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The Complete Collection of Travel Literature

In Search of King Solomon's Mines, Beyond the Devil's Teeth, House of the Tiger King, Sorcerer's Apprentice, Travels With Myself, Trail of Feathers

TAHIR SHAH

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© TAHIR SHAH 2013

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Table of Contents

IN SEARCH OF KING SOLOMON’S MINES

BEYOND THE DEVIL'S TEETH

HOUSE OF THE TIGER KING

SORCERER'S APPRENTICE

TRAVELS WITH MYSELF

TRAIL OF FEATHERS

IN SEARCH OF KING SOLOMON’S MINES

TAHIR SHAH

SECRETUM MUNDI PUBLISHING

Acknowledgements

Ethiopia is encircled by mountains and shrouded in misinformation.

In the West, our impressions of this African country have been molded by what we have seen on television: enduring images of drought, famine and starvation. But there is far more to Ethiopia than that, and I hope that this book helps lift the veil on a land which has captivated travelers and scholars for centuries.

In acknowledging the enormous amount of guidance and support that I received during my search for King Solomon’s mines, I must first thank the Ethiopian people. In few countries have I been welcomed with such extraordinary warmth and hospitality, whether in the capital Addis Ababa or in the remotest villages.

So many people in Ethiopia have helped me that it is impossible to list them all. I would, however, particularly like to thank Getachew Tessfai and his team at the Ministry of Mines, the experts at the Geological Survey of Ethiopia, and the staff of the British Embassy in Addis Ababa. Sincere thanks must also go to Dr Araga Yirdaw, Petrus Visagie, Wayne Nicoleta and their colleagues at Midroc Lega Dembi; and to Yasmin Mohammed and her family In addition, I am indebted to the many Ethiopians who are mentioned by name in the text. Most of all, I would like to thank Samson Yohannes, who stayed by my side even during times of considerable hardship.

Many others elsewhere have endured my petitions for information, advice and help. Sir Wilfred Thesiger was the first person to suggest I go to Ethiopia, the land of his birth, and he has assisted me at every step. I am also extremely grateful to Dr Richard Pankhurst and his wife Rita for their support. A large number of others have likewise given guidance and advice. They include Fisseha Adugna, Paul Henze, Wak Kani, Alex Maitland, Professor Alan Millard, Dr Konstantinos Politis, Professor Beno Rothenberg, Claus Schack, Rob Kraitt, Josh Briggs, Tarquin Hall, Robert Twigger and Gail Warden.

Above all, however, I am indebted to the hundreds of ordinary Ethiopians who assisted me during my travels. They have probably long since forgotten the day I stumbled into their lives. But I have not forgotten them, nor their acts of kindness. It is to them, and to their compatriots, that this book is dedicated.

Contents

Title Page

Acknowledgements

One - Ali Baba’s Map

Two - Seven Stones

Three - The Father of Madness

Four - The Mines

Five - Children of the Devil

Six - Breakfast with Idi Amin

Seven - The Emperor’s Jeep

Eight - Sheba’s Gold

Nine - The Jinn of Suleiman

Ten - The Place of Gold

Eleven - Prester John

Twelve - The Mad Sultan

Thirteen - Used Mules

Fourteen - Tullu Wallel

Fifteen - Return to the Accursed Mountain

Glossary

Bibliography

“He who does not travel does not know the value of men.”

Moorish Proverb

“Now the weight of gold that came to Solomon in one year was six hundred threescore and six talents... And king Solomon made two hundred targets of beaten gold: six hundred shekels of gold went to one target. And he made three hundred shields of beaten gold; three pounds of gold went to one shield... Moreover the king made a great throne of ivory, and overlaid it with the best gold... And all of king Solomon’s drinking vessels were of gold...”

Kings I, x: 14-21

ONE

Ali Baba’s Map

“So geographers, in Afric-maps,

With savage-pictures fill their gaps;

And o”er unhabitable downs

Place elephants for want of towns.”

Jonathan Swift, A Rhapsody

An inky hand-drawn map hung on the back wall of Ali Baba’s Tourist Emporium. Little more than a sketch, and smudged by a clumsy hand, it was mounted in a chipped gold frame and showed a river and mountains, a desert, a cave and what looked like a trail between them. At the end of the trail was an oversized “X”.

“Is that a treasure map?”

Ali Baba looked up from the back page of the Jerusalem Herald and peered at me. He was an old dog of a man, whose pot-belly hinted at a diet rich in fat-tailed sheep. His chin was covered with bristly gray stubble; he was bespectacled and he spoke through the corner of his mouth. Like all the other merchants in the bazaar, Ali Baba had gone from rack to ruin, but he didn’t care. He lit a filter-less Turkish cigarette and let his chest swell with the smoke.

“That is not for sale,” he said.

“But is it a treasure map?” I asked again.

The shopkeeper grunted and returned to his paper. You couldn’t accuse Ali Baba of hard salesmanship. Times had never been worse for tourism since the fighting had flared up again, and all the other traders in Jerusalem’s Old City were falling over themselves to do business. But then none of them had a treasure map hanging on their walls.

“Where’s the treasure supposed to be?”

“Africa.”

“Diamonds?”

“No, gold.”

“Oh,” I mouthed with mounting interest, “pirate treasure?”

Ali Baba glanced up again from his newspaper. Then he straightened his white skull-cap, scratched a broken fingernail through his beard and replied.

“Gold mines, it is a map for the gold mines.”

“The gold mines?”

“The mines of Suleiman,” he growled, “King Solomon’s mines.”

The Via Dolorosa is packed with poky shops touting the latest in Virgin Mary T-shirts, playing-cards bearing the head of John the Baptist, Jesus Christ bottle-openers and Last Supper baseball caps. Several merchants that morning had even offered me “splinters” from the Cross, and one had shown me what he said were Christ’s thumb bones. The prices mentioned suggested they were fakes: they only cost two hundred dollars each. Holy Land kitsch surpasses all other forms. It seemed amazing that anyone would ever buy any of the merchandize, especially since tourists were now few and far between. Most had been scared away by the renewed Intifada.

As anyone who’s ever set foot in the maze of back streets of Jerusalem’s souk knows, everything has a price. After forty minutes of drinking dark sweet tea with Ali Baba, the map was mine. Wrapping it in his copy of the Jerusalem Herald, Ali Baba licked his thumb and counted my wad of notes. Then, after counting them once, he turned them over and counted them again, checking for forgeries.

“Six hundred shekels,” he said. “Cheap at the price.”

“It may be little to you, but it’s a lot to me. It’s nearly a hundred pounds.”

“What do you mean?” exclaimed Ali Baba. “This map could lead you to a treasure greater than the farthest limits of your imagination. It’s been in my family for six generations. My father would slit my throat if he were alive. And my mother must be turning in her grave. I can hear my ancestors cursing me from the next world!”

“Why haven’t you ever gone off to look for Solomon’s mines yourself?”

“Hah!” said the merchant, recoiling. “How do you expect me to leave my business?”

“Then why are you selling the map after so long, and why to me?”

“You seem an honorable man,” said Ali Baba, opening the door.

I thanked him for the compliment.

“You are wise too, I can see that,” he added, as I stepped into the street, “so hang the map on your wall and leave it at that.”

All over the world unscrupulous shopkeepers have palmed me off with their most suspect merchandize. Most tourists instinctively avoid such objects, but I can’t help myself. I have an insatiable appetite for questionable souvenirs. My home is filled with useless junk from a hundred journeys. The highlights include a lucky painted sloth jawbone from the Upper Amazon, a boxed set of glass eyes from Prague, and a broken boomerang purchased in a Moroccan souk, and supposedly once owned by Jim Morrison. I have a West African divining bowl too, made from whale bone, and a fragment of an Ainu warrior’s cloak, a human hair talisman from Sarawak, and a ceremonial executioner’s sword from the Sudan.

But Ali Baba’s map was different. From the moment I saw it, I knew that a great opportunity was spread out before me. No names of places or co-ordinates were marked, but it was the first fragment of a journey. Such leads are rare in life, and must be seized with both hands.

Before Ali Baba could regret the decision to sell his heirloom, I hurried out into the web of streets, past the fruit stalls and perfume-sellers, the caverns heaped with turmeric, ground cinnamon and paprika, dried figs and trays of oily baklava. The Old City was full of life, moving to an ancient rhythm which could have changed little since the time of Christ.

The Intifada might have frightened away the package tourists but, as I saw it, a visit to Jerusalem in a time of peace would strip it of a vital quality — danger. My wife has grown used to hastily planned holidays in the world’s trouble-spots. As soon as there’s a bomb, an earthquake, a tidal wave or a riot, I call the travel agent and book cut-price seats. I’m no fearless war correspondent, but I have come to realize that the news media has a knack of exaggerating the perils of even the worst national emergency. In any case, a little danger is a small price to pay for ridding a place of tourists. We spent our honeymoon in Alexandria, living it up in the presidential suite of a grand hotel a couple of days after a bomb had wiped out a tourist bus in the Egyptian capital. At first my wife grumbled — she had been looking forward to Venice — but over the years she’s got used to holidays that come with a Foreign Office health warning. But even she wasn’t prepared to accompany me to the West Bank during the worst fighting since the Six-Day War.

In more peaceful times I would have had to fight my way through the crowds to get up to the Dome of the Rock, which stands on an outcrop known to Jews as Temple Mount, and to Muslims as Haram al-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary. The small plateau is one of the holiest sites in Islam and is revered by Jews as well.

The Cotton Merchants’ market, which was built by the Crusaders and which leads up to the sanctuary, was deserted. A pair of Israeli soldiers were standing guard at the far end of the tunnel, lit by octagonal skylights in the vaulted stone roof. Their fatigues were well-pressed, but their expressions were heavy with the boredom that only conscripts know. In a synchronized movement they lifted automatic rifles to my chest and told me to turn back. Tourists were not welcome, they said. If I took another step towards the shrine, I’d be arrested and charged.

I explained that I was no tourist but a pilgrim. My father, my grandfather and his father before him had prayed at the Dome of the Rock. Now I had come to continue the tradition. Nothing would make me leave without fulfilling my duty. As I delivered my harangue, a beggar with no legs swam desperately over the flagstones, his arms flailing. He kissed my feet, rejoicing at the sight of a tourist. Until my arrival his livelihood must have been in doubt. I handed him a few small coins, for charity is one of the central pillars of Islam.

The conscripts lowered the barrels of their weapons to groin height. They were giving me a moment to persuade them of my faith.

“Tourists degrade what is holy. They are the agents of the Devil,” I exclaimed, as I spat on the ground.

The guards’ eyes widened and, perhaps worried that I was a lunatic and would give them trouble, they let me through the cordon. A pair of great doors were swung open on rusting hinges, and I caught my first sight of the fabulous golden dome.

Before I had taken a single step towards the shrine, an old Arab guard hurried over and insisted that I required his services. Only he could keep me safe, he said, and besides he needed the money. His honest eyes were pale green, the color of rock opals, his unshaven cheeks leathery and walnut brown. His front teeth were missing, causing him to whiffle when he spoke. His name was Hussein.

“My seven sons have been hungry for many weeks,” he said. “Thank God that you have come! You were sent by God to help restore my family’s fortune. I have been blessed by your arrival, and my family have been blessed! May you live for a thousand years!”

After such a welcome I had little choice but to hire the guide. He motioned to the dome and clamped his hand to my forearm, so that I might pause to savour the moment. Resting on an octagonal mosaic-tiled base, and framed in the brilliant blue afternoon sky, the great golden dome blinds all who look upon it. We shaded our eyes in the sunshine and then began to climb the steps up towards the shrine.

The floor of the main chamber is almost entirely taken up by the Rock – a broad rolling slab of stone — which Muslims call Kubbet al-Sakhra. It is from here that the Prophet Mohammed is said to have ascended to Heaven on his Night Journey to receive the Quran. Hussein pointed out the hoof-print of the Prophet’s steed Buraq where he leapt into the air to carry his master heavenward. The Rock is sacred to Judaism, too, supposedly the very spot where Abraham prepared to sacrifice his son Isaac, long before the rise of Islam.

Hussein had tears in his eyes as he led me around the shrine. I was unsure whether his emotions were stirred by the thought of my custom or if, like me, he was genuinely affected by his surroundings. Perhaps it was a mixture of both, for you could stare upon the Dome of the Rock for hours and never tire of it.

As he led me down to the Well of Souls, the subterranean chamber where legend says the dead congregate to pray, Hussein wiped his eyes.

“God rewards all believers,” he said. “Islam is the true path, of course, but we do not frown on those of the other faith. Hostility is bad for us all and it’s an affront to what is sacred. Abraham is after all a prophet mentioned by the Holy Quran, just as Suleiman – whose great temple stood here – is honored by Muslims.”

“Suleiman, Solomon... his temple was built here?”

Hussein paused to show me the niche where a strand of the Prophet’s hair is kept. It is brought out only during Ramadan.

“Solomon, the wise king,” he said slowly, “he built the most spectacular temple right here where this sanctuary now stands. How it must have looked, its walls and roofs covered in fine gold!”

“Gold... from the mines, from Solomon’s mines?”

“Yes, of course,” said Hussein.

We left the Dome of the Rock and walked towards the El Aqsa mosque which stands at the southern end of the plateau. Hussein was talking, extolling the merits of Islam, but I wasn’t listening. The mention of Solomon and his golden temple had distracted me.

I asked Hussein to stop for a moment. I’d stashed the map from Ali Baba’s Tourist Emporium in my rucksack. We sat on the ground beside the fountain where ablutions are performed while I rummaged. Hussein was eager to tell me that Anwar Sadat had come to pray at the mosque, and to recount the day King Hussein of Jordan’s grandfather, King Abdullah, was shot dead as he entered El Aqsa. With his own eyes he, Hussein, had seen the bullet enter the old king’s head, his turban fall and the dignitaries scatter like rats.

I unwrapped the gilded frame and stared at the map. Hussein glanced at the image, the bright sunlight reflecting off its glass, and fell silent.

“Solomon’s mines,” he said, “the mines in Ophir.”

I was surprised that he could recognize the map so easily, especially as there were no place names marked.

“What is Ophir?”

“The land of gold,” said the guide, “from where the finest gold on earth was brought.”

“Where is it, this land of Ophir?”

Hussein hunched his shoulders and shook his head.

“Read the Bible for your answers.”

King David was a man of war and so was forbidden by God to construct a great temple in honor of his faith. God guided David s hand as he drew the plans, but he decreed that it would fall to his son, Solomon, to build the temple, for such a building needed a man of peace to craft it. David paid fifty shekels in silver to a man called Araunah for a piece of land on Mount Moriah, and there, four years after David’s death, Solomon began work on the temple.

First he sent word to the Phoenician king Hiram of Tire, ordering him to fell cedar trees from his forests in Lebanon. The cedars, a symbol of strength and power in biblical times, were the most highly prized trees in the ancient world. Hiram sent timber as instructed and also skilled metalworkers, carpenters and masons. The masons knew the secret science of geometry, some of whose cryptic codes are kept alive today by the Brotherhood of Freemasons, and it was they who cut and polished the immense stone blocks. The accuracy of their work was so great that no hammers were used while the temple was being built, or so the Bible relates.

The temple was built on a conventional Phoenician design, suggesting that King Hiram’s draughtsmen helped with the plans. It comprised an outer hallway, the ulam; a central courtyard, the heikal; and an inner sanctum, the debir, or “Holy of Holies”. It was here, in the inner sanctum, sequestered away from the eyes of laymen, that the Ark of the Covenant was to be kept.

The stone for the temple is thought to have been quarried from beneath the city of Jerusalem. In 1854 one of the royal quarries was discovered by an American physician, Dr Barclay, who was taking an evening stroll with his dog. The dog suddenly disappeared down a narrow shaft. Barclay enlarged the hole and found himself peering into an immense cavern. The entrance to the cave, known today as Zedekiah’s Grotto, can still be seen not far from the Old City’s Damascus Gate.

When the temple was finished, its decoration began, as the Second Book of Chronicles records:

And the porch that was in the front of the house, the length of it was according to the breadth of the house, twenty cubits, and the height was an hundred and twenty: and he overlaid it within with pure gold. And the greater house he cieled with fir tree, which he overlaid with fine gold, and set thereon palm trees and chains. And he garnished the house with precious stones for beauty: and the gold was gold of Parviam. He overlaid also the house, the beams, the posts, and the walls thereof, with gold: and graved cherubim on the walls. And he made the most holy house, the length whereof was, according to the breadth of the house, twenty cubits, and the breadth thereof twenty cubits: and he overlaid it with fine gold, amounting to six hundred talents. And the weight of the nails was fifty shekels of gold. And he overlaid the upper chambers with gold. And in the most holy house he made two cherubims of image work, and overlaid them with gold.

The temple was completed in the seventh year of Solomon’s reign and on the day of its dedication the Ark of the Covenant was carried from Mount Ophel in a grand procession, led by King Solomon himself. Priests dressed in pure white linen followed the king, blowing their trumpets, and behind them came a jubilant cavalcade. Every six paces oxen were sacrificed, drenching the road in blood. By the time the Ark was in place in the Holy of Holies, and the temple was dedicated, 22,000 oxen and 120,000 sheep had been slaughtered.

The temple served the people of Jerusalem for almost four centuries after the death of Solomon in 926 bc, but Solomon’s successors lacked his wisdom and the land was misruled. The final blow came when the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar invaded Judah, almost annihilating its population and laying waste its cities. Jerusalem itself was besieged for a year and a half, and when the starving defenders finally capitulated, their capital was plundered. Solomon’s temple was destroyed and every ounce of gold was stripped away, and carried back to Babylon.

In the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, in the Christian quarter of Jerusalem, a gaggle of nervous Russian tourists were taking in the sights and trying to remain calm. Gunfire was ricocheting off the walls outside, but the priests said there was nothing to worry about. They’d seen much worse. One at a time the Russians stooped to kiss the Stone of Unction, where Christ’s body is said to have been anointed after his death. Then they filed into “Christ’s tomb”, the holiest site in Christendom.

The mood in the church was subdued, the air filled with the smell of burning beeswax and incense. The walls were filthy, especially at waist height where millions of pilgrims’ hands had stroked them as they filed past. I sat on a low wooden bench and waited for the gunfire to stop, but it didn’t.

I had already spent two days reading the Old Testament and staring at Ali Baba’s map. The West Bank’s Intifada was claiming new casualties on a daily basis and making it tricky to see the sights or even to sit in a café. To pass the time I’d bought a tattered third-hand copy of Henry Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines near the American Colony Hotel, where I was staying along with much of the world’s press corps.

The book, which first appeared in 1885, was written by Rider Haggard when he was twenty-nine, as the result of a shilling bet with his brother, who doubted he could write a best-seller. Advertised by its publisher as “THE MOST AMAZING BOOK EVER WRITTEN”, the novel was a runaway success, and more than thirty thousand copies were sold in the first year alone.

In the novel, Solomon’s mines lie in what is now South Africa, but they are diamond mines, not gold mines. Rider Haggard was capitalizing on the diamond fever of the time. As a laborious introduction in my copy points out, he set the book in southern Africa because he had spent time in the Colonial Service in Natal and Transvaal, and so knew the region well. As well as an introduction my copy also contained a map. It was even sketchier than the one I’d bought from Ali Baba, marking little more than a river, a pan of bad water, “Sheba’s breasts”, a kraal and a treasure cave. After going through the Old Testament for a second time, I came to the conclusion that Rider Haggard’s novel, although a rattling good read, was of no use to anyone engaged in a serious search for Solomon’s gold mines.

From the outset, I’d grasped that the biblical land of Ophir was the key clue to follow. The Bible can be deciphered in many ways, with an interpretation often hanging on the precise meaning of a single word. For that reason I chose to use the Septuagint version, the earliest known translation of the Old Testament. Made during the third and second centuries bc, it is still the official text of the Orthodox Greek Church. At the time it was written, the Hebrew version of the Bible still wasn’t standardized.

The First Book of Kings relates that king Solomon made a navy of ships in Ezion-geber, which is beside Eloth, on the shore of the Red sea, in the land of Edom. And Hiram sent in the navy his servants, shipmen that had knowledge of the sea, with the servants of Solomon. And they came to Ophir, and fetched from thence gold, four hundred and twenty talents and brought it to king Solomon...

Now the weight of gold that came to Solomon in one year was six hundred threescore and six talents... And king Solomon made two hundred targets of beaten gold: six hundred shekels of gold went to one target. And he made three hundred shields of beaten gold; three pounds of gold went to one shield... Moreover the king made a great throne of ivory, and overlaid it with the best gold... And all king Solomon’s drinking vessels were of gold... For the king had a navy of Tharshish with the navy of Hiram: once in three years came the navy of Tharshish, bringing gold, and silver, ivory, and apes, and peacocks.

Stop a man in the street today and ask him the meaning of Ophir and he is likely to shake his head. But for centuries the word was steeped in myth.

The Bible reveals what came from Ophir, but it does not say where it was located. Its authors took it for granted that everyone knew where it was and recorded only that those who journeyed to Ophir were away for three years. Interpreting this literally, some scholars took it to mean that the actual traveling time was three years. So they, and others, pointed to the most distant lands they knew. Ptolemy, in his maps, placed Ophir in the Malay peninsula and Christopher Columbus believed he had found Ophir in modern Haiti. Some suggested India, Madagascar, Ceylon, Arabia or even Peru, while others postulated that Ophir may merely mean “remote”.

It was the discovery of an immense set of ruins in southern Africa – known as Great Zimbabwe – that led the Victorians to believe that they had finally discovered the Bible’s Ophir. The ruins, after which Rhodesia was renamed at Independence, were found in the 1870s. To the Victorian mind, the stone workings, which lie nearly two hundred miles inland, resembled Solomon’s temple. Though this was amateur archaeology at its most suspect, at the turn of the last century dozens of books appeared claiming that the riddle of Ophir had at last been solved. Rider Haggard’s novel was but a fictional account of an astonishing discovery.

These days the Great Zimbabwe theory has been discredited and the location of Ophir remains a mystery.

If Ophir is the first real clue to finding the mines, then the second lies in the most famous consort of King Solomon — the Queen of Sheba. Just as we are never told the location of Ophir, so the Bible fails to give the exact location of the Queen of Sheba’s kingdom. In fact, it doesn’t even tell us the queen’s name, but the First Book of Kings does hint that she hailed from a land which was rich in pure gold:

And when the queen of Sheba heard of the fame of Solomon concerning the name of the Lord, she came to prove him with hard questions. And she came to Jerusalem with a very great train, with camels that bore spices, and very much gold, and precious stones: and when she was come to Solomon, she communed with him of all that was in her heart... And she gave the king an hundred and twenty talents of gold, and of spices very great store, and precious stones... And king Solomon gave unto the queen of Sheba all her desire, whatsoever she asked, beside that which Solomon gave her of his royal bounty.

As I sat in the shadows of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher that afternoon I thought of Ophir, the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon’s gold. It seemed absurd that so many generations of amateurs and experts should have searched for King Solomon’s mines in such far-flung lands. The answer, surely, must lie closer to hand.

My Michelin map of the Middle East included a large part of East Africa, stretching south as far as Lake Victoria and east to the Persian Gulf. I spread it out before me. If Solomon’s ships left the port of Ezion-geber, thought to be near modern Elat in the Gulf of Aqaba, then his fleet would have headed south down the Red Sea in search of gold. Solomon’s people had reached the Promised Land after fleeing from Egypt. They were a land-based people, not accomplished mariners, and it seemed unlikely that the king’s ships would have gone further than necessary to find gold.

I knew that Ophir might have lain in southern Arabia, which may have been the Queen of Sheba’s homeland, but the Sabaen kingdom probably stretched across the Bab al Mandab Straits to the African continent. The more I sat and deliberated, the stronger Africa, and in particular Ethiopia, beckoned me. I had been to a great number of African countries but had long yearned to explore Ethiopia. Like thousands of adventurers before me, I’d been bewitched by the country’s history, its folklore and the strange tales of life there. Years before, I had learned that the imperial family of Ethiopia traces its descent from Menelik, the son supposedly born to the Queen of Sheba and Solomon. A sacred Ethiopian text, the Kebra Negast (The Glory of Kings), tells the story in full.

After becoming pregnant by Solomon, the Queen of Sheba returned to her native land. She left the wise king to his seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines, and departed with seven hundred and ninety-seven camels, all of them laden with gifts. The Queen, who is known as Makeda in the Ethiopian texts, brought up Menelik on her own. When the boy reached adulthood, he journeyed north to Jerusalem to meet his father. The Kebra Negast says that as they left Jerusalem, Menelik’s companions stole the hallowed Ark of the Covenant and took it back to Ethiopia. The Ark is supposedly still kept in the northern city of Axum.

I could see from the map that Ethiopia would have been easily reached from Solomon’s kingdom — it was no more than a short boat trip down the Red Sea. In ancient times Ethiopia was a source of apes, ivory, frankincense and myrrh; precisely those items which the Bible says came from Ophir. And in ancient Egypt, Ethiopia was known as a land where gold could be easily mined. Even today the country has extraordinary reserves of gold and other valuable minerals and, unlike in southern Africa where you have to dig down thousands of feet to reach the ore, in Ethiopia’s highlands the gold seams lie close to the surface.

I stood up, folded my map away and walked out into the afternoon sun. To the right of the main entrance to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher there is a doorway that leads to a chapel maintained by Ethiopian Christians. Once there was an Ethiopian monastery in Jerusalem, but in the seventeenth century when the monks could no longer afford the Ottoman taxes, it was forced to move here, to a series of dank rooms that lead off the roof of St Helena’s Chapel. Now a handful of monks continue to maintain a presence in Jerusalem as their forebears had done for centuries.

In one of the rooms I found a small shrine, its walls black with soot, its benches shiny and worn where thousands of robes had brushed against the wood. The walls were hung with colorful paintings showing the Queen of Sheba being greeted by King Solomon. I walked through the chapel and up a flight of stairs, out on to the roof. A bearded Ethiopian priest, dressed in a flowing black robe, a prayer book in his hands, was asleep beneath a weeping willow. As I watched him sleeping I thought about my map, and about Ophir, and about a journey. Ethiopia was awaiting me.

On my way back to my hotel, I passed Ali Baba’s Tourist Emporium once again. I glanced in through the open door. The shopkeeper was dozing in his chair but he awoke with a start when he heard my footsteps cross the threshold. Even to the ears of such a reluctant salesman, the sound of feet meant tourists, and tourists meant trade.

When he’d wrapped the loops of his glasses around his ears and squinted in my direction, Ali Baba asked how I was enjoying the gunfire. He said that there was nothing like a little shooting to keep everyone on their toes. I told him that I’d been unable to think of anything but King Solomon’s mines since buying the map, and that I had decided to look for the mines myself. I was heading for Ethiopia, I said.

Ali Baba warned me against making the journey. It would be full of dangers. He should never have sold me the map. His mother would be turning in her grave, his father would be cursing the day he was born. As he spoke I noticed something familiar hanging on the far wall of the shop. Little more than a sketch, and smudged by a clumsy hand, it was an inky hand-drawn map. I went over and compared it with my own map. Although obviously executed by the same unskilled artist, and set in identical chipped gold frames, they were different.

Furious, I demanded to know why another map was hanging in the very same spot as the one I’d purchased. Ali Baba ran a callused hand across his cheek. Times were desperate, he said woefully, and desperate times called for desperate measures.

“That’s all well and good,” I said with mounting anger, “but this is fraud. I’ve got a good mind to call the police.”

Sensing trouble, the old shopkeeper started to board up his emporium. He packed away the splinters from the Cross, the Virgin Mary fridge magnets, the fluorescent pink rosaries and the kitsch Nativity scenes.

“The map I sold you was the real one,” he said slyly, “I’m giving you a head start in your search. You see, this other map is a fake. It”ll keep the competition from your heels. Look on it as after-sales service!”

TWO

Seven Stones

“The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.”

Rudyard Kipling

When the blind Mauritanian woman’s deranged guide-dog sank its front teeth into my thigh, I doubled over in agony. The pain was terrible, but it was soon replaced by an overwhelming fear. Since my arrival in Addis Ababa, two days before, dozens of people had warned me to watch out for rabies. Ethiopian dogs, they all told me proudly, are very rabid indeed. Pressing a hand to my bloodied leg, I looked down at the dog. It was panting wildly, its eyes seemed to flash manically, and its tongue lolled out of a frothing mouth. The dog’s owner called the creature to heel. I told her that her pet was a danger to society.

Oh,” she exclaimed frivolously, “isn’t petit Bertrand a naughty little one?”

An hour later I found myself sitting in a doctor’s surgery on the other side of Addis Ababa. A pair of impressive medical certificates on the far wall advertised the physician’s skill. I pointed to the crescent of puncture marks in my thigh and grimaced. The doctor asked if the dog’s eyes had glinted. I replied that they had.

“Was there milky froth around its mouth?”

I said that there was.

The surgeon licked his lips.

“Rabies,” he declared menacingly.

“The woman was blind,” I said, “she couldn’t see the animal’s condition. Are you going to give me twenty-one jabs in the stomach?”

“There’s no anti-rabies serum in Ethiopia,” said the doctor. “You’d better go back to your hotel and rest.”

He began to write out his bill.

“What if I start frothing at the mouth?”

“Don’t bite anyone,” he said.

Back at the Hotel Ghion I sat on the lawn with a map of East Africa spread out before me. Blind people from across the continent had converged on the hotel for their annual conference, and some of their savage guide-dogs had escaped their sightless masters. Now they were tearing around the hotel grounds, hunting as a pack and snapping at the unsuspecting. Spying me from across the garden, and clearly eager to join in the fun, petit Bertrand slipped his collar and bounded over, eyes flashing, mouth foaming. I leapt up and seized a deck-chair, holding it out in front of me like a lion-tamer, and as we danced across the lawn I yelled for help. When at last Bertrand was dragged away, I returned to the matter in hand. I had arrived in the Ethiopian capital charged with a solemn mission to locate the source of King Solomon’s gold.

There’s nothing quite like a good quest for getting your blood pumping. In faraway Jerusalem, the idea of seeking out King Solomon’s mines had seemed irresistible and Ali Baba’s map, though perhaps not the genuine article, seemed the key to a magical journey. Now, faced with a real map, I began to feel daunted by the task I’d set myself.

In London, I had snapped up all the books I could find on King Solomon, the Queen of Sheba, biblical history, Ophir, Ethiopia and gold. Most were still unread and lay wrapped in newspapers and packed in a wooden tea-chest in my hotel room. The background reading would have to be done en route.

I looked at the map again.

Ethiopia is a reddish-brown anvil of mountains, nestling in the Horn of Africa. Everything about it hints at remoteness, and for three thousand years its name has been synonymous with mystery Herodotus was the first to tell of its strange beasts, its ebony trees and its exotic inhabitants, “the tallest, handsomest and longest lived of men”. Cosmos wrote of the emporia of frankincense and myrrh. Then there were the great explorers who risked life and limb to penetrate the country — men like Juan de Bermúdez, Cristóvão da Gama, James Bruce and Henry Salt.

A well-known geologist in London had suggested I look for gold in the Afar region, near the Red Sea coast. The ferocious Danakil people who live there have, until recently, judged a warrior’s standing by the number of testicles hanging around his neck. Someone else told me to seek out the hyenas of Harar which, a legend says, guard Solomon’s golden treasure. Another friend pointed to the north. Deep in the mountains there was, he said, a monastery which kept safe the secrets of the wise king. Another acquaintance told of a church in Lalibela, said to have the “Gold of Sheba” in its treasury.

Almost fifty years before, my father had also searched for King Solomon’s mines. He’d unfurled a great map of the Middle East and, taking a handful of stones, had placed them on key points. He had put one stone on the Sudan, another on Petra, others on the holy city of Mecca, on Damascus, Cyprus and Beirut, and on our ancestral home of Paghman, in Afghanistan. His journey had eventually led him to deep caverns north of Port Sudan on the Red Sea coast. Thirty years before my father set out for the mines, his father, Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah, had spent months criss-crossing southern Arabia on the same quest. The search for King Solomon’s mines was a family obsession.

Sitting on the hotel lawn, I took out of my pocket seven pebbles of my own. I placed the first on Afar, where the testicle-hunters once roamed. The next I put on Harar, home of the hyenas. I dropped the third pebble on the northern border with Eritrea, and the fourth on Lalibela. Then I placed another on Gondar, once Ethiopia’s seat of imperial power, and home to the Ethiopian Jews. That was five. Where else?

The sound of guide-dogs mauling a newly arrived traveler distracted me for a moment. I glanced at the map again. Herodotus had said of western Ethiopia “there is gold obtained in great plenty”. So I placed a pebble due west. I had one left. That morning’s newspaper had spoken of a legal gold-mining operation in the south of Ethiopia. So I put the last pebble there.

Uncertain of where to begin my search, I decided to go for a walk. For two days I’d been cooped up in the hotel, tormented by insomnia and savage West African guide-dogs. It was time to get to grips with Addis Ababa.

Leaving the grounds of the Hotel Ghion, I headed north-west. The red clay-like soil, the morning dampness after heavy night rain, the bitter green oranges and roasted maize laid out on makeshift stalls, and the grinding gears of battered blue Peugeots brought back memories of other journeys in Africa. The sky was gray, low clouds threatening more rain, and the air was thick with diesel fumes and the noxious stench of old plastic bottles being burned on open fires. Taxis honked as they swerved to miss each other. Roadside hawkers whistled through their front teeth at passers-by. A flock of sheep bound for market ambled along the road, their bells ringing as they walked.

Addis Ababa, the “New Flower”, is not as new and fresh as its name suggests. In the years since 1975, when Haile Selassie, the last Emperor, was smothered with a pillow in the bedroom of his palace, the capital has dwindled. The street-lamps are broken and birds now make their nests in them. The concrete office blocks are crumbling, and the sidewalks are full of people who seem to have nowhere else to go. Cars are held together with bits of string, their bodywork patched with makeshift repairs, and the roads are pocked with craters. Every detail of daily life reflects the confusion of the country’s recent history.

Once he’d dispatched the Emperor and buried him standing upright under his lavatory bowl, President Mengistu set to work on pacifying the tribes whose leader he’d become. For seventeen years his torture-rooms worked overtime, taming a proud people. He managed to achieve notoriety even in a continent where despots are commonplace. Few Ethiopians will talk of those terrible Mengistu years. Perhaps they are trying to forget, or perhaps they are still in shock. When at last Mengistu’s Marxist government collapsed in May 1991, the streets ran with blood once more. Promises were made and then broken, and the cycle of hardship has persisted. People live from one day to the next, keeping their heads down, making do as best they can. Many fear the present and most have little hope for the future. As for the country’s 3,000-year-old history, that is a taboo subject. The government’s greatest worry seems to be that Ethiopians will remember the exiled imperial family and demand their return. Ask anyone about the glorious legacy of the past and they will place a finger to their lips.

I walked on as if in a daydream. Hundreds of men and women were swarming down the road, their heads veiled in white cotton shawls with embroidered borders, their feet squashed into ill-fitting shoes. Some of them were singing, their voices high-pitched yet solemn. Others were chanting verses softly to themselves. Many more were clutching Bibles to their chests. One woman was carrying a gaudy painting of the Virgin Mary and another was crawling on her knees, with a silver cross cupped in her hands. At the centre of the crowd a plain pine coffin was being carried at shoulder height. A posy of violet-colored flowers had been placed on top, along with a scruffy straw hat.

Across from the mourners a man without legs dipped his head in respect. He seemed numbed by pain, his eyes welling with tears. Like veterans from a secret war, he and his countrymen had seen too much, had endured the unendurable. Worst of all was the thought that the world had forgotten them.

As I stood watching in silence, a dilapidated turquoise taxi pulled to a halt beside me. I assumed the driver was looking for a fare, but I was wrong. Instead, he climbed out of his cab, strode over to the solemn procession and said a prayer. He looked as if he was in his late twenties. His back was ramrod straight, his hands clenched together over the buckle of his belt, and his head bent towards the ground. When the cortège had moved on, the taxi-driver returned to his vehicle. Curious, I asked him if he knew the deceased.

“No, sir,” he replied courteously in English, “but when an elder dies our entire nation must mourn...”

Before he could finish his sentence the first drops of late morning rain splattered down. I leapt into the taxi. A second later the shower became a torrent. In the distance the funeral procession moved forward, the white cotton shawls now soaked and clinging to frail bodies.

The driver was waiting for the name of a destination. He said his trusty Lada would take me to the ends of the earth if I wished. Ducking his head humbly, he smiled broadly and introduced himself. His name was Samson, son of Yohannes.

I had heard that Haile Selassie’s body, now retrieved from beneath the presidential lavatory, was being kept at the tomb of Emperor Menelik II until a fitting burial could be arranged. Since Ethiopia’s imperial family claim descent from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, the tomb seemed an obvious place to visit, so I asked Samson to drive me there.

“There’s no money to pay for the Emperor’s funeral,” he said as we drove along. “The government won’t give any money, and Haile Selassie’s own family are too miserly. They don’t want Ethiopians to know how rich they are. As for the Rastafarians, they could easily afford to pay, but they won’t.”

“Why not?”

“The Rastas named themselves after Ras Tafari, the title of the Emperor Haile Selassie. They say he is God, and since God cannot die, they won’t pay for his funeral. It’s not right, there’s no dignity for the man.”

In a country where the study of history is frowned upon, I was impressed by my driver’s knowledge.

“I only drive a taxi because I have to,” he said. “I support my brothers and sister, my mother, my father and so many others. They all rely on me.”

The tradition of one man supporting a whole host of relatives is known in the Middle East as “living off Abdul’s job”. As soon as one man gets work, the rest of his family give up their own jobs and sponge off him. Samson tapped me on the knee with his thumb.

“I long to have a real job with respect and honor,” he said. “Then my girlfriend’s father will think I’m a worthy man. But secretly I have an even greater wish.”

What is it?”

“To know every detail of our history.”

“Can you buy history books?”

“The government’s bought them all up,” he said. “They burn them or tear out the subversive pages. It’s much easier to forget about the old days and keep quiet. That’s the best way to stay alive.”

“Do you have any history books, though?”

My questions were making Samson uneasy. In Ethiopia, as I was fast finding out, you couldn’t be too careful. But he was well aware that the government had no funds to hire foreign spies.

“Yes, I have a history book,” he confided. “It tells an astonishing story. It has taught me about the Emperor and his ancestors – about Menelik and Mekonnen, King Tewodros, and the great battles they all fought. I have learned, too, about the British explorers James Bruce and Nathaniel Pearce, about the kings of Harar, Queen Makeda and Solomon.”

“What if the book was discovered?”

“It’s well-hidden,” he replied. “I bring it out only at night when my prying neighbours have gone to bed. I lock the door and bolt the window of my room. Sometimes I pretend to snore loudly even though I’m awake. Then, still snoring, I light the candle, hold its flame close to the pages, and read.”

As he spoke Samson span the wheel through his hands and we turned off the road. Then he revved the engine as hard as he could and drove up a steep path that led into a copse of eucalyptus trees. A sentry in grubby fatigues was standing guard and he raised his Kalashnikov as a cloud of oily exhaust engulfed him.

“Follow me,” said Samson, leading the way towards an octagonal Orthodox church.

Rain was still falling, rustling through the eucalyptus like a shamanic rattle. A handful of pilgrims were clustered at each of the church’s doors. Most had shuffled up the steps on their knees and were now pressing their lips to the door-frames. We mounted the steps, removed our shoes and sought refuge inside.

In Jerusalem I had visited the Ethiopian church tucked away behind a wall on Etyopya Street. This one was laid out in the same way. The main hall was covered in threadbare carpets and lit by dozens of crackling neon strip lights. Dotted around it were tremendous drums and makwamya, ritualistic prayer sticks. The air was pungent with the smell of frankincense. The walls were decorated with murals and hung with bright paintings of biblical scenes, and in the middle of the chamber there stood a grand cube-shaped structure, shrouded by curtains. Here, hidden from the eyes of common men, was the “Holy of Holies” in which lay the tabot, a replica of the Ark of the Covenant.

Hearing our voices, a deacon appeared. He was muffled in a blue shawl, and in one hand he carried a collection tin. Voices hinted at visitors, and visitors suggested donations. I asked politely if I could look inside the Holy of Holies, as I was eager to see the Ark. The deacon recoiled in horror and shrieked. Not even he, he said, was permitted to set eyes on the mystical Ark. So I asked about the murals. They showed Makeda and her entourage making the journey across desert sands to Jerusalem, where the queen presented Solomon with golden treasures. A trainee priest, who could not have been more than thirteen, was dusting the paintings with a rag tied to a long bamboo pole. The deacon looked at his collection tin and then at me. I asked where the tomb of Emperor Menelik could be found. The deacon snapped his fingers, and the young trainee priest struggled to lift a flagstone in the floor, revealing the entrance to a crypt.

Time spent in Cairo’s great cemetery – known locally as “the City of the Dead” — had introduced me to the delights of subterranean mausolea. In one fabulous Cairene tomb, an ancestral guardian had once brought me a pasha’s head. I’d never seen such a fine set of teeth but, anxious to avoid the wrath of the dead nobleman’s family, I’d ordered the warden to put the head back as quickly as he could. Now, the former Emperor’s mausoleum brought back those days and nights spent in Cairo’s cemetery.

The crypt housed three colossal marble tombs, belonging to Menelik II, his consort the Empress Taitu and their daughter Zawditu. My interest in Menelik, the modernizing Emperor, had begun years before when I’d read a book on the history of execution. In it I came across a tale about Menelik. The Emperor was told by his advisers that in far-away America a new and ingenious technique for dispatching criminals had been devised. The victim was strapped into a wooden chair and subjected to a strange and dangerous substance called “electricity”. The Emperor was told that the process was excruciating and that death followed only when the prisoner’s eyes had popped like ripe grapes, and his head had sizzled. Menelik liked what he heard and, so the story goes, he placed an order for a pair of chairs. It took months to transport the chairs to the Ethiopian kingdom. When at last they arrived they were assembled and taken to the palace where the Emperor surveyed them. He was impressed by their craftsmanship and asked for a demonstration. Only then did the courtiers realize that the devices were useless — electricity had not yet reached Ethiopia. Undeterred by this setback, Menelik ordered that the electric chairs be used as imperial thrones.

Next to Menelik’s gray marble sarcophagus stood a long glass-fronted cupboard set into the wall. Inside was a delicate, finely tooled coffin. The deacon bowed his head, and Samson the taxi-driver looked glum.

“Here is our former Emperor, Haile Selassie,” said the priest. “We are waiting to bury him according to the ancient rites. But there are problems...”

I raised an eyebrow.

“The Rastafarians!” he exclaimed, rolling his eyes. “They come in their hundreds to see him, but they say that he’s still alive. He is in their hearts. That’s what they say. So they don’t give any money for the burial.”

The deacon rubbed a hand across his face and stared longingly at the empty collection tin. I dropped a folded note into it and stepped aside, as a throng of Rastafarians entered the crypt, their dreadlocks hidden under crocheted hats, their Jamaican accents echoing through the shadows.

Samson led the way back to his taxi. He told me that Haile Selassie had striven to bring Ethiopia into the modern world, just as Menelik had done before him. Both men had also recognized the great natural wealth of the country and had hoped to exploit its treasure.

“What treasure?”

Samson narrowed his eyes.

“Gold,” he said.

From the mausoleum we drove on through rain-soaked streets to the National Museum. Tourists are few and far between in Ethiopia these days. Rastafarians may visit the coffin of their deity, but they rarely bother with the dilapidated state museum. Some of the former Emperor’s ceremonial robes were on show, along with tribal crafts and a jumble of bones s’ ed “Lucy, the oldest Humanoid in the world”. Samson said they’d been found in the Danakil region in 1974 and had been named after the Beatles’ song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”.

“Lucy has made us famous. There’s even a ballet about her in America. It’s all about her life.” He glanced down through the cracked glass case at the assortment of bones. “Lucy’s made us famous, but she hasn’t made us rich.”

Unable to resist, I asked him about Ethiopia’s gold.

“The Bible speaks of Ophir,” he said, “a great golden treasure, hidden, but waiting to be dug up. A little hard work, a little sweat, and we’d all be rich like they are in America. Gold is the future of Ethiopia.”

Samson told me that he was from Kebra Mengist, a small town far to the south of Addis Ababa. His father, a schoolteacher, had instilled in him a love of the Bible and a thirst for knowledge. But at an early age he had strayed.

“My parents told me that history was a good thing,” he said. “After all, the Bible is a kind of history and that is the best thing of all. They told me to study, but my friends tempted me with riches.”

“Were they thieves, stealing from the wealthy?”

“No, no, they were prospectors,” he replied, “digging gold from the giant open mines.”

I felt my pulse begin to race. A possible source of Solomon’s gold suddenly seemed within reach. Anxious not to appear too enthusiastic, lest he take advantage of me, I asked Samson why he had abandoned mining and become a badly paid taxi-driver instead.

“For three years I dug gold from the ground,” he replied. “Stripped bare to my waist, I worked like a rat in tunnels below the surface. It was infernal down there: hot, stinking, dangerous beyond words. The men who labored there used to say that they had died and gone to Hell. The Devil was our employer. There was no escape. Yes, I earned good money but, like all the others, I spent it on liquor and bad women. If there was any cash left we gambled it away. The more money we earned through mining, the more we drank, and the more desperate we became.”

We moved on through the museum, past cases filled with imperial crowns, carved gourds, baskets in every color of the rainbow, and manuscripts written in Ge’ez, the ancient language of Ethiopia. As we walked, Samson continued his story.

“There were dangers everywhere. Sometimes a tunnel would collapse and the miners would be buried alive. I lost many friends that way. Others were killed for their pouches of gold dust, their throats slit with a razor-blade during the night.

“My parents begged me to return home. They said Beelzebub was inside me. But I laughed at them and made fun of their poverty. Then one morning as 1 was shaving, I saw my face in the scrap of mirror. My eyes were bloodshot from drink and filled with anger. They were not my eyes — they belonged to the Lucifer.”

Back at the taxi, Samson showed me his prize possession — an extremely large leather-bound Bible which he kept under the passenger seat. It had been printed near St Paul’s in London in 1673.

The good book, Samson said, reminded him of the true path. But it also taught him that gold could be beneficial if given respect, if used for the good of all men. He had read the Books of Kings and Chronicles and knew all about King Solomon and the land of Ophir. Unable to believe my good fortune at meeting a man who was familiar with biblical history and who had worked as a gold miner, I took out my map and told Samson about my quest to find Solomon’s mines.

“Traveling in Ethiopia is hard,” he said. “It’s not like America where the roads are as smooth as silk. Here the buses break down and the police want bribes. A foreigner searching for gold would surely be locked in a cell and beaten with a thorny stick.”

I boasted that I had experience, that I’d only recently traveled to see the Shuar tribe who live deep in the jungles of the Peruvian Amazon. I told him how they shrink the heads of their enemies to the size of a grapefruit, and how they make manioc beer with the saliva of their ugliest crones. I omitted to say that the once feared Shuar warriors are now all fanatical Evangelists, desperate only for tambourines.

“It sounds as if you are a man with no fear,” Samson replied, blowing into his hands. “But how will you find your way to the gold mines? You are a stranger in a foreign land.”

“I need an assistant,” I replied meekly, “someone with a knowledge of history and gold. And if I’m to find King Solomon’s mines, I’ll need someone with a gigantic Bible to keep the Devil away.”

THREE

The Father of Madness

“There is little doubt that Abyssinia is the real emporium of Ophir.”

Frank Hayter, The Gold of Ethiopia

In 1894, two engineers sought an audience with Emperor Menelik II, who had recently moved Ethiopia’s capital from Ankober to Addis Ababa. One was Swiss, the other French. They had realized that Menelik’s new capital would only expand if it were connected to the Red Sea coast; and so they proposed building a fabulous railway, linking Addis Ababa with the French port of Djibouti. The project would be a masterpiece of engineering skill. Never one to shun a modern idea, Menelik was intrigued by the scheme. But before he would agree to it, he set the two Europeans a task to test their expertise. They were confined to a room under armed guard, given some twine, an awl, a knife and a sheet of tanned leather, and ordered to make a pair of shoes before the sun rose at dawn. The engineers unpicked their own shoes and used them as patterns. They worked all night and, as the first rays of light swept across the capital, they presented the Emperor with a fine pair of leather shoes. Menelik pledged his support and three years later the railway was built.

In the century since its completion, the railway has gradually decayed. In Ethiopia, if something breaks it stays broken. Now the paint on the railway carriages is peeling and the floorboards have cracked. The light-fittings have been stolen, the clock dials have lost their hands and the bolts have lost their nuts. Even the station-masters’ whistles no longer whistle. Packs of wild dogs feed on the rats which eat the cockroaches, which feast on the larvae which infest the wooden boards of the rolling stock.

Samson and I turned up at the station in time to watch the third-class passengers being whipped into line with batons. As far as the police were concerned, third class were fair game. When the railway police had finished beating their passengers into submission, they turned their attention to the beggars. Addis Ababa is awash with desperate supplicants, lured from the countryside by the dream of streets paved with gold.

I knew the journey to Harar was going to be bad when the train broke down three minutes after leaving Addis Ababa station. Samson, who had not been on a train before, pleaded with me to jump out into the sidings while we still had a chance to escape. Our cramped carriage was packed with a troop of riotous Somalis, and Samson was not happy. Understanding their language was, he said, a curse greater than any other imaginable. But the Somalis were nothing compared to the rain. The carriage leaked like a rusting sieve. In the summer such ventilation must be a boon, but during the heavy rains it soon drives you wild. Samson kept getting up to rearrange himself, frantic at the thought that the rain might drip on to his cherished Bible.

I had promised him a considerable wage if he would lead me to the gold mines. I suspected I’d kick myself later for hiring someone about whom I knew so little, but Samson had agreed willingly and he seemed amiable enough, if a little preoccupied with the Devil and biblical passages. Leaving his brother to look after the taxi, he packed a plastic carrier bag with a few old clothes and waved his girlfriend goodbye.

Before heading south to Samson’s ancestral home, we would make a detour. I wanted to visit the walled town of Harar in the east, for it is there that hyenas are said to guard King Solomon’s gold.

Three hours after breaking down, the train came alive, pulling out through the endless shanty towns that surround the capital. Corrugated iron shacks stretched to the horizon, slotted together like tin-plate toys. A band of shoeless children were playing hide-and-seek in thickets of bamboo while their older sisters thrashed clothes on a rock in a stagnant pool. Five men were drinking beer from dark brown bottles beneath a eucalyptus tree. A blind man hobbled down to the tracks to relieve himself. As the train struggled to gather speed, the stench of raw sewage and methane became overpowering.

I found myself watching the Somalis in fascination. Quite different from the Ethiopians, who frown on boisterous behavior, they spent the journey passing a demijohn of hard liquor around. When they were not drinking they sang, and when they were not singing, they chewed qat, the mildly narcotic leaf that is so popular in the Horn of Africa and southern Arabia. Periodically Samson would look up from his Bible and mutter darkly. He said they would rob us in the night and might even throw us out of the train altogether. Somalis, he said, are in league with the Devil.

Just before dusk, the rain eased and allowed the dying sun to illuminate a mass of gray clouds on the horizon. Ten minutes later we were sitting in total darkness. The carriage’s lights had long ago burnt out. As the hours slipped by, our eyes adjusted to the darkness, and the Somalis’ unruliness reached new heights. One man stood up and urinated the length of the aisle. Then two others had a competition to see how far they could spit. The man sitting across from us, a soft-spoken engineer with a cross pinned to his lapel, informed me that they were not Christians. The depraved conduct of the Somalis was not their fault, he said, but that of their religion.

Samson had brought out a candle stub and was reading the Psalms by its flickering light. He promised to stay awake, to ensure that the Somalis kept their hands off our baggage and our throats. I drifted in and out of sleep, dreaming of the hyenas of Harar and their cache of treasure.

By nine o’clock the next morning the Somalis had passed out, and the sun was burning high above a desert. I gazed through the window, still half asleep, and thanked God for the change in climate. Low thorn trees and cacti threw shadows across the panorama of sand. Rabbits scuttled about in search of food. We passed a huge herd of camels hobbled near the tracks, their clay-colored hides reflecting the light. There were camel calves, too, tied together like convicts in a chain. When the carriage halted at a small station, herdsmen swarmed up to the windows, selling fresh camel milk and salted cheese. I bought some of the milk, which was passed up in an old tin can. It was still warm.

Twenty-six hours after leaving the capital, we pulled into the terminus at Dire Dawa. Given the state of the track and the train, it was a miracle that we had arrived at all.

As usual, I had far too much luggage with me. I had left most of my books in Addis Ababa, selecting only a few at random to read along the way. Even so, I was surrounded by military canvas sacks full of supplies. I like to be prepared for any eventuality. What I was not prepared for was a full luggage inspection. All alighting passengers were frisked before they could leave the station and every piece of luggage was searched by a team of officious female guards. They were looking for contraband. When I had heaved my belongings on to the inspection table, all the guards ran over to rifle through them. I might not have had any contraband, but I did have all manner of imported curiosities, including an electric razor and an inflatable camping chair. The chair was viewed with great suspicion and I was ordered to inflate it. Then, to my great annoyance, it was confiscated.

I was eager to press on to Harar, but Samson had fallen into conversation with a fruit-seller on the station platform. The man spoke of an immense cave on the outskirts of Dire Dawa, in which gold had once been mined. Deciding to investigate further we took rooms at the Hotel Ras and then made a beeline for breakfast. The hotel had seen better days. The telephones had lost their dials and the ceiling fans were missing their blades. The lavatories leaked, and the floor tiles were hideously chipped. We took seats at one end of the dining-room and ordered a large quantity of buttered toast. Samson seemed very happy and said that he always tried to stay in hotels when he had the chance. I asked which was his favourite hotel. Rubbing his eyes with his thumbs, he confessed that he had not stayed in one before.

I am not sure why, but caves and gold tend to go hand in hand. Throughout Africa, Arabia and the Indian subcontinent, I’ve come across snippets of folklore which link the two firmly together. Underground caverns are of course the perfect place to hide treasure, just as they’re a good starting-point for digging shafts to reach gold-bearing veins. Of all the stories I have heard on the subject of caves and gold, the strangest was related by my father in his first travel book, Destination Mecca.

Following Arab folklore, which says that Solomon took gold from the region north of Port Sudan, he prepared for an extensive search. Everyone he met on the Red Sea coast alerted him to the dangers he would face. Some warned of bandits. Others told him to beware of the Hadendowa tribe whom the British called “Fuzzy-Wuzzies” during their occupation of Sudan. They were reputed to hack off the limbs of intruders for sport. Still others spoke of death through thirst or hunger, or at the hand of supernatural forces. Undeterred, my father journeyed up the Red Sea coast. He hoped to meet a lone Irishman who had supposedly spent the previous twenty years prospecting the area for gold. He never found the Irishman but, after a long search, he came across hundreds of immense slag heaps that reminded him of the piles of coal tailings in Yorkshire. He reckoned they were probably thousands of years old and that the ancient Egyptians and perhaps Solomon’s legions had mined gold in the area.

Not far from the slag heaps, he found a series of tunnels, many running more than three hundred feet into the ground. Once inside the workings,” he wrote, “there is something eerie about the silent maze of intersecting galleries, the abandoned piles of earthenware crucibles, the strange silence of the place.”

But more peculiar still was the absence of carbon on the walls. Lamps or burning torches would have been required to illuminate the long tunnels and shafts, and they would have left a residue of carbon. When my father asked local people about the mines, they all gave the same reply. Obviously there was no sign of carbon, they said, because these mines were worked night and day by Solomon’s army of jinn.

After breakfast Samson and I left the hotel, walked past the Coca Cola factory and made our way to the bazaar. On either side of it were hundreds of refugee tents but in the bazaar itself business was thriving. The stalls were piled high with dried ginger and spices, garlic and onions, rose-water, dried dates and limes, and on every table sticks of sandalwood incense were burning to ward off the flies.

Now and again Samson would stop to ask a stall-holder about the legend of the cave filled with gold. Everyone he spoke to nodded vigorously. There was a legend, they said, and there was a cave filled with treasure. They were certain of that much. But when I inquired where the cave could be found, they swished at the flies and shook their heads.

We pressed deeper into the bazaar. The entire market was roofed with a patchwork of sacking, but it didn’t keep out the heat or the flies. Children were whipping their home-made hoops through the streets past yet more stalls. I took a close look at the merchandize. As well as spices and fruit and vegetables, there were sacks of flour and oil donated by US Aid. Thousands of empty tin cans were on sale as well, and rusting car parts, tattered clothing and a sea of broken telephones, bicycles, kettles and shoes.

A boy in a bright red shirt said he knew the cave. It wasn’t far and he would take us if his friend could tag along as well. What about the treasure? The boys shook their heads. No one ever went down there, they said, on account of the bats.

Twenty minutes later, after rambling through a maze of back-streets and an enclosure filled with goats, we found ourselves looking down on a substantial crater that led to a wide-mouthed cave. From the smell it was evident that the crater and the front part of the cave were used as a public lavatory. Reluctantly, we climbed down.

One of the boys offered to take us deep into the cave if we bought an old rubber boot and a cup of petrol. He needed these for a fire, which would provide light and keep away the bats. I handed over funds, and someone was sent to fetch the required materials.

I was ready to endure hardship in my quest for Solomon’s mines but I’d not expected the first obstacle to be so unpleasant. The boy in the red shirt said it was the refugees who used the cave entrance as a lavatory He didn’t know where exactly they’d come from, but he said they squatted night and day.

Eventually the rubber boot arrived, along with a cup of petrol and a metal tray. The oldest boy took charge. First he ripped the rubber boot into strips. Then he put the strips on the tray, poured the petrol over them, and struck a match. A few seconds later, the strips of boot were alight and belching black smoke. By now a crowd of children had joined us down in the hole. None of them seemed to mind sliding around in the faeces and choking in the smoke. They were determined not to miss the opportunity of watching a foreigner make a fool of himself.

The blazing boot was carried ceremoniously into the cavern.

Samson and I kept close behind. Thousands of orange-yellow eyes shone from the walls like stars on a clear night, but as soon as the first fumes billowed into the chamber all hell broke loose. Suddenly we were attacked by screaming harpies, diving, swooping and flapping, their leathery wings bombarding us from every direction. Then the rubber boot, which had heated the tray to an industrial temperature, went out, plunging us into darkness. Provoked beyond all reason, the bats redoubled their attack. I stood stock-still, hands drawn over my face to protect my eyes, trying desperately not to panic.

Another boot was brought into the cave and ignited. I called out to Samson. Could he see any mine-shafts leading off or any sign of gold? Choking, he pointed to the far wall of the cavern. I peered through the mass of wings and dense smoke. In the lowest part of the wall there appeared to be a doorway which had long since been filled in with neatly cut blocks of stone. The boy in the red shirt said that a hermit used to live in the cave and that he drew paintings on the walls in bats’ blood. Behind the doorway there was a room, and in the room was the hermit’s skeleton. Local people had bricked up the doorway when the hermit died.

The children didn’t know whether the hermit had been secretly searching for gold. What about the refugees? Had they ever been found digging for gold? The boys didn’t know that either. The refugees were very poor, they replied, in fact so poor that they lived in tattered tents and had almost no food — which made me wonder how such an ill-fed people could produce such monstrous amounts of sewage.

After a cold shower back at the Hotel Ras, we took our places in the dining-room once again. The waiter watched me show Samson how a formal table is laid, with multiple pieces of cutlery. He leaned over and adjusted the fly-paper which hung above our table. His shirt had become discolored over time and his bow tie was frayed and bleached from years of wear.

“We used to lay the table like that,” he said wistfully. “That was in the old days, in 1965, when the Hotel Ras was a jewel. Of course I was a young man then, a foolish young man. But I remember those times. The parties, the music, the fine foreign food.”

We ordered spaghetti and boiled potatoes, and the old waiter hurried off to serve a table of rowdy Russians on the other side of the room. I wondered what business had brought them to Dire Dawa. Gold, perhaps. They certainly had a great deal of money to spend, if the number of prostitutes at their table was anything to go by.

Samson tried to count the dead and dying flies cemented to the fly-paper. I looked over at him as he counted energetically, and I congratulated myself. I was pleased with the way he had stood up to the rigours of the cave. He’d hardly complained, even when he realized that, like me, his hair was matted with bat excrement. I suggested we take high-powered torches and return to prize the blocks of stone out of the doorway. A mine-shaft might lie behind the blocked-up entrance. Samson ate his spaghetti without looking up.

“The cave’s secret is obvious,” he said. “The Devil is waiting behind the doorway. He imprisoned the hermit and would do the same to us. As for the bats, they’re the Devil’s servants.”

Unable to muster support for a second assault on the cave, I told Samson that we’d return to the bats if the hyenas of Harar didn’t live up to expectations. We left our bags at the hotel and then hailed a minibus heading for Harar.

The road up to the walled city had been recently constructed by the Chinese. A sea of crooked-horned cattle ran down the olive-black asphalt as we approached, parting only long enough to allow us through. Like the road on which it drove, the minibus was brand-new and we were the only passengers, which made me suspicious. In a country like Ethiopia no vehicle travels if it’s not laden to bursting. The driver, whose face was tormented by a severe nervous tic, said he had won the vehicle in a game of cards. When I quizzed him why he had no other passengers, he changed the subject, declaring that Harar was the Pearl of Ethiopia. Once I’d set eyes on it, he said, I would weep like a child whose mother had died.

I asked him if he’d ever heard the legend of the hyenas and the gold. He let out a shrill cackle of laughter.

“Ah, yes,” he said, “the hyenas – there are thousands of them. They come to the city walls each night, and they take children. Dozens of babies vanish every year. It’s a problem for our peace-loving town.”

He paused to feed the steering-wheel through his hands.

“There’s little we can do. You see, if you kill a hyena, ten more are born.”

“Has it always been so?”

“Yes, of course, since ancient times. Everyone knows that the hyenas were once men like you and me. They were all in love with the Emir’s most beautiful daughter. Each night they’d try to climb up to her bedroom in the palace. The Emir got so enraged that he turned all the suitors into wretched dogs.”

Most sub-Saharan towns have an air of torpor, brought on by the heat and a general eagerness to relax. But Harar has a distinctly Eastern bustle about it. Everyone was busy. Some were counting money. Others were running errands or making butter by shaking plastic bottles full of milk. Even the lines of lepers were hustling for handouts.

In the market, wide cane baskets brimmed with qat, okra, melons and lentils, mangoes and black-bellied fish. There were cupfuls of peanuts on sale too, and macaroni, blocks of gray salt and prickly pears. The range of fruit and vegetables was impressive, but nothing could compare with the range of contraband.

Shops in Ethiopia generally have only a few meager goods on sale, little more than basic foods, Chinese cooking-pots, plastic buckets, rubber boots and scouring pads. But Harar’s proximity to Djibouti has made it a refuge for illicit merchandize. The shops were full of the latest wide-screen TVs, videos, blue jeans, cartons of Marlboro and bottles of Scotch. Wherever I looked, bales of illegal stock were being off-loaded from trucks.

I tried to imagine what Harar was like when Richard Burton, the Victorian adventurer and linguist, reached the walled city in 1854. The British East India Company had commissioned him to explore the Somali coast and he came in disguise, uncertain whether he would be treated as a guest or as a prisoner. In fact he was the first European to visit the town and not be executed, and he later described his journey in First Footsteps in East Africa.

The back streets of the old city were crowded. Old men sat playing draughts with upturned bottle caps, reclining on charpoys or sipping glasses of mint tea. Lines of women in traditional Harari pantaloons loitered outside the many mosques, hoping for alms. There were children too, tottering along with great bundles on their heads, savage dogs snapping at their heels. And everywhere there were donkeys and goats, tattered chickens and underfed dairy cows. Doorways led from the narrow streets into courtyards shaded by sprawling acacia trees. Barbers ran cut-throat razors over cheeks, then rubbed kerosene into the skin. Mothers washed clothes in tubs. The faithful prayed in silence, and in every doorway sat bearded men, their mouths stuffed with qat, their eyes glazed like those of the Lotus-Eaters. By early afternoon, most of Harar’s men were in a trance.

A shopkeeper had told us where to find the hyenas. Outside the city wall a crude whitewashed building stood in the shade of a tree. In its courtyard a shrine had been built, and on the shrine a beggar was sleeping. The ground outside the house was littered with hundreds of jaw-bones and sets of front teeth.

In the courtyard a young woman was squatting, picking nits out of her daughter’s hair. She chatted to Samson for a few minutes without looking him in the face. He told me that we had come to the right place: the woman’s husband was a hyena-man. The woman brought us glasses of sweet tea and said her husband Yusuf would return shortly.

Ten minutes later, a fiendish-looking man arrived at the house. Yusuf had thin lips, a greasy complexion and no eyebrows. He was leading a scrawny cow by a rope. I introduced myself and asked him what exactly a hyena-man’s duties involved. He motioned for me to sit and watch. Wasting no time, he sharpened a pair of long knives against each other and led the cow to a spot beneath the tree. He tied a rope around the neck of the animal and bound another around her front feet. A gentle push and the cow was forced to kneel like a convict before an executioner. She let out a mild bellow of protest but seemed resigned to her fate. Yusuf held one of the blades high above the jugular and recited the traditional prayer: “Bismillah ar-rahman ar-rahim, In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful”. With that he carved the knife into the animal’s neck and a fountain of blood gushed out. The cow collapsed as blood continued to pump on to the ground beneath her. Then, just as I thought the grim event was over, her back legs struck out wildly in a last struggle for life.

Yusuf started to dismember the carcass. He drained the remaining blood into buckets, hacked away the head, carved off the limbs, gouged out the lungs and the offal, and emptied the stomachs of their half-digested grass. Then he chopped the carcass up into small, bite-size chunks.

I asked him why he had slaughtered the beast.

“Every night I feed the hyenas,” he said, “just as my father did and his father did before him. My eldest son Abbas will do the same. It is a tradition in our family, a responsibility we pass through the generations.”

“Is the cow sick?”

“No!” he shouted. “We only feed them the very best cows, and we kill them in a halal way, bleeding them to death.”

“What happens if you don’t feed the hyenas?”

Yusuf’s already sullen expression froze.

“If we do not feed them,” he said, “they’ll descend on Harar and carry away all the children.”

“Have they ever bitten you?”

“So many times,” the hyena-man replied, as his bloody fingers stuffed his mouth with qat. “But better I am bitten than our children eaten.”

“How many hyena-men are there in Harar?”

Yusuf burped loudly.

“At one time there were so many — a dozen or more. The town was very safe because the hyenas were happy. But now the young don’t want to carry on the duty. They don’t realize the terrible price they will pay. If no one feeds the hyenas, the animals will become enraged and will run wild!”

“Who pays for the meat?”

“That’s a big worry,” he replied uneasily. “Some people with young children donate money, but it’s not usually enough. You see how we live, like beggars. I spend all my extra money to make sure the hyenas get the very best meat.”

I asked about the gold.

“These creatures are not mortal,” Yusuf replied. “That’s certain. They are ghosts or jinn. It’s true, they protect Solomon’s golden treasure and keep it from Satan.”

“Have you ever tried to find the treasure?”

“Only a lunatic would risk his life to follow the hyenas to their lair,” Yusuf replied. “Any man who has dared to climb down into their burrows has been torn limb from limb.”

Muttering to himself, Yusuf wandered away. Each night, before he feeds a bullock or a cow to the hyenas, he goes off to wash, to collect his thoughts, to pray and to chew a great deal of qat. He asks God to make sure he’s not bitten badly, to keep the hyenas happy, and to protect the city’s children until dawn.

By nine o’clock the moon was high above Harar, casting ivory light over the whitewashed walls of the house. Yusuf had chewed qat since early afternoon, and his eyes were dilated to capacity. The mild amphetamine gave him the strength he needed to face the hyenas.

Before the feeding began, he hurled the buckets of cow’s blood as far as he could over the baked earth outside his house. The hyenas’ sharp sense of smell would quickly alert them to the killing. Then, sitting on an upturned pail, he started to call the animals by name.

At that moment the first hyena appeared. Cowering and snarling, its head hung low, it darted over to where the blood had been thrown and began to lick the ground feverishly; its mottled fur reflecting in the beam of light from my torch, its eyes glistening like shards of crystal. Yusuf spoke to it in a language I did not understand. Then he tossed over a hunk of offal. When I looked again I saw others, many now, their shadowy forms moving through the darkness like phantoms. Whistling, calling names and chanting mysterious words, the hyena-man lured the animals towards him.

As Yusuf skewered a chunk of roughly cut beef on a stick and held it in his teeth, I stepped back from the buckets of meat. Lurching, snapping, the hair on their spines bristling, the hyenas crept forward. More were joining the pack. Before I knew it there were too many to count accurately, at least sixty, perhaps more. One by one they seized the meat from the stick. Then gradually they forgot their fear and seethed around their master, filling the air with the sound of crazed laughter. From time to time greed would get the better of them, and they would turn on each other. For an hour or more Yusuf continued to feed them, until the entire carcass had been devoured.

Before driving back down to Dire Dawa, Samson and I stopped for some food at a small café. All the tables were occupied by men who were smoking, laughing and chewing piles of fresh qat. We asked three or four of them about Yusuf and the hyenas. To my surprise they all said the same thing. They agreed that without fresh meat, the wild dogs would descend on Harar and butcher the town’s infants. They were convinced that the hyenas guard a treasure more fabulous than any other known to man. Sometimes, they said, a hyena is shot and in its ear is found a gold earring. Lastly, they explained that at night, after he has fed them, Yusuf transforms himself into a hyena and runs off with the pack. Until dawn the next day he reigns as the hyena king.

On hearing this we rushed out of the café and down through the narrow streets to the gate in the old city’s wall. Jumping across a ditch we made our way to Yusuf’s house. The smell of offal and blood still lingered beneath the tree where the hyenas had fed. Samson declared that he’d prove that the tales of superstition were a load of nonsense, and so we scoured Yusuf’s home, the courtyard and the surrounding area. But the hyena-man wasn’t there.

Travel in Africa is generally something to be endured rather than enjoyed. The bus-ride back to Addis Ababa was the kind of experience that makes you question the purpose of even the most well-intentioned journey and long for the luxury of home. Shunning the train, I had insisted that we race back to the capital on the local bus. After numerous false starts, the vehicle rolled out of Dire Dawa at walking pace. It was the middle of the night. Very soon it became clear that the bus had severe mechanical problems. The gearbox was badly in need of repair and the bus had no brake pads.

We discussed the hyenas. Samson was convinced that there was no gold mine or hoard of treasure waiting to be found at Harar. To my irritation he declared that the expedition so far had been a waste of time.

“Gold drives men mad with greed,” he said. “You can see it in their eyes. If there was a treasure,” he went on, Yusuf would be the first man to kill the hyenas and take it all.”

The man sitting in the row behind us was dressed in a patched boiler-suit with a canary-yellow scarf wound around his throat. He was clearly deranged. For fourteen hours he pretended he was a radio announcer, chattering manically into his thumb. Someone whispered that he’d been a soldier during Mengistu’s regime and that he had been tortured. As the hours passed my sympathy wore thin. The other passengers grew sick of his noise as well. They held an impromptu vote, and then threw him off the moving bus.

We broke down more times than I can remember. At each breakdown the occupants trooped off with all their belongings and sat at the side of the road. At the regular checkpoints the vehicle was searched and searched again. Each time, the passengers would struggle to conceal their contraband — cartons of imported cigarettes, pink Lycra shell-suits, fake Ray Bans and tubs of French margarine.

By local standards the journey was not unusual, but in a dusty village called Hirna something happened which confounded me.

The bus was undergoing repairs at a blacksmith’s stall. Samson had gone off to find some food. I wandered about the village aimlessly and a group of children followed in my wake, taunting me with the usual chorus of “Faranji, faranji!” I hardly looked up, but then I noticed that away from the gaggle of children a boy of about ten was standing all alone. He was barefoot, covered in dirt and dressed in rags like the others. But the strange thing about him was his complexion — he was white. In African countries you often see albinos, but I was sure this boy wasn’t one of them and his appearance brought to mind a newspaper story that I’d once read.

In the 1970s a man and a woman turned up at the US Embassy in Addis Ababa, claiming to be American citizens. They explained in Amharic – they spoke no English — that they were brother and sister and that they had been abandoned by their parents twenty years earlier. The woman was called Tegest Gadessa, and her brother was named Mariam. In the intervening years both had been badly treated and Tegest had been raped on several occasions.

The details of the tale are sketchy, but it seems that their parents were driving alone through the Ethiopian highlands when their vehicle broke down. Some people said they were missionaries, others that their father had a contract to search for oil. The mother and her two children stayed with the vehicle, while the father took to the road in search of help. He was never seen again, probably killed for his wallet and his shoes a few miles on. When the car was attacked by shiftas, bandits, the mother died. The boy and girl were taken to a remote village, sold into slavery and given Ethiopian names.

The loss of awareness of one’s identity, a condition called fugue, is very rare and I might not have given the white boy at Hirna further thought had I not remembered the Gadessas’ story. I called the boy over and gave him some bread. He didn’t speak English or Amharic, only Oromo. The other children said he was sleeping in the open and that he’d arrived in the village six months before. Samson confirmed that his speech was slurred and his knowledge of Oromo only mediocre.

Where were his parents? With the other boys taunting him, he replied with growing apprehension. He didn’t know where his family were, he said. He had been left to fend for himself. I asked him to lift up his tattered shirt. His chest and back, although very grimy, were undeniably white.

The more questions we asked, the more frightened the boy became. I slipped him a wad of birr notes and gave him some more food. Then, bursting into tears, he ran away.

Three toots of the horn warned us the bus was about to leave. There was no time to search for the boy, but I decided to report the incident to the British Embassy when we reached Addis Ababa.

For two more days that accursed brakeless bus inched its way towards the capital. At night we stopped at roadside dens where music blared, warm beer flowed freely and prostitutes caroused with clients. Diesel was heavy on the air, and oily mud thick on our shoes. Outside the dens truck drivers slept beneath their vehicles, wrapped in no more than a shamma, a white cotton shawl.

On the second night we stopped at a particularly vile bar and decided to sit outside instead. A meal of injera, Ethiopian bread, and doro wot, spicy chicken stew, was brought out and set before us. As we ate, Samson talked of his home town of Kebra Mengist, of his family and his beloved girlfriend. Did he plan to marry her? He looked somber at the question.

“If God wills it, we will marry,” he said gloomily, “but weddings are expensive. When I mined gold I was rich, but the Devil was inside me. Now that I have returned to God I am penniless.”

After the meal he opened the great Bible at random and started to read. As far as Samson was concerned, a man who didn’t read the Bible had no hope of succeeding at all. He never said so, but I knew he regarded me as an especially wretched case. While he ploughed through the Book of Revelation, I started the life story of an Englishman called Frank Hayter. The book was entitled The Gold of Ethiopia, and it had been published in 1936. With such a title it had seemed an obvious book to buy.

Every few minutes Samson would pause, glance up at the starlit sky, and thank God for walking beside him. Then he’d return to the text, his lips trembling as he mouthed each word. Across the table I had a revelation of my own.

The frontispiece showed a moustachioed Hayter in a pith helmet, a safari shirt and khaki shorts, with a long cigarette-holder between his lips. He was standing against a backdrop of a giant leopard skin. I started to read, and by the end of the first chapter I was hooked.

Frank Hayter was born in 1902, into a farming family on the Welsh borders. From his earliest youth he dreamt of becoming a great white hunter and of traveling to the Dark Continent. The first step towards his goal came when he got a job at the London Zoo as a taxidermist. He took pride in his work and was thrilled when he was selected for a special African expedition. He was to travel to the Abyssinian highlands to collect a hundred baboons for the zoo.

In 1924 Hayter took the boat-train to Marseilles, and then a steamer on to Djibouti. There he caught the train to Dire Dawa, where he made his base. In those days the now quiet railway town was full of shady characters. Greek and Armenian merchants ran every type of scam, and Danakil warriors would meander in from the desert, shields held tight across their chests, testicles dangling round their necks. Hayter even came across the resplendent entourage of the socialite and traveler Rosita Forbes, camped out on the outskirts of Harar.

After buying guns and supplies, and hiring guides and camels, Hayter and his small caravan set out across the desert towards Afar. By day the party was ravaged by heat. At nightfall the jackals arrived. Eventually they reached marshland. “For three hideous days, and three even more hideous nights,” Hayter wrote, “we were in those reeking, fever-stricken swamps, moving not mile by mile, but foot by foot.”

While trapped in the marshes, the caravan was ambushed by Danakils, who were eager to add fresh trophies to their necks. Undaunted, Hayter forced his men to charge through the warriors’ lines. Several were slain and most of the supplies were lost. Remarkably, Hayter managed to complete his mission, rounding up a hundred Abyssinian baboons. But as they were carried away, a monk put a curse on Hayter for stealing sacred animals. Thinking nothing of it, Hayter loaded the baboons on to a ship bound for London. The animals’ crates were lashed to the deck but one night a storm blew up. The waves that broke over the ship split many of the crates, so freeing the baboons which ran wild. The curse had begun to take effect.

In the years that followed, Hayter returned time and again to Ethiopia. He was bewitched by the country. Traveling to the most distant outposts, he struggled to earn a living. He worked as a rat-catcher, as a rare butterfly hunter, as a muleteer and as a debt-collector, but it was as a gold prospector that he made his name.

The 1920s were buoyant times in Ethiopia. Although Menelik II had sought to open up his kingdom to the outside world and to modernize it, the economy was still largely feudal. A handful of Europeans took advantage of the country’s lack of sophistication and introduced luxuries for the few who could afford them, while others leased mining concessions from the government and prospected for gold.

Frank Hayter spent years panning rivers and digging alone in the untamed reaches of western Ethiopia. The locals nicknamed him Abba Kuta, “The Father of Madness”. They’d never come across a man so set on searching for gold. Hayter was certain that the precious metal had been mined in Ethiopia for millennia and that ancient Egyptians must have worked the region even before the time of Solomon. For Hayter, Ethiopia was the “Land of Sheba”, whose queen traveled to Jerusalem to shower the wise king with gold.

Somewhere lost in the Simien Mountains Hayter believed there lay a network of shafts from which fabulous quantities of gold had once been mined. He had heard of monasteries built over cave entrances where the monks refused to let foreigners enter the gold-filled caverns: they were waiting for the “Great White Queen” to return.

Hayter never relinquished his search for what he called “the Queen of Sheba’s mines”, but gradually the curse began to exact its terrible revenge. Each day, he grew a little weaker. A once athletic young man was slowly becoming a physical wreck. Then, after years of solitary prospecting, he stumbled across a series of cave entrances which led to mine-shafts. The doorways, faced with carved stone, stood high on the ledge of a remote mountain called Tullu Wallel.

Cautiously, Hayter entered one of the portals, fearful of disturbing a wild animal in its lair. Deep in one of the shafts, he said, there lay a fabulous treasure. But before he could cart away the gold and other riches, the curse of the baboons struck for the last time. A river which flowed through the cavern suddenly swelled to a torrent and Hayter was forced to escape. By the time he had returned with fresh supplies, the entrance to the caves had been mysteriously sealed. However hard he tried, he could not break in.

Samson had never heard of Tullu Wallel; nor had anyone else I asked. But he did agree that Ethiopian curses are something to be taken very seriously. He’d seen with his own eyes a cursed man die a slow and painful death. The spell had been cast by a high-ranking priest on a shopkeeper whose only crime was to enter a church wearing shoes.

By the time we reached Addis Ababa I was determined to find out more about Frank Hayter and Tullu Wallel, and I knew there was only one man who might be able to help. Dr Richard Pankhurst has spent most of his life in Ethiopia. His grandmother, Emmeline Pankhurst, was the founder of the suffragette movement, and his mother was equally spirited, moving to Ethiopia in the 1930s in order to help support the resistance against the invading Italians. Dr Pankhurst has written extensively on Ethiopian society and history, and is regarded as the foremost expert on all matters Ethiopian.

Tracking down the distinguished scholar was far easier than I had expected. He lives with his wife and their dogs in a cottage on the outskirts of Addis Ababa. An hour after speaking on the telephone, he pulled the front door wide open and ushered me in for tea.

We sat in a conservatory at the back of the house, drinking mint tea and nibbling at slices of toast spread with home-made jam.

Despite this veneer of Englishness I very soon realized that my host had an unusual sensitivity towards the African continent and, in particular, Ethiopia.

Dr Pankhurst has spent most of his life traveling in the country’s remote areas and he speaks faultless Amharic. I was worried that he might regard my search for Solomon’s gold as frivolous. I did not know much about Ethiopian culture and so far I’d only been as far as Harar. So when I was invited to talk about my project, I gave the details uneasily.

Pankhurst stared into space for a few moments.

“Ethiopia has a great history of gold,” he said at last. “Herodotus, Cosmos, Agathachides, Barradas – they all spoke of it.”

I asked if he’d heard of Tullu Wallel or Frank Hayter.

“Tullu Wallel is not far from Beni Shangul, as I recall,” he said. “Historically the area was renowned for the quality of its gold. Menelik seized the province in 1886 to exploit its rich mineral resources. The most valuable licence was granted to a prospector called Ilg. He found what he believed was an ancient Egyptian gold mine at Nejo. As for Frank Hayter,” he continued, “yes, I know the name. He wrote some letters to my mother. Like her, he was against the Italian Fascist invasion of Ethiopia.”

Pankhurst paused to sip his tea.

“Even so, as a credible point of reference, I’d have to say that Hayter is rather unreliable.”

Later that day I thumbed through my books, searching for the references that Pankhurst had mentioned. Agathachides, a Greek geographer writing in about 140 bc, told how prisoners-of-war were used to mine gold. “Vast numbers of them are bound in fetters,” he wrote, “and compelled to work night and day without pause, with no hope of escape. For they are under savage soldiers who speak a foreign tongue.”

Cosmos, a Greek-speaking merchant — writing seven centuries after Agathachides — said that “a land of frankincense and gold lies at the farthest end of Ethiopia”. Arriving at the Axumite port of Adulis in about ad 524, he heard that gold was mined by the Agau people in the west and bartered through a system known by anthropologists as “dumb commerce”. Every other year, the king of the Axumites sent forth his agents to trade with the Agau. The agents arrived with a great entourage, bringing oxen, iron, salt and other merchandize to exchange for gold. They would set up camp, and surround it with thorny fences. Oxen would be slaughtered and the meat hung on the thorns along with other goods. During the night the Agau would take what they wanted and leave nuggets of gold in their place.

A thousand years after Cosmos, the Spanish explorer and patriarch Juan de Bermúdez traveled west along the Nile. Bermúdez, nicknamed “the Lord of Wealth”, had become famous for discovering the Caribbean island of Bermuda which is named after him. (He actually found the island by chance, when he was shipwrecked on a voyage from Virginia.) In his chronicles of Ethiopia, he wrote that the land was barren but that the soil was red, for it was two parts gold and one part earth. The precious metal was more common than iron, and was fashioned into wondrous objects by the locals.

From the earliest times explorers have been fascinated by Ethiopia and particularly by its western regions and the barbarous tribes who once inhabited them. Famed for their strange rituals and their expertise in mining gold, the tribes of Wollega and Beni Shangul are the stuff of legend. It is no surprise that for people like Frank Hayter — who was inspired by Rider Haggard’s novel – western Ethiopia was an obvious place to search for King Solomon’s mines.

Though Pankhurst had dismissed Hayter as unreliable, I was gripped with an overwhelming desire to follow in his footsteps. I knew that my chances of success were slim, but the idea of seeking out the mountain seemed important. I searched for Hayter in my other books but only one mentioned him. In the Land of Sheba, written by Captain E.J. Bartleet, Hayter’s contemporary and friend, tells the story of Tullu Wallel. Opposite the text, there is a black-and-white photograph of a cave and a shaft entrance. Beneath it, the caption reads: The entrance to the Queen of Sheba’s caves.

FOUR

The Mines

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu

We must have been mad to swap the comfort of our beds for the snarl of the bus station. Long before dawn we turned up to search for the bus heading south to Samson’s home town of Kebra Mengist, walking through ankle-deep mud and wishing we were anywhere but here. A dozen battered buses were being mobbed by crowds of would-be passengers, all of them frantically trying to get aboard. Their belongings were wrapped in blankets and held above their heads, as if they were wading through a flood. The engine of each bus roared wildly in competition but, as I’d already discovered, noise had nothing to do with reliability.

Our vehicle rolled up at high speed, its single headlamp lighting the way. A sea of pickpockets and ticket touts, priests, soldiers and porters lurched towards it. Behind them all, soft-spoken Samson and I tiptoed through the mud as bravely as we dared.

A few birr were sufficient to give us the pick of the wooden benches. As all Ethiopians know, the best place to sit is at the front, and the worst is beside the rear door. We stuffed our bags under our seats. Samson had spent his first wages on a Chinese-made tartan bag. He winced when I made fun of the purchase but he wasn’t dispirited. The case had somehow transformed him. He was no longer a taxi-driver. Instead he had become a traveler. As he drew my attention to the bag’s stitching, a tidal wave of people swept up into the bus. At first I couldn’t make out individual passengers, for it was still dark. But gradually the dawn brought detail to their faces. Many looked fearful at the thought of the journey ahead, as they struggled to find space for their children and their baggage. No one but me seemed to care about the bus’s dilapidated state, or that its driver looked like an axe-murderer.

At home I’m the first to complain at the prospect of a road trip. The hum of radial tires on tarmac and the tedium of the motorway are enough to drive me to road rage. But elsewhere in the world a long drive is quite different. The wooden seats, the exhaust fumes, the loud discordant music and the press of passengers, fattened chickens and dingy sacks are only minor irritants. What matters is survival.

On an African road trip you’re a gambler. Every passenger has a lump in his throat, like the man who slips one bullet into the chamber of a revolver, spins it and holds the weapon to his temple. You pay your money and you take your chances. As in Russian Roulette, the thrill lies in surviving.

Peer out of the grimy windows if you dare, and you will see the wreckage of those who have lost the gamble. A great truck laden with crates hurtles past. Minutes later you pass the same vehicle, lying on its side at the foot of a ravine. Its crates have been reduced to matchwood and their contents lie strewn across the ground. The drivers body sprawls out of the cab’s open door. The vultures begin to descend, and soon locals from the nearest village swarm down like locusts to pick the wreckage clean. Within a matter of hours everything that can be carried away has gone. The merchandize is the first to go. Then the splinters of wood from the crates are taken and the diesel is siphoned from the tank. The wheels are plundered, then the truck is stripped of its engine, its bodywork, wiring, wing-mirrors and seats. Soon all that is left is the chassis. Ethiopian hillsides are littered with them. A serious crash is something to be relished, an unexpected bounty for the whole village to share.

There was a time when Ethiopia’s roads were safe, but Menelik II, the great modernizer, heard news of a new-fangled invention. The electric chair might have been a disappointment, but he’d been told of another toy — the motor-car — and he wanted one desperately. Word spread far and wide that the first man to drive a car to the Emperor would be rewarded beyond his wildest dreams.

Three thousand miles away an Englishman called Bede Bentley heard of the challenge. He was already a respected adventurer and had fought against the Boers and against the infamous Mad Mulla in Somaliland. He’d even proposed building a motorized armoured vehicle, which he called a “tank”. But he’d made the mistake of sending the designs to Lord Kitchener, who thanked him politely and promptly stole them.

In 1907 Bentley bought the newest model of Siddeley motorcar and had it painted in green and white stripes. The expedition’s party included Bentley’s uniformed chauffeur Reginald Wells, a Somali gentleman who went by the name of George, and a brindle bulldog called Bully. A few supplies were loaded up, and the adventure began. Soon after leaving England, Bentley heard that a German team had set off at the same time and were racing them to reach Menelik first.

After covering the roughest terrain ever navigated by a motor-car, Bentley, the chauffeur, the Somali and the brindle bulldog arrived at Menelik’s palace in Addis Ababa. The journey had taken them many months, but they’d beaten the Germans and upheld British honor. Best of all, the Emperor was delighted with his new toy.

The landscape flattened once we descended from Addis Ababa and we drove through rolling ranges of farmland, edged with eucalyptus trees and peppered with low tukul, traditional huts. In the yellowing afternoon sunlight oxen pulled ploughs, goaded on with pointed sticks by farmers who had worked since dawn. The fields were tiny, divided up again and again as each generation received its inheritance. In some, tall strands of maize rustled in the breeze. In others grew teff, the grain from which injera is made; it was feathery like pampas grass, swaying as the wind rippled through its long stems. Young girls, some of them no more than four or five years old, trudged barefoot along the roads and across the fields, stacks of firewood on their heads. For them, childhood is an apprenticeship for a life of extreme hardship. In Ethiopia it is the women and children who do most of the work.

The bus passed a small town’s quarry. Its ragged laborers were all old women ferrying blocks of dusty stone on their heads. Nearby their overseer, a man, sat primly on a cushioned chair. When I commented on the plight of the women Samson made excuses. The government was rotten, he said. It encouraged men to do nothing.

“It is the way of our country Old ways cannot change.”

From time to time the bus would stop on the outskirts of a village. Soldiers would frisk everyone and then pillage their luggage. Sometimes they would seize a passenger at random and beat him. Samson said that the ploy was used to frighten all the rest. If so, it worked. The other passengers shuffled their feet and stared down at the ground, too frightened to stand up for the innocent.

Sometimes the stops were more pleasant. Droves of hawkers would come crowding up to the windows, holding up their wares for sale. The passengers would buy all they could afford: baked maize and peanuts sold in twists of paper, hair combs and oranges, unripe plums and roasted barley, rubber shoes, cooking pots and packets of seeds.

The highlight of the bus journey was the fight. As anyone who’s ever taken an Ethiopian bus knows, there is an unwritten rule that the windows must remain firmly closed. I was never quite sure of the reasoning behind this, but the only time I opened a window Samson told me to shut it quickly before I was beaten up. Late in the afternoon, a quiet, unassuming man decided to open the window beside him just a fraction to let in a little fresh air. The man next to him immediately leapt up and began to shout. At first the two men just yelled at each other, but then they started to brawl. Within seconds, fists were flying, nails were slashing and sticks were raining down. The commotion, which had begun at the far end of the bus, spread like wildfire as all the other passengers took sides. The driver looked in the mirror and clapped his hands. If they didn’t stop at once, he shouted, he’d drive the bus off an approaching cliff.

Despite the brawl, the cramped seats and the lurching motion of the bus, I found myself brimming with energy. Frank Hayter’s story and his discovery of a mine-shaft could have come from Rider Haggard’s own pen. Hayter’s book spoke of ferocious tribes and ravening wild beasts, of hunters without fear, of treasure maps and gold beyond measure.

From what I could make out, Hayter never prospected in the south of Ethiopia, perhaps because the rich southern seam, known as the Adola greenstone belt, was not discovered until after the Second World War. In Hayter’s time, prospectors worked the rivers and mountains of the west, and the great gold seam on the Eritrean border.

The problem with searching for ancient gold mines is that, like any mineral, gold can be mined out. Hundreds of thousands of slaves would have been able to work through entire hillsides, extracting almost all the ore. In the same way, a man in search of oil wells in three thousand years’ time will probably find not a trace of oil left.

As we drove Samson rambled on about Kebra Mengist. He said his home town was the finest place in Ethiopia, blessed with the best food, the cleanest water, the most beautiful girls and the most chivalrous townsfolk. As for the gold mines, he claimed they were very extensive indeed. I was nervous that a foreigner arriving on the scene, even escorted by a local, would be regarded with suspicion. Samson said that Kebra Mengist was his town, and the miners were his people. They knew him and he knew them. He would protect me.

Late afternoon became early evening, and the bus rolled on. The earth turned from red clay to sand and back to red clay again. Gradually the scenery changed. The land became more fertile, dotted with banana plants and tall trees bearing flame-red flowers. The huts were different, too, their walls fashioned from wickerwork, with a pot woven into the apex of each thatched roof. Until then, most of the huts we had seen were made from wattle and daub.

