Do I tell Tomas that the man is a charlatan and that he knows less about the universe than we do? Do I tell Tomas that luck saved him from the tsunami and that tragedy awoke his spiritual conscience? That nothing in the world has anything to do with a piece of string?
Of course I don’t. Instead I bow reverentially and offer the man my wrist. I think of the shadow of the mountain in the early morning sun, of a lost boy clinging to a coconut tree and gaze at Chittasena lighting the flames of his shrine. Despite myself, I recognise something serene and dignified about the way he carries himself.
I see the look of contentment on Tomas’s face and decide that kindness is a far greater force than logic. I offer Chittasena a donation and ask for his blessing.
MANY OF THE WORLD’S holy places are fought over, but Adam’s Peak is not one of them. For that I am grateful. It is shared by the rivers, the ravines, the curling trees and the many creatures that stumble to its summit. It tells us that all faiths have more in common than they think. That perhaps all religion could be one.
On the way down I gaze at the pirith noola on my wrist and decide that I will hold onto it until it falls off. I accept that the point of the journey is the journey. And that being in a hurry doesn’t get you there faster.
Because it doesn’t matter what mythology you choose to accept or what the sunrise at the summit chooses to reveal. What matters is that you accept the world for what it is and that you withhold judgement on things you do not understand. What matters is that you surrender to the holy mountain before you. And that you take the journey a step at a time.
The End of the Bolster
SARA WHEELER (born Bristol, 1961) is a traveller, journalist and broadcaster. Her books include Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica, and Cherry: A Life of Apsley Cherry-Garrard (Cherry was one of Captain Scott’s sledgers, and the author of the polar classic THE WORST JOURNEY IN THE WORLD). The book she most enjoyed writing, The Magnetic North: Notes from the Arctic Circle, was chosen as Book of the Year 2010 by Michael Palin, Will Self, A. N. Wilson and others. This year Jonathan Cape publish Sara’s Access All Areas: Selected Writings 1990-2010 to celebrate her fiftieth birthday.
The End of the Bolster
SARA WHEELER
In 1981, I purchased a return ticket to Warsaw on LOT airlines. I was twenty, with a year of university behind me. Why Poland? I really can’t remember, except that the country had been in the papers a lot that year. I had been waitressing throughout the holidays and accrued the absurdly small sum to buy, in addition to the plane ticket, a month-long Polish rail pass.
It was already dark when I arrived in Warsaw, but I had the address of a government accommodation office and managed to get there on a tram. There was throughout the Soviet bloc at that time a scheme which arranged for visitors to stay in people’s homes. It was cheap, and I thought it would be a good way of getting to know Poles.
The office had a full-length glass frontage behind which a stuffed eagle moulted kapok. A heavy revolving door scraped through its revolution like an orchestra tuning up. Two gorgons swathed in black behind a Formica desk looked up, briefly. I could see that they found the interruption to their knitting an irritation. A double room, it quickly emerged, was all that was available. I said I’d take it. It was against the rules, snapped Gorgon One, revealing three gold teeth, for a single person to take a double room. She returned to her knitting with a triumphant clack of needles. I said I was prepared to pay double rates. ‘Also illegal,’ chipped in Gorgon Two, anxious not to miss out on the opportunity to ruin someone’s day. In addition, they alleged there was not one hotel room available in the entire city.
I deployed a range of tactics, including tears. No dice. It was dark, I was in a strange city without a word of Polish.
At that moment the revolving door spluttered to tuneless life once more. All three of us looked up. The crones muttered darkly, no doubt about the damnable inconvenience of a second customer. A tall, blond man with marble-blue eyes and a rucksack sauntered athletically into the room.
‘We’ll take the double room,’ I said to the crones.
She looked at her henchwoman. So it was all true.
The blond man put down his rucksack and held out his hand to shake mine. An elastoplast covered his right thumbnail. I knew from the first syllable that he was Australian. It turned out that he had already been on the road in the Eastern bloc for a month, so when I explained the non-accommodation situation, he found it perfectly normal that we should share a room.
