The Complete Collection of Travel Literature

by Tahir Shah

  ELEVEN

  WASP AND SCORPION STINGS

  The oil scraped out of a tobacco-pipe is a good application; should the scorpion be large, his sting must be treated like a snake-bite.

  The Art of Travel

  The full moon reflected off the surface of the river, glinting, teasing, luring us upstream. It was as if an unseen force had lit a beacon to light the way. Héctor insisted that we leave his village at midnight to avoid the penetrating eye of Señor Franco. In the hours before our departure, he had spread a rumor through the community that we were heading to another river, the Rio Negro, in search of boutou, pink dolphins. The rumor wasn’t strictly necessary, as I had already bribed the villagers with a promise to buy a new Bible for every man, woman and child if they pointed the official in the wrong direction.

  To make faster progress, we had hired a pair of clinker-built boats to navigate the course as far as the western mouth of the Palatoa river. Shortly before midnight, the chainsaw gang heaved the mass of equipment and food down to the water and stowed it in the boats. They were moored to the bank of a rivulet, which fed into the Madre de Dios. The water was low there, the moonlight shaded by tall kapok trees.

  There is no feeling quite like the nocturnal commencement to a journey. It was a rich blend of anticipation and secrecy, as if we were a part of something devious and depraved.

  The one major setback had come at dusk when we had done a full inventory of equipment. Richard had not only taken the video cassettes but had stolen our entire stock of morphine as well. He was planning, no doubt, to use it for recreational purposes. It was too late to replenish our supply, so we would have to head into the jungle without it. It would be needed, though, if a man snapped an ankle on the slippery stones that lined the river.

  From the start the crag-faced Francisco was irate. He didn’t approve of leaving in the middle of the night. Late nights, he said, gave him a migraine, and migraines made him very angry indeed.

  Héctor simply laughed at the protestations. “Think of it like this,” he whispered, as we covered the bags with tarpaulins, “the greater his fury now, the greater his friendship later.”

  Just before we pushed off, Héctor’s young son, Paolo, hurried through the jungle and called to us: “Señor Franco knows you are leaving,” he said. “He’s at the main branch of the river with his launch, flashlights and six of his men.”

  Francisco cackled bitterly, insisting we should turn ourselves in or, better still, go back to the village and call off the trip. His expression was sour, as if he had sucked down a plate of limes, his cheeks pulled back to the ears, all stretched and tight.

  But Héctor had already come up with a plan. “It’s too risky for so many of us to travel past Franco with the boats,” he said. “He will know we are up to something. We will walk through the forest and meet the boats at the second bend.”

  Héctor said he was concerned about the boats. They were so heavy that they were terribly low in the water. While they often ventured downstream fully laden with yuca and bananas, they rarely went upriver with a load. The cargo was covered first with our tarpaulins, and second, with ragged sackcloth sheets, forming a primitive disguise. Unlike the tarps, the sacking did not reflect the moonlight.

  The film crew were unhappy at being separated from their precious camera equipment. I had little sympathy because they had not heeded my pleas to cut down their gear. Film may look far grander than video, but the film cans were bulky and an awful nuisance.

  One minute before one a.m. we tramped into the forest, moving in single file. Héctor and the other locals knew the path so well they needed no light. The film, crew and I had more difficulty: the trail ascended and descended sharply without warning, there were roots and armadillo holes to catch our feet, and a mesh of low branches that whipped us in the face every few feet. We walked in silence, the ghostly curve of the moon breaking through the trees from time to time.

  In the distance we could hear the faint grumble of the engines, the boatmen forcing their craft against the fast current of the Madre de Dios. With hidden boulders so common, even the most experienced pilot risked much by navigating the river at night. Franco was certainly aware of the danger. His curiosity would surely have been piqued by a pair of craft pushing upstream in the middle of the night.

  We walked due north for two hours. In that time not a word was spoken, yet we were deafened by the din of the jungle. Insects with wings no bigger than postage stamps created a sound as loud and piercing as a siren; their noise was drowned out in turn by the chorus of tree frogs, and the clamour of barking rats.

  The men were unladen but I could sense their strength and eagerness. As we pushed on, I considered the importance of enthusiasm: with an enthusiastic team you can achieve virtually anything. When I am selecting people with whom to work, it is the one quality I look for. I don’t care if someone doesn’t have a specific skill, they can learn it. With enthusiasm, a man can overcome his limitations; without it, he is a dead weight.

  Suddenly my train of thought shifted. I realized that Héctor and most of the chainsaw gang were armed with machetes. We had been parted from our equipment, were walking through the jungle at night, and no one but they knew where we were heading. They could have slit our throats, hacked up our bodies and grabbed the boatloads of gear without a second thought. Within a few days the jungle fauna would have consumed us, and we would be a memory, a cautionary tale, like the Nichols expedition had become.

  I was about to urge the film crew to be vigilant for signs of imminent execution, but Héctor spoke first: “Can you see the river down there?” he said, pointing through the trees. “It looks as if we’re ahead of the boats.”

  I glanced down to the water’s mirrored surface, a scene of absolute peace, in stark contrast to the undergrowth. The river moved with an angelic ease. On either side of it, the gray-green foliage was charged with life, the savage fauna within it feeding on itself and on intruders. My legs were running with blood, released by an army of microscopic insect teeth. In more usual circumstances I would have complained, but I noticed that everyone else was affected in a similar way.

  We crouched there, mopping our shins, waiting for the rumble of the peki-peki engines. They didn’t come.

  “We have not yet passed into the restricted area,” Héctor said quietly, “so Señor Franco cannot confiscate the equipment.”

  “But he can cause trouble,” I said.

  “Sí,” said the Maestro, with a deep sigh. “That man can cause trouble.”

  Another hour passed. Héctor was going to send one of the men to spy on the official’s position but just before he dispatched him I made out the faintest murmur of mechanical sound. It was low, rhythmic and consistent, and was getting louder, increasing in echo and pitch. Héctor slapped his palms together. “Here are the boats,” he said.

  They pulled up a few minutes later. We stayed in the shadows lest Señor Franco had come upriver as well, but there was no sign of him. The boatmen reported that the official had swung a bright searchlight across their bows, but the boats had carried on without stopping.

  “There must be so much oil up there,” said Héctor. “I cannot believe that a place so beautiful can shelter a commodity so wicked:

  “Is it safe for us to travel on the boats?”

  “Climb aboard,” said the old man. “Franco won’t bother us now. He has to check in with Cusco every morning at six.”

  We lay outstretched over the packed boats, which moved in fits and starts against the current. The moon had gone, replaced by a blush of pink in the east. I stared up at the sky, my eyes picking out the last trace of stars.

  It was eight thirty when I was wakened, forced with the others to jump into the water and ease the boats through the shallows.

  The payloads were pressing the craft deep, and the boatmen were becoming bitter. They said they would charge us if their boats were damaged on the rocks and, if we didn’t pay up, they would report us to Señor Franco.<
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  My temper almost got the better of me, but Héctor cautioned me: “Let them shout like children,” he said. “There are bigger problems to take our attention.”

  He was right. Fifty yards ahead a throng of Machiguenga warriors were waiting on the shore, many armed with bows and elongated arrows. There must have been about forty men, women and children. Twenty more were squatting on homemade rafts. It was obvious that they were not out fishing.

  “They want money for passing through their stretch of river,” said Héctor calmly. “We must talk to them. They’ll kill us if we trespass.”

  The boats struggled over to the huddle of Indians. They greeted us nervously, suspiciously, as if they had thought up a devious plan.

  Héctor jumped out and waded ashore. The tribe knew him and, although they did not share his belief in Christianity, they liked the old man, and he made an effort to be liked. The rest of us sat in the boats, waiting for Héctor’s command. In such circumstances your trump card is the man with experience. He chatted with them, sharing jokes, lifting the atmosphere. He knew as well as they that money was the only subject of discussion, but he eased the conversation along, warming it, readying it for the matter at hand.

  Eventually the dialog of negotiation began. Numbers were called out in Machiguenga and Spanish, fingers counting sums. After a long while, Héctor approached the boat in which I was sitting. “Shall I give them some alcohol?” I asked.

  “No, no, that will make them even greedier,” said Héctor, “and they are far too greedy already. They have nothing to use this money on — they don’t even know the value of it — but the missionaries have told them to demand currency.”

  “How much do they want?”

  “Cincuenta mil soles, fifty thousand soles,” he replied.

  “That’s four thousand dollars! It’s nothing short of piracy.”

  “Of course it is,” said Héctor. “Most of them have never even seen a shop.”

  I sent the Maestro back to get the price down, or to offer them some equipment after the expedition. Two hours of discussion followed. At the end of it, gourds of warm bubbling masato were served up and the warriors were grinning. “I’ve offered them your rubber boat and five hundred dollars,” said Héctor. “Regard it as the value of our lives.”

  By dusk, the boatmen were seething with anger. They had been enraged for a good long while, surpassed only by Francisco, who was driving us all mad. He moaned about anything and everything, from the condition of the boats to the sound of their engines to the scent of the air. Whenever he heard Crag-face’s reprimands, Héctor would exclaim how fortunate we were to have him along, and how valuable he would be once we reached the zone of negative energy.

  We had seen no houses on the shore since leaving Panataua, except for two or three at the tribe’s village. In the Upper Amazon, communities were much more common along the rivers, but the Madre de Dios jungle is higher and sustains far fewer animals, and therefore fewer people.

  Venus was visible, and I spotted a triangle of bamboo malocas three hundred yards ahead. At first it was an unnerving sight; I feared more Machiguenga wanting yet more money. But Héctor’s spirits were boosted at the sight. “It’s Aboroa,” he said, “the home of Pancho’s mother, and her other son, Javier.”

  “The one who also knows the location of the ruins?”

  ¡Sí, sí” he replied. “Él puede ayudarnos, he can help us.”

  The boatmen put us ashore and fled back downriver. They were both incandescent with rage. It seemed miraculous that they had taken us as far as Aboroa. All around the water was filled with boulders, rising up like miniature black icebergs. I was sorry to see the craft retreat; it meant that we would be carrying the luggage from then on.

  Before we could ask about Pancho’s brother, we greeted his mother. She was a wizened woman with a bald head, twig-like limbs and a mouth naked of teeth. I am uncertain of her name, as I never heard it spoken. Héctor and the others called her Tía, aunt. He hugged her, and she rewarded him with half a gallon of masato, its raw ingredient chewed by her gums.

  When we had all greeted the old woman, and drunk a similar quantity of the wretched beverage, Héctor asked her about Javier.

  “He’s gone upriver to trap parrots and hunt tapir,” she said. “Go up there and you will find him.” She made it sound so easy, as if we would spot him straight away among a million trees.

  We pitched a camp beside her shack, and she presented us with a male curassow. One of the porters tore off the bird’s head and the jet-black feathers; he said he was very hungry. We had brought a large amount of yuca. It was boiled up as well. The roots were so heavy that I was keen for them to be eaten, rather than carry them. I strained a little of the starchy water from the pan and poured it into a Chicken and Mushroom Pot Noodle for the old woman. She took a nibble with her gums and grimaced.

  “It tastes like pacamama”, she said.

  “What’s pacamama? I asked.

  “It’s bamboo rat,” said Héctor.

  Tia fed the Pot Noodle to a cluster of chicks that she kept as pets. She had woven them a kind of wicker nest; it was an impressive example of craftsmanship. Her home was awash with jungle animals — there was a clutch of matamata turtles, a spider monkey, four toucans and a pair of young anteaters. It was like a zoo without cages, but it was clear that all the creatures were being raised for the table. The Machiguenga regarded the jungle as a giant larder that is always stocked. If they needed something to eat, they looked around for an animal to catch. If they saw one, they killed it. They never hunted for sport, and always ate what they killed.

  The porters were eager to try the Pot Noodles for themselves. Since our trip to the pinnacles, word had spread about the additive-rich snacks brought from far away. Their leader was a strong-willed man called Julio, whose chest was ribbed with muscle; he begged me to let him try a mouthful.

  “Is it true that one Pot Noodle can make a man potent all night long?” he asked, when there was a pause in conversation.

  “Sí, sí,” said another, “I have heard that you can satisfy six women and still not get tired!”

  I warned the men against believing misinformation. Do so, I said, and our expedition’s success would be plunged into danger.

  Pancho’s mother had much to say on the subject of danger. When she had heard of my mission to discover Paititi, she declared simply that we would all perish on the trip: “El río los tragará, the river will swallow you up,” she said.

  We came across remarkably few people in the jungle. But all of them, without exception, foresaw disaster. Some said that a giant serpent would rise up from the river and drown us, others that a storm would slay us with lightning, or that El Tigre would pounce, and swallow us while we slept.

  We found one of Tia’s old neighbors pilfering our supplies that night. He took one look at me and shouted something.

  “What did he say?”

  Julio seemed anxious. I repeated the question.

  “Él dijo que eres un hombre malvado, he said you are an evil man,” he replied.

  Perhaps the warnings were expressed because of the wretchedness of our equipment; after all, most other expeditions must have seemed far more glamorous. But, looking back, I assume our gear had nothing to do with their reasoning. As far as the tribe was concerned, any outsiders — by that they meant non-Machiguenga — were intruders. To them intruders had the power to trigger the wrath of the jungle. They regarded the cloud forest as a single being, a creature, an animate object capable of thought. They believed that the jungle could be made happy, just as it could become enraged.

  I took the cautions of danger lightly. They flooded in from all sides, most strongly from Héctor. He ranted on all the time about wild renegade warriors lurking in the undergrowth. He said they carried special arrows designed to pass straight through a man’s chest. It seemed ludicrous that he believed in such hazards; but danger, or the myth of it, was his own twisted currency. Like Tia and everyone
else we met, the idea of sinister forces waiting to prey on our feebleness fed his mind and gave him strength.

  My concern was that the men were listening to the tales of impending disaster, and they were believing what their ears took in. The more they heard, the more they chattered together in the darkness; and the more they chattered, the more fiercely they regarded me each morning. Sometimes they would approach me in ones and twos, hoping to discuss the risk. I knew that I had to keep them moving at all costs. There was no time to speculate on phantom predators, and no sense in it. Speculation was perhaps the most dangerous enemy of all.

  Héctor might have been the originator of many rumors and legends, but I was realizing his great value. He charged the men with fear, but he motivated them at the same time. I wondered if the talk of terror was in fact a tool by which he sought to control others. The porters looked up to him as a kind of superhuman. As far as they were concerned, he was a man in tune with the mortal and spiritual dimensions. Unlike the previous team of porters, the new group were not Adventists, although they were Christians.

  The day after arriving at Aboroa, we left it. I was pleased to have escaped Tia’s unending supply of masato. The first dose had given me a bad stomach, which was to plague me for weeks. The film crew were equally affected, all except Boris, the Bulgarian, who became strangely addicted to the saliva-based alcohol. He couldn’t drink enough to satisfy his thirst.

  We had spent the morning building a pair of balsa rafts, and swapped some yuca for a large raft owned by Pancho’s mother. The dilapidated rubber boat was inflated, much to the Machiguenga’s amusement. By the late morning we were on the move again.

  Heading upstream without even the feeble peki-peki engines to propel us forwards was gruelling beyond belief. The water was high, the current fast, the rapids endless. With hindsight I can say that it was impossible, but I was unaware of that then so I drove the men on. The previous porters would have mutinied in the first hour, but the chainsaw gang thrived on the physical pain. We tied the long climbing ropes to the rafts and to the Zodiac, and split into teams, four men to a craft, two pushing, two pulling. The ropes were paid out a hundred yards or more. The longer the distance between the boat and the pulling team, the faster the progress.