Outside each hut a woman sat plaiting fibers to make baskets. As the road climbed again, we looked down across a swathe of emerald grassland rolling towards the horizon. When I tried to describe the lushness of the landscape in my journal, I knew that no one would believe me when I got home. We think of Ethiopia as a place of starvation, where the land is barren and the soil scorched by drought. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Ten miles from Kebra Mengist the bus pulled over at a police checkpoint. We trooped out and stood in line with our luggage. In the flickering light of a pressure lamp all the bags were inspected, and the passengers frisked. Then one of the soldiers climbed up into the bus and searched it. He whistled loudly to his officer. Contraband had been found. A moment later the driver and his companion were being marched away. The search was at an end, said the officer. They’d caught the culprits. The rest of us could go. I had heard that smugglers sometimes slip their goods under the seats of innocent travelers, and one glance at the driver’s face suggested that he wasn’t an innocent. Still, I asked, could he not be allowed to take us the last few miles into town? Quite impossible, came the reply. The driver was transporting contraband and had to be punished. So, like refugees walking with their worldly possessions, we took to the road. I regretted bringing so much equipment with me but none of the other passengers complained. Perhaps they were just thankful that it wasn’t they who were locked up in a cell.

Fortunately the moon was full and it led us like a beacon through the darkness. The road was flooded with soupy gray mud and we trudged through it like soldiers broken by defeat, our packs heavy on our backs.

Three hours after leaving the checkpoint, we reached Kebra Mengist and staggered into the Holiday Hotel. It doubled as a butchery — a bull’s heart had been nailed to a post in front of the building, in a crude advertisement. Drenched in mud and aching, I was too tired to complain. I flopped down on the mattress in my room, still in my boots and filthy clothes, and fell into a deep sleep.

When I awoke hours later, the sun was high above Kebra Mengist. My back and legs still ached and I knew that I needed some pampering. Samson wasn’t in his room, so I walked through the muddy streets in search of some luxury.

Having listened to Samson’s enthusiastic description of his home, and knowing that on the map the town was s’ ed prominently, I had had high hopes of Kebra Mengist. A couple of minutes’ walk was enough to shatter the illusion. There was no electricity and no running water. No petrol was on sale and there was no tarmac on the roads. Most of the houses had crumbling walls and corrugated iron roofs, rusted through and pocked with holes. The only place to eat was a bar where a dozen or so prostitutes were already touting for business. I sat on the veranda, ordered something to eat and tried to keep the flies away from my face.

Like so many towns in Ethiopia, Kebra Mengist was living from day to day. No one gave any thought to the weeks or years ahead. They were making do as best they could, struggling through the present. The only certainty was that life would get worse. The streets were teeming with people, many of them drifting desperately from one place to the next offering a single object for sale.

One woman clutched a bruised apple; others had only a stalk of maize, a worn-out tire, a bar of soap, a basket, or a handful of eggs. And here and there boys pushed home-made barrows over the rocky red dirt, on the lookout for odd jobs.

A few feet from where I was sitting a cow was licking a discarded engine block. There were goats, too, foraging for non-existent scraps. And all around there were beggars, wrapped in a web of rags, some blind, others lame or maimed with leprosy.

I sat swishing the flies and sipping sweet tea, and wondered what had happened to Samson. Perhaps he’d sloped off to see his family or had hurried away to church.

Then, in the far distance, I spotted a well-dressed man walking towards the town centre. Every few moments he would pause to greet an old friend, pressing his shoulders to theirs, kissing cheeks, nodding in satisfaction. He seemed to know everyone. His head was held high and there was a spring in his step. But most surprising was his get-up. He was wearing a mint-green three-piece suit and a scarlet tie. I screwed up my eyes to get a better focus. With each step, the figure became more familiar. It was Samson.

He saw me and, rather sheepishly, ambled up to the veranda where I was sitting, still caked in dried mud. There had seemed little point in changing my clothes or washing if we were going to go down a mine.

“This is my home town,” he said grandly, “I have a reputation here. And I’ve been in the capital, so people are asking how well I have done for myself.”

I could sense every young man in Kebra Mengist packing their bags for Addis Ababa at that very moment.

“Aren’t you leading them astray? After all, Addis is awash with people from small towns who can’t get jobs.”

Samson straightened his tie and dusted an imaginary piece of fluff from his shoulder.

“Look at this place,” he said gently. “If you lived here, wouldn’t you want a little hope as well?”

Tesfaye was Kebra Mengist’s barber, an Ethiopian version of Sweeney Todd. He’d have pulled your teeth out, slit your throat and chopped you up for pies before you knew it. His hands were muscular, their veins thick with blood, their nails chipped, with dirt beneath the tips. He invited me to sit in his chair, and he sharpened his scissors on a strip of black leather. They hadn’t been used for months. In times of hardship people cut their own hair. Samson told me to watch my throat. Tesfaye had, he said, worked in Mengistu’s torture-rooms. It didn’t surprise me in the least.

While Tesfaye chopped my hair, Samson strolled about town in his suit, showing it off to his friends. He was enjoying his newfound status as a celebrity, and he seemed to have forgotten that we were just passing through on our way to the gold mines. When I reminded him of the project, he cupped his hands over my ears and replied that he was doing research. Before we could set out for the illegal mines at Shakiso, we were expected to put some money into the local economy. If we didn’t spend enough cash in town, he said the locals would lay a trap for our vehicle, push it off a cliff, and strip our bodies of their clothes. I was about to curse Samson for talking such garbage, but one look at Tesfaye stopped me. Then, to my astonishment, the barber put down his blunt scissors, picked up his pet tabby cat and blew kisses in her ear.

We returned to the local bar. I was expected to buy drinks for a string of regulars. Samson said the place was notorious as the haunt of shiftas. Satisfy them, he said, and we’d go unhindered.

On the porch there sat a tall man whose face was painted white, and spotted with black and red dots. His shirt was open to the waist, revealing a chest smothered in gray ash. He was drinking a glass of tea, and he looked very much out of place. I was overcome with a great urge to stand and stare. I couldn’t help myself. Samson said the man was from the Karo tribe — a people of strong traditions, who hail from the south-west of Ethiopia. I would have asked a dozen questions, but Samson tugged me into the bar by the collar.

The drinking den was like so many others on the African continent. Before my eyes could adjust to the dark, fly-ridden room, the smell of warm beer, vomit and urine hit me squarely in the face. Around the edges of the room, a handful of prostitutes sat looking bored. Business was slow. In the middle of the room twenty or so middle-aged men were slouched at tables. One of them was polishing a knife blade on his sleeve, and most had scarred faces. They were a rough bunch by any standards, and they were clearly suspicious of strangers.

“Foreigners don’t come to Kebra Mengist,” said Samson in a worried tone. “So when they see a white face they get nervous, and when they get nervous they get violent.”

“So what should I do?”

Samson rubbed his thumb and forefinger together.

“Spend some more money,” he said, “buy more beer and treat them to prostitutes. Everyone here knows that spies are stingy men. And besides, if they’re enjoying themselves with the women they’ll leave us alone.”

So I asked Samuel, who owned the bar, to tell every whore in town to hurry over. His customers were to be treated to as much beer as they could drink, followed by a bawdy time in the back rooms. A wave of anticipation rolled through the joint. The prostitutes winked at me all at once, grateful for my philanthropy, and the male customers raised their beer bottles high above their heads in a drunken salute.

Samuel took my cash and nodded solemnly. I’d be safe from vagabonds on the road, he said. He had learned English from a book, and he pieced together his sentences with exquisite care. When he had counted my money four times, he asked how much he’d need to bribe the American Embassy to give him a visa. Would a hundred birr be enough?

Before I could reply, the door was swung back and two dozen working women strutted in, flaunting their thighs and their breasts, and pouting lasciviously. The drinkers saluted again. I’ve never seen so many grinning, glowing faces in a single room. Samson suggested we leave while the men were occupied, so we made a hasty exit.

To my surprise, a vehicle was waiting to transport us to the mines. It was owned by Peter, one of Samson’s school friends. He was a thin, soft-spoken man and in the first minute of our meeting he told me three times that he was a Christian. He thanked the Lord for bringing us to Kebra Mengist, and then he thanked Him again for blessing his friend Samson with such good fortune.

At some point in the recent past Peter’s Toyota van had been in a head-on collision. Its front was hideously disfigured. In any other country the vehicle would have been condemned, and flattened into a block of steel for recycling without so much as a second thought. The doors had been welded shut, which meant you had to climb in and out through the windows. The steering-wheel had been replaced by an iron spike, a severe hazard in itself. As for the windscreen, it was so cracked that it seemed miraculous it hadn’t shattered.

Peter agreed that there”d been trouble on the roads and said he’d lost a wagon-load of passengers. The carnage had been terrible but, thankfully, his vehicle had been resurrected from the dead.

The ends of two wires were touched together to create a spark. A moment later and dense blue diesel fumes were billowing around us. Then we were off, crawling out of Kebra Mengist and heading south-east towards the mines.

The first small community we reached was Shakiso, a frontier town in the gold-mining belt. We halted for a cup of freshly roasted coffee, while Peter carried out emergency repairs to his vehicle.

The main street was lined with shops selling Western contraband – Walkmans and televisions, Swiss Army knives, Russian vodka, lacy underwear, Marlboro cigarettes and CDs. Profits from the gold mines put luxury purchases within the reach of ordinary men.

There were a few vehicles too. Most of them were painted yellow and belonged to Midroc, the only company licensed to mine the Adola gold seam, at a place nearby called Lega Dembi. Midroc was founded and owned by Mohammed Al-Amoudi. In fact Al-Amoudi seems to own almost every major enterprise in Ethiopia. His photograph greets you wherever you go in the country, smiling widely, with a scrap of beard on his cheeks. As well as the gold mine, he owns the leather tanneries, the foreign car dealerships, the main construction company, mineral companies and soft drink franchises, office blocks and even the new Sheraton Hotel in Addis Ababa. I had known that getting access to the legal gold mine at Lega Dembi would be very difficult. Everyone I asked, including Samson, had said there wasn’t any hope. Even so, before leaving Addis I had sent a gushing letter to the chief executive of Midroc, asking for permission to visit. But African bureaucracy is never fast moving, and in the end I had decided to forget about Lega Dembi and concentrate instead on gaining entry to the illegal mines.

Shakiso doesn’t feature in guidebooks, nor was it on my map. In more usual circumstances it would have been a place to avoid. The central bar in town was full of surly customers. I assumed they were miners, but they made the shiftas at Kebra Mengist’s drinking den look like saints. We sat down at an empty table near the far wall and waited for the coffee. A man of about forty reeled in, already drunk. He made for our table and ordered a bottle of beer. The whites of his eyes were straw yellow and his brow was a mesh of interwoven lines. When he spoke, his lips trembled and splayed outward, revealing flushed gums. I paid for his drink, hoping it would ease the tension. Then I asked his name. He spat on the floor. Names, he said, were for friends, and I was no friend of his. Samson kicked me under the table and suggested we leave before there was trouble.

Two hours later, when the sun was high in the sky, we saw the first signs of mining. A row of elderly women were panning a river, swirling the dirt with a smooth sweep of the arms. Around their necks were leather pouches in which they kept the precious gold dust. We had reached the Adola greenstone belt, Ethiopia’s richest gold seam.

The authorities had licensed the one official mine at Lega Dembi, but they were powerless to stop the dozens of small illegal mines dotted throughout the region. The illegal mines all focus on alluvial gold, that is gold which has been washed down by rivers and which is panned from the silt. Solomon’s miners would have used the same technique, for blast-mining didn’t develop until the nineteenth century. Modern gold mining concentrates on breaking down the rock around a gold seam, pulverizing it into dust and extracting the metal from that dust. It is, however, an extremely expensive process. In most places alluvial deposits do not contain enough gold to make modern, large-scale industrial mining worthwhile.

Samson warned me that the illegal mines were dangerous — a place where there was no honor, no brotherhood of men, and where Christianity was a dirty word.

As he spoke, I made out a line of thatched huts in the distance. It was hard to see much through the windscreen’s cracks, but it looked as if we had reached a village. The driver said the encampment had been deserted. The gold had run out, so the miners had moved on a few miles down the road. The empty village, its ghostly huts sloughing their walls and roofs like an unwanted skin, was my first glimpse of a mined-out seam. With so much at stake, the miners were willing to leave perfectly good huts and build new ones elsewhere.

Eventually we spied another village on the horizon called Bedakaysa. It was framed by eucalyptus trees which grew straight up from the ocher-red earth, and above it buzzards soared, riding the thermals of the late afternoon air. The village was made up of dozens of simple thatched huts bordered by enset, or “false” banana trees. And this time there were people, hundreds of them.

A river flowed between us and the village, but it was almost dry: its waters had been redirected to feed panning pools. There must have been about sixty houses, each roofed with long, gray grass, packed cheek by jowl. Narrow plumes of smoke rose from cooking fires, and there was the occasional shriek of a child or the bark of a dog protecting its territory. The closer we got, the more people we saw. They were like ants on the jungle floor, all busying themselves with work.

Samson said the community was no more than a year or two old.

“They come and they go,” he explained, “rising up from nothing, becoming more and more sordid, and less Christian, as the miners waste their money on drink, gambling and girls. Then, when the gold dries up, the village breaks down and moves on.”

“The Devil is all around us,” added Peter. “Be careful that he doesn’t tempt you.”

We unloaded our belongings from the van. Samson had not wanted to stay in the encampment, but I’d insisted. How could I appreciate the community, I asked, without experiencing it at first hand?

After we’d stopped Peter had kept the engine running. When I looked round again to say goodbye, he had gone, leaving us with no choice but to enter the village.

In moments of great uncertainty on my travels, I have always felt that something is protecting me, that I will come to no harm. Samson would say that God is watching me. I am not so sure, but, as we stumbled down the hill towards the mining village, I sensed a protective arm embracing me.

A voice was calling out to us from the river bank.

“Sammy! Sammy!”

One of the miners had recognized Samson and ran up to us. The two men embraced, nudging their shoulders together in the usual prolonged Ethiopian greeting. The miner was about my age but he was built on a superhuman scale, standing as tall as a black bear on its hind legs. His arms were like pistons, capable of exerting a great force for a long period of time. A halo of hair ran round the outer edges of his balding head in a natural tonsure. His skin was very dark, almost the color of Indian ink. Samson introduced him as Noah, a miner whom he’d known since childhood. Noah came from Gambela in western Ethiopia, on the border with Sudan, a land where all men are as tall as trees and as dark as charcoal, or so he said. Then, without another word, he heaved my army kit bags on to his back and led the way into the encampment.

An Ethiopian mining village has to be seen to be believed. The camp was like the Wild West – stakes were high, hard liquor flowed, and the value of human life was almost non-existent. Samson likened it to a diabolical inferno. I followed Noah between the rows of thatched huts, struggling to keep up with his giant strides. Many of the huts were drinking dens selling home-brewed araki, marked by an upturned can on a pole outside. In others, prostitutes were servicing the needs of young men whose bodies were raw and aching after a shift in the tunnels. More still were packed with gamblers, waging gold dust on the turn of a card.

The main street was a quagmire of mud where forlorn dogs roamed. The place stank of sewage. Despite the dirt and the depravity, there was an air of excitement, a sense that fortune was within any man’s grasp. As well as bars, there were other entrepreneurs too. One man was selling old clothes from a wagon. A neighbouring stall offered bruised vegetables, and next to that there was a cobbler who would repair flip-flops for one birr.

Our arrival in the village attracted attention. A gang of drunken young men clapped and whistled when they spotted us and began to follow us, but Noah threatened to tear them apart with his hands. He dumped my bags and Samson’s Chinese tartan case in his hut and said we were welcome to stay there. The room was entered through a low doorway outside which there was a home-made rack for shoes. The floor was carpeted in spotlessly clean nylon sacking. Above the bed hung a hand-crafted cross, and beside it stood a row of worn paperback prayer books sandwiched between a pair of bricks. Pride of place was given to a bulky black stereo powered by a car battery. There was no electricity in the village. Noah reminded us to watch out for thieves. Nothing was safe, he said. Then he led us up the hill to the mine.

The crater almost was the size of a football pitch and about a hundred and fifty feet deep at its lowest point. It had been carved out of the rocky African dirt, a fragment at a time. A thousand shades of golden brown reflected in the bright sunlight. The miners were covered in mud. I hardly noticed them at first, but as my eyes adjusted, what I saw took my breath away.

Thousands of men, women and children were digging with their hands. A few had basic implements, shovels or iron pikes. All were barefoot, dressed in ragged wet clothes, their skin glistening with sweat, and all were laboring desperately to dig out the earth and haul it to the surface. It was a sight out of the Old Testament, and at that moment the notion of Solomon’s mines fell sharply into focus. For the first time I understood what I was searching for.

In the village I’d been the cause of great interest, but at the mine itself the workers were too busy to look up. Each had a role to play. If one person paused in his work the system would begin to break up, then production would slacken and money would be lost.

At the bottom of the pit were the diggers. Many of them were women and children. They’d chiselled their way further and further down, through layers of clay, rock and earth. You could see the gold seam clearly. It was a honey-yellow strata, which started about thirty feet down. The upper layers of soil had been piled in a bulwark around the edge of the crater, and the precious vein was being chipped away and carried to the panning pools. Moving such an enormous quantity of earth called for brutish manpower. Hundreds of men, perched on fragile ledges, tossed the pans of soil from one to the next in a giant relay. Their biceps were savagely over-developed, enabling them to transfer a forty-pound pan from the bottom of the crater to the surface in thirty seconds flat.

Once at ground level, the gold ore began another relay, to the panning pools. A great deal of water is necessary for panning, which is the usual way to extract specks of gold from an alluvial lode. The river had been dammed, creating a large pond edged with rushes and water hyacinth. A series of sluices had been built to filter out rocks and to allow a constant stream of fresh water into the pool. In fact, the system hasn’t changed much since it was invented by the ancient Egyptians five thousand years ago.

Most of the panning was done by women and children, using round, wooden pans about three feet wide. A gentle sluicing movement removes unwanted dirt and, if you’re lucky, leaves a fine crescent of gold dust at the bottom of the pan.

The ancient Egyptians turned panning into an art form, and it was from them that Solomon’s kingdom learnt the technique. In the late nineteenth century, gold tailings in the Egyptian desert were discovered and processed by archaeologists. They found that almost no gold had been left by the miners working five millennia before. But the cost was high. The Nubian Desert is littered with human bones, no doubt those of slaves who succumbed to the heat and the toil. The main difference between Solomon’s mines and the illegal ones in Ethiopia is slavery, or rather the lack of it. The Ethiopian miners were working for themselves. There was no need for whips and threats of death. Greed was their master, goading them to work from before sunrise to dusk.

Noah led the way from the main crater to another area, where many hundreds more were working in a labyrinth of tunnels. The openings were like well-shafts, dozens of them stretching out over a distance of about three hundred feet. Etching out smaller, individual seams, the lone workers labor in an underworld where cave-ins are a constant threat. Samson said that every year the narrow tunnels entomb many young men. But for the men without fear the rewards are high. If they find a nugget, they swallow it or stuff it up their rectum, for retrieval later. In the mining camps, trust doesn’t exist.

When I asked how much precious metal had been found, I was always greeted with anxious looks. No one would admit to finding any gold at all, even when everyone knew they had. Although the gold was supposed to be shared out equally in a loose co-operative, everyone lied, cheated and stole from their neighbours. The only people who’d boast were the younger men. They did so to impress the whores, whom they hoped would give them a free servicing. But, as the girls knew very well, anyone boasting about what they’d found, hadn’t found anything at all.

FIVE

Children of the Devil

“Where the south declines towards the setting sun lies the country called Ethiopia, the last inhabited land in that direction. There gold is obtained in great plenty.”

Herodotus, The Histories

Dusk falls swiftly in southern Ethiopia, casting a cape of blackness over the gold mines. The air gradually cools and then comes alive with tremendous bats. Noah said they were the spirits of the miners killed in cave-ins. Enraged at being cheated by death, they were desperate to bite their companions who still worked in the mines.

Soon after dusk the strong young men slunk up from the mine-shafts and returned to the village. Even for them it was far too dangerous to stay out after dark. Who knew what a shaft miner had swallowed? Given the right circumstances there were plenty of would-be murderers eager to find out.

“They slit your throat with a razor-blade or a sharpened belt buckle,” Samson explained. “Then they cut open your intestines and sometimes even your bowels.”

“Very messy,” added Noah.

“How does the murderer get away with it if he’s covered in blood?”

“That’s not the problem,” said Noah. “If he’s found gold he’ll buy some araki and everyone will forgive him. The problem is if he doesn’t find anything and he can’t afford a few rounds of drinks.”

There was no church at the encampment, a fact which made Samson increasingly restless. He said he could smell depravity in the air. Noah, also a staunch Christian, had proposed erecting a house of worship, but the other miners had scoffed at the idea.

They said a church was a waste of money, and proposed instead that a team of them should be sent up to the northern state of Tigray to bring back new prostitutes. The ones at the mines were, by all accounts, riddled with venereal disease. Tigrayan women have angelic features and copper skin, and are considered by many people to be the most beautiful women in Africa. A large number of the prostitutes I’d seen at the mining village, not to mention in the bars in Kebra Mengist and Shakiso, were Tigrayan. Samson told me that prostitutes usually work in another region, for fear of bringing shame on their families.

Without a church to pray in, Samson and Noah sat on a bench in the bar and talked about Jesus. They swapped stories of his life and drew morals from his teachings. A pressure lamp lit up the room like daylight, causing the huddle of miners to blink nervously. They preferred the shadows. An empty glass was sitting before every one of them. Bizarrely, the walls of the bar were papered with The Straits Times, the Singapore daily. Beside my head was an interesting feature about black magic rites performed by Dyak headhunters in Malaysia. I pointed it out, but no one was interested. They had only two things on their mind — araki, and how to get some more of it.

Noah said that little gold had been found that day, so I bought a round of drinks. The araki was served warm, straight from the still. Quite often a batch is so strong it turns to a crude form of poison, knocking out everyone who drinks it. Quality control is non-existent.

Samson and Noah shunned the araki and pulled out their Bibles. I respected them for staying faithful to their religion in what were testing circumstances. They were like missionaries in a foreign land. But they knew as well as I that saving souls and spreading God’s Word was a sure-fire way of getting themselves killed. What surprised me most was that Samson had managed to wrench himself from the debauched spiral of life at the mine.

“Gold mining is like a drug,” he said. “The more gold you get, the more you need to excite you. Your closest friends are dying around you, but you don’t give them a second thought. All you can think about is araki, Tigrayan whores and the meaningless knick-knacks you’re going to buy.”

Samson’s father had stressed the value of education to his sons.

Studying, he’d told Samson as a youngster, was the key which could open the doors to life. I was struck by the clear goals Samson had set himself, now that he had escaped from the world of prospecting. In his spare time, he was learning computer programming, a skill which he had heard would be useful if and when he got to America.

“For years I wasted every moment working at a mine like this,” he said, pressing his Bible to his stomach. “I turned my back on my parents and my true friends, accusing them of jealousy. But worst of all I turned my back on God. If I’d not got away, I’d have been dead long ago. Yes, I may be much poorer — but driving a taxi is more honorable than this!”

He motioned to the pack of thirsty miners who were ready for more free drinks. Then he begged Noah to leave the mines. But his friend said he was wedded to the profession, addicted to the thrill of danger and the financial rewards.

When I had doled out as much charity as I could afford, a string of tall Tigrayan women trooped into the bar, each wearing yellow vinyl shoes and a transparent top. Their hair was braided tightly and their mouths shone with fuchsia-pink lipstick. None of the miners had any money, but the girls took credit. Samson said some of the men, the older ones at least, had wives. But they liked the prostitutes, whom they considered to be sophisticated. One of the women, plumper than the rest, sat down beside me. Her name was Hannah. When I asked what she thought of the miners, she rolled her eyes and blew me a kiss.

“You go America, tomorrow?” she replied.

I didn’t understand.

“No, no, I’ll be staying here at the mine for a few days.”

“Not America... tomorrow?”

“No,” I said.

She sneered at me and turned her attention to a hulking creature with a fresh gash down one cheek. Again, I heard her asking about America. I doubted if the man even had a passport, let alone a visa to the United States. But as he massaged her thighs, he whispered: “America, America.”

The evening dragged on, with Samson and Noah discussing the Psalms, and the miners racking up huge bills on credit with the working women and the bar’s one-eyed owner. As the hours passed, it seemed that everyone was talking about America, and any man who merely uttered the magic word was assured the Tigrayan girls’ attention.

As I settled down to sleep in Noah’s hut that night, I wondered how an entire population could have become so desperate to get to a place of which they knew so little. Samson rarely stopped going on about the life he’d lead in that far-off land. Even as he read the Bible or discussed the lives of the Apostles, I could sense him thinking of America.

To him and others, America was a place full of opportunities where Ethiopians were given prospects and a future. Samson had applied to the US Embassy for a visa but had been refused. He knew the chances of gaining entry were slim, and he was turning his mind to more subversive tactics. Someone had told him that you could go to Mexico and cross the border by swimming the Rio Grande. Another had suggested he find a rich American woman and persuade her to marry him.

The following morning, three more women asked me if I was going to America. Then a gang of children selling maize and roasted barley came over to tell me that it was nearly time for America. They would be going over there to have a look.

“When? When are you going?”

“Oh,” one replied dreamily, “any minute now.”

By the time the first rays of sunlight spilled over into the mine, two thousand workers were busy digging the ground or lugging ore up to the panning pools. As the sun rose it baked the ground, making the business of digging far harder. The miners toiled away like convicts.

A few years before, I’d seen Sebastião Salgado’s extraordinary black-and-white photographs of the enormous Serra Pelada gold mine in Brazil. I remembered images of mud-drenched men, tens of thousands of them, climbing rickety ladders up the sides of the pit. They carried sacks on their backs, filled with soil to pan. The mine near Shakiso didn’t have ladders. Rather, the workers would take their positions and stay in them. In some ways their system was more efficient. Hurling pans of earth up in a giant relay was much speedier and far less tiring.

The miners were working together because they had to, but I never got the feeling that they did so willingly Given half a chance, they would happily have killed the man or woman next to them for the smallest nugget of gold. Noah pointed out three or four characters to keep away from.

“That’s Josiah,” he said, pointing to an elderly miner with a limp. “He killed his own wife after suspecting she’d stolen a pouch of gold from him. He’s already asking why you have come here.”

Noah tapped one finger on his nose meaningfully.

“And that’s Yohannes over there. He’s got Aids, but he still rapes the Tigrayan girls.”

Later that morning I left the mine and walked back through the village. Samson had been complaining that his shoes were being ruined by the ankle-deep mud and I’d offered to buy him a pair of rubber boots. We headed for the market area and had a good look through the heaps of old clothes on offer. The only boots were parrot green and four sizes too big. He took them anyway.

There was a commotion at the far end of the market. In the distance I made out a throng of Tigrayan girls mobbing a stall. They were admiring its stock of impressive merchandize. There were lipsticks and handbags, blankets and bed-sheets, leather footballs and French aftershave, silk shirts, Swatch watches and cartons of 555 cigarettes. Some of the girls sidled up to me and implored me to buy them luxuries.

Samson said it was all contraband, brought from Djibouti once a week by a traveling salesman.

“He goes from mine to mine selling this garbage. Who needs aftershave in a place like this? Instead of saving their money these foolish people come here, to America!”

“America?” I exclaimed.

Samson pointed to a crude, hand-drawn board hanging above the stall. On it, in Amharic, was the word America.

As we wandered back towards the crater I found myself questioning man’s obsession with gold. How could a simple, relatively useless yellow metal have been so important for so long? Was it the color, the weight, or the warmth of it in one’s hand? Or was it the fact that gold stays brilliant and clear of rust in even the wettest climate?

Whatever the reason, gold has been hoarded and worked since the days of the ancient Egyptians, though man discovered the metal long before Pharaonic times. Fragments of natural gold have been found in Spanish caves, apparently put there forty thousand years ago by Palaeolithic man. And the lure of gold has been responsible for some truly terrible episodes in history, not least the Spanish conquest of the Americas that brought the Aztec and the Incan empires to a brutal end.

With the sun beating down on our heads, we clambered down the slalom of trails leading towards the floor of the crater. The first thing I noticed as I descended was a sharp rise in temperature. Fifty feet down and I was gasping for breath, asphyxiated by the press of hot air. Another fifty feet and my pores began to run with sweat. The miners tossed up their weighty pans higher and higher in their well-rehearsed relay. They too were sweating, but I never saw one of them pause for water. When they needed to pee, they did it where they stood.

We squatted in the deep glutinous mud at the bottom of the crater, catching our breath and wishing we’d brought a supply of drinking water. Around us were dozens of women and children, all shovelling earth on to the round wooden pans. Up above, the children had been thrilled at the spectacle of a foreigner and eager to cluster around and get a good look. But on the floor of the pit there was no such interest. The children worked like slaves. Indeed, they were slaves, for I doubt they got any share of the money they earned. Working alongside them, their mothers were brawny and well built, with strong backs and muscular hands. Several of them were obviously pregnant.

One of the boys, aged about ten, slipped me an affecting smile. Samson told me that the children start young.

“They work down here in the pit,” he said, “but they’re more useful to bore the tunnels which run along the actual gold seams. You can send a child down a hole just a few inches wide.”

“Don’t they ever get stuck?”

Samson nodded.

“Yes. Then they suffocate. Or else they’re killed in cave-ins.”

Our timing couldn’t have been worse. As Samson finished his sentence, we heard shouts from beyond the pit. The area echoed with sound at the best of times, but these yells rose above the usual noise. Many of the miners dropped their pans and scrambled to the surface. Others were running round the periphery of the crater.

“Cave-in,” said Samson coldly. “Someone’s trapped, probably a child.”

We left the women and children and hurried up the steep banks and over to the maze of tunnels. A crowd of miners were digging furiously with pikes and spades, and one man was shouting out, calling a single name: “Adi! Adi! Adi!” But there was no response.

A woman came running, tearing barefoot down the track from the village. She was weeping hysterically. I found out later that no one had called her, she had simply known that her son, her eldest boy, was trapped. We listened, all quiet, desperate for a sound. But there was silence, a terrible, haunting silence.

The woman ran from one hole to the next, crying down each tunnel. All the other children had scurried to the surface. They said that Adi had been digging in a separate tunnel, away from the others, when the earth above had collapsed. The mother screamed, her features locked in an ecstasy of pain. Nothing is so agonizing as to see the face of a mother who has lost her child. I couldn’t bear to watch. The miners crowded round, comforting her. I wanted someone to reassure the woman that there was hope, that children have been pulled from rubble days after an earthquake. But like everyone else, she knew that her son was already dead.

Adi’s body was eventually found a few minutes before sunset. The time that it took to dig the boy out was testimony to the depth at which he had been working. The camp’s wild, carefree atmosphere had evaporated. That evening none of the miners joked or boasted, and there was no talk of Tigrayan whores. Instead they banded together like brothers, and for the first time I felt respect for them. One of their own had died. He may have been a child of nine or ten, but he was a miner who’d perished in the line of duty. In silence the corpse was carried at shoulder height down the muddy track into the village. The mother walked beside her son, resting her hand gently on his head. Her eyes were swollen with grief.

The sordid carnival of the previous night was nothing but a memory. No one drank in the bar. The few clients who couldn’t stay away simply sat there staring into space, consoling each other. In the back room, the fire under the still was starved of fuel. The drip, drip, drip of transparent liquid had ceased. The whores sat about plaiting their hair, ready for a night without trade.

Adi’s crushed body was wrapped in a clean white shawl and laid out in his parents’ home. Samson and I stopped there to pay our respects. The hut was already filled with people.

Samson recited Psalm 23 as softly as I’ve ever heard it spoken:

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.

He maketh me lie down in green pastures:

He leadeth me beside the still waters.

He restoreth my soul...

Samson’s eyes were closed as he spoke. Perhaps he was remembering past friends and enemies whose lives had ended under the ground. When we left the hut, he looked up to Heaven and rebuked God. Then he held his Bible to his face and wept.

Next morning, long before the mining had begun, the villagers rose and filed from the camp. Most were wrapped against the early chill in their shammas. Their heads were bent towards the ground, their faces long and drawn. Noah led the procession which snaked for a mile or so south of the mine. We walked near him. Behind us Adi’s body was carried at waist height, with his mother and father, and their closest friends following behind.

A grave had been carved out of the brick-red soil in an area away from the gold seam. The body was placed in the hole and, with little ceremony, it was covered over. Then the first light of dawn turned the sky steel blue.

By seven o’clock the mine was burgeoning with activity again. The pans of golden earth were wending their way up from the bottom of the pit, and the dark, cramped network of tunnels was busy with infant workers. A young miner had been lost, but hardly anyone stopped to reflect. Contemplation is a luxury, requiring time and alternatives.

In the late afternoon a vehicle could be seen negotiating the jagged track leading to the mining community. We could hear its engine revving for a mile or more before it arrived. The miners didn’t have to look: they knew the car. It was the property of a local government bureaucrat. Somehow he’d heard that there had been a death and he had come to get the details down on paper.

Noah told me to go into his thatched hut as quickly as I could. The only thing the bureaucrat would like more than a dead miner was a foreigner to torment. So I hid in Noah’s shack while Samson hastened back and forth, filling me in on what was happening. The administrator, he said, was questioning Adi’s parents, telling them to go to Shakiso to help with an official report. That was the last thing they intended to do.

“If the government knows about this and other illegal mines,” I asked, “then why don’t they close them down?”

Samson winked.

“They’re in it for the money,” he said. “They buy most of the gold, and they sell it at a big profit. Unless they send the army down here they’re never going to be able to stop all the mining, and this way at least they get the lion’s share of the profits.”

Despite this, I found that the miners had a pretty accurate idea of international gold prices. For this reason they only sold part of their haul to the officials.

“If they let on just how much gold’s coming from this seam,” said Samson, “then the government would have no choice but to nationalize the place. Then they might have a rebellion on their hands.”

There was already insurrection in the air. Samson reported that hundreds of miners had left the pit and were massing around the official. I could make out loud voices, then shouting, and finally the rumble of an engine as it sparked to life.

“How did he find out that someone had died?” I asked Noah later when he returned from the mine-shaft.

“There are spies, lots of them,” he replied. “In fact it is strange that they haven’t handed you in.”

Now that he mentioned it, I realized that the miners had been friendly towards me. They had welcomed me as courteously as they knew how, and some had offered to show me the surrounding area at night or to feed me.

“You’d better watch out,” said Noah, “they’re probably planning to rob you or kill you.”

“America,” added Samson.

“The market stall?”

Noah frowned.

“No, the country America,” he said. “They see you as their way out of here and over there.”

Like all Ethiopians, the miners had a grand plan which culminated with their arrival in the United States. No other country was good enough – none had the cachet of America. I hadn’t been in Ethiopia long, but dozens of people had already asked me how to get a visa for America. I’d even heard of agents who, for a steep fee, could prescribe the best route across the Atlantic.

Noah pointed to a man outside one of the huts lolling back on a home-made chair.

“That man there,” he said, “he’s an expert on America.”

Dawit’s head was round, like a small watermelon, and it appeared to balance on his wide shoulders without any trace of a neck. His palms were as soft as a beauty queen’s cheeks. They’d obviously never been down the mines. Dawit laughed riotously at the slightest opportunity, and I asked him why he was always so cheerful.

“We Amhara are very happy people,” he replied.

“What’s the best way to get to America then?”

Dawit stopped laughing and lowered his head. The only thing he never joked about was business.

“These days it’s harder to get an asylum visa,” he said, “but there are lots of other ways in. You can go through another country, like Germany, France or Britain. You can say you’re a priest and get a Christian foundation to sponsor you, or pretend to be a Jew and go via Israel. Or, if you can get to Mexico, you can jump across the river...” He paused for a moment, trying to remember its name. “The Río Grande, they call it the Río Grande, and the water’s very low at the moment. But the best way to get to America,” he said, flexing his shoulders, “is to get yourself a foreigner’s passport.”

I was struck by how much Dawit knew and the more we spoke, the more impressed I became. There were very few questions he could not answer. At last I asked him which was his favourite American city.

Dawit looked blank and then burst out laughing, and Noah and Samson collapsed in hysterics. When eventually they stopped, the three of them stared at me as if I were mad.

“He’s never been to America,” said Noah.

After meeting Dawit, I tiptoed around the village, gripped by paranoia. If I disappeared and my passport was taken by a swarthy young Ethiopian, it could be months or years before the crime was discovered. I told Samson of my worry and forbade him to leave my side even when I was asleep — in fact especially when I was asleep. That night my dreams were filled with gangs of miners creeping into the hut, snatching my passport and slitting my throat. Then they fought with each other to see who would win my passport for the journey to America.

The next morning I awoke to find Dawit at the foot of my sleeping-bag. He’d had an idea in the night, he said. I was to give a short informal talk about America to the miners. As someone who’d passed through US Immigration several times I had inside knowledge that I could pass on. It sounded like an easy way to please the community, so I agreed to talk in the open space that evening.

Life at the gold mine was pleasant so long as you didn’t have to do any mining. There was a perpetual sense of risk, balanced by the lure of instant wealth. The place was like a grand casino. Money raised by communal mining was shared out, but anyone who found a large nugget was permitted by the others to keep it. Whether anyone realized it or not, the system encouraged industriousness. The big problem though was that all of them were unable to stop mining, regardless of how much gold they found.

Everyone I spoke to said they would leave if they found a big enough nugget, but I knew that that was a lie. The miners had become addicted to the gambler’s lifestyle. Nothing, except possibly religion, could prize them away. And in any case, anyone cashing in on a big find had debts to pay, and what was left would be blown in an instant.

“If you look at this place,” said Samson as we sat together in the late morning sun, “you’d think there wouldn’t be much in the way of expense. But you’d be wrong. Miners make good money, much more than any other Ethiopians. But they have to pay back the money they owe to other miners, they have to buy clothes and food, and they have to send money home to their families. Then there are illegitimate children to care for, there’s araki to buy, and Tigrayan girls to employ.” Samson stared at the baked earth as he remembered the corrosive existence. “The most expensive thing of all,” he added, “is treating others to luxuries – women and drink.”

“But why pay for others if you can’t afford to?”

Samson smiled from the corner of his mouth.

“Just in case one of them finds a big nugget,” he said. “If you don’t help them when they’re poor, they won’t remember you when they’re rich.”

Life must have been much the same for prospectors working in the Klondike, in California, or in Australia in the mid-nineteenth century. The first great gold rush took place near the Sacramento River in northern California in 1848. A carpenter working at a sawmill there found a sizeable gold nugget. Try as he might to keep his find quiet, word soon got out. Within days there were tens of thousands of would-be miners camped out nearby, and within four years more than 250,000 miners had descended on California. Living in the most terrible conditions and blinded by greed, they were risking everything for the sake of gold.

I met an Italian recently whose great-great-grandfather had set out from his native Milan in search of a fortune in California. He saw the prospectors living like dogs, eating rotten supplies and using lousy equipment. The Italian had intended to search for gold like the rest of them. But as soon as he saw the conditions in which they lived, he changed tack. Instead of thinking about gold, he turned his hand to bringing in supplies. Within weeks he’d made a fortune selling saddles and clothes, pans, chemicals, tents and food.

Look at the map and you can see traces of those pioneering days in the names – Bonanza Creek, Gold Hill, Gold Creek, Eureka. But the name which crops up again and again is Ophir. Christian miners were certain that they’d discovered the Old Testament land. In Bedakaysa no one apart from Samson and Noah had ever heard of Ophir. They had no interest in Bible readings. They had been residents of Hell for far too long. Samson called them “The Children of the Devil”.

We often discussed the idea of Ophir. Samson felt sure that Solomon’s gold had come from ancient Ethiopian mines. He pointed out that the Israelites had probably acquired the metal from many mines in one region rather than from a single glorious pit. He said that a giant mine only existed in the minds of novelists and Hollywood, and he reminded me that an entire region, or country, can get mined out, especially where the gold veins are close to the surface, as they are in Ethiopia. Modern industrial mining processes can sift through thousands of tonnes of ore each day. But mining was no less thorough before the days of heavy machinery. Hundreds of thousands of prospectors at the Klondike River did the work of the machines, as they do today in mines like Bedakaysa.

In London I had managed to buy a handful of books written at the turn of the last century which told of Great Zimbabwe, the ruins which the Victorians thought were once Ophir. One of the volumes had been published in 1899 and was written by an eccentric German professor called Carl Peters. The book was entitled King Solomon’s Golden Ophir: A Research into the Most Ancient Gold Production in History. Peters tackled the subject with Teutonic thoroughness and came up with an interesting theory. The Old Testament writers were usually very precise in giving details. Why then did they give no indication as to the whereabouts of Ophir? They seemed to assume, says Peters, that everyone knew where it might be found. If Ophir was remote there would have been a need to supply the curious with details. Africa was a land known to the ancients, though they knew little of its interior or overall geography. Might not Africa and Ophir be one and the same? In support of his theory, he looked at the etymology of the word “Africa”. The original root of the name, according to him, was Afer, probably meaning “Red” or “Red Land”, as in the common color of the continent’s soil. Afri were its people, and African the adjective which described them.

In the century since Peters’ book was published, it has been proved that the Great Zimbabwe ruins are not connected with the ancient Israelite kingdom, the land of Solomon. Even so, Peters’ theory seems plausible. Ophir might well have been Africa, and Solomon’s gold might well have come from a region of the continent that lay close to his kingdom, the mountainous hinterland of Ethiopia.

In the late afternoon I paddled at the edge of the panning pool. The miners were hard at work, ferrying their pans of earth from the bottom of the crater. Children darted about selling sticks of roasted maize, sugar cubes and knitted hats. From time to time women and children came up from the mine where they had been digging and swapped places with the panners. Panning was back-breaking work but it meant that you could at least wade in the thigh-deep water and keep cool.

The male miners were proud of their profession and keen for their sons to follow them. Noah told me that mining gold was considered the most macho thing a man could do. Miners scoffed at farmers and laughed uncontrollably if one mentioned people who did office work. They rated the value of a job by the thickness of the calluses it gave their hands.

Noah was an exception. He had two young sons but he shuddered at the thought of them entering the mine.

“They’re having an education,” he said. “The only way I can pay for it, though, is by mining. I pray that I’ll find a big nugget. Why do you think I spend such long hours in the tunnels risking my life?”

“Where are your family?”

“Back in Kebra Mengist,” he replied. “I won’t let them even come to the mine. I’m not ashamed of the work, but I don’t want my wife or my two boys to see the savage people I live with.”

Dawit came over and said it was time for my talk. He’d spread the word through his network of contacts and he expected a bumper audience. We made our way to a flat patch of land to the west of the main mine. Young men would sometimes play football there. Others used it for their ablutions, and the place was running with rats and stank of human excrement. Despite the stench, dozens of miners had already arrived. More were turning up every minute. Most of them knew that a foreigner had been staying in the village, but until that moment they had regarded me as of little use. That was about to change. Dawit had billed me as the man who could put an end to all their problems – he had declared somewhat fictitiously that I was the missing link between them and America.

Samson grew nervous when he saw the extent of the crowd. He said there was a danger of the local official closing the event down and arresting us. Having been in big gatherings in India and Africa before, I was more worried by another danger. At a right-wing rally in Nigeria, given by a fanatical Christian preacher from Germany, I’d seen dozens of people trampled to death. The pastor claimed to have the power to heal the sick. He told hundreds of cripples to make a pyre from their crutches and wheelchairs. When they’d done this, the preacher claimed to have healed everyone, and with that he drove off in his stretch Mercedes. Of course no one was cured. Instead, tempers boiled over and the crowd stampeded. The saddest thing was to see all the disabled left lying on the ground without their crutches and wheelchairs, unable to get home.

Dawit assured me that there would be no stampede. Everyone present, he said, had paid one birr entrance fee, or at least had promised to pay later. The children sat at the front, wriggling in the dirt, a little unsure of why they had been coaxed to attend. Their parents and the general population of miners stood behind them. There must have been about five hundred people. The Tigrayan girls had donned their best dresses and vinyl high heels, and were sitting with the children. The entire congregation was united by their interest in the title of my talk, “Getting to America”.

When they were quiet, and we were sure that there were no stragglers still to come, Dawit introduced me, speaking in Amharic, while Samson translated.

“Mr Tahir has come from faraway America,” said Dawit, “to tell you about his wonderful country and how to get there.”

After a prolonged greeting, I began my talk. Whenever I said the word “America”, the gathering drew a deep breath.

“America is an amazing country,” I said, waiting for Dawit to finish translating my words. “It’s sometimes known as “The Land of the Free” because everyone has rights.”

One of the young men began to heckle me, demanding to know what people in America thought of Ethiopians there.

“People like Ethiopians in America,” I said, reassuringly. “I’ve met many Ethiopians there who have a good wage, but they were not frightened of starting in a simple job.”

“Like gold mining in a pit?” called another.

“Not exactly... more like working in a restaurant. But it’s important to study hard and to learn English. If you have a qualification you can earn a lot of money.”

The audience looked worried. None of them had any qualifications.

“Tell them the best way to get into America,” prompted Dawit.

I thought for a moment.

“It’s a big country,” I said, “with many ports of entry. Some people cross over from Mexico, but that’s getting harder; and others come in by sea. But the best way is to get a friend or a relative to sponsor you, or to have a job waiting for you. You see, if you’re “uniquely qualified”, they can easily bring you from overseas to do the job.”

Dawit struggled to translate the concept into Amharic.

One of the Tigrayan girls had a question. She rose to her feet, thrust her chest out towards me and asked: “Do American men need us?”

I was taken aback by this question, but rather than discourage her, I replied with enthusiasm.

“Yes, I’m sure they do!”

I carried on, padding the talk out with information about life in America, saying it wasn’t all like the movies, and that the streets weren’t paved with gold. Some of my metaphors must have suffered in translation.

Then, winding up, I said jokingly that they could push me down one of the mine-shafts and steal my passport. That would give one of them at least an easy entry into America. The miners looked at me and then at each other. Then they stared at the ground and giggled nervously.

SIX

Breakfast with Idi Amin

“In Africa think big.”

Cecil Rhodes

The morning after my talk, one of the miners came to Noah’s hut and presented me with a gift. His name was Solomon. I would have asked how he came by the livid scar that ran from his eye to the base of his neck but, reading my thoughts, Samson suggested in a whisper that it was none of my business. Solomon said he’d enjoyed my talk very much and that he knew the details would come in useful when he arrived in America. He had heard about a city where a ferocious wind blew, rarely ceasing for a moment. He couldn’t remember its name.

“Chicago?” I suggested. “It’s called the Windy City.”

He smiled broadly.

“You really know a lot about America.”

“There’s no need to give me anything,” I said.

But Solomon insisted.

The gift was wrapped in fresh banana leaves, and there were flies swarming all over it. Dreading what I would find inside, I unfurled the leaves. There lay a pair of very bloody and very dead hares, their long bodies rigid with rigor mortis. The very sight of the creatures so early in the morning made me feel nauseous. I gagged at the stench, and asked Noah to dispose of them immediately. He thought I was mad. To him, their smell was like the scent of freshly cut flowers. He rambled on about how roasted hare was one of life’s true luxuries. One taste and, he assured me, I would become addicted to the meat.

He hurried off and gave the hares to one of the Tigrayan girls called Taitu, named after Menelik II’s consort. She said she’d stew them for us. Hares are a delicacy in Tigray. The Amhara, she said, had no idea how to cook them. Taitu was so beautiful that no one dared look her in the eye, not even Noah when he asked her to cook the hares. Her skin was the color of burnished brass, rolled over a frame of bones of extraordinary delicacy, and her voice was as soft as a siren”s. Noah said she’d been married but had run away from Tigray after being found in another man’s bed. Unable to face her husband or her family, she had fled to the south and eventually ended up as a whore.

Taitu cooked the animals and brought them to me for lunch, served in a thick gravy. I invited her to join us and, as we ate, I asked her about her homeland of Tigray.

“In the north,” she said, “people are so proud that a father will kill his daughter if she brings shame on the family. Then if anyone asks him about his dead daughter he will pretend to forget her name.”

Taitu nibbled at a bone with her front teeth. Her eyes were bright, but I sensed great sadness.

“We all have dreams,” she went on. “Most of the men here dream of going to America. They don’t know what they will do once they’re there, or even why they want to go. But,” she said, looking me squarely in the eye, “they all know that whatever America is like, it must be better than Bedakaysa.”

“What are your dreams?”

She fiddled with her braids for a moment before answering.

“I dream of going home,” she said.

That night the first real rains of the monsoon fell. There is no smell in the world as intoxicating as African rain on the red sub-Saharan soil. All the miners’ children ran outside and danced in the downpour, laughing and shouting with glee. Samson and I pulled off our shirts, rolled up our pants and splashed our way to the panning pool. Awed by the power of nature, Samson looked up at the sky, the rain cascading over his face and down his body.

“This is my God talking to me!” he cried.

For once I knew he was right.

By morning all the water had long since been absorbed into the earth. The footprints leading to the mine were a little deeper, the mud a little thicker, the panning pool a few inches higher.

Noah had been down the shaft for two hours by the time we got there. Rather than being exhilarated by the break in the weather, he looked worried.

“Another death,” he said.

“A cave-in?”

“No, another kind of accident.”

The body was lying a few yards from the shafts, covered by a thin white shawl with delicate embroidery around the border. It was the body of an adult miner, a man universally despised. According to Noah he was a well-known thief and was suspected of being one of the official’s spies. Unlike the death of the child, there was no display of emotion at this death. Most of the miners didn’t even bother to look at the corpse, which had been found early that morning.

Noah took me over and lifted the corner of the shawl. There was a hideous wound on one side of the man’s face — a gash from the left ear down to the base of the neck. The jugular was clearly severed.

“A bad accident,” said Noah.

“What do you mean “accident”? The man’s obviously been murdered. That’s a clean cut made with a knife.”

Noah tapped me on the shoulder.

“No, it’s an accident,” he said firmly, “he slipped in the rain and cut his neck. The others are going to bury him right away.”

Two days later we heard the sound of the official’s vehicle skidding through the mud. Another spy had no doubt informed him of the murder. A second downpour had turned the track into a thick reddish-brown soup, but the rain was good for the miners. It softened the earth and made the panning easier. An adequate supply of water is always a problem for gold prospectors. In many parts of the country small-scale mine-shafts shut down in the dry season. Samson had said that the main dangers in the heavy rains were from cave-ins or flash-floods in the narrow tunnels where children and the bravest men worked.

As we watched the vehicle lurching up the trail, Noah told me to go to his hut and wait there, as I’d done before. Finding a foreigner in the village at such a time would only complicate matters.

I did as he requested, but then peeped through a hole in the hut’s back wall. I had a good view of the official and his assistant as they got out of the car.

They were an odd couple. The assistant’s nose had been broken, and he had small ears that lay flat against his shaven head. He was dressed in a grubby beige coat with oversized lapels; the garment’s right shoulder was torn, exposing the lining. His boss wore a checkered overcoat, purple pants and a felt hat, but despite his eccentric outfit he looked formidable. His thick-framed glasses and cold efficient features hinted at a man who liked to get to the bottom of things. Both men’s shoes and ankles were caked in mud. They’d obviously had to push the vehicle en route. The official seemed very angry.

In any other part of the country a local administrator, however lowly, would command respect, but not here. The miners were brash and self-confident. They were used to danger, and though their daily work broke the law, they made ten times more than the officials from Shakiso.

No one bothered to meet the car, so the visitors tramped over to the mine itself. I waited in Noah’s thatched hut. A few minutes later I heard shouting and a high-pitched whistling. Samson hurried in and said there was trouble. He looked very worried and told me to pack up my stuff at once.

“Is it about the murder?”

“No, no,” he replied, “they don’t even know about that, or they don’t care.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“It’s you.”

I bundled up my sleeping-bag and stuffed it with odd bits of clothing into my kit bags while Samson laid his precious Bible flat in his tartan case. The case, I noticed, was already splitting at the seams.

“What shall we do? They’ll see us if we leave.”

Before Samson could reply, the hut’s door swung open and the official and his assistant stood in the doorway. I could sense their delight at finding a foreigner. Noah was behind them, trying to get their attention. I knew from that moment that any efforts to talk our way out of the situation would be futile. The official asked for our papers. I pulled out a photocopy of my passport and handed it to him — I had learned years ago never to give original documents to anyone if I could help it. Samson fumbled in his case for his identity card and passed it to the official. Much conversation in Amharic followed.

As the debate grew more heated, I became worried. In the Indian subcontinent a few crumpled notes slipped surreptitiously into a sweaty palm would have effected our release. But in Africa bureaucrats are usually too proud to accept a bribe, something I admire when I’m not the one being arrested.

The murderer had got away with it, but Samson and I were bundled into the back of the official’s car and driven off. There had hardly been time to thank Noah and say farewell to the miners and the Tigrayan girls. Samson was generally talkative, but as we slip-slided through the soupy mud, he said nothing. The officials were also quiet, but I sensed an air of triumph.

We were driven to Shakiso and taken to the police station. Once inside we were told to stand in a corner. A notebook was taken down from a shelf, a pencil licked, and the interrogation began.

Neither the official nor his lackey spoke English, so Samson had to translate. I didn’t really know what to say but I decided to tell the truth, though I knew it wouldn’t be easy – the reasons behind my journeys are never straightforward. As we stood there, my hands sweating, Samson’s brow knotted with anxiety, I attempted to explain.

“I have come from London to search for King Solomon’s gold mines,” I said. “It is known that the Israelites, and before them the ancient Egyptians, mined gold in Ethiopia. That is why I am here. Unlike others before me, I see it as my duty to visit all kinds of mines — legal and informal.”

Samson struggled to translate my words into Amharic. The official didn’t look at me — his eyes were on the wide-spaced lines of his notebook — but he scribbled madly. When his pencil had stopped moving I started to talk again.

“The last thing I want,” I said, “is to acquire any gold. You see, I’m interested in Ethiopian history.”

Samson paused and stared at me in alarm. Had I forgotten that the word “history” was taboo?

The official put down his pencil and cracked his knuckles one by one. Then he looked at me, glanced at the photocopy of my passport and asked Samson a question.

“He wants to know who you’re spying for,” he said.

I sighed. Then Samson sighed.

The man spoke again.

“He wants your film.”

Fortunately I’d learned a trick from the veteran cameraman and war photographer Mohamed Amin. Mo, as he was known, was the man who filmed the original television footage of Ethiopia’s famine in the mid-i98os. It was his powerful images that galvanized action which culminated in the Live Aid pop concert. When confronted by officials intent on confiscating his films, Mo would quickly wind in the tapers of unexposed rolls and pass them off as exposed films.

Before we’d left Noah’s hut I had hidden my exposed films in a pair of filthy hiking boots at the bottom of one kitbag. Now I whipped out a couple of blank films, slid in the tapers, and ranted on about how valuable they were.

The official looked delighted and demanded I hand them over. Theatrically I tossed them on to the desk. The official passed them to his assistant, who stamped on them. Then he barked a string of orders and we were taken away. Samson was still trying to negotiate us out of our predicament and had become desperately upset. I dared not tell him that I was rather enjoying the experience.

We were taken to a cell and locked inside, though “cell” is a misnomer. The floor consisted of baked mud, and the walls were merely wooden planks with gaps between them. The roof was built of rusting corrugated iron which let in a draught and leaked when it rained. In the wide gap between the floor and the walls lay shards of broken glass, presumably intended to discourage inmates from sliding out on their stomachs. Five other men were already inside, three of them asleep, the other two playing cards.

Samson was miserable. He didn’t say anything, but I knew he was regretting ever having met me. I had become his tormentor and was dragging him further and further away from his objective of getting to America. I told him that I’d double his pay for every day we were incarcerated, but he didn’t respond. Instead he sat on his haunches and chewed his knuckles.

After an hour there was the sound of a key turning in the lock and the jailer arrived carrying a lunch of zill-zill tibs, shredded beef strips. He said that if we were still hungry afterwards we could have some more, and if there was anything else we needed we were to let him know. The jailer had been miscast by life. He was one of the most gentle and compassionate men I think I’ve ever met. Samson and I treated him with due courtesy, but the others took advantage of his kindness. They had him washing their clothes, fetching them water and darning their shirts.

I remarked on the jailer’s kindness to Samson.

Of course he’s kind,” he said, “he’s an Amhara.”

The first few hours in the cell were quite stimulating. I’d never been in a prison cell before and was quite enjoying the experience. I urged Samson to introduce me to the other felons. Befriending them might lower our chances of getting our throats slit in the night. The two card-players turned out to be Amhara as well, which raised their standing in Samson’s estimation. One of them had small shifty eyes. He reported proudly that he’d beaten his wife with a stick for having run off with a neighbour. The second card-player said he was there because he’d stolen a chicken. He had no money to live anywhere better and so preferred to stay in the jail.

The other three convicts only woke up when it was getting dark and then they shouted at the jailer, ordering him to bring them some food. He did as he was told. One of the men, whom I discovered later was a miner accused of killing a prostitute, drew a line in the dirt with his thumb and then glared at me. If Samson or I crossed the line, he said, he’d break our necks.

The jailer declared that anyone wanting to go and pee could do so in the bushes outside the police station. The five men trooped out unsupervised. I was surprised that they didn’t break free and run off. When they came back a few minutes later they seemed to sense my surprise because they looked rather sheepish. Meanwhile the jailer told Samson that the official had gone home and that he wouldn’t be back until noon the next day.

That night I lay on my back and thought about earlier narrow escapes. A journey, I reflected, is of no merit unless it has tested you. You can stay at home and read of others’ experiences, but it’s not the same as getting out of trouble yourself. Whenever I’m in a tight spot, I think of Mohamed Amin. He was an expert in getting out of tight spots in Africa and, in particular, in Ethiopia.

As well as filming news, Mo ran a small publishing company. In my early twenties, when no one else would give me work, Mo hired me to write books. By then he had already lost one arm, blown off in Addis Ababa, during the fall of Mengistu’s regime. During our travels together in many African and Asian countries, Mo passed on some of his knowledge. He taught me to take my own fuel into war zones, preferably high-octane aviation fuel — most petrol engines can run on it as long as their timing is altered. He also showed me how to hide a roll of 35-millimeter film in the heel of my shoe, and he taught me that when dealing with African bureaucracy you should remain respectful and calm.

Mo Amin died during the hijacking of an Ethiopian Airlines plane off the Comoros Islands in November 1996. I remember the day clearly because it was the same day that my father died. A week before his death I’d met Mo in Nairobi. He’d asked me to write the text for a book on Saudi Arabia. He knew I wanted to spend time there. But, as always, he drove a hard bargain.

“I’ll give you a thousand pounds,” he said.

Even for Mo this was a pitiful sum, but he was a shrewd negotiator, and was never one to start high.

“That’s not enough,” I said.

“Well, double it.”

From past experience I knew to ask for payment in kind as well as in cash.

“What about some transport?”

“I’ll give you two club class tickets on Ethiopian, anywhere they go,” he said. Mo had an inexhaustible supply of tickets on Ethiopian Airlines.

“What else?”

He leant back in his chair and thought for a moment. His bionic artificial arm was laid out on the desk before him like a trophy, a reminder of his bravery.

“I’ll give you a Somali passport,” he said.

“You”ve already given me one, for the last job.”

Mo bit his lip.

“Make it a diplomatic Somali passport.”

“Now we’re getting somewhere. What else?”

“A holiday to the Seychelles.”

“And...?”

Mo drew his hand down his graying goatee beard.

“All right,” he said coldly, “I’ll give you breakfast with Idi Amin.”

A week later Mo was killed, and with his untimely death went my chance of sharing a meal with the infamous Ugandan dictator.

The jailer woke me at dawn with a cup of freshly roasted coffee. He said that if he’d made it too sweet, I was to tell him and he’d try again. The other felons were asleep, all except for the one the others called Wossen. Samson said he had been drinking all night. The liquor had been smuggled in by the jailer as a reward for good behavior. Wossen’s right eye was milky white and suppurating. Every so often a fly would land on it but Wossen had given up trying to brush it away. He was too old, too tired, too drunk.

The night had been uncomfortable but not unbearable. My bags were locked away in the office but the jailer had provided some hay for our heads. He had even offered to wash our clothes, though it would take three days to dry them now that the rains had come. I thanked him but said we hoped to be released long before then. The jailer responded, saying there was little hope of us being given an early release.

At about eleven o’clock the official ordered us to come to the office. He was dressed in the same purple pants as the day before, but his shoes had been expertly cleaned and they now shone. To lighten the mood, I thanked him for having looked after us so well. The experience had been absorbing, I said, but now we were ready to leave.

The official slapped his hand down on the desk and ordered me to be quiet. He would ask the questions and we were to answer them. But before the interrogation could continue, he wanted to look through our bags. Samson was to show his first. The tartan Chinese case was placed on the table and unpacked. The parrot-green Rubber boots were brought out, then the three-piece suit. The official frowned.

“Now unlock your bags,” he said, pointing at me.

Most Ethiopians travel with only the bare necessities. If they bring along any luxuries at all, they’re usually intended as gifts for relatives or friends. But, as every African checkpoint guard knows, foreigners carry with them all sorts of appealing objects, and I am no exception. Fearful of leaving a key piece of equipment or an important book behind, I travel with just about everything I own. Unlocking the kit bags’ padlocks, I began to remove an assortment of items. First came a plug of soggy, mud-ridden clothes, then a few books on Ethiopian history and on the business of gold. The official rifled through the mounting pile, searching for subversive material, and as he did so his face darkened. Clearly he thought I was a spy, and I began to get worried. At the bottom of one kitbag, I knew, there was something that would confirm his suspicions.

In London I had bought an expensive metal detector. So far I hadn’t even shown it to Samson. The detector – called a Gold Bug II — looked like the sort of thing James Bond would take along on a mission. I had planned to try it out at the mine, but I hadn’t had time.

I mumbled that there was nothing left in the first bag and started to take out the contents of the other. The bureaucrat knew that I was lying. He plunged his hand in and triumphantly pulled out various bits of the detector. Then he laid the pieces on the table and told me to assemble the device. As I did so, I tried to explain why I needed it, but the official wasn’t listening. He had found a foreign spy and he was clearly already thinking about the likelihood of promotion. Samson glared at me, furious that I’d kept all knowledge of the device from him.

The official picked up the telephone and barked into the receiver for a minute or two. I couldn’t understand the conversation, but I could guess its drift. A pair of spies had been found, he was telling his boss. One of them’s a sly foreigner caught red-handed with illegal equipment. The other’s a local, an Amhara found in possession of a suspicious three-piece suit.

After the call, the official smoothed a hand down his shirt-front, pressed his fingertips together, and said something in Amharic. Samson was led away. Sweating profusely, his hands trembling, he was unable to look me in the eye. Then I was marched back to the cell. Samson wasn’t there. I sat against the far wall, away from the others. The thrill of incarceration was beginning to wear thin. The jailer motioned with his hands and mouth, asking if I’d like some lunch. I shook my head. Now, I said in English, wasn’t the time for eating.

Again I found myself wondering how to get away. We probably could have escaped, but they had Samson’s identity card and would have hunted him down. The thought of Samson being hunted by anyone seemed unfair. Mo Amin had always told me to remain calm in a tight spot. Calmness, he used to say, buys you time. He was a great believer in allowing events to take their course. Solutions, he’d say, present themselves if you give them time. But sitting in a small-town cell was a waste of time. Ϊ had things to do. I had Solomon’s mines to find.

Then I remembered the advice of another friend. When you’re in a scrape, she said, the best thing to do is the unexpected. A seasoned opponent of Apartheid in South Africa, she’d once found herself in the midst of a riot in Johannesburg. A vigilante mob had surrounded her car and was rocking it from side to side. She was running out of time. Another minute and she’d be dead. So, instead of screaming or showing fear, she blew the vigilantes kisses. They looked horrified and ran away.

Samson was brought back to the cell a few hours later by a man I’d not seen before. He introduced himself as the commander of the region, and asked some basic questions in English. What was I doing in Ethiopia? Why did I need such a high-tech piece of equipment? What had I seen at the mines? Was I a spy?

As before I answered truthfully. Samson and I, I said, were searching for King Solomon’s gold mines. We were not interested in buying gold but rather in its cultural and historical importance. The man rubbed his eyes and then he smiled.

“Are you from America?” he asked.

“No, from England.”

“I want to go to America,” he said. “Can you give me some advice?”

At first I was wary, suspecting some kind of ploy to get information out of me, but then I realized the man’s inquiry was genuine. So I scribbled out some suggestions on a sheet of paper. He thanked me and asked if there was anything he could do to help. I pointed at the cell door.

“You could open that,” I said.

Without a second thought he snapped his fingers. The door swung open from behind. The official, who was pacing up and down in the hallway, scowled as we strode past him. Samson was given back his identity card and our possessions were loaded into the commander’s car. He had insisted that his driver take us to Kebra Mengist.

There seemed little hope of gaining entry to the legal gold mine at the nearby Lega Dembi plant, but Samson urged me to follow up my letter with a phone call. To my great surprise, my call was put straight through and I found myself talking to the managing director of Midroc operations. By the end of the conversation I had been invited to tour the legal gold mine, and even to stay at Midroc’s headquarters, a few miles from Kebra Mengist.

At the gatehouse, our identity papers were inspected. One of the armed guards spat our names into a walkie-talkie and listened to the crackling reply. Then the barrier slowly lifted and, as it did so, the guards stood to attention and saluted. In the pick-up truck that had brought us from Kebra Mengist we rolled ahead into a vast compound. Only hours before Samson and I had been locked up in a cell with convicts. Now our luck had miraculously changed.

Lega Dembi was laid out on a grand scale. From the gatehouse to the actual mine was a distance of about two miles. The plant’s perimeter fence was festooned with razor-wire and punctuated at intervals by sentry posts, each manned by soldiers armed with Kalashnikovs. We heard later that there was also a special paramilitary squad that roamed the grounds, searching for intruders.

The road snaked down into a valley, before climbing steeply. We passed a series of enormous pools, where tailings were being processed and then, as the route ascended, we caught our first glimpse of the plant. There were storage depots and power-generation units, mills and foundries, warehouses and rows of geological laboratories. And everywhere there were tracks leading in all directions on which towering Caterpillar crushers and tippers drove at speed.

A well-built man dressed in khaki and wearing thick wire-rimmed glasses strode out of his office to greet us. His name was Wayne and he was Australian. He said he couldn’t remember the last time a visitor had come to Lega Dembi. I told him about my search for Solomon’s mines and then I asked him about the gold.

“You”ve come to the right place for gold,” he said, “but we don’t mine it like Solomon’s slaves would have done. We use ammonium nitrate.” He paused. “I don’t think Solomon had any of that.”

As Wayne drove us to the mine, he admitted that in the gold business you can’t like gold too much. If you do, he said, you get greedy, and if you get greedy, you make mistakes.

Five minutes later we stood on a ridge above the lip of a vast crater. Below us lay an enormous mine, so big that it made me shiver. A dozen trucks were being loaded with rocks. When they were full they’d hurry away through deep mud to the crushing plant. I was surprised to see that some of the biggest trucks were being driven by women. Midroc was an equal opportunities employer.

On one side of the crater a group of men in yellow hard hats were busily unloading boxes guarded by a man with an AK-47.

“That’s the ammonium nitrate,” said Wayne. “It can blow a mountain into dust, but actually it’s just fertilizer.”

“What about the bullion?”

“I’ll show you.”

Wayne took us to the gold room where the molten metal was about to be poured. Once through the rigorous security system, we were locked into what was really a large workshop. The walls were whitewashed breeze blocks, the floor was bare cement, and the ceiling was made from reinforced glass. A pair of security cameras watched our movements. At the far end of the room a technician was checking over the electric furnace. I could clearly see through his mask the beads of sweat joining up on his brow. He looked worried, but tried to maintain an air of professionalism. From twenty feet away I felt the heat. An extractor fan on the back wall seemed to be blowing the hot air towards us. It felt like the parched wind which rips across the Sahara in June. Wayne said things would get much hotter; and then they did. We dressed up in protective silver outfits, like astronauts, donning masks and gloves. Then we crowded round and winced as our bodies were washed in boiling sweat beneath the silver suits. The furnace was the shape of a very large barrel. It was tipped by a system of hand cranks. Gradually a steady semi-molten flow poured out that reminded me of lava spewing from a volcano. Then the flow changed to a stream of liquid gold. Wayne said that the slag ran off first, followed closely by the molten gold.

Five minutes later the ingots were thrown on to the concrete floor, and the bullion was knocked out like loaves of bread from their baking tins. Lega Dembi is considered a medium-sized plant, and it produces about three hundred and fifty gold bars a year. A single bar of the bullion weighs about 2olbs and is worth approximately $80,000. Given the extent of its reserves, Ethiopia could yield much more if international investors came forward. I found myself thinking about the gold and whether it might be the key to reviving Ethiopia’s economy. As I pondered the question, the rough blackened ingots were whacked with a hammer. The surrounding crust of slag fell away, and for the first time I saw the glint of pure gold.

The next morning Samson and I huddled in a doorway out of the rain, waiting for the bus to Addis Ababa. An elderly man was crouched on a stool opposite. His pants were too tight, and they were ripped at the knees, and his shirt was split. Every so often, his body trembled and his limbs twitched. Samson said he was called Old One” because he’d been an old man even in his youth. He had a penchant for whipping small boys with a long leather switch, and children would creep up from behind, baiting him. But now his eyesight was fading and his aim was less accurate than it had once been. Like an aged bulldog that’s lost its teeth, Old One was a pathetic sight.

After four hours the bus arrived and we clambered on board. As we pulled out of town, I noticed a tall athletic man running alongside the bus. He was calling out a woman’s name, and he had taken off his shoes so he could run faster.

“Who’s he?”

Samson asked one of the other passengers.

“His wife is running away with another man,” he said.

The bus driver had a severe bladder disorder which forced him to stop and pee in the bushes every few minutes. His affliction, coupled with the low speed of the bus, made the vehicle the worst means of escape imaginable. The adulterous woman must have been cursing herself for ever having climbed aboard. At the third pee-stop her husband caught up with the bus and dragged her off by her hair.

That evening back in Addis Ababa, we went to the Sheraton to celebrate. The hotel was yet another of Mr Amoudi s investments and rumor had it that he’d paid $100 million to build the place. Now it was full of foreign aid workers, all on expense accounts and all earning magnificent tax-free salaries. They appeared especially keen on the French restaurant where they could dine on lobster thermidor, Scottish smoked salmon and foie gras imported from Fauchon in Paris. Ethiopians in the restaurants or bars were few and far between, but young courting couples liked to stroll along the hotel’s palatial corridors and walk hand in hand in the gardens.

At the buffet Samson piled a spectacular amount of food on to a soup bowl. It was the first time he’d been in the Sheraton but, despite eating his body weight in cooked meat, he said the food wasn’t anything special. In fact he had said very little since our incarceration in jail, though he thought our release was due to God answering his prayers. We were friends and would remain so, but I sensed he had lost faith in me.

Now that I’d seen an illegal mine in operation, I had some inkling of how gold must have been mined in Solomon’s time. But I was captivated by the idea of Frank Hayter’s lost mine-shafts on the remote mountain of Tullu Wallel in western Ethiopia. And besides, I still had to investigate the five spots on the map where I’d laid my pebbles – places which might yet yield answers to the riddle of Solomon’s mines.

Over dessert I introduced the subject of continuing the search. Samson put down his spoon, covered his eyes with his hands, and sighed.

“We have been to the illegal gold mines,” he said.

“They’re like Solomon’s mines would have been, but they are working a new seam,” I explained. “Ophir must have been further to the west.”

“How do you know?”

“We’ve still got five other places to visit,” I said, sidestepping the question. “How can we stop now? We haven’t even been to Frank Hayter’s mine yet.”

Samson peeped through his fingers.

“We?” he asked.

The only way I could talk Samson into coming with me was by promising that I’d hire a vehicle for the rest of the trip. Local buses, said Samson, were hard on the buttocks and far too slow. My budget was limited, and I’d heard that renting a 4x4 in Ethiopia was fiendishly expensive, but Samson insisted that with his contacts we’d get a great deal. The next morning he set off to find a car while I went to meet a gold merchant in the Mercato area of town. The man who cleaned the lavatories in the Hotel Ghion had put the business card of the goldsmith on my bed. His name was Abdul Majeed, which means “the Servant of the Glorious” in Arabic, and his shop was called “Solomon’s Gold”.

When I reached the goldsmith’s street I found it was lined with dozens of small jewellery shops. In the gutters outside, men squatted over primitive stoves on which crucibles rested. The sight reminded me of the ghamelawallas in India who pay goldsmiths for the dust they sweep from their workshop floors. In Calcutta alone there are more than a hundred thousand men, women and children who work as ghamelawallas, all retrieving minuscule particles of gold from the dirt.

When I entered his shop, Abdul Majeed stood up, blew on his palm, and extended it for me to shake. His teeth were capped and his nostrils were flared, and he wore a skull-cap embroidered with tarnished gold thread. When he spoke, he leant forward until his mouth was no more than an inch from mine. Abdul Majeed had extremely bad breath.

Making it clear from the start that I hadn’t come to buy, I asked what he knew about Solomon’s mines. He invited me to sit, before sliding over a glass of weak tea.

“First the refreshment,” he said, “and afterwards the chatter.”

We sat for a few minutes in silent contemplation, sipping our milky tea. I glanced around the small shop. A series of well-built mahogany display cases covered the back wall. Their shelves were lined with green velvet that had been faded by years of sunlight. Against an adjacent wall stood an elegant grandfather clock, made in Hamburg. Opposite that hung a calendar, illustrated with a picture of the Empire State Building and opened at the page for April 1993. When it comes to time, Ethiopia has its own rules which place it in a sort of parallel universe. Instead of following the Gregorian system, as we do in the West, Ethiopians use the Julian calendar, a system seven years and eight months behind us. In Ethiopia there are twelve months, each of thirty days, and a thirteenth month of just five days. Every year thousands of unsold Western calendars are shipped to Addis Ababa, stored for seven years, and then sold to people like Abdul Majeed.

The shopkeeper served me a second cup of tea and we continued to sit in silence. Then, the refreshment over, he began to speak.

“Gold,” he said pensively, “I could talk on the subject for a lifetime and would still not have begun.”

“Do you have any advice for a seeker of Solomon’s mines?”

“If you want an answer,” said Abdul Majeed, leaning towards me, “you have to consider much more than Solomon. You have to think about the ancient trade routes, the politics, and the reasons why Solomon needed gold.”

“The great temple,” I said, leaning back in a hurry, “I’ve been to Mount Moriah, where it supposedly stood.”

“That’s a start, but what do you know of God’s Land?”

I didn’t know what he meant.

“I am talking about the ancient Egyptian Land of Punt,” he said.

Then he licked his finger and held it in the air.

“To understand the puzzle of Solomon’s mines,” he said, “you have to understand the riddle of Punt – the place from which Egypt once got its gold.”

“Do you think Ophir and Punt were the same place?”

The shopkeeper ignored my question.

“The Israelites’ kingdom was destroyed after Solomon,” he said, “and their records were lost with them. You will find no clues from Solomon’s time, or from the centuries which followed. You have to go backwards, not forwards... back to the Egyptians.”

He got up to serve a customer and then returned to resume the conversation.

“What do you know about Queen Hatshepsut?”

I shrugged.

“There is a temple on the western side of Thebes called Deir el-Bahri. On its southern wall are hieroglyphs which I have seen with my own eyes! They show Queen Hatshepsut’s fleet returning from Punt. The journey wasn’t long before Solomon’s reign!”

He thrust his face forward into mine, his eyes glittering with excitement. I tried not to flinch.

“Most people say that Punt was in Somalia. But now the scientists have changed their minds. Now they say Punt may have been here in Ethiopia.”

“When exactly did the Egyptians start going to Punt?”

The shopkeeper gazed into my eyes. I sensed that he had waited years for a customer to turn up with an interest in Punt. Now such a man had arrived he was eager to demonstrate his knowledge.

“The earliest record was in the Fifth Dynasty,” he said, “when Pharaoh Sahure sent a fleet of ships down the Red Sea. They returned in triumph, the boats piled high with Puntian myrrh, ivory, ebony, electrum and gold.”

“Were Punt and Ophir connected in some way?”

“They may have been the same,” whispered Abdul Majeed. “After all, the Israelites learned their skills of metal-working directly from the Egyptians. You must remember that until they arrived in the Promised Land, they’d been enslaved in Egypt.”

“So you think that Solomon’s gold mines were really the mines of the Pharaohs?”

“Imagine that you were Solomon,” he said. “You wanted a huge amount of gold, and you knew that your neighbours obtained it from mines not so far away. Surely you’d send ships to that place rather than begin an entirely new and dangerous search of your own.”

The shopkeeper’s theory certainly made sense. But before I could give it much thought, he stepped over to one of the display cases and pulled out a set of earrings. They were circular convex shields made of eighteen-carat gold, each about an inch and a half wide. I expected the sales patter to begin but he wasn’t selling the jewellery.

“Look at these,” he said. “They’re worn all over Ethiopia, but you can’t find them anywhere else in the world, except in Egypt. You can find identical jewellery in the Cairo Museum.”

Abdul Majeed, the Servant of the Glorious, blew on his palm and held it out for me to shake once again. He’d enjoyed talking to me about the past, he said, as he hardly dared to think about history these days.

“It’s not like the old days,” he said, leaning forward for the last time. “Ethiopians used to be proud of their traditions. They walked tall and had self-respect. Now all they care about is getting to America.”

SEVEN

The Emperor’s Jeep

“Princes shall come forth out of Egypt, and Ethiopia shall stretch forth her hands unto God.”

Marcus Mosiah Garvey

Franco said he could not remember a time when he did not live in Addis Ababa. He had survived the bad times and the even worse times. He’d seen the capital set ablaze, and the gutters running with young men’s blood. Three generations of his family had lived and died in Ethiopia and the last thing he was going to do was leave now. When he had money he dined at Castelli, a plush Italian restaurant favoured by aid workers. In leaner times he sat on the porch of his ramshackle shop and drank Bedeli beer from a bottle. Five decades of the summer sun had seared lines into Franco’s face. They told his age like the rings of a tree.

Most of Franco’s family possessions had passed through the shop at one time or another. He’d sold his mother’s wedding-gown, his father’s top hat, dozens of trinkets, even his grandmother’s false teeth. I poked about the shelves, admiring the merchandize, but Franco wasn’t really bothered whether I bought or not. His attitude was much the same as that of Abdul Majeed, his friend of forty years whose shop lay opposite, on the other side of the street.

Bric-a-brac shops containing anything of real value have all but disappeared in the West. These days no one throws anything out for fear that it might be worth something. But a browse through Franco’s shop told the recent history of Ethiopia. There were pictures of Haile Selassie as a young man in his imperial robes. There were Fascist medals and rings made from Italian coins. On a hat-stand hung a pair of moth-eaten uniforms along with a pith helmet and a clutch of crumpled silk ties. There were dozens of Ge’ez prayer books and Bibles as well, and scrolls from monasteries, silver crosses and ebony neck-rests. The back wall was covered in feathered masks and clay lip-plates from the Mursi tribe on the Omo River. Adjacent to them, in the shadow of a forlorn stuffed lion, hung half a dozen crocodile-skin shields, tribal spears and amulets on strings.

“That’s quality stuff,” said Franco, leaning over my shoulder. “You just can’t get it any more. It’s all from the Danakil.”

He held a bowl up to my nose. It was filled with what looked like dirty shelled pistachio nuts.

“What d”you think these are?”

I had a sniff. They smelled of nothing at all.

“Don’t know.”

Franco rolled back on his heels and grinned.

“They’re testicles,” he said.

Back at the Hotel Ghion I thanked the hotel cleaner for his tip-off about Abdul Majeed’s shop and showed him my bowl of Danakil testicles, which impressed him no end. I found out later that they were fakes, which saddened me greatly. The cleaner pointed out three businessmen from Shanghai sitting in the hotel’s foyer. They were smoking cheap cigars and sharing a joke. Wiping his face with his rag, the cleaner said they wanted to meet me. The men were cement barons and they were eager to break into the European construction business. Shanghai cement, said my confidant in a whisper, is the best in the world. A man bright enough to buy Danakil testicles and other rare objets would, said the cleaner, surely see the value of an opening like this.

There was no time for cement barons, I explained. I had work to do and pieces of a puzzle to slot together. My quest for Solomon’s mines was far from finished.

Over a pot of tar-like coffee, I thought about the goldsmith’s advice. He was right: the best way to understand Ophir and Solomon was to look forward from the Egyptians, rather than back from the time of Christ.

Queen Hatshepsut was indeed a key. As Abdul Majeed had recounted, in about 1500 bc, a little over five centuries before the time of Solomon’s reign, the Queen sent five great ships to Punt.

There, as the hieroglyphs which adorn the reliefs at Deir el-Bahri relate,

We loaded our ships very heavily with marvels of the country of Punt, all goodly fragrant woods of God’s Land, heaps of myrrh-resins, of fresh myrrh trees, with ebony and pure ivory, with green gold of Amu, with cinnamon-wood, with incense, eye cosmetic, with baboons, monkeys, dogs, with skins of the southern panther, with natives and their children. Never was the like of this brought for any king who has been since the beginning.

The reliefs at Deir el-Bahri clearly show the Queen’s vessels piled high with exotic merchandize. This wasn’t the first time an Egyptian ruler had sent an expedition to Punt, but it was probably the greatest and most successful of all the Puntian journeys, which explains why the Queen chose to immortalize the voyage in such an elaborate frieze.

The reliefs, which still bear traces of their original paint, show glimpses of Punt. There are beehive-shaped huts, similar to those still found in some parts of Ethiopia, and alongside them there are Hamitic figures with refined features, perhaps related to one of the Ethiopian tribes like the Oromo or the Tigray.

Scholars have pointed out other similarities between modern-day Ethiopia and ancient Egypt. Reed boats like those used in Pharaonic times still ply Lake Tana, and the traditional sistra instrument of Ethiopia is thought to be of Egyptian origin. Incense is still valued highly in Ethiopia, just as it was thousands of years ago in Egypt. Other experts have suggested etymological links between the two cultures. Graham Hancock, the celebrated hunter of the Ark of the Covenant, has spoken of the ancient Egyptian trade in dwarfs, who were needed to “dance before the gods” – the Egyptian word dink, or dwarf, is found today in both the Hamitic and the Semitic languages of Ethiopia.

At the time of the great voyage, the Israelites were still an enslaved people, but they would have heard of the mysterious land of Punt, and of the pomp and ceremony that greeted Hatshepsut’s fleet when it returned to Thebes. Such a voyage may well have passed into Israelite folklore, so providing Solomon with a source for the gold he required to build his temple.

I felt I was beginning to make progress, but only by covering more ground could I hope to tease out the clues which, I was sure, lay in the Ethiopian hinterland. Frank Hayter and his fabulous mine-shafts were never far from my thoughts, but first I wanted to go north.

While we were at the mines, Samson had left his taxi in the care of his youngest brother, Moses. The twenty-year-old Lada, which was rented for fifty birr a day, was Samson’s pride and joy. He polished it constantly with a rag, and each morning the seats were dusted down, the windows wiped and the engine checked over. Samson said that if he didn’t take pride in the car, he wouldn’t take pride in the job, and he’d tried desperately to instil the same reasoning in his brother. But Moses was more interested in meeting girls than in eking out a living with the taxi.

The morning after our return from Kebra Mengist, Samson slunk into the Hotel Ghion. The bounce had gone out of him, and his conversation lacked its usual religious undertones. I wondered what had happened.

“The Devil is on my shoulders,” he said ominously.

He tapped a finger to his clavicle.

“There,” he said, “can’t you see him?”

“What’s wrong?”

The first problem was that Moses had crashed the taxi. While it was being repaired, they would earn no income but would still have to pay the rental, not to mention the bill for the repair work. In addition the police had been called to the scene of the crash because the taxi’s passenger had sustained injuries. Who knew what further bills would follow? But that was only the beginning. On our arrival back in Addis the night before, Samson had gone out to buy some food. In the few minutes he was gone, Moses had managed to burn down the one-room shack in which they lived, and most of their possessions had been incinerated in the blaze. It seemed amazing that Moses had survived to tell the tale.

“He put a candle on my radio,” said Samson, “and then he fell asleep. The candle fell and set fire to the mat, and then the bed and all my books. I came back with lots of food, but our house was in flames!”

Samson stood tall and tried to hide the burns on his hands, but there were tears in his eyes.

“I’ll never forgive him,” he said. “There are some things so precious that they can never be replaced. You see, my Bible was destroyed in the fire.”

Together we went by taxi to look at what remained.

Samson’s shack lay in a compound walled with a thorny hedge on the outskirts of Addis Ababa. As we neared the burned-out building, I could smell scorched plastic, and then I spotted a pile of charred belongings. Moses was sitting on a stool dolefully sorting through what was left. Samson gave him a poisonous glare and then led the way to the spot where their home had stood. It had been a rectangular mud-built structure, about the size of a family estate car. He had rented the room from a widow who lived opposite with her seven dogs, for 120 birr, ten pounds, a month. By Ethiopian standards, rents in the capital are extortionately high. The widow was sympathetic towards the brothers’ plight, but she needed money to rebuild. In the meantime, Samson and his brother had nowhere to live.

That afternoon, I bought a few token objects and handed them over with a wad of low-denomination birr notes. Samson was bright and hard-working, and he had given himself an education but, like most Ethiopians, he lived on a knife-edge. Destitution was never far away, and a disaster such as this could ruin him.

Despite his troubles, Samson had managed to find a car for the next leg of our journey. It sounded exactly what we were looking for — a brand-new Toyota Landcruiser with air-conditioning, off-road tires, a spare fuel tank and a skilled driver. When I asked the price, Samson said we’d have to negotiate, so we went to have a look at it and meet the owner.

I cannot remember when I last saw such an exemplary vehicle. It was exactly what I had had in mind. The bodywork was immaculate, the tires had hardly ever been used, and the seats were upholstered in an attractive shade of lilac. My chest tightened in expectation.

Standing next to the car was a man whom we took to be the driver. I asked the price. Samson translated the question.

“How much did he say ?” I asked.

Samson shook his head.

“I’ve made a mistake,” he said, “this is not the vehicle. It belongs to the French Ambassador. This man is his driver.”

“Then where’s our car?”

Samson pointed to a second vehicle which was parked at an angle behind the first. My face fell. A much earlier model of Landcruiser, it had seen its fair share of Ethiopian roads. In fact it looked as if someone had taken a mallet and struck every inch of its off-white body. The tires were balder than bald, and the back doors were welded shut. I peered through the cracked windscreen. A man was stretched out asleep on the back seat.

“That must be the driver,” said Samson.

I’ve never had much luck hiring vehicles for rough journeys. The last thing I rented was a rotting hulk of a riverboat in which I sailed up the Amazon. It looked like the African Queen shortly before she blew up. My Amazon trip had been fraught with incidents, many of them the result of the riverboat’s condition. I’d also had problems with the crew. This time I was going to make sure that the vehicle and its driver were carefully vetted.

I clapped my hands to wake the driver up but he didn’t stir. So I leant through the passenger window and yanked his big toe. The man sat up with a start and then peered out of the window. His eyes were bloodshot and a trail of spittle ran down his chin.

“What’s his name?”

“Bahru.”

“Where does he come from?”

“He’s a Somali,” said Samson, grimacing.

I said we were interested in hiring the vehicle. The driver got out of the car and did his best to stand to attention, though his gaze never strayed from my feet.

We weren’t to be deceived by the rough condition of the vehicle, he said. Beneath the dents was a chassis of iron. We could search the whole of Addis Ababa and never find a car half as sturdy. Then Bahru lowered his voice.

“This Jeep used to be very important,” he whispered. “It once led the imperial convoy of Haile Selassie.”

We negotiated over the price for an hour and ended with a figure twice my original budget. Bahru agreed not to drink and drive, and that he’d provide his services free of charge and find his own place to sleep at night. I stressed that I wouldn’t pay for his food. It seemed miserly in the extreme, but through bitter experience I have learned that it is best to promise little and then to reward hard work with generosity. Finally, I gave him a list of repairs that I wanted carried out before we left Addis.

Bahru said the Emperor’s Jeep wouldn’t be available for two days. A feud had arisen between his family and another. He couldn’t leave town until it was sorted out. Samson muttered that it was a mistake ever to use the services of a Somali, but I ignored him.

“Is two days enough time for the feud to end?” I asked.

Bahru rolled his bloodshot eyes. Then he licked his thumb and pressed it to his throat.

“What does that mean?”

“Some things cannot be translated,” said Samson.

In Addis Ababa I kept seeing Rastafarians. Most were from Jamaica, although some had come from Europe. They would stroll about the streets with an air of confidence which many Ethiopians lacked. Intrigued by the Rasta link with Haile Selassie, and in turn with the line of Solomon, I had started reading books on the movement.

As I understand it, the Rastafarians are concerned with the plight of black people. Yet they are not a political party nor a religious sect. Instead, like the Israelites, they see themselves as a people waiting to be reunited with their Promised Land — Africa. They believe that Haile Selassie is their Messiah, their redeemer.

These days when we talk of Rastafarians, we think of their music, most notably the songs of Bob Marley, but the man who established the precursor of the modern Rastafarian movement, Marcus Mosiah Garvey, has all but been forgotten.

Garvey was a Jamaican, and in the 1920s he promoted the Universal Negro Improvement Association whose aim was to return all black people to Africa. Blacks had become “mentally enslaved” by white people, he said. The only way to restore their dignity was to get them back to Africa. So Garvey used a black-owned steamship line to effect a mass migration to Liberia.

Garvey’s work to repatriate African Americans failed, but his great interest in the continent survived. “Look to Africa,” he said, “when a black king shall be crowned, for the day of deliverance is near.” Soon after, in November 1930, Haile Selassie was crowned in Addis Ababa, fulfilling Garvey’s prophecy Garvey himself died in 1940, and in the years that followed, his influence waned, but the Rastafarian movement has grown. A line from Leviticus (“They shall not make baldness upon their head”) is taken to mean that Rastas should grow their hair, and another line from the Psalms (“He causeth the grass for the cattle, and the herb for the service of man”) lies behind the Rastas’ adoption of ganja, or marijuana.

At breakfast next morning I asked Samson what he thought of the Rastafarian movement. He screwed up his face and stuck out his tongue.

“They’re not good people,” he said. “They come in my taxi and order me around. They pretend to be Ethiopians, but they don’t know anything about our country.”

“Where can I meet some?”

Samson seemed disappointed.

“They’re a waste of time,” he said.

An hour later we arrived at a shanty town on the northern fringes of the city. The shacks were made from little more than cardboard, which was melting into the mud now. Here and there sheets of plastic sacking offered some protection from the rains. In the gaps between the buildings, raw sewage flowed, and the alleyways were full of vicious dogs and even wilder children. Women were washing clothes in buckets, struggling to achieve cleanliness, while their husbands and teenage sons sat about laughing and watching the women work. As we approached, we saw a snaking line of people walking slowly through the slum towards us. They were all dressed in simple white shammas, their faces solemn.

“It’s a funeral,” said Samson. “Someone important has died.”

Sure enough there was a body in the middle of the cortège. As we bowed our heads in respect, I wondered if our visit was appropriate.

One of Samson’s contacts had said that a splinter Rasta group was living in the shanty town and that they were anxious to get back to the grassroots of the Rastafarian creed. When the funeral procession had passed us, Samson went in search of the leader of the group. A few minutes later he hurried back and led me to the hideaway. The headquarters of the Rastafarian New Order lay in a steep-sided house. The place was well swept and lit by natural light which flooded in through a pair of large windows adjacent to the door. A single figure was sitting at the back of the room. His name was Jah and it was he whom we had come to see.

Jah didn’t get up, but even before I saw him walking, I knew he was the kind of man who walked with a sway of the hips. He wore a denim coat torn at the collar, stone-washed Levis and a red mohair vest, with no shirt underneath it.

“All white men are sinners,” he said in a thick Jamaican accent. “The whiter you are, the more you have sinned.”

I thanked him for the information and introduced myself I was pleased we’d managed to meet with so little trouble. I was looking forward to talking to him.

“I’ll talk,” he said, “but I need some cash for ganj. No cash, no ganj, no talk.”

It was a firm line to take, but I respect a man with principles, so I slipped him a torn fifty birr note. Jah stuffed it in his coat pocket and pulled out a cigar-sized joint. Then he leaned back on a dilapidated couch, thrust back his mane of dreadlocks, lit the joint and inhaled.

