The Complete Collection of Travel Literature

by Tahir Shah

  “Sí, muchos problemas, yes, many problems,” said El Maestro. “If you knew the hazards that lie between us and Paititi, your hair would turn white in a moment, just like my own.”

  “What problems lie ahead?”

  Héctor peered down at the worn table, blew a spider from its surface, and said: “After the fourth pongo we will come to a place of negative energy. It will affect us all, turning friends into enemies and enemies into friends. The compass will spin round and round, and we will lose all orientation.”

  “But we have the river,” I interjected.

  “Ah, sí, el río,” said Héctor, disdainfully. “The river is the greatest enemy of all. It will try to drown us, sucking us into an underwater world of spirits and demons.”

  There was a point in all Héctor’s rants at which he crossed a dividing line. It separated two worlds: one of questionable but interesting possibility, the other in which his fantasy ran amok. I would always notice the dividing line approaching and seek to halt the conversation before we crossed the threshold.

  “Underground tunnels connect Paititi with other places,” he exclaimed, in one such tirade. “You may laugh at me, but Paititi is linked with the lost continents of Atlantis and Mu.”

  The film crew and I regarded each other with disappointment. Our host had descended once again into the twilight zone of his own imagination.

  One way to deflect Héctor’s attention away from the fantasy, back into the natural world, was to mention the name of the Machiguenga tribe. He despised them, although he would never admit it. In his eyes they were not noble savages but a barbaric, atheist people. “The time for conversion will come,” he would say grandly. “It’s time for them to grow up, to taste the Word of God on their tongues.”

  It was at one such debate about Paititi, the tribe and the Word of Jesus, that we first heard of Pancho. Héctor uttered the name in passing, as part of another tale.

  “Who’s Pancho?” I asked.

  Héctor inhaled a deep breath of air, and let it out gently, in a prolonged sigh.

  “Pancho,” he said, “is the man you will need if you want to find Paititi,” he said.

  “Why? What does he know?”

  The old man caught my eye. It was like a paralyzed man signaling to me, signaling a grave danger and a secret solution.

  “Pancho has seen the ruins of Paititi, con sus propios ojos, with his own eyes,” he said calmly.

  I wanted to slap Héctor on the back and curse him for not telling us before. But he must have had reasons not to reveal Pancho until then.

  “As a young man seeking new hunting grounds,” said Héctor, “Pancho spotted a big wall deep in the jungle. It was overgrown with creepers and vines. Nearby he found another, and then another. He realized that it was a series of vast ruins, from the time of the Incas. He saw something poking out from beneath a big stone, so he dug with his hands and discovered a hatchet, its blade adorned with gold. He was very excited, so he took the thing to his father, who was then head of the tribe. But his father grew very angry. He shouted at the boy, ordering him to return the hatchet at once and to forget about the ruins... for fear of activating the curse, the curse of Paititi.”

  Again Héctor paused, this time to heighten the dramatic effect. “Pancho returned the hatchet, but...” he said slowly “... pero él nunca pudo olvidar, but he could not forget.”

  “Where did he find the ruins?”

  “Only Pancho knows exactly,” Héctor replied. “Sólo él puede llevarnos allá, only he can take us there.”

  “Let’s go and meet him now. Let’s beg him,” I said. “Surely there’s something he wants in return.”

  “You are not ready yet,” he responded. “You are not cleansed of your sins.”

  Héctor stood up, put on his clean white shirt and went to church to pray. As far as he was concerned, we ought to have been living in the church: it was the best route to Paititi. I was buoyed by Pancho’s story, but until I heard it from his own lips, I suspected it was just another tale from the dark side of the old man’s mind.

  Another week drifted by. We hardly saw Richard in that time. He would get up at night and walk round the village, scurrying from one shadow to the next. He never turned up for meals, and refused to pray.

  “Un hombre que no reza, a man who does not pray,” said Héctor one morning, “es un hombre que tiene el alma envenenada, is a man who has a poisoned soul.”

