Jaguars Ripped My Flesh

by Tim Cahill

  I could see the situation in my mind’s eye. Half a dozen boats bobbing in the mild swell, blue sky, the sun blazing away, and here’s a guy with a horribly distorted, rubber-looking face and one arm, arguing with some guy who’s got a gold medallion hanging from his neck.

  “The zombie must have gotten some assurances—probably he got some money—but anyway, he got back into the water and lumbered over to his spot. The shark took him. We got the shark and saved the zombie.”

  The lady shark handler and I had another drink. I had learned three almost important things. One: underwater zombies can be repelled with coral. Two: those who play underwater zombies in movies are pretty gutsy. Three: The Zombie II is another in a long series of Mexican horror films that I am going to force myself to miss.

  Cahill Among the Ruins in Peru

  In the northeastern section of Peru there is a state called Amazonas, and the capital city of six thousand is Chachapoyas. Three blocks off the Plaza de Armas, down the narrow streets between clean pastel houses, there is a high wooden door that leads into a courtyard, and just off that courtyard, under his second-story apartment, Carlos Gates, the supervisor of Archaeological Monuments for Amazonas, keeps an office. For Chachapoyas, it is a luxurious affair. The floor is poured concrete, not dirt, for one thing, and for another, there is an electric light. On the walls there are various certificates and diplomas, along with the obligatory framed painting of Christ showing the Sacred Heart glowing in His chest.

  A man in his middle years, Gates, like most of the people of Chachapoyas, is short, no more than five feet two inches, and very broad in the shoulders and chest. Despite his exuberant gestures, Carlos exuded grace and dignity. He smiled often, in a kindly fashion, and gave us no help at all.

  “It is very difficult for you to explore here,” he said in Spanish. “You must have a permit to dig.”

  Laszlo Berty, who spoke the best Spanish, said, “But we do not wish to dig. Only explore.” The other two members of the expedition—Tom Jackson and I—nodded our assent.

  “To explore, you must have a permit. You must have a permit to go into certain areas,” Gates said. He suggested we visit the known ruins: Kuélap, Congona, and others.

  Laszlo explained that we would certainly want to see those ruins, for we had read of them and we understood that they were beautiful. Still, our research indicated that there were other, unexplored ruins in Amazonas, and our goal was to find some of them. Señor Gates knew more of these ruins than any man alive. Could he not give us help on our expedition?

  Gates stared at his desk top in what appeared to be great sorrow. Sometimes, he said, it is not good when new ruins are discovered. Men come searching for the gold and they destroy what is left of the ruins. Huacos—prehistoric objects—are removed and sold to wealthy collectors, and the work of scientists is made difficult.

  Laszlo explained that he intended to run commercial trips down the rivers of Amazonas and that he wanted to find ruins near the rivers where he could take his clients. Tom Jackson worked for the South American Explorers’ Club and he would note our discoveries, in a scientific fashion, in that club’s journal. I intended to publish the results of our expedition in an American magazine. We would not dig and we were not huaqueros, not grave robbers.

  Gates apologized profusely. He did not mean to suggest that we were huaqueros—never. It is the men who come later, like vultures, who defile the ruins. He was referring to those men and not to us.

  There was silence. We were getting nowhere. Finally Laszlo said, “It is true that we are not professors of anthropology or professors of archaeology. We are adventurers. But adventurers with an object.” He fixed Gates with his most sincere stare. “In the life of a man,” he said with great dignity, “it is important for adventure. What else is in life?”

  I am incapable of uttering a statement like that. It would wither and die on my tongue like a snake in the sun. But it was Laszlo’s genius, when dealing with Peruvians, to say the right thing at the right time. Carlos nodded sagaciously as if he agreed that, yes, it is adventure and adventure alone that is important in the life of a man.

  Laszlo knew enough not to push any further at this point. We would visit Kuélap, he said, and the others. When we returned to Chachapoyas, perhaps Señor Gates would be able to help us then.

  Yes, Carlos said, if he could find the time, perhaps.

  There is, in northern Peru, a unique area known as the montaña located just east of the Andes and west of the awesome forests of the Amazon basin. It is a wet, mountainous, transitional surface between the mightiest mountains of the Americas and the largest jungle in the world.

