Authors: Tahir Shah
In the background I made out the atmospheric buzz of a radio. The woman, known to all as Tia, aunt, had switched it on full volume. Like the best chair, the radio was saved for the rare arrival of guests.
José-Luis said I was interested in the ancient people of the Atacama. He explained that I’d come across the ocean, from the ‘Land of Diana’. When he thought I wasn’t listening, he added that my heart was strong; I could not be frightened.
Juan went over to the corner and delved his hands into a cardboard box. He returned a moment later with a parcel, wrapped in brown paper.
‘We found this seven years ago,’ he said, as he handed it to me.
Gripping the package between my knees, I pulled apart the sheets of paper. Had I been a believer in susto, it would have got me right then. I jerked backwards. On my lap was a mummified human head.
Juan said that since they had found the trophy head in a grave behind the house, they had been blessed with good fortune.
‘We honour it at Christmas, at Easter and festival times,’ he said. ‘It’s a part of our family, as much as anyone else.’
The head had all the classic hallmarks of the ancient Nazcan techniques. The skin was intact, although preserved with a clay-like preparation. The eyes were sealed shut, the lips pinned together with thorns; and a carrying string had been threaded through a hole, trepanned through the brow. My interest in tsantsas, shrunken heads, had introduced me to all kinds of trophy heads.
Ethnologists have long debated whether human trophy heads were those of dead relatives, slain warriors, or even of people sacrificed at the graveside. Whatever the truth, one thing is certain - the trophy heads found at Nazca are expertly mummified. The general consensus is that the skin was peeled away, before the heads were boiled. Then, when the brain had been cleaned out, the skin was reapplied and layered with preservatives.
I was struck by the likeness of the trophy to the tsantsas for which I had such a fondness. Shrunken heads, like Juan’s trophy, were typically suspended from a string, and had the lips skewered with splinters of chonta palm. This prevented them from calling out to members of their own tribe. (Similar, too, are the trophy heads from Nagaland, in India’s North-east, which have buffalo horns fixed to the ears, to stop the head from hearing its rescuers.)
Juan was pleased at my praise for his trophy. No house, he said, should be without such a possession, an honour to the ancestors.
‘I’ll get you one,’ he beamed.
‘Where from?’
Juan’s face erupted in laughter.
‘Sigame, follow me,’ he said.
We trouped out of the house, past the sleeping guard dog, and on through the warango trees. The noon sun rained down, scalding our backs. Juan led the way across a flat expanse of dust.
Waving the flies from his face with his hat, he pointed to a steep bulwark.
‘Up there…’
The farmer, José-Luis and I staggered up the bank. The sand was so fine that a footprint disappeared as soon as it was made. It was littered with bottles, plastic bags and tin cans. A handful of thorn trees clung to the soft sand, providing some leverage as we clambered up.
Climbing over the top of the hill was like emerging from the trenches into no man’s land. The scene was one of unimaginable devastation. Not even a Calcutta body dump could compare. There were human remains everywhere. Mummified bodies, recently hacked from their graves, their skin leathery, yet preserved. The plateau was pitted with thousands of tombs,- their sides fallen in, the contents either stolen or strewn about. The bleached-white bones were too numerous to count. They shone in the sunlight, the last remains of an ancient people, forsaken by their ancestors. I saw ribs poking up out of the sand, femurs and jaws, the mummified spine of a child, and skulls - thousands of them, many with their hair still attached. Dozens had been deformed; others were trepanned.
As well as bones there were baskets made from cotton and fibre. For each mummy there had been a basket, in which it had sat cupped upright in the foetal position on a wad of cloth. Leading mummy experts say the burial position, the layers of cloth, and the baskets, are all for a reason. They were, they say, part of an elaborate drainage system. Liquids exuded in the years after death would naturally drain through the body, seeping down, and out through lower orifices, into the basket’s pad.
Juan led me across the immense burial ground. I watched my step, fearful of falling into one of the pits, or of treading on the mummified remains. Every few feet the farmer would stop to tug a fragment of cloth from the dust, waggling it to shake off the sand. He handed the scraps to Tia, who had caught up with us.
Juan stopped at a deep crater.
‘This was a big tomb,’ he said. ‘An important one was buried here.’
