by Tahir Shah
Juan was pleased at my praise for his trophy. No house, he said, should be without such a possession, an honor to the ancestors.
“I’ll get you one,” he beamed.
“Where from?”
Juan’s face erupted in laughter.
“Sígame, follow me,” he said.
We trouped out of the house, past the sleeping guard dog, and on through the warango trees. The noon sun rained down, scalding our backs. Juan led the way across a flat expanse of dust.
Waving the flies from his face with his hat, he pointed to a steep bulwark.
“Up there...”
The farmer, José Luis and I staggered up the bank. The sand was so fine that a footprint disappeared as soon as it was made. It was littered with bottles, plastic bags and tin cans. A handful of thorn trees clung to the soft sand, providing some leverage as we clambered up.
Climbing over the top of the hill was like emerging from the trenches into no man’s land. The scene was one of unimaginable devastation. Not even a Calcutta body dump could compare. There were human remains everywhere. Mummified bodies, recently hacked from their graves, their skin leathery, yet preserved. The plateau was pitted with thousands of tombs; their sides fallen in, the contents either stolen or strewn about. The bleached-white bones were too numerous to count. They shone in the sunlight, the last remains of an ancient people, forsaken by their ancestors. I saw ribs poking up out of the sand, femurs and jaws, the mummified spine of a child, and skulls – thousands of them, many with their hair still attached. Dozens had been deformed; others were trepanned.
As well as bones there were baskets made from cotton and fiber. For each mummy there had been a basket, in which it had sat cupped upright in the foetal position on a wad of cloth. Leading mummy experts say the burial position, the layers of cloth, and the baskets, are all for a reason. They were, they say, part of an elaborate drainage system. Liquids exuded in the years after death would naturally drain through the body, seeping down, and out through lower orifices, into the basket’s pad.
Juan led me across the immense burial ground. I watched my step, fearful of falling into one of the pits, or of treading on the mummified remains. Every few feet the farmer would stop to tug a fragment of cloth from the dust, waggling it to shake off the sand. He handed the scraps to Tia, who had caught up with us.
Juan stopped at a deep crater.
“This was a big tomb,” he said. “An important one was buried here.”
Tía and he helped me into the hole. They swished away the sand. First they dug out the resident mummy. He looked rudely awakened, ripped from his cocoon. His hair was long and soft, his skin the color of honey, the individual pores quite distinct. The line of his ribs was clearly visible. The stench was rank as the smell of a Masai encampment. But it was nothing like the vile, chaotic smell of rotting human flesh.
The body was bound in textiles. Juan peeled a grand mantle away from the mummy’s back. He shook off the sand. Along the border of the blanket was a row of images. I looked at them closely. They were Birdmen.
Tía was still digging. She excavated a second figure.
“It’s a woman,” said Juan. “See sus pechos, her breasts.”
As he fumbled about, showing me the mummified bust, the woman’s right leg fell off.
“They’re very fragile,” he muttered, handing me a head.
“This is for you,” he said. “It’s just like the one in the house. It will bring you good luck.”
Thanking the farmer, I rejected his offer. “It belongs here,” I said. “I won’t be taking anything away with me.”
Juan couldn’t understand why anyone would turn down a fine trophy head.
“¿Está seguro? Are you sure?” he trilled. “It’s got a very nice face.”
The business of human remains is an unpleasant one. Our society dislikes the subject of corpses and death. Much has changed since ancient times. The Incas would bring out their mummified leaders during festivals. One 17th-century etching in Guaman Poma’s chronicle shows the grinning cadaver of an Inca being paraded through the streets. The practice appalled the Spanish. But, as I squatted in the burial crater, surrounded by mummies and trophy heads, I felt none of the fear which so often accompanies death in our own world. The mummies were not skeletons but people, with faces, fingernails and hair.
I couldn’t blame Juan and his family for robbing graves. The drought had killed their pigs and their meager crops had shrivelled. How else were they to support themselves? Juan played down the extent of his part in what is a massive local operation. But, as I went back to the car, he asked respectfully if I’d like to buy some blankets, ornaments, pottery or beads. The burial ground on their doorstep was like a blessing from God. It must have contained more than 30,000 graves, only a fraction of which had been touched.
Ninety-five per cent of the antiquities in Peruvian museums are said to have been dug up by huaqueros. They have little or no scientific provenance as a result. Nazca’s street corners are loaded with an army of agents, eager to sell the robbers’ bounty. But the best loot bypasses Nazca, heading straight for the auction houses in the West.
José Luis threw the hatchback into gear and aimed it at the embankment, as if it were a tank out on manoeuvres.
“Tonight’s a full moon,” he said, as we gathered speed. “Juan and his family will be busy digging.”
“Robbing graves?”
Pepe’s son jerked his head in reply.
“It’s time for the sleeping to be woken.”
Back at the Hummingbird Hotel, a man in an embroidered kurta pajama, Indian costume, was propping up the bar, quaffing Pisco sours. The drink, a local speciality, is made from whipped egg white and Pisco, a grape brandy. His name was Freddie, and he told me that he’d just come from India, where he had spent seven years searching for a guru. It’s a line that is usually enough to send me running for the door. As far as he was concerned, he went on, mind-altering substances were the real attraction of Nazca. I would have left right then, but I was reminded of the llamateer, Manuel, who’d led me to Sillustani. He had spoken cryptically of drug-induced flight.
I told Freddie about my feather with three notches, the message, and of the Birdmen, whose images I’d seen on funeral blankets. I asked for his thoughts. Did he think man had flown in ancient Peru?
Or was it flight of a different kind – allegorical rather than actual? Freddie listened to the questions, and to my description of the mummies at Majuelo.
Knocking back another Pisco sour, he dragged his fingers through his beard.
“You won’t understand those mummies,” he said, “unless you think about the drugs they were taking when they were alive.”
“Drugs?”
“Of course,” said Freddie. “I’m not talking of LSD or tabs of ecstasy, but natural drugs... psychotropic plants, like the San Pedro cactus.”
I remembered seeing it growing on the Inca Trail.
“The Nazcans were taking San Pedro,” he said. “If you look at the pots, the textiles, and the other things they made, see it. Sometimes they’re holding it during rituals,-other times you find it as a star-shaped cross section. San Pedro’s still an important tool in any Andean shaman’s arsenal.”
“But does San Pedro give the sensation of flight?”
Freddie said that usually it didn’t.
“For that there was a tea made from a vine,” he said. “It gave the feeling of growing wings and flying. It used to be common around here. Your Birdmen from the mummy blankets were probably taking it. Why else do you think they’re reeling like that, like dope fiends?”
“What’s this tea called?”
Draining his fifth Pisco sour, Freddie breathed into his fist.
“Ayahuasca,” he said. “The Vine of the Dead.”
TEN
Vampires
The Paracas peninsula is named after the harsh wind which tears in from the ocean and flays the desert coast. Like the Mistral of southern France
, it’s a merciless force of nature endured by generations, but never welcome. For more than 3,000 years man has braved the treacherous shores of Paracas. The shacks may have tin roofs now, and there’s a wrecked Dodge truck outside every one, but little else seems to have changed since ancient times.
At dawn, fathers and sons head out to sea in frail skiffs, bobbing on the Humboldt Current like toy ducks in a bath. Left at home, their wives and mothers nurse the babies, clean the home and scrub the porch. Their work is never done, but their laughter rings through the backstreets with the howl of the wind.
Freddie had passed on to me the basics of ayahuasca, the hallucinogen once used by the coastal peoples of Peru. The potion was, he had said, made from a stew of plants. It opened a door into another world. I had posed many questions, but Freddie was hesitant to reveal more. He told me that he wasn’t qualified to discuss ayahuasca.
“Then who is qualified?”
Freddie scribbled down a name.
“Professor Cabieses, that is if he’s still alive.”
“Where does he live?”
“Have a look in Lima,” he said.
*
An opal-green Ford Zephyr Six with bald tires and a windshield webbed with cracks, purred up the highway and into Paracas. Its owner was a precise man from the old school, when taxi driving was an art. He wore leather gloves, and shifted the gears with meticulous care. I complimented him on his vehicle. Of course, he said, the chrome was no longer as shiny as it should be, and the upholstery was stained where a passenger had spilt glue. They were a pair of old workhorses, he laughed. Since 1958 they’d done the colectivo run from Nazca to Paracas ten thousand times. But now they were tired.
The Zephyr cruised to a halt at the neck of the peninsula and I got down with my bags. Traveling with so much baggage was a cross to bear. I was beginning to wonder if I would ever use all this precious equipment. Was I ever going to need the carabiners or the caving rope, the folding spade, the Lancashire Hot Pot or, for that matter, the moose knife?
Late in the afternoon, before the sun had set, a golden ball over the Pacific, I paid a visit to the Paracas Museum. The clerk was busy swatting flies in the pool of light on his desk. He was surprised to have a visitor, and fumbled in a drawer for the visitor’s book.
Paracas is the name of the wind, but also the name given to the pre-Incan culture which once existed on the coast. It’s thought to have thrived between 1300 BC and 200 AD. The Peruvian archaeologist Julio C Tello first brought fame to the region, when he noticed that the undulations in the sand were actually burial mounds. Above ground little remains of the culture. But dig down and you reach the treasure. The Paracas civilization was an advanced one, producing some of the finest artefacts ever made in Latin America. Without doubt, the most wonderful and possibly the most sacred of all, were the Birdmen textiles.
One display in the museum showed how the mummies were cocooned well below the surface, wrapped in multiple layers of fabric. The funeral blankets, ponchos and shawls were made exclusively to be worn in death. They were not made to fit the cadaver, but to cover the actual bundle which surrounded the corpse. Unlike ancient Egypt, where only dignitaries were mummified, the Paracas and Nazcan people preserved all their dead. Important members of society were buried with masses of loot. Bows and arrows, pipes, sling-shots and pottery are commonly found in the graves. Mummified animals have also been unearthed, including dogs, cats, birds and foxes. Some preserved bodies were wrapped in no less than eighteen cloaks and mantles, with as many as thirty garments.
The huaqueros who ravage the burial grounds on a daily basis, have been smitten by gold fever. Hacking their way through the layers of cloth, they prize open the mummies’ mouths in their quest for gold. They tear fingers off hands to get at jewelry. Laden with treasure they hurry away into the night.
Thousands of rare textiles have been unearthed in Peru, spanning as far back as 3000 BC. These days they are regarded as more precious than gold, just as they were to the people who made them. No other region on Earth can boast a longer textile history. The work must have called for a communal effort, bringing llama wool from the mountains, dyeing it, designing patterns, spinning, weaving and embroidering. Centuries before the first lump of Latin American clay was worked into a pot, Paracas was a centre for textile production.
With allegorical flight in mind, I studied the textiles, searching for clues. Woven into the fabric were a wild assortment of images, including hundreds of Birdmen. The main figures were comprized of sub-images. In the wings of the Birdmen were rows of trophy heads, serpents and daggers. They had streamers spewing from their mouths and ornamental crowns. All were awash with color, as if inspired by a psychedelic dream.
The flight of these Birdmen wasn’t forced and cumbersome like real flight. It was graceful and easy, like an angel wafting through a dream. A few of the mantles bore rows of “falling” shamans, plunging Earthward with glazed expressions. Perhaps these were clues that the
Birdmen flew, at least within the limits of their minds.
*
Not far from Paracas is the town of Pisco. It is inextricably linked with vampires. Cast an eye across its Plaza de Armas, and you will see members of the vampire cult. They come to the town in their hundreds. Dressed in black coats and matching boots, with lines of kohl circling their eyes, punky hair pushed up in quiffs, they sit on the benches, waiting for the night.
