The Complete Collection of Travel Literature

by Tahir Shah

  Back at the hotel, Richard and Rodrigo had been experimenting with a shrub called sinicuichi. More commonly found in Mexico than Peru it was used by the Aztecs. Ingestion of the plant leads to strong auditory hallucinations, radically distorting any sound. Richard’s condition made it quite impossible to have a sensible conversation, so I went downstairs.

  In the foyer, the manager had heard about Sánchez. “They’ve taken him away,” he explained glumly.

  “Because of his outspoken views on the government?”

  “No, no, on account of his ice creams. He makes them himself, and they keep poisoning people.”

  We got talking about Paititi. The manager dabbed a handkerchief to his temples, as if trying to soak up a stain. “Have you spoken to Navarre?” he asked.

  It took another twelve minutes to track down Señor Navarre. He was a professor of tourism at the university, and had written a treatise entitled Paititi: The Truth of the El Dorado Legend. I flicked through it and realized the book was designed to throw other Paititi-hunters off the trail. Its author was about forty-five, had sleek Mongolian eyes, a thick beard and a slippery disposition.

  “Why are you interested in Paititi?” he asked at once.

  “We’re making a film about great explorers who have searched for the ruins.”

  “You’ll never find them,” he said. You have no hope at all.”

  “You mean we’ll not find explorers?”

  “No, the ruins. I know you are hunting for them. I can see it in your eyes.”

  I lowered my head and stared wide-eyed at the floor. Gosh, I thought to myself, this man’s really good.

  “I suppose you want me to tell you where to find Paititi,” Navarre went on. “Well, I won’t. I won’t help you at all. I’ll just give you some advice: keep your team small, a handful of men at the most. Take the bare minimum of food, and plenty of coca leaves for stamina, and don’t forget the lifta to activate it. But, most important of all, take your time. A man with no hope has even less hope if he has no time.”

  We waited and waited, and hoped, and waited some more, but our permission to enter the restricted area didn’t come from INRENA. The morning before we were scheduled to leave Cusco for the jungle, I rose before dawn and walked out of town, up the hill to the ruined fortress Sachsayhuaman. It’s said that the Incas built Cusco in the shape of a puma and that the stronghold of Sachsayhuaman formed its head and jaws. The puma, or tigre, as everyone in Peru calls it, was regarded as a sacred animal by the Incas. No one is quite sure how long it took to construct the unfinished fortress, or how the stone blocks were moved into place.

  Sachsayhuaman is undoubtedly the most impressive feat of known engineering left by the Incas. The stones range in size from small rocks to colossal shaped granite boulders, which weigh more than three hundred tons each. They are fitted together without the slightest gap between them, a fact that has bewildered archaeologists for generations. As usual, the mystery has led to a great number of theories, some of them possible, others far-fetched. One of the least plausible suggestions was that a plant-based potion was poured on the stone. When left for an hour or two, it supposedly softened even the hardest granite to the consistency of clay.

  As I climbed up to the fortress, a family brushed past me, all dressed up in tight Andean clothes, a pet llama led behind on a frayed string. They, and hundreds of other Cusqueños, made the same trek each morning, posing for tourist pictures in the alleyways of the Plaza de Armas. For such people tourists are manna from heaven, ever-willing to sprinkle a few coins in return for a glimpse of how Peru might once have been.

  The mighty fortress was still sleeping, enshrouded in darkness, cold and surly as if betrayed by the people who had built it. I walked down into its heart, and marvelled at the massiveness of the stones. They sit flush, cheek by jowl, taller than a man, daring you not to be impressed. You can set eyes on those blocks a thousand times, and each time you are forced to regard them with the same awe, the same fascination.

  I was certain that somewhere, deep in the jungle, there were other immense walls like those at Sachsayhuaman. They would be overgrown with foliage and vines, but they would be there all the same. Of that I had no doubt.

  Later that day Marco went to the INRENA office to see if the paperwork had been approved. He was armed with a roll of hundred-dollar bills and a box of Cohiba cigars. He returned an hour or so later with our application. It had been stamped all over: “refused”.

