The Cloud Forest

by Peter Matthiessen

  April 20. Timpia.

  As it turns out, my instincts about our Machiguengas’ good intentions were probably right. The padre feels sure that their reluctance to leave the raft was caused by a fear of the mission instilled in them by the Pereiras, who do not like to lose slave labor to the Church. But it also turns out that Andrés’s low estimate of our safety while at Pangoa may not have been as exaggerated as I’ve assumed. Epifanio has the worst reputation of the Pereira sons, and Padre Daniel speaks from personal experience: while he was in charge of the Coribene mission it was once invaded by Epifanio, who molested the Indian women and shot up the place with his gun. Fortunately he was too drunk to hurt anybody, but Padre Daniel told Epifanio that he would not accept confession of this sin, and that Epifanio must never return to Coribene. As for Ardiles, his complaints of mistreatment at the hands of a gringo he has guided through the Pongo are made extremely doubtful by the conviction of both Roblés and Ayesta, both of whom have worked in this region for eight years, that Ardiles himself has never been through the Pongo in his life. In fact there are not very many people who have, even in the dry season, and an interesting sidelight of the whole ill-starred voyage of the upper Urubamba is the possibility that, quite unwittingly, we may have had a more significant adventure than the ones we originally sought. Our sole idea was to get downriver to join Cruz, at which time the expedition would begin: knowing nothing of the Urubamba, and receiving only lies and misinformation from its inhabitants, whose ambition was to get rid of us, we looked upon the navigation of the mal pasos and the Pongo as a necessary ordeal of the journey, and one that such veterans as Ardiles and Pereira had negotiated a dozen times.

  Having written this, however, I shall have to contradict myself a little. We received plenty of warnings, and we chose to diminish them, partly because of the agony of going back and partly because of Andrés’s conviction that the Urubambans were scared to death of their own river, the dangers of which must certainly be exaggerated and which were not, in any case, to be mentioned in the same breath with those of the Huallaga, say, or the Pongo de Manseriche of the alto Marañon. But the bald gentleman at the Lugarte hacienda, Padre Giordia at Coribene, and Abraham Marquez, all of whom know something of the river and all of whom apparently wished us well, had told us that the river was presently unnavigable; Marquez went so far as to say that, if we risked the Pongo in a balsa with the river in this state of flood, he wouldn’t give a sole for our chances. And these people were not alone: here and there on the river haciendas a peon had uttered a quiet, humble warning, like the capitaz who had told us to beware of Rudi Ardiles.

  Against this advice we set our own stubbornness, and the experience of those steep, hot valleys of the montaña which would have to be retraced, and, finally, the easy assurances of Ardiles and Pereira. And we survived the Pongo without undue emergencies, which would tend to suggest that Ardiles and Pereira were right, and the others wrong.

  The Pongo, from the vantage point of a small raft rushing through it, is a fearsome spectacle, no question of it. But—without meaning to set myself up as any sort of authority—it can probably be said that, given a good balsa which will not break up on a rock or cliff, and good bogas who will not panic, it can probably be passed safely at any time of year. Even a well-constructed balsa, overloaded or mismanaged, will break up in a hurry, but the most serious danger is of a volteado—overturning. This would not be difficult, even in a strong balsa, if the latter were permitted by the bogas to hang up on a rock or shallow shelf, with the other end sliding around and down into a rough pool below. We very nearly overturned, in just this way, at Vacanique.

  I’ve said earlier that life preservers would be a comfort, and certainly one would do no harm. But in the Pongo, in the current of the rainy season, I no longer think it would do very much good. Sooner or later the swimmer would be caught in one of the big remolinos, and, even if it did not drag him down, it would keep him spinning merrily in his bright little jacket until he starved to death. (Andrés has been on a balsa that was stuck in a large remolino for sixteen hours, and there is a known case of a balsa and crew caught in one for twenty-four days.)

