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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
The incredible true story of a journey to the heart of the Amazon, published alongside Complicite's critically acclaimed stage production 'The Encounter' 1969: Loren McIntyre makes contact with the elusive Mayoruna 'cat people' of the Amazon's Javari Valley. He follows them - into the wild depths of the rainforest. When he realises he is lost, it is already too late. Stranded and helpless, McIntyre must adjust to an alien way of life. Gradually, he finds his perception of the world beginning to change, and a strange relationship starts to develop with the Mayoruna chief - is McIntyre really able to communicate with the headman in a way that goes beyond words, beyond language? Petru Popescu's gripping account of McIntyre's adventures with the Mayoruna tribe, and his quest to find the source of the Amazon, is reissued here to coincide with Complicite's acclaimed new stage production,The Encounter, inspired by McIntyre's incredible story. Pushkin Press are reissuingThe Encounter: Amazon Beaming, with a new foreword by Simon McBurney and cover designed by David Pearson, to accompany McBurney's and Complicite's dazzling, highly acclaimed stage production inspired by the book. Born in Bucharest in 1944, Petru Popescu is a Romanian-American writer, director and film producer. He studied English language and literature at Bucharest Univerity, before defecting to the United States from Communist Romania in 1975, after which his books were banned in his home country.
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PUSHKIN PRESS
THE ENCOUNTER
Amazon Beaming
1969: Loren McIntyre makes contact with the elusive Mayoruna “cat people” of the Amazon’s Javari Valley. He follows them – into the wild depths of the rainforest. When he realises he is lost, it is already too late.
Stranded and helpless, McIntyre must adjust to an alien way of life. Gradually, he finds his perception of the world beginning to change, and a strange relationship starts to develop with the Mayoruna chief – is McIntyre really able to communicate with the headman in a way that goes beyond words, beyond language?
Petru Popescu’s gripping account of McIntyre’s adventures with the Mayoruna tribe, and his quest to find the source of the Amazon, is reissued here to coincide with Complicite’s acclaimed new stage production, The Encounter, inspired by McIntyre’s incredible story.
PRAISE FOR COMPLICITE’S STAGE PRODUCTION
The Encounter
“A tour de force that shows contemporary theatre at its most immersive and thought provoking”
Financial Times
“Spellbinding”
Telegraph
“So astonishing and inventive is this show that it feels like we’re witnessing a real turning point in theatre, a performance that will be looked back on in years to come as hugely influential”
The List
“An unforgettably brilliant work of total theatre”
Herald
“One of the great theatre-makers and theatre-changers of our time … McBurney holds us enthralled”
The Scotsman
“Masterful storytelling from a man and a company who are incapable of remaining within known theatrical boundaries”
Independent
THE ENCOUNTER
Amazon Beaming
PETRU POPESCU
PUSHKIN PRESS LONDON
for Iris, Adam, and Chloe
“The river now widened, so that in places it looked like a long lake; it wound in every direction through the endless marshy plain, whose surface was broken here and there by low mountains. The splendour of the sunset I never saw surpassed. We were steaming east toward clouds of storm. The river ran, a broad highway of molten gold, into the flaming sky; the far-off mountains loomed purple across the marshes; belts of rich green, the river-banks stood out on either side against the rose hues of the rippling water; in front, as we forged steadily onward, hung the tropic night, dim and vast.”
THEODORE ROOSEVELT,
Through the Brazilian Wilderness
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
by Simon McBurney
“WHY ARE YOU HERE?”
In forty degrees centigrade and 100% humidity, I am as drenched as if I had plunged fully clothed into the vast River Solimões that runs alongside the Mayoruna village of Marajai, not far from Tefe in the heart of Brazilian Amazonia. I lick the sweat dripping off my upper lip.
When I was given this book in 1994 I never imagined the journey it would take me on twenty years later.
I am standing before the headman of Marajai, who has just posed the above question; half of the inhabitants of the village, all crammed into his hut, are gazing at me expectantly. Desperately thirsty, I glance around, looking in vain for something to drink; a fifth of the world’s fresh water is here in the Amazon, I tell myself, surely someone will get me something.
Faced with the expectant silence of this collective gaze, however, I cannot delay my answer. So I clear my throat and find myself plunging into an entire re-telling of The Encounter: Amazon Beaming.
This story is of a journey and an encounter. It is a chronicle of photographer Loren McIntyre’s journey to the Javari valley in the remote heart of the vast Amazon basin and his encounter with the Mayoruna, otherwise known as the Matsés, who are the indigenous people of that land.
But this is as much a voyage of the mind as a bodily one, an inner journey which proves as attritional as any of the physical challenges McIntyre has to face. And the series of “encounters” in this book reveal a pattern of thinking, a vision of the world, that startles and disturbs as deeply as any of the physical “events” that unfold in Petru Popescu’s remarkable account.
When we think of a journey we think of distance. But hidden within the word is a reference to another dimension: that of time. For the word “journey” derives from the latin diurnum, which itself originates from dies, meaning day—an appropriate revelation, because this book is as much about time as it is about distance, and the encounter it describes is as much with ourselves as it is with any idea of “the distant other”.
McIntyre encounters not just a people, but also ideas that throw his view of himself and the world into question. And through Petru Popescu’s extraordinary focusing of Loren McIntyre’s lens, The Encounter confronts the reader with questions that are just as urgent as those facing Loren and the Mayoruna in 1969.
Our adamantine vision of time as an arrow, moving in a pitiless irreversible horizontal motion towards oblivion, is called into doubt. Could it be that this version of time is a fiction, a story that only exists in our common imagination? Could there be more than one time existing at any one moment? Certainly contemporary scientific thought accepts the possibility of multiple dimensions of time.
Our idea of distance, crucially the distance between one person and another, is also challenged. The notion of a “separate self”, so precious to our contemporary notion of identity, is undermined to the point that it becomes, for McIntyre, utterly illusory. One self, one so-called individual consciousness, he discovers, is not necessarily separated from another by language, time or distance. We are possibly interconnected in ways to which we are, mostly, blind in the modern world—a world in which, paradoxically, we are more connected by technology than at any time in history.
