Voyage By Dhow

by Norman Lewis

  Then again, it had to be admitted that the gods of the Huichols were very close to them: cosy intimate figures from the family fireside, all of them seen and addressed as the nearest of relatives—Our Grandfather Fire; Our Mother Dove Girl, the Mother of Maize; Elder Brother Sacred Deer; Great Grandaddy Deer Tail. The padre thought that, by comparison, Christianity might seem abstract. In fact only one Christian saint—St Michael—had had any success, and he was accepted because his wings enabled the Huichols to identify him with the double-headed eagle god.

  I told Padre Ernesto that I would very much like to learn more about the Huichols by visiting them in their tribal area, and he said that this was easy enough to do, but I would have to arrange to go with a Franciscan friar and stay at a mission, where I would be most welcome. ‘Otherwise,’ he said, ‘you will be killed.’ I thought that he meant by bandits, but later I happened to meet a Mexican who had been born in a village on the edge of the sierra, and who said that some of the Huichols could be trigger-happy at times. They had suffered from the incursions of evildoers of all kinds, and a stranger without obvious business was far more likely to be an enemy than a friend.

  Padre Ernesto said that all one had to do was to go to the town of Tepic, in the State of Nayarit, ask at the airfield for Padre Alberto Hernandez, and through him charter the mission plane. This would fly to a landing strip in the sierra, after which, he said, there would be a short walk. I was to learn that the padre had fallen into a habit—common among those who have had long contact with Indians—of vagueness and understatement in matters of time and distance. In these countries people derive a huge and human satisfaction from telling others what they believe they want to know, and a village described as ‘not far away’ may be beyond a horizon of mountains, while anything within several hours’ trek is often quite simply aquicito—‘more or less here’. The alternative to the plane trip, and Padre Ernesto’s ‘short walk’ to follow it, was nine days on the back of a mule.

  The opportunity to return to Mexico and see the Huichols came early this year, and this time David Montgomery went with me to take photographs. We flew to Guadalajara for a last-minute briefing by Padre Ernesto, and from there we travelled to Tepic, down near the Pacific coast, by a Tres Estrellas bus—the heroic Mexican version of the North American Greyhound.

  Early next day we went to look for Padre Alberto at the airfield. Here at last, after the anonymous cities, we found ourselves in a traditional Mexican landscape, illuminated by a bland morning sun. To the south, an eruption had dumped glittering coals on a horizon of lively greens. Eastwards a small volcano tilted its crater in our direction, and beyond it the Sierra Madre rose up in a gentle blue swell. Two Huichols had come to catch a plane that might be going somewhere next day, and they squatted among the gesticulating cactus, faces chiselled with noble indifference, absorbing time through their skin. Vultures were pinned here and there like black brooches on the sky, and presently there appeared among them the glittering insect that soon transformed itself into the mission’s plane.

  Padre Alberto drove up through the wash of the excitement created by this arrival, in a large American car. He came here every morning for an hour or two to supervise air cargoes flown into and out of the mission at Guadaloupe Ocotán; a neat, quick man in ordinary street clothes, with an important file of papers under his arm, who listened to what we had to tell him, but seemed unimpressed, and even wary.

  Padre Ernesto, comfortably remote from such scenes of action, had been ready to promise anything. It happened that he was a talented photographer, and David, excited by his dramatic enlargements of masked and antlered dancers cavorting round a slaughtered bull, had hoped he would be able to get pictures of this kind. The padre said that nothing was easier. If there didn’t happen to be a fiesta on wherever we happened to find ourselves in Huichol country, what was wrong with manufacturing one? ‘Buy a bull,’ he said, ‘and get them to sacrifice it.’ It was clear that his attitude towards the performance of such pagan rites was a liberal one.