We stayed in a high-rise in the industrial suburbs, guests of a saturnine family who had been instructed not to speak to us. (In those days, Poland was still a fomenting sea of suspicion, and people who rented out rooms were rigorously vetted.) So much for meeting Poles. Once we had settled in to our chilly billet, my new friend took up the cylindrical bolster that lay at the head of the double bed and placed it down the middle. ‘No need to worry,’ he said. ‘This is my half,’ and he pointed to the left side of the bed, ‘and that’s yours.’
The Security Services had been busy that year, doing what they most liked to do – shutting up everyone else, brutally if possible. Millions of Poles naturally reacted with anger, and in March Solidarity activists had coordinated an extraordinary general strike unique in the Eastern bloc. Tension had subsided somewhat, but the economy was a carcrash. Even though every food shop was empty, a queue snaked outside, the people waiting for some tiny rationed bit of something to be doled out from behind the counter. A Solidarity poster on the telegraph poles showed a black skull with a crossed knife and fork under it.
As for Teddy, following in the footsteps of so many of his compatriots, he had taken six months out to have a look at the world. His mother was a Pole who had arrived in Western Australia as a twenty-four-year-old refugee. She had married Teddy’s father, a wood-turner from Perth, and they had worked hard and made good. Teddy, who was twenty-four, was the youngest of seven. He turned out to be a fine companion, with a relaxed Antipodean attitude to everything that the Polish system tossed in our path. It seemed natural that we should travel together. Before leaving Warsaw we paid 20p for opera tickets in Teatr Wielki, installing ourselves in the magnificently restored Moniuszko auditorium to listen to a fine coloratura soprano sliding up and down Amina’s arias in La Sonnambula. Afterwards we sat in bars kippered with smoke, downing tiny glasses of vodka. We left the capital to wander through the mildewed rooms of baroque castles, and tore our jeans climbing to hermitages teetering on Gothic outcrops. We visited Teddy’s mother’s birthplace, where I took his photograph, and then travelled to the Tatra Mountains, where we swam in Lake Morskie Oko, climbed Mount Koscielec and ate spicy wild boar sausages. We discovered a new world – or so it seemed to us.
By the time we rode the Coal Trunk Line through the steel belt of Upper Silesia, I was struggling to ignore the fact that I really liked him. I kept telling myself that I’d be betraying the whole mature arrangement if anything happened between us. I had somehow absorbed the idea that travelling occurs in a separate moral universe, outside the confines of normal life. I know differently now.
One day, at the end of our second week together, we took an overnight train to Wroclaw. Early in the morning Teddy procured a cup of acorn coffee from a vendor through the train window and brought it to me, waking me by stroking my arm. When I opened my eyes I felt a rush of emotion. Despite all Poland’s exotic unfamiliarity, I learnt then that the most foreign country is within.
The end, or beginning, came when we visited Chopin’s birthplace, a modest manor in the Mazovian heartland. A group of musicians from the Warsaw Conservatory were giving Chopin piano recitals in the grounds; as we approached they were belting out mazurkas, but when we took our seats a young man began to play the incomparable C-sharp minor Scherzo. The fierce opening octaves uncoiled over forest, glades and the willowed hills behind the fast-flowing Utrata: a perfect setting for the music of an ardent patriot. But Chopin finished the piece at George Sand’
s summer house in Nohant, France. He was twenty-nine, consumptive, and guilty at his self-imposed exile in Louis-Philippe’s France. Folded into the devotion, a betrayal. One forgot all that, though, and one even forgot Poland as the genius of the music took hold. The small amphitheatre of chairs gave onto a glade infused with the butterscotch light of late summer, and the intense final harmonies of the Scherzo – a climax of desire and longing – drifted away over the silver beeches. We sat there in the chequered shadow of the trees, Teddy rested his fingers on the nape of my neck, and that was the end of the bolster.
