City of the Beasts

  He was faster returning than coming, because now he knew the way. He was not tempted to stop and dig out precious stones, and when he passed the milky lake where he had seen the mirage of Cecilia, he did not even pause but held his nose to defend against the fragrance that addled his brain. The greatest difficulty came when he had to crawl back into the narrow tunnel through which he’d come, holding the gourd upright to keep from spilling its contents. He had a cover, a square of leather tied with a cord, but it wasn’t waterproof and he didn’t want to lose a drop of the miraculous water of health. This time the tunnel, though oppressive and dark, was not as horrible since he knew that at the end, he would reach light and air.

  Struck by the last rays of the sun, the feather mattress of clouds at the mouth of the tepui was turning every shade of red from russet to pink gold. The six moons of light were beginning to fade from the strange heavens of the tepui when Nadia and Alexander returned. Walimai was waiting with Borobá in the amphitheater of the city of gold, facing the council of the Beasts. As soon as the monkey saw his mistress, he raced to her with obvious relief and wound his arms around her neck. The two young people were limp with fatigue; their bodies were covered with cuts and scratches and bruises but they had the treasures they had gone to seek. The ancient witch man showed no sign of surprise; he welcomed them with the same serenity with which he performed every act of his life, and notified them that it was time to leave. There was no time to rest; that night they would have to pass through the inside of the mountain and emerge in the Eye of the World.

  “I had to leave my talisman,” Nadia told her friend sadly.

  “And I left my flute,” Alex added.

  “You can get another,” the girl said. “You make the music, not the flute.”

  “Just like the powers of the talisman are within you,” he consoled her.

  Walimai examined the three eggs with care and sniffed the water in the gourd. He nodded with great seriousness. Then he untied one of the small leather pouches hanging from his healer’s staff and gave it to Alex with instructions to grind the leaves and stir them with the water to cure his mother. Alex hung the pouch around his neck as tears came to his eyes. Walimai shook his quartz cylinder above Alex’s head for a good while, blew on his chest, temples, and back, and touched his arms and legs with his staff.

  “If you were not nahab, you would be my successor. You were born with the soul of a shaman. You have the power to heal. Use it well.”

  “Does that mean that I can cure my mother with this water and these leaves?”

  “Maybe yes and maybe no . . .”

  Alex realized that his hopes had no logical base; he should trust the modern treatments of the hospital in Texas and not a gourdful of water and a few dried leaves given him by a naked old man in the middle of the Amazon, but on this journey he had learned to open his mind to mysteries. Supernatural powers did exist, and other dimensions of reality, like this tepui filled with creatures from prehistoric times. True, nearly everything could be explained rationally, including the Beasts; however, Alex preferred just to hope for a miracle.

  The council of the gods had accepted the warnings of the foreigners and the wise Walimai. They would not go out to kill the nahab; that was a futile task, since they were as numerous as the ants and others would always come in their place. The Beasts would stay inside their sacred mountain where they were safe, at least for now.

  • • •

  Nadia and Alex said good-bye to the giant sloths with a heavy heart. In the best of cases, if everything turned out well, the labyrinthine passage to the tepui would not be discovered and helicopters would not descend there from the sky. With luck, another century might pass before human curiosity reached this last refuge of prehistoric times. But if not, they hoped that at least the scientific community would defend those extraordinary creatures before the greed of adventurers destroyed them. One way or other, they knew that they themselves would not see the Beasts again.

  As it grew dark, their way lighted by Walimai’s resin torch, Alex and Nadia climbed the steps that led to the labyrinth. They went straight through the intricate system of tunnels, which the shaman knew to perfection. Not once did they come to a dead end, and they never had to turn back or retrace their steps, because the map was etched in the shaman’s mind. Alex gave up on the idea of committing the turns to memory, because even had he been able to remember them, or set them down on paper, without points of reference it would be impossible to find where he was now.

