Authors: Tahir Shah
‘Have you ever seen them in the jungle?’
Without breaking eye contact, the professor jerked his thumb to a cupboard to the right of his desk. Displayed on a pedestal was an exquisite tsantsa.
‘Go on’ he said, ‘pick it up …’
Cautiously, I detached the head from the stand and cupped it in my hands. A plume of thick, clove-brown hair curved down over the hollow neck. The features had been miniaturised impeccably.
‘Look at the ears,’ said Professor Cabieses proudly, ‘see how they’ve been reduced so perfectly’
I admired them, and checked for nasal hair - the sign of a good tsantsa.
‘Don’t worry’ said the doctor, ‘it has nose hair.’ The lips were sewn together, sealed like those of the trophy head I had seen at Majuelo.
Cabieses read my thoughts.
‘The trophy heads at Nazca’ he said, ‘were prepared in much the same way. You probably know there’s evidence that the Paracas civilisation once shrunk heads, too.
‘Haven’t you seen all those heads woven into the funeral textiles?’
The professor was right. The wings of the textile Birdmen are often decorated with trophy heads, just as the graves of the pre-Incas are littered with them.
‘The ancient people of Peru’s southern coast and the Shuar of the jungle,’ he said, ‘are the same people, with the same culture. If you want to learn about the Birdmen who once lived at Nazca, go and meet their descendants - they’re alive and well. Go to the Pastaza and find the Shuar.’
Cabieses ran a knuckle over the tsantsa’s cheek.
‘They are your Birdmen,’ he said.
‘Is it dangerous up there?’
‘Danger gives life meaning,’ retorted the professor. ‘Will they cut off my head?’ ‘There are worse hazards.’
‘Like what?’
‘Datura … La Trompeta de Diablo, The Trumpet of the Devil,’ said Cabieses. ‘Beware of it.’
Iquitos is the capital of Loreto, by far the largest department in Peru. It’s the only city of any size in a state as big as Germany. The flight north-east from Lima slices across the sierra and the barren highlands of the Cordillera Azul. Peer out of the window again and the mountains are gone, supplanted by a carpet of green. Even from twenty thousand feet you can’t help but be struck by its vastness. Millions of trees form a single unbroken canopy. Rivers crawl east and west like colossal serpents, twisting with oxbow lakes. All of it vivid with life, in ten thousand shades of green.
The moment I got out at Iquitos airport, I sensed the jungle around me. The morning air was thick with heat, the sunlight filtered through cloud. Where the runway ended the rain-forest began.
I followed the jumble of passengers across the cracked slabs of concrete towards the arrivals’ hall. Like me, they all had good reasons for making the journey. Only wheeler-dealers and the most intrepid tourists bother with Iquitos.
The middle-aged Peruvian who had sat beside me on the flight said he’d come to buy spider monkey bones for a Chinese aphrodisiac dealer. I was surprised he was so open about his line of business. Slip a wad of cash in the right hand, he said, and you could smuggle anything out of Peru. He poked a finger towards a Customs’ display case, which featured the skins of animals facing extinction.
‘I can get you any of those,’ he boasted.
‘But aren’t they endangered?’
‘Hah!’ grinned the businessman, ‘there are plenty of them left; thank God, as I’ve got lots of customers in China.’
Long before the first bags had arrived, the luggage carousel came to life. We waited obediently, as the conveyor belt stop-started forward. The baggage did not come. Instead, a bizarre ceremony began.
A procession of thirty figures emerged from a cluster of bamboo shacks at the far end of the hall. They were dressed in fibrous skirts, their faces painted for war. The men led the way, each of them holding a long blowpipe above his head. The women followed close behind, all bare-breasted; and the children were unclothed.
Some of the warriors wore crowns made from the bright feathers of scarlet macaws. They danced around the hall, incorporating the empty luggage carousel into their routine. The warriors would take it in turns to ride the conveyor belt, while pretending to use their blowpipes.
None of the other passengers from the Lima flight showed any interest. I asked the monkey bone smuggler what was going on. Grimacing, he swished his hand at the dancers.
It’s a horrible tragedy,’ he said.
‘What is?’
‘The Bora … or what’s become of them.’
‘What are they doing here?’
‘They live in the airport,’ said the trader, ‘the government’s trying to step up tourism - they thought having a warrior tribe resident in the arrivals’ hall would be a good idea.’
