by Tahir Shah
On the fourth day after the great storm, we rose early and prepared to move out. The camp was criss-crossed with the oversized tracks of a sachavaca, giant tapir. The footprints were deep in the sand, hinting of the creature’s considerable weight. Héctor had been up in the night, and appeared depressed and anxious. He was sitting on a stone beside the smoldering fire, his palms pressed over his white beard. I asked what was the matter.
“The energy is becoming stronger,” he said.
I was going to beg him to be optimistic, but Marco nudged me. “Héctor is a dreamer,” he said. “Let him dream.”
So I did, and we pushed out into the chill water. One bend followed another, and the jungle came alive with hyacinth macaws, which cluster on the riverbanks to feast on the clay. The Palatoa had long been following a ridge, which ran to the north like an impassable bulwark. It was shrouded in trees. Perspective made them seem like seedlings, but in reality they were a hundred feet high.
A great swarm of sweat bees appeared at about noon. They covered our faces, suffocating us as we struggled ahead. Suddenly the river was swept into a vast chasm. It came with no warning at all. We stood there, up to our chests in water, gaping at the canyon walls. Our gaze descended in unison from the top of the canyon, down across the sheering gray granite walls, to their base. We had been hardened by weeks of river travel, but the sight that greeted us was awful beyond belief. A series of immense rocks had created a pongo, rapids, on a grand scale. I could not compare them to anything we had seen. The boulders were shale-black, worn smooth by millennia of turmoil.
“God help us,” murmured Julio.
“There is no hope,” said another.
“This is the Gateway to Paititi,” Héctor whispered.
We stood for many minutes, staring as the sea of water raged through the chasm, charging at the walls. If it was the Gateway, then the Gateway was shut. The porters managed to moor the rafts and the old rubber boat. Their morale had been crushed. The Maestro was similarly despondent. I begged him to continue, at least until our lives were in danger. But he warned me: I was becoming overpowered by greed, he said.
I struggled to find a route along the periphery of the gorge. The scant foliage and slimy rocks hindered my efforts. From the corner of my eye, I saw Héctor piling up stones, one on another. Perhaps he had a plan. I called: “What are you doing?”
The old man shook his head glumly. “I am building a memorial to the place of your death,” he said.
There was no choice but to retreat. Héctor said it would be months before the water level was low enough for us to pass through the Gateway. We could wait until later in the year, he said, and next time, he promised, we would return with Pancho as our guide.
In early March I left the cloud forest and flew back to Europe. It was like exchanging one life for another. Time has never passed so slowly as it did during those five tortuous months in London.
The journey back to Héctor’s village had ground us down, rubbing in the sense of failure. The only advantage was that we were no longer warring against the current, even though the rapids were still precarious. The old man had no idea what returning to Europe involved. He had suggested it as if it was nothing more than a stroll from one village to the next. The journey from the Gateway of Paititi to my London apartment took more than three weeks. It entailed wading through rivers, and traveling by dugout canoe, tractor and truck, by bus, taxi and airplane.
The film crew came with me. On the way home I went down with dengue fever, the “broken bone” disease. My wife found me collapsed on the doorstep, sweating buckets, ranting about ruins, warrior tribes and curses. I had lost a third of my body weight, was covered from head to toe in septic insect bites and sores. “Thank God you are home,” she said. I looked at her hard, my eyes burning into hers. I didn’t have the heart to tell her I was going back.
I stayed in bed for a week, sweating, raving, calling commands to the porters in the night. My home was a palace of comfort, yet I was an outsider there. I had dreamed of its luxuries while deep in the jungle, now they frightened me. My life had been stripped down to the bare mettle, trained to survive, to progress upriver.
On the ninth day, I met the film crew in a dismal café. We hugged each other, and felt a bond, the bond of shared anguish. I remember that meeting so well. We sat there with cups of tepid coffee on our laps, staring at one another, not needing to speak. It was enough that we were together again. Marco had contracted the fever as well.