  We mentioned this suggestion now to Padre Alberto, and he shot us an austere glance. A slight chilling of the atmosphere could be detected. ‘Such sacrifices,’ he said, ‘are strictly reserved for ceremonial occasions. I’m afraid that at the moment you would find little to interest you in Guadaloupe Ocotán.’ He then exploded his bombshell. The mission’s plane was too busy carrying urgent cargoes to take us to the sierra. If we still insisted on going, all he could suggest was that we chartered a twin-engined Beechcraft belonging to a local company. This could fly us further into the sierra to San Andres, where there was the only airstrip it could use, and from San Andres we could walk to Santa Clara where the Order had their second mission, and where they would be able to put us up. It would be expensive, and—it had to be pointed out—chancy, because the weather at the moment was tricky, with high winds, so that even if the Beechcraft could fly us in, there was no telling how long it might be before it could pick us up.

  At this point it began to sound to us like nine days on the mules after all, but soon afterwards there was better news. The padre, who had rushed off to inspect packages, give instructions and sign papers, was back to tell us that the Beechcraft would be making the flight to San Andres in any case next morning. This was a Friday, and on the Sunday—which was not normally a working day—the mission’s Cessna could be chartered to fly in and pick us up at Santa Clara, where there was a small airstrip it could use.

  This solution we accepted with huge relief, although San Andres was twice as far away as Guadaloupe Ocotán, and we had heard there were fewer Indians there. A suspicion lingered that the padre might have decided that this was the best way of getting rid of us. Why—it was hard to say. Writers and photographers could be a nuisance in off-the-beaten-track places like this. A Mexican magazine had just published unflattering photographs of the Coras, taken by a visiting journalist, as a result of which the outraged Indians had barred whites from the Cora tribal area of the sierra. As soon as it was quite clear that there was no chance of our turning up at Padre Alberto’s mission, the atmosphere cleared and we parted the best of friends.

  After leaving Padre Alberto, we made a courtesy call on Dr Ramos, of the Instituto Indigenista, whom we found seated at his desk beneath a fine nearika of the doubled-headed eagle. On our enquiring whether this was the work of the shaman Ramon Medina, the director said that it was, and added that the shaman happened to be in Tepic at that time. He thought he might agree to meet us and allow himself to be photographed. This was an almost incredible piece of luck because the last time Ramon Medina had been heard of in Mexico City he had been living on his family rancho, somewhere in the remote sierra. A tentative appointment was fixed at the Institute’s office for four that afternoon.

  The shaman arrived punctually; a remarkable figure even in Tepic, where there were many Indians in the street, and not a few of them in bizarre regalia. He was a man of about forty, with a small, brown, smiling face and penetrating eyes and, in his cotton shirt and trousers embroidered with deer, eagles and jaguars, and his wide hat decorated with coloured wools and fringed with pendant ornaments, he dominated the discreet environment of the Instituto’s office.

  Fears that he might not wish to be photographed were soon dispelled. Regarded by his countrymen on ritual occasions as an incarnation of the Fire God, the shaman was remote from small-scale intolerance, and he allowed himself, endlessly benign, to be studied from angle to angle, and shifted from position to position, while the shutter of David’s camera clicked interminably.

  It was a huge advantage that although he spoke no English, his Spanish was slow and precise, as if learned late in life, and there were no problems in understanding each other. When we told him of our plans, he shook his head. It would be impossible to see anything of the lives of the Huichols if we went by ourselves. They came down into their five villages only for ceremonial purposes, living otherwise in isolated ranchos throughout the sierra, which no stranger would ever f
ind. We told him that we proposed to make the attempt, whatever happened, and the shaman said: ‘In that case, perhaps you would like me to come with you.’ This we assumed at first to be a piece of Indian politeness, like the offer of a well-bred Spaniard to accompany you when you stop him to ask the way. It was difficult to believe that the shaman really meant what he said, but he did. He was as free as the air to come and go where and when he pleased, he said. We could leave at that moment if we liked.

  Disconcerted a little by this almost inhuman display of independence, we finally agreed to pick the shaman up next morning, and at 5.30 we went in a taxi to find him in a glum little street on the outskirts of the town, where all his neighbours were waiting with their lamps lit to see him off.