Encounter in the Amazon
HUGH THOMSON (born London, 1960) is a writer, film-maker and explorer, specialising in the Andes, where he led an expediton that discovered the Inca site of Cota Coca. He is the author of The White Rock: An Exploration of the Inca Heartland and Cochineal Red: Travels through Ancient Peru, and Nanda Devi – about a Himalayan valley ringed by 20,000 ft peaks. His most recent book is Tequila Oil, a memoir about ‘getting lost in Mexico’. www.thewhiterock.co.uk
Encounter in the Amazon
HUGH THOMSON
John Hemming is the epitome of a certain sort of English gentleman – courteous, retiring and extremely modest. Now seventy-five, he was the Director of the Royal Geographical Society for over two decades. He has written definitive histories of both the conquest of the Incas and the tribes of the Amazon. But beneath the reserved exterior of this scholarly explorer lies a life of unusual adventure and risk-taking that began with the most remarkable story. For as a young man, in 1961, he lost his closest friend, Richard Mason, who became the last Englishman to be killed by an undiscovered tribe in the Amazon.
I first met John thirty years ago when I was planning my own expedition to Peru to look for Inca ruins. He lived then, as he still does, in a quiet Kensington square. It was characteristically gracious of him to advise me, as at that stage I had very little experience. He led me down the dark hall of his house and into a study lined with books about South America, with shafts of light from high windows. In a curious way, that moment of entering his study with him felt like the first step in the process of discovery. He told me part of the story then, and over the years I have filled in other sections, but it was only recently that we discussed at length not only the tragic events of the 1961 expedition but his later quest to find the perpetrators.
The expedition had begun so well. It was Richard Mason who suggested to John that they take a team to an unmapped part of the Amazon. They had been room-mates at Oxford and had already developed a taste for exploration: Richard had crossed South America by Land Rover, while John had managed to get a berth on a freighter to Peru. They recruited a third member, the unlikely figure of Kit Lambert, an old schoolfriend of Richard’s who was later to be The Who’s manager, and set off.
At first the three young men, all in their twenties, felt they were living a wonderful adventure. By night they slept in hammocks; by day they mapped the beautiful and uncharted country along the Iriri River, having fun naming the lakes and hills after their girlfriends, just as a blameless river had been called after Theodore Roosevelt’s son Kermit when the ex-president led an expedition to the Amazon in 1913.
Their technique for getting through the jungle was simple. One of them would lead the path-cutting team of wood-cutters. Aiming at a distant tree as a sightline, the leader would crash and hack his way forward through the undergrowth, while two men widened the trail behind and the others followed. John remembers it vividly: ‘Sometimes we shot game – wild turkeys or tapirs – but generally we ate little and lost weight. We became pale from rarely seeing the sun, and were covered in bites and scratches. The compensation for all this effort was the beauty of virgin rainforest and the knowledge that no Westerner had ever trodden there before.
‘Richard was a wonderful leader. His Portuguese was poor, but his hard work and optimism commanded respect and inspired the men even when the going was toughest.’
Yet progress proved slower than expected. Their stocks of food started to run down and John was dispatched to Rio de Janeiro to get more supplies and drop them back by parachute.
‘I had no money. To get to Rio, I had to barter a bottle of whisky with a pilot, and then hitchhike my way from the airport into the city – where I found myself in the midst of an attempted coup. The whole air force had been grounded. Somehow I managed to get an air-sea rescue team to help us and found myself flying back across the jungle in an enormous seaplane to be dropped off with the new supplies. Then we ran into a lightning storm. It was a surreal experience, seeing the lightning surround us and illuminate the jungle canopy by night.
‘In the middle of the storm, the co-pilot came back into the cargo-hold to tell me that they had picked up bad news on the radio. While I’d been away, the expedition had been attacked and someone had been killed. At that point they didn’t know who.’
Only on landing did John discover what had happened. Richard Mason had been alone and going back down a trail they had previously cut. After months of exploring what the expedition had been told was uninhabited jungle, they had long stopped worrying about Indian attacks. But that is what seemed to have taken place. The others had come across his body carefully laid out on the path, surrounded by forty arrows and seventeen heavy clubs. A bag of sugar was spilled nearby, untouched – as was a lighter. Nothing had been taken.
