Back of Beyond (4 page)

For me it was just the beginning, or at least I thought it was, but having bored several guests with my plans to travel deep into tepui country, I found myself no closer to leaving after three days of negotiation with local guides.

I had almost given up hope. Everyone seemed to consider climbing the outer tepuis to be a ridiculous idea anyway, especially for this rather overweight traveler who sweated like an ox at the first thwack of morning sun.

Then I met Charles Arkright Gurnley.

So often in adventures of this kind, something comes up that transforms an apparently hopeless situation. You need to keep your mind focused on your goal and to sidestep setbacks with agile optimism.

I was at the local airstrip, a hop, skip, and a bump down the rutted track from my cabin, exploring the possibilities of leaving Canaima early. There seemed little point hanging around only to be told “no” all the time. A few yards from the airline office was a ramshackle place that doubled as a café and souvenir stall selling hammocks, masks, blow pipes, all authentic stuff produced by the local Pémon Indians.

Mr. Gurnley suddenly appeared, a gaunt figure, tall and jangle-limbed, with thick-rimmed spectacles, neatly trimmed moustache and beard, balding head and jungle-stained shorts and shirt. He was hardly a Hemingway but there was something in the way he carried himself, erect, like one of those Buckingham Palace guardsmen, and with the same distant focus in his dark brown eyes.

We almost bumped into each other. I apologized and his focus shifted to the tip of my sun-scorched nose. He had a haughty, stiff-upper-lip glance, and my first impression was that of a Britisher, ex-public school (which in Brit-lingo means private fee-paying), almost a caricature of the type. His face was a smother of incised lines, and I couldn’t tell if he was scowling or in pain, the kind of look you get when you take a bite out of a lemon (although why would anyone ever take a bite out of a lemon?). He reminded me of my old school headmaster—acetic, furrowed, stoic.

“My fault, my fault,” he murmured, and then he smiled, and his smile was remarkably angelic, turning all the furrows into instant laugh lines. I liked him immediately.

“I’m trying to find a bit of shade,” I said rather uselessly.

“Yes—it’s hot today. Bit much for this early.”

“You’re British?”

“Yes. You are too?”

“Yes.”

“Like it here?”

“I’d like it a lot better if I could find a way up into the tepuis.”

“Beyond Auyantepuy?” he asked with an incredulous glint.

“Yes.”

“They’re difficult to climb y’know.”

“You’ve been?”

“Oh yes. Once or twice.”

“How do I get up them?”

He laughed and exposed a keyboard of ivory-white teeth.

“You ask me.”

“You?”

“Well you could ask the boys here, but they won’t be very interested.”

“Why?”

“They don’t like climbing.”

“Why?” (I was feeling like a kid with his dad.)

“They don’t trust it very much.”

“Frightened?”

“Yes.”

“Of what?”

“Aha!” Another toothy grin. “It’s best you don’t know.”

“Seriously?”

“Oh it’s all a lot of guff.” But the way he spoke made me feel I wasn’t getting to the whole truth.

“So how do I get up?”

He stopped smiling and looked at me, a little quizzically, with his head on one side.

“It’s very difficult.”

“You’ve told me that.”

“Yes. Yes, I did.” More piercing looks.

“So?”

“You really want to go?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

(You’re always tempted to give the standard Edmund Hillary “because it’s there” response, but I didn’t.)

“Because I’ve never seen anywhere in the world like this place, and I don’t want to leave.”

“Yes, it can affect you that way.”

“Do many people climb?”

“No.”

“Can I do it?”

“Perhaps.”

“So how do I go about doing it?”

Another long pause.

“Meet me here tomorrow. About nine
A.M.
, after breakfast. I’ll see what I can do.”

“All right?”

“Right then.”

And he was off, like a giraffe, stiff-backed and long-necked, with a final “Say nine-thirty! That’ll be better for me.”

“Okay.”

A quick smile and he vanished.

I was back at our meeting place promptly the following day, but Mr. Gurnley wasn’t. Instead I was met by two of the most unlikely looking Indians, solemn faced, slightly bowlegged, and very small. Both were wearing old torn shirts, grease-stained shorts, and broad straw hats that kept their faces in perpetual shade. One stepped forward and handed me a note. It was from Mr. Gurnley.