  The plane should have left at six, but by the time it lumbered down the runway and bumped into the air towards the sierra the sun was well up. Besides the three of us, there were two other passengers: a Huichol and his exceedingly pretty wife, aged about fourteen. She had the small-boned, elegant face of an Andalusian dancer, without mongoloid traits, but her cheeks were brilliantly rouged in Indian style. At the airport she had sat apart, her back to her husband, in demure Huichol fashion, but now protocol had collapsed under the strain of the experience, and she had buried her face in his neck.

  Through the scratched and misted windows of the Beechcraft, a dramatic landscape had been spread beneath us, rocking gently as the air currents buffeted the plane. We stared down into the green baize-lined crater of the small volcano, and not far from it—despite the fact that Nayarit is supposed to be devoid of archaeological interest—a neat construction of concentric rings that was unmistakably an ancient pyramid appeared and slid away. Ahead, the sierra threw itself in grey waves against the horizon, and the Beechcraft thundered towards them. After my years of air travel in jets, it seemed hardly to move but to lie suspended, flinching and shuddering in each trough of the mountains before the struggle up to clear the next shattered Crusaders’ castle of rock, with a hundred feet or so to spare. At these moments of maximum effort the fuselage flexed gently, and the pilot reached out to make an adjustment here or tighten a wingnut there. The Rio Chapalanga, drawn in its gorges like a flourish under a signature, appeared and vanished again. The shaman, remote from preoccupations and perils, said that the fishing in this river was good, and he pointed with relish to locked-away valleys where jaguars abounded.

  At last a narrow tongue of tableland came into sight across a low precipice, with a patch of fabric among its trees that was the landing strip, and we banked to come in and touch down.

  We climbed down from the plane and looked round us. We were in a clearing of a forest of sparsely planted oaks; bromeliads knotted with their thin daggers of blossom among their branches. Harsh sunshine shattered itself on facets of jade and ice on the rocks beyond the runway, and a freezing wind hissed down. Saying something about worsening conditions, the pilot clambered back and made haste to take off. A group of Huichols with painted faces, squatting in expressionless contemplation of this miracle, got up and trotted away into the trees.

  We were carrying a tremendous load of cameras and tinned foods, and the problem that now faced us was how to struggle under this weight to the mission, which the shaman Ramon assured us with a smile that only inspired doubt was only one hour away. Two apathetic and fragile-looking Huichol women now appeared, as if from a hole in the ground, and the shaman immediately enlisted them as porters.

  The loads were distributed, the shaman taking the heaviest package, and we were about to make a start when he asked us whether we had brought arms. He seemed surprised that we had not. Slung over his shoulder was a splendidly ornamented satchel, and from this he took a 9mm pearl-handled Star automatic pistol, which he stuck in his belt. Had he known we were unarmed, he said, he would have brought his Luger as well, and perhaps his bow. I asked why, and the shaman said we might have shot a deer. His explanation surprised me, because I had read somewhere that the deer was regarded by the Huichols as their totemic ancestor, as well as a minor deity. The ordinary people, I had read, ate deer flesh on the occasions of their major feasts, but it was taboo to their shamans. Ramon later admitted that this was so, and that in his case the killing of a deer would involve a complete magic dislocation, which would inevitably bring about his instant death.

  We now set out over a narrow trail up a gradient leading to low peaks ahead, the shaman leading the way, followed by David and myself, and then, at a respectful distance, the two Huichol women with a valise apiece suspended from cords tied across their foreheads. The landscape had become delicately artificial, a piece of chinoiserie carved from ivory and shell for the amusement of the court of Versailles, and the shaman slipping ahead of us through the trees looked like a tartar from a Russian ballet, or an ornamented Polovtsian, rather than the Indian he was. There was no undergrowth in the forest, and great boulders had been artfully arranged among the beautifully distorted firs and oaks. Clouded blue water trickled through a valley over porcelain rocks, which Ramon told us were full of opals. A macaw, indigo and orange, flashed from the high branches and Ramon held it for a moment with a strange ventriloquist’s whistle. There were gay, squawking birds everywhere, and a few years ago, the shaman said, we would have seen wolves along the trail, and might even have had the luck to run into a bear, or a jaguar; but of late more and more Huichols had come to own .22 rifles, and the animals had withdrawn further into the sierra.

