Authors: Matilde Asensi
“Up, my friends! Time for breakfast!”
Our alarm clock, the good Efraín, had decided at five in the morning that we’d already slept enough. When I jumped out of the hammock, I felt like all of me was stiff, right down to my ID.
We walked for seven hours without rest, putting up with the stifling heat that new day had given us and forcefully clearing a trail through the lianas. My hands and the others’ hands were so bruised we could barely feel them, but what did it matter? The three novices had been turned
to zombies, to robots, because, if I was exhausted, it was nothing compared to what showed on Marc and Lola’s faces: pale lifeless ghosts brought to life by some botched enchantment to resuscitate the dead. If we continued like that, we weren’t going to be able to reach our destination. It was a good thing we were enjoying those few days of limitless energy the change of altitude had provided, because otherwise we would have died.
That night we were again unable to pitch the tents, so we repeated the disagreeable adventure with the pucararas, but my body told me it had had quite enough silliness, and I managed to fall directly asleep at last and wake up in the morning much more rested. It would have been perfect if it weren’t for the thick fog that enveloped us and kept me from distinguishing what the thing was on my legs that was as heavy as a Great Dane. When I stirred to get up, thinking it would be a branch or the pack of one of my already awake companions, the Great Dane turned out to have four agile and fast feet equipped with sharp toes that scratched me through my pants.
“Fuck! What is this?” I exclaimed with the adrenalin flooding my veins, as I struggled to see through the fog what the hell it was that was running over my body like that.
From the trunk I had attached the end of my hammock to, some eyes covered in armor stared at me: A lizard longer than my arm, marked with some ostentatious greens, browns, and yellows, sat motionless, in an alert posture, with a strange forked tail raised in the air, and a threatening spiny crest as large as a fan.
“Get out of the hammock very slowly, Arnau,” Gertrude told me.
“How slow?” I asked without moving.
“As if all the bones in your body were broken.”
“Oh, okay. Lucky me.”
“Is it poisonous or something?” Lola asked anxiously, as I forced myself to slide millimeter by millimeter, without slipping, to the ground.
“No, actually it’s not,” Gertrude replied in a playful voice. “These geckos, or Amazon lizards, are completely harmless.”
I felt like a complete idiot hanging from the hammock in a truly ridiculous position, but I joined in their laughter once I had my feet on the ground and my heart rate had returned to normal. The poor animal had run off up the tree as fast as a race car as soon as I had jumped.
“Did you see it had two tails?” Efraín remarked, lighting a new fire to prepare breakfast.
“It was revolting!” Lola exclaimed, her disgust clear on her face.
“These geckos tend to have two tails,” the archaeologist explained while Marta put water on to heat, “because since their tails fall off very easily and another grows right away, any small cut or scratch on the first one makes the second one grow.”
“Please, that’s disgusting!” Lola almost yelled. “Can we change the subject?”
“What a way to start the day,” I said, showing solidarity.
Marc was already chewing his granola chocolate cookies.
“Well, I thought it was pretty,” he mumbled. “I would have liked to take a picture of it to use as a desktop on my office computer.”
We had our digital camera and Efraín had also brought his, but if someone had taken one of them out to satisfy the insane wish of the intergalactic worm, I would have been capable of killing him. The cameras were reserved for our encounter with the Yatiri and were not for photographing repugnant animals.
“You’re not right in the head,” I told Marc disdainfully. “The lizard should have been sleeping on your legs. Then we’d see how much you liked remembering it every morning when
you turned on your computer.”
“I always have good memories of those who have shared my bed,” he declared, joking.
“In other words, just me,” Lola clarified, sighing in boredom.
That day we progressed at good speed, enough to cover a total of twelve miles. My muscle pain disappeared as I walked, and my hands began to get callouses where before there had been painful blisters. My nails were broken and black, and the dirt mixed with sweat started to stain my skin a brown color that no longer came off with the water from the rivers and lakes we found on our way. I also stopped feeling my swollen feet inside my boots and the inhumane weight of my pack on my lower back and my shoulders. Anything could be gotten used to.
