by Tahir Shah
Iquitos is a captivating place, the kind you only discover on long, insuperable journeys when you least expect to find anything at all. It’s a blend of people, some wicked, some good, living it up at the edge of a great dreaded expanse. Most never venture beyond the city’s perimeter, as they are terrified of reptiles, spirits and untamed tribes. I wondered if Paititi had shared the happy-go-lucky atmosphere of Iquitos. After all, if the city had lain in the uncharted depths of the jungle, its Inca citizens would surely have been touched by the awful fear of what lay beyond.
Before dawn Rodrigo appeared as if by magic at the blistered front door of Hotel Perú. I went down to greet him. He was about five foot one, and skinnier than he had been. The gauntness emphasized his long, pale cheeks, the deep-set eyes, and the flat, misshapen nose that hung at the centre of his face, like the shaft of a modeling tool. He was wearing flip-flops, checkred pants pulled tight at the waist, and a faded velvet T-shirt, whose American slogan read “Beware of the Werewolf”. On the ground beside him lay a five-gallon cauldron, blackened and wretched, and a small denim satchel from which poked a spray of roots.
The shaman had no trust for me, and I little for him. We were acquaintances, the kind who endure each other and struggle to make do with a bad situation. Previous experience had taught me that without Rodrigo, Richard would be even more trouble than he was likely to be. My main concern stemmed from the fact that where you had Rodrigo you also had an incessant stream of mind-altering drugs.
Before Richard came down from his room, I cautioned Rodrigo, warning him to refrain from brewing up any Amazonian psychedelia. On his mother’s grave, he promised to resist, kissing his knuckles as a pledge. A moment later the sound of jungle boots could be heard rapping across the warped floorboards above. Then Richard was standing in the doorframe. Over one shoulder was slung a compact camouflage backpack, and over the other a twelve-gauge Brazilian pump-action shotgun, designed to kill rioting slum dwellers. The American was a shadow of his former self, his muscles were wasted from inaction, but at least he wasn’t drunk.
The film team had been on the town all night, taking advantage of Iquitos’ unlikely ratio of women to men. No one spoke as we drove to the airport for the flight to Lima. The silence was appropriate: we were at last the nucleus of a team, ready to undertake a grave duty.
At the airport Richard kissed Delicious, a long, passionate kiss, as if to prove to everyone in the departure hall that she was his girl. As soon as they were parted, she howled like a lamb being led away to slaughter.
“Fucking whore!” Richard said, under his breath. “That dog’s got no self-respect.”
FOUR
CONDITIONS IN SUCCESS AND FAILURE IN TRAVEL
An exploring expedition is daily exposed to a succession of accidents, any one of which may be fatal to its further progress. Interest yourself chiefly in the progress of your journey, and do not look forward to its end with eagerness.
The Art of Travel
In the hope of bonding with Rodrigo, I sat beside him on the flight to Lima and spent the time asking for his advice on finding a lost city. I thought the chatter might put him at ease, as he had never flown before. But the shaman wasn’t in the least perturbed by his first experience of jet travel. Leaning back in his seat, with his knees pressed against his chest, he looked like a cheerful Amazonian leprechaun.
When he had listened to my question, he plugged his thumbs deep into his nostrils, sniffed hard, and pondered for several minutes. I thought he hadn’t heard me, or had not made sense of my inquiry. But at length, he withdrew his thumbs, licked them front and back, then ranted about the danger.
The thing about shamans is that they aren’t preoccupied by the matters that concern the rest of us. They don’t care about brushing their teeth, eating healthy food, or what others might think of their overall appearance. Their feet may walk the earth, but their minds are roaming in another dimension.
Rodrigo reported dreamily that he’d flown over the jungle a thousand times “in the secrecy of his mind”. There was danger all around, he said, nowhere more so than in the cold, spectral landscape of the Madre de Dios cloud forest. I asked him to clarify what he meant by danger.
“The curses,” he said coldly. “They run up and down the rivers and through the trees, hovering like humming-birds before a passion flower. Look at one and it will turn you blind. Touch one and you will drop dead.”
