The Complete Collection of Travel Literature

by Tahir Shah

  Sahib: Honorific title of address meaning “Sir” or “Mr.” in India. Arabic loan-word, it signifies both Friend, Owner and Sir in various usages.

  Samburu: Pastoral tribe found in central and northern Kenya, thought to be related to the Masai.

  Sarnosa: Fried pastry triangle filled with meat or cooked vegetables.

  Santería: South American cult, based on West African lore: involving invocations made to Yoruba deities depicted as Catholic saints.

  Saree: Long piece of cloth worn by women in India as a robe.

  Sayed: (Lord, Prince) Title borne by descendants of the Prophet Mohammed.

  Seppuku: Japanese ritual suicide.

  Serengi: Stringed Indian musical instrument.

  Shah: Title (literally “King”) borne by descendants of the Prophet Mohammed, who also trace their ancestry from the Sassanian Emperors. In India, occurs as a surname among Hindus: who are not of this family.

  Shalwar kameez: Pyjama suit worn by men and women, popular in Pakistan. Originating in Iran, its correct name is Shalwar wa qamisa: “Trousers and shirt.”

  Shashlik: Pieces of meat and vegetable cooked on a skewer over charcoal.

  Shilling: Currency used in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania.

  Silverback: Dominant male of a troop of mountain gorillas, the hairs on whose back may have turned silvery gray with age.

  Songo: Central African dish prepared from stewed cassava.

  Sitar: Indian stringed instrument, similar to the lute, with a long fretted neck.

  Stinger: American-made ground-to-air missile.

  Sushi: Japanese dish, usually of bite-sized pieces of rice and raw fish.

  Swami: A Hindu religious instructor.

  Talwar: Long Indian Saber.

  Tanpura: Large Indian stringed instrument made from a giant gourd.

  Thali: Metal tray on which several small individual dishes are placed; originally from south India, now found across the country.

  Tilapia: Freshwater fish similar to perch, found in Lake Victoria and other African waterways, forming an important part of local diet.

  Tonka beans: Fragrant black bean from a tree in America’s tropical regions; used in perfume manufacture. Thought in Venezuela to be lucky.

  Toxodont: Giant rhinoceros-like creature covered with coarse hair and thought by some to live in the mountains of Patagonia.

  Tutsi: Cattle-herding tribe living mainly in Rwanda and Burundi.

  UCLA: University of California, at Los Angeles.

  Ugali: Starchy maize flour meal, forming an important part of the East African diet.

  Umbanda: South American cult, related to Macumba and found particularly in Brazil.

  UZI: Compact Israeli-made 9-millimetre machine-gun.

  Wolof: African language spoken in Gambia and parts of Senegal. Takes its name from the Wolof tribe.

  Yataghan: Turkish Saber — often slightly curved. The hilt, which has no guard, generally ends in two ear-like protrusions. Also used by Afghans.

  Yerba mate: The Ilex paraguayensis tree, from whose dried leaves and shoots the mate infusion is made.

  Yoruba: People of southwest Nigeria, Togo and Benin: whose lore forms the basis of Macumba and Santería.

  HOUSE OF THE TIGER KING

  A Jungle Obsession

  TAHIR SHAH

  SECRETUM MUNDI PUBLISHING

  Contents

  Arab proverb

  Introduction

  ONE - Blistered Feet

  TWO - Qualifications of a Traveller

  THREE - Size of the Party

  FOUR - Conditions in Success and Failure in Travel

  FIVE - Presents and Articles for Payment

  SIX - Reputed Dangers of Travel

  SEVEN - Engaging Natives

  EIGHT - Bones

  NINE - Warm Carcasses

  TEN - Porters for Delicate Instruments

  ELEVEN - Wasp and Scorpion Stings

  TWELVE - Drowning

  THIRTEEN - Fever

  FOURTEEN - Good Temper

  FIFTEEN - Pitching A Tent

  SIXTEEN - Portable Food

  SEVENTEEN - Bivouac

  EIGHTEEN - Seizing Food

  EPILOGUE - On Concluding the Journey

  Glossary

  Bibliography

  A Tomás, un gran viajero y un gran amigo

  A journey is a fragment of Hell

  Arab proverb

  House of the Tiger King

  Introduction

  House of the Tiger King was a journey into an obsession – an obsession with the bleakest, most magical, most dangerous, jungle on Earth.