  They came to the marvelous cavern where they had seen the first dragon and once again marveled at the colors of the glittering precious stones and crystals and ores. It was like the true cave of Ali Baba, with all the fabulous treasure the most ambitious mind could imagine. Alex remembered the green stone he had put in his pocket, and he took it out to compare. In the pale splendor of the cave, the stone was no longer green, but yellow, and he realized that the color of the stones in the cave of his quest was the result of the light, and that possibly they had as little value as the fool’s gold of El Dorado. He had done well to reject the temptation to fill the gourd with them instead of the water of health. He kept the false emerald as a souvenir; he would take it to his mother as a gift.

  The winged dragon was in its corner, just where they had seen it before, but now a smaller one was with it, this one mostly red, perhaps its mate. They were not disturbed by the presence of the three humans, nor when the wife-spirit of Walimai flew over to greet them, fluttering around them like a fairy without wings.

  On this occasion, just as on the pilgrimage into the depths of the Earth, the return seemed shorter and easier to Alex; he knew what it was like and was not expecting surprises. And there were none, so after passing through the last tunnel, they found themselves in a cave a few feet from the exit. There Walimai told them to sit down. He opened one of his mysterious little pouches and produced some leaves that looked like tobacco. He explained briefly that they must be “cleansed” to erase the memory of what they had seen. Alex did not want to forget the Beasts or his journey deep into the Earth, and Nadia did not want to give up what she had learned. Walimai assured them they would remember all that; he would merely erase the route from their minds so they could not return to the sacred mountain.

  Walimai rolled the leaves, sealed them with saliva, and lighted them like a cigarette. He took a puff and then forcefully blew the smoke into the young people’s mouths, first Alex and then Nadia. It was not a pleasant experience, the stinking, hot, biting smoke went right to their heads; the effect was like breathing pepper. They felt a sharp stinging, an uncontrollable desire to sneeze, and very soon they felt dizzy. Alex’s first experience with tobacco came to mind, when his grandmother Kate had bundled them into a car and they had smoked until he was as sick as a dog. This time the symptoms were similar, except that everything was whirling around him.

  Then Walimai extinguished the torch. There were no pale rays from the sun to light the cave, as they had several days before when they were just starting. The blackness was total. Each of the young people reached for the other’s hand, and Borobá whimpered with fright, arms tight around his mistress’s waist. They saw monsters lurking in the dark and heard hair-raising screams, but they weren’t afraid. With what little sense they had left, they knew that those horrifying visions were the effect of the smoke they had breathed and that in any case, as long as the witch man was with them, they were safe. They made themselves comfortable on the ground, arms around each other, and within minutes had lost consciousness.

  They could not estimate how long they slept. They awakened gradually, hearing the voice of Walimai calling their names as they reached out to find each other. The cave was not totally dark; the faintest light allowed them to see general outlines. The shaman pointed to the narrow tunnel that was the way out and, still a little dizzy, they followed it. They emerged in the forest of the ferns. The sun was rising in the Eye of the World.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

&n
bsp; The Cannibal-Bird

  THAT DAY THE travelers began the march back to Tapirawa-teri. As they came within sight of it, they saw the gleam of helicopters through the trees, and knew that the civilization of the nahab had finally reached the village. Walimai decided to stay in the forest; all his life he had kept his distance from the foreigners, and this was not the moment to change his habits. The shaman, like the People of the Mist, had the talent of making himself nearly invisible, and for years he had prowled around the camps and towns of the nahab, observing them without their suspecting he existed. The only ones who knew him were Nadia and Padre Valdomero, his friend from the time the priest had lived with the Indians. The witch man had met the “girl the color of honey” in several of his visions and was convinced that she was an envoy of the spirits. He thought of her as one of his people, which is why he allowed her to call him by name when they were alone.

  Alex felt a thrill of happiness when he saw the helicopters in the distance: He was not forever lost in the planet of the Beasts, he could return to the known world. He imagined that the helicopters had flown over the Eye of the World for several days, looking for them. His grandmother must have raised a monumental uproar when he disappeared, and forced Captain Ariosto to comb the vast region from the air. Possibly they had seen the smoke of Mokarita’s funeral pyre and had discovered the village that way.

