The Complete Collection of Travel Literature

by Tahir Shah

  But his companions did not listen: there was too much at stake for them not to follow. There were still Pot Noodles to be eaten. They scrabbled the equipment into the packs, fell into line and marched behind me into the twilight. Left with no choice, Julio joined the rear of the procession.

  Entering the cloud forest was like crawling beneath a great velvet curtain of secrecy to witness some clandestine ritual. What struck me first was the silence, and the lack of animal life. A million eyes might have been watching our wretched procession, and as many ears listening to the Ting! Ting! Ting! of machetes cleaving vines, but they were invisible. The only obvious form of life was that of the insects. The ground between the trees was crisscrossed with trails of soldier ants. The trees themselves were striped up and down with termite tracks, which ran to the nests, the great balls of clay, hanging like lanterns in the uppermost branches. Giant moths flapped across our faces, brushing the sweat from our cheeks, then flitted back to the instant camouflage of the jungle floor.

  We pushed into the suffocation of trees, drowning in perspiration, impelled by a kind of madness. It must have been madness, for no sane man would ever have left the river and ventured into that green hell. The fact that the men were trudging forward gave me great satisfaction and renewed my energy. If I could keep them going a little further, the ruins of the lost city would be within reach. More comforting still was that Pancho had taken the initiative and, for the first time, he was leading the way. I had spent weeks courting him, coaxing him. Without Pancho there was no chance of success.

  Like most Machiguenga, he went barefoot and, like all the others, he took delight in cackling at my clumsiness. Behind the pretended veil of political correctness, our society so often ridicules the primitiveness of tribal people. But spend a moment with them under the sprawling canopy, and you grasp at once the proficiency of their own society. The Machiguenga are masters of jungle movement, as serene in their world as ballerinas in ours.

  The team chopped a route towards the ridge and, as they did so, my bitterness evaporated. Until then I had felt that Pancho was flirting with my greed, luring me on with a vision of unattainable victory. I would spend hours watching him, desperate to understand. I knew that if I could get inside his mind, and see what he was thinking, there was a real chance of success. Yet I realized now that Pancho wasn’t going to do all the work for me. If I was lucky, he would point out the way, but if I wanted to find Paititi, then in many ways I was on my own. In Pancho’s world you had to work out the answers for yourself.

  Three hours after leaving the river, we found the first block of stone. Straight-edged and uniform, measuring four feet by two, it was obviously the work of Inca stonemasons. You could make out the subtle chisel marks on the sides. I wondered if it was a marking post of some kind, a pointer to the ruins. We excavated the surrounding area, hacking wildly with machetes. Three more of the stones were unearthed, and what looked like a lintel for a door.

  I applauded Pancho and the others, and roared the order to continue at full speed to the crest of the ridge. Six of the men were armed with machetes; they sliced a narrow corridor through the oppressive foliage. The ascent was brutal beyond description. The porters heaved themselves up a step at a time, the agony framed in their faces.

  Halfway up the ridge we made a camp. The men were reluctant to stay in the jungle, but the prospect of a piping hot Pot Noodle was too much for all except Julio. He stormed back down to the river with Alfonso’s ancient shotgun, ranting that El Tigre would feast on our blood.

  The ground was so uneven that we cut staves of cedar wood and created a crude platform across which we lay. We were used to a good deal of space at the camps pitched near the river’s edge. The situation was different in the jungle. Every inch of ground had to be earned, and was done so through much exertion with the blade.

  I was pleased that Julio had chosen to leave us: it quashed the talk of malevolent spirits. Giovanni, who usually prepared the food, heated a little water gathered from sections of giant bamboo and dished up the Pot Noodles. The porters’ fatigue was eased by the sudden injection of monosodium glutamate: the chemical had an impressive ability to restore one’s strength; I had noticed that it helped to protect us from mosquito bites as well.

  The Pot Noodle appetizer was followed by the usual main course of jungle birds stewed with an assortment of extra-bony fish. Copious hot food is the only thing that can keep tired men from mutiny. My great fear was for the next day: after breakfast the treasured Pot Noodles would all be gone.

