The Complete Collection of Travel Literature

by Tahir Shah

  “¡Si!” exclaimed the others, “¡un afrodisíaco!”

  On the first night, I lay on my back wrapped in my sleeping-bag, my head propped up with a tangle of wet clothes. If I looked out from the end of the makeshift tent, I could see the stars. They were like a million fragments of chalk dust blown across a sheet of black card. I gazed at them, adoring them, worshipping them. The air was still, motionless, punctuated from time to time by the sound of one creature caught by another, the chorus of death.

  The film crew lay still, lined up like anchovies in a can. Richard was sitting up at the far end of the tent, smoking Marlboros and chewing coca leaves. Like me, I think he appreciated the calm. It reminded him of Vietnam. Then, from the distance, my ears registered a faint sound. It was the sound of a man groaning, a man in pain. It grew louder and louder, as if the pain was increasing. I sat up. “What’s that?”

  “Nothing to worry about,” said Richard.

  “It sounds serious.”

  “Go back to sleep.”

  “But what is it?”

  The veteran exhaled a cloud of smoke. “It’s just the farm boys buggering each other,” he said.

  We walked all next day, the porters groaning about their packs, and the smirking of other wounds, fresh from the night. Morale was tremendously low, pathetically low, considering we had covered little ground and endured nothing in the way of real hardship. The jungle grew very thick, a snarled mess of paka, fine thorny bamboo; brush against it and it lacerated your skin. The undergrowth was too thick to traverse with machetes, so we marched up the river in a line, slipping on the flat round stones on the bottom. The new danger was the sudden dips, which took us by surprise. A misplaced foot, and you were underwater, pulled down by your pack, struggling to get upright, flailing like a drowning man.

  Sometimes there was a slender strand of silt that formed a beach along which we could walk. The difficulty of walking on wet sand was tremendous. From time to time it was dotted with the haphazard tracks of a large quadruped.

  “Sachavaca, giant tapir,” said Richard. “Good meat if you can catch it.”

  The farmers squirmed and moaned with every step, like schoolboys lost on a cross-country run. The film crew and I were carrying the same weight; we found we could endure our packs with comfort.

  “I’ve been around,” Richard explained menacingly,” and I’ve never seen a bunch of sissies like this. If we were in the army, I’d get physical with “em, beat the shit out of “em.”

  Then, as the Inchipata veered north-west, we caught the first glimpse of the mountain ridge, on the windward side of which the pinnacles were said to lie. The farmers stopped trudging as soon as they caught sight of the ridge. They took out their Bibles and held an impromptu prayer session.

  At four that afternoon we made camp. Richard had found some “magic” psilocybe mushrooms and planned to chew them once it was dark. He had been performing well since Rodrigo’s departure, so for once I didn’t berate him for giving in to his addiction.

  “It’s medicine,” he said, under his breath.

  That night I gave the order for some spaghetti to be cooked with two cans of sardines. I wanted to keep the aphrodisiac out of the farmers’ blood. They ate heartily, gorging themselves on the food. Later they prayed long and hard, until the full moon was high above the camp, hanging there like a disc of antique ivory.

  Richard took his military hammock, a candle and a machete, and went to be alone. He climbed up into the undergrowth and made a simple camp, slinging the hammock between a pair of kapok trees. Then he lit the candle and, I assume, he chewed his magic mushrooms. The film crew didn’t say it, but I knew they were now fearful of the veteran soldier. In the four years since he and I had worked together, his mind had become eroded, damaged by the constant stream of nerve agents and, perhaps, by the jungle itself. We were all part of the same unit, the same team, but somehow Richard saw us as a threat.

  I stumbled down to the water’s edge to fill my canteen. The moon’s platinum light reflected off the river, as if the surface had been burnished in some way. I stood there for many minutes, staring out over the silhouette of trees, wondering about Richard, the film crew, the porters and Paititi. I wondered, too, why I find it so necessary to set myself impossible quests. It would be far easier to stay at home and get more gainful employment.