  He didn’t say so, but I knew he was referring to the Vietnam veteran. Word spread in the village that Richard was in league with the devil. The headman said he had seen him jumping on chickens, ripping off their heads and drinking the blood. And Héctor’s neighbor, a kind woman with gold front teeth called Dolores, said she had seen the veteran “raping the pigs”. Richard and I might have been at each other’s throats much of the time, but I had to protest at the allegation. Even he, I felt, would have drawn a line at bestiality.

  Then, one morning, Richard approached us as we sat in the shade studying the maps. He was chewing a big quid of coca leaves. I noticed that his jungle boots were laced, as if he was ready to set out on a journey. I asked him what was going on.

  “I’m leaving,” he said, “pulling out.”

  We all showed surprise.

  “Yeah, well, just remember,” he said, “that I’m no pussycat. I got friends, people of influence. Mess me around and the Lima police will be buggering you before you know it.”

  Héctor and his family got wind of the departure and fled to the church to pray for Richard’s poisoned soul. They said later that they didn’t want to say farewell. It was left to the film crew and me to walk him down to the river to begin his long journey back to Iquitos.

  A moment before he stepped on to the rickety hollowed-out canoe to cross the Madre de Dios River, Richard shouted back, “You’ll be hearing from me.”

  Sure enough we did hear from him a few days later, through a middleman. The communication came via the film crew’s satellite telephone. A voice at the other end was asking for twenty-five thousand dollars in used fifty-dollar bills. “It’s for the tapes,” said the voice. “Take down this number and call me at dusk.”

  A sick, panicked feeling washed over us all. David and Leon ran to their camera bags and counted their videotapes. Twenty-five hours’ worth of material was missing. The two Swedes huddled in a corner for a long time, chattering in their native tongue. At first they seemed in the depths of despair. But then their voices strengthened. They stopped talking and came to where the rest of us were sitting.

  “How can we ever raise that much money?” I asked.

  “We don’t have to,” said David.

  “What do you mean? Shall we call the police?”

  “We’ve decided not even to return the call,” said Leon. “It’s like kidnapping a man who no one wants. We’ll shoot more film. It’s as easy as that.”

  The next day Héctor was up as usual at five a.m. But that morning he did not sing hymns. Instead he had taken out his rubber hunting boots and his best machete. He was sharpening the knife on a block of oiled granite.

  “No hymns?” I said quizzically.

  “No hay tiempo para canciones, there is no time for songs,” he replied.

  “But what has changed?”

  Héctor, El Maestro, looked at me down the razor-sharp blade of his machete.

  “The wickedness that cloaked you has vanished,” he said. “Estamos listos para partir, we are ready to leave.”

  As if he had been listening from behind a tree, the Peruvian official Señor Franco appeared from nowhere. He said he was passing and merely wanted to remind us of the danger of breaking sanctioned boundaries. It was obvious that Richard had tipped him off on his way back to civilization.

  Héctor said we would need to spend a little time getting a good group of porters together, and making contact with Pancho. “You need chainsaw men,” he said, slapping his biceps, “not feeble farm boys. You need men who can uproot trees with their
bare hands, and live on raw jungle meat if they have to.”

  “Do such men exist around here?” I asked.

  “Of course,” the Maestro replied, “but they’re deep in the forest cutting down trees. You have no idea how many trees there are to be felled. I will call for them.”

  The next problem to overcome was Pancho. Although he supposedly knew where the ruins lay, he had refused to return to them. He was not so fearful of activating the curse as he was of his own tribe. They had threatened to burn down his hut if he even talked of Paititi. I begged Héctor to think of something that might tempt Pancho into taking us. Surely there was something we could give him worth more than his wattle-and-daub maloca, and the land it was on.

  “There is something that Pancho wants very, very much,” Héctor replied. “He would risk everything he had on it.”

  “What is it?”

  “He wants to go to Cusco.”

  “We can arrange that,” I said. “We can take him.”

  Héctor smiled softly. Then his look of pleasure turned to one of contempt.

  “It is worse than that,” he said. “You see, Pancho wants to go to a brothel with “high class” women, with big breasts, and he wants to go dancing in a discotheque.”