He mopped his brow with a monogrammed handkerchief, and looked close to death.
In the second week, I received a call out of the blue. The voice was gritty and cold, like the sound of footsteps on broken glass. It said that I would fail, that I had no hope. “Fail at what?” I asked. The man didn’t reply, then he hung up. I tried to trace the call, but without success. The week after, I had lunch with an old school-friend who was working in the oil business. When I mentioned the name of the oil firm prospecting in Madre de Dios, he told me they were rotten to the core. “Beware of them,” he said.
The next day I was invited to talk about exploration on the radio. I got in a fast jab against the oil company, without naming it exactly. To my surprise, the gritty voice called again late that night. My wife picked up the telephone and passed it to me.
“Do not go back to Peru,” said the voice.
“Who are you?”
Again, the caller hung up.
Another week slipped by. I stocked up with more provisions, and ordered a pair of new Zodiacs. Although I had promised it to the tribe, I had not yet given them the antique rubber inflatable, so on the return trip we would have three boats. The balsa rafts had proved themselves extremely durable, and they were free, but I wanted to be ready for any conditions that lay beyond the Gateway. The added expenses, and the cost of the second trip to Peru, put me in debt. But I was lured back by the thought of Pancho, and by Héctor’s promise: that the tribesman would guide me when I returned.
For five months I lived in limbo, unable to think of anything but going back to the Madre de Dios jungle and progressing beyond the great pongo. Every day I waited, other expeditions were preparing themselves, gearing up and moving out. I stopped buying newspapers or watching television for fear of hearing that a rival expedition had located the ruins of Paititi. Friends would invite me to their houses, expecting a dependable entertainer at the dinner table. But my animation, my zeal for the exotic, was dead. I would sit in a corner, numbed by my distance from the jungle. Everyone wanted soundbites of expedition life, but I shunned their requests. How could they begin to understand the depth of our experience?
Each night the jungle tormented me in dream: the sound of macaws flying overhead in pairs, the clatter of rain on the river, the smell of termites rubbed into one’s skin. But it was the river itself that beckoned most strongly. It was calling me, urging like a siren, goading me to return, to continue the search.
In early August I kissed my wife and our little daughter goodbye, and boarded a flight back to Lima. As before the film crew were in tow. Our dynamic was still the same: they leeching off Marco, the banker, and I freeloading off them.
I had sent the two new Zodiacs and many more Pot Noodles by air cargo, having done a deal with an airline. Marco’s platinum credit card had paid for everything late one evening when he was in high spirits. It had been a valuable session, which earned us all new jungle boots and wristwatches with electronic compasses built in.
I spent three days begging Lima’s cargo office to give me the boats. They had evolved a system of red tape that surpassed even Indian bureaucracy in its ruthlessness. Forms had to be filled out in quadruplicate, stamped in pink, then blue, then black, signed once and signed again. I queued for the stamps, then to pay, and again to collect my change. Finally, after three days of wasted time, the boats were expelled from the great bureaucratic machine.
That night Leon unwrapped one, and discovered it had been slashed open on the left side. We chec
ked the second. It, too, had been damaged, then rewrapped. I suspected the evil hand of Paititi saboteurs.
The manager of our hotel, lost in the war-lands of downtown Lima, was a short Japanese Peruvian, named Señor Kanagawa. He had made a career of telling people what he thought they should know. He already knew about our expedition. I dragged one of the Zodiacs down to Reception and asked for his advice. The manager pulled off his bifocals to get a better look at the damage. “You are not the only people searching for el gran Paititi,” he said. “To you the search is an entertainment, but to others it’s big business.” Señor Kanagawa ran the tip of his index finger down the gash in the boat. “If I were you,” he said softly, “I would be careful to avoid treading on tall men’s toes.”
The night before, I had read a far-fetched newspaper piece that claimed Sendero Luminoso, the infamous Shining Path, might be searching for Paititi. The article said that the Marxist organization would use the lost city’s gold to relaunch itself. I asked the manager for his opinion.