“Welcome to the New Order,” he said.

“How are you different from other Rastafarians?”

He asked if I knew of the history of the movement. I said I’d read a certain amount. I knew about Garvey and the steamship plan. He nodded through a haze of smoke.

“That’s good, man, that’s good. You know about Garvey.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Then you know that the path strayed.”

“What do you mean?”

“Garvey had a goal: Africa. That’s why I’m here,” he said. “He knew the work can only start when we’re on this holy ground. But Garvey got lost and Marley got found.”

“Great music,” I said limply.

“Screw the music, man. Bob Marley got it wrong. We are the new path... we’re gonna retrace the steps...”

“From Garvey?”

“Yeah, man,” said Jah in a fog of smoke, “we’re gonna recraft the message. Black takes white.” He paused for effect. “Checkmate.”

“What about Ras Tafari and his line, the line of Solomon?”

“Ras Tafari was a dude,” said Jah, “so was Solomon. They understood about the Rasta Way... the Path. Yeah, man, those dudes were Rastas.”

When Jah had finished his joint he lit another. I asked him what he knew of Solomon.

“King Solomon was the wise king,” he said. “Think about it. If you were as wise as he, wouldn’t you line your pockets too?”

“But he needed the gold for the temple on Mount Moriah.”

“What are you on, man?” snapped Jah. “Solomon just said he needed the gold for the temple.”

“You mean he was lying?”

“No way, man, he was the wise king.”

“So what happened to the gold?”

Jah inhaled until his lungs were bursting. His nostrils flared and his eyes widened so much I thought they’d fall out on to his lap.

“The Copper Scroll,” he choked, “check out the Copper Scroll.”

Mariam was arthritic, had flat feet, and a taste for chewing chicken bones. He kept a plate of carcasses within easy reach and sucked on them between meals. Samson had taken me to the old prospector’s shack which was lost in the sprawl of Addis Ababa’s bustling Mercato area. Mariam, he said, was a regular in his taxi cab and had mined in the north of Ethiopia forty years ago. I wasn’t sure why Samson hadn’t mentioned the old man before.

Mariam must have been eighty though he didn’t look it. The grease from the chicken bones had kept his skin soft and oiled. It was his speech that gave away his age. It was punctuated by wheezing, as if an enormous weight was pressing down on his chest. Even so, he spoke fluent English and Italian as well as four Ethiopian languages. He had never met Frank Hayter, but he remembered his friend, a cantankerous Irishman called Thaddeus Michael O”Shea.

“Everyone knew O”Shea,” he said, fumbling for another bone, “he was a legend. He claimed to have found a cave full of gold...”

“At Tullu Wallel?”

“No, no, in the north, near Axum. Near the monastery of Debra Damo.”

“Another cave, another treasure?”

Mariam nodded and rubbed a sleeve across his mouth.

“There’s more than one treasure all right,” he said. “O”Shea found the cave while prospecting. But he never mined any gold there. He was terrified by the curse.”

“What curse?”

“Anyone who mined gold in the cave would have their body ripped limb from limb by wolves. Then the wolves would hunt down the victim’s family and eat them as well.”

The curse reminded me of the hyenas in Harar. I wondered if there was a link. The stories credited to Hayter and O”Shea spoke of caverns filled with gold. No one seemed to know for certain whether they were the entrances to mine-shafts or simply caves in which treasure had been stashed. If they were old mines, then it was more than likely they’d been mined out in ancient times.

I told Mariam that we were planning to follow Hayter’s trail to Tullu Wallel after we had been north.

“Tullu Wallel is a savage place,” he said. “Only a fool would head that way, especially now the rains are here. The mud will be three feet deep, and four feet in places. You’ll need a great many mules and ropes, and some good men.”

“I’ve hired a Jeep,” I said, gloating. “It used to be in the imperial motorcade.”

Mariam narrowed his eyes and threw down the chicken bone.

“It won’t get anywhere near the mountain,” he said.

Later, at lunch, Samson picked at a bowl of spaghetti without speaking. I knew his thoughts were on his taxi repair bills and his burnt-out house. As his employer I felt it was my responsibility to weigh in and help get him out of the quagmire of debt. So, overcome with weakness, I doubled his salary and slid another wad of cash across the table. A faint glimmer of a smile appeared. I asked him what he thought about the story of Thaddeus O”Shea and the cave filled with gold.

“I think Ethiopia is different from your country or America,” he said. “People here cannot afford to go around looking for treasure in caves. That would take time, and they need their time to earn money. If they don’t earn, they starve.”

“But why hasn’t the government searched for the caves?”

“Perhaps they already have.”

The Emperor’s Jeep lurched up the hill to the Hotel Ghion at six o’clock the next morning. Only three cylinders were functioning, and none of the repair work had been carried out. Bahru shook my hand violently. The car might look in bad shape, he said, but it was as strong as an elephant. I was so pleased he’d actually turned up that I decided to believe him. We loaded the bags, some sturdy three-ply rope that I’d bought in the market, a pair of Chinese-made jerry cans, a charcoal brazier and forty square feet of tarpaulin. Bahru had left the vehicle running and was forced to admit that the starter motor didn’t work. The engine could only be turned off if the Jeep was pointing downhill.

When everything was aboard, Samson climbed into the front seat and I got in the back. Our first destination was to be Lalibela, where the “Gold of Sheba” was supposedly kept in the treasury of a church. Looking at my Michelin map I judged the distance from Addis Ababa to be about four hundred miles. I asked Bahru how long it would take to get there, but he refused to say. Samson had no idea either. In the end it turned out that neither of them had ever been north of the capital.

On hiring the vehicle I had given Bahru seven hundred birr to fill up with petrol and to change the tires. After that he would be responsible for all breakdowns and punctures. Now the tires were as bald as ever and the tank was almost dry. I kicked myself for having believed that the money would ever be used for the correct purpose. As I’d discovered in Peru, when people are living hand-to-mouth, funds are spent on necessities, though in Bahru’s case I suspected he’d had a night on the town instead.

Before setting out on the Amazonian riverboat journey, I’d watched my guide, a Vietnam veteran called Richard Fowler, publicly humiliate and then fire one of the employees. He told me later that he’d done it as a warning to the rest of the crew. Fowler said you had to be cruel to be kind. Following his example, I launched into Samson and Bahru. If I had any trouble from either of them, I said, they’d be returning to Addis on the bus. They looked at me with long faces. The journey north had begun on a sour note.

We drove out of Addis Ababa at low speed. The Emperor’s Jeep wasn’t a patch on the French Ambassador’s car but it was a great improvement on the local bus. Although it was still early, hundreds of people were walking into the city through the platinum light. Most Ethiopians living in rural areas have no choice but to walk. Some of them were herding flocks of animals down the main road and must have come from far away. Long-horned cattle were goaded forward with the swish of a cane, their backs steaming, their heads bent low. There were donkeys as well, all laden with merchandize: sacks of coffee, baskets and firewood, earthenware pots and pans, scrap metal and hides. And on the edge of the road hundreds of barefoot children staggered along beneath piles of sticks.

“We passed through the first of many small towns. The street-sellers were getting ready, placing potatoes and dung patties in neat clusters on their sidewalk stalls. Others were laying out fresh animal hides to dry in the sun, or slaughtering chickens and draining their blood. Morning in Africa is the most peaceful time and place I know. There’s a gentleness about it which is hard to describe, except to say that it’s framed in a naturalness which has been knocked out of our own world.

We drove through forests of eucalyptus and out over a pancake-flat plateau. We passed a church, at the steps of which a pair of elderly women were kneeling while the priest beat a row of carpets with a baton. The rough fields were awash with children dressed in rags, many no older than four or five. Most of them had been out all night tending the goats. Their noses were streaming and their faces pale with cold.

The Emperor’s Jeep ground along in fourth gear at fifteen miles an hour. Bahru had already demonstrated an alarming habit of waiting until he was on a blind bend before overtaking. Most of the vehicles on Ethiopian roads were gargantuan trucks, overladen with goods. Private cars were almost non-existent, except for those owned by aid organizations. Samson said that people in Addis preferred to stay there. The roads were too dangerous and besides, once you’d tasted life in the big city, village life seemed dull.

Outside a hamlet Bahru slammed on the brakes. He’d spotted a man selling some qat by the side of the road. The Jeep took a hundred yards to stop. I made a mental note to get the brake-pads seen to.

The qat-seller had a strand of turquoise cloth wound in a crude turban around his head. He pointed to a pit which could only be seen by leaning over a craggy stone outcrop. The Italians, he said, had once killed seventy children and hurled their bodies into the pit. If we looked hard we’d see their bones.

Gradually the round huts were replaced with square ones that had tall thatched roofs. Wood smoke spiralled up from fires in the forest, and dry stone walls divided the fields. Then we came to meadows and terraced hillsides where nothing but tiny purple flowers grew; and we passed through a series of tunnels hewn out of the rock, their rough sides glistening like cut glass. Further on we passed camels chewing listlessly at the cacti that grew along the road. High above, rain clouds threatened a monsoon downpour.

The road was not good, but it was far superior to the others I’d seen in Ethiopia, though every mile of it was dotted with the rusting chassis of wrecks. In the West we hold roads in high esteem. They lead us from one place to the next. We care about their condition and their straightness. But in a land where most people travel by foot, and where so many road journeys end in fatalities, roads are not held in high regard at all.

Samson hadn’t forgiven me for berating him before setting out. His taxi had crashed, his house had burnt down, and on top of all that, I’d yelled at him for the sake of it. At the third stop for qat I took him aside and apologized. I’d shouted, I said, to make sure Bahru didn’t take advantage of us. It had been nothing more than an ingenious ploy. Samson’s expression warmed, and the dimples returned to his cheeks. He rummaged in his tartan bag and took out a large brown manila envelope. It was a gift, he said.

“What is it?”

“Some research.”

I broke the seal and took out several sheets of paper. Samson had found an article on the Copper Scroll, the one which Jah had spoken about. Though I’d actually seen the Copper Scroll in Amman’s National Museum a few years before, I hadn’t understood its importance at the time.

The Copper Scroll was found along with the other Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran in 1952. While most were written on papyrus, the Copper Scroll’s text was, as its name suggests, etched on a sheet of beaten copper eight feet long but less than one-twentieth of an inch thick. The text listed sixty-four locations in the Holy Land where an enormous quantity of gold and other treasure acquired from a great temple was hidden. Scholars have postulated that the temple could have been that of Solomon.

Copper was an expensive metal in ancient times, and writing on it an extremely slow business. It is hard to believe that anyone going to the trouble of writing on such a rare medium would have made it up, and it is clear that the Essene priests at Qumran used copper because they didn’t want the text to deteriorate. Biblical scholars agree that the text speaks of a monumental hoard of gold and silver but, depending on the translation, the weight of the gold varies from twenty-six tonnes to forty-four tonnes. More aggravating still is the fact that no one has determined exactly where the treasure is buried.

That evening we slept at a roadside bar in a village of uncertain name, perched on a steep hill. Night fell after a thunderstorm of astonishing force. The Emperor’s Jeep had overheated, requiring us to stop. Bahru promised that he’d fix the car’s leaking radiator by dawn and, since morale was low, I decided to treat him and Samson to a dish of injera, fermented Ethiopian bread, and a mutton stew.

As we ate a teenage boy hobbled over, his weight supported by a pole. His right leg was wasted and bent sharply at the knee. The foot beneath it was curled and withered. Ethiopia’s villages are full of such people whose dreadful deformities could have been prevented with a single dose of polio vaccine. He was too proud to ask for food but we could see his ribs and knew he must be desperately hungry. Samson asked him to join us. The invalid refused politely, as if he had a better invitation elsewhere. Again, Samson asked, and again the boy refused. Only when Samson stood up and led him to our table did he give way. Then Samson selected the best pieces from the stew and made sure our guest ate them all.

As I sat there after the meal, touched by Samson’s thoughtfulness, I reflected on Ethiopia. The country was once occupied by the Italians but it was never colonized. As a result it has retained its own very distinctive identity and sense of pride. Ethiopians listen to Ethiopian music, they wear Ethiopian dress and they eat their own traditional food. Though many want to emigrate to America, they know very little about Western society. The only flaw in this cultural homogeneity is the absence of an awareness of their past. The more time I spent in Ethiopia, the more I came to understand how incongruous this was. There is no other sub-Saharan country with such a rich cultural heritage and it seemed extraordinary that the wealth of its history was not being harnessed.

Unlike most of his countrymen, Samson had studied the nation’s history. He was a self-schooled expert on the Kebra Negast and the other important Ge’ez texts. His strength was founded in his knowledge of Ethiopian history. It seemed a terrible waste that such a solid member of society should be so desperate to leave, to go to America.

“There is no future here,” said Samson after the meal. “You come from a country where people have choices, even though they may be unaware of the fact. We’re looking for Solomon’s gold mines because we have food on our plates and we’re healthy. We can wake up in the morning and not have to worry about getting enough money to eat. But put yourself in the place of the boy who was our guest tonight. Most Ethiopians are like him. A few birr in his pocket and a little education would allow him to think of the future. But that boy and millions like him don’t have that layer of fat to support them...”

Samson stopped mid-sentence and then took off his wristwatch and put it on the table.

“They live second by second, minute by minute, hour by hour until...”

“Until what?”

“Until their time runs out.”

EIGHT

Sheba’s Gold

“Our excitement was so intense, as we saw the way to Solomon’s treasure chamber at last thrown open, that I for one began to tremble and shake.”

Henry Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines

Early next morning at the roadside bar, a group of six Tigrayan girls sat at the back, preening themselves and spreading their legs as widely as they could. They were improbably dressed in white coats, the kind which doctors wear in hospitals, and their feet were strapped into high heels. It was five o’clock but as far as they were concerned the night shift hadn’t ended. I glanced over at them as I sat waiting for Bahru to get the Emperor’s Jeep warmed up. The girls looked away, pretending to be coy, though they knew better than I that coyness was a quality incompatible with their trade.

I watched as a truck driver staggered over to one of them. His shirt-front was spattered with dried vomit and his waxy face was peppered with sores. The Tigrayan woman didn’t seem put off by her customer’s appearance. First he flirted and she bargained, and then he bargained and she flirted. Eventually they struck a deal. The client handed over his cash, bought a bottle of Coca Cola, and followed the girl into a back room. I asked Samson why a man with an obvious taste for stronger liquor would have wasted his money on Coke.

“In the countryside,” he said, “some people believe that if you wash your groin with Coca Cola you won’t get Aids. The prostitutes insist on it.”

The night before, the bedbugs had been ferocious. My face and shoulders were so badly bitten that I looked as if I had a chronic skin disease. Samson had been attacked by insects as well, but he didn’t complain. We needed hardening up, he said sternly, if we were ever to make it to Tullu Wallel and Frank Hayter’s mine-shafts. As we spent more time together, Samson and I developed a curious relationship. Each of us saw it as his mission to force discomfort on the other. Rather like Inspector Clouseau’s manservant, Kato, Samson knew he was making me stronger by causing me pain. I never quite knew if he was doing it out of loyalty or cruelty. For my part I felt a deep sadistic urge come over me whenever I saw Samson flagging. I couldn’t help it. If he suggested we rest at seven, I insisted we continue until ten; and each morning I forced him to take a freezing cold shower before the day’s start. He had stopped complaining long ago, well aware that a sadist is empowered by the slightest hint of victory.

We left the white-coated whores to their business and drove out of the village. The sun would soon be rising, forcing the girls back into the shadows. It was good to be moving again. Bahru shifted the gears restlessly, coaxing the vehicle west towards Lalibela. As the Emperor’s Jeep ground its way around the potholes, I lay stretched out in the back watching the green landscape unfold. The road wound its way upwards, round one hairpin bend after another. Most of the hillsides were cultivated, their reddish-brown soil sprouting with thick crops of maize and wheat. The more I saw of Ethiopia’s rural areas, the more confused I became about the country’s image. In the West everyone thinks of Ethiopia as a place of starvation and famine, but although there are isolated pockets of desert, most of the country is lush.

We stopped at the town of Dilbe. Bahru was urgently in need of some qat. As he tottered off towards the market Samson and I got out of the Jeep to stretch our legs. Nearby stood a bar, little more than a lean-to, that served thimble-sized cups of coffee made with an Italian espresso machine. Mussolini’s invasion in 1935 had brought nothing but misery to Ethiopia, nothing that is, except for espresso machines. They can be found even in the smallest towns and they are the only pieces of machinery in the country which never break down.

As the qat began to take effect, Bahru’s foot grew heavier on the accelerator. Despite the terrible road surface we raced along at an impressive speed. Chewing furiously at the dark green leaves, his pupils dilating, Bahru bragged that the engine had been overhauled during the night. Samson said that Bahru hadn’t wanted to ask me for money so he’d paid for the overhaul himself. I checked my bags to see that they were all still there.

“What exactly did he sell?”

Samson translated the question into Amharic, and Bahru spat out an answer.

“What did he say?”

“He said he sold three of the brake-pads,” replied Samson.

A pair of white girls were sitting by the side of the road. They were in their early twenties and their hair was matted and their skin grimed with dirt. They had spent the night in the open. At twilight the day before, the bus they were taking had swerved to miss another. Luck had been on their side — it was the oncoming bus, not theirs, that had gone over the cliff. When the Emperor’s Jeep rolled to a stop, one of the girls pointed to the wreckage in the ravine below.

“It was like a horror film,” she said. “The other bus had no choice but to go off the road. When our driver realized he was still alive, he burst out laughing and honked the horn. He drove on, but we wanted to stay and help the injured and the dying. So he left us here.”

“Dead bodies were strewn everywhere,” added the other girl. “Some of the survivors were lying face down, praying to God. Dozens of them were screaming. One woman had lost all the fingers from her right hand and she couldn’t speak. She was in shock. We didn’t have any medical supplies, and even if we had had some there wasn’t much we could do. Still we did our best to comfort the injured, until help arrived.” She paused and stared at the ground. “But no one ever came.”

Samson and I got out of the car and looked over the edge of the cliff. Fifty feet below, the mangled white shell of a bus lay in a ditch. There were seven or eight bodies scattered on the ground near the vehicle, and I could make out several survivors huddled together under a tree.

We have to get word to Lalibela,” said the first girl. “Someone there will come and help.”

We told the girls to get in. Then Samson and I exchanged a worried glance. We both knew that the chance of anyone in Lalibela volunteering to help was remote, and that it wouldn’t be long before the local villagers descended to strip what they could from the wreckage.

The first thing we noticed in Lalibela were the flies. They swarmed over us like locusts, getting in our ears, up our nostrils and in our mouths. For once, I kept my mouth shut. Samson said he’d go and find an aid organization with medical supplies and he got out of the car. Within seconds, he disappeared in a cloud of flies. I told him to hurry. I was impatient to locate the Gold of Sheba.

Lalibela contains twelve churches hewn from the living rock. They may not be as grand as the monuments of the Nabateans at Petra, or on such a scale as the Pyramids, but they are equally mysterious and very beautiful. Were it not for its location, Lalibela would be swamped with tourists.

The story goes that in the twelfth century, during the rule of the Zagwe dynasty, a male child was born to the Queen. The King had died, and the boy’s elder brother ruled as regent. Soon after the birth of her second son, the Queen noticed that his cradle was infested with a swarm of bees. She recalled an ancient Ethiopian belief which says that the animal world can foretell the arrival of true nobility. In Ethiopia children are generally named some days after their birth, once their character has shown itself. The Queen thought that the bees were a sign, and so she named her second son Lalibela, “the man whose sovereignty is recognized by bees”.

Years passed, and Lalibela’s brother grew jealous. Fearing that his younger brother would usurp him, he had him poisoned. Lalibela drank the poison and fell into a deep sleep. As he slept, he dreamed that he was taken by angels to the first, second and third heavens. Then God spoke, telling Lalibela to return to earth and to build fabulous churches, the like of which the world had never seen before. When Lalibela awoke, his brother paid homage to him, declaring him to be the true king. Then Lalibela gathered together stonemasons and craftsmen, and ordered them to start carving the rock. During the day they worked with great speed, and during the night the work was carried on by angels.

The twelve churches that Lalibela created are laid out in two main clusters. Each building is unique and can only be appreciated by looking at the space around it. Where there is empty space there was once rock. All the churches were carved out of the surrounding red volcanic tuff.

After an hour of waiting for Samson to reappear, I decided to continue the search for the Gold of Sheba alone. Leaving Bahru to chew qat in the shade, I began to make my way to the northern cluster of churches. Within five strides of the Jeep, I was surrounded by a gaggle of boys. They spoke good English, which is rare in Ethiopia, and all of them wanted to be my guide. I said that I wanted to see the Gold of Sheba. I expected blank looks, but to my surprise they all nodded keenly. Then a boy of about eight with bloodied knees spoke for the rest:

“The Gold of Sheba is kept in a big box, which King Lalibela himself made. It’s locked and guarded by the priest at Bet Giyorgis.”

The children were adamant that only one of them could be my guide. That was the rule. They could decide amongst themselves by fighting, one said, but it would take time and cause them pain. It was better that I choose my guide as quickly as I could. A small boy stood a little apart from the group, clearly afraid that he would be beaten by the others. Darker-skinned than the rest, he was also the weakest. I chose him, and the others scowled.

I asked the boy his name. He had a high-pitched voice and a cheeky smile. He said he was called Amaya, and that his mother and father were dead, so now he lived with his grandmother who was blind.

We set off down the narrow path which led through tall, lush elephant grass towards the northern churches. Amaya rambled on in English, telling me about life in Lalibela and skipping to keep up. He took me first to the biggest church, Bet Medhane Alem, “Savior of the World”. The church stands in a great courtyard carved out of the volcanic rock, and the building itself is encircled by columns, with many more inside its carved interior.

In 1521, a Portuguese priest, Francisco Álvares, arrived in Lalibela and was astonished by what he saw. Yet when he came to write his journals, he was convinced that no one would believe his description. In A True Relation of the Lands of Prester John, he explains: “It wearied me to write more of these works, because it seemed to me that they will accuse me of untruth... there is much more than I have already written, and I have left it that they may not tax me with it being falsehood.”

A few minutes from Bet Medhane we came to the church of Bet Maryam. Each of the churches has its own sacred well. That at Bet Maryam is said to contain healing water which has the power to make barren women fertile. Inside, the arches are adorned with carvings and fabulous frescoes, some of which bear the Star of David. Elsewhere I saw ventilation holes carved in the shape of swastikas, evidence of ancient trade routes between Africa and the Indian subcontinent.

On the southern side of Bet Maryam a tunnel led us to more churches. Among them is the most sacred chapel of all, the Selassie Chapel, reputedly the resting-place of King Lalibela himself. Then Amaya led the way to Bet Giyorgis.

Lalibela’s Church of St George is one of the true wonders of the world. If it were in any other country, it would be surrounded by curio-sellers and hot-dog stalls. Guided tours would be conducted, and a five-star hotel erected to overlook it. Thankfully, it’s in the middle of nowhere and so has been left alone. Bet Giyorgis is carved in the shape of a Greek cross, and it stands on a three-tiered plinth. Legend has it that when King Lalibela had completed his churches St George galloped up on a magnificent white steed. He was furious with the king for not dedicating a church to him. And so King Lalibela ordered one more church to be built in honor of Ethiopia’s patron saint.

As he led me through a tunnel to the church’s entrance, Amaya tugged at my shirt sleeve.

“This is where the Gold of Sheba is kept,” he whispered.

We ascended a flight of broad steps, removed our shoes and called out for the priest. The ceiling of the church was about twenty feet high, its interior square chamber carved out from the rock, with a shrouded cube — the Holy of Holies — in the centre of the room. As my eyes adjusted to the dim light, a man in deep purple robes stepped from the shadows. He had dark, sorrowful eyes and his beard was flecked with gray. I asked Amaya to translate, but the priest butted in, saying he understood English. There was no need for the boy, he said.

“I have come on a long journey from America,” I replied, as no one in Ethiopia ever seemed very impressed by a journey begun in England.

The priest’s eyes widened.

“Ah,” he said, “America. America is good.”

“I’ve come to Lalibela to see a precious treasure. I’ve heard you have that treasure here.”

He nodded.

“I am looking for the Gold of Sheba.”

The priest turned and motioned to a dark wooden coffer, sealed with an unusual lock which seemed to be fastened with a system of wooden levers and bolts.

“The Gold of Sheba is kept in there,” he said. “The box was made by King Lalibela. It is sacred and cannot be seen by anyone.”

I had come a long way to see the Gold of Sheba and I was not going to be thwarted by religious bureaucracy. I looked down at Amaya and saw him rubbing his fingers together. I fumbled in my coat pocket. The priest’s tongue probed the hairs around his mouth, like that of a snake testing the air.

“I’d be willing to make a suitable donation,” I said obsequiously.

A moment later, the priest was opening the lock. He began by loosening a pair of large wooden screws. I leant forward to get a better look, but he turned his back to me and blocked my view. Minutes later he stepped back. In his hand was an Ethiopian cross intricately worked in gold.

“This is the Gold of Sheba.”

Holding the crucifix high above his head like a battle standard, the priest tilted it to catch the shaft of sun coming through the doorway. Amaya and I stumbled backwards as the bolt of light dazzled us. Although not as large as some other Ethiopian crosses, the Gold of Sheba was magnificent. The priest deciphered its complex design. An intricate cross lay at its centre, surrounded by twelve bosses that represented the Apostles of Christ. On the outer edge were a pair of birds that looked like hoopoes. The priest explained that they were doves from Noah’s Ark.

“You are the first foreigner ever to set eyes on this sacred cross,” said the priest untruthfully. “A man whose genius shines as brightly as yours, as brightly as the Gold of Sheba itself, is the kind of man who rewards true beauty when he sees it.”

“Where is the cross from?”

“It was crafted in the highlands.”

“By King Lalibela?”

“No, no,” said the priest, “long before Lalibela. The gold was brought from Judah. The gold in the cross came from the Great Temple in Judah.”

“The Temple of Solomon, in Jerusalem?”

“Yes, that is right,” he replied, twisting the shaft of the cross in his fingers. “An Ethiopian went to Judah after Solomon’s death and brought back three of the gold treasures.”

“The hoards mentioned in the Copper Scroll?”

The priest said nothing, but he smiled.

I had listened to him with mounting suspicion. How tempting it was to believe his tale. The idea of Solomon’s gold returning from the land of the Israelites to Ethiopia was wonderful – a completed circle. But it was implausible, and I had found no mention of the legend elsewhere. I asked the priest where he thought the gold for the temple in Jerusalem had been mined. He shook his head.

“What does it matter where the gold came from? More important is what happened to it when the Temple of Solomon was destroyed.”

Saying this, he laid the Gold of Sheba back in its box and fastened the lock.

“There are thieves,” he said furtively. “Foreign thieves!”

Amaya tugged at my sleeve. There had been a terrible theft in Lalibela, he said. Then the priest took up the story. In 1997, an 800-year-old solid gold cross that was kept in the Church of Bet Medhane Alem went missing. It weighed more than fourteen pounds, and was one of the greatest Ethiopian treasures. When the theft was discovered, the small community was plunged into mourning. Lalibela’s people whipped themselves into a frenzy of grief, pleading with God to help them. Suspicion fell on the head priest, who was arrested and taken away. Some said he was tortured; everyone believed he was involved. Months went by and there was no word, no sight of the cross. The priest had not confessed. Then news came when it was least expected. The cross was discovered being smuggled into Belgium, where it had been sold to an unsuspecting purchaser. The Ethiopian government had to pay $25,000 to get it back.

Before we could leave the church, the priest fished out a collection tin from the folds of his robes and looked at me expectantly. I folded a fifty birr note and stuffed it through the slot in the lid of the tin. The priest smiled in gratitude and then he was gone.

A horde of beggars shuffled towards us as we walked out of the church. Like Lalibela s flies, they longed for sustenance. At the back of the pack was a very old woman. She was stooped low, her spine twisted and bent, and her body was shrouded in rags. Around her neck there hung an enormous growth, the size and shape of a coconut.

“The others say she’s a witch,” said Amaya, “that she talks to the Devil at night.”

“What do you think?”

Amaya smiled at the woman.

“I think her back hurts,” he said gently, “but I don’t think she’s a witch.”

The desk clerk of Lalibela’s Sheba Hotel cursed the government for driving the tourists away.

We used to get pretty women coming here,” he said, staring into space. “They had nice pink lipstick and jewellery that rattled when they laughed. But our leaders don’t want the world to see the mess the country’s in. They’re greedy for the money the aid companies bring. The worse the situation sounds, the more money the United Nations sends. So of course they don’t want the place to be stable.”

For a man working as a desk clerk in a small hotel, he seemed unusually well-informed. I asked if he expected tourism to pick up again.

“Hah!” he jeered. “Only when the government falls.”

“When will that be?”

The clerk looked at his watch.

“It could happen any minute.”

Amaya had recommended that we spend the night at the Sheba Hotel and I had sent him off to find Samson. When I asked the clerk for my room key, he toyed with it, unwilling to end our conversation.

“I see from the register you’re from America,” he said.

I replied that I was.

“Ah, I am going to America.”

“Oh, when?”

“When beautiful Ursula sends me the ticket and the visa.”

“Who’s Ursula?”

The clerk leant over the counter and his eyes lit up.

“Ursula, beautiful Ursula!”

“Yes, but who is she?”

“She came here, from Texas,” he said. “She has white skin, like the shell of a goose egg, and soft hair. When she came to Sheba Hotel we talked for hours. She said she wanted me to see America with my own eyes. She promised me that one day I would be a guest, and I promised to wait for her letter... the one with the ticket and the visa.”

“When was Ursula here?”

“Eleven years ago.”

Lalibela’s buildings are unlike those in any other part of Ethiopia. The houses are circular with two storeys and are built of loose-fitting stones. The town’s inhabitants eke out a living by keeping a few animals and tending their meager crops of maize and teff. Around Petra or the Pyramids money from tourism trickles down into the local economy, and there’s a hustle and bustle in the air. But at Lalibela what little money there is from tourism goes straight into the priests’ pockets. The local people are ruinously poor and like all Christians in the country, they stand in awe of the priesthood.

Shortly before sunset, Samson turned up at the hotel. He’d spoken to some Danish aid workers about the bus crash and said they would go and have a look in the morning. I wondered how many more of the injured would have died by then, and cursed myself for not having ferried them to Lalibela myself.

“There’s no hospital in Lalibela,” said Samson, reading my thoughts. “And even if we did go and get them we’d run out of petrol. There’s none of that here either.” He was right. Lalibela had a severe petrol shortage, and the town was littered with cars that had been abandoned when their tanks ran dry.

The Emperor’s Jeep had an engine with an insatiable thirst, made worse by the fact that we could never turn it off. Our expedition was on a tight budget, but our transport had been constructed for an emperor who had had access to plentiful funds. Bahru had promised that the more distance we put between us and the capital, the cheaper petrol would become. By the time we were on the Eritrean border, he said, we’d find fuel was virtually given away. As a result, he had refused to fill up at any of the petrol stations en route and now we were running dangerously low.

Early next morning I told Samson to go and find some petrol. If he couldn’t find any, he was to look for high-octane aviation fuel. He ambled away in the direction of the market with a one-gallon bottle under his arm. He hadn’t quite understood the extent of the Jeep’s thirst.

An aid worker in Addis Ababa had told me to be careful when buying fuel in rural Ethiopia. Much of the stuff on sale is diluted with kerosene or even with water. The best way to test its quality is to offer a little fuel to the person you are buying from. If he jumps at the idea you know he’s hawking the real thing.

The only man in town with petrol for sale looked surprisingly gloomy given that he had a monopoly on all the fuel.

Samson checked the price and was quoted four times the usual rate.

“That’s scandalous!” I shouted. “But we’re desperate, so tell him that we’ll buy all the petrol he’s got – so long as he puts some in his own tank first.”

The petrol-seller’s face froze as Samson translated my words. Then he grew very angry and threatened to call the police. While he was shouting, Samson took a sniff at the fuel he was touting.

“This isn’t petrol,” he said, “it smells like horse urine.”

For the next two days we waited for a petrol tanker to arrive. The two girls we’d picked up had wisely decided to catch a lift westwards to Gondar on a truck piled high with crates of ouzo. Like the espresso machines, ouzo had been introduced by the Italians, and the Ethiopians had developed a taste for it. As a result, there was a distinct correlation between wrecked trucks and the contents that they were carrying at the time of the crash. Many of the vehicles we saw that had plunged into ravines seemed to have been carrying ouzo or beer or vodka, or in some cases all three.

The problem with having your own transport is that it limits your movements. All I could do was force Samson and Bahru to stand by the roadside and flag down vehicles to ask if we could buy any of their fuel. On the first day only one truck passed, and it ran on diesel. On the second day they were a little luckier: a government jeep rolled into Lalibela. Samson begged the driver to sell us some precious fuel, but the man jeered at him and drove off.

I was secretly pleased to have been marooned in Lalibela and spent the first two days exploring the town and its churches with Amaya. But then, having seen all there was to see, I grew impatient.

By the third day, Samson and Bahru had still had no luck and I retreated to the Sheba Hotel. The desk clerk was also tired of waiting, in his case for non-existent guests. He asked me if I’d man the front desk while he took the afternoon off. What if a tidal wave of tourists flooded in? His face lit up for a second and then fell. “This is Lalibela,” he said, “not Las Vegas.”

So I sat behind the front desk and re-read Frank Hayter’s account of his discovery of the mine-shafts at Tullu Wallel·.

It was not until I was within a few yards that I realized what the patches of darker stone were — the entrance to underground caves; and not natural entrances either, for the stone uprights and heavy lintels that squared the openings had been fashioned by the hand of man.

Switching on my torch I stepped between the massive uprights. Ahead loomed a narrow passage which at some remote age had been hewn through the rock. I glanced at the walls and saw that they had been roughly chiselled. Here and there various-sized bosses of darker stone had been left protruding from the wall’s surface, giving the impression that the workmen had found the task of cutting through them an impossible one. Advancing step by step I penetrated some forty feet and was wondering how much farther I could go before the passage ended, when the torch-light illuminated the far wall of a huge cave.

After reading Hayter’s words, I took another look at the photograph of the mine opening in Captain Bartleet’s book. The dressed stone doorway near the rough cave entrance looked convincing, but I knew that the only way to solve the matter was to make for the mountain myself.

When I am about to embark on a difficult journey, I comfort myself by reading the accounts of the great nineteenth-century travelers, men like Stanley, Burton, Speke, Burckhardt and Barth. They are towering figures who persevered through the most brutal circumstances imaginable, often in disguise, though today their methods seem rather savage. If any of Stanley’s team gave him trouble, he had them put in chains.

Of them all my favourite is Samuel White Baker. He traveled throughout Abyssinia, as Ethiopia was then known, and he was instrumental in locating the source of the Nile. Baker was a man of overwhelming ambition who thrived on adversity. When the chips are down and I’m wondering how best to proceed, I turn to him.

Samuel Baker was the only Victorian ennobled directly as a result of his explorations. He was also the only adventurer of his era who traveled with his wife, Florence. Baker had purchased her at a Bulgarian slave market, and they became inseparable. The journey on which they met was typical of a time which, sadly, no longer exists.

Baker had agreed to take a young Indian Maharaja, Duleep Singh, on a bear-hunting trip to Transylvania. Duleep Singh divided his time between Claridge’s Hotel in London and a Scottish castle in the Highlands, where he pursued his passion for hunting. On the journey to Transylvania he traveled under the pseudonym of Captain Robert Melville. He also insisted on bringing his three English servants with him, including his butler. Most of his voluminous luggage seemed to consist of crates of vintage champagne. The party reached Budapest by train, and then Baker bundled the Maharaja and his entourage aboard a corn barge which was heading down the Danube.

While sailing downriver, the corn barge collided with an ice floe near the Ottoman-controlled town of Widdin, in what is now Bulgaria, and the Maharaja and his retinue were forced ashore. Widdin was as sordid a place as one could imagine, its only business the sale of black, white and Chinese slaves. While waiting for the corn barge to be repaired Baker and the Maharaja went to look at the slave market, It was there that Baker first set eyes on Florence, with whom he fell in love instantly. He haggled furiously for her, but he never disclosed how much he had paid.

Four days after our arrival at Lalibela, Samson flagged down a jeep. In the back there were seven jerry-cans that belonged to a local businessman. Even before I saw the driver’s face, I knew the negotiations would be hard. I stood out of the way, for the appearance of a foreigner tends to quadruple the going price. Samson put on his most courteous voice and smiled so much that his eyes disappeared in creases. He motioned a finger to the cans. The driver nodded. Samson smiled again. I could tell money was being discussed. The driver kept nodding. The bargaining continued for about half an hour, with the driver nodding and Samson smiling. By the end of it Samson was no longer smiling, he was chewing his upper lip.

“How much?” I asked.

“A lot.”

I handed over all the money in my wallet.

“We’re going to need more than this,” said Samson nervously, “we’re going to need the money in your shoe as well.”

Before we left Lalibela I gave Amaya a selection of old clothes. He’d asked if I had a dress in his size. He’d always wanted a dress, he said. I was confused and rather concerned that a small boy wanted to dress up as a girl. I asked Samson to have a chat with him and explain that dresses are for little girls, not little boys. Amaya started to grin and then burst out laughing. Then Samson started to laugh.

“Amaya is a little girl!” he said.

Ten minutes later we were on the road again with Bahru crunching the gears and jerking the wheel as usual, an enormous quid of qat stuck in his cheek. The scenes we passed were now familiar: children with huge piles of sticks on their backs, goats being herded along the road, people trudging to distant destinations, solemn funeral processions of elders wrapped in white, making their way down mountain trails, walking in silence towards a burial ground. I asked Samson why so many people were dying.

“Life in the country is hard,” he replied. “If you fall sick you get sicker and then you die. People with a little money use it to buy food, not medicine.”

The contrast between village life and a small town in Ethiopia is astonishing. Small Ethiopian towns are vibrant places, full of bustle. Cluttered shops sell a colorful display of goods imported from China. Boys play table tennis on the sidewalks. The bars are alive with deafening music, the flow of warm bottled beer and the lascivious solicitations of whores. And all the while, there is a constant flow of people arriving from the villages to barter and to buy basic necessities. In a remote village or hamlet, days from the nearest road, there are no paraffin lamps or electricity, only candles; no running water either, or shops, or the noise of an ill-tuned transistor radio. I am not new to Africa or to lands where good, innocent people are struggling to survive. Even so I found myself reeling at the extraordinary level of hardship that rural Ethiopians endure.

Ask me to list all the things which I own and I wouldn’t know where to start. I have rooms filled with possessions I never use. Our attic is packed to bursting with objects I’ve collected and forgotten about. But ask a villager in the Ethiopian highlands what he has in his tukul and the list will be precise and short. Everything is functional and has ten uses. There’s a knife, perhaps an axe, a candle or two, or a lamp made from the bottom of a tin can, a blanket and hides, a bucket, a pot, a sheet of polythene, a few old clothes, some flour and a pile of sticks. That is all.

NINE

The Jinn of Suleiman

“It is better to die than to live without killing.”

Danakil proverb

Five hours out of Lalibela we passed a terrible accident on what was surely the world’s roughest road. A truck had somehow toppled over on a flat stretch, and its cargo of ouzo had shattered. The driver was dead. So was his companion. The bodies had been pulled out of the cab and were lying on the side of the road. The fact that there was so little blood indicated that they’d probably died instantly. To my relief there was no sign of the two Dutch girls. They had been traveling west. This road led north.

A few miles further on Bahru sped through a village and hit a dog. He burst out laughing and clapped his hands. I turned round and through the rear window saw the poor creature writhing in its death throes. I shouted at Bahru, but he didn’t understand why I was so angry. As far as he was concerned stray animals on the road were fair game, something to enliven the tedium of the job.

By now, the deficiencies of the Emperor’s Jeep were becoming apparent. The worst problem was the tires. On a good day we would have only a couple of punctures. On bad days the number would rise to seven or eight. The reason was blatantly clear. The tires had gaping holes in them. At first I found myself yelling at Bahru. Why didn’t he get the tires properly repaired? But eventually I came to see his point of view. In Addis Ababa I had insisted that Bahru be responsible for all punctures and breakdowns. As far as he was concerned, the less money he laid out on tires, the more he had to spend on qat. If your life revolves around chewing an intoxicating leaf, it makes perfect sense.

Though Ethiopian villages have very little in the way of merchandize to offer, they do usually contain at least one shop selling a selection of worn and lacerated tires at highly inflated prices. At Sekota, Bahru was finally persuaded to buy ten tires. Though we all knew they probably wouldn’t get us through the day, I felt I’d achieved a minor victory.

While we were at the tire stall I got chatting to a frail balding man who smelt strongly of sulfur. Every few minutes he’d pull up his shirt and apply a layer of Indian-made ointment to a suppurating wound on his chest. He was old and underfed, and it was clear that the injury wasn’t healing. I had a look at the instructions on the tube. The ointment was supposed to ease back pain.

“Strong medicine,” said the man.

“Does it help?”

“Oh yes,” he said, “it’s imported medicine.”

“Where did you get it?”

“I bought it at the market. It was expensive.”

“But it says you must not put it on an open wound.”

The man looked confused but then he raised his shirt and massaged more ointment into the lesion. He grimaced with pain. In the Ethiopian highlands there’s an enduring trust in foreign-made goods. Local markets are flooded with cheap Indian medicines which are regarded as the height of sophistication. Imported drugs are seen as panaceas: a randomly selected cream, lotion or tablet is used to cure any illness.

Samson said that when he was a teenager his parents thought he had meningitis, so they went to the market to buy some medicine. The stall-holder there weighed out a few handfuls of uns’ ed tablets and prescribed them to be taken with chicken broth.

I asked Samson if he’d had seizures as a result.

“No, no,” he replied, “I got better with a little time, although my sweat turned brown.”

My geologist friend in London had looked at the map of Ethiopia and had said that he’d put money on Afar being the ancient Ophir. He had pointed to a ridge of low mountains that rise up along the Red Sea coast. They were the place he’d head for. I had scoured dozens of geological reports, but none of them mentioned there being any gold in Afar, though there were gold prospectors’ reports on just about every other corner of the country. Still, I knew I had to go and see for myself. And if Afar wasn’t Ophir, it had other attractions.

The north-eastern region of Afar is a desolate expanse of desert peopled by one of the most ferocious tribes imaginable — the Danakil.

I have always been fascinated by the curious habit of taking human body parts as trophies. Most cultures have at one time or another slain their foes, lopped off their heads and paraded around with them. But the Danakil developed a reputation for taking quite a different kind of trophy. Their predilection was for testicles. A warrior hadn’t proved himself as a man until he’d spilt his enemy’s blood and had the man’s genitals hanging round his neck. A search through Ethiopia for Solomon’s mines wouldn’t have been complete without a journey to Afar.

Once we were on the main road I told Bahru to start heading east rather than north. He continued to chew his qat and didn’t blink. I was pleased he hadn’t objected, so I added that we would be going to Afar in search of the Danakil. I watched Bahru’s face in the rear-view mirror as we bumped along. It contorted and then froze in paralysis, as if his qat-chewing jaw had at last seized up. Samson was equally horrified. He said that the Danakil were a brutal people who only had one thing on their minds.

“What’s that, then?”

“Testicles!”

“But we’re driving in the Emperor’s Jeep,” I exclaimed, “no one’s going to mess with us.”

Bahru’s jaw suddenly loosened in a torrent of Amharic.

“What’s the problem?”

“Bahru says he’s not going to drive to Afar. If you want to go there you’ll have to go on foot.”

I tried everything I could think of, but Bahru wouldn’t budge. He was a man with no fear, he explained, but he was more attached to his testicles than he could say. Wild horses wouldn’t drag him into the Danakil Desert. Bahru’s own tribe, the Somalis, have a formidable reputation for courage in battle, so I was surprised by his refusal to continue. Maybe going to Afar was too dangerous.

“Samson, what do you think?”

The indefatigable fixer wiped his face with his hand.

“They’re heathens,” he said.

“Then look on our journey as a missionary expedition to preach the Word of the Lord.”

At that Samson seemed to perk up and I caught the glint of missionary zeal in his eye. He fished out a newly acquired Bible from his disintegrating tartan case. It was much smaller than the one he had lost in the fire, but the Word of the Lord takes many forms.

“We will go to Afar,” he said boldly, “and we will spread the Word.”

After a great deal of coaxing, Bahru agreed to take us as far as Didigsala on the edge of the Danakil Desert. He would leave us there and beat a hasty retreat, meeting us later at Mekele, the capital of Tigray. I’d heard that in Didigsala we could join one of the salt caravans that make their way through the desert to the market at Mekele.

On my recent journey up the Amazon to the Shuar people, my companions and I had been terrified that we might have our heads chopped off and dramatically reduced in size. The very thought had had a dire effect on the morale of the expedition. But modern times have brought change, and missionaries have now replaced Shuar blowpipes with tambourines. The destruction of ancient customs in a matter of years angers me, but I suspected that the testicle-lopping days of the Danakil had probably come to an end. I informed Samson that Alabama missionaries had probably beaten us to the Danakil. He smiled widely. He looked forward to talking to them about Jesus.

Wilfred Thesiger is one of the few to have written about the proud traditions of the Danakil. He was born at the British Legation in Addis Ababa in 1910. The capital was then still young, and until Thesiger was sent to boarding school in England at the age of eight, he’d never seen a car. His father, a high-ranking diplomat, was instrumental in helping Ras Tafari accede to the Ethiopian throne, but before the prince could be crowned as Emperor, Thesiger’s father died quite suddenly of a heart attack. Wishing to acknowledge his gratitude to the family, the Emperor extended a personal invitation to Wilfred Thesiger to attend his coronation in his father’s place.

In November 1930, when the festivities came to an end, Thesiger embarked on his first true expedition. He had heard that the land of the Danakil had good hunting, so he set off for the desert, writing later that “The whole course of my life was to be permanently affected by that month.”

Thesiger has often told me of that, his earliest, African expedition and he recounts the tale with characteristic animation. He was aware that the Danakil were ferocious, but he had little idea quite how dangerous. The more officials pleaded with him not to go, the more determined he became. Almost every foreign expedition that had headed into the Danakil Desert in the past had been wiped out, the testicles of every participant seized as trophies. When, therefore, Thesiger returned in one piece, he became something of a hero. He was just twenty years old.

At virtually the same time that the young Wilfred Thesiger was rounding up pack animals for his journey, another European was returning from the Danakil Depression. L. M. Nesbitt was a prospector and the foreman of a gold mine in western Ethiopia. He believed he might find gold in Afar, though in his book Desert and Forest, he hardly mentions the subject – serious prospectors always keep their cards close to the chest. Still, the fact that Nesbitt, a seasoned prospector, made such a perilous journey was encouraging. There might well be gold in Afar after all.

I rallied Samson and Bahru, telling them that Nesbitt’s expedition proved there was the possibility of finding gold, or even ancient mines, in the Danakil region. I decided not to relate the details of Nesbitt s trip or tell them exactly how many of his men lost their genitalia.

The road to Didigsala was the greatest challenge that the Emperor’s Jeep had faced so far. The dilapidated vehicle rattled at every joint, as if it shared its driver’s fear of Danakil bandits. Thorn trees and eucalyptus gave way to low rocky hills and patchy scrub. We saw camels grazing, the odd shepherd with his flock of goats, and a smattering of huts nestling in the shadows between the hills. Samson took out his Bible and started selecting appropriate passages with which to convert.

Before veering off the main road towards Didigsala, Bahru swapped the car’s jack for a bale of qat at a small hamlet. I would have stopped the unwise trade but we didn’t have a spare tire left, and there was little hope of getting one now. Bahru chewed so feverishly that his mouth foamed, and his eyes seemed to start from his head like those of a man being electrocuted. Four hours later, I spotted a cluster of low huts. We had reached the outskirts of Didigsala.

Samson got down and asked the first man he saw when the next salt caravan would be leaving for Mekele. I watched as, ever polite and respectful of others, he posed the question only after lengthy salutations. The local man waved his hands frantically, motioned sideways and pointed at the sky. Then he bent down and put his palms on the ground, did five press-ups, jumped up again, pulled down his shorts and waved his genitalia about. Samson looked back at me despondently.

“He’s a lunatic,” he said.

Most small Ethiopian towns seemed to have a token madman, and in rural areas people seemed to delight in throwing stones at them. Samson passed a crust of bread to our madman, who whimpered with satisfaction. He was very thin, and the lines of his ribs showed through his shirt. As he choked down the bread, a middle-aged man dressed in a brilliant white shamma swept out of his house. He picked up a large stone, and flung it at the maniac, hitting him on the backside with considerable force. At that, the madman fled.

A minute later a crowd had gathered round the Jeep. Thirty or forty old men clutching gray blankets had stumbled over and now they were peering in through the windows of the vehicle. Clearly visitors were rare.

One of our new companions placed a hand on the Jeep’s bonnet and closed his eyes.

“You have come far,” he said.

I nodded.

“We have come to meet the salt caravan which goes to Mekele.”

“Ah, Mekele, very far.”

“How far?”

“Ah, very very far.”

Samson translated and winced with worry.

“When will the next salt caravan come from Afar?”

The old man pulled his blanket more tightly around him and then, lifting up his walking cane, he swung it in an arc toward the horizon.

“There they are now,” he said.

We shaded our eyes to follow the line of the stick. I could see nothing.

“He is right,” said Samson. “I can make out people and camels. Dots. Many dots.”

“They will not reach here until morning,” said the man. “You will stay the night with me.”

He led the way to his hut. Bahru needed no cue to unload our belongings. They were piled up on the sand before I’d said a word. Then he leapt back into the Jeep and said he’d meet us in Mekele.

“When? When will you get there?”

Bahru spat on his hands and revved the engine.

“The question is when will you get there,” he replied.

Then he was gone in a swirl of dust.

“He is a coward,” said Samson. “Bahru is a disgrace to his tribe.”

The man with the stick called the others to leave us alone and lashed out at them with his cane. We were his property. As he led the way to his hut he said his name was Adugna. His wife was dead, he explained, and so he lived with his son’s family. They were poor, but they were honored to accept us into their home. I inquired about the camel train to Mekele.

“You will need strong legs,” he said. “It is very far.”

“A week’s walk?”

Adugna blinked his frosted eyes.

“Many days.”

Samson, who was brimming over with unexpected enthusiasm, comforted me.

“We are in God’s hands,” he said. “We are the Israelites in the desert. The only thing we should fear is the Devil.”

Adugna led the way through a ring of thorns that encircled his son’s home. A hunting dog sprang at us from the shadow of the hut, but Adugna lunged at it with his stick. In the dark, smoky atmosphere of the one-room hut, a dozen eyes widened as we entered. I couldn’t make out the features of faces at first, just eyes, all winking like owls in the trees. Adugna swung his cane to make space for us, then clapped his hands and barked orders. His family members hurried out into the sunshine and sought refuge behind the hut.

“You will stay with me for a month!” said Adugna. “This is your home. We are brothers.”

“But we want to go to Mekele with the caravan,” I said.

The old man laughed a deep and sinister laugh.

“They will kill you and take your money,” he replied. “They are bad men. The salt traders are greedy. Not like us. We have no money. We have no use for it. Money is the Devil’s currency.”

The old man’s son returned, stooping respectfully, and asked what we would like to drink. Without thinking, I said that tea would be very welcome. He stooped again, clasped my hand in his, thanked me, and left.

An hour passed. Samson asked Adugna about life in the desert.

“It’s very hard, very hot, very dusty,” said our host. “I was born at Lake Afrera in Afar. It’s even hotter there.”

“How old are you?”

Adugna scrunched up his face and wiped it with the corner of his shawl.

Oh, I must be very old,” he said. “Maybe seventy by now, or eighty. Maybe even older. I remember the days when the Italians were here. I was a young man then. There were other faranji as well. They were looking for gold.”

“Gold? Did they find any?”

“There is no gold here any more,” he replied.

“Did there used to be gold, though?”

“Oh, yes, there used to be. Afar was richer in gold than any other place on earth. There was so much gold that our people were rich like kings. Gold was the only metal we had.”

“When was that? When was there gold?”

“A long time ago.”

“How long – a hundred years, a thousand years?”

“Oh, yes,” said Adugna. “That long.”

“Which? A thousand years?”

“Yes, a long time ago.”

“What happened to the gold? Was it mined out?”

“No, it was not all mined,” said our host. “There was too much ever to be mined. There was so much, I tell you, so much gold!”

“So it’s still here, still in the ground?”

Again Adugna wiped his face with his shawl.

“It is here, but at the same time it is not here,” he said.

“How can that be?”

“Well, I will tell you. God got very angry with our people. He told them they were greedy, that they thought of nothing but themselves. So he punished them. He waved his cloak over the desert and turned all the gold into salt. But one day,” Adugna continued, “when our people are no longer greedy, he will pull his cloak away and reveal the gold. That is why we stay here. We are waiting.”

Adugna called out to his daughter-in-law, telling her to bring the tea, which still hadn’t arrived.

“Stay here with me,” he said. “Be my guest and stay here. We will sit together and wait for God to pull away his cloak, to show us the fields of gold.”

Night had fallen by the time the tea finally arrived. Adugna’s son and daughter-in-law slipped into the hut with a pair of steaming cups. They presented one to me and the other to Samson. We breathed in the steam and thanked them for their hospitality. The family clustered around and watched us. I took a sip of the boiling liquid. It tasted earthy and weak. I assumed it was some blend of local tea.

“Have another sip,” said Adugna’s son anxiously.

So I did.

“Delicious.”

“Is it?” he asked earnestly. “Are you sure it is delicious?”

“Yes, yes, quite delicious,” said Samson and I at the same time.

The air of anxiety seemed to lift.

“Can I tell you something?” asked Adugna’s son.

“Of course.”

He touched his hand to his heart.

“Well, we did not have any tea,” he said. “But it is our custom to give an honored guest whatever he asks for. You asked us for tea. We did not know what to do. None of our neighbours had any tea either. Then someone found an old sack which had once had some tea in it. So we boiled up the sack. And we made tea from it.”

As I stretched out in the tukul waiting for sleep that night, I thought of Adugna’s story of the gold. Throughout Ethiopia, gold and folklore seemed to be closely connected. Where you found one, you found the other. Many people knew of the legend of God punishing the Danakil for being greedy — I was to hear the tale a dozen times in different parts of the country. When other tribes recounted it, they did so with scorn, doubtless because the Danakil are feared and disliked. The Danakil themselves sincerely believed the legend: one day, God will transform the salt back into gold.

Adugna was an old man, but possibly not old enough to remember Nesbitt’s expedition, though he must have heard of others with the same ambition. Before the Second World War, Ethiopia was a magnet for those wishing to seek their fame and fortune. Nesbitt himself described the European population of Addis Ababa in the late 1920s as “always a mob of disillusioned, broken-down vagrants, meddlers, spies, sharpers — adventurers all. All are adept at something: some of them have academic titles, probably self-conferred... they are stayers-behind, dressed in ill-fitting threadbare clothes with untrimmed hair.”

But Nesbitt was different. He was educated and well-organized, and he knew the dangers of traveling among the Danakil. Three Italian expeditions in the 1880s had ended with the entire party being butchered in Afar. The focus of life for any young Danakil man was to kill. A man who had not slain another would never be accepted as a husband and would be called a woman by his peers.

The Danakil passion for killing is from another time, when slaying one’s enemies brought honor and respect. My own ancestors in the Hindu Kush thrived on a culture where killing was respectable. They would dress their womenfolk up in red clothing so they wouldn’t be killed in the crossfire.

That night Adugna slept outside the hut with his family, leaving Samson and me alone. I began to imagine a midnight assassination, but Samson seemed untroubled.

“Adugna’s parents were wild people,” he said, “but he and the others have kindness in their eyes.”

He was right. While we slept, the old man’s daughter-in-law took our clothes and washed them. Her husband cleaned my shoes, and their children sprinkled the petals of fragrant flowers over us. I was grateful for their hospitality but saddened at the same time.

It seemed as if the Danakil had been called into line, like the Shuar and so many other once proud tribes.

Next morning, before the first light of dawn cut across the horizon, the salt caravan arrived. Forty camels and ten men walked briskly into the settlement. The camels were laden with what seemed to be large gray slabs of stone. Like every camel on earth, they resented being enslaved by man, but they were energetic, for their day had just begun. Their leader gave the order for the beasts to be given water and he checked the bindings of their loads. Then he came over to where we were standing.

Adugna introduced us. Kefla Mohammed was a slender man with skinny legs, callused hands and an occasional squint. He walked with a limp, plunging his long stick into the sand as he went, like a gondolier. He must have been the same age as me, but he looked much older, his skin roughened by decades of desert sun.

When Adugna had introduced us, Kefla pressed his shoulders to mine in greeting.

“We will be friends for a thousand years,” he said.

“We wish to journey to Mekele.”

The leader stood tall, pushing himself up on his stick.

“You will walk with us and share our food,” he replied, “for we are brothers.”

I thanked him.

“How many days’ trek is it?”

Kefla took a step back.

“Far,” he said. “It is very far.”

“Two days?”

“Perhaps.”

“More than that?”

Again he stepped back. Then he glanced at the fine sand which covered his feet.

“Perhaps.”

Two hours later our bags and our water-bottles were strapped on the strongest of the she-camels, and we took our positions at the rear of the caravan. Adugna and his family stood to attention and wished us good fortune. Other villagers came to bid us farewell too, but Adugna fought them away with his stick. This was his moment. I promised to return when I had visited Mekele, when I had found the gold of Solomon.

“I have told you,” he called as we left, “come and stay here with me and we shall wait together for God’s cloak to lift.”

Setting out on a journey of uncertain length in an unknown land is a thrilling prospect. I asked Samson if Kefla and his troop seemed trustworthy. He hugged his Bible close to his chest and hinted that they were good people but that they needed his Christian counsel. Only then, he said, would God raise his veil and restore the fortunes of the Danakil.

“Do you really believe the legend?” I asked.

Samson looked up at the sun blazing overhead.

“The Lord is wonderful and mysterious,” he said.

We trekked over parched ground, heading north-west. There was no tree cover and only a smattering of cacti and scrub. Whenever the camels spotted any vegetation, they would stop and graze. They were roped together like mountaineers and didn’t seem in the least affected by the great weight of their loads.

The salt they carried had been carved from the dry bed of Lake Karum and from the salt flats around it in Afar. Long wooden poles are used to prize the blocks loose, and then the blocks are sawn into smaller pieces of a uniform size.

Kefla called us to the front and offered us some cooked meat and water from his bottle. He was eager to tell us about his life. Fortunately, like Adugna, he spoke some Amharic, and so Samson could translate.

“I have walked this route a thousand times,” he said, “since I was a child. Before me, my father walked with the camels, as his own father did before him.”

“What of the dangers, the fear of shiftas?”

“These days there’s no danger,” he said, “except from scorpions and snakes. Our people used to enjoy killing foreigners but now we have come to trust them.”

Kefla glanced over at me as we walked. I knew what he was thinking. He was wondering if I’d heard of the Danakil’s preoccupation with testicles.

“I have read of the proud traditions of the Danakil,” I said. “It is sad that they have disappeared.”

“We are still proud,” he replied. “We are Danakil. But we no longer kill every man whose face is unknown to us. That was the old way. It was a good way, but now it has passed.”

Most of the men in the party were related to Kefla, brothers or sons, nephews or cousins. They formed a strong unit, he said, each man trusting the others with his life. The salt caravan was no place for women. Kefla’s wife, his third, was with the clan in the Danakil desert. They had been married the previous year, after his second wife had died in childbirth.

“What about your first wife?”

The leader thrust his stick in the sand, his gaze fixed on the ground.

“She died as well,” he said, “of malaria.”

I changed the subject and asked about the legend of the gold.

“Ah, yes, the gold,” he said, almost as if he had anticipated my question. “It has been turned into salt by God.”

“Do you think He will ever turn it back into gold again?”

“Perhaps,” said Kefla, “and that would be good, as you can sell gold for a lot at Mekele. But I get angry when I hear my friends and clansmen cursing that the gold has gone. You see, God changed a useless metal into salt — and no man or camel can live without salt, but we can all live without gold.”

Nesbitt had warned of the danger of trekking with camels. He had written of the constant worry that they would catch a foot in a crack in the ground. Kefla and the others were alert for such clefts and, if there was any doubt, they would halt the caravan and probe the earth with their sticks before carrying on. Another problem was the stifling heat. I found myself drinking water incessantly. Kefla told me to be careful. Too much water, he said, was as bad as none at all. I doused a shirt in water and wrapped it around my head like a turban, and Samson did the same.

From time to time a block of salt was unstrapped from one of the camels and given to them to lick. At other times, Kefla would feel the sand with his hand. If it were too hot, the camels’ feet would burn. Nothing was as important as the well-being of the camels.

Nesbitt wrote that he preferred to travel with human porters rather than with pack animals. Humans, he said, can take short cuts, negotiate precipitous slopes and cross torrents by jumping from rock to rock. More to the point, fresh porters can be hired when necessary. But then again, no man could heave blocks of salt such a great distance.

In the late afternoon, camp was pitched near a thicket of thorn trees. Samson had been keen to spread the Word of God to the Danakil, most of whom were Muslims. But now that he had a captive audience, he hadn’t the strength. We sat in a heap on the ground: I was too exhausted to write my journal, and he was too tired to preach. Around us, the camels were being unloaded and watered, a fire was built and some scraps of meat were roasted. I asked Samson to find out how much further we had to go.

“Please do not make me ask that question,” he said. “I cannot bear to hear the answer.”

So we lay there, waiting for the night, and I thought longingly of the Emperor’s Jeep. I even began to think of Bahru with some affection.

Kefla told his eldest son to keep guard. He was a boy of about twelve.

“He’s as wise as Suleiman,” he said, “like his grandfather. Many girls already want to marry him. But there is time for that.”

“You know of Suleiman?”

“Of course,” responded the leader, “all Danakil know how he came here himself searching for ivory and gold.”

“Did he find them?”

“Yes, yes, he did. I told you, there used to be gold here. There was much gold in the time of Suleiman.”

“Did he mine it?”

Kefla stoked the fire with his stick.

“His men cut the gold from the ground in slabs,” he said. “Then it was loaded on to ships and taken back to the land of Suleiman.”

“How did they carry the gold to the ships?”

“Suleiman’s army of jinn carried it, of course.”

The camels had been fed and were now sitting, chewing the cud. The sky was lit by a crescent moon and speckled with stars, and the air was cool, chilled by a light breeze from the east. Kefla’s eldest son was called Yehia. He patrolled the camp with a Lee Enfield .303. He was close to puberty, the time when his forebears would have started to prepare for their first kill. The boy’s finger never left the trigger; he was clearly itching to pull back the curved sliver of steel. But he had been born too late. Deaths are still a frequent occurrence among the Danakil, but now they are put down to self-defence rather than cold-blooded murder. These days when they kill, the Danakil don’t bother to rip off testicles. Although Kefla and the others didn’t say so, it was quite clear that they thought killing wasn’t the same if you couldn’t hack off your enemy’s private parts.

When he passed me, Yehia clenched his jaw and swung the rifle to his shoulder in a practised movement. As a foreigner my kind had been fair game since the beginning of time. Only now had the rules changed, and the young warrior felt cheated. I smiled at him, but his mask of rage didn’t break. His uncle Abdullah invited us to sit with him on a coarse goat-hair mat. He was taller than the others, with a slim neck, and he wore a pair of bandoliers strapped across his chest. He cut a piece of dried meat from a carcass in his lap and held it to my lips.

I was about to ask how much further we had to travel, but I knew Samson would be reluctant to translate the question. Instead I asked Abdullah about Mekele.

He frowned so hard that his brow rippled like corrugated iron.

“It is a very big city,” he said. “Too many men, too many cars, too much noise!”

“So you don’t like it?”

“Ah!” he said. “Walk in the city and you see the worst side of man. People forget where they have come from when they reach such a place. They grow lazy and drink beer, and they waste their money. That is not the real world.”

“Then what is the real world?”

Abdullah loosened the bandoliers and then slapped his hands together and held them out like scales.

“This is the real world,” he said. “Look at it! Smell it! Taste it! Listen to it!”

Kefla came over to where we were sitting and crouched on the ground. It was dark, but I could see he was tired. He said that Yehia would protect us in the night. If there was any trouble the camels would be sure to sound the alarm. They could smell a thief from a great distance.

“I hope we are left alone,” I said feebly.

Kefla smiled, and leant back on his heels.

“You may be wishing that,” he said, “but Yehia is praying that we will be disturbed. He is ready to pull the trigger, to prove himself a man.”

All of the next day we marched, one foot ahead of the next, as the sun rose from a faint pink glimmer of light to a raging ball of fire above the desert. I found the going hard. By early afternoon it was so hot that my spit sizzled on a rock. My mind kept flashing back to the jungle. The desert was bad, but nothing could compare with the horrors of a tropical rain forest. As I staggered on, I thanked God that we were far from the jungle. We had seen no insects or reptiles, and we could walk freely, unhindered by low vines, fallen tree trunks and the press of undergrowth. Samson had never been in the jungle, so he didn’t know how lucky he was. He started moaning about missing Addis Ababa, saying that his girlfriend would be longing for him, and that he had to get back to urgent commitments. His misery gave me new strength. I found myself sympathizing with Henry Stanley and his habit of throwing men in irons at the slightest whisper of dissent.

The camels were unloaded every three hours and their bindings were constantly checked. Rubbing would lead to sores. The only journey I had ever made with camels was in India’s Thar Desert years before. On that trip we had actually ridden the camels, rather than walking alongside. But I’d soon come to appreciate the unique relationship between man and camel. The animals look at their masters with loathing. But the men in a caravan regard the camels with silent wonder. They would never admit it, but you can see that they value the beasts as highly as their closest friends. This was never more apparent than when one of Kefla’s camels went lame.

It was the late afternoon of the third day and Kefla was leading the caravan through a series of low barren hills. We were all exhausted. The camels were about to rest and be watered. We had grown used to being blinded by light so dazzling that it scorched our retinal nerves and made our eyes stream with tears. Somehow, the Danakil coped with the brightness and remained alert to the camels’ every move. They needed to: a single misplaced step could spell disaster. Then, suddenly, one of the smaller she-camels plunged to the ground and let out a truly terrible bellow of pain.

Without wasting a second, Kefla took a knife from beneath his shawl and sliced away the straps which held the slabs of salt. The animal thrashed in agony and her bellows turned to a high-pitched shriek. With the others struggling to keep her still, Kefla made a quick inspection. It was obvious that her right foreleg had shattered. Then the caravan’s leader picked up his knife and pressed it against the camel’s neck. “Bismillah ar-rahman ar-rahim, In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful,” he cried.

With a whack of the blade, the animal’s jugular was severed. Blood gushed out of the wound as the camel kicked in a last frenzied gallop, her eyes rolling, her mouth wide open. A few moments later she was dead.

Kefla stood over the carcass, his knife still wet with blood. There were tears in his eyes. He covered his face with his hand and then wiped it with the edge of his shawl. I was not surprised that a Danakil was weeping. His friend was dead. While the other men unloaded the rest of the camels, Kefla walked away into the distance to be alone.

TEN

The Place of Gold

“The Desert of the Danakil is a part of the world that the Creator must have fashioned when he was in a bad mood.”

Ladislas Faragó, Abyssinia Stop Press

It took all evening to dismember the dead she-camel. The men worked together, cutting the flesh from the carcass, draining the hump of its liquid, removing the entrails and cooking the bones for their marrow. For once Kefla stood back and let the others do the work. The dead camel was his favourite. He had bought her as a calf and they must have traveled the route together hundreds of times. The rest of the party were sensitive to their leader’s loss. One of them put out a mat for him to sleep. He crouched on it but refused to lie down. The air was heavy with the smell of his beloved camel roasting.

The last time I’d eaten camel was in the Jordanian desert where it was made into mensaf, cooked in milk and served in a rich pilau. The Bedu had prepared the dish during Ramadan, the holy month of fasting. Each evening when the fast breaks, a feast is held. Then the meat had been succulent and tender. The she-camel’s flesh in Afar couldn’t have been more different. It was tough and sinewy, as if the long treks across the desert laden with salt had drained it of all moisture.

We did not sleep until late that night. All the meat and the entrails were cooked, and much was eaten. What was left over was packed up in sackcloth next morning and stowed on the back of the last camel. The blocks of salt were then redistributed, all the animals sharing the load of their dead sister.

Samson rose early that morning to read the Bible. Like me, he’d been touched by the camel’s death and its effect on Kefla Mohammed. I watched from a distance as he tied two sticks together and planted them in the cleft where the camel had caught her foot. It was a marker to warn others of the danger, as well as a tribute to the dead animal.

The morning’s departure was delayed, and we didn’t start walking until some time after eight. Sensing a slackening of the pace, I asked Samson if he thought we were nearing our destination. He was reluctant to find out, but he winked at me. He could smell civilization, he said.

Four hours later, after crossing a ridge of hills, we saw a cluster of houses on the horizon. As we drew nearer we made out people, goats and a few cars. Kefla pointed to the distant settlement.

“That is Kwiha. We will be in Mekele this evening.”

Inside I was jumping for joy. The novelty of trekking through Afar had long since worn off. I slapped Samson on the back and promised to treat him to the softest bed and the biggest meal the Tigrayan capital had to offer. He smiled, his cheeks dimpling, but before he could reply, Kefla came over.

“We will sell some of the salt in Kwiha,” he said. “The market there is good.”

Soon the caravan was making its way through the dusty lanes of the small town. The camels seemed awkward now that we’d escaped the desert. They did not belong in a town, just as cars don’t belong in the desert of the Danakil.

We made a beeline for the market which was in full swing. There was the usual assortment of green plastic buckets, piles of dirty bottles, polythene bags, old clothes, worn-out tools, grain and butchered meat on sale. Women haggled for food, and their children rummaged through the heaps of old clothes in the local equivalent of window-shopping.

The camels were led to one side and relieved of their loads. About a third of the salt was taken off to be sold, and what was left was then redistributed.

Danakil traders such as Kefla sell their salt to a central dealer. He in turn sells slabs to middlemen who saw it up into smaller blocks. Individual customers buy only a small block, a few inches square.

These days salt is brought from Afar to be eaten. But in more ancient times the salt bars, called amole, were also used as currency. The Egyptian monk Cosmos recorded their use in about ad $2$, and a thousand years later the Portuguese priest Francisco Álvares said he saw salt being used as money throughout Ethiopia: “He who carries salt finds all that he requires.” Even as late as the 1960s travelers to Tigray reported seeing salt being used for trade.

As I stood there in the market, listening to the rhythmic sound of salt slabs being sawn, it began to rain in great splattering drops. Rain is generally welcomed in the north of Ethiopia, but it is the curse of the salt business. The sellers scurried away to borrow plastic sheets from their neighbours to protect their precious inventory.

Within an hour we were ready to press on to Mekele. Somehow the camels knew we were close to our destination and the pace quickened. Kefla was pleased with the money he’d made from the sale at Kwiha and he stuffed a great wad of bills under his shawl. Before we started the last leg to Mekele, he had ordered Yehia to untie all the camel meat which was still uneaten. He had then approached a group of beggars dressed in rags, and offered them the food. Samson was touched by his generosity.

“Kefla is a good man,” he said. “He may not be a Christian yet, but I think he will go to Heaven.”

From the moment we crossed Mekele’s city line, it was obvious that the place was going to be different. Not just different from the desert, but different from every other town and city in Ethiopia. Mekele was inexplicably modern. The tarmac under the camels’ feet was newly laid and as smooth as patted butter, with cats’ eyes in the middle, and gutters along the sides of the road. The houses were large and imposing, with imported tiles on their roofs and satellite dishes the size of fish ponds in their backyards. There were large hotels and restaurants, and petrol stations where fuel was actually on sale. All the vehicles were brand-new, running on flawless tires.

Samson looked astonished at his first sight of Mekele.

“I have heard of this place,” he said. “People talk about it in the bars in Addis. They are usually laughed at, though, because no one believes them.”

“Why is it so prosperous?”

“The President,” said Samson. “The President’s from here.”

Kefla said he and the others would spend the night in Mekele but that they would leave at dawn. They felt uncomfortable in the town and they were anxious to get back to their families with the proceeds from the trip. Since Mekele had grown in size and sophistication, there wasn’t the same demand for salt as there had once been. These days, explained Kefla, the people of Mekele want refined salt, and they can afford to have it imported.

“It’s not good for us,” he said. “One day, everyone will want it. That will put us all out of business and we’ll probably starve to death.” He paused and then, looking me squarely in the eye, he grinned. “Maybe that’s when God will have mercy on us and turn all the salt back into gold.”

That evening Samson and I invited Kefla and the others to a meal at a small restaurant. We had endured hardship and were ready to taste luxury. I ordered just about everything on the menu for my guests and made quite sure that they didn’t catch sight of the bill. It came to far more than they had earned from the entire journey. That night Samson and I slept on soft mattresses and showered in hot water. I had thought of asking Kefla and the rest of the team to join us in the hotel, but Samson had insisted they’d be embarrassed. Instead I’d offered them some money, but they’d refused to take it, even when it was handed over by Samson. They were too proud. So, in the end, I’d presented each of them with clothing and pieces of equipment from my kit bags.

In the morning, after a good night’s sleep, we went down to the reception desk. I wanted to send someone to find Bahru and the Jeep. The doorman said something had been left for me during the night. It was a package wrapped in sacking, about the size of a brick. I opened it. Inside was a neatly cut piece of gray salt.

After a long search we found Bahru in the back of the Emperor’s Jeep parked in a lane off the main roundabout. He was fast asleep, and the front of his shirt was encrusted with dried vomit. I banged on the door and he sat up like a zombie woken from death. Four days of debauchery had taken its toll. I wondered how he had funded it all. Despite his hangover, however, he seemed pleased to see us and said he’d been doing some research. He had heard that the Italians had dug a series of test trenches for gold about fifty miles north of Mekele. I was so surprised at Bahru’s initiative that I gave him a handful of tattered birr notes almost without thinking. That seemed to cure his hangover instantly, and within minutes our bags were loaded aboard the Jeep and we were jolting along a rutted country road. The dust churned up by our wheels was like talcum powder and it got into everything, but the surrounding landscape made up for it.

The President was right to be proud of his homeland. The highlands of Ethiopia are beautiful, and I found myself staring in amazement at a vast sweep of land covered in lush vegetation. Never before in Africa had I seen such astonishing fertility.

Tigray’s people seemed as fertile as their land. Wherever we looked there were children herding sheep and cows with long horns, old men whipping their donkeys forward, women working in the fields and more children foraging for kindling. The Tigrayan people look quite different from the other Ethiopian tribes. They are fine-boned and svelte, and they stride about as if they are walking on air.

The road sliced through passes walled by great granite bluffs, so perfectly formed that they looked as if they had been carved by man. Then the granite cliffs gave way to sandstone and to open fields where crops of teff rustled in the breeze.

An hour out of Mekele it started to pour with rain. The water turned the dust into a thick soup, and the Jeep began to skid about. Bahru said his informant had given him directions to the gold trenches. Even though he was quite sure where he was going, I forced him to stop and get directions from a young boy who was out in the rain hurling stones with a sling shot. His teeth were chattering with cold, and his arms and legs were covered in goose-bumps. I asked if he knew about the trenches. He said he did and would show us the way. They were at a place called Werkamba.

“That’s good news,” said Samson. “It means ‘The Place of Gold’.”

Before we reached Werkamba, the mud became too deep for the Emperor’s Jeep to continue, so Samson and I decided to leave Bahru in the Jeep and walk with the boy through the downpour. The mud was the color of oxtail soup and as thick as porridge, and in places it came up to our knees. I had brought along a camouflage green army poncho and so kept reasonably dry, but Samson had no waterproof clothing and was soaked within minutes.

Werkamba was a village of about ten houses built of stone, each with a finely woven thatched roof. The boy said that a big mining company had been looking for gold in the area. (I found out later that it was Midroc, the company that also operated the Lega Dembi mine.) Villagers dread the discovery of gold on their land because then the government nationalizes it and they are forced to leave. Samson said that farmers do all they can to pretend that their land has no gold, though some of them mine illegally, digging narrow tunnels to reach the seam. I even heard of a farmer who built a hut over the entrance to his mine-shaft. He managed to keep the shaft secret for more than a year, but word eventually got out. The government seized the land and he was thrown off it.

In the village we were given freshly roasted coffee by the boy’s mother and she told us what had happened. Engineers had come the month before and taken soil samples. A foreigner had also come. She was worried, she said. They were all worried. I asked if they did any mining themselves. The woman held her son’s head to her chest and looked at the ground, but she didn’t reply.

The new test trenches were set alongside the old ones made by the Italians, a couple of miles east of the village. They were no more than a yard deep, suggesting that the gold was close to the surface. Samson pointed to the veins of marble-like quartz that ran through the rock. Where you find those, he said, you find gold. It was unclear whether the Italians had actually mined the area. When I looked the place up later at the Geological Survey in Addis Ababa, I could find no record, but I knew that significant mining was taking place across the border in Eritrea.

I had brought the Gold Bug metal detector along with me. At last there was no danger of being arrested by officials or being mobbed by excited hordes of illegal miners. We assembled the unit and swept the test trenches once the rain had started to ease off. The machine squealed piercingly wherever the head was pointed. Samson raised his eyebrows. Then he knelt down in one of the trenches, probed with his fingers and selected a lump of soil.

“Look at this,” he said, crumbling it with his fingertips, “it’s got gold in it.”

He suggested we spend a couple of days at the trenches looking for nuggets. Gold is one of the hardest metals to find with a conventional detector, largely because the machine picks up nodules of iron, known as “hot rocks”, but specialized detectors such as the Gold Bug can compensate for iron in the soil. The metal detector has come a long way since it was invented by Gerhard Fisher in the early 1930s. Fisher was a German émigré and a close friend of Albert Einstein. When he showed his first model of a detector — the “Metallascope” – to Einstein, the great scientist reputedly forecast that it would be a commercial failure.

Though I was tempted by Samson’s suggestion that we look for nuggets I knew I couldn’t. Before setting out in search of Solomon’s mines, I had privately sworn an oath that I would not try to make a profit from the gold business. Instead we took a few soil samples to satisfy our curiosity and then we hurried back through the rain to the Jeep.

That evening in the town of Adigrat, perched on the border with Eritrea, I planned the next stage of the journey. I was keen to get to Tullu Wallel, to locate Frank Hayter’s mine-shafts. We took out the map and had a good look at the route. There was quite a distance to cover down the western flank of Ethiopia. But before we could find out the truth behind Hayter’s claims, there was one more place to visit. A friend had told me about a monastery called Debra Damo. In its vaults there were said to be secret texts that told of King Solomon. I was happy to give the place a miss and head straight for Tullu Wallel, but Samson said that visiting a monastery was an act of piety, and that it would bring us luck. I found Debra Damo on the map, right on the Eritrean border. It wasn’t far from Adigrat.

We set off soon after dawn. The rain clouds which had brought such discomfort the day before had vanished and now the landscape was bathed in sunlight. Bahru put his foot on the accelerator and the Emperor’s Jeep hurtled along, swerving round potholes and bouncing over ruts. We were on the main road to Axum, but there was very little traffic. Instead the road was full of cows and sheep grazing the verges. After an hour of driving Bahru misjudged a turn and hit a sheep head on. The poor animal was trapped under the Jeep. Despite this, Bahru refused to stop immediately for fear of encountering a furious farmer. Only once we were some distance from the herd did he pull over and get out to cut the mangled carcass from the chassis.

Another hour passed, with similar near misses. Bahru seemed exhilarated by his recent kill and refused to slow down, smiling evilly when I shouted at him. Then we came to a village where the road was full of people and animals heading for the morning market. Bahru seemed to accelerate deliberately, and people and animals leapt for safety. One sheep was too slow and there was a sickening thud as our wheels caught it. The animal’s owner managed to jump in front of the Jeep — a brave act in a country like Ethiopia where most vehicles have unreliable brakes – and we were all catapulted forward as Bahru slammed into first gear. Thankfully, the farmer wasn’t injured, but before we knew it, the entire village was pressed around the car. They wanted blood.

I told Bahru that he was on his own. He would have to get out and face the mob. His perpetual grin wavered and his lower lip began to tremble. The crowd peered in through the windows. Some of them were arming themselves with stones. Others were trying to rock the Jeep from side to side. I yelled again for Bahru to get out. Gathering his courage he climbed out of the window and up on to the bonnet. Then he bowed his head and pleaded with the farmer. I could not hear what he was saying, but his body language was eloquent. He was begging for mercy.

The villagers worked to free the sheep from the wheel arch. Then they daubed the Jeep’s filthy white bodywork with the animal’s blood. The farmer was shouting at the top of his voice. Samson said he was demanding compensation. He wanted cash, lots of it. Still standing on the bonnet, Bahru tried to talk his way out of the situation. He was the kind of man who could talk his way out of anything. Samson translated. First Bahru blamed the sheep for its stupidity. Then he blamed the Jeep’s brakes. After that he blamed the poor condition of the road.

The villagers said they were sick of dangerous drivers. The dead sheep was no more stupid than any other sheep, and the road was bad because of the government. They were, they said, going to make an example of Bahru. They’d make sure he never injured another helpless animal again.

I prodded Samson in the back. He stopped translating and, with great reluctance, climbed on to the bonnet as well. I watched them through the windscreen: two grown men, throwing themselves at the mercy of the crowd. Every so often they would turn and point to me. Instead of lessening the villagers’ rage, this seemed to anger them even more. I began to wonder if my companions were offering my head in exchange for the dead sheep.

Then Bahru fished out his wallet from his back pocket. Like a conjurer performing a trick, he demonstrated that the wallet contained no money. The only thing inside it was a driving licence. He offered it to the farmer, promising to leave it as collateral until he next returned to the village. The villagers talked among themselves, debating whether to take the licence. At length they agreed. The farmer put it in his top pocket and shouted a string of insults. Samson and Bahru clambered back into the Jeep. They looked very relieved. Bahru threw the Jeep in gear, waved to the crowd, and sped off. Then he burst out laughing.

“What’s so funny?”

“Those people are as stupid as their sheep!” he exclaimed. “I’ve got lots of fake licences for times like this.”

A few miles from Debra Damo a withered old man hailed us for a lift. He was so frail that I feared he might die in the back seat. His curly hair was as white as bleached whale bones, and all his teeth were missing. He said he was eighty-five years old, and he had been to the monastery a thousand times.

“What about its treasures, the books about Solomon?”

The man ran a thumbnail down the ridge of his nose.

“Yes, there are books,” he said. “They are written in Ge’ez, the old language. They are very precious and they are guarded by the monks.”

“Will they show them to me?”

“Of course, but first you must get to the monastery.”

I had heard that no women were permitted to set foot in Debra Damo, and that the ascent kept a lot of men out too.

Shortly before we reached the mountain Bahru stopped to wash the sheep’s blood from the bonnet. He said that if it hadn’t been for me, he would have killed a lot more animals. It took his mind off the tedium of the drive. Like a Danakil warrior forbidden to hunt for testicles, he felt that his rights had been curbed by political correctness.

Debra Damo is perched on top of an amba, a flat-topped mountain, that rises 8,400 feet above the surrounding land. The track that leads to it is hideously rough, and when the Emperor’s Jeep refused to negotiate a giant pile of boulders, we were forced to abandon it. The last stretch entailed crawling on our hands and knees up an enormous rockfall.

We eventually reached the foot of the mountain in the early afternoon but I could see no way up it. There was no path, and the cliffs towering above us offered no footholds. I told Samson to ask our fragile passenger which was the best route. The man put his hands over his ears and laughed a great toothless laugh, which echoed around the rocks like the ripple of distant thunder.

When he could laugh no more, he sat down in the shade and fell asleep. I feared he was another madman and was about to give Samson more orders when a strange thing happened. Someone whistled from halfway up the cliff. We looked up, blinking into the light. A hand was waving and pointing downwards. We shouted up questions, but before they were answered the man up the cliff threw down a plaited leather rope. It was as thick as my wrist, and it stank of rotting meat.

Telling Samson that he was more athletic than me, I made him go first. He wound the rope around his waist, but before he could start to climb, he was lifted from the ground. I could only marvel at the strength of the men who were hauling him up. Samson rose higher and higher with jolting movements, his hands frantically clawing at the rock face as his head was battered against its walls. At first he whimpered with fear, but then, as the height increased, the whimpering turned to groans and then to a chilling scream. I called up to him, telling him to be brave. Then suddenly Samson vanished.

Shading my eyes, I tried to work out where he’d gone. There was no sign of life. I shouted to the old man asleep in the shade but he didn’t wake up. So I called up to the rock face. A moment later the plaited rope reappeared. I’d brought far too much baggage as usual. How was I going to get it and myself up? As if in answer to my question, a second rope appeared, thinner than the first but also made of sinewy leather. I tied it round my bags’ straps and then they too began to rise.

When the bags were no more than a speck in the sky, the voice called down again. Then the hand pointed at me and at the thick rope. I wound it around my waist, securing it in a reef knot. But before I could adjust it comfortably, I found myself being pulled upwards. As I rose higher and higher, the rope cut into my sides, squeezing me like a boa constrictor crushing its prey. I breathed out, gasping, and found I couldn’t breathe in again. Then I began scrabbling desperately for finger-holds in the cliff. But every time I found a fragile purchase in a crevice, the rope tore me away, jolting me upwards. It was as if a group of enormous fiendish jinn were at work.

The walls of the cliff were polished and grooved where the rope had rubbed across them over the centuries. A few more minutes and I was nearing the top. I could hear voices now, a young child and a cluster of men. Then there was the sound of Samson urging me on. The last twenty feet were so terrifying that my hands still sweat at the memory. I felt as if I was being cut in half, and the sight of the ground far beneath me made me feel sick with vertigo. A minute more and it was all over. I was pulled into a doorway and lay there on my belly, shaking and whimpering.

A skinny figure was looming over me. He was wearing dark green pants and a royal blue overcoat, darned in places with white thread. On his feet were sandals made from rubber tires, and on his head was a white cotton cap. His nose was long, his ears were pointed, and his mouth was hidden by a tuft of white beard. He looked like Asterix the Gaul, and like Asterix he obviously had a magic potion.

Samson introduced me to Asnake. His modest appearance belied his extraordinary strength. When I commented on his muscles, he roared with laughter.

“God gives me strength,” he said.

“He gives us all strength,” added Samson piously.

“Doesn’t anyone ever fall down the precipice?” I asked.

“Oh, yes,” he replied airily, “people die all the time.”

A child priest appeared. He was huddled in a white shawl and his feet were bare. He said his name was Eyba and that he would escort us to the monastery. A narrow path led round the edge of the cliff and up to the plateau above. Still shaking, Samson and I began to worry about getting back down the cliff face, but Eyba simply smiled and told us to look at the view. We could see for many miles in every direction. The afternoon light played on the hills, bringing them alive. Beneath us there were dry riverbeds, copses of trees and farmsteads, and in the distance we could see a mountain range veiled in mist. I could even make out Bahru asleep on the roof of the Jeep. Eyba pointed to a crest of hills in the foreground. He said they were in Eritrea.

Up on the plateau, a herd of fifty oxen were grazing in long grass. I was about to ask Eyba how they’d got there but Eyba had more important things on his mind. Had I been to America? he asked. I replied that I had.

“I am going to America,” he said earnestly.

“But aren’t you a monk? Surely you’ll spend your life here.”

The boy sniffed, then wiped his nose on his arm.

“In America there are Christians, aren’t there?”

Samson answered for me.

“Many, many Christians, and many, many churches!” he exclaimed.

Eyba led the way through a maze of wattle and daub walls. As he walked, he foraged under his shamma and brought out a familiar sheet of paper. It was a Diversity Visa form for the United States. I rolled my eyes.

“I think they will need me in America,” he said.

Debra Damo was supposedly founded by Abba Aregawi, one of the famous Nine Saints of Syria who fled persecution and arrived in Ethiopia in about ad 451. A legend says that Abba Aregawi stood at the base of the mountain, wondering how he could ever climb it. But God called to a serpent which lived on the top of the mountain and told the creature to lower its tail and pull the priest up.

For fifteen hundred years a company of monks have inhabited the remote monastery. They are brought as children by their parents, who believe that good fortune will be conferred on the family if a son devotes his life to God. Until recently, Ebya said, there were also three hermits who spent their lives in silent prayer. No one ever saw them, but when they died, their bodies were taken to the far side of the mountain and thrown into a cave.

“I will show you the bodies,” he said.

I was impatient to look at the secret manuscripts which spoke of Solomon, but I knew it would be discourteous to refuse. So we made our way to the edge of the plateau and down a narrow track that clung to the rock face. Eyba cheerfully clambered over a tree growing out of the cliff. Samson and I followed, not daring to look down. Then the young priest gestured to a narrow cave entrance and, before I could stop him, he slipped inside, calling out to us to follow.

At the back of the cave lay several skeletons. One still had black and rotting flesh attached to it. The stench was appalling. Eyba picked up a femur and waved it around. He said big birds flew into the cave and fed on the rotting bodies.

After another terrifying clamber back along the path, we reached a cistern. Over the centuries the monks have carved a number of them out of the plateau, some as deep as sixty feet, to collect water on the rare occasions when it rains. Eyba said the water was very fresh. He scooped up a cupful for me to drink. Just in time I noticed that the water was alive with maggots and I hastily passed it to Samson.

It was early evening by the time we were taken to the church. The building was square in shape and made of small rectangular stones. It stood behind a wall and was surrounded by trees and patches of dried grass. It is said to be the oldest church in Africa.

As we took off our shoes outside a monk waited in the doorway. I pushed Samson forward to begin the lengthy salutations. The monk welcomed us in a whisper. He said he had been waiting for our arrival for many months, and he thanked God for delivering us safely to Debra Damo.

The antechamber of the church was decorated with wooden panels carved with images of elephants and giraffe, camels, gazelle, lions and snakes. There were paintings, too, vividly colored. One showed Abba Aregawi being pulled up the mountain by the serpent. Another depicted Saint George dispatching the dragon. In a third the Queen of Sheba was arriving at the court of Solomon.

“Solomon,” I said.

The monk’s face lit up.

“Ah, Solomon.”

“A wise king,” I replied.

“Yes, wise, very, very wise.”

“And rich.”

The monk smiled.

“Very rich,” he said.

I instructed Samson to ask about the secret manuscripts. The monk gazed at the floor.

“There were many books,” he said, “but recently there was a fire in the library Only a few now remain.”

“Where are they?”

He pointed towards a door leading to the back of the church.

“In the Holy of Holies.”

“I’m looking for King Solomon’s gold mines,” I said. “And someone told me that you might be able to help me in my quest.”

The monk turned to a wooden lectern standing in the middle of the anteroom and pulled off a mottled green cloth. Beneath it lay a very large book bound in scarlet leather.

“Is that the Kebra Negast?”

The monk opened the book at random, revealing neat handwritten columns of rounded black letters. The script was Ge’ez, the ancient language of Ethiopia. He did not answer my question, but he did speak.

“God appeared to Solomon in a dream,” he said, “and asked him what special power he wished for. The young king replied that he yearned for wisdom so that he might be able to distinguish between good and evil. God blessed him with wisdom. Then Solomon built his great temple in Jerusalem, layering the walls with the purest gold, Ethiopian gold.”

He paused to turn the page with both hands.

“Word of Solomon’s wisdom and fortune spread across the oceans and the seas,” he went on, “and it came to the ears of Makeda. She wanted to look into the wise king’s eyes and to hear of his learning. So she traveled with a great caravan through the desert, from our land to Judah.”

“Where in Ethiopia did Solomon get his gold?”

The monk did not reply but he continued to talk.

“And Makeda came to Jerusalem and rested in Solomon’s palace, which was also fashioned from gold. She gave him precious beakers and fine objects and much gold, pure gold. And she asked him hard questions, and he answered them. Makeda was stirred by the king’s wisdom and power. And Solomon was moved by the queen’s beauty. So he held a banquet and sprinkled the food with salt. Makeda ate much and that night she slept in a bed beside Solomon’s own.

“Between their beds was ajar of water. Solomon said he would not touch Makeda if she agreed not to use what belonged to him. But in the night the queen was overcome with thirst. She reached for the jug of water and drank from it. Solomon jumped from his bed and took the queen, for she had stolen what was his. Makeda returned to Ethiopia, where their son Menelik was born.”

“But what of the gold, Solomon’s gold?”

Again, the monk turned the pages of the book.

“I will tell you of the gold.”

“Where did it come from? Which part of the country?”

“From the west,” said the priest, “from the land of Shangul.”

“Beni Shangul?” I repeated, remembering that Dr Pankhurst had spoken of the place and had remarked on the quality of its gold.

The monk nodded.

“Yes, that is right. I myself come from Beni Shangul. The people who live there know about the mines of Makeda.”

“You mean the mines of Solomon?”

“No, they were not the wise king’s mines. They were the queen”s, for this was her kingdom.”

I asked him to tell me more, but the audience was at an end.

“It is time to pray,” he said.

Without another word, he disappeared into the main body of the church. I called out, asking for more details of the gold, but there was no reply.

Eyba led us out through the enclosure and back to our shoes. It was dark now, and the air was flickering with fireflies. We stayed at Debra Damo for another day, but we did not see the monk again. Ebya said that the monks preferred to spend their time alone rather than speaking to visitors. If they had wanted to talk, he said, they would never have joined the church.

Before we plucked up courage to descend the cliff and make our way back to the Emperor’s Jeep, I had to know the answer to a question. The herd of oxen grazing on the mountain still baffled me. As no women or female creatures of any kind were allowed to enter the monastery, it wasn’t possible to breed cattle there. I knew, too, that there was no track or secret path up the mountain. The only way to get to the top was by rope. I asked Ebya how the oxen were brought up.

“That is very difficult,” he said. “When we want to bring an ox up we lower down a pair of big ropes. Then we tie them around the ox and all the monks come out to pull it up the mountain.”

Ebya broke off to take a deep breath and his eyes widened.

“The ox makes a terrible noise.”

ELEVEN

Prester John

“And the windows of the halls and the chambers be of crystal. And the tables whereon men eat, some be of emeralds, some of amethyst, and some of gold, full of precious stones; and the pillars that bear up the tables be of the same precious stones.”

Sir John Mandeville, on the palace of Prester John

In a café on a back street in the ancient town of Axum I met a man who told me he was a god. I have spent time with deities in human form in India — the subcontinent has hundreds of them – but this was the first time I’d met a godman in Africa. His name was Michael and he was a former Rastafarian from Liverpool. His skin was the color of dark apricots, pocked with mosquito bites, and his features a blend of African and Caucasian. He smoked hand-rolled black tobacco cigarettes, one after another, and he spoke in a slow rhythmic voice. Every few minutes he would get down off his seat and go and spit in the gutter outside.

“There’s a bad taste in my mouth,” he said.

“From the tobacco?”

“No, from the troubles of the world.”

Michael was different from the deities I had come across in India. He took the business of being a god very seriously indeed. Although there are exceptions, Indian godmen are generally an easy-going bunch. I’ve heard them likened to snake-oil salesmen for they perform miracles, heal the afflicted and generally entertain. In a small village with no television, no cinema and no doctor, their arrival is the social event of the year. I watched as Michael took a long drag on his cigarette and expelled a plume of smoke through his nose. Some people are incidental smokers, but Michael was an expert. I asked him if he’d always been a deity.

“It was in me,” he said, “but it was not wakened because I was sleeping. My eyes were blind and my ears were deaf to the truth. I followed the Way of Rasta. I found love with my brothers. I dreamed of a reunion with The People. But still I was blind.”

“How did you learn to see, then?”

He scratched at a scab on his arm.

“Ras Tafari came to me in a dream. He told me that I was his successor, that I was to leave Liverpool and journey to the Promised Land.”

“To Africa?”

“To Ethiopia.”

“That must have made the Rastafarians angry,” I said, “because they regard Ras Tafari as their Messiah.”

“Yeah, man, there was bitterness: the sourness of ignorance.”

“Do you have a following?”

Michael lit another cigarette and was soon engulfed in a cloud of impenetrable smoke.

“A prophet needs followers,” he said, “but a god walks alone.”

“What about miracles, can you do any?”

“I’m not a circus performer. I am the reincarnation of Ras Tafari.”

Samson kept quiet, but I could tell he wasn’t relishing the foreigner’s company. He took a very dim view of bogus deities, and kicked me under the table when Michael went out to spit in the gutter.

“This man is the Devil in disguise,” he said, voicing his disapproval, “let’s go quickly before he lures us into the desert.”

“Maybe he is a god,” I said, unable to resist teasing Samson. “Shall I test him?”

When Michael returned, I said that my friend Samson was having trouble believing his divinity.

“Can I ask you a question?”

“Okay, man, ask me.”

“I’m here in Ethiopia searching for something. Can you tell me what it is?”

Michael’s face seemed to retreat into the haze of smoke, and the silence that followed made Samson shift uneasily in his chair.

“I will tell you,” Michael said at some length. “You are looking for...”

He paused.

“Yes... what are we looking for?”

Samson and I stared into his eyes, waiting.

“You are looking for...”

“Yes?”

We leant forward on the edge of our chairs.

“For a cave.”

I burst out laughing. I have seen all kinds of mind-reading performances in India, but even so I was impressed by Michael’s routine.

As far as Samson was concerned, Michael’s answer was proof indeed that he was the Devil in disguise, and he jumped up and ran outside.

“Will we find the cave?” I asked.

“Oh yes,” Michael said, almost as an afterthought, “you will find a cave.”

Samson brooded all afternoon. He was angry that I had talked to the godman, and said I should be more selective in the people I mixed with. Though I liked to think we’d become firm friends, I knew deep down that he was only accompanying me because I had offered him sound employment. As far as Samson was concerned I was just another foreigner in pursuit of a lunatic quest.

Virtually everything in Axum seemed to be named after the Queen of Sheba. Legend has it that she made her capital there, though that seems improbable. Makeda died long before the rise of the Axumite kingdom. Nonetheless, the faltering tourist trade clung desperately to the myth. The hotels, the trinket stalls and the restaurants all claimed links with the Queen, if only in name. There was even a local brand of chewing-gum named after her. Most of the archaeological sites were also attributed to her. The tourist guides had rechristened a stagnant pool on the edge of Axum as “Sheba’s Baths”. A jumble of rubble nearby was reputedly “Sheba’s Palace”, and the stelae field opposite was supposedly her grave.

Samson’s thoughts weren’t on the tourist sites. He was thinking about a devil called Michael. I had once studied basic mind-reading with an Indian magician called Hakim Feroze, and I knew that there were all sorts of ways in which information could be extracted from an unwitting victim – who would then be astonished to be told what he thought had been secret. Even so, I found myself preoccupied by a premonition that I’d find a cave.

Most travelers spend days in Axum and they all have the same ambition: to be the first foreigner to set eyes on the Ark of the Covenant. The Ark is said to be kept in the Holy of Holies, in the compound of the Church of St Mary of Zion. I knew it was only indirectly related to my quest, but before we left Axum, curiosity drove me to pay the small entrance fee and enter the compound in which the Ark is kept. At the entrance to the church we passed lines of beggars waiting for tourist handouts and for God to answer their prayers. The hostilities with Eritrea had driven most of the tourists away. I must have been the first foreigner to visit the church that month. The beggars fell on me like locusts, holding out arms covered in suppurating sores or disfigured by leprosy.

The Church of St Mary of Zion, built by Haile Selassie in the 1960s, is an extraordinary example of hippy kitsch. Opposite it stands a curious square-shaped shrine in which the Ark itself apparently lies. The domed roof has lost many of its green mosaics, and the railings around the building are chipped. In the doorway hangs a crimson velvet curtain. The penalty for any layman attempting to enter is death, and I decided not to chance my luck.

Instead I asked Samson if I could see the royal treasures that are kept in the compound behind bars. They were guarded by a black-bearded priest who I knew must be very important because he was wearing Ray Ban Aviators with reflective lenses, and a black felt hat. Only a theologian who was very sure of himself would dress like that. He barked at Samson.

“What’s he saying?”

“He wants more money.”

Ethiopian priests may be very pious, but they have an insatiable appetite for handouts. I was about to protest at such extortion but the priest tapped a yellow steel cabinet behind the bars and then grinned at me.

Unable to resist, I handed over a few notes and the priest began the long process of unfastening the locks. Then he pulled the cover open to reveal a very large gold cross and five or six imperial crowns, the oldest of which was apparently made in ad 400. Seconds later, he replaced the cover and snapped the locks shut.

“Your time is up,” he said.

The next morning both Samson and Bahru asked if they could have a lie-in. They’d eaten a questionable bowl of asa wot, a spicy fish stew, and they had been up most of the night as a result. I had been more fortunate. The day before I had discovered some tins of food at the back of a poky tourist shop. They had clearly been there for some time, because they each bore the letters CCCP and were stamped with a red star. Most of them had no labels, but I thought they’d be a welcome change from the interminable diet of injera and asa wot. That evening, unbeknown to Samson and Bahru, I’d dined on Russian corned beef.

Despite their pleas, and delighted that the corned beef had had no ill-effects, I insisted we hit the road early. I knew that the trek to Tullu Wallel would be arduous and I didn’t want them to think they could down tools at the first sign of trouble. So we loaded the bags aboard and drove out of Axum before dawn. Already the road was packed with people and animals, all heading towards the town. Some of them must have been walking most of the night. Our headlights didn’t work so to my annoyance road-kill was inevitable. By six o’clock Bahru had racked up an impressive total, even by his standards — two rabbits, a dog and a pair of sheep.

As we snaked up into the Simien mountains, the gradient increased sharply, as did the frequency of punctures. We no longer had a jack, so every time there was a flat tire we had to wait for the grunt of an overloaded truck. Sometimes no vehicles passed for hours. I told Bahru that a Formula One racing team can carry out an engine overhaul and change all four wheels in a matter of seconds. He looked at me as if I was mad.

The tedium of waiting by the side of the road was relieved by scenery so spectacular as to defy our senses. The mountains reared up in a series of jagged peaks, and their slopes were carpeted with trees and ferns, grasses and mosses. There were waterfalls, too, plunging through the woods and dropping like sheets of diamonds to the valleys below.

During the long rains in the highlands of Ethiopia it is impossible to keep things dry. The most valued possession of the children who herd sheep and goats is a plastic bag. During good weather it is folded into a peaked cap. During the rains it becomes a transparent overcoat.

It is in these mountains that Prester John was once said to live.

Tales of this mythical Christian monarch, who ruled a blissful kingdom surrounded by pagan lands, kept generations of Europeans spellbound and, as the centuries passed, the myth evolved. Prester John, it was said, was descended from Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. He governed forty-two lesser kings and ruled a land where centaurs, Amazons and a race of “shrinking giants” roamed. Through his kingdom there ran a river which bore precious stones, and theft and poverty were quite unknown. His palace was roofed with gems and its walls were adorned with translucent crystal. No traveler, it was said, was ever refused entry, and each day in the palace thirty thousand guests sat down to dine at a magical table carved from emeralds whose powers prevented drunkenness.

Prester John himself wore clothes fashioned from salamander skin, but despite his wealth he was as humble as any man alive. His only enemy was the new faith, Islam, against which he waged war with his army of superhuman cannibals.

In one corner of his kingdom issued forth the Fountain of Life. It restored the vigor of youth to any man who drank from it. Prester John had drunk from it many times, and though he was five hundred and sixty-two years old, he showed no signs of ageing.

For a thousand years the tale of Prester John dazzled all who heard it. Like Timbuctoo, the notion of such a place was intoxicating to Europeans, and many thousands of adventurers set out in search of the kingdom. Some went of their own accord. Others had little choice.

The Portuguese sent their degradados, convicted felons, to search for Prester John in the early 1500s. It was their last chance of gaining redemption. Those who succeeded in finding him and who returned to Portugal would be pardoned. None of them ever came back. But it was said that two Portuguese travelers who successfully disguised themselves did manage to pass through the Muslim lands surrounding Prester John’s kingdom. Eventually they presented themselves to the king, who was so enchanted by them that he refused them permission ever to leave.

High in the mountains we stopped at a village to get the punctures repaired. There was an Agip petrol station with an old Italian-made hand pump, but they’d run out of petrol years ago. The mechanic took one look at the Emperor’s Jeep and his eyes lit up. He knew we’d be good for business. Before he did any work he treated us all to coffee and brought out chairs. I was struck by the level of customer service, considering there wasn’t any competition for miles around. The mechanic said the road down the mountain was very hazardous indeed. We would need good tires and brakes. Since Bahru had sold three brake pads the Jeep had been using a single brake. Still, we had managed to cover hundreds of miles without serious mishap, and it seemed an extravagance to spend money on any more. A second cup of coffee was served, and the mechanic became more persistent. If we didn’t have the vehicle overhauled, he said, we would never get past the next village but one.

“Is the road that bad?”

“Of course the road is bad,” said the mechanic, “but the problem is the villagers. They are evil. They put boulders in the way and you have to stop very fast. You see, they like driving cars off the road. Then they strip the chassis clean.”

Bahru looked tense.

“I have heard of that place,” he said. “The drivers in Addis Ababa talk of it. They call it “The Place of Death”.”

“Come on, it can’t be any worse than elsewhere in the country,” I pointed out.

Bahru shook his head.

“This time the danger is real,” he said.

So we stopped the night there, while the Emperor’s Jeep was refurbished. The engine was tuned and tested, third-hand brake pads were fitted, the tires were replaced, and the leaking radiator was plugged. Working all night by the light of a paraffin lamp, the mechanic even fixed the faulty starter motor.

We slept on the floor of the village’s only bar. A legion of overdressed girls swanned up and offered their services. For such a modest village there were a lot of them. Basic economic principles of supply and demand hadn’t yet culled their numbers.

At six the next morning the mechanic woke us. The Jeep was better than new, he said. Bahru asked how much money he owed. The mechanic said something in Amharic. Samson grimaced. It was quite clear that Bahru didn’t have enough money to pay the bill. But he didn’t seem concerned. He invited the mechanic to sit down with him and play cards.

“But I don’t have any cards,” said the mechanic.

“I do,” said Bahru, and with that he produced a pack of cards from his pocket.

“If you win,” said Bahru, “I will pay you double what you are asking for, and if I win, I won’t pay anything.”

The mechanic looked down at his oily fists and considered the proposition.

“All right,” he said at last.

Bahru dealt them each nine cards. I’m not sure what game they were playing or how many hands it entailed, but it appeared to be some form of poker. We clustered round and looked at both men’s hands. Word of the game gradually spread. A wave of anticipation rippled through the village. Despite the early hour, people filtered in. Within a few minutes the garage was packed. All eyes were on Bahru and the mechanic. Some of the villagers placed side bets on who would win. It was the first time in Ethiopia that I’d seen a craze for gambling.

The first hand went to the mechanic. He burst out laughing as the crowd pressed tighter. It was his turn to deal. He shuffled, and shuffled again. Then he dealt them both seven cards. Bahru glanced at the top card on the remaining pile. It was face down. He took it. Then he took another. And then another. The mechanic’s cool expression faltered, and Bahru laid a winning hand on the table. The cards were dealt again, and again Bahru won. Then the mechanic won a hand. Samson called for the audience to quieten down.

“Last hand,” he said.

Seven cards were dealt to each man. The mechanic snapped his into a fan and pressed them to his nose. He seemed confident. Bahru picked up his cards and glanced at them. Then he took a card from the pile, looked across at me, and winked. The mechanic looked up at the ceiling and began to whistle. I could tell he was close to winning. In my mind I went through the consequences if we lost. They were grim. Then, just before the mechanic took a card, Bahru stood to his feet and slammed his hand on the table. The crowd went wild. He had won.

Fifteen minutes later we were rolling through the countryside again. The mechanic had been very sporting, despite a significant loss of earnings. Bahru steered the Jeep through the next village, taking care not to run down any animals. A new, virtuous side of his character had emerged which I had not seen before. We drove on in silence, negotiating the hairpin bends. Quite suddenly Bahru slammed on the brakes as we rounded an oblique turn. Without them we would have gone over the cliff. In the middle of the road there was a boulder, partly camouflaged with branches and foliage. Samson and I climbed down and pushed it over the edge. Exhilarated at the thought of cheating death and the murderous villagers, I asked Bahru how he was so sure he’d win at cards. He changed into third gear and peered into the rear-view mirror.

“Marked cards,” he said.

The greatest red herring for anyone searching for King Solomon’s mines must be Henry Rider Haggard’s novel of the same name. The book is a tour de force of Victorian literature, a swashbuckling tale which has appealed to generations of young men. Its characters are larger than life, fearless, and charged with an insatiable lust for adventure. But Rider Haggard’s story is so embedded in fiction that it is of little use as a guide to finding ancient gold mines.

The book’s real achievement is more subtle. It may not have led men to riches, but it has inspired them to leave their ordinary lives behind and go in search of adventure. Between the wars thousands of young European men flocked to Africa. Their purpose was always the same – to hunt big game and to track down treasure. Many had little in the way of education or training, but some did have solid academic credentials. One such man was a young Polish Count called Byron de Prorok. He was intrepid beyond measure, an adventurer and an amateur archaeologist. If there was ever a real-life Indiana Jones, it was he.

De Prorok had spent years during the 1920s in North Africa, excavating in the high Atlas mountains, on the banks of the Red Sea, and at the site of Carthage, in what is now Tunisia. But his real obsession was Ethiopia. While in Carthage he claimed to have bought an old parchment map that showed an ancient slave route up the Nile to Khartoum, then eastward to Ethiopia. De Prorok believed the slaves had worked in gold mines near Beni Shangul and then transported the yellow metal westwards, back to Egypt.

I didn’t have much faith in de Prorok’s treasure map. It sounded about as genuine as the one I’d bought from Ah Baba. De Prorok, however, was determined to discover the ancient mines. In 1934, leading an expedition that was both well-funded and well-equipped, he set out from Khartoum in the Sudan, and crossed into Ethiopia at Kurmuk by what he called “the back door”. He had difficulty in getting permission from Emperor Haile Selassie to travel through the west of the country and, when eventually permission was granted, de Prorok was forbidden to carry weapons.

Frank Hayter had traveled in secret and alone, but de Prorok brought along archaeologists and photographers, scientists and taxidermists, porters and a retinue of hangers-on. The Count knew how to travel in style, and the tale of his journey to Beni Shangul might well have come from the pages of King Solomon’s Mines. He claimed to have discovered ancient gold workings, and shafts carved into the mountains where emeralds had been mined long before. He spoke, too, of legions of children enslaved by a fiendish warlord known locally as the Mad Sultan Ghogoli. The despot forced them to work in the mines where they were guarded by brutal warders, who wielded Ápotamus-hide whips. The Sultan was rumored to be a hundred years old, and to have a thousand wives. Anyone who crossed him was strung up on a tree by the thumbs until he fell away from them. Ghogoli was more than a little reminiscent of Rider Haggard’s own antagonist, Gogool.

Beni Shangul was not far from Hayter’s mine-shafts, so I decided to head to Tullu Wallel via the Beni Shangul region. I had managed to get a copy of de Prorok’s account of his expedition, Dead Men Do Tell Tales, before leaving for Ethiopia. It bore many similarities to Hayter’s own description of the area in Gold of Ethiopia, which I took as a positive sign. Hayter noted that de Prorok had discovered positive proof that the Pharaohs had obtained gold from north-west Ethiopia. In fact the Count had actually taken gold samples from the west and had tested them against ancient Egyptian gold. He found the samples to be virtually identical.

The Jeep’s renovation in the highlands had been a godsend. But no sooner had some problems been solved than new ones surfaced. First the fuel pump failed, then we had a blown gasket and yet more punctures. The last straw was when one of the front tires burst on a blind bend. Bahru wrestled desperately with the steering-wheel as the vehicle lurched out of control, eventually managing to bring us to a juddering halt on the edge of a ravine.

Once we had celebrated having survived, Samson climbed on to the roof rack to untie the last good wheel. He threw it down to the ground for Bahru to catch. But the driver’s vision was clouded by an overdose of qat. He clutched at the air, and the wheel went over the cliff and into the ravine below. Samson volunteered to climb down and retrieve it. He was gone for four hours.

By dusk we reached Gondar, the seat of Ethiopian power from 1632 until the middle of the nineteenth century. Despite its glorious past, my first impressions of the town were not favourable. It started to pour with rain the moment we arrived, and it didn’t stop until we left. Much of the intervening time was spent hunting for lodgings and a place to eat. All the hotels were inexplicably full. Someone said something about a Pan African football match, but I found it hard to believe that the continent’s great football teams would converge on Gondar.

The manager of the only hotel in town with spare rooms took my money and led me to a peephole in the wall.

“Look through there,” he said.

“What is it?”

“Just look!”

He grinned. I put my eye to the hole and looked. Then I blushed and drew back quickly. A white woman and a black man were locked in an intimate embrace.

“She’s Israeli,” said the manager bitterly, “and she’s staying in there with her Ethiopian guide.”

“Maybe they’re in love,” I said.

The manager shook his head abruptly.

“It is not love.”

In the morning we ate breakfast in a large café with orange walls and a bright blue ceiling. The waitress ferried espressos to our table, and asked if we’d heard about the Israeli woman.

“That’s gossip,” snapped Samson righteously.

“Maybe they’re in love,” I said, repeating myself.

“No, no,” replied the girl, “it is not love.”

After a meal of crusty bread rolls dipped in thin gravy, we inspected the castles for which Gondar is famous. Sometimes on a journey you arrive at a town which is famed for its architecture, a place about which countless books have been written. But after casting an eye over it all, you wonder if you’re missing something. The royal enclosure, which contains the castles and palaces of Gondar, had been stripped bare. The buildings were empty shells, and all trace of their former residents had vanished.

Samson trudged behind me, enduring both the rain and my astringent comments on one of his nation’s greatest treasures. He suggested I look beyond the ruined walls and think of their history. He was right. The ground on which we walked was once regarded by the European powers as an Avalon, an enchanted seat of sovereignty. The Portuguese, the French, the British and others sent their explorers to present their credentials to its emperors. Many of them never completed the journey and those that did endured extraordinary hardships.

The most famous early explorer to arrive in Gondar was James Bruce, the Laird of Kinnaird, and a man of considerable private wealth. He set off from Scotland in search of the source of the Nile and eventually reached Gondar on St Valentine’s Day, 1770. Bruce was a great hulk of a man, standing six foot three, stout as a barrel, with a mane of bright red hair. He was a crack shot and a fine horseman, and he was also a severe hypochondriac. Contemporary accounts said he was easily offended and had a violent temper. When he grew angry his nose would start bleeding quite spontaneously.

Hardly a single white man had ventured to Ethiopia since the Portuguese had left three centuries before. Bruce found himself in the middle of a barbaric civil war, but he managed to get to the headstream of the Blue Nile, although he mistook it for the main source of the river. The journey back to Britain was one of almost unbelievable hardship. Before returning home Bruce stopped at various European spas to cure his malaria, and to receive treatment for the guinea worm which riddled his right leg. He made the mistake of announcing his discoveries to the court of France. This was seen by the English as a direct snub. London wits, including Dr Johnson (who loathed the Scots, and who was regarded as an authority on Ethiopia although he’d never been there), tore Bruce’s story to shreds and turned him into a laughing stock. A broken man, the Laird retired to his Scottish estate and years later wrote a long, ponderous account of his adventure.

My interest in Gondar lay not in the ruins, but in some of the city’s inhabitants for it is here that the last of the Ethiopian Jews, known as the Beta Israel, once lived. A great deal of misinformation surrounds the Ethiopian Jews. Remarkably few academic studies have been conducted on the subject, and much of the work published is of questionable scholarship. Judaic scholars are not even certain when the Beta Israel arrived in Ethiopia. Some have put the date as early as the tenth century bc while others contend that they arrived as late as medieval times. Although it is a tempting idea, only the most dubious scholars believe that the Ethiopian Jews arrived during the reign of Solomon. The Beta Israel themselves believe that they are the descendants of Menelik I, the son of Solomon and Sheba. Others have postulated that they are the tribe of Dan, one of the ten lost tribes of Israel, or that they failed to cross with Moses when he parted the Red Sea, and so fled southwards out of Egypt.

For centuries the Ethiopian Jews survived encircled by Christianity. Commonly known as falashas, they were totally isolated from the world of mainstream Judaism. They were unable to read or speak Hebrew or to learn the Talmudic scriptures. Their religious life was based on the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, and they kept to a kosher diet and observed the Sabbath.

Sometimes they were persecuted, and at other times they were left alone. Almost always they lived in their own villages, sequestered away from the Christian community. Many of them must have converted, for fear of losing their lands in times of persecution; in doing so, they affected Ethiopia’s own unique blend of Christianity. In ancient times there may well have been hundreds of thousands of Beta Israel in Ethiopia. Yet gradually their numbers were decimated through persecution, conversions, famine and disease.

The Beta Israel made the news headlines in the mid-1980s and early 1990s when almost every one of them was airlifted to Israel. Operation Moses in 1984, and Operation Solomon in 1991, were two of the largest mass airlifts in history. No one is quite sure exactly how many Ethiopian Jews were moved in the evacuation, largely because the operations were so hurried. But it is thought that about forty-five thousand left in the exodus.

The strangest thing I have read about the Beta Israel was written by C. H. Walker, a former British Consul to western Ethiopia. He remarked that they were unsurpassed as craftsmen and that the local Christians didn’t trust them. Walker said the most feared section of the Beta Israel were the Buda, the religious hierarchy. They were believed to have the power to turn themselves into hyenas, and to transmit the Evil Eye. At night, in animal form they would ravage graves and feed on the dead. In human form they would typically wear a gold earring, quite unique in design. Walker said that hyenas were frequently shot and found to have the same curious rings pinned through their ears. Was there, I wondered, any connection with the hyenas of Harar?

A couple of miles from Gondar we came to a hand-written sign in white chalk which advertised that we had arrived at the “Falasha Village”. It was the kind of place that must have attracted many tourists before the evacuations, but now there were none. Bahru braked sharply and pointed to the sign. The village appeared to be deserted and all the houses were empty. Even the blacksmith’s foundry and the workshops, which would once have produced the ironwork, pottery and baskets for which the Ethiopian Jews were renowned, had been abandoned.

A boy of about seven wearing pink Rubber boots and an outsize T-shirt was standing by the road playing in a deep puddle. I went up and asked him if there were any Jews left. He kicked his foot towards a thatched hut, partly hidden in a grove of banana trees.

“She is in there,” he said.

As Samson and I walked over to the hut, a woman spotted us and began to lay out a series of crude fired-clay figurines. Then she smacked her palm against mine, and welcomed us to her house.

“We have come to meet the Beta Israel,” I said.

The woman looked at the figurines and then at me.

“They have gone to Israel,” she said, “and they have left me behind.”

“Are you the only Jew here?”

She nodded, her eyes drooping sorrowfully.

“They left me alone.”

“But there was plenty of warning. Why didn’t you get evacuated?”

“I was sick, so they wouldn’t take me. They said they would come back. So I am waiting here, and selling these figures which I make.”

The figures were all very similar. A third of them represented a man, another third a woman, and the rest a man in bed with a woman.

“These are Solomon,” she said, “and these are Makeda, and those ones there are Makeda visiting Solomon.”

After we had admired her work and Samson had bought a figure for his girlfriend, the woman, who was called Rachel, took us to see the synagogue. It was a plain circular building and above it rose a large Star of David. Rachel said she never went into the synagogue now that she was alone. She stayed by the roadside most of the time, waiting for tourists or, better still, for the Israeli officials to come and get her. Then she led us to her tukul.

We took off our shoes and went in. The walls were papered with old newspapers printed in Chinese characters. The floor was made from dried mud, and the only piece of furniture was a long, rickety bed. So the three of us sat in a line on it.

“The Israeli Embassy people came to meet me,” said Rachel, “but they told me I was too late to come to their country. I would have to wait here until the next evacuation.”

“When will that be?”

Rachel coughed into her hand.

“I don’t know, but they said they would come and get me when it happened. They promised.”

Samson asked her about Solomon.

“King Solomon and Makeda had a son,” she said softly, “and he is our ancestor. He was Menelik.”

“Can you read the Talmud?”

“No, we don’t have it. We have never had it. But we have a book of prayers in Ge’ez.”

I told Rachel that I had been to Jerusalem, to the place where Solomon’s Temple had once stood. I said that I’d met some Ethiopian Jews, and that they were still adjusting to the great change in their lives. Many of the Ethiopian men were in the army, and others were living in very poor conditions despite handouts from the state. Every Israeli, it seemed, knew of their plight.

Rachel got off the bed and looked me straight in the eye.

“These Beta Israel you met in Jerusalem,” she said, “did they speak of me?”

Halfway between Gondar and Bahir Dar, which nestles on the banks of Lake Tana, Bahru charged through a vast sea of gray vultures. Within seconds there was carnage on the road. Most people avoid vultures, but not Bahru. As the wheels sliced through the vultures’ ranks, crushing wings and breaking beaks, I prayed that the slaughter wouldn’t have ominous consequences later on. Samson said vultures were the messengers of the Devil. Killing them was a virtuous act, though diabolic retribution would probably follow.

As the road ran along the eastern bank of Lake Tana, we caught our first glimpse of the water. The late afternoon sun reflected on it, transforming the surface into a dazzling sheet of gold. Lake Tana is the kind of place where you could easily spend a lifetime navigating the inlets and visiting the monasteries on its banks and on the islands which lie scattered across its waters. Samson begged me to let him make a pilgrimage to some of the churches. He wanted to ask for God’s protection now that we’d spilt vulturine blood. I would have loved to stop as well, to journey to the island of Dega Estefanos where the Church of Saint Stephanos contains the mummified remains of five former Emperors of Ethiopia in glass-sided coffins.

Samson wasn’t thinking about sightseeing so much as survival. He predicted a catastrophe if we didn’t stop and pray. The vultures were already beginning to take their revenge, he said. To take his mind off the matter, I pulled out the map and went over the route. We didn’t have time to stop. We had to go further west, to Beni Shangul, and then head south to Tullu Wallel. There would be plenty of opportunities to pray later, I said.

We spent the night in Bahir Dar. The town was one of unexpected beauty, quite unlike anywhere else I had been in Ethiopia. Palm trees lined the wide avenues, which were brushed by cleaners sweeping with long palm fronds. There were little boutiques selling knick-knacks and banks offering foreign exchange, basket-sellers hawking their wares, and policemen in immaculate uniforms. Samson took a deep breath.

“I think this is the most beautiful place in the world,” he said, “I will bring my girlfriend here when we are married.”

Samson was still a long way from his honeymoon. The subject of marriage was one which preoccupied him. He spoke of wedded bliss continually. A man who was married, he said, was a man who had been touched by angels. Samson was the kind of person who would make a good husband. He was considerate and generally good-natured, and he didn’t smoke, drink, gamble, chew qat or swear. But his girlfriend came from a different social class. Her family had a big house in a good suburb of Addis Ababa. They even owned a car. Samson was a taxi-driver who had lived in a shack until it had been burned to the ground. He had never met the girl’s parents during the three years they had known each other. Worse still, he and his girlfriend were so fearful of being found out that they had to avoid being seen together in public. This need for secrecy put a great strain on Samson.

Bahru dropped me at the Ghion Hotel in Bahir Dar, and my bags were unloaded and ferried to the room by a porter with a club foot. Samson said he wouldn’t need a bed for the night. He was going to seek out the nearest church.

“There is much to pray for,” he said.

“Are you still thinking about the vultures?”

“Yes, the vultures,” he replied, “but I am thinking of angels as well. If I pray very hard, all night, maybe they will fly down and touch me with their wings.”

TWELVE

The Mad Sultan

“The trail led up a wild valley in which we were astonished to find hundreds of slaves at work riddling gold in the riverbed under brutish foremen armed with whips of hippopotamus hide.”

Count Byron de Prorok, In Quest of Lost Worlds

The yellow and white line which ran westward to Beni Shangul looked harmless enough. Michelin’s map-makers sitting in their cosy offices in Paris could have had no idea of the true condition of the road. I made a note in my journal to write to them as soon as I returned home. Then I reminded myself that it was the rainy season, a time when inoffensive tracks become surging rivers of mud. Bahru clenched his teeth and accelerated at full speed. The wheels span furiously, propelling the wretched Emperor’s Jeep through the slime. Neither he nor Samson said very much. I could feel them ganging up on me, bound by their common nationality and by their reluctance to continue the journey Both men were eager to return to the capital, and they knew instinctively that the road was about to get even worse. A glance at the route into Beni Shangul confirmed it. The yellow and white streak would soon be replaced by a narrow pencil line, indicating an unmarked track. I ripped the legend off the map and stuffed it down behind the back seat.

Despite the dreadful driving conditions, Samson was feeling better. Since leaving Bahir Dar two days before, I had let him stop at any church we passed for a quick bout of prayer. Sometimes even the harshest employer has to veer towards lenience.

De Prorok’s book, Dead Men Do Tell Tales, had been written decades before, but it spoke of a wild, untamed people living in a hostile land. The countryside hadn’t changed since de Prorok’s time, but I hoped the indigenous tribes had grown more friendly. However, everyone I’d asked en route had said that only a madman would dare to make the journey to Beni Shangul, and eventually I’d stopped asking for people’s opinions because they didn’t do much for general morale.

The only comfort was that the Mad Sultan Ghogoli must surely be dead by now. De Prorok went into every chilling detail of the despotic ruler’s regime. Ghogoli governed Beni Shangul as a semi-independent kingdom, paying only lip service to Haile Selassie, and he retained complete control over the gold mines in his territory. His rule was absolute. The lightest form of punishment was castration, in which he clearly delighted. If any of his slaves were found swallowing gold, they were buried up to their necks in ant hills with their noses and ears cut off, or they were hung from posts until they were dead. When Ghogoli was feeling benevolent he permitted a wrong-doer to be executed by his nearest male relative, with the rest of the family looking on. The walls of his palace were said to be festooned with the dried “body parts” of his enemies. De Prorok was too polite to say it, but I knew he was talking about genitalia.

The Sultan’s favourite punishment was the so-called “human candle”. This was reserved for those who questioned his authority. I’d heard that Haile Selassie had frowned on the practice but had been powerless to stop it. One reason for its persistence was that it was popular with the locals. No one could see enough human candles, just as bull-fighting aficionados can’t get enough of their sport.

The punishment began with Ghogoli’s guards lighting a slow fire beneath a cauldron filled with tallow. The prisoner was then stripped naked and his hands were tied behind his back. Next the guards dipped thin cotton bandages in the tallow and wound them around the unfortunate victim. De Prorok likened the process to Egyptian mummification. When the prisoner had been completely swathed in lengths of cloth, from the chin down to the backs of his knees, a thicker strip of tallow-soaked cotton was woven through the layers across his back, and left to hang down like a wick.

On the Mad Sultan’s command, the wick was ignited. With the crowd cheering enthusiastically, the bandages smoldered, smoked, broke into flames and then blazed. As he burned, the victim ran about, screaming. If he tried to run away, the guards would lash him with their swords. De Prorok was intrigued by the punishment: “Gradually, the smell of burning flesh increases, but there is a limit to human endurance. The victim goes mad. In the intensity of the suffering, he does not know what he is doing. The pungent odour of roasting meat is unmistakable. At last his suffering is ended, from insanity he goes into unconsciousness and then into his death throes.”

I decided to keep all mention of the Mad Sultan to myself, for fear of inciting a mutiny. With every hour that slipped by, Samson and Bahru questioned the wisdom of our expedition. I, too, queried my line of work. Why, I asked myself, couldn’t I have a more normal career like most of my friends? But before I could give it any more thought, Samson pointed to the road. Ahead of us lay a stretch of water. Bahru eased the vehicle to a stop, like a rider pulling up his horse before an especially high fence.

It was impossible to tell how deep the water was, but it looked very muddy, and every so often a bubble of methane would rise to the surface and burst. Samson got out, took off his pants and waded in. When the water was up to his waist he leaned out and dipped a long bamboo stave into the middle of the ooze. It disappeared without trace. All around the edges of the bog there were discarded rocks and splintered pieces of wood, indicating that other vehicles had got stuck here. Bahru wrung his hands together and bit his lip. Then a look of determination stole over his face.

“He’s not seriously going to try and drive through it, is he?” I asked Samson.

“For Bahru this is a matter of honor,” replied Samson wearily.

The driver got back into the Jeep and reversed about fifty feet. A second later he was charging at full speed towards the water. It was nothing short of suicide. Samson and I yelled for him to stop as we waved our arms. But it was too late. The vehicle was grounded in the middle of the bog, with Bahru slouched behind the wheel, a broken man.

For three hours, we struggled to free the Emperor’s Jeep. Bahru stripped off all his clothes — even his underwear — and swam down to wedge stones under the wheels. Samson and I cut bamboo and razor grass, and put them in place. But it was no good. Every attempt at escape failed and settled the vehicle still deeper in the bog. By the end the Jeep had sunk to its bonnet, our hands were lacerated and we were all covered from head to foot in thick, noisome mud.

Eventually I gave up and sat down by the edge of the quagmire in despair. A few minutes later we heard three children in the distance. They were chewing sticks and giggling. They sat down beside me and stared at the Jeep. Then some more children turned up, followed by a pair of women, and after them half a dozen men. Before we knew it an entire village had surrounded the bog. They were laughing and pointing, but none of them offered to help.

“These are bad people,” said Samson under his breath.

“Ask them to give us a hand.”

He rattled off a sentence in Amharic. The crowd jeered and gesticulated and shook their heads.

“They want money,” he replied.

“How much?”

“Two hundred birr!

“That’s nearly twenty pounds!”

Samson looked at the bog and then at the crowd.

“They are bad people,” he said again.

We tried to negotiate the price down but they were well aware that we had no other choice. When, eventually, we settled on a price only a little lower than the original demand, it became apparent that they were professionals. They worked together, each taking a job. The men found stones and the women cut down more bamboo poles, while their children opened a sluice to drain away the water. Twenty minutes later the road was clear.

I handed over the money.

“They will feast tonight,” said Samson.

We drove on through the twilight and then the darkness. The moon rose high above us, a vanilla disc of light. If the track was bad during the day, it was ten times worse at night. We still had no headlights, and the sides of the track were lined with impenetrable thickets of bamboo. In some places the potholes were as deep as plague pits. We begged Bahru to stop, declaring that we could camp in the Jeep for the night. But he refused. His pride had been dented.

A few minutes before midnight we reached a hamlet that was little more than a cluster of thatched huts. Samson went to find us somewhere to sleep. The villagers had been woken by the sound of our engine and soon they were crowding around the car. Samson got out and spoke to them.

“They are miners,” he said, “working a gold seam two miles to the north. They have invited us to stay the night here.”

We were welcomed by a lantern swinging in the cool nocturnal air. I could smell tobacco burning and see the whites of eyes illuminated in the pastel yellow light. When they saw my face, the miners ducked their heads and shook my hand vigorously. A pot of meaty stew with macaroni was prepared, and a short-wave radio was fished out of a box and switched on with the volume turned up. It sounded like Radio Moscow.

The leader of the miners, Lucas, sat beside me in his hut. The lantern was hung above his head, drawing moths to it. We flailed our arms to knock the insects away from the food, but Lucas and the others didn’t seem to care that a number of them had flapped into their stew One of the men stirred the dish with a goat’s thigh bone, and then everyone started to eat from the communal dish. Lucas urged me to take the best pieces of meat and then reached into the stew and selected a bone for me to chew, holding it to my lips.

I slept more deeply that night than I think I have ever slept before. The miners could easily have slit our throats, pilfered our equipment and run off into the hills. But they had a greater source of prosperity, gold.

Dawn was accompanied by the sound of chickens scratching and children playing, and was followed by another communal dish of macaroni, high on moths and low on meat. Lucas said he would take us to where they were mining gold.

We left the Jeep at the camp and set out into the undergrowth. Rain during the night had lowered the temperature but had brought out horseflies and mosquitoes. Lucas explained that the area close to the hamlet had already been mined out. So now the men were working a stretch across the river. The operation was quite different from the mine near Shakiso. For a start it was much smaller, involving no more than about twenty men and their families. Unlike Bedakaysa, the miners worked as a group, each man and each woman looking out for the next. An unknown visitor turning up at the Bedakaysa mine in the middle of the night would have been courting death.

Soon the bamboo thickets gave way to wild mango and thorn trees. I followed close behind Lucas, anxious not to fall down an old mine-shaft. There were dozens of them pitting the ground, each about three feet in diameter with passages that linked them to others.

Though he wore only a frayed tweed herringbone coat with turned-up cuffs, Lucas was an impressive figure and stood well over six feet tall. As I struggled to keep up with him I asked if they were finding gold.

“There’s plenty for all of us,” he said, “but we find it hard to get a fair price. Addis Ababa is a long way away, so usually we sell it to dealers who take it across the border and up to Khartoum.”

“What’s the quality like?”

Lucas grinned, then wiped the sweat from his neck with his hand.

“It’s the best gold in Ethiopia,” he said, “ninety-nine per cent best quality. Ever since men have lived here they have mined the gold.”

“How long is that?”

Lucas thought for a moment.

“Since time began,” he said.

Half an hour later we came to a series of freshly dug tunnels. There must have been more than fifty of them, stretching over about an acre of ground. Lucas slipped off his coat. Three or four of the tunnels were being worked, with young boys standing at ground level and catching the wicker baskets of earth as they were sent up. Another group of boys, younger than the first, ferried the soil down to the river where the women panned it. The operation was small in scale but efficient.

Lucas said the tunnels ran along a rich seam and that they always had a hole at each end so as to ensure an escape route if the roof caved in.

“Are there cave-ins?”

“Often,” he said, “especially in the rains when the ground is so wet. There’s nothing we can do except make sure we prop up the sides of the tunnels with wood. Last week one of the men was almost killed. We dug for many hours. But he was a strong man, thank God, and he survived.”

Samson stripped off his shirt, kicked off his shoes and jumped down the tunnel, disappearing like a ferret down a rabbit-hole. He clearly hadn’t forgotten his mining days. Lucas asked if I wanted to go down. I took a small torch from my camera bag and followed him into the shaft. It went straight down like a well shaft. For someone unused to the work, clambering down was an unnerving experience. Lucas made it look so easy. He glided down the thirty-foot hole without giving it another thought. Behind him, I was wheezing and struggling. Eventually the shaft levelled out and led to a passage, little more than three feet in height, that continued for fifty feet, before diving down again, this time in a steep slope. It reminded me of the cramped passage which leads to the heart of the Great Pyramid of Cheops at Giza. We crawled on our stomachs over soil that had been tamped down by innumerable bodies. The light from my torch was dim and in the end I switched it off. It was easier to shut my eyes and rely on the sense of touch.

After a great deal of crawling I heard voices. Samson had reached the mine face and was calling out.

“This is the seam,” said Lucas, pressing my hand to a jagged wall of soil. “There is much gold here. You can smell it, can’t you?”

I turned on my torch and then breathed in. All I could smell was red African earth and sweat. Lucas showed how the miners chipped away at the seam with a sharp iron pike. Most of them didn’t bother with lanterns or torches. Years of tunnelling had given them a sense of their surroundings. Like moles, they had no need to see.

Back on the surface, after a gruelling ascent, I followed the procession of children who shuttled the baskets and pans from the mine face to the river. The boys were apprentices. One day they would continue the work of their fathers, as their fathers had done before them. But first they had to scurry back and forth like rats through the tunnels. In our society we regard the idea of child labor as deplorable, but most of the world knows no other way. Children’s miniature frames and nimble movements make them the obvious choice for tunnelling.

Down at the river twenty-five women were sweeping the round wooden pans in the flow. They became uneasy when they spotted me but then relaxed when they saw Lucas by my side. A couple of girls were bathing on the rocks and rinsing their dresses. They shrieked for us to turn away until they’d slipped back into their clothes. Others were singing. Samson said it was a song of lost love. Each woman wore a miniature gourd, no bigger than the bowl of a pipe, strung around her neck. In it was kept the gold dust for which they worked so hard. Squatting on their haunches, the women swirled water around the great pans until all the soil was gone, leaving no more than a speck or two of gold. Vast quantities of dirt have to be sifted to produce even the smallest trace of gold dust. For every grain of it a gallon of sweat is lost.

During the rains the river is high, providing the water needed to pan the gold, but in spring and autumn the water level drops. Then the villagers work in the fields instead.

I asked if the government ever tried to restrict their mining.

“The officials are fearful of this place,” said Lucas. “They think that we will cut their throats and kill them. And they know about the Devil in the mountain.”

“Which mountain?”

Lucas pointed a finger to a double peak in the distance. It resembled the so-called Sheba’s Breasts in Rider Haggard’s novel.

“The Devil is up there on Gorba,” he said. “The peak on the right is male, and the one on the left is female. The Devil is on the female hill.”

“Have you seen him?”

“No, I haven’t,” he said, “and I don’t wish to. The people who have been there have all died. Sometimes they climb up and disappear. Even faranjis have gone up there and disappeared.”

Just as Ethiopian caves are frequently associated with gold and treasure, mountains are often linked to the Devil. I had read a description of another Devil mountain in the Simien range, written by Paul Hartlmaier, a German traveling in Ethiopia during the 1950s. He said the Devil supposedly dwelt near the village of Addi Arkai, on a mountain called Amba Hawasa. The locals believed that anyone stupid enough to venture up the mountain would be cast into the chasm below. Whatever the case, such tales are an effective method of keeping inquisitive visitors away.

I wondered if Frank Hayter or Count de Prorok had ever explored the mountain of Gorba. After all, de Prorok had searched the area before the Mad Sultan’s army chased him away. He had found a river called Werk Warka, literally the “River of Gold”, at which hundreds of Ghogoli’s child slaves were toiling. De Prorok said the slaves were in a pitiful condition and that anyone who ran away and was caught was flayed alive by the guards’ hippopotamus-hide whips. Near the river the Count found chambers full of graves. When his team excavated them they discovered ancient human bones, embalmed skeletons, a number of amphorae, and necklaces similar to those found in ancient Egyptian tombs.

The Ethiopian porters were so terrified of opening the graves that de Prorok and the other Europeans had to leave the camp during the night and exhume the bodies alone. The Count thought the bones might have belonged to Egyptian gold miners working the area even before the time of Solomon, and he claimed to have come across what looked like an obelisk, made from porphyry. As if that wasn’t enough, de Prorok also said he’d found an ancient emerald mine at Beni Shangul.

The Mad Sultan’s forces hounded the expedition out of the area before the obelisk and their other discoveries could be removed. I asked Lucas and his fellow villagers if they knew of Werk Warka, and if they had heard of ancient graves and an obelisk. They all laughed at the question.

“Take my advice,” Lucas said as we walked back to the hamlet, “don’t waste your time with these things. Go back to your country and forget about the gold and the emeralds.” He stopped and turned to face the twin peaks of Gorba.

“Why?”

“Because the Devil is watching you.”

Christmas swayed across the yard, brushing a chicken away with her broom, each stride starting at the hips, buttocks moving legs. Her feet were bare, callused like the hull of a ship which has been at sea for many months. She fluttered her eyelashes at Samson and sighed deeply. He said the woman wasn’t his type, and in any case he was faithful to his girlfriend. But the bar owner’s wife had fallen head over heels in love.

Samson and I had shared a room at the back of the bar, in a village called Mengay, two days on from the mining hamlet. The road had deteriorated even further and I dreaded the journey ahead.

The room at the bar had cracked mud walls, a high tin roof and a pair of rope beds. During the day, light would stream in through a glassless window. There were bats roosting in the darkened corners where the tin roof met the walls. At night they would flutter out of the window to hunt for insects above the trees. There was also a gap often inches below the door, under which chickens would scramble in their perpetual search for grain.

That night I was so tired that I fell into a deep sleep. In the early hours a live creature armed with many claws plunged the thirteen feet from the tin roof on to my chest. I sat up screaming and gasping for air. It was the bar’s cat stalking bats.

Next morning I asked Christmas about the bats.

“The Death Birds!” she cried. “Did they bite you?”

As I probed for puncture marks on my neck, she served Samson an immense bowl of spaghetti topped with chicken livers. It was on the house, she said, massaging her fingertips flirtatiously into his shoulders.

The village was near Asosa, virtually on the border with Sudan, and it was flooded with refugees, some of them maimed and missing limbs. Although the Ethiopian population were sensitive to the plight of their Sudanese cousins, there was tension between them. The refugees were eligible for handouts from aid organizations, whereas the local Ethiopians were given nothing.

In the West we have little concept of poverty. But on Ethiopia’s border with Sudan, its full meaning is all too apparent. These people are stranded in limbo, from one generation to the next. They have barely enough food to survive, and never enough to escape. They cannot afford to buy rags to clothe themselves, to send their children to school or to buy medicine if they fall sick.

“Now you can understand why gold is so alluring to these people,” said Samson. “They have nothing else to hope for.”

In the afternoon a blind woman was led up to the bar’s veranda where we were sitting. The child leading her took her hand and placed it on my shoulder. Her arms were emaciated, her face haggard, her mouth empty of its teeth. The dress she was wearing was ripped down the sides and the back. She spoke in a voice so loud that we assumed she was deaf.

“She’s saying that she’s heard there is a faranji here,” said Samson. “She has something to sell for the right price.”

“What?”

The woman shouted something.

“Some coins.”

“Can she show us?”

The woman untied a pouch tucked into her dress and handed it to me. Somehow I knew what was in the pouch even before I opened it. There were twenty of them – large silver coins, all bearing the same date, 1780. I had bought a bag of identical coins years before while living in Kenya as a student. They are known as Maria Theresa dollars or thalers (the word from which “dollar” is derived) because they were first minted during the reign of the Austrian Empress, between 1740 and 1780. For decades the coins were the currency of Ethiopia, where the image of the Empress was believed to be that of the Virgin Mary. What was strange, however, was the fact that though the coins were minted in many different years, Ethiopians only trusted the ones stamped with the date 1780 and considered all the rest to be fakes. So all later versions were marked with the same date. The Austrian mint has recently started to produce the coins again. They are still dated 1780.

Bahru needed to get the Jeep’s chassis welded, so we were forced to spend a second night in Mengay. When we told Christmas, she quivered with delight.

Evenings in remote Ethiopian villages tend to be quiet. No one has much money to spend on carousing, although Bahru always managed to find a card game in which to use his special deck. I never stopped him, for if I condemned what was his only source of revenue, he’d have turned to me for funds.

Samson and I went for a walk. He was desperate to get away from Christmas, who was busily preparing him yet another vast meal. We passed a row of run-down shops — a baker”s, a tailor’s and a kiosk selling soap and wire wool, mosquito coils and matches — and then a bar, marked in the usual way by an upturned cup on a stick. A little further on, towards the end of the village street, we saw a crowd gathering. Samson asked what was going on.

“A miracle man,” said a passer-by.

The villagers lined up in an arc, waiting for the miracle man to begin, the atmosphere electric with anticipation. “He’s from Sudan,” said one man. “He can do miracles,” said another.

I’ve been interested in illusion for a long time but I’d never heard of any miracle workers plying their trade south of the Sahara, so I persuaded Samson to stay and watch.

The magician lit a pair of paraffin lamps dangling from the lowest branches of a tree and then laid out a striped blanket, removed his shoes and welcomed the crowd. As he stepped into the pool of light cast by the lamps I got a better view of his face. Very dark and softened with age, it was friendly and trustworthy. Samson said the man, whose name was Petros, didn’t speak very good Oromo. His native tongue was Arabic.

Petros said he would perform four miracles. First he would throw ordinary water on to the ground to make a fire. He poured a cup of clear liquid on to a patch of soil near one corner of the blanket. A stream of smoke spiralled up, and then the ground burst into flames. The crowd cheered and clapped and Samson nudged me in the ribs.

“A miracle!” he exclaimed.

Next Petros declared that he would stop his own pulse. A woman from the front row put her fingers on the miracle man’s wrist and announced that his pulse had faded and then disappeared altogether. Again the audience went wild, slapping their hands on their thighs and laughing out loud.

For the third miracle Petros said he would eat glass. He broke a clear light-bulb with his shoe, placed a shard of glass on his tongue and then crunched it up and swallowed it. Samson slapped me on the back.

“Isn’t this incredible?!” he shouted, as all around us the villagers clamoured for more.

Petros said that he would do one last miracle. The piece de resistance would be to turn a rod into a snake. Samson’s eyes lit up. He knew the miracle well. It was first performed by Aaron at the court of the Pharaohs. The miracle man turned his back for a moment and drew a rod from a cloth bag. It was about three feet long and the color of black olives. He asked the crowd what they saw.

“It’s a stick,” they said in unison.

The magician tossed the stick on to the blanket. At first nothing happened. But then, slowly, it began to move and eventually it slithered away. I can hardly begin to describe the effect this had on the crowd. Men, women and children leapt up and ran about in awe, unable to believe what they had seen.

I made the mistake of bragging that I knew how the tricks were done. Samson thought I was demeaning the miracle man.

“Explain the miracles to me,” he said.

“All right. For the first trick he made a fire without any matches.”

“Fire with water,” said Samson, nodding.

“Well, I think you’ll find he sprinkled some potassium permanganate on the ground and poured glycerine on to it.”

“What about the second miracle, stopping the pulse?”

“You put a walnut or something small and hard in your armpit and squeeze. It stops the blood’s circulation in your arm.”

Samson scratched his head.

“Okay, but he ate glass.”

“If you eat a banana first and then grind up the glass with your back teeth, it gets embedded in the banana and passes through the intestines harmlessly.”

We had come to the last trick. I knew this would be sensitive because Aaron’s miracle had been recorded in the Bible, and Samson took the Bible very seriously indeed.

“Turning a rod into a snake,” I said, “is sometimes regarded as the oldest piece of conjuring in existence.”

“Aaron did it himself,” said Samson, “it’s recounted in Exodus,” and he gave me chapter and verse.

“It’s easier than it looks,” I said. “The trick is that there is no rod, just a snake. If you stretch the snake out and press down hard on its pituitary gland, the poor thing thinks that an enormous predator is standing on top of it. So it goes into shock. But when you let it go, it comes to and wriggles away.”

“You think you know all the answers, don’t you?” said Samson bitterly.

Feroze, the conjurer who taught me magical illusion, advised me always to carry a few simple tricks on my travels. He said they would alleviate boredom and might help get me out of a sticky situation. In the West we tend to underestimate the effect of magic tricks. We all know they’re just that – tricks. But transplant the same illusions into a small village off the beaten track and you can drive people wild.

In the early years of the last century an indefatigable Englishman called John Boyes set out for East Africa. An old friend of Frank Hayter, he had been inspired by Rider Haggard’s Allan Quartermain. In the book, which is a sequel to King Solomon’s Mines, the hero goes in search of a lost white race north of Mount Kenya. Boyes intended to follow Quartermain’s own route down into the Rift Valley. Very few white men had ever been accepted into the indigenous Kikuyu tribe before, and a number had recently been massacred.

When Boyes arrived at the first Kikuyu stronghold, he audaciously declared that he was a god, and he told the locals that he could not be killed. Such a claim might seem suicidal, but Boyes had a plan. Before the first spear could be hurled in his direction, he told the villagers that he would prove his power by drinking boiling water. He poured some water into a cup containing effervescent liver salts. The water bubbled furiously, and Boyes gulped it down, to the amazement of the tribesmen. Then he pulled out his phonograph, wound it up and played a record. That, he said, was an evil spirit trapped in a box.

In his book King of the Wa Kikuyu, Boyes claimed that tribal people from miles around came to pay homage to him as a result. Eventually he became their monarch, with five hundred thousand warriors under his command.

As we continued our journey, the rains grew heavier. In places the mud was so deep that it came up to the door handles, and traversing it with treadless tires was a vile experience. Still, despite his enthusiasm for trapping wildlife under the wheels, and his constant qat-chewing, Bahru proved himself a skilled driver. While Samson would fall into a gloom of despondency, Bahru never complained. He was a man who lived from one minute to the next. Nothing fazed him. Sometimes we’d turn a bend to see a seemingly impassable stretch of track before us: a battlefield landscape of holes, mud and quicksand. Then, stuffing some qat leaves in his cheek, his eyes lighting up in delight, he’d stamp on the accelerator and charge through the quagmire and out the other side.

On the way to Nejo, our next stop, dense forest gave way to a patchwork of fields. The ground was clearly full of minerals, for each rocky outcrop gleamed with iron and quartz. The soil was fertile too. Samson said that if you planted a walking-stick here it would grow into a tree a hundred feet tall. Then he reminded me that, as all Ethiopians know, this was where the Garden of Eden had been.

Eventually the road levelled out and its surface improved. There were less potholes and less mud. Best of all, the rain had stopped. When I exclaimed at our good fortune, Samson said it was because God was watching over us. No sooner had he spoken than Bahru jammed on the brakes and the Emperor’s Jeep skidded to a halt.

“Is it a flat tire?”

Bahru shook his head.

“We can’t go on,” he said.

“What’s wrong? The road’s fantastic.”

Turning off the engine and pulling out the key, Bahru said his luck had run out. Samson and I looked at him.

“Just like that?”

He nodded meekly.

“Just like that,” he said. “If we continue we will die.”

A few miles before, when the road was indescribably bad, we would have taken his sudden alarm seriously. But things were looking up. Despite us offering to push-start the Jeep so we could drive the short distance to Nejo, Bahru was adamant. He wouldn’t drive another yard. So Samson had to drive while Bahru sat in the front passenger seat, hunched up, his knees pulled up against his chest.

An hour later we were slipping down Nejo’s muddy main street, past buildings with corrugated iron roofs and cement walls. We pulled up at a bar. Kerosene and sawdust had been sprinkled on the floor to keep away the flies. I ordered Bahru a large glass of araki. He slugged it down and asked for another. Still a cloud of depression hung over him. Samson told him to pray: beseeching God was the only path to redemption. Bahru said he needed a third drink. Then he asked to be left alone.

I had heard from several sources that Nejo was the site of ancient gold mines. Frank Hayter’s friend Captain Bartleet had written of ancient mines in the Wollega area, and the Swiss engineer and prospector Alfred Ilg (the same man who had proposed a railway from Djibouti to Addis Ababa and made a shoe to prove his skill to Menelik) was certain that he’d found the remains of ancient gold mines a few miles from the town.

After being granted a concession to mine gold near Nejo, Ilg returned to Europe to raise capital. Then, in 1901, he formed a company in Antwerp, naming it the “Mines d”Or du Wallaga”. Ilg’s concession, which was granted for fifty years, extended in a radius of eighteen miles around Nejo. The adventurer Herbert Weld Blundell visited the area in 1906. Commenting on the “lively and curious aspect” of the place, he reported that the mine produced about eighty thousand American dollars’ worth of gold a year and that the Emperor received half of this as his share.

Samson and I went from one shop to another asking if anyone knew where the ancient gold mines were. Our questions were met with suspicion and no one would give us a straight answer. As I became increasingly frustrated, Samson begged me to stay calm. Foreigners searching for gold mines made people nervous, he said. At last we gave up and went to a small hotel which served European food. The place was empty because the owner refused to employ prostitutes. As far as most Ethiopians are concerned, a hotel or bar without whores is a bad joke.

The owner was unusually light-skinned, and he tiptoed around the table as I harangued Samson on one of my pet themes — the gap between utter failure and absolute success is often as narrow as a hair’s breadth, and in our quest for King Solomon’s mines we had to leave no stone unturned. Samson couldn’t stand my sermons, but he put up with them all the same.

When I had finished, the owner presented us with our macaroni and introduced himself. He said his name was Berehane and he’d heard we were looking for gold. He pointed to a faded sepia photograph hanging in a frame on the back wall. It was of a white man.

“That was my grandfather,” he said, “Signor Antillio Zappa.”

I couldn’t believe our luck. Zappa had been a gold miner and a friend of Frank Hayter in the 1920s, and he was mentioned in many of the books I’d read on pre-war Ethiopia. Berehane sat with us as we ate and said that most people made fun of his mixed ancestry. Half-castes are disliked, but those with Italian blood are especially despised.

When we’d finished eating Berehane jumped up and returned a minute later holding a battered leather case. We opened it up and began to leaf through a jumble of papers that had belonged to Zappa. There were black and white photographs of men panning and others building sluices. There were diaries, too, written in a spidery hand, some in English, others in Italian. Samson unfolded a set of maps and typed geological reports. But Berehane wanted us to see something else. He handed me a sheaf of letters. They bore wax seals and an embossed lion standing beside a flag, printed on brittle, yellowed paper.

“They are from the Emperor to my grandfather,” he said. “You see, they were friends.”

Early next morning Berehane took us to where his grandfather Antillio Zappa had mined three-quarters of a century before. We soon left Nejo behind us. Ahead lay rolling hills surrounded by a patchwork of fields in which farmers whipped oxen pulling home-made ploughs. The sky was inky black, threatening rain, and a pair of crows flew overhead, calling “Werk, werk!”

“Do you here that?” said Samson. “They are saying werk, which means gold. It’s a good omen.”

After some time we came to an exposed hillside. Berehane pointed to a vast crater the size of a football field.

“This the old mine,” he said.

“How old is it?”

“Gold was mined here thousands of years ago,” he said. “That’s why my grandfather came here. At one time there were hundreds of men digging and panning. But there isn’t much gold left now. Sometimes the farmers find small nuggets, but they sell them quietly. Everyone fears that the government will take their land away if they hear of gold being found.”

It was very likely that Zappa had dug where ancient gold mines had once existed. But all trace of any ancient mines had long since disappeared. Even the crater excavated by Zappa was far less deep than it would once have been, for the soil was soft and erosion during the rains swift. Despite the lack of evidence, I liked to think that the Pharaohs and, later, Solomon, might once have obtained gold from the hills near Nejo, from Signor Zappa’s mines.

THIRTEEN

Used Mules

“God has given us mules but no roads to ride on.”

Ethiopian proverb

Back at the bar, Bahru was lying in a heap in the corner. He was too drunk to stand. The gaggle of resident prostitutes said he had drunk a whole bottle of araki and had no money to pay. They asked why he was so dejected.

“His luck has run out,” said Samson coldly.

The women looked sympathetic and tutted to themselves while we helped Bahru to his feet, paid his bill and got him a room. Then we went off to buy some supplies.

If we were going to make an attempt to find Hayter’s mine, we’d need some specialized gear. My big worry was being able to illuminate a large cavern, as torches only give an isolated beam of light. I wanted to buy a pressure lantern which would run on kerosene. We also needed blankets, waterproofs for Samson, nylon ropes, a portable stove, some polythene sheeting, marker posts, mallets, and a sack of old clothes that might be bartered for food along the way. Fortunately, most of these items were readily available across Ethiopia. Shops seemed to remain reasonably well stocked because no one had any money to buy anything. In fact goods would stay on the shelves for years before a customer with cash turned up.

After a prolonged search we managed to buy almost everything except a waterproof coat for Samson. We’d found one high-quality waxed canvas coat and Samson’s face had lit up when he saw it hanging in a polythene wrapper at the back of the shop. He’d hinted that it was his size and that it was just the thing to keep him dry, but it was much too expensive. Instead, he had to make do with a black bin-liner with holes cut for his arms and head.

Most of the garments on sale at Ethiopian used clothing stalls have come from Europe or America, but they are hopelessly unsuited to the harsh African conditions. Such flimsy clothing may be fine in the West where we rotate dozens of outfits, but in a place like Ethiopia clothing soon gets worn out. It kept striking me that someone ought to supply the market stalls with durable army surplus gear. Military clothing lasts forever and is extremely cheap. I was surprised to find my idea wasn’t original. In the 1920s, the geologist and gold prospector L. M. Nesbitt said that a destitute European in Ethiopia had wanted to import army surplus clothing from Marseilles, though the plan had come to nothing.

I asked the man who was selling the waxed coat if he had any pressure lanterns. He stuck a finger in his ear and jiggled it about. He had had one once, he said. It had been on the shelf for twenty years so he’d not reordered when eventually it was sold. For the rest of the day we searched through virtually every kiosk, shop and stall in Nejo looking for a pressure lantern. Towards the end of the evening we came to a shoe shop on the outskirts of town. I wasn’t going to bother going inside, but Samson hoped to talk me into buying him a new pair of boots. Amidst the clutter of worn-out shoes sat a frail-looking man in a peakless pink baseball cap. I said we were looking for pressure lanterns. The salesman rummaged under the counter and brought out a box covered in soot. We opened it up and there sat a pressure lantern in almost mint condition.

“Two hundred birr” he said.

It was a huge sum, almost twenty pounds, but I knew it was essential to have the right equipment. So I fished out the notes and slid them across the counter. Money spent on good-quality gear is always money well spent.

We returned to the bar to find Bahru sitting on the end of his bed, his knees pressed up to his chin. He had run out of qat and he was suffering from withdrawal symptoms. I showed him all the gear we’d bought.

“We’re going to need every bit of it to get to Tullu Wallel,” I said.

Bahru stared at his feet.

“I’m not going to Tullu Wallel,” he muttered.

“You don’t have to come up the mountain, you can park nearby.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

I couldn’t understand what had come over the man. He’d not shown signs of depression before. I offered to pay for his meals and to buy him a bale of the wicked green leaves. I even offered him more money. But he wouldn’t budge.

So, the next morning, with great reluctance, Samson and I unloaded our belongings from the Emperor’s Jeep and stood by the side of the road. We waited there for eight hours, until late morning turned into evening, but not a single vehicle passed by.

That night in the bar I treated Bahru to some more araki and gave him a gift, a bar of Greek-made chocolate. He cheered up a little and challenged a drunk in the bar to a game of cards. I winked at Samson.

“That’s our old Bahru,” I said.

Bahru slapped the marked deck on the table and told the drunk to cut it. They played a few hands, with Bahru inevitably winning. But then the drunk pulled a knife and accused him of cheating. He snatched the pile of cash on the table and said that if Bahru challenged him for it, he’d stab him. The whores intervened and broke them up, and Bahru crept to his room, his head low, his arms dragging down at his sides.

“My God,” said Samson, as Bahru left, “maybe his luck really has run out.”

Next day we hauled the baggage back to the roadside. Three hours later a brick-red Landcruiser skidded to a halt beside us. It was the only vehicle we had seen moving since morning. The driver said he could drop us at Begi, seventy-five miles west of Nejo. After that we were on our own. I peered into the back of the Landcruiser. All I could see were dozens of arms and legs and faces squirming in discomfort. Samson hugged Bahru and then I too embraced him. It was a sad moment, but we had no choice. We had to continue without him. The next minute our bags were thrown up top and we squeezed into the tangle of limbs.

Anyone who has ever traveled in East Africa knows the joy of matatus, the ubiquitous communal vans that are the main form of local transport. They make even the worst overland bus journey seem luxurious. In a matatu the concept of personal space doesn’t exist. Passengers are pressed together so tightly that they become a single entity, with multiple heads, legs, hands and feet. If you sneeze, the entire organism shudders. You find yourself counting the minutes, wondering how you can stand another second. But time slips by, punctuated by flat tires and pee stops. It seems incredible to me now, but there were twenty-four people pressed inside that Landcruiser, not including the three men clinging to the roof.

The hours passed and I grew used to having someone’s elbow in my back, and a cotton candy hairstyle pressed against my face. Samson had a long conversation about the Old Testament with the person squashed up beside him. I was sitting near him, but I didn’t feel like chatting. The fact that we had left Bahru behind, so far from his home, bothered me. The first rule of an expedition is that everyone should stick together. If Stanley had been leading the party he’d have thrown Bahru in chains and had him horse-whipped. But then things have changed since Stanley’s day.

Begi lies on a flat plain of grassland with hills to the south and east. It’s the sort of place at which, in more normal circumstances, you’d never stop, but there had been no time to check the maps before climbing aboard the Landcruiser. The driver appeared to think the small town was near Tullu Wallel, so we took his word for it. The few locals who watched us extricate ourselves from the back of the vehicle looked alarmed, and I half expected them to rush over and tell us we’d made a terrible mistake.

Then our bags and equipment were tossed down on to the edge of the road and, before we could look up, the matatu had driven off towards the border with Sudan.

I always try to get the best maps before going to a new country because generally, with the exception of India whose National Survey produces fantastically detailed maps, the last place you can get good maps is in the country itself. Michelin produces the most detailed series of civilian maps for the African continent, scaled at 1:4,000,000. I also had all the American tactical pilotage charts for Ethiopia. The one that covered the western region was segment K-5D, on a scale of 1:500,000. Although there weren’t many place names marked, it gave valuable relief information.

We looked at the maps and it immediately became clear that we were twenty-five miles north of Tullu Wallel. It would have been much better to approach from the south, as the road there runs nearer the mountain, but it was too late to turn back.

There was a single bar in Begi which served warm Pilsen lager and doubled as a brothel. The whores were sitting in the shade of the veranda, picking their teeth and plaiting each other’s hair. They looked over at us and then looked away. A foreigner and an Ethiopian with a Bible stuffed under his arm weren’t the kind of people who generally required their services. We dragged our belongings into the shade and asked the girls where we could hire mules. They screwed up their faces, and then one of them pointed silently across the street to a rickety wooden kiosk.

Inside, a man was asleep on a chair with a kitten curled up on his chest. All around him were stacked empty gin bottles. He woke up, disturbed by the opening door knocking over part of his stock. His cheeks and chin were covered in gray stubble, his eyes sagged down, and most of his nose was missing. He greeted us. We greeted him.

“Mules,” said Samson, “we’re looking for mules.”

“How many do you want?”

Samson asked me for a figure.

“Lots,” I said, “we’ll need lots of mules.”

The man seemed pleased. He brushed the kitten away, stood up and called out of the door. A young boy came running. The man barked orders and the boy ran off.

“It’s hard to get good mules,” he said. “Why do you need them?”

“To go to Tullu Wallel.”

His face froze.

“The mountain?”

“Yes.”

We stood there in uneasy silence. The man peered at me. I don’t know why but I feared blinking, as if by doing so I’d be revealing secret information.

“The Devil lives on the mountain,” he said. “Oh.”

“He’ll kill you and eat your brains.”

“Ah.”

There was an awkward silence.

“Are you missionaries?” he asked at length.

I looked at Samson, who was still holding his Bible.

“Yes... yes, we’re missionaries,” I said devoutly, grasping at straws. “We have come to get the Devil off Tullu Wallel. We’re going to kick him all the way back to Hell.”

The old man dipped his noseless head in appreciation.

“That is good,” he said. “Then you will need fine mules.”

“The very best,” I responded, “for we are doing God’s work.”

The gin-bottle man told us to come back a little later. His contact in the mule business would need time to get there. We sought refuge from the late afternoon rain back at the bar. The girls sat about waiting for the evening’s clients. There’s something very strange about African drinking dens during the day. They’re like discos when the house lights have been turned on. There’s something not quite right about them.

Samson opened his Bible at random and began to read the Psalms. I had expected my announcement that we were missionaries would infuriate him. But he was delighted and took the disguise very seriously.

One of the girls was serving drinks. I asked for a cup of coffee. There’s nothing like village coffee in Ethiopia. The only problem is you have to wait for it. A good cup can take up to two hours because it is made from scratch. After an hour of sitting around, I went into the yard behind the bar to see how things were progressing. The girl told me to be patient. The water supply had been cut, she said, which meant she had had to trek to a well a mile away. Then firewood needed to be collected. Only after that could the slow process of roasting the coffee begin.

When the beans had turned from pale green to dark brown, she held them up to my face for me to smell them. After that she tipped them into a mortar and ground them to powder. Only then could the cup of coffee be made. Almost two hours after placing the casual order, it finally arrived. It was the freshest, most delicious cup of coffee I can remember.

In the late evening the gin-bottle man sent his son to fetch us. His mule contact had turned up. We strolled across to the kiosk and were introduced to Tadesse. He was one of the most evil-looking men I have ever set eyes on. If I’d been told he had just chopped up his children and danced on their graves, I wouldn’t have been the least surprised. He had wicked, shifty eyes, high cheekbones, and a long waxy tongue which emerged from his mouth between sentences, like that of a tree frog catching flies. The gin-bottle man spoke highly of the muleteer, saying he was the only man who knew the mountain.

I asked Samson what he thought.

“We don’t have to climb Tullu Wallel to find the Devil,” he said. “He’s standing right here.”

The muleteer’s eyes flickered from side to side. He was waiting for our answer.

“Where are the mules?”

He said he would take us to them once they had been rounded up. I asked how long that would take.

“One or two days.”

“That seems like a very long time.”

Tadesse looked at me hard.

“Ethiopian mules are very wild,” he said.

We arranged to inspect the animals at first light. If they still hadn’t been caught, I would view them through my binoculars. Business turned to the mountain itself. When I inquired if Tadesse was afraid of Tullu Wallel, he didn’t say anything; he just laughed manically.

“He is a good man,” said the gin-bottle man. “You will grow to like him.”

“Are his mules strong?”

The gin-bottle man rubbed the hole where his nose ought to have been.

“They’re as strong as the mountain,” he said.

We thanked him for the introduction and turned on our heels to go. But I couldn’t leave yet. There was something I had to know. Unable to contain myself, I made Samson find out how he’d lost his nose. The gin-bottle man glanced down at the table, and I felt embarrassed at having asked.

“A long time ago,” he said, “I had an argument with my wife. She bit it off and ran away.”

On the way to the mules I bragged about my equestrian experience. I told Tadesse and Samson that my Pushtun ancestors prided themselves on their skill at buz-kashi, the Afghan national sport played on horseback with a headless goat. Polo is said to have developed from the game. The horses get so charged up that they bite each other if they get the chance. I went on about how I myself had been raised with horses. The animals were in my blood, I said.

Of course it was all a lie. As children we did have a pair of vicious donkeys called Boney and Claude, but they rolled under the fence one day and were never seen again. Anyone mad enough to try saddling them up would have been torn to pieces.

Everything I know about horses was passed on by an old family friend. An indomitable Swiss, he had decided that he’d trek with horses from Ulan Batur, in Outer Mongolia, to Vienna. He bought a pair of ponies from a horse-dealer in a suburb of the Mongolian capital. They were wild animals with sores all over their backs. The locals told him to pee on the sores. He soon found this was no easy feat. But when he did manage it they reared up and ran away, leaving him stranded in the frozen wastes of Mongolia. When, after many adventures, he arrived back home, I asked for his advice.

“Always pick your animals very carefully,” he said.

Those words rang in my mind as we walked the three miles to where the mules were grazing. There were eight of them, and Tadesse still hadn’t managed to catch them. However, their backs were covered in saddle sores, which meant that they must have been ridden at some point.

I asked the price.

Tadesse pointed out the high quality of the saddles and the harnesses.

“There’s not a finer mule for a hundred miles,” he said. “I’m only charging ten birr a day for each.”

That was about eight pounds a day for all eight. It sounded like a bargain, so we took the lot.

Samson didn’t understand why we needed so many animals but I justified the decision by saying that I expected injuries. It was going to be a long, hard trip. There were sure to be fatalities. In fact my reasons were different. There’s nothing like a pack of mules to give one a sense of entourage.

The night before we left Begi with the mules, I re-read Frank Hayter’s description of finding the mine-shafts at Tullu Wallel. A dejazmacth, a nobleman, had told him of a legend. It said that the ancient kings of Ethiopia had obtained their gold from two places in the west of the country. The first was Beni Shangul, and the second was at the base of Tullu Wallel. Both sets of mines were, he warned, “guarded by the spirits of the old rulers of this country”. The tip-off sent Hayter’s head spinning. He left at dawn the next day and, after days of trekking, he finally reached the twin peaks of Tullu Wallel, which he called Sheba’s Breasts.

The party continued their approach, pushing through a dense bamboo forest, and eventually reached the eastern flank of the mountain. There Hayter claimed to have discovered fourteen stone portals covered in vegetation. “They were the entrances to underground caves,” he wrote, “and not natural entrances either, for the stone uprights and heavy lintels that squared the openings had been fashioned by the hands of man.”

Hayter’s two books on Ethiopia contain many black and white photographs. There are pictures of gold prospectors and mule caravans, of lepers and encampments and tribal ceremonies, and there are innumerable shots of Hayter himself, dressed in pith helmet and safari suit. The only image missing from his books is the one of the actual mine entrances. However, Hayter’s friend Captain E. J. Bartleet, who retold the tale in his own book In the Land of Sheba, includes an extraordinary photograph. At first glance it looks very ordinary, but on closer inspection you begin to appreciate its significance. At the top right of the picture there is a natural cave opening. But a few yards away, at the bottom of the photograph, there is the upper part of what looks like a man-made stone entrance. It is partly hidden by vegetation but it is unmistakable, and it appears to lead to a mine-shaft.

That night, before setting off for Tullu Wallel, I sat on my bed in the brothel, shining the beam of my torch on the picture from Bartleet’s book. A man was screaming in the next room. At first I thought it was the cry of passion. Then I remembered that Samson had taken the room next to mine and that he was devoted to his long-suffering girlfriend. So I got off my bed and knocked gently on the door, irritated that Samson should be making so much noise. The screams turned to a long, low groan. I pushed the door open. Samson was lying on the floor, sweating profusely and clutching his abdomen. I asked what all the fuss was about. From what I could understand, he claimed to be in a great deal of pain. I hoped it wasn’t a burst appendix. I remembered reading a book about climbing Everest. It had said that top climbers always have their appendix out before starting the ascent. I kicked myself for not thinking of it before. We were a man down and our assault on Tullu Wallel hadn’t even begun.

Unsure of what to do, I went and asked the Tigrayan whores. They spoke no English, so I clutched my stomach, stuck out my tongue and pointed to Samson’s room. The girls looked puzzled, and one of them nodded and stuck out her tongue. Then they walked off into another room, and a great deal of muffled shouting followed. I went back to Samson. A moment later there was a thump on the door. A tall, athletic-looking man wearing nothing but underwear was standing in the door frame. He said in English that he was a doctor. I pointed to my traveling companion. The doctor jabbed a finger into Samson’s belly.

“Probably the appendix,” I said knowledgeably.

“No,” he said, “it is intestinal worms.”

I asked how much we owed for the diagnosis.

“Fifty birr!

The doctor said he would send one of the prostitutes to get medicine. Then he returned to his room. He clearly had unfinished business to attend to.

After the disturbance I went back to Bartleet’s book and ran over the facts again. The story seemed to fit. My American tactical pilotage chart indicated that Tullu Wallel did indeed have two peaks, reaching a height of 10,738 feet. The distances Hayter had given from Gambela and Gore were about right too. And, more importantly, like Beni Shangul just to the north, the area was well known as an ancient source of gold. But the question that haunted me was why Hayter hadn’t published the photograph of the cave entrance in his own book. Bartleet had scooped him, publishing the account of the find in 1934, a year before Hayter’s book appeared. In his account, Bartleet explained that he was supposed to go on the adventure but fell ill and had to stay behind in Addis Ababa. So Hayter went alone, and Bartleet never got to see the fourteen portals or the mine-shafts for himself. I assumed that Hayter must therefore have taken the picture but chose not to publish it himself. Perhaps he feared it would help others identity the place.

I had insisted we leave Begi at dawn. An early start on the first day keeps untested men and mules on their toes. Moreover, I didn’t want Tadesse to think I was a walkover, even though I’d agreed to pay his opening rate for the pack animals.

Tadesse had roped in his two sons, whom he said would work for free. The boys grinned wickedly. They had their father’s genes. The younger one carried a sharp bamboo stave which he used to poke the poor mules’ behinds. When he wasn’t poking, he was sharpening the stick. The other boy didn’t have any interest in being a muleteer, despite his father’s hopes. He had heard of a place called America, he said, where he could get money for free.

After taking a couple of sachets of yellow powder prescribed by the doctor, Samson said his symptoms had gone away. I felt rather guilty about not delaying our departure, but he exclaimed that he was fighting fit again. I think he was embarrassed that he had worms.

Tadesse herded the mules to the front of the bar. They huddled together, eyes staring and hooves stamping. Despite this feigned fear, I could tell they were longing to escape. They were wild animals and resented laboring for humans. I had seen the same deranged look in our donkeys’ eyes the day before they ran away.

The kit bags were soon strapped into position with leather thongs, and then the younger boy shaved a sliver off his bamboo shaft and plunged it into one of the mule’s backsides as if to let them know who was boss. I looked over to see if the gin-bottle man was up but, like everyone else in the small town, he must have been fast asleep.

There is something about walking with mules that stirs me. I’ve traveled with camels and yaks, and even llamas, but mules are quite different. I’ve been bitten by a llama and spat at by more than one angry camel. Donkeys are less hostile but you always get the feeling that you’re doing them an injustice. Mules on the other hand are built for rough work and thrive on hardship.

Samson was pleased to be heading for the mountain. He kept dropping hints about his new role as a preacher. I took him aside and said that we weren’t really missionaries. In case he hadn’t realized, I said, I wasn’t even a Christian.

The track from Begi veered to the east and skirted a hill called Gimi. We were very close to the border with Sudan, which lay on the other side of the hill. I was worried that we might be arrested as spies, for border areas in Africa tend to be patrolled by secret police. If we were arrested, I told Samson to hold his Bible high in the air and declare that we were working for God. If interrogated, I planned to pretend I was a recent convert to Christianity. Everyone knows that converts are the most fanatical followers of a faith.

We continued walking well into the afternoon. The saddles were in poor shape, but at least they kept the flies off the mules’ sores. The animals took every opportunity to stop and eat, and I knew they were all on the lookout for an escape route. As we trudged along, the humidity rose until finally, in the afternoon, it began to rain. We sought refuge under a bank of trees and waited for it to pass.

Tadesse asked me if I was really a missionary.

“Of course I am,” I replied firmly.

“Then why do you talk about treasure so much?”

“The Bible,” I said, “that is the treasure that we are talking about.”

The muleteer narrowed his eyes and gave the order to move on.

“The Devil will be waiting for us,” he said.

We slept the night at Gidami. My feet were sore and Samson’s arm ached from carrying the Bible all day. We’d walked for almost twenty miles. However, the mules seemed to be in high spirits. Samson took Tadesse and his sons to get some food and asked me if I would join them but I declined. An old English explorer whom I had once met near Hunza, in the Karakoram range, had passed on a valuable tip. He said that you have to turn yourself into a mythical figure early on in a journey: that is the only way of establishing your authority. The explorer’s method was simple. He told me not to eat, at least not in public.

“I never chow with the natives,” he explained, “not because I think I’m above them or because I don’t like the food. They see me going on day after day without anything in my stomach, and they think I’m superhuman. Try it out some time, old boy.”

I’d been waiting to put this into practice for years. I unpacked my kit bags. In them I still had eight of the tins I’d bought in Axum. Samson couldn’t understand why my luggage was so heavy and I’d let him assume it was full of books. That night I gorged myself on a can of corned beef. It’s an explorer’s staple. Count Byron de Prorok and many other travelers in Africa all swore by their inexhaustible supply of “bully beef.

During the night a spider wove an enormous sticky web over my face. As a die-hard arachnophobe I was very disturbed by the event. None of the others could understand why I was so alarmed. Unable to convince them of my horror of spiders, I decided to bolster my spirits with another surreptitious tin of corned beef.

After a couple of hours of walking, Samson and the muleteers were ready for breakfast. They sat down to eat some crusts of bread and a few bruised pieces of fruit. Tadesse couldn’t believe I wasn’t hungry.

“The Lord fills my stomach with His goodness,” I said, looking over at him meekly.

That day we altered course, heading east, and Tadesse pointed a broken fingernail at the distant horizon.

“That’s Tullu Wallel,” he said.

I stopped and took a deep breath, and then glanced over at Samson. He was sucking his lower lip. Tadesse’s eyesight was either remarkably good or remarkably bad. When I looked I couldn’t see anything except for tall razor grass and the tops of trees. Only after another hour of trudging through rain did I see Tullu Wallel. It was fitting that I caught my first glimpse of the Devil’s abode in such horrible weather. Samson and I let the mules go on. We both needed a moment to stare at the mountain. The summit was lost in cloud, brooding and mysterious, but it quite obviously had twin peaks — Sheba’s Breasts, as Hayter had called them. Before we set off again Samson said a prayer. He looked up at the heavens and prayed that God would look after us and deliver us safely from the mountain.

I asked Tadesse how long it would take to get to Tullu Wallel.

“Maybe one day, maybe four days,” he replied.

It was an appropriate answer to a stupid question. Time didn’t matter. We were nearing the mountain and that was all that counted. Above us, in the trees, baboons swung from branch to branch, taunting us. Tadesse picked up some stones and flung them at the animals.

“They are the Devil’s disciples,” he said. “Beware of baboons.”

I didn’t tell him of Frank Hayter’s curse, but I was thinking of it as we passed the baboons. Hayter believed completely in the spell that was put on him by an Abyssinian monk, when he’d captured a hundred sacred baboons and shipped them back to London Zoo.

That was back in 1924. He later wrote: “Let me put my feelings in a nutshell. Ten years ago I was a very fit man indeed, fit enough to enter the ring and defend my title as boxing champion of Herefordshire. Today I am no more capable of flying without wings than of boxing. And I am only thirty-three.”

During my research I had tried to find some trace of Frank Hayter’s family. He said that he married his cousin who bore him a son. I did manage to obtain copies of his birth and marriage certificates, but I do not know when he died. His last published book, The Garden of Eden, appeared in 1940. After that the trail goes cold. I wrote to hundreds of people all over the world called Hayter, but none appeared to be related to the explorer. Even so, I am sure that somewhere, in some forgotten attic, his notebooks and journals must survive.

Tadesse said the mules needed time to graze. We untied their packs and let them chew on the long grass. The muleteer’s sons decided to pass the time by throwing more stones at the baboons. I said it was probably unwise to aggravate them, as they could be cursed.

“Of course they’re cursed!” exclaimed Tadesse. “That’s why we throw stones at them.”

I asked Samson to go over to a clutch of low mud huts nearby and see if anyone knew about Tullu Wallel.

“What should I ask?”

“Ask them if they fear the mountain.”

He was gone for an hour and when, eventually, he came back to where we were sitting, he looked rather unnerved.

“I think you had better meet these people,” he said.

“Why?”

“Come and see.”

The seven huts were arranged in a horseshoe, with a fire smoking in the middle. The central yard was shaded by a thorn tree. Under the tree sat a man, a woman and about six children. The man greeted Samson and then stood up when he saw me.

“You must sit down,” said Samson.

I sat down. The children giggled, their mother smiled and their father nodded.

The parents were about thirty but looked sixty. Three decades of village life in western Ethiopia turns the skin to leather and calluses the hands and feet until they are almost unrecognisable. The man said his name was Jambo and that his wife was called Sara. We shook hands and Jambo offered me some berries. They were plum-colored and pippy. I ate a few and praised them. The children giggled again. Sara smiled. Jambo nodded. Then I said how happy I was to have come to their home. We sat in silence. I was waiting for Samson to say something, but he didn’t.

“Tullu Wallel,” I said after some time.

I was expecting more giggles, more smiles, more nods. But Jambo and his family looked alarmed.

“A bad mountain,” said Jambo sternly.

“The Devil...”

“He lives there!” he shouted, pointing away to the distance.

“Have you ever been there?”

Sara looked nervous.

“Of course not!”

“They kill animals in honor of the mountain,” said Samson gently.

I asked if this was true.

Jambo nodded. “Yes, sometimes we kill animals.”

“Does it keep the Devil happy?”

“Yes, when we kill animals, the Devil is happy.”

“What if he is not happy?”

Jambo fell silent for a while and then spoke.

“It is not good when the Devil is angry.”

I asked Jambo when he was planning the next sacrifice. He passed me some more berries.

“No money to buy chickens.”

“If you had money would you make a sacrifice?”

Jambo leapt up from his seat. Yes, they’d make a sacrifice immediately, he said. He had remembered that the mountain required an offering urgently.

“What happens if no sacrifice is made?”

Jambo shook his head.

“Trouble.”

I fished out a wad of low-denomination notes. Explaining that we were missionaries, I said we had come to kick the Devil back to the farthest reaches of Hell. But before we routed him, we would give him one last meal.

Jambo grabbed the cash, passed half of it to his wife, and barked at her as gruffly as he could. She returned a few minutes later with a rather mangy pair of chickens. Within moments Jambo had broken their necks, hacked off their heads and plucked them. The children crowded round. I sent Samson to bring Tadesse and his sons. We would spend a night camping out at Jambo’s place.

It wasn’t long before a watery stew had been prepared. Tadesse, his sons, Samson and Jambo’s family all dug in.

“Don’t you have to hold the meat up to the mountain and say a prayer?”

Jambo gnawed at a bone.

“We have already done that,” he said.

“Eat, eat!” said Sara.

“I’ve made a vow not to eat anything until the Devil has run away from Tullu Wallel.”

With that I got up and walked off into the darkness. I had an appointment with a tin of corned beef.

When the watery stew had been eaten, I asked Jambo to take a look at the photograph of the mine entrance in Bartleet’s book. He held the red binding up to his nose, and his family clustered around.

“It’s the entrance to a shaft,” I said. “Can you see the stone doorway?”

“The shaft,” said Jambo, “that is the place where the Devil lives. You must not go there.”

“But I told you, we’re missionaries. It’s our job to get rid of the Devil so that you can live in peace.”

The farmer threw a chicken bone to one of his dogs.

“The Devil will bite off your heads,” he said.

“We know there is danger,” I replied. “But God will protect us.”

Jambo stood up and walked over to one of the huts. A few minutes later he returned and sat down beside me. There was something cupped in his hands. It was made from leather and was the size and shape of a film canister.

“Tie this amulet around your neck,” he said. “Inside there is a spell written on paper. It is written in Ge’ez, and it will give you extra protection.”

Jambo wiped his face with his hand. Then he stared into the fire, as if he was looking into the future.

“Remember one thing,” he added, “the Devil is very clever. Missionaries have been to Tullu Wallel before. Like you they said they were very strong but...” “But what?”

“But they never came down from the mountain.”

FOURTEEN

Tullu Wallel

“A good traveler has no fixed plan and is not intent on arriving.”

Lao Tzu

Frank Hayter said the mine-shafts were located at the base of the eastern flank of Tullu Wallel. By this I assumed he meant the east breast of the mountain. All the next day we walked through fields in which ripe ears of wheat reflected the sun. The land was almost empty of people. Samson thought that most locals preferred to farm other land.

“Many of them won’t even eat this wheat,” he said. “They think it’s poisonous, so they sell it to people down in Gambela.”

We took regular breaks to let the mules rest. I was sure that the climb up the mountain wouldn’t have improved much since Hayter’s day. The animals would need their strength. Tadesse didn’t approve of my reluctance to work the mules hard. He said that if we were too kind, they would become even lazier and wilder than they already were. As it was, he said, they weren’t carrying enough on their backs.

“If people see that I’m walking with half-laden mules,” he said, “they’ll laugh at me.”

“Why?”

“They’ll say that my mules are weak.”

Until late that afternoon none of us bothered to ride. While the ground was far from flat, it wasn’t a great strain to walk. Only on the last stretch towards a village did I decide my legs needed a rest. All eyes were on me as I struggled to mount the most docile of the animals. I’d chosen her because her eyes lacked the glint of savagery present in those of the males. When I asked what her name was, Tadesse shook his head.

“These are animals,” he said, “they are not people; they don’t have names.”

So I called her Clarissa.

Tadesse, his sons and Samson had listened intently to my tales of ancestral horsemanship. With my usual flair for hyperbole I’d gone a bit far. In the end I had just about claimed to have been born on the back of a horse. They longed to see the great equestrian in action. But riding a mule in the wilds of western Ethiopia called for special training, training I didn’t have. I couldn’t get my balance at first and blamed it on the saddle, the uneven stirrups, the terrain, and then on Clarissa. More than once I ended up on my back on the ground, wounded and humiliated, to the delight of the muleteers. But with time I learned the basics of balance, and that Clarissa would protect me if I just clung on.

At the next village we passed around the photograph of the mine entrance. The oldest man, who was blind, virtually deaf and hunchbacked, pricked up his ears when he heard the words Tullu Wallel.

“He’s saying that he knows the mountain,” said Samson.

“Has he ever been up there?”

Samson translated the question. The man nodded.

“Yes, he has.”

“When was that?”

“A long time ago.”

“When?”

“It was when the Italians were here.”

“Did he see the mine-shafts?”

