The sun.
The star that allows life on Earth, making all beings equal by its light, by its heat. The principal symbol of paganism, which finds in every kind of vegetable or animal or human life, and in every inanimate form — fire, sky, earth, water — a combination of veneration and respect. And if that was paganism, then Jordi believed in it. It was a creed that allowed him to feel a part of what was now opening out magnificently before his eyes — of the woods and the mountains, the other living things, the stuff all around him.
The discovery that three of Chitral’s valleys were home to a pagan tribe, of Indo-European origin, who were capable of producing wine and whose women had their faces not only uncovered but painted, was what finally convinced him that this had to be his destination. That must explain these nerves. He had to acknowledge it — he was excited. He wanted to see the Kalash.
When he came back into the cabin, he deliberately made a little noise — not too much, just enough for Yannik and the others to wake.
As he had anticipated, the Kalash women of Bumburet immediately captured his attention owing to their sober, hand-made black dresses trimmed with bright colours, and the fine chains that decorated their extremities and necks. They wore extraordinary hairstyles adorned with white shells, red coral, buttons, and various pieces in metal. The men, however, were distinguished from the Muslims only by their lack of beards.
They travelled a stretch of the road that crosses the narrow Bumburet valley over several kilometres, leaping over streams, very slowly, because of the snow. The houses piled on top of one another on the slopes, making the most of every metre of that natural ravine.
The Kalash had whiter skin than the Muslims of Chitral, but they still looked nothing like the race of splendid blondes that the ethnologist Loude had described in his book on the last infidels of the Hindu Kush. It was at least true that they shaved and that they adorned their caps with coloured feathers and ears of corn. When Jordi saw the way two Kalash lads joked around with a group of Muslims, he got angry. Were these the pagans holding out against the pressures of Islam that Loude had been talking about? Either the Kalash had changed a great deal in a couple of decades, or Loude had created a fiction. But why? What for? A scientist is a scientist — what possible reason is there to fantasise? Proof, proof, proof. That’s what our work comes down to, isn’t it? Did Loude just not think anybody was going to corroborate his claims?
There were clouds of smoke coming from many of the houses. The women were cooking, griming their faces with soot. The cemetery, the rock for the ritual sacrifice of lambs, the sanctuary dedicated to Mahandeo — the great god of horses — and the altars honouring the various divinities were all neglected. Nothing matched up to expectations. It was cold.
‘Some pagans!’ said Jordi. ‘What a fake.’
Before travelling to the valleys, he had recreated the life and aesthetics of the Kalash so many times in his mind that now he felt cheated. The places of worship were simple, with no pretensions of any kind, as though they had been left behind, anchored in a primitive state. The representation of divine symbols seemed to him clumsy and naïve.
As he came into the lounge of the little Kalash hotel where they had chosen to stay, they found a group of young people facing the TV set, which was showing an American war movie at top volume. None of them noticed their arrival; all of them were intoxicated with drugs and alcohol. The air smelled of hashish, so thick that you could cut it. Several of them were getting high chewing naswar. From time to time, somebody would spit on the floor.
‘They can’t expect us to sleep here,’ said Yannik.
After protesting to the owner, they managed to moderate the volume of the TV.
‘Don’t worry, the kids will be heading off very soon.’
‘Can we sleep upstairs?’
‘I’m sorry, the two bedrooms are taken by some journalists from France.’
Jordi wanted to go up and say hello to them. He knocked on one of the doors, and when it opened, he found two men and one woman, all half-naked. The man at the door smiled ecstatically, inviting him in, while those inside were smoking hashish. They seemed uneasy.
‘A new opium delivery has arrived in town,’ said the one at the door after Jordi declined his invitation. ‘You know anything about that? Where you can get some gear?’
‘No, no. We’re only just settling in.’
Jordi slipped away, trying to maintain his composure, hurt and scandalised.
He hastened to get out of the valleys. In his diary, he wrote that all he wanted was to ‘forget the nightmare’. How could a town fall into such decline? It was so pitiful, so appalling, so horrific.
‘The Kalash are done for, they’re nothing more than folklore for the tourists, they’ve reached a point of no return,’ an Italian couple travelling round the region would later remark.
‘I agree,’ replied Jordi.
VII
AND off they went to explore the mountains. Prince Hilal took them into the forests of willow, fir, and green oak, and they crossed imposing formations clad with junipers, fields of wheat … He was the best of guides.
‘Look.’ He pointed at a clearing.
The prince passed Jordi the binoculars. It didn’t take him long to focus on an impressively horned goat.
‘A markhor?’
‘There aren’t many left. The arrival of large flocks of Kalashnikovs has almost put an end to them. Too many have died in a short space of time.’
‘The collateral effects of war, I suppose? Hunger …’
‘Until we managed to bring in legislation to stop people hunting them, they were bringing down about twenty a day.’
Destitution had also accelerated the felling of the trees. The number of poachers was multiplying, which meant that Hilal had to be tireless in his patrols of this labyrinth of cathedrals of rock. It was so hard to find anything there. And if on top of that you knew how to hide … The forests exceeded any sense Jordi had previously formed of them. He felt so tiny, on such a different scale … That amazing immensity was showing up his own derisory size. A lesson worth learning! The landscape was explaining better than anything before how small he was, how little he meant. In the days that followed, he was filled with the certainty that being so aware of his own insignificance enlarged him.
