The Complete Collection of Travel Literature

by Tahir Shah

  It took about an hour to travel the short distance to Mantacolla. I was half expecting a village set on the riverbank, with people and commotion. Jesús stopped the engine and jumped into the water, guiding his craft up on to the shale beach. There was no sign of anyone.

  “Wait here, and the tribe will come,” he said. “I’ll be back for you this evening.”

  “Are you sure we’re in the right place?” I asked.

  But Jesús didn’t reply. He slid the canoe out into the water and hopped in, allowing the current to ease him back to Shintuya.

  We sat there for an hour, blinded and burnt by the sun. Then a boy appeared from nowhere. He was naked, about seven years old, and had a fish skewered on a stick. He watched us from a distance, taking occasional nibbles at the meat. We waved, then gesticulated wildly The child ran off into the undergrowth. A few minutes later a line of figures stepped out on to the beach. Like the men we had seen at Shintuya, they carried long arrows and black chonta palm bows. But these men had saffron-yellow faces. They didn’t look up, but gazed at the ground before them as they approached, as if lost in thought. The man at the front walked with a limp.

  When they were close we smiled falsely, baring our teeth in friendship. Now I think back to it, it seems mad to greet strangers with a display of teeth, as we do in the West. But I don’t suppose the warriors saw us smiling. They never lifted their heads, as if eye-contact would afflict them with a disease of some kind.

  Leon, who spoke the best Spanish, began the conversation. “Hace calor, it is hot,” he said.

  “Sí, mucho calor,” said the man with the limp.

  “The sun is bright, too.”

  “Yes, yes, the sun is bright,” said the tribesman.

  “We have come here as your friends,” Leon went on, “and we have gifts.”

  The men looked nervously at each other. I sensed a silent wave of expectation pass between them.

  I dished out some shotgun cartridges from a tattered plastic bag, as if they were boiled sweets. The men smiled and took a handful each.

  “We have food as well,” said Leon.

  “Food,” said one of the other men. “Bien por traer comida, food is good.”

  We all agreed, nodding animatedly, that food was a good thing.

  “There were some foreigners here once,” said the third man. “They didn’t have any food. They came into our village and stole food. Eran malos, they were bad men.”

  “The French,” I said softly. “It must have been the French.”

  But to the warriors, all white men looked the same.

  “It is bad to steal food,” I said.

  “Yes,” intoned the first man, “it made us sad. We were very sad. Toda la aldea estaba triste, the whole village was sad.”

  The tribesmen looked at each other and chattered in a high-pitched language for a minute or two.

  “If you want to go through our territory,” the first man continued, “you will have to pay us money.” There was a pause. “If you do not pay us money we will be sad.”

  The film crew and I exchanged worried glances. The last thing we wanted was for the Machiguenga to be sad again. Sadness appeared to bring out their violence.

  Again, there was a long pause. After which the man with the limp said we could come to the village and talk about money. I was reluctant to discuss matters of business so early in the palaver, but there was little choice. The tribesmen stood up and led the way from the pebbles into the undergrowth. We walked after them down a track no wider than a doorway, the jungle rearing up on either side. Despite their reputation, the warriors seemed quite a straightforward group of men. As long as we kept handing out shotgun shells, I thought, we would stay on their good side.

  Eventually we came to a clearing. A large number of trees had been felled, creating an open grassland, with a smattering of malocas, frail wooden houses, at the far end. They were made from narrow strips of hard wood and thatched with hay. Each one had a low door, necessitating extraordinary limberness to enter or exit. Between the huts there stood a hearth, protected by a shelter of woven banana leaves; in the hearth a fire was smoldering, and on the fire there was a pot. A woman, whose face was caked with yellow paint like the others, was stirring the pot. It was blackened, and filled with a mushy white porridge. I recognized it from my time in the Upper Amazon.

  “Masato,” I said coldly.

  “¡Sí! ¡Sí!” said the Machiguengas, grinning. “Masato.”

