April 11. Lugarte’s.
Still no Cruz. We have now decided to make our way downriver as far as we can, in the hope of meeting Cruz en route. Marquez himself may be going in a day or two, for he has another holding at Siraiola (place names on the Urubamba refer not to settlements, as there are none, but to the confluence of a tributary river), but meanwhile we will try to obtain a canoa or balsa raft at one of the small haciendas on this upper stretch of the river.
Early this morning we set off in a truck with a group of Quechuas bound for Quillabamba; the truck left us at an arroyo above El Encuentro where one can cross the river in a sort of crate hauled on a cable. On the far side another road proceeds downriver for a few miles, and Gregorio assured us that a truck would be available to take us to the hacienda of a Señor Lugarte.
On the far side of the river stood two trucks, both of them broken down. We have been here now for about five hours, in company with peons more patient than ourselves, who would wait here until doomsday without complaint. One little boy of about ten is all swollen like a tick from malnutrition; he cannot walk, and his family has seated him in the hot sun, rather inexplicably, since they themselves have sought shelter in the shade. The boy has a little cup of filthy water which he keeps slopping on his swollen feet; struggling to extricate himself from his hot rags, he whines in pain. A man refills the cup for him, and later I do the same, but the family pays no attention to any of us; they squat in the shade, dull as stones with their blank yellow eyes.
At noon we recrossed the river and obtained a squalid meal in a local hut. In the hour we waited for the meal—a kind of bean stew with fried plantains and the inevitable yuca—Andrés consumed eight or nine oranges from the piles lying around on the mud floor. He kept reaching for more, less out of hunger than out of impatience and frustration about our journey, and as, under trying circumstances, the food habits of one’s traveling companion can become a crucial source of annoyance, I tried, not entirely successfully, to keep his addiction from irritating me.
In mid-afternoon, convinced that no truck would necessarily appear, and anxious that Lugarte know our whereabouts should Cruz appear, or should Marquez decide to go downriver, I set off on foot, accompanied by a small boy carrying a chicken. Andrés remained behind to guard the equipaje.
The walk down the valley was pleasant enough. Loritos, or parakeets, hurried in all directions, and the river banks swarmed with swallows, anis, river orioles, and other small birds unknown to me. We came on two dead snakes, one a sort of green racer, very pale—culebra chicotillo—and the other brown and large, bright-yellow-bellied. Neither was poisonous. The boy knew the names of all the trees, though he could not spell them; there was the leche-leche (literally, “milk-milk”: my small companion fetched one a fierce whack with my machete, and a white fluid sprang forth), the red-trunked sacahuinta, the pale ohe, and the palo santo, or “holy tree” with its great gleaming leaves and infestation of biting ants. As usual, the ants were numerous and varied; we inspected two large ground species, a leaf-cutter with a broad head known in Quechua as cuki, denoting “mother-in-law,” and another one, black, marching in long files, which the boy called chaco. He was awed by the chaco, saying, “This one attacks anything, anything, and kills it.” I presume this is the famous army ant.
We were now well below the encuentro and could see in the distance three high cascades of great beauty, one below the other, at the foot of which, the boy said, lay the hacienda of Lugarte. We stopped to drink at a pretty stream and once picked and sucked a few red coffee beans from trees along the road. The distance to Lugarte’s was said to be ten kilometers, or about seven and a half miles, but at dark we still had not got there. After a time we passed the hut of the boy’s family, and a still smaller boy came out of it and joined us. He brought his brother a machete of his own length, which increased my guide’s confidence enormously. Nevertheless, we had no light, and there were some spooky sounds abroad, including the echoing tom-tom of the giant frogs and the squawks of marsh birds. The older boy spoke ominously of the dangerous creatures of the night, including the jaguar, el tigre, and the large venomous snakes; both boys were barefoot, and I must say I admired their sang froid. The little boy would run ahead, and his high voice would come floating back to us, wistful and regular as a bird call: “Look, look, what’s that? … No, it’s nothing… . Look, look, what’s that? … No, it’s nothing….” But after a while the suspense became too much for him, and he fell into line behind us. Here and there a dark lump would stir softly on the pale path ahead, and, a description in Green Hell of a huge tarantula seen under similar circumstances having come to mind, the first lump gave me quite a start. But apparently I am not fated for the horrors which befall my confederates. My serpents are not only non-poisonous but dead, and the evil-looking lumps on the night roads are harmless frogs.
