by Tim Cahill
The schoolhouse had a tin roof, and the rattle of rain upon it was deafening. Just before dark, as lightning flashed and thunder rumbled over the ridge, Feliciano entered the schoolhouse. Like most of the local Indians, he was short, barely over five feet tall, but he was broad in the chest and shoulders, a powerful-looking man. For a fellow named Feliciano (the Happy One), he didn’t smile much.
We could, he said, reach the top of Roraima in two days of hard walking. But that was in the dry season. He didn’t think it was possible to go in the rainy season. We would have to ford the Kukenam River, which was very wide, very fast, very dangerous. The top of Roraima was all marsh and rain, all fog and wind and thunder and lightning. The only person Feliciano had ever heard about who went to the top in the rainy season was a solitary hiker from Caracas who had supposedly died in the frigid rains there.
There followed a long discussion, shouted over the roar of rain on the roof, and in the end, Feliciano agreed to take us as far as the Kukenam.
The dawn was rosy and clear. We could see the bulk of Roraima in the distance. Rising next to it was the tepui called Kukenam, and north of that were two more of the immense tabletop mountains. They were more than twenty-five miles away, but they loomed over the village and seemed close enough to reach out and touch.
Late that afternoon, we reached the Kukenam River. It had been raining steadily for hours; one of those constant, drenching downpours; a rain that made one feel as if it would be like this until the end of time, gray and cold and pounding away until it turned the brain to jellied pus.
When Feliciano saw we meant to cross the river with or without him, he began muttering mysteriously, then followed us across.
The Kukenam was about fifty yards wide and waist-deep on me. Crossing a fast-flowing river with a sixty-pound pack on one’s back is a hazardous undertaking. The river bottom consisted of smooth, slippery stones, and they turned under our boots, so that in midstream we found ourselves rocking back and forth with each step, like inept tightrope walkers. The idea of falling into those swirling waters and being swept downstream into the rocks and rapids was not a happy one.
When we were all safely on the Roraima side of the Kukenam, Feliciano smiled for the first and only time.
Roraima rose above us. There was a lower slope to the mountain, and it was covered over with a dense rain forest. A finger of the forest crawled up the sheer rock where the walls became vertical, then it crept along a rising ledge. The trail had been cut through that part of the jungle.
The first pitch was steep and so slick with running water and minor mudslides that it was a good idea to take it on all fours. This jungle was different and unutterably worse than the lowlands around El Dorado. There, the trees were high and straight, and the canopy they provided hid the sun and kept the jungle floor somewhat free of foliage. But this sidehill rain forest was a choking vegetable metropolis. The competition was fierce, deadly. The soil was thin, and roots could take no firm grip in it, so trees tottered and leaned, one against the other. Vines, like tentacles, lashed out and wrapped themselves around this branch or that. Parasitic flowers erupted everywhere. Branches, vines, and strange bits of bushy foliage twisted and snaked about through the tortured, thorny gloom, looking for a place in which to steal the sun. Each of these twisted, growing things longed for the death of its nearest neighbor.
We pushed on, slipping in the mud or on the mossy rocks, grabbing anything to keep from falling: grabbing long white vines the color of flesh and slick with some sort of slimy mucus, grabbing branches the size of a fullback’s thigh, branches that crumbled in the hand and stank, morguelike, of rot and decay.
The jungle tangled our feet and grabbed at our legs. It slapped at our faces with thorny vines. It held us back, tugging at our packs like a boorish, drunken host who won’t let you leave his party. The jungle, it seemed, was jealous of the mountain and would not allow us to climb it.
By the time the trail, such as it was, rose above the tree line, I was exhausted, deadened with fatigue. We passed behind a waterfall, then began climbing a boulder fall that seemed to have come from the summit. Here and there, we could see a few dead leaves, carried up to the rocks by the wind. The leaves had not rotted or withered. They were exactly as they had been in life, except that they had turned glistening black in the rain. They were the same color as the rocks.