  Then I turned back towards the pair of tarpaulin canopies. Beyond them I caught a glimpse of Richard’s candle, its wick flickering between the intertwined foliage. Very silently, I crept over. Richard was standing naked, a bandanna tied tight around his scalp, a machete in his hands. He was stoned out of his mind, dancing in slow motion round the candle, like a man who had been separated from his sanity. It was so easy to pity him, to see he had been betrayed by his people. He was adrift, clinging to a frail memory, a memory of the time that had both created and destroyed him.

  My eagerness for an early start was never fulfilled. The porters started praying an hour before breakfast. They then insisted on eating a vast amount of fish soup, which the cook had brewed up. While eating, they moaned and groaned about the pain of the straps, which they said cut into their shoulders. It was almost eleven a.m. before we were once again wading through the river.

  The chief danger of late morning was the stingrays, which liked the warm shallow water close to the banks. Most of us cut bamboo staves and stabbed them ahead of our feet. Richard looked very off-color, as if he had been up all night. He didn’t utter a word all day, to the thrill of the Swedes. They were distressed that their bags were being drenched in the river, hour after hour. Then in the afternoon, the Arriflex’s lens fogged up. They had to get the generator going, and use the hairdryer to warm the glass.

  We walked for four hours, bursts of movement punctured by regular breaks for rest and prayer. By the late afternoon we were being plagued by sweat bees. The vile nature of those creatures is indescribable. They swarmed over us, silently sipping the sweat from our faces, hair and arms. As soon as we removed our packs, they flocked to the damp patches where the packs had pressed up to our shirts. I tried removing my shirt entirely, but my skin was soon covered with a thick layer of ecstatic bees.

  The river zigzagged to the west, doubling back on itself every mile or two. The only compensation was that the current was slow: walking upstream would have been much harder work in heavy water. From time to time we cut a trail through the jungle where the river formed a horseshoe. The porters liked to stop in the forest, take off their packs and gather wild berries. It was at one of these berry breaks that we learned of the cook’s obsession.

  He was called Roberto, a young man of no more than about nineteen, with close-cropped hair, and a youthful cleanliness. His skin was fresh and undamaged by hardship, his hands smooth, his voice feminine and soft. The porters were eating the berries they had collected, giggling and poking fun at Roberto. It was gentle fun, like women playing in a harem. I asked them for the joke.

  “It’s Roberto,” said one of the others. “Él está enamorado de Richard, he’s in love with Richard.”

  That night, when the sun had set and the moon ascended to its full height, Roberto plucked up the courage to sneak from the porters’ tent to Richard’s alcove in the jungle. I was almost asleep but, through half-open eyes, I saw a slender shadow move across the beach and into the undergrowth. A minute went by. It was followed by a high-pitched, terrifying shriek of fear, and the sound of the cook’s bare feet tearing back to bed.

  Richard had mistaken the naked young suitor as a predator, and had lashed out with his machete. By a great stroke of good fortune, the blade had missed the boy’s throat.

  The routine of wading through the river continued for three more days. The porters whinged about the pain at every opportunity, scowling at me as if I had murdered their families in the night. So great was their anger that the Swedes suggested I sleep with a machete under the knot of clothes I used as a pillow. They said it was just a question of who snapped first: the porte
rs or Richard.

  The men might have reviled me as their tormentor, but Richard’s condition was far graver. From the moment Roberto had sought to attract his affections, Richard had been behaving very oddly indeed. He stopped talking, plugged his ears with candle wax, and if anyone addressed him, he would tremble uncontrollably. We tried to stay out of his way, fearful that his withdrawal symptoms might be reaching a climax. The focus of my overriding concern was the shotgun, designed to bring down a maximum number of people in the least time. His hands were always molded around it as he walked. It had become an extension of his body, just as an M16 must have been in Vietnam.

  Every so often I went to Richard to make reconciliations. But he stared through me, as he did with all the other men. The only one he struggled to focus on was the cook. He watched the boy like a hawk, as if waiting for the right moment to kill him. Worse still was that the more threatening Richard’s gaze became, the more Roberto adored it.