  Walimai advised the two young people to hide in the trees and watch what was going on in the village. Alex wanted to give him some remembrance in exchange for the miraculous cure for his mother, so he presented the Indian with his Swiss Army knife. Walimai took the red metal object and felt its weight and its strangeness, without the least notion of what it was for. Alex opened out the knives, tweezers, scissors, corkscrew, and screwdriver, one by one, until it was transformed into a gleaming, bristling hedgehog. He showed the shaman how to use each tool, and how to open and close them.

  Walimai thanked him for his kindness, but he had lived more than a century without metal and, frankly, he felt a little old to learn the tricks of the nahab. He did not want to be discourteous, however, and he hung the marvel around his neck, where it joined a necklace of teeth and other amulets. Then he reminded Nadia that the screech of the owl would summon him, and that they would stay in touch that way. The girl gave him the basket with the three crystal eggs because she thought they would be safer in the hands of the ancient. She did not want to show up with them in front of the foreigners; they belonged to the People of the Mist. The trio said their good-byes, and in less than a second, Walimai faded into the vegetation, like an illusion.

  Cautiously, Nadia and Alex approached the place where the “birds of noise and wind,” as the Indians called them, had landed. They hid among the trees where they could watch without being seen, although they were too far to hear clearly. In the center of Tapirawa-teri, besides the birds of noise and wind, there were three tents, a large awning, and even a gas cookstove. A wire had been strung with gifts to attract the Indians: knives, pots, hatchets, and other steel and aluminum articles glinting in the sun. They saw several armed soldiers, in an attitude of alert, but no sign of Indians. The People of the Mist had disappeared, as they always did at the first hint of danger. That strategy had served the tribe well; in contrast, other Indians who had dealt with the nahab had been exterminated or assimilated. Those who had been incorporated into civilization had become beggars; they had lost their dignity as warriors, and their lands. That was why Chief Mokarita had never allowed his people to approach the nahab or take their gifts; he sustained that in exchange for a machete or a hat, the tribe would forget its origins, its language, and its gods.

  Nadia and Alex wondered what the soldiers had in mind. If they were part of the plan to eliminate the Indians of the Eye of the World, it would be better not to go near. They remembered every word of the conversation they had heard in Santa Mariá de la Lluvia between Captain Ariosto and Mauro Carías, and they knew that their lives were in danger if they dared to interfere with their plans.

  It began to rain, as it did two or three times a day, brief and violent unexpected downpours that soaked everything for a while and stopped as suddenly as they had begun, leaving the world fresh and clean. The two friends had been observing the camp for almost an hour from their refuge among the trees when a party of three arrived in the village. They obviously had gone out to explore the area and now were running back, soaked to the bone. Even from a distance they were instantly recognizable: Kate, César Santos, and the photographer Timothy Bruce. Nadia and Alex could scarcely restrain a whoop of relief; that meant that Professor Leblanc and Dr. Omayra Torres were also nearby. With them present in the village, Captain Ariosto and Mauro Carías could not count on bullets to get rid of the Indians—or them.

  The two friends left their hiding place and approached Tapariwa-teri with caution, but, after only a few yards, they were sighted by the guards and immediately surrounded. Kate’s shout of joy when she saw her grandson was comparable only to that of César Santos’s when he saw his daughter. They both ran to meet their loved ones, who were ready to drop, covered with scratches and scrapes, filthy, their clothes in tatters. Alexander also looked strangely different with his Indian haircut, which exposed a circle of scalp with the long, scab-covered cut. Santos swept Nadia up in his muscular arms and hugged her so hard that he nearly broke the ribs of Borobá, who was captured in the embrace. Kate, in contrast, was able to contain the wave of affection and relief she felt; as soon as her grandson was within reach, she slapped him in the face.