John found Kit Lambert in a complete and understandable state of shock. In today’s culture, Kit would have been more of a candidate for I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here than an actual expedition to the jungle. In later life he led a flamboyant and camp rock’n’roll lifestyle with The Who.
The two men’s immediate concern was that there might be a further attack, so they hurried with the rest of their team to the relative safety of the one air-strip they could reach, Cachimbo, ‘as isolated in the jungle as a small island in the South Atlantic’.
THE BRAZILIAN AUTHORITIES flew in some medics and a platoon of ‘jungle troops’ – who looked like they would have been more at home in the nightclubs of Rio. John asked if the body could be cremated. He was told that first there would have to be an examination to make sure that he hadn’t been killed by other members of the expedition; they all had to return to the scene of the death.
For John, it was a terrible journey: ‘We walked sombrely back along that familiar trail, sleeping at an old camp site. I remember it all as dreamlike, with the landmarks along the trail seeming unreal and the once-cheerful camp gloomy and strangely sinister. The medics embalmed Richard’s body and we carried it out, wrapped in canvas and slung under a pole, for eventual burial in the British cemetery in Rio de Janeiro.’
While, like Kit, John was still in deep shock, he tried as best he could to rationalise his friend’s death. As Kit and he agreed, at least it had been almost instantaneous – it could as easily have been a crash in one of the fast cars that Richard was so fond of driving. And then John did something which some might find surprising. He decided to leave a gift of machetes for the unknown attackers, hoping that they would conclude that the white men were well-intentioned. This was in the tradition of earlier Amazon explorers like Colonel Rondon.
The question that haunted John was how the attackers had come across Richard in supposedly uninhabited jungle: had they seen the smoke flares lit by the team for several days to guide John’s plane when it made its expected parachute drop – and were they from an unreported village nearby or a long range hunting party from tribes known to be living in the far distance?
For many years it remained an unresolved mystery, though by carrying one of the jungle arrows back to an academic in Oxford (‘I felt very conspicuous on the train’), John was able to get an identification for the tribal group who had committed the murder. It belonged to the Panará, at that time uncontacted by the outside world, and feared as savage and violent by neighbouring Brazilian tribes who called them ‘The Men With Heads Cut Round’ because of their pudding bowl haircuts.
In t
he decades that followed, John continued working in other areas of the Amazon and became a well-known expert on its history. It was not until forty years later that he finally came face to face with the tribe.
‘I ASSUMED THAT all the Panará involved in Richard’s death would by now be dead, and that their descendants would have forgotten that distant ambush. They had suffered too many calamities of their own since then. Within two years of their first face-to-face encounter with the outside world in 1973, their numbers had fallen from 600 to 80. They were then forced off their tribal land by gold prospectors and cattle-ranchers. The Brazilian Government’s Indian Service had restricted access to them as a result. But when by chance we were able to reach the new Panará village when visiting another tribe nearby, I found that they did remember that first contact with a white man.’
With great good luck, one of the three people in the world who could speak the Panará language, anthropologist Elizabeth Ewart, was at the village when he arrived, so could translate. She told the tribe that John was a friend of the man they had killed and they became worried and apprehensive. Their leaders revealed that it had indeed been a long distance hunting party veering far from their usual path in search of Brazil nuts who had come across Richard in the jungle – or rather had come across the path the expedition had been cutting which, as John says, must have seemed like a motorway. They had waited beside it until they heard the ‘swish’ that Richard’s jeans made from far down the path as he approached. One man said that the hunters had called out ‘Come here’ to Richard, and when he had not understood, they had killed him.
‘I learnt,’ said John, ‘that doing so has always been the Panará way. Their word for “stranger” – for any non-Panará – is the same as for “enemy”. It was also an old Panará tradition for every member of a party that killed someone to leave his weapons beside the body.’
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