Epifanio told us a number of Machiguenga legends and showed us a book of notes on the tribe that his father had compiled; a copy of these notes, which must be of great potential interest to ethnologists, is apparently in the hands of Padre Matamola in Quillabamba. Even Ardiles expressed interest, squatting next to Epifanio on a log bench, but the atmosphere is still strained. Later in the evening, when we lay down at last, Andrés had his carbine and his flashlight at his fingertips, and I kept the loaded revolver in my hand, beneath my head, though I took pains not to show it. There is a popular idea in South America that the British are frightened of cold steel, and in this regard I could easily be mistaken for an Englishman. I think that Andrés’s idea of the difficulties is perhaps exaggerated, but I’d much, much rather be safe than sorry.
April 18. Pongo de Mainique.
The night passed without incident, and this morning the air had cleared to the extent that Epifanio took me on a guided tour of Pangoa; Ardiles came along, and so did Alejandro. We took one of the canoes downriver a short distance, to a point on the bank known as Sangianarinchi, or “painted stones”; there, on the smooth boulders by the river’s edge, partly submerged at this time of year, are some extraordinary hieroglyphics and symbols of obscure origin, including a striking “dancing frog.”1
Sangianarinchi is just below a former mission station of the lingüísticos, as the personnel of the Summer Institute of Linguistics are known throughout the jungles of Peru; this Protestant organization, as I have noted earlier, specializes in the transcription of the many Indian tongues into the written word and the translation of the Bible into Indian. The Pangoa station was run by a man named Snell, according to Epifanio. It has been abandoned for some time, for reasons which he did not make clear, and the jungle has reclaimed the clearing. The thatch roofs of the buildings are falling in, and the two rude crosses which still rise out of the growing tangle are precariously aslant, about to tumble.
At the hacienda, meanwhile, the Indians were assembling a balsa, using some logs already cut and dried as well as some green poles cut this morning; we returned in time to see two braves come sailing down the bank, clinging to slippery fresh poles gathered at a point upriver. These were soon notched and spiked and lashed together, and it occurs to me with rather a start that we are actually on the brink of “risking our lives,” as Andrés remarked, unfortunately, I thought, in the Pongo de Mainique. But between risking his life and making his way back upstream on foot, Andrés would infinitely prefer the former, and though I am filled with a growing dread as we wait here, I must say I agree. One is through the Pongo, it is said, in fifteen minutes, though ideas on it vary so much that I wonder at times if anybody has ever been through it at all. Ardiles speaks loosely of waves twenty feet high, whereas Pereira claims that, in certain respects, the passage of the Pongo in the rainy season is less dangerous than in the dry season, when people ordinarily try it: his theory is that some of the dangerous rocks are covered over. I hope he is right, but I would have more faith in what he says if he were going to accompany us.
Whatever the truth of the matter, we are casting off at midday. I’m not at all sure we know all we should, and would feel much happier with a life-preserver. I asked Epifanio if he thought we would make it to the mission at Timpia before nightfall. He and Ardiles grinned at each other in a way I disliked very much, and Pereira said, “Maybe, if you go directly.” This sounded pretty sinister to me.
I do not trust Epifanio, but he is an appealing fellow and I bear him no grudge. Standing there on the bank as we clambered gingerly onto our new balsa—in a desperate attempt to amuse myself at this ominous moment, I have christened her the Happy Days—both he and the unkempt Ardiles seemed genuinely sorry to see us go. Between them, they had all our money in their pockets, and no doubt felt that, in letting us disappear into the Pongo, they were killing the goose that laid the golden egg.
The Happy Days is comprised of four large balsa poles, with two much smaller ones along each side, and the usual cargo frame mounted in the center. It strikes me that about twelve more large poles would be just the thing, but apparently there comes a point—it is said to come rather often in the Pongo—when maneuverability is more important than bulk. In all, our craft is about eighteen feet long by four and one-half feet wide, very little larger than its predecessor but infinitely better made. Though rude in appearance, it has a nice feeling of solidity about it, and in calm water its deck is actually above the surface.