“I think you will find these two gentlemen adequate for your purposes. They are Pémon Indians. The taller one is named Tin, at least by me, and I call the other fellow Pan. (Their tribal names are unpronounceable.) Tin can speak some English. He will explain about the cost of their hire and the boat. I shall be away for a few days but hope to see you on your return. Bon voyage. CAG.”

Tin and Pan! How could I refuse such a combination even though I was a little doubtful about their ability to lead me deep into the unknown. I had no choice anyway. We agreed terms, their terms, and I asked when they could be ready. They turned to each other and smiled. Tin held up a small canvas bag, Pan shrugged. Apparently they were ready right now. Well—so was I. The comforts of Canaima were beginning to pall.

The river is placid and oily-surfaced. The ripples made by our wooden dugout canoe or
curiara
powered by a modest outboard motor, hardly ripple at all; the water moves reluctantly in thick undulations toward the jungle shore. The sun hammers its surface into submission. Even at full acceleration (not particularly fast in our case, especially against the current) there’s hardly a breeze to cool my pumping pores. I’m biting off lumps of limpid air and trying to swallow them, and trailing my hand in the river. It’s as warm as a hot tub. Then I remove my hand remembering all those tales of subsurface creatures awaiting the unsuspecting novice—the giant Cayman alligator whose bite will snap off an arm fast as a die-cutter; the notorious anaconda, a huge river-dwelling boa said to reach fifty feet in length and more; the piranhas, with a hundred teeth of honed glass set in bulldog jaws, driven into communal frenzy by blood and capable of shredding a fifty-pound capybara to the skeleton in a few frantic minutes.

Worst of all is the candiru, like a bit of broken string, said to have a fondness for man’s lower orifices, whence inserted, it spreads its body spikes into flesh to prevent extraction. A barbed arrow of destruction that blocks passages and bursts bowels and bladders with insidious ease. And overhead, the ever-watchful, ever-ravenous black vultures, circling silently, waiting vigilantly for rich pickings. All the jungle contradictions: peace disguising panic; order in the midst of chaos; horror hovering over the happiest of moments, mellowed by complacency. I keep my fingers to myself, gripping the side of the canoe.

The jungle eased by, a solid exuberant mass of green, edged in parasol-topped palms. Taken in small sections it was a senseless tangle of vines, dead limbs out of which soared new limbs, fallen trees still standing half straight in the gloom, fresh perky foliage striving for the sun, masses of dun-colored leaves, ferns, and palm fronds sinking back into the pulpy floor of the forest. Taken in larger sections, you could see the calm, changeless form and structure of the jungle, the striated tiers defined by the varied species of trees, ferns, and bushes, peaking in hundred-foot treetops where breezes made the branches frisky in the freedom of space and air and endless sunlight.

It was at once dull and full of endless variety. It tantalized with the partial transparency of its riveredge fringes and threatened with the impenetrable gloom a few yards in. It invited and repelled. Its scale was impossible to imagine. Hundreds of miles of the same stuff in every direction, an infinity of contradictions, a complete and separate living entity needing nothing save itself—discouraging all but the most cursory of explorations, keeping all its mysteries well hidden, safe in those endless sanctuaries.

And yet vulnerable—as the rape of the Brazilian Amazon is now showing us. An elephant being destroyed by a mouse. Easily decimated forever, leaving behind weak soils incapable of protracted cultivation. The “green hell” of white man’s legend or the last true earth lung? A graveyard for the uninitiated, rife with malaria, yellow fever, beriberi, dysentery, or a lost world in need of safekeeping? A humid, fetid hot pot of mosquitoes, chigoes, jejenes that turns even the best-sprayed white torso into an overnight battleground of whelts, bites, and festering sores, or a place of magic and mystery where the body can learn to develop unimagined immunities, find salve in its natural medicines, and discover the secrets of the stars from its potent hallucinogens. A place to end terribly in the whirligig flailings of a Cayman’s body, locked in locked jaws, being beaten to a pulp on river rocks as the alligator does its ritual somersaults of death in the muddy depths—or a place to touch the harmony of Gaia herself and sense the great slow rhythms of the earth, eternally beating, eternally steady, and, with our understanding and participation, eternally strong.