It was nearly seven when we took a side path through the trees and came out at last at the edge of the mud yard of the hacienda. A single dim light was burning on the stoop. “La hacienda,” my guide whispered, and before I could thank them properly the two children darted back into the forest.
On the porch sat a solitary man in jack boots, and an enormous boar—truly a monster, larger than a pony—stood stock still at the foot of the steps, the light reflecting from each bristle. Neither man nor pig took any notice of me. I approached the steps. I had walked at least ten miles and was dry and tired.
“Señor Lugarte?” I said.
“No,” the man said. With the wan light and bleak mud, the silent man and the giant pig, the whole scene seemed theatrical, full of evil portent. But after a moment the man stood up politely and invited me to join him on the porch. We went through the usual elaborate courtesies of these countries, at the conclusion of which I wondered aloud if the hacienda truck might not be rented, to go and fetch Andrés. The truck, he said, was broken down. He then wondered aloud where I imagined I was going on the river and, when I told him, smiled unpleasantly. He was bald and smooth-faced, intelligent-looking, and his smile was chilling. He told me he had a hacienda of his own farther downstream. “You know,” he began, “that even in the dry season the rapids at Sirialo, not to speak of the Pongo, are no joke. This is not the dry season, señor, and I must tell you that what you wish to do is very dangerous. I came myself past the tumbos of Sirialo today on the mule trail, and they are frightening—appalling.” He smiled, and I did not smile back. He shrugged his shoulders. “In any case,” he concluded in a manner which dismissed the whole subject as absurd, “your man Cruz could never make it up that river.”
Señor Lugarte appeared out of the darkness, a small bewildered man who peered at me suspiciously. He could not seem to absorb the card of introduction I had brought from Señor Porras Cáceres: either he did not recognize the name or he was unable to read at all. He agreed unhappily that the río was very dangerous at the moment—muy bravo, muy feo—and was the highest, for the season, that he could ever remember. (Probably this is true: the floods this February on the Urubamba watershed washed away chacras that had stood for years, and all but destroyed an Indian mission at Camisea. In one bad night the river at Timpia rose thirty feet.) The two men decided that the river was unnavigable.
Though every other piece of information we had received had so far proved to be questionable or mistaken, I found this report extremely discouraging. If one could believe what one heard, one could act accordingly, but the absence of good information and the resultant uncertainty, in company with the unquestionable fact that César had failed to appear, were beginning to eat at my morale. Lugarte’s Indian woman now appeared and served us a dismal supper—rice and yuca, garnished with a piece of meat so strange and foul that, try as I might, I could not get it down. The three took baleful notice of my defection. The radio was blaring senselessly (in South America radios are always played for all they’re worth, and at full volume), and outside the musky yellow light in which we ate, the monster pig, still rooted to the spot, grunted
spasmodically.
Señora Lugarte, if that is who this defeated woman was, was kind enough to give me a bed in a large loft with the smiling man, who was also a transient: a night’s lodging, on the rivers, is offered to strangers as a matter of course. The sheet on the bed had seen a lot of service since last washed, but I had no sleeping bag with me and was glad to have it. The great part of the loft was devoted to drying coca, and the leaves gave off a sweet, reassuring smell, not unlike alfalfa. My companion, who still seemed to be smiling, had an Indian muleteer and servant; the servant slept, appropriately, I thought, on the floor beneath the foot of his master’s bed.
April 12. Downriver.
A peon who came this morning from the arroyo said that Marquez intends to go downriver today; he must pass this way, as his canoa is located below Lugarte’s. Therefore, he will have to pass Andrés, and I decided to await them here, rather than walk the ten miles back to no good purpose.