Our bogas are three young Machiguengas, dressed in cushmas, with shorts beneath; they wear only the shorts while on the river. They have with them their hard black chonta bows and long cane arrows, to provide for them on the return trip through the jungle; they also have yuca, plantains, and a watery fruit called limas, in fiber bags. The three have been given Christian names—Toribio, Raul, and Agostino—but they do not speak Spanish. Our faithful Alejandro, a Quechua, manages to divine their intentions now and then, though when asked to interpret he only smiles gently, saying, “I don’t know. Theirs is a different tongue.” Alejandro is the fourth boga, kneeling clumsily behind the bow man, Toribio. He is dressed in his poor underwear, and he is a very ugly boy, with a head which could only look natural beneath the distracting headgear of the puna; his skin, when cold, is the nameless color of an old bruise, blotched with old healed sores of purple. His shoulders are narrow and his joints knobby, while his feet are short and thick as clubs; he has none of the grace of the Machiguengas, who slide into place like fishes. He has a low brow and exceedingly long lashes over small discolored eyes, giving him a lidded look, and he is not alert. Yet he is strong and faithful and has natural gentleness and manners. He also has a little plastic comb, his sole belonging, and with this he goes each morning to the riverside and carefully draws flat his coarse black hair; this is the substance of his ablutions, and five minutes later his hair is awry once more, thus to remain for the next twenty-four hours. He was born in Cuzco, where he belongs, and wishes to seek his fortune in Lima, where he does not.
We had not gone very far downriver when we came upon a small canoa drawn into the bank; the Indians steered our balsa in beside it. Without a word, all three disappeared into the tangle. One reads of Indians being “swallowed up” by the jungle, and the phrase is a good one: one moment they were there, and a second later they were not.
Surprised, we sat stupidly where we were. In the silence that followed we listened to a chito monkey and to the ubiquitous pustes. Andrés was openly apprehensive; we were not beyond the reach of foul play or “revenge,” one form of which would be to have the Indians remove us downstream, thus, and suddenly desert us. A balsa cannot be poled upstream, and the trail, if one existed, not only would be difficult to find but would lead us straight back to the difficulties at Pangoa. Our emergency food was all but gone—we had two cans of peaches, a bottle of pisco, and Celeste Allen’s ceremonial Scotch—and starvation in this jungle, for anyone but a native Indian, is a simple matter. In effect, our one chance would be to risk the Pongo and try to reach the mission at Timpia; undermanned and inexperienced as we were, this course would be all but suicidal.
Within ten minutes, however, the Indians returned. They brought with them lengths of strong liana, and these they secured to the cross-pole forward, then led back to the stern. To Alejandro they managed to convey the idea that from now on we could expect to use these lianas as a safety measure and should hang on for all we were worth.
A few of the mal pasos above the Pongo de Mainique are alleged to be worse than the Pongo itself, and while this is not so, at least in the rainy season, they are worse by far than anything to be found farther above. And no two are alike: the encuentros of the Yavero and Mantaro Rivers are very different in the type of maelstrom they create, and besides these there are such places as Bongoni (waves-next-to-the-land), Maranquiato (ravine-of-vipers), Shintorini (place-of-pig-transformed-into-fish), Patirini (where a bishop—patirini—was drowned), and Mapirontoni (place of many stones)
. These are but seven of the sixteen mal pasos between Pangoa and the Pongo which are recognized by name, and of all of them Mapirontoni, where gray waves leaped up in a narrow channel and crashed down across the raft, was perhaps the most spectacular. But there was something for every taste—swift rapids and evil remolinos, and water climbing the canyon face, tilting the raft at an uneasy angle, and holes-in-the-water where a boulder did not quite protrude, and rushing white wakes where a boulder did, and the inevitable tumbos—each mal paso drenched us. We wore only shorts and shirts, in case we had to swim, though I can’t believe swimming would have helped very much in the mal pasos; everything, in the end, depended on the stoutness of the Happy Days and the skill of the Machiguengas.