“He says he did see a cave,” said Samson, “a big cave.”

“What was inside?”

I was waiting for him to say “the Devil”. But he didn’t.

“There were bats, many bats.”

“Anything else?”

“Yes,” said the man, “there was...”

“What? What else was there?”

“There was gold.”

I smacked my hands together and gave Samson a double thumbs-up. Tadesse looked over at us suspiciously.

“I thought you were missionaries,” he said.

“Yes we are, but the Devil is attracted to gold. So if we find gold, we’ll find him!

“Ask the man if he’ll climb the mountain with us and show us the cave.”

Samson translated.

“He says he’s too old, too frail.”

“But we can strap him to a mule. We’ve got plenty of them.”

The hunchback croaked an answer.

“He says he wouldn’t go back up there for all the money in Ethiopia.”

“Why not?”

“Because of the curse.”

I am all for curses and superstition, but there’s a point at which they start getting in the way. That point had arrived. I explained we were missionaries, that we were doing God’s work. He remained unmoved. I rustled a large denomination note, but still he wouldn’t budge. He shouted something to Samson.

“He says that anyone who goes up Tullu Wallel is hit with misfortune afterwards. When he came down from the mountain his father died from malaria. Then his brother dropped dead. No one knew why.”

“But that could have happened naturally. There’s a lot of illness here.”

Samson had more information to pass on.

“Yes, but the wives of the two men he climbed the mountain with both died in childbirth.”

I unfolded the map and asked for accurate directions. If the informant wouldn’t accompany us, at least he could advise us how to find the mine. The man’s blindness and inexperience with maps were a severe handicap. He didn’t want to talk about the route, only about the curse. That was the one thing I didn’t want to hear about because I knew it was beginning to worry Tadesse and his sons. Without Tadesse we’d have no mules. And without mules we’d have no entourage.

I gave the order for us to move out. It was unpopular with Samson, who was complaining of blisters. The boys didn’t want to go further either, but they wouldn’t admit that they were afraid.

We took to the path again. Clarissa dug her hooves into the dirt and soldiered on. I rapidly developed a respect for her as she compensated for my pathetic riding skills. The track led up to higher ground. We were all aware that the rains would start in the mid-afternoon, so we were eager to keep going for as long as possible. I kept an eye out for a village where we could spend the night, but there wasn’t any sign of human life.

Samson asked me if I thought Bahru would have left for Addis Ababa. It hadn’t been long since we had parted from him, but it now seemed an age away. We reminisced about him as we moved ahead, recounting the many near-misses and his addiction to qat and marked playing cards. Then my mind turned to the subject of Ophir. Western Ethiopia was as remote as it was possible to be. Solomon’s men might have acquired gold from nearer the coast, but I knew there were trading routes from central Africa to the east coast and that they had been used for centuries. And, of course, western Ethiopia is close to Nubia, from which the Egyptians mined gold long before the time of Solomon.

When it came, the afternoon downpour fell harder than on any other day. The mules didn’t seem to mind very much. The water cooled them, and they could drink from the pools that collected on the path. But torrential rain is a great hindrance to humans. Unlike on the Indian subcontinent or in the Amazon, in Africa the rain seems to cool the air temperature dramatically and soon you find yourself quivering with cold. I put on my army camouflage poncho, spreading it out at the bottom to accommodate Clarissa’s hindquarters. Samson donned his black bin-liner. He resented me having the best equipment. As for Tadesse and his sons, they didn’t have any waterproofs, so they just got soaked.

The worst thing about the rain was that it turned the soil into a quagmire. In some places we were walking up a torrent of dark brown mud and I began to worry that the mules might miss their footing. As it was they tripped and stumbled, and then, quite suddenly, one of them toppled over. With the memory of the lame camel in Afar fresh in my mind, I jumped down to help Tadesse attend to the poor animal. It was in a forlorn state. Tadesse grappled with the harness and managed to inspect its legs. Fortunately, none were broken, but the mule was shaken and the accident unsettled the other animals.

In the late afternoon we took refuge in a grove of wild gum trees a hundred yards from the track. I was concerned that we were nowhere near a village, but Samson pointed up to the high branches of the trees.

“Look at those,” he said, “that means that there are people near here.”

About twenty large wicker baskets were tied to the topmost boughs. Samson said they were for honey The local people hang them in the trees and leave them there for months. Eventually honey bees swarm in some of them. Then the bravest men in the village climb up and harvest the honey. Tadesse boasted that his family had been honey-hunters for generations, but that they had progressed up the social ladder to herding mules.

Samson was right about there being people nearby. As the light began to fade, we came to a settlement. It was much larger than the other villages we had seen since leaving Begi. There was a line of small shops, a market area, a blacksmith and even an official. Within minutes word of our arrival had spread, and the official stepped from the comfort of his shack to confront us. He wanted to know why we had come and he demanded to see our identity papers. When the rain had stopped, he dragged his desk and chair into the central square and interviewed us formally, as the inquisitive villagers clustered round. I said we were missionaries and that we had come in peace. The man said he was going to search our luggage. That was the last thing I wanted. Whenever my kit bags were examined valuable items seemed to disappear. Worse than that, I didn’t want him to find the metal detector.

The official dropped a heavy hint that on his pitiful wages it was hard to afford a quantity of araki befitting a man of his standing. I wondered what that quantity might be. We led him to the bar and plied him with the local brew. He managed to down fifteen glasses. Then he passed out.

That evening we were put up by one of the villagers in his hut. As before, Samson and the muleteers invited me to eat, but I refrained. The Devil still hadn’t been routed, I said, so I could not eat. They didn’t say anything, but I could tell they were moved by my lack of appetite. When he had eaten a monstrous amount of injera and kai wot, spiced goat stew, Samson questioned the villagers about Tullu Wallel. The first man to talk said that a faranji, a white man, used to live up on the mountain. He couldn’t say precisely when, but it was in the days when the Emperor was still in power. Maybe it was Hayter, I thought to myself.

“Did he see the white man himself?”

The informant said it was long before he was born.

Everyone else we spoke to had a tale to tell about the curse. Some of them had ventured up the mountain in their younger days in search of gold. They had all borne terrible misfortune as a result. One man had been stung by a thousand bees, another had been poisoned and had nearly died, and a third told of how his wife had gone mad after gathering sticks there.

After hearing all this, I knew we were going to have trouble getting more people to join our team. For the climb itself we required one man for each mule. I didn’t know how long we would be on the mountain, but I was certain that we would need to take food and extra supplies. Samson broached the subject, asking for volunteers. He said we’d pay generously. The villagers shook their heads, and one woman grabbed her two sons by the ears and marched them back to their hut. We said we were missionaries, and I likened us to St George on his quest to slay the dragon.

“The only difference is that our dragon is much bigger,” I said, “he’s the Devil.”

The villagers were unimpressed. A curse was a curse, and no amount of inducement would make them risk the wrath of the Devil.

That night the Russian corned beef sat heavily in my stomach. I was apprehensive about what we might find on Tullu Wallel. For a long time the mountain had been an obsession, and now at last we were going to ascend it. I found myself thinking about Frank Hayter more and more, and I went over his descriptions of Tullu Wallel yet again.

At dawn we rose and loaded the mules. It was pouring with rain. I slipped on my poncho, and Samson wriggled into his bin-liner. We were just about to head off, when four men approached us. They said that they had decided to come with us.

“Aren’t they frightened?”

The men, all in their early twenties, looked petrified, but one of them spoke for the others.

“It is time for the fear to end,” he said.

They each took the reins of a mule and led the way towards the mountain. The rest of us followed behind. As it was still dark I walked beside Clarissa. After an hour of trudging uphill, the first glint of light brought life to the undergrowth. The mist was low, hanging over Tullu Wallel like a death cloud, but I found myself stirred with new energy. At last, our motley band of mules and men had been transformed into a fully fledged expedition.

We headed straight for the mountain, which seemed to beckon us towards it. The rain didn’t let up for a minute, which made the going very slow. I stayed at the back of the procession. I might have been the inspiration behind the expedition, but I was a novice at muleteering. We crossed fields and forded rivers, but we didn’t seem to get any nearer to Tullu Wallel. I began to wonder if the mountain was a mirage, alluring yet unreachable.

Tadesse stopped three times during the morning to adjust the leather straps that bound the packs and saddles to the mules. In the rain the thongs stretched and had to keep being tightened. Clarissa’s reins were tied to my hand and she battled on beside me. Samson was less appreciative of the experience. His blisters had got worse and I could tell that he was missing his girlfriend and Addis Ababa greatly.

For most of human history, man has walked with animals. Nothing is more natural, but the last century has erased our communal knowledge of that past. Now we think of wheels and tires rather than legs and hooves; we think of miles per gallon and engines overheating, not of hay and animal fatigue. An internal combustion engine may be one of man’s greatest achievements, but it is a noisy, polluting beast of a thing. Spend a few days trekking with pack mules through the forests of western Ethiopia, and you realize there’s no comparison.

The woodland began quite suddenly. We forded a stream and ascended a steep bank, with Tadesse’s sons jabbing their sticks angrily at the mules. Before us stood the forest, like a great curtain on the edge of a stage. I knew straight away that I would emerge the other side a different man.

We entered the forest and the morning sun disappeared. I have been in thick jungle before, but even the Upper Amazon couldn’t compare with this. I stared up at the tops of the trees. They formed an unbroken canopy above us, each tree rising from a snarl of roots and mud, their long vine-covered trunks rearing up into a sea of green.

The smell changed too. There was the scent of wild garlic, and the musty aroma of moss and leaf mold. There was lemon mint as well, which grew wild. I chewed it and found it helped stave off thirst. We moved in a single file, stumbling over roots and low branches, and slipping and sliding in the mud. The track wound round trees and up and down gullies, zigzagging back and forth. The four local men said they had never come into the forest before. Only the most courageous honey-gatherers ventured there. In some of the taller trees we saw more honey baskets trussed high in the branches. There was little time to think of the diabolic danger ahead. Our first worry was the mules.

Tadesse kept telling me to ride, but I dismounted early on after almost being garrotted by a low branch. Somehow Samson managed to stay on his mule most of the time. He had hidden talents as a horseman. Thankfully, the tree canopy high above us gave us some protection from the torrential rain, but the mud was appalling. Mules are always the butt of man s humour, but the hours we spent battling through the muddy floor of the forest proved to me their extraordinary worth, and I found myself appreciating the writings of Dervla Murphy more than ever. An old hand with mules, she has trekked over mountain ranges and through forests with them, but to read her you would never guess just how difficult such a feat is.

The mud had been up to our thighs for a couple of hours but we soldiered on. I noticed that the mules had an uncanny ability to find the best route, and Tadesse’s sons encouraged me to let Clarissa find her own way. But by late morning, even Clarissa was finding the mud tough going.

I suggested that we unpack the animals and carry some of the equipment ourselves. Tadesse balked at the idea. He seemed to thrive on the mules’ discomfort.

“People will not be able to say that my animals are weak now!” he shouted.

Leading pack mules through thigh-deep mud is a slow business. I wanted to try another route, but the local men said there was no other track leading to Tullu Wallel. Their certainty surprised me, especially as none of them had actually been to the mountain before. I was also worried about the ermoli tick. De Prorok had written that it worms its way under a mule’s skin and lays its eggs there. If not extracted, it can cause a terrible infection.

In the middle of the day we stopped at a stream. Samson opened one of the packs of food and passed it around. I drank some water but didn’t eat anything. Tadesse and his sons were beginning to regard me with wonder. They asked Samson in whispers how I could keep going day after day without eating. Samson said that God filled my belly and gave me strength, so I had no need for food.

A few miles on we hit a patch of bog. Tadesse was at the head of the line, leading a large male mule. Suddenly the animal began to sink into the mud and it started to bay, fighting to keep its muzzle from going under. The local men knew what to do. They yanked the animal sideways by the bridle and the girth straps, and the mule crashed on to its side on firmer ground, its legs kicking furiously. One of Tadesse’s sons stabbed it with his stick to make it get up. I swiped the boy on the back of the neck and told him to give the animal a minute to regain its strength.

Then, quite suddenly, the forest came to an end. Though we now got wetter than ever, having left the protection of the tree canopy, morale began to rise. In the late afternoon we reached a hamlet. At first it looked uninhabited, but we soon discovered that a group of honey-gatherers lived there along with their herd of goats.

The head of the hamlet came out to greet us. Straight-backed and wrapped in an emerald blanket, he invited us to spend the night. Our exhausted mules were unpacked and fed, and the rest of us, cold, wet and hungry, slumped down on the ground outside the huts.

At my prompting Samson asked the headman about the mountain.

“We don’t go up there,” he said, “not even to get honey.”

“Why not?”

“The danger.”

“You mean the Devil?”

The headman didn’t reply.

“We’re missionaries,” I said boastfully, “and we’ve come to kick him back to Hell.”

Still the headman remained silent. I sensed that he was regretting ever having invited us to stay in his home, but hospitality is of paramount importance in Ethiopia. Still ignoring Samson’s questions, he told his wife to prepare food for the guests and then he led us into the hut which he shared with his goats. We huddled round the fire and tried to dry our clothes. The problem with army issue kit bags is that they are made of canvas and everything in them gets soaked through when it rains. I emptied out one of the sacks and looked for clean underwear. The local men and Tadesse’s sons watched in disbelief as I sorted through my belongings. They hadn’t brought along any extra gear, not even a toothbrush. I found myself apologizing, but then I remembered the pressure lantern, which still hadn’t been used. I gave it to Tadesse along with the kerosene and told him to get it working. His eyes lit up with glee.

While the food was being prepared, I stuffed an uns’ ed tin down my pants and said I had to go to the loo. Then I trotted out into the rain and found a quiet spot to open it with my penknife. The tin was full of sweetened prunes.

Back in the hut the lamp’s instructions had been trodden under foot. God knows who ever came up with the design for pressure lanterns, but you need a Nobel prize in physics to work them out. Tadesse took the entire thing to pieces and laid the component parts out on my damp sleeping-bag. We all clustered round and marvelled at just how many pieces there were. When the puzzle was finally put back together the muleteer was left with a handful of odds and ends. Declaring them to be surplus to requirements, he tossed them into a corner. Next he filled the fuel tank to the top with kerosene and pressured the unit by pumping the handle. He pumped and pumped until his shoulder ached. Then he primed the lamp with alcohol and, his eyes glinting, struck a match and put it to the wick.

What happened next took us all by surprise. The lantern shot flames high into the thatch and then exploded. The headman emitted a shriek as he realized that his hut was on fire. It was an awkward moment. We were burning down our host’s house, a situation which any guest seeks to avoid.

Fortunately the rain had drenched the roof so the fire was slow to take hold, and Tadesse’s sons managed to put out the flames quite quickly. The second problem was Tadesse’s burns. He held his hands to his face, whimpering. I prized his fingers away. To my relief his injuries weren’t serious. Of more concern was the fact that we now had to sit in almost total darkness.

After dinner Samson lit a candle, took out his Bible and read us a passage from the Book of Chronicles. We were all huddled around the smoldering fire, with the goats pressed together in a single wooly mass. In the background I could hear an infant crying, and outside the rain continued to fall. Samson chose the passage in which Solomon welcomes the Queen of Sheba as his guest. I snuggled up in my soaking sleeping-bag and thought how fortunate I was to have found Samson. He had a knack of reinventing himself. He’d been a prospector, a gold miner, a taxi-driver, a guide and a fixer extraordinaire. And now he’d become a missionary, albeit in disguise. I thanked God for sending me Samson and then, lulled by his reading, I fell asleep.

An English childhood introduces you to heavy rain, but even that doesn’t prepare you for the monsoon of East Africa. We set out at five in the morning having thanked the headman. I left some supplies in payment for the damage done to his hut. The mules were laden and the men readied, but an early start in pouring rain had dampened our spirits. Samson was particularly miserable. He had had only a thin nylon blanket to sleep under, and it was soon drenched. He hadn’t slept at all and his stomach hurt. I suspected that the intestinal worms had returned to haunt him. To make matters worse, his bin-liner raincoat had melted when the thatch caught fire, so now he had no protection against the rain.

It was still very dark when we left the hamlet. I tried to raise morale by suggesting that the end was nearly in sight. Tadesse and his sons said they’d have to be getting back to Begi soon – they had important affairs to attend to at home. Even the local men were reluctant to continue. Soon Samson was clutching his stomach and complaining about the rain. Tadesse began to bark angrily at his sons, and the local men lagged behind at the back of the procession, their heads down. It was time for a little magic.

I halted the caravan and unpacked one of my kit bags. From the bottom I took out a medium-sized glass jar, with a sprinkler built into the top. The men didn’t say anything, but they were clearly wondering what was going on. I asked them to line up and stick their tongues out. It was an unpopular command, largely because of the heavy rain. I ordered them to trust me. Samson went first. I sprinkled a few grains of the white powder on his tongue and told him to swallow.

As soon as his tongue retracted, his face lit up. He smiled and then he burst out laughing, and begged for more. The others grew jealous and wanted some too. I sprinkled a little of the miracle powder on Tadesse’s tongue, then on those of his sons, before giving a dose to the other four men. They loved it.

“It tastes all meaty,” said Tadesse.

“It’s delicious!” exclaimed Samson. “What is it?”

I didn’t tell them, except to say that it was magic from Peru. That was partly true. I had been sold the powder by a man in the small town of Nazca in the Peruvian desert. It was monosodium glutamate.

Morale rose sharply after that. I enticed the men on by promising them more of the magic powder. They couldn’t get enough of it. Samson said it tasted like the kai wot that his mother made back in Kebra Mengist.

An hour later we reached the eastern slope of Tullu Wallel. At the next magic powder break I made an announcement. I told the men to be brave, declaring that we would vanquish the Devil and drive him from his cave. But they were changed men already. They no longer had any fear. Their blood had been fortified by the mysterious effects of monosodium glutamate.

We started climbing. Hayter had said that the cave lay at the foot of the eastern slope. So when we were a little way up I gave the order to fan out in pairs and search for the mine-shafts. Earlier that morning the men wouldn’t have dreamed of looking by themselves. But now they were buoyant. We left the mules with one of the local men and began the search.

For six hours we combed the mountain. With the muleteers’ spirits bolstered I felt that at last we were within reach of Frank Hayter’s mine-shafts. I had promised a sack of magic powder to the first man who set eyes upon the cave. But with time the team’s enthusiasm levelled off and then died away completely. No amount of monosodium glutamate could compensate for the wretched conditions. The rain was torrential and didn’t let up for a minute. It hampered the search, as did the bushes armed with barbed thorns, and the area’s infestation of ticks. The men would have stormed away, but there was nowhere to storm off to. Instead, they took every opportunity to make the extent of their discomfort known.

At 5.14 p.m. Tadesse screamed louder than I have ever heard a grown man scream. Samson and I ran towards his voice, stumbling over rocks and roots.

“The cave! The cave!” he shouted.

“Where?”

Over there! The entrance to a cave!”

I congratulated the muleteer and rewarded him with an extra dose of monosodium glutamate. He licked his lips and said it had been a communal effort. We examined the cave entrance, while Tadesse’s sons fetched the mules. It was far larger than anything I had imagined. I whooped loudly and slapped Samson’s hand in a high five. We had found it. We had found the entrance to Solomon’s mines.

I thought fast. We would need ropes, flashlights and the Gold Bug. Once the mules had been brought over, I unpacked the kit bags and pulled out a red nylon rope. Attaching it to myself and Samson, I said that we would go in alone while the others paid out the rope. The order went down very well with the men who clearly didn’t envy us our task. Tadesse asked what the metal detector was for. I told him it was a special machine for detecting the Devil. Then Samson said that the flashlights had run out of batteries, and the pressure lantern was too dangerous to risk using again. I racked my brains and asked myself what Henry Morton Stanley would have done.

“Cut down bamboo staves,” I shouted. “Rip up the blankets and make fiery torches.”

The men set to work. Samson was less than happy at having his blanket shredded, but it was in a good cause. We wound the cloth round the sticks, dipped them in kerosene, and set them alight. Then I gave Samson a last sprinkling of magic powder and together we entered the cave.

The smoke from the torches set the place alive with bats. There were thousands of them, just like the ones we had encountered in Dire Dawa. Our torches gave off more fumes than they did light, and it was impossible to see more than a few feet ahead. I led the way, with Samson’s hand on my shoulder. At last, I thought, we were entering the ancient mine-shafts. But then, after twenty feet, we hit a rock wall and the cave came to an abrupt end. With the bats still swooping and diving around us, we searched for a passageway or a brick wall or a door. But there was no way forward.

FIFTEEN

Return to the Accursed Mountain

“There is no greater pain than to recall a happy time in wretchedness.”

Dante, Inferno

Seven months later I was back in Ethiopia. Tullu Wallel had haunted me ever since I’d left its accursed twin peaks. Although I’d tried to get on with new projects, resuming normal life was impossible. I had to complete the search. I knew that somewhere on the mountain’s slopes lay the answer to the riddle of King Solomon’s mines. As before, there was only one way to find out. I was going to have to return to Tullu Wallel.

Usually, there is nothing more pleasing than returning to a place where you have endured hardship. But as the plane taxied towards Addis Ababa’s airport terminal, I felt a lump in my throat. My toes curled up in my shoes, and my heart raced. I was mad to have come back and I knew it. The only certainty was that there would be much more hardship ahead before I flew home to Europe.

A familiar figure was waiting at the arrivals gate. He was dressed in some of my old clothes, his hair was cropped short, and he looked despondent. It was Samson. When our eyes met neither of us smiled. The journey ahead was about unfinished business. This was not a time for pleasantries. Samson took my bags and led the way to his taxi. He didn’t say whether he’d been surprised to get my message. In fact he didn’t say anything at all.

As the taxi neared my hotel, I muttered my first words.

“I had to come back,” I said.

“The mountain?” whispered Samson.

“The mine-shafts, I can’t stop thinking about them. I know that I can find them.”

Samson ran the wheel through his hands before applying the brakes gently. The taxi glided to a halt.

“Tullu Wallel will kill you,” he said. “Take my advice. Go back to Europe and stop thinking about Solomon’s gold.”

The words echoed advice given to Hayter when he ventured back to Ethiopia to search once more for the mountain’s mine-shafts. That was sixty-five years before my own journeys. On his death-bed, Hayter’s old companion “Black” Martin whispered to him: “Leave Tullu Wallel and Abyssinian gold alone, or you will live to regret it, as I have done.” Black Martin, who was afflicted by an Ethiopian curse, died a few days later.

Perhaps I should have taken the advice, but I didn’t. Instead I made a beeline for the accursed mountain, dragging Samson with me. I was struck with a strong case of deja vu, for we tracked down Bahru and roped him and the Emperor’s Jeep in as well. Bahru’s luck had eventually returned and he had made his way back to Addis Ababa. We found him lying in a daze in the back of the Jeep, his eyes bloodshot, his mouth packed with qat.

The days that followed were far harsher than any other journey I have ever undertaken. We struggled through mud, sleet and torrential rain. The mules and muleteers battled on despite the dreadful conditions. Our clothes, blankets and supplies were drenched early on and never dried out. The skin on my feet began to rot away, and my shins felt as if they had been flayed with whips. Samson was in no better condition. His intestinal worms had returned with a vengeance.

My obsession with Frank Hayter’s mine-shafts was destroying not only me but those with me. Most journeys have a clear beginning, but on some the ending is less well-defined. The question is, at what point do you bite your lip and head for home?

On the last morning, after a truly wretched night, we sat crouched in the lee of a hardwood tree dreaming of being far from Tullu Wallel. Our spirits were broken. I took stock of the situation. The rain was coming down in sheets. Most of the food was gone and the batteries were dead. The kerosene was finished, and the last of the drinking water had been consumed. Samson was clutching his belly and moaning. I had fallen into an ants’ nest and my back was badly bitten. Being eaten alive by soldier ants is indescribably painful. The mules had started to buck whenever anyone went near them. The muleteers’ faces were drawn, the palms of their hands raw and bleeding. I wondered if things could get any worse, and at that moment the rain turned to hail. I knew then that my search for Hayter’s mine-shafts was at an end.

Taking a deep breath, I staggered to my feet and ordered the retreat. As we turned on our heels and began the long, miserable trek back towards the main road, I smiled wryly to myself. Frank Hayter’s secret was still safe, as was the exact whereabouts of King Solomon’s mines.

The End

Glossary

Abyssinia: former name for Ethiopia

amba: a flat-topped mountain

Amharic: the language of the Amhara tribe, widely spoken in Ethiopia and often regarded as the national language

amole: a uniform block of salt, once used as currency in Ethiopia

araki: an alcoholic drink, usually distileded from maize

asa wot: a spicy fish stew, made with freshwater fish

berbere: a highly spiced sauce common throughout Ethiopia in which meat dishes are served

Beta Israel: the tribe of Ethiopian Jews

birr: the national currency of Ethiopia: at the current rate of exchange, 12 birr equal £1

Buda: the religious hierarchy of the Ethiopian Jewish community believed to have the ability to transmit the Evil Eye

dejazmacth: a local nobleman

dink: the ancient Egyptian word for a dwarf, which is also found in various tribal languages in Ethiopia

doro wot: a spicy chicken stew, often served with hard-boiled eggs

enset: the “false banana” plant, cultivated in Ethiopia and prized for its edible stem

falasha: one of the community of Ethiopian Jews, most of whom now live in Israel: the term is now regarded as politically incorrect

faranji: colloquial term for a foreigner

Ge’ez: the ancient language of Ethiopia, still understood by the country’s priesthood

ghamelawallas: sweepers in Calcutta and other Indian cities who buy the dust from the floors of jewellery workshops

injera: Ethiopian bread made from teff flour, upon which a communal meat stew is served

kai wot: a spicy lamb stew served in a berbere sauce

Karo: a tribe from south-west Ethiopia whose warriors paint their bodies in elaborate patterns

Kebra Negast (The Glory of Kings): sacred text of Ethiopia, which contains a detailed account of Solomon’s meeting with Makeda

Makeda: the Ethiopian name for the Queen of Sheba

makwamya: ritualistic prayer sticks used by the Ethiopian clergy

matatu: a communal taxi or minivan, popular in East Africa

mensaf: a Bedu dish of meat cooked in milk and served with flavoured rice

Mursi: a tribe from south-west Ethiopia, famed for the curious clay lip-plates that they wear

Oromo: one of the main tribes in Ethiopia, or their language

qat: the mildly narcotic leaf chewed in the Horn of Africa and in southern Arabia, sometimes called chatt in Ethiopia

shamma: a cotton shawl, worn throughout Ethiopia, often with a delicately embroidered border

shiftas: bandits

sistra: an Ethiopian musical instrument, possibly of ancient Egyptian origin

tabot: a replica of the Ark of the Covenant

teff: a grain popular in Ethiopia, from which injera is made

thaler: a Maria Theresa dollar, once used in various African countries as currency, and still minted by the Austrian government

tukul: a wattle-and-daub or simple stone hut

werk: the Amharic word for gold

zill-zill tibs: shredded beef strips fried and served with sauce

Bibliography

All books were published in London unless otherwise stated.

Solomon and Sheba

Budge, E. A. Wallis, The Queen of Sheba and Her Only Son Menylik (Medici Society, 1922)

Littman, Enno (ed.), The Legend of the Queen of Sheba in the Tradition of Axum (Bibliotheca Abessinica, 1904)

Philby, H. St. John, The Queen of Sheba (reprint, Quartet, 1981)

Phillips, Wendell, Sheba’s Buried City (Gollancz, 1955)

Raymond, Captain E., King Solomon’s Temple (Artisan, Thousand Oaks, Ca., 1992)

Toy, Barbara, In Search of Sheba (John Murray, 1961)

Biblical History

Feather, Robert, The Copper Scroll Decoded (HarperCollins, 1999)

Grierson, Roderick, and Munro-Hay, Stuart, The Ark of the Covenant (Phoenix Press, 2000)

Hancock, Graham, The Sign and the Seal (Heinemann, 1992)

Keller, Werner, The Bible as History (Hodder & Stoughton, 1956)

The Septuagint Bible (Falcon’s Wing Press, White Hills, 1954)

Vermes, Geza, The Dead Sea Scrolls in English (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1962)

Ophir and Punt

Bent, J. Theodore, The Ruined Cities of Mashonaland (Longmans, Green, 1895)

Burton, Captain Richard F., The Gold-mines of Midian and the Ruined Midianite Cities, 2 vols. (Kegan Paul, 1878)

–– Land of Midian (Revisited), 2 vols. (Kegan Paul, 1879)

Craufurd, Commander C. Ε. V, Treasure of Ophir (Skeffington, 1929)

Hall, R. N., Great Zimbabwe (Methuen, 1905)

–– and Neal, W G., The Ancient Ruins of Rhodesia (Methuen, 1902)

Keane, A. H., The Gold of Ophir (Edward Stanford, 1901)

Kitchen, Κ. Α., Punt and How to Get There (Orientalia XL, 1971)

Peters, Carl, The Eldorado of the Ancients (Pearson, 1902)

–– Solomon’s Golden Ophir: A Research into the Most Ancient Gold Production in History (Leadenhall Press, 1899)

Rothenberg, Beno, Were these Solomon’s Mines? (Thames and Hudson, 1972)

Stuart, J. M., The Ancient Gold Fields of Africa (Effingham Wilson, 1891)

Wicker, F. D. P., “The Road to Punt”, Geographical Journal, Vol. CLXIV, July 1998

Gold

Angier, Bradford, Looking for Gold (Stackpole Books, Mechanicsburg, Pa., 1980)

Bernstein, Peter L., The Power of Gold (John Wiley, New York, 2000)

Butler, Gail, Recreational Gold Prospecting (Gem Guides, 1998)

Cornell, Fred C., The Glamour of Gold Prospecting (Fisher, Unwin, 1920)

Goble, G. F., Hints to Intended Gold Diggers and Buyers (n.p., 1853)

Marx, Jennifer, The Magic of Gold (Doubleday, New York, 1978)

Randle, Kevin D., Lost Gold and Buried Treasure (Evans, New York, 1995)

Ethiopia

Baker, Samuel White, The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia and the Sword Hunters of the Hamran Arabs (Macmillan, 1867)

Bartleet, Captain E. J., In the Land of Sheba (Cornish Brothers, Birmingham, 1934)

Briggs, Philip, Guide to Ethiopia (Bradt Books, Chalfont St Peter, 1998)

Blundell, H. Weld, “Exploration in the Abai Basin, Abyssinia”, Geographical Journal, Vol. XXVII, June 1906

Bruce, James, Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, 5 vols. (J. Ruthven, Edinburgh, 1790)

Budge, E. A. Wallis, A History of Ethiopia (Methuen, 1928)

–– Bandlet of Righteousness (Luzac, 1929)

Burton, Captain Richard F., First Footsteps in East Africa (reprint, Dent, 1910)

Demessie, Metasebia, Bibliography of the Geology of Ethiopia (Ethiopian Institute of Geological Surveys, Addis Ababa, 1996)

de Prorok, Byron, In Quest of Lost Worlds (Frederick Muller, 1935)

–– Dead Men Do Tell Tales (Harrap, 1943)

Farago, Ladislas, Abyssinia on the Eve (Putnam, 1935)

Gordon, Frances Linzee, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Djibouti (Lonely Planet, 2000)

Griaule, Marcel, Abyssinian Journey (John Miles, 1935)

Harris, Major W Cornwallis, Highland of Aethiopia, 2 vols. (Longman, 1844)

Hartlmaier, Paul, Golden Lion (Geoffrey Bles, 1956)

Hayter, Frank E., In Quest of Sheba’s Mines (Stanley Paul Ltd., 1935)

–– The Gold of Ethiopia (Stanley Paul, 1936)

–– African Adventurer (Stanley Paul, 1939)

–– The Garden of Eden (Stanley Paul, 1940)

Henze, Paul B., Ethiopian Journeys (Ernest Benn, 1977)

–– Layers of Time: A History of Ethiopia (C. Hurst, 2000)

Jelenc, Danilo Α., Mineral Occurrences of Ethiopia (Ministry of Mines, Addis Ababa, 1966)

Jones, Α. Η. M., and Monroe, Elizabeth, A History of Abyssinia (Clarendon Press,

Oxford, 1935) Nesbitt, L. M., Desert and Forest (Jonathan Cape, 1937)

Nicholson, T. R., A Toy for the Lion (William Kimber, 1965)

Pankhurst, Richard, An Economic History of Ethiopia (Haile Selassie University Press, Addis Ababa, 1968)

–– The Ethiopians (Blackwell, Oxford, 1998)

Pankhurst, Sylvia, Ethiopia: A Cultural History (Lalibela House, Woodford Green, 1959)

Phillipson, David W, Ancient Ethiopia (British Museum Press, 1999)

Rey, C. F., Unconquered Abyssinia As It Is Today (Seeley Service, 1923)

Salt, Henry, A Voyage to Abyssinia (Rivington, 1814)

Spectrum Guide to Ethiopia (Camerapix, Nairobi, 1995)

Thesiger, Wilfred, The Danakil Diary (HarperCollins, 1996)

Trimmingham, J. S., Islam in Ethiopia (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1952)

Ullendorff, Edward, The Ethiopians (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1961)

–– Ethiopia and the Bible (British Academy, 1967)

Weninger, Stefan, Ge’ez: Classical Ethiopia (Lincom Europa, 1993)

Miscellaneous

Álvares, Francisco, A True Relation of the Lands of Prester John (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1961)

Barradas, M., Tractus Tres Historico-Geographici (1634)

Boyes, John, King of the Wa Kikuyu (Methuen, 1912)

Cashmore, Ε. E., The Rastafarians (Minority Rights Group International, 1992)

Coan, Stephen (ed.), Diary of an African Journey : The Return of Henry Rider Haggard (Hurst, 2001)

Davidson, Basil, Old Africa Rediscovered (Gollancz, 1959)

de May, R., Narrative of the Sufferings and Adventures of Henderick Portenger (Richard Phillips, 1819)

Haggard, Henry Rider, King Solomon’s Mines (Cassell, 1885)

Hall, Richard, Lovers on the Nile: The Life of Samuel White Baker (Collins, 1980)

Herodotus, The Histories (Everyman’s Library, 1910)

Kessler, David, The Falashas (Allen & Unwin, 1982)

Mandeville, Sir John, Travels and Voyages of Sir John Mandeville (c. 1356—7)

Shah, Sayed Idries, Destination Mecca (Rider, 1957)

BEYOND THE DEVIL’S TEETH

Journeys in Gondwanaland

TAHIR SHAH

SECRETUM MUNDI PUBLISHING

FOREWORD

Breaking in as a travel writer is virtually impossible these days.

No publisher worth their salt will take an unsolicited manuscript, and getting a commission is almost out of the question if you haven’t been published before. It’s the crème de la crème of viscous circles.

The standard way to get a foot in the door is by getting an agent and relying on them to sweet talk the publisher into taking you on.

But getting an agent is no easy task in itself.

I wrote Beyond the Devil’s Teeth when I was twenty-three. I had no agent, no publisher, but I did have a raging enthusiasm to produce a book from adventures in India, Africa and South America.

I had been obsessed by the theme of Gondwanaland and by the Indian tribe of the Gonds, and had written a book based loosely on these themes.

The problem was that once I’d finished the book, no publisher would take it. I sent the manuscript to dozens of publishing houses – great and small – and received the standard letters of refusal.

Undeterred, I tried getting an agent.

There was still no luck. I was turned down by absolutely everyone, and became very depressed. I thought the book would never get in print, and I put it on a shelf for three years.

Then, one morning, I had an idea.

I decided to get a letter-heading printed, a fabulous one, with many colors and expensive-looking type. It announced the services of a media agency, under the direction of a fictitious chief agent, Mr. William Watkins.

Then I sent the manuscript to as many famous people I could think of, including former US Presidents, heads of companies, illustrious explorers and corporate visionaries. A small percentage of them wrote back with very good quotes for use in publicity. I printed these on large sheets of brown wrapping paper, wrapped manuscripts of Beyond the Devil’s Teeth inside, and sent them out again from my own literary agency – Worldwide Media.

Then I waited.

Days passed.

Then a week or two.

I was about to give up hope when, one afternoon, I was sitting in my studio flat in north London eating Campbell’s soup from a can, wondering how I would ever make enough money to travel again, when the telephone rang.

I picked up the receiver.

It was a big publisher calling from the top floor of a tall steel and glass building in the West End. A publisher had never called me before. The woman at the other end asked to be put through William Watkins, the chief agent. She obviously took me for a receptionist.

Thinking as fast as I could, I asked the lady to hold on while I put her through. Realising that an important chief agent would never be instantly available, I laid the receiver on a chair and took the time to finish my cold soup.

After three or four minutes, I picked it up, cleared my throat, and replied in the silky smooth obsequious voice I assumed my fictitious Mr. Watkins would have.

Yes, I confirmed, I was the agent for the up and coming genius Tahir Shah and, yes, Beyond the Devil’s Teeth was still available, although I said, lying, the work had sparked considerable interest in the literary establishment – in Britain and abroad.

The woman, a commissioning editor, said she very much wanted to meet Tahir Shah. She asked if I could find out when he was available.

“He is always available,” I said quickly.

“Are you sure?” she replied.

“Quite certain.”

“Always?”

“Always!”

“But don’t you need to check with him?”

“I just have,” I said coldly.

We made an appointment for the next afternoon. Before hanging up, the editor said that, as the agent, I was quite free to come along to the meeting as well.

“Madam,” I retorted, “how very kind, but it may be rather difficult for me to attend as well as Mr. Shah.”

Tahir Shah

2013

CONTENTS

Title Page

Foreword

PART ONE: NORTH GONDWANALAND

India and Pakistan

ONE - The Sword of Shah Safi

TWO - Servants with Children

THREE - Too-Feee and Eunuchs

FOUR - Send the Fool Another Mile

FIVE - The Alchemist’s Assistant

SIX - Abdul the Warrior

SEVEN - Leaving the Nest

EIGHT - Here Comes the King

PART TWO: CENTRAL GONDWANALAND

West and East Africa

NINE - Rats Eating Cats

TEN - My Name is Zakaria

ELEVEN - In Search of the Source

TWELVE - Beowulf and Buckweed

PART THREE: WEST GONDWANALAND

South America

THIRTEEN - Beyond the Devil’s Teeth

FOURTEEN - Opera in the Jungle

FIFTEEN - For the Need of a Thneed

SIXTEEN - The Mountains of Blue Ice

Glossary

PART ONE: NORTH GONDWANALAND

India and Pakistan

ONE - The Sword of Shah Safi

TWO - Servants with Children

THREE - Too-Feee and Eunuchs

FOUR - Send the Fool Another Mile

FIVE - The Alchemist’s Assistant

SIX - Abdul the Warrior

SEVEN - Leaving the Nest

EIGHT - Here Comes the King

ONE

The Sword of Shah Safi

In the Glens of Seven Mountains,

Of the Twelve Hills in the Valleys,

Is the mountain Lingawangad,

Is the flowering tree Pahindi;

In that desert so far out-spreading

Twelve coss round arose no dwelling.

The Tale of Lingo, retold by J. Forsyth, The Highlands of Central India.

A maze of passageways stretched in all directions.

As I wandered from one cavern to the next, I could smell shish kebabs and coriander. Figures cloaked in desert dress murmured in Arabic from beneath their robes. Were they uneasy that I had discovered the source of their fortune?

One chamber was filled with ancient artefacts, dulled with age and guarded by an old man. He observed me carefully as I examined his hoard.

Hidden deep under a stack of papers and a torn shawl of silk I discovered the object. Only on picking it out did I realize something of the true significance of the find.

It was a sword of what seemed to be seventeenth century Persian design. Certainly worth twenty times the asking price. Holding the hilt, I slowly slid back the scabbard, to reveal an immaculate blade of watered steel, damascened in gold. Mughal, Indo-Islamic... Engraved in Arabic letters was the inscription of the master swordsmith Shah Safi: his signature, along with a kind of poetic spell, which read:

Chastise all evil with this fair blade

And through its magic your glory shall never fade.

The guardian mumbled the price and, trembling slightly, I handed him a new note. Then, as I stood dazed before him, trying to come to terms with what I had bought, he said in a loud Cockney voice,

“’Ere d’you want a bag for that, mate?”

I had quite forgotten that this was London’s Bermondsey Market early on a Friday morning, and the treasure’s purveyor was a stallholder like any other.

He thrust my fifty-pound note under layers of wooly clothing and handed me a crumpled piece of wrapping paper.

As I was leaving, I looked back and nodded to my benefactor. He sat huddled against the cold under a sign, on which was scrawled in almost illegible lettering:

Thieves will be HURT.

* * *

Some weeks later I lounged at the back of a large London auction room. Against the low hum of conversation were the sounds of lot numbers being called, and a hammer clicking down at the end of each sale. My sword, labeled lot 732, waited to be sold.

As I sat there, thoroughly bored, I noticed a dagger, also numbered for the sale. The blade had been hammered from a coarse piece of iron: and its hilt reminded me of a weapon I had seen some time before. The design was typical of a people in Central India, a tribe for which I had an unusual fascination: the Gonds.

I thought back to a trip I had made to India some years before, and of a curious place in which I had found myself. One particular conversation had seemed important:

The waiter poured me a glass of straw-colored tea. He turned and went to lie in the shade, removing his artificial right leg, and using it as a pillow. Every few minutes the makeshift café under the railway bridge was swamped with steam and smoke from passing trains. I was in Gondia, Central India.

As the waiter snored loudly, a mysterious old man — wrapped in a navy blue blanket — came and sat next to me. His skin was dark, his face was square, and a clump of shiny black hair poked out from each ear. As I scratched away at a notepad, the man watched me in silence.

Observing my interest for his town as I looked around inquisitively, he said:

“It was once very different, you know.”

“But it looks as though nothing’s changed here for centuries,” I replied.

The old man chuckled, and the blanket rippled with his laughter.

“Look around! Where we sit now was jungle not long ago: there were dense forests, monkeys swinging from tree to tree, and panthers stalking through the undergrowth. Now, instead of big cats, there are camels: it’s not a jungle, but a desert!”

Putting away my notes, I looked in all directions. It seemed hard to believe that panthers ever roamed these parts.

The man had more to say:

“For thirty years I’ve lived here. I am making a study for Calcutta University... my work you see, is concerned with the Gonds, and how their society vanished.”

“Who are the Gonds? I asked.

The man pulled his wrapping closer, as if a freezing chill had run down his spine.

“Who are the Gonds?” he echoed. “Well, this great tract of land used to be known as Gondwana: it was named after its people, the Gonds.”

The café filled with a fog of black coal smoke as a steam-engine roared by. The one-legged waiter snorted in his sleep and, when the smoke had cleared, the old man continued:

“The Gonds were a stocky, dark people, quite unlike the other tribes of Central India. They told of a time when their ancestors ran wild. In an epic rhyme they sang the adventures of their prophet — whose name was Lingo. With the poetic meter like that of Hiawatha, the epic story is, in some ways, similar to the tales of the Norsemen.”

The old man paused and, twisting the clumps of hair which sprouted from his ears, the tale began...

“One day the Goddess Parvati gave birth to twelve clans of Gonds: they lived in the jungles and were very wild. They ate anything that moved. Goddess Parvati loved them, but her husband — the Great God — did not. He sent a squirrel amongst the Gonds, which they chased. When the rodent scurried into a cave, the Gonds followed. Then the Great God sealed the cave with a boulder: trapping all but four Gond men inside.”

“Did the Gonds perish in the cave?” I asked.

The academic ignored my interruption. And, when I was silent, he continued with the story.

“Parvati was very sad because her Gonds had vanished. In her misery she went to the God of Gods. When he listened to her tale, he presented her with the bud of a flower. The bud opened and gave birth to Lingo, the prophet of the Gonds.”

As the old academic wriggled deeper into his chair, I wondered how long his fable might be. India is famous for its epic poems. Some are said to be so long that they take almost a lifetime to tell.

Noticing that my attention was straying, the storyteller coughed and caught my eye.

“When Lingo was nine years old,” he said raising his voice, “he yearned to meet other people. So he climbed a tree and spied the four Gond men, who were barbarians. Lingo felled some trees, made a field, and grew some rice. From a giant he stole a firebrand as well as the giant’s seven daughters. The flames and the women he gave to the Gonds.”

“What were the giant’s daughters like?” I asked.

Instead of answering my question, the man abruptly removed his dentures, rubbed them on his blanket, and stuffed them back in his mouth. Then he frowned.

“What happened then?” I inquired weakly, hoping to break the uneasy silence.

“Well, one day,” began the voice again, “when the Gond men went hunting in the forest, the women tried to seduce Lingo. So he pounded each one with a pestle. The Gonds were angry when they found their wives battered black and blue. So they killed Lingo and played marbles with his eyeballs.

“But the Gods breathed life back into the prophet Lingo and sent him to find the other Gond people. Which he did. When he had saved them from the cave, he became their leader.”

The ancient paused for a moment, as if his strength were failing. Yet I sensed that there was more to tell. Looking deep into my eyes, he whispered:

“The Gond kingdoms have fallen, their people live dispersed in poverty: the teak trees and the jungles have been cleared... but the importance of the Gonds must not be forgotten!”

“What importance is that?”

“Gondwanaland!” shrieked the weary academic, his fingers grasped around each other.

The waiter sat up, woken by the cry. He reached for the prosthesis and strapped it onto his stump.

“What is Gondwanaland?”

“Long ago India, Africa and South America formed one super-continent,” continued the scholar. “This colossal landmass, known as Gondwanaland, was named after the Gonds and Gondwana.”

“How on earth did a theory like that get named after such a remote and unknown tribe?”

The man explained:

“Gondwana,” he said, “was found to have many species of flora and fauna which existed in other parts of the Gondwanaland.”

“Are there other features common to the different areas of Gondwanaland?” I asked.

The old man sipped his tea, narrowed his eyes, and observing me straight on, screeched:

“That is something for you to find out!”

* * *

As I sat at the back of the drafty auction hall, wondering about Gonds and super-continents, a hammer banged down and lot 732 — my sword — was sold for six thousand pounds.

I went about London gripped by a strange and unhealthy greed. As my mind set to work, I began to consider what eastern treasures one might find at the source. If one could buy a Mughal sword in England for fifty pounds, how much would it cost in India?

Gonds, India and riches became fused in my mind.

In the early morning activity of London’s antique markets, I would often hear tales of wondrous things to be found in Mumbai’s Chor Bazaar, the Thieves” Market. British antiques were said to lie there in abundance, unwanted, underpriced, or discarded along with rare artefacts from Mughal India, the splendid empire which the British had displaced.

With the profit from my Bermondsey buy, I arranged an expedition. I bought maps and guides and finally a ticket to Mumbai — the Chor Bazaar and its treasures were waiting.

One morning, a few days before I was about to leave, I received a letter from an old traveling companion of my grandfather. He invited me to his house for tea.

On arriving at the house in the countryside, some miles from London, I was led into the durbar, reception room. The walls were hung with ancient Bokharan tapestries; the floors concealed by Afghan rugs bearing the filpai — elephants” foot — design.

Furniture carved with Arabic calligraphy, and brass trays were dotted about.

I explained to my host my plans to go to India and see what I might find: as I, too, had an interest in eastern antiques.

He showed me the most prized pieces in his collection: Turkish yataghan swords, their hilts carved from walrus ivory and silver; daggers with damascened blades and rock-crystal pommels; and a number of ancient amulets and talismans with hidden spells.

After we had drunk some tea, and I had listened to my host, he stopped for a moment and sat in silent concentration. Then, from a large elaborate display, he took down a pair of camel saddle-bags which had hung on a hook. The bags were embroidered with geometric designs and symbols.

“I want to present you with these,” he said. “Your grandfather and I were presented with them by a dervish on our travels in the Middle East some fifty years ago. The mystic promised that they would always bring their bearer good fortune.”

Thanking the old gentleman warmly, I left.

When I was ready to start packing, I opened the saddlebags to check their full capacity. They were lined with a fine gray felt, in which lingered the musky smell of camel. Grains of some, doubtless desert, sand were rubbed deep into the seams.

The two main pockets were quite sufficient to hold all that I intended to take. As I filled the pouches with my clothes and maps, I discovered something odd: at the bottom of one pouch there was a secret pocket. It had been craftily concealed beneath an extra felt flap. At first it seemed empty, but then I noticed that something was hidden there. Inside was a scrap of parchment. As I unfolded the sheet, the edges cracked; it was old and delicate.

Inscribed on it was a verse from the Quatrains of Omar Khayyam, the eleventh-century Persian mystic. Reading the words aloud I prepared for a most amazing journey:

The sages who have compassed sea and land,

Their secret to search out and understand,

My mind misgives me if they ever solve

The scheme on which the universe is planned.

TWO

Servants with Children

Eating raw and eating rotten;

Eating squirrels, eating jackals...

Eating lizards, frogs, and beetles,

Eating rats, and mice, and bandicoots;

So the Gonds made no distinction.

The India Guest House was hot at night, and was always so: except when it rained.

A fan above my squalid box of a room rotated, blowing the hot air downwards across the four graffiti-covered walls. There were no windows. This was the third night.

A servant with a fixed smirk ground mashed cockroaches deeper into a plug hole with the end of a spoon, and grinned wider as I stared and gagged.

I was in Colaba — the “A-1 part of town” — as the taxi driver had assured me, en route from Mumbai’s International Airport.

The steps and walls of the street were plastered red, as if a gangland gunfight had taken place, and the corpses had just been removed. Blood-red splashes of half-masticated paan — the concoction of betel leaf, lime and tobacco which Indians love to chew — decayed amongst bits of straw and coconut husks, as I walked out into the sunshine.

It was hard to get to grips with a city where all the elements of human existence mingled: from the most affluent businessmen and visiting landed gentry, to the poorest wafer of human servility. Mumbai is a mixture of all that is human.

I wandered about the streets looking, smelling, and listening to a new kind of chaos: almost melodious and well-practised. It seemed as if such disorder had been going on since the beginning of time and would continue until time came to an end. It had experienced all, seen everything, and been exposed to the most bizarre and peculiar qualities of man. I was to find it impossible to surprise.

Colaba is an island edged with reclaimed land. It is lit with street lamps, drained by sewers, and has shops in which chocolate can be bought. Yet children with elephantiasis played in rags, their noses streaming like those of any other children. I heard the shouts of beggars: “Doh Rupia, Doh Rupia! (Two Rupees, Two Rupees!).”

I saw coffee brewing on tiny stoves, stalls selling surgical gloves in rows, imported Lux soap, cans of Coca-Cola, underwear and paperbacks, as I walked into the waves of dark heads, gripped by a strange excitement.

Treasure and the Gonds. Mumbai was where they intersected: for here, by current repute, the relics of the Mughals and the British Raj alike were concentrated. More than that, I had discovered that Mumbai was a form of Parvati, deity of the Gonds, derived from Maha Amma, Great Mother. Coincidence or omen?

Back at the guest house I tried to acclimatize. A travel-worn adventurer had once told me that leaning with one’s head dangling over the end of a bed was the best way to achieve this. It was while I was in this position, the blood rushing to my temples, that the door swung open.

The western woman who entered seemed to be tattooed from head to toe. She rubbed a stick of sandalwood incense between her fingers as she gushed excitedly in a Texan drawl:

“I just had to show someone,” she said.

Having adjusted myself to a more usual position I asked what she had to show.

“It’s very special and so symbolic,” she gasped.

“What is?” I asked.

Unravelling a long white crepe bandage from her left arm she revealed a newly-tattooed epic scene.

What I made out to be a dragon was being ingested by what looked like a scorpion: which in turn was in the process of being swallowed by a field-mouse.

“It’s very nice,” I said politely; “What exactly does it mean?”

The woman’s eyes burned with evident horror that I should not understand such an elementary scene as this. At that moment her husband arrived. A towering hulk of a man with long blond hair and six days” growth of beard, he wore no shirt. He, too, was heavily tattooed with outlandish symbols and motifs. As his wife danced about in the confinement of my box, with what she confided were secret movements, whose meaning she was forbidden to divulge, the man addressed me:

“We just came from a monastery in Kathmandu, where we stayed with the head priest as his guests. Of course not anyone could just go and stay with a priest like that.” He looked at me accusingly as if that was my very intention. “A very, very wonderful thing happened while we were there.”

“What was that?” I inquired with interest.

“The priest wanted our electric tattooing needles, and in exchange he presented us with the chisel they had used for the very same purpose — that is to say, tattooing — for hundreds of years.”

I was appalled that such an ancient tradition had ended so suddenly. But the tattooed figure had more to say:

“You know what was even more wonderful than that?”

“What was?”

“Well, as we were leaving the monastery, we heard our very own, one hundred per cent American, tattooing needles being put to work. And I said to Jan, “You know Jan, the monastery’s gone electric!”

In desperation I wandered the streets of Mumbai to find a new place to live. The tattooist-mystics had come to my room late at night, brandishing the Nepalese chisel: seeking virgin skin. Jan’s delirium had been uncontrollable. She had rubbed her hands across my bare chest, calling for a ceremony of demonic proportions and guaranteeing its wholly genuine Tantric provenance.

The Texans hummed in unison outside my door, in an attempt to recreate the natural monastic surroundings for the blunt knife. It was then I had realized that it was time to leave.

As I turned onto Veer Nariman road for the first time, I found what were to be my new hangouts, my new homes. On the right was the Chateau Windsor Hotel, and opposite, on the left, Gaylord’s restaurant. Both were imbued with tradition and hospitality, lubricated with endless supplies of servants, who laughed and listened, and became my friends.

I moved up into a rooftop room aired by breezes rolling off the Arabian Sea. The bathroom had no bath or shower, so the television — which did not work — was thrown in free of charge. By now I had been in Mumbai long enough for the arrangement to seem perfectly natural.

The hotel ran on peculiar lines. I would go down to use the shower on the floor below, and return to find a troop of six or more miniature, khaki-shorted servants pilfering from my possessions. Some had dusters, others mops, or even only decorative smiles.

A managerial lady, standing five foot five, towered above them as she called out constant instructions in Hindi. Pulling the towel tighter to my waist, I would point to the door. The army of khaki uniforms and servile giggles then ambled out. I would go back into the bathless bathroom, to find four more lurking with the last-stand resistance of knobbly-kneed schoolboys, caught hiding behind the bicycle sheds during lessons. They looked sheepish and bowed themselves out.

* * *

As the primitive elevator wound down from the fifth floor, I was saluted by the gentleman with a silver mustache and green beret who never left the elevator. Gradually, with cables grinding up above us, we were lowered down the shaft. In a brief and jolty examination of the walls which enclosed us, I noticed a small sign, which read:

Servants are not allowed to make use of the elevator unless accompanied by children.

The monsoon had come. In the depths of the umbrella bazaar I spent much of the afternoon negotiating to buy an umbrella. The bazaar was knee-deep in mud. A man, squatting on the gutter’s edge, juggled a set of cobweb spokes. He was a master craftsman who could reconstruct a delicate framework, like the skeleton of some primeval creature, to shield one from the hardest monsoon waters. Rebuilt and modified contraptions, beautifully restored, were sold as new. Some must have been upwards of a hundred years old. An antique umbrella was placed in my palms and I inspected it like a new revolver, looking down the barrel in respect for such workmanship. We haggled for what seemed like hours and, having marched off in pretended indignation more than once, I threw down some notes and left protected.

The Chateau Windsor, by almost alarming contrast with where I had been living, filled me with a deep sense of pride. I could now ring my parents’ friends without being ashamed of my lodgings. An operator with four days’ growth of beard grinned conspiratorially at me and pointed to an antique Bakelite telephone. I called an old friend of my mother’s who lived nearby. The line was triple-crossed and punctuated by a loud buzzing. My words echoed as if off a satellite. “Hallooo!” came a distant voice. I yelled into the mouthpiece with some difficulty, as it was fixed at stomach level to the wall. My mother’s friend answered and I managed to shout my address before we were cut off. An hour passed and a telegram was handed to me: an invitation to dine by the lady to whom I had spoken.

In the depths of Colaba Market, far from the tourist cameras and souvenir shops, vegetables and videos were sold in heaps. All night, Xerox stalls guarded by blinking assistants clattered and flashed, in the mysterious practice of copying stacks of books.

It was in this darkness that I found V.V. Gupta: the master tailor. He was to become a contact and friend in my hardest hours. His shop was sandwiched precariously between another — which sold explosives mainly to small boys with evil, glinting eyes, and a stall vending fighting-kites of all shapes and colors to their sisters. I commissioned a shirt to be crafted in an indestructible beige sackcloth. Somehow the tailor had convinced me that this crude fabric was ideally suited, in color and quality, to my sunburnt skin. The shirt would be ready the next afternoon.

One day seemed to melt into the next, a symptom that perhaps I, too, was falling victim to Mumbai’s general lethargy. Time passed, and I was aware of neglecting my treasure-seeking goals. Instead, I felt compelled to people-watch for hours on end — and was particularly enthraled by foreigners on their travels. The hours I invested lurking at the Leopold Café set me on a course to study fellow travelers on my own adventures.

As I sat there, on the hard-backed chairs, I peered out onto Colaba’s bustle. Leopold’s was like an island cocooned in what seemed to be the last bastion of internationalism. Yet its clientele were there for their own enjoyment. They had come to India with highly selective vision to solve their own insecurities.

The summer rain fell continuously, washing away the past year’s filth until the streets sparkled. A herd of sacred cows had found their way to the Strand, bringing traffic to a standstill. Weaving through the centre of the drove, I made my way to the tailor’s shop. There I found V.V. Gupta sewing a scarlet polyester petticoat.

He held out a sackcloth shirt with double cuffs and a large label announcing “Fancy Tailors”, stitched prominently to the outside. I was so impressed that I placed an order for numerous pairs of boxer shorts which he assured me he would complete immediately. He and his wife then burst into laughter and said the “panties” would take a week. What I had not realized was that this order would expand into an ongoing obligation to keep this man supplied with work. I had become, in proper Indian fashion, his patron.

In order to make the relevant grassroot-level contacts, I realized the necessity of hiring an assistant, secretary and legman. I consulted V. V. Gupta who told me to return at midnight, for he knew just the man.

That night, shortly before the stroke of twelve, I waded down the waterlogged Strand. Its photocopiers flashed with robotic precision, like lighthouse beacons to guide the lost. Continuing into the darkness towards my nocturnal meeting — I fantasized about the paragon of a secretary who, like a bloodhound in pursuit, would lead me straight to treasure.

V. V. Gupta ushered me into his shop, on tiptoes, as if to a Masonic ritual of the thirty-third degree. He poked his head around the street making sure that the explosives man and the kite vendor had retired. They had, and I entered the cluttered shop.

It was amongst piles of uncut sackcloth that I first saw Prideep. He sat, thin and swarthy, in a bundle in one corner, shadows from a hurricane-lamp playing about his imp-like face. This, then, was the man who was to take me to great riches. We were formally introduced. Prideep held out a wrinkled hand with inch-long fingernails painted red. Then he smirked and giggled for no reason, and looked deeply into the pupils of my eyes.

An eager, gap-filled mouth, with broken teeth, opened. I examined the remarkable dentistry of bridges, braces and crowns, which reflected the lamplight.

I hired Prideep on the spot, agreeing to pay the enormous wage of 100 rupees, about £2, a day for his expertise — which Gupta guaranteed was worth every paisa. Suddenly I had a co-worker. To cement the alliance I presented my new assistant with a small notepad and a yellow and green Bic ballpen. He clawed them to his chest and grinned. I never saw the pad again.

It was perhaps put away, perhaps sold. But the pen was always present in his top shirt pocket: a symbol of his elevated state.

It was explained in subdued whispers that Prideep could not write, but had every intention of learning. So he would like to keep the writing equipment for the time being, if that was all right. I said that it was. Then I was politely advised that, although Prideep spoke no English, he had the capacity to learn, and would, of course, acquire this language during his service. I looked at V. V. Gupta in some alarm, while a pair of twinkling eyes shone, and Prideep waved and laughed, and cackled some more. I wondered whether his enthusiasm was from the knowledge that he was to be financially successful from now on, or through true eagerness for the job.

V. V. Gupta explained to Prideep exactly what he would need to do. Prideep nodded eagerly. We would begin the next morning.

The eggs benedict was runny at Gaylord’s. And incessant cups of coffee were poured with scientific precision from a conical flask into a china cup. After breakfast I strolled south to the promontory of Colaba to begin great things with Prideep.

Every early morning walk through the crowded streets revealed more of the hidden realities behind the clichés of Indian life. As I scattered coins at the lines of strategically-placed beggars, a white Indian-made Ambassador car pulled up. Three living torsos were unloaded: not an arm or a leg between them. They were dropped off each morning, and collected in the evening, by a pimp whose sideline they were; he fed them and took their earnings. They would roll back and forth under the sun and monsoon rain, singing in perfect harmony.

I would pass Churchgate Station, the main commuter artery to the city. It discharges millions of people whose broken shoes grind down the paan-splattered garbage into dust. Newspapers and pineapples are sold, and old men sit on the gutters performing their morning ablutions. Some people spit and clear their throats, others choke in the dust, combing back greasy black hair with long, waxed nails. Rows of dabba boxes are weaved through the chaos. Within their round tin walls were packed heavy lunches of curry and rice, mutton and chapaties. For, in India, a midday meal is more than a couple of crusty sandwiches wrapped in brown paper. Performing one of Mumbai’s miracles, the dabba-wallahs deliver hundreds of thousands of cooked lunches every day. Transported on bicycles, barrows, carts and on heads, the boxed lunches are collected from each office-worker’s own home every weekday. Like a secret society, with cryptic signals, words and secret routes, the dabba-wallahs manage, for a small fee, to convey each meal to its rightful owner without error in time for lunch.

I was becoming addicted to Mumbai. There was squalor and poverty, but I had begun to realize my good fortune and would never again forget it. To be healthy and well-clothed and to have even a few tattered rupee notes in one’s pocket, was a source of enormous satisfaction.

I passed tree-lined streets, a cricket ground and the curly, determinedly artistic facades which run down to the Arabian Sea. Wavy lettering announced names such as “Belvedere Court” and “Oval View”. All this had been once so very British.

Prideep was chewing on a stick when we met at the prearranged rendezvous. He politely offered the unchewed end to me. In such ways he was always courteous, though rather quiet, which was sometimes disconcerting. We began to communicate through signs. Soon, though, I was to find out that Indian sign language was different from that to which I was accustomed. I pretended to pull a dagger from my belt: thus suggesting that I wanted to see old Mughal daggers. V.V. Gupta had explained that this was one of my interests. Prideep nodded.

Things seemed to be going well. We set off at a brisk enough pace. Then a second problem manifested itself. Prideep insisted on walking behind me as a sign of his humility. This made matters very complicated, especially when he was supposed to be leading me somewhere. I tried to suggest that he might walk alongside me and not even in front. He would have none of it.

Twice I stepped on people’s toes and once tripped over a sleeping sacred cow, whilst turning to see which corner my assistant had taken. Prideep firmly refused to allow me to take taxis and, when I finally leapt into the back of one, he jumped on a bus and I had to follow it in the cab. All the time he assured me in sign language that we were getting closer to the treasure.

When the afternoon heat was at its worst and lines of dabba boxes were being pushed through the traffic on huge barrows, Prideep pointed to the ground. We had, it seemed, arrived. My heart began to pound at the idea of jewel-encrusted sword-hilts. I was ushered into a large white shop.

My loyal and wise assistant motioned for me to wait. Like a bloodhound he tracked down the manager who handed him a small parcel wrapped copiously in newspapers. Adrenalin coursed through my veins. I watched the papers being pulled apart. That was as far as the excitement went. Inside was a very large and very fat silvery trout. The scales were coming off. My lower jaw dropped at the complete misunderstanding. Prideep screwed up his eyes and smiled widely, expecting enormous praise. Turning on my heel, I decided that a translator was necessary.

V. V. Gupta was a worried man. As I sat in his shop with Prideep, long-faced characters with devilish looks would enter, go through a back door, and return, stuffing bundles — wrapped in coarse jute cloth — down their shirt-fronts. I pretended not to notice. V. V. Gupta rubbed his caloused palms across his face and moaned:

“How will I ever do it?”

“What are you so worried about?” I asked.

“I promised my two children that I would send them to Harvard to study; it’s very expensive you know.”

I did a double-take and looked around the shop. Did I hear right? The tailor brought out some prospectuses. I suspected that some devious deals were taking place on the premises. Surely a small-time Mumbai tailor was not earning the hundreds of thousands of dollars necessary for one Harvard education, let alone two?

However, we were here on different business. I had confided to him the difficulty of communicating with Prideep, and had been summoned to Gupta’s emporium.

V.V. Gupta lifted his face and whispered, “Are you ready to meet him?”

Osman was a Muslim and was six foot three. His features were unmistakably those of a Pashtun: deep penetrating eyes, a hawk-like nose and a solid square chin. A man of severe proportions, he was acutely refined — his manners were impeccable, his clothing neat and orderly and his fingernails carefully manicured. And he spoke fine English.

V.V. Gupta apologized profusely that Osman had been the best translator he could come up with at short notice. It was explained over tea that Osman had once worked at the United States Embassy in New Delhi. His position had been assistant janitor. Osman, whose voice was deep and warm, was to get equal wages to those of my illiterate secretary. My team was now a fully-fledged band.

I decided to take him and Prideep on a tour of the Prince of Wales Museum to see fine Mughal exhibits.

Built by the British in 1911 in an Indo-Saracenic style, with domes and galleries in white mosaic, the museum was, curiously, the only place in Mumbai I ever saw gardeners who were happy.

I stood entranced in front of cases containing Mughal armor, and ruby-encrusted swords with jade hilts. Osman reported that Prideep understood now what I was looking for. But this comprehension seemed to cause him to slouch and fall into a decline. He was very quiet. I pointed to the hand-written calligraphic Korans and miniature paintings of the emperors Shah Jahan and Akbar, Babur and Arungzeb. A lump came to my throat from seeing such beauty after the barbarisms of Mumbai.

When we emerged from the museum, Prideep looked nervous. I told him and Osman to go and find hungry people who could secure such treasures discreetly from private vendors. Great discretion, I had been told, was necessary. This was because, while masses of valuables were still in the hands of now-impoverished aristocratic families, everyone knew everything in India, and to sell things openly meant irredeemable loss of face. It was the hungry people, motivated by need, who would be our key, acting as go-betweens. My assistants cackled in unison. Prideep mouthed the word hungree and they ran off into the evening sunlight.

At the Chateau Windsor, the elevator operator saluted and I was moved into a smaller, cheaper, room which overlooked the kitchen on one side and the main lavatory on the other. Having become the sponsor of so many citizens of Mumbai, and hence burdened by heavy expenses, I felt that more modest accommodation was in order. I inspected a neat sign pinned firmly to the north wall of my new room. It read:

Please inform management when your room is on fire.

Making a mental note, I flopped down on my bed, exhausted by the day’s events.

Later on, I pressed a handkerchief tightly over my nose and mouth on the way back from watching a thriller at the Regal Cinema. Charles Bronson was a big star in Mumbai: posters bore his name and image high above the defiled walls. I walked down Mereweather Road where the sewers were always being unblocked. Dead dog carcasses and all kinds of garbage were fished up and placed neatly in the gutters. There they continued to decompose — waiting for the right person with a need for a bundle of rotting rags or a dog’s carcase to come along, scoop it up, and carry it off with childish glee. In India everything has a use and a value. Torn brown cloth sacks are hauled around from morning till dusk by small boys and old men alike. Some collectors are specialists in maize cobs perhaps, or old tin cans. It sometimes takes a while for the searcher to run down his quarry.

Osman sat in the front passenger seat of the Indian-made Pal taxi. As we wound up Marine Drive, the neon signs of V.I.P. Luggage and Air India flashed on and off. Mumbai has a pinkish light which is reflected off the sea as the black polluted waves lap on the shore.

A gang of children were washing amongst broken glass and coconut husks, amid the hoots of rush-hour traffic. Prideep was cross that I was taking a taxi. He asked Osman to explain that he would have preferred me to give him the money and take a bus. Osman was cautious as to what he translated, always eager to ensure that I was happy.

The car turned inwards after Chowpatty Beach as if we were driving to Kemp’s Corner. But our destination that morning was the infamous Chor Bazaar: the place where the European antiques change hands. Now with an assistant and interpreter, I felt confident enough to make a direct onslaught on the source of the treasure.

The taxi driver handed me the meter conversion card as usual. The meters in Mumbai’s taxis are so out-dated that the passenger is obliged to work out the fare that is due, by using a number-filled conversion sheet. As I calculated, the meter ticked and the fare increased. To sit in a stationary taxi was more expensive than if it were moving. The driver said he had no change — a ploy hoping that I would leave the extra money. He sucked harder on his lump of paan, and looked towards the smoldering shrine, dedicated to Ganesh, which sat on the dashboard. I handed over a ten-rupee note and slammed the heavy steel door behind me.

The early activity of Mutton Street is overwhelming. Ten million people live in Mumbai and many of them live around Crawford Market and the Chor Bazaar. Some sleep in gutters, some under the stars.

Ragged tents bulged as the sleeping awoke and started another day foraging for food. Stray dogs chewed on bits of stringy flesh and licked newspapers which had once held food. Mothers breast-fed babies and carefully de-loused their children, who sat obediently still. This fastidiousness always surprised me, for the women practised the ritual even in the most sordid surroundings.

The sounds of ablutions and throat-clearing rivalled those of the traffic. A taxi driver climbed into his machine, propped the horn full on with a piece of stick, and careered into the chaotic bumper race ahead. Ox-carts moved with enormous determination, hauling loads of sugar-cane into the mayhem.

We took tea at the Friendly Guest Tea House, where the owner rubbed his greasy hands together and poured glasses of chai slow-boiled all night with milk. The tea was delicious and sweet. Prideep had a toothache and could not drink. Suspecting he had more than one cavity, I wondered how one mouth could be afflicted with such troubled dentistry. He turned a profile to me and looked through the corners of his almond eyes. He knew I was thinking about him. I still hoped that he would prove himself to be a silent paragon like Jeeves.

Flies were swept out with the dust as Osman translated from the daily paper. He loved to talk and took great advantage of the fact that Prideep spoke no English. The two jockeyed for my praise and attention. They hated each other.

Each street corner was loaded heavily with characters who loitered intently. Some were wrapped in blankets, others in lungis, all with thick beards, awaiting the morning’s business. These were characters of the underworld. Covered in hideous scars and armed with rusty knives: they were ruthless men who stole to order. But there was a code of honour among them.

Prideep, who was supposed to be the expert middleman between them and me, was terrified. But Osman was more roused than ever. He lumbered up to a man standing close to seven foot, a Pashtun with a long hennaed beard, and hugged him. The bear hug turned into a spar and the two men wrestled for a moment. Then Osman, who was incredibly strong, dropped his crushed opponent and walked back to me.

“What ever did you do that for?” I stuttered in surprise.

“Have to show your domination over these people or they’ll rob you of every paisa you”ve got.”

We pressed deeper into the bazaar. It stretched for miles and each line of shops was more diverse than the last. My eyes grew wider and wider as I saw things which might normally be displayed in country homes in Dorset or the Cotswolds.

Giant Regency fireplaces, terracotta vases, gramophones with fluted brass trumpets, were all around. Belgian crystal chandeliers in blue and pink, five foot across, were stacked up beside oak roll-top writing bureaux, Louis XIV dining chairs, and card tables with faded green baize.

One stall specialised in silver trophies — some for cricket, others for croquet and lawn tennis — all inscribed with the names of generations of English public schoolboys. Cameras complete with bellows, and sixteen millimetre projectors were hidden far inside dark, treasure trove rooms.

Osman clutched an armful of Victorian teddy bears and laughed as he squeezed their necks. Prideep held up an oil painting on a canvas wider than he, depicting a nymph-like nude.

We hurried from stall to stall with the ferment of gold-prospectors at the Klondike. These were all relics of the old days when the British Raj held the Indian sub-continent in its grip, a time when expatriates were allowed to bring their belongings to the far-flung reaches of the Empire, all expenses paid by the omnipotent Raj.

Everything had a price. Many of the items were very much more expensive than they would have been in Europe. The shop owners were consumed with a passionate greed, the type of which I have only ever seen in India. You could feel it emanate from them, almost like a physical force. They ardently believed that everything — from the greatest battered canvas to the most trivial toy car — was worth a fortune.

A foreigner, even with a humble entourage such as mine, picking his way down the narrow streets, is quoted exorbitant prices. Realising this, I decided to send Osman back another time to spend an afternoon haggling for blue crystal and tin plate.

Bicycle bells rang out and wheels of all sizes collided and crossed. Green parrots strung up by their ankles were on sale for fifty rupees. They squawked in protest and wriggled their toes like amateur escapologists. Carts laden with white collarless shirts were paraded about: the wheels slipping in the sewage, to shouts of “Panch Rupia, Panch Rupia!” (Five Rupees, Five Rupees!).

Breathing deeply in, I strode onward along a makeshift path, my eyes and nose streaming from the sulfur pollution and stench of poverty. I thought back to duty-free airport lounges with their luxurious chairs and bottles of yellow perfume; it seemed to be the most glorious contrast to Mutton Street’s secret world.

The sound of fog-horns grew louder and, I expected a monstrous junction of roads around the corner.

We turned and the golden sunlight blinded us, silhouetting men in turbans and sacred cows. This was the horn bazaar. Any device which could create a hideous noise was here sold or exchanged. Deafening instruments for overland trucks were being prized from their housings and re-fixed to mopeds. In Mumbai, it is far more important to have a sturdy horn than a sound engine.

Osman ambled off and tormented an old toothless wretch for a moment. He returned with a lump of metal wrapped in the Times of India, held out at arm’s length like a grenade about to explode. Grasping it with some apprehension, I pulled the sheets apart.

Osman looked away as I held up an antique bicycle horn. It was a touching gift which made me look with growing admiration at this man who had so soon become more than just a translator. He squeezed the rubber bulb between thumb and forefinger with the dainty movement he might use to pick up a teacup in politer society. The demonstration, his expression said, was just in case I should be unfamiliar with the device. “Now, Sahib, you too are like a bus,” he stammered, before blushing.

1 wondered what these words meant, then understood. In Mumbai, all the disintegrating red buses (modeled on those in London), have bicycle horns instead of electric instruments. Before the waist-high wheels run over you, you hear a muffled toot. I thanked Osman warmly which only made Prideep scowl harder and longer than before.

* * *

My room at the Chateau Windsor was being spring-cleaned. The commanding lady with the clipboard marched up and down the cell-like box, small though it was, as if it were an army training camp. I decided to take a shower and leave them to it. After spending the day in the Chor Bazaar there is no feeling more invigorating than a freezing Chateau Windsor shower.

The bathroom door was open. An old lady was brushing her teeth inside. She was using my toothbrush. It was yellow and had my initials carved on the shaft. Her teeth had seen better days, only a few still clung in the rubbery gums. She looked thrilled as she poked the head with inexperience around the blackened surfaces.

Then, leaning over the basin, she spat out a mouthful of blood, hooting with pain. The once-white bristles were stained red and parted at right angles down the middle: the result of gigantic pressure. I guessed immediately what had happened. What always happened. The contents of my desk were frequently swept into the garbage bin beneath and eagerly carried off. A process of selective sweeping ensured a wonderful sellable bounty. The servants had the edge because of an incident which had occurred before. I had attempted to throw away a red disposable razor. It did not seem to matter which bin I placed it in, for as if by magic it would always reappear on my bed. Lining up as many figures dressed in khaki shorts as I could find, I had told them that the contents of the garbage bin could be theirs. I thought that bringing in a factor of personal benefit might solve the problem. How wrong I was.

THREE

Too-Feee and Eunuchs

Wrathful then became the Great God,

Called his messenger Narayan,

Said he, “Bring these Gonds before me —

Outcast wretches! How their stink has

Spread o’er my Dewalgiri.”

A dwarf was walking towards me down Veer Nariman Road. Each of his legs had been amputated at the same height below the knee and the stumps moved quickly on thick leather pads. Somehow they resembled elephants’ feet. I wondered for a moment how it came about that both legs were cut off at an identical length. Then he was just another face that blended into the lines of heads which bobbed up and down as they moved away.

While waiting to cross the road behind the Regal Cinema, on the way to visit Mr. Wing Son — the Chinese shoemaker — a sign caught my eye:

Definitely no spitting of paan.

The announcement dripped in bright red saliva, which illuminated the letters. As I stood there, a figure approached me. Her hands piously raised, her gaping mouth revealing lines of ground-down molars. A saree draped across all six foot of the form. Thick black hair sprouted from her nostrils: it had to be a hijra, a eunuch. I pulled a folded calendar from my wallet. Indeed, it was Tuesday — the day Colaba is overrun by men dressed as women — who beg for money and give you luck as a reward for your charity.

Losing my cool, I began to run down Apollo Bunder, past Leopold’s and the mystic backpackers; past Wing Son, the Chinese shoemaker, and on.

The eunuchs saw my flight and chased after me: like hounds pursuing a fox. They howled and whooped and pushed back locks of twisted black hair in exultation. Some tripped in their sarees, others pulled them up most ungracefully to reveal knobbly knees. In Mereweather Road I rested on some steps for a moment, regaining my breath. Closing my eyes, I wiped the sweat from my face. There was a tugging at my sleeve. I started up, terrified that the army of castrated men were upon me... a turbulent thought indeed. A crouched figure bent over me and croaked, “Vould you like ears cleaned, Sahib? Ek rupia (One rupee).”

As he thrust a pair of tweezers — with a plug of cotton wool on the end — towards me, I ran off yelping like a wounded mongrel. To them, I realized, I must have seemed quite mad: to me, they were the insane ones. What was most unnerving was the thought, “If I stay here long enough, will I become like them?”

* * *

My aunt had airmailed me a bag of toffees from London. They were black and had already begun to melt at the American Express office. I chewed on a lump as I walked past the used clothes stalls and paan sellers, on the way to Chateau Windsor. Memories of leaking packages arriving at my boarding school came to mind. No one else had aunts who even entertained the thought of sending large quantities of pear and apple curry second class through the post. Consequently, they had not been reprimanded for essays like mine: “My Eccentric Aunt”. My work was branded as a fantasy, though it contained nothing untrue.

Back at the Chateau Windsor there was a rat-like scratching at the door of my room. Vinod, the youngest servant, came in with a soda water. He placed it next to the bag of toffees. Then he watched me read. I was used to being observed reading. Sometimes the room would fill like a railway station at rush hour and I would be expected to cure widespread boredom. Some visitors were complete strangers. This, and their sheer numbers, made me suspect at times that tickets to watch me potter about my room were touted in the corridors when my back was turned.

Vinod edged towards the door but, with one foot still inside, he pointed to the molten lumps of goo in protective plastic:

“Chocolate, Sahib?” He grinned, hoping that I would understand the question.

“They are treacle toffees, from London,” I replied.

“Too-feee?” Something more wonderful than chocolate perhaps.

I handed out a couple of the big black lumps, grease running through my fingers. Vinod skipped off to torment the others.

Later I went to the bathroom to try out my new toothbrush. The locally-made instrument was more suited to painting emulsion over large surfaces, than cleaning the inner reaches of one’s mouth. A row of bristles two inches long grated against my gums.

A line of blood ran across the bathroom floor. Not the kind of blood that drips from a cut finger — but lashings of it, as if from a mortal wound. Some of the servants were mopping at the red pools. They looked very worried. When asked what had happened none would say. Only when I questioned harder, one perked forward and broke the silence:

“Sahib, Vinod... his teeth pulled from mouth with too-feee.”

The others shuffled backwards as if I was the perpetrator of some atrocity, guilty of supplying a deadly device to pull teeth from the innocent. Another pushed forward and stuttered, “Vee vere not going to tell you, Sahib.”

Vinod appeared, looking as if he had just axed three men to death. He unclenched a fist to reveal one canine and one incisor. Then he smiled weakly with chess-board gums, and whispered, “Too-feee.”

Noises of the night mingled in the darkness. Hindu chants ran down Apollo Bunder with slow melody. A taxi with no lights swerved to miss another. It all seemed like just another Mumbai night.

At eight P.M. my Sikh taxi driver lunged at high speed past Chowpatty Beach, accelerating with the intrepidity of a kamikaze pilot. The black cab missed meshing with a Mercedes by an inch, as the driver’s turbaned head rocked with laughter.

My parents’ friends had invited me as their guest to a neighbor’s party. The Mumbai socialite crowd would all be there. Since my arrival in India, I had not been accustomed to mixing with the well-to-do.

The party was in a studio flat. The ceiling had been adorned with a sprawling mural by one of the daughters who was artistically inclined. I was taken into the crowded room and introduced to ministers and dancers, producers and businessmen. They looked me up and down and stared with evident and intense distaste at my pleated coat. It had been pressed by V.V. Gupta, and now resembled a white tennis skirt. I chatted to an English lady who was interested in Afghanistan. Before I was led off to meet some people of importance, she pressed a piece of paper into my palm. Later I read it. The name of a laundry screamed out at me, in block letters.

My gaze strayed to the balcony. There in the moonlight was the most perfect form I had ever seen. She stood tall above most of the guests with the grace of a Nubian warrior, and the poise of a goddess. A solid silver clasp encircled her upper arm. I had to meet her.

Across the room sat a man in Tai Chi shoes and a beret. Feet dodged his crossed legs, which extended into the middle of the floor, but he paid no attention to them. A gaggle of admiring girls clustered around him; he lectured softly, thrilled to have such a glamorous audience. I wandered over and we began to talk.

“Hey man, let me tell you about this place,” he said.

“Please do, I’m new around here.”

He was the first one to avoid questions about my origin, quest, and my coat’s crumpled state. His name was Blake... “D” Blake. A musician of classical persuasion, he had left his native California to travel the world in search of a guru. It was here, after many years, that he had found that man.

The more we talked, the more questions I felt pressed to ask. I was intrigued that a man should leave his native land, then come to live in India, marry an Indian lady, which he had done: and study under a respected master in the suburbs of north Mumbai.

A Fulbright scholarship supplied the means to fund Blake’s vital research. Such financing fueled the relationship between pupil and teacher. Blake was devoted to completing a thesis of great magnitude. A topic whose title he imparted in whisper: The Application of the Electric Guitar in Hindustani Music.

Blake was detribalized — no longer completely American and not quite Indian. An upbringing in the 1960s had shown him many things and given him the basis for a roaming life. He kept repeating: “Yeah man, as long as you’re happy that’s all that counts.” Then he began to ramble on about my family, of which I had not spoken.

Riveted, I was eager for him to shed some light on the madness that was Mumbai. And, secretly I hoped he could advise about the young lady who had so captured my attention.

* * *

Time began to slip away increasingly quickly as I filled my days with routine matters. Coffee at Gaylord’s, tea at Leopold’s, checking mail and arranging my laundry, left little time for anything else. One afternoon, as a new batch of crumpled clientele slumped in Leopold’s, I was forced to share a table.

The man in the tasselled shoes flicked cigarette ash with a nervous — almost reflex — movement into the top of an empty bottle. His left hand was folded around a copy of E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India. Ah, I thought, the kind of traveler who likes to be immersed in the place. We crossed glances and both frowned at the Australians at the next table. They skulked behind a couple of torn sci-fi paperbacks. The young man at whose table I sat re-contorted his face as his eyes focused on Forster’s words once again.

Waiter number sixteen weaved back and forth, bringing endless cups of coffee to the man: who drank them black and in one gulp. After every second earthenware cup had been drained he would stride off to relieve himself. Two hours passed and we sat in silence throughout. Then I was caught reading at right angles the blurb on Forster’s genius: and the ice was broken.

Another Rothman cigarette began to smoke as a dulled Zippo clicked shut and was slid into the man’s shirt pocket. He introduced himself as Hugh Randolph Hamilton-Waite.

Hamilton-Waite had traveled widely. His father’s diplomatic rank had necessitated such upheaval. He lived in Paris; and moved about on his wicker-based chair with a definite delicacy. I drew backwards towards the window, keeping my distance, but at the same time was intrigued. I asked what he did.

“Nothing,” was the brief and disconcerting reply. Which left me grappling with a chap of perhaps thirty who had seen the world but seemed uncomfortable within it. He repeated many times: “I have been so terribly, terribly ill,” the voice deepening with dramatic emphasis.

I felt sorry for him, quite out of place in Mumbai, yet he somehow fitted into Leopold’s as everyone does. Making polite conversation, I declared that Gaylord’s was the only sensible place to dine in Mumbai, and across from it, the infamous Chateau Windsor.

Stretching out a hand for him to shake, he gripped it as an elderly aunt might do — clasping the fingers just short of the knuckles and holding on for a moment weakly. I left Hamilton-Waite to his coffee and duty-free Rothmans and wondered what his future might be.

Nights spent worrying over my two assistants, and their lack of success in finding treasure, had put my sleep-pattern off its usual orderly track. I had decided to go to a chemist to buy some sleeping tablets. The pharmacist held up a shimmering pack of Diazepam, explaining that a prescription was necessary from a doctor.

A moment later I was round the corner at the rubber stamp bazaar. There I commissioned a stamp to be designed and constructed. It was to read:

DR. TAHIR SHAH

PHYSICIAN & SURGEON TO THE KING.

An apprentice took my order and set to work immediately.

Flowers were cut out and placed around the words, somehow emphasising their authority. I left a twenty-rupee note and returned to the chemist, stamp in hand. He produced a sheet of paper and an inkpad at my request. Pressing the block down — it was certainly ornate — I wrote out a prescription for ten Diazepam.

“I am now a doctor,” I said audaciously.

There was no dispute. The stamp was my passport into the world of medicine.

As the chemist admired the fine workmanship that had created such a superior credential, he passed me a sheet of chalky-white pills. There had been no discussion how a layman could in twenty minutes not only become a doctor, but a surgeon too, and to The King. I was learning how to behave.

As I strolled back to Chateau Windsor, I remember my head spinning at the advantages of the system. Great things could be achieved, nothing could stop me now.

At ten forty-five P.M. there was a knock at my door. Vinod pulled me to the telephone in the hall. A voice crackled in the distance. It was the manager of Gaylord’s, who said that a gentleman was requesting my company and inviting me to dine. I went down to Gaylord’s.

Great activity surrounded one table on the veranda. Waiters were bobbing and weaving about. Some loitered, expecting instructions, and the manager poured from a bottle of Omar Khayyam, Indian-made champagne, wrapped in a towel. The table top had been covered with a gingham cloth, and beside it was stood the champagne bottle in a cooler.

Hamilton-Waite sat resplendent in a cravat and double-breasted coat. He sipped from a fluted glass with a degree of grace and, in his theatrical manner, he spoke of his travels. The manager circled the table like a shark awaiting its prey. He wanted to be introduced. I was worried that my reputation would be ruined and I would never be able to eat there again.

Hamilton-Waite spoke at length about his life as an ambassador’s son, and how his friends knew him as H.R.H. He removed his coat and I automatically drew my feet under my chair.

As before, he drank many cups of black coffee, this time diluted with imported brandy. Again he spoke of his mysterious illness. I plucked up courage and politely asked what exactly the condition had been. “It’s mental,” was the reply. He hated life and was useless for it, showing no understanding of my exhilaration for living. He was despondent. A man rich enough not to work, and poor enough in spirit to do nothing.

Hamilton-Waite left six hundred rupees, about twelve pounds sterling, as a tip — many weeks’ income in the eyes of millions of Indians. We moved out into the street to hail him a cab. Deformed bodies lay strewn across the sidewalk, huddled against railings in rags. Their absolute will and ardent determination to survive — the opposite of their supposed fatalism — contrasted with Hamilton-Waite’s lethargy. I felt both sympathy and condemnation for him. In his society such weakness and irresolution were sure to survive. It is an unjust world.

The concrete benches in the gardens of the Prince of Wales Museum were newly painted and very comfortable indeed. One Thursday afternoon, as I basked in the absolute humidity on bench number three, a tall man, with a pencil-line mustache and greased-back hair, sidled up. Tweaking the big toe on my right foot, he asked, “One rupee for a blind dwarf?”

“You don’t look blind to me,” I replied, noticing that the rather well-dressed man — who stood close to six foot —had a neatly furled newspaper under one arm.

“The rupee is for my blind brother,” said the giant, “he is a dwarf.”

“Go away and leave me alone!” I called, eager to be left to slumber on the cool white concrete. I shut my eyes firmly, but sensed that the chill shadow of the man had not yet moved on.

“Your sister Safia would want you to give me a rupee!” grunted the figure as I was dozing off again.

How did he know my sister’s name?

“I know other things,” continued the giant boldly as if reading my thoughts, “I know everything about you.”

The man opened his mouth and scraped his tongue. A newspaper editorial the week before had instructed the denizens of Mumbai to shun mind-readers. It had claimed that phenomenal feats of the mind, which were quite possible to genuine mystics and resulted from extensive meditation, were nothing more than a cheap stunt when carried out for money. Nevertheless, I was prepared to conduct my own investigation.

“All right, then tell me about myself!” I said.

“You were born on 16th November 1966,” began the giant firmly.

“Well, anyone could know that,” I snapped.

“You are allergic to shellfish and your family comes from Paghman in Afghanistan,” he continued.

“Go on, tell me more,” I said, intrigued by the man’s information.

“The second book you edited was called Cultural Research,” he continued... “Your blood group is O-negative, and you had your tonsils our last year.”

Fishing a single rupee coin from my pocket, I handed it to the giant.

“Take this for your trouble and now leave me in peace!”

But as I nuzzled back to sleep the deep voice came again.

“My brother has talents even more unusual than mine.”

“Ah,” I remembered, “the blind dwarf... give him the rupee and my greetings. Now if you will excuse me I really have to get back to sleep.”

But the giant was not ready to leave.

“He may have physical handicaps, but my brother’s mind can see through walls... his skills can turn your desires into reality... for he is a white swami.” The ease with which the sentence flowed from the giant’s mouth made me suspicious. I sensed that the routine had been acted out many times before. Indeed, perhaps many times that day alone.

Just what led me to seek the blind dwarfs guidance 1 do not know. But within minutes of hearing of his curious mental powers, I was bumping along in the back of a taxicab, bound for a rendezvous with the white swami.

In a suburb of a suburb in north Mumbai the taxi slid to a halt. It had become embedded in mud. The driver glanced at the photocopied map — which had been efficiently supplied by the slick clairvoyant — and pointed to a corrugated iron shack in the distance. A sign, nailed to the exterior of the building, advertized in several languages:

PALACE OF THE WHITE SWAMI:

Fortunes Told

Secrets Revealed

See Through Stone

Become Invisible

As I was about to rap on the door, it was swung open by an elderly woman who was wailing with grief. She left, and I entered the Palace of the White Swami.

The dusty wreck of a room was bisected by a shaft of bright sunlight which sliced through a hole in the roof. Sitting on a mattress, amid a clutter of peculiar medicinal odds and ends, was an apparently blind dwarf.

“Welcome!” he growled menacingly.

“Your brother said that you would tell me...” Cutting me off in mid-sentence, the dwarf said, “I know what you want to know.” He picked up a dark brown earthenware jar and held it out towards me at arm’s length. On the side was scrawled in white paint, 100 RUPEES PLEASE.

The jar was rattled imperiously. I dropped a fifty-rupee note into the container, hoping the blind dwarf would not notice the lesser sum. Without a word, the white swami waved the jar once again. And, when I had deposited a further fifty rupees, he prepared to solve my case.

First, a thread was drawn from the pile of a tattered gray rug. Dividing it in two with a long, blunt talwar — an Indian sword — the blind dwarf tied one half around my left wrist, and placed the second portion under the mattress on which we both now sat. Then, foraging about, he picked up a dry white bone — probably the thigh bone of a sheep or goat. A pinch of red powder, taken from a carved wooden box, was pressed onto the bone. And, as a cloud blocked the sunlight for a moment, the swami lit a stick of incense, and proceeded to wave it in circles around his head. As the trail of scent revolved rhythmically around him, the seer began to babble the sounds of a language which sounded extremely unusual to me.

The ritual continued for almost half an hour. The white swami, who moved through familiar motions, retrieved the gray thread from beneath the mattress, tying with it the remains of the incense to the thigh bone. An old toothbrush which had been brought out was used to scrub the palms of my hands with a little water from the kettle. I began to sense, from his expression and movements, that the dwarf was acting on autopilot.