  A bowl of dirty river water was mixed into the brew, and stirred by a clumsy hand. The bowl was dipped into the liquid, which now resembled pancake batter. It was passed to me. I closed my eyes tight and gulped down about two pints. The Swedes went next, then Boris and Marco. Unlike me, they had the benefit of ignorance – they had no idea how the beverage was prepared. Masato is drunk across the western Amazon and the surrounding jungle region. It is made from yuca, the tubular cassava root, which is boiled in water and mashed. Then the women making it, invariably the oldest, ugliest crones in the community, stuff handfuls of the mashed yuca into their mouths, chew for a minute or so, then toss it back into the pot. Within hours, the cassava has fermented in the saliva and is mildly alcoholic.

  Masato featured prominently in Machiguenga hospitality, as did roasted armadillo meat. I picked restlessly at the jumble of armadillo bones on my lap, the leftovers of an animal that had been killed a few days before. It had been cooked over a termite nest in the usual way.

  When the man with the limp had downed almost a gallon of masato, he addressed us again. “Some white men came here recently,” he said slowly. “They told us they were looking for the walls of Paititi. Then they said they would give us money and gifts if we showed them where to find the walls.”

  “Paititi?” I said keenly. “Isn’t that just a myth?”

  “Yes, it’s a myth,” said the headman, gnawing at the armadillo’s jawbone. “It’s very nice, though. People come here looking for it. They give us lots of money for passing through our lands. If they don’t give money we get sad.”

  The film crew and I exchanged a firm look. We understood what he was saying. In the world of the Machiguenga, sadness could be equated with anger, and anger was a perilous emotion, by which a foreigner could lose his life.

  I asked how much people paid to travel through their stretch of the river.

  “We charge twenty thousand soles” he said.

  “That’s more than five thousand dollars,” I said.

  The headman did not reply. But he seemed pleased that the figure was regarded as large.

  Late that afternoon, we heard the rumble of Jesús’s peki-peki pushing upstream. I didn’t feel we had yet made the breakthrough we needed with the tribe, but it seemed that we had covered as much ground as possible in the initial meeting. We thanked the tribal leaders and walked back to the beach, each of us wondering how we could evade paying the fee, while at the same time keeping the Machiguenga happy.

  SEVEN

  ENGAGING NATIVES

  On engaging natives, the people with whom they have lived, and to whom they have become attached and learnt to fear, should impress on them that, unless they bring you back in safety, they must never show their faces again, nor expect the balance of their pay, which will only be delivered to them on your return.

  The Art of Travel

  Back at the camp, Richard had wakened from his hallucinogenic sleep. He was sitting in the twilight with his pants down. Rodrigo was shining the beam of a flashlight carefully at the veteran’s genitals. It made for a curious scene. As soon as he saw us approaching, Richard struggled to pull on his camouflage fatigues.

  “Itching?” I said.

  “That’s my business.”

  Our conversation was cut short by the sound of English being spoken on the road. A few minutes later a hippie was standing before us. He was five foot tall, with a gangling frame as if he had suffered from recurring malaria; a long carpet of beard ran down from his face. His legs were hidden b
y what appeared to be homemade tie-dye pants, and he wore bedroom slippers on his feet. He was an Australian from Darwin, who, coincidentally, was called Darwin as well.

  “Let me guess,” I said, “you’re looking for Paititi.”

  But Darwin didn’t know what I meant. He had never heard the name before. “I’ve come to stay with the monks,” he said.

  “Monks?”

  He pointed downriver.

  “It may sound weird, man,” he said, “but someone in Cusco told me that ten miles south of here there’s a community of monks. When the leader of their fraternity dies, they cook him and eat him.”

  “Cannibals?” I asked.

  “In exceptional circumstances,” said Darwin.

  Normally, I would have been the first to go in search of cannibal monks, particularly as I had heard of a similar tradition at a nunnery in the Philippines. It’s the sort of quest I can’t resist. But Paititi was still beckoning, and I felt as if we were making real progress. I left Darwin to listen to Richard’s tiresome repertoire of Vietnam tales, and walked up to the shop to extract more information from Gloria.

