The Complete Collection of Travel Literature

by Tahir Shah

  The film crew and I turned in early and were up at dawn in time to see the fresh glow of pink rise like a halo above the horizon. The odd couple were passed out cold. They had both thrown up in their sleep, no doubt a side-effect of the medicine. We roused them, feasted on an economic loaf of dry brown bread, and made our way to meet the grave-robbers at the burial ground of Barillo.

  A campesino gave us a lift to the cemetery in his sleek new pickup truck. He didn’t think it odd to be asked to drive off the main road and veer on to the pampa in search of mummies. In the hope that he wouldn’t inquire about our motives, I praised his vehicle’s immaculate condition.

  “¡Sí, sí, Señor!” He cackled. “It’s all thanks to our ancestors. They scratched those mysterious signs out there. Why did they do a thing like that? That’s what everyone asks. The answer is simple, my friend, it was so that centuries later their descendants would get an easy living.”

  The old farmer reflected on this for a moment or two, changed from third to second gear and went on: “We should be like them,” he said, “and do something that will help out our great-grandchildren a century from now.” He turned up the air-conditioning a little higher, for the heat outride was already fierce. He accelerated, swerving down on to a dry riverbed, the same route I had taken four years before. The sand was fine, like sieved cake flour, and it exploded away from the wheels as we swept through.

  We glided past a grove of warango trees, then caught sight of the farmhouse: a low adobe building with a rusted tin roof, circled by a slapdash fence of thorns. A pair of savage dogs rushed at the car, blurred in movement.

  “Who’s there?” shouted a man. We couldn’t see him, but he was close. “Who’s there?” he called again.

  I shouted my name, exclaiming that I had visited four years previously. The voice whistled back the dogs. A minute of silence passed, and a man appeared. He stood before the vehicle, his back arched over, his grimy shirt ripped like a rag mop. I stepped over to him and put out my hand. The figure did not offer his.

  “Juan! ¿No te acuerdas de mí? Don’t you remember me?” I asked. “You showed me your mummified trophy head. You took me to the cemetery over there.”

  I pointed beyond the warango trees, but the farmer didn’t see the sweep of my arm. He was sightless. Stooping a fraction, I observed his face. It was crafted from the same sheet of coarse leather as before, chapped and blistered like rawhide. His eyes were open but damaged in some way.

  “The head’s gone,” said Juan sullenly. “It was taken by the thieves.”

  “Thieves?”

  “Sí, vinieron por la noche, they came in the night. They said we were taking too much loot from the cemetery. They wanted it all for themselves. So they killed my wife, took my sight and beat me with a cane. If I took anything else from the graveyard, they said that they’d return and cut off my hands.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “Dos años atrás, two years ago.”

  “Did you tell the police?”

  Juan spat at the dust. “Police? What good are they?”

  He might have been blind, but Juan could still lead the way unaided up the steep embankment to the burial ground. He had walked it a thousand times for sure, so often laden with riches from newly opened graves. We ascended the natural bulwark of sand, and went over the top like soldiers at the Somme. The cratered panorama was like a repulsive no man’s land. Bleached white bones were scattered all around, tattered clothing, scalps of brunette hair and fragments of human skin: a postcard of apocalypse.

  The grave-robbers’ front line had advanced considerably since my previous visit. The huaqueros were far more organized now, using bulldozers and chainsaws to open the graves.

  The Swedes were shocked by what they saw. They shot a few feet of film uneasily, as Richard knocked the teeth from a broken lower jaw. “I’m gonna make a necklace for Delicious,” he said.

  We all looked at the Vietnam vet, appalled at his insensitivity. But I was as guilty as he. I had conspired with Rodrigo to pilfer a mummy for our protection.

  I asked the slim shaman for an alternative defence against the invisible Curse Lines. “If we take a mummy,” I explained, “Juan here will have his hands cut off, and we don’t want that to happen.”

  The shaman tightened the strap of his wide-brimmed cloth hat to his chin, and nodded vigorously. “I will ask the spirits, the dead, to leave their graves,” he replied, “and to join us on our journey to find Paititi.”