In the early hours I went out along the road, taking note of some unremarkable birds—doves, river orioles (known locally as pustes), parrots, anis, and finches, including a lovely species with a breast like deep red velvet. A rail squawked like a harassed chicken in a marsh made where the river had overflowed its banks, and a hawk screamed from the top of a tall white tree. The spiders and insects, however, are most interesting, even to a person like myself who has always preferred to disregard them wherever possible: one spider, gold-tipped and built like a spiny crab, is truly demonic. Then there are lavender dragonflies, the color of which is almost exactly duplicated in the flower-like leaf of a small tree. And the mariposas flutter and pose in every conceivable combination of pastels, from tiny violets and green-and-oranges to the huge cobalt-and-blacks and the rich blue morphos—Matisse colors, by and large, arranged strikingly, and sometimes with a flickering trompe-l’ œil effect, on a jet black base. The narrow-winged helicon butterflies of this upper region of the Urubamba are more astonishing in their variety and colors than any I have seen in South America, or anywhere else, for that matter. (H. W. Bates observed 700 species of butterfly within an hour’s walk of Belém, as opposed to 390 in all of Europe.)
In mid-morning Andrés appeared, but no Marquez. We left our equipment at some peon huts at the end of the road, a few miles below Lugarte’s, and rode back with the truck to the arroyo; our idea was to return to Black Drunken River and find out Marquez’s plan, as nobody else was the least interested in taking us farther downriver. I told Andrés of the discouraging reports I had received, but Andrés is a veteran of the great rapids on the Huallaga River, farther north, and believes these people exaggerate out of ignorance and fear. At the arroyo we met Marquez, Gregorio, and four peons coming the other way; we returned with them to the end of the road and prepared the canoe for departure.
To reach the canoe we had to descend a steep forested slope, carrying a 30-horsepower outboard motor, gas, tools, food, some bales of wire, general supplies for the hacienda at Sirialo, and our own rubber sacks. A path was cut through with machetes, and I am relieved to report that, during the course of this operation, I contrived to tread upon a snake. I say “relieved” because, to date, my experience has been so puny compared to that of other writers. Since the snake episode may be as close as I shall come to their experience, I may as well recount it in all its harrowing detail: I stepped on this snake despite the fact that two peons had already passed just in front of me, and I can’t deny that it gave me quite a start, writhing up over a decaying log in the damp brown shadows. The Indian behind me said, “Culebra!” and the one in front turned quickly around and halved the creature with his machete. The snake was brown with yellow bands and a fat gray head, and a post mortem proved it to be harmless (or at least it was not a pit viper—it may have been one of the obscure rear-fanged species). It was at least sixteen inches long.
Marquez’s canoa is typical of the rivers, big and deep and black, and hewn from a single log; incongruous in the stern, his outboard motor, with its dirty gasoline line and general air of sludgy incompetence, is typical also. It was not the machine for a leaky, overloaded canoa—in addition to the cargo, we were ten men and a boy—in a swift mountain river. But Don Abraham Marquez is a spirited young man and consigned us without further ado to the torrent; we moved upstream a few yards in an eddy until, gaining speed, we moved offshore on the eddy’s curl, swung violently around, and started off down the Urubamba.
Almost immediately the motor stalled, just in the waves of the first river bend or vuelta, and a good deal of water slopped in. The boy, Ascensión, a beautiful child of twelve or so with an infectious laugh, was wide-eyed with alarm. “Are you afraid?” he asked me. I said that I wasn’t yet, though I might be any minute, and he managed to smile.
The river varies from about forty to one hundred yards across with a current which, even in the wider reaches, must exceed eight knots; in the rapids and in the deep-water swirls of the bends it is markedly more swift. The motor is used only to steer or to try to gain the bank, and the latter recourse was attempted a minute later, when the second small rapid brought about a second important ingestion of cold water. The canoe was plainly top-heavy, owing to the fact that the excess crew were piled on top of the cargo; when we gained the shore at last, the heavier items of cargo were deposited on the bank, with Ascensión to guard them. Another of Marquez’s peons was taking some mules down the jungle trail to Sirialo and would take Ascensión and the jettisoned gear along.
