The Cloud Forest

by Peter Matthiessen

  Before I left I asked Snell if he had told me anything he did not want repeated. “No,” he said, “I’ve been very careful. I haven’t told you half of what I know.” He smiled thinly. “As to Pangoa, you could write practically anything and you’d probably be right.”

  May 6. Pucallpa.

  I have now passed a week in Pucallpa, attempting to deal with an aroused populace. The bone has become the talk of the town, almost every inhabitant of which has come to the yard outside the police station to stare at it. The misinformation heaped up by the excited reports of Pucallpa’s radio station has caused me to be recognized by one and all as I stalk the streets, and I am frequently stopped and asked my opinion as to the identity of the monster. The truthful answer, that I have no idea, is entirely unsatisfactory, and I now say that it appears to be some sort of long-extinct herbivorous mammal. Depending on the alertness of my audience, this answer brings about either a blank stare or a furious nodding of the head, as if to say, Of course, of course, it’s just what I suspected.

  After six days of suspense a radiogram has at last arrived from Andrés, saying everything is OK, whatever that means. Things are not OK here, for the police have still heard nothing, and Macedo, who also stalks the streets, is open to neither bribe nor logic. The question of ownership is hopelessly lost in a mountain of lies and accusations, and the only hope of a change in this situation appears to be a wire from Lima stating that the bone belongs to neither Macedo nor myself but has been confiscated by the state. Meanwhile it stands mutely in its crate beneath this vulture sky, of no use to anybody.

  My original plan was to take the fossil to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, since there is nobody in Peru equipped to make an exact identification. But an expert is not required to state that our unwieldy find is of considerable scientific value, and it seems unlikely that the Government of Peru, should they once claim it, will ever let it go: this is especially true since Peruvians, resenting the number of Inca and pre-Inca artifacts which have been taken from the country, are more than sensitive about “national treasures.” The law on national treasures does not embrace paleontological finds, but doubtless it can be construed to do so.

  I have taken photographs of the bone from every angle, but there seems to be nothing else that I can do here, if indeed there ever was: I am flying out to Tingo María tomorrow, minus the object of the expedition, with only the faint hope that matters can be straightened out in Lima. The week has passed in a sort of dream, a kind of miasma of unreality which only a jungle town could induce. Aside from the interview with Wayne Snell, the only noteworthy experience was an evening when César and myself took a jungle potion prepared by an old Indian of the town. This bitter stuff, which in color alone resembles opaque apple cider, is called variously ayahuasca, which is Quechua for “dead man’s vine,” or soga de muerte, which is Spanish for “vine of death.” It produces hallucinations of far-away music and arrested time, a sense of several simultaneous worlds, which is quite remarkable; there is also the vague giddiness of being drunk, without the exhilaration. Toward the end a distinctly morbid state occurs, quite disagreeable. I have since identified the plant as Banisteriopsis caapi, a flowering liana of the Malpighiad family first described by Richard Spruce in 1853 and used as a narcotic by the Indian tribes throughout the Amazon: it is the narcotic known to the American writer William Burroughs and other admirers of its use as “yage.” (In Lima I turned over a large draft of ayahuasca to the wandering beat poet Allen Ginsberg, who subsequently visited Pucallpa and saw the “excellent monstrous fossil.” Of ayahuasca he wrote me fervently, “No wonder it’s called soga de muerte.”)

  I have talked many times to César on the subject of the Picha ruins. He is sincerely convinced that they exist, on the basis of what he has been told by the Machiguenga at his ganadería. His description corresponds with that of Basagoitia, except that, according to Cruz, the ruin lies four days upriver rather than fifteen, plus a trek of several days into the jungle. Last year, he says, two Englishmen tried to reach it but had to give up when their guide refused to go any farther.