It turned out to be a superb school. On his first sighting of the black-and-white wings of the bearded Himalayan vultures, lined up like great bombers taking off from the runway, one after another, he was overwhelmed.
Yannik climbed up the crags, supported by his extraordinary muscles, and positioned himself in some well-chosen place for the necessary length of time, until the photo was ready. Jordi was impressed at his coolness and his ability to connect with the children particularly, who always sought him out to play.
At the end of the day, they ate a bowl of rice with something — meat, if they were lucky, perhaps lamb. Or corn fried in goat’s fat. Or vegetables. Or unidentified greens soaked in dubious sauces that frequently had dead beetles floating in them. On the plains, Tajik shepherds offered them yoghurt they had produced from the milk of their yaks.
They bought horses, dogs, they learned to shoot a tchounjor, the local double-stringed bow, and when they went out hunting, Hilal’s father told them all about the good times with the English colonists. Yannik was such a good combination of musculature and sobriety that he proved a tremendous shot.
What more could he ask for? It was the life he had so often fantasised about as he disappeared into the Vercors. He was recording each watercourse in his memory, and the condition of each bridge, the enclaves where lakes formed in the spring. He learned to distinguish those routes down which one could take horses from those that only allowed donkeys or which had to be passed through on foot, making the most of the prodigious memory that had so impressed his family and his teachers ever since his childhood. How
ever dense and unknown the thickets or the woods he entered, he never got lost. Instinct and light were enough for him to orient himself, and he entrusted himself to them. As though he had a gps system in his head. As though nature herself were guiding him.
During a rest break, he moved a few metres from Yannik, wanting to be alone. As he sat on a rock, he saw a lizard watching him. They spent nearly two minutes like that. Jordi reached out an arm, and the lizard climbed onto it. Why do I have this power? Even as a kid, he used to follow cats around to study them, and it wasn’t uncommon for him to show up at home with a lizard on his shoulder. It was as though he hypnotised them, as though he knew how to talk to them. He possessed the intuition of the hunter, that sense of his environment. He would go to a place, and find something there.
‘You’re really something.’ Yannik had noticed the scene. ‘You’ve got little creatures in your blood.’
At the age of nine he had enrolled in the Club des Mal Aimés, a group of kids from the Calvaire neighbourhood whose most conspicuous act was to rescue all the lizards from an estate that was going to be torn down. Contact with nature is particularly easy in Valence. The Vercors mountain-range rises up right beside the city’s most distinctive plateau, occupying the horizon in a way that seems to be a call. Jordi heard it more clearly than anyone. It was common to see the young Magraner setting out on rue Franklin to negotiate the slopes that lost him in the forest. On more aquatic days he would vary his route, passing the corridor of wisteria that precedes the river port of l’Epervière to spend hours watching fish, catching frogs. Nowadays, despite hosting a bowling alley, l’Epervière still isn’t a particularly busy place, but in the seventies that part of the river possessed a wildness that was even more bewitching.
‘No, not in my blood,’ Jordi replied to Yannik. And he thought about his father, though in reality none of the Magraners had developed that same instinct.
His father had never got along very well with lizards, nor with almost any of the animals that excited Jordi. The old man preferred the sea. Perhaps the problem between them had been no more than a question of surface; the thing was, he found it hard to adapt to what at the time he had considered pure authoritarianism. Of course, who’d have told him that one of the greatest moments of his boyhood was one for which he’d have his father to thank? Communication between them didn’t flow well at all — Jordi was the fifth of six siblings, there were too many years between them, and the patriarch didn’t seem to understand his weakness for escaping into the mountains, but that was why the kid was especially struck upon unwrapping a present one Christmas to discover a biologist’s case.
‘It’s just what I wanted,’ he mumbled.
Jordi kept thinking about that episode the whole day, and when it got dark, as he sat at the fire in the icy night, he tried to remember how old he’d been that Christmas. Fourteen, he figured. Yes, fourteen, because he’d joined the boy scouts a few years earlier. That was when he’d first met Erik, Yannik’s brother. They had gone into the Vercors to watch the chamois. Erik noticed Jordi because he was a lot of fun, and so he tried to make contact by walking close to him. At one point a dog passed them, and Jordi started talking about that particular species. He knew everything — what they ate, their habitat, their genealogical background, and how they had come to be in the Vercors. It’s amazing, thought Erik. He knows all about it. Except he soon realised that Jordi’s demonstrations were constant, that he could do the same with any animal at all. Erik was impressed by his knowledge of nature and his curiosity, his capacity for taking an interest in everything — history, too, music, philosophy — and he, brazenly now, moved closer towards him. He wanted to know more about this encyclopaedic prodigy. He wanted to learn.