“Can’t you protect yourself?” I asked.
“Seguro que se puede, certainly you can.”
“How?”
“Take someone who has a connection to the place.”
“We’re going to make friends with the Machiguenga and go with them,” I said importantly.
Rodrigo thought for a moment, scratched a long thumbnail down his flat nose. “That’s not good enough. The invisible curses will still be there.”
“Well, who else has a connection with that jungle?”
“The Incas,” said the shaman.
“But the Incas who lived at Paititi are dead, long gone. It’s a lost city.”
“You can take a dead Inca with you,” he said.
“A corpse? You think we should take a corpse?”
“Not a corpse, but una momia, a mummy,” Rodrigo corrected me meekly. “Nos guiará a Paititi, it will lead us to Paititi.”
The shaman stuffed his thumbs up his nose again, lowered his eyelids, and began to hum.
I am all for respecting the advice of a spiritualist, but grave-robbing seemed a little extreme. I would have dismissed the shaman’s suggestion as lunacy, but experience has taught me the power of trophies. You may have every knick-knack and useless contraption ever devised, but while they weigh you down, a simple trophy can go a long, long way. Such artefacts can keep the porters calm, boost morale and pacify a native people.
Better still, I reflected, I happened to know a good source of mummies within stabbing distance of Lima. I had once befriended a family of sympathetic huaqueros, grave-robbers, living in the Nazca desert, while on the murky trail of the Birdmen. The ancient communities of the Peruvian coast had predated the Incas by more than a thousand years. Their societies had placed great value on mummification, and had developed elaborate embalming techniques. Unlike the ancient Egyptians, who tended to preserve only aristocrats and royalty, the ancient coastal culture of Peru mummified everyone. The desert is still littered with tens of thousands of mummy bundles, entombed in the desiccated fringes of the Atacama. You know they are there because of the unmistakable humps on the deserts stark surface.
I had been drawn to learn about the ancient culture because of its expertise in weaving. A great many funerary textiles were decorated with flying men, Birdmen, clutching human trophy heads and what appear to be hallucinogens. When the grave-robbers dig them up, after they have been buried in the sand for almost two millennia, the colors are blindingly bright. The ancient coastal societies’ knowledge and repertoire of textiles was passed down to the Incas, along with their mummification skills.
From the start of the journey, I had made it clear to the film crew that they would be documenting, not deciding. I didn’t want their opinions influencing my own decisions. But I wondered how they would react to the idea of taking along a mummified body I intended to run the plan past them that evening, once we were secure in the fortress of our hotel downtown. Rarely do I have difficulty in broaching a subject, especially one in which I have a deep interest, but I hadn’t spent long enough with the team to judg how they would react.
Marco, the banker, had ordered a bottle of vintage Veuve Clicquot to toast the expedition. I was surprised that such an atrocious hotel would keep such a fine Champagne. Marco’s appetite for the drink was considerable. He ordered it whenever it was available, which halved in likelihood with every mile we covered. Although usually unruffled, he snapped at the waitress because the bottle was insufficiently chilled. Warm Champagne, he scowled, was a drink fit only for pigs. The remark filled me with a new concern:
how would the big banker deal with the jungle if he was so disturbed by the temperature of a sparkling wine?
In the awkward silence, as the waitress fumbled to find ice, I raised the idea of bringing a mummy to the jungle. The banker grimaced, but the Swedes clapped in unexpected delight.
“A mummy will look fabulous on film!” shouted the young director, forming a rectangular frame with his hands.
I tapped the Bulgarian, Boris, on the knee. He slid his eye away from the viewfinder of his video camera and squinted at me in confusion.
“What do you think about taking a mummy?”
“Mummy, Daddy, baby... Sure, no problem,” he said, in his heavy accent.
“If Rodrigo says we gotta take a fuckin’ mummy,” said Richard, wringing his hands together, “then we’ll take one. He knows...” Richard paused for dramatic effect. “He can see the invisible beams, the rays, the Curse Lines.” He shaded his eyes with his hands, and pretended to seek out the invisible rays.
The decision to take a mummy trophy touched a vein of lunacy, and set us a little further apart from our competition. I had heard from the Explorer’s Club in Lima that a famous Polish adventurer had just departed for the high jungle east of Machu Picchu, in search of the lost city. On the phone, the club secretary’s voice was trembling as he listed the inventory of the equipment and supplies, the team of learned men and women who made up the expedition.
I, on the other hand, had almost no equipment, limited food stores, consisting chiefly of Pot Noodles, and a team made up of a washed-up Vietnam vet, a shaman, a Ukranian banker with a penchant for chilled Champagne, a clueless Bulgarian and a pair of ever-optimistic Swedes.
My line-up might have been suspect, but I felt sure we could gain the upper hand by putting ourselves in the mindset of the Incas. Think like the Incas, act like them and, I felt, we could only be strengthened. We know that the Incas took their mummies along on journeys. It’s conceivable that some were even taken to Paititi, to form a kind of spiritual nucleus of the society. So, in some warped way, having an embalmed body with us made perfect sense.
Before setting out to acquire a mummy, I broke away from the team and visited the library at the ancient monastery of San Francisco, a few blocks away from Lima’s central square. The whitewashed walls of the central courtyard were hung with paintings, some dating back to the time of the conquistadores. The floors were laid with large, waxed terracotta tiles, the color of blood oranges, and a cedar ceiling above the stairwell, clearly inspired by Islamic geometric design. I ascended the wide, low stairs, turned right and slipped into the magical library.
Sombre wooden shelves ran the length of the room and every inch was caked with dust, oily and aromatic like rappee snuff. The subjects were clearly labelled — Liturgia, Ciencia, Historia, Topografía; the fragile vellum texts were pressed tight together, a reminder of the days when the written word was sacred. A pair of symmetrical staircases, rising in spirals, connected the upper gallery to the one below. I was on the trail of a book written four centuries before, the lost manuscript of Aguirre, self-styled Spanish king of the Amazon. A scholar in Seville had contacted me out of the blue and said that the text had been written in 1622 by Héctor Gómez of Castile. I was surprised the man knew about my quest, and would bother to track me down to pass on such invaluable research for free. He swore that the manuscript gave the true location of Paititi. What he meant by “true”, I wasn’t sure. But an original clue is worth its weight in gold. My source told me that he thought there was a copy of the manuscript at Lima’s San Francisco monastery.
The monk on duty had permitted me entrance to the library on condition I donate generously in advance. I counted a selection of damaged Peruvian bills into his hand, until his voracious eyes shimmered like fire opals.
Like all Paititi-hunters, I had read the existing account of Lope de Aguirre’s expedition, which is presented in a text written by Friar Pedro Simón, published in 1625. It is hard to overstate the author’s contempt for Aguirre, a veritable bad boy of Spanish exploration. Of him, Simon wrote:
He was the Demonio himself, this Aguirre! About fifty years, short of stature, sparsely built, coarse-featured, of a villainous weasand, which any hangman would have slit with pleasure. His face was small and lean, his neck and cheeks pock-marked, his beard black as coal, and when he looked at you, out of dark eyes piercing as a falcon, his gaze was stern and threatening. But withal, he was a noisy talker and a boaster, if well backed by the compañeros, and bold and determined; otherwise, he was an arrant coward. So hardy was his habit of body that he could endure endless fatigue, afoot or on horseback. Never was he seen without two coats of mail, or a steel breastplate, and he always carried a sword, dagger, arquebus or lance. He slept mostly by day, being careful of his throat, for he was afraid of resting at night, lest one steal on him in the dark. Never did he take off his armor altogether, nor hang up his weapons. Turbulent was this Señor Aguirre, lover of the broils and breeder of mutinies, enemy of all good men and deeds.
Lope de Aguirre, a Basque, had been sent to accompany a Spanish general, Pedro de Ursúa, on his journey in search of El Dorado. The year was 1560. They were hunting for the secret Inca city hidden deep in the jungle, said by contemporary accounts to be abundant with gems and gold. It is a dream that has driven honest men mad for centuries.