  “What shall we do?” the Swedes asked nervously.

  “We’ll go without a permit, and get on with it,” I said.

  I suggested we prepare the equipment to take the film crew’s minds off the paperwork. We took great care that all the bags were waterproof, their contents double-wrapped in polythene. For an expedition with a non-existent budget, we had accumulated a striking amount of gear. Most of it was the Swedes’ camera equipment. They were shooting principally on film, digital video as backup. Film gives much grander results; the other advantage was that the 16mm Arriflex camera was virtually indestructible, a sharp contrast to the video, which was to seize up frequently in the humidity. They had eighty cans of film stock, each ten minutes in length. That alone weighed ninety pounds. Then there was the tripod, another fifty pounds; and a bag filled with tapes, chargers and batteries, a clapperboard, cables and lights, weighing another hundred and forty pounds. They had a seventy-pound Honda generator, too, for charging batteries and to run the hair-dryer, needed for drying out circuitry. There was sound equipment as well, and spare lenses for the Arriflex, the video system, and a mountain of other odds and ends. Another expanse of technical paraphernalia was positioned nearby in the shade. There were three steel boxes with padlocks, and a set of four black indestructible cases, more lights, another tripod and half a dozen tote bags, which felt as if they were filled with lead.

  “That’s not our stuff,” said the Swedes, icily. “It’s Boris’s gear.”

  “But he’s just a film student,” I snarled. “Why does he need all this junk?”

  Leon looked over the sea of technical apparatus. “Bulgarians are like that,” he said.

  I begged the film crew again to cut down their equipment, but they chased me back to my room. There, heaped against the far whitewashed wall, was the food and my own odds and ends. The pile rose up to the ceiling, like a bonfire waiting for the touch-paper. The Pot Noodles were still stowed in cardboard cartons, the size and shape of coffins. The food and supplies we had bought in Cusco had been stashed in the plastic barrels. Beside them was a set of tatty climbing gear and ropes, and the thirty-six-year-old Zodiac dinghy, deflated and packed, then a dozen machetes with various lengths of blade, the sharpening stones and shotgun cartridges, shovels, kerosene, lanterns and saws.

  Previous journeys had taught me the danger of taking too much stuff. You end up spending all your time bogged down, feverishly protecting gear that’s of little value anyway. The worst part is that you need an army of men to carry it, and an army of men needs food. It’s a vicious circle: the more gear you have, the more men you need, and the more men you need, the more food you must have for them, and the more food you have, the more men you need.

  On my expedition to the Shuar I had found that any item that couldn’t be broken up, or cannibalized into something else if required, was worthless.

  With gnashing teeth, I marched over to the Swedes’ room and told them that if we hit hard times, nothing could be regarded as too precious. We had to be prepared to cannibalize everything.

  “Everything?”

  “Yes, everything, even the Arriflex!”

  It might have been cruel to taunt them with such threats but, as I saw it, a little threatening was a good thing. It kept the men on their toes.

  In the next room, the odd couple were waking up for the day. Their room stank of excrement, as the toilet had overflowed, sending a tidal wave of sewage as far as the beds. The film crew had come to my room in the night to tell me of their fear. Lined
up, like cadet officers on parade, they reported the problem.

  “It’s Richard,” said Leon, gravely. “He’s very unstable.”

  “He’s a Vietnam vet,” I said. “He’s been trained to kill a man with a single blow. A guy like that finds it hard to adapt to the city. He’ll be fine once we’re in the jungle.”

  Leon and the others didn’t actually say it, but they were hinting Richard should be left behind. What passed for his usual conduct put the fear of God into ordinary men. I was no longer troubled when he pulled out a machete in a crowded bar, tried to pick up schoolgirls, or threatened to scalp us, then rip off our heads and scoop out our brains. To me it was quite normal, the kind of behavior one would expect from a man who had walked the fine line between life and death.