It is both salutary and necessary to have our assumptions challenged in the self-centred times we live in. To really consider the idea that we are deeply interconnected, inseparable from one another, just as we are inseparable from nature even when we do not think of ourselves as “living in nature”. To truly accept that we are part of the ecosystem wherever we are and that we cannot escape it, just as we cannot escape the planet. And also to accept that our ability to hear, to listen to each other, is perhaps essential for our collective survival. These thoughts are urgent because, in order to survive, we need to acknowledge that there is another way of seeing the world and our place in it.
“Why are you here?”
In Marajai, as I finish my answer by explaining that The Encounter has lead me to their village because I wish to tell its story to other people in a theatre, I realise I have been speaking for more than an hour. Whatever else is happening I know that my thirst is real. There is silence. The headman, Norival, clears his throat.
“We are moved by what you told us. Thank you. And when you are retelling your story to your people, you can tell them that we, the Mayoruna, exist too.”
And without my asking, someone places a bottle of water in my hand.
And if, like me, you find The Encounter to be deeply resonant for our times, I urge you to place it in someone else’s hand too.
SIMON MCBURNEY
December 2015
PREFACE
AS THE READER WILL NOTICE, Amazon Beaming’s narrative style alternates between the third person and the first. That may seem unusual, but the book really wrote itself that way.
When I started researching the story of Loren McIntyre’s quest for the Amazon’s source, and of his unusual relationship with a branch of the Mayoruna tribe, I was faced with a global difficulty. Most of the events to be narrated were twenty years old. Despite the integrity of McIntyre’s own memory, the documentation was fragmented into personal notes (some were intended to become part of a regular diary, yet never did), as well as letters, photographs and their captions, books and articles, stories published in the National Geographic, and testimonies of friends and collaborators. Altogether, I started telling McIntyre’s story by pulling it out of that overpowering mass of material, as a third person narrative.
But through the writing, as I came to passages that needed expanding or simply peeked my curiosity, I asked Loren new questions, recorded his answers on tape, and re-recorded older first person accounts of this or that incident. At that point, the fact that it all had happened in the past became an advantage. Loren could comment with all the acumen provided by verified references and hindsight. We were both able to speculate and to add new data. And in recounting the most suspenseful moments, I could use a pace and wealth of description that no diary can afford.
Thus the recordings, enlarged and rewritten, became the book’s first person sections. They are the best I could do to recreate McIntyre’s own voice. I thought about converting them back to the third person, but that seemed more artificial than using two narrative modes, because it robbed the book of a naturalness and sincerity that only made the story more poignant.
So I left them in the first person. I hope that the readers will forgive the trick, and enjoy the immediacy of an adventure happening here and now.
PETRU POPESCU
Los Angeles, March 1991
INTRODUCTION
by Loren McIntyre
WE WERE EMBARKED on the greatest mass of flowing fresh water on earth. Yet in the comfort of my cabin, amid a clutter of cameras and conversation, we were conscious of sailing down to the sea at eighteen knots only when our six hundred passenger vessel heeled a little to port or starboard in answer to the rudder that urged it to follow the river’s sinuosities.
We were three. Petru Popescu, Jean-Michel Cousteau, and I. Although Petru’s native tongue was Romanian and Jean-Michel’s was French, we chatted in the relaxed Californian English that suited us best. And we gesticulated in silent languages, as when we lifted our glasses to some of the bold ones who had made this transcontinental voyage in dugout canoes: Friar Brieva in 1637, Madame Godin in 1769, and John Schultz in 1947. And we saluted the Amazons, whoever they might be, who had showered Orellana with arrows in 1542 and lent this river their name.
On our own voyage down the River of the Amazons, Petru wondered aloud how explorers communicated with remote forest Indians in the absence of interpreters. “Among the Achuara, how did you deal with it?” he asked Jean-Michel, son of oceanographer Jacques.
Jean-Michel raised his hand chest-high, palm outward, as if to put a stop to something. “Like this. Or with grunts and grimaces that transcend cultural and even species differences. Body English that even wild animals understand.”
“Well, that’s fine for showing anger or sorrow or asking for something to eat,” said Petru. “But how would you advise a creature of the forest about a plot against his life? Or ask him the reason for worshipping the wind? Abstract things…”
“There may be a way.” I spoke without thinking. Maybe the champagne had loosened my tongue. All these years I had kept from mentioning a strange case of apparent thought transference I experienced among the Mayoruna Indians because it seemed preposterous. Now all of a sudden, I brought it up.
I didn’t mean to make a big thing out of it, but evidently I told just enough about my Mayoruna experiences to whet the literary appetite of Petru Popescu and to leave Jean-Michel Cousteau vowing to join me on a headwater expedition as soon as he and his father finished the long sojourn they called “the rediscovery of the world.” Jean-Michel pocketed the wire hood of the champagne bottle, saying, “This is a cage.” He handed the cork to Petru. “You keep the bird. When we meet again, whoever fails to produce either bird or cage must buy the bottle.”
Verbal communication is Petru’s occupation. He speaks four languages, reads a couple more, and wrote books in Romanian and then in English before settling in Hollywood, where he divides his time between writing books and screenplays. Even so, Petru has long been fascinated with non-verbal communication. He asked me to tell him more about the Mayorunas, peppering me with questions all the way down the Amazon. I now believe that somewhere in the back of his head Petru had already begun to write Amazon Beaming, while in the bottom of my brain lay the conviction that the story would never be told.
Since he works in a medium and in a locality—Hollywood—where high visibility is the stuff of success, Petru was puzzled by the lack of hullabaloo about my expedition to the most distant Amazon headwaters in 1971. The National Geographic published an account of it. But not until 1987, the year of our shipboard conversation, did my name and picture appear in The Guinness Book of World Records as discoverer of the source. Petru had long been fascinated by Burton and Speke’s tales of their search for the source of the Nile. Though we had only known each other for a few days, he told me that he would drop everything and write the full story of the discovery of the ultimate source of the Amazon, if I would participate.