  The expedition was characteristic for me in that I hadn’t given more than a passing thought to the book I might write at the end of it.

  Like so many other quests on which I have embarked, I never really considered writing it up. Doing so was the furthest thing from my mind.

  When you are shaking each night from dengue fever, the flesh on your feet rotted away, worms boring out from the soft skin of the inner thighs, the idea of a comfortable writing room is a distant luxury.

  My quest for the lost city of Paititi – the greatest lost city of the Americas – was about keeping myself going, and about keeping my men with from deserting me.

  It was a tortuous journey, one that almost broke us all.

  Looking back to the initial plan, to scour deep jungle for a vast lost city, I cringe at my ingenuousness. But, more than that, I can only shrink away at the absurd desire to find a “lost” city. How stupid could I have been to think that there was merit in the mission?

  After all, there is only one reason to embark on such a quest – to become the most feted, revered, explorer in existence.

  Now that I look back, I glimpse that there are far more important things in life than attaining the adulation of some meaningless prize. And, I am ashamed at having pitted myself against the jungle.

  But, then again, without the lure of the quest in the first place, I might not have been tested, and the ripened writer that I am, may have remained as guileless as I was before.

  In the jungles of Madre de Dios, I learned humility. I learned, too, that there is very little difference between a Machiguenga warrior and someone from our over-complicated preposterous world.

  More than that, I discovered – as Pancho used to tell me – there is no reason to strive for a lost city, one empty of people, a sloughed huddle of broken homes.

  Find Paititi, and the jungle would be chopped down. Urban sprawl would quickly take its place, the tribesmen employed as bell-hops in a hundred horrific hotels.

  And so, we decided that if we ever came upon the ruins, we would pretend that we had never found them at all…

  Tahir Shah

  ONE

  BLISTERED FEET

  To prevent the feet from blistering, it is a good plan to soap the inside of the stocking before setting out, making a thick lather all over it. A raw egg broken into the boot, before putting it on, greatly softens the leather.

  The Art of Travel, Francis Galton, 1872

  The men had lost their smiles and their cheap grins.

  Their cheeks were gaunt and unshaven, their eyes ringed with dark circles. I felt their hatred, their judgment. They would have killed me if they had thought they could get away with it. But their fatigue was so extreme that none of them could devise a plan by which to end my life.

  We crouched on the shore, cold, crunching pebbles beneath our boots. No one had the energy to speak. We had progressed, or regressed, to a state of dumbness. Conversation merely reminded us of the suffering. With a fleeting telepathic glance I could now quiz the porters about their loads, tell them to rest, or give the detested order to move on.

  The canopy of jungle hung like a tremendous barricade, concealing us from our world. There was an energy about it, a despicable power, a sense of consciousness. It watched you, scanning your movements, observing minutely as you stumbled ahead through the river. Thank God for the river.
It was the only blessed thing for a thousand miles. The slick ribbon of water had allowed us to traverse the densest cloud forest on earth, Madre de Dios, the Mother of God.

  Morale was low, and with every mile it waned a little more. We had all lost the skin on our feet, eroded by the sand in the strong current, and each man had succumbed to the fits of dengue fever that savaged us in the long, insect-ridden nights. There was diarrhoea too, but the most accursed affliction was the guinea worms. They bored out from the soft tissue of our inner thighs mocking our feebleness.

  The team of twelve porters had been chosen for their brute strength. It seemed like a lifetime ago that I had hired them, down at their village where the river was wide. They had been all smiles then, boasting of their muscles, their courage, their love of adversity. It had been I with the doubt, the fear, the dread. But after sixteen weeks in the jungle our roles had reversed. I had lost all fear and all doubt. I knew now that the ruins were up there, waiting for us. I was certain of it. It was a simple matter of perseverance, pushing ahead behind Pancho, our guide. Endure the unendurable a little longer, and the greatest lost city in history, Paititi, the El Dorado of the Incas, would be mine.