  Whatever the dangers, the fact remains that trips through the Pongo are few and far between, and in some years there are none; and that such trips as there are are made in the dry season, from June through October, when the river is low and slow. Despite Epifanio’s smiling assurances about the joys of April travel in the Pongo, the Dominicans know of only one doubtful passage through it in the rainy season: this trip may have been made at this same time last year by a Machiguenga who turned up at Timpia, having run away from the Pereiras.

  If the priests are not mistaken, in other words, then Andrés and I are the first white men ever to travel the Pongo de Mainique in what the Indians call “the time of waters.” Since this feat was the one farthest from our minds, we thus become the greatest heroes malgré eux since the voyage of Wrong-Way Corrigan.

  April 21. Timpia.

  The padres are not ready to leave, and so we shall pass another day at Timpia. This will be the first place we have slept in more than one night since leaving Cuzco, and we have chosen the right place: Padre Daniel, with Brothers Ayesta and Ruiz, have been extremely hospitable and agreeable, and Ruiz has given us the first respectable meals we have eaten in twelve days. He has even contrived to make yuca presentable by slicing it very thin and frying the bejesus out of it.

  Timpia is a village of about forty Machiguengas, high on a bluff overlooking the encuentro of the Timpia and Urubamba. The Indian huts, built up off the ground on poles, are actually derived from the style of the Piro Indians farther north: the excellent idea of the design is to keep the pigs, chickens, and four cows which roam the central yard from making themselves too much at home. The Indians grow yuca and bananas, and hunt and fish; they are civilized here, and the cushma has been largely replaced by calico and homespun. Our bogas, with their cushmas and face marks, long hair, and striking weapons, stand out from the rest like wild flowers in a bed of vegetables.

  The three lingered at Timpia for a day, restless and wary. They left this morning, guided upstream as far as the Pongo by Indians from the village. Andrés was happy to see them go. He has been sleeping a good deal and looks much better. Since we left Pangoa, he has told me two very interesting things: first of all, it appears that Ardiles and Julio took a liking to the small machete Andrés carries, and, having used it in the construction of the first balsa, suggested that they would like to keep it. When Andrés made a point of taking this as a joke, Ardiles inquired, not quite pleasantly, what Andrés would do if they kept it against his will. Andrés told them that he still knew how to shoot. Clearly, this statement displeased them, and he hastily explained that, in the jungle, a knife of any sort is a very personal thing, and that either to sell one or to give it away brings very bad luck to both parties. Both Ardiles and Julio were Indian enough to take this superstition seriously, and no more was said about it, but the incident did nothing to increase Andrés’s peace of mind.

  The other thing was that Epifanio, by his own admission, was wanted by the law, not only in Cuzco, where he is seriously in debt, but in Quillabamba, where he recently slugged a policeman. Like his father, he felt quite safe in Pangoa, the implication to Andrés being that he could do anything he pleased there and get away with it. Obviously this was true, and Andrés’s apprehension at Pangoa seems more natural to me all the time.

  It is remarkable that a man of Andrés’s age has borne that trip down through the montaña as well as he has. I suggested to him last night that, wild-goose chase or no, we had had quite an adventure. “Adventure!” he said. “My Lord! Look, in all the years I’ve spent in the jungle, I’ve never been through anything like the last ten days.”

  Yesterday, still in a state of nervous exhaustion, he had remained suspicious of our Indians. In the afternoon I went down to the river for a swim and had to carry the revolver to make Andrés happy; as it was, he wante
d Alejandro to accompany me. But I refused this, wanting to be alone; we have all been at very close quarters, under strain, and solitude at that moment seemed badly needed. I also wanted to look at the Happy Days, tied to a dead stick stuck in the sand; unless an Indian made use of it, this would be its last berth, and after all, it had gotten us safely through the Pongo. And I let myself wonder if some such idea did not affect those Machiguengo boys: when I revisited the delta again today I found an Indian shelter of palm reeds and a cold fire on the playa beside the balsa. The bogas had gone a half mile from the village to spend the night there.

  Raul, Toribio, and Agostino were not happy at Timpia. I watched them that first morning, when Padre Daniel made fun of their crude paddles for the benefit of the mission Indians; their faces, ordinarily cheerful, were set, unfathomable. It seemed to me that they felt uncomfortable in their wild dress and might have been made to feel inferior. They stood silently beside their bows and arrows rolled in neat bundles with the bowstring, while the mission children in their cheap factory shirts stood about them, gawking.