But, just as I was about to announce my boredom, the ritual came to a sudden stop. The blind swami put away the toothbrush. Then, smoothing back his jet-black hair, he said, “I can only help you if the spirits would like you to be helped. They say that you do not deserve their time, and so I must now ask you to leave instantly and immediately!”

The blind dwarf turned away and began to fumble through a heap of bleached white animal bones, as if reverting to urgent business. Feeling rather despondent, and too unhappy even to demand the return of my hundred rupees, I slunk away.

I had feared from the start that my quest for antiques would not be an easy one to complete. But the new and unwelcome news, that the spirit world was now against me, had made the task harder to bear than ever.

Reeling from my experience with the mind-reader and his brother, the swami, I began to devote a great deal of time pondering their singular abilities. Most people I consulted thought my questions had no grounds. One man, who was hawking bath-towels stolen from the Oberoi Hotel, shook his head vigorously from side to side when I told him of the mind-reader’s talent. “Is that all he could do?” he asked in disappointment.

Only when I had quizzed several dozen people, did I get an answer which seemed satisfactory. A street-barber, squatting outside Churchgate Station, was only too delighted to discuss the matter while shaving an elderly client’s head. As he moved the cut-throat razor over the stubble, he explained: “You must understand something. These mind-readers and swami types are very clever folk. For weeks they study their prey, learning all about them and tracking their movements. They hire researchers — even sometimes engaging spies abroad — and only when they believe that they know everything about you, they move in for the kill.”

Later, I emptied out my wallet to look for a telephone number. And, as I hunted through the mass of ticket stubs and scraps of crushed paper, I realized that it contained all the information revealed to me by the giant mind-reader. I recalled the continuous stream of people who invaded my room. Perhaps the street-barber had been right.

Wing Son, the Chinese shoemaker, sat on the bare floor of his shop and pulled stitches through an old black riding boot. 1 le removed a shoe from the display, and pointed out the quality as he did so. His features had been softened by time, and a pair of pupils — frosted with age — hid behind spectacles as thick as milk-bottle glass. His father had come to Mumbai as a refugee in the 1920s from Canton, setting up business in the same shop.

Wing ran his fingers over the wooden last for a lady’s shoe.

“My father loved this one,” he said squinting with magnified eyes. “You just can’t get them any more; there have been problems in Agra.”

Wing Son seemed to be a man who understood how the city worked. Himself an immigrant to Mumbai, he might, I thought, have a tip or two for a treasure-seeker such as myself. I explained what I was searching for. He glanced around his shop: taking in the old tattered lasts, the bundles of thread, and the heap of worn-out shoes he was to repair.

“If I knew where a great treasure was,” he said shrewdly, “would you expect me to be working here day in, day out, as I do?”

“Well do you have any advice to give me?”

Wing Son thought for a moment.

“If you want to find fantastic riches,” he said in a silky voice, “you will need a pair of Chinese shoes.”

So, taking Wing Son’s advice, I placed an order for two pairs of brogues, one black and the other in brown suede. A piece of string with inches marked in ballpoint pen was slid around the arches of my feet. Wing Son read off the scale in Cantonese and noted numbers in the order book. His eyes glazed over as he spoke with slow dignity.

“I have people all over world who come to me,” he said. “They always remember Wing Son.”

* * *

There were problems moving around the city at night. For a fortune in notes of several currencies was strapped tightly to my waist. After weeks of flattering high officials, and coaxing their servile deputies, I managed to open a bank account. First, I had chosen a backstreet bank in Colaba. The director of new accounts was so overjoyed to have a customer with cash that he treated me to a slap-up lunch.

We chewed at chicken bones in his office and wiped the grease on figure-covered sheets of paper. It was all very satisfactory. I thought it a good moment to tackle the question of a safe deposit box in the vault. Could I have one? Certainly, of course I could. Stamps with crests and tigers’ heads were dug out of drawers and licked. They covered my signature which had been etched into quadruplicate sheets.

“Can I deposit the money in the box this afternoon?”

“It might be a little longer than that,” was the vague reply.

“Could I see your vault?”

I expected to be led to an underground strong-room. The director clapped his hands and a stooping accountant beckoned me to follow. He walked around chairs and desks taking a distinctly indirect route. Then he stopped in front of a filing cabinet and hovered with unease.

The bottom drawer was missing and a dabba box had been stowed in its place. The smell of curry and lentils wafted upwards. I weaved my way back across the room around the stacks of papers and waiting regulars.

“Wonderful!” I exclaimed nervously. “Would you expect that I could get a box tomorrow?.”

“Perhaps,” said the director as he sucked at the ball joint of a chicken’s leg.

“What exactly does the availability depend upon?” I was determined to get fundamental answers to basic questions, and cut through the layers of uncertainty.

“It all depends if someone dies.”

I slid a fifty-rupee note — known throughout India as Inkpot Money — under the desk blotter and pretended to tie my shoelace. I could just see a hand digging for the note from the other side of the desk. It foraged with mole-like experience. Then I directed a simple question, “In your estimation, is a client likely to pass away today, Sir?”

“Positively if not certainly!” were his words, his head wobbling from one side to the other as he spoke.

But my efforts had been in vain. The manager of the branch had heard that a foreigner was trying to keep his money within his establishment. He drew a deep unbribable breath and boomed from his office:

“There are no provisions for such a situation to exist. You must close your account immediately!”

I was more demoralized than ever. Prideep and Osman insisted on hanging around me like flies around butter. They just wanted, following true eastern tradition, to make me happy. Osman began to tell jokes. The punchlines were obscured by indirect and terrible translating. Even Prideep frequently fell to the ground, cackling with hideous laughter.

I was getting a little nervous that both assistants might become reconciled and unite against me: was a possible mutiny underway?

I began to track down a vault with lockers to rent. Osman had a plan. He had a distant cousin who worked at a bank near Akbarally’s Department Store. The relative cleaned all the offices and would be able secretly to pencil in an appointment for me with the manager. It seemed a cunning ruse and I sent Osman off to contact the cousin. Alas, it turned out that the man had been laid off because of restructuring and decorations.

I was inspired by Osman nonetheless. Handing Prideep a tie, I swung my pleated coat over my shoulders with the aplomb of a ring-master. With Osman towering on my left and Prideep scurrying like a mouse to keep up on the right, we stormed into the building and I strode into the manager’s office — pretending to be an old friend.

My assistants waited outside the door with crossed arms and straight backs. I had told them to look intimidating. Osman pulled faces and showed his teeth. The manager greeted me so warmly that I thought for a moment that we had met before. He presented me with six forms to complete and promised me a box in the strong-room in one week’s time.

By then a shining new key had been cut for box number 88. It was passed to me in a small green envelope and I turned it in the lock for the first time. There is nothing so satisfyingly perfect as the click of a well-fitting key in a steel lock.

The vault was the most idyllic place in Mumbai. There was a certain smell of documents and industrial detergent. In its cool and dehumidified atmosphere I felt secure and hidden from the world.

Prideep and Osman became used to finding me in the vault where I would sit for hours and read or sleep. In London one might look upon someone who habitually snoozes against the back wall of a steel-lined vault as eccentric. In Mumbai it seemed a perfectly normal way to behave. The bankers were delighted that I made such complete use of their facilities.

On one such day I was taking a nap in front of my locker. There was a thumping of feet and Osman bounded into the strong-room. His cries echoed about the chamber like those around a tomb.

“He wants to meet you! He wants to meet you!”

I resented being woken so suddenly.

“What are you on about, Osman? Who wants to meet me?”

“The Dervish does.”

FOUR

Send the Fool Another Mile

Some took sticks and some took stones,

Some took clods, and off they scurried

After Warche, King of Squirrels,

Hip-cloths streaming out behind them.

Lines of black taxicabs with yellow roofs waited opposite the Opera House. Each driver had turned his engine off and was jamming down his horn in the hope that it might clear the way. An electric bugle sound radiated from under the bonnet of our taxi. The driver had just been to the horn bazaar and picked up the latest little number in public harassment.

The Opera building must once have been a wonderful sight. I wound down my window to take a better look. A hand brushed across my face and poked about inside the taxi. With no fingers, just concave stumps, it was attached to a blind baba, led by a young lad. It is common to see old men with advanced eye conditions being led about. The couples have a symbiotic relationship, each compensating for the other’s weakness. Before I had a chance to produce a coin, the blockage cleared and we sped on towards Foras Road and our appointment with the Dervish.

Foras Road has a sordid reputation. It is the red light area of Mumbai. The taxi driver had chortled when Osman, Prideep and I leapt in and told him to hurry. Although it was still early morning there was enormous activity around the lodging houses.

Children carried pots on their heads, and water sloshed over the sides. A two-year-old would scrub at a baby’s back, and her sister would, in turn, pour buckets of brown water over her. Old crones sat in doorways, while their daughters were pushed out to earn money. It is intriguing that a society which is very covert with sexuality should be so straightforward about prostitution.

Leaving the taxi, we stumbled deeper into the filth and I felt ashamed for complaining about my life and conditions. A boy had fashioned a blade of sorts from a tin can’s edge. He was sawing at the horn of a dead goat which seemed to have been killed by a passing vehicle. The boy screwed up his face with effort and began to jump on the horn, trying to make it snap.

The community existed by selling reused goods. All the plastic bottles and cardboard boxes from uptown homes served new purposes. On Foras Road it did not matter what something had been, only what it could be used for now.

Pimps surrounded us and offered us girls. “You want a young one, real pretty?” Osman was getting very agitated and I was nervous he would attack the next pimp who bothered him. A child of about twelve called to Prideep, her face had been bleached and was white as snow. But her neck and hands were dark brown, and they moved from side to side hoping to coax Prideep to join her.

Osman had been given orders that we were to contact the Dervish through the manager of the underground bar somewhere in the locality. We walked up and down asking all types of people where exactly the bar was hidden. Some pointed left and others shook their heads dolefully. Did it mean they did not know, or that our quest was dangerous?

Osman plucked up a shoeless lad, and dropped him onto his shoulders. Squinting with Nepalese almond eyes, the boy had assured us he could show the way to the bar. He laughed so loudly at Osman’s jokes that his face seemed to split in two. Steps led down from the street into a subterranean cavern. We descended. Girls with elaborate costumes and ankle bells danced to the tune of a sitar with the grace of ancient styles. Prideep was happy and began to twitch. He always twitched when he was happy. Yet I was nervous of the revolving red lights and anxious for the impending rendezvous.

A waiter took our orders and said the middleman would be along shortly. An hour passed. Another hour passed. I was getting tired of the dancing.

Just as I was about to storm off, a hunchback with a shaven head appeared, and told me to follow him. My colleagues would not be allowed to meet the Dervish, but they could drink tea with his guards.

We moved through alleys and down passages between kiosks where clients were already being entertained. My heart was thumping and I must have looked worried. Osman put a hand on my shoulder and smiled as I turned back to see his expression.

In one alley, which was darker than the rest, a door within a door opened. We entered a courtyard and I was led away from Osman and Prideep.

Guards loitered, toying with the triggers of Chinese-made Kalashnikovs. I tried to look serious and not as frightened as the situation warranted. A glass of tea was poured and passed to me. Grains of cardamom settled down at the bottom. Some sultanas — mixed with pine kernels — were placed next to my right hand: in Afghanistan known as kishmish. Who was the Dervish? For cardamom tea is also a favoured drink in Afghanistan.

I waited. Then the door swung open and a huge figure approached me with outstretched arms. Everything about him was big. His strides were long and full, and his limbs seemed double the size of those of any normal man.

My fingers were crushed in his grasp, and it was as if I were being greeted by my oldest friend.

“How kind of you to find me here. I am Yusufjahan. Some call me the Dervish.”

He spoke with slow deliberation in very good English, in an unusual, courteous voice which somehow made one feel warm and distinguished. A thick black beard reached to the second button of his shirt. He was dressed in camouflage army fatigues. A straight-bladed dagger — a Khyber knife with a bone handle — poked from just beneath his belt. The instrument and the man were most definitely from the wild lands of the Hindu Kush. What was an Afghan doing here in India?

Choosing my words carefully, I addressed him, “Aga, forgive me,” I said, “but you seem to be a man from the north-west of this land, perhaps from the country of my own ancestors: Afghanistan?”

The Dervish smiled with pursed lips and nodded as if I had answered a puzzle and pleased him.

“I am from Jalalabad,” he said. “I heard that Tahir Shah was looking to buy certain items in Mumbai, the name sounded Afghan and so I sent to meet you. But Shah in our country is a title, what is the name of your family?”

“We are of the Hashimite family. We come from Paghman. Alas, because of the war I have been unable to live in Afghanistan. I was educated in the West and have lived there most of my life.”

“You must be proud of your homeland, then it will be proud to have you as a son,” began the Dervish. “I left Jalalabad when the KHAD, Afghan secret police, offered a reward for my arrest. I had wanted to journey south for many years, and so made for India with some of my men to live amongst these Hindus. With the end of the war in our country, and the end of KHAD, we will soon go home!

“I am like the fat which never mixes with the tea... our customs and society can never be reconciled with those of India. I had hoped to come here and teach them to be like us. Now I realize that they are happy in their ignorance. You can put a fleece on the back of a wolf but it will never take root.”

Though I felt a kinship with the Dervish, I decided to cut through the pleasantries to see what assistance he could be to me. The Pashtun anticipated me.

“I hear that you are looking for old things. What old things do you need?”

I explained that I wanted to purchase both Indian and European antiques. But until now I had found little to satisfy my interests. The Dervish listened, nodding gently. He only began to speak when he was sure that I was drained of words.

“I shall see what I can do. Are you looking for any other products? I have many friends and could be of great help to you.”

What exactly was he aiming at?

I asked: “Is there anything in particular which you think might be of interest to me?”

He looked at me directly. Black eyes burned from his face and his Pashtun nose hooked at the air.

“I have a quantity of Dragunov sniper rifles. Seven point six two millimetre SVD. Capable of firing twenty rounds per minute, 830 metres a second. They are enormously accurate, and are in excellent condition. At this moment available to be exported.”

So, he was in the arms business...

“Well, Sir, for the moment it is not exactly what I had in mind. That is to say I don’t have orders for such merchandize.” I stuttered, my thoughts floundering.

“Well what about SA-7 Grail hand-held anti-aircraft missiles? Six mile range, highest Russian technology. I have a contact who is willing to supply.”

There was silence. The Dervish looked displeased and scratched his forehead with a set of manicured nails. I gulped my tea which was cold, and agreed to notify him if and when I was ever in need of a Grail Missile. He passed me a silver bowl of sugar-coated almonds. I praised their taste, he was pleased that I liked them.

“I have them sent from Kabul every month. It would be unbearable here without certain luxuries. You must see what else I brought with me to this heathen land.”

We both stood up and went to a stable, guarded by a lad who was armed to the teeth. Inside were two ponies.

“They are trained for Buz Kashi, the Afghan national sport,” said the Dervish, images of this most extraordinary game came to mind. It is the sport — said to be the forefather of modern polo — played on horseback by anything up to a thousand players. A stuffed goatskin is fought over by the mounted horsemen, with the aim of positioning it within a circle on the field. Fabled as being one of the roughest sports ever devised, the horses are at times trained to bite each other.

The Dervish shouted out, “Do you play?”

“I haven’t ridden for years, but next time you have a game perhaps I could watch.”

“You will be the guest of honour. If I have any information before then I shall send for you. Now I am sure your friends wonder where you are.”

We shook hands and I left the Dervish with his ponies.

Osman was relieved to see me. He had been trying to teach Prideep and the guards a game like bowls, only played with small pebbles which do not roll. I did not mention what the conversation had been about. Strangely they were not curious at all. We left by the door within a door and started to look for a taxi.

* * *

There was a need to talk to someone who might understand. I remembered the American, sitting advising people that day at the party: D. Blake. I telephoned him. His words mingled with other voices on the line, which crackled in dialects, spreading gossip and news from one mouth to the next.

“Yo man, just ride on up here and we”ll chew some fat. Tell the cab driver you want to go to King’s Circle. Get off at the Aurora Cinema. Ask for the American, this is a small neighborhood. See ya later.”

The drive was longer than I had expected. The first four taxi drivers I had asked refused to take me. One scowled and berated me in Punjabi — saying that after taking me once before he had declared war on all westerners. I was secretly chuffed to have acquired a reputation of sorts, even if a bad one. There must be five thousand taxis in the city: making the odds extremely small of getting the same one twice. Mumbai is like New York when it comes to taxicabs. The drivers have seen everything. They cannot be impressed. Sometimes I rambled on, telling tall tales of great fortunes. Not a single one even raised an eyebrow.

A tear-shaped bottle of imported iced tea sat on my lap. It jerked about as we swerved around blind bends, up and down hills. The jaunt seemed to encompass all the life that India has to offer, perhaps all that is human.

We sped on like the wind through suburbs and outskirts where wealth and indigence meet. Rows of lights twinkled in the twilight, as millions of feet dodged through chaos, and holy cows became traffic islands at their will.

The taxi stopped to let a group of oxen rearrange their form. A man with mutilated legs, riding on a primitive skateboard, grabbed hold of the rear bumper: he was propelled at what must have seemed the speed of light. His mouth burst open and snapped for air. The wheels were in danger of melting as they spun round and around. Then the board hit a bump. The form’s rags were swept back with aerodynamic precision: he curled into a ball and braced for the shock as he became airborne. I heard muffled cries and saw a pair of twig-like limbs revolving into the night.

Blake was training a flock of vultures to take chillies from his palm. They squawked like badly-behaved school children as they stomped about, refusing to respect his command.

“This is just the first step,” said Blake, enthused to have an audience on his rooftop. “They prefer chapaties, but I read that green parrots like chillies: they’re all birds. In the afternoon they sit around and preen each other. That’s when they love to hear my bongos.”

He beat out a tune on a hide-covered drum. The vultures flew off to a faraway tree. “They only like it in the afternoon, you understand.”

The roof was concealed behind numerous sets of railway tracks, across from a six-lane highway, and at the exact point above which three glide-paths crossed. Yet somehow there was silence.

We sat on silk cushions, sipping brownish tamarind juice and watching geckos watch us with an air of psychopathic derangement.

“When the vultures have been tamed I’m going get those gecko suckers to walk on a leash... just wait and see,” said Blake.

He would lurch forward with anticipation and passion at the telling of a story, and his bright green eyes would flash with his excitement for another tale.

Before settling in India, Blake had taken Priti, his wife, to West Africa, in search of a spiritual director. Whilst living there he had studied West African magical sciences. As we spoke, he brought up one of the most sinister areas of study, whose practices seemed bewildering.

The belief is known as Macumba. It was almost as if Blake had to fight himself to conceal what he had learnt. He seemed desperate to tell me of this curious art, yet when I began to question him, he forced me to drop the matter, which I did.

My interest in West African witchcraft had come long before with the letters of a friend, who had ultimately gone to study in Freetown, Sierra Leone. I intended to visit him and learn more of his efforts to learn about ju-ju. But Blake had mentioned another dark science — Macumba. Although African in origin, it was developed in Brazil. Known to have roots in many societies and cultures, it has taken symbols and rites from many nations and religious groups, including Hinduism.

Blake did not realize it, but in refusing to tell me more of what he knew, he had made me all the more determined to pursue the matter alone.

He could see I was thinking hard and he changed the subject:

“You’re too goofy to go into the antiques or any other business,” he exclaimed, sprawling back on a wicker sofa. “Man, people in this place will rip you for every paisa, they don’t care about long-term deals... they all want to make a buck. Just one buck and that’s fine for them. Look at all the corner stands from here to Churchgate: those guys are just treading water trying to survive. Okay, some of them have crawled this far and consider a news-stand as fulfilling a life’s ambition, but for most of those dudes there isn’t a hope in hell.

“Those bastards in the West go on moaning about their misfortune: I just want to show one of them North Mumbai! That’d keep them quiet and give them something to think about. Man, I don’t even like to go downtown to Churchgate; it’s full of snobs in taxi lines who couldn’t give a damn. They have their boots cleaned and never even take a look at the guy who’s doing the job.”

Blake had married Priti eight years before. The more time I spent in Mumbai, the more I came to realize what a famous wife he had. She was well known in advertising and graphic design.

“It wasn’t easy for my parents when I married Blake,” she said. “We met in the States; I was just traveling around. Then we went to West Africa where he was in search of his guru. Six months later I persuaded him to come here. I think my parents must be very special people to have accepted the situation so readily.”

I could see that they were very much in love. Blake and Priti were the first educated people I had met in Mumbai who were not trying to impress or astound me with their intelligence. Priti spoke demurely and behaved with great elegance.

“I’m really happy that we are living here,” she said: “I liked the States: it has advantages for a woman who wants to get serious work done. People accept it there, more than in Mumbai where so many men are in my field. I wouldn’t like to live in the States for a long time, though. Once, Blake’s oldest friend invited us to dinner. He cooked spaghetti, and when Blake began to help himself to more, it was pulled away. The host took it for himself! In the East a guest is treated as if he were God.

“Some Americans tend to be superficial. When I first went there I was visiting my brother in Kentucky. We were invited to a belly-dancing competition in a tiny town, in the middle of nowhere. I couldn’t believe my eyes: all these fat American women wrapped in sheets swaying their waists and shaking their heads from side to side. People kept giving me uneasy looks when I said my name. When I told one guy, “Hi, I’m Priti,” he rolled his eyes and said, “Do you really think so?”

I asked Blake who the beautiful girl had been at the party where we first met. She was, he explained, the daughter of the host that night. Was there any chance of meeting her? Blake chuckled and rubbed his fingers across each other and spoke.

“I can arrange to introduce you. But it will involve your becoming my pupil and doing all that I say. If you put your trust in me all will go well. To show that I am your guruji you must bring me a garland of flowers and a coconut. This is tradition.”

I agreed and the subject was dropped. It was decided that I should be introduced to Blake’s own guru. He was an aging teacher of music, the finest there was: a man who had grasped the very mechanics of Hindustani rhythm and hit. I picked up a six-inch spool tape, sitting next to the peanuts. Blake started up from his upside-down slump:

“Hey man, be careful! That’s weeks of work you’re holding right there.”

“Wow! What is it, some new sitar track or what?”

“No man, it’s for a great new Hindi movie. It’s atmos.””

“Atmos?”

“I recorded twenty-four hours of it. It’s fantastic aphony, man. I’m really happy with the way it turned out. You see, movie tracks must have atmos dubbed in, otherwise you just hear the projectors rolling.”

I knew that there was so much for me to learn, it seemed having Blake as a guru might help me understand more of India and its unconventional customs. We spoke some more, then I left D. Blake and Priti to tame the vultures on their rooftop in the middle of nowhere — which was somehow so central all the same.

* * *

“The Town Hall’s where you’ll find it.” Everyone assured me that this legendary site was the solution for everything and anything. Sometimes strangers stopped me in the street, muttering “Town Hall”, as if it were a secret curse or code they were desperate to pass on.

One day I was so curious to see what I had been missing that I jumped into a taxi.

“The Town Hall please,” I said.

“Round ball? Vat round ball?” came the confused reply in a heavy Gujarati accent.

“Not a round ball, but the Town Hall. It is very famous, everyone knows where it is.”

“Vere is it then, Sahib?”

“I don’t know, you’re the driver. You must have gone there before.”

“I vill take you to Haji Ali’s Tomb. It is nice place. You like it.”

“Are you crazy? If I wanted to go to Haji Ali’s Tomb or to a round ball I’d say so.”

The driver looked at me in the rear-view mirror, his face drawn with worry. He unwound the window and opened the door from the outside. There were shouts in Gujarati, Tamil and Punjabi. Everyone was baffled.

“It must be a big old building,” I chirped.

Then a bear-like driver laughed and pointed to the back seat of his cab. He, apparently, knew the way. There were problems because the first driver had made me pay the fare in advance so he could buy some petrol. Couldn’t the one who knew tell the other? No, that would never do, for the one who had the knowledge was suddenly unable to recollect the names of any of the roads. They tried to draw a map in the red dirt. The finger which was poking about unearthed a one-rupee coin. A brawl began as the drivers debated who owned the rupee. Snatching the coin, I decreed that anyone who could take me to the Town Hall would get one rupee extra. It was decided that they would take it in turns to drive me. But the bear of a man pushed me into the back of his cab and we screeched away.

I have a very bad sense of direction. But it seemed to me we were going out of the town. An hour passed and I was pretty sure the Town Hall was not twenty miles out of Mumbai.

“Where the hell are you going?” I screamed. “Stop right now and take me back to town.”

“No, vee going to Town Halls, Sahib... ek minute.”

I sat back, knowing that I would be the only casualty. Ideas ran through my mind. Perhaps the whole business of the Town Hall was one enormous joke. Like the village idiot who had a prankster’s note pinned to his back, reading “Send the fool another mile”, I was being passed from one to the next.

I could hear airplanes above the yellow-topped taxi. A large white sign depicted a bowing Maharaja — the symbol of Air India. Now I knew where we were. It was not the Town Hall but the airport.

“Why the hell did you spend an hour bringing me here? You’re an idiot!” The driver beamed with satisfaction.

“No, Sahib, I bring you to the Town Halls. Look there it is.”

A bony finger stretched out and I stared in astonishment at the control tower to which he was pointing with pride. He mumbled:

“I vas not understanding at the beginning. You see most people are not vanting to come here. That will be two hundred rupees, plus the bonus one rupees makes two hundred and one rupees, Sahib.”

I faced the fact that I had been beaten yet again.

Another week passed and I asked Prideep and Osman to try and find out if there was a Town Hall in Mumbai. They both thought, however, that it was totally logical to be taken to the control tower of an airport when asking for the main building of public affairs. I began to get to grips with the fact that it might be me who was going insane. I looked in a mirror at the Chateau Windsor to see if my eyeballs were twitching. Staring deeply at my reflection, I sensed an unfocused row of servants cackling behind. Then, I pulled Vinod to one side, and put it to him straight:

“Do you see me doing anything unusual? I want you to watch out and tell me. I can take it, don’t worry. Do you think I’m a bit mad?”

He looked squarely into my eyes — which had indeed begun to twitch and cross uncontrollably — they blinked and flashed and I felt like barking out loud. “Do I look cuckoo to you Vinod?”

“Sahib, you not a cloo-koo.”

“Not a raving lunatic: a screwball, an aberrating corybantic?!”

Vinod was openly nervous of my behavior. He shuffled his bare feet in circles and said comforting things:

“Sahib, you are not mad. You will know if you are when your ears turn green.”

I thanked Vinod for his words of support and went to my room, pondering what he had said. There I lay on the bed. My head spun and for the first time I succumbed to it. I was in a country where everyone was a little peculiar — a bit off the norm. It was one against nine hundred million: a population who will say exactly what they think you wish to hear. My only fear was for those in the mental hospitals. Were they, by my standards, completely sane?

Osman pounded at my door. We had a rule that he could only report when I gave the word. He stood straight-backed, fidgeting up and down like a schoolboy who needs permission to be excused.

“All right, what do you have to report?”

“We found it! We found it! The Town Hall! And I know why you could never find it.”

“Why? What are the secret directions?”

“You have to ask for Akbarally’s Departmental Store, of course! It’s right behind Akbarally’s.”

I leapt up. We would go at once.

A botanical garden led to the Town Hall and was home to what looked like a battlefield of bodies. Children crept about, picking the pockets of the sleeping and playing marbles in the afternoon heat. Akbarally’s was indeed the landmark. It was surprising that no one seemed to know where the fabled municipal building stands. The desire to tell all the cab drivers of my discovery gripped me. The one stipulation to be a taxi driver in Mumbai seems that you must have no knowledge of the city’s geography and layout.

A wrought-iron gate swung open. We crossed a street and climbed up a wide set of steps. Constructed in 1833, the building was like a grand pavilion; white, with canopies over the windows. Corinthian columns supported the roof, and marble statues lurked in corners. An odour of bureaucracy persisted, as if we were entering a warehouse of partially processed, stored information. This was a place where data with no constructive use to anyone were protected and pored over by an army of what are known in democracies as public servants.

The floor creaked as I tiptoed up to a large south Indian woman dressed in a sparkling white saree.

“Excuse me, I’m interested in membership of the library.”

“Do you want temporary or permanent membership?” she asked.

“Temporary would do fine.”

Thrusting her right arm in the air, she announced with crushing authority:

“There is no temporary membership!”

I coaxed her for half an hour – and was promised an assistant who would help me choose three books. It was forbidden to tip the servant and to spit paan on the floor. I would obey all the rules.

The lady in radiant white was pleased, and clicked her fingers. No one came. It was then that I realized that this woman who had been dealing with me was not employed by the library at all.

Within minutes the real librarian arrived and arranged for an assistant to help me.

A pair of feet in bedroom slippers dragged across the unpolished parquet floor, making it creak and bend. The servant showed no enthusiasm for life. Osman was concerned that a man should be so sad. The character stared up at me like a dog which had been tormented with a bone, but no longer had the energy to care if he got it or not. His face was deformed and one ear was badly torn.

We staggered round and round, taking short cuts through the alleyways between the stacks... round and round. I gained a certain feeling for the geography of the room. Still Osman and I followed one step behind the servant, digging our metal heel studs into the parquet. Osman cackled uncontrollably, ecstatic that he could be so tormenting. The servant was not in the least intimidated: he trudged on and on around the stacks as if in a trance, his bedroom slippers sliding with a muffled grating sound.

Osman’s feet had developed blisters, so we paused to sit on a wide blue vinyl-covered couch. He removed his shoes and stuck his thumb in his left ear. Fishing out a lump of beige wax, he rubbed it over the blisters. Then, he smiled and his spirits were rejuvenated. The assistant paced on with time-measured steps. Four hours passed and I had almost given up hope of ever seeing the three books I had ordered.

Shuffling feet moved among the blackness of bureaucratic papers. A sign fell to the ground and Osman picked it up and read the words: No book is for sale.

Volumes were piled in every corner, covered with black dust, some were backwards or upside down. Ladders with broken rungs led to galleries where carved ebony lions sat guard. Monastic methodical silence, not even disturbed by ticking from the wall clocks — those had stopped, probably many years before. A young clerk slouched over a heap of disintegrating newspapers, labelling with careful precision. He appeared resigned to a lifetime of sitting, in devotion to routine. The books he guarded were too precious, his glance and posture said, to be touched by the hands of infidels.

The assistant trod on, clutching my order close to his chest. Osman and I wandered away. The statues stared as if to recognize our failure. The taxi drivers could rest in their ignorance of such a legendary place.

* * *

That evening, as I clasped my head in my hands in defeat, a call from Blake was announced, “Yo man, I told you to leave it all to me! I’ve fixed it all up. You can relax and let the wheels turn smoothly,” he said.

“Blake, what are you on about? What did you fix up?”

“Man, I hope you appreciate it, after I put in all that sweet talking and sliming.”

“What are you on about, Blake?!”

“I got you a date with Rachana tonight. You have to pick her up at eight-thirty. This is the address. Don’t be late.”

I ran about the hotel wondering what to wear, what to say? Where I should take her? Vinod had let himself into my room. He had learnt to whistle through the new gaps between his teeth, and had come to demonstrate his new talent. As he whistled he swung his head from side to side, splattering saliva across the walls.

The door vibrated as fingertips clawed down its outer surface. I opened it to find a tidy procession of servants. One carried clean towels, one a bar of soap, another a shoe-cleaning kit and, the last, an iron. The first reported:

“Sahib, Anan the telephone operator said to bring you these things. Where is the shirt you will be wearing on this very special evening?”

I had always suspected that my conversations were monitored. My suspicious were at last confirmed. News of the impending occasion had spread like wildfire. I went to see V. V. Gupta, who worked miles from Churchgate. After handing me a stack of multicolored boxer shorts, he nudged me in the ribs and giggled:

“My wife says you should wear the yellow silk panties this evening. I think better to put on the pink ones as it’s the first time you’re with her.”

How did he know about Rachana?

Prideep and Osman had also heard of my date and dropped by, to give me some tips on Indian girls. They would not leave until I had repeated all they had said. Osman made notes in calligraphic script (which he had learnt at The Embassy while mastering his trade as a janitor). Prideep forced Osman to translate all that he had to say:

“You must remember always to tickle her under the chin and to blow in her ears — girls like that, you know. If you want her to fall in love with you, you must have her serenaded by my cousin’s sitar band. They are available tonight, I already made sure. They can be here by eight and come with you. Their charges are reasonable.”

Osman pushed Prideep out of the way and stopped translating his words.

“No, no, no! Prideep’s all wrong. To win her heart there is but one sure way.” His voice lowered and I bent forward so as not to miss the words of great wisdom. “You must take her to Ali Hussain’s Halal Meat Chop House, when you get there mention my name and ask for the special Chinese soup. As soon as the first spoonful touches her lips she will follow you to the end of the world. I have already told Ali Hussain to make room for you. He owes me a favour.”

I was moved by their concern and unbridled gladness for my evening with Rachana. Osman handed me a sheet of paper with their combined notes laid down in neat italic script.

As I handed my key in at the desk the manager turned and wished me luck. The corridors were lined with double rows of saluting servants. It felt as if I were going to collect a gallantry medal.

Having taken a taxi past Kemp’s Corner, I waited outside the apartment because I was ten minutes early. I seemed invisible to the hordes of commuters who rushed past.

Rachana’s mother opened the door to the apartment. She was straight-backed, correct and very elegant. All eyes were on me as I crossed the room.

Trying to avoid the microscopic scrutiny, I slunk into a chair and attempted to disappear myself by mental effort into the surroundings. The family was having the customary evening discussion: deep in debate as to whether it was better to be good or to be bright. I steered diplomatically around the argument, trying not to take sides and thus to avoid making enemies. Rachana’s mother peered at me from above her white-framed bifocals and suggested that we leave.

Blake had done very well indeed to cajole such a formidable matriarch into allowing me to take her daughter out without a chaperon. I wondered exactly what he had said to win her trust. My coconut and garland had not been wasted.

Mosquitos and flying beetles buzzed around fluorescent lamps outside the Roxy cinema. Pineapple and melon was being cut into mouth-sized lumps and put on green plastic plates. I queued up and bought two tickets for Tridev, one of the great epics of Mumbai’s movie industry, which Prideep had recommended.

We took our seats upstairs in row Dl. Giant lights, suspended from the ceiling, flickered. Arabesque scenes hung from the walls around us — like tortured prisoners in an eternal captivity. The seats squeaked and were hard and uncomfortable.

A quarter of the screen began to reflect an ancient advertising film in blue and white. The virtues of Uttar Pradesh Province were explained by unsynchronized mouths, strobed with thread lines and the neat silhouette of the sound recordist’s head. Suddenly — without warning — the epic began.

Like a convict facing a life sentence in solitude, I considered how I would ever emerge sane after three hours. The plot was hard to follow, especially as I understood very little Hindi. I pressed Rachana to translate every line.

Villains framed a man for murdering someone; they kidnapped another taking him to their fantastic castle, perched on top of a waterfall. A group of three Indian musketeers united against the bad men and penetrated the castle’s perimeter. Battle scenes became love scenes as the audience gasped and cheered in unison.

As minutes turned into hours, I sensed water dripping onto my neck. There was a crackle of food wrappers and I swivelled in my seat to tell the weeper to back off. As I turned, my eyes bulged in horror. Osman and Prideep gaped at me adoringly.

Osman was crying like a baby, and Prideep pushed a bag of miniature samosas into my face. I yelled at them, shocked that they would stoop to spying, then shouted that they should leave. Rachana and the audience looked eagerly to see what the commotion was about. The pair stood up to leave. As tears slipped from Osman’s eyes, he chirped:

“Don’t forget to blow in her ears and remember Ali Hussain’s soup”!

A man stumbled through the aisles juggling a tray. “Tea in a tray, tea in a tray!” There were shouts and hisses as his head was profiled on the screen. I tried to get back to the plot.

The villains’ kingdom had, for some reason, burst into flames and heads were rolling on the ground. Swords flashed as they sliced through the air and, in the middle of the final battle, a tumultuous chorus of the theme song began, “Oye-oye, Oye-oye!”

Continuity is unimportant in Indian film-making. Characters can appear in fresh costumes half way through a speech; or a murder scene can be interrupted with a song which involves the whole cast (whether they have already been killed or not).

Three hours after arriving, I left the Roxy exhausted — with Rachana linking her arm through mine — and we took a taxi to the Ambassador Hotel to eat in the revolving rooftop restaurant.

The manager showed us to a table which overlooked Marine Drive.

V.I.P. Luggage flashed on and off, the letters reflecting off the black water. The street lights, which lit up the peanut sellers and prostitutes, looked like an elegant string of pearls. Rachana sat opposite me and smiled demurely. She seemed thrilled to have escaped her mother’s clutches.

Marine Drive became Flora Fountain as the floor moved, revealing Mumbai’s high spots. The roads were deserted. Now and then the odd yellow-topped taxi or white Pal car passed, flashing ambers, and an occasional working headlight.

A waiter appeared with arms covered in plates: fish and fettucini and iced mango juice. The evening was idyllic. We drank to Blake and Priti’s health. My mentor had done very well.

The silence was broken by shouts at the next table.

“Is this steak sacred? Am I eating holy cow?” The cries of a severely overweight gentleman — with a Central European accent — echoed around the revolving dining room.

The waiter was shifting uneasily from one foot to the other, obviously concerned by the notion that something he worshipped was being eaten by a foreigner.

“Ludwig! Ludwig! Leave zie nice vaitor man alone,” croaked his wife, as she continued to smoke a miniature Havana cigar, in a gold holder. Her chest, which was richly adorned with Egyptian tourist ornaments, rattled when she spoke. On noticing my interest in her husband’s outburst, she turned to Rachana and me:

“India ees so mystical, vee love it here,” she said sternly narrowing her eyes, “You are very lucky to have such a country such as zis.”

Thanking the lady, I tried to draw her conversation to an end. One would often see westerners in Colaba, dressed like the couple at the next table. They would never venture more than one block from the Taj Hotel, immaculate in Givenchy suits and Banana Republic coats, leading beggar children around by the hand. I would watch with interest. They never gave a single coin to those children — let alone clothed or educated them. Instamatic cameras would record the “mixing with the natives’ for posterity; and the party in broad-brimmed explorers’ hats would return to sip tea in the gardens of the Taj.

Down below, Gaylord’s was turning through the window pane. The wise old manager, always immaculately dressed, would be down there pleasing his customers.

Rachana held her hands across the table. I noticed a dull silver ring on her left hand. “Who gave you that?” I asked.

“It’s a toe ring.” She turned it round, revealing a tiny flower on the inside. “My sister wears the other, she bought them when she went away to study.”

“Why don’t you wear it on your toe?”

She giggled and replied, “That would just not be done.”

It was late when we left the Ambassador Hotel. We strolled down to Marine Drive and walked for a few minutes. Street sellers were still offering their wares. “Rubber gloves, rubber gloves, peanuts, shoe shine?” Bedding was being laid down and bodies were hunched up against the sea wall. An old man called out to us. I looked down. On a rag he had placed two combs: one yellow, one red. Fishing boats roamed out into the darkness towards the horizon. Rachana breathed deeply. She said, “I am really happy here. I never want to live anywhere else.”

I thought about her words and Mumbai. I thought about the garbage and the heat, the smells and the millions of people.

“You’re right,” I said, “This is a very special place.”

Wing Son saw me enter his shop, tucked behind the Regal Cinema, and climbed down the narrow ladder from the attic workshop. He seemed pleased and I knew that it meant the shoes had been finished. He walked to greet me with a nervous smile, chewing at the corner of his mouth, waiting expectantly for my praise.

Two packages were produced, wrapped in paper printed in large Hindi script, tied with string and bows. I drew the leaves apart and held each shoe in turn, admiring the stitches and wonderful quality of the calf’s leather.

“Put them on your feet...” he said, “See how they fit; I made the soles extra thick like you asked.”

Wing fidgeted as I tried on each shoe in turn. They were sculpted perfectly to my feet.

“These are the most wonderful shoes I have ever worn. I shall always be proud of them,” I said.

Wing Son, the son of Wing Son, smiled like a Cheshire cat, the contours of his face curved and blossomed into the greatest expression of pleasure that I have ever seen.

Barefoot bearers who knew no other life weaved through the meshed traffic carrying dabba boxes on their heads. There was a smell of chapati flour and mutton curry, of sesame seeds and pumpkin chutney. Feet moved in all directions. Four hundred people lined up at a bus stop: in Mumbai it can take nearly a whole day to get to work.

Weaving my way back to the Chateau Windsor, around sets of mutated toes, I thought for a moment about how no one moved in a mainstream way. Millions of people walked about bumping into all around them. Everyone behaved independently from the rest. There was no unison or continuity of movement, just random bombardment, like billiard balls colliding in a box.

At the Chateau, a telegram had arrived. It was from Blake. It read:

HEY MAN CANT GET THROUGH BY PHONE MY

GURUJI PLAYS TONITE MEET YOU GAYLORDS 7PM BLAKE.

Midday chimed as usual twenty-three minutes early. The Chateau Windsor was on its own time, five hours and seven minutes east of Greenwich. I lay on my bed and felt the resonance of bells. The Chateau, as it was locally known, had a certain quality which made one feel impregnable and warm.

The yellow-flowered wallpaper watched me dress. I was sure it moved around when I turned my back, swanning about like a gigantic triffid. Switching off the light, I went down to Gaylord’s. The foliage could play in the darkness until my return.

Sunday night was always packed at Gaylord’s. Large, bulging mothers sidled about in tight shoes. Their colored glass bangles tinkled in the evening air as they struggled to place one enormous limb in front of the first. Only by such burdened mathematical precision were they able to move. In India the rich die of heart-failure from obesity, the poor from starvation.

A blind man passed. He also moved one foot in front of the other with the same delicate mathematics. A stick with a bicycle bell attached to the handle was his guide. He sauntered forward cautiously, ringing the bell. Sarees were pulled tighter to conceal the fleshy reams of fat surrounding Mumbai’s wealthy.

Blake came an hour late. I poured him a cup of tea with lemon. He added milk and the liquid curdled, but he insisted on drinking it.

The restaurant’s manager circulated, ensuring that we and the other clients were content. And, when my guest went to wash his hands, he offered to buy my watch. I refused for the hundredth time — in a bargaining routine which was enacted twice daily — regretting as usual that it had been a gift. The old manager smiled with a mouth which bore the scars of immeasurable quantities of paan, and drifted away.

Blake was eager to know the details of my date. He had acquired a general report from the vegetable bazaar that morning. Apparently everyone was talking about the events of the night before. It was something which I did not doubt for a moment, for Mumbai is a city where gossip is treated as a commodity. Praising Blake, I assured him that his tutelage had already brought results.

“Well, now you must meet the teacher of the teacher: my guruji,” he said.

* * *

A chord was struck and the guru began to hum. His eyes were closed, palms upturned and open. Two giant tanpura — instruments like sitars made from gourds — produced a droning sound, almost a stage on which the guru performed.

We all sat cross-legged and obedient on the floor of St. Xavier’s college. Long faces with deep black beards stared down from their mahogany frames. F. Dreckman, former headmaster, watched in amazement from the confines of his frame, listening to the wailing sounds which were now being emitted from the guru’s mouth.

The teacher was a refined, white-haired man of perhaps seventy. His skin had no wrinkles, his hair was wetted down and combed. A bow ran across a serengi’s strings and the vibrations echoed about the Gothic hall.

A little girl stood up and dragged her rag doll across the floor. She passed a row of ancient pupils, with white sticks and swollen eyes; her ponytail swung from side to side as she ran off into the courtyard.

The teacher controlled one sound, taming it with his lips and balancing upon it like a tightrope-walker. A man with headphones began to weep; a lady’s body quivered ecstatically, as she tugged fitfully at her hair. Blake and I watched, hypnotized by the sounds enclosing us.

Three hours elapsed and I was numb from the waist down.

The guru suddenly stood up and left. The audience sat transfixed and motionless. Blake turned to me and whispered with deep pride:

“That was my teacher.”

FIVE

The Alchemist’s Assistant

Purest water may be stained;

Stainless all and pure was Lingo.

Diamond sparkled on his navel;

On his forehead beamed the Tika.

Osman and Prideep had been in my employment for some weeks. Every Friday I would take them to lunch. It was the high point of their calendar. During the meal I would harangue them as a reminder of what they had been hired for: but my orations never seemed to increase their output. I realized later that, in the East, a commitment to produce does not automatically accompany employment.

To stimulate the ambitions of my team, I offered large bonuses and rewards upon our success in finding bounty. They seemed unimpressed.

One Friday they turned up as usual, expecting to be fed. The shadows of the two — who were lurking in the hallway — were visible through the gap under my door. Prideep was practising his English loudly, with Osman instructing. They hoped that I would hear their voices and come out.

“Come on Prideep, you must try counting again.” Osman spoke with self-consciously amplified words. Then Prideep began, “Wone, toe, flee, fooer, seeks, nine...”

“Well done, that was much better, Prideep.” Osman paused, waiting for me to open the door. He was teaching his colleague to count wrongly, I realized, so that he would himself never be replaced.

“Maybe Tahir Sahib wants to be left alone today,” said Osman sadly. I heard a slap, Prideep had evidently forgotten his cue. He yelped pitifully.

“I don’t know what we should do with this letter that has come from... who is it from, Prideep?” There were whispers in Hindi and Prideep stammered, “Day-wi-ss-hah!” Running the sounds through my brain, I decoded them to make Dervish. Then, pulling open the door, I grabbed the letter from Prideep’s fingers.

The brown manila envelope was too thin to be a bomb, so I sliced the top off with a scalpel. Inside was a hand-written note. Thumb prints obscured many of the words, but I made out:

To the Presence of: Tahir El Hashimi,

Insha Allah you are well and your men are healthy also. I fear that soon I shall have to return to our own land, for these infidels make my blood too warm. I have been unable to find your old things in Mumbai, but have contacted a Muslim who lives west from here. You must go to meet him in the Great Thar Desert. He awaits you and keeps the treasure hidden. Go first to Jaisalmer in Rajasthan and use the instructions on the back of this paper. His name is Abdul Rachid Mohommedi. His friends call him Abdul the Warrior.

DERVISH.”

It all seemed too wonderful to be true. I read the letter several times, almost choking with anticipation. Prideep and Osman gazed at me: they felt left out. Besides, they had not been fed yet, as tradition decreed. I waved the letter in the air and shouted:

“We are going to Rajasthan!”

* * *

Arrangements were made to leave Mumbai in two days. V.V. Gupta handed me another stack of silk boxer shorts — large enough to fit a hippo — and wished me well. He was a kind-hearted man, although enormously slow in his craft.

At Chateau Windsor, sixty servants knew that I had paid the bill, and they all loitered outside my door waiting for my departure. Some pretended to be polishing, others mopping the walls or straightening pictures. An air of expectancy filled the corridors. I went to the bathroom to shave. When I tried to get out into the hallway I was knocked back by a wave of small men in khaki shorts, all of whom wanted to be the first to be tipped.

In a moment of exultation I had decided to take Osman and Prideep along. After all, this was to be a great expedition and an entourage was most definitely in order. The team turned up three hours early. Prideep had never left Mumbai before. He had heard, though, of the palaces and castles of Rajasthan. Osman was for the most part the perpetrator of these glorious tales. When he was working at the American Embassy in New Delhi he had once been sent to Gwalior to fetch some cleaning fluids. I often wondered what the cleaning fluids were doing in Gwalior in the first place. I had not asked, however: in India an explanation is often more confusing than what prompted it.

Osman led Prideep past the rows of servants — who lurked like vultures in wait for their prey to die. Sixty heads were drooped in respect and anticipation when they saw me, in much the same way that vultures cower.

Osman had packed a battered leather case which was covered with labels of many destinations. He attempted to convince me that he had escorted the case to the places advertised on its exterior: on secret diplomatic business. A couple of shirts and a tie with spots moved about inside. I handed him a compass to wear around his neck at all times. He demanded a short lecture on its use. After that there was no holding him. His eyes lit up and he read off bearings, pointing the instrument like a water diviner around the room.

Prideep had become jealous that Osman should be so favoured. I passed him a portable stove and said that he was in charge of making soup. Osman translated my words, punctuating them with bearings generated by his new toy. Everyone was happy.

The elevator was summoned. Sixty mouths smiled. We walked to the contraption. Toes trod on toes in our wake and I heard my garbage bin being torn apart. I had left a couple of old paperbacks and a half-used bottle of shampoo. Two pairs of feet rushed past me and ran down the stairs. The elevator came and I handed a hundred-rupee note to the manager. He promised to divide it up amongst all the employees. Osman hailed a taxi to take us to Mumbai Central Station. As the bags were loaded into the cab I noticed my paperbacks staring up at me: for sale on a street stall at ten rupees each.

Mumbai Central is like a cavernous aircraft hangar. Its immensity sends shivers down one’s spine. We stepped into the building though a side entrance. Everyone seemed to have a well-defined role, a purpose for their presence. Sacks of flour were being dumped into the middle of the place. Guards in worn-out quasi-military uniforms, and decorated with twisted moustachios, brandished shotguns and looked as menacing as they possibly could. Osman fought off the army of red-shirted porters, who had brass number bands on their arms.

Prideep had put on his best shirt, which had electric blue diagonal lines running across it. I had never seen him look so neat. The other shirt he possessed, the one he usually wore, was folded up and stuffed into his trouser pocket. He had no bag.

Osman began to read out bearings, assuring me that the practice might be welcome in case there were trying times ahead.

Extended families lived in isolated groups in the middle of the floor, amidst the paan spit and sacks of flour. A machine, with flashing beacons and grinding cogs, would tell one’s weight and fortune for 50 paisa. Fishing out a coin, I inserted the money in the slot and stood on the platform provided. Whistles sounded, sirens roared, cymbals crashed and, as a brace of revolving lights spewed color through the bleak surroundings, a rectangular chip of cardboard was thrust from an aperture towards my face. Having caught the card with my teeth, by some remarkable reflex action, I inspected it closely. On the front was written my weight. And, on the back, was a sinister warning. It said: Spit into the spittoons only. Travel may be imminent. Be Prepared!

Lists of names, pinned to a board, indicated where we would sleep. The journey to meet the Warrior was complicated to say the least, and entailed changing trains several times. Firstly, we would have to take a train to Vadodara, an important city in Gujarat. Osman assumed control, which only seemed natural as he had the compass.

We climbed aboard. Every door and window was left wide open, to cool us in the night. The fans were paralyzed and looked as if they had not revolved in many years. A c licking of iron on iron filled the carriage as it pulled out from Mumbai Central.

As we passed Dadar and the suburbs, I imagined Blake watching from his rooftop. The tracks cut through the city dirt and took us far out into the countryside. Buffaloes bathed in flooded pools and young women worked in the paddy fields. The horizon grew black and fireflies jostled in patterns as the night approached.

Prideep pointed to the flames of paraffin lamps as they came alive in the distance and cackled in awe at the experience. He was happier than I had ever seen him. He lit the portable stove and made some soup. I was to discover that making tasty soup with one carrot, ten peas and a little dishwater, was his greatest skill. One wondered what the man would be capable of creating with a blender and a non-stick frying-pan.

The train tended to screech to a halt every few minutes. While it was stationary for a moment, I opened my mouth and it filled with mosquitos. There was a sudden infestation of gnat-like insects. The light above my bunk was obscured with fleas which formed one solid layer. The air buzzed with life as arms waved around troubled heads. It was at this moment that a fortune-teller arrived.

He had nowhere to sit and so Osman invited him to stay with us a while and share some dishwater soup. The strangest thing happened: all the bugs and grubs and moving specks disappeared. We could all breathe easily again. The man who came and sat wore a blue coat which was visibly infested with parasites. Prideep tore a few chapaties and passed around a pot of thin pea soup. Our guest began to speak in perfect, if individualistic, English.

“My business is to tell the future,” he said. “There are many things which I can see and feelings which enwrap my bones.” He brushed back his long white hair with the palm of his hand and paused for a moment or two. “I should like to be of help to you, Sir, and your party.”

I li-had no crystal ball or magic cap, just a wrinkled face with long, prominent ears, and a pair of slippers with curly toes. His words were those of an actor, spoken with theatrical flair.

Osman pointed at Prideep who was probing around his mouth with the end of a spoon. With a smile he said:

“Why doesn’t he tell Prideep’s future?”

Prideep heard his name spoken and looked up, hoping that it meant good things.

The seer nodded and closed his black eyes. Taking Prideep’s left hand in his bony fingers, he swaggered about, moaning wildly. The other passengers turned and watched. Mothers paused from feeding infants and a group of city men dropped their playing-cards. At first, Osman and I suspected it was all a big joke. Prideep did not know what was happening and looked terrified. He tried to pull his hand away, but it was gripped too firmly.

The seer dropped Prideep’s fingers and jumped up so suddenly — as if he had received an electric shock — that Osman and I shouted: “What is it? What did you see?”

Prideep had understood nothing of the episode and went back to drinking his soup. The fortune-teller clasped his hands together and mouthed a short prayer.

“This boy is cursed!” he said simply. Osman and I stared at each other and then at the old man.

“What”re you talking about? That’s Prideep, he’d all right,” Osman said.

“He has a deadly curse cloaking his existence. You must keep away from him. It was placed upon him as a child.”

“Can it ever be removed?” I asked.

“Removed? See how he waves his head about and his tongue beats in his mouth! He is mad and dangerous!”

Prideep had burnt his tongue and gums on the boiling pea soup and had begun to choke. As he yelped, Osman thumped him on the back, thinking that it might clear the blockage. I turned to the great mystic and explained, “My friend, he is not cursed, he just burnt his mouth. The soup is very hot you know.”

The wrinkled lips parted, “I have seen his future. I have witnessed many things.”

“What have you seen? Tell us!”

The prospect of knowing Prideep’s future was somehow fascinating. We were prepared to listen, if only for cynical entertainment. Prideep could not understand the conversation, if there was anything he should know, Osman could translate. The soothsayer began, “What I have witnessed is unpleasant, I will reveal in the hope that the future’s events may be changed, and that one particular incident may be avoided.”

“What are you trying to say?” The conversation suddenly took on a rather more serious tone. Osman and I listened, as Prideep began to clean the stove, absorbed in the operation.

“Your friend will some time from now — in some place from here be working in an office — his mind deep in his work as it is now. He hears screams from the building opposite, the cries of a little girl. He runs out of the door and sees flames consuming the house. The child is trapped inside. He puts his arms around his head and rushes to help her. The roof collapses. No one leaves the building.”

Osman had tears in his eyes. Prideep sensed that something was bothering us. He looked up and we all tried to smile.

“Your friend is cursed,” the sage repeated.

Osman addressed him, his words shaky and carefully phrased:

“Wise man, what can we do to defend our dear friend?”

“Such a strong curse is hard to deal with,” said the fortune-teller.

“But you must know of some solution,” persisted Osman.

“Well,” began the sage, almost reluctantly, “there is one thing that may protect him. In Vadodara my cousin lives. He is the alchemist’s assistant... he can make a talisman which, if your friend wears it, will protect him always. Go and ask for Bhindu.”

Osman inscribed the details on my white note-tablet. I handed the seer a few coins. Wishing us a comfortable night, he left to ply his trade in another carriage. As his blue coat moved away, the light was obscured again with fleas, flies and crawling things. Then, jumping up onto my bunk, using my camera as a pillow, I tried to sleep.

Prideep shook my arm as I slept late and handed me a cup of sweet tea. The train had been delayed for three hours during the night. We went to the lavatory in turns. The floor was slippery and covered in mud. Paan juice had been spat across the walls from many misjudging mouths.

Vadodara was to entertain us for one day, then in the evening we were to catch a train to Udaipur. The sun shone brightly but had not yet begun to warm the air. My body was red and sore from a thousand insect bites. We had breakfast at the Hotel Aditi. Macaroni cheese came sweet, with a runny white sauce. I had encouraged Osman to order the macaroni, saying that it was very European. Disgusted by the sauce, he had requested for the pasta be taken away and rinsed. Osman never had very much good to say about the Europeans. He jumped at the fact that the British almost certainly renamed Vadodara, their own “Baroda” because they could not pronounce the real name. Nowadays the two names coexist.

We took a walk around the town.

Vadodara was not, as many now think, anglified by the British, but by its own Maharajas; for it was the capital of a state, rather than part of British India. Nevertheless there are Devonshire cottages, great institutes dedicated to Queen Victoria, street lamps and four-faced clocks. Unfortunately, when the Maharajas lost their authority, all they had created fell into a general state of Indian dilapidation. The paving stones were cracked and the clocks’ hands long removed. Whatever the former rulers had tried to create had been replaced by a more peaceful Indian way of life.

We strolled into the grounds of Maharaja Gaekwar and viewed, for one rupee, the paintings in his gallery. He had a European collection which would make many museum curators in the West envious. Prideep and Osman cackled away together in low voices, laughing freely at what I had been educated to respect. In Mumbai, I recalled, I had met an Indian lady artist who told me about the French Festival in India. She reported that several priceless paintings by Europeans, such as Monet and Manet, had been transported to Delhi and hung there for a few weeks. The French guardians of the masterpieces were horrified when Indian visitors to the exhibition ran their grubby fingers over the canvases. They insisted on feeling the workmanship.

* * *

The floor of the bazaar was covered in life and moving limbs. Naked children filled Thums-Up cola bottles with dust and chewed on bits of glass. They pointed at us, their noses running and their hair matted with dirt. A boy was pulling himself along the ground. His legs, wrapped in linen bandages, were totally concealed. One leg stretched forward, the other backwards: he was doing the splits. I stared in fascination and pity, for the child was still moving although attached to a pair of dead legs. He put out a hand, but only I saw his attempts to reach out to the world above him.

We walked into the blue smoke of peanut burners; my eyes darted about, taking in people living like spiders sprawled across a web of absolute poverty.

Osman was miserable. He had stopped reading out compass-points and was the picture of dejection. I was astounded that his feelings for Prideep were suddenly so strong, when until recently they had hated each other. Osman dropped hints continually that we should seek the alchemist’s assistant and get him to protect Prideep from the eternal curse.

“Do you really think it”ll make a difference?” I asked Osman as we trudged along. “All that performance last night by the fortune-teller might have been a ruse to increase his cousin’s business. Alchemy isn’t as productive as is widely believed.”

But Osman insisted:

“You heard what the wise Baba said, and you saw his manner when he said it; his voice trembled and he didn’t want to reveal the future at first. It is our responsibility, as Prideep’s guardians, to help.”

Having agreed that the visit might be interesting, Osman pulled out the directions that he had made, and we set off.

The rickshaw labored under the weight of its driver, three passengers, and our luggage. After careering for several miles away from Vadodara, it turned onto a road obviously used mostly by oxen. Osman and I looked at each other as if to note that the rickshaw was lost: a very usual occurrence. Prideep was humming the song from Tridev; he clasped the portable stove and sighed as we bumped along. His seemed to be the only mind that was at rest.

The rickshaw came to an abrupt halt and we were required to pay twelve rupees. Prideep had become friends with the driver and offered to make him some carrot soup. The two men crouched over the paraffin Primus: one shielding it from the breeze, the other pumping the handle.

Grinding sounds and cries in Gujarati radiated from a black hut some thirty feet from where the rickshaw had stopped. Was it the alchemist at work? Would we see molten gold produced? We knocked. There was no answer. Osman pushed the door open and called to a boy who was sharpening knives. The child ran off. A man, whom I assumed to be his father, appeared, and motioned us to enter.

The interior of the hut was dark, smoke-filled, and smelt of sulfur. In one corner six gray sacks were piled up on each other; in another had been placed a miniature cage in which a brown rat was scurrying. Much of the hut’s main room was taken up by a large homemade workbench. Cluttered with odds and ends, the surface of the bench was sprinkled with a kind of fine black sand. And, at the far edge of the counter was a sinister apparatus, festooned in cobwebs and dirt. A mess of beakers, tripods, burners and primitive condensing-tubes, I suspected that the contraption might once have been the alchemist’s tool.

The alchemist’s assistant was a very average-looking man, dressed in a white loincloth and the remains of a string vest. Osman began to speak to him in Hindi. There was no communication. He tried English; our host replied in Shakespearian English. I explained that we had met a fortune-teller on a train and we were to ask for “Bhindu”. He was Bhindu. Could he produce an amulet to protect Prideep from his fateful future? He, and only he had that skill, we could be assured. Osman smiled and asked how long it might take to make such a powerful charm. Two hours, and it would cost one hundred rupees. The whole procedure seemed rather commercial; I had a nagging feeling at the back of my mind that we were being exploited.

With the smoke blinding us, and the stench of sulfur unbearable, we went out into the sunshine to allow the master to craft the charm.

The carrot soup was very tasty. Prideep had gathered some wild herbs and seasoned the carrots and water with them. Osman paced up and down. In the black hut, magical spells were being cast. Fantastic words and sounds escaped through the broken window pane. We waited. The driver fell asleep. A goat came and went.

Then the alchemist’s assistant opened the door and beckoned us forward. He held in his hand a rust-colored talisman, one inch square. A leather thong passed through an eye at the top. It bore a single sign rather like an asterisk in the centre of three concentric circles. I handed a note to Bhindu, who stood in the doorway, he tucked it deep into his lungi. I asked if he still practised alchemy.

“Alchemy, not now. The master hath died.”

“How did you learn such fine English?”

“From the teach-book.” He went and delved deep in the back of the hut, returning with a leather-bound volume. I read the words from the first page:

“A Practical Grammar of the English Language, by John Bum, Printed Glasgow, 1766.”

We thanked the alchemist’s assistant and went back to the rickshaw. Osman called Prideep to him. He spoke slowly in Hindi. I could just understand what he said.

“I want you to promise me one thing. Can you do that?” Prideep nodded and waited for Osman to continue.

“Will you promise to wear this amulet around your neck always?”

Prideep frowned but agreed that he would, if only to make his friend happy.

Osman tied it around Prideep’s thin neck and spoke. “My friend, you must not question this ever or fail me. You are bound by a promise. Never cut the thong and I pray that God shall always love you.”

Vadodara passed from under the railway tracks and we left Gujarat, India’s only dry state, behind. Osman read numbers off the compass and coal smoke churned in our wake. My heart beat in time with the sound of the steam-engine chugging along. A feeling that life in the world was idyllic pervaded. Images of the bazaar and the boy with dead legs seemed to be but phantoms as we prepared our minds for the journey that lay ahead.

The train stopped at a station a couple of hours from Udaipur. It was called Zawa. Rain poured from the sky and the population of Zawa — some two hundred people — loitered on the platform watching our arrival. Many were sheltering from the sheets of water under moth-eaten black umbrellas. When I climbed down to stretch my legs, I met a young man with deep-set eyes and straggly mustache, who was hawking oranges. He lamented that no one ate oranges when it rained, and said that the people of Zawa always trooped out to watch the train pass through their village. It was tradition.

Leaving the orange-seller to his trade, I climbed back into the carriage. And there we lay on our bunks waiting for the iron wheels to move. They did not, for what seemed like days. Then it was announced that we would depart at three o”clock. The driver climbed down from the locomotive, and lay on a bench. He fell asleep, the stoker at his feet. Groups of old men crouched about, smoking bins, and wrapped in blankets against the chill. Goats chewed on reeds, or ambled about eyeing the black umbrellas as if they were delicacies of some mouth-watering cuisine.

At Udaipur, a rickshaw laden with our bedraggled group left Udaipur City station behind. The journey had been seriously delayed, largely due to the apparent lack of enthusiasm by the driver for his career.

The first rays of light were reflected as pink rings in Prideep’s eyes. We jerked up and down as the rickshaw capered from one pot-hole to the next. It labored up narrow streets, making the sound of a Spitfire. The ground was knee-deep in rain water. Suddenly a surging undercurrent caught the floundering black rickshaw, transforming her into a makeshift raft.

None but a sacred cow bore witness to the driver’s pleas for help. Every hotel and guest house in Udaipur seemed to be full. The driver beached the craft on the steps of a great temple. We abandoned the rickshaw and pressed on through the dark waters in search of a room.

Osman thumped at a giant Mughal door within a courtyard, sensing that the building might provide accommodation. There was no reply. Just as we were about to leave, a bolt was slid back and a cloaked figure welcomed us. We had arrived at Bada Haveli. The host was Lala, a man of exquisite bearing, gentle features and gray-green eyes.

Lala greeted us, his hands with palms placed together and fingers at a point,

“Namaste,” he said bowing his head and placing his palms together. “You are very welcome to stay here for as long as you wish. This is a traditional house, there are few of the modern conveniences which other hotels offer.”

The Bada Haveli lay amidst a network of chambers. Courtyards opened into secret gardens and steps led to upper levels. A haveli is a house built for a nobleman, a gentleman of standing. We were taken by Lala to our rooms. My bedroom had an antechamber — three feet wide and four feet long — which Lala referred to as a “breakfasting room”. The windows had no glass, but neat-fitting wooden shutters with filled pointed arches in the classical Mughal style. The bed was a marble slab with a sheet on top, and a bolster at one end. It was very hard. The floor was stone and decorated by drips of multi-colored candle wax.

Lala rushed about tending to our needs. He brought a cake of red soap that another guest, he said, had left behind.

Osman and Prideep took the room next door. Stained-glass panels had been set into one wall. When the sun shone, its pink light was tinted in greens and blues. Prideep’s face glowed with the sort of excitement children feel at Christmas. Amongst the green and blue rays were columns decorated with mythical scenes. Lala smiled, acknowledging our obvious delight that the lodgings were so bewitching.

On the second level was a garden where squirrels played, darting about after each other. We climbed up onto the rooftop. Steps protruded from the walls — an advantage of “afterthought” architecture. There we sat for two hours gazing out across the city as it woke and came alive. Women were preparing their homes for the day, feeding children and hanging bundles of clothes to dry. Shopkeepers began to put their wares on display as the narrow streets of Udaipur bustled with the frenzied activity of the morn.

The architecture, the color of the light, the smell and sounds of the city as it woke, intoxicated us all.

Lala brought a tray of peanut balls, honey and a loaf of fresh coarse bread. He was fasting, but looked on with no sign of temptation as we feasted in his presence.

This was an extraordinary man. It was a delight to meet a person so eminently charming and kind. We were grateful that such civilized courtesy should be showered upon us; especially since we had only just met.

Lala spoke softly with a dignity that captivated his audience:

“My family were the official astronomers to the Maharajas for many generations,” he said. “Being of that status allowed us to build a house on the third highest site in Udaipur. When my father died, I had no choice but to rent out parts of the building to guests. I have not had the means to develop amenities as yet. But in the future I hope that more tourists will come.”

“Do many foreigners come and stay here?”

“The problem is that I refuse to pay the unreasonable demands of the rickshaw drivers who bring people from the station. They want half the rent money. That is too much, so they take tourists to the other hotels.”

Rex was the only other guest at Bada Haveli. Aged about forty, he wore wire-rimmed spectacles, and was dressed in Bermuda shorts and a sunflower shirt. A strong Afrikaans accent obscured his words:

“Magik place trekker, tell ya vere’s nowhere like et end thet’s a fect. Vis ees me thed time een Endia, I alvays geet a tren stret here froem Deelhi.”

“Have you seen any other part of this country?”

“Nope min. Ven I geet tired of Bada Haveli arnd Udaipur I’ll move on... but teel thet heppens I’ll keep comin’ ’ere min.”

Osman asked me about Bermuda shorts, “Do people really wear those in the West?”

“Well, some people do,” I replied.

“In India the poorer people wear short pants like that; no one would do it out of choice. Not even in Gwalior!”

From the roof of Bada Haveli we surveyed Udaipur with its many shrines and fine buildings. The largest sacred building, the Jagdish Temple, dates back to about 1640 AD. A pair of elephant statues stand guard at the foot of the steep steps which lead up to the shrine. The highest building is the City Palace, which gleams in white marble and granite, supreme over all below. Only the Lake Palace can rival it — floating below in the midst of Lake Pichóla — it is surely one of the most spectacular monuments ever created by man.

The Lake Palace, like some vast Mississippi paddle-steamer fashioned from white marble, fills every inch of its island. Osman, Prideep and I looked about in awe. The South African was right: this was indeed a magical place.

We went down to the street where old men squatted, framed by doorways, shadows filling the folds in their crinkled skin. Sacred cows became traffic bollards at will in the narrow streets — around which large men in orange turbans swerved at great speed on their fragile scooters.

We wandered about the Bada Bazaar, where silver amulets and bracelets are bought and sold. Dealers crouched on white cotton mattresses, perched above the gutter, squinting through thick spectacles at workmanship that is very fine indeed.

We walked out of the Suraj Pol, the Gate of the Sun, with its long iron spikes, ten feet above the ground, intended to stop the elephants of a hostile army from charging the doors. And we passed children who demanded “one rupees” and little girls who giggled when they saw Osman. The sky — and the mountains which it touched — were reflected in the lake’s green algae.

Five girls stood in the water washing their clothes. They were bare from the waist up. I averted my gaze and made Osman and Prideep do the same.

Suddenly the sound of hooves could be heard behind us. I turned, as my eyes crossed, trying to focus on the gigantic black mass of bones and flesh that was charging toward us. We stepped to one side and choked as dust swirled above the fresh hoof-prints. A buffalo had run amok and was making a beeline for the horizon. No one paid much attention. Haggard crones stopped talking to their friends for a moment, stepped aside as we had done, and continued chatting as before. Do buffaloes often carry on like that? Baffled, I put the problem to the back of my mind, and walked on, out of the town. Alone. Prideep and Osman preferred to hide in the shade of a tall acacia and spy on the girls who were now taking off the rest of their clothes.

Two hundred bicycles went by. Whole families balanced on the backs of the Calcutta-made frames, waving at all they passed. Where were they going? Were they following the buffalo, perhaps? What was the buffalo in pursuit of? These questions, and more, captivated me. So I decided to tag along too.

Thirty minutes later and there was no sign of the buffalo. A stall-keeper who sold Thums-Up cola pointed into the distance when I asked where the bicycles and the black brute had gone. Where were they going? The man waggled his head from behind a sea of cola bottles. I carried on along the earthen track, due east from Udaipur.

After another half hour, in pursuit of the bicycle tire tracks and hoof prints, they stopped. The buffalo was lying under a tree, exhausted. About three hundred bicycles were sprawled around it in heaps of twisted metal. Their owners had formed a ring and were concentrated on a man in the centre.

The figure was dressed like a westerner in jungle green khaki shorts and a safari shirt. He held a black umbrella filled with large holes above his head. Silently, the front row of the audience stood up and paraded around the man in khaki shorts. They were all painted and dressed in bizarre costumes.

A man with a full black beard was dressed as a lady. One had a denim cone tied as a hat above his head; half his face was painted black, the other half white. Two men in dark glasses had swords, and another a club. The last capered about with two angelic wings attached to his arms. The audience stared. The buffalo panted. And I watched in wonderment as the characters began to dance.

The dance was choreographed with considerable precision, to the thud of a beating drum. The strokes grew closer together and the strange ritual continued. Three more men waved peacock feathers in the air, convulsing their bodies and heads from side to side as if they were possessed. Suddenly, and without warning, all the dancers turned to the man in khaki shorts and beat him up. The clubs and swords rained down until the khaki was ripped and the umbrella twisted.

The crowd cheered and clapped and leapt about with glee. I had a feeling that, having come from a place where men in khaki are respected, I might be unwelcome. I began to tiptoe away past the buffalo and bicycles, but a group of crouching men called me back. They made room between them for me to crouch, too. Dancers came and went; acrobats jumped in the air. Then, as suddenly as they arrived, everyone clambered back on the black bicycles and pedalled away at full speed.

I jogged back to find Osman and Prideep fast asleep. The girls had left. They had no interest in my adventure, which seemed more and more like a dream as I tried to relate it. They had both fallen in love but made me swear not to tell a soul.

SIX

Abdul the Warrior

Nine years old became my Lingo,

When his soul began to wonder

Whether all alone his lot was

In that forest shade primeval.

In the stables of the City Palace, a Rolls Royce was rusting unused. Alongside it, together with a broken chair, a stuffed bear lay on its side — forced to snarl for eternity by a wicked taxidermist. Men with pink turbans sat under mulberry trees and the sun beat down. Relics of past glory had been left like toys abandoned by a spoilt child: a sedan chair and a set of scales made by Salter of London; paintings of hunting scenes and signed photographs of Queen Victoria.

We drifted about the palace rooms: from the mirrored suites of the last Maharaja, through the hidden gardens and durbar chambers inlaid with precious stones. Fruit bats, as large as eagles, with a wingspan a good three feet across, clung from the parapets. They alone seemed unimpressed by the grandeur of the surroundings.

* * *

Prideep was hungry. Lala assured us that the best place in town to eat dinner was the Naturaj Hotel outside Suraj Pol. It cost twelve rupees for as much thali as one could eat. We set off. Prideep’s stomach had begun to growl uncannily loudly, and people gave him uneasy looks. Osman and I were so embarrassed that we made him walk ahead. We passed the soda water factory, the owner of which held out a signed photograph of Roger Moore when he saw me. Moore, he said, had filmed parts of the movie Octopussy in Udaipur a few years before. It was explained that James Bond himself had purchased one of the famous homemade sodas and chatted a while. Did I have a signed photograph of myself? I regretted that I had not, but would bring one when I came again.

The host at Naturaj beckoned us in with three fingers which were fused together. He stamped his feet and young boys filled the individual dishes in our metal trays with food. Buckets of pumpkin and potato were touted from one table to the next in case anyone had been able to endure the first helping.

The people of Udaipur were very welcoming. Osman said that he would move here when we returned from the Great Thar Desert, and marry one of the local girls. Prideep agreed that it was a good idea and that he would live next door to Osman. They would wed sisters, identical twins, so they would not be able to fight over the prettier one. Osman and Prideep had become inseparable friends.

We washed our faces in the basin provided and wiped our mouths on the towel which was passed around. I felt as if I would never be able to eat again. Prideep was still hungry but I forced him to leave with us.

The streets were teeming with people. Hurricane lamps burned brightly, carried on turbaned heads.

We walked into the crowd and made our way past the clock tower and back to Lala. Three wedding processions were milling about, overlapping and exchanging guests. The bridegrooms, beautifully dressed, were swamped in bright brocades.

Tambourines jangled all around, but their sounds were smothered by the wailing of bagpipes, as each cortege tramped forward with hypnotic movements.

Each procession was led by a groom atop a fine white stallion. Some horses might have been unsettled by such a sea of people, but these had seen it all before. I turned and watched figures, concealed in white robes, stumbling forward. On their heads were turbans, and from the turbans sprouted neon strip-lights, four feet long. They pointed heavenward, lighting up the night.

Following the turbaned heads were mule carts. On each, petrol generators produced electricity and pollution amidst a grinding of cogs.

The processions passed Bada Haveli’s keyhole doorway and left us behind to sleep. Our beds were so hard that Osman and Prideep came to me for “insomnia medicine”. I handed out all I had — antibiotics, and they went away happy. The moon shone down and made shapes across the walls. The Milky Way burned brightly and the constellations shimmered above the little city of Udaipur. I thought of Lala’s ancestors sitting on the rooftop and interpreting the patterns of the stars. The next day we would leave in search of treasure once more.

At five A.M. we emerged from Bada Haveli. Lala had been up for some time praying. He was from the Brahmin caste and was devout in his observances. The sun had not yet risen as we walked down to the Jagdish Temple to find a rickshaw.

The tickets for the Super Deluxe Luxury bus to Jodhpur were gold and red. Luxury was only in the name. Hens and squawking children were passed along the rows of seats. Their owners would claim them once the journey had come to an end. Now and again, the bus stopped. All the passengers would automatically unload themselves, together with all their belongings. They had just enough time to smoke a biri, or huddle briefly over a fire. Then the horn would sound and everyone and everything had trooped back aboard. Again the fowls and children had no identifiable owners and the wheels began to turn.

An aging public servant from Bihar pressed up against me. Not for comfort. Rather, the attraction was that an epic Hindi movie was to be shown.

Prideep had bought a bag of samosas and a small bar of dark chocolate, which he passed round. The bureaucrat snuggled up to my shoulder and wriggled in anticipation of a film he had seen five times before. The saga lasted three hours, with the volume jammed on full. When the final song had finished and the titles appeared I cheered loudly with relief. But the solace was short-lived; for the driver stopped, rewound the tape, and pushed the “play” button again. The only breaks to the monotony were the punctures, which were frequent.

An hour before we reached Jodhpur the bus made an emergency stop. The birds were thrown from the back, together with three children, and were hurled against the windshield. The driver had steered wide to hit a wild boar which had been crossing the road. A great altercation began over who was to keep the dead animal. The driver, the on-board mechanic and a passing peasant all laid claim to the mutilated beast.

After an hour of shouting and heckling the bus driver won his case. The fare-paying passengers, pining for the film, had conducted an impromptu ballot. Delighted, the driver strapped the carcass onto the roof and accelerated. With blood pouring down the windshield and the wipers toiling at full steam, we ploughed on towards our goal.

* * *

An hour later, having arrived in Jodhpur, I was unable to move. My backside felt as if it had fused to the seat. Osman dragged me from the bus. Thirty people had trampled over my camera and mashed the bag of samosas, which had fallen into the aisle. I was too weak to berate anyone.

At ground level, there was a grinding of wheels. A barrage of legless beggars headed for us at breakneck speed — propelled on their low red trolleys. Instinct told us to run. The wheels spun faster and faster. We took refuge in a dentist’s shop. The surgeon held up a pair of pincers and beckoned me to sit.

Osman had decided to take Prideep to buy a watch. Prideep had been saving his wages and wanted to get the latest from the Hindustan Watch Company’s range. They took a rickshaw to the Sadar Bazaar. Meanwhile, rumour had it that the most spectacular building in Jodhpur was the Umaid Bhawan Palace; I would go there for afternoon tea.

The rickshaw drove to the palace of Umaid Bhawan from the city. The route wound up a steep incline, towards the gigantic pink sandstone structure at the apex of the hill. It reminded me of Sacré Coeur in Montmartre. A wide dome had been slapped down on top of the building — in an attempt to create a Mughal masterpiece.

Like many other palaces in Rajasthan, the Umaid Bhawan had been converted into a luxurious hotel. Built between 1929 and 1942 by the Maharaja Umaid Singh, the Palace was constructed at a time when unemployment was even worse than usual. The Maharaja had hired three thousand workers for thirteen years to complete the project. The fittings and ornaments, of a heavy art deco style, were a remarkable contrast to the light and delicate palaces of Udaipur. The hallways and even the lavatories, crammed with dead animals, resembled a taxidermist’s workshop.

I strolled up to the reception desk. An immaculate clerk looked up.

“Would it be possible to take tea?”

“Yes, certainly; are you requiring a room also?”

“Are there any available?”

“Yes Sir, I am sure we can fit you in,” was the reply, as the clerk flicked through the empty register.

I would think it over. The underground swimming pool had just been cleaned. I was taken to inspect it. Reflections played about the walls and gave animation to the mythical sea monsters guarding the silent stone chamber.

A stuffed bear stood at the entrance of the grand dining room. It was the only animal in the palace which was not in an offensive pose. It wore a pair of white gloves, upon which a silver tray had been placed. On the tray was a bottle of Pernod and two crystal glasses.

The doors, inlaid with deco lines, swung inwards as if by magic. Two hundred eyes stared at me: the walls were covered with the heads of stuffed animals. Tigers and rhinoceros, buffaloes and bears, an extensive range of big game was represented.

Five hundred places had been laid with a spectacular arrangement of eating instruments. Yet I was the only guest to dine. A team of about twenty waiters ran to my assistance. I requested a table away from the animal heads. There was none secluded from the “game park” theme, but perhaps in the far corner, with my seat pointed to the gardens, I would be pleased. I was.

The waiters began the type of routine that I had only seen on a film set. Two enormous fans were placed in front of my table to blow the flies away from the condiments. The butter, together with its silver dish, flew off the table. Servants in golden turbans dived about with jugs of water, plates of cakes and scones. The tablecloth was brushed whenever I dropped a single crumb. Like a famous movie star who had forgotten his lines, I yearned to be left alone.

After the jam blew from the table, I ordered the fans to be removed. Five giants wheeled the dominating structures to the other end of the dining room. Still, there was concern that my table should become infested with flies and hornets. Another team of waiters with cloths over their wrists danced about with fly swats. I turned away, trying to ignore the insect massacre going on among the silver spoons and forks. An ibex looked down at me with sad eyes as if he had seen it all before.

The door-wallahs had deserted their post. From their station came a creaking sound. The patterns of wavy and zigzag lines were pushed apart a few inches and two slight characters, with hand bags, slipped in. On seeing me they tramped over to my corner, cowering as if tormented by the wildlife stalking about the room. We became instant friends, almost as though we had met in a jungle.

“Bonjour Monsieur! I am Henri and this is Jean-Yves. We are French.”

“I am very pleased to meet you both. Have you been staying here long?” I asked.

“We ’ave come here two weeks ago. You are the first other person from Europe that we ’ave met.”

They chattered away. Henri’s mouth twitched in a most alarming manner. Jean-Yves rolled his eyes about with disorientation. The palace was obviously playing on their nerves. The very fact that a Frenchman was prepared, after two minutes of conversation, to be so friendly towards anyone, especially one who had come from England, made me restless.

Jean-Yves asked if I was residing at the palace. His eyes blinked nervously, and Henri’s mouth moved about unconsciously. Regretfully, I said that I could not stay. Indeed, it was almost time for me to leave. The Frenchmen seemed disappointed.

We began to talk of the severe design according to which the building had been constructed. I mentioned that they were very brave to stay so long. Jean-Yves tittered, raising his index finger in the air.

“Mais Monsieur, we ’ave protection from ze evil.”

I leant forward to hear what secret guarded them even in a place like the Palace of Umaid Bhawan. The Frenchmen glanced at each other and then at me. Henri whispered, “Do you promise not to tell?” I swore a solemn oath.

They reached down the front of their shirts and pulled out identical talismans. Rust-colored, about one inch square, both bore a sign like an asterisk within three concentric circles:

“We got zem from a secret place. De l’Assistant du Monsieur l’Alchimiste!”

My jaw dropped in stupefaction. They seemed heartened that I should be so suitably impressed.

* * *

Osman read the guidebook of India aloud from cover to cover. No other passengers on the train from Jodhpur to Jaisalmer understood a word of the English, but they cheered all the same. Prideep had rolled up his sleeves so that everyone could admire his new watch. It had a gold face and a brown leather strap. He was very pleased. The steam train had left Jodhpur, with its Palace of Umaid Bhawan and the two curse-protected Frenchmen, far behind. I was getting anxious to find the Dervish’s contact and waste no more time traveling. The thought of rubies and emeralds drove me on like gold-fever. Prideep, who gave his bunk to a decrepit man whom he had befriended, slept on the floor.

I awoke in the middle of the night to see what looked like black beans crawling over Prideep’s face. They were beetles. As usual it was impossible to turn the carriage lights out. The fans were working and guillotined all that went near them most efficiently. A swarm of dragonflies buzzed in through an open window as we stopped near a marsh. I tossed about, trying to sleep, as pieces of dragonfly wing and abdomen splattered across my face. Finally I fell asleep to images of chests filled with wondrous things.

* * *

Jaisalmer, founded by Maharaja Jaisal in 1156, had been the capital of the Bhati of the “Lunar” dynasty.

It had not rained in Jaisalmer for as long as anyone could remember. Yet, in the first four hours that we spent there, rainwater caused floods three feet deep. Rickshaws lay marooned on high spots like beached boats at the seaside. A hunchback taking goats to sell on a buffalo-cart gave us a ride into town. The news on everyone’s lips was that a camel had just drowned. It was very wet indeed.

As we set about looking for a hotel, I pondered the logistic procedure of a camel drowning. Small boys ran up with the business cards of hotels. Another pulled out three calculators and could thus exchange dollars, deutsche marks and yen.

Ignoring all, we pressed on into the yellow sandstone fortress to escape the importuning. I had heard that several hotels existed actually inside the fortress. Blocks of stone had been carved and placed one on top of the next; crenellations stretched as far as the eye could see, and the rain continued to fall. Enshrouded within concentric walls — high above the city — was a Jain temple. Next to it stood Hotel Paradise.

We took two rooms there for the night whilst arranging to get out to the isolated settlement of Mandha, where Abdul was said to reside.

Intricate designs had been chipped from the brittle yellow stone, forming spectacular patterns on its portals. The rain stopped and, for the first time, we looked upon the Great Thar Desert. From the fortress there was no romantic desert view of rolling dunes or distant tribal dwellings. The one significant feature between our vantage point and the horizon was an extensive garbage heap.

The bleak scene — as if despised by nature and neglected by man — reminded me of Africa’s Skeleton Coast. Weeks spent trudging up and down that barren Atlantic seaboard, while writing a book on Namibia, had been useful preparation for the Great Thar.

Several hundred birds circled the dump, swooping down in their search for food. It was very unromantic. Leaving our things at the Hotel Paradise, we walked into the bazaar to find a man who could take us to Mandha.

A man with a Sikh turban and desert robes stepped from the shadows and proposed that he might be the one we were looking for. A pair of steely-blue eyes blinked from his badly sunburnt face. He told us that he had two camels and an unrivalled knowledge of the desert trails. No other could be a more faithful guide than he. Osman translated the peculiar dialect with some difficulty. He said that the man was suitable and that the camels would be fine for a couple of days’ travel. We planned to set off before dawn the next morning.

The Paradise Hotel could not have been more wrongly named. Osman and I killed one hundred and thirty-three flies in my room alone. Prideep had lured a pigeon into the other room, hoping that it would feast on the resident insect population. When he opened the window again five more pigeons flew in to roost. There was no electricity, the fan did not move, and candle wax dripped onto the floor. I dreamed of being far away from the Great Thar Desert.

Morale was very low, despite the reasonable prospect of finding a great cache of secret treasure. Time to rally the troops. As I spoke, I felt the confidence streaming back into me: a bracing sensation. After haranguing Prideep and Osman, I found myself enthused again. So I offered to take them to the best restaurant in town to celebrate our imminent success. The Trio was the best restaurant in town. It also was the only restaurant in Jaisalmer. We took a table on the first floor of the building. A wooden stepladder led up. Constant power cuts meant that a blindingly bright hurricane lamp was supplied — placed behind my left ear — so that we could see the details of the dishes that were brought.

The waiter had managed to conquer the set of rungs whilst carrying four plates on his arms. What seemed like the whole insect population of Rajasthan slithered out of the desert night and flopped onto the starched white tablecloth. Prideep squinted in the lamplight, and rolled his eyes. He filled his glass with crawling black creatures and turned it upside down to trap them. Osman told him to behave. After a while I gave up picking each wriggling shape from my mutton stew. The food had become more substantial at no extra charge. Osman was delighted.

* * *

Igor Singh led his camels to Hotel Paradise long before the sun had broken across the horizon. Prideep tried to wash pigeon droppings from his face in the blackness.

The two she-camels were very old. Igor kept kicking them to show their sturdiness. It was something which they did not appreciate at three A.M. We walked down through the town and out along a desert path. Igor Singh had no flashlight. When I gave him mine, he held it close to his chest, expecting it to become a gift. I held onto Igor’s shirt-tail, Osman clutched onto mine, with Prideep stumbling somewhere behind him. It seemed as if we were casualties of some horrific war, blinded by gas.

By the time streams of yellow light appeared from the sky, we were quite far from the city walls. The yellow sandstone of Jaisalmer stood invisible within the rays. Our band stopped every so often to drink water from a goatskin. The camels would sit, their legs turned inwards, and their giant lashes fanning over golf ball eyes. Their names were Unt meaning camel, and Qaisara, which means empress.

Igor Singh was a disciplined man who would let neither his animals nor his guests relax for long. Covering our heads with shirts, we swaggered with exaggerated movements towards the horizon. Osman read bearings from the compass, pretending that we were tracking treasure with a map. But we had no map. It struck me that our guide could easily slit our throats, steal our money and belongings and still return to town before breakfast.

It was odd that a Sikh should, firstly, be in Jaisalmer and, secondly, have a Russian first name. Igor began to speak, Osman translated his words so that I might understand the life of this peculiar man.

“My father came to Rajasthan between the world wars. He was sick of Russia, the country of his birth, so he escaped communism and he decided to live in India. He married a Punjabi girl who was working in Jaipur. After Partition and all the slaughter accompanying the splitting of India and Pakistan in the mid-1940s, they wanted to get away from people and so they moved to Jaisalmer. I was brought up here.”

“Do you speak Russian?” I asked.

“I am a mixture, so have all the advantages of a crossbreed.

I taught myself about my mother’s Sikh religion. And, as I am out here much of the time, it doesn’t bother me to wear a turban.”

Osman and Prideep climbed on Unt’s back and I was offered Qaisara. The she-camels groaned as we ascended. I was immediately gripped by motion sickness. Qaisara’s gait made it like riding in the wispy shell of a boat through rough sea. Prideep was thrilled by the new experience. Enjoying his adventure away from Mumbai, from time to time he reminisced to Osman, and speculated on the gossip which our trip must have provoked.

Qaisara sighed, I guessed in relief, as her parasite population seeped onto me. And, by early afternoon, there was nothing in front of us, and nothing behind, but sand. I had grown used to the idea of being in the Great Thar Desert: the novelty had quickly worn off.

We stumbled along all day under a sun which made our faces raw. My camel bags were at last in their native environment, much less of a burden to me, thrown over Qaisara’s bony back. I wondered for a moment if my grandfather’s expedition through the desert had been similar to mine. Perhaps one of his journeys had been across these very plains. Perhaps he, too, had gone in search of treasure in the Great Thar Desert.

There was no sign that it had rained in the desert. Thoughts of the camel drowning occupied me for at least an hour. Then, images of a chest brimming with rubies replaced those of floundering camels. My pace quickened and my mouth salivated with greed.

* * *

Osman began to shout. “I see People! People!”

Rubbing the sand from my eyes, I turned round 360 degrees. Still I could see no movement. Prideep leapt about as if suddenly illuminated. He and Osman embraced like old comrades reuniting.

“What the hell are you talking about? There’s nothing, you idiots!” I yelled, fearing that they had both finally cracked.

“There! Look over there!”

Osman placed his hand on mine and pointed. He was right. There, in the distance, was a tiny speck which looked like a flea, jumping about. Then others. My brain and all its contents seemed to have been erased. I could just about understand fleas and sand. The thought of a city or of driving a car seemed terrifying. Would I be able to live in western society again?

The specks grew bigger. They were not fleas, and dogs could be seen running about their feet. Was it Mandha, the place where Abdul lived? Yes, Igor assured us, it was.

Qaisara and Unt were given to a child to look after. Igor Singh led us to a group of desert folk. The men, each with a full beard and a face worn by the harsh conditions, sat in a circle around a smoldering campfire. The greetings were formal and drawn out. I prodded Igor to find out if Abdul was around.

“Tell me! Is Abdul the Warrior here?” Igor paused and parted his chapped lips.

“Yes, the Warrior is in Mandha.”

“Has he the treasure?”

“Yes, he has it at his house.”

“Could we go straight there?”

Yes, indeed we could.

Abdul the Warrior had the physique of a bear. His face was hidden by a massive black beard: only his great hook of a nose seemed to escape the bristles. His back was rounded, and his immense hands shot forward as I drew near. The Warrior pulled me to his chest like a long-lost son being welcomed by his father. He did not mention the treasure. I knew that it would be impolite to ask of it before we ate.

Dates were brought and straw-colored tea was poured into dainty cups. Abdul grinned ferociously, and sipped from the white china, which he held in his thumb and forefinger like an upturned thimble.

Three chickens had been roasted and buried in a bed of pilau rice. I fished for a leg. Abdul dug his hand into the mound of rice and threw a whole chicken across to me. He growled. I grasped at the bony feet and sunk my teeth into the breast. The Warrior seemed pleased and, rubbing his fingers into the thick mass of black bristle that sprouted from his face, he spoke. Everyone listened.

“You are friends of Yusuf Jahan?”

“Yes, Sir. He sent us to meet you. We traveled from the busy streets of Mumbai, across Gujarat and Rajasthan in search of you. The Dervish said that perhaps you might help us on our quest.”

Abdul stopped me as I spoke: he obviously had some advance information.

“I understand that you seek the great treasures of the world.”