  It poured with torrential rain all night. The water cascaded downhill and drenched us as we fought to sleep. I drifted in and out of consciousness, hounded by a recurring nightmare... a phantom with foot-long fangs, coarse whiskers and wicked soot-black eyes.

  Before the first shafts of pale gray light had cut through the trees, we were woken to the report of Julio’s gun. The sound was close by. A second later, a large, bulky creature was falling downwards, crashing through the lattice of branches. It smashed on to the bottle-green tarpaulin under which we lay huddled in a sodden line. From the weight I could tell immediately it was no bird. Julio leapt through the trees to claim his prize – a full-grown howler monkey, the size of a toddler.

  As the hunter knew well, the one vice that appalled me was the killing of monkeys. The animal was skinned, dismembered, and sliced up for breakfast without delay. Pancho built a small fire, fueled it with a fresh termite nest, and soon had the primate roasting. I had eaten monkey before, while a guest of the Shuar, a tribe in the Upper Amazon formerly celebrated for making tsantsas, shrunken heads. I cannot say that I shared the other men’s enthusiasm for the meat, largely on account of the worms.

  We set off once the last strands of flesh had been consumed, and the bones shattered for their marrow. Despite the protein, the porters were weak and getting weaker. They craved carbohydrate, but lack of it was not life-threatening. More worrying was that one might slip and we would have another casualty. As any platoon commander knows, an injured man is a terrible liability, requiring one or two others to attend him. A few days before one of the porters, Francisco, had vomited blood one morning. By lunchtime he had lost his sight. Going blind in deep jungle has to be the most fearful prospect imaginable. Fortunately Francisco’s vision had returned. Suspecting he had had a mild stroke, I had been forced to leave him in a cave with a trusted companion.

  The main thing on my mind now was to push on to the top of the ridge. From my research I knew the Incas built simple stone roads along ridges, and on high land, linking up distant points within their empire. Others who have searched for Paititi have talked of a secret stone road running north-west through the Cordillera. I was certain that if I could discover it, I would find the city. Every night for months I had studied the contours on the maps, and had replayed Pancho’s story through my mind.

  As a young man searching for new hunting grounds, he had ventured far up the Rio Palatoa, before hacking into the jungle. There, beside a deep expanse of crystal water, he said he had found a series of large ruins. Digging at the foot of a towering stone wall, he had discovered a metal hatchet, its blade highlighted in gold. Pancho took the hatchet back to his father, who was the tribal chief. Rather than praising his son, the old warrior exhorted him to return the weapon at once, and to forget about it for fear of activating a curse. El Tigre was waiting to punish not only him but the entire tribe, he said. Pancho did as his father bade him. Three decades passed, but he could not forget about the ruins or the golden hatchet.

  It had taken me months to get Pancho involved in the expedition, partly because the tribe had forbidden him to co-operate, and partly because he saw it as an empty cause. As far as Pancho was concerned, there was no reason to search for the ruins. Why look for a ruined city, overgrown and deserted, when there are plenty of live cities, bustling with people and traffic? Pancho had heard the tales of civilization from the missionaries. They had spoken of the wickedness of development, a wickedness th
at the warrior had found appealing. They had told him of Lima’s dens of vice, the “high-class” brothels where girls line up in tall shoes, their mouths circled in paint, the color of scarlet macaws. They had told him, too, of meeting-places where immoral men served up sinful, intoxicating drinks, places at which there was always plenty of liquor to go round. But, best of all, he liked the sound of the third fantasy: a house with drinks and colored lights that flash on and off as music plays, even though no one’s playing it.

  Pancho’s dream was the mirror image of my own. He longed to go to the place of which the missionaries had spoken, to carouse, to drink till he dropped, dance, and to have a look at how the other world lived. We had made a pact: if Pancho took me to the deserted ruins of Paititi, I would take him to the city of Cusco.

