The Serpent and the Rainbow

by Wade Davis

  When one is lost it is not the absolute number of days that is important, it is the vast uncertainty that consumes every moment. With the rifles we had food, but it never seemed enough, and with the rains each afternoon and night we found little rest. Yet we still had to walk long hours each day through the rain forest, and when one is stripped of all that protects one from nature, the rain forest is an awesome place. Sebastian’s injury had not improved, and though he walked courageously he nevertheless slowed our progress. The heat and incessant life seemed to close in, exquisitely beautiful creatures became a plague, and even the shadows of the vegetation, the infinite forms, shapes and textures, became threatening. In the damp evenings, sitting awake for long hours while the torrential rains turned the earth to mud, I began to feel like a crystal of sugar on the tongue of a beast, impatiently awaiting dissolution.

  The worst moment came on the morning of the seventh day. An hour from our previous night’s camp, we stumbled upon the first person we had seen since leaving Yavisa, a solitary and slightly mad woodsman who had carved a clearing from the forest and begun to plant a garden. When we asked the direction to Santa Fe, he looked surprised and, unable to suppress his laughter, he pointed to a barely discernible trail. At a fast pace, he told us, there was a chance that we could arrive in another two weeks. His news was so devastating that it was simply impossible to acknowledge. We had no food left, were physically and mentally exhausted, and had only enough ammunition left to hunt for two or three days. Yet we had no choice but to continue, and without a word passing between us we began to walk, myself in front with one of the rifles, then Sebastian, followed by the three Kuna. We kept a fast pace until the forest again held us tangibly, drawing us on into a hallucinatory passage devoid of will or desire. Into that trance, not twenty meters before me, leapt a black jaguar. It paused for an instant, then turned away and took several strides toward what would turn out to be the direction to Santa Fe, before springing like a shadow into the vegetation. No one else saw it, but for me it was life itself and, I believe, a portent, for it turned out that Santa Fe was not two weeks away, but rather a mere two days. That very evening, we found a track that led to the right-of-way of the highway. It had all been a test of will, and as we burst into the full sunlight after so many days in the shade, Sebastian turned to me, placed his arms about my etiolated body, and said simply that God works in mysterious ways. That evening we made camp by a clear stream and broiled a wild turkey that one of the Kuna had shot, and later we slept in the open under a sky full of stars. For our first night since leaving Yavisa, it did not rain.

  The next morning I arose early, certain that I could reach Santa Fe in a single day. With my belly finally full and the weight of uncertainty lifted from my mind, I basked in the freedom of the open road and felt an exhilaration I had never known before. My pace increased and I left the others far behind. The road at first was no more than a track that curved hypnotically over and around every contour of the land. Several miles on, however, it rose slowly to the crest of a ridge, and suddenly from the rise I could see the right-of-way of the Pan-American Highway, a cleared and flattened corridor a hundred meters wide that reached to the horizon. Like a deer on the edge of a clearing, I instinctively fell back, momentarily confounded by so much space. Then I started to walk slowly, tentatively. My senses, which had never been so keen, took in every pulse and movement. No one was behind me, and no one in front, and the forest was reduced to the distant walls of a canyon. Never again would I sense such freedom; I was twenty and felt as if I had reached the heart of where I had dreamed to be.

  Before I had left Boston that spring I had advised myself in the frontispiece of my journal to “risk discomfort and solitude for understanding.” Now it seemed I had found the means, and my chance meeting with the jaguar remained with me, an affirmation of nature’s benevolence. After the Darien Gap I began to look upon Professor Schultes’s assignments as koans, enigmatic challenges guaranteed to propel me into places beyond my imaginings. I accepted them easily, reflexively—as a plant takes water. Thus, in time, the Darien expedition was reduced to but an episode in an ethnobotanical apprenticeship that eventually took me throughout much of western South America. I earned my degree in anthropology in 1977 and, following a two-year hiatus from the tropics in northern Canada, returned to Harvard as one of Professor Schultes’s graduate students.