  The montaña is close to the equator; and, along rivers such as the Utcubamba, people grow tropical fruits and rice and sugar cane. But the vegetation of the surrounding mountains seems strangely inverted to those familiar with ranges in the temperate region. The lower slopes are poor and sandy—a cactus and mesquite environment similar to what we call high chaparral. Above the cactus the land becomes fertile—it is much like the American Midwest—and here people raise livestock and grow corn and potatoes and melons on small terraced farms called chacras. Above the chacras, one comes upon the strangest inversion. The terraced fields rise into thick, choking jungles. It is as if the tropical forests of the Amazon basin had made one last effort to claim the entire continent. These mountaintop jungles of the montaña are known as the ceja de selva, the eyebrow of the jungle.

  From the highest points on the ridgetops, it is possible to watch clouds form, wispily, in the great river basins four thousand and five thousand feet below. They rise to the ridge, thicken into great roiling banks, drop a hard cold rain, and fall again into the valleys.

  The ceja, then, is a jungle formed of clouds—a cloud forest—and one thousand years ago there was an Indian people, the Chachapoyas, who lived among the clouds, in fortresses constructed high on jungle ridgetops. It is thought that they chose the cloud forests for their cities for obvious defensive purposes, and also to avoid the malaria and other tropical diseases endemic to the river valleys.

  Conquered by the Incas in 1480—who were, in turn, conquered by the Spanish in the 1530s—the Chachapoyan empire fell into obscurity and ruin. The great fortresses, the graceful stone cities, the grand plazas of the Chachapoyas were abandoned, left to the jungles. Many are known to archaeologists, but they are little studied. Other cities and fortresses—dozens of them, perhaps hundreds—lie undiscovered, undisturbed in a millennium, in seldom-visited frontier country the Peruvians describe as silvestre and salvaje, wild and savage.

  During the month of July, Outside magazine launched an expedition into the montãna of northeastern Peru. Our objective was to locate undiscovered jungle ruins of the people of the clouds.

  The expedition was the brainchild of Laszlo Berty, thirty, of Erie, Pennsylvania, the owner of Amazon Expeditions, a fledgling Peruvian river-running operation. Berty had been both a computer systems analyst and a Marine, and he managed to combine the fine attributes of both these professions into one remarkable personality.

  Puns and jokes were lost on Laszlo. The English language is best suited for issuing orders so that one may achieve specifically stated goals.

  “Don’t do that,” Laszlo would say.

  “What?”

  “Put that cup on the filthy ground.”

  Laszlo had outfitted the expedition—tent, sleeping bags, stove, cooking equipment—and it was important to him that these things be kept spotless. He didn’t like me putting the sleeping bag I was using—his bag—on the filthy ground. He didn’t like Peruvians to drink out of his canteen because you can never tell what strange diseases they might have. Driving along the broiling river basins, we were frequently obliged to bake in the car with the windows up because Laszlo is allergic to dust.

  In the little cafes, Laszlo ordered the waiters to stop wiping his bottle of Amazonas Kola with their towels. The towels were invariably sucio, filthy. My hands were usually suci
o, Tom Jackson’s hands were sucio, even Laszlo’s hands were sucio at times, a condition which disturbed him greatly. He’d examine his fingers and mutter, “Filthy, filthy.”

  It is fair to say there was tension between Laszlo and me. By the morning of the third day—no later—we had come to an unspoken agreement. At odd intervals I’d simply explode. Laszlo would regard me with injured dignity and apprehension—you can never tell what a crazy person will do—and I’d shout in his face for five or ten minutes at a crack, walk off stiff-legged and steaming, think of something else and charge back to stand inches from him, waving my arms and pointing. After one of these berserk tirades, Laszlo and I would be very polite to each other for, oh, two or three days. Then the cycle would start over.

  Tom Jackson, twenty-five, the third member of the expedition, watched these outbreaks in noncommittal silence. He was a slight, handsome fellow, and a missing tooth in the front of his mouth gave him a boyish, Huck Finn look. Tom had accompanied Laszlo on a previous river trip, and I assumed that he had sided with Laszlo during that first high-volume confrontation. I was wrong.