Doubtful that anything would come of it, I agreed, never imagining how drastically it would interfere with other plans and change my directions. For four years, since that day on the river when we shared a bottle of champagne with Jean-Michel Cousteau, Petru’s thoughts and mine have lunged and parried as in a duel until, at last, to my amazement, Amazon Beaming has become pinioned between two hard covers.
Petru Popescu wrote this book with enormous enthusiasm, but he had the devil’s own time with it because of my inaccessibility. There was a burst of note-taking while we descended the Amazon and cruised the Caribbean. Petru is a swift writer, but I ran off to Brazil for the Geographic and a year went by before he cornered me with a tape recorder in Washington D.C. I had assignments and my own books to write and illustrate, but there was no backing away, despite distances and time differences. For the next three years we both wrote bulky letters. I narrated episodes into tapes and mailed Petru clippings, photographs and other pieces of research. We spent hundreds of hours on the phone, met twice in Washington and twice in California, and talked into the night, arguing about literary renditions of events or thoughts that had been intimate or minuscule at the time, yet were creating now a sort of philosophy of the places and people I had encountered during some forty years.
For a good part of the process, I felt reluctant. Things I had lived but rarely talked about would be exposed to an unseen audience. I feared readers would think I’d gone around the bend. Petru was drawing upon his considerable research on time and early man to lend logic to something that was never logical in the first place: communication that was so direct that no poet could find words for it.
And I was torn by the usual dilemma of a lensman who aims at unknown and unknowing targets. He wants to bring back a great picture that makes the viewer say “Wow!” yet he’s morally uneasy about exposing innocents to alien societies and possible future intrusion by aliens, by us. But maybe that’s just an excuse to mask a yen for exclusivity, as in the case of some anthropologists who try to keep their subjects pristine by excluding all contact with outsiders—except, of course, themselves.
Because he no longer writes in his own tongue but in English, Petru Popescu reminds me of Joseph Conrad. Conrad’s masterful novels about South America, Africa, and other hearts of darkness were largely autobiographical and ridden with visions of despair, whereas Popescu dares to tackle themes beyond his personal experience that require enormous research, and he is optimistic about the human condition. A joie de vivre that blossomed with his escape fifteen years ago from Romania and its multiple censorship has not withered. While Conrad viewed writing as an illness, Popescu is that rare writer who really likes to write in his adopted language. His pairing of themes in this book strikes me as just right for telling about my concurrent journeys through psychological and physical time, on the Rio Javari and to the Apurímac source.
Someday, I’d like to take Petru to a certain Shangri-La in Amazon headwater country. He would find it overflowing with material for an autobiographical novel which would release the cry of freedom that has been swelling in his chest ever since his defection from Romania. I’d ask Jean-Michel Cousteau to join us. If Jean-Michel brings along the small wire cage and Petru remembers the champagne cork, it would fall to my lot to buy the bottle.
LOREN MCINTYRE
Arlington, Virginia, April 1991
THE VANISHING TRIBE
“For forty-eight days we saw no human being. In passing these rapids we lost five of the seven canoes with which we started and had to build others. One of our best men lost his life in the rapids. Under the strain one of the men went completely mad… murdered the sergeant and fled into the wilderness.”
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
Through the Brazilian Wilderness
“The first explorers of South America were Indians who hunted in forests, erected stone shrines on snowy peaks, and buried treasure in desert tombs.”
LOREN MCINTYRE
Exploring South America
1
OVER THE OCEAN FOREST
Upper Amazonia, October 1969
“IAM AFRAID,” said the pilot, “that we won’t be able to land anywhere.”
“Where is the village?” asked the explorer. “If this is the area where you saw the village, let’s go on as long as we can. Make sure at least that it’s still there.”
They were hurtling at a hundred miles an hour over jungle treetops in a Cessna 206 floatplane. The clouds were hanging low, less than three hundred feet above the jungle, and in order to reconnoiter the terrain the plane had to fly beneath them. Carrying extra containers of gasoline, their limit of flying time was nine hours, of which four had elapsed. To be safe, they should turn back now and arrive at base with an hour’s worth of fuel still in the tanks. If they didn’t find what they were looking for within minutes, they would have to give up.
Even so, the return would not be without risk. They might meet a thunderstorm which they would have to bypass, depleting the reserve fuel even more. A Cessna was hard to glide down, and it could only be put down on the river, since landing on wheels in a jungle without clearings is practically impossible. But this Cessna had no wheels anyway. Rivers were the highways out here—you flew along them and landed in them. They were the entries into the Amazon Basin, the routes for trading, the front lines of population growth and development.
The rivers were also the main feature on maps: ever since man had begun to record his exploration, the hydrography, the “blue stuff,” had been marked on his maps first. It was the same with the maps aboard the Cessna: the most reliable contours on them were the rivers. The forest was a giant green mask, hiding most other variations of terrain. As for the tributary the plane was now following, at its lowest level in the month of October, it looked like a trench filled with the skeleton of a giant fish. The tree trunks fallen across the brown stream were its bones, the sandbars and mudbanks its rotting flesh.
“There were plenty of good stretches to land on just two months ago,” lamented the pilot.
He swooped down deeper into the trench. Suddenly the flight became a struggle to keep the Cessna’s wingtips between the treetops flashing past on both sides. As the pilot was flying too low now to anticipate the curves of the river, all he could do was expect one every few seconds and brace himself to stay with it.
The Rio Javari, a south bank tributary of the Amazon and possibly its most tortuous due to the extremely mild incline of the terrain, meandered some nine hundred miles from its birth to where it flowed into the Amazon proper. By cutting curves in flight, however, there were only some five hundred miles from source to confluence, practically the distance flown by the Cessna in the last four hours. Which meant that the muddy stream below was soon to disappear. The Cessna was struggling for a clear stretch of water to land on only minutes from the source of the Javari.
For the last half hour, the pilot had been marking down on his chart the exact location of every estirón (“straight stretch of river”) that he could land on, timing his progress almost to the second. If he found no landing place by the Javari’s source and had to turn back, he knew exactly how far he had to go. But turning back would mean giving up on the Indian village which, as the pilot had explained to the explorer, lay minutes from the source, on the Brazilian bank of the Javari.