  Crouching low on his haunches, Rodrigo opened his denim bag, and pulled out a homemade cigar. It was stuffed with mapacho, black jungle tobacco, and was as thick as my wrist. He lit it, sucked at it, kissing with his cheeks until the tip was burning evenly. Then he took a long, measured drag, his chest swelling with smoke, as he traversed into another cerebral plane.

  While the shaman called the spirits from their sleep, I escorted Juan back to the farmhouse. We sat there on rough-cut logs fanning our faces with our hands. On the far cracked mud wall the poster of Diana, Princess of Wales, was still hanging, a little dustier and more yellowed than before. Nothing had altered since my last visit, except three new pieces of furniture, positioned in the corners of the room. For some reason they were hidden under dirty sackcloth sheets.

  “My wife is dead, mi amada esposa, my beloved wife,” said Juan forlornly. “She was the light of my life. How I miss her!”

  I tried to console the retired grave-robber as he squatted on the log, his blind eyes weeping. “She lives in your heart,” I said. “She is with you. She is here. Fight the loneliness.”

  Juan stared blindly at the poster of the princess. “¿Soledad? Loneliness?” he whispered. “I am not alone.”

  I assumed that he was referring to his children, or to the image of the dead princess. But he was not. Leaning over to one of the sackcloth sheets, he fumbled for the corner and tugged hard. I am not easily surprised, but I was certainly taken aback by Juan’s secret friend. For under the cloth was the embalmed cadaver of a man, crouched in the foetal position, all leathery and calm. His hands were grasped together, the fingers contorted like tubular roots; his spindly limbs were slender and crooked, and his face a crazed, glaring mask of disbelief.

  Juan got up, and lifted the veils on his other two mummified companions. He did so with extraordinary composure, as if pulling the coverings away from disused chairs. The other two people were similar to the first, one male, the other female. They were perched awkwardly, wrapped in gloomy layers of cloth, their desiccated features leering like grotesque fiends from a child’s imagination. Juan could not see his embalmed friends. But he stared at them all the same, caressing his rough palms over their faces, moving his fingers lovingly over the furrows and the grooves.

  As I sat there, watching, part in horror and part in awe, I reflected that, in any other society, an old man who lived with mummies might have been dragged off to an institution. But Juan wasn’t harming anyone. He was the one who had been duped by society.

  A long while passed. There was still no sign of the film team or the odd couple. Juan and I sat in silence, reflecting, thinking, hoping. Then, spontaneously, he wept again.

  “Estamos malditos, we are cursed people,” he said, in a dry, raspy voice, when the tears had dried. “All of us, cursed, certain to face damnation. No hay escapatoria, there is no escape.”

  FIVE

  PRESENTS AND ARTICLES FOR PAYMENT

  It is of the utmost importance to a traveler to be well and judiciously supplied with these: they are his money, and without money a person can no more travel in Savagedom than in Christendom.

  The Art of Travel

  A journey to Peru would be meaningless without at least one fifty-hour bus ride over the Cordillera, the mountains that run down the country like the spine on a chameleon’s back. The distance between Nazca and Cusco is pitifully small, but the drive is an endurance test of jolting, the kind used to see if a new model of car is roadworthy or not.

  The t
rip was made worse by Richard, who entertained himself by boasting about every girl he had savaged. The list was long, the details obscene, especially the conquests of prepubescent girls in the riotous days of Vietnam. There’s nothing like a French whorehouse to service a man’s needs,” he said, rattling the mummy’s teeth in his hand like dice. “Those little Asian chicas could bring tears to a grown man’s eyes. I’ll tell ya, I’ve killed people, what the heck? I’m not ashamed of it. War’s just like that. Sure, I’ve killed gooks, scalped “em too, but I’ve never shed a tear over it. They’re dead and that’s that. Then I hustle down to Saigon with a couple of chums, and I’m weeping like a kitten within the hour.”

  I asked about taking scalps.

  Richard stared out at the coffee-brown panorama, lost in concentration. “You need a sharp knife,” he said slowly. “It’s got to be real, real sharp, so sharp you could do someone an injury. You lie “em face down with your boot on the back of their neck. Then you slice from the temple, at the hairline, cutting down through the fat, real gentle, with an arc-like movement. You have to make sure to get enough of the flesh, otherwise it’ll go wrong and you’ll start losing the hair.” Richard paused, his eyes wide as he peered into the past. “I did a lovely one once. It was a woman’s scalp. Had it hanging from my belt.”