  In the early afternoon we came upon more hand-cut blocks of stone. This time they were standing upright, like sentries. We scraped away the moss and lichen to find them gargoyle-gray beneath. My investigation of them was brief: I feared that a prolonged stop would cause the men to desert. Julio had been speaking of the specter again, and someone had reminded him of the curse. Such talk had the immediate effect of obliterating what little optimism we had earned through the climb.

  A few feet on we reached a sheering granite rock face. It towered upward like the supporting wall of a medieval cathedral, indomitable and encrusted in lichens and silky olive-green moss. The men slumped at its base. With Pancho’s help I managed eventually to get a rope to the top. It was threaded through the mass of roots and the medley of branches. One look at the porters and I knew full well that they would not be going on. They were not tribesmen, but members of a chainsaw gang whose ancestors had emigrated from the mountains to the forest. For them, the jungle was an awe-inspiring backdrop, a twilight zone of life to be felled as swiftly as possible. None of them understood the attraction of seeing a tree in the perpendicular position.

  The granite rock face was a natural parting point, a crossroads, a place of decision and indecision. I didn’t ask for volunteers to accompany Pancho and me because the men had proved their honor. Perhaps it was at that moment I should have pressed them harder than before, but I had lost my nerve. The last push was my own challenge, a contest for myself against myself.

  The film crew were tough beyond words, but their batteries were exhausted, and the Peruvian cameraman suffered from vertigo. We whispered goodbye, and made a plan to keep in touch by radio.

  I slipped on the climbing harness, attached an ascender and began the excruciating climb in search of the stone road. Pancho had shunned the rope and scaled the rock face barefoot, with great ease. A glance up and I could make out his spindly frame waiting for me between the trees far above. A glance down and the cluster of men was smaller than before. A moment later I looked down for the last time, but they were gone.

  TWO

  Qualifications of a Traveller

  If you have health, a great craving for adventure, at least a moderate fortune, and can set your heart on a definite object, which old travelers do not think impracticable, then – travel by all means.

  The Art of Travel

  My search for the last refuge of the Incas had begun in the snug surroundings of our illusionary world. Only a man who has his health, a full stomach and wears clean clothes would ever entertain the notion of tracking down the greatest lost city on Earth, or venturing from such comfort into the bitter reality of the jungle.

  My obsession with the ruins had begun a decade before, when my eyes had been drawn to the cursed name “Paititi” in the footnote of an obscure historical text. From the first moment I read the word, I sensed it beckoning, daring me to try my luck. It would have been so easy to turn the page and move on. But, instead, I gazed coldly at the type, took a deep breath and shut the book.

  Once inside me, the corrosive allure of Paititi ran wild. For months, then years, I tried to suppress all thoughts of the Incas and their lost treasure. I undertook other projects, other journeys, but Paititi was never far from my mind. Like so many before me, my motivation was founded on greed, an overwhelming greed. Not for gold, but for glory.

  Locate a lost city and your name is etched in the history books. Find Paititi, and I would be transformed overnight from a humble traveler into the world’s most famous explorer.

  To have a hope of discovering the lost city, I knew the key lay in the archives of the Spanish conquistadores. They had documented their invasion of the Americas in fine detail, but they were too busy suppressing native people to piece together the clues. For months I studied the history, reading and rereading the chronicles of Francisco de Jerez, Garcilaso de la Vega, Cristóbal de Molina, and of Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala. The clues would be hidden, for they had eluded explorers, adventurers, archaeologists and warrior-priests for almost five hundred years. Yes, they would be concealed well, waiting to be teased out — that is, if there were any clues at all.

  In the West, we are brought up to solve a puzzle with fragments of collected information, rather than by placing ourselves in the mind of the person who devised the riddle. By steeping myself in the Spanish chronicles, detailing the Incas’ daily lives, folklore and beliefs, I hoped to understand how they thought. Understand that and, I hoped, I would be closer to rooting out the trail to Paititi.