  Schultes was far more than a catalyst of adventures. His guidance and example gave our expeditions form and substance, while ethnobotany remained the metaphor that lent them utility. He had spent thirteen years in the Amazon because he believed that the Indian knowledge of medicinal plants could offer vital new drugs for the entire world. Forty-five years ago, for example, he had been one of a handful of plant explorers to note the peculiar properties of curare, the Amazonian arrow and dart poisons. Struck by a poison dart, a monkey high in the forest canopy rapidly loses all muscular control and collapses to the forest floor; often it is the fall, not the toxin, that actually kills. Chemical analysis of these arrow poisons yielded D-tubocurarine, a powerful muscle relaxant once used in conjunction with various anesthetics in virtually all surgery. The several species that yielded curare were but a few of the eighteen hundred plants of medical potential identified by Schultes in the northwest Amazon alone. He knew that thousands more remained, elsewhere in the Amazon and around the world. It was to find these that he sent us out. And it was in this spirit that he brought me to the most important assignment of my career.

  Late on a Monday afternoon early in 1982 I received a call from Schultes’s secretary. I was teaching an undergraduate course with him that semester and expected a discussion of the progress of the class. As I entered his office the venetian blinds were down, and he greeted me without looking up from his desk.

  “I’ve got something for you. Could be intriguing.” He handed me the New York address of Dr. Nathan S. Kline, psychiatrist and pioneer in the field of psychopharmacology—the study of the actions of drugs on the mind. It had been Kline who with a handful of others in the 1950s rose to challenge orthodox Freudian psychiatry by suggesting that at least some mental disorders reflected chemical imbalances that could be rectified by drugs. His research led to the development of reserpine, a valuable tranquilizer derived from the Indian snakeroot, a plant that had been used in Vedic medicine for thousands of years. As a direct result of Kline’s work, the number of patients at American psychiatric institutions had declined from over half a million in the 1950s to some 120,000 today. The accomplishment had proved a two-edged sword, however, and had made Kline a controversial figure. At least one science reporter had referred to the bag ladies of New York as Kline’s babies.

  Schultes moved away from his desk to take a call. When he was finished he asked me if I would be able to leave within a fortnight for the Caribbean country of Haiti.

  2

  “The Frontier of Death”

  TWO NIGHTS LATER I was met at the front door of an East Side Manhattan apartment by a tall, strikingly handsome woman whose long hair was pulled up over her head in the manner of a Renoir model.

  We shook hands. “Mr. Davis? I’m Marna Anderson, Nate Kline’s daughter. Do come in.” She turned abruptly and led me through a corridor of clinical whiteness into a large room crowded with color. Approaching me from the head of an immense refectory table was a short man in a white linen suit and an antique vest of silk brocade.

  “You must be Wade Davis. Nate Kline. I’m glad you could make it.”

  There were perhaps nine people in the room, and though Kline made the obligatory introductions, it was in a manner so perfunctory as to let me know that none of them mattered. He lingered only when we reached an elderly man, sitting narrow and stiff in a corner of the room.

  “I’d like you to meet one of my oldest colleagues, Professor Heinz Lehman. Heinz is the former head of psychiatry and psychopharmacology at McGill.”

  “Ah, Mr. Davis,” Lehman said softly, “I am delighted that you have
joined our little venture.”

  “I don’t know that I have.”

  “Yes, well, let us wait and see.”

  Kline directed me to a sofa where three pleasant but nondescript women sat sipping cocktails, their attentions scattered. A few moments passed in gossip, and then they began to question me about my life with an enthusiasm that made me uncomfortable. As soon as I had a chance I got up and began to circulate, making my way toward the bar, where I poured myself a drink. The room was filled with art—Haitian paintings, antique games and puzzles, a Persian chest with gilt decorations, a small forest of naive early American weather vanes, iron horses poised in flight.