On Saturday, when, according to our calculations, we were only a few days from our goal—we had covered more than forty miles and we were in unexplored territory—the landscape mysteriously began to transform: The trees became much larger, reaching a hundred or a hundred twenty feet high, forming an impenetrable canopy that forced us to walk through a stifling half light in which everything was cold and dark and in which there were no signs of animal life, although the profusion of hanging plants, lianas, and creepers was such that we could barely make out the trunks of the trees, many of which now measured more than ten feet in diameter at the base; in other words, they were authentic jungle giants. The flowers disappeared, leaving a landscape painted exclusively in shades of green, and the ground was covered in a high and tangled kind of weed, full of thorns that scratched our skin and pants, making pitiful tatters of the HyVent windproof fabric and the anti-sweat lining. We tied kerchiefs to our legs to keep from getting scratched, but it was useless, since the thorns of those plants were like scalpel blades. Everything took on the shadowy tone of a nature that didn’t seem to appreciate visitors, if one could, I thought, use such a human comparison when talking about something as strange as that environment. Even the smell changed, becoming moldy and filled with the aroma of rotting vegetation.
Sunday was even worse, since the trees seemed to huddle together, looking for a way to block our path. We wore all the clothes we had brought, we had even knotted the towels around our faces, arms, and most importantly, our legs, but it was impossible to avoid the scratches. That forest seemed to be kicking us out, letting us know that it would be better if we turned around and went back the way we had come.
That night, sitting around the fire, covered in small stains of Betadine as if we were a new species of animal with mottled skin, we commented, amazed, on how hard it must have been for the Yatiri to cross that thick forest carrying all their possessions and accompanied by their families. It was almost impossible to imagine such a feat. None of us could explain it.
“Maybe we’re wrong about the path,” Marc suggested, stirring the wood in the fire with a green stick. We had worked hard clearing the vegetation from that small area of ground and cleaning it of all kinds of insects and snakes.
“I assure you we’re following the correct route,” I guaranteed, checking the GPS. “We haven’t veered at all from the itinerary laid out by the map from the Pyramid of the Traveler.”
Efraín, who was still holding his plate with his half-finished dinner (rice with canned vegetables), smiled widely:
“Have you realized that tomorrow or the day after, at the latest, we’re going to find them?”
A look of satisfaction appeared on all of our faces.
“Could they have built a city like Taipikala in the middle of a place like this?” Gertrude asked, with her eyes shining.
“I’m anxious to find out,” Marta remarked, dropping comfortably onto her pack. “If they
have, it must be an impressive place… and alive,” she added, showing certain excitement. “More than anything, alive. I think it would be the biggest satisfaction of my life to enter a Tiwanaku inhabited by people and brimming with activity. What do you say, Efraín?”
“I don’t know…,” he replied with a childish smile on his face. “Yes, I think I too would feel like the king of the world: the first archaeologist to have the opportunity to travel in time! Tiwanaku alive… I don’t know, really. The idea overwhelms me.”
“I don’t want to be a killjoy,” Lola interrupted, untying her boot laces, “but have you thought of how they could have brought hundred-ton stones here? Don’t get me wrong, but I very much doubt there are andesite quarries in this area.”
“There aren’t any near Tiwanaku, either,” Marta argued. “To build that place on the Altiplano, they had to transport them from many miles away.”
“Yes, but the jungle?” Lola insisted, obstinate. “And the conquistadors? Someone would have seen impossibly huge stone blocks disappearing into the jungle without accounting for the fact that they would have had to bring them through areas like this one.”
“A colleague of mine,” Efraín said, “a famous Bolivian archaeologist, presented a very good theory about how the Tiwanakans managed to move those impressive rocks. According to some studies he did, two thousand six hundred twenty workers could drag a ten-ton piece of andesite using long leather cords made with I don’t remember how many vicuña skins, making them slide over a ground covered in millions of square feet of clay.”
“Oh, good!” my colleague Marc blurted, exaggerating the relief he felt from the information. “Everything’s resolved, then! Let’s catch all the vicuñas on the Altiplano, kill them to get the leather necessary to make really long sturdy cords that two thousand six hundred twenty people can hold onto, who, on top of that, have to transport enough clay to cover Mount Illimani plus the thousands of quarts of water necessary to wet it, and, walking on this slippery mud, they drag, for fifty or sixty miles, a ten-ton rock, of which there were not one, but thousands in Tiwanaku.” He sighed and kept peacefully stirring the fire. “Fine, no problem. Now I understand.”
