by Tahir Shah
“You mean to prepare your body and build up your muscles, that sort of thing?”
“No, no tus músculos, not your muscles,” said the old man, “but your mind.”
Héctor stopped talking and stared down at the swirl of smoke spiralling up from the fire. He sat down on a homemade chair and looked at me, studying my face. “To find Paititi,” he said, “you must not look for it. But even then you have to purify your spirit, cleanse your soul.”
“How long will that take?”
“Llevará seis meses, it will take six months,” he replied.
Leon and I glared at each other.
“I feel quite pure inside,” I said. “I think I could get away with a quick bout of purifying, a few days at the most.”
“Me too,” said Leon earnestly.
El Maestro gazed at me, not to examine my face or clothes, but my soul. I struggled to think pure thoughts, as Héctor sucked out my psyche with his eyes. When he had finished, he glanced down at the fire again. Like the Indians, his vision seemed unclouded by trifling insignificances: his mind had been washed clean by the jungle.
“What of the Machiguenga?” I asked, hoping to draw him from his inquisition. “Do they believe in Paititi?”
“Of course they believe,” he said, without hesitation, “but don’t mention the word to them. It will turn them wild.”
“With envy?”
“No, con temor, with fear.”
Héctor suddenly seemed overcome with tiredness.
“Hay mucho peligro, there is much danger,” he said sternly.
It sounded like a line from a B-grade horror movie, but he really meant it.
“I will be back at the village in a week,” he said. “Come and see me. We can talk further then.”
Two days after drinking the preparation of datura, Darwin, the Australian hippie, came to. He couldn’t stand at first, and complained of severe soreness in his arms and back. “I flew, man,” he said gently, as if he believed it.
“Where did you fly?”
“Up the river, and over the jungle, low above the water, over the tops of the trees. It was magical. I smelt the wind.”
The film crew and I didn’t pay much attention. We discussed what the next course of action was to be, and agreed unanimously that Héctor, El Maestro, was our best bet so far. Although sitting there for a week was an unwelcome prospect, we had little choice. Meanwhile, Richard listened intently to the hippie’s story. His eyes were encircled with shadowy rings. He looked worse than I had ever seen him, like a man woken from death. “Did you speak with the spirits?” he asked.
Darwin appeared confused by the question. “Yes, spirits, there were spirits,” he replied at length. “They washed me, they touched me, they loved me, man.” He smiled tenderly. It was the smile of a hippie who has been comforted in an endless blanket of free love.
“Yes, man,” he said, “yes, they loved me and they showed me the hills.”
“What hills?” asked Richard.
“Over there. There are twelve of them.”
The hippie’s mention of hills would have been lost if Richard had not been listening. The veteran said Jesús the boatman had spoken of a series of pinnacles due west of Shintuya. “They’re kind of pyramids,” he said, “man-made pyramids.”
I would not have paid any attention, but I had read that the Incas built stone pyramids and worshipped the sun from them. So we looked for Jesús to ask him about the pinnacles. He wasn’t at home. His wife said he had run off to his mistress’s house. “She’s a witch,” said the woman, “but I don’t care. One day he’ll come home but I’ll be gone. There’s a man in Santa Cruz, a good man, who looks at me nicely when I pass his house. He needs a wife. He must do, his house is all messy.”
“Do you know about the pinnacles?” I asked.
“Don’t believe anything Jesús has to say,” she snapped. “He’s a fool, a fool with a big dick.”
Back in the camp, Darwin had gathered up his belongings and disappeared on a canoe filled with bananas in search of the cannibal monks. I was glad to be rid of him. We strolled up to Gloria’s veranda and inspected the map in its shade. About twelve miles due west, up the winding Inchipata river, there was a curious series of what looked like hillocks, jagged with contours, like the grooves of a saw. It was impossible to say if they were man-made or not, but they were mysterious. My mind filled with the image of an Inca priest, slitting llamas’ throats in honor of the sun.
The only way to know something for sure is to go there yourself, so we set about hiring men and mounting a reconnaissance trip to the so-called pinnacles. It was a good way of testing the equipment. Gloria said she would look after the luggage we did not need.
“Get your porters from Panataua, Héctors village,” she said. “You don’t want men from Shintuya, they’re lazy and weak.”
We crossed the river and marched over to Panataua. The headman was blowing cigarette smoke into his infant daughter’s hair in the hope of killing the lice.
“We need to hire some porters,” I said.
“¿Cuántos necesitas? How many do you need?”
“Fifteen at the most.”
“Wait here until dusk.”
Passing time in a Peruvian hamlet can drive a reasonable man berserk. The village was thin on entertainment. There was no electricity, so no television, and no theatres, or shops, or anything to help pass the time; nothing except a church. As we soon found, it was the one attraction, patronized energetically by every member of the community. It was a bright, whitewashed building, set at the far end of the village in a thicket of breadfruit trees. Open-sided, with a sloping tin roof, there was a space under the floor where feral dogs took dust baths and fought.
Twice a day the entire village donned their best clothes and tramped into the church to pledge their love to God. Most of them carried oversized Bibles wherever they went. While we were waiting, I asked the headman about Héctor. “If anyone knows about Paititi, it is Héctor,” he said. “He is trusted by the Machiguenga. They tell him things. They come to his house and whisper to him.”
“He is a bridge between our world and the world of the natives,” I said.
“¡Sí! El puente, the bridge.”
That evening, when dusk had turned into darkness, and the air was filled with the rustling of cicada wings, ten men arrived at the headman’s shack. Most of them were farmers, earning a meager living by growing bananas and yuca for Cusco. They were all clutching well-thumbed Bibles, dressed in their best clothes, ready for church. None looked at all strong. They looked like preachers.
“How many pounds can you carry?” I asked them.
“Eighty,” said a very short, feeble man. “We can carry eighty pounds at least.”
Boris, who had served as a conscript in the Bulgarian military, weighed out eighty pounds, and stuffed it into a kit-bag. I marked out a distance of a hundred yards through the village. The first puny man stepped up, wrestled to pick up the pack, and staggered ahead for a few feet, before dropping it. Behind him, the other young farmers looked sheepish. We cut the weight by half. The farmers still found it a struggle. I asked how many of them would come with us for fifteen soles a day. They all put up their hands. I fished out a bottle of Peruvian grape brandy from the supplies. “We don’t drink,” said the feeblest of them all. “We are Adventists.”
“Fuckin’ girlies,” said Richard. “I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
We planned to leave Shintuya at dawn the day after next. The Adventists’ frailty meant we would have to deposit the bulk of our equipment at Gloria’s shop.
After I forbade him to prepare hallucinogens, Rodrigo turned his shamanic hands to cooking, and became quite an accomplished chef. Everything he served up from his magic cauldron was wonderful, not least of all his pont-neuf potatoes. That evening, after the pot had been scraped clean, he went down to the river to drink his last batch of ayahuasca. He said it was to search for Paititi.
It rained
all night, a torrential downpour that found crevices in the tarpaulin, soaking us as we slept. When we woke at about six, we found the river had encroached all around us, turning our sandbank into a miniature island. The equipment was drenched. Three hours of hauling the gear up to higher ground followed. At the end of it, Rodrigo seemed to have something to say.
“La muerte nos espera más adelante, death is waiting up ahead,” he said, through a grin of broken teeth.
“The Curse Lines?”
“Sí, una pared de energía, a wall of energy, of power, a power of death. Touch it and you will die.” Nothing pleased Rodrigo so much as the prospect of misery being visited on his friends. “The only way through it is to burrow under it, like dogs. After that is a stone wall, a thousand yards tall, covered in vines.”
“Like the wall of Sachsayhuaman?”
Rodrigo didn’t reply to the question.