I wasn’t really interested in vampires, but a chewing-gum seller said I’d regret it if I didn’t look into the town’s fiendish tradition. So I hailed an Indian-made auto-rickshaw and told the driver to head for the cemetery on Calle San Francisco.
Standing outside the graveyard was a man selling enormous blooms of chrysanthemums. He asked if I wanted to buy flowers; I replied that I wasn’t sure who I’d come to see.
A few steps further and a guide offered his services.
“Come to see Sarah Ellen?” he asked.
“Um, yes, I think so.”
“She’s over here.”
As he led the way down to the other end of the graveyard, he told me the legend.
“She was a young English girl,” he said. “She died and was buried here in 1913. No one knows much about her... but a few years ago your vampire friends started arriving.”
“But I’m not a vampire.”
The guide looked me in the eye.
“Are you sure?”
I nodded earnestly.
He pointed to a grave set into a wall.
“Perhaps you are telling the truth,” he said. “It’s women who come mostly, from all over the world. From France and Germany, Australia and Japan. They bribe the police, so that they can spend the night here.”
“Do they lay flowers?” I asked.
“Hah!” came the reply. “No, they don’t leave flowers, but they leave other things.”
“What?”
“Bits of meat, strange amulets and dead cats with their heads cut off. Some of them have tried to open the grave,” he said. “I think they want to take un recuerdo, a souvenir.”
“A souvenir?”
The guardian wiped a hand over the plaque.
“A finger, a hand, something like that, something to take away and show to their friends.”
The Ormeno bus from Pisco to the Peruvian capital was so plush that the backpacker sitting beside me took off his shoes and socks and nuzzled his toes into the thick-pile carpet. We glided up the coast road, the triple-glazed windows tinting the light, and muting the sound of the wheels. I stared out at the desert, which stretched to the east like a silvery-gray bedspread of sand. In the few places where it had been irrigated, maize and bananas thrived. Dousing the dust with a little water is like touching it with a magic wand.
The backpacker fished out a crumpled guide to Peru and thumbed through it. From the state of the book, I could see he’d been on the road for months. He seemed on edge, eager to share his enthusiasm for this rare luxury. I knew he was English even before
he opened his mouth, because an Englishman abroad is always reluctant to be the first to break the ice. He wriggled his toes and thumbed harder through the book.
“D’you see the deformed skulls in Paracas?” he blurted, “the ones which look like alien heads?”
I replied that I had.
“I’ve just bought one,” he said, pointing to a dented steel box on the luggage rack.
“What are you going to do with a deformed skull?”
“It’s for my museum.”
For the rest of the journey, the shoeless backpacker informed me of his lifelong passion – a museum of curiosities. The collection, built up over twenty years, already boasted a number of important objects: a pickled tumour from a dead woman’s groin, an Eskimo’s seal-intestine coat, death masks from China, and a selection of trepanned skulls. He even had an “exotic mermaid” – half-baboon, half-fish – faked in Victorian England. The man claimed to have turned his Merseyside house into a shrine, devoted to freakery. Modern museums, he said, were fearful places, packed with dreary objects. Building on the foundations of the past, his collection was full of spirit.
His aim was to match the museum of Peter the Great. The Russian Czar’s storehouse had been packed floor to ceiling with oddities. Many of the exhibits were still breathing. There were live children with two heads, sheep with five feet, and a variety of deformed babies. The caretaker was a dwarf with two fingers on each hand and a pair of toes on each foot. When the dwarf died, he was stuffed and plonked on the shelves with the other exhibits.
The coach trundled through las barriadas, Lima’s shanty-towns. Veiled behind high municipal walls, they hid a world of burden, very different from the luxurious bubble that was the Ormeno bus. The interlocking maze of wooden shacks stand testimony to those who’ve come in search of a better life. Lured by the prospect of magnificent wealth, theirs is a life of unimaginable hardship. They survive on less than nothing. Once they have tasted the drug of the metropolis they can never return home.