  As much as I disliked the porters, I went to them after their early-evening prayer session, and advised them in the strongest terms to rein in Roberto. “If he carries on like this,” I said coldly, “the gun will claim its first victim.”

  Máximo spoke for them all: “Le hemos advertido, también, we have warned him, too,” he said, “but Roberto has the fire of a woman who has been rejected. It cannot be put out, but must blaze on and on. My friend,” he continued, with increased drama, “éste es el fuego del verdadero amor, this is the fire of true love.”

  In the evening Richard made his usual modest camp in the forest, built a campfire, and sharpened his machete on a stone. We could hear the blade rasping up and down, again and again, like the sound of the sea breaking over rocks. Roberto was looking on in the darkness, timid and bewildered. He had removed his clothes and was crouching low. For a moment, in the silver light, I thought I saw him clench his knees as if he was ready to hurl himself upon his true love. It would, of course, have been suicide.

  At 10.24 a.m. on the fifth day, we spotted the so-called pinnacles. It was hard to make them out at first, as they were densely covered in trees and shrubs, lying in the shadow of the low ridge. They didn’t look like pinnacles or pyramids at all. From the first moment I saw them, I knew the journey had been a waste of time, that the pinnacles were no more connected to Paititi than anything else. They were certainly not man-made.

  The porters took one look and refused to go another step. They stripped down to their boxer shorts, sprawled out on the warm sun-baked rocks, and were soon covered from head to toe in sweat bees. If I had been Stanley, I would have resorted to corporal punishment — but, I reflected, a great explorer such as he would never have hired such a pathetic bunch of men in the first place. “What’s the matter with you all?” I shouted.

  “Es demasiado caluroso, it’s too hot,” said one.

  “Our backs are hurting us,” said another.

  “The devil is up there on the pinnacles,” said a third.

  “¡Sí, el diablo! Yes, the devil! The devil!” cried the others.

  With the porters almost naked and on the point of mutiny, I invited the film crew to carry on with me, on a reconnaissance expedition. We took two climbing ropes and left most of the other gear and food beside the river. I was concerned that the farmers might pilfer the supplies, then mutiny. And so, before we left for the recon mission, I made them give me their boots and the Bibles just in case. We hid them in the jungle a few hundred yards away. Most jungle porters would happily have walked barefoot, but not these softies.

  After following the watercourse for days, it was a wonderful feeling to climb above it. Within an hour of slashing and traipsing through undergrowth, we reached a natural mirador. From there we got a good look at the pinnacles. There were about a dozen, all odd angular shapes, probably having fallen away from the ridge in ancient times. To get to them, we had to cut a trail in an arc, veering down to the south. Without the porters, and the equipment they bore so unhappily, we made fast progress.

  Three hours after setting out, we had managed to climb one of the structures. As we ascended, the vegetation quickly changed, from trees and bamboo to ferns and other higher-altitude flora. There were orchids now, and bromeliads, and every branch and twig was encrusted with green-gray lichens. The temperature fell sharply, too. It was as if we had crossed an invisible barrier, a divide between one realm and the next.

  Despite the coolness of the air, we sweated uncontrollably from exertion, and were caked with sweat bees and small black flies. They crawled over our skin and clothes, desperate to suck liquid from our dry mouths and from our eyes. With the river so close, I couldn’t understand why their thirst was so great.

  Near to the top of the pinnacle, we were forced to haul ourselves up over decomposing vegetation. The granite base was lost beneath many layers of dead branches and fallen trees. We used one of the static ropes, but it wasn’t much good. The amateur climbers for whom they were made rarely have the inconvenience of such a deluge of roots and twisted stems.

  Finally we made it to the top and surveyed the area. It was a place of astonishing natural beauty, and of some secrecy. But it lacked a key ingredient: enchantment. The Incas would have liked it there, I thought, as we went down, but they would never have constructed Paititi in such an obvious place. For them nothing was quite so important as a landscape in which they felt the enduring presence of their god.