  “That was for what you’ve put us through, Alexander. The next time you get out of my sight, I’ll kill you,” she said. In answer, Alex hugged her.

  The others showed up immediately: Mauro Carías, Captain Ariosto, Dr. Omayra Torres, and the ineffable Professor Leblanc, who was covered with bee stings. Karakawe, as unsociable as ever, showed no sign of surprise at seeing the young people.

  “How did you get here?” asked Captain Ariosto. “Without a helicopter, it’s impossible.”

  Alex gave a quick summary of their adventure with the People of the Mist, without going into details or explaining where they had made the climb. Nor did he mention his journey with Nadia to the sacred tepui. That way he didn’t think he was giving away any secret; the nahab already knew of the existence of the tribe. There were obvious signs that the village had been deserted by the Indians only hours before: cassava was piled in baskets, coals were still warm in the small fires, meat from the last hunt was covered with flies in the hut of the bachelors, and a few domestic pets were wandering around. The soldiers had chopped up the peaceful boas with their machetes and left the mutilated bodies rotting in the sun.

  “Where are the Indians?” asked Mauro Carías.

  “Far away,” Nadia replied.

  “I don’t think they’ll go very far with their women and children and old folk. They can’t disappear without leaving a trace.”

  “They’re invisible.”

  “Let’s be serious, child!” he exclaimed.

  “I always am.”

  “Are you going to tell me that these people can fly like witches?”

  “They don’t fly, but they run really fast,” she clarified.

  “Can you speak the language of these Indians, sweetie?”

  “My name is Nadia Santos.”

  “All right, Nadia Santos. Can you talk with them or not?” Carías insisted impatiently.

  “Yes.”

  Dr. Omayra Torres stepped in to explain the urgent need to vaccinate the tribe. Their village had been discovered; it was inevitable that sometime soon they would have contact with outsiders.

  “As you know, Nadia, without wanting to we can infect them with diseases that are deadly for them. Whole tribes have perished in two or three months’ time because of a common cold. Measles are an even graver danger. I have the vaccine, I can immunize these poor Indians and they will be protected. Can you help me?” the doctor begged.

  “I will tr
y,” the girl promised.

  “How can you communicate with the tribe?”

  “I don’t know yet, I have to think about it.”

  Alexander transferred the water of health to a bottle with a waterproof cap and carefully placed it in his knapsack. His grandmother saw him and wanted to know what he was doing.

  “It’s water to cure my mother,” he said. “I found the fountain of eternal youth, what people have been looking for, Kate, for centuries. My mother will get well.”

  For the first time since he could remember, his grandmother initiated a show of affection. He felt her thin, sinewy arms around him and smelled her pipe-tobacco scent as her thick, self-cut hair and her dry, leather-tough skin brushed his face; he heard her hoarse voice saying his name, and he suspected that maybe she loved him a little after all. The minute Kate realized what she was doing, she stepped back, pushing Alex toward the table where Nadia was waiting. The two hungry, tired adventurers fell upon the beans, rice, cassava bread, and nearly burned fish bristling with bones. Alex devoured all of it with a ferocious appetite before the amazed eyes of Kate, who knew how picky her grandson had always been about food.

  After they ate, the friends went to the river to bathe. They knew they were surrounded by invisible Indians who were following every movement of the nahab from the undergrowth. As they were splashing in the water, they felt eyes on them as clearly as if hands were touching them. They concluded that the Indians were not coming close because of the presence of the strangers and the helicopters they had seen in the sky. They tried to move a little away from the camp, thinking that if they were alone, the People of the Mist would show themselves, but there was a lot of activity in the village and it was impossible to drift into the forest without attracting attention. Fortunately, the soldiers did not dare step outside the camp because the stories about the Beast and the way it had gutted one of their companions had terrorized them. No one had ever explored the Eye of the World before, and they had heard tales of the spirits and demons that roamed in that region. They were less afraid of the Indians; they had their weapons to rely on, and then they themselves had indigenous blood in their veins.