‘They look quite pacified to me,’ I said.
‘That’s the saddest thing of all,’ grunted my confidante. ‘The Bora used to be one of the most feared peoples on the Upper Amazon. They used to slaughter anyone they wanted. They loved killing … now look at them.’
A fleet of three-wheel passenger motorbikes, known as motocarros, fought to take me into town. The drivers were a rugged breed, their shoulders trimmed with tattoos, bandannas hiding their mouths. The leader of the pack snarled at the others, frightening them away. He wasn’t tall, but stocky. Around his neck he wore the skull of a small bird. Spitting a razor-blade from his mouth, he threatened to carve up the rest of the gang. My bags were loaded onto the back of his bike. The driver stashed the blade back in his mouth and pushed away down the patched tarmac towards Iquitos.
The undergrowth loomed up from either side of the road. As someone who’s more used to city life, I felt unsettled by the blend of creepers, roots and spiders’ webs, which hung in the trees like fishing nets. Unfamiliar sounds echoed from the jungle, over the noise of the engine. I wondered how Fd survive on the long journey into the interior.
I watched in the wing mirror as the driver flipped the razor-blade on his tongue. It was an impressive stunt. ‘Don’t you cut your mouth?’ I shouted.
‘It’s not as hard as it looks,’ he said. ‘None of the others can do it, so they’re frightened of me. If you don’t make a reputation for yourself in Iquitos, te comerán vivo, people will eat you alive.’
I thanked the driver for his advice.
‘Where are you staying?’ he asked.
‘I don’t have a hotel yet.’
‘Iquitos is full of thieves,’ he replied. ‘I’ll take you to my friend’s hotel. It’s off Plaza de Armas, on Calle Putumayo. Stay anywhere else and you may get your throat slit.’
*
On my travels I’ve stayed in some extraordinary places. In Rwanda, I once put up at a hotel where the walls were drenched in human blood; in Delhi I stayed in an opium den and, in Varanasi, at a dhobi’s, laundryman’s, shack. But none of them could compare with Hotel Selva.
The woman at the reception desk asked if her husband could keep his chickens in my bathroom. It was, she said, the only place near the kitchen with direct sunlight. I agreed reluctantly. She pointed down the hall to room 102.
‘What about the key?’
The woman shook her head.
‘At Hotel Selva we trust each other,’ she said obscurely.
The building harked back to a time when Iquitos was one of the most prosperous towns in the world, founded on the rubber business. Its walls and rounded arches were built from solid blocks of stone,-the stained glass windows must have been imported from Spain or France. But Hotel Selva had been ravaged by a hundred years of Amazonian wear and tear. The windows had lost most of their glass years before, the guttering leaked, and the roots of a nearby ironwood tree had lifted the flagstones.
The panelled door of room 102 had come away from its hinges. Taking it from the entrance, I propped it up against the wall. With unsure footsteps, I edged forwards into the dim chamber.
I tried the light switch, but there was no electricity. Nor was there any furniture, except for a bare, mildewed mattress. The walls were coated with a veneer of slime. One corner had been used as a pissoir. The sounds of female ecstasy flowed from the adjacent room, in time with the creaking of a bed frame. I nudged open the bathroom door. About fifty full-sized chickens were flapping about, agitated by my intrusion. The floor was peppered with excretions and dried blood. A bolt of sunlight lit up the birds. A glance up at the ceiling explained the brightness. There was no ceiling.
As I stood there, surrounded by chickens, a second door to the bathroom opened. It led to the kitchen. A hand reached into the sea of birds and grabbed one, as another hand ripped off its head. The chef called back, asking me to keep out of his chicken coop. I had no business to be in the bathroom, he said, as there wasn’t any water anyway.
I sat on the flea-infested mattress and took in my surroundings. I would have looked for another place to stay. But, as someone preparing for a journey of certain hardship, I decided that a stay at Hotel Selva would be invaluable experience.
By lunch-time Iquitos was coming to life. Motocarros tore down the wide avenues in droves. Shopkeepers wiped down the rich arabesque façades, sheathed in azulejos, glazed tiles. A battalion of boot boys slipped from the shadows, and patrolled the streets. Their mothers would be waiting for them to bring money for food.
Glance at a map and you wonder how Iquitos can survive. Like Manaus, its sister city in the Brazilian Amazon, Iquitos is a quirk of 19th-century history. It ought not to exist at all. Nestled on the Amazon’s west bank, it’s more than two thousand miles from the river’s Atlantic mouth. No roads lead to the town; it can only be reached by boat or by aeroplane. Every pot and pan, every tin of tuna fish, outboard motor and drinking-straw has to be shipped in.
I wandered up Calle Putumayo and turned right a block before the waterfront. A hundred years ago the embankment must have been a formidable sight. Overflowing with rococo grandeur, the buildings still had their elaborate Doric columns and lead-lined domes, their cornicing and balustrades. The buildings reflected the men who had erected them: opulent, powerful, arrogant. Men with no fear. They mirrored the might of the great river which they overlooked. But, as with Hotel Selva, time had dealt them a terrible blow. The plasterwork had chipped off, the banisters crumbled, and the Portuguese tiles had fallen like scales from a great fish.
Cast an eye over the palatial buildings, block out the groan of the motocarros, and it’s not hard to imagine how things must have been a century ago. In a handful of years the rubber barons had transformed themselves from destitute adventurers into some of the richest men on Earth.
One traveller passing up the Amazon in March 1854 afforded Iquitos a single line in his diary: sparse and miserable hamlet,’ he wrote, ‘consisting of 33 houses, a straw-thatched church.’ By 1900, Iquitos was a town of 20,000, of which 4,000 were Europeans. Crates of English banknotes were regularly unloaded at the docks. The rubber barons spent their new-found wealth like water. They bought Italian furniture, satins, silks, the finest porcelain, and entire cellars of vintage Champagne - all of it shipped in direct from London.
For centuries native peoples of the western Amazon have dipped their feet in liquid latex, before curing them over a fire. Columbus reported seeing Indians playing games with strange ‘elastic’ balls. Rubber had been known of in Europe for a long time, but it was always of limited use. In the winter it became too brittle and hard, and in the summer it grew soft and sticky. But everything changed in 1839, when Charles Goodyear invented vulcanisation.
Paying slave wages, the rubber barons employed thousands of native people as seringueiros, tappers. Only they knew where to find the rubber trees, which grew naturally in the jungle. They tapped the latex into cups, coagulated it into thirty-kilo balls called peles, and floated them down the river. The latex could only be harvested in the morning and evening - as the sun’s heat thickened it. Once he had a bucket of latex, the tapper would cure it a little at a time over the smoke of a fire.
For a period of about thirty years, Iquitos was firing on all cylinders. At the same time that gold was discovered at Klondike’s Bonanza Creek, a new élite of millionaires were living it up in the Amazon. But the boom years came to an abrupt end when, in 1912, the first crop of latex was harvested from Oriental trees. A few years before, during the height of the bonanza, Henry Wickham, an Englishman, had smuggled seventy thousand rubber tree seeds to Asia. No one noticed his precious cargo plying its way east towards the Atlantic. With no indigenous diseases to attack them, and arranged in neat plantations, rubber trees thrived in Malaya. Success in the Far East spelled disaster for the Amazon. Its boom was snuffed out overnight.
*
The Amazon River was swollen, its waters much higher than usual. From my vantage point on the embankment I could see dozens of miniature islands - the roofs of submerged shacks. The heaviest rain in living memory had forced thousands of people out of their homes,-hundreds more had drowned. I’d heard that high water was good for Amazonian travel. The sandbars which lie beneath the surface - some as large as steam ships - make navigation a constant danger. The higher the water, the faster the current, and the less threat there is of running aground.
As I stood there, the heavens opened and the afternoon rains washed down. I sought refuge in a café called Ari’s Burger, on the east side of Plaza de Armas. It was a South American version of Arnold’s, the ‘50s diner from television’s Happy Days. The floors were chequered, the chrome tables topped in raspberry-coloured vinyl. A jukebox hummed away in one corner. The young waitresses glided about, their feet forced into under-sized plimsolls. They wore a uniform: red skirts, ivory pinafores and matching sun visors. Each of them had the same pouting lips, highlighted with shocking-pink gloss. Spiralling down over the right edge of each sun visor was a tight brown curl.
A teenage waitress hurried over through the tangle of chrome chairs. Puckering her lips as provocatively as she could, she suggested I order a banana split. It was, she said, her favourite. After ordering one, I made the mistake of admiring her curl. She leant down to pick a hair from my shoulder, and puckered a little more.