  The lights of the city drew me out onto the balcony. Low clouds swept through the high corridors of darkness slowly dissolving the summits of the skyscrapers, and from far below came the sound of tires running over glistening pavement. Looking back through the window, I saw Kline moving vigorously about the room, ushering the last of his dinner guests to the door. His movements seemed ostentatiously virile, reminding me of the kind of elderly man who might ask you in public to place your hand on his chest to measure the strength of his heart. He seemed ill cast as a doctor, exhibiting a vanity more likely in a poet. Lehman, on the other hand—tall, thin, and frail—appeared born to be a psychiatrist, and I couldn’t help wondering what vocation he would have pursued had he lived in an earlier age, before men were prepared to yield their feelings to analysis.

  Marna joined her father at the door of the apartment, linking her arm lightly in his as they said goodnight to their guests. One sensed immediately the bond between them, how they chose to act as one person, so that his glance became her gesture, which beckoned me in from the balcony.

  Emptied of the other guests, the room strangely came to life. Lehman, visibly more at ease, moved to its center. He fixed me with a smile.

  “Let me relieve you of any further suspense, Mr. Davis. We understand from Professor Schultes that you are attracted to unusual places. We propose to send you to the frontier of death. If what we are about to tell you is true, as we believe it is, it means that there are men and women dwelling in the continuous present, where the past is dead and the future consists of fear and impossible desires.”

  I glanced at him skeptically, and then at Kline, who picked up from Lehman automatically.

  “The first problem is to know when the dead are truly dead.” Kline paused, regarding me deliberately. “Diagnosing death is an age-old problem. Petrarch was nearly buried alive. It haunted the Romans. The writings of Pliny the Elder are full of reports of men rescued at the last minute from the pyre. Eventually to prevent such mishaps the emperor had to fix by law the interval between apparent death and burial at eight days.”

  “Perhaps we should do the same,” interjected Lehman. “Recall the Sheffield case?”

  Kline nodded, and turned back to me. “Not fifteen years ago English doctors experimenting with a portable cardiograph at the Sheffield mortuary detected signs of life in a young woman certified dead from a drug overdose.”

  Lehman added with a smile, “There was an even more sensational case here in New York around the same time. A postmortem operation at the city morgue was disrupted just as the first cut was being made. The patient leapt up and seized the doctor by the throat, who promptly died of shock.”

  I looked across the table at the two of them, trying to conceal a faint premonition of horror. They were both old, their voices hard and clinical. It was as if the imminent presence of death had so saturated their minds at this late point of their lives that they looked upon it as a source of amusement. I had to remind myself that these men were professionals who had earned some of the highest awards of American science.

  “By definition death is the permanent cessation of vital functions.” Kline leaned back in his chair, clasping his hands and smiling. “But what constitutes cessation, and how is one to recognize the function in question?”

  “Breathing, pulse, body temperature, stiffness … whatever,” I answered somewhat awkwardly, still uncertain what they were getting at.

  “You can’t always tell. Breathing can occur with such gentle movements of the diaphragm as to be imperceptible. Besides, the absence of respiration may represent a suspension, not a cessation. As for body temperature, people are pulled out of frozen lakes and snowfields all the time.”

  “The eyes of the dead tell you nothing,” added Lehman. “The muscles of the iris continue to contract for hours after death. Skin color can be useful….”

  “Hardly in this case,” Kline interrupted, glancing at Lehman. “The pallor of death only shows up in light-skinned individuals. As for heartbeat, any drug that induces hypotension can result in an unreadable pulse. In fact, deep narcosis can manifest every symptom of death: shallow imperceptible breathing, a slow and weakened pulse, a dramatic decrease in body temperature, complete immobility.”

  Kline poured himself a brandy. “‘No warmth, no breath, shall testify thou livest.’ Friar Laurence to Juliet, gentlemen. Perhaps our most famous reference to drug-induced suspended animation.”

  “In fact,” Lehman concluded, “there are only two means of ascertaining death. One is by no means infallible and involves a brain scan and cardiogram. That requires expensive machinery. The other, and the only one that is certain, is putrefaction. And that requires time.”