The Javari’s banks were built of soft earth, without rocks or stones. As the river lowered from May through October, the flow’s failing pressure no longer held up the banks and they frittered, letting a generation of trees fall across the riverbed. Some were over a hundred feet tall.
The curves were unpredictable, the map of no specific usefulness. The Javari’s path had been shifting every year since long before man had appeared in the Americas, following the dictates of its changing volume. The soil of its banks was soft: the billions of root ramifications weaving through it failed to give it a lasting structure. The river kept reshaping the banks, abandoning old beds and cutting new ones, sometimes bisecting itself. The history of that shifting was absorbed by the facelessness of the jungle. And now this small plane, an object of puffing pistons and grinding gears, flew above this vast primordial space, searching for one short stretch of clear flow to land on.
“Logs,” the pilot called over the sound of the engine. “Fallen trees everywhere.”
Three minutes later, they were still hugging the river’s curves. In the seat next to the pilot, a half-Indian guide kept a tense silence; the pilot noticed him mop a tear of sweat from his temple with his brown thumb.
“In two minutes, I’m going back,” the pilot shouted over his shoulder. He turned his head to check on the explorer, who flew strapped in the seat by the Cessna’s starboard doorway. The door had been removed to enable him to take pictures, so Loren McIntyre sat in silhouette against the blur of the treetops zooming past the plane. He aimed the stubby cannon of a Minolta SR=101 at the jungle.
“First find that village,” he shouted back. “Climb a little higher and see where we are.”
With a shrug, the pilot thrust up and out of the river’s trench, climbing as high as visibility permitted. They zoomed under the boiling edge of a planet of clouds seeming ready to crash down into the misty forest.
Suddenly a crater-shaped clearing opened below. All three fliers, one looking through the camera lens, saw a half circle of Indian huts, the space between them zigzagged by a handful of running figures. The half-Indian guide waved. Then the vision was harshly cut off by the jungle.
The plane banked sharply back to the river. The three men looked down anxiously. Fallen trees and sand bars snagged the flow upstream and down. A Cessna could land and come to a full stop in less than five hundred feet, but it needed three times that distance to get airborne again. And without a beach to unload the explorer’s supplies and equipment and steady the plane for refilling the gas tanks from the plastic containers now cramping the cargo space, a clean stretch of water was useless.
Despite all that, a smile played on the pilot’s stubbly face. “I think that’s the village,” he yelled.
That was the village he had told McIntyre about back in Iquitos, Peru, when they had met. The pilot thought it to be a village of Mayoruna Indians, the most enigmatic tribe of the region, until recently believed extinct.
McIntyre nodded back, aware that each moment, even the instant of his nodding, was taking them farther away, into jungle time. Jungle time is measured in days and weeks—their landing spot might be moments away by air but would turn out to be several days of paddling from the village. He looked at the mixed-blood bush guide; Carlitos, a half-Cahuapana Indian, had been hired only two days before in Leticia, Colombia, near the confluence of the Javari with the Amazon. He’d insisted that he knew the river and the sites of several Mayoruna villages. He also claimed that their dialect was related to his own, which neither McIntyre nor Mercier, the pilot, could confirm, since they didn’t speak Mayoruna. At the moment, Carlitos was looking airsick.
McIntyre leaned toward the plane’s open doorway. The treetops zipped by so fast that a good shot was out of the question. But he always got a bang out of sweeping thus over the jungle, and it helped keep his anxieties in a suspended state. The last four hours had been compact with risk. A storm could punch out of the clouds at any time, fracturing this flying toy. Engine failure could make them lose control and crash into the trees. A forced landing over fallen trunks could slam cargo and people forward with deadly force, tearing the plane apart, blowing the flammable gasoline vapors against the exposed hot engine and turning fuselage and bodies into a pyre. But zooming like this kept his anxieties abstract; just a few more inches of leaning toward the slipstream, and the air roaring past the plane would slap his face and peel his eyelids back. What he felt now was a frantic urge to see enough, to be enough to comprehend the forest underneath. It looked planetary. It was an ocean of forest. It was fitting that the Amazon River had been baptized “O Rio Mar” by the first Portuguese explorers: the River Sea.
This was also the easiest, most pleasant part of exploration, when the wilderness was spread at his feet. Once down, the walking and paddling began, and with them came the sweat, the stickiness, the strange food. And then the insects, the jungle’s first line of defense: gnats and mosquitoes, piums and isula ants, chicharra machacuys, or viper locusts, and so many others named and unnamed. Everything that stung, bit, pricked, or slipped its eggs into human skin for delayed invasion, wrapping a human in a cloud of insect activities, the least aggressive of which was the buzzing.
He heard his own grunt of relief: he’d just glimpsed a clean stretch of water, running past a brown riverbank. The riverbank sloped gently out of the water, then rose steeply and vanished under the forest that covered the whole Brazilian shore. McIntyre checked his watch. Only two minutes had passed since they had been above the village.
Two minutes of air time. Maybe two days of jungle time.
Yelling over the throb of the engine, they discussed a way of alerting the Indians in the village that they would be landing not too far upstream. They agreed to turn back and fly over the village wagging the plane’s wings. “Let’s do it twice,” McIntyre suggested. Even for uncontacted tribes, aircraft were becoming familiar, and that sort of aerial body language was the closest to an explicit message they could think of.
The pilot turned the Cessna. For a whole minute, the clearing seemed lost. But then a crenellation of treetops announced the empty space beyond, and the village reappeared. More tribesmen had spilled out of their huts; McIntyre estimated there were at least three dozen. They made no hostile gestures and didn’t attempt to hide, surprising for a tribe that had been in virtual hiding for seventy years. Were they really Mayoruna?
As if reading McIntyre’s mind, the guide turned and ran his brown thumb over his upper lip, indicating the Mayorunas’ specific tattoo, which McIntyre knew from drawings and a single recent photograph: a broad dark blue line hemming in both lips and continuing back across the cheeks. Men, women, and children wore it, also puncturing their lips and the outer sides of their nostrils and sticking in the holes five-to seven-inch-long palm spines, the same kind of thin straight spines they used as sewing needles. Primitively but hauntingly, the tattoo and spines made them resemble jaguars, which they believed themselves to be descended from. For that reason they were also known as cat-people.
Yes, the guide was saying. Those were cat-people down there.
After circling above the village, the Cessna flew upstream and descended toward the river. Float planes usually land against the current and take off heading downstream. Mercier touched down on the water and almost came to a stop, then proceeded to dock by the mudbank by revving against the current while the cargo rattled like a crateful of chickens waking up. McIntyre stepped out and onto one of the floats with a rope and a long oar in his hands. As soon as the propeller stopped and the floats grated against the brown sand, McIntyre stuck the oar down into the sand, threw the rope around the oar, and fastened it. They would look around later for a strong tree trunk, to provide better mooring for the plane’s twelve hundred pounds. The guide had already started to move McIntyre’s gear toward the open doorway.
McIntyre jumped ashore. The Indian guide jumped out after him, landed in the brown shallow ripples, and shivered. It was eleven in the morning. Even without sunlight, the heat wrapped them possessively, and McIntyre immediately felt his collar go limp with sweat.
After three hours of engine roar, their dulled hearing barely perceived other sounds. But soon the gurgle of the river and the jaggedness of bird calls, the sound of one’s own breathing, words, every kind of natural noise became audible. McIntyre’s equipment and supplies were stashed in flour sacks which had been rubberized—dipped into liquid latex to make them waterproof—and strung three feet apart on a long rope. If they were washed from a canoe while running rapids or otherwise dumped into the river, he stood a good chance not only to save his equipment but also to save himself, as the buoyant sacks would catch a low branch and stop both man and gear from drifting away or sinking.
As the guide and the pilot helped McIntyre with the sacks, the guide shivered again, then suddenly shook so hard that he dropped his load. McIntyre heard the clinking of a sack of presents: little mirrors, combs, knives, and other trinkets easy to hang on bushes and trees. He had bought them in a riverfront store in Leticia, to help seduce the uncontacted Mayoruna into contact.
Both he and the pilot rushed over. Mercier, who was French and a Catholic missionary, had a training in tropical diseases. It took him one look to guess what the trouble was.
“Malaria?” he inquired.
Carlitos murmured confusedly that he’d had malaria once. But he had been cured of it for years.
McIntyre and Mercier exchanged a glance. Their friendship was less than a week old. They had met in Iquitos, the Amazon’s last big port, twenty-three hundred miles upstream from the mouth, three hundred miles from Leticia. Iquitos, a sprawl of tin-roofed houses looking from the air like corrugated turtles, is the capital of Peru’s largest Amazonian state, Loreto, selling to the world timber, zoo articles like snakes, caimans, and monkeys, and, more recently, drugs. A lavish metropolis by bush standards, it flaunts paved streets and licensed dentists.
Mercier and McIntyre had met the way civilizados usually meet at these latitudes, chancing their trust in each other within minutes without asking for credentials. They had grown friendly over the topic of the cat-people’s reappearance. At Yarinacocha, Peru, a team from the Summer Institute of Linguistics, the best organized of all the evangelizing breeds active in Amazonia, had contacted the Mayoruna several times in the last three years; they were the ones who announced that the Mayoruna, believed exterminated at the time of the rubber boom, had survived in the depth of the jungle. No one had officially attempted a contact on the Brazilian side, though the tribe had traditionally straddled the border, but Mercier told McIntyre how he had landed next to a village on the Javari that summer and deemed the inhabitants to be Mayoruna.
Mercier had spent a few hours among naked men and women with cat whiskers, found them intelligent and friendly, and decided that they were good material for a mission. Mercier spoke no Mayoruna and had never met Mayorunas before, but what convinced him of their identity were the cat whiskers, worn by no other tribe in the area. By his estimate, the village lay close to the Javari’s source.
Anthropologically speaking, that constituted the beginning of a first contact with an unacculturated tribe, so McIntyre listened to him with fascination. Though he was not an anthropologist, McIntyre had a passion for visiting tribes and had done it repeatedly since 1953, being even part of a first contact once, with a branch of the Chacobo tribe of Bolivia. The chance of another first encounter and perhaps of taking some sensational photographs excited him. Thinly financed from home, Mercier often rented his services as a pilot, so McIntyre hired man and plane at $120 an hour plus an hour’s rate for each overnight. From Iquitos they flew to Leticia, where the already mile-wide Amazon received the muddy flow of the Javari, and from there they had headed upstream.
Now here they were, hoping that the village they had glimpsed from the plane was the one Mercier remembered.
“What are we going to do if Carlitos is sick?” Mercier wondered aloud.
McIntyre pondered. “Postpone the expedition and take him back.”
Carlitos suppressed a chatter of teeth and said that he was all right. Then he needed to sit down: in the last fifteen minutes his cheeks had sunk. Contritely, Mercier delayed the refueling of the plane and they sat down on the brown sand for a lunch of sandwiches and Cokes still cool from the plane’s ice chest.
Carlitos had scouted the Amazonian bush both for missionaries and geologic prospectors and planned to become a one-man tourist agency specializing in Indians. Both he and Mercier were quite typical of the Amazon’s cast of characters. The exception was the yanqui, the photographer. In his early fifties, five-ten but looking taller from the tautness of his lanky body, McIntyre was now pulling out of his kit some chloroquine tablets, his straight strong profile cutting the hot air. He had hazel eyes that trained themselves on things and people with some initial fixedness, as if eager to observe them exactly. His voice sounded like he’d never been angry in his life, and his gestures were efficient and uncomplicated, all actually part of the self-discipline taught by ten years of naval service. After handing Carlitos the tablets, he rose and prowled back and forth on the mudbank, taking pictures of the plane, of the location, and of the two other men, documenting the already doubtful expedition.
He stopped once, to instruct Carlitos to drink more liquid.
Camera clicking, he noticed that the shore, some ten feet high, dropped in one spot, becoming almost level with the strip of mud they had landed on. There the trees rose from the waterline, making for a spectacular shot, so McIntyre headed for the trees.
He kneeled, getting his camera ready, then got up slowly and made his way back to the others.
“Indians, in the forest,” he whispered, and reached to pull over a bag of gifts. He broke out of it a cardboard box with six cheap pocket mirrors and walked back with it and with the camera toward the unseen Indians.
Mercier jumped as if struck by an electric shock. The village they had overflown seemed unwary of strangers, and if it was the same Mercier had visited in summer he had reason to expect a friendly reception. But two minutes of flight upstream meant that they were now at least two days of paddling away from it, so these had to be other Indians, their intentions as yet unknown. Historically, the Mayoruna were a numerous enough tribe to spread over thousands of square miles and had developed dialects sometimes as dissimilar as separate languages. The Javari, marking the border between Peru and Brazil, was sparsely dotted by civilizado settlements of a few houses, none deserving to be called a town. Instead, its beaches invited the sunbathing of caimans fourteen to eighteen feet long while its swamps bubbled with piranha. Two years before, oil prospectors forcing their way into this dereliction had been porcupined with arrows by unidentified tribesmen. The Mayoruna, never successfully acculturated, had always been at war with both civilizados and the neighboring tribes that sold other Indians for slaves. In fact, their relation with the outer world had become so adverse that at the turn of the century, as the rubber boom brought more intrusion and conflict to upper Amazonia, they had simply plunged into the forest and disappeared.
And now they were reappearing, undoubtedly still carrying memories of strife and bloodshed.
All that was suddenly thrown at Mercier, like an ominous background to Loren’s sparse communication. He had no weapons within reach, though there was a rifle in the Cessna.
Yet that didn’t hold him back. He moved to follow McIntyre, and Carlitos shuffled behind. Mercier’s plan to start a mission here received an inspirational boost from what he saw: inside a pattern of spiky leaves shone several small brown faces. One showed a blue tattoo or streak of paint over the upper lip—or maybe it was just the shadow of a leaf. But staring at McIntyre’s camera, the faces conveyed the innocence of children everywhere.
2
GIFTS ON THE RIVERBANK
MCINTYRE HAD FIRST READ about the Mayoruna in the chronicles of the conquistadors. The Spaniards had first entered the area in 1541, coming down the Andes after subduing the Incas. They were looking for El Dorado, a quest that saw many expeditions return to their bases in Peru and Ecuador decimated and empty-handed. Especially gruesome was the story of Don Pedro de Ursúa’s expedition. Ursúa was betrayed and killed by his lieutenant Lope de Aguirre, who ended up rising against the crown and pillaging the Spanish settlements on the Caribbean. So demented was Aguirre that his own soldiers had preferred to desert and take their chances with the cannibal-infested jungle.
Legend had it that some Spanish soldiers joined the Mayoruna tribe, a scattered confederation who claimed descent from jaguars. Travelers who met the Mayoruna later described them as having thick beards and white skins (“more like English than Spaniards,” one noted). Other accounts, more likely correct, explained the nickname barbudos, “bearded,” by the labrets of palm wood they wore in their lips. The Mayoruna’s first major contact with civilization set the pattern for subsequent encounters: no commerce with the white world, but a measure of pity for its stragglers. Later, as their numbers were depleted in intertribal wars, the Mayoruna resorted more and more to capturing Europeans, especially females, which explained their occasional light pigmentation.
Like their jaguar fathers, the Mayoruna were described as impossible to “tame” (which meant to convert). They had always been semi-nomadic. For a long time they even lacked the blowgun, which is standard in the area, and fought with only arrows and clubs. They fought neighbors and civilizados, fought the slave-trading Conibo and Puna, who raided them over and over until and particularly during the rubber boom. Never strong in numbers (a 1940s report guessed three thousand), they were a constant target, but would respond fiercely to attacks before drawing deeper into the forest. Thus by 1910 they had disappeared, remaining totally unheard from until the sightings reported in 1966 by the Summer Institute of Linguistics.
Yet they had managed to create quite an impression, more memorable than that of bigger and more stable tribes. With their spines sticking out of noses, lips, and even earlobes, they seemed like a spirit of the place, elusive yet haunting like the felines of their totem.
Very little was known about them, and some of it may have been just hearsay. They wore no clothing except an occasional penis sheath for the men, and they put their young through severe puberty rites (for the girls, that included the excision of the clitoris). They spoke Panoan lingoes of extreme complexity. Their marriages were polygamous. About marriage particularly, they had interesting regulations, one being that parallel cousins (the children of two brothers or of two sisters) could not marry each other, while cross-cousins (the offspring of a brother and sister) could marry and were encouraged to do so. Since Mayoruna families were numerous, cross-cousin marriages occurred constantly. Maybe that practice reflected a sense of vulnerability to which was opposed the strength of common blood, but it also allowed for a lot of inbreeding. To correct the effects of inbreeding, the Mayoruna were known to strangle their defective infants or cast them into animal holes, and to replenish their blood by capturing females from outside. Their close sense of kinship could be observed in other attitudes, including that toward death. The Mayoruna were endocannibals: rather than leave a relative’s dead body to the worms, they roasted it and ate it; they kept the head until it filled with maggots, then spiced the brain with wild herbs before eating it, and even ground the skull into an edible powder. In that way, by putting the loved one inside their own bodies, they symbolically reinforced their tribal cohesiveness.
The information about Mayoruna marriages and funerals, interesting and unusual, had caught the attention of earlier visitors. Their resistance to acculturation was established. But many other things about them were not known. They had been roaming for several centuries, but where was their origin? If they came from outside Amazonia, when had they arrived here, and following what route? Their folklore had not been recorded and studied; their religion was superficially understood (they were rumored to be “superstitious,” killing members of the tribe, even children, if suspected of sorcery). Only recently had the Summer Institute of Linguistics begun to compile a Mayoruna dictionary.
And there were more unanswered questions regarding their social structures, manufacture of their artifacts, techniques of hunting and fishing, agriculture, diet, festivals, their own beliefs about their origin and ancestry.
As for the kidnapping of civilizados, both infants and adults, it was documented; yet there was no history of prisoners escaping back to civilization, and no tradition of horror stories about their captivity. Which could mean that the prisoners were never many, or that they received a tolerably decent treatment.