“It’s not their style,” he replied, “and in any case their leader, Abimael Guzmán, is locked up in jail. But there are equally powerful people in this country, and abroad, who want to get to Paititi before you.”
“Then whom should we fear most?”
Señor Kanagawa thought for a moment, and pressed his hands down on his desk. “You should fear each other,” he said.
A week later we arrived by bus at Cusco, dusty and cold. Our spirits were high, even though winter had descended on the Andean town. On every street corner young boys were touting alpaca sweaters, embroidered with vistas of the mountains. The alleyways behind Plaza de Armas were teeming as always with backpackers, walking softly with a glint in their eye.
We spent two days in the town, stocking up on fresh provisions and morsels of cheap equipment that we really didn’t need. Marco managed to get the Zodiacs repaired by an army of mechanics. Their workshop was oily and overlooked, the kind of place normal people crossed the street to avoid. The workers took a liking to the banker, and invited him to drink beer with them while the adhesive dried. When they heard he was going to Madre de Dios, they were all overcome with fear. “¡El Tigre!” one had shouted. “He will gobble you up.”
“He will bite off your face,” said another.
“¡No!” exclaimed a third. “He’ll suck out your blood and then he will bite off your face!”
On the morning of our departure, I went to buy some vials of morphine at a clinic off Avenida del Sol. A doctor in a filthy white medical coat asked me why I needed so much of the drug. I explained our mission, saying that this was our second trip to find Paititi.
“When you came before,” he said, “did you have a sickly-looking American man with you?”
I replied that we did. “He was a Vietnam veteran,” I said, tapping my brow, “all messed up in the head. Do you know him?”
“I treated him.”
“For fever?”
“No, no,” said the physician, “for chronic venereal disease.”
The bus to the edge of the jungle was seven hours late. When it finally rolled up, its driver jumped down and threw up in the gutter. He was a broad man, with a neck as wide as an elephant’s foot, and dark, bloodied knuckles. He stank of alcohol. We stowed the cartons of Pot Noodles and the rubber boats in the hold, and climbed up. The driver hardly waited for the passengers to take their places. He jumped into his seat, spewed beer and half-digested chicken over the dashboard, then shouted, “¡Comencemos nuestro largo viaje hacia el infierno! Let us begin our long journey to Hell!”
The driver’s inebriated condition and the poor state of the road made for slow, painful progress. The vehicle rumbled out over the altiplano, and began the descent down into the forest. I can hardly describe the joy that welled inside me. Returning after five months had strengthened us, filling each man with the highest expectations. The ruins continued to elude our competitors, a point that energized me beyond all else. As the mist filtered through the web of trees, I counselled myself to be strong, to stop at nothing until we had found Paititi.
In the middle of the night we arrived at Pillcopata. The sky was lined with storm clouds, darker than on any night I can remember, the air silent and chilled. As soon as the bus pulled up, a pack of the town’s most savage dogs surrounded it, circling like sharks round a bleeding whale. We spent the remainder of the night at the only hotel. The owner, Walter, remembered me from before. At breakfast he sat on the slim veranda, smoking an Inca brand cigarette, pondering the future.
I asked him for the latest news on the Paititi-hunters. He wiped a rag over his bronzed face. “There are French and Americans, Chileans and Peruvians all looking for it now,” he said buoyantly. “Someone will find the ruins any day. This time next year Pillcopata will be a boom town.”
We made a grotesque heap of our bags, boxes and packs in the middle of the town, and waited, and waited. There was no transport heading towards Héctor’s village. There was no transport heading anywhere on account of the torrential rain. Walter screwed up his face when he saw us trying to hitchhike in the rain with so much gear.
“All the other expeditions have their own transport,” he said. “Some have helicopters as well.”
Two days later we were still poised in the middle of town, ready for immediate evacuation, but no vehicles had come or gone in that time. The ferocious dogs no longer baited us: they reserved their energy for fresh targets who were filled with the great fear they so enjoyed.