  Kline left the room and returned with a document which he presented to me. It was a death certificate in French of one Clairvius Narcisse. It was dated 1962.

  “Our problem,” Kline explained, “is that this Narcisse is now very much alive and resettled in his village in the Artibonite Valley in central Haiti. He and his family claim he was the victim of a voodoo cult and that immediately following his burial he was taken from his grave as a zombi.”

  “A zombi. …” A dozen conventional questions came to mind, but I said nothing more.

  “The living dead,” Kline continued. “Voodooists believe that their sorcerers have the power to raise innocent individuals from their graves to sell them as slaves. It is to prevent such a fate that family members may kill the body of the dead a second time, sometimes plunging a knife into the heart of the cadaver, sometimes severing the head in the coffin.”

  I looked at Kline, then back to Lehman, trying to measure their expressions. They appeared altogether complementary. Kline spoke in visions, in ideas that spun to the edge of reality. Lehman held the reins and balanced the conversation with reason. This made it that much more impressive when he too began to speak of zombis.

  “The Narcisse case is not the first to come to our attention. A former student of mine, Lamarque Douyon, is currently the director of the Centre de Psychiatrie et Neurologie in Port-au-Prince. Since 1961, in collaboration with Dr. Douyon, we have been systematically investigating all accounts of zombification. For years we found nothing to them. Then came our breakthrough, in 1979, when our attention was drawn to a series of most singular cases, of which this Narcisse was only one.”

  The latest, according to Lehman, was a woman, Natagette Joseph, aged about sixty, who was supposedly killed over a land dispute in 1966. In 1980 she was recognized wandering about her home village by the police officer who, fourteen years before, in the absence of a doctor, had pronounced her dead.

  Another was a younger woman named Francina Illeus but called “Ti Femme,” who was pronounced dead at the age of thirty on February 23, 1976. Before her death she had suffered digestive problems and had been taken to the Saint Michel de l’Attalaye Hospital. Several days after her release she died at home, and her death was verified by a local magistrate. In this case a jealous husband was said to have been responsible. There had been two notable features of Francina’s case—her mother found her three years later, recognizing her by a childhood scar she bore on her temple; and later, when her grave was exhumed, her coffin was found to be full of rocks.

  Then, in late 1980, Haitian radio reported the discovery near the north coast of the country of a peculi
ar group of individuals, found wandering aimlessly in what appeared to be a psychotic state. The local peasants identified them as zombis and reported the matter to the local authorities, whereupon the unfortunate party was taken to Cap Haitian, Haiti’s second city, and placed under the charge of the military commandant. Aided in part by an extensive media campaign, the army had managed to return most of the reputed zombis to their home villages, far from where the group had been found.

  “These three instances,” Lehman remarked, “while curious, were still no more substantial than many others that had periodically surfaced in the Haitian press.”

  “What made the Narcisse case unique,” said Kline, “was the fact that he happened to die at an American-directed philanthropic institution which, among its many features, keeps precise and accurate records.” Thus Kline began to describe the extraordinary case of Clairvius Narcisse.

  In the spring of 1962, a Haitian peasant aged about forty approached the emergency entrance of the Albert Schweitzer Hospital at Deschapelles in the Artibonite Valley. He was admitted under the name Clairvius Narcisse at 9:45 P.M. on April 30, complaining of fever, body ache, and general malaise; he had also begun to spit blood. His condition deteriorated rapidly, and at 1:15 P.M. on May 2 he was pronounced dead by two attendant physicians, one of them an American. His sister Angelina Narcisse was present at his bedside and immediately notified the family. Shortly after Narcisse’s demise an elder sister, Marie Claire, arrived and witnessed the body, affixing her thumbprint to the official death certificate. The body was placed in cold storage for twenty hours, then taken for burial. At 10:00 A.M., May 3, 1962, Clairvius Narcisse was buried in a small cemetery north of his village of l’Estère, and ten days later a heavy concrete memorial slab was placed over the grave by his family.