  Another man who believes completely in these ruins is Wayne Snell. Snell, incidentally, lent four of his Pangoa Indians to the Tennant expedition which discovered the ruin on the Mantaro, referred to earlier: he says that the party would not have gotten through had Fidel Pereira not approved it and passed word of his approval from tribe to wild tribe of the savage Machiguengas who inhabit the interior tributaries. Apparently there are also Machiguengas on the upper Camisea who kill on sight, and one gets the impression that civilization has reached only the outposts of some of these peoples; in many areas of Peru there remain wild rivers up which, past a certain point, no traveler dares to go. The Mantaro ruin lies about fifteen days, by canoe and foot, from the Urubamba.

  Like César Cruz, Snell knows a Machiguenga who claims to have visited the Picha ruin. There is also another boy, a Machiguenga-Campa now at Yarina Cocha, who he thought might have been there too, and he talked to this boy the afternoon I was there. The boy had indeed been to the ruin, as had his father. He and Snell talked for a while in Machiguenga, and, adding this new information to what he already had heard, Snell was able to supply the following description, by far the most complete I have obtained to date.

  The ruins lie at a journey of two days up a small tributary of the Picha, followed by four days on foot: this more or less corresponds to the distance estimated by Cruz’s man. The Machiguengas do not like strangers prowling around in the region and avoid going there themselves, as their legend is that the place was cursed and deserted by its original chief: this may account, Snell feels, for the reluctance of the Machiguengas at the Dominican mission at the mouth of the Picha to admit any knowledge of the place.

  The site itself is not a ruin in the usual sense, but a high cliff with a huge cavern: in former times a waterfall ran over the cliff and down across the cave mouth, making a natural fortress which was almost impregnable. The water course has now changed, and the cave has become accessible. A low wall surrounds the entire place, which is known to the Indians today as Shankivirintsi.

  Snell hopes to reach the ruin this summer and, if he succeeds, will be the first white man ever to see Shankivirintsi. I wish him luck, but I must confess to a deep regret that Cruz was not there awaiting us at Timpia. For on the basis of all the evidence, pro and con, that I have heard, I now believe that the Picha ruin exists.

  But if it served once as an excuse to enter the jungle, it can serve again. At this point I am suffering from a certain sense of failure, for not only did we miss our chance of locating Shankivirintsi but, after all this time and risk, we are also unable to leave the jungle with the bone. Still, I am leaving Pucallpa willingly, in the certainty I will be here again another time, for I have caught Andrés’s jungle fever, the strong sense that something mysterious exists here which, even if located, can never quite be found.

  And Alejandro. Alejandro, bowing and tugging his forelock to the last. Alejandro Condoris, beloved son, one hopes, of people named Condoris in Cuzco, though Alejandro, wandering away with us from the Rodriguez hacienda and now anxious to try his luck in Lima, gives the impression of being alone. Alejandro spent most of his meager pay on a great shining clumping pair of black shoes, for he had arrived in Pucallpa barefoot. (At one point he possessed a rude pair of sandals hewn from the defunct tire of a large truck, but these met an obscure fate somewhere on the rivers.) Besides his salary, he has been given his fare and food money and a little extra for his own diversion, should he care to make a distinction between diversion and food, and the promise from Andrés of a job in Lima. He left on a lumber truck this afternoon.

  I feel bad about Alejandro, though he himself is as happy as his mountain melancholy will ever let him be. I feel bad because, in a very trying moment on the Ucayali—Cruz lost his hold on the rope by which I was swinging myself from the canoe to a steep mud bank, and I fell ignominiously into the river, camera and a
ll; I managed to hold the camera high, but in doing so smashed that hand hard on the snout of the great fossil—I became exasperated by his weak grasp of the situation, and I showed it. Afterward he brooded and seemed sullen. I bought some fresh bananas from the Chamas (he loves bananas and has a way of lying down next to a large bunch and quietly absorbing the lot, without ever appearing to take one up and peel it) and presented these, repentant, but still he looked distraught.