The expedition was colossal: hundreds of Europeans – warriors, religious men and common adventurers – and thousands of Indians from the Andes. They descended from the mountains, down, down, down, with their horses, weaponry and palanquins, into the grotesque vastness of the jungle. The general, Pedro de Ursúa, had brought along his lover, a young widow. Her name was Inés de Atienza; either she was out of her mind, or the bravest woman ever to live. Soon after the procession arrived in the jungle, Aguirre slit the frail widow’s throat, then killed Ursúa and declared himself King of the Amazon.
My informant in Seville had described the lost manuscript of Aguirre as “the last perfect chiselled piece to the Paititi riddle”. Find it, he assured me, and I would possess the key to the lost ruins. I hadn’t told the film crew of the lead, partly through paranoia and partly through a desire to control the information. After nine hours, checking ten thousand books, I came to a horrid conclusion. The book did not exist... not in the library, not anywhere. Months later, I realized that the Andalucian scholar was a fraud, his story a fabrication, dreamed up by the Paititi-hunting competition to draw me away from real research and waste my time.
Talk of Curse Lines, black magic and embalmed bodies dominated the fifteen-hour journey to Nazca. The driver became so fearful of the conversation that he made a detour to a chapel, and prayed there all afternoon. Most visitors to the small desert town of Nazca take the air-conditioned luxury bus: the service had the distinct advantages of speed, comfort and reliability. But we were on a budget and so we hitch-hiked instead.
Never before in the history of television could a film crew — or, for that matter, a lost-city expedition – have hitched with so much gear. We split up into two groups to increase our chances. I stood out in the road with Rodrigo and Richard, surrounded by a sea of kit-bags and boxes. It was a long time before anyone stopped. Eventually a 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air ground to a halt two hundred feet ahead. It was a sleek vehicle, plum-red, dented, and missing the chevron from the front. The driver was a burly, dark-skinned man called José, with a scarred neck and impressively muscular hands. He was eager to talk about the jungle and the danger. At the same time I realized that he harbored strong suicidal tendencies; he was the kind of person who becomes addicted to horror movies, not because he likes them but because he can’t help himself.
Every so often he would swerve the steering-wheel to the left, throwing the old wreck of a car into the oncoming lane as a truck approached. As a veteran of India’s highways I am not easily frightened, but José would wait until you were drowning in adrenaline before veering the crumbling roadster back to the right side of the road. His enthusiasm f
or dicing with death seemed at odds with the fear he derived from talk of bewitching.
“The legend of Paititi is as true and as sincere as a newborn baby,” he said. “Nurture the legend, love it as a mother loves that child, and it will return the love.”
“Do you think it will be a dangerous journey?” I asked.
José flared his lips wide so I could see the rotten teeth hanging from bloodied gums, like crumbling tombstones in a deserted burial ground.
“El peligro es diabólico, the danger is diabolical!” he yelled. “It could make an executioner of a priest.”
We must have been the only visitors to Nazca in fifty years who had no interest in seeing the famous “Lines” etched into the basalt surface of the desert. People come from every country in the world to soar above them in small airplanes and marvel at the mystery. No one is certain how the strange symbols got there, or when, so they show their foolishness by dreaming up implausible hypotheses.
We had no time to solve the mysteries of Nazca: we were already engaged, committed to a far darker business. These days, the town is prosperous, enlivened by the wealth of tourist cash, every cent of it lured there by the Lines. We found a cheap, squalid boarding-house at the end of the main street. It perched there like a sparrow on a branch. You had the feeling that a sudden gust of wind might send it crashing to the ground.
As soon as we reached the hotel, Rodrigo stripped down to his boxer shorts and prepared a ritual. He said it was for the carcass, the cadaver of a man whom we would meet next day. The ceremony involved the shaman drinking a murky tar-like fluid, more usually stored in a Fanta bottle at the bottom of his bag. When the cork was pulled out, a putrid smell issued forth. Rodrigo refused to tell me what the concoction contained, but said it was to wake the sleeping. He chanted for an hour or two, rattling the dried fronds of his chacapa, drifting on the sound. Richard was on the journey too, having sucked the dregs from the bottle while the shaman wasn’t looking.