What was known with certainty was that they were largely unknown, and probably still unsullied by the contact with the modern world. It was precisely that unsullied state that McIntyre hoped to record with his camera, before the Mayoruna would be dragged, like so many before them, into the basement of Western culture.
McIntyre snapped a few shots as he advanced towards the little brown faces. A tremor of apprehension seemed to seize the children; the branches around their faces vibrated, as if from the tension of bodies ready to jump back. Letting his camera hang on his chest, McIntyre set the mirrors on the hardened mud several yards from the edge of the vegetation, then backed away. He signaled the other men to turn, and all three retreated toward the remains of their lunch.
They moved slowly and talked at normal volume. Slowness is key with natives. So is noise. Enemies, not friends, steal in quickly and silently. They had to show that they were not enemies.
They talked, excitedly and interrupting each other. They had seen no adults, but there was undoubtedly a tribal group of some size nearby. By the children’s stance, glimpsed so briefly, they could be unacculturated Indians. They belonged not to the village they had overflown but to another one, closer, whose clearing they hadn’t spotted from the air. Clearings abandoned by a semi-nomadic tribe (which the Mayorunas typically were) succumbed to secondary growth in a matter of months. If these were Mayoruna, they were related to the ones first sighted in 1966 in Peru, doggedly pursued since by a missionary pair from the Summer Institute of Linguistics known as the two Harriets. Harriet Fields and Harriet Kneeland kept flying over the Peruvian jungle, calling in Mayoruna through an airborne loudspeaker the way an alien ship would call to the earth race in a science fiction movie.
Five months earlier, intrigued by the two Harriets’ reports, McIntyre had flown to their base at Yarinacocha and asked to join their flights. He was turned down: their plane could barely carry their weight, their pilot’s, and their interpreter’s. McIntyre handed two fresh rolls of film to the pilot, Ralph Borthwick, himself a missionary. Borthwick later sent McIntyre a shot of a contact climaxing three years of efforts: in it, Loren saw tribesmen with labrets in their lips and noses standing against the silvery body of the plane. The labrets, extremely thin and straight, at least five inches long, were clearly visible against their hairless cheeks. Their eyes peered at the camera with quiet intelligence, their bodies were svelte, gracefully smooth and fawn as if from a light tan. One wore the gift of a T-shirt, the first sign of the change his nation would undergo if it accepted permanent contact with the missionaries.
The photograph had reached McIntyre just weeks before he met Mercier and hired his floatplane. It made the idea of a first contact on the Javari’s Brazilian shore seem eminently possible. McIntyre had made a feverish string of preparations, including wholesale purchases of objects to be used for the gift-exchange process. Then came the flight from Iquitos to Leticia, the spontaneous hiring of Carlitos, and this morning’s exciting thrust out into the unknown.
Now this unknown looked populated. Contact had already begun, though now, scanning the edge of the trees, McIntyre no longer saw the little faces. They had melted back into the bush.
The mirrors had not been picked up, which wasn’t surprising: gifts were not accepted at once. In some cases months passed from the first laying down of the gifts to the first tenuous face-to-face encounter. Slowly, McIntyre walked up to the mirrors, and past them. He stepped through the screen of bushes, whose tops mixed with the parasite plants hanging from the towering trees. He could detect no movement and saw no discernible trails through the vegetation carpeting the inner edge of the forest. Just as he was about to turn back, he tripped on an object lying on the forest floor, looked down, and found sure proof that the children had not been an illusion. It was a bird snare of the spring pole type, a thin and flexible young sapling bent down and attached to a toggle connected to a vine looking like any old vine dragging on the forest floor. Any creature that tripped the vine pulled out the toggle and released the sapling, whose end was fitted with a noose like a lariat. The lariat tightened around the creature’s feet and snatched it up in the air. The Mayoruna used the same mechanics to power much larger snares set in the paths of their human enemies.
This snare looked new and no bird fluttered about in it. All it said was that the children knew this shore’s abundant game, and that could mean a relatively stable community. A portrait of the unseen tribe was beginning to draft itself in Loren’s mind.
He called Mercier and showed him the snare. Mercier nodded. “This might be easier than we thought,” he reflected aloud, even more reluctant to abandon the expedition; yet for a few days, at least, Carlitos would be no good for hacking his way through obstinate undergrowth, and they could give him no proper medical care.
They backtracked to the mudbank. “Estoy bien,” Carlitos kept saying, “I feel fine,” yet he looked anything but fine, and his pulse pounded under Mercier’s fingers. They would have to fly him back to Leticia.
“Or I could set up camp here, and you could pick me up in a few days,” suggested McIntyre.
“But that’s too risky. You don’t even have a weapon,” mumbled Mercier, though he knew that a firearm was dubious protection against a determined Indian attack.
“I’ve never taken a weapon into an Indian territory. As for risks, they might be slighter if I’m completely alone. The Indians won’t feel threatened.”
Mercier pondered. He didn’t lack personal courage: he had left the safety of a European seminary for the life of a bush aviator. But if he stayed with McIntyre he would not be much use to him; if the explorer decided to advance without Carlitos into the jungle’s interior, the pilot would be grounded on the mudbank guarding his plane. A few years earlier in the Curaray Forest of Ecuador, five missionaries, one of them a pilot, had been speared to death by Auca warriors, who also bashed in the wood bee, their landed plane. The pilot’s sister, a celebrity in the evangelical community appropriately named Rachel Saint, later converted and turned into personal bodyguards the very warriors who had killed her brother.
In any case, McIntyre’s solo success in starting a relationship with the tribe would be an indication of Mercier’s own chances to build a mission among them.
McIntyre had already started to move his sacks toward the edge of the trees, where he would have to sling his hammock if he set up camp on the mudbank. He was not afraid to stay here alone—he felt less safe crossing a street in Rio de Janeiro, where motorists seemed to deliberately aim their cars at pedestrians. Since the early fifties he had been roaming the jungle and had visited tribes in the Andes, in the Xingu, in Venezuela, in the cloud forests lining the headwaters of Bolivia and Ecuador. One particular tribe, the Aguaruna, had even initiated him. Like the Mayoruna, the Aguaruna had a history of cannibalism and attacks on intruders.
Carlitos felt cold, so cold that they made him lie down under the closest tree and covered him with a blanket. McIntyre helped Mercier filter the gasoline from the latch-down canisters through a chamois skin into the plane’s tanks—with no water in the fuel, at least one risk of engine failure was eliminated. Halfway through the operation, they saw a brown shadow streak out from the bushes: an Indian child grabbed the mirrors and raced back into the jungle.
*
“It’s going to be easier than we expected,” Mercier repeated with discernible envy.
Any hesitation McIntyre had about staying vanished. He would not give the erratic Mayoruna a chance to disappear. Mercier would return for him in three days, or a week at the most if the plane was beset with unforeseen delays. If McIntyre decided to head inland, he would not stay away from the river shore more than forty-eight hours. And he would leave at his camp on the shore a written message for the pilot.
The day was October 18, 1969.
Even before the Cessna took off, the forest that loomed beyond its aluminum spine seemed to project an air of distrusting watchfulness. There were mahoganies and cedars in it, and palo sangres, their wood so heavy that it refused to float and so red it justified the name of “blood trees.” There were huacapus so hard that nails wouldn’t penetrate them, giant sumaumas, and tall lupunas, known as “river lighthouses” because boatmen used them as landmarks (one rose not far from where the floatplane was moored, an excellent memory aid for Mercier’s return). There were rubber trees, chonta palms producing long hardwood shafts popular for making bows and arrows, and scores of others, each species with its particular use and story. All those and their retinues of bromeliads, vines, parasites, mosses, and bark mushrooms seemed to exude a tense stillness, like that of a beast ambushing its prey.
Modern man had always been a transient here, coming and going irritatingly, unlike the aboriginal man, who was nothing more to the forest than were the howler monkeys or the sauva leaf-cutting ants. The forest tolerated tribal man but fought the European intruder, and in that lay its current triumph. What surrounded the floatplane was forest of the wildest type, entirely dependent on its laws alone and ignoring all symbiosis with civilized man. In it resided and evolved in an ancient rhythm half the natural inventions of the planet. No one knew for sure how many plants and animals lived on earth and the estimates were continuously revised upward, but Amazonia kept adding to the list more new species than any other part of the world. The concentration of unknown species was naturally assumed to be where the forest had been invaded least. This “total forest” fascinated McIntyre, and so did the tribes living in it. Least known, least harmful to the habitat—homo inconspicuus, an attribute modern man had completely lost.
That kind of forest had an interesting effect on the minds of the civilizados prowling its edges. There was nothing to be found in the forest but more forest, thicker and more tangled and matted and less witnessed and understood, but the civilizados kept assuming that something else lay in its depth, as hard to reach as it was rewarding to look for. Since the earliest conquistador forays, the jungle was expected to be a protective shell snuggling a treasure in its midst. That treasure was variously imagined as a mythical realm on the shores of a fabulous lake, an inexhaustible mother lode of gold or diamonds, a race of prosperous and gullibly hospitable half men, half beasts, even a giant deposit of petroleum. It was baptized in turns El Dorado, the Kingdom of the Omagua, Sevilla del Oro, Beni, Mojo, or Gran Para. With it in mind, conquistadors started on treks trumpeted as “civilizing missions” but ended up dead, insane, or captured by Indians.
Those who returned sick and crippled kept the myth up. The treasure was there. Right before crawling back, half mad with exhaustion and hunger, they had glimpsed those fabulous towers looming above the treetops. They had met the proud envoys of that kingdom, their clothes and weapons adorned with gems and gold. They had sipped water from the fabulous lake. The myth survived and grew. Such was the density of biota on nearly three million square miles that it could cover, conceal, disguise, and keep ready for unleashing any beast of the imagination. In 1925, when McIntyre was a schoolboy, the much publicized Colonel Fawcett had vanished in the jungle somewhere near the headwaters of the Xingu River, looking for a city of crystal. And who was to say that he hadn’t found it, and perhaps turned into crystal himself, succumbing to the place’s supernatural exudations?
The banks of the Javari had sporadically attracted visitors. Three hundred years earlier, a bandeira, as the Portuguese called their exploring parties, had reached this area led by the son of the governor of Rio de Janeiro. Their goal was to find slaves for Brazil’s east coast sugar plantations, and jewels reputed to lie in the forest in mounds twenty feet high. Paddling upriver for weeks, going crazy from heat, hunger, bugs, and Indian attacks, the Portuguese finally discarded weapons too heavy to carry, ate their clothes, revolted against their commander, stabbed each other, and left a trail of 180 unmarked graves. The survivors reached an Indian village, where they were fed manioc, but they were so insatiate after weeks of starving that some ate “till their bellies burst.” They quarreled with their saviors, attempted to take them into slavery, were captured themselves, and some were eaten. Those who escaped eventually returned to the coast, a few bringing back children sired with native women. They found their wives remarried and caring for new families. This expedition, a classic of wilderness disaster, in no way discouraged further ambitions.
In 1750, the Treaty of Madrid redrew the boundary between New Portugal and New Spain along the Javari River, bestowing status upon the otherwise forsaken backwater. Both the Spaniards, anxious to stop the Portuguese from claiming more territory, and the Portuguese, eager to establish credible outposts, announced grand plans for settlement. Viceroys and governors waved the lucre of virgin land and abundant Indian slave labor. In fact, there were no roads, cutting trees and starting plantations were exhausting and dangerous labors (snakebites always took their toll), and floods could wipe out the work of a year in hours. The Indians were indifferent to the Word or downright hostile. Development started and always petered out.
The region seemed almost supernaturally protected against exploration. Even today, its maps remained poorly drawn and its settlements small and unsophisticated. Puerto Carmen was a town of four huts, Concepción a city of fifteen houses, Puerto Amelia, a district capital, still had no radio station. As for Leticia, the base for McIntyre’s current trip, the annually published South American Handbook described its Hotel Victoria Regia as “primitive and just possible. People are often stranded for a week in Leticia. It is not worth it.”
