by Tahir Shah
“We thought you were dead,” I said.
The warrior took a deep swig of pisco and grinned even wider than before.
“The villagers said you had run away,” said Oscar.
“They said you’d been eaten by El Tigre.”
Pancho slapped his knee to kill a wasp.
“They are bad people,” he replied. “They chased me away, said I should have stolen your bags. My wife went to another man. The people burned down my house.”
I apologized that our arrival had led to so much turmoil. The tribesman glanced adoringly at his lantern and asked to be shown how it worked. I flicked on the switch. “I have been waiting for you to come back,” he said, “because I have not forgotten your promise.”
“Will you now take us to Paititi?” I asked.
“Sí,” he replied.
“And we will take you to the city,” I said.
We shook hands, and grinned at each other like Cheshire cats, each delighted with his side of the bargain. I knew that if I could keep Pancho on board we had a real chance of victory. The warrior’s well-being became my obsession. There was little I would not have given him to keep him happy. But Pancho’s requests were modest. He asked if he might look through the Arriflex’s lens, and smell the strange white powder that Marco frequently rubbed under his arms; and he asked if he could have a few feet of 16mm celluloid film. Leon gave him as much of this as he wanted, and he tied it round his neck in a crude necklace.
“Voy a mantener alejado a El Tigre, I will keep El Tigre away,” he said.
Héctor found a grove of balsa trees set back from the water. The men chopped them down for rafts. As members of the chainsaw gang, nothing gave them more pleasure than hacking down healthy trees. I sometimes felt that, if they had their way, they would have felled the entire jungle for firewood.
By late morning, the expedition was on the move again, pushing through the low water with tremendous difficulty. In the five months since we had been away, the river had lost more than fifteen feet in depth. Héctor said it was still falling, and by our return it would be lower still. I dreaded the thought. From time to time, we were forced to unload the Zodiacs and the rafts, and heave them up over rocks. It made for a punishing routine. As before, the great advantage of rafts was that they could be slid over sharp surfaces without any damage.
It took two days to reach Aboroa, the home of Pancho’s mother. She seemed pleased to see her son. The tribe had told her he was dead. In the West, she might have displayed a riot of emotion, but she merely laughed, and passed him a gourd of masato to drink.
“The villagers are bad,” she said. “They will all die of chamaga.”
I asked Pancho what she was referring to. He pointed to his genitals. “Sífilis,” he said.
For eleven days we pushed on, fighting to cover the same ground as before. Our supplies and equipment were drenched in the river by day, and our makeshift camps were lashed by storms at night.
Our feet had healed during our months of luxury in Europe, but the repair was quickly undone. Within days of our return, all of us were lame. I had anticipated the problem, bringing ajar of petroleum jelly for each man. At every rest break, the entire team would pull off their boots and grease their feet. I had presented Pancho with a tub of Vaseline, but he didn’t use it for the intended purpose. Instead, Giovanni found him eating it with a plastic spoon.
Each morning the first thing I did was to look around to see if the tribesman was still in the camp. He had no idea of the effect his presence had on me and the team. But the porters did not share my fear that he would abandon us: they had other worries, most notably of El Tigre. That old anxiety had resurfaced on the eighth day upriver.
It had been a full moon, silver light charging the air with an eerie electricity. None of us could sleep, not even Héctor, the soundest sleeper of all. There was a sense that something sinister, something wicked, was about to take place, like the second before a murder in a low-budget Hollywood film. I opened my mouth a fraction, to help me hear, and held my breath. In the distance there was a faint sound of branches breaking, of feet moving, a sound of fear. I sat upright. The noise was getting louder, smashing and crashing through the trees. Within a moment the entire team was awake, poised for flight. Then came the moment of death: an animal struggling from a predator, wrestling, clawing for life.
“What is it?” I whispered.
To the porters it was an inane question. They all knew what it was: El Tigre, the ghost of the jungle.