  Alejandro had been longing to shoot the pistol or the rifle, and on the Inuya I had suggested to Andrés permitting him to do so, but both Andrés and César had dismissed any such idea as unheard of, and no more was said about it. On that afternoon on the Ucayali, however, I gave him the pistol to console him; he fired wildly at one crocodile, turned pale, and handed the gun back, sinking immediately into an even more impenetrable gloom. And I kept thinking how very much we had taken this slow, shambling boy for granted, as a kind of ungainly presence, as faceless and heavy and patient as one of the big duffels—this is the way such peons are treated here, and, having always had liberal pretensions, I disliked very much how easily I had fallen into this custom and become hardened to it.

  At a loss, I tried to talk to him. This is not a rewarding occupation, especially when a certain language barrier is compounded by a Quechua accent, and probably I have avoided it more than I should. But anyway, we talked haltingly, reminiscing about our trip together, and immediately he came alive. I had been mistaken: the poor fellow had not been resentful of me but only despondent because he had angered me. Now it was clear to him that we were friends again, and he could scarcely contain himself, hunching forward over the rubber duffels until he was perched at my shoulder. With a frantic smile, eyes shining, he began to wring one of his hands, just as he had that afternoon in the Pongo de Mainique.

  He cried out, “And the Pongo! Do you remember that time we went through the Pongo together, señor, do you remember how terrible it was!”

  “Sí, sí,” I said as eagerly as I could. “Sí, sí, Alejandro.” But I felt heavy-hearted and very small. I thought of all the interest and credit Andrés and I had received for having gone through the Pongo de Mainique in el tiempo de agua: Alejandro Condoris had been with us on the Happy Days and had received no credit whatsoever. As a peon, he was presumably not supposed to know what had befallen him, much less give himself airs.

  Well, he’s off to Lima, our good and faithful Alejandro, to match his wits with his loud vivo compatriots of the city streets. I’ll remember him with fondness, and I wish him well.

  1 These drawings are not dissimilar to those found on rocks at the mouth of the Rio Branco in Brazil by Richard Spruce, a botanist who worked in the Amazon Valley at the same time as H. W. Bates, and whose text, like Bates’s, remains a standard reference work a century later.

  Epilogue

  SINCE RETURNING TO the United States, I have looked at a number of journals of South American exploration in attempts to find further information about the Urubamba and the Pongo de Mainique. Mr. Leonard Clark, as we have seen, has referred to the river as “forbidden,” and while this is scarcely the case, there are few references to it in the literature of the jungle. Mr. Stratford Jolly and Mr. Julian Tennant, already mentioned, are the only writers known to me who speak about the Pongo.

  The first descent of the Urubamba of which I have found record was made in the summer of 1846 by a party under the direction of a noted French naturalist, Francis de Castelnau: an account of its hardships appears in The Valley of the Amazon, by William Herndon and Lardner Gibbon, published in 1854. The account makes no reference to the Pongo de Mainique by this name, but an extract quoted from Castelnau’s journals describes the loss of one of the party in an attempt to cross the river and portage around a dangerous waterfall—quite possibly that which lies at the head of the main rapid of the Pongo.

  We found the current of exceeding rapidity; and the second cataract roared and foamed only one hundred metres below us. The Indians at every instant cast anxious glances over the distance that separated them from the danger.… At this moment we heard the cries behind us, and an Indian pointed with his fìnger to the canoe of M. Carrasco, within a few yards of us. It was struggling desperately with the violence of the current; at one instant we thought it safe, but at the next we saw that all hope was lost, and that it was hurried toward the gulf with the rapidity of an arrow. The Peruvians and the Indians threw themselves into the water; the old priest alone remained in the canoe, and we could distinctly hear him reciting the prayer for the dying until his voice was lost in the roar of the cataract. We were chilled with horror; and we hastened to the bank, where we met our companions successively struggling to the shore from the lost canoe… . We deeply regretted the loss of our companion, whose death was as saint-like as his life.

