doubt could not read the signs for himself. “Have you gone blind?” I snapped.
Héctor was displeased with my over-familiarity. He inhaled a breath of mist sharply. “Todos nos hemos vuelto ciegos, we have all gone blind,” he said.
The afternoon became night, somehow bypassing evening altogether. The vapour did not let up for a moment. None of the men asked me, but I could sense they wanted to know the plan. The loss of Francisco’s sight had unnerved us all. It had demonstrated to me the fragility of our existence; and it had proved to the men that malicious forces were all around us. I said we could not move until Francisco had rested. It was a weak decision, devised through my own uncertainty.
I suggested that we stay at the camp for two more days. After that, I hoped a natural resolution would rise to the surface. The team agreed that it was best to wait, especially as it would allow their crippled feet to dry out. But then, in the late morning of the next day, Pancho gave voice to his fear. He said a great storm was brewing in the west. He could hear it. We would have to move to higher ground. There was a cave where we could take sanctuary.