  An hour passed and then two hours, and the track became narrower, steeper and more cluttered with boulders. At one point we passed along the edge of a slope looking down over a gorge that was a small version of the Grand Canyon in dour greens, and the women who had been calling to the shaman came up and pointed to a Huichol rancho—the first we had seen—on a hillside a mile or so away. The shaman’s face changed, and when I asked him what was the matter he said the rancho had been attacked by bandits who were active in the neighbourhood—although in this case the attackers had been driven off. The day was hot now; here we rested, and Ramon, after offering a prayer to the rain god, went down on his hands and knees, blew the scum from the surface of a marshy puddle that had been there since the last rainy season, and drank deeply.

  Three-and-a-half hours after setting out from the airstrip we finally came in sight of the mission. It had been eight miles over hard terrain, and only the shaman showed no signs of fatigue. Coming down the path to the compound we met Padre Joaquin, the Franciscan in charge, who had just arrived in the mission’s Cessna, and we were a little surprised to learn that he had been the only passenger. Our reception seemed less enthusiastic than Padre Ernesto had led us to hope that it might be, and no great intuitive effort was called for to conclude that this was probably the last man in the world to speak to about organizing a pagan fiesta. Ramon had suddenly fallen back and was invisible among the trees, but the father had certainly caught sight of him and it occurred to us that the appearance in these surroundings of a shaman in all his Stone Age trappings might not have been altogether welcome.

  The padre was a man of few words, and little was said until we crossed a stream in which a large, battered metal object lay half-submerged. He told us that this was the remains of the mission’s workshop, which the Huichols had burned down two years before. Speaking with some emphasis, he added: ‘They were hostile to us at that time.’

  To further conversational efforts he replied briefly. The primary function of the mission, he said, was to educate Huichol children, and at that moment they had some sixty pupils of both sexes—all of them boarders, because their family ranchos were too far away for them to return home each day. No charge was made for instruction or board. The children had the afternoon free from study, so we would not see many of them about. He made no offer to show us the mission, but wanted to be quite sure that there was no mistake about the arrangements for our departure. The plane would come on Sunday morning—early, he said, to avoid the high winds. He showed us to the hut, on the edge of the co
mpound, where we were to sleep and quickly made an excuse and left us. A suspicion that he would not be sorry to see the back of us was beginning to grow in our minds.

  Later, sitting with the shaman among the trees in this refined landscape, while woodpeckers with fiery crests scuttled up and down the trunks all round, I made a cautious approach to the topic of the conflict between the two religions, and Ramon set forth his views on the subject with frankness and authority.

  The religious instruction the Huichol children received at the mission, he said, was unimportant. A Huichol soul always remained one and could not be ‘caught’ by the Christians. Whatever the shortcomings, the errors, or the backsliding of this life, he, the shaman, would come for it at death. He would release it from the thorn on which it had been impaled for its sins, draw it through the purifying fires and guide it past the animals that menaced it at the gates of the underworld. Freeing it after its sojourn in the land of the dead, he would escort it on part of its journey to the sun, and if after five years it craved to return to earth he would build the grass shrine to be placed in the family house, where it would live on in its earthbound form as a rock crystal.

  Warming to his theme, his voice pitched in a high incantatory drone, the shaman described the endless after-death saga of the imperishable Huichol soul. And this was the charge that he laid against the missions. Baffled in their attempt to convert the Huichol, their policy was to capture his children by turning them into mestizos through their parents’ intermarriage; the boys and girls at the mission, he said, would be encouraged to marry out of their tribe. The children of such marriages would be baptized, and they would be lost to the Huichol race.