The Complete Collection of Travel Literature

by Tahir Shah

  We trudged on all that day and all the next. It was obvious now that we had reached the furthest limit of our resources. There was still some food, but the men were broken. They had lost the will to carry on. I felt a pang of satisfaction easing through me. It is terrible to admit it, but I took pleasure in the knowledge that I had subjugated my team.

  They had started to follow my orders without dispute. None of them had the energy to contest the plan, none except Julio. He was still strong, his mind still sharp. I sensed that he was waiting, biding his time. Perhaps unwisely, I made the most of the team’s co-operation, driving them on hard before they bit back.

  In the early afternoon the mist returned, ebbing through the jungle like steam off piping hot bisque. It gave a ghostly aspect to the place, and compounded the sense of fear. I found myself wishing that Héctor was still there. He was a madman, but he possessed an unwavering confidence, the ability to remain composed. The cloud forest had an energy about it, a cold, calculating presence, as if it was waiting too — waiting for our dismal parade to surrender.

  The men reached a slender scrap of beach, and crouched on their haunches, pack straps cutting into their shoulders. They were waiting for my signal to move on. I was about to give it, but it was then that Pancho nudged a finger at the ridge and emitted the reviled word: “Arriba.”

  Twenty-four hours later I was alone, deserted by the film crew, the porters and Pancho. The willowy warrior had led the way up the granite rock face to the top of the ridge. He climbed nimbly, a sharp contrast to my display of wheezing and puffing. I envied him, and hated him at the same time.

  At the top, we parted ways. He wasn’t going on. He left as quickly as he had come. The message I got from his silence was that he wanted me to go on. But I would have to take the last steps by myself.

  I felt sure that Pancho had brought me to the brink, but he had sworn to the tribe never to reveal the actual location of the ruins. Without him and the porters the expedition was crippled, but I knew Paititi was close. If need be, I was prepared to go on alone for days. The Swedes had begged me to turn back. They had said there was no hope. I was adamant that we were on the verge of victory.

  I had all I needed to survive in a kit-bag: some plastic sheeting, matches, a machete, sleeping-bag and flashlight, a change of clothes, plenty of food and some water. Once Pancho was gone, I took stock of the situation, and made a small camp at the foot of a rubber tree. I erected a canopy, tied the corners down tight, and set about gathering wood for a fire. My only fear was of Tremarctos ornatus, the so-called spectacled bear, but I hoped the fire would keep them away.

  To be there alone in that wilderness was the most daunting yet elevating experience. I felt alive, truly alive. I was almost lame, my feet severely damaged by weeks in the river, and I was ground down by the recurring fever. But at the same time I felt stronger than I ever had before.

  I passed the night quite peacefully, protected by my ingenuousness. The fog lingered until first light, shrouding my camp like a muslin veil. I slept on and off, and talked to myself a great deal. When the sun was up and the air was touched by its heat, I marched on, searching for the Inca stone road or the lake. Words cannot describe the sensation. It was as if I was on top of the world, looking down across an unending carpet of trees, millions and millions of trees. I was small, and getting smaller. The jungle was massive and, with every step, it doubled in size and magnificence.

  I took great care to stay in radio contact with the film crew who, along with the men, had made their way back down to the river. Every few hundred feet I put a marker in the GPS, the limit of my skill. I was wearing gloves for the first time: without them the bamboo lacerated my hands. I staggered ahead, hoping, praying, bleeding.

  The highlight of the first day was the meal. I cooked two Pot Noodles and gorged myself on them. Pancho had shown me how to take water from bamboo, but still I rationed it, using the bare minimum, and became dehydrated as a result.

  The lack of water probably added to my mental infirmity. By the second day my mind was raging with a ferocious anger, a madness that called for revenge. I was against the world, against humanity, against my men. I didn’t give a damn about them. I wanted Paititi. I deserved it. To Hell with the rest of them. I hoped they would rot in their horrible contortion of life. I pushed on.

  The trees teemed with termites and soldier ants, and monkeys howled high in the branches, baiting me, boosting my rage. There were so many monkeys, no doubt kin of the one Julio had shot and cooked. I cursed them all. The wildlife coveted by package tourists on peaceful safaris is not the same odious life-taking fauna as exists in deep jungle. Real wildlife is an executioner, a barbaric devourer of the dead. It was waiting for me to expire, longing to carve me up. I could sense the jungle placing bets on how long I would survive. Every ant, termite, tapir and macaw was guilty, each vying for a piece of my flesh.

  As for the others, they were cowards. I cursed them, slandering their names, even those of the Swedes. Their film had destroyed my expedition. They had stifled the search, the quest, with their ludicrous luggage. In a cruel, deranged moment, I prayed that they would all lose their way home, and pass from this world to the next in the most appalling agony.

  The hunt for Paititi brings out the best and the worst. But in some people, like myself, it only brought out the worst. The fuel that energized me was a blend of anger, bitterness and bile. I spat insults, cursed, begged for retribution.

  On the third night alone on that mountain ridge, I squatted on the ground in misery. The fire had not caught, the wood was far too wet. The nocturnal sounds pressed close. Pancho, no doubt, would have found them comforting. To me, they were the choir of the devil. I removed my boots and unwound the bandages from my feet, anointed the skin with rubbing alcohol, and allowed the sores to touch the breeze. The sensation was soothing. One lives for such moments in times of hardship.

  Crouching there, I pondered our own world, and the notion that one only knows a place by going far from it. We live in an illusion of comfort and invented luxury. We dwell on aspects of life that are framed in absolute insignificance. Such hollowness consumes us and we forget how to live. The jungle was at the other extreme: a seething, accursed champion of vitality, uncontrollable and untamed.

  Next morning I cut a path north-west down the ridge, charting the slow progress on the GPS. A machete is a clumsy tool in inexperienced, blistered hands. Pancho and the others had an inbuilt dexterity; most had used the long, unwieldy blades since infancy. They would have choked with laughter to see me thrashing forward in search of the great stone road.

  But the road never came.

  The enormity of the cloud forest was overpowering. I was a speck moving through it like any insect marching across the jungle floor. The only difference between us was that I thought I had a vague comprehension of the scale.

  I climbed a tree to gain vantage over the panorama, and stared out, my eyes streaming. I was overcome with shame at my wretched state.

  A man who embarks on a journey must know when to end it. The ending had come. Perhaps it had come long before and I had not had the bravery to face it. Sitting in the tree, gazing out at the emerald mantle before me, I considered my expedition to locate Paititi. I had encountered good men, madmen and dreamers, and had descended into the real world to be with them.

  The golden city of Paititi, last outpost of the Incas, has stood the test of time astonishingly well. Constructed as a secret haven from European greed, it has remained undefiled for five centuries: that is, if it exists at all.

  I have no idea whether the House of the Tiger King is legend or fact. To the natives fact and fantasy were blurred, two inseparable elements. To them, the search for ruins was empty of any meaning. As one who had spent months in their world, I too now realized how meaningless it would be to find a lost city.

  EPILOGUE

  ON CONCLUDING THE JOURNEY

  When your journey draws near its close, resist restless feelings; ma
ke every effort before it is too late to supplement deficiencies in your various collections; take stock of what you have gathered together and think how the things will serve in England to illustrate your journey or your book.

  The Art of Travel

  The last night I slept alone on the ridge I had a powerful dream that Pancho had come back up the granite rock face, found me nestled in my sleeping-bag and led me by the arm on a night journey. I had moved with the sleekness of a Machiguenga, almost as if I were floating through the forest. I had asked where we were going, but the warrior only smiled.

  We drifted along for some time. I was oblivious to the sounds, to the danger, breathing easily like a man who is at peace in a hostile world. Pancho pointed upwards. I followed the line of his arm and saw a jaguar asleep in the fork of a cacao tree. Beyond it, the ridge fell away to the east. We moved past it, drifting like the souls of dead men, down through a curtain of tall trees. Down further and further until we came to a mirrored surface of silent water, glinting in the moon’s light, lustrous and calm.

  Pancho did not look at me and did not speak. He led me along the edge of the water, until we came to a wall built from massive stone blocks. It was overgrown, shrouded with vines, secret, vast. I asked him how we would ever scale such a thing. The warrior smiled again and motioned for me to climb on to his back. I did so and he carried me effortlessly up and over the barrier. We found ourselves in another realm, in the sacred city of Paititi.

  Pancho didn’t utter a word. If I had not known better, I might have thought he was smug. He led me through the remnants of what must have been a great city, the outpost of an empire. There were walls everywhere, all built with the same massive stone blocks, the roofs long fallen in, ravaged with creepers and vines. There was a central heap of stones, a sacrificial place, a site of execution, perhaps. I asked Pancho, but he led me away, taking my arm again. We crossed the city, a diameter of about half a mile, gliding over the tumbled ruins like birds in flight.

  “Te lo mostraré, I will show you,” the warrior said earnestly.

  “What?”

  “Come, follow me.”

  Pancho took me to a place where three high walls met at an angle like the spokes of a wheel. He started to dig down with his hands. I watched as his fingers pushed into the soft earth beneath the ferns.

  “What are you searching for?”

  The warrior burst out laughing: uproarious, wild laughter. In his hands was a hatchet, its blade clearly adorned with gold.

  Pancho had not taken me to Paititi, but then again he had. He might not have shown me tangible stone ruins, but he had led me to the lost city, the one that lived in his mind. His world was the bridge between fact and fantasy, two realms blurred into one. It may sound like foolish reasoning, but I felt it right now to uphold my side of our pact.

  A month later, after a truly horrifying return through the jungle, I arrived with Pancho in Cusco. I was unsure whether it was correct to take him there, whether I was crossing a line of what is considered acceptable. But he begged me to take him and, at the time, I saw I had little choice.

  The week we spent together in Cusco was one of the most evocative, rewarding experiences of my life. And I can hope that the Machiguenga warrior gained from it as I did. The days were spent in experimentation, interacting with things that we take for granted: sitting on a chair, looking at a television, walking upstairs, eating ice-cream, driving in a car. One morning we walked down a side-street where the walls were made of new concrete. Pancho ran his hands over them in wonder, searching for a break, a cleft of some kind.

  “It is stone,” he said, in a puzzled voice, “but it is not stone.”

  As we walked around the town, Pancho observed everything I showed him with interest, but he remained remote, almost if he was not there at all.

  I took him shopping for clothes and he selected a voluminous yellow and blue anorak, bright red sweatpants and a billowing pink fluorescent shirt. He slipped them on over the ubiquitous football strip that forms the second skin of all Machiguengas. In the next shop he chose Nike running shoes for his bare feet, and an American baseball cap embroidered with the words “No Fear”. He peered into a full-length mirror for the first time in his life and giggled.

  “You look like a rap-star,” I said.

  The warrior stared at himself, crossed his arms, grimaced and giggled some more.

  One problem was that Pancho lived according to jungle time. He rose with the birds. At about four a.m. he would sit in his room in the hotel, staring out of the window as the darkness became dawn. The city might have been quiet but it was too dangerous for him to go out unescorted. Just as the jungle all looked the same to me, the streets all looked the same to him. Then there was the traffic. On his first day Pancho was nearly knocked down twice. In the jungle man has few predators, and almost everything yields to him. In the city the danger is all around, all of it caused by other men.

  He murmured constantly of his dream to visit a brothel, to mix with painted girls in high-heeled shoes. He had heard that white women had large cleavages, and he wanted one of them naked, sprawled out on a bed, ready and willing to service his needs. It was an obsession of which he spoke often, sometimes in the lewdest detail.

  I was against this craving and wore Pancho down. I suggested instead that we visit a disco and he could find a nice girl, dance with her and invite her out. Pancho was happy because his other ambition was to dance in a room with colored flashing lights and music that no one was making.

  The warrior’s internal clock struck again. He could not stay awake after seven p.m., and none of the discos opened until ten. I would ply him with coffee, and make him walk up and down. But by six thirty he had invariably fallen into a deep stupor-like sleep.

  He liked his room in the hotel. It was furnished simply: a bed, a table, a chair and an electric bedside lamp. He switched it on and off incessantly, intrigued that he could control the darkness so easily. He shunned the bed, preferring to sleep on the floor furled up in a sheet, his new possessions nestled around him. His favourite mod con by far was the lavatory. I showed him how it was used on the first morning, and he was delighted with it, although he disapproved strongly of using loo paper. He thought it a waste to wipe his bottom on it, and took to winding it round his neck as a scarf. As for the lavatory itself, he was so delighted that he found another use for it — washing his head. He would bend down, knees on the tiled floor, stuff his head into the bowl and pull the handle sharply. The result was an immediate, impressive head flush. The warrior’s enthusiasm did not extend to the shower, of which he was suspicious. The only time he used it as it was designed, he kept on his second skin, the blue and green football strip.

  On the last day, we spent the morning trawling through Cusco’s shops. I bought virtually anything Pancho pointed to. By noon we were laden with gifts for his entire family: blankets and beads, fishing tackle and extra clothes, machetes and rope, acres of plastic and a wind-up radio. I hoped that the warrior’s status would now rise in the estimation of the tribe.

  “Ellos dirán, “¡Pancho estuvo en Cusco!”. They will say, “Pancho has been to Cusco!”” he said solemnly. “Maybe now my wife will come back.” He paused to think for a moment. He folded his arms again and smiled. “Maybe,” he said, “I will meet a girl in the disco and she will come with me to the jungle. Then if my wife comes back, I will beat her with a sharp stick.”

  We passed the afternoon drinking espresso to keep the warrior awake. I longed to ask him about the ruins again, to quiz him now that we were out of the jungle. But I knew the answers would be ambiguous, couched in mystery, just as the expedition itself had been.

  By six p.m. Pancho was falling asleep. He begged me to let him go for a quick head flush and then to bed. “I’m taking you back to the jungle tomorrow,” I said. “This is your last chance for disco-dancing and kissing high-heeled girls.”

  Pancho glared at me. A single tear formed in the corner of his eye and rolled sil
ently down his cheek. “The women in the city are beautiful,” he said. “Why will they want to dance with me?”

  “Because you are a warrior,” I said grandly.

  A little later Pancho gave himself a long head flush, put on his rap-star clothes and followed me on to Cusco’s cobbled streets. His hair was wet and slicked back, his eyelids heavy. He walked with a swagger, like a cowboy with a six-shooter on his hip. The air was cold, and we could see our breath. The night was filled with expectation, as if it were Christmas Eve. We went into the first disco we came to, a hole in the wall called El Cerebro, The Brain.

  I paid the entrance fee, and we were frisked for concealed weapons, as one often is in Peru. A bouncer pulled apart the swing doors and we were thrust into a bedlam of bright lights and blaring techno music. The room was heaving with local youths, overfed and underdressed, the floor a skating rink of warm beer. I tried to apologize to Pancho, but he could not hear me. He swaggered past a line of striking girls, licking his lips like a hunting dog on the prowl.

  “¡Chinani!” he said boisterously. “Chicas, girls.”

  Without another word Pancho grabbed the prettiest girl and dragged her on to the dance-floor by the hair. She struggled at first, but soon understood that the warrior was giving her no choice. I was expecting a fight to ensue, but Pancho danced like I have never before seen a man dance. He spun the girl round and round, sliding her between his open legs, caressing her with his coarse fingers, his body gyrating, his face dripping with sweat. The other dancers stopped, hustled to the edge of the floor, and watched. Pancho’s routine gathered speed and sleekness. He moved faster and faster, tossing his partner around like a rag doll. He may have been dressed like a rap-star of the techno age, but his moves were pure Disco 1975.