by Tahir Shah
Nervously, the warrior squinted at them. He said nothing.
“Have you seen this?” Héctor urged.
Still Javier said nothing.
“He knows, I’m sure he knows,” said the old man, “but he’s frightened. You cannot imagine the depth of his fear. Outsiders are not supposed to go there.”
I was irritated that Héctor would work against me. He was the one man who had the tribe’s respect, yet he would never press them for answers.
A moment later my irritation turned to dismay. The Maestro called together the film crew and me. “We cannot go any further,” he said.
I was too struck, too angry to answer at first.
“What is the problem?” asked the banker.
“There are many problems,” he replied. “The rapids are so perilous that we will drown, and if we do get ahead, the savage tribe upriver will slit our throats. But, worst of all, the spirits are waiting.”
The leader of an expedition has two responsibilities. The first is to solve problems, and the second is to drag his team ahead, whether they like it or not. I brooded in silence, waiting for Héctor to finish. Condemning him as a coward would have served no purpose, for he was our link with the tribe. But then, as I saw it, the tribe were next to no good at all. For all his grand talk about Paititi, Héctor was proving himself a dreamer – a strong man, but a dreamer none the less.
The sun was not yet hovering above the trees. It was still early.
“We will leave in an hour,” I said. “There is no point wasting time with Javier, at least until we have forded the rapids. We will move on with the gear, then send a team back to talk him into coming.”
The film crew went to gather their equipment together. Héctor and I were left alone.
“No tienes miedo, mi amigo, you have no fear, my friend,” he said, with a wry smile.
“My ignorance protects me.”
Search for a lost city and you need heroes. They provide solace in the days of miserable rain, illness and fatigue, and are a beacon of hope at times when the only certainty is failure. On hard journeys, as I huddle in the tent waiting for sleep and the wretched night to pass, I find myself standing before my pantheon of heroes. They sit in judgment, peering down at me in the dock. They are all in shadow, except one whose face I see quite clearly. Each night the face is different. Sometimes it speaks, urging advice, or simply leers down, as if to remind me of its triumph over adversity.
The face that I was to see most often was that of Hiram Bingham, the American explorer celebrated for discovering Machu Picchu in 1911. For any man on the quest of Paititi, Bingham is the example of excellence. At thirty-six, he was the same age as I was then when he found Machu Picchu. The portrait I would see of him in my mind was the one so often presented in history books: Bingham the glorious, posing before his canvas tent, dressed in safari jacket, puttee leggings, stout walking shoes and gray trilby Glorious he might have been, but his expression was almost sullen, as if he was not quite content with his achievement.
Bingham was a scholar and an expert on Incan history. He was associated with Yale University, which funded his expedition, and was a man who pursued his goals with single-minded determination. He scanned the historical treatises for clues and quizzed the local people, but his success was largely a result of good calculation and time spent on the ground. On 24 July 1911, he reached Machu Picchu, and first set eyes on the ruins of which he had dreamed for so long. He saw houses, built “of the finest Inca stone work”, overgrown with creepers and vines; there were walls of white granite blocks, funerary caves, flights of stone steps, sacrificial places and, of course, the intihuatana, the stone post to which the Incas tied the sun.
Locating Machu Picchu set Bingham up for a life of celebrity, and made him a household name. He mixed with the rich and famous, lectured all over the world, and was even elected to the US Senate.
If Hiram Bingham was to teach me anything it was to keep going, however rotten the conditions, and to drive on the team mercilessly; but, most important of all, Bingham’s example taught me never to give up on any account.
We pushed ahead for six more days, enduring miles of rapids. At the time I could not imagine a terrain more terrible. The water cascaded down from the mountains, churning with unimaginable ferocity. It was white, always white, alive, like some horrible creature desperate for revenge. The porters pulled the boats ahead an inch at a time, like an army pitting all in the hope of gaining a few feet of no man’s land.