We wriggled on up the river, avoiding the stronger currents in the center, keeping to the calmer water near the bank. For such a small outboard motor, it seemed to be making a surprising amount of noise. Conversation was almost impossible. The sun was hammering in spite of the breeze made by our zigzagging movements; I found it hard to think, and my brain kept whirling off into half dream states.

My companions looked dreamy too, almost drugged.

The jungle is full of plants, barks, and fungi with hallucinogenic properties, much more powerful than the initially benevolent cocaine and those other concoctions found in the “designer drugs” of western cities. Someone back at Canaima had warned me about the pernicious
yopo
, which even the Indians use with great caution.

“You should see what happens when one of these little guys gets a nose job from one of his buddies,” a young world wanderer told me in Canaima. “He sits down and his buddy pushes a yard-long bamboo tube up his nostril and blows in a load of this yellow powder and poof—he’s gone in a flash. Throwing up, coughing, sneezing, spitting out black stuff, weaving about, shouting, moaning, prancing like a bird, and then charging around like a stuck pig. They can’t stay still. They’ll go on for hours….”

My guides seemed reluctant to talk about yopo. They explained in hesitant English that only selected individuals were permitted to take the drug-induced journey to meet the tribes’ “spirit-guides” and return with wisdom, insights, and even predictions for the benefit of their fellows.

“Very strong,” said Tin.

“Very bad,” said Pan.

Neither had ever tried yopo and neither seemed at all tempted by the possibility.

After two long days of relatively calm riding, the peat-brown river suddenly narrowed to swirling rapids, and our tiny canoe bounced like a bottle on the frothy current. The jungle closed in, tangled foliage on either bank almost meeting overhead. It was a forbidding stretch of angry water; I felt we were unwanted, like so much useless flotsam, enveloped in shadows, waiting for something unpleasant to happen, something to pounce, some disaster that would sweep us all away, unnoticed, irrelevant, in the great scale of the place.

Rocks rose up, black and pyramidal, topped with green mosses and forest slime. Pan had eyes for nothing but the river, watching every eddy, steering the boat with his long guitarist’s fingers, avoiding the approaching calm sections, which slowly whirlpooled away into the shadows. We were drenched. The canoe was taking in water. Sometimes there were only a couple of inches between the sides of the craft and the snarling torrent. Tin scooped out the water with his hands. I helped, but it didn’t seem to make much difference. One kamikaze wave, and we’d be as waterlogged as before. The noise was deafening, ferocious. The river would forgive nothing. One mistake and we’d be somersaulting back down the rapids, back into those rocks. I watched Pan’s mouth. He was either chanting or talking to the river. His body was still except for that outstretched hand on the rudder; part of something that could end our lives in an eye-blink. He and the water were one, not exactly on friendly terms, but certainly role-matched. My fears turned to trusting admiration as I watched his eyes. I knew we would make it.

And we did. Half an hour or so later we were through the rapids and into a wider, calmer stream. The jungle pulled back and sparkled in the afternoon heat. The first trial was over and we eased toward a small rocky beach. Both men were smiling. I took Pan’s hand and held it. I could have hugged him but the gesture may have been unfamiliar to him.

“Thank you,” I said.

He squeezed my fingers, placed them on my stomach—and grinned a rare grin before leaping out and pulling the front of the canoe out of the water.

We’d chosen a lousy place to land. Not only was the bank collapsing and root-riven but if you put one foot wrong you were up to your thighs in a putrid black goo that stuck like molasses.

A few minutes later though I wished I was covered head-to-toe with the stuff. At least it would have been some protection against the unbelievable onslaught of mosquitoes and a million other blood-sucking bombardiers. They settled on every inch of exposed flesh and without so much as an exploratory jab, thrust their evil little proboscises into each available blood vessel, willy-nilly. For every dozen I smashed, two dozen more took their place, with ever-increasing frenzy. And what made me so mad was that, as I was thrashing and cursing through the undergrowth, dear Tin and Pan were sauntering on, virtually naked and unmolested. The more I exhausted my vocabulary of expletives, the more they smiled and nodded benignly. I slapped, sprayed three different kinds of expensive repellent, leaped about, threw water over myself, even rubbed mud on my arms and neck. But they were utterly unassailable. Where the hell did they feed when I wasn’t around? They must have been waiting for years for this precise moment!