  A worn-out bus ran the route twice weekly from Cusco to the brink of the Madre de Dios jungle. We loaded up our gear and scoffed omelette sandwiches before the bald tires grumbled away down the cobbles. There can be few drives on earth quite so spectacular as the one from the highlands to the cloud forest east of the Andes. The landscape began as desolate, forsaken, abandoned, a thousand shades of gray. There was the odd thicket of eucalyptus trees, tall and huddled, like giants sheltering in the wind. The stark beauty was bisected from time to time by rivers, their high waters rolling down from the hills towards the secret heart of the jungle.

  We passed infrequent hamlets, thatched houses crafted from honey-colored blocks of mud. Outside each one an old man was chopping wood, and a pair of savage dogs basked in the late-morning sun. There were children, too, tossing marbles in the dust, and llamas striding about haughtily, as if they owned the world.

  Drive down from the altiplano and you get a sense of how little the Peruvian countryside has changed in centuries. I wondered whether the Incas might have taken the very same route to Paititi with the Spanish at their heels. There would have been thousands of them on the move, some carrying the treasures perhaps, whatever they had been, as well as stone-masons and artisans, engineers, soldiers and priests. The Incas had scant understanding of the jungle. They traded with the tribes, but to live in the jungle themselves, they would have needed know-how. For me, that was the greatest mystery of Paititi. How did the Incas, a mountain people, learn to adapt to the ferocious jungle environment? How did they endure the mosquitoes and the damp, and stay safe from the predators and the tribes?

  As the road spiralled downwards, the vegetation changed. Gone were the meticulous eucalyptus groves and the filigree of ferns, replaced by a riot of lichen-encrusted trees. From the moment I saw it, something clicked in my mind. This was an ancient, mesmerizing place, the kind the fleeing Incas would have found irresistible.

  In a handful of miles, the meagerness of the highlands had been exchanged for a realm of prehistoric flowers with bronze-green fronds, of cecropria, bamboo and bromeliads, a place where every square inch of flora was a world of its own.

  There were sheering rock faces, too, shadow mountains, veiled by the variation in light, and sleek waterfalls, tumbling from one ledge to the next. Through it all, permeating like a dragon’s breath, was the vapour. It was moist and haunting, cool, but above all it was cautionary, warning intruders to turn back while there was still time.

  As we traveled into the jungle, I gave much thought to the ruins and what we would do when and if we found them. My concern from the start was that the Peruvian authorities would muscle in and try to take the place over. We were on tourist visas, after all, and had nothing in the way of formal accreditation: a point that was sure to be held against us. One possibility was the idea of licensing Paititi, or buying it outright. It may sound far-fetched, but there was a precedent. In 1839, while traveling through the jungles of Honduras, the American traveler John Lloyd Stephens discovered and then bought the lost Mayan city of Copan. On buying a lost city, he wrote:

  The reader is perhaps curious to know how old cities sell in Central America. Like other articles of trade, they are regulated by the quantity in the market and the demand; but, not being staple articles like cotton and indigo, they were held at fancy prices, and at that time were dull of sale. I paid fifty dollars for Copán. There was never any difficulty about the price. I offered that sum, for which Don José María thought me only a fool; if I had offered more, he would have probably considered me something worse.

  The bus driver stayed alert with a quid of coca leaves stuffed up in his cheek. He was a timid man who took each bend with hesitation, as if it was his first day out. His face was long and anxious, with chicken-feet wrinkles to the sides of his eyes, and a field of deep furrows on his brow. His wife sat beside him, swivelled in her seat. She was a buxom woman, whose alluring eyes scanned the male passengers flirtatiously. The Swedes, the banker, the Bulgarian and I managed to avoid her gaze out of respect for her husband.

  The further the decrepit bus lurched down towards the jungle core, the more suggestively she teased the audience, until Richard could stand it no longer. He beckoned her over. In a heartbeat, she had flown from the front, and was perched like a bird on his knee. She clung there precariously, whispering into his ear, pouting with delight.