  As we crouched there on our haunches, pack straps biting into our shoulders, Pancho straightened his left index finger, then directed it slowly towards the top of a mountainous ridge. The men took a sudden breath. No one dared say a word.

  “Arriba, up,” he said, in a whisper. “Up there.”

  Following the course of the river was arduous, but at least it was possible. We all knew that hacking up into the undergrowth would be tantamount to suicide. As leader of the expedition, it fell to me to drag the others forward. But men stripped of health and enthusiasm are dead weight. They had no interest in the instant glory that is showered on the man who finds the ultimate goal of exploration: a Lost City.

  The porters were only half the problem. Also in tow was a small knot of Europeans: two Swedes, one Ukranian and a listless Bulgarian. The Swedes were diehard film-makers – a father and his son. They were making a documentary of my quest. The Bulgarian was making a film of them making a film about me. As for the Ukranian, he was a millionaire banker who was paying his own way. I had agreed to allow the Swedes to come with me in the hope it would lead to a gravy-train of TV funding. That bonanza never came, so the Swedes leeched off the banker and I leeched off them.

  Drowning in tripods and cameras, film-stock and lights, the documentary team threatened to snuff out the frail flame it sought to preserve on celluloid. The vast quantity of their gear, strapped to the porters’ backs, made for painfully slow progress. And now Pancho was pointing to the ridge.

  I led him aside. Fine-boned, nervous of outsiders and unable ever to look me in the eye, he squatted on an uneven granite block and glanced away as I addressed him.

  “Are you sure, Pancho?”

  He did not answer. He never answered.

  “Pancho, you know that climbing the ridge will kill the men?”

  The fragile warrior of the Machiguenga tribe remained silent. He extended his index finger for a second time and poked it mutely at the solid canopy of trees.

  “Is that the place... where you found the ruins as a young man?”

  Pancho’s cheeks lifted for an instant as he smiled, a faint glimmer of pleasure. “Sí, arriba, arriba.”

  I instructed the men to untie their packs and gather round. They were suspicious of my charity. Never before had I granted permission to remove packs during a march. Ours was not a pleasure trip to the French Riviera or the Costa de Sol: we were on an expedition where the only certainty was pain. The porters might have hated me, but I do believe that they appreciated my consistency.

  Very slowly, they rested their burdens on the pebbles, and clustered round.

  “We have arrived at the crossroads,” I said. “It is here that we leave the river and take a new road. Up there.”

  I motioned to the swirling fog seeping between the cordon of trees. It filtered down to the river like a phantom, rinsing our faces in moisture.

  “There is no road there,” said Julio, the tallest and most confident of the porters. Unlike the others, who had been broken long before, Julio remained resilient despite the appalling conditions. “There is no path, no way ahead,” he declared. “Si entramos a la selva estamos muertos, enter the forest and we are dead.”

  The other porters regarded him as their leader, and when he spoke, they listened. It would have been wiser never to have hired Julio, but I had done so in the hope that I could dominate him. Control their leader and I would control the porters. My plan had been flawed, for Julio was a radical. He had no fear, but used an abiding sense of terror to influence his peers.

  “Los hombres no entrarán en la selva, the men will not enter the jungle,” he said, with calm assurance. “There is danger in there.... El Tigre está esperando. The Tiger is waiting.”

  That word was in the air again, that infuriating word. Our search for the last refuge of the Incas, known to the Machiguenga tribe as the House of the Tiger King, had been blighted by the fear of an imaginary cat. The entire team knew as well as I that tigers are not native to the Americas, but to them Tigre was not flesh and blood. They would have been able to deal with that. To them, the Tiger was a specter, an apparition of an ancient empire, the ghost of the jungle. It was invisible, haunting, terrifying in the most elemental way. The porters would speak of it at night as they lazed beneath their flea-ridden blankets. Julio would tell them of the myth. He would whisper it as a slow incantation, syllable by syllable, word by word. My Spanish is unimpressive, but I would find myself drawn in, as terrified as the others.