“Después de la pared hay un lago, after the wall is a lake,” he said, “it’s very deep, like an ocean, and filled with dolphins with fangs. If they smell your fat, they will eat you. Beyond the lake is another wall. It’s made of gold. And after that is Paititi. It is waiting, eager for visitors.”
“That’s excellent,” I said.
The shaman regarded me with a poisonous glance. “It’s waiting for visitors,” he repeated, “para poder matarlos, so it can kill them.”
EIGHT
BONES
Another remarkable substitute for firewood is bones; a fact which Mr Darwin was, I believe, the first to mention. The bones of an animal, when freshly killed, make good fuel; and even those of cooked meat, and such as have been exposed to the air for some days, will greatly increase the heat of a scanty fire.
The Art of Travel
Rodrigo was the first to succumb to madness. At six thirty that evening, after scrubbing his cauldron clean, he grabbed a cooking knife and held it at arm’s length at the film crew. He didn’t say anything at first. His eyes seemed clouded, and his mouth was dry. His long tongue poked out from between his teeth at intervals, like a viper tasting the air. I called Richard. He came over to see what the fuss was about.
“I’m going to kill you,” said Rodrigo, jabbing the knife at me.
“What’s wrong with you?” I said sternly.
“The potatoes! You are forcing me to cook potatoes. I am a shaman, not a chef.”
I had not imagined Rodrigo could make such a protest; until then he had never raised his voice. Leon begged him to put the knife down.
“We’re not forcing you to do anything,” he said, “but the hallucinogens are destabilizing Richard, and he’s frightening when he’s unstable.”
Richard strode over and grabbed the knife. “Pull yourself together!” he shouted at Rodrigo. “Or I’ll kick your ass all the way back to Iquitos.”
“I’m going back to Iquitos anyway,” replied the shaman. “I don’t need a knife to kill you. I’ll do it with a curse.”
With that, Rodrigo stood up, took up his wet cauldron and his cloth bag, and walked away into the night.
“Shall we go after him?” I asked.
“Fuckin’ phoney,” barked Richard. “Let him rot in Hell!”
We never saw the shaman again.
Next morning, disbanding the camp did much to boost morale. The tarpaulin was removed from its frame and furled up like a bed sheet. The film crew insisted on bringing most of their equipment, which piqued my anger and caused me to shake my fist. The porters were too feeble to carry much, even though we were taking only a fraction of the equipment with us. We agreed that if we did find ruins, I would send some of the men back to ferry the rest of the gear up there. The porters didn’t turn up until noon. They said they had been in church, praying for our souls. I lined them up and paced up and down like a sergeant inspecting his troops.
“From this moment forward,” I said, “if there’s any praying to be done, it has to be done in your own time.”
The men didn’t say anything. They just looked at their bare feet timidly.
“Don’t any of you own shoes?”
Again, they strained to look meek. Marco fished out the kit-bag full of rubber boots, and handed them out. I had learned years before that the majority of Peruvians have wide Central Asian feet, and most take size-nine boots. Their universal foot-size is a legacy of their ancestors who crossed the frozen Bering Straits from Asia twenty thousand years ago.
Then the packs were divided and we moved on out, with Richard in the lead. For the first time he seemed revitalized. I wondered if it had anything to do with Rodrigo’s sudden departure, or with the large quid of coca leaves pressed tightly into his cheek. He was dressed in his usual camouflage fatigues, the Ninja singlet, and a bandanna tied over his head. Across his chest was the Brazilian riot shotgun, loaded, he said, with buckshot. The weapon took seven cartridges, and could spray fire across forty-five degrees.
“Any trouble with these kids,” he said acerbically, “and it’ll be show time.”
The procession moved in single file, heading due west through low jungle. Words cannot describe my elation at moving. Venture to a remote corner of a faraway land and, from the moment you get there, every person and every thing becomes an obstacle, designed to entrap you, to stop you proceeding on your way. The crew were documenting the momentous departure, which slowed us down considerably. It took them precious time to get out the cameras and put them away once they were finished.
I watched the path before me like a hawk. One moment it was as level as a bowling green, the next it had become an acute wall of mud and roots and, beyond that, a downhill slope. The mud was terrible. It came up to our thighs in places. Dodging round it was difficult because of the weight of our packs. Shift the weight too much in one direction and you could snap an ankle.
Over the first three miles we made good progress, having essentially followed the course of the river back down to near the porters’ village at Panataua. The men moaned from time to time about their burdens, but the sight of Richard’s riot shotgun muted their protests. We crossed the river in relays, taking our chances in the unsteady hollowed-out canoes. Then, after regrouping on the other side, we cut a path due west so as to bisect the Rio Inchipata.
Ten minutes after entering the forest, the men put down their packs and sat on them. They did this simultaneously, without the faintest whisper between them. It was as if each man had an identical threshold of imagined discomfort.
“What’s the matter?
“Es trabajo duro, it’s hard work,” said the farmers. “We don’t like walking like this.”
Richard cocked a cartridge into the chamber of his weapon.
“Force is not the way,” I said to him. “If any man wants to leave, let him leave right now.”
The farmers looked at one another tautly.
“Does anyone want to go back?” I asked again.
The smallest of the porters, a slender wisp of bone, called Máximo, stood up as their leader. “We will not be threatened by the American,” he said. “If you want us to walk hard you have to feed us well.”
“There’s good food,” I told him, “food from England. It’s special food called Pot Noodle.”
The men seemed pleased for a moment.
“Pota Noodel?” said Máximo.
“Yes. It will make you feel stronger than you have ever felt before.”
“Does Pota Noodel make you strong down there?” Máximo jabbed a finger between his legs.
“Yes!” I smirked. “Your wife will boast that you are a king of kings!”
The men cackled, took up their packs and strode ahead through the mud. There were sometimes paths in the undergrowth when we neared a village. The advantage was that the macheteros did not need to do so much chopping, except where the path had been reclaimed by the jungle. The drawback was the glutinous mud that took us constantly by surprise, sucking the men down to within an inch of their lives.
By late afternoon, we reached the Inchipata River. I had plan
ned to float the old rubber boat, but the water was no more than ankle deep. A tense moment passed, during which the farmers realized they would have to carry their loads the entire way. Again, Richard brandished his weapon menacingly, as if ready to dispatch a band of Vietcong lurking between the trees.
“We will camp here for the night,” I said.
The first camp took a long while to build, there being no routine. We erected two tarpaulins, one for us and one for the men. They had put down their loads and were waiting for Pot Noodles, and for someone else to prepare the camp. I gave a volley of orders: collect firewood, secure the gear, put up the tarps. Máximo shook his head, smiling the smile of an obsequious salesman who thinks he knows best. He took off his boots and lay back.
“We are praying,” he said.
“No work, no Pot Noodles,” I responded.
The farmers were galvanized into action, even though they had still to taste the exotic English dish.
I had known from the start that I could not expect a local team to be charged with the insatiable enthusiasm that drove me on. As I saw it, the single objective was to keep going. Anything that did not aid this goal was against me and against us all. Running an expedition can bring out the worst in a man. It can make you a power-crazed monster. Even if you keep hold of your senses, you find those under your command detest you from the start. When I read in historical memoirs how a commander was adored by his troops, I take it with a pinch of salt. For if the commander pushed his troops through landscapes of unendurable hardship, they would have no choice but to despise him.
I took comfort in the expeditions of the great Victorian explorers. Their methods were at best ruthless, at worst criminal. But men like Stanley, Livingstone and Samuel Baker could maintain movement for months, even years. I had to respect them for that whatever their methods.
The farmers said prayers before dinner, each reading a passage aloud from his Bible. Then they ate their Pot Noodles in silence, as if they were a religious symbol of some kind, a jungle Eucharist. Rogerio, the most sullen of the men, was overcome with pleasure. He said he could feel blood gushing like a waterfall into his boxer shorts. “Un afrodisíaco” he said, gloating.