Both of these seemed in good order, for though the dangers were far more serious than any we had encountered with Marquez and Ardiles, the actual emergencies were probably less. For the most part the Indians, squatting on their heels, worked deftly and silently, without the desperate shouting and confusion which characterized the earlier journeys; they spoke to one another softly, in little whoops, like children, and only in three or four places prior to Megantoni, as they called the Pongo, did their alarm get the better of them. Then they would screech at one another to paddle harder— “Shin-tse! shin-tse!”—and, when paddling was of no avail, would set up an unearthly howling, especially Raul, who emitted sounds of terror and psychic pain which were extremely hard on the nerves. On the other hand, a certain amount of racket comes naturally to these Indians in tense moments, and they continued to do their work very well indeed. We were racing along into a driving rain and wind when suddenly we dropped over a shallow tumbo, at a bend, and there, two hundred yards ahead, rose the sheer portals of reddish granite which form the entrance of the Pongo de Mainique.
At this the Indians howled anew and struggled desperately to bring about an emergency crash landing at a small beach of black sand lying under the steep bank on the left side. The bow man, Toribio, leaped for the beach with a liana, but he sank from sight into the torrent, and the line pulled free: I was certain in that instant that we had seen the last of him. But he popped up, mouth wide, and, as the current swept him down, caught hold of the stern as the raft swung around, for his tug had pulled her in toward the bank. The timing was miraculous, but, though Toribio grinned uneasily, the Indians otherwise took no notice of it. They tied the balsa to a stiff, scraggy shrub which is common on the banks in this part of the river, and Agostino and Raul went downstream along the sharp rocks, barefoot, apparently to peer into the Pongo.
There had been some idea before we left Pangoa that we would not try the Pongo until morning, on the theory that, in case of accident, we would not have the oncoming darkness to contend with. Now I was not sure how I felt about it: I was afraid, I knew that much, and more so because of this dark, gloomy afternoon of rain and cold, and I kept asking myself what in the name of God I thought I was doing here in the first place. On the other hand, there was no turning back, we were already trapped in the outer canyon, between cliff and torrent, and the side of me already frozen stiff and scared longed to be put out of its misery as speedily as possible, one way or the other. Andrés was shaking so with cold that he could scarcely talk; I imagine he felt as I did. As for poor Alejandro and Toribio, they squatted and shivered on the rocks, arms wrapped around their knees, naked and resigned as a pair of apes; their dark skin looked nobbly and dead.
I had in my shirt a little coca, presented me as a last-minute love token by Ardiles: I took a little and almost immediately felt better. At least I stopped trembling sufficiently to walk. I offered some to Andrés, but he refused it, saying it made him dizzy.
Now the two scouts returned, moving swiftly, and without a word untied the raft. A few moments later, much too hastily for my taste—it seemed to me that I had a lot of important questions about the Pongo, though of course our bogas could not communicate the answers—we were aboard and bearing down upon the Pongo, and at a speed which, had we had even the slightest control over it, could only have been called insane.
The word pongo denotes a ravine or gorge where a river bursts through the mountains, and the Pongo de Mainique, to the Machiguengas, is known as the Place of the Bears: the legend is that a river monster or demon in the form of a bear lurks in its waters, rising up now and again to do some drowning. The single mal paso on the far side of the Pongo is called Tonkini, or Place of Bones, which may or may not be an indication of the bear’s success.
“The Pongo de Mainique,” wrote Mr. Jolly, “is the worst pass on the river.… The approach was a magnificent sight. Gaunt rocks rose sheer on either side, with great white waves dashing high against them … The river thunders over huge boulders in a mass of foam and spray at a speed I estimated at forty miles an hour. The fall is from fifty to sixty feet.…”
My own impressions of the Pongo are less definite, owing to a certain nervous confusion; I can only say that if the conditions in the Pongo are as Mr. Jolly described them, then in portaging the rapids on foot—I insert this here with a certain calculating smugness—he and his party did the right and sensible thing. It is true that the approach is a magnificent sight, as the Gate of Hell must be, and the gaunt rocks and high waves at the entrance made a marked impression on me, to be sure, but after that I had but a tenuous grasp on my aesthetic vision. I don’t say that everything went haywire, but my outlook was decidedly blurred, even when my head was not submerged.