The cloud forest had a powerful effect. It could bring happiness, a relief from society, but it could also fill ordinary men with unspeakable terror. The porters had spent most of their lives traipsing in and out of the jungle, but they were traumatized by it. They would never admit it, but their fear ran deep, like the hanging roots of a banyan grove. Héctor was the only one who would speak of the hazards. He thrived on the subject, tantalizing the others with his lust for the supernatural. I asked him repeatedly to cease reminding the men of imagined danger, but he couldn’t help himself. The porters would gather round, their jaws locked with fright, their faces frozen, as the Maestro revealed the limit of his fantasy.
By the time we reached Pusharo, and its wall of petroglyphs, the men were in a bad state. They might have been bristling with muscles, but they were jelly inside. I pleaded with Héctor to refrain from telling ghost stories at night.
“They are not ghost stories,” he snapped. “They are the world around us.”
My concern that Pancho would leave was now compounded with worry that the porters might mutiny. I didn’t know what to do. I tried sycophantic kindness, oozing praise and offering double rations to anyone who admitted aloud that El Tigre didn’t exist. But no one took up the offer. They were too scared. So I tried a harsher approach, calling them sissies. They didn’t like that at all. Latin men loathe having their sense of machismo dented.
Marco rambled on about fear and the havoc it can wreak. He told me of the days when the KGB roamed the streets in his hometown of Kiev, hauling away innocent men. “The fear was terrible,” he said. “Your father might go out for some milk for the tea, and never come back.”
“How did you cope?”
Marco sucked at a long, thin Cuban cigar and winced as the smoke swirled into his eyes. “We used to buy as much vodka as we could afford,” he said, “and get so drunk that we passed out.”
“How often did you do that?”
The Ukranian narrowed his eyes and pulled at the panatella. “Every night,” he said.
I knew that beyond Pusharo the water would be too low to continue with the Zodiacs and the rafts. We would have to resort to carrying the equipment and supplies. Again I implored the film crew to cut down their gear, calculating that they could easily shed two hundred pounds and not feel the difference. They went through their endless Pelican cases and bags, and separated out a handful of odds and ends. They disliked cutting down, and regarded me as a spoilsport for hounding them. Setting an example, I reduced my backpack’s contents by three-quarters. Then I went through the food supplies, weeding out the tin cans and anything too heavy to be taken upriver. There was no point in bringing the alcohol either, as it was so heavy. We had about five gallons of it, gut-rot pisco, distiled grape juice. The porters adored it, so I let them drink it all, hoping it might stave off their fear.
Giovanni opened the cans and tossed their contents into the big metal pot, along with a few bony sábalo fish, and a couple of ripe-smelling birds. He poured in a bucket of river water, and boiled until the stew was thick like tar scraped from the hull of an ocean-going ship. The men gorged themselves until their eyes bulged with excess. I passed out the enamel mugs and filled each one to the brim with the firewater. By the second mug the men were drunk like sailors on shore leave; and by the third they had all passed out.
Héctor had crept off to be alone at the petroglyphs. When he returned, the team were lying sprawled on the ground.
“It is medici
ne,” I said.
“Pisco is strong stuff,” he replied, “but it cannot lessen the fear of frightened men.”
Next morning the porters were still lying where they had fallen. They looked like soldiers slain in battle. I hid the rest of the alcohol in the undergrowth, along with much of my gear, and the deflated Zodiacs. Then I walked back to the camp and was about to write my journal when I saw three people approaching. They were not tribesmen, but were dressed in Western clothes, with smart khaki safari shirts and black Stetsons. I rubbed my eyes, astonished that there should be any other foreigners in the area. They were traveling light, no more than ten or fifteen pounds per man, and were moving quickly along the far riverbank. I pointed them out to Héctor, who had just woken up.
“They are the competition,” he said.
“Looking for Paititi?”