  In any case, my heart went out to them, and I thought about them a lot today down at the river, where I walked around naked in the sun, feeling infinitely clean; their world was not the mission yard but the white trees and swift river, the tracks of a large ocelot or small puma on the sand near the shelter, the lost arrow feathered with blue and yellow macaw quills which I found in the cane behind the beach. I’m sorry I did not see them to say good-by, though this is a sentiment that they would not have understood. Our lives were preserved by the skill of these three smiling, graceful boys who, as a reward for building the balsa and risking their lives on it, may or may not receive from Epifanio a cheap knife or some cheap pisco. Today they are hunting barefoot through the jungle, moving back toward the strange world of Pangoa. They will be there three days from now, or thirty-three, for time means as little to them as their Christian names, Toribio, Raul, and Agostino.

  April 22. Río Picha.

  Yesterday I read my notes on the Pongo de Mainique to Andrés; he was generally in agreement on the various phenomena and added a few impressions of his own. For one thing, the Indians at his end of the raft were genuinely terrified, he felt, and gave way momentarily to panic; both were washed violently against him, and both failed to respond to his smile of reassurance. As far as they were concerned, the Pongo was no laughing matter, and they had no Western concept of the stiff upper lip to restrain them from howling out their dismay as loudly as possible.

  Andrés too saw the bright yellow bird, but to him it was the bird which seemed out of place, rather than ourselves. The worst moment of his passage was when the balsa slid backward toward the vortex of the great remolino.

  Having discovered the unique nature of our adventure too late, we are both stunned by the realization that we haven’t a single photograph of the Pongo, nor even of its approaches. Andrés’s camera, as I have said, is a casualty of the upper river, but my own still works in a sluggish sort of way, and, had we known what we were up to, we might have risked it. On the other hand, the heavy rain and the frequent waves crashing over the raft would have made its use impossible in the dark Pongo: my one chance would have been to go down with the Indians to the mouth of the canyon on foot and take a somber portrait of the portals. Also, we could have gone ashore below the Pongo and made our way back to photograph the lower end: this picture would have been less exciting, but it might have been spiced up a bit with a title like SPEWED FROM THE MOUTH OF HELL.

  This morning we left early, emerging from the mouth of the Timpia before seven and heading down the Urubamba; behind us, at the encuentro, the good old Happy Days nuzzled peacefully against the banks, its lianas trailing in the current. We were now traveling in style, in a large motored canoa, with Padre Daniel, Fray Ayesta, Alejandro, and a Machiguenga motorista whose crucifix did not entirely obviate his black heathen tattoos. In addition to our own equipment, we carried some supplies for a new Dominican mission being established near the mouth of the Río Picha.

  The canoa moved swiftly with the current, and yet I don’t believe we traveled as fast as we did on the balsa, without power, above the Pongo. The river has slowed drastically, and it is only the fact that our time is running out that kept us from continuing on the Happy Days, for balsa travel is incomparably more rewarding than travel by outboard, the growl of which tends to shut away the atmosphere of the jungle rivers.

  There was a heavy fog on the river this morning, and the sun rose dimly behind the strange silhouettes of the forest—large ohe trees, and the pona and chonta palms, and the white cetico of the cecropia or fig family, with its great fingered disk of a leaf—this is the common tree of the river banks and islands—and a delicate elm with lavender leaves, the bolaina, and a tree with rich yellow flowers, and countless others: one can ask the names, but the names change with the locality and the tribes, even if one could spell them. The job to be done with this triumphant flora, still so little known, is enough to tempt one to become a botanist.