Tia and he helped me into the hole. They swished away the sand. First they dug out the resident mummy. He looked rudely awakened, ripped from his cocoon. His hair was long and soft, his skin the colour of honey, the individual pores quite distinct. The line of his ribs was clearly visible. The stench was rank as the smell of a Masai encampment. But it was nothing like the vile, chaotic smell of rotting human flesh.
The body was bound in textiles. Juan peeled a grand mantle away from the mummy’s back. He shook off the sand. Along the border of the blanket was a row of images. I looked at them closely. They were Birdmen.
Tia was still digging. She excavated a second figure.
‘It’s a woman,’ said Juan. ‘See sus pechos, her breasts.’
As he fumbled about, showing me the mummified bust, the woman’s right leg fell off.
‘They’re very fragile,’ he muttered, handing me a head.
‘This is for you,’ he said. ‘It’s just like the one in the house. It will bring you good luck.’
Thanking the farmer, I rejected his offer. ‘It belongs here,’ I said. ‘I won’t be taking anything away with me.’
Juan couldn’t understand why anyone would turn down a fine trophy head.
‘¿Està seguro? Are you sure?’ he trilled. ‘It’s got a very nice face.’
The business of human remains is an unpleasant one. Our society dislikes the subject of corpses and death. Much has changed since ancient times. The Incas would bring out their mummified leaders during festivals. One 17th-century etching in Guaman Poma’s chronicle shows the grinning cadaver of an Inca being paraded through the streets. The practice appalled the Spanish. But, as I squatted in the burial crater, surrounded by mummies and trophy heads, I felt none of the fear which so often accompanies death in our own world. The mummies were not skeletons but people, with faces, fingernails and hair.
I couldn’t blame Juan and his family for robbing graves. The drought had killed their pigs and their meagre crops had shrivelled. How else were they to support themselves? Juan played down the extent of his part in what is a massive local operation. But, as I went back to the car, he asked respectfully if I’d like to buy some blankets, ornaments, pottery or beads. The burial ground on their doorstep was like a blessing from God. It must have contained more than 30,000 graves, only a fraction of which had been touched.
Ninety-five per cent of the antiquities in Peruvian museums are said to have been dug up by huaquews. They have little or no scientific provenance as a result. Nazca’s street corners are loaded with an army of agents, eager to sell the robbers’ bounty. But the best loot bypasses Nazca, heading straight for the auction houses in the West.
José-Luis threw the hatchback into gear and aimed it at the embankment, as if it were a tank out on manoeuvres.
‘Tonight’s a full moon,’ he said, as we gathered speed. ‘Juan and his family will be busy digging.’
‘Robbing graves?’
Pepé’s son jerked his head in reply.
‘It’s time for the sleeping to be woken.’
*
Back at the Hummingbird Hotel, a man in an embroidered kurta pyjama, Indian costume, was propping up the bar, quaffing Pisco sours. The drink, a local speciality, is made from whipped egg white and Pisco, a grape brandy. His name was Freddie, and he told me that he’d just come from India, where he had spent seven years searching for a guru. It’s a line that is usually enough to send me running for the door. As far as he was concerned, he went on, mind-altering substances were the real attraction of Nazca. I would have left right then, but I was reminded of the llamateer, Manuel, who’d led me to Sillustani. He had spoken cryptically of drug-induced flight.
I told Freddie about my feather with three notches, the message, and of the Birdmen, whose images I’d seen on funeral blankets. I asked for his thoughts. Did he think man had flown in ancient Peru? Or was it flight of a different kind - allegorical rather than actual? Freddie listened to the questions, and to my description of the mummies at Majuelo.
Knocking back another Pisco sour, he dragged his fingers through his beard.
‘You won’t understand those mummies,’ he said, ‘unless you think about the drugs they were taking when they were alive.’
‘Drugs?’
‘Of course,’ said Freddie. ‘I’m not talking of LSD or tabs of ecstasy, but natural drugs … psychotropic plants, like the San Pedro cactus.’
I remembered seeing it growing on the Inca Trail.
‘The Nazcans were taking San Pedro,’ he said. ‘If you look at the pots, the textiles, and the other things they made, you’ll see it. Sometimes they’re holding it during rituals,- other times you find it as a star-shaped cross section. San Pedro’s still an important tool in any Andean shaman’s arsenal.’