  It was too easy to judg Richard, to condemn him. His first experiences as a man had carved out his life, charging him with hatred, a terrible bitterness. He was traumatized beyond the point of redemption, broken, unwanted, loved by no one except Delicious. Richard had his sight, but was sightless; just as Juan was blind but could see.

  The bus rolled on to the east, lurching over the mountains like a fairground ride. It stopped frequently and, when it did, an army of short round women with plaits and black sombreros scuttled up and touted purply-pink jelly. They completed the carnival atmosphere, howling with laughter for no reason at all.

  I sat with my face pressed up against the window, pondering life and entertaining dark thoughts. I shared Juan’s sadness, then found myself raging that Richard should have been wounded by the generation he had served. After that, my thoughts turned to Paititi.

  Perhaps the lost city wasn’t a haven for the Incas’ mummies or their gold, I thought. Instead, it might have been a place of sacrifice. The carved sacrificial stones at Machu Picchu, with their cupped conduits for blood, have been well discussed. So, perhaps it’s conceivable that Paititi was in fact a killing ground, a zone dedicated to ritual sacrifice. After all, the Spanish frowned on the slaughter of innocent child victims, a practice to which the Incas were rather partial. Without such executions they had no way of placating the wrath of the Sun. Down there in some corner of Madre de Dios, I reflected, perhaps there lay the remains of ten thousand dismembered children: their blood tapped by a deranged officer, veteran of a depraved campaign, an Inca Colonel Kurtz.

  After six punctures and fifty-one hours we arrived at Cusco, broken and dishevelled. I suggested to Leon, the producer, that he suck some funds from the Ukranian banker. But he said Marco was enjoying the hardship: it was new to him, a feature of life he had not tasted before.

  As soon as we had settled into a fleapit off Avenida del Sol, I set about tracking down a man called Sánchez Esmeralda. A friend of a friend had slipped me the name in London, exclaiming he’d found more lost cities “than Indiana Jones”.

  Finding Sánchez took about twelve minutes. This was partly because Cusco is quite a small town, the kind where everyone knows everyone else; and partly because he happened to sell ice cream from a booth a hundred yards from where we were staying.

  He was an earnest-looking man, bespectacled and bald, with bushy eyebrows that hung above his face like thunderclouds. He smiled between sentences, and talked very fast, about ice cream, mostly. He gave me an ice-lolly for free. It was shocking pink and tasted of walnuts.

  “It’s a new one,” he said smugly, “getting quite popular... It’s called la Sangre de los Incas, Blood of the Incas.”

  I asked him about lost cities.

  “There’s no such thing,” he said quickly.

  “But I thought you’d found lots of them.”

  Sánchez ripped the wrapper from a second ice-lolly and sucked on it hard. “Cusco’s full of people searching for El Dorado,” he said, “pero son idiotas, but they’re idiots. They have no brains. Sure, I did have a quick look in the jungle, dipped my toes into it. But I’ve got brains, so I came back and settled down to an honorable life. Search for a lost city and you understand there’s no honor in it... that it’s a worthless way to spend your time.”

  I swept my tongue over the Blood of the Incas, and grimaced at the taste. “What about Paititi, then?”

  Sánchez giggled and slid the bridge of his glasses to the top of his nose. “Paititi is a myth created by los que están en la sombra, the men in the shadows.”

  “Who are they?”

  “The men in gray suits who run the country.”

  “You mean the President?”

  “No, no,” Sánchez corrected me. “Presidents come and go, but the men in the shadows are always with us.”

  “But why spread a rumor, a myth, the myth of Paititi?”

  “Por el petróleo, por supuesto, because of the oil, of course.”

  Sánchez stopped talking, and paused to serve fluorescent yellow ice creams to a group of schoolgirls.

  “Oil? What’s oil got to do with Paititi?”

  “Have you seen the oil charts for Madre de Dios?”

  “No.”