  She was sitting in the dimness on a bench, caressing a kitten’s back with the tips of her fingers. As soon as I stepped up on to the floorboards, she let the cat slide from her lap and turned up the flame of her paraffin lamp. “Did you meet the Machiguenga?” she asked.

  “They gave us masato and armadillo meat,” I said.

  “Don’t be misled by their hospitality. They’ll rob you blind.”

  “If someone wanted to find Paititi,” I said cautiously, “who would he talk to?”

  “Not the tribesmen, for sure,” said Gloria.

  “Then who? Who knows?”

  The shopkeeper rubbed a palm across the warts on her cheek. “Hay solo un hombre, there is a man,” she said.

  “Does he know about Paititi?”

  “Sí. Él conoce, he knows.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “He’s called Héctor. He lives across the river.”

  “Is he a tribesman?”

  “No,” she said, “they’re not from the tribe over there. They follow the way of Jesus.”

  We hadn’t been down at the edge of the jungle for long, but our presence there was already paying dividends. Perhaps, I pondered, as I wandered back down to the camp, we would have beginner’s luck and we would find the ruins with no trouble at all.

  At the camp the Australian had succumbed to the noxious effects of datura.

  “It seemed a shame to waste it,” said Rodrigo.

  Next morning, Leon and I left the others on the riverbank, and took a ride across the mighty Madre de Dios in a hollowed-out canoe. The water was much faster than it had been the day before, and the young boatman fought with the flat paddle as if our lives depended on it. He shouted that it had been raining heavily upstream, that the water would rise much higher in the coming days.

  I asked if he knew Héctor.

  “Sí, ese hombre es un Mesías, that man is a Messiah,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Él tiene un aura, un carisma, he has an aura, a presence. He has been touched by God.”

  On the far side of the river, we jumped into the water and marched up to the wall of jungle. With time we eventually found a path, and took to it, slipping on the mud like half-wits tramping across ice. On either side of the track there were banana plants and breadfruit trees, suggesting a village nearby.

  We walked for about forty minutes, the morning sun scorching our necks, the flies bathing in our sweat. Then, quite suddenly, as we came to the village, the skies opened and it poured with torrential rain. Within five seconds we were drenched. A man waved to us from his porch. We ran over and took refuge in his house.

  He had a big square head, broad shoulders and short-sighted vision, which caused him to scrunch up his eyes when he was talking to you. He announced modestly that he was the headman.

  “We are looking for Héctor,” I said.

  “You mean El Maestro, the master?”

  “We were told he knows about Paititi.”

  “Ah, yes,” said the chief, “él conoce, sí, él conoce, he knows, yes, he knows.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “Usually he’s here in the village, but now he’s out at his chacra, his farmstead, planting a crop of yuca. He’ll get back in a week.”

  “We have to go there now,” I said.

  The rain was growing heavier, and in the jungle heavy rain can fall for many hours without letting up. The headman peered out at the mud. “You could wait until tomorrow,” he said.

  “I cannot wait a moment longer,” I replied.

  The inertia of a jungle village is a dangerous thing. Before you know it your whole life has slipped by and you are still sitting there. I tapped my watch. “Debemos irnos ya, we must leave at once.”

  “Then my boy will take you.”

  He called to his oldest son, Sergio, and instructed him to take us to meet El Maestro.

  We set off at once, sliding up and down the narrow path as it wound through the undergrowth like the body of a snake. Sometimes we scrambled -to grasp at roots; at others, we forded streams up to our waists. All the while it poured and poured with rain, freezing us to the bone. Then, after four hours of misery, we spotted banana trees again. Our pace increased. A cluster of simple shacks came into view. There was no one about, just a few chickens looking wretched in the wet. We called, but no one came. We took off our shirts and wrung them out.