  When the Spanish first arrived at the coastline of Peru, in the first half of the sixteenth century, they were searching for El Dorado, a land of unimaginable wealth. An Indian chief in Panama had spoken of a kingdom to the south where the only known metal was gold: where it was used for pots and pans, plates and jewelry, for hunting bows, ritualistic daggers and flutes. The conquistadores made a beeline southwards.

  They found a vast empire that had been established only a century before, known to its people as Tahuantinsuya, the Land of Four Quarters. Centred at the capital of Cusco, the realm stretched from Chinchaysuyu in the north to Lake Titicaca in the south, and from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to the endless cloud forest of Madre de Dios in the east. It was a land of contrasts: stark altiplano, seething jungle and snow-capped mountains, populated by a people whose barbaric rituals shocked even the cruel sensibilities of the conquistadores. The religious figurehead of the society was the scion of the sun itself, the Inca Atahualpa.

  Had it not been cut short by such an unlikely foreign invasion, the Inca Empire would surely have endured for centuries, amassing even more treasure than it did. And what of the treasure? The Spanish imprisoned Atahualpa, who feared imminent execution. He had noticed the invaders’ obsession with gold and silver and, although surprised by it, he proposed what must surely be the most famous ransom in history He scratched a line high on one wall of his cell, and pledged to fill the chamber once with gold and twice with silver in exchange for his freedom. Amazed and delighted, the Spanish readily agreed. One can only imagine their astonishment: the room measured more than twenty feet by seventeen, and the line on the wall was higher than a man: a volume of more than two thousand cubic feet.

  Gold and silver were ushered forth from across the Inca Empire, a quantity that exceeded the Spaniards’ wildest dreams. As one would expect, the pledge to Atahualpa was broken; the conquerors executed him, then set out to plunder his capital. But in Cusco they found relatively little gold. A rumor circulated that the bulk of the golden treasure had been hurried from the city by the Incas’ supporters. It was said that they had retreated deep into the jungle, east of Cusco, where they established a magnificent city in the most inaccessible corner of the cloud forest. They called it Paititi.

  I tried to put myself in the mind of the Incas, asking myself how they might have secretly passed to one another the whereabouts of their El Dorado. With the conquistadores all around them, they would no doubt have resorted to ciphers, unlikely to arouse the suspicions of the invading Spanish. But they had no tradition of writing, no paper or ink.

  We know that they placed relatively little importance on gold. A civilization without iron, they favoured the soft yell
ow metal for its easy malleability, and regarded it as utilitarian rather than as a valuable commodity. The Incas placed utmost value on their fine textiles, woven in alpaca and vicuña wool. Early conquistador reports tell of the first meetings with the Incas, who came alongside the Spanish ships in flimsy craft. They presented the European visitors with exquisite woven garments, their highest honor. Horrified at what they assumed to be an open insult, the Spanish set fire to the textiles and chased the Incas away.

  The fabulous arts of weaving and embroidery had been developed by the ancient communities at Paracas and Nazca on the Peruvian coast, which flourished almost two thousand years ago. It was from them that the Incas acquired their knowledge and further developed the craft, using it to record information and ideas. These embroidered patterns, known as quellca, a word that is sometimes used to mean “writing”, might well have been employed to conceal the location of Paititi.

  I studied hundreds of Inca textiles, hoping to decipher the meanings of the geometric patterns; and I spent a great deal of time attempting to trace the finest Inca textile ever made. It was sent to King Philip II of Spain in 1570 for the monastic walls at El Escorial, but it has disappeared without trace. One of the greatest historical treasures ever to come from the Americas, it was probably thrown away.

  My studies of the quellca embroideries led me to consider what treasure the Incas would have taken to Paititi for safe keeping. If they did not consider gold the ultimate possession, then perhaps they would have taken their textiles instead. I knew from previous experience that the humidity of the rainforest is ruinous for cloth. If Paititi had lain in the jungle, there was little hope of any woven riches remaining intact. None the less, the draw for me was the ruins themselves, the vast stone walls like those at Machu Picchu, which would surely form the foundation of the lost city.