  “Well, go to INRENA and take a look,” said Sánchez, smiling. “There’s ten million barrels of oil under the trees. If the government started drilling, there’d be an international outcry. It’s virgin jungle after all. So they’ve closed the area off, saying it’s to protect the nature and the ruins... the ruins of Paititi.”

  Sánchez’s conspiracy theory and the Blood of the Incas gave me a terrible stomach-ache. I did not agree with his theory that Paititi simply didn’t exist. But I was alarmed by the government’s eagerness for oil. I have come across suspect oil projects before, and where you find them, you find problems. Next morning, with the film crew trailing me, and the odd couple still asleep, I went to ask hard questions at the National Institute of Natural Resources, otherwise known as INRENA.

  The department had that odious air of officialdom, the kind that drains the life out of visitors and employees alike. Everyone who worked there staggered around with furtive movements, clutching dusty files to their chests. They spoke in whispers — if they ever spoke at all. It was as if an invisible sign ordered silence on pain of execution. The only sound was the clunk-click of manual typewriters spewing out official reports on reports.

  Not daring to speak, I waved at the clerk to attract his attention. His index fingers were pecking at the keys of an antique Remington typewriter, like a pair of peahens feasting on grain. Eventually he looked at me and came over. There was a patch of grime in the middle of his shirtfront, where dusty files had pressed while being transported surreptitiously from one desk to the next. “¿Sí, Señor?”

  “I am interested in going into Madre de Dios,” I said.

  The clerk didn’t reply at once. He stooped low, pulled back a deep wooden drawer, and snatched an inch of papers. “Fill them in triplicate, all triplicate,” he hissed.

  It was then that on the far wall, beyond a sea of gray-skinned clerks with grime patches on their chests, I saw a map. The reason it caught my eye was that at the top, printed prominently in brash type, was the name of an oil company, a household name all over the world. The map was green. It was a map of the jungle, the Madre de Dios jungle.

  I motioned for Marco to engage the clerk in grave conversation. As a banker, he was good at such things, while remaining charming. Then I hurried between the maze of desks, bobbing and weaving like a frail sailing boat balanced upon a curl of ocean wave. I was soon standing at the great lime-green jungle chart, struggling to make sense of the contours a
nd waterways.

  I found the Madre de Dios River. Some distance northwest a clutch of pins, with miniature flags attached, poked triumphantly through the sheet, like markers of an immense treasure. All around, a zone had been drawn with a red Chinagraph marker, warning ordinary folk to stay away.

  Until that moment, as the clerk chased me back through the labyrinth of desks, I had considered ice-cream-selling Sánchez to be a bit of a crackpot, the sort of man who kills someone famous for no reason at all. But the map pins had suggested there was oil, and if there was oil there was money at stake. I rushed back to have a chat with Sánchez. But, mysteriously, his booth was boarded up.

  “Él se ha ido, he’s gone away,” said a shoeshine boy. “Two men came this morning and took him away.”

  “Where? Where did they go?”

  The boy shook his head. “Al infierno, to Hell,” he said.

  I’m not good with forms or official documents, so we got Marco to complete the application. He pored over it for hours, while the Swedes and I went to the market to buy supplies with his money.

  Cusco is the Kathmandu of South America. The main square, Plaza de Armas, was flooded with sickly yellow light, backpackers and prim little boutiques selling junk: llama-shaped toothpick holders, condor-feather fans and paperweights crafted from rusty tin cans. On the other side of town there lay a fabulous covered market, where stout Andean women scurried past, heaving bundles on their backs. We bought a pair of blue plastic barrels with tight-fitting lids and filled them with basics: rice, raisins, coca leaves and nuts, flour and cooking oil, garlic and spices, spaghetti, canned fish and plenty of sugar. Elsewhere, we stocked up on size-nine rubber boots for the porters, fishhooks and plastic sheeting, pots, pans, cutlery and plates. We bought some cheap Chinese flashlights, too, and batteries and candles, and a Manchester United football. My journey to the land of the Shuar tribe had taught me the importance of practical gifts. Last time I had made the mistake of buying beads and trinkets, and learned quickly that tribal people all want the same thing: twelve-gauge shotgun cartridges. So we bought six boxes of them. The only thing they valued higher than ammunition were Man United footballs.