We took to the river once again. The canoe rode better now, but Andrés and I, sitting on its floor in the forward section, were several times up to our waists in water and spent most of the afternoon bailing. I wasn’t happy about this, especially since we had yet to strike a true mal paso, as the danger points on the river’s course are known; the river was swift, and turbulent at the bends, but it should not have presented a severe problem for a good canoe and good bogas, or boatmen. Unhappily, we had neither. Marquez admitted this himself a little later, when we had made camp for the night. He was amused by the inexperience of his men, some of whom had stood up and leaped around in the precarious craft at the first sign of trouble; in the frequent intervals when the motor was not working, those entrusted with the paddles had done everything in their power, or so it seemed, to keep the canoe broadside to the current.
I asked Marquez how many of the men had had experience on the river.
“Not one,” he said and grinned at the hugeness of this joke. “Not a single one.”
April 13. Sirialo.
Last night we camped on a broad river beach of gray sand where the white water of a tributary stream roared into the Urubamba. I went to sleep to the rush of the river, with only the thip-thip of hunting bats between me and Orion; we had reached the wild montaña and were well on our way. In the morning we would reach the Coribene and a village of Machiguengas presided over by a Dominican priest, Padre Giordia; this priest knew the river well and would lend us a canoa or balsa raft, with Machiguenga bogas, for the journey to the Pongo and perhaps farther. Furthermore, Padre Giordia had a radio and could advise the several missions in the hundreds of miles between this point and Atalaya that we were on our way downriver. They would notify César Cruz, wherever he was, to come to meet us.
But at four in the morning the bright stars disappeared and the rain began to fall. At five we huddled miserably in a steady downpour. The peons got a fire going, and we had a breakfast of lemon juice and hot water mixed with a kind of fine-powdered farina made of yuca and beans. By six we were on the river again, in a dim light, with water coming at us from every direction—from the air, over the bows, and through the bottom. A dull fear joined the farina in the pit of my stomach, for capsizing or foundering in this current would be no joke at all, especially when one was trying to protect camera, binoculars, notes, and other fragile essentials of the journey. Once again the problem presented by the river was far less serious than that offered by the crew. The spectacle of their cheerful and noisy incompetence, which thre
atened to drown the lot of us at any moment, was especially frustrating to someone like myself, who has had a certain experience of small boats: I positively itched to fire orders.
We passed down the empty, raining river without undue incident, however, having to repair to the bank but twice before reaching the Coribene mission; a solitary bigua cormorant perched on the snag of a drowned tree was the only living creature I observed, though one of the crew glimpsed a large shushupe, as the dread bushmaster is known, on a steep bank by the water’s edge. Just above Coribene a group of peons at a small chacra, apparently surprised to see us, had cheered our doughty craft, but at the first huts of the Machiguengas, where the Indians on the pouring banks stood like statues in the rain, we were greeted with dismal silence.
At Coribene, Father Giordia succored us with coffee. He is an intelligent-looking man with white hair standing straight up on his head, and he voyages frequently on the river although he does not know how to swim. But he assured us that the river farther down, and especially the Pongo, was not navigable at this season, and that Cruz could not possibly come upriver, even if we were foolish enough to try to go down. Furthermore, his radio was out of order, so that he was unable to transmit any messages; the suspense as to César’s whereabouts and intentions would continue.
I digested this spate of good news with some difficulty, staring out across the thatch huts of the Machiguengas on the river slope below the mission; in the rain, they seemed to grow up out of the mud. The valley of the Coribene, climbing away into the mountains across the river, was obviously a lovely one, but I was in no mood to appreciate it.
The padre said that there was a foot trail through the jungle, two and a half days from Sirialo to the Pongo de Mainique; there, perhaps, Machiguengas attached to the hacienda of the lengendary Pereira could get us past the Pongo, and down to the next mission at Timpia, where Cruz might be waiting. But there was no trail of any sort from Timpia onward, and it was quite possible that Cruz had never come at all, or had come and gone. We asked again if we could not hire a few of the padre’s expert Indians to take us on the river, and he said again that this would be impossible. At a loss for a solution, we rejoined Marquez and started off for Sirialo.