Search For the Lost City of Paititi
The jungle canopy hung like a tremendous emerald barricade, concealing us from our world. There was an energy about it, a power, a sense of consciousness. I could feel it watching our miserable procession, faltering ahead through the interminable undergrowth. We had been in the cloud-forest for sixteen weeks, much of it spent staggering inch by inch through the raging, waist-deep waters of the Madre de Dios River, the so-called ‘Mother of God’. My porters were broken men. They had all lost the skin on their feet weeks before. Most were lame, plagued with chronic diarrhoea, and guinea worms, which bored out from the soft tissue of our inner thighs. There was dengue fever, too. We would spend the long insect-ridden nights, huddled under the makeshift tent, shaking like cold turkey crack addicts in rehab.
As leader of the expedition, it fell to me to drag the porters forward whether they liked it or not. But men stripped of health and enthusiasm were a dead weight. They missed their wives and the comforts of their village, and lacked the raw ambition which kept me going. I could feel that we were close now: close to Paititi, the greatest lost city in history. Endure the unendurable a little longer and, I hoped, the El Dorado of the Incas would be mine.
I was not the first to go in search of Paititi, and I fear I will not be the last. For five centuries soldiers, adventurers, explorers and warrior-priests, have hacked through the Peruvian jungle on the quest of the lost city, the Holy Grail of exploration. Most of them have followed the same clues, and the theory that, as the Spanish Conquistadores swept through Peru in the 1500s – the Incas retreated with their most prized possessions, taking refuge in the densest cloud-forest on Earth. There, so the legend goes, they constructed a new city, more fabulous than anything than South American had ever known.
After first hearing the legend a decade ago, the corrosive allure of Paititi ran wild in my mind. Like so many before me, my motivation was founded on greed, an overwhelming greed. Not for gold, but for glory. Discover a lost city and I would be transformed overnight from a humble traveller into the world’s most famous explorer.
To have a real chance of finding Paititi, I would have to unearth clues in the chronicles of the Conquistadores. I read them, spending months trawling through library stacks – thousands of books, many written four centuries ago. The recurring name was Made de Dios, the vast impenetrable jungle, east of the Andes, on the southern cusp of the Amazon.
There comes a point when the library research must come to an end. You must draw a line in your mind, and begin the expedition itself. From the outset, it was clear that mine would have to be an expedition born of economy. My bank balance was pathetically dry. After having one bank card swallowed by the ATM, I managed to withdraw £200. I bought a copy of Loot, spread the pink pages out on my sitting-room floor, and searched for equipment worthy of a budget lost city expedition. Within an hour I had found an old Zodiac dinghy, a pair of used jungle Altama boots, two shovels, six canvas kit-bags, three tarpaulins and a pair of Chinese-made lanterns. With the money that was left, I went to a hardware store and bought some rubble sacks (the kind used by builders to carry gravel), and a few rolls of plastic bin liners. Lastly, I went down to Safeway and snapped up their entire stock of six hundred Pot Noodles, charged to my credit card. Pervious experience had taught me that an expedition marches on its stomach.
Explorers like to pretend that they are select breed of people with iron nerve and an ability to endure terrible hardship. It is true that exploration can entail much misery, but anyone can find some used gear in Loot, buy a cheap airline ticket, and set out on a grand adventure. You don’t have to be Indiana Jones to go out and look for a lost city. Indeed, most people reading this will have far better credentials and money to do so than me.
In addition to being overloaded with unnecessary supplies, I felt that the big expeditions who had searched for Paititi had failed for another key reason: arrogance. They consider themselves far superior to the indigenous tribes, the very people who know the jungle inside-out. As far as I was concerned, in order to locate Paititi, I would have to become trusted by the people who knew the Madre de Dios best of all: the Machiguenga Indians. After all, I reasoned, it must be very hard to lose a city, especially one as important as the El Dorado of the Incas.
I flew to Lima, along with the rubber boat, the jungle boots and the mountain of Pot Noodles. Then I took the local bus across the Cordillera, the mountainous ridge than runs down the country like the spine on a chameleon’s back. At Cusco, the former Incan capital, I heard that six well-funded teams had recently entered the cloud-forest in search of the very same prize as me. One of them boasted a million-dollar budget, and every contrivance from chemical toilets to a military field hospital.