  “Naw,” he told me privately, “I was hoping you’d punch his lights out.”

  Jackson swallowed what I interpreted as a lot of abuse from Laszlo: orders issued in bored disgust, as if Tom were some witless incompetent. Because Outside had funded the expedition and Laszlo had organized and outfitted it, Tom attempted to remain neutral regarding the basic unsettled question of who was to lead the party. It took him a week to break. When he finally did, he erupted, burning Laszlo with a number of acid and intolerable comments. After some time I was invited to arbitrate. Who would continue with me, who should return to Lima?

  Wrong approach, I said. Stupid. Together we were a complete entity. Apart our chances of success were minimal. We were all pretty fair woodsmen, but Laszlo had a knack for getting information out of Peruvians. Tom was the most accomplished climber, the hardest working, the most adept at fixing mechanical things. I was the strongest swimmer—we would have to get our equipment across a number of rivers at the rapids—and I had done more reading on the area, more recently. Decisions, I suggested, should be a three-way affair.

  In the end, my position prevailed. Still, we spent the next few weeks gnawing on one another’s nerves like rats on a rope. Laszlo had to put up with incredible stupidity on my part, and at times Jackson was even dumber. Once we found ourselves halfway up a mountain just as the sun set. We were on a grassy flat and we could see several two-story wattle-and-daub huts: two feet of mud and clay packed onto a frame of branches and thin tree trunks. The huts were empty.

  We had drunk all our water on the climb. We were exhausted and sweated out and my tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth. I suggested that our first order of business should be to find water.

  Laszlo could hardly believe I had said such a thing. “There’s no water up here,” he said. It should have been self-evident. “That’s why there’s no people here. They only come up in the wet season.” He paused to let this sink in. “When there’s water.”

  Still, you can’t talk good sense to cretins. Tom and I decided that since there was new corn and wheat in the chacras, and since we could see horses in a pen, and since there had been a fiesta in the town below, that the people who lived in the huts were at the fiesta, that there had to be water for the crops and livestock, and that we would look for that water. Laszlo, who knew the search was fruitless, lay on his back in the grass, wisely conserving energy.

  At dusk Tom found a small pool, about two feet in diameter, behind a stand of trees. Later, after dinner and over coffee, I expressed the opinion that Tom had saved our ass, finding the water.

  Laszlo sighed heavily. “Of course you found water,” he explained. “Water runs down the side of a hill. You guys walked across the side of the hill. Anybody could have found water.”

  This was the kind of irritating idiocy Laszlo had to put up with every single day.

  Shortly after our second visit to Carlos Gates, we drove south from the city of Chachapoyas to Tingo, where we started the long walk to Kuélap. That fortress, discovered by Juan Crisóstomo Nieto in 1843, was the keystone of known Chachapoyan culture. It is simply massive—the largest pre-Inca construct in Peru—and the fort is set like a ship upon high, crumbly cliff walls. The battlements rise some sixty feet above the cliffs and stretch for nearly half a mile. One stands before the main gate feeling dwarfed and impotent.

  Kuélap had been cleared in spots, but for the most part it belonged to the jungle. It was an easy matter to become lost inside, and wander about, stumbling into typical Chachapoyan circular habitations. These are round stone buildings, usually open at some point to form a door, and constructed out of what appears to be local limestone. They are five, ten, fifteen, sometimes twenty feet high. In all probability, the circular habitations (or “circle habs,” as we soon began to call them) had been covered with the same kind of thatched roof we had seen on the huts below. They were now, of course, open to the sky, and countless generations of jungle plants had grown in their interiors—grown and died and provided the loam for other plants so that most of the constructs were filled with soil. Flowers and trees and thorns grew where the roofs had been.

  There were more battlements, rising in concentric circles behind the main walls, and everything there built by the hand of man, even the outer walls, was curvilinear. Small trails wound among the circle habs and underground chambers and mossy walls. Off the trails, the jungle was so thick it took a good fifteen minutes of machete work to move a hundred yards.