  Our guide, the headman’s son, said that Paititi was thirty days’ walk through the jungle. Even then, I knew better than anyone the local inaccuracy of distance. In the Upper Amazon, I had found that the Shuar hardly ever ventured more than a few miles in any direction. They had a reasonable knowledge of the surrounding area, but their language did not contain the words to express distance, weight or any other measurement.

  “The government air force fly over our village very often,” said the teenager. “My father believes that they may have already found Paititi, and that they’re clearing out the gold bit by bit.”

  “How much gold does he think there is?”

  The boy stretched his arms above his head and swung them down to his waist. “That much, or more,” he said.

  A few minutes passed, and then a young, athletic-looking woman appeared. She was no more than about twenty. Unlike everyone else in the region, her teeth were not rotten. It was as if she was from a different genetic stock. Her name was Mariela; she was Héctor’s daughter.

  “Where is your father?”

  “He will be here soon.”

  Five minutes more, and I glimpsed a gray-white beard moving through the trees. It was wrapped round the cheeks of a muscular man. His shirt was unbuttoned, its tails tied in a knot about his waist. Over one shoulder hung an axe, the blade ground down by years of sharpening. His expression was focused and the glint of a secret obsession shone in his eyes. From the first moment I saw him, I knew he was a key that could help unlock the puzzle of Paititi.

  Héctor did not seem surprised to find a pair of drenched strangers, shaking with cold, taking shelter at his shack. He strode over and introduced himself. A silence followed, a silence that called for explanation.

  “We are here because we share the same interest as you,” I said.

  “You like growing yuca,” he replied, regarding our soft hands. “No, I don’t think so.”

  “We are on a quest,” I said solemnly, “searching for the lost city of Paititi.”

  “Aaaaah,” said Héctor. “You are the fresh moth attracted by an old flame.”

  “We were told that you have experience.”

  Héctor took off his shirt and wiped it across his face. He seemed very serious. “People have died searching for Paititi,” he said. “Others have returned different from when they set out. They all made sacrifices.”

  “You mean they went mad?”

  “Locura, madness.” Héctor u
ttered the word slowly, studiously. “Why do you want to find Paititi?” he asked. “Por el oro, for the gold?”

  “At first it was for the glory,” I said, “but now I’m not so sure.”

  “Paititi is up there,” said the old man obliquely. “There is no doubt. If you have doubt, then turn and walk back on that path.”

  Héctor was quite different from most other Peruvians. He had the charisma of a politician, and a form of compacted energy I have only ever encountered in men with resolute belief. It came as little surprise that he was a Seventh Day Adventist.

  I asked if he was a missionary. He said he was not. He had never converted anyone, he explained, for he saw it as each man’s right to seek out his own faith.

  “I came here from Arequipa with my young family eighteen years ago,” he said. “I was searching for something. If you are searching, the jungle is a good place to find an answer.”

  “Was it Paititi?”

  “No, no, that was long before I’d heard about Paititi,” he said. “I was searching for a cure for deafness. I’d been working in the mineral mines in the north of Peru, drilling in tunnels. I lost my hearing as a result, so I threw in my hard hat and came here, dragging my wife and children along.”

  “You obviously got healed,” I said.

  “Oh, yes, by a shaman. He’s dead now, but he was a remarkable man. He forbade me to speak for an entire year. Utter a single word, even to myself, and, he said, I would never hear again.”

  Héctor brushed his sinewy hands over his face. “¡Qué difícil fue! Oh, how hard that was!” he said, laughing. “I thought I’d go mad. But then one morning I woke up and heard a cockerel crowing. It was the most wonderful sound I have ever heard. There were so many delicious sounds!”

  “What of Paititi?”

  “Ah,” said the old man, “the shaman used to tell me about it. He said it was upriver, that his father had been there. Naturally, I was interested.”

  “Have you mounted expeditions for Paititi?”

  “You need money, lots of it,” he replied, “and time to prepare. Without preparation you could lose your life.”