Undeterred by the modesty of my own expedition, I clambered aboard the worn-out bus which occasionally ran the route from the highlands, down into the jungle. At the start, the landscape was desolate, abandoned, a thousand shades of grey; but as we descended, the vegetation changed. Prehistoric flowers and bronze-green fronds gave way to bamboo and bromeliads, to waterfalls and
a suffocation of trees.
When the bus ride ended, I hitched a lift on a truck full of pigs and, three days later, I was at the edge of the Machiguenga tribe’s ancestral lands. The first contact is always the hardest. But a lucky break came in the form of an old man, called Hector. A dreamer and a Seventh Day Adventist, he yearned to mount an expedition to find the ruined city. But his real value was in his connections to the tribe.
Hector had no doubt that the lost city existed. He said there was a man, a tribal warrior called Pancho, who had stumbled upon the ruins long ago in his young, while out searching for new hunting grounds. Pancho was the key. After weeks of coaxing Hector, he agreed to take me to meet the warrior.
Fine-boned and fragile, Pancho was at first reluctant to talk about the jungle or what secrets lay within it. We spent the afternoon at his hut, drinking gallons of warm masato, a vile white beer made from manioc, chewed by old village crones and fermented in their saliva. As afternoon became night, I realised that Pancho’s ambition was the mirror image of my own. I yearned to find a lost city, overgrown and deserted, while he yearned to go to a live city, bustling with life, and the cars he had never seen. Missionaries had told him of wayward places called discos, where lights flashed, music blared, and beer flowed; and they had talked of high-class brothels where large-breasted women would service a humble man’s needs. Grinning like a Cheshire Cat, Pancho whispered that he would like to go to the city and taste the vice for himself. We made a pact: if he could take me to the ruins of Paititi, then I would take him to Cusco.
The journey that followed was the hardest of my life. We pushed on, week after week, hauling the flimsy rubber boats up hundreds of miles of rapids. On either side of the river, the jungle watched us. I could feel it rolling with laughter at the sordid state of the gear and the men. My greatest fear was that one of the porters would snap an ankle, especially when we had struggled through the greatest of the rapids – known to the tribes as the ‘Gateway to Paititi’. Our stock of morphine had been stolen early on, and we would have had nothing to reduce the suffering, or quell the pain.
Explorers are quick to talk about the raw beauty of the jungle, but they glaze over the monotony. Words cannot describe the tedium of turning a river bend to be greeted with yet another expanse of waist-deep water, rapids and fever trees. After fifteen weeks, the porters were on the point of mutiny. One of them had gone blind, and all the others were shadows of the men who had set out down at their village where the river was wide. They hated me, and would have killed me – but their fatigue was so extreme that none could devise a plan which to end my life. Each morning we pushed out into the water in torrential rain, our forlorn procession moving like a column of spent soldiers, who have forgotten the grounds for war. I knew that if I permitted them to pause for a single moment, the expedition would be over. Raise the level of comfort, and the porters would begin to question why they were enduring such hardship at all.
As they staggered on, I found myself questioning why anyone would want to set himself such an insane quest: why I couldn’t make do with a 9 to 5 job like everyone else? It sounds clichéd but, ground down by weeks of fever, by guinea worms and putrid sores, I came to know myself. More importantly, I developed an astonishing respect for the jungle and its delicate web of life. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that finding Paititi would was a death sentence for the jungle and the tribes. Within weeks the great trees would be felled, and package tourists would be trouping through. Pancho and his peers would be bell-boys in swish hotels before they knew it. I cursed myself for thinking of the fame and glory, and swore that even if I found Paititi, I would pretend I had never been there at all.
At the end of many weeks, I was forced to recognise that disaster was the only certainty if we did not turn back. The food supplies were exhausted and most of the porters were dangerously ill. The golden city of Paititi, last outpost of the Incas, has stood the test of time very well indeed. I have no idea whether it exists at all. To the Machiguenga tribe, fact and fantasy were blurred: two inseparable elements. To them, the search for a lost city was empty of any meaning. As one who had spent months in their world, I too now realised how meaningless it would be to find a lost city.