  I looked at the Swedes. They looked at me. We all looked at Héctor, and said together, “We can arrange that.”

  With the Maestro fighting us every inch of the way, we marched out of Panataua and up along the jungle route to the Machiguenga village at Mantacolla. Our visit coincided with their annual carnival. Rather than being linked in any way to the tribe’s culture or heritage, it was centred around their unremitting desire to get extremely drunk on masato, the manioc-root beer.

  By the time we got to the village, the festivities had been going on for about three days. Many tribesmen were so drunk they couldn’t stand. In our society a person may have a few drinks in the evening. But in Machiguenga culture, a man will drink all day and all night for days on end, with short periods of stupor-like sleep in between. The sight of fifty inebriated men and women was made all the stranger by the fact that most of them were painted fuchsia pink. Those who could stand were dancing around a tree in ankle-deep mud, swiping at its trunk with axes and singing.

  Héctor forbade us to mention the name of the lost city to any of them. Do so, he said sternly, and they might kill us, so strong was their fear of the curse. I asked him to go and find Pancho. Two hours passed, and Héctor returned. He said he had found his friend, who had agreed to come to Lima. “Pancho’s very happy” he said, “but he won’t go now, because everyone is watching. The tribe have told him they’ll kill him if he breaks the bond of secrecy.”

  We stayed at the carnival for two days, in the hope of befriending the tribe. They were suspicious, and only began to warm to us when they saw us drinking their unpleasant saliva-fermented beer. They sat in the middle of the village, watching the sun go down, a glorious backdrop against which the theatre of the Machiguenga carnival was played out. As we sat there, drinking the vile masato, declaring how delicious we found it, I reflected.

  Pancho’s ambition was the mirror image of my own. I yearned to find a lost city, all overgrown and deserted, while Pancho dreamed of a live city, bustling with people and traffic. Taking a Peruvian tribesman from the jungle to the city was certainly not a politically correct thing to do, but I didn’t see that I had much choice. Pancho was the only man who could lead me to Paititi... or was he? I asked Héctor.

  “His brother knows the location of the ruins as well,” he replied. “He is called Javier, and he lives upriver at Aboroa.”

  “Do you know him?”

  “Sí, por supuesto, yes, of course I do,” said Héctor. “I’ve known them both since they were young men.”

  With the Machiguenga festivities in full swing, it seemed as if the carnival might last many days longer. Héctor said they would celebrate until no one had the strength to stand. “In some ways it’s a good thing,” he said. “They go crazy from time to time and get it out of their system, then they go back to their ordinary lives.”

  Héctor was careful not to condemn the tribe, a people whose souls he obviously regarded as damned. They all knew him, from the old crones to the strapping young warriors who wore bands of black toucan feathers across their brows. They would offer him a bowl of warm masato or try to rub fuchsia dye on his face. Héctor would simply smile, thank them for thinking of him, and shy back into the shadows.

  Before we left Mantacolla to walk back to Panataua, Héctor pointed to a glade that lay between the village and the forest. He seemed overcome for a moment, as if a higher power were signaling to him. “That would be a lovely place to build a church,” he said.

  That night Doris served stewed bananas. They were lightly salted, sitting on a bed of macaroni. Since Richard’s departure, Héctor’s wife had been filled with an intense energy. She said it was the soul of Jesus filling her veins. You could see it in her eyes, in her manner. She no longer stooped, but swaggered around the shack, singing, laughing.

  “El diablo estuvo acá, there was evil here,” she said, “pero ahora el mal se ha ido, but now the evil has gone.”

  Héctor was equally buoyant. He was ready for the journey, and spent all the next morning looking at the map. What surprised me was his lack of knowledge of the great jungle that lay west of the village. But no one else in Panataua knew any more than he: only the Machiguenga had explored the wilderness of Madre de Dios. As far as everyone else was concerned, the jungle was a place where blood-drinking phantoms lurked, a place to be avoided at all costs.

  Just before lunch a squat, crag-faced man in blue denim shorts came to the house. We had often seen him stalking us as we wandered through the village. Héctor had once said that this man, who was called Francisco, had killed his wife but that no one could prove it. The woman had disappeared one night, fifteen years before, after a night of rain. Rather than show remorse, Francisco had been seen dancing drunk in his shack. He was universally despised for being a busybody. I was taken aback to find Héctor welcoming him into his home. “Francisco will be coming with us on the journey,” he said.

  The crag face lit up for a moment, before its mouth barked, “Well, you’d better give me enough food, or you will see my anger!”

  I regarded Héctor incredulously. Francisco shook our hands and stumbled away into the bright light.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, once Crag-face had gone. “He’s terrible. He can’t come with us. Everyone hates him. He is an enemy, not a friend!”

  “Precisely!” said the Maestro. “I told you... we will reach a place of negative energy, que hará amigos a los enemigos y enemigos a los amigos, it will turn friends into enemies, and enemies into friends.” He paused to allow the warped logic to sink in. As he saw it, we would have to take along an enemy who would ultimately become a friend. “On the journey to find Paititi,” he said, “you have to prepare, and use your mind. Francisco is indeed my enemy, we loathe each other, and as my enemy he could be the one man to save our expedition.”

  “But why didn’t you want Richard to come on the trip, then?”

  The old man looked at me hard, blinked, and said, “Because there is a difference between an enemy and the devil.”

  Héctor could see I was worried. We might have had a mountain of Pot Noodles to feed our porters, but we still didn’t have any porters, except the village busybody whom no one could stand. We had a map with gaping white spaces across it, Peruvian officials snapping at our heels, and the one man who could take us to the ruins, Pancho, was too fearful to join us.

  “Put your trust in Jesus, and clear your mind,” Héctor counselled. “The problems will melt like butter on the desert sand.”

  “When will the porters get here?”

  Héctor looked at his wristwatch. It ran two hours slow, but in the jungle precision timing was not important. “They should be here in a few minutes,” he said.

  Sure enough, the sound of men in
rubber boots was heard soon after, stomping across the baked-mud path. I opened the door and peered out. Even through the twilight it was instantly clear that they were not farm boys but chainsaw men. There were fifteen of them. Their arms were bulky and over-developed, part attractive, part grotesque. They walked with confidence, purpose, as if they knew where they were going, and they had no fear of the destination. Best of all, they were not carrying Bibles.

  Héctor nudged me as they approached. “These men don’t need aphrodisiacs,” he said.

  When they had greeted the old man, I asked them if they would work as porters, for eight dollars per man per day. They did not show much excitement about the wage. But Héctor said it was merely their manner, confident yet reserved. The porters agreed to carry as much as they could for as long as the journey took. I asked whether they were frightened of the jungle. The men showed humour for the first time, laughing until their eyes were glazed with tears.

  “We have no fear of the jungle,” said one man, “but it is terrified of us, because we are the chainsaw gang.”

  The day before leaving upriver, Boris, the Bulgarian film student, woke up in the night. He ran out of the dining shack, where the five of us were sleeping in a line on the floor. We found him in the morning, crouching on the path outside. He was gripping his belly. Leon asked what was wrong, if he had stomach problems.

  “The spirits entered me through my dreams,” he said. “I can feel them in there.”

  Until that morning Boris had seemed to me an intelligent young man, not the type you would expect to believe in such nonsense. I warned him not to mention the dream or the spirits to Héctor and Doris. But, unfortunately, they had overheard the conversation. They rushed out of the shack with an oversized Bible.

  “Los espíritus, the spirits,” said Doris darkly, “they are battling for Boris’s soul. We must take him to church at once.”

  The expedition was put on hold as Héctor led the Bulgarian to the wooden church at the edge of the village. They stayed there all day, praying, beseeching Jesus to cast out the malevolent forces from Boris’s intestines. Two further days of praying followed. The rest of the film crew and I went mad with waiting, but there was no alternative. Then, on the morning of the fourth day, Héctor said that Boris was healed. We could leave at once.