“Yes, Sir.” I shifted apprehensively. “Do you have anything here that might be of interest?”

“You may see what I have, my humble possessions. I insist that you take any which are to your liking.”

Abdul signaled to one of his men who was weighted down by bandoliers and endless rounds of heavy-calibre ammunition. A tea-chest was carried in by two other men. My heart beat faster and faster. More dates were passed around. A pack of dogs began to bark outside.

Abdul reached for the chest. He elevatored the lid off. I rubbed the vision of rubies from my eyes, peering into the darkness of the box. Osman and I gagged at its contents. Prideep pushed us aside so that he, too, might see the riches. Abdul was pleased with our speechlessness. He delved his great fingers into the tea-chest and pulled out the most grotesque colored glass lampshade that I had ever seen.

A paraffin lamp was brought closer, and the Warrior ran his fingertips over an engraving.

“Can you read what it says?” he roared. I held the lampshade under the light and read out the legend:

“Made in Birmingham.”

Abdul the Warrior winced with delight and gasped, “Do you know how far away that is?”

“Yes, Sir. It is many miles from the Great Thar Desert,” I said.

“Would you like it?”

Abdul was prepared to offer it as a gift. There was silence. Images of sand and fleas danced around in my mind as I tried to string a set of words together.

“Aga-i Janab, Respected Sir,” I began, “you are a lucky man indeed to own such a valuable object. Fate favours us both, having extended great fortune to me also. For I already have an identical lampshade to this. It is destiny that has given us both such a wondrous thing.”

Abdul the Warrior had tears of empathy in his eyes. In the desert there is little beauty but there is a closeness and solidarity between all men. Abdul looked at Osman, Prideep and I, and said, very softly:

“My boys, stay here and live with me. It is my honour to be your host.”

SEVEN

Leaving the Nest

To the Red Hills, Lahugada,

Holy Lingo joined the Brothers

To those seven nice young women,

To the daughters of the Giant.

Sizzling lumps of mutton were borne towards us on a silver tray. The waiter glided beneath the crystal chandeliers and cornices of Delhi’s Gaylord Restaurant. His hair had turned white with years of servitude. Osman and Prideep howled like wolves, with uncontrollable joy, at the sight of food.

We had left Abdul the Warrior with his lampshade and desert life, and trekked back across the Great Thar to Jaisalmer once again. Then, after many hours spent jarring about at the back of packed local buses, we arrived in Delhi, the capital of India.

Osman had talked me into coming to Delhi, the city of his youth. He swore that, with his contacts and friends, there would be nothing to stop us finding antique treasures. Prideep agreed that we should have come straight to the capital in the first place. The two had bonded, become a gang and, although we were friends, they could never forgive me for dragging them to the single most unpleasant spot on earth.

In a moment of weakness I had promised to take them to Gaylord’s before even getting a hotel room. They were allowed to have all they could eat.

The waiter had become so bewildered scribbling down the order, that Osman made him note down the dishes they would not require. There were only three of those... brains masala, fried brains and boiled brains masala. I had made them promise not to order brains. They had looked sad for a moment but then had agreed.

Osman held a truffle cake in one hand and a mutton steak in the other and took alternate bites of each. The dining room had gone quiet. Waiters and guests, security guards in tin hats, and the chefs, stood around and watched the spectacle. My face took on the color of the crimson silk-covered walls and I pretended not to know my associates.

* * *

“Hey mister, change money? Something nice to smoke? Cute girl? Cheap flight? Want a room?”

“No, thank you. We have everything under control!”

The street corners of New Delhi are packed with agents. Rumour has it that if one wanted to buy General Motors, the place to set the contract, or at least find out the market price, is on Connaught Place, New Delhi. The loitering youths act as fixers, and can easily sniff out liars and time-wasters.

When lunch was over, we lugged our bags with us, trying to look as though we often strolled the streets so encumbered.

My camel saddle-bags, which were never an easy item of luggage to haul about, were cutting into my shoulder more than ever. So we rested, bloatedly, in a heap outside an exclusive jeweler’s shop. Prideep stared into the window and became hypnotized by a silver bowl, filled with glinting, gleaming gemstones. He prodded Osman and made him take a look. Mesmerized by riches, Prideep and Osman pressed their faces to the glass and panted heavily. When the window became clouded with the vapour, they slumped in silence on the ground beside me.

Just then, two Arab sheikhs, wearing the black-and-gold headbands of royalty, exited the air-conditioned jeweler’s shop. Dressed in immaculate Bedouin robes, they walked over to a stretch Mercedes limousine. And, three paces behind, followed their entourage of advisers, bodyguards, secretaries, hangers-on and bearers of numerous just-purchased gifts.

As the sheikhs prepared to climb into their vehicle, they glanced at the miserable heap in which Osman, Prideep and I were sitting. Our clothes were in tatters; our bodies were bathed in dirt and sand. The older of the two sheikhs said loudly to his friend, “You know, India really is quite an amazing place! Look at that young man sitting over there.” The entire group turned to me and stared. “He looks exactly like Sayed Tahir Shah!”

A few minutes later — still red with shame that my father’s close friends should have observed me in such a state — I was squashed between Osman and Prideep in a rickshaw, searching for a place to stay. The driver pressed his thumb hard on the horn and swung into the gates of the inimitable Special Number One Hotel.

Special Number One rose uncounted floors into the sky like a reared up, sprawling creature of the deep. Planned by idealists, the human element had overcome most of its utilitarian qualities. Its purposes now seemed to torment poor travelers with multiple forms and unnecessary paperwork.

I approached the reception desk, in the warehouse-sized foyer, already beset by a snaking line of dejected foreigners. They looked as if they were queuing for forgotten reasons, like people waiting in the bread-lines of Siberia. A cocky little man glared at me from the other side of the desk.

“Good afternoon. I would like to take two rooms please,” I said.

“Do you have a reservation?” The official straightened his tie, pulling his collar even further out of alignment with the rest of his garb.

“Yes, of course I have one. I made it by telephone several days ago. The name is Shah.”

A policy of lying often does the trick when faced by the clerk. And my last name is so common in India that there was a good chance of some Shah having reserved a room. Osman and Prideep seemed pleased with my boldness. The pockmarked face wagged violently from side to side, “Sir, we don’t make reservations over the telephone. We are full!” Having already lied, I decided to go further to capture the initiative.

“I also made a reservation for two rooms in writing.”

“Sir, we do not make advanced bookings of any kind. We have no vacancies. You will have to leave!”

The whip-hand calmness infuriated me. I pulled a note from my back pocket and slipped it to the official as covertly as the situation allowed. Again the head shook from side to side. This was officialdom of the worst kind — no-hope bureaucracy — which is its own reward: so pure as to be unbribable. I tried staring him out, while the people at the head of the queue gazed almost indifferently at me. After what seemed an age, the clerk’s eyes crossed; he said that maybe after six hours we could get a room.

Six hours turned into eight hours and we were still waiting. The snaking line of demoralized travelers had sloughed layers of clothes. The humidity was almost unbearable. Osman went about shaking hands with servants and administrative staff, trying to press ten-rupee notes into their palms. No one took the bait.

After ten hours in the foyer, I was asked to pay large amounts of foreign currency in exchange for two room keys. I completed various multilingual forms in quadruplicate — it seemed more like a university entrance examination than registration at a hotel. All I could think of was taking a steaming hot shower.

We staggered with our possessions to the elevators, of which there were four. Only one worked. But as there was a power cut that was not functioning either.

Our rooms were on the top floor. Osman flew into a rage at having to climb the hundreds of stairs necessary to reach the accommodation. I was surprised that he did not adapt to the situation. I calmed him as best I could, saying that things had probably changed a good deal here while he had been in Mumbai. Usually he never stopped talking of the benefits of Delhi. He was now consumed with embarrassment at the inaccuracy of his memory.

The receptionist had been away from three to nine P.M. Osman stormed over to the reception desk, where the man was torturing another hopeful. He stretched over the Formica and grabbed hold of the terrified bureaucrat.

“You bastard Baku, can come with us to the top!” he roared. “You must teach these people respect,” he told me, over his shoulder, shaking the clerk to emphasize the point. I wondered if there would be repercussions: but, at least Osman was back on form.

Our party climbed the stairs. It felt like the ascent of K2. The receptionist stumbled in front, his left arm clamped in a half-nelson, followed by Osman, who was sniggering sadistically, with Prideep and me at the rear. Our shadows flickered on the slime-covered walls. It seemed that no human had visited the uppermost floor in a long time. An enormous raven sat perched at the top of the stairs, a sinister omen of things which were to come. The bird croaked at our intrusion.

Osman’s captive lay slouched and panting on the top step. We moved over him like a column of soldier ants on the warpath. There was an eerie feeling to be so high above New Delhi. Probing about my room with uncertain footsteps, I was perplexed that such a haphazardly built structure could remain standing. For the first time in India, I was frightened. I put it down to the utter hostility of the accommodation, and its total lack of personality. Another raven marched back and forth on the window ledge. Its head moved at awkward angles, and for a moment I thought back to Blake and his vultures. Maybe he had sent this avian symbol of security to comfort me.

Osman had explained to Prideep that he would take him to all his old haunts. They would try to track down some girls he had once known. I was not invited to participate. Osman said that in the Old City he had a contact, more useful in my quest, who might be able to help. It was rumoured that the acquaintance had a warehouse full of Mughal jewels. Osman was not one to brag; his promises and contacts usually came through. Having put the negative experiences of the Great Thar to the back of my mind, I was determined to continue in pursuit of great riches.

The next morning Osman went out early to hang about on the street corners of Connaught Place. At lunchtime we met up and he announced that his old contact, Iqbal, was still in Old Delhi. We would take a rickshaw and go to meet him.

Osman suggested that we try to cross into the park at the centre of Connaught Place to hail a rickshaw. Motorbikes and Ambassador cars swerved in all directions to miss us. A white buffalo with wide-stretching horns was moving in slow straight lines across the park. Deliriously, it heaved at a Webb lawn-mower, a boy with a sharp stick prodding at its behind.

Osman jumped into the road and wrestled with a speeding blue rickshaw, bringing it to a hasty stop. We clambered aboard and ordered the driver to take us to the Red Fort. The driver stared into the air blankly and muttered, “Airport... vich airport do you vant?”

“Red Fort! You idiot! In the Old City,” Osman yelled.

He and I had become very irritable in Delhi. I put it down to too many positive ions in the air, but did not dare begin to explain the concept of the electrical charging of ions. The possibilities for confusion were too substantial. Mumbai’s citizens, however, seemed much more easy-going than those in Delhi.

The Red Fort appeared on the right. I passed the driver two rupees. Osman had assured me that was the rate. But the driver chased after us, shouting how disgusted he was that we should be so miserly. Osman picked up the unfortunate man and threw him into a paan stall. Prideep fell down on the ground laughing as Osman dusted himself off and led the way into the Red Fort.

Inside the giant walls, package tours mingled with curio dealers. A brace of small shops had divided the forecourt territorially so that the owners could benefit equally from the visitors. The existence of such intrusions would have made the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan, (“King of the World”) the fort’s founder, turn in his grave.

Osman hastened between the assorted curio sellers and pickpockets in an attempt to find where Iqbal might be. After scurrying about for twenty minutes, he announced that Iqbal was now in Chandni Chowk Bazaar. We would go to meet him at once.

Chandni Chowk sprawls behind the great Jami Masjid mosque — the biggest mosque in India. Rickshaws and bicycles dodged a group of sacred cows, languidly raiding an apple stall. Holy men blew magical smoke into the air, blinding both the cows and cyclists. Roasted peanut sellers ambled about with burners aiding the pollution and confusion. What made the holy men’s smoke more divine than that of the peanut sellers? Osman thought it was a ridiculous question.

Each street was bordered by rows of stalls, crammed with odds and ends, dating back a thousand years. We pressed deeper into the labyrinth. Men would nod and point when Osman whispered Iqbal’s name. The word seemed like a special key, capable of opening any lock.

Outside a modest silk shop a donkey stood in silence, as donkeys do, as if waiting for the world to end. We paused, as Osman sent the shop’s junior to fetch his master. Silks in pink and red fluttered under the sluggish ceiling fans. Then Iqbal appeared.

Osman and he bear-hugged. Prideep and I were introduced, before taking places on a mound of white cotton cushions. Tea was brought.

“Peace be upon you, my friends,” said Iqbal. “You are welcome to my humble house, anything that you wish I will have brought.”

Then Iqbal rubbed at his orange-hennaed beard, which glowed in the darkness of the shop. He was perhaps in his late sixties but somehow his age was irrelevant. There was an air of rectitude about this man. I had expected to meet another arms-dealing Dervish type. Iqbal seemed wizened by the experience of many years, but calm, at peace.

Pulling out a watch on a chain from his trouser pocket, he began to wind it up. I could make out Russian lettering on the dial. Iqbal noticed I was staring at the instrument and, to break the silence, I began to talk.

“You are most gracious, I hope that we did not disturb you. We have just returned from Jaisalmer; I am on a quest in search of treasures.” I spoke with a formality which somehow appeared appropriate. “I have been residing in Mumbai, Osman and Prideep have assisted me in my search to find hungry people who might be necessitous enough to help us secure such objects as jeweled daggers.”

“My friend,” said Iqbal, “you must understand that a hungry person who has nothing is only interested in finding one crust of bread. If you give him that crust then his stomach is full and he is satisfied. You see, poverty is common in India; you can say that when a person finds one rupee in a gutter may be so happy that he feels rich. Hungry people are not the solution to your problem.”

“Then what is the solution?” I was interested by his observations.

“My boy,” Iqbal spoke each word with precision, “this country is filled with very greedy men. You cannot blame them for being like that. They have crawled from the sewers and have climbed from the degradation which consumes much of this land. A man becomes very cynical here, the poor and ill die on the streets. The injustices of the caste system still haunt many unfortunate millions of people. Do you realize that if the very shadow of an Achhoot — an “untouchable” — falls on the food of a Brahmin, the Brahmin must throw that food away?

“I myself did have a remarkable collection of priceless objects until a few years ago. Then men with guns came one night and threatened to kill my wife and boys if I didn’t hand the collection over. There is nothing left. You never know who will inform on you if you keep even one ring. At last I can sleep well at night, knowing that our lives are safe from the clutches of desperate men. The memory of such wondrous artefacts still brings me happiness. I am content that I could hold such things, if only to be their keeper for a while.

“Delhi has been robbed of countless wonderful treasures. They are now in the Arab Gulf or in the West. Go and see our new museum here near Janpath, they built it recently and filled it mostly with new or forged pieces! I will try to assist you because I don’t want to see a friend of Osman’s get hurt by vicious men. Will you come back to me in four days? I shall see what I can do.”

Before I left the shop I shook hands with Iqbal and sensed a curious energy from his touch. He seemed happy that I had gained something, although at the time I was not sure what.

* * *

Osman treated Prideep and me to ice cream at Nirula’s Café on Connaught Place. There was an uneasy atmosphere. He and Prideep kept looking at each other and then at me. I asked them what the matter was. Osman stopped licking at the cone.

“There is nothing really the matter,” he said without looking at me. “But we know that soon you will be leaving India, and it shall make us sad.”

I listened to his words and, instead of thumping him on the back and joking about or denying it, I said nothing. Time spent in India has a extraordinary effect on one. It acts as a barrier that makes the rest of the world seem unreal. I would read Time magazine each week, but India was strangely removed from the photographs and stories. At the same time I knew that my adventures there were close to an end. I was ready to move on. Characters flashed through my mind: Blake my guru, Rachana my date, Prideep with his imp-like looks and, of course Osman, who had become my closest friend of all. Together, we had explored the darkest regions of Mumbai and traveled across the Great Thar Desert.

India, with its nine hundred million people, is often referred to as the largest democracy in the world. The British once controlled the vast country but had little lasting effect on its people. I felt they never really came to grips with what they claimed to control. As they strove to dominate the subcontinent, it slipped from their grasp without them ever realising why.

The British failed to penetrate the culture and understand its dangerous capacity for absorption. This, at any rate, is the very widespread opinion of many Indians, scholars and others. I have heard it from Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and Zoroastrians, as well as Christian converts.

In India, where all is possible, contradictory beliefs nestle together. An Indian friend, whilst talking of his nation, once looked at me squarely and said:

“How can you conquer a people with the self-confidence of the Hindus? India is a place where the cow is sacred: supposedly because once there was once nothing: no world, no people, not a thing... just a cow floating about in nothingness. One day — although there were no days — the cow let out an enormous belch and from that, all you see around you comes. The stars and sun, the planets and the grass beneath our feet, all came from the cow’s gigantic eructation. How can you even begin to influence, to any depth, a people such as this?”

Four days after visiting Iqbal, we returned to his shop in Chandni Chowk. The doors were locked and none of the silk was displayed.

Osman rapped on the door, calling “Iqbal Sahib! Iqbal Sahib!” A bolt on the inside rattled, and the door opened. Iqbal’s son greeted us, his eyes red from crying. Osman bent down to his level and asked what the matter was.

“My father, Iqbal Jamal, died this morning in his sleep. He has not been well for a long time. Before he went to bed last night he gave this to my mother and said that when you come back to give it to you. It is for the man from Englistan.”

The child held out his right hand, it was clasped around something. I could just make out a silvery gleam between his fingers. He placed his hand in mine and I felt the object. It was Iqbal’s Russian pocket watch. Osman, Prideep and I were too moved to speak: we stood for a moment in silence.

The boy asked us if we would like some tea. Osman replied:

“No, thank you, we shall leave you now. When you have grown up and are in Mumbai, go to the Colaba Tailor Shop on the Strand. I shall be waiting there for you.”

The child nodded and went back inside the shop.

We left Chandni Chowk and took a rickshaw back to New Delhi. Each of us was silent. The watch sat firm in my palm. It was still ticking. Although I had only met Iqbal once there had been a click of understanding between us. I sensed Iqbal’s energy around me. The watch was almost like a gift in return for housing something of his spirit.

Osman looked at me quizzically. I knew what he was thinking, and I nodded as if to reply to his unspoken question. Yes, I did realize the honour and exceptional responsibility, and respect it.

A message had been slipped under my door at the hotel. It explained that, in accordance with the regulations of the establishment, where we had been resident for a week, we would have to pay double the normal rate from now on. I went down to the clerk and counted out some dollar bills. He consulted a calculator and stapled the money to an ornate multiple form. Exhausted with fighting the system, I almost admired the man’s steadfast application of policy, irrespective of logic and without customary rewards. In some peculiar way, indeed, the rules were now beginning to seem quite logical. It was then I knew that I had been in India long enough.

At the Special Number One, I began the ascent to the umpteenth floor with the usual necessary dedication of a mountain climber. I stopped in at the laundry part-way up. There was no reply when I knocked, so I pushed the door open. Reflected in the flickering light of a black and white television screen I discerned about ten faces. The chefs and security guards scurried off back to their jobs, worried that I might report them. The laundry assistant was the only person left. I asked for my clothes. There was something strangely familiar about the man. It was not his face nor his build. Suddenly I realized what it was: he was wearing my best clothes, and had obviously dressed up ready to go out on the town.

Prideep and Osman were waiting for me outside my room. They were smiling. Prideep was whistling as if he was covering something up. Osman had spent weeks teaching him to whistle, and his broken set of teeth was very effective. They shuffled their feet and looked at the ground to hide their smiling cheeks. I muttered that I had been invited to the Japanese Embassy to dine. Osman sighed how unlucky I was. He, of course, had attended many such boring occasions whilst working at the American Embassy. I reminded him that he was only a janitor there. He pledged that while nominally only a concierge, he had had many special privileges. The way he put it, I was almost tempted to think that he had been the ambassador: undercover, of course.

The thought flashed through my mind that the Americans had perhaps appointed Osman Chief of Mission, rather in the manner of the old Soviet Unions, when the chauffeur or gardener was the real kingpin of their embassy. Anyway, Prideep and he were going out to find girls and enjoy a wild evening in Old Delhi’s most amoral nightspots. Osman had put on his tie with spots and Prideep had donned his best shirt.

Osman and Prideep returned to the hotel at breakfast the next day. Their evening had been very different from my own. I had eaten sushi and was in bed by ten. Their story, I feared, could not have been more contrary.

Osman strode along the corridors like a soldier, and Prideep shuffled behind, chortling. They banged on my door to give me their report. It had been a night of debauched behavior unrivalled in history. They recounted every detail. Osman decided to write the adventure down in English and give it to me for the book I was to write. The events of their evening, alas, were far too sordid. They went off to get some sleep, burbling like schoolboys after lights out, revelling in their impropriety.

At the telex office on Janpath there was a power cut. Indeed, I had the feeling that no electricity had been supplied to the premises for a very long time. Five ladies with large red bindis, red dots worn on the forehead by Hindu women, moved about behind the smoked-glass windows clutching candles.

One of the women, on seeing me, began frenziedly waving a sheet of paper above her head.

“It came! It came!” she screamed.

Her colleagues huddled round while I signed assorted receipts for a telex from my sister, who was living in Pakistan. The communication had been received weeks before, when electricity was briefly available. It had taken many days to get here, forwarded by land from Mumbai. It read:

COME TO PESHAWAR STOP WILL MEET YOU AT GREENS HOTEL STOP

HAVE GOT EXTRAORDINARY TREASURE COME AT ONCE STOP SAIRA

An audience had gathered, as there had been no other telecommunications for weeks. The crowd insisted on being told where Peshawar was, what my sister did and when I would be leaving.

“Leaving?” The idea of getting away from the chaos of India, and up to the North West Frontier Province — the Hindu Kush and the lands of my ancestors — was extremely appealing. What was this treasure of which she had written? I knew that telephoning to make inquiries about matters such as this would have been inappropriate. I would fly straight to Pakistan to see what the treasure was. Perhaps I had been looking in the wrong country, and some benign fate was luring me northwards to the Afghan borderland. Besides, I would still be in Gondwanaland...

The PIA office was nearby, so I booked myself on a flight to Islamabad leaving in two days. Then I set about making arrangements for my departure, and perhaps the saddest thing of all: preparing to leave Osman and Prideep.

I called Blake in Mumbai, he was sitting on the rooftop, “Hey Man, how is it up there? The vultures are taking chillies from my hand now, you”ve got to see this!”

“Blake, I have to go to Pakistan to see my sister for a while. I’ll try and get back here sometime.”

“Man, I’d like to visit, but these vulture suckers are taking up all my time!”

The spindly line crackled and Blake faded away.

Osman and Prideep were eating breakfast. It was nearly five-thirty in the afternoon. I joined them, but said nothing. They knew it was time for me to leave them. I felt like a fledghng bird, about to jump from its nest for the first time. Osman looked across. I averted my eyes and he asked, “When are you going?”

“In two days’ time, I have to see my sister in Peshawar.”

“We must get back to Mumbai anyway, our families will be waiting for us. It has been a long time since we walked down Marine Drive,” said Osman. He paused for a moment but began again when Prideep nudged him with his elbow. “Tahir Sahib,” he said, “will you come with us? We have something to show you.”

We took a rickshaw to Old Delhi, where it pulled to a stop deep inside the maze of Chandra Chowk. A door opened and we ascended a staircase, then turned right into a huge studio.

On one wall hung a vast painting — the type that advertise Hindi movies — with powerful heroes and heroines, gods and armies. The faces and acts were familiar, all too familiar. A group of men on camels were riding off into the desert. A steam train was rushing out of control. Gaylord’s and the Chateau Windsor stared down, oozing with servants and tradition. In the centre there were three men, standing like cowboys, in lavish costumes. Prideep on the left, Osman on the right and me in the middle. Osman spoke jerkily, almost choking:

“Our words of thanks will dissolve,” he said, “but maybe this will help you to remember the good times. They were the best times we have ever had.”

EIGHT

Here Comes the King

Wrathful then was holy Lingo,

At those wanton Giant’s daughters

Rose the flame of indignation

From his boots up to his top-knot.

War correspondents sat about eating chicken shashlik and making up the news.

They swapped tall stories in the darkness of Lala’s Grill at Green’s Hotel. Mercenaries and missionaries ambled about, stranded in the border town after the end of the Soviet-Afghan war.

A Danish prosthesis expert had befriended me. He said that as long as I ate chicken I would probably be all right. I thanked him for this first tip on survival in Peshawar and he wandered off to fit an artificial limb.

Peshawar had been a crucial base during the Soviet-Afghan war. Mujahed commanders, international aid organizations, drugs dealers, Russian spies and a bevy of journalists, transformed the ancient border town into a thriving metropolis.

Four million Afghan refugees fled to the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan. With the end of the war against the communist forces, the refugee populace had begun to go back to Afghanistan. Yet their return was hampered by an abundance of mines, and total lack of food in rural areas resulting from the devastation of Brezhnev’s war.

Peshawar, still a cocktail of people — thrown together because of the war — ran on its own lines.

My sister, Saira, had come to Pakistan initially to report on the conflict for several western newspapers. Now she concentrated on the refugee repatriation question and the feuding of Afghan parties. A veteran reporter for newspapers and television of various wars, she had made her name from her front-page eye-witness accounts of the allied air strike on Baghdad in 1991.

A blue and yellow rickshaw had taken me to Green’s Hotel where I hoped to meet my sister. Having flown from Delhi to Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, I had traveled northwards to Peshawar.

At Green’s I climbed to the reception desk over parcels and packages, which looked suspiciously like containers of explosive devices. Men with walkie-talkies crouched behind potted plants, chain-smoking American cigarettes. They watched each other through orange-tinted glasses, eyeing the bundles nervously.

My sister had left no message, the receptionist had never heard of her. I took a room on the second floor and prepared to wait. The sound of the evening call to prayer radiated out over Peshawar.

There was a knock at the door of room. I opened it to find a young boy holding a tray with a Coca-Cola already poured into a glass over ice. It made me remember the Chateau Windsor and the friendly army of obsequious servants. I took the drink and sipped, for the first time in many months, real Coca-Cola.

Ten minutes later a harder thudding sound made the door bend inwards. I pulled it open, expecting to find the boy returning for the glass. But a huge Afghan filled the frame, a black bushy beard obscured his face. Bandoliers stretched from shoulder to shoulder, and what I made out to be a Russian Makarov handgun was thrust into his belt.

“I am Akram,” he said.

The voice roared from somewhere amongst the bristles. I was unsure what my reaction was supposed to be, I played along, hoping for some more information.

“Peace upon you! Welcome, Akram Khan. I am Tahir Shah.”

“I have been sent by your sister to look after you.” Akram boomed.

“Excellent, come inside, out of the corridor.”

Akram sat squarely on a chair, having drunk copiously from the cold water tap in the adjoining bathroom. He preferred to keep the bandoliers strapped tightly across his chest.

“Tell me Akram Khan, where is Saira Jan?”

“She said that she would be back in seven days from now. She has gone to Kabul to cover the feud between two warring clans.”

Akram saw worry contort my face and he tried to comfort me. For Kabul was an extremely dangerous place to be.

“She is with a very brave band of Mujahedin, Afghan Freedom Fighters, who have gone into the battle to try to bring peace to the factions. There is little danger.” He stroked at a clump of hairs growing from his beak-like nostrils, adding, “Until her return I am responsible for all your desires. We can go tomorrow morning to collect Saira’s jeep which has just been repaired.”

“Very well, what time shall we leave?”

“I’ll be here at nine.”

He stood and strode from the door, his giant feet pounding out into the corridor. I sat on my bed, forcing myself not to worry. The next day would teach me more of the situation, and perhaps it would bring a clue to the great treasure which Saira had mentioned in her telex.

The Danish relief worker, Adam, joined me for breakfast. A doctor at a relief clinic, his work in prosthesis was well known in Peshawar. A copy of The Muslim was stuffed under one arm together with an artificial hand which he fondled lovingly during the meal.

“I’ve been making alterations to this hand for days,” said Adam enthusiastically. “It’s for an old Afghan woman whose left hand was amputated after a bullet wound became very infected.”

“How is she coping with the loss?” I asked.

“It’s astounding, people learn to adapt and survive if they have to: human beings fear potential disasters, but if a catastrophe occurs they learn to live with the consequences.”

Peshawar’s bright morning sunshine broke through the tinted windows and Lala’s Grill lost its funereal air for a moment.

Adam went off to fit the prosthesis and Akram and I took a rickshaw past the Qissa-Khwani Bazaar to find the jeep.

Afghans strode about, chatting on street corners and embracing old friends. There was an air of confidence and sophistication amongst these men, a nobility which I had rarely seen before. A woman crouched outside the Post office, a burqa, a garment like an upside-down shuttlecock, covering her body. Two little children were playing together at her feet. Coins were sewn into their clothes and kohl was painted around their green eyes.

The bazaar smelt of melons and leather. Rays of crisp white light streamed through holes in the canvas roofs. I bought a shalwar kameez — a baggy suit like pajamas — and a pair of leather chappals. The shoe seller soaked my chappals in water before I put them on, to soften the leather.

The bazaar snaked on for miles. Melons as large as medicine balls were carried about by muscular stallholders. Dogs barked and chased black and white cats and we turned left into a scrapyard. Akram pointed to a once-red heap of nuts and bolts.

“This is Saira’s jeep,” he said. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

His eyes shone as if he were witnessing a miracle. I muttered and urr-ed indistinct praise at what I saw. The wheels and engine had been removed and stacks of bricks were holding up the chassis. On the front right side a spent shellcase was propping up the wheel arch. Akram pulled the canvas back to reveal a nest of life. Two boys were curled up asleep, their bodies intertwined with a Htter of yellow puppies, around a large boiling pot.

The third child was covered from head to toe in oil and grease: he was stirring a huge pot of soup with a spanner. He looked up and smiled so broadly that my resentment at the situation disappeared. The other boys woke and the soup was served from a set of grubby Ford hub caps.

“These are Afghan boys; they are too proud to beg,” said Akram. “I managed to get them this place to work from. They will accept no money. Their father and mother were killed in Panjshir valley. An old uncle who is blind came with them; they look after him too.”

In a few minutes a boy of about thirteen had fitted the engine back in place. As he wielded a spanner, as long as his forearm, his younger brother started her up. The yard was filled with a dense blue smoke that seemed almost too thick to enter one’s lungs. Cheers mixed with the smoke. The cauldron was lifted to the ground and a piece of broken glass was handed to Akram — a homemade key.

An assortment of wheels were produced and fitted with some difficulty; I suspected that they were not those which had been removed from the vehicle when the work had begun. Akram handed a large bar of milk chocolate to the youngest of the boys.

The elder brothers stared down at the infant, and nudged him. The boy stretched out both hands which were folded around the bar of chocolate, he tried to give it back to Akram. The eldest child spoke with shrill words in good English.

“Baba, you have been kind already to my brothers and I, we cannot accept.”

A set of miniature fingers caressed the shiny foil wrapper as Akram insisted that they take it. The smallest child put the chocolate down and held out a squirming ball of yellow fur: his gift in exchange.

Akram took the puppy and held it tightly in his folded arms. We left the oily yard as the fumes filtered upwards. The dogs and family of brothers climbed up into another jeep, and the cauldron was filled with water again.

* * *

Green’s Hotel ran wild with rumours. Journalists slouched in Lala’s Grill nonchalantly, then ran off to file the bogus tales to editors around the world. Akram and I decided to play a practical joke: Afghans love jokes.

When the foyer was at its busiest, we lounged about talking loudly.

“Tahir, did you hear that the King of Saudi Arabia is coming on a secret visit tonight, to hand out funds to refugees?” shouted Akram as loudly as he could.

“That’s amazing news, but where will he be staying?”

“I heard from my cousin who is the receptionist at Dean’s Hotel that he will be resting there, but under a false name.”

“What time is he expected?”

“Oh, at about seven this evening.”

“Where did you say he was staying?”

“At Dean’s Hotel.”

There was a rustle of palm leaves and men in white suits with gold bracelets stopped talking into their walkie-talkies and rushed for the door. One by one, the journalists caught the gossip and dashed out to hail rickshaws. Akram and I went into Lala’s Grill for tea.

Akram slurped his tea, almost choking with enthusiasm at the immediate response. Then Adam surfaced, his face glowing with excitement.

“Adam, what”re you all shaken up about?” asked Akram.

“You”ll never guess who’s coming to Peshawar tonight!” Akram kicked me under the table and we gasped together:

“Who? Tell us who!”

“Fahad ibn Abdul-Aziz, the King of Saudi Arabia! He’d bringing his entourage on a secret mission to deliver Stinger missiles to the Mujahedin. It’s a great secret, and I don’t know if I should tell, but he’ll be staying at Dean’s Hotel, incognito of course.”

“Oh, of course,” muttered Akram. There was no detail which Adam could not supply. People capered about, telephones rang and distraught journalists yelled down landline connections, to their editors. We decided to go down to Dean’s to see what chaos we had created.

A camera crew were setting up high wattage lamps in front of Dean’s Hotel. In the reception area, the poor manager had given in to the bevy of journalists. Running nicotine-stained fingers down the list of guests, they searched for an Arab name.

“Ahmed Hussain! It has to be him, room 302!” an American voice shouted and was trampled underfoot as the seething mass of pencils, hand-held tape-recorders and flashguns swarmed up to room 302.

Akram and I had seen enough. We drove back to Green’s, both delighted. Akram moved his eyes from the road to the dozing yellow puppy on my lap, and said:

“Beware little one, human beings are funny things.”

* * *

Waiting for my sister, and the treasure that she had promised, was almost too much to bear. I could not leave Peshawar in case she returned in my absence; and I could not sleep for the glorious images of a hidden hoard. So I forced Akram to take me to Saira’s house to see if there had been any news.

We drove out from Green’s towards University Town, a suburb of Peshawar. The jeep hummed along, swerving to miss cattle and painted Afghan lorries.

After some miles of ploughing through the frenzy of petrol tankers, cars, auto-rickshaws and buffalo carts laden high with rice, the road came to a sudden end. A single man, armed with a shiny silver whistle and a road worker’s helmet, held the frantic mob of fast-paced chaos back as if by a magic spell. Taking a lump of white chalk, he scratched a line at right angles across the road.

A dozen petrol tankers with flashing lights and blaring horns revved their engines. A row of suicide bus drivers jolted their gargantuan wheels right up to the line. A thousand rickshaws, buffalo carts and cyclists, readied for motion. But still the worker, the whistle in his teeth, held his ground. Then, thrusting a solitary round-edged spade into the dirt, he began to dig.

The raging mass of transport, animal and mechanic, looked on at fever pitch as the construction works began. But, just as the horde was about to explode across the official boundary, a cyclist veered from the paved track, cross country, to by-pass the line, the official and the shiny silver whistle.

Without a moment’s hesitation, the swarm of vehicles and buffalo followed, releasing their brakes and careering off the tarmac road, and on through a graveyard. Akram pulled over to the side of the road. Instead of surging at breakneck speed through the dusty field of graves with the rest of the mob, he climbed out of the jeep consumed with fury.

He marched down into the middle of the flow of vehicles heaving off the beaten track. Then, forcing the greatest of the petrol tankers into an emergency stop, he opened its door, and dragged out the driver by the throat. Showing no mercy, Akram threw punches at the poor wretch of a man, who was soon unable to stand.

Rather surprised at Akram’s spontaneous rage, I asked him whether such a random display of force had indeed been necessary. Akram, who was still pulsating with anger, caught me in a cold stare and said, “That driver, whose blood now covers my hands, dared to drive over the grave of my own ancestor. He shall not do it again!”

When we had overcome the area of road works, I asked Akram how he knew where to go, as the shops and stalls seemed very alike.

“It’s very easy, Tahir Jan. You turn right at the ruined fort and left at the sheep-pens.”

Opposite the sheeps’ billets, in a very rundown area, we came upon a huge mansion. Gates swung open and we were ushered inside. A servant informed us that nobody was in residence.

After some argument, he gave me a local telephone number to try.

I dialed the number from the foyer at Green’s. An Afghan voice at the other end of the line seemed to be very shaken. He said that they had heard nothing and, in any case, it was better if I came to his house the next day at two P.M. There was cause for concern, especially as reports from Kabul had announced that battles between warring Afghan factions had led to substantial casualties.

We took an early lunch before the meeting at the Peshawar Club as Adam’s guest. The club was set deep in the military cantonment — an area which the British had developed for themselves. Everything was whitewashed, and box hedges were tended by doting gardeners.

One of Adam’s young patients, Habib, came too. The son of a blacksmith, his father had died near the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif. It had been there that Habib had learnt to speak good English. His right leg had been completely blown off in a midnight bombing raid; and his little sister had lost an eye. The parents had died shielding the children as the roof caved in.

Habib’s prosthesis had been very complicated, mainly hampered by the size and shape of the replacement limb. It reached up to the bowels and was jointed in several places. Adam was pleased with the work and was thrilled to speak about the surgery.

Habib ate slice after slice of chocolate cake which Akram ordered for him. Sug, the yellow ball of fur, sat under the table, his tiny black eyes shining from the fluff. He barked at the waiter who came on tiptoe to take our orders, hoping that the dog had fallen asleep. Habib petted Sug and let him chew his fingers.

The waiter reappeared and walked across the gardens to our table. He staggered under the weight of an enormous tray of pilau rice and slices of beef. There was a gnashing of fangs and suddenly a yellow ball of fluff was charging at the man’s legs. With a rip of woolen cloth, the waiter cried out and ran up a tree. We sat staring in astonishment as he managed to scale the tree without spilling the contents of the tray. Sug sat beneath the boughs and revelled in victory.

The Dane introduced me to Camilla, an elderly English lady with a strong Yorkshire accent.

“You must come and see my class of little Afghans,” she said. “They”re usually as good as gold. But today they behaved very naughtily. I was telling them that in England we call our dogs names like Fido and Rover, just like in Afghanistan where they call their dogs Mohammed and Ali. You know what they did?” I shook my head in silence. “They all stood up together and walked out!”

I explained to Camilla that in Afghanistan people never give the names of the Prophet or his family to animals or objects.

“Oh,” she replied, “that must be why my driver hit a tree when I nicknamed my station-wagon the “Allah-car”.”

Akram stayed in the jeep and I pressed the buzzer on the wall precisely at two P.M. Two wrought-iron gates swung open and armed men escorted me inside a vast compound. Toyota Land Cruisers were being loaded up with rocket-propelled grenades and cases of ammunition. Rows of Kalashnikov AK-47’s stood lined up to be counted. All the Mujahedin were dressed in baggy pants and American army coats. Men crawled on their stomachs, others were climbing ropes or firing off heavy-calibre rounds into the air. I had never seen anything like it.

Three guards — armed to the teeth — led me into a sitting room. I sat on a straight-backed chair for twenty minutes. My heart was pounding. Not only was I anxious for my sister, but for my own safety. No one had seen me enter except for Akram. There is no detail that I can remember of that room. I just recall my hands running with sweat and the pulse in my temples.

It was then that a balding man with a few short strands of gray hair appeared. I waited for the words that my sister had been injured or killed. The old man looked deeply upset. He put out a hand and clenched my fingers in his.

“Good afternoon. Please sit down.”

He spoke with an English accent which surprised me, rather like a soldier from Sandhurst. Just as he was about to sit, a stout Afghan with a bear’s curved back and coal-black beard strode through the room. Mumbling a few words to the balding one in Pashtu, he left us alone.

The old man, whom I later realized was a formidable hero of the resistance and a former brigadier of the Afghan army, seemed to be a little more confident. I broke the silence.

“Sir, I am the brother of Saira Shah. I have come from India where I was living. My sister told to meet me her in Peshawar, but I understand that she is still away. Do you have any recent information about the expedition?”

The Brigadier drew a very deep breath and nodded slowly. Then he spoke, “Come with me, we will go to talk somewhere a little more secure.”

He stood up and walked to the door. The fortress which we were in seemed to be very secure indeed, but I decided to comply. Perspiration poured from my face; the heat outside was no help.

We climbed into a Land Cruiser and four heavily armed men jumped into the back. No words were uttered. Akram and the dog were asleep outside the gates, I did not call out, but sensed that the situation was getting very serious.

The Brigadier turned from the front seat and spoke slowly:

“Do you realize that it is not my responsibility for your sister, and that I have nothing to do with this?”

I was determined to keep very calm.

He continued:

“Do you love your sister?”

“Yes, Brigadier, I do. What exactly are you getting at?

What is the need to move about like this?”

“Saira has been in great danger. I have no idea where she is or if she is still alive. I cannot help you.”

The Brigadier could see that I was very shaken by his words. He stopped talking, and the Land Cruiser halted about ten miles from the fortress, in the countryside. I recall nothing of the hut where we were taken, just that there were small purple flowers growing in front of the door.

The Brigadier pushed me forward. A Mujahed commander stood guard, picking his teeth with a bayonet. There was a smell of burning wood and the sound of logs being chopped. We entered the house. A fierce-looking figure in battledress — festooned with fragmentation grenades — saluted as we crossed the threshold.

In the sitting room, the same bear-like man with the black beard sat. Beside him was a girl with a chadar veil covering her face. I averted my gaze, in accordance with Islamic courtesy. She turned and spoke my name. It was Saira.

The Brigadier had been playing an Afghan joke. Only when we met initially and the man with the black beard, Akbar Shah, had passed through like a shadow, had he heard that Saira had made it back. Before then he admitted that he, too, was nervous and had not been able to think of words with which to console me.

Back in the compound, Akbar Shah filled his green tea with heaped spoonfuls of salt and bellowed with laughter. We went back to Saira’s red jeep, Akram woke up and started it with the piece of broken glass. Saira, tired out, had gone home to sleep.

The next morning I went to Saira’s house and found her writing about the foray into Afghanistan. I had taken a rickshaw there, managing to avoid Akram. For, if the hoard was as wonderful as I suspected it to be, I would have to be careful as to whom I entrusted with the secret.

The bathroom had been turned into a makeshift darkroom, and several reels of Ilford film were hanging up to dry. The thought of the treasure was driving me crazy. At four A.M. I had switched on the bedside lamp and scanned the crumpled telex that Saira had sent to me in India. I read again and again the four words: HAVE GOT EXTRAORDINARY TREASURE.

Saira stopped typing and made me some tea. I sipped the drink and, trying to subdue my elation, I mumbled, “In your telex you mentioned something you’d located... treasure wasn’t it?”

My sister topped her cup up with milk and said quizzically:

“Treasure?”

“I thought that’s what you said; of course it might have been mistyped by the telex operator.”

My mind raced as I thought of all the possible mistakes an Indian clerk could have made, resulting in error with the word treasure. Saira gulped half a cup of the milky tea and exclaimed, “Ah, the treasure.”

“Yes, yes,” I stammered, “I knew that’s what you had written.”

“I hope it’s still okay. It’s been left in the cellar for weeks,” she said.

“Can I see it?” I gasped, “Can we go and have a look right away?”

“Well, I suppose so,” Saira said, leading me through the house. We arrived at the cellar door. “It’s in the basement, or was when I left. I do hope that no one took it while I was in Afghanistan.”

“That would be terrible!” I said, surprised that she could be so nonchalant, so carefree, about such an important matter.

We descended the stairs and Saira fumbled for the light-switch at the bottom. She flicked the switch and led the way through three illuminated chambers. Behind the door of the third there was a large cardboard box which had been wrapped in newspapers.

“I hope you appreciate how special this is,” Saira said. “It was brought out of Afghanistan by the Mujahed leader Zahir Khan.”

I had heard stories of the great commander Zahir Khan. Some said he was a madman, others that he was esteemed by God and given special protection. He rode a snow-white horse, that he was said to have captured from a Russian General: who had brought it from the Ukraine. He had trained the animal to crouch down on its knees when Soviet helicopter-gunships swooped by.

“He risked his life to bring us this box; to bring to us what is naturally ours,” said Saira.

Naturally ours? I was desperate to find out what it was, but was baffled by what she had said.

Saira tore away the newspapers and revealed the contents of the box. My confusion increased when I saw what was inside. For it was a box of very ripe apples.

“They are from our ancestral orchards in Paghman,” said my sister. “Zahir Khan picked them himself. They”re more precious than any gemstones. They are the fruit grown on Afghan soil: in the garden of our ancestors.”

* * *

The Brigadier had accepted our invitation to dine. He had said that he would be pleased to come; but, in accordance with Afghan tradition, he gave no date or time. And of course it would have been rude for us to press him. For two days we supervised the cooking of a feast at the mansion. Afghan meals have to match the esteem in which the guest is held. The Brigadier was expected at any moment. Another two days passed and we were still sitting around waiting for the guests. There was no word.

Then, just as we were giving up hope, Akram rushed in and announced that a convoy of about twenty jeeps was turning off the main road in our direction, and would arrive any minute. The Brigadier and his chief commanders, a dozen men, entered the house. About one hundred of his fighters sat in the garden, brandishing every kind of weapon, from Kalashnikovs to blunderbusses, waiting to be fed.

The presence, the aura, that surrounded the Brigadier was most unusual. He sat crossed-legged on an Afghan rug in the durbar room. A pakol cap was propped on his balding head and an army coat covered his square shoulders. He sat silent for a moment. A mysterious power seemed to radiate from the man, an air of absolute confidence. He spoke with precise deliberation, in almost a whisper. Everyone leant forward to hear his words.

“Your sister is very brave. You must be proud of her,” he said. “The party was shelled four times, but they escaped the danger. I selected my best men to escort her and they would all have been willing to give their lives for her protection.” The corners of his mouth turned upwards and he smiled like a cheeky schoolboy, “I hope I didn’t scare you with my little joke!”

“I am grateful for the help which you have given my sister,” I said.

The Brigadier produced a tin insulated with polystyrene and removed the lid. Inside there was what looked like a large lump of yellow marzipan. He Brigadier motioned me to smell it. It smelt of marzipan too. Then he said, “This is so hard to get, I like to keep a supply with me.” I looked in query at Saira and she whispered, “C5... plastic explosive!”

The men in the garden chatted and smoked cigarettes until the food was brought. Several lambs, chickens buried in trays of rice, huge flaps of naan bread, bowls of beans in yoghurt, and many great melons, were devoured in a few minutes. Almost every scrap of food had disappeared.

The men rubbed the grease into their beards, stretching out and waiting for their leader to speak, while green tea was served. The Brigadier eventually put down a leg of lamb and started to talk again.

“The war in Afghanistan weaned children who have known nothing but hostilities. Now that the Russian forces have pulled out, the struggle continues between numerous factions vying for power. For the refugees the road ahead will not improve. Their lands have been destroyed by chemicals and mined beyond all reason. The international aid organizations come, their people prance about, but often, sadly, are manacled in their corruption.

“Go to the bazaars and you will be able to buy any aid, from coats and grain to pills and even grenade launchers. The Afghan factions shell, rocket and ambush each other and end more lives, as if the war did not claim enough. The fighting continues, exterminating the ordinary people.

“The future of the warring in Afghanistan, which dictates the future of Peshawar to a great extent, still seems very bleak despite the Soviet withdrawal. The one unifying element to all Afghans is Islam. It bound them together, inspired their heroism during the conflict with the Russians, but is now becoming too fundamentalist in its more fanatical believers. Remember, for ten years, foreign interests have been supplying fanatics with arms. Further, the Cold War and other factors have been behind the rise of fundamentalism. There is no doubt that some powers have actually backed both sides, for reasons of their own. Islam, as a result, has been hijacked, in some places by men who commit blasphemy in its name.”

The Brigadier’s words became clearer when, the next day, I visited a clinic for children with my sister. A line of long beds bathed in bright sunshine ran along one wall of a room. Children with burns more horrible than I can describe were wriggling about like deformed animals. Indeed, I would hardly have known them to be children if I had not been told.

Little girls, of perhaps five or six had had their faces wiped off: the disgusting effects of Russian napalm, used in what the Soviet Air Force called its “International Duty”. Only the remains of a mouth were left, and a hole where the nose had once been. Akram said it was good that those children were now blind, “They shall not see how ugly they are on the outside. Tahir, they are beautiful inside.”

Legs had been fused together and fingers melted off. A boy called Ibrahim smiled, his bright blue eyes shining inside a scarred face. He was like any other child, perhaps like I once had been. But Ibrahim had both legs missing. They had been so badly embedded with shrapnel that amputation had been necessary. We spoke for a few minutes, he told of his escape from the Rouss shortly before the Russian withdrawal.

“The helicopters came and the sky went black. Bombs fell all night, and there was the sound of bullets. I looked outside and I could see tracer bullets flashing through the air. My father went outside to shoot. He was killed that night.”

“What will you do when you get better?” I asked.

“I will go back to Panjshir and make sure the Rouss do not return. I still have hands and my eyes are good!”

I raised my camera to a little girl who had a gaping hole in her lower abdomen. I remembered how in the West people seem to give more money to charity when there are pictures of suffering. I would document the results of unmitigated evil. The child screamed and screamed in a fit of terror. A nurse came to comfort her and we left the room. As I was leaving, I asked the nurse why the little girl had been so afraid of a camera.

“Sofia thought your camera was a gun. Her parents were shot dead in front of her; she was hit in the stomach and left for dead. She is a very brave little girl. We are very proud of her.”

As I left I noticed a poem written by a child pinned next to the door. It read:

When I see fields of wheat I remember

My own village with green fields and high trees,

When I see a river I remember the rivers

Of my own province, Paghman.

When I see the mountains I remember the range

Of the Hindu Kush. I will never forget

My friends, nor how I went with them to the nearby hills,

Covered by green grass,

With hundreds of cattle grazing there;

And then we were forced to leave.

PART TWO: CENTRAL GONDWANALAND

West and East Africa

NINE - Rats Eating Cats

TEN - My Name is Zakaria

ELEVEN - In Search of the Source

TWELVE - Beowulf and Buckweed

NINE

Rats Eating Cats

Saw a pestle hard and heavy...

With it thrashed those Giant’s daughters;

Thrashed them till they bellowed loudly,

Fled and roared like Bulls of Bashan,

Fled and hid them in their wigwams.

A pair of pregnant ladies sat either side of me on a bench. They looked at each other and giggled. The one on the right made a joke in Wolof and they both rolled about in laughter.

I had come to the Clinique Troy in Castor — a suburb of Dakar — in Senegal, to get a visa for Sierra Leone. During the journey from Asia to West Africa I had tried to bury all memories of greed. The apples from Afghanistan and the mutilated bodies of the innocent had helped me to understand that treasure was more than a chest of jewels.

Blake’s mention of Macumba, a magical science thought to be more comprehensive than any other, occupied my reasoning. There was one man whom I knew could assist this pursuit. His name was Max, and he lived in Freetown, the capital of the West African country of Sierra Leone. If Macumba had, as some claimed, derived from the most ancient lore in Africa, it had at least — by association — some resonance with the Gond theme.

The journey from the borderlands of Pakistan’s northwest frontier, to West Africa, had been anything but simple. A travel agent in one of Peshawar’s darker backstreets had sold me a cut-price ticket. Although somehow the fare was extremely convenient, the route was not. Having diced with death by taking the “Flying Bus” from Peshawar to Islamabad, I first flew to Damascus. From there, I jetted on to Aden in Yemen, before taking an evening cargo flight to Moscow — then I was hustled on board an indirect flight to Paris. And, it was from there — as my internal clock was spinning out of control — that I ventured on by air to Dakar.

* * *

When I was told that the maternity clinic issued visas I had hardly flinched. My travels in India had made such practices seem normal. Assuring myself that the experience of Mumbai, Rajasthan and the Afghan frontier would hold me in good stead for what was to come, I was determined to press on across Gondwanaland.

My passport was examined thoroughly. A hundred irrelevant questions were asked and it was hinted darkly that maybe I just wanted to get close to expectant women, rather than to obtain a visa. I pleaded with the director — a middle-aged lady dressed in a blood-drenched surgical gown — who had just delivered twins. Finally, agreeing that a visa could be granted, she led me into the operating theater and offered me a cigarette. The mother was recovering from the trauma of childbirth with her twin daughters.

“It will take forty-eight hours,” said the director, blowing smoke into my face.

“I was hoping to leave Dakar as soon as possible...” I said.

“All right, come back at five this afternoon.”

At five P.M. the director’s assistant — who was a nurse — took my money and handed the passport back to me. I checked the visa. It filled a whole page and was striped in several colors. Just as I was leaving, I noticed that the wrong dates had been entered. Plucking up courage, I informed the assistant. Without batting an eyelid, she ripped out the page and stamped a new visa in another part of the passport.

“Will there be anything else?” she growled.

I went back to my hotel feeling as if a piece of my anatomy had been amputated.

The Hotel Monlogie had been recommended by a burly Parisién at the airport. He had been unloading crates of gear for the Paris-to-Dakar rally. The famous desert race was just ending, the first drivers having made it across the wasteland of Mali to Dakar. The tension was electrifying. People were rushing about, everyone shouting in French. It seemed that the whole of Paris was in Dakar. I had no visa for Senegal, and was very surprised to be waved through without any bureaucratic contretemps.

Hotel Monlogie was on Rue Lamine Gueye. A faint line of blood could be made out about three feet up the wall: a sign, my guidebook assured, that bedbugs shared the premises.

Men in wide Mauritanian robes flapped about the dusty streets of Dakar. Their fingers were concealed, tucked into a flap of cloth around the stomach. As I stared at the fine gold embroidery, two small boys came up and started to rub my knees. The sensation was not displeasing and I allowed them to continue for a moment, before my western thought-patterns forced me to question the reason for their activity. They looked rather disappointed. Just as I was going to ask the cause of their dissatisfaction, they ran off. The smaller one tossed back a black piece of curved metal. It was the key to my hotel room.

A doddery old man staggered over to where I stood and took charge. He spoke French with a thick accent that I could barely understand. I had soon become his property and, when a younger man came up and offered to take me around the city, he protested vehemently. After a while the man, his face wrinkled with blue-black lines, gave up, and insisted I go on, even if with the other man.

The newcomer, after telling me that his name was Joseph, pulled out a lump of gold — the size of a golf-ball — and offered it to me as a gift. His legs were bulging in black denim jeans and he wore the colors of a Rastafarian. I refused the nugget, suspecting that an obligation would ensue, and asked him for a good place to eat. “Chez Lourcha on Rue Blenchot,” he said.

Joseph accompanied me there. A French woman slid a plate of spaghetti in front of me and threw a spoon at Joseph, screaming for him to leave. He shuffled his feet in the doorway, asking for a commission for bringing a customer. The woman slammed the door in his face — and turned my chair to the far wall — where a poster of the Eiffel Tower seemed to be all that was holding up the ceiling.

The next morning I went to the bus stop early and caught a coach to Barra Point. My intention was to get to Banjul, the capital of Gambia, from where the flight to Freetown would leave.

Rally cars and relay runners were bounding towards Dakar. The stripes of sponsorship and names of multinationals enveloped all. They became a blur as the vehicles pulled away, as we drove to the south of Dakar, and entered a forest of baobab trees. Grey trunks twenty feet thick stretched from horizon to horizon. They were spread out from each other, unlike a normal forest; and somehow looked more like a herd of grazing elephants than anything else. Baobabs are among Africa’s most bizarre trees: they can live for over a thousand years. Their enormous trunks store water and in a drought they actually shrink, as the water is used up. The giant pods have seeds containing concentrated vitamin C.

Sitting next to me on the bus was a Frenchman who introduced himself as Auguste Lecomte. He fingered an immaculate copy of that very morning’s Le Monde — Francophone Africa is splendid at distributing the papers — and read a line at a time through pince-nez. A few minutes later he looked up and spoke.

“We are nearly at the ferry point, and should get to Banjul by about six,” he said.

“Are you here on holiday?” I asked.

“My boy, my profession is to travel around the world buying excellent rare banknotes to sell to dealers. Did you know that Gambia’s dalasi are quite sought after?”

I replied that I did not. Opening his case, he displayed perhaps a hundred currencies, each in mint condition. Tugrik from Mongolia, metical from Mozambique, Icelandic krona, dollars from the Solomon Islands, and many others, lay jumbled about.

I sensed a heavy breathing down my neck. Monsieur Lecomte obviously felt the draft as well. We hunched up our collars, but the cinnamon-scented breath continued. I turned around and focused on an emerald pair of eyes — which dilated with curiosity and envy. A mouth on the same face yelled:

“Khey meng, how ya dawing? I’m Oswaldo, Oswaldo Rodriguez Oswaldo.”

His vice-like hand was thrust into mine and pulled me towards the seat behind. He addressed the Frenchman, “Khey meester, ya wanna buy dis stuff?”

His fingers fumbled in a pouch around his waist and he fished out two handfuls of grubby Argentine banknotes. Monsieur Lecomte grimaced, appalled by the abruptness of the heavily-breathing Argentine. Declaring that the notes were worthless, he turned away to finish reading the editorial in Le Monde.

Oswaldo Rodriguez Oswaldo leant back, pushed a dark brown trilby onto his forehead, and sat in silence. Short, almost stunted in appearance, with well-proportioned features and an immaculate mustache, he smelt of lavender.

Outside, the baobabs stood motionless. There was no wind and the sky was free from clouds. The bus moved closer to Barra Point; it felt almost that we were driving through an oil painting.

On the ferry to Banjul a man, who said he was a hundred years old, changed my Senegalese C.F.A. currency into dalasi. He studied each note through thick lenses, reading the numbers aloud in Wolof. Oswaldo followed in my footsteps. I had the feeling that I would rather be alone, but Oswaldo craved company. The money-changers, who had refused to accept his pesos, had asked where Argentina was. We sat on a blue iron bench and watched Gambia draw closer.

“Where ya gooing meng?”

“I’m on my way to Freetown, to visit a friend. What about you?” I asked.

“I”ng gooing to eest.”

“How far east?”

“All de way meng. I earning from Buenos Aires in sheep to Dakar. Long tyng meng.”

“Where are you from, exactly?”

“Patagonia.”

I recalled geography lessons and the teacher rolling the word Patagonia around his mouth with an educated satisfaction. Oswaldo was short, perhaps five foot three. He swung his stubby legs in the air and clicked a pair of decomposing cowboy boots together. He never stopped moving. Before speaking, he would rub his pencil-line mustache with his thumbnail; and would laugh loudly three times, as if to clear his throat.

A boy selling wooden pots made from the branches of the baobabs offered them around. Oswaldo was delighted. He grabbed the boy and screamed, “Ha Ha ha! Khey meng I lika wota ya gote dare. Give us looks!”

Four assorted-sized bowls were brought out and the Patagonian passed a bundle of Argentine pesos to the child.

“Ya taka dem to za benk, Okhey?”

The boy shuffled away, wondering what to do with the large collection of multicolored bills. Oswaldo opened the mouth of his voluminous rucksack. He fished out a shirt and a pair of red jeans and put the baobab bowls at the bottom. I asked why he had such a large rucksack and only two other pieces of clothing.

“Che, dee reeson’s cos I buying lots souveneers, I lika dis stuff meng.”

I hoped we could get away to Banjul before the boy’s father saw the pesos.

Having stepped off the ferry onto the shore, a child of about nine took Oswaldo by one hand and me by the other and led us to the Hotel Apollo. The wooden bowls clicked about as we took our first look at Banjul — capital city of the former British dependency.

Hotel Apollo was run down. But without being discourteous, one could say that the whole of Banjul had lost any air of elegance that it might once have commanded. There were two main streets: Buckle Street and Wellington Street. Hotel Apollo had once been painted white.

The owner was named Haji, and he greeted us warmly, his long Mauritanian-type robes dragging in the dust beneath his feet. Oswaldo asked if the hotel accepted Argentine pesos. It did not. But, as an act of diplomacy, Haji offered to reduce our board by a third if we would pay in a European currency and stay two nights.

Having agreed, our bags were carried ceremoniously up to a rather dilapidated room. A peculiar contraption filled one corner. The bag boy flicked the switch to turn it on. Before it started up, I heard the sound of his bare feet pounding as fast as they could away from the room. Cogs within the machine began to grind. This was followed by the noise and vibrations, as of a pneumatic drill. As we stood there, plugging our ears with our thumbs, water was sprayed across us and the walls. Oswaldo grappled with the apparatus, which was very like one of those machines film crews use to create wind and rain. A small plaque on the side, inscribed in Gothic script, read Desert Cooler.

Oswaldo combed back his short brown hair and applied a thick layer of green brilliantine. The room now reeked of lavender. The Patagonian pulled on his red jeans, opened his shirt to the waist and, after cackling three times, yelled, “To those deesco meng!”

He dragged me out of the hotel, hauling me up and down the two main streets, requesting that I ask for the best dance-hall in town. One man pointed left, another right, and a third looked very worried. There was a shimmering red glow coming from a bar off Buckle Street.

“Khey Brit, we gooing dere!” He pointed a stubby arm towards the bar and pulled his shirt front further apart, revealing a hairless white chest.

A thunderous rhythm was being beaten out on two drums. Some torn sacks had been tacked together and hung in front of the doorway, almost as if they were keeping some kind of poison gas inside. Oswaldo clicked his heels to the drum-beats, then we entered the red glare.

A room, which seemed little bigger than an airplane’s lavatory, was packed with all kinds of life. Oswaldo ordered himself two bottles of Jewel lager, I asked for a pomegranate juice.

“Khey, dis nice stuff!”

Oswaldo seemed overjoyed and, in his enthusiasm for the situation, he slapped the man next to him very hard on the back. I prepared for a bar fight. But the Gambian man was too drunk to co-ordinate hostile movements. Oswaldo handed him a bottle of Jewel lager and the two men began to dance.

When the boys had stopped drumming, we each pulled up a packing crate and sat. Oswaldo’s dancing partner was a Gambian called Robertson. In his early sixties with a fat, chubby face, he began to tell his life story. A career as a sailor had shown him the world. He spoke twelve languages, one of which was Spanish. Oswaldo was ecstatic when he discovered his new friend had been to Argentina. He puckered his lips and kissed Robertson squarely on the forehead. The two men began to sing Spanish sailing songs, acting out the sordid parts in full detail.

The manager’s baby son was sucking at an empty lager bottle and making gurgling sounds from between the crates on which we sat. Robertson patted the infant on the head affectionately as he continued with his tale. Then Oswaldo broke in, swigging from the dark green bottle in his left hand as he spoke. Suddenly, while he was talking, the Patagonian calmly reached inside his right boot and, in one motion, pulled out a stiletto. Springing the blade open, he threw it between the fingers of the baby boy. The drummers and the proprietor looked up. A chicken which had been roosting in one corner flapped to the door. Robertson stopped talking and stared in horror. Oswaldo took a sip of his lager. Then he pulled at the knife, which was deeply embedded in the floor. A scorpion was skewered halfway up the blade.

“Khey meng, eets beeg one,” he muttered, as he scraped it off with his foot onto the floor. Robertson cheered. The landlord, who was shaken, grasped his son in his arms. Then the drummers beat out a special rhythm to compliment Oswaldo, the unusual Patagonian. He lounged back on the crate.

The manager — who had been deeply moved by the stranger’s bravado — came over. In his hands was an old biscuit tin which had lost most of its paint. He pulled open the lid. Inside was a dusty bottle of Heineken lager. Wiping a tear from his left eye, the landlord murmured gently:

“I have been keeping this for a special man and a particular night. That man and that night have now come.”

We ate breakfast the next morning at Café Express on Buckle Street. I had decided to take the evening flight to Freetown. Oswaldo said that he would like to come too, as he had never flown before. Having seen his display the previous night with a stiletto, I thought it might be to my advantage to have him along. After the meal we would go and buy tickets from the travel office.

A schoolboy came and sat at the third chair. He said nothing, just sat motionless. His and Oswaldo’s legs dangled above the ground. Oswaldo hummed what he said was the Argentine National Anthem. One hotdog was brought and we divided it into three. Each of us chewed at the sausage as long as was possible. The child jumped up, shouted Jirijef, Hello,” and ran off with his satchel swinging behind him.

A reduction was given for students on all flights to Freetown. I had no student identity card. But, in the interminable ticket queue, I used some Letraset to turn an international driving license into a student identification. The letters were rather crooked, but it did the job. Oswaldo flashed an Argentine identity card. The lady nodded approvingly and the tickets were written out. Oswaldo was very happy.

“Macanudo! Lets gooing sunshining!” he said.

“What’s that?”

“In that beach.”

An hour or so later I found myself supine on the beach front of the Atlantic Hotel. Fleshy British package tourists waddled about, clutching towels, suntan oil, brown sauce, and plates of fish and chips all at once. I told Oswaldo not to point. He explained that to get a tang, you must he in the sun for four hours.

The rays burnt deep into my back and chest until I was sure that something was wrong. Gambia is near the equator and so the heat is very intense. At three P.M. I tried to stand. My skin had shrunk, and I felt like the inside of a cooked frankfurter trying to burst out.

Oswaldo looked worried for a moment. Then he said that we had better get to the airport. A woman from Blackpool had given him a ballpen with a scaled-down replica of a tower trapped inside. When he tilted the pen, the tower moved. Delighted with his new possession he showed it to everyone he met. But I was not interested. Instead, I staggered towards the Hotel Apollo, feeling like a boiled lobster.

The Air Ghana flight was delayed three hours. The plane sat on the runway for half that time, waiting for some repairs to be done to the fuselage. Engineers with troubled expressions hurried up and down the cabin shouting, and hurling spanners like boomerangs back and forth. The lack of security checks before boarding had been rather disconcerting. Oswaldo took the stiletto from his boot and ran it across his fingers. I told him to put it away before we were both arrested. The stewardess clambered about, handing out rock-cakes and glasses of fluorescent orange squash. An aging Ghanaian lady insisted on sharing my seat, as the plane was now full.

As we munched on our rock-cakes, the pilot suddenly hauled back the throttle and the craft swooped out of Banjul airport into the African sky. Orange juice and rock-cakes flew about as if there were no gravity. Oswaldo screamed at the top of his lungs and swung his red jeans about his head. Pulling a sick bag over my face, I pretended not to know him. The woman sharing my seat writhed about, increasing her territory. There was a tap on my shoulder. I turned round and was handed Oswaldo’s pants which had been propelled into the row behind us.

At Freetown’s immigration, our passports were taken away. They were put in a black box. Two guards patrolled back and forth for about ten minutes and then opened the box. The documents were returned, dripping with stamp-pad ink. Rumour had it that, on entry to Sierra Leone, a large amount of foreign currency had to be declared and immediately changed into leones at the official rate. The routine searching of luggage often resulted, a source had assured me, in the confiscation of one’s belongings. Oswaldo handed me a piece of chalk.

“What’s this for?”

“Cross da bags, amigo.”

He had noticed that all checked luggage was efficiently crossed in white chalk. But what about the currency regulations? Oswaldo leapt into the lair of officials and they forced him to hand over a wad of Argentine pesos. The soldiers looked as if they believed that the unknown notes might be even more valuable than dollars.

As I walked through, a very strange thing happened. I concentrated deeply on the end of the line of salivating officials. Some were handing out forms, others brandished white chalk.

I moved straight ahead without turning. There was no sound behind me. No one called back or grabbed me. For some reason I managed to get by without changing any money at the official rate. It was as if I had willed them not to see me.

Max was studying philosophy at Freetown University. He had written in his last letter that I should to take a room at the City Hotel, as it would be more comfortable than his floor. We had not met before. When I was about twelve I had placed an advertisement to be circulated world-wide asking for interesting and unusual pen-friends. Max’s letters had always been unusual. Many had been covered in blood, while others spoke of fantastic experiments and ceremonies in which he had taken part.

With one letter he had once enclosed the dried intestines of a small fly-eating lizard, together with some dogs’ claws, which he said that I was to boil up into a kind of tea. He had come to West Africa to learn more of the rituals of ju-ju and the secret societies of Freetown.

A Frenchman from Marseilles with an aristocratic air let us share his taxi into town. He loaded four Purdey shotguns into the back of the Renault and rolled up the corners of a handlebar mustache as we jerked along. Thick jungle undergrowth abounded on either side of the road. Monkeys swung from tree to tree and the sounds of a seething insect population hummed around us. Oswaldo began to tell the man from Marseilles all about his homeland. Removing the stiletto from his boot, he showed it to the Frenchman, who admired the Patagonian quality.

Freetown was dark and depressing. We crossed a stretch of water in a launch and walked up the slope to the City Hotel.

It was in a state between dilapidation and total dereliction. The crumbling facade was subsumed in moss and creepers. Yet it must once have been almost palatial. Corinthian colonnades held up the remains of the roof, and the lintel of the main doorway had been replaced with an iron bar. A symmetrical pair of flights of winding steps led to the door. The wrought-iron gates were rusted from neglect.

A white man sat on the veranda under the light of a paraffin lamp. He was the proprietor, and said he could provide Oswaldo and me with a room. The Frenchman from Marseilles sniffed haughtily and carried his shotguns off into the night to find a more salubrious place to rest.

The owner was an Italian from Switzerland. He had not returned to Europe in over four decades. His skin was pallid, as if it had not been exposed to light in years. The building was bathed in an aura of decrepitude. A giant, standing at least six foot nine, moved into the lamplight and picked up our bags. The owner spoke in French, mumbling, “This is my son, he will take you to your room.”

The creature, whose resemblance to Frankenstein’s monster was more than uncanny, trod his way up three flights of stairs, whilst demonstrating his unusual talent of holding a lit candle in his teeth. The candle flickered as we progressed from one draft to the next towards the attic. The banisters, and indeed, all removable pieces of wood, so the giant said, had been incinerated to heat the house.

On the second floor, a naked man was washing a shirt in a basin. His broad smile revealed three gold teeth. The stairs creaked beneath our feet and, as we stumbled upward, Oswaldo edged closer to my side.

Two beds filled most of the attic room. Neither had mattresses, only tattered sheets on bare springs. A swarm of mosquitos fought above the sink and flitted around the peeling pink walls. The giant strode to the sink and relieved himself in it. I asked for the room key. There was no need for a key, I was assured, as there were no locks. Instead, we were invited to come down for a drink and to get anti-mosquito incense coils. Oswaldo went down immediately, while I took a shower on the second floor.

A slow stream of water fell onto my head. It was cold and pleasing. I washed my sunburnt body with enormous care; it could just endure the pressure of the cold water. When the drops became less frequent, I glanced upwards at the nozzle to see if it was clogged. I noticed a gap of about two inches between the boards above my head: they were the floorboards of my room. In the candlelight, the white of a single eye rotated and blinked above me. Shrieking, I ran from the shower. The sound of footsteps pressed across the ceiling, as I made for the stairs to get to the putative privacy of the attic room. Halfway up I met the naked man with gold teeth. We paused for a moment. I might have asked him the reason for his voyeurism, but the fact that he was naked and that my badly blistered body was protected only by a face-cloth, gagged my questions.

Oswaldo had become instantly chummy with an assortment of villainous-looking men on the veranda. They lounged about on broken chairs smoking home-made cigars. The old Swiss man had passed out and was lying on a mattress on the ground, an empty bottle of whisky at his side. A man called Olivier introduced himself to me. He was a French Senegalese priest who, he said, was an expert in both yoga and karate.

An infant boy weaved between the clouds of cigar smoke and mosquitos, selling bubble gum and matches. It was easy to imagine Graham Greene lounging back on a broken wicker chair on the veranda of the City Hotel.

I tried to reach Max on an antique telephone. The dial had lost its spring and only the digit “1” worked properly. I banged the disc with my palm, but it still did not work. At that moment Oswaldo burst in and grabbed me by the shoulder.

“What’s the matter?”

“Caramba! Dere’s dieemonds and goold... we gooing now!”

We charged out onto the veranda. Oswaldo whispered that I was not to show much interest, as the men suspected we were there to gain from their secret wealth. The giant held up a flaming torch. He, the gold-toothed man, Olivier, Oswaldo and I climbed into the back of a jeep.

We drove out of the town into the night. I looked upwards into the night sky and saw the Big Dipper beginning to turn silently above us. The sound of bats and the chirping of crickets echoed all around as the bald tires of the jeep spun along a muddy track. Oswaldo glanced at me nervously. Putting a fist on his left boot, he felt the stiletto, and nodded at me. We were both prepared to be robbed and left: but the opportunity to go on a midnight gold and diamond run was too great to miss.

The jeep pulled onto a side track about ten miles from Freetown. The glinting lights of the city were no longer visible; just two flares burning on the jeep. The dense undergrowth seethed with life of all types. Mosquitoes and all manner of insects buzzed around the flares and headlights. In the distance I could make out a wooden hut. The jeep pulled up at the front door and we descended. A man inside began yelling in Creole when he saw Oswaldo and me. The giant calmed him and we were all ushered into the shack.

A bottle of locally-brewed alcohol was passed around. It burnt into the Patagonian’s throat, making his eyes bulge as he choked aloud. Three pouches were fetched by the old inhabitant of the hut, who brought a flashlight closer to illuminate their contents. The pouches were upturned on a packing crate.

What looked like small pieces of ground glass sparkled in a pile. They were of irregular shapes and only some of the surfaces shone. In another heap, gold — perhaps eight to ten ounces — was admired by all. Oswaldo’s and my eyes widened with avarice. The shadows of greedy men danced about the dark walls. Oswaldo pulled at Olivier’s arm and asked where the diamonds and gold were from. The priest narrowed his eyes and whispered:

“They come from the mountains. Diamonds and gold are in the village paths and when it rains they are washed up. People come out and dig them from the ground with knives.”

A session of animated negotiating followed, lubricated with a seemingly endless supply of firewater. Some money changed hands in the untrusting candlelight and we left for Freetown with the smugglers.

As the jeep fish-tailed towards the City Hotel I thought of treasure. It was deserved far more by this sort of men. I myself no longer had a grasping fascination for such instant wealth. It was as if the appeal had been treasure for the sake of treasure: as if I had been driven by its romance, its mystique, and by its awe alone. India, Pakistan and now Africa seemed to have exorcized the lust: though not the quest.

Early the next morning I managed to contact Max. He arranged to come to the City Hotel and take us to lunch. Oswaldo and I sat in the bar waiting for him. The night had been very uncomfortable.

Oswaldo had put a little beer in one of the baobab bowls, and left it on the floor. In the morning the bowl was full of cockroaches. Some survivors were crawling over the dead, their tiny antlers poking around the corpses. He gave the black insect carcasses to the boy who had been selling bubble gum the night before. The child was thrilled and plodded off to dissect the remains.

A procession of school children paraded past the hotel as we waited for Max. Dressed in neat green and yellow uniforms, some played instruments, others clapped their hands, as banners were waved from side to side.

The old owner made one of the smugglers get down from the bar where he was sleeping. There was no more beer, he informed me gravely: but appearances had to be maintained.

Max arrived. It was odd to meet the man to whom I had been writing for so many years.

Oswaldo and Max glanced at each other like different species of animal. Oswaldo, whose hair was smoothed with brilliantine, wore his brown trilby and well polished cowboy boots. Max’s appearance integrated him neatly with the City Hotel. His hair was long, greasy and very black, and his face — which was dark with dirt — was peppered with infected sores. A pair of tattered sneakers were rotting about his ankles and a cluster of leather pouches hung around his neck.

We, all three, snaked our way about the silent town. Almost nothing moved. A sense of utter despondency prevailed as if Freetown was not advancing or even attempting to progress. Max pointed out the giant cotton tree which is a landmark in the centre of town. Nearby, at the American Embassy, we were given glasses of sterilized water and allowed to see newsreels two months old. Max had adapted here as I had done in Mumbai. Freetown had become his life, his very existence.

Outside the embassy came the sound of sirens. Flashing red and blue lights blinked from a motorcade and five jeeps with outriding motorbikes sped past. The few people about stood still and lowered their heads. Oswaldo gasped, “Khey meng, what’s dat?”

“That’s the President going to work!” said Max.

Like many African nations, Sierra Leone’s leadership had gained power by coup d’état. Indeed, as soon as one group gets control, another is scheming secretly how they may take over. But Captain Valentine Strasser’s coup of Spring 1992 was exceptional, even for Africa: for Captain Strasser was just twenty-seven, and his deputy — Solomon Musa — was a mere twenty-four years of age.

We were each presented with a bowl of boiled seaweed. It had been partially fermented and then covered in a watery meat sauce. I suspected that the meat was cow’s brains. Max had ordered this delicacy for us all at his favourite restaurant. He picked up lumps of the green sludge in his nicotine-stained fingers, tossed his head back, and dropped the morsels down his throat one handful at a time. Oswaldo and I stared at each other blankly.

“Don’t you like it?” huffed Max in surprise.

“Slightly too much salt for me,” I grunted.

“I’m plenty eat Okhey!” squeaked Oswaldo sadly at his full plate. Max finished the three portions. Then he sucked the ends of his fingers, which had become splayed from extensive nail-biting.

The café was behind an abattoir on the second floor, somewhere on the outskirts of the town, past the Cuban Embassy. There were no windows, but on one wall was a faded photograph of the Prince and Princess of Wales on their wedding day.

When Max had finished the seaweed he rubbed his hands in his hair to clean them off. Then he lit a cigarette and removed the filter. We had written about many things in our letters, such as music, our friends, and places in which we had lived. Max was an avid fan of the Grateful Dead, an American rock band. But his extreme fascination for ju-ju was of most interest to me.

Sinister ceremonies take place at night around the darkest corners of Freetown. A number of societies, most secret in their operations, participate in ominous rituals. Max spoke of his involvement with these groups.

He had become the pupil of a Babalawo — a medicine-man — one who practices ju-ju. Although, technically-speaking, ju-ju refers to a fetish or image used in a magical rite, today its use is much wider. Ju-ju can be something that causes a change in the natural and supernatural worlds. It may be a potion, an ointment, a talisman, a sign, or even a magical word or phrase.

“It wasn’t easy gaining the trust of my teacher,” said Max. “He knows that I appreciate the honour. I have immersed myself in this science: I must become one with it.”

Max paused, and I frowned, wondering exactly what he meant. Staring deeply into my eyes, he pushed up the right sleeve of his shirt. A series of dots and Unes had been tattooed into his copper-colored skin.

“What is it for?” I asked.

“This is ju-ju to protect. There is evil here.” “Vat evils?” Oswaldo asked.

“Alé,” said Max. “That is ju-ju, or medicine, that puts harm on someone else.”

“You mean black magic?” I said.

“Yes, black magic,” said Max. “Alé is my real interest but my teacher won’t let me even think about that for years to come.”

What of the secret societies? Max had studied their history but was very unwilling to share what he knew.

“Many things,” he said, “are better ignoring. These matters are taken very serious around here.”

Having read about the Alligator Societies and the Leopard Societies in Sierra Leone, I asked Max if such accounts could have been true.

“The Human-Alligators, as they are known,” he said, “were at first thought to be people who were turned into reptiles by magic. They would kill someone — often eating the victim’s corpse — before reappearing as humans again. Later it was found that people were just dressing up in alligator and leopard skins to kill people. That stuff has been forced deep underground following persecution by the authorities.”

“But does it really still go on?” I asked.

Max nodded slowly, “The various societies have become more crossbred and have taken influences from new sources recently; each sect affects the practices of the next, even my Babalawo uses a Borfima,” he said.

“Borfima, what’s that?”

It’s a symbol, a source of power, and a centre for magical activity,” replied Max.

“What is it?” I persisted, trying to find out more.

“I’ve just told you,” said Max.

“No, I mean what is it made from?”

The cook came to collect our plastic dishes; he seemed suspicious of our conversation. When he had left, Max continued in a low voice:

“I have made Borfimas my special study,” he began. “The most likely origin for many of the societies’ cannibalistic activity seems to have started in order to feed the Borfima.”

“Feed?” I asked.

“Feed,” replied Max. “To keep the Borfima bag as an effective medicinal tool, it must be supplied with newly killed or extracted human fat or blood. It will gain the strengths of all that is fed to it.”

I was still rather confused by what Max was saying; he saw my uncertainty and continued:

“I was just reading of a mysterious society in Angola, the Butwa sect who keep a Borfima.” He pulled a worn sheet of yellowing paper from his back pocket, and said:

“This is what the Englishman Butt-Thompson wrote of the Butwa Society’s Borfima:

“The duiker horn is said to contain human flesh, hair, nails, bone and sinew. In the larger horn are animal claws, bits of lion and leopard heart, of feet of elephants, hide of hippopotamus, shell of tortoise, bird bills, eye of osprey, eyebrow of vulture, head of the “ngweshi” snake, heart of python, head of puff-adder, nose of crocodile, brow of hyena, head of dogfish, and human and lizard gall, a tooth of a field rat, a scorpion, a burned honey bee, a baby’s head, a human caul, some soldier ants, some powdered meteorites, some sand from the footprint of the founder of the Society, a head from a dead chief, a piece of tree upon which an official of the Society committed suicide.”

When Max had finished reading, he closed his eyes and grasped one of the leather pouches which was strung around his unshaven neck. There was a tense silence. Oswaldo shifted nervously in his broken chair, then he gave me a tortured look as I addressed Max:

“Can we meet your teacher? I think that it is important,” I said in a wheedling tone.

“That’d be quite impossible,” he replied. “Getting him to have anything to do with me was accomplishing the impossible.”

“Then Max,” I said, “can’t you make the impossible happen again?”

* * *

At two the next morning we crept from the City Hotel. A cat was stalking a giant toad on the veranda next to the sleeping Swiss owner.

Enticing his master with a bottle of local whisky, Max had managed to persuade the Babalawo to meet us. As we stumbled behind him into the darkness towards the rendezvous, Max kept on repeating how difficult it had been to arrange. Understanding the gravity of the meeting, I thanked him.

Freetown seemed more alive in the hours of darkness than during the day. We left the city, walking past the abattoir and the restaurant to which Max had taken us.

A few of the shacks housed shadowy figures who could be heard talking and laughing. Insects buzzed in the undergrowth into which we walked.

Max explained that traditionally secret societies were located deep in the bush, and only the initiated had known of their whereabouts. A revival of the societies in Freetown had taken place, and men such as his Babalawo now practiced very close to the city, or at times actually in it.

Initiation, Max said, was fundamental in gaining membership of a sect. The Societies native to West Africa are often formed from the people of several tribes, even of different nations. Boys would traditionally be taken into the bush to be initiated, a process that was known to last for weeks, even months. They would be instructed in hunting, defence, and in the secret qualities of the jungle’s plants. But of the greatest importance to them were their studies in the magical and occult arts.

Max explained that, as such initiates respected the force of the Babalawo’s incantations, we must also do so. We agreed that we would abide by the ways of the cult.

Oswaldo was very quiet and trudged along less than enthusiastically. I sensed that he was trembling. Reluctant to have anything to do with such dark matters, he had had conventional Catholic beliefs instilled in him as a child. Max led us into the forest as if he knew each step of the path.

After half an hour of walking I smelt burning meat. This was followed by the sound of someone whistling. Flames could be seen through the trees and, as Oswaldo and I trod softly behind Max, he also began to whistle. He led us into a clearing, illuminated by three burning torches. Between them sat a figure who poked at the embers of a dying fire. Max greeted the man in Creole. It was his Babalawo.

The mentor ignored Oswaldo and me, and continued to poke rhythmically, almost as if he were in a trance. Max told us to remove our shoes and socks, as he did the same. The ground was warm and damp underfoot, and covered in dead leaves.

I tried to make out the contours of the Babalawo’s face. It was hard to tell his age, perhaps forty, perhaps sixty. His head had lost much of its hair. A striped tee-shirt covered his chest: the lines of it ran from his neck to his navel. He poked away at the fire as we sat and watched. I peered up at the sky, the stars looked down and I felt a little more secure.

Max had closed his eyes and sat cross-legged in silence. The Babalawo dropped a handful of herbs onto the embers. An asphyxiating, sweet-smelling cloud ascended from the fire as the leaves ignited and were consumed in flame.

The master began to chant in Creole. I nudged Max, hoping that we could learn of the significance of the words, but he did not translate. Instead, taking some bluish-gray dust from the fire’s edge, he rubbed it across his face and over the backs of his hands. Oswaldo and I did the same. The ash smelt aromatic and soothing as I pressed it over the bridge of my nose and onto my cheeks. Was this the sort of ceremony that Blake had mentioned? I wondered how my mentor might have reacted if he were in my position. Such a rite as this must have influenced the Brazilian Macumba of which Blake, my own teacher, had told me. Of that magical system, which took its roots from many lands, I longed to know more.

The Babalawo began to squeal like a tortured pig. Then, panting, he thrust his arms high above his head, shouting out what must have been the names of spirits.

Max seemed to know precisely what was going on. He stood up and made his way over to a very low-roofed hut. After a few moments he returned with something in his hands. The master took the object and, in return, passed Max some more leaves. Max motioned to us what to do.

Copying him, Oswaldo and I each pressed a broad leaf onto the roof of our mouths. My mouth was numbed by a bitter taste. And, on trying to move my tongue, I realized that it was paralyzed. I glanced in horror at the Patagonian, who winced miserably as if he, too, had fallen prey to the Babalawo’s magic.

Max handed Oswaldo, and then me, an egg. As before, we did exactly what Max did. He broke the shell and gulped down its contents. We did the same, despite the handicap of our oral anaesthetic. Then, Max put the actual shell in his mouth, crunched it up, and swallowed it. Oswaldo looked very miserable, but we both copied Max in silence. My stomach seemed to twist as it was presented with the raw egg, followed by the shell. Oswaldo’s stomach also gurgled in surprise at what it had just ingested. Max looked pleased with us.

The Babalawo stood up, clasping the object that Max had brought from the shack. The size and color of a haggis, it smelt, as it passed by me, of something which had died quite some time before. A rusty razor blade was produced by the Babalawo. He held it between his thumb and forefinger with dexterity, leading me to believe that he had handled it on many such occasions. At that moment it became apparent that the razor was not just intended for show. It was no mere symbol, for the Babalawo wiped it, and readied it for use.

Oswaldo and I glared at Max through the orange lamplight with expressions that called for an explanation. The egg had not been pleasant, but we had swallowed it, together with shell, in the interests of magical science. But what was the blade’s purpose? Max seemed a little concerned and he spoke for the first time. His words struck Oswaldo and me with horror. He said simply:

“The Borfima is ready to be fed.”

The witchdoctor’s dark shadow fell over the Patagonian, who sat cross-legged, rigid with terror, as the Borfima, blade, and Babalawo, approached him. He was too petrified to move, as the Babalawo took his arm and prepared for the operation of drawing blood from it. Just as the blade’s edge was about to press down on Oswaldo’s skin, he leapt up screaming. The doctor fell back, clutching his beloved Borfima to his chest. Max was not sure what to do. He cried apologies to his master who called for us to leave.

Oswaldo was silent as we stumbled back to Freetown, he was clearly upset and mumbled a prayer in Spanish. Max had left his Babalawo, to accompany us back through the woods. I regretted bringing the Patagonian along. But his outcry had done nothing to curb my interest in ju-ju. Indeed, this interest had only just begun.

Long before dawn we walked to the bus station. It was deserted. Oswaldo had made it clear that he would not spend another night, in fact another hour, in Freetown. We might have parted company then and there, but I sensed that a journey south — to Liberia — might reveal important new material. In any case, Max was reluctant to help any more, in spite of our long postal friendship. Besides, he said that the spirit of the Babalawo would be searching for us: and if he were to find us, he would certainly feed us all to his adored Borfima.

One could never be sure when the next vehicle bound for Liberia would leave, but we stood a good chance of getting one as it was still early.

Oswaldo and I crouched in one corner of the terminal, which resembled some gigantic aircraft hangar. Still there was no light, just the sound of rats as they scuffled about. A very young girl slept against one wall; in her arms was a newborn baby. There was no sign of the mother. The two clung together to keep warm.

After about an hour, a brand new Land Rover stopped for a moment outside the terminus. Oswaldo went to ask for a ride, at least part of the way to the Liberian capital, Monrovia. We were in luck, for the driver — who was going to Kenema which was on the way — would take us there for free.

The road was excellent by African standards, and for four hours we bumped along, only stopping from time to time to get out at checkpoints. The jungle was thick and lush on both sides of the road. And, as the warm rays of dawn turned the cobalt sky pink, we could see smoke rising intermittently from a clearing, or a crook-backed woman walking to fetch water.

The Land Rover dropped us at the vegetable market of Kenema. Oswaldo bought a cucumber, cut it into slices, and squeezed the juice of a lime onto the pieces. It was a refreshing breakfast. The market was still being set up. A selection of unusual roots and berries were displayed in round wicker baskets. Each basket was minded by a woman with a headscarf — who chattered in friendly competition about the day’s business. Oswaldo led me to the bus stand as if he had been there before. He had a very good sense of direction but, when I complimented him, he just laughed his usual three times.

A yellow Peugeot 504 was filling up with passengers. In fact, it already seemed full. Ten people, a nanny goat, a large quantity of baggage, and a baby girl in the arms of her mother, were already aboard. The driver assured us that his vehicle was bound for Monrovia and there was plenty of room for two more. We clambered onto the back seat. The goat was passed onto Oswaldo’s lap. The baby was handed to me by its mother, who was sitting on my right.

We set off. The communal taxi stalled four times because it was too heavy to move. The driver pumped the accelerator until the engine sounded like a dragon roaring. Only then did the wheels begin to move. The driver hooted with joy and the 504 slunk its way along the craggy dust track towards Monrovia.

Oswaldo squeezed hold of the goat as the front right wheel plunged into a deep hole. Screams of panic followed, and the goat, which was bleating in terror, passed water profusely over Oswaldo’s red jeans. The liquid soaked down onto the plastic seat and seeped under my thighs. Looks of silent misery passed between us.

A dust storm filled the car. Someone made the mistake of opening windows to release the grit. I chewed on the particles. When the animal began to choke violently, Oswaldo handed it firmly to the woman beside me. She was more willing to hold the brown goat than her own tiny infant.

The baby had begun to sweat tremendously. I pointed this out to the mother but she just shrugged her shoulders. Drawing in a monstrous breath, the infant promptly spewed the contents of its stomach over my chest and lap. It mixed with the piddle and an offensive odour penetrated the innermost reaches of the cabin. The mother caught me in an angry stare and, in the confined space, managed to turn away in disgust. All the other passengers refused to hold the child.

Four hours passed and all the initial feelings of embarking on an adventure had drained away. Arms and even toes poked about in the cab, hoping for another inch of space. The only breaks in routine were the strip-searches which took place at every checkpoint at least twice an hour. Twisted limbs unfurled themselves on the ground, like butterflies breaking from their cocoons.

Each passenger was led into a bamboo stall, where they removed their clothes. Anything which the soldiers thought to be contraband was confiscated. In one of the earlier searches I found a Kalashnikov AK-47 pointing at my chest. Its owner was a boy of about sixteen. He calmly removed my watch and put it on his own wrist. It did not seem to be a subversive item to me. So I asked politely for it back. Pushing the barrel of the AK-47 closer to my heart, the boy in fatigues replied:

“It is my watch now.”

The saliva in my mouth was thick, like spaghetti. Before even trying to spit, I had to cut what felt like strands of it with the edges of my incisors. Oswaldo’s trilby had gone, through pollution, dust and dirt, from dark brown to a shade of light tan. He looked very miserable. We jolted along on a track whose undulations were surely too extensive to be natural. Oswaldo suddenly gave out an unnatural, throaty laugh. Wriggling my left hand free, I maneuvred it to pat him reassuringly on the shoulder. He was clearly beginning to crack.

At that moment the Peugeot 504 came to an abrupt stop. A soldier was waving in the road. We all trooped out. The goat and baby were passed from hand to hand and laid down on the grass. A very stern-looking major strutted up and gave orders that all belongings were to be vigorously searched. Parcels were unwrapped for the hundredth time and even shoes were removed. The major pointed to the car, and two young soldiers ripped out the back seats. We heard shouts as one of the lads ran to the officer with something wrapped in a cloth. All the passengers froze. The major ripped the cloth away to reveal a wad of US dollars and a large nugget of gold. The driver was seized and put in a makeshift bamboo cell.

Another man confessed that the money and gold belonged to him.

Oswaldo and I sat quietly awaiting the verdict. The officer announced that the smuggler and the driver had been arrested and the vehicle detained. Neither vehicle nor driver could be released as they had been abetting the smuggler. The major began to interrogate the two guilty men. It was then that an albino who spoke excellent English sidled up to us. He was the teacher of the local school.

Word had spread fast that two foreigners were visiting. We agreed that we were foreigners who were, in a broad manner of speaking, visiting the village. The albino bowed deeply and asked with ornate courtesy if we would come and talk to his pupils. Before I knew it, Oswaldo and I had jumped across a ditch and were in front of a class of maybe twenty young children.