As for Pancho, he returned to the city with me, where he tasted vice, and saw the curiosities of urban life. He drove in a car, watched television, ate ice cream, and even tried a Cappuccino. At the end of a week, he said he wanted to go home to his village. I asked him what he thought of our world. He was silent for a moment. Then he said:
‘It’s a terrible mess, isn’t it?’
(Written for Quintessentially Magazine)
(C) Tahir Shah, 2004
Ends
As leader of the expedition, it fell to me to drag the porters forward whether they liked it or not. But men stripped of health and enthusiasm were a dead weight. They missed their wives and the comforts of their village, and lacked the raw ambition which kept me going. I could feel that we were close now: close to Paititi, the greatest lost city in history. Endure the unendurable a little longer and, I hoped, the El Dorado of the Incas would be mine.
I was not the first to go in search of Paititi, and I fear I will not be the last. For five centuries soldiers, adventurers, explorers and warrior-priests, have hacked through the Peruvian jungle on the quest of the lost city, the Holy Grail of exploration. Most of them have followed the same clues, and the theory that, as the Spanish Conquistadores swept through Peru in the 1500s – the Incas retreated with their most prized possessions, taking refuge in the densest cloud-forest on Earth. There, so the legend goes, they constructed a new city, more fabulous than anything than South American had ever known.
After first hearing the legend a decade ago, the corrosive allure of Paititi ran wild in my mind. Like so many before me, my motivation was founded on greed, an overwhelming greed. Not for gold, but for glory. Discover a lost city and I would be transformed overnight from a humble traveller into the world’s most famous explorer.
To have a real chance of finding Paititi, I would have to unearth clues in the chronicles of the Conquistadores. I read them, spending months trawling through library stacks – thousands of books, many written four centuries ago. The recurring name was Made de Dios, the vast impenetrable jungle, east of the Andes, on the southern cusp of the Amazon.
There comes a point when the library research must come to an end. You must draw a line in your mind, and begin the expedition itself. From the outset, it was clear that mine would have to be an expedition born of economy. My bank balance was pathetically dry. After having one bank card swallowed by the ATM, I managed to withdraw £200. I bought a copy of Loot, spread the pink pages out on my sitting-room floor, and searched for equipment worthy of a budget lost city expedition. Within an hour I had found an old Zodiac dinghy, a pair of used jungle Altama boots, two shovels, six canvas kit-bags, three tarpaulins and a pair of Chinese-made lanterns. With the money that was left, I went to a hardware store and bought some rubble sacks (the kind used by builders to carry gravel), and a few rolls of plastic bin liners. Lastly, I went down to Safeway and snapped up their entire stock of six hundred Pot Noodles, charged to my credit card. Pervious experience had taught me that an expedition marches on its stomach.
Explorers like to pretend that they are select breed of people with iron nerve and an ability to endure terrible hardship. It is true that exploration can entail much misery, but anyone can find some used gear in Loot, buy a cheap airline ticket, and set out on a grand adventure. You don’t have to be Indiana Jones to go out and look for a lost city. Indeed, most people reading this will have far better credentials and money to do so than me.
In addition to being overloaded with unnecessary supplies, I felt that the big expeditions who had searched for Paititi had failed for another key reason: arrogance. They consider themselves far superior to the indigenous tribes, the very people who know the jungle inside-out. As far as I was concerned, in order to locate Paititi, I would have to become trusted by the people who knew the Madre de Dios best of all: the Machiguenga Indians. After all, I reasoned, it must be very hard to lose a city, especially one as important as the El Dorado of the Incas.
I flew to Lima, along with the rubber boat, the jungle boots and the mountain of Pot Noodles. Then I took the local bus across the Cordillera, the mountainous ridge than runs down the country like the spine on a chameleon’s back. At Cusco, the former Incan capital, I heard that six well-funded teams had recently entered the cloud-forest in search of the very same prize as me. One of them boasted a million-dollar budget, and every contrivance from chemical toilets to a military field hospital.
Undeterred by the modesty of my own expedition, I clambered aboard the worn-out bus which occasionally ran the route from the highlands, down into the jungle. At the start, the landscape was desolate, abandoned, a thousand shades of grey; but as we descended, the vegetation changed. Prehistoric flowers and bronze-green fronds gave way to bamboo and bromeliads, to waterfalls and
a suffocation of trees.
When the bus ride ended, I hitched a lift on a truck full of pigs and, three days later, I was at the edge of the Machiguenga tribe’s ancestral lands. The first contact is always the hardest. But a lucky break came in the form of an old man, called Hector. A dreamer and a Seventh Day Adventist, he yearned to mount an expedition to find the ruined city. But his real value was in his connections to the tribe.
Hector had no doubt that the lost city existed. He said there was a man, a tribal warrior called Pancho, who had stumbled upon the ruins long ago in his young, while out searching for new hunting grounds. Pancho was the key. After weeks of coaxing Hector, he agreed to take me to meet the warrior.
Fine-boned and fragile, Pancho was at first reluctant to talk about the jungle or what secrets lay within it. We spent the afternoon at his hut, drinking gallons of warm masato, a vile white beer made from manioc, chewed by old village crones and fermented in their saliva. As afternoon became night, I realised that Pancho’s ambition was the mirror image of my own. I yearned to find a lost city, overgrown and deserted, while he yearned to go to a live city, bustling with life, and the cars he had never seen. Missionaries had told him of wayward places called discos, where lights flashed, music blared, and beer flowed; and they had talked of high-class brothels where large-breasted women would service a humble man’s needs. Grinning like a Cheshire Cat, Pancho whispered that he would like to go to the city and taste the vice for himself. We made a pact: if he could take me to the ruins of Paititi, then I would take him to Cusco.
The journey that followed was the hardest of my life. We pushed on, week after week, hauling the flimsy rubber boats up hundreds of miles of rapids. On either side of the river, the jungle watched us. I could feel it rolling with laughter at the sordid state of the gear and the men. My greatest fear was that one of the porters would snap an ankle, especially when we had struggled through the greatest of the rapids – known to the tribes as the ‘Gateway to Paititi’. Our stock of morphine had been stolen early on, and we would have had nothing to reduce the suffering, or quell the pain.
Explorers are quick to talk about the raw beauty of the jungle, but they glaze over the monotony. Words cannot describe the tedium of turning a river bend to be greeted with yet another expanse of waist-deep water, rapids and fever trees. After fifteen weeks, the porters were on the point of mutiny. One of them had gone blind, and all the others were shadows of the men who had set out down at their village where the river was wide. They hated me, and would have killed me – but their fatigue was so extreme that none could devise a plan which to end my life. Each morning we pushed out into the water in torrential rain, our forlorn procession moving like a column of spent soldiers, who have forgotten the grounds for war. I knew that if I permitted them to pause for a single moment, the expedition would be over. Raise the level of comfort, and the porters would begin to question why they were enduring such hardship at all.
As they staggered on, I found myself questioning why anyone would want to set himself such an insane quest: why I couldn’t make do with a 9 to 5 job like everyone else? It sounds clichéd but, ground down by weeks of fever, by guinea worms and putrid sores, I came to know myself. More importantly, I developed an astonishing respect for the jungle and its delicate web of life. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that finding Paititi would was a death sentence for the jungle and the tribes. Within weeks the great trees would be felled, and package tourists would be trouping through. Pancho and his peers would be bell-boys in swish hotels before they knew it. I cursed myself for thinking of the fame and glory, and swore that even if I found Paititi, I would pretend I had never been there at all.
At the end of many weeks, I was forced to recognise that disaster was the only certainty if we did not turn back. The food supplies were exhausted and most of the porters were dangerously ill. The golden city of Paititi, last outpost of the Incas, has stood the test of time very well indeed. I have no idea whether it exists at all. To the Machiguenga tribe, fact and fantasy were blurred: two inseparable elements. To them, the search for a lost city was empty of any meaning. As one who had spent months in their world, I too now realised how meaningless it would be to find a lost city.
As for Pancho, he returned to the city with me, where he tasted vice, and saw the curiosities of urban life. He drove in a car, watched television, ate ice cream, and even tried a Cappuccino. At the end of a week, he said he wanted to go home to his village. I asked him what he thought of our world. He was silent for a moment. Then he said:
‘It’s a terrible mess, isn’t it?’
(Written for Quintessentially Magazine)
(C) Tahir Shah, 2004
Ends
posted by Mangorains at 1:54 PM
0 comments