‘But does San Pedro give the sensation of flight?’
Freddie said that usually it didn’t.
‘For that there was a tea made from a vine,’ he said. ‘It gave the feeling of growing wings and flying. It used to be common around here. Your Birdmen from the mummy blankets were probably taking it. Why else do you think they’re reeling like that, like dope fiends?’
‘What’s this tea called?’
Draining his fifth Pisco sour, Freddie breathed into his fist.
‘Ayahuasca,’ he said. ‘The Vine of the Dead.’
The Paracas peninsula is named after the harsh wind which tears in from the ocean and flays the desert coast. Like the Mistral of southern France, it’s a merciless force of nature endured by generations, but never welcome. For more than 3,000 years man has braved the treacherous shores of Paracas. The shacks may have tin roofs now, and there’s a wrecked Dodge truck outside every one, but little else seems to have changed since ancient times.
At dawn, fathers and sons head out to sea in frail skiffs, bobbing on the Humboldt Current like toy ducks in a bath. Left at home, their wives and mothers nurse the babies, clean the home and scrub the porch. Their work is never done, but their laughter rings through the backstreets with the howl of the wind.
Freddie had passed on to me the basics of ayahuasca, the hallucinogen once used by the coastal peoples of Peru. The potion was, he had said, made from a stew of plants. It opened a door into another world. I had posed many questions, but Freddie was hesitant to reveal more. He told me that he wasn’t qualified to discuss ayahuasca.
‘Then who is qualified?’
Freddie scribbled down a name.
‘Professor Cabieses, that is if he’s still alive.’
‘Where does he live?’
‘Have a look in Lima,’ he said.
*
An opal-green Ford Zephyr Six with bald tyres and a windscreen webbed with cracks, purred up the highway and into Paracas. Its owner was a precise man from the old school, when taxi driving was an art. He wore leather gloves, and shifted the gears with meticulous care. I complimented him on his vehicle. Of course, he said, the chrome was no longer as shiny as it should be, and the upholstery was stained where a passenger had spilt glue. They were a pair of old workhorses, he laughed. Since 1958 they’d done the colectivo run from Nazca to Paracas ten thousand times. But now they were tired.
The Zephyr cruised to a halt at the neck of the peninsula and I got down with my bags. Travelling with so much baggage was a cross to bear. I was beginning to wonder if I would ever use all this precious equipment. Was I ever going to need the carabiners or the caving rope, the folding spade, the Lancashire Hot Pot or, for that matter, the moose knife?
Late in the afternoon, before the sun had set, a golden ball over the Pacific, I paid a visit to the Paracas Museum. The clerk was busy swatting flies in the pool of light on his desk. He was surprised to have a visitor, and fumbled in a drawer for the visitor’s book.
Paracas is the name of the wind, but also the name given to the pre-Incan culture which once existed on the coast. It’s thought to have thrived between 1300 bc and 200 ad. The Peruvian archaeologist Julio C Tello first brought fame to the region, when he noticed that the undulations in the sand were actually burial mounds. Above ground little remains of the culture. But dig down and you reach the treasure. The Paracas civilisation was an advanced one, producing some of the finest artefacts ever made in Latin America. Without doubt, the most wonderful and possibly the most sacred of all, were the Birdmen textiles.
One display in the museum showed how the mummies were cocooned well below the surface, wrapped in multiple layers of fabric. The funeral blankets, ponchos and shawls were made exclusively to be worn in death. They were not made to fit the cadaver, but to cover the actual bundle which surrounded the corpse. Unlike ancient Egypt, where only dignitaries were mummified, the Paracas and Nazcan people preserved all their dead. Important members of society were buried with masses of loot. Bows and arrows, pipes, sling-shots and pottery are commonly found in the graves. Mummified animals have also been unearthed, including dogs, cats, birds and foxes. Some preserved bodies were wrapped in no less than eighteen cloaks and mantles, with as many as thirty garments.
The huaqueros who ravage the burial grounds on a daily basis, have been smitten by gold fever. Hacking their way through the layers of cloth, they prise open the mummies’ mouths in their quest for gold. They tear fingers off hands to get at jewellery. Laden with treasure they hurry away into the night.