At nine thousand feet, we came over the lip of the summit. We were in the clouds, and the prevailing weather condition might best be described as howling mist. This was Conan Doyle’s Lost World: alien acres of black, tortured rock. There were no dinosaurs and no place in which one might comfortably sleep. We found no spot on top of the mountain where it would have been possible to pitch a tent. What wasn’t rock was marsh. The mountain, it seemed, was a reluctant host, and it resented our presence.
An overhang at the bottom of a small cliff was the only place we could find to camp. It was cramped and dank. We curled up in our bags as darkness took hold of the mountain. The wind shrieked, and lightning cracked among the rocks.
Mornings were particularly unpleasant atop Roraima. Everything was wet and gritty. Wool socks were wet and gritty. Wool shirts were wet and gritty. All rain gear was wet and gritty. Once dressed, one simply sloshed out to the marshes.
The top was not perfectly flat. There was a central valley below the cliff, and there, water stood in rocky pools or flowed down to meet a river. In the river and the pools, I found hundreds of milky quartzite crystals. One explorer had called Roraima the Crystal Mountain.
We had reached our goal, but I found it difficult to think anything at all. The constant torrential rains affected the spirit, made one feel empty and soulless and instantly stupid. When I found myself wondering whether it would be possible to die by lying on my back with my mouth open, I knew I had to get out of the rain. I sat for an hour in a small canyon under an overhanging rock.
The canyon floor was sixty yards long, forty wide. The walls on either side rose thirty to sixty feet. Water dripped down the walls, forming a clear, shallow central pond surrounded by tufts of green-gold grass. Near one end of the pool were three stunted trees.
There was a serene beauty to the pond; it looked like a formal garden. The canyon walls, however, were eerie and vaguely menacing. Wind, rain, and time had carved stone balconies, pillars, and gargoyle shapes. There was a cavernlike quality to the canyon, and the mind does not allow such shapes to go uninterpreted. Some of the rocks looked almost simian: I could see in them the faces of screaming monkeys. Other rocks had a Neanderthal cast to them: the faces formed in the mind’s eye were brutish things with heavy ledges over the eyes. There were pig faces and twisted dog faces, all howling in some sort of timeless pain.
Taken as a whole, the images seemed at once mystical, demented, and blasphemous. It was a simple thing to see the canyon as a ruin, the remnants of some ancient, inhuman culture. The altars and balconies and pillars, the strange stone faces grimacing down on the gardens and the pool, all these summoned up images of mindless gods and cruel rituals, of shrieks and curses echoing off the canyon walls, of pale blood flowing with the waters.
Suddenly, impossibly, the mists cleared. The sky above was deep blue, and warm afternoon sun poured down, turning the pond the color of honey and straw. I stripped off my soggy clothes and stood naked under the unfamiliar sun. There was no wind. It was silent in the canyon but for the constant flow of water. Water ran in rivulets down the canyon walls, and water over the rock has the sound of muffled voices. It was as if hidden beings in the balconies were conversing with one another across the gardens below, speaking in some alien, liquid language.
I was warm and dry for the first time in days. Now it seemed to me that the smooth, rounded, dripping rocks, the puddled depressions, the archways and spires, all had overtly sexual connotations. Rivulets splashed down the broken, rocky walls, sounding like laughter, and they murmured sweetly through the grasses to the pond. The waters of the pond emptied through a great
V-shaped depression into a semicircular stone trough leading down to the crystal river below. There, at that hard notch, the water gurgled deeply. All these waters—waters from everywhere atop Roraima—would meet at the precipice of the mountain. There, with a terrible roar of release, they’d fall forever into the green world far below.
I have two newspaper clippings on my desk. One, from the back pages of a Caracas daily, features a picture of Pedro and Luis. It says that despite many hazards, they made what is believed to be the first rainy-season ascent of Roraima. Nick, Mark, and I are mentioned in passing. The impression one gets is that we just sort of tagged along with Pedro and Luis. Still, the article makes us all sound like heroes.
The second clipping concerns a plane crash in the jungle. Every time I look at it, it gives me the creeps.