  The quest for a lost city erodes your body, damaging you beyond all reason. But it is your mind that bears the heaviest toll. Listen to the doubters, the worriers and the weak, and the vaguest hope of success evaporates. The men despised me because I pushed them as hard as I pushed myself. I was fortified by the prospect of triumph; I could already taste the glory. But the porters had nothing to keep them going.

  The only tool I knew strong enough to mobilise them was to dent their sense of machismo. They might have been exhausted, covered in sores and riddled with worms, but calling them a soft-skinned bunch of sissies had a magical effect. Each one would grit his teeth, wearily pronounce his manliness, and carry on. But after weeks of overuse the efficiency of this mobilising device had weakened.

  As we paused there on the riverbank, I launched into my usual harangue, lampooning the team’s pathetic state as a sordid mishmash of femininity. None said a word, except Julio.

  Raising himself to his full height, well over six feet, he lowered his eyelids, stretched his arms towards the trees, fingers splayed. Then, as we all watched, motionless, he began to whistle. Monotone, echoing, unforgettable, the sound swept round us. I wondered if it was a spell of some kind, but there was nothing protective about it.

  The porters cowered together rigidly. Their leader was communicating directly with El Tigre, the phantom of the jungle. I shifted my gaze from Julio to the men. They looked on, like believers witnessing the miracle of a saint, the whites of their eyes swollen with conviction and with fear.

  “El Tigre me ha hablado, the Tiger has spoken to me,” Julio said, when he had finished. “Enter the forest and he will gorge on our blood tonight.”

  Forty minutes of silence passed. My mind was racing but I dared not speak. Utter the wrong words, and the expedition would end right there, on the rough pebble shore of the Palatoa river. I had come too far to give up the search for Paititi, especially now that Pancho was at last pointing to the trees. So we sat there, each waiting for the other to break.

  All I could think of was Henry Stanley, the nineteenth-century explorer, celebrated for finding Livingstone in central Africa, and famed, too, for his barbarity. Stanley would think nothing of having dissenters thrown in irons, or lashed until the verge of death. He was heartless and cruel, but he had a knack of keeping his men going.
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  What would Stanley have done in my situation? I wondered. Perhaps he would have used force, threatening to shoot anyone who fell behind. But there comes a stage at which a man would rather die cleanly by a bullet than by the unknown terror of the phantom in the forest. I believe Stanley would have resorted to a more cunning tactic. He would have taken control of what the men held most dear.

  I ordered the porters to unload their packs and display the contents on the lean stretch of beach. They complied willingly: they liked nothing more than to stare in wonderment at the tantalizing array of equipment and supplies. Even though we had stripped down again and again, there was still no shortage of gear: giant green tarpaulins for the evening camps, climbing tackle, machetes and sharpening stones, lanterns, shovels and saws, pots, pans, kerosene and gasoline, and even a metal-detector for finding gold. The food consisted of rice, beans, spices, dried jungle meat, and an assortment of dead birds trussed up in a sack. Beside the birds lay a rotting British army kit-bag. I spread its neck wide and observed the contents. As I did so, I realized I had found the men’s one weakness. The bag contained Pot Noodles.

  Ours was an expedition born of economy. There had been no funds for upmarket rations. I had spent my own meager budget on the cheapest, lightest food I could find – six hundred Pot Noodles. I had never expected them to become an obsession, but however weary their state, the porters could always be coaxed to continue a little further through driving rain by the mere suggestion of a Pot Noodle at the end.

  After months in the jungle we were down to the last dozen white plastic pots. The men regarded them as a symbol of extraordinary sophistication, fare fashioned from the most advanced additives and E-numbers.

  I lashed up the neck of the Pot Noodle kit-bag and slung it on to my shoulder. The porters cringed anxiously, then gasped, as I tramped up the steep, root-encrusted bank into the jungle. Down on the shore I could make out Julio reminding the others of the terror of El Tigre: “Enter the forest and you will not come out alive!” he yelled.