  The photographs of the giant mandíbula I took to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Dr. Charles Mook, the museum’s senior authority on fossil reptiles, inspected the prints with a magnifying glass and tentatively identified the former owner of the jaw as a very large fossil crocodilian. Dr. Edwin Colbert of the museum agreed with this opinion; he estimated that the giant animal must have attained a length of at least thirty-five feet. According to Dr. Mook, it inhabited the earth at some period between five million and twenty-five million years ago. He was much interested in the discovery of this fossil, which represents a species heretofore unknown to him; he said that the museum would very much like to see it and would pay for its shipment from Peru if I could obtain permission for its export.

  I have written a number of inquiries to Peru, where César Cruz has since become the defendant in a suit brought by his former friend Victor Macedo, and the ownership of the bone itself obscured for good by the mass of documents and memoranda: but for the written testimony of Mr. Allen Ginsberg, who saw it in its last known resting place, in Pucallpa, I might almost believe that the whole adventure of the jaw was the very sort of jungle hallucination against which I had been warned. “Between the outer world and the secrets of ancient South America,” as Colonel Fawcett once lamented, “a veil has descended,” and it now appears that the giant mandíbula will remain behind it, sinking slowly beneath man’s detritus on the steaming banks of the Ucayali.

  Amazonas

  M.S. Venimos loading grain meal (Gonaïves Gulf, Haiti)

  Pucallpa waterfront, Ucayali River (Peru)

  River settlement at Belén, near Iquitos (Peru)

  On the Napo River

  Aymara woman (Bolivia)

  “Crying God,” Tiahuanaco ruins (Bolivia)

  Quechua Indians of the sierra (Bolivia)

  Andean lake (Peru)

  Inca ruins at Sacsahuaman (Peru)

  Quechua market, Pisac (Peru)

  Strait of Magellan and Tierra del Fuego (Chile)

  Sheep range, Tierra del Fuego (Argentina)

  Beagle Channel and Hoste Island, Tierra del Fuego (Argentina)

  Hidden Lake and Lake Fagnano, Tierra del Fuego (Argentina)

  Caraja encampment, Araguaia River (Brazil)

  Caraja canoes, Araguaia River (Mato Grosso in background)

  Caraja boy

  Caraja ritual costume

  Old woman bathing, Araguaia River

  The Upper Urubamba, from ruins at Machu Picchu

  Hacienda Marquez, on Yanatili River (Black Drunken River)

  The cloud forest at El Encuentro

  Ardiles

  Epifanio Pereira, at Sangianarinchi (note dancing frog)

  Andrés Porras (right) and his friend Señor Antonio Basagoitia

  Toribio

  Machiguenga campfire

  Construction of balsa raft, Pangoa

  Agostino

  Mouth of the Pongo, lower end (picture taken at 4000 feet by George Insley, missionary-pilot)

  Dawn on the Urubamba

  Last resting place of the Happy Days, Timpia

  Machiguenga chief, Timpia

  Machiguenga woman, Camisea


  Campa woman (note toucan), Inuya River

  Campa hunters and drying arrow shafts

  Indian encampment, Inuya River

  Quebrada Grasa

  César Cruz and author, with mandíbula, Mapuya River

  Mission Conibos, Ucayali River

  The fossil in police yard, Pucallpa

  The fossil in police yard, Pucallpa

  Acknowledgments

  The last month excepted, I traveled through South America alone, but the solitude was broken in the cities by the kindness and hospitality of many people. Most of the introductions I was fortunate enough to have came about, directly or indirectly, through letters written by Mary Lord and by Arturo Ramos, and I should like to thank these good friends first of all.

  I am grateful also to Lucha and Alfredo Porras in Lima, who put me up in the beginning and in the end put up with me; to Dorry and Ted Blacque, in La Paz; to Angela and Peter Deane in Buenos Aires; to Jean and Tony Deane in Punta del Este (Uruguay); to Nina and Clayton Templeton in Orizona (Brazil); to Señora and Señor Carlos Menendez Behety in Río Grande (Tierra del Fuego); and to Betsy and Oliver Bridges in Viamonte (Tierra del Fuego), all of whom, for no other reason than their own generosity, cheerfully took me in.