We had driven south from Roraima to Santa Elena, a town near the border between Venezuela and Guyana. In a bar at the Fronteras Hotel, I met Floyd Park, a big, middle-aged diamond and gold buyer, formerly from Texas. Floyd had spent a lot of good years in the bush, and he had seen some pretty strange things. “They got snakes out there, anacondas, forty feet long and as big around as a fifty-gallon oil drum. They eat deer. You see ’em sunning on a riverbank with the horns sticking out of their mouths. When the deer is pretty much digested, they spit the horns out.”
We had a few more beers, and Floyd began talking about a mining camp he knew. It had gotten big enough to put in an airstrip, and one of the first planes down contained three West Indian prostitutes. Instantly, it seemed half the camp was suffering from venereal disease.
Floyd was flying in supplies at the time, and one of the storekeepers asked him to bring in one hundred shots of penicillin. The shots were sold for about five dollars apiece. Another storekeeper, who knew a good thing when he saw it, asked Floyd to fly in five hundred shots and “one of those things doctors have to put in their ears.”
“You mean a stethoscope?”
“Yeah, that’s it, a stethoscope.”
With the stethoscope, Floyd explained, the man was able to sell his shots for ten dollars apiece. He looked more professional.
An officer in a neatly pressed uniform approached the table. He wore a mustache that looked very good on him, and he had the dashing air of a military pilot. “I understand you have climbed Roraima,” he said. “I, too, am interested in the mountain.” His name was José Wilson. He was, indeed, a pilot and a major in the Venezuelan National Guard, It would be his pleasure, he said, to take us on a flight over Roraima so we could see where we had been from the air. He could arrange it for Saturday. Since it was Wednesday, that meant we’d have to stay in Santa Elena more days than we had planned, but the flight seemed worth it. I thanked Major Wilson and told him we’d see him Saturday morning.
“I didn’t get to tell you about Old Sammy, the ugliest man in the world,” Floyd said. “He was in that camp where they all had the clap. Anyway, they had caught him stealing diamonds and cut up his face with machetes. Cut him real good.”
“Jesus.”
“Sammy would have died, but some Brazilians came along and sewed up his face with bag needles.”
“Bag needles?”
“Needles and thread for burlap sacks. That’s all they had. Sammy was a mess, and even after he healed up, he couldn’t seem to work at much. Well, Sammy was thinking about buying a bottle of rum and noticed all the empty bottles in back of the store. There was still some penicillin in the bottom of them, so he started trying to collect enough to make a couple of shots he could sell. Then he got greedy. He filled the syringes halfway with penicillin and halfway with dirty river water. That’s the way he sold them.”
I waited, sipped my beer, and finally said, “And that’s all?”
“That’s what happened.”
“What’s the punch line? What happened to Sammy?”
“No one knows. It’s just something that happened. There are no punch lines in the jungle.”
Saturday, we went down to the National Guard headquarters and asked for Major Wilson. They said he was supposed to be flying down from up north, but his plane was late—twelve hours late. No one wanted to say it, but it seemed certain that Major Wilson had gone down.
On the way north from Santa Elena, we stopped at the big army base of Luepa to inquire about Major Wilson. The soldiers at the gate wouldn’t answer our questions, but they did take us to the officers’ club. Above the bar was a large motto: La selva es nuestra alidad (“The jungle is our ally”). It was one of those sentences you know is untrue on the face of it, sentences like “The policeman is your friend” or “The dentist won’t hurt you.” A tired-looking officer listened to our story, then bought us a drink. Major Wilson, he told us, had definitely crashed.
By the time we got to Caracas, it was front-page news. The report from Venezuela said that a mail plane had gone down “on the border.” The report from Georgetown, Guyana, was much more specific. The plane had crashed near an airfield called Johnson’s Ridge, well within Guyanese territory. The report said the pilot had lost his way, that he had become confused by the lights at Johnson’s Ridge. Several soldiers aboard the plane had been killed. And Major Wilson, who loved Roraima and Venezuela, was gravely injured. In another twelve hours, we would have flown with him over the mountain, but he had gone down in Guyana, at Johnson’s Ridge.
I knew that airfield. There was an army base at the field. I had landed there on my way to Jonestown, some fifteen miles away.