  The vegetation was thick and rank and thorny. To walk it was necessary to clear an area from head to thigh. It was impossible to see more than three feet ahead, and the odor was intense. Everywhere there was the smell of faded lilacs, a sickly sweet odor, that combined with something thick and dead and skunklike.

  We camped for a night atop a tower situated at the highest point in the fort. Twenty-seven feet high with crumbling steps to the top, it had been cleared, and there was a grassy spot for our tent. We could see forever, in every direction.

  As the sun set, we listened to the jungle. At twilight there was a last frantic avian burst: green parrots shrieked over the constant chatter of smaller birds and occasionally we heard a series of strange, high-pitched whoops. As darkness fell, the birds gave way to crickets and the odd frog, croaking deep and resonant, like the sound of two rocks striking together underwater. Fireflies flashed in the jungle and, this night, there was a full moon; the tops of the trees shown silver in its light. Occasionally, there was a deep-throated wail, probably a monkey, followed by about half a dozen barks or grunts.

  I slept the sleep of a Chacha warrior, secure in this fort at the center of the universe.

  Virtually nothing is known of the Chachapoyan people (also called Chachas) before the Incas. We have some information—about a page and a half—in a book written by Garcilaso de la Vega. Born in 1539, Garcilaso was in a unique position to record the events of the conquest of Peru by the Spanish; his mother was the granddaughter of the Inca Túpac Yupanqui, his father was a conquistador with Pizarro. Combining his own memories of the conquest and interviews with Inca court historians—the Indians had no written language, but their historians memorized a set chronology, using colored ropes in which various knots had been tied as mnemonic devices—Garcilaso wrote his massive Royal Commentaries of the Incas.

  The Chacha women, he tells us, were considered especially beautiful and the men fierce fighters. They worshiped the serpent and they lived in a hard, mountainous land where travelers were routinely required to raise and lower themselves by rope. In the late 1470s, the eleventh Inca, Túpac Yupanqui, moved north from the Inca capital of Cuzco on a march of imperial conquest. In 1480, his armies conquered the Chachapoyas and subdued seven major cities. Garcilaso places these cities in a rough geographical context: one can be found on the other side of a certain snowy pass, another located atop a sloping hill so many leagues long.
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  In the mid-1960s, an American explorer, Gene Savoy—inspired by the exploits of Hiram Bingham, who discovered Machu Picchu in 1911—launched a series of expeditions into the montaña in search of the cities mentioned by Garcilaso. A University of Portland dropout and former newspaperman, Savoy was not a professional scientist. “I taught myself what I know about archaeology, anthropology and history from reading, study and practical field experience,” Savoy states in his book, Antisuyo. (The name refers to that quarter of the Inca empire east of the Andes.) In his last expedition, Savoy may have discovered as many as six of the seven cities mentioned by Garcilaso.

  In his travels, Savoy hoped to examine a theory first propounded by Dr. Julio C. Tello, one of the fathers of Peruvian archaeology. Having discovered one of the the first full-blown Peruvian cultures—the Chavín, dated about 900 to 400 B.C.—Tello postulated that the forerunners of the Chavín may have originated in the jungle.

  More accepted theories say that culture there first evolved among less sophisticated local peoples or that it was imported by Central American or Mexican peoples who migrated to northern Peru. The idea that culture in Peru might have originated in the montaña or jungle is not taken seriously by most archaeologists. The jungles of both regions, it is thought, could not have supported a high culture.

  But what if a major migration, had taken place along long-forgotten jungle trails? If so, it was possible that the remains of a culture earlier than the Chavín existed, undiscovered, somewhere in the tropical rain forest.

  Savoy’s expeditions in Amazonas did not prove, conclusively, that ancient man in Peru rose up out of the jungle. However, the dozens of cities, the hundreds of curvilinear Chachapoyan ruins Savoy found, did prove, he wrote in Antisuyo, that the mountaintop jungles of the ceja de selva “could support a vigorous civilization whose monumental remains are as imposing if not superior to anything found on the coast or sierra.” Potsherds taken from Savoy’s finds were carbon-dated and found to be between 800 and 1400 A.D. All were from superficial grave sites, and test pits undoubtedly would have yielded older specimens.