  This stretch of the river is all but uninhabited, even by Indians. In the more than one hundred miles of river between Pangoa and the mission at Sepahua, there are only a few clusters of Machiguenga huts and two or three modest chacras. Nevertheless, wildlife, even birds, seems very scarce. A few small hawks, a kind of turkey vulture with a head yellow rather than red—we saw three of these on a sand bar—the blue-black and white swallow of the Amazon, a number of long-tailed blue and green parrots, a splendid blue and gold guacamayo, as the macaw is known in this region, and a flock of large, primitive gallinaceous birds, greeny-black with white crests and wing patches. The latter are called pavas or turkeys, though actually they are guans, resembling the chachalacas of our own border with Mexico. Two of these we were able to shoot for supper, as a consequence of their indomitable stupidity, including an ability to sit tight on their perches with outboards and small-arms fire crashing around their ears. In addition to the birds, we saw a magnificent specimen of the morpho butterfly cross before a sparkling waterfall, and two white crocodiles—strictly speaking, the white and the black “crocodiles” of the Amazon basin are caimans—which ran to the water with their quick, unpleasant gait at our approach. But the monkey, tapir, capybara, puma, jaguar, and other mammal members of the community kept their own counsel behind the still wall of trees.

  The Urubamba is magnificent in this season, when the water is high without being in full flood. The small cliffs of rock, the waterfalls, shadowed streams, the red faces of landslide (the thunder-like landslides are a common sound on the rivers at this time of year), the ever-varying forest, the gravel bars and sand beaches, the canebrakes and palm thickets—these turn and blend and illumine one another at every vuelta of the river. And we had fair weather for a change, a cheerful sun which burned the mist from long stretches of calm, clean water.

  We paused at the missionary station on the Río Camisea, then continued through the heat of the day to the mission at the mouth of the Picha. Here we decided to spend the night. It is on this river, of course, that Cruz claims a ruin exists, and, with the help of the pleasant sister in charge of the settlement, I made some inquiries about this mysterious place. Cruz had told me in January that the ruins were a few kilometers from the river bank, which places them far off the beaten track in a land where the rivers are the only roads: one wonders why they would have been built there, though the river might since have changed its course, a common phenomenon in this transient terrain. But an old Machiguenga who had been all the way to the headwaters of the Picha and who passed for the local sage claimed he had never seen a sign of ruins. If the Picha ruin is as decrepit as it probably is, the old man might not have recognized it even in the unlikely circumstance that he had stumbled over it back in the jungle, but the chances are he would have heard the legend, and he denied this. On the evidence, therefore—Cruz not being here to defend the minority view, much less transport us—we will have to forget the ruins of the Río Picha
. The Indians disavow them, and this is not the kind of place where one can just go poking about the woods.

  I discovered this latter fact to my own satisfaction late this afternoon, after a swim in the river. The pleasure of the swim was lessened somewhat by the memory of the two caimans of this morning; they were of the small, white species, alleged to be harmless, so I risked a quick turn and flourish in the shallows. (I’m not sure when piranha territory is entered, but this will become a consideration before long, and there are always the sting rays, electric eels, and the wretched candiru.) I leaped out with relief and was immediately set upon by insects of ground and air, a number of which hurried into my pants with me: the air has become decidedly more tropic, with a variety of soft, sweet smells, and from now on bugs will become an increasing menace.

  Forsaking the river, I tried to make my way into the jungle, with the vague notion that I might come upon one or more of the elusive mammals, and possibly a snake or two; since my brother and I, as boys, harbored numbers of snakes, including copperheads, I have less fear of these creatures than of tarantulas, say, or scorpions, neither of which have the brains to run away. But the jungle turned out to be a thorn forest of bamboo, cane, and cat claw, growing densely around large ohes and another large species with a white-blotched reddish trunk, known locally as the charapilla. Stumbling along, supremely conscious of the din I was making in the airless silences, I was caught at from above, from below, and on all sides, and, having put everything for miles around to flight, I soon gave it up as a bad job and made my way back to the river. There the soft evening had drawn out the jungle birds. I saw all three forms of the brilliant guacamayos, including a small flight of the hyacinthine species, and a yellow-faced vulture, perched close at hand. There were a white and olive-brown swallow, two species of flycatcher very similar to the western and vermilion flycatchers of North America, and a big jay I have heard often but never seen until today. It is blue and gray, with a black hood.