“That image reminds me of the Hollywood movies,” I said, “the ones where thousands of Jewish slaves drag, under the lash of a whip, the stone blocks to build the pyramids of Egypt.”
“Well, that’s not true,” Efraín remarked. “The most recent discoveries show that slavery didn’t exist in Egypt.”
I was dumbfounded when I heard what Efraín said. I still remembered Charlton Heston playing Moses in The Ten Commandments and ripping the whip from the hands of the Egyptian overseer who hit the Jewish slaves.
“But those calculations about the two thousand six hundred workers don’t work for the hundred-ton stones of Tiwanaku, right?” Lola asked uncertainly.
“No, of course not,” Marta replied. “Those calculations don’t explain how they could transport the one hundred-ton ones or the one-hundred-twenty-ton ones. They don’t even explain those of fifty or thirty. It’s only a theory, but it’s the most accepted, in lieu of a better one. Although it doesn’t really hold up.”
“Which means,” the mercenary continued, pensive, “that if no one really knows how they moved them, maybe they could bring them to the jungle.”
“Well, the truth is, we hope so,” Marta agreed, smiling.
“We’ll have to see it,” I murmured, stifling a yawn.
“It won’t be much longer, my friend,” Efraín said with conviction.
And it wasn’t. After a Sunday and a Monday of fighting hard with the underbrush and the
woody and flexible strands of the hanging plants that united the trees in a sinister hug, in the middle of Tuesday morning, the underbrush suddenly got less dense and the trunks got far enough apart that we could move without using the machetes. Even the sun seemed to filter easily through the high canopy, touching the ground with its long and delicate arms, under which we loved to pass. Paths seemed to form in front of us, paths which, although they looked wide and clear from the beginning, were still narrow trails that got wider, heading into a forest that got clearer every minute.
Suddenly, I tripped over something. I extended my arms in the air to keep my balance and ended up leaning on Efraín’s back.
“Arnau!” Marta exclaimed, quickly grabbing me by the straps of my pack.
“I almost broke my neck,” I growled, looking at the place where I had lost my footing. The sharp point of a stone clearly carved by a human hand stuck out of the ground. Everyone bent down to look at it.
“We’re very close,” Efraín said, stating the obvious.
Barely fifty yards later, we ran into a wall covered by thick green moss and made of large stones, fitted together like the stones of Tiwanaku. The cries of a family of howler monkeys filled our ears.
“We’ve arrived,” Lola announced, moving past the others to stand next to me.
“And the Yatiri?” Marc asked.
No sound other than the jungle noises could be heard, or, needless to say, any other human voice apart from our own. There was no one to be seen, either; only that green wall, crumbling in spots. A black portent began circling in my head.
“Let’s keep going,” the archaeologist muttered, taking the path on the right.
“Just a minute, Efraín,” exclaimed Gertrude, who had dropped her pack on the ground and was opening it with quick capable movements. “Wait, please.”
“Now what’s going on?” he muttered impatiently.
Gertrude didn’t answer, but took something that looked like a credit card out of her pack and lifted it in the air so we could see it.
“Whatever happens,” she said, very serious, “I have to record the voices of the Yatiri.”
And saying this, she untucked her shirt from her pants and stuck the tiny gray recorder to the milky skin of her belly. It looked like one of those patches for quitting smoking that nicotine addicts put on to overcome their cravings, just a little bigger.
“In case they don’t let you, right?” Lola remarked.
“Exactly. I don’t want to take any risks. I need their voices to be able to study them.”
“But, does it record in a high enough quality?”
“It’s digital,” Gertrude explained, “and yes, it records in very high quality. The problem is the battery, which only lasts three hours. But that will be enough.”
A few yards away, we found an entrance. Three doors identical to the Gate of the Moon of Lakaqullu stood together, forming an entrance of truly gigantic proportions which was in perfect condition. On the upper part of the lintel, in the center, the largest—about thirteen feet high—was marked with a
tocapu
in the style of a family crest, but the moss that covered it kept Marta and Efraín from being able to identify it. The place was completely abandoned. The Yatiri had left there a long time ago, but only Gertrude dared to say so out loud: