The Babylon Rite

by Tom Knox

  He parked the minibus. They climbed out and bought some food from a stall. Adam gawped. Rats ran under their feet, next to a new luxury hotel already mouldy from the heat and the wet, the air which pretended to be air.

  The arepa-seller handed over the banana leaf wraps of cheese, which were delicious and disgusting at the same time. They climbed back in the minibus. Boris continued talking. He never stopped talking, it seemed. ‘Now poor old beautiful mad Iquitos is having a second boom. It’s the trade in lumber, in hardwoods, and oil of course, and all the good stuff of the jungle, and it’s also pesos turisticas from the mad gringo and Jap kids who come here to take drugs. Because the Amazon jungle contains the vast majority of the globe’s naturally occurring recreational substances. You know what indole is?

  ‘No,’ said Adam.

  ‘Indole-containing plant hallucinogens are concentrated, overwhelmingly, in the New World, and in Amazonia especially. Hell, you could probably eat the rats around here and have a decent little trip, if you don’t get leptospirosis first.’ The car raced past a tall woman loitering on a corner wearing a dizzying blonde wig; Adam looked again: ‘she’ was a transvestite. ‘What I was saying, yeah, the Amazon is the most amazing place of all for discovering new mind-altering drugs. It all started in the 1850s. Two Brits, Alfred Russell Wallace and Richard Spruce, they travelled around here and on the upper reaches of the Rio Negro, Spruce saw a buncha Indians preparing a strange foodstuff, then he noticed that the main ingredient was a liana, a climbing vine – he called it Banisteria caapi. Finally he realized this plant was the main ingredient for ayahuasca, the vine of the gods, the great hallucinogen of the jungle, and that’s why we get kids coming here from all over: backpackers, British students. You Brits like to get high, don’t you? Is it the rain that depresses you? Damn it anyway, look, there’s one: I’ll try and run him over – stoned as a lizard – look at him, god-damn hippies.’ Boris swerved the battered windowless minibus and scared the bedraggled Western youth onto the sidewalk. ‘They come here in their fricking pyjamas and sandals hoping to meet a shaman and take some ayahuasca in a stupid clearing in the jungle and they pay two hundred bucks to take some crappy old yage mixed with dope and diesel and lord knows, and they puke their guts up for eight hours and claim they’ve had visions of monkeys with dentures and then they come back to Iquitos and get off their gourds on coke and heroin, and then they wander around like zombies and get run over. Sometimes by me. We’re here. Belen river market. Prepare yourselves. You ain’t seen nothing like this.’

  The minibus pulled over. The heat and humidity was now joined by the intense noise of a pullulating market. Boris gave some kid a few pesos to watch the bags and the gutted bus and he dived straight into the mêlée, expecting them to follow.

  Jess turned to them. ‘I know he seems crazy. I know. But he really knows this stuff: he’s the best ethnobotanist around. Come on before we lose him.’

  It was all too easy to lose someone in Belen market. The place was teeming with tribespeople from up and down the Amazon. Little boys and girls ran naked between stalls selling potatoes and cheap Valium and huge catfish and sad-looking sloths in cages and dead turtles on their backs with slimy, yellow intestines tugged out and displayed. Ingots of raw sugar were stacked like building bricks in huge piles next to plastic sacks of cornflour. The rats were everywhere: big, sleek and smug.

  A man sang the blues with a three-stringed guitar. Women wearing three hats at once cackled and shouted, ‘Hay chambira, hay uvas, hay jugo de cocona a cinquenta centimos’ as they stood over trestle tables piled high with crude cigarettes made from mapacho jungle tobacco, and arrays of reeking salt fishes, and piles of large gourds and camu-camu fruit; selections of parrots, bell peppers, and fat manzanillas; chunks of wild black jungle pig; hooves of tapirs still bloody and frazzled with flies; tiny coconuts the size of ping-pong balls; strips from the ten-metre-long great river fish called paiche; plates of platano mush being hungrily eaten by off-duty river captains; plantains, chambira, copaiba wood, spices in supersaturated colour; dead buzzards which might have been on sale or might just have died and fallen from the sky.

  ‘Here,’ said Boris, ‘try this.’ It was a bottle of white liquid, in a clear plastic bottle, like runny yoghurt. ‘Go on, try it.’

  Adam was thirsty, and sweating, in the intense humidity; he grabbed the bottle gratefully, and swigged. It was sweet and drinkable. He glugged some more, wiping his mouth with his wrist.

  ‘It’s good. What is it?’

  ‘Chicha beer. Made from manioc. They ferment it by chewing it up and spitting it out. It’s basically a beer made from old woman’s drool. This way.’ He turned and dived back into the mêlée.

  Adam knew he was being tested. He refused to flinch; but the gorge rose inside him as they walked on.

  Finally they reached the floating market, where the just-after-the-rainy-season Amazon reached up to the waist of the city. Boris, of course, was first in the little boat; the rest of them climbed in, unsteadily, sweating, dirty, energized, frightened.

  The motorboat puttered between stilt houses and houses floating on balsa platforms. This part of the market was mercifully quieter: Adam got the idea that they were in a different emotional zone of Belen market.

  Jess said quietly, ‘It reminds me of the Witches’ Market in Chiclayo.’ She paused. ‘These people are curanderos, I think. Shamans.’

  There were men and women in tribal costume hawking their goods from the floating houses and tethered balsa rafts. Men in loincloths with parrot feathers in their hair. Women in nylon ra-ra skirts with tattoos on their faces. They sold strange-coloured fungi, withered vines, tiny seeds in little calabash pouches, dried birds’ heads, and litres of ayahuasca in old Johnnie Walker whisky bottles. At several spots Boris stopped and chatted discreetly with the shamans and the shawomen, mostly in Quechua or some rare Amazon language.

  Occasionally Adam caught the odd snatch of Spanish, and what he could interpret was not encouraging. ‘Se los lleva el sol.’

  They are being taken by the sun.

  ‘¿Que es eso?’ ‘Eso es el polvo de yohimbina.’

  What is that? It is just yohimbe.

  The sun was beginning to set, to thankfully sink into the Amazon beyond the floating market. Adam’s anxiety rose. The cartels could be following them anywhere. They were all-powerful. They could arrange for a London policeman to be silently garrotted, just as a kind of lurid joke. The cartels were richer than some countries. They had the weaponry of modern armies. They carved words into your skin with knives and filmed it, and then they dissolved you in vats of acid.

  Even Boris was looking defeated and anxious. He muttered something about trying again tomorrow. Glancing nervously at the setting sun. ‘You don’t want to be in this part of Belen after dark. Specially with Catrina on your case, mes amigos. Let’s try this one last house.’

  The last floating house had the most flamboyant shaman of all, a Kofan shaman with a coloured mantle that fell to his knees. Festoons of multicoloured beads hung around his neck, alongside necklaces of shells and seeds and curving white jaguar teeth. His eyebrows had been vigorously plucked and painted, his lips were dyed a sombre purple-blue, his wrist was braceleted with iguana skins, his flat brown nose had a singular emerald macaw feather pierced through the septum, and his long earlobes were studded with caiman fangs. Surmounting it all was a resplendent headdress of violet hummingbird feathers, scarlet macaw feathers and wild sapphire parrot tail feathers, like the halo of an archangel.

  ‘What does he say?’ whispered Adam, in awe.

  ‘He says we should talk to his wife.’

  There was an awkward pause. Then the shaman’s wife came out from the floating shack wearing denim shorts, flip-flops and a dirty T-shirt with a picture of Justin Bieber on the front. She listened to Boris’s question. Then she nodded, casually. ‘Ulluchu si.’ She talked quickly in her own language.

  The excitement quickened with the dying of the day. ‘
Where?’ Adam asked. ‘What is she saying? Where?’

  Boris turned. His face was uncharacteristically grave. ‘She says we will find it two hundred miles upriver. That makes sense. It tallies with what we know of Archibald McLintock’s movements.’

  ‘Two hundred miles?’ Nina interjected, her forehead slightly streaked with river mud, and the inevitable thick Iquitos sweat.

  ‘Two hundred miles up the Ucayali. With the Pankarama. Protected tribal wilderness.’ Boris looked perturbed, for the first time that day.

  ‘So?’

  ‘Amigos. The Pankarama are headhunters. They kill gringos. They kill everyone. And then they shrink their heads.’

  46

  The Amazon, Peru

  They left at dawn the next day, bribing their way on to a small cargo ferry, the MV Myona, transporting mahogany and ebonywood and camu-camu and jungle spices to Pucallpa, via ‘a certain number’ of jungle villages and settlements.

  The captain was half shaven, evasive, a clichéd drunk at 3 a.m.; a quarter Colombian, he wore flip-flops and long Billabong surf shorts, and a Brazilian flag T-shirt that was stained with diesel. Two of his bare-chested crew members bore bizarre scars on their backs.

  Adam stood on the roofed, open passenger deck of this hired apology for a boat, with their gently swaying hammocks behind him, watching Iquitos disappear in the early mist. If he’d still been a simple journalist he’d have been sad to leave this city so soon, this place of apparently endless stories; but they were being hunted. The Zetas were out there, right now; and probably Catrina too. So he was very glad to leave, before they could be taken, or killed, or brutally chopped up with machetes like the forest hogs in Belen market.

  He leaned over the taffrail and stared down as the last cargo was longshored aboard; then the good ship Myona belched dirty water into the muddy riversurf and they moved out, treading the sludgy waves. The mist was still covering the mighty expanse of river all around them, rising like an army of wraiths.

  Nina joined him at the taffrail, gazing at the river slums of Iquitos where the backwash curtseyed on the grey beaches of litter, and naked children with white teeth laughed and bathed in the citrusy sewage that guttered into the dawnlit water. She asked, ‘Do you trust him?’

  ‘Boris?’

  ‘Aye. Boris! He blethers. One minute he wants to scare us to death about visiting this place, this place with the headshrinkers, then the next it’s all, och, it’s fine we’ll be fine, let’s get goin’. Mm?’

  ‘Well. He says the captain knows the Pankarama well. That makes sense if he trades with them. He says we’ll be safe.’

  ‘What if Catrina are there already? Looking for the same drug, like you said? They’ll be expecting us. Them and the headshrinkers. What chance do we fucking have then?’ She paused. ‘Sorry. Must be brave. I know. But it’s just hard, sometimes.’

  He wanted to hug her, comfort her, but he couldn’t. Instead, he turned and surveyed. Jess was in her hammock, sleeping; her face was pallid, sweaty. Boris Valentine was talking, animatedly, with the captain in the cabin, eating from a small paper bag of barbecued maggots. He’d been doing this since they embarked. Adam wondered if he did it just to provoke.

  The endless Amazon stretched before the boat, a three-mile-wide road of river. The mist had now fled, scorched away by the tropical sun. Mighty ceiba trees, with flocks of green parrots flying between, lined the river like lofty guardsmen on a processional mall, with smaller lemon and moriche palms in between; every so often a clearing fed on to long steep wooden stairs, which led to ramshackle river piers and little riverine beer shacks. Kids stood on the piers selling mangos, guanabana fruit, and flat rounds of bread. Pineapples for a cent. Fried piranhas two cents.

  The immensity of the river induced a kind of false serenity. It was as if nothing was happening, nothing was going to happen, nothing could ever happen. Not here, in the severity of the sun that silenced the birdlife, where the jungle stretched for a thousand miles in almost every direction. And yet somehow the jungle also seemed menacing in its silence. Watchful. And steadily drawing them in to the final revelation, the terrible drug. Ulluchu.

  By noon it was hot and Adam was scared. The boat was doing ten knots: they wouldn’t reach the next town for six years at this rate. If anyone came after them in a fast boat, and it wasn’t hard to find a faster boat than this, they would be trapped. They could hardly swim for the shore: crossing miles of river, infested with watersnakes and piranha.

  Out of nowhere, Nina asked, ‘Adam, do you believe in life after death?’

  He didn’t have a clue what to say. He lay in the hammock in embarrassed silence for a few moments, then decided to be truthful. ‘My mum used to say when we die we are … snuffed out like a candle. And that’s it. I guess that’s what I think. It’d be nice to think we go to heaven, or just a different place, with better food. But no. I can’t. I think death is it. What do you believe?’

  Her smile was the saddest smile he had ever seen. ‘Ach, I never know. Sometimes I think … yes death is the end, the flick of the switch, like you say. But other times I think that it can’t be the end. That consciousness is like light, it just goes on, the star that produces it may die but light is inextinguishable, it just goes on, it is the essence of the universe itself. Fundamental.’

  ‘OK.’

  She sighed. ‘As you get older, life becomes more dreamlike, don’t you think? It gets stranger. Sometimes ominous, yet, somehow, more beautiful.’ Her eyes were abrim with the potential of tears. ‘Not sure how to put it. I mean I always thought life would make more sense as I aged. It doesn’t. It gets mistier. Scarier. But lovelier, even in its sadness …’ A single tear slid down her face.

  ‘You shouldn’t think about it, about your dad and … Nina. Just don’t.’

  She reached out a hand from her hammock, and took his hand, and this time he didn’t resist or reject – and she stared at him with her green eyes, as green as the jungle out there, and she said nothing. Nothing at all. The only sound was the baritone churn of the boat’s knackered engine.

  Then she dropped his hand and turned over and slept almost at once. And he watched her sleeping: her white face, white arms, she looked like a marble angel on a Victorian tomb. For ever sleeping. Not dead, just sleeping. And beautiful.

  He shook the foolishness from his head. Jumping from the hammock, he walked across the deck. Boris and Jess were conversing, hurriedly; they turned and looked at him. Adam sat down on an upturned and empty metal keg of propane ‘Tell me about ulluchu. About all of it. This guy Schultes.’

  Boris finished his bag of barbecued maggots, looked quickly at Jess, and nodded. ‘Richard Evans Schultes, Harvard professor, born 1915, died 2001, el principe de la selva! He was the greatest ethnobotanist of the century. He dedicated his life to discovering new plants in the Americas, especially in Mexico, and Amazonia. He was the first person to identify and collect specimens of teonanácatl, the sacred mushrooms of Mexico, the so-called flesh of the gods.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘By deduction, mi amigo, by deduction. All the scholars who had examined Aztec records believed teonanácatl was, well, a psychoactive snuff, or perhaps datura, maybe a nice chocolate McFlurry. No one even believed there were psychedelic shrooms in America! Yet Schultes as a very young man had researched the Kiowa of North America, and he knew they used peyote mushrooms in their ghost dances. So then he went back to the records.’ Boris sat forward, engaged, his silver medallion swinging gently like a pendulum against his chest hair. ‘There are several documents like Codex Vindobonensis in the Spanish colonial archives, which refer to sacred mushrooms. Lots of other Aztec codices make similar references, if you know what to look for. One of them describes a mushroom teonanácatl – as being served up at the coronation of the Aztec emperor Ahuitzotl in 1486.’

  A macaw swept past the boat, red feathers vivid in the pointless blue sky. Boris smiled, and continued, ‘Indeed the Spanish were obsessed with discovering the ident
ity of this mushroom, a mushroom so muy importante it was dished up for an emperor. What could it be? What purpose did it serve? During and after the conquest, they tried to torture the truth out of the Aztecs.’ Boris’s small eyes sparkled with glee; then he reached for his apparently bottomless bag of snacks and pulled out an egg. ‘Iguana egg. Very nutritious. And muy sabroso.’ Carefully he peeled the egg, then munched the white softness.

  ‘So. Here we see the crucial obsession of the Spanish seeking out the truth of the entheogenic substances of the New World: they wanted to get high, like any gringo – like the ayahuasca-addled backpackers in old Iquitos.’

  He swallowed some egg. ‘But the Spaniards, of course, never did discover the true identity of teonanácatl. It remained a riddle. But there was enough in the archives to guide the gifted and determined modern explorer. And Harvard scholar Schultes was just such a man: he had cojones of tungsten and a steel-tipped mind. He spent months in the summer of 1938 searching the wild Mazatec hills and valleys near Oaxaca, where he had heard that a mushroom cult, which sounded very much like the old teonanácatl cult, had survived. By talking with curanderos in Mazatec country, he narrowed down the options. He went to little towns like Huautla, where the sacred use of fungi was still quite intense, and then, finally, in July Schultes was invited to witness a ceremony in which the cunning men took a psychedelic mushroom.’