In the afternoon of the fourth day, a high-sided truck stopped near the hotel. The driver said he was going to the end of the road at Shintuya. He could take us. I didn’t want to alert the official at Santa Cruz, Señor Franco, that we were back in the area so we decided to alight at the hamlet of José Olaya and take a dugout canoe from there.
By evening, we had crossed the Madre de Dios. In the five months we had been away, it had transformed from a massive waterway with entire trees coursing down it to a modest river with a near glassy surface. Paddling across in dugouts was easy, even when they were laden with the gear.
An hour later, at about eight p.m., the film crew and I staggered up the steep mud bank into Panataua, and made our way to Héctor’s shack. We could hear singing from a distance, muffled by kapok trees. It was Paolo’s voice, perfect and innocent. We stood at the empty window waiting for the family to see us. Nothing had changed. The Maestro was poring over his Bible, and Doris was sitting over a tray of beans, picking out the rotten ones. The dining area was illuminated by three or four candle stubs, long wicks feeding the flames. It was like looking back in time at a place far away.
I said Héctor’s name. He looked up, startled. Then he smiled. “El Señor Paititi ha regresado, Señor Paititi is back,” he said.
We lined up to hug the old man. There was a remote look in his eyes, as if he had seen something he had not wanted to see, like death.
No one in the village could understand the great distances we had traveled since leaving for Europe. Except when venturing to their farmsteads, none of the villagers, Héctor included, ever left the area. For them, travel was one of the many pointless activities with which we fill our lives.
On the night of our arrival I didn’t mention the second expedition. I was itching to quiz Héctor about Pancho but I knew it was more sensible to wait.
In the morning we had a meeting. I spread out the map on the coarse wooden dining-table, and boasted of our new equipment. I exclaimed that we had two rubber boats, and hundreds more Pot Noodles. Héctor did not utter a word, until he was sure I could think of nothing more to say. Then, lowering his head, as if a great weight had been placed on his shoulders, he said: “Muchos problemas, many problems.”
I pretended not to have heard the remark, but Héctor pressed his hand on my arm. “Escúchame, listen to me. We will never find Paititi now,” he declared.
“Why? What’s wrong?”
Héctor stared down at the floor. “Pancho is dead,”
he said.
FOURTEEN
GOOD TEMPER
Tedious journeys are apt to make companions irritable one to another; but under hard circumstances, a traveler does his duty best who doubles his kindliness of manner to those about him, and takes harsh words gently, and without retort.
The Art of Travel
The reunion with Héctor was followed by a tidal wave of gloom.
There seemed hardly any reason to ask how Pancho had died as it would not bring him back. When I did ask, the Maestro said that Pancho had gone upriver three months earlier and had not returned.
“In his village people are saying El Tigre slayed him,” he said, “for offering to be our guide. His wife has run off with another man, and his house has been burned down to the ground. His brother is so ashamed and frightened he’ll be next that he is hiding in the forest.”
Héctor clicked his tongue in remorse. “El destino es algo terrible, fate is a terrible thing,” he said.
“But if no one has seen a body,” I said, “then there’s no proof that Pancho is dead.”
“Believe me,” said the old man coldly, “Pancho is not coming back.”
We turned to other matters and Héctor listed more difficulties. He said my maps were wrong, that there were no men to be porters, and that Señor Franco had put a bounty on our heads.
The film crew and I huddled in the bright afternoon light and tried to formulate a plan. We had traveled halfway round the world and none of us was ready to give in. But Héctor seemed to have lost all hope. Perhaps it was because he had lost interest, or that he did not have the energy needed for another hard expedition. I asked him if he would come with us even if we did not have Pancho. “You can count on me, my friend,” he said desolately, “but what of the porters? We need the same men as before.”
We sent messages to the various logging sites, asking for the men to regroup in Panataua. I knew that if I could get the expedition moving upriver, everything would fall into place. Without Pancho, it was true we had little chance, but I hoped we could find another Machiguenga warrior, as someone else must know where the ruins lay.