They proved their strength. They heaved at the ropes, until their hands bled and the muscles in their arms were raw. The film crew were forced often to stop filming and help. Every hand was needed to haul at the ropes, to clear away rocks and create an easier passage. Inch by inch, we progressed, but as soon as one rapid ended, another began. I asked for Héctor’s advice.
“Éstos no son los verdaderos rápidos, these are not the real rapids,” he said.
On the third evening a new problem visited the camp: the great fever. We had learned to put up with the guinea worms, which bored out of our thighs. They were alarming, but small. We also endured the other great scourge of the Madre de Dios jungle, the chigger fly, which burrows into the skin and inserts its eggs into a cavity beneath the subcutaneous fat. The chigger fly, known locally as uta, has beset jungle explorers for centuries. It plagued our legs, as it must have done those of the conquistadores five hundred years before. Once the larvae have hatched, the wounds turn to sores and then go septic. The pain was severe and, as we spent each day in the water, the infected skin could not heal. In the sixties an American socialite traveler in the Amazon, called Nicole Maxwell, discovered that the best way to kill the unhatched larvae was to dab the spot with red nail varnish. Unfortunately we had taken no beauty products with us.
The chiggers grew worse every day, and affected us all. But the new torment to hit us was the fever, which caused the victim to sweat so uncontrollably that the shape of his face changed. I realized, some time later, that it was dengue fever.
The Swedes were the first to go down with it. They lay beneath the tarpaulin, shaking like madmen in a cell. River travel ensured that most of our clothes were always wet, but for them this no longer mattered. Sweat poured from their bodies in astonishing quantities. The rest of us stood and marvelled as they wrung out their shirts.
Héctor did not say so, but I knew he wanted to turn back. The Swedes’ condition grew worse, as did the pressure on me to call the retreat. The film crew were my friends, but they were there only to document the journey. Stubbornly I ordered the team to continue upriver.
On the afternoon of the fifth day, I felt the air temperature cool a fraction. We were resting, having secured the cargo on the rafts, and rubbing our feet with Vaseline. The chill was followed by a distinctive silence, a calm, an indication of change. I glanced up at the sky, and noticed a faint wisp of cloud in the west. I asked Julio for his opinion.
“It will rain in an hour or so,” he said.
“Then we will push on for a little longer.”
The chief porter narrowed his eyes.
“Muy bien, very well,” he said.
In the jungle things can change very fast. We continued hauling the rubber boat and the rafts for thirty minutes. Then, suddenly, darkness fell, and at the same time a storm of demonic proportions descended.
It began with a sprinkling of rain: heavy droplets at first, a messenger of the tempest. We were in the water negotiating an arching staircase of boulders, the river ripping round us like a hurricane. There was no beach on either side, just towering walls of paka, thorny bamboo.
With no riverbank, and nowhere to anchor the boats, we had little choice but to continue. Let the craft go, and our precious equipment and supplies would have been dashed on the rocks. We struggled ahead. Then the full force of the storm broke. The rain hurled down in sheets with such force that it bruised our arms. It threatened to drown us right there and then. The water level rose instantly. Within fi
ve minutes the river had doubled in its cruelty. After that the wind whipped up, tossing us about like skittles. I called to the porters, but no one could hear me. Each man was fighting to save his raft or boat.
The film crew clutched their black Pelican cases, and wrestled through the waves. We took it in turns to throw ourselves upon the mercy of the riverbank, only to have our hands and faces gashed by the thorns. As if the scene was not bad enough, the darkness was suddenly illuminated by arc lightning, which tore across the sky, claps of thunder fast on its tail. The heavens were lit up for minutes at a time.
My head was forced under the waves, smashing against one boulder and the next, as I was swept away. It was like being flushed down a sewage pipe. My shirt and shorts were ripped off by the current, leaving me naked except for my boots. Instinct told me to count: one, two, three, four... I’m not certain why, perhaps it was a countdown to my own death. But the counting suddenly stopped. I had become wedged on my back in a crevice between two boulders. I struggled to thrust my mouth above the surface, and suck in air, glorious air.
I expected to be washed away at any minute. It would have meant certain death. The fury of the water was like when the sluice gates of a dam are flung open wide. All efforts to pull myself round, to sit upright, failed. So I lay there, waiting for the torrential rain to cease, and for the men to spot me.
An hour or so later Francisco arrived. He had been running up and down through the rapids, searching for my remains. I did not see his face at first, just the shadow of a man moving in slow motion through the white water. He struggled over and whistled to the others, sounding the alarm. I was so firmly lodged in the cleft that it took the strength of Francisco and Héctor to release me. Crag-face was laughing, the first time I had seen him do so. But there was no smile on Héctor’s lips: he was stirred with anger. “You will get us all killed,” he shouted, against the noise of the water.
The porters were equally enraged. I couldn’t understand it. They had tied one of the tarps in a copse of saplings, and were sheltering beneath it like sodden chickens on a roost. I thanked them for their endurance, but the line of their faces scowled back. Julio said he wanted more money, and Oscar snapped that he would slit my throat if he did not get some hot food. Another exclaimed he had been robbed, and accused his best friend of the theft. Then Héctor strode up and castigated the men for allowing the supplies to get drenched.
There was only one explanation for the hostility: we must have reached the place of negative energy.
THIRTEEN
FEVER
The number of travelers that have fallen victims to fever in certain lands is terrible; it is a matter of serious consideration whether any motives, short of imperious duty, justify a person in braving a fever-ridden country.
The Art of Travel
The storm died as quickly as it had been born. Shortly before midnight, the lightning ceased, as if an enormous electric switch had been turned off. The rain stopped, too, but the river rose all night, ascending to the high ground on which we were camped. I had ordered that some of the valuable kerosene be used to start a fire, and that each man could eat two Pot Noodles. In usual circumstances, they would have responded with cheers, but on that bleak night, they cursed me, and swore that the expedition was a waste of time. They picked fights with each other, like children brawling over toys. No one was unaffected, except Francisco. He scurried from man to man, muttering words of encouragement.
“He is a stupid fool,” said Héctor, “they’re all stupid fools!”
I accosted the old man. “Don’t you see what’s happening?” I shouted. “We are at the place of negative energy. Friends have turned into enemies, and enemies into friends.”
Héctor slapped his hands together, grimaced, and stormed off into the rain. The film crew were busy drying out the Arriflex and their other camera equipment. They were all bitter beyond belief. I stood apart from them, for fear of an exchange of anger I might regret. Boris scolded Marco for his clumsiness, and the Ukranian rebuked the Swedes for nothing at all. They were both very frail, still sweating despite the cold.
By morning, water was lapping around us. We were lucky no one had drowned in the night. I woke at about six to find everything I owned soaked through. The camp was like a scene from a shipwreck. The men were all asleep, except Héctor. He was standing in the water, gazing upstream. I called to him, then plodded over. After a long while he turned. “You are right,” he said.
“About what?”
“The place of negative energy.” He motioned to an old military compass sitting in his palm. “Mira eso, look at that,” he said.
The needle of the instrument was flitting back and forth. There must have been a scientific reason for it, but at the time it filled me with a terrible haunted sensation, as if we were being watched from the trees. The Maestro had no doubt. As far as he was concerned, the field of energy was part of a divine curse. It had caused the storm and had whipped up hostility between the men. Wait another hour at that place, he said, and no man would escape alive.
We packed up our soaking gear and moved out.
By noon the sky had cleared, and a fresh cool breeze blew in from the west. I didn’t subscribe to Héctor’s belief in witchcraft, but it certainly seemed as if we had crossed a barrier of some kind. The smell of the river had changed, too: it was no longer sour and hard on the nose, it was perfumed with a scent of ripe fruit.
By the afternoon, the place of negative energy, if it had existed at all, was behind us. The current was stronger than ever before, but now the high water helped to ease the boats ahead. We advanced fast, covering four miles or more, the progress boosting the porters’ spirits. Their resentment had dissolved, as had Héctor’s.