Jordi shored up his friendship with the L’Homme brothers with an attempt at wolf-watching in the summer, and talking about the wide-open spaces they were going to visit together years later. They travelled to various natural parks in France, Spain, and Corsica, and in the mountains of Cantabria, Erik, Jordi and a handful of friends spent a month surviving by their own means. They shared the idea of the perfection of beginnings, and they were minded to set out together to find the mythical lost paradise and be faithful to their seeking with a religious devotion — seeking, seeking, seeking, above all, to be better, more natural, their way of feeling completely human.
Jordi was more attracted to reptiles and amphibians than to anything else; he drew them constantly. When he was out with F.R.A.P.N.A. (the Rhône-Alpes Federation for Protection of Nature), he used the opportunity to analyse them and ask about them, and in that way, by asking questions, he became close to Suzanne Marius, the German teacher and ornithology expert who captained some of the excursions.
If Monsieur Aussiette had been the teacher who had been key to awakening his yearning for knowledge in his early adolescence, it was Marius, prompted by her student’s clear-eyed enthusiasm, who suggested a piece of reading to him in 1977 that would prove decisive: L’homme de Néanderthal est toujours vivant — ‘Neanderthal Man is Still Alive’. The book dazzled him. He was absorbed by it, almost physically so. In the time he took to read it, he stopped going out with his friends, he didn’t watch television, he decreased the number of field expeditions. As he read, he began to see astonishing possibilities for science and adventure. But how much truth was there in it? Cavemen? Was he sufficiently convinced by it to launch his own line of investigation? Most important of all, the book ended with the survival of the Neanderthal line.
The rift had been opened. Some say Jordi would have drifted into the study of hominids anyway, because his interest in amphibians was only down to the fact of man coming originally from water. It’s a theory. What is certainly the case is that Jordi was profoundly bothered by the way amphibians and reptiles had never been well thought of in Europe while, for example, the Aborigines of Australia revered them. He read that after the advent of Christianity, the holy men had driven reptiles away as a reaction against paganism, identifying them with witchcraft. And continuing on the trail of Christianity, he saw how this faith had decided that there would be good animals and bad animals. No, Jordi concluded. No. Myths are only myths, and legends only legends. Myths and legends get used as tools for discrimination, for struggle, and for taking sides against this or that category of people or living things. Someone has to change this. Someone had to change it.
In the intimate settings of pools and thickets, studying the ingenious survival-methods of widely despised creatures and marvelling at the skills about which few people know or speak, Jordi had forged his own value system, very remote from the one imposed out there in the so-called ‘real world’. He was not going to be deceived by them. It is not only the bear, the whale, the elephant, or the lion that are magnificent. He also believed in thorns, in frogs and mud, all of them lit by the great omnipotent sun. He would be the defender of life, without exception. He felt strong, sure, autonomous, young. Able to shout, to roar, in support of a new order.
On 20 March 1988 in Pakistan, he and Yannik celebrated the arrival of spring. They hoisted pagan and Valencian flags. They sacrificed a rooster. What excellent company Yannik seemed, almost as bold as he was, and even stronger. As he cut up the rooster, watching Yannik tidying the cooking pots, Jordi noticed a smile on his own face that felt idiotic. With his machete embedded in the bloody backbone, he decided he needed to control his bursts of enthusiasm; he couldn’t allow comradeship to soften him. Even the greatest missions could be sunk by excesses of warmth. In the tacit hierarchy that had been established, he was the boss, and he ought to show it.
‘How’s it coming along?’ Yannik asked.
Jordi dealt the rooster another blow of the machete without replying. Yannik raised his eyebrows and went on calmly arranging the pots. Concentrating on cutting up the animal, Jordi tried to convince himself he was doing well by keeping this distance. He must not allow himself to be infected by Yannik’s calmness and sweetness, s
o innocent when it came to dealing with the natives. After all, the ultimate decisions would always be in his hands: he felt a responsibility for things to work out well, all of the responsibility, and the surroundings required that he maintain the same bluntness he had employed until that moment. If not more.
Jordi tipped the parts of the rooster into a pan. No, the friendship with Yannik would not soften him. Rather he should use it to help glorify his own role, transforming him, quite straightforwardly now, into the head of the team who drove every initiative, suspicious the way such people must be suspicious, imposing his opinions on the coarse local ways. He knew how to behave, dealing personally with them. Which was why, as he emptied the big pot into the saucepan, he let another smile escape, but this time following a thought about Yannik’s naïveté. He really does just believe everything people say to him …
By then, the word had already got around Chitral that Jordi was intending to seek out wild men.
On 23 March, he heard something like cries in the night. The 26th gives us the first mention of the yeti in his diary, while he is talking to a hunter during a snowstorm. He doesn’t expand on it at the time, but it does indicate that the investigation had begun. On April 9th, he heard those cries again. ‘I don’t know what to think,’ he wrote, dazed at the possibility of such an obvious clue, and at having found it so quickly.
‘No, I can’t be that lucky,’ he said aloud.
A shiver ran through him; he was almost trembling at really finding himself faced with a specimen whose existence he continued to doubt. And it was only four months since he had landed, he had begun to master the geography, and the testimonials of the natives encouraged him to look more deeply … but he retained his scepticism.
In the Land of Giants Page 3