I had a sudden vision of all those wasted lives, all those bodies bloating in the heat and the rain at Jonestown. The thought of more bodies lying out in that stinking jungle choked me, brought a taste of bile into my throat. La selva es nuestra alidad. The jungle is your friend. The jungle won’t hurt you.
There are no punch lines in the jungle.
The Underwater Zombie
A zombie walks around all day in a rotten mood. Walking death does that to a guy. It’s worse than bursitis. Most people don’t enjoy the company of zombies. How many times have you heard some bigot say, “I’m not going to any restaurant that serves zombies,” or “Marge, let’s not go to Cleveland. The place is full of zombies.” Zombies resent this sort of prejudice, and that’s why they go around ripping up people like confetti.
These days, a new, bitter chapter is being written in the zombie saga. The walking dead, it appears, have taken to the sea. Probably not one diver in ten thousand knows what to do when confronted by an underwater zombie. Of course, these dead denizens of the deep are pretty rare, but a little preparation never hurt anyone. Expect them to walk on the bottom. They come strolling out of the deep, and they like to hold snorkelers down, and rip the regulators out of divers’ mouths. They are extremely strong, impervious to pain, and no fun at parties.
I learned about the dread underwater zombie from a woman who lives in Cozumel and sometimes works as a shark handler for underwater films made in those waters. “The Zombie is a very successful Mexican horror film,” she said. “In The Zombie II, he hangs out underwater a lot, and he mostly goes for girls who dive topless.”
“I’ve never seen any woman dive topless around here,” I pointed out.
“That’s an instance where The Zombie II may not be entirely true to life. Anyway, they had this starlet who was diving topless, and the zombie came walking up.”
“He wasn’t a real zombie?”
“No, he was an actor playing a zombie. His shoes weighed fifteen pounds apiece, and they kept him down. He walked real slow. Just like a zombie. He’d take a breath, you know, buddy-breath with a support diver, then walk four or five steps with the camera rolling. Then they’d cut, and he’d take a few more breaths.
“All the local captains were in the water, watching this scene with the topless girl. Some of them, I know for a fact, hadn’t been in the water for years.”
“They were pretty curious about underwater zombies, I bet.”
“No doubt. As it turns out, the thing to do with a zombie u
nderwater is to hold up a piece of coral. Apparently they hate that. It’s like vampires and crosses, I guess. Anyway, the girl held up the coral and zombie put his hands in front of his face and went ‘arrggh’ underwater and trudged back to the support diver. The girl surfaced, and every one of the gallant Mexican captains managed to give her a hand before she could get into her robe.
“That was the end of that scene. Now they were ready to film the grand finale to the movie: a fight between the underwater zombie and a shark. We had this nurse shark, six or seven feet long. We had six handlers: three of us holding the shark on one side, just out of camera range, and three waiting on the other side. The guy playing the zombie was in the middle, in front of the camera.
“My team pushed the shark over to the other team. They’d grab it, turn it around and push it back. I mean, this was a docile shark, and it just sort of drifted by the zombie guy. But they could cut the film so that it’d look like, you know, a series of darting attacks, what with the zombie waving his arms and everything.”
“Can an underwater zombie take a shark?” I asked.
“No way. First the shark took off one of the zombie’s arms. It was a fake arm, of course, and we had a pretty hard time getting the shark to take it. Then all this fake blood came out of the place where the arm used to be, and the zombie thrashed around for a while until the shark came along and dragged the zombie out to sea. The guy playing the zombie didn’t much care for that last scene.
“You have to imagine it. He’s got all this makeup on his face, and no mask, so he can hardly see. He’s got a wire-cage deal hanging off his shoulder, and his real arm strapped to his body inside heavy clothes. He’s wearing thirty pounds’ worth of boots. And he’s got one breath. The shark was supposed to bite the wire cage, and drag him away. We were supposed to catch the shark and get the regulator into the zombie’s mouth.
“Well, the zombie wanted to talk to the director before this scene. They talked for quite a bit, and if I was the zombie, I would have asked for a hell of a lot more money for that scene. They talked for quite some time.”