That evening, seeing that Francisco was sitting alone, I went over to thank him for saving my life. “Is the earth a better place that you walk upon it?” he asked, and turned away angrily.
When the team had eaten, their feet had been greased and their sores smeared with iodine, I told them we were closing in on Paititi.
“We need a volunteer to go back for Javier,” I said. “Without the Machiguenga, we have no hope of finding the ruins.”
The porters stared down at their boots, their lips tight shut. I said I would double the pay of the one who escorted Javier upriver to our camp. No one volunteered. I rooted through the small black pouch I carried at my waist. It contained a Leatherman knife, a bottle of alcohol wash, a miniature torch, Vaseline, and a few feet of damp loo paper wrapped twice in plastic. None of the items was of sufficient value to entice the porters to volunteer for the mission. Then I noticed a small white plastic box at the bottom of the pouch. I took it out. The men’s eyes followed the object, as I weighed it in my hand. To them, the thin cord contained inside the box was the most useful substance ever devised. They were always asking for a few inches, to sew up their boots, to go fishing, or for hanging the snake-bite antidote piri-piri round their necks. It was waxed dental tape.
I offered the entire box to the man who would fetch Javier. All the porters jumped forward, puffing out their chests like sprinters at the finish line.
That night the long, bearded face of the explorer F. A. Mitchell-Hedges appeared in my mind before I slept. All but forgotten now, Mitchell-Hedges discovered the ruined Mayan city of Lubaantun in Belize back in 1924. As well as an explorer, he was a big-game hunter and adventurer, a yachtsman and an amateur archaeologist. The story of his life reads like a Boy’s Own annual. He claimed to have ridden with Mexico’s Pancho Villa, to have sheltered Leon Trotsky for the night, and to have found ruins on a massive scale.
If anyone has ever proved that you need no credentials to be an explorer, it was Mitchell-Hedges. For years he traipsed around the Caribbean and the Pacific with his adopted daughter Sammy in tow. Like many others of the time, he was a master of self-promotion. His Who’s Who entry of 1928 includes: “Life devoted to exploration and deep-sea research work... holds numerous world records for captur
e of giant fish, penetrated unknown portion of the hinterland of Panama, 1922-3, discovering a new race of people.”
Mitchell-Hedges is best remembered not for the great lost city he found, but for owning the finest rock crystal skull in existence, known as the Skull of Doom. He always claimed that his daughter had found it glinting among the ruins of Lubaantun on her seventeenth birthday. The skull, which has a hinged lower jaw and rectangular ocular cavities, has been a centre of attention for the lunatic crystal-believing fringe for decades.
Cast an eye over Mitchell-Hedges’ curriculum vitae, and you see light shining through the holes — he massaged the facts or made them up. But to me that was not the point: he was a man whose life was never confined by nine-to-five, never restricted by the opinions of others.
All next day we pushed on, as we did the day after, and the day after that. The team was working together like never before, energized, raring to cover ground. They had become expert at rearranging the stones in the rapids to allow the craft an easier passage. Oscar had gone back for Javier, holding the dental floss high like an Olympic torch. I would have sent two men back, but we needed everyone else on the boats.
Héctor counselled me often on the price of doubt. Fail to believe in Paititi strongly enough, he would say, and we had no chance of success. Believe in it, like a sinner touched by God, and, he told me, I would be rewarded. I did believe: I believed that Paititi was there, hidden in the cloud forest, and I believed that, with Javier’s help, we could find it. Every river bend we passed made me more certain that we would triumph, and that locating the ruins without him was impossible.
The routine on the river was matched by the routine on land. We worked together to build a camp each afternoon and to strike it the following morning. We all had duties, including the film crew, who had the added burden of having to clean their equipment each night. They would take immense care to ensure that the damp didn’t penetrate the Arriflex and the lenses. Their most valuable tool was the hairdryer. It was powered by the generator, surely the greatest burden of all.