  NINE

  WARM CARCASSES

  In Napoleon’s retreat, after his campaign in Russia, many a soldier saved or prolonged his life by creeping within the warm and reeking carcass of a horse that had died by the way.

  The Art of Travel

  We arrived back at the camp at twilight. The temperature had continued to fall through the afternoon and the air was now filled with a sinister calm, the kind that can only lead to a massive, unrelenting downpour of rain. The porters were snuggled up together, some naked, others not. Richard was sitting alone by the river. He didn’t say a word when we got back. He was shaking, rocking back and forth, as if he was very, very cold indeed.

  The porters were reluctant to talk to me, and when they did it was only to say that Richard had been acting strangely all day. They said he had urinated into a cup and stared into the liquid for an hour or more; and that he had wept uncontrollably while they were praying after lunch.

  “What’s the matter with him?” asked Roberto. “¿Qué pasa con mi verdadero amor? What’s the matter with my true love?”

  I said that I didn’t know, but that I was frightened.

  “He has been trained to kill people,” I told them, “so we must forget our differences and protect each other.”

  I would have devised a plan to wrestle the shotgun away from Richard, but feared it would enrage him further. In any case, a man like that, I reflected, could kill us all with his bare hands. He was a killing machine.

  Roberto got up in the night and made a secret meal for the old warrior. He took it to him in his lair in the forest. I don’t know what he was expecting, or hoping, but he was chased away, yelping like a small dog that had been kicked hard by an unkind man.

  At about two a.m. the temperature cooled a fraction of a degree, a rustle of wind streamed over our faces and it began to pour. The rain of Madre de Dios is similar to that of the Amazon, but there is a petrifying aspect to it, as if it seeks to wound rather than to nurture. It rips down in sheets, with anger, with hatred. We lay in our sleeping-bags hoping desperately, as always, that the water would stay out. But, as always, it found its path in, and was soon being sponged up by our bedding.

  The rain continued to fall. It fell through the remainder of the night, all the next morning, through the next day and the following night. All the while, the river rose, inch by inch, until it was ten feet from our camp. We had the option of moving, pitching again in the forest, but the farmers didn’t want to budge. They said that the rain would stop... and, sure enough, it did. It was how the world must have been in the wake of the bibli
cal flood. Birds were seen twittering in the chonta palms, bright sunshine spilling between the fronds.

  The river, which so recently had been little more than a creek, was now a surging body of water. Transformed from innocence to maturity, it was now our greatest foe. The current was so tremendous that we could not get across, let alone wade down it.

  That morning the porters were slower than usual. At eight a.m. they were still cuddled up with each other beneath their long green tarpaulin.

  “What’s the matter with you?” I shouted.

  “Es sábado, it’s Saturday,” said Máximo. “Seventh Day Adventists don’t do anything on Saturday.”

  So they lay there all day. Their only breaks were to eat a meal of roasted fish heads and yuca, and to pray.

  The next day, the river was still far too high for wading. There was only one solution: to blow life into the rubber boat. Máximo and Rogerio took out the Zodiac and unfurled it. Since I had purchased the boat, from a used-car salesman in London’s East End, it had remained untested. Now was the chance to impress the locals, I thought. The porters gathered round. Their amazement lasted until the fragile foot-pump had begun to work. It was soon apparent that the craft was riddled with holes, twenty-three of them.

  Marco, the Ukranian banker, got to work with a repair kit. He glued and glued, until the boat was covered in patches. The problem was that in addition to the holes, the wooden floor was about to fall out, as the seams were in a terrible state. We decided to use it only for luggage, which would be placed on a platform above the waterline.

  As the gluing was in progress, the farmers went out into the forest and hacked down a thicket of balsa trees. They felled about eighteen in all. Within an hour or two, they had stripped the bark of the smooth trunks and nailed them together, using pins made from chonta wood, the same wood that the Machiguenga used for their bows. Their skill and speed in making the rafts astonished me. Until that moment I had regarded them as good for nothing.