Fear is very much like pain, in the sense that, in the intervals that one is free of it, one forgets how very disagreeable it is. I am not an authority on fear, avoiding the condition whenever possible, but I do know that its worst agony comes well beforehand, in the period of suspense; by the time the crucial moment arrives, a certain detachment—a fatalistic sense, a longing to finish the suspense, and finally a dull resignation—has replaced the quaking. Stupidly, one plods to meet one’s fate. In any case—and the coca may have helped a bit—I found myself able to absorb the experience more or less objectively. Here are my impressions, written down the following morning. I shall check them later with Andrés, who, as a dedicated believer that the rapids of the good old days on the Huallaga are worse than anything we could possibly come upon in these puny times, is sure to cut away the excess fat.
The Happy Days, then, rushed down upon the entrance and struck a white swirl under the great monolith on the east side; the Indians screamed, and the balsa yawed down into a kind of hole, spun around twice, and bobbed free again. The waves came at us from all directions, and we took several large ones full in the face; the next moment, to my astonishment, we had surfaced again and were sweeping along in swift, calm water. I had expected a maelstrom from one end of the Pongo to the other (one alleged veteran had told us that the waves accumulated all the way, reaching a terrifying pinnacle at the far end), and this breathing space came as a very pleasant surprise. Not only that, but it gave me a chance to look around, though I had to jar myself out of an odd state of mental suspension—perhaps the dull resignation I referred to previously—in order to do so.
First of all, the Pongo must certainly be one of the most beautiful canyons in the world; on a late afternoon of rain, it must also be one of the darkest. The sheer cliffs rise several hundred feet on both sides of the narrow cut, and the higher walls are overgrown with rich mosses and ferns and other denizens of shade and shadow. The rocks near the water, however, as well as the numerous caverns, look black, and the water itself, where it runs clear, is as black as in a fairy tale. The current bore us along in soft, slow ominous swirls—we were actually moving swiftly—passing us from one vague remolino to another. All this time the rain and wind swept at us up the canyon, which stretched away like a long avenue of high, dark battlements.
On the raft there was now that utter silence of simple awe, awe of the mal paso traversed at the entrance, perhaps, and even of the majesty of this forlorn place, which might be the rock garden of a giant, but mostly of the fact that we were now in it,
irretrievably, with no place to stop or even to pause. (In the dry season, apparently, one can catch one’s breath, take photographs, and so forth, at several small beaches and footholds which appear in the canyon, but this was not true on April 18, 1960.) And I remember a small yellow bird, like a yellow warbler, flicking along from moss to dripping branch; the bird seemed so heedless and natural in that world, as we were not.
I was sitting in the fore part of the raft, behind Toribio and Alejandro. Then came the small cargo rack, and behind it Andrés; I turned to look at him, and he peered at me non-committally, like a beaver. We were just hanging on now, psychically as well as physically. Behind Andrés, Raul and Agostino commenced to moan, and I faced forward again: the channel was narrowing, and ahead the water had turned white.
The Indians were yelling something, and Andrés called to me, his voice a little strained. “Look out, now,” he said. “Hang on with all you’ve got.” I got a death grip on the lianas. Alejandro was staring forward at the waves, and even the back of his head looked surprised. The waves had not looked very high at first, but this was because we had seen only the crests of them; the waterfall between the raft and the waves had not been apparent in the rain. “Alejandro,” I said. “Be ready, now.” He nodded rapidly and flashed a kind of smile in a quick half-turn of his head. This was all he had time for. The Machiguengas were yipping and grunting, and Raul was making a special sound of his own that came from somewhere in his pelvis, a sound a man might make when, having been confronted with the imminence of his own death, he was then punched in the stomach. The next moment, forsaking their paddles, they howled as one and sprang for the lianas, for there was nothing more they could do: we seemed to slide sideways down the waterfall, and then we were looking up from the bottom of a hole, with the waves caving in on us from impossible heights.