“Si”
They did not stop but crept nimbly past. Like a stealth force on a mission through enemy territory, they moved swiftly, with nothing more than bare necessities. When they had rounded the bend and were out of sight, I surveyed our camp. The ground was littered with the porters and mounds of luggage. I shouted for the men to get up, but no one responded. They were still too drunk to stand.
I cursed them with a deafening exclamation of fury. But, as Héctor reminded me timidly, it had been I who had served up the alcohol. He tapped his hand on a stone block, inviting me to sit. “Don’t be in too great a hurry” he counselled. “Haste is the enemy of success.”
I might have been guilty of plying the men with pisco, but it was a tonic to quell their fear. I could not restrain myself from feeling bitter at their weakness. My anger towards them was matched only by my resentment of the film crew. They had volunteered to document the expedition, but their presence was now affecting its progress. I had slimmed down my personal gear to a fraction of what I needed; and the porters carried next to nothing in the way of personal effects. The food and basic equipment were bulky, but that weight was exceeded many times by the possessions of the crew.
Whenever I looked round, they were amusing themselves with new trifles, new gadgets pulled from their bags. I would pounce, ordering them to leave the luxuries behind. But they would respond sharply, declaring the devices were for the film. Sometimes I would see them pressed tight, hiding together in the bushes, gorging themselves on sweetmeats from Marco’s pack. I sensed their shame, and it fanned my anger.
The day after the porters’ drinking session, we moved no more than a mile upriver. I kept an eye open for the foreigners, but assumed they were way ahead by now. There was no sign of anyone at all. Pancho said his brother had probably scaled the ridge on the western bank of the river in search of monkeys to eat. It was like a mountain chain, a granite spine, enveloped in dense forest. I couldn’t imagine how a man would ever enter it and hope to come out alive.
That night, as we sat in silence around the fire, I quizzed Pancho about the ruins he claimed to have seen. He grew nervous when I eased into the interview, offering him a cup of tepid tea, and praising his strength. The air was cooler than it had been for a long time, and was thick with insects, attracted by our lanterns. We sat together awkwardly, as I wondered how best to draw the truth from the warrior’s mind.
In our world a simple question is so often answered with an equally simple answer. We have a tradition of asking and replying, and have rigid divides between fact and fiction, legend and reality. Anyone who blends the two beyond an acceptable point is regarded as a liar, or a madman. But the world of the Machiguenga has developed a curious hybrid of fact and fantasy, a world in which they are one and the same.
The first time I realized the extent of the blurred dividing line was that night when I spoke to Pancho. I asked him if the tribe feared the jungle. He did not seem to understand the question. Héctor, who was sitting with us, explained it to him. The warrior pulled his arms into his chest, covered his mouth with his hands, and smiled apprehensively.
“El Tigre está allá,” he said, in a muffled voice. “The tiger is there.”
“Where?”
Pancho drew a circle with his finger in the air. “Everywhere.”
“Why do the tribe fear the ruins?” I asked.
Again, Pancho seemed reluctant to speak and, again, Héctor coaxed him. “Hay peligro, there is danger,” he said.
“At the ruins?”
“Sí!”
“What kind of danger?”
Pancho said nothing. He closed his eyes and seemed hardly to be breathing. I repeated the question once, and then again. “What is the danger?”
“Pai-ti-ti,” he said.
“You fear it?”
The tribesman nodded. “Mucho peligro, much danger,” he whispered.
I asked him about the ruins he had seen. Could he describe them? I yearned for him to recount the tale, but it was like getting blood out of a stone. “Have you seen the ruins yourself?”
“Sí”
“Were there stone walls?” I asked.
“Sí”
“Can you tell me what they looked like?”
Silence.
“Did you find a hatchet with gold on it?”
“Sí”.
“Were the walls made of big blocks of stone?”
More silence. Héctor helped me, working to extract the details. “Las ruinas,” he said, motioning with his hands, “what did they look like?”
As before, Pancho closed his eyes, but this time he let silence be his answer. I built up the fire, so that it would burn all night and ward off El Tigre, then I crept into the tent. Héctor and the film crew had already turned in for the night, and were snoring loudly. I could just make out their calm, satisfied expressions — freed from the discomfort of consciousness. As I followed them into dream-state, I saw Colonel Percy Fawcett glowering down at me. He was dressed in tweeds, layers of heavy cloth with a necktie tight round his throat. His face was bearded and serious, the stem of a briar pipe poking from the corner of his mouth. Fawcett has been a hero to many before me. He is not famous for ever locating the great lost city of gold, a place he called Z, but is remembered for disappearing without trace while on the quest. God knows what terror he witnessed or how he died, but to anyone searching for Paititi, Colonel Fawcett holds a special place. He vanished at his height, and his disappearance is almost as great a mystery as Paititi itself.
The Colonel’s deep-set eyes regarded me studiously. He looked down at my filthy clothes, my sunburnt face and wounded feet. Then, in a raspy voice, he ordered me to get rid of half my men, and to keep tighter control of those I retained.
“But who will carry all the gear?” I asked.
Colonel Fawcett stiffened his back, narrowed his eyes, and barked:
“Throw it on the fire!”
With so much equipment, we were forced to leapfrog forwards, the men struggling under the tremendous weight. The only path was the river itself; walking through it fully laden was extremely precarious. It was paved with slippery rocks and abounded with hidden dips and holes. The current stirred up the water, making it impossible to see one’s feet. I dreaded the advance, and constantly expected to hear the cry of an injured man. But good fortune was watching over our haphazard column.
The chainsaw gang proved their ability to endure hardship, if ever I needed proof, and exhaustion appeared to assuage their fear of El Tigre. They held off talking of it for three days.
We pushed on, each mile an achievement in itself. Morale was neither high nor low. The men were too tired to consider their feelings. Their hands were now as raw as their feet, and their legs were covered with suppurating sores. They lived from one stride to the next, unable to think of anything but food and sleep. I ordered Giovanni to dish up extra rations at every meal. The men had earned it. There were always real concerns about our supplies, but hot food was the single element that could instantly raise morale. Every two days we would pause for half a day to allow time for rest, and to butcher a new selection of endangered animals.
Early one morning, one of the porters, Pepe, spotted a pair of vultures circling above our camp. He pointed them out to the others and, before I could protest, a plan was hatched to trap one. Unfortunately I had translated a passage from Galton’s The Art of Travel a few days previously. It explained exactly how to catch a condor or a vulture. The method was to spread out a raw ox-hide on the ground. A man lies under it, armed with some cord to tie the bird’s feet, with another two men ready nearby to leap out. We didn’t have a raw ox hide, so the porters hacked up the rear end of an agouti they had caught, and laid it out on my green military poncho. Julio crawled beneath it. The men waited in the bushes, ready to jump out. An hour passed, and then another. I whispered disparaging remarks from the shade but at that moment one of the great birds swooped down to feast. Julio thrust his arms up and wrestled with the vulture’s wings. The porters jumped out and broke the poor creature’s neck. They plucked it immediately and revelled in their success. I was shocked that they would eat a vulture’s meat, but they were delighted by it.
I see now why hunting has been so popular a pastime throughout history. It allows a man to exercise his body and mind with a chance of filling his stomach at the end of it. Alfonso had brought with him a decrepit sixteen-gauge shotgun. He and the others took it in turns to stalk through the jungle in search of prey. They knew how I detested them executing innocent animals, but the more I condemned them, the greater their slaughter became.
One afternoon, we had been walking almost without pause when Héctor called me to the front of the procession. He said that Pancho had drifted away from the river and was climbing into the trees. “He said there are ruins!” the old man exclaimed.
My heart raced. I gave the order to stop and rest. Pancho! Where was Pancho? I ran to the embankment and peered up into the forest. He was standing at the foot of a high granite rock face, about forty feet away. I clambered up, ran towards him, and made a quick inspection of the natural wall.