  When eventually the bus slunk into the modest town of Pillcopata, Richard disappeared with the woman. He whooped loudly, declaring in his atrocious Spanish how he would give her a night to remember. As his employer I felt responsible in some way. I was unhappy that the bus driver’s honor had been flayed so publicly. So, I went to apologize.

  He was sitting alone, timidly, at the only bar in town, with a glass of warm beer and a damp cigarette. A rumba was playing in the back, the melody wafting through the evening air. I nodded in greeting and the bus driver pointed to a chair.

  “I am burning inside,” I said. “I feel terrible for the way my colleague has behaved. He has no manners. If you can forgive him...”

  “¿Por qué te preocupas? Why do you worry?” asked the bus driver.

  “Because I am embarrassed, and ashamed.”

  The man said nothing for a moment or two. He took a long, refreshing sip of his beer, stared out at the dismal mud street, and then he smiled very gently. “Mi esposa, my wife...” he said, under his breath. “She’s got two gifts for your friend tonight.”

  “Gifts?”

  “Sí. El primero es gonorrea, the first is gonorrhoea,” he said, “and the second is syphilis.”

  SIX

  REPUTED DANGERS OF TRAVEL

  Savages rarely murder new-comers; they fear their guns, and have a superstitious awe of the white man’s power: they require time to discover that he is not very different to themselves, and easily to be made away with.

  The Art of Travel

  Pillcopata was hardly a town at all. There were no more than a few hundred residents, a blend of urbanized natives and adventurers, who wiled away their days in the broken shade. You wouldn’t have realized it at first, but they were all waiting for the same thing: a tourist bonanza to roll into town. The men sat on the jerry-built verandas, smoking black tobacco, with their wives flustering in the gloomy wooden houses behind. Sometimes the sweltering silence of midday was pierced by the shriek of a small child being mauled by a savage dog. The dogs of Pillcopata had a vigour that I have encountered nowhere else. They could withstand the blazing temperature, but were exceedingly ferocious as a result.

  Next morning the manager of the only hotel sat down beside me on the veranda. He was meek, yet severe, had a swarthy complexion, short graying hair and small hands that never stopped moving. He told me, almost as an apology, that his name was Walter.

  He asked me to describe in detail the desert town of Nazca. I began to explain about the famous Nazca Lines.

  “No, no, Señor,” he said, with a smile. “I know about the Lines. But tell me of the tourists. What are they like?”

  “Well, there are all kinds... from all over the world. Some are rich, others less so, but they all want the same thing — to fly over the symbols on the desert.”

  “¿De todas partes
del mundo? From all over the world?” said Walter dreamily.

  “Yes, they come from everywhere.”

  “And they bring money?”

  “Oh, yes,” I said authoritatively, “they have made Nazca very rich.”

  Walter puffed on a hand-rolled cigarette, and flicked the ash on the floor. “One day Pillcopata will be like that,” he said, with certainty.

  “But you don’t have the Nazca Lines.”

  “We have something better, far better.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The ruins of the Incas.”

  I slid my tongue over my parched lips. “You mean, Paititi?”

  “That’s it,” said Walter. “It’s there, out there. It’s just a matter of days now, weeks at the most, and it’ll be found.”

  “Do you really believe it’s there?”

  “¡Claro! Of course! Why do you think I have this hotel? I’m waiting out the bad times, ready... ready for the shout, “¡Paititi!” When it comes, I’ll be a millionaire.”

  I took a sip of my coffee, leaned back on my chair, and scanned the main street. “If the lost city was discovered,” I asked, “how would Pillcopata change?”

  Walter jumped to his feet, the veneer of meekness gone. “We’d build a line of hotels with fifteen floors on each, and a dance hall, and a bus station, restaurants and shops. There’d be banks and beauty parlours, too, and an international airport, and Tarmac roads carving their way deep into the jungle... to Paititi.”

  “But what about the native tribes?”

  Walter clicked his tongue. “They’ll all have jobs,” he quipped. “It would do them some good. They’ll help with the tourists, carrying their bags, that sort of thing. Think, my friend, think!”