A mouse was scuttling about in a cage in one corner of the classroom. The teacher introduced us to his students and said that we had come especially from far away to teach them. Oswaldo began a very long and serious lecture about Patagonia, the politics and tribulations of its culture and people. The children stared up blankly in silence. Oswaldo was thrilled at the opportunity of having a captive audience. It was a perfect therapy for him after the horrors of the drive.

The albino teacher told his pupils to sing the school song. They stood up and a chorus of shrill voices ran around the room.

“We have a problem here,” began the master as the children sang. “You see we can’t get the books and pens that schools in the cities can. At the moment we only have three pens for the whole class. I spend much time getting the children to learn the lessons by heart because they shall not forget them that way.”

He was a very polite and dedicated man.

Oswaldo dug deeply into the back pocket of his jeans. He pulled out the piece of white chalk and the ballpoint pen from Blackpool that the English woman had given him. I rummaged in my saddle-bags and found a couple of notepads. Oswaldo handed them to the albino.

“Dees are for yoo meester,” he said.

The teacher looked at the ground and said that he could not take them, especially as they had come from so far away. We insisted, and Oswaldo gave him his address in Patagonia. The educator exclaimed that we would always be welcome in his school, and that he would never forget the day we came.

Oswaldo and I returned to the taxi which still had not moved.

By a great stroke of luck, it transpired that the major had once been to Banjul, where he had met Haji, the owner of the Hotel Apollo. Pleased that we shared a mutual acquaintance, he agreed to allow the driver to take us to Monrovia. Two soldiers would accompany us and afterwards would make sure that the driver returned to his bamboo cell. One of the soldiers managed to squeeze between the mother and me. The other clambered onto the roof and banged hard when he was secure.

Just before we set off, the twenty schoolchildren appeared, led by their teacher. The eldest of the pupils tapped on the window against which Oswaldo’s face was lodged. The Patagonian wound down the glass and the boy passed him a brown mouse.

“We thank you, Sirs, for helping us... have this,” he said. “We will not forget you in our village.”

The wheels turned again and the students waved as the yellow Peugeot 504 left a cloud of dust in its wake.

Twenty minutes before it was due to close for the night, we arrived at the Liberian border. Two piles of forms were counted out; one for Oswaldo and one for me. We scribbled answers to what seemed like unending sides of photocopied questions. With only five minutes left, we were less than halfway through: all the gaps had to be filled in full before we could leave Sierra Leone. It was clear that we would have to spend the night. But Oswaldo and I had no more leones left, and it was far too dangerous to risk exchanging foreign currency at the border on the black market. There was no official bureau-de-change.

A young Liberian man from Monrovia staggered about, clutching a bottle of whisky in one hand, and balancing a battered straw hat on his head. Oswaldo sidled up to him and began a short dissertation of the merits of Patagonian life and cuisine. The Monrovian winced and led us to his rented room which was in no-man’s land.

A line of kiosks stretched out across the no-man’s land. Liberia was about half a mile away. We were permitted to walk freely about the area, as all the soldiers and bureaucrats had gone to bed.

The Monrovian stumbled away into the moonless night with his bottle and straw hat, insisting that we take his bed. We explained that we had no leones with which to pay. But he was planning to spend the night drinking at a bar. Taking the lantern, he left us in the darkness.

Oswaldo always slept with his boots on. The left one was like a scabbard for the stiletto, which he would whip out at the first hint of trouble. We stretched out over the large bed.

A colony of insects lived in the bed. I could feel what seemed to be beetles crawling over my hands and face, searching for food, I supposed. It was almost comforting not being able to see anything in the blackness: I imagined that I was back with Osman and Prideep strolling up and down Marine Drive in Mumbai. Then Blake’s form appeared and I watched him sipping vodka and feeding chapaties to a line of greedy vultures.

Oswaldo began to snore.

Just as I was falling into a deep slumber, a thudding noise hurtled across the corrugated iron roof. Instinctively, Oswaldo and I clutched each other like children terrified of a ghost. When the sound stopped we let go, both trying to conceal our fear.

Then again came the sound of feet charging at speed across the metal roof. A cat seemed to be screaming — almost a human screech — as if it were being torn limb from limb. Oswaldo and I were paralyzed with consternation. Our imaginations ran wild.

We huddled together, all the muscles in my back and my limbs were rigid as we waited for the morning to come.

The young Monrovian was sitting outside our room, eating breakfast. A pineapple and the pelt of some small mammal lay next to where he sat. Oswaldo asked what kind of skin it was. The youth replied:

“It’s from a cat. A couple of rats killed it last night and ate it. I’m going to make a pouch from the skin.”

Oswaldo and I decided to risk entering Liberia without exit stamps from Sierra Leone: an offence said to be punishable by imprisonment. The mouse jostled about in Oswaldo’s shirt pocket as we walked to Liberia. A boy on a bicycle pedalled up and said that the border guard wanted us to return to Sierra Leone. We strode on, in defiance of regulations.

At the Liberian border post we each handed five passport photographs to an officer’s clerk. These were then stapled neatly into a large leather-bound tome. More forms were produced and we were led to a cell with smooth cement walls and floor.

I began to remove my clothes and empty out the contents of my saddle-bags. My toothpaste was squeezed from its tube. It was inspected for diamonds. The back of my camera was prized off with a coin and the film exposed to light. All potentially subversive pictures were thereby destroyed. Following this encounter I went to ridiculous lengths always to mail my films — and my notebooks — back to England after the last frame had been shot. Oswaldo thought my obsession was insane.

I stood motionless, no longer caring to what lengths the conscripts went to make me angry. Then one, the youngest, picked up my stick of anti-perspirant. He removed the lid and slowly began to wind up the deodorant. Several hundred American dollars were concealed under the stick of deodorant. The scent of sandalwood wafted about, and sweat began to drip into my eyes. The consequences of having undeclared money were very serious indeed. Unable to resist any longer, I grabbed the stick from the boy and rubbed it under my arms. The room was filled with broad smiles and laughter. Oswaldo and I were allowed to enter the Republic of Liberia.

Still there was no sign of the yellow Peugeot 504. We had not got round to paying for the ride, which was to be expensive. Oswaldo suggested that we could hitch with one of the trucks going to the capital, thus escaping the misery of the yellow cab. We asked around for a ride. Four lorries were going to Monrovia but still had to clear their paperwork; so we sat about waiting for the first to negotiate the red tape.

A Chevrolet station-wagon pulled up. Clouds of exhaust fumes surrounded battered bodywork. In most other countries the vehicle would have been scrapped as a moving safety violation. I went up and asked if we could have a lift. A middle-aged man in a moth-eaten orange three piece suit said that it would be a pleasure for him to take us. We were to be his guests. His name was Daniel, but we were to call him “Danny.”

Oswaldo and I lounged in the back seat. Danny’s ten-year-old son and sister were also in the car. They had just come from Conakry, the capital of Guinea. The exhaust pipe of the vehicle led directly, curiously, into the car. Oswaldo and I covered our eyes and mouths with our shirt sleeves.

As soon as the windows were opened billows of black dust swept in and mixed with the carbon monoxide. For six miles the crumbling Chevy rumbled on. Then the fan belt broke. An assortment of worn replacements were fetched from the boot. Danny fitted one in the extreme equatorial heat. Oswaldo and I were both parched and reeling.

Another half hour passed and there was a puncture. The heat was so tremendous that it was unbearable to leave the shade of the cabin to change the wheel. A bald spare was brought out by Danny’s son and we secured it with a single wheel nut. I choked as my lungs filled with dust and exhaust gases. Then we began to move.

Oswaldo’s once brilliantine-soaked hair was stiff with dust and sweat, standing straight up like a sheet of cardboard. He looked at me and tried to manage a smile. Time and again he and I scrabbled under the bonnet, fumbling with the engine, scraping our knuckles as we struggled to fit yet another fraying fan belt. Neither of us had any knowledge of mechanics, but we were propelled by the desperation of survival.

Twenty miles from Monrovia, a line of metal spikes on a bar had been dragged into the road. Danny pulled over and we were made to enter an office where a man in civilian dress sat with his feet resting on the desk. He toyed with a handgun, caressing the trigger of what seemed to be a Colt .38.

Our belongings were brought and dropped on the desk. The figure shouted at me with arrogance.

“What’s your purpose here?!”

“Sir, we are tourists in your country, we are traveling to Monrovia.”

“No tourists ever come here,” he exclaimed. “You are obviously lying!”

Oswaldo and I drooped silently, too weak to argue. We would have pleaded anything, said anything, just to be allowed to go on our way.

Oswaldo’s shirt pocket twitched. The man pointed to be shown what was hidden inside. A miniature nose probed for air. The Patagonian reached up and gently removed the brown mouse. The man behind the desk motioned to hold it. Oswaldo stretched out his hand. The official clasped the animal by the tail. Then, in one abrupt motion, he clubbed its head against the desk with the end of his revolver. A little blood spurted from the head, before he flung the body against the far wall, dead. Then he snickered sadistically. Oswaldo was close to tears. The rodent had been a symbol of the kindness of a simple people, amidst the barbarism of a totalitarian regime.

Just then, during the interrogation, came shouts from one of the soldiers outside. Danny was brought into the office, together with a box of medicines from his car. Oswaldo and I were ordered to leave. In the shade of a cement wall, Danny’s son brought us each a plastic bag of water. The liquid was cool and tasted like nectar.

An hour passed and Danny came out of the office weeping.

A conscript announced that he was to be put in prison, as he did not have the correct paperwork for his medicines. He would be taken to Monrovia under escort to face trial. My friend and I would also be arrested if we interfered. We were to leave in the next vehicle that crossed the checkpoint. I pleaded with the official in charge, but he was ready to reinforce his tyrannical orders with force. Danny was taken away.

Oswaldo went back into the office. He stooped down on the smooth cement floor and picked up the carcass of his mouse. Then, behind the building, he dug a modest grave. The Patagonian crossed two twigs and placed them on the upturned topsoil.

As we stood in silent prayer I heard a car approaching. Oswaldo turned and pointed with the words, “Khey meng look dare, man on yelloo roove!”

The Peugeot 504 taxi with the dust-covered conscript still clinging dutifully on top — brandishing a Kalashnikov — moved uneasily towards us. The car stopped and the goat leapt over the reluctant mother. I gawked at the sight of the group. All the passengers were now bedecked in gold, ivory and fine clothes. The transformation was unbelievable. It seemed incredible that the travelers could have concealed such items during the strip-searches and random checks. The driver was watched suspiciously as he went into a bush to relieve himself. Oswaldo asked if we could have our old places back, as the Chevy’s owner had been imprisoned. It was agreed. Then, the soldier banged on the roof once more with the palm of his hand and we sped off towards Monrovia. Oswaldo and I were distraught at leaving Danny and his family stranded with the tyrant in civilian dress. We sat, brooding in silence, counting the minutes until we reached the war-ravaged capital.

The contents of the yellow Peugeot 504 piled out at the Disco Hotel, in a rather rough district of Monrovia. Oswaldo took the twelve-inch stiletto from his boot and stuffed it up his sleeve. He led me away from the yellow Peugeot and its soldier, sick baby, goat — which had gone into labor — and a quantity of luggage which could have sunk a ship.

Although weak and exhausted, we had been hardened by the experience of the last two days. Oswaldo’s stride was longer than usual, he chewed at the inside of his cheek and scowled at all he saw in a bitter and twisted manner. I had not seen this side of the Patagonian before. No longer did he laugh or fool about. The murder of his mouse and the imprisonment of an innocent man had affected the South American deeply.

Through a series of complicated international banking transactions, Oswaldo had managed to have western hard currency sent from his village in Patagonia to a bank in Monrovia. The financial situation in Liberia was quite bizarre. United States dollar bills were the legal tender of the country. Instead of incinerating them, the United States sent worn-out dollar bills to Liberia. A shortage of notes prompted the Liberian government to mint its own dollar tender, with the same theoretical value as the American originals. But the black market value for the genuine American notes was much higher.

Liberia’s civil war devastated the capital city and much of the countryside. The signs of combat were all around. It often happens in Africa that an unpopular president is butchered or forced to flee as his regime is toppled and replaced by another. Samuel Doe, the previous president, who had lost the battle to keep his position, had allegedly had his ears chopped off by the forces which overthrew him.

Two men were wrestling on the stairs of Maxim’s Hotel. They seemed to have no intention of moving until one had fallen to the bottom. We clambered over them and found the manager holding out a key to the best room. Oswaldo snatched it as if it had been stolen from him in the first place. My clothes had been bonded to my skin with layers of black dirt. I peeled the filthy socks from my feet.

Oswaldo leapt into the shower, and cackled so long and loudly with zest when hot water hit his back, that the landlord came to see what the fuss was about. I asked him to bring a couple of towels, as none had been provided. He went away. An hour passed. Oswaldo had sung many a Patagonian ballad; I was getting impatient to get clean, too. Another hour passed. I hammered at the bathroom door. Oswaldo had begun to belt out his favourite Argentine saga — “The Life of Martin Fierro.”

Still there was no sign of the towels, so I shouted down the corridor. A faint cry radiated from some back room from which there came a distinct smell of burning.

A fist pounded at the door: I walked over and opened it, expecting to be handed two clean towels. The manager’s head was servilely bent at right angles to my stomach. There was no sign of the towels. Instead, a plate was pushed at me: on it were the charred embers of something which had caught fire. The manager gasped, “Here’s your toast, Sir.”

At last, I forced the Patagonian from the bathroom and I took a shower.

Oswaldo turned his red jeans inside out and put them on. We went out into the town to eat. Our stomachs had almost forgotten the concept of digestion. The thought of mountains of food had kept us going since Freetown. Oswaldo pulled the collar of his shirt closer to his neck and we entered an elegant Lebanese restaurant. Monrovia has been dominated economically for many years by the Lebanese community.

A menu was produced and Oswaldo waved it aside. The waiter looked displeased. I, too, was surprised.

“Sir, are you here to eat something?”

“Meng.”

“Yes Sir?”

“Breeng one of evryting!”

The mad Patagonian looked at me for approval and I nodded.

He laughed three times and I knew that everything was back to normal.

Kebabs, pizza, sirloin steaks and strawberry milkshakes were shuttled to our table by a troop of waiters. The Patagonian took alternate bites of each succulent dish. Osman would have approved.

At the next table sat a tall man with a thick black beard and Mediterranean looks, dressed in a cream gaberdine suit. He was laughing at our extravagance, Oswaldo invited him over to join us. The figure stood up and -walked over. His fingers, neck and wrists were enveloped in pieces of gold jewelry. The clasps and bracelets jingled as he sat. He spoke through a New York accent.

“I’m Jacques,” he said.

“It’s nice to meet you; are you just passing through like us?” I asked.

“No, I’ve been living here a few years. If I can stand the place I’ll stay a while longer.”

“Are you in business?” I inquired; he looked as if he was a successful man.

“Yeah, you might say that,” he murmured, “I’m in metals.”

“Any in particular?”

“Yes,” said Jacques as he paused to sip a drink, “Gold.”

He picked a Kent cigarette from a soft packet and lit it with a gold lighter which I admired:

“It’s a Bic fifty-cent lighter. I made a cover in 18 karat gold. Passes the time, but I’m really getting fed up with it here.”

“Where do you get the gold from?” I asked.

“I go into the bush, three or four days’ trip. Buy it there. Then I bring it back to Monrovia and melt it into ingots. Why don’t you guys come around tomorrow? I’m melting in the morning.”

Placing a cream business card on the table, he sauntered off.

My stomach had surely shrunk. It felt as if food was stacked up my oesophagus, waiting to be digested. Oswaldo ploughed on. Sweat was dripping into his eyes and mixing with the tears which were pouring down his face. His greed had transcended the pain barrier. His fork was raised from the plate, his eyes spun, and he moaned, “Just one udder mouf meng!”

Oswaldo was unable to sleep all night. His indigestion was very bad: he ran hunched to the bathroom time and again and groaned with self-pity.

Next morning we went to meet Jacques. His office was on the third floor of a modern apartment block. Security cameras moved about like eyes on stalks when I pressed the bell-push.

Jacques was berating a young African who stood in front of his desk, staring blankly. The young man left.

“What’s dat problem?” Oswaldo asked.

“This city is driving me crazy!” yelled Jacques. “I went back to the States for one week. Just one damn week, that’s all. When I came back not only had my car been stolen, but my safe had knife marks in it and my partner had withdrawn a hundred thousand dollars from my account and fled. It’s really beginning to get on my nerves.”

We went into a sealed-off room. Inside was a workbench and a small furnace. Jacques rotated dials and turned off the gas. What looked like a cake tin was carefully slid from the fire. When it had cooled, he tapped out a shiny brick of metal. It was solid gold. My eyes met Oswaldo’s. There was no need to speak, the dilation of our pupils must have said more than words.

Jacques seemed to be the sort of man to whom one could talk at ease. He would listen and give encouragement if he thought it necessary. Oswaldo crouched over the gold ingot in the work room: he had evidently fallen in love with the substance. I sat with Jacques in his office and told him about the ceremony with Max’s Babalawo. Then I began to explain to him about my interest in the Gonds and Gondwanaland.

He, too, had read about Gondwanaland and had been x enthraled. He spoke of a tribe, believed to exist in Central Africa, said to be related to the Gond people of India.

“They are thought,” began Jacques, “to live in Zaire, on the east side of the country: in the very heart of what was once Gondwanaland.”

“Where do they live, exactly?”

“At the summit of the Nyiragongo volcano.”

The idea of venturing to the very centre of Gondwanaland suddenly seemed important, as if the quest might provide information until now unknown.

A people related to the Gonds, could that really be true? It seemed severely implausible, especially as man had not appeared until millions of years after the continents had separated, about 45 million years ago.

But Blake had spoken of Macumba: whose magical arts had been influenced by the peoples of Africa and India... perhaps there had been an ancient affinity — impalpable and not time-bound — between all Gondwanaland’s people. Perhaps a sister tribe to the Gonds did exist: the Nyiragongo seemed a good place to look.

Wresting the block of gold from Oswaldo’s clenched fingers, I began to lead him away. As we were leaving, I turned to thank Jacques. He lit a cigarette and inhaled.

“Fellas,” he said, “go to Zaire, climb the Nyiragongo and breathe deeply, for you will be standing at the core of Gondwanaland.”

Oswaldo agreed to accompany me to Zaire as long as I would promise him it lay to the east. Geography was not his strong point, Patagonia’s confines were the extent of his knowledge: the rest of the world was to be discovered on his great adventure. He also made me swear a solemn oath that I would avoid all contact with the dark arts of local magic. I gave my word. Then I went back to the hotel to take a nap, while Oswaldo went off to tell the travel agent all about the tourist trade in his native Patagonia. One of his cousins there had requested that he drum up business wherever possible. I had suggested that there might be a lack of Liberians with the will and finances to patronize his cousin’s tourist lodgings. He had looked me sternly in the eye and had said, “Are yoo crazee?! Peeple loove Patagonia!” As I lay on my bed dreaming of lost tribes and volcanoes, Oswaldo burst in and said with zest:

“Khey chappy! I ordered us tomorroow to Zaire. Flighting ees at six afternoons.”

Oswaldo’s first trip in an airplane had filled him with a new kind of excitement: one that he wanted to relive. He had developed a passion for flight, and insisted that all journeys that could be done by air, were done by air.

TEN

My Name is Zakaria

Called their wives, and lit some torches,

Blazing torches made of flax-stalks;

Played their horrid game of marbles

With the bored-out eyes of Lingo.

Two soldiers had taken off their coats and were smashing at a man’s body and skull with the butts of their rifles. The sound of bone meeting wood mixed with the gasps of the victim. He did not cry out, but took the blows passively.

I wondered if such sights would be commonplace in Zaire.

Oswaldo and I were standing outside the airport at Goma, waiting for a taxi. Air Zaire was relaxed about scheduling. Timetables had not existed and we were bundled aboard the first plane leaving Kinshasa, the capital, having flown there direct from Monrovia. Oswaldo wanted nothing more of cities; we were both inspired to get out into the jungles of Zaire. I longed to walk at the heart of Gondwanaland.

The ticket agent had seemed to think that everywhere was the same away from Kinshasa, for he handed us each blank tickets and ordered us to stand in a line.

So we found ourselves on the eastern edge of Zaire, in Goma, a city on the border with Rwanda. It had been an enormous stroke of luck. For Goma was the nearest major town to our destination: the fabled Nyiragongo volcano.

After an hour of hanging about a soldier moved us on. He said that in Goma there were no taxis, and if we loitered we would be arrested. Noting his unhealthy interest in my camera, I grabbed my saddle-bags and we started to walk into the town.

We passed some children who were sitting on engine blocks, their faces devoid of all youthful animation. And, as the infants lingered glumly, the adults stared at us with tortured, transfixed expressions — as if there was nothing to look forward to. No one smiled. No one laughed — for both, like comfort, are luxuries.

A stretch Mercedes passed us at high speed — gliding through the slums from the airport — towards the town. The vehicle seemed alien: almost like a spaceship, from some development of the future, and a world away. Gaping as if it had been a vision, we continued on the long walk into Goma.

Oswaldo perked up when he saw the discotheque, optimistically called La Planete. Above it there were rooms for hire. Before I had a chance to object, I found that I was sharing a room with Oswaldo, and several hundred assorted beetles. Directly below the room was a throbbing box filled with sinister sounds, and with dense red revolving lights.

We went down from our room into the red glare. There, in the vibrating disco, sat two western girls, their faces pocked with mini-craters from chafed mosquito bites. They were aid workers from Finland. Oswaldo danced with the thinner of the two. He pulled her close to his chest and she twitched with pleasure. Her friend was called Roxanne. All she was interested in, I soon learned, was fantasising about food and drink.

After two years in the Kivu region she had almost forgotten her native diet. She edged closer to me and put her hand on my thigh. I went to the drinks’ counter and brought her a large brown bottle of Primus lager. She knocked back the beer in a couple of giant gulps. Then she remembered the conversation and began to speak enthusiastically of the taste of caterpillars and locusts.

“What do they really taste like?” I asked.

“Caterpillars are a bit like eating dust, but with a few wild herbs they’re not bad at all.”

After some time, having managed to escape the clutches of Roxanne, I clambered back to the room. A woman was lying naked on the bed, her hair twisted in numerous individual short spiky plaits, which radiated from her scalp like antennae. A man was stretched out on top of her. Employing basic sign language, I tried to make it clear that my friend Oswaldo and I had hired the room for the night: and that I was now ready to go to bed. The man cursed in Lingala, as the couple stumbled downstairs towards the throbbing redness of the disco.

Doors slammed all night and still there was no sign of Oswaldo. Franco’s music — he was the most famous Zairean musician — made the walls vibrate until half-past three. Next morning the room shook with banging. Oswaldo was taking off his jeans, but was so drunk that he had forgotten to remove his boots first.

When the morning sun streamed into the room, the first thing I focused on was six legs. One pair were much smaller than the rest. My eyes moved up the bodies which ran in the same direction: each was topped with a groaning, moaning, very unhappy head.

Getting to my feet, I kicked Oswaldo, scolding him like a mother whose daughter had been out all night:

“What the hell time did you come back, and who the hell are your new friends?”

Oswaldo did not move. He was doubtless hoping that I would think he was dead and leave him alone.

A huge chicken was pecking at crumbs on the floor: a long cotton string dangled from its leg. The body in the middle turned, a mop of blond beard covered its face like a Balaclava. With a pained expression, he put out a hand, and croaked:

“Hey man, my name is Zakaria, but you can call me Zak.” With that he collapsed into a stupor once again.

Opposite La Planete there was a Belgian delicatessen, where a deliciously fresh croissant and a cup of aromatic coffee were the breakfast placed in front of me. A photograph of Zaire’s ruler stared down from the wall. I had read about this man.

He had made the news in the West when he had removed crucifixes from churches and replaced them with portraits of himself. His palaces were said to be spread throughout the country. It all seemed quite astonishing, particularly as he had once been an ordinary soldier, named Joseph Desiré. That was before he changed his name to Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbeandu Wa Za Banga. He had assumed control by coup d’état in 1965.

The delicatessen’s owner was one of the last colonials to have braved the uprisings following independence and the authoritarian regime of Mobutu. He changed some dollars for me, unofficially. The local notes, all bearing Mobutu’s grin with leopard skin cap, were of several different sizes. Even bills of the same value varied in size. The Belgian said it was because of the shortage of paper recently.

At La Planéte, the huddle of legs began to untangle themselves and their owners attempted uneasily to stand. Zak pulled up the boy — who was about nine and had a terrible hangover. His name was Marcus.

“Well guys,” began Zak in a drawl, “thanks for the floor space, that was a rad night. D’you have plans today?”

“Yes,” I said, “we’re off to climb the Nyiragongo volcano. It’s a very special, international scientific expedition.”

Oswaldo had been leaping about since he had heard about the Nyiragongo and its significance: he loved volcanoes.

“Che!” he cried out, “Can Zake came claymeng vocannow? Pleeese che.”

I muttered that Zak and Marcus could tag along if they would aid the expedition in every way possible. They promised to do so.

Marcus grabbed up the chicken. We left La Planéte and started out of Goma, hoping for a truck to pick us up. Oswaldo and I were laden with our belongings. I would always keep my saddle-bags nearby, even though at times they could be inconvenient. Various hardened travelers had cautioned me never to leave my possessions alone for a moment in Africa. I noticed that they generally traveled by car. Some had porters to carry the baggage. None had ancient saddle-bags.

A massive sculpted hand — clutching a burning torch — sprang forth from a triangle of white cement like Excalibur: the symbol of Mobutu’s tyranny. We tiptoed past.

The Nyiragongo volcano had apparently last erupted in 1977, sending a ten-foot high wall of lava towards Goma and forcing the townspeople to flee into Rwanda. Oswaldo spluttered all he knew about erupting volcanoes: he had once done a school project on Parangaricutiro, a village covered by the erupting lava of the Paricutin volcano in Mexico.

Marcus was a peculiar boy: he chain-smoked lumps of black tobacco which he rolled in broad green leaves. He never said anything, just ambled along behind the rest of us, pulling at the string to make his chicken hurry. I asked Zak if Marcus spoke English. He replied:

“Man, he don’t speak nothin. He was hexed as a baby... best dude I ever knew.”

I wondered how Zak had found out that Marcus had been bewitched, if they were unable to communicate in speech: indeed, how did any one know to call him Marcus? But it would have been rude, somehow, to have asked.

Zak, who came from Seattle, had played ice hockey for Washington State. His body was muscular and stocky, and his feet were size thirteen: perfect for the world of professional ice hockey. Zak had a set of crude false teeth — many of his own teeth had been knocked out in hockey matches. He would remove the dentures from time to time and put them in his jeans pocket. “They”re a bit too big,” he mumbled, as he carried on chatting. His stories of players having fingers sliced off with skates and limbs gashed, made Oswaldo and me reel in abhorrence.

“Zak, what exactly brought you to Zaire?” I asked, for it seemed curious that an ice-hockey star should be attracted to Central Africa.

“Well,” he said slowly, “there is a reason.”

“What is it?” I probed inquisitively.

“Mokele-Mbembe,” he said.

“What on earth is that?”

“It’s supposed to exist in the most remote parts of the jungle, where it lives in caves and on the banks of rivers.”

“But what exactly is it like?”

“Its body is said to be as large as an elephant’s; some say it has a giant horn mounted on its nose; its neck is long and muscular, and the tail is like that of an alligator. It can live on the land or in water, and its a kinda grayish-brown color and about thirty feet long.”

“Deenosaw!” said Oswaldo firmly, wiggling about.

“Yeah man, it’s a kinda dinosaur. I came here to track it. No one from the West has ever positively seen one. I figured if I hung out here long enough I’d eventually bump into a specimen.”

“Searching for Mokele has not been easy,” said Zak pensively.

“Why soo hard, amigo?” asked the Patagonian.

“Well,” said Zak candidly, “there’s an old pygmy myth which makes things a bit tricky.”

“What do the pygmies say?” I inquired.

“They say that if you see Mokele-Mbembe and tell of it, you will die a horrible and agonising death... so getting witnesses to step forward has been hindered.”

“Is this the precise area it’s supposed to be living?” I asked.

“Not exactly,” began Zak, “it’s thought to exist mainly around the Mainyu river over in Cameroon.”

“Did you go and look over there already?”

“Yup.”

“How long did you stick it out?”

“Eighteen months,” said Zak, “I guess we just never bumped into each other over there... so I came to this part of the jungle. I like it here.”

Maybe, I mused, Zak had seen the legendary creature already, but was gagged by the peril of the pygmy myth.

After we had walked for an hour, a petrol tanker rolled along. Zak jumped into the road and the driver slammed on the brakes.

“Yo man, we need to go to the Nyiragongo! You dig?”

The African driver, who was recovering from the whiplash of the emergency stop, threw up his arms and said, “Quoi?”

“Hey man I don’t speak ya language, you speak American?”

The driver spat. Oswaldo blushed and asked in his own brand of French if the vehicle was going towards the Nyiragongo. It was. Although Zak had spent such a long time searching for the mysterious Mokele-Mbembe, he had not mastered any Central African dialects, let alone French. The driver motioned us to climb aboard. We jumped up onto the slippery tanker and clung on as it squirmed between deep potholes towards our goal. Near to Kibati, on the Rutshuru Road, we descended.

Out of the jungle undergrowth rose the steep slopes of the Nyiragongo. A sense of primeval desertion surrounded the remote peak: this was the very centre of Gondwanaland.

As we stood in awe and breathed in deeply, I could taste the sulfur and vapours on my tongue. A silence, the like of which I had never before known, surrounded us. Everything was still, almost as if in respect for this quintessential form. Torrential rain began to pour from the sky. Yet, instead of taking cover, we all stood in wonder and felt strangely affected.

A boy wearing purple plastic shoes appeared from nowhere, a banana leaf shading his head. He could take us to the top for a few zaires. Oswaldo handed him a note and he led the way. As we climbed higher up the thin mud path, the terrain changed in density to a lighter mixture of ferns and shrubs. Marcus choked now and then and exhaled black smoke in time with his steps. Steam sprang from fissures on either side of the track. And the stench of sulfur was all around.

After about five hours of climbing we reached the cloud level. It was like walking into a wet white sheet. Zak sang hockey songs, with Oswaldo improvising, as the child in purple plastic sandals leapt from crag to crag ahead of the group. He turned to Marcus and asked him a question in Lingala. Marcus said nothing, as usual, but looked at the sky and put his left hand on the back of his neck. The other boy nodded. Whenever anyone asked Marcus a question, whether in Lingala or French, he did this. It seemed to make perfect sense to all Zairean people.

The enormous chicken squawked and stopped to peck at the mud. I wondered if it was the first domestic fowl ever to have ascended the Nyiragongo.

By the time we reached the layer of solidified larva, Zak was staggering along with Oswaldo stretched across his arms. There was still no sign of the Gonds’ sister tribe. Oswaldo moaned in Spanish the words from La Cucaracha that there was no way he could walk another step. The boy in purple plastic shoes looked round, surprise on his face that we could have been afflicted so easily with such exhaustion.

Suddenly, a bushy red beard pushed out of the apparently virgin undergrowth. It was attached to the face of a massive Australian. He had ferns tied to his feet and was carrying a banana leaf on his head. His name, he informed us, was Howard.

“G’day sport! What’s new from the old country?” he asked me.

I replied that as far as I knew everything was fine. Pulling a bottle of Primus lager from his belt, he bit off the top, and indicated that it should be passed around. Marcus’ eyes lit up. He snatched the brown glass bottle and gulped down the contents in five seconds flat. Howard looked sad that a minor should have already taken such a liking to drink. I asked Howard what he was doing in Zaire.

“Well, things in Brisbane were down, really down. Felt it was time to chuck in the job and go walkabout.”

“What did you do in Australia?” I asked.

“I was a computer systems analyst.” He chuckled.

There was something I had to know. Plucking up courage, I put the question bluntly, “Howard, please tell me why you’re wearing ferns on your feet and a banana leaf on your head.”

He looked at me as if I was absolutely insane: as if I were inquiring why birds fly. He shook his head slowly and said, “Don’t you know?”

Then he walked off into the undergrowth again.

Zaire had a strange quality which, however unpleasant the conditions, made it assuredly one of the most enchanted places. Completely unexpected things would happen. I had been guilty of thinking like a westerner when challenging the reasons for Howard’s appearance. The Australian had striven to cast away these obstacles of thought — leaving behind the life and mentality of a systems analyst — to attain salvation in the Zairean rain forest.

The longer I stayed in Zaire, the more outlandish seemed the events which took place, and the more I began to understand the limitations of my knowledge of people. Real people.

The boy in purple plastic shoes shouted out. We had reached the crater. There was no one about. Perhaps Jacques had been mistakenly informed about the Gonds’ sister tribe; but what faced me now drove all thoughts of lost peoples from my mind.

I had expected the crater to be a few feet wide: nothing serious, just a gap. Rain plunged down as we sat on the rim, and stared in stupefaction at its enormousness. The Nyiragongo’s diameter seemed to be many hundreds of feet across. Black cloud was mixed with the steam that bathed us. Oswaldo yelled louder than I had heard him yell before. No echo followed his roar and, in a remarkable way, his cries hardly dented the silence.

As he held my legs, I bent over the precipice. Exhilaration and a sense of absolute elation grasped me, as I peered down through an abyss of vapour. The Nyiragongo was alive — I was sure of it — and I could almost sense it breathing. Was this not Gondwanaland’s core pulsing beneath me?

Our guide was growing nervous. It would soon be night and we should descend the volcano before darkness fell. Noises of the twilight had begun in the rain forest, as wild animals caught their evening prey and birds sang out in warning of our presence.

Oswaldo, Zak, Marcus, the chicken and I reached the road and started to walk towards Goma. An hour later there was still no sign of a car. At ten P.M., the whine of an engine was heard, then headlights appeared, and a small white Renault came to a halt just in front of us. The driver was Belgian. A doctor — going to a patient in a village halfway to Goma — he was willing to take us to the crossroads where he had to turn off.

The old settler chatted away in excellent English about the days before African rule.

“I remember when there was a dying man at the top of the Nyiragongo,” he said. “I had to climb up at night to save him. There was so much snow that we built an igloo on the summit to take shelter, as we couldn’t move the patient for three days until more painkillers came.”

The doctor had been unable to readjust to his native country after living in Central Africa for so many years. I was beginning to understand the curious addictive force of Africa. The longer one stayed, the more dependent upon it one became.

At the crossroads we clambered out of the car. It hooted twice and drove away, leaving us in the middle of nowhere. Oswaldo switched on the penlight flashlight he always carried in case of an emergency. We walked for hours. Morale plummeted. Zak’s ice-hockey jokes had been told and told again, and a steady stream of rain fell from the night sky. After a few miles we saw a side road that seemed as if it might lead off to a village.

By group decision we agreed to take a chance and venture down the track. Several miles later the road suddenly ran out, and a wall of jungle sprang from the ground in front. Maybe the track had been reclaimed by the jungle, or perhaps never finished. The rain fell harder and we assembled in a huddle. Marcus grasped the bedraggled chicken close to his chest for warmth and we each moaned in turn.

But in Zaire, when things were at their lowest ebb, something unusual always happened.

A pretty, teenage girl stepped out of the jungle ahead of us. I wondered for a moment if she was from the Gonds’ sister tribe, but she did not resemble the Indian Gonds. Her hair was twined in hundreds of short antennae and her cheeks had dimples. We followed her into the undergrowth. It seemed as if we were entering an enchanted forest: each of us stepped cautiously with expectation.

The trees sprouted taller and thicker and the stars were hidden by their foliage. After an hour or so of trudging I began to fear a trap. Something or other, at any rate, was going to befall us.

Suddenly, Oswaldo stopped whining and stood motionless. Then Zak and Marcus froze, transfixed. I stared up at one of the most phenomenal sights I had ever seen: a chateau of typical European design stood squarely in front of us. Its reflection was visible, lit by the moon, in lake Kivu.

The girl shuffled towards it and we followed, each of us thunderstruck.

A figure, bent-over with age, moved towards us in the darkness. He looked even more shocked than we to meet like this. Addressing me in French, in an almost poetic tone, he said:

“You have returned! We have waited all these years. I knew that this night would come.”

Moving over to Zak, he hugged him with all the strength left in his frail arms. His wife — who was much younger — walked over, her eyes peering to focus on us. She put out her fingers to touch mine. The door of the chateau was unlocked with a great iron key and pushed open. As I tried to come to terms with the paradoxical circumstances of the night, we entered the building, guided by Oswaldo’s penlight.

A hall led into a expansive living room: where original paintings hung on the walls and, enormous pieces of mahogany furniture stood about. A chandelier three feet across hung from the ceiling. Two tall glass doors led to the lake.

The man and his family, the remnant of its former staff, had been guardians of the property for many years. They had lived in the stables all this time. It was obvious that the colonials had left in a tremendous hurry. Many of their belongings and personal effects were spread randomly around the house. We lit candles and paraded about the rooms.

The main door swung open again; the girl brought in a bucket full of songo, boiled cassava, and medeso, black beans, as well as ajar of clean water. As we chewed on the cassava roots we heard a tapping noise. Oswaldo went to open the door.

The decrepit man shuffled in, bowed under the weight of a child who lay outstretched in his arms. The infant boy was placed carefully on the sofa. His forehead dripped with sweat... I suspected that he had malaria. Oswaldo fished some quinine tablets from his pack, crushed one, added water in the palm of his hand, and fed it to the child.

The guardian of the estate looked pleased with our attention and stuck his fingers down his pants, pulling out a creased piece of paper. He handed it to Zak who unfolded the purple corners. It was so worn that it seemed more like cloth. Mobutu’s face looked up from amongst the creases; it was a one-zaire note. Zak pressed it firmly back into the palm of the old gentleman, who stooped a little lower in respect.

Oswaldo carried the boy back out to the stables where the family insisted on huddling. They uttered blessings in Lingala and French and pulled socks over their hands, to keep warm.

Oswaldo made up the bed. Generations of moths had munched their way through the starched white sheets, the remains of which covered the great expanse of the black mahogany bed.

As the wind ripped across lake Kivu, eerie shadows played on the walls of the bedroom. Oswaldo, Zak, Marcus and I made excuses that for our safety we should all sleep in the same room. We lay in a line, with the hen at our feet.

Beams of yellow sunshine broke over the surface of the lake and lit up each of our faces in turn. The chicken scratched about, pecking for moths amongst the line of forty toes.

Rising before the others, I wandered out into the garden where newly-born gnats cavorted in the bright sunlight. It was only then that I understood the extent and grandeur of our lodgings.

Vines and untamed creepers concealed much of the stonework, their stems woven about the complicated architectural features. At one end of the chateau a tall lancet window looked out onto the jungle-fringed garden. Mossy tiles covered the roofs and a fine balustrade balcony was hidden beneath a carpet of green. A wrought-iron garden chair lay upturned and entombed in brambles. Pulling it out, I sat upon it in the middle of what must once have been a manicured lawn. My mind reeled at the vision, labor and expense of erecting a building like this in such a place — and having to flee it, perhaps at only a few minutes’ notice.

As I sat there I suddenly felt ashamed at our intrusion. I tried to convince myself that we had had good enough reason to spend the night uninvited in someone else’s home. It was easy to imagine a Belgian family taking tea on the lakeside lawn: nothing less than dangerous political developments could have caused them to decamp from such a paradise.

Back inside the house, my three companions were still fast asleep. I wandered into the drawing-room whose tall French windows looked out onto lake Kivu.

Sunlight streamed in as I perched on a faded beige chaise longue. An object was poking out from under one of the cushions. Without thinking I reached to see what it was. My fingers sensed something and pulled out a small pink cloth doll, with a lopsided smile and long woolen brunette hair. Holding her on my palm, I suddenly felt despondent, for there was a sense of something tragic around me.

For a moment I had contemplated staying forever, but this was not my home: we had been privileged to be guests, and now we should leave.

The caretaker and his wife brought some matoke, cooked bananas, for our breakfast. Their child was feeling much better after the medicine. His fever had vanished. Saying how pleased I was, I explained that we would have to leave almost immediately. The man looked at his wife and she stared back at him and then at me.

“It is not possible: leaving? You have just arrived.”

His temples frowned with absolute disbelief, before continuing with the same dignity and respect, “Are you going back to l”autre coté, the other side?”

I explained that we would indeed have to return there for a while.

“When will you come back from the other side?” asked the old woman.

“As soon as we can,” I replied.

The woman whispered close to her husband in Lingala. Her words were strung together like a rope of pearls, formed from the back of her mouth. When she had left, the man asked Marcus something in Lingala. As usual, he craned his neck back and put a hand behind it. The man nodded in agreement and his wife returned. She was clutching a baby, just a few months old.

Zak and Oswaldo went over and began to play with it. They were, in a flash, very paternally orientated.

The guardian of the estate took me aside from the baby and its admirers. As before, he addressed me in French:

“Monsieur, we are poor,” he said. “Our youngest child, who lies there, is destined to have a simple life like ours. We want him to be educated and see wondrous things. Monsieur... will you take him to the other side and see that he is educated?”

I asked him to repeat his words three times to make sure that I understood the question. Each time he spoke, asking the favour, it hurt him more. It was as if I were torturing him, making him admit a mistake, a foul deed.

We stood together: he waited for my reply. I gazed out through the long panes of glass to lake Kivu, which sprawled away from the bottom of the once-landscaped gardens. Such beauty enveloped the place that it seemed enchanted, as if by a spell. I thought back to the pollution of the West, the problems of its societies, and the misdeeds of educated men.

The guardian looked expectantly, his eyebrows knotted together and I addressed him.

“Where we come from there are bad men. They He, they steal, they are discourteous; these are the values which they teach each other: even the educated, on the Other Side. Monsieur... we have come to Zaire to increase our own education. We shall return soon to our own countries, but we must return alone.”

We collected our belongings and walked into the hallway. Oswaldo first, then Zak, me, and lastly Marcus and his chicken. The old man and his wife embraced each of us in turn and seemed genuinely miserable about our leaving. Their teenage daughter appeared, with a clump of pink and white flowers. She handed them to Zak and he blushed. Oswaldo and I grunted disapprovingly and we moved out into the daylight.

It felt more as though we were leaving after a weekend with friends, perhaps in Sussex, than exiting a Belgian chateau somewhere in Zaire’s jungle, on the banks of lake Kivu. Oswaldo turned to the old couple and told them in French that they were to Uve in the chateau from now on and not in the stables. Then he gave them his malaria tablets. The old concierge’s black eyes twinkled with a childish delight; he thanked us all.

Zak looked sternly at Marcus and prodded him in the back. Marcus stepped forward, his arms outstretched towards the Zairean. His palms cupped his pet chicken with a string dangling from one ankle. The old man took the bird and thanked Marcus with feeling. We all knew that there was a severe lack of protein in the Kivu region and that the bird was destined for the pot. Marcus stuffed his right hand into one pocket and dug out a handful of wild seeds. He placed them in the guardian’s palm and we began to walk up the steep bank to the road and let our more usual adventures begin once again.

* * *

Zak wanted to see gorillas. He carried on at length about how he was preparing to relinquish soon his long and tedious pursuit for the Mokele-Mbembe, and take up a more important and arduous quest. For the hex of the pygmies was impeding his progress. Zak intended to head for the Tarra river in Venezuela to stalk the Ameranthropoides loysii: the “missing link”. The creature was named, so Zak recounted, after Francois de Loys, who — in 1920 — tracked then killed the only example known to exist. Zak wanted to begin his study with mountain gorillas which themselves had been thought to be fictitious until 1901. He said that it would be of great importance to gain an understanding into how Loys’ man lived. Only when armed with such knowledge would his new quest be successful.

He took Oswaldo aside and got him fervid with the prospect of hacking through a jungle in search of primates. Then Oswaldo and he ambled over to convert me to the idea. They worked together like a pair of collies trying to trap a stray sheep. Finally I agreed that we would all go in search of gorillas. Where were they easiest to find? Zak, who knew all the answers, cleared his throat, swept the mop of yellow hair away from his eyes, and then began:

“National Volcano Park in Rwanda is where Dian Fossey studied groups of gorillas in their natural rain forest. There are seven extinct volcanoes in a line.”

“Vocannows!” screamed Oswaldo, enchanted at the idea of scaling another peak or two.

Zak continued, “We can go to Bukavu, get visas and then cross into Rwanda. But it means we should go straight past Goma and on southwards. I know it’s a hassle going right down to Bukavu, but it’s the only place to get a Rwandan visa around here.”

It was agreed. Shortly afterwards we caught a lift in a blue and white pick-up truck that was heading all the way to Bukavu, a town situated almost squarely on the three borders of Zaire, Rwanda and Burundi. Getting the ride had been a considerable bonus. As we rattled along I mused that it must be fate’s hand at work.

Eight enormous straw baskets filled with tilapia, a fish not unlike perch, were placed precariously upon our laps. A group of women with bright headscarves cackled in surprise at our discomfort. In Africa there is a total acceptance of circumstance. Comfort, and the very concept of it, is only appreciated when it has been experienced.

Marcus was sulking and pining deeply for his beloved chicken. The two had been inseparable. Visions of the bird being lowered head first into a cauldron — with a little water and seasoning — haunted us. I wondered for a moment if the little family realized that the chicken had climbed the Nyiragongo.

The haul of tilapia had been caught on lake Kivu and was now being taken southwards towards Burundi. The driver had heard that there was a shortage of food on the Zaire-Burundi border. Trouble with the engine of the pick-up had caused delay, and had led the fish to rot. For three days the tilapia had lain covered in the baskets whilst a mechanic tinkered under the bonnet of the vehicle. The stench of decomposing fish was nauseating. But the women, who chattered away in Lingala, seemed not to notice the pungent odour. Instead, they stopped gossiping every now and then to stare at us and cackle with toothless laughter.

It rained for much of the afternoon and the drops of water blinded us as the driver accelerated. By the time we reached Bukavu night had fallen. And the fish — which had been washed clean if not fresh by the rain — were ready to be sold. We stumbled away to find the cheapest part of town.

Zaire can be extremely expensive for foreigners. All the hotels were completely full; all, that is, except for the Hotel Joli Logi. As soon as I stepped inside the door I realized why it had been the last to attract guests.

Oswaldo and I shared one room, Marcus and Zak took another. Our room had no windows. Having signed the register, we were each handed a bucket for our natural functions.

Oswaldo and I would blink for a second and the wallpaper would appear to move. It was Mumbai wallpaper all over again, or claustrophobia. The patterns slithered into each other and would occasionally, I could swear, spring up and flit about the bare light bulb. Forcing Oswaldo out of bed, we went out to explore.

Across from Hotel Joli Logi a single drum was beating. It managed to grasp a harmony of notes and complement a voice: the shrill voice of a male child who sang in perfect pitch.

Oswaldo had taken the stiletto from his boot, expecting trouble. Yet when we heard the voice he murmured that its purity would protect us. We stumbled over to the bar with its inevitable red light, from where the sounds radiated. Oswaldo pulled back a shawl at the entrance and we went in.

Bottles of Primus, with the large white insignium of Zaire painted across them, were held by all. Everyone was happy; women constantly burst out laughing and rocked about clutching at the brown bottles. Three tall men were dancing alone in the middle of the floor. They shook about with great dexterity in time with the drumbeats. Oswaldo and I fell back together, in surprise: for the three men were dancing on crutches. They had not a leg between them.

A woman the size of a walrus sidled across waiting to dance, her hands clenched around a bottle of Primus. Pulling me tightly to her chest, she jerked me about the room until, that is, she spotted Oswaldo. He was evidently more her type. Her eyes crossed with glee as she bounded over to pilot the Patagonian around the floor.

For the first time in Zaire I had seen people truly happy. There was still hope, still sincerity, amongst the people. The core was intact, only the government was rotten.

* * *

A visa more elaborate than any I had seen before was stamped into my passport. It bore out the theory that, in Africa, the smaller the country the bigger the visa. We rested for a day in Bukavu, a city that had been developed by the colonial-era Belgians and had begun to disintegrate since independence.

The city is not an African entity. Colonial settlements developed in sub-Saharan Africa, and in those all the drawbacks of western society were encased. In African tribal communities, many such problems do not occur. Bukavu had been left with a skeleton of paper-pushing systems and a token of administrative symmetry. But other than the physical infrastructure there was very little else. Abject poverty forced the majority of the inhabitants to occupy the city’s sprawling slums.

Zak, Oswaldo, Marcus and I gathered our belongings and walked out of Bukavu towards Rwanda. The frontier was only a few miles distant. As we walked, a thousand people seethed forward in silence beside us. What seemed to be the whole population of Bukavu was moving out of town. They had been ordered to attend a political harangue. Each face was expressionless, each person stared blankly ahead as if hypnotized by a sinister force.

“Eets just lika Patagonia,” said Oswaldo, “lika de festeeval vee doo in weenter.”

“You’re from Patagonia?!” cried Zak, overjoyed to have met a native of the area.

“Yep!” replied Oswaldo.

“Man, you ever seen a Megatherium?” said Zak.

“Nope,” was the reply.

“What about a Toxodont or a Glyptodon? Man, you must have seen a Glyptodon!”

“Nope,” said Oswaldo blankly.

“What are all those things?” I asked.

“They”re just the most incredible animals that a few select crypto-zoologists working in seclusion have reason to believe still exist... in Patagonia!”

“But what are they?” It seemed that I had asked this question before.

“A Megatherium was a kinda giant sloth, that walked about on its back legs, was about fifteen feet tall and had immense hooked claws; some say it was as big as an elephant and had the tail of a komodo dragon. The skeleton of one was found in the eighteenth century near Buenos Aires. There’s no reason why it ever became extinct,” said Zak.

“Vat’s Tooxoodoont?” murmured Oswaldo.

“Toxodonts were like huge rhinoceroses covered in coarse hair, they — and giant armadillos called Glyptodons — have been said to still thrive in the mountains of Patagonia.”

Oswaldo looked pleased that his homeland was famous for something of which he had not known. He turned to Zak and said, “Zake, came to Patagonia and vee goo looking dem!”

Just before reaching Rwanda, we passed a stadium. The population of Bukavu had filled the rows of seats and were preparing for an address. A compulsory political rally was being held by one of Mobutu’s men. We slipped away and entered a valley. Spanning the two hillsides was a great rusting iron bridge which had once been covered with ornate metalwork. Crossing from one side of the valley to the other, we stared back at Zaire. Marcus shook his head in ridicule at our visa stamps; as he was indigenous to the area he could walk straight across the border with no papers.

At the border post there was only one soldier. He had been deserted by his companions, who had left to drink beer. We chatted for a while as he toyed with the trigger of an American-made assault rifle. The trigger finger’s nail was chipped and broken, yet the others were neatly coated in a thick red nail varnish.

A rumbling of wheels upon the bridge made us turn: a black Mercedes with diplomatic markings pulled up. The soldier saluted. We stood and watched like a line of crows on a fence. The driver said that he was going to Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. Oswaldo stepped out of our line-up and asked politely if he could take our party to the capital: for a small consideration of course. The driver agreed, so long as we bought him beers along the way. His name was Ben. The soldier with the red nails waved his rifle in the air to bid us a safe trip and we began on the road to Kigali.

Our relief at leaving Zaire was like a force that united us all. It seemed almost as if a long, sustained war had suddenly been declared over. Travelling in uncertain circumstances has a way of binding one with another, forming lifelong friendships in a short time.

The road to Kigali was perfectly paved. There was not a single bump or pothole, and we glided along at great speed. Ben, who was an ambassador’s chauffeur, got very drunk. He requested that we stop every few miles so that he might imbibe another bottle of beer. The purpose of his trip to Kigali was to gather items on the ambassadorial shopping list. Simple things like stationery, toiletries, processed cheese and chocolate, which were hard to get in the Kivu region of Zaire.

Rwanda is one of the smallest countries in mainland Africa. Its geography is hilly and it is covered in lush fields and woodland. The road wound through some of the most exquisite areas of Africa that I had seen.

Oswaldo and Marcus were thrilled to be riding in the luxury of a limousine. In Africa the concepts of comfort and travel are rarely synonymous. Travel usually implies being squashed up for hours or days on end, seeing more of the ear of the person next to you than the landscape outside.

Old ladies drew in smoke from wooden pipes and children waved as our vehicle passed. The scenes had the gentle contentment of a paradise: I was certain that the future of Rwanda would be one of harmonious prosperity. Yet, a short time after I left the small central African state, everything changed. An age-old tribal rift between the Hutu and the Tutsi tribes flared up once again, leaving many hundreds of thousands dead. The cattle herding Tutsi have been at odds with the Hutus — an agricultural people — for centuries. Although the carnage of the early 1990s might have ended, the rift itself has not.

* * *

Rick and Gracie Schmetman were standing in the middle of the road. Both had designer hairstyles, solid gold wristwatches, and wore identical Vuarnet reflective sunglasses. I recognized them instantly as Californians, having spent time in their country.

Oswaldo was in an irascible mood. Our changed circumstances were not to his taste. He had developed, remarkably quickly, delusions of grandeur at having been transported in a Mercedes limousine. Ben dropped us on the road to Ruhengeri to await a ride to the Pare National des Volcans, where gorillas are native to the rain forest.

The couple from California saw us and waved. Unlike other Americans, West Coast folk are a breed of their own. Zak and I looked the other way, hoping that they were trying to attract a passing relative or long-lost friend. Oswaldo, however, stumbled over and introduced himself. Then the three came up to where Zak, Marcus and I were slouching.

“Oh my lord, isn’t this wonderful? It’s just so great,” announced Gracie, massaging her hand in mine.

Rick and she wore identical golden raincoats with transparent buttons. Oswaldo started to tell his new friends of his native land.

Rick suddenly froze, yelling:

“Gad, stop, stop, I must get this down!” He clicked his fingers and, in a trice, Gracie had brought out a stereo reel-to-reel recording machine. It had a microphone with an extra long lead.

“Testing, testing... Okay, now when I put my hand up like this you can start talking.”

Oswaldo nodded approvingly and Rick raised his hand.

The Patagonian had filled two long-playing tapes with such vital data as the sound of snow falling in his home village and his impersonations of a rough-riding gaucho, before a tractor and trailer appeared. It stopped, allowing us all to clamber aboard. Oswaldo’s prattle continued; the more he was encouraged, the longer he could talk of his childhood and relatives back home.

Rick reloaded his pair of long-lens Nikons more than once with black and white film, clicking away at the new-born star.

Then the recording machine ran out of tape. It was returned to its case and I took the opportunity to ask what all this activity was for. Rick leant back on the side of the trailer and explained, “Hey man, ya see my wife and I, that’s Gracie over there...”

Gracie heard her name spoken and lifted her golden sleeve to wave with a clenched-face smile. “We just flew in from Los Angeles to write a travel book.”

“Wow, that’s really interesting. What’s the central theme of the piece?” I asked.

“Well man...,” began Rick again, sweeping his head from left to right, as if to look around for lurking plagiarists, “the book’s going to be a conceptual dialog if ya like about the world and inner empowerment. The theme will be space and its effect on society and social understanding of philosophical values as we know them.”

I nodded, with false studious attention.

“What makes my companion, Oswaldo, such a prized source of information?” I asked.

Rick thought hard for a moment. Then, with great deliberation, he said:

“You guys are special.”

“Thanks.”

“No,” continued the Californian, “you guys are really special.” I could tell by the simplicity of his language that something had moved him deeply.

“Why’s that?”

The socio-babble reasserted itself, with the effort to communicate: “Because you represent the first perceived signs of a truly multi-racial societal state in Africa at this point in time! Boy, is this gonna rock them at the Department of Hinterland Studies!”

For some reason, Rick had decided that Oswaldo, Zak and I were indigenous to Rwanda. He was passionate about his task, and thrilled with the material he had collected so far: describing Oswaldo’s incomprehensible monologues as “pure gold dust!”

I hadn’t been to California for nothing. “Right on: I hear you — are you going to transcribe the tapes, Rick?” I asked.

“Yuh, you got it, you got it!” he yelled, working himself into a frenzy. “We”re gonna geta real African linguist back at UCLA to translate the little fella’s words.”

I glanced at Oswaldo, who was ecstatic at finding himself the centre of a major anthropological study.

But something was obviously troubling Rick.

“There’s one thing I have to know...” he blurted out all of a sudden. “I can take the truth, I’m prepared!”

“Rick, what do you want to know?”

“Give it to me straight... I can take it straight!”

“Sure, I’ll tell it to you straight,” I said.

“Is your friend there...” he said pointing to the Patagonian, “really a pygmy?”

Confused at what to answer, I closed my eyes and nodded slowly.

Zak, who had noticed that I was at a loss for words, came to my rescue.

“Vertically challenged genetically,” he corrected. “What”re you going to call the work, Rick?”

Rick and Gracie stiffened. They turned to each other with raised cheeks, each seeking approval from the other to divulge the secret name. Rick funnelled his hands round his mouth, and whispered:

“We”re gonna call it... “WIDE”!”

* * *

We checked into a hostel at Ruhengeri which had six beds in one room. A large spider was embalming its prey above our heads. Rick took pictures with a powerful flash that he had attached to the body of his camera. I empathized with the spider for this intrusion of privacy; for wherever I went Rick and Gracie followed, taking copious notes on all I said and did. To my annoyance, they had found one last spool of recording tape. Marcus liked to watch the sprockets of the recorder turn round and round. He kept on signaling to Rick to turn the machine on, again and again. Rick was worried that the batteries would soon be exhausted; he fumbled in his shoulder bag and pulled out a round disc. It was a luminescent red yo-yo. He handed it to Marcus.

Plates of heavy black beans and carrots, served in a bright green sauce, were brought to the room by the proprietor’s wife. Rick, who had made her stand against a white wall, blinded her, using his high-powered flash unit. She ran away blinking, making wailing noises, to her husband.

There was a fierce knocking at the door of the room. I opened it and the owner of the hostel barged in and grabbed Rick by the throat. Then he yelled in French that the Schmetmans were to leave immediately, and they were to hand over the film they had taken of his wife. Rick dropped the canister of film onto the paw-like palm, and he and Gracie gathered up their belongings. Euphoria replaced by despondency, they walked out into the night to find a new place to stay.

The spider, which had finished digesting all four legs of its dinner, seemed to peer down to see what had happened below. Silence surrounded us. In one corner Oswaldo was scratching away with a blunt pencil. He looked up.

“What are you writing, man?” asked Zak.

“Meng, dis mee traveling boooks.”

“Do you have a title?” I asked. Oswaldo covered the twisted pencil lines with his fingers and nodded.

“I calling eet “LOONG”!”

We walked out of Ruhengeri towards Africa’s first national park, accompanied by the buzzing sound of Marcus’ yo-yo running up and down its string.

Women were working in the fields, bending down and scything grass. One would sing, a scarf tied tightly about her head, as the others joined in with the chorus. A track led through meadows filled with chalky-white and yellow flowers.

The seven volcanoes of the national park suddenly came into view, protruding from the jungle like a line of camels’ humps. Each was covered in a forest of trees and banana plants, which shrouded luxuriant vegetation of all kinds. One plant blended into the next. Many were bowed down under the weight of gigantic green and red fruit. We pressed on, high up into the groves of tall bamboo where the canopy was thick and became denser with each step.

A barefoot child appeared with a machete competently gripped in his hand. The machete was his stock-in-trade: he hacked through the stems, having offered to take us to where the gorillas were.

It began to rain. Some plants collected the water and stored it in their bowl-like leaves. Troops of monkeys swung from branch to branch, and birds called out warning of our arrival across the jungle.

Mountain gorillas are known for moving about one area in small groups, usually guarded by the dominant male, the Silverback, who is said to have strength enough to tear a grown man limb from limb. As no one is ever quite sure where the gorillas are on any one day, it can take hours to locate them.

The boy with the machete cleaved a path just wide enough for us to ease our way through. A rhythm guided his blows, as he wielded the blade skilfully, chopping only what was necessary. We followed in single file; and behind the party the jungle closed in again, healing its wound.

The vegetation was denser than any I had seen before. One plant overlapped with another, creating an abundance of nature that seemed all but impossible for man to dominate.

Everything but ourselves was hidden as if in camouflage and blended perfectly into the green mixture. Dressed in the colors of bright synthetic dyes, we moved with great clumsiness through the habitat: totally intrusive outsiders. We had come from the complexity of the West: where one has to study for fifteen years merely to understand something of the society that it has created. Now back in the very belly of nature, from which our forebears emerged, we were uneasy as if all around us was an alien land.

After some time we reached a small opening where the bamboo stems had been broken away. Zak and Oswaldo sat down, as the boy with the machete pointed to the end of the clearing. A family of wooly black — almost human — forms were moving about. At first they looked to me like humans dressed in gorilla suits with hidden seams.

A female clutched her baby and rocked it up and down, another picked fleas from her behind with neat precision, using the very tips of her black nails. She radiated absolute satisfaction at ridding herself of the insects.

The male Silverback stamped around restlessly, as if he were waiting for the ladies to get ready to go out. Some other gorillas strolled about like a family on a spring afternoon at Brighton.

Then the male jumped to within six feet of where we stood. He peered: with a stare that seemed to pass right through us.

A glare ran across his face and his eyes were filled with tight round drops. Could these primates have been the original people of Gondwanaland? Perhaps to them the Gond tribe was related. As I stared and wondered many things it felt as if I was being reunited with a long-lost companion whom I had never really known.

Dian Fossey had befriended these creatures. One morning in December 1985 she was found with her skull split open: supposedly the work of poachers. My travels had begun to teach me of the irresponsibility of mankind. I had seen sights of destruction created as a by-product of one form of civilization.

Ashtrays fashioned from gorillas’ hands continue to be made: educated people pay for them. They will pay the price in the future. Man must realize that what he does today shapes the world that he will have to inhabit tomorrow.

The child with the machete led us back towards the edge of the forest. As he hopped through the tall bamboo, guiding us back to the main road, I wondered what would become of that place in his lifetime.

ELEVEN

In Search of the Source

“Eyes that look into the darkness,

Tell me where my Sixteen Scores are.”

But the cold stars, twinkling ever,

Said, “Your Gonds we have not seen them.”

Four men with straight backs passed us and smiled. Each was holding a corpse’s limb at shoulder height. The body was concealed under a blanket, except for the feet which poked out from under the covering, pointing downwards.

We continued back towards Ruhengeri which disclosed an assortment of characters in a circus-like procession. Boys with hoops played amongst the long stems of grass which engulfed the edges of the track. Towering trees, with wide green leaves and sprawling branches, gave some cover from the warm drops of rain. Then three more corpses with rigid toes were borne away towards the humpbacked range of volcanoes.

Rwanda, especially before the butchery of 1994’s civil conflict, was an unusual country. It felt, somehow, more like an old-fashioned European principality than a remote Central African nation, struggling for development. It seemed inconceivable that such harmony should ever change, as it did so violently in the civil war of 1994. An enchanted place of hills and rolling meadows, it was the sort of domain one might dream of owning, ruling over as one’s own kingdom. I began to understand an idea which had once been expounded to me: that presidents-for-life step into their fantasies, actually believing that the nation is their own property.

Marcus was very happy. He spent much of the time re-enacting movements of the gorillas with Zak. At night he would tie the shiny red yo-yo around his waist, lest it be stolen while he slept. It had taken the place of the chicken.

I had decided to go around Lake Victoria, through Uganda, towards Kenya. There were various reasons; not the least being that I yearned to complete my crossing of Gondwanaland’s greatest central segment.

Oswaldo burbled that he wanted to track the source of the Nile, which runs from near Jinja right up to Egypt: one of the few rivers in the world to flow northwards. He had read his Bible. Since I had made him participate in a ju-ju rite, he insisted, he should be allowed to see where the Nile starts. The Nile after all, held the reeds where Moses was discovered hidden as a baby. In the knowledge that Oswaldo was from a religious family, I thought that accompanying him to the Nile’s source might help him to get over the painful memory of the Babalawo and his Borfima.

A friend in Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, had asked me to pay him a visit. So Oswaldo would be my companion once again. He repeated twice:

“Vee go gooing veesiting, we go eest all the way.”

Zak and Marcus wanted to lurk a little longer in Rwanda’s dense foliage. They escorted Oswaldo and me to the main road. We would hitch a ride to Kigali, the capital, situated just west of Rwanda’s centre.

When a tractor pulled up, I threw my saddle-bags and Oswaldo’s luggage aboard. Then the Patagonian and I turned to wish our companions farewell. But they had already gone.

* * *

When Oswaldo and I crossed the no-man’s land into Uganda, I felt the same fear that I had experienced in Zaire.

The immigration men entered our names into a large leather-bound volume and asked politely if we were carrying pornography or explosives. Oswaldo shook his head and collected his kit together. The sky was black as if an artist had painted lines across it with a thick-tipped Chinese brush. Soldiers, no more than fourteen years of age, strutted up and down. Their camouflaged uniforms were belted with straps of hide. The pants and tunic-cuffs were turned up several times whilst the boys waited to grow bigger.

A character who had a calculator and pencil stowed in his tangled mop of hair took my last Rwandese francs. He pulled out instruments and began to calculate with a wild enthusiasm. Having handed him only a few notes, I was given in return five wads of currency — as thick as bricks. The black-marketeer apologized that only the lowest denomination banknotes were available.

Oswaldo and I were stuffing the near-worthless piles of local currency into our pockets when we heard shouts from the checkpoint. An English-looking man climbed off an antique motorcycle with a sidecar attached. He stood six foot five and was exceptionally thin. His face was clean-shaven and covered in freckles. The functionary took the man’s British Passport and asked if he had either explosives or pornography. He had not. The aging black motorcycle was admired by a line of the teenage conscripts. Then, for the first time, the man turned to where Oswaldo and I were standing. I stopped in my tracks. He, too, looked startled. I walked over and greeted him. Oswaldo had no idea what was going on.

“His name is Denzil Fairfax,” I explained to the Argentine. “We were at boarding school together in a remote part of England called Dorset. Denzil was my stripe.”

“Stripps?” said Oswaldo, “Vat dese stripps?” Denzil answered in his low and patient voice, which seemed to hypnotize Oswaldo.

“A Stripe is a prefect, a person who is in charge of another.”

Memories of Denzil sitting on my head and throwing punches at my rib cage would always be vivid. The pain had been incidental, for the very fact that the Head of Rowing was reducing me to a pulp would do much for my image. Public schools are like that.

Denzil was on his way to Kampala. He had bought the old Triumph motorbike in Zaire for fifteen dollars and a pair of jeans. Before we had a moment to protest, Oswaldo and I were bundled aboard, and we were tearing around the potholes towards the Ugandan capital.

Oswaldo sat in the sidecar; he took my saddle-bags and held them on his lap. A peculiar exhilaration arose from moving so fast into a place so unknown.

Uganda’s lush beauty surpassed any other I had seen on the African continent. Innumerable flowers of uncounted species filled one landscape after the next.

We stopped to look for petrol twice on the way to Kampala. It seemed as rare as gold. People had little use for cars, they just walked from one place to another. They had reverted to an almost feudal existence, having been continually beaten down by their presidents-for-life.

But at last the tyranny had ended and a just political regime reigned. It had replaced the same negative type of development as I had seen in Zaire. Only now was the country rebuilding itself, and people were trying to forget their sordid history. Roads had become overgrown, houses lay derelict. But the greatest tragedy was that a warm, hospitable people had become frightened.

The black machine arrived at Kampala as the sun was setting. We took one large room in a rambling hotel near the railway station. The manager showed us to the chamber with some pride. Mildew had until recently covered all four walls, but an industrious soul had systematically scraped it away — leaving only thin vertical lines of greenness which had been missed.

Oswaldo drew the curtains apart to inspect the view. A burst of high-velocity machine-gun fire had left a line of holes, the size of bottle tops, at eye level across the windowpane.

Rolled-up sheets of paper plugged the holes. The manager winced, and Oswaldo closed the curtains gingerly, saying nothing.

Kampala had been a battle zone during the fight for supremacy in Uganda. Damage to the capital had been so extensive that years would pass before the scars of war could be erased. Many shop-fronts were still intact, but the shops themselves had been gutted and vandalized. Windows and walls were lavishly sprayed with bullet holes. Spent casings and shells lay about, serving as a reminder of what had passed. This debris surprised me, as the hostilities had in fact ceased some time before.

Amidst the turbulent years of destruction, sporadic periods of rebuilding had occurred. International organizations had left Kampala alone to solve its problems, with the street skirmishes and car bombs, withdrawing their wealth as they went.

Uganda’s string of dictators was unequalled by any other African nation. The terror of Milton Obote, Idi Amin and others even became headline news in the West, as one after the other pursued his barbarous reign over the lush East African state.

Amin’s coup in 1971 deposed Obote and began one of the most violent periods in all Africa’s history. Hundreds of thousands of civilians were dead. The country was left economically destitute, and the people terrified of their master.

Amin forced the Indians to leave, seizing the billion dollars of investment they left behind. Nationalising all that Obote had left in private hands, he squandered the money. While the executions and torture continued, he foolishly invaded Tanzania, his East African neighbor.

Tanzania’s unexpected counter-attack delivered a serious blow to Uganda, despite its Libyan military aid. Eventually Idi Amin fled into exile to Libya, before settling in Saudi Arabia. Then Obote returned and a new stage of the terror began.

Brigadier Basilio Okello ousted Obote in 1985, before handing over the presidency to Yoweri Museveni, who began working tirelessly to achieve reform. Museveni, throwing off western beliefs about multiparty states as more applicable to Europe, recognized the primacy of tribal affinities in his planning. He had candidates for parliament stand as independents, and brought members of various ethnic groups into his administration.

Denzil offered to take us to dinner at the Speke Hotel — named after the man famous for discovering the source of the Nile at Jinja. It amused me to hear that an Englishman could be credited with finding the origin of the river. As early as 150 AD the Greek astronomer Claudius Ptolemy wrote that the Nile’s origin was amongst the Mountains of the Moon, in the Ruwenzori mountains, not so far to the west. Centuries before Speke’s arrival in Africa, the Arabs had charted the entire length of the Nile. Not only that, but countless generations of Africans had inhabited the “unknown” region for centuries.

We ordered lavish dishes from the menu, all of which promptly came. No other guests were patronising the hotel, and so the manager came over and spoke to us.

“It is wonderful that tourists have started to come to our country again,” he said. “So many bad men fought for this city. So much blood was spilt, we just want to forget all those men and their time. We don’t want any more war and killing: you are very welcome in our country.”

There was a charming naivety about him and many other Ugandans that I met. It was more than the desire to please which I had become accustomed to in India or even Zaire. Something about it was almost as if everyone bore the burden of each individual misdeed which caused the past tragedy. I felt safer in Uganda than at any other time. It is an interesting paradox, that the people of this nation are so passive and honest, but they should have been ruled over by a series of such violent and despotic men.

Oswaldo poked me as I tried to draw conclusions. The meal was so cheap that we ordered all four courses again.

Next morning, before the sun had risen above the bullet holes in the windows, Denzil, Oswaldo and I drove out to Entebbe. The famous botanical gardens had borne the brunt of war and neglect. Denzil apologized every so often for tormenting me at school and, sweeping a hand to push back his long hair, he would snort through both nostrils into a very large and grubby handkerchief.

Oswaldo and I took turns sitting in the sidecar. Denzil drove to Entebbe Airport.

Renowned as the scene of the Israeli midnight raid in 1976, Entebbe’s chapter of history is hard to forget. Palestinian hijackers took hostage over one hundred Israelis aboard a French aircraft. Three Hercules cargo planes — escorted by Phantom jets — left Israel packed with airborne commandos. Within one hour of landing they had rescued the hostages. In the course of the operation, eleven MiG fighters, supplied to Uganda by the U.S.S.R., were destroyed.

The debris of that attack was still lying about, having been pushed off the runways so that life could get back to normal. One aircraft, it looked like a DC-10, was parked on the tarmac of a taxiway. Covered in green algae, it lay abandoned, I suspected, because the necessary engineers to repair it did not exist.

We took tea in the airport cafeteria, which was open although no flights were expected. A hundred people struggled for good places from which to watch a twelve-inch television screen. Whole families were clustered around the flickering reception of Ugandan television. The cook and cafeteria helpers had deserted their posts and were also crouched around the miracle of technology. Amongst the interference, Michael Jackson was pacing through the robotic steps of his music video “Thriller”.

Denzil knew a lot about Uganda and its history. He told with great animation of the brutality of Idi Amin and Milton Obote. And he spoke of the burial grounds where the earth was parted and filled with corpses. These were Uganda’s killing-fields.

As the sun sank down behind Kampala’s concrete buildings, Denzil strapped two jerrycans brimming with petrol onto the sidecar. Oswaldo and I risked instant incineration trapped in that death seat. Petrol slopped about as we set off at dawn the next day to witness the evil legacy of Amin and Obote. Although I was apprehensive — and at first unwilling — to visit the killing-fields, Denzil maintained that such a trip would be of significance.

For several hours we drove along red mud-tracks bordered with lush vegetation. Once in a while Denzil would pull out a hand-scribbled map. His up-to-date information and interest in such matters as the killing-fields, led me to suppose that the lanky Englishman had unrevealed contacts: perhaps in the Foreign Office. Rather oddly, he seemed reluctant to brief Oswaldo and me as to where the killing-fields were located. When I asked him to give me names and directions for my notebook, he said firmly that these details were irrelevant. Perhaps, I reflected, I had contracted the Developing World paranoia, which almost everywhere holds that newcomers are undoubtedly spies.

At what seemed like the middle of nowhere, Denzil stopped driving, glanced at the tatty map, and switched off the engine.

“We are here,” he said.

An albino boy ran up to the motorbike and screamed when he saw Denzil.

The child plucked up courage, slowly approaching the Englishman and rubbing his fingers through Denzil’s long brown hair. Then he chortled, because he had never before felt such a thing. A moment later he touched Denzil’s freckles. There were cries from behind us, and the child’s mother ran over. She yanked the boy up into her arms, smacked him, and rushed over to a trough to wash his hands. Denzil looked a little disconcerted. The woman had obviously never seen freckles before and thought, quite naturally, that they were due to a disease which might be contagious.

We stayed the night at the back of a teahouse. A fire burned in the middle of the little room. The flames licked at the corrugated iron walls, crackling and squeaking as the fire was fed with a few old pieces of damp wood.

The man who put us up was very old indeed. His name was Albany; and his eyes were rheumy with age. He spoke wearily, as if he had seen the history of the world and all those who had walked upon it. And he told stories of the slaughter.

Albany had seen corpses being dragged into open pits — often by the victim’s own children.

In Uganda a generation was stolen by the deeds of tyrannical rule. Albany’s raspy words echoed around us. As the flames licked higher than before, the old Ugandan spoke about the lost years of the second Obote reign.

Obote had returned to a people who were beginning to recover from Amin’s terror; a people who had not realized that a new dictator had just replaced the last. Albany said that he would rather the truth be told just once, than it never be told at all.

Next morning Albany took us to a leper colony near to the hut in which he lived. I was not sure of the reason for visiting the enclosure and its inhabitants. At first I felt like a voyeur or a child being taken to visit a zoo. Albany knew the lepers well and introduced us to them. Their features and bodies were actually rotting; holes had formed in cheeks, and finger-joints had dropped away.

It was the first time that I had seen serious disease since Mumbai. Dry leprosy is not usually as highly contagious as people tend to believe. Oswaldo reached into his pack and pulled out a bag of boiled sweets. They were striped with white and black lines. He handed them to the oldest of the lepers. The joy was no longer expressed in physical demeanour, but in a distinctly higher sense, as if an aura surrounded him.

Few people lived in the region. Visitors were unknown. It was as if the world were trying to leave it alone, in peace.

We walked across a field to buy some milk from a stall. What looked like thick sticks were scattered about, their ends fat and rounded. Skulls were spread about like orbs, some enmossed — others shining brightly — polished by the rain. Many of the bones and skulls were small and delicate; they were those of children and their mothers.

Albany gave us some bananas when we left. He told us to tell our friends that his country had found peace at last. And called out:

“Smile, when you think of us here, because we are smiling for the world.”

The jerrycans were secured and we mounted the black machine. The fuel was hardly the purest: clouds of noxious gases spiralled behind us as we pulled away to seek the source of the Nile.

* * *

A group of white men carrying large sacks were heading towards us. We studied their movements in puzzlement, trying to make out what country they were from. The tallest one moved with a limp in front of the others. Their skin was so white that for a moment I wondered if they were albinos.

The men had in fact come from Jinja’s grain mill, where they worked. A second skin of blinding white flour covered each from top to toe.

Denzil left the motorbike with the manager of a backstreet bar who had assured us that he was the right man to take care of the machine. A table took pride of place in the bar at which a school of card-sharps threw down piles of bills, each bearing Milton Obote’s face. A monster with eight heads was rearing up from a pinball machine in the middle of the room. Oswaldo tamed it, becoming addicted to the game; until Denzil walked over, picked him up, and threw him outside onto the grass.

The Patagonian and he were very different. One was tall, the other short. One liked knife-throwing, the other was a pacifist. Yet they were fascinated with each other, both respecting, yet each not quite comprehending, the other’s viewpoint.

Bicycles were for hire to take visitors to the source of the Nile. Each came equipped with a pedal-man.

I perched on the back of the Chinese-made frame, and it began to gather speed, powered by the gangling body of the Ugandan youth. We passed a golf course on the edge of Lake Victoria where two old colonials were having a vociferous tee off.

Buildings in the 1930s style, neglected statues of Mahatma Gandhi, and small, overgrown Hindu shrines were dotted around. One day in 1972, Idi Amin decided that all the Indians were to leave Uganda. Most went to neighboring Kenya. One told me later that they were allowed to take no possessions: they crossed the border wearing only their three-piece suits.

Lake Victoria came into view, surrounded in a gaggle of teenage boys and glittering tilapia. The morning’s catch had just come in. Scaly fish bellies were being slid into yellow wicker baskets, which were put onto heads and whisked away to market.

Noah, my pedaller, offered to find us a boat so that we might visit the very spot where the Nile is born. He went off and chatted to every boy with a canoe. After lengthy negotiations, we lumbered aboard a craft with three slow leaks. Noah, who insisted on accompanying us, bailed with a jam jar as we pulled out into the expanse of Lake Victoria.

The boat was long and thin. An array of wooden struts held the two sides together, while a child with a paddle propelled us into the middle of the lake.

Noah pointed to a small island and a lone tree which sprouted from the water. He said that the tree was the exact source of the Nile, and that the island moved about according to the moon. As to what he meant, I was unsure. Yet it was something on which he was very emphatic indeed.

Oswaldo gave a short address on his homeland to the occupants of the boat, which he instructed them to tell to their various peoples. The Patagonian was eager to make the most of the auspicious moment. Afterwards Noah asked me exactly what my friend had said. When I admitted that I had no idea at all, Noah burst out laughing and ran off to tell his friends.

The Owen Falls Dam raged as Denzil’s little black Triumph ran across the road bridge towards the Kenyan border. At a checkpoint, at Tororo, on the border we were received with great courtesy and hospitality. A cluster of young women, who wore colored cotton dresses with pointed shoulders, stood about chatting to the soldiers. A bucket of hard-boiled eggs and packets of biscuits — which tasted of grit — were passed round at the border post. The officials lounged beneath a wide acacia, smoking cigarettes from pink cartons.

Out of all the countries I had visited, Uganda was the hardest to leave. A curious sense seemed to bond all Ugandans together. As if it developed like an extended family which is united by hard times.

The supply of cash that I had brought from London was running out. Somehow I had to contact my bank there to send more money from my account. Although concerned that problems would inevitably arise, I was reassured that very soon I would be with Mich — my childhood friend — in Nairobi.

Before crossing into Kenya, we had a last bottle of Coca-Cola in a rowdy café. At the bottom of the bottle there was an inch of black silt. Swirling the remaining fluid around this deposit, I leant my head back to drink. As I did this, my eyes caught on a few words scrawled across a blackboard on the café’s wall. Each letter was carefully formed. It read:

As for me, God will help we all in the judgment day for the work we doing today. And also God will help human being more than anything in the world. He is our guide and he we love.

TWELVE

Beowulf and Buckweed

“Lingo hear, your Gonds are asses,

Eating cats, and mice, and bandicoots,

Eating pigs, and cows, and buffaloes;

Filthy wretches! wherefore as me?...”

In the early afternoon we reached the edge of Nairobi. A dented sign announced:

Welcome To The Green City In The Sun.

Breaking with our tradition, we stayed in a rather extravagant hotel in Westlands, a suburb where many Indians and European expatriates live. My traveling companions had refused to put up with the bug-infested rooms with no windows which they thought I favoured. I would have preferred luxury, but was living on a tight budget. The sword money would not last forever: and Gondwanaland extended, after all, to the farthest reaches of South America.

Denzil had negotiated with the hotel’s manager and swapped his motorbike for lodgings for us all. He was delighted, secretly confiding that the vehicle would only be good for a few more miles.

I telephoned Mich, who was attending the Kenyatta University. We arranged to meet in the centre of town.

Bus number 118 was very full. Oswaldo dangled from a window and yelled with exhilaration as the driver swerved around the huge roundabout near Tom Mboya Road. It was hard getting used to metropolitan life once again. Buildings stretched twenty storeys into the vast African sky, and had elevators that worked. Tour guides herded flocks of package ‘safari” tourists from one souvenir shop to the next; as the bustle of suit-clad commuters hurried home. My companions were thrilled to be in a big city once again. Denzil ran off towards Woolworth’s and Oswaldo hugged a businessman from Argentina.

At the Thorn Tree Café outside the New Stanley Hotel we met Mich. He had changed considerably from the twelve-year-old whom I had known many years before. Built like a Marine, with a square body and a shaven head, his hands were as wide as soup plates.

Mich had roamed the trouble-spots of the world with his father. A military man, his father was, as he put it, “A Colonel — the Full Bird”, now stationed at the Pentagon. They were always at loggerheads. Mich’s father had expected his son to follow in his footsteps and join the Marines. But Mich was dedicated to other causes. He loved animals and detested war. His favourite creature was a ferret called Buckweed. The two had been almost inseparable. But, before coming to Africa, Mich had been forced to leave Buckweed with the Full Bird: who hated animals and loved war. I dreaded the consequences.

Mich invited me to see Kenyatta University. We took a matatu, a private van, out to Kahawa, which is on the road to Thika. At the matatu-stop on Moi Avenue hundreds of people ran into the road as soon as any of the private vans approached.

In Africa seldom is there queueing: a surge of arms and legs push against each other, in the hope of squeezing aboard. A woman forced her head towards my face. As the bushy mop of hair obstructed my nose and mouth, I began to suffocate. Forget-me-nots were embroidered on her dress. I wriggled in horror that they should be the last thing I would see before finally collapsing.

The bus plied a course through the military base at Kahawa, until it reached the University grounds. A sly move on the part of the government, it was said, to ensure that the University was constructed beside a military base. Student demonstrations in past years had caused various Kenyan universities to close and a gigantic backlog of students to develop.

Kenyatta University was very spread out. Students crisscrossed the campus along the sand-covered paths as if they had a definite purpose. I asked Mich why he had not bought a bicycle. He shook his head and said, “Nah, I’d just look rich... people here don’t have as much as we do. I brought all these clothes from the States, but usually I wear the same pair of pants and just a couple of the shirts.”

I asked what the dropout rate was.

“Man, if a guy dropped out he’d be throwing away his life. Kenya has the highest population growth in the world. You know, it’s funny... when I was in the States I used to grumble all the time at what I had. At Virginia Tech we had multi-million dollar wind tunnels and we weren’t happy. But just look at our physics lab over there...”

He motioned towards a pair of huts with tin roofs.

Mich shared a room with two others. Three beds were pushed up against the walls, leaving just about enough space for two people to stand in the surrounding area. Mich pointed to a duffle bag and said:

“That’s where Jimmy keeps his stuff; Kennedy doesn’t have anything but what he wears. I’ve got enough equipment to kit out an army. These guys have become closer than my brothers; they”ve taught me so much by their example of modesty.”

Above Mich’s bed was hung a framed picture of his ferret, Buckweed, and a three-toed sloth. As I was admiring them, the door swung open. Kennedy stumbled in and we were introduced. He stuck out one of the largest hands I have ever seen: bigger even than Mich’s. It seemed to grip at my whole arm. He was wearing shorts and was agitated for some reason.

“What’s wrong with you?” asked Mich.

“Well, I don’t want to bother you, because your friend has come. But I remembered that yesterday was your birthday...” Kennedy rummaged under his bed. He pulled something out wrapped in a page of the Times of Kenya. “I didn’t forget, but it took longer than I had hoped to make you a gift.” He held out the small package and Mich took it.

“Open it. I made it myself.”

Mich unwrapped the paper which was scrunched up at the edges. A pouch made from denim was revealed. Mich examined it with praise, opening it for a moment, as if he expected something inside.

“It’s for Buckweed,” said Kennedy.

“I shall treasure this, but you cut up your jeans,” Mich said.

“I don’t mind wearing shorts,” Kennedy replied, laughing.

He sat on his bed and picked up a Mills and Boon romance. We left him to read and Mich offered to take me to eat dinner.

* * *

Mich had given me the address of a place in Eastleigh — an overcrowded suburb of Nairobi. From this secret establishment one could telephone, at a low fixed rate, anywhere in the world and talk for as long as one liked. We took bus 106 out to Eastleigh — where Ethiopians and Somalis are the majority — to meet our contact, whose name was Francis.

A river of oozing mud was surging down the main street of Eastleigh. Oswaldo took charge of the scribbled directions and navigated us passed the Disco Day and Night Club to the house where Francis lived.

A doorway led to a passage and then to a house with dry mud walls. We entered the main room and Francis greeted us. His teeth were many shapes, and rather unusual in that most of them were twisted at right angles to what would have been their normal positions. And as he talked, he used them to strip bark from stems of mira, a bitter-tasting plant containing amphetamine, which is legal in Kenya.

Half the room was curtained off. I could see the shadow of a woman breast-feeding an infant on the other side. Francis handed each of us a book of international dialing codes and pulled a handkerchief away, revealing an extremely modern telephone with digital display. It sat upon a stack of international directories. I rang my bank in London and persuaded them to wire some money from my account to a bank in Nairobi.

Oswaldo took the telephone next. The hut in Eastleigh was miraculously connected to Oswaldo’s village in Patagonia. Oswaldo’s eyes filled with tears of joy; but after a few moments of conversation his voice trembled and he stared into space. He put down the phone and whispered:

“My Papa dying last week. Dey burying heem tooday in mi veelage.”

The bank cashier counted out several hundred purple notes. With a sweep of his tongue, he coated each finger in a layer of sticky saliva. The lubrication aided the counting process. Then he smiled broadly.

My bank had successfully transferred some money to Nairobi but, on arrival, the funds had been automatically changed into Kenyan shillings. I pleaded that, since the sum had been sent in sterling, it should paid out in sterling. The manager shook his head and suggested that I hasten to a quiet, discreet foreign-owned bank in a suburb of the capital.

It was one P.M. — on the last Friday of the month — by the time I arrived there, and this circumspect branch was being mobbed by five thousand people, all of them trying to cash their pay checks. When I jumped up and down in the middle of the crowds, the mob paid no attention, but swept over me like a wave rushing shoreward. An elderly American queuing up was creasing back page three of Robert Ruark’s Uhuru. I told him my story, weakly hoping to win his friendship and sympathy. He looked up for a moment and said, “Gard, man, ya should go to Botswana if ya think this is bad!” Having decided to use other tactics, I burrowed under the waves of legs, and threw myself on the mercy of the most senior clerk I could find. He counted out twenty forms, mumbling, “You can start by filling these in.”

Snatching a ballpoint from the official’s hair, I wrote furiously, hardly lifting the pen from the page.

The sheets were accepted with grave formality, and the officer himself climbed on a chair to place them atop a pile. Then he unbuttoned his shirt another notch to reveal a navel filled with sweat. After which he removed his left shoe and began to exhibit its fine stitching to his colleague at the next desk.

When I banged my fist on the table, he looked up in annoyed shock, handed me another batch of forms, and told me to shut up. A man in a boiler suit crawled over to me from under the desk. He was groping about with a screwdriver trying to mend the electric fans. I refused to fill any more forms. The official replaced his shoe and almost showed some pity. He commended me on my own footwear, then said I was to meet him at the telephone box behind the bank at three that afternoon.

At five-thirty P.M. I was still waiting and was beginning to wonder what exactly was going on. A group of men in long black coats were watching me, as if they had been told to do so. Was it usual policy to meet clients at the telephone box? The long black coats moved closer and I went inside the box. A moment later there was a tap on my shoulder and the bank officer addressed me: “Thank you for waiting...” he began.

I butted in, “What are those men doing staring at me from over there?”

“Don’t worry, they’re waiting for one of my colleagues.”

“The gentlemen who process the forms would like you to pay them some money. It will speed the wheels of your case.”

I reeled in surprise, at first, on learning that bank officers could be corrupt. But then, instead of condemning the system, I realized the possibilities, and asked:

“How much?”

“A thousand shillings.”

“I’ll give you five hundred.”

“They might take seven hundred.”

“Six hundred and it’s a deal!” I shouted.

“I’ll see what I can do,” he replied, shuffling away. He returned an hour later with the necessary signatures.

Oswaldo met me under the Thorn Tree. He looked a little happier, and said that Denzil had taken him to an astrologer who told his fortune. Then Denzil had gone off to see his elderly great-aunt who lived in Nairobi. A decrepit Indian soothsayer, with a face as creased as an elephant’s belly, had seen Oswaldo’s future. The phantoms and spirits which he had conjured up had pledged that Oswaldo’s future was to be mystical and great. I was shocked that the Patagonian would bow to magic provided it predicted good things. It all seemed very hypocritical, especially after Oswaldo had refused to feed the Babalawo’s Borfima.

“What are the details, Oswaldo?” I couldn’t help asking.

“Dey remain seecrets, meng, till five yeers passing. Nice man give me magica stoone to protekting me fameely and Oswaldo.”

“What does it look like?”

His hand fished about in the tight jeans pocket and pulled out a yellow piece of stone. A pentagram was etched into its face. He held it close to his chest and shut his eyes. Images of Rajasthan and the alchemist’s assistant were hard to suppress. Could another of Bhindu’s brothers be working from above a bicycle shop somewhere in Nairobi?

Denzil’s great-aunt invited us all to watch Beowulf. A local boys’ school was putting it on as an opera, for a limited period only. Mich, who was helping Kennedy with his studies, apologized for not attending. At eight that evening, great-aunt Rósela, Oswaldo, Denzil and I found ourselves sitting in the front row of a drafty school hall.

Boys dressed as witches and princesses pranced about, shouting out lines from the great Anglo-Saxon epic. Oswaldo, who was sitting next to great-aunt Rosela, was called upon to explain what was happening, as she was more than a little short-sighted. The South American was at a loss for words as he had no idea of the events, either. Irritated by the slowness of the plot, great-aunt Rosela banged her stick on the ground, croaking for a gin and tonic.

After the play, we applauded until our hands stung; and great-aunt Rosela invited us to a cocktail party. One of her oldest friends, another widow, was returning Home: to England, to retire to a country cottage. The expatriate enclave awaited us.

Oswaldo entertained a select group of elderly and captivated European ladies at the soirée. He filled their glasses liberally from a bottle of Gordon’s gin, gallantly escorting them about the room on his arm. All the time he spoke of Patagonia.

Having escaped from an expert in molluscs — who had cornered me under a long portrait of an early settler riding a zebra — I sidled over to Oswaldo. Suddenly, and without warning, he dug the stiletto from his boot and threw it at the feet of one of the women. Gin glasses clinked and fake pearls clattered as all stared down in horror.

The dagger was embedded in the parquet flooring, through the body of a large winged insect which had been killed outright. The mollusc-man strode over and picked the creature up, caressing the corpse with his fingertips.

Aunt Rosela and the other widows swooned in disbelief at the prowess of the gallant Patagonian. Miss Lambeth-Whitley became quite wheezy and lay for a moment on a sofa. Miss Finklefirn produced a fat cigar from her handbag, and stuck it between Oswaldo’s lips. She announced that it had belonged to her departed husband, Archie, and he would definitely have liked a Patagonian to have it. Oswaldo lit it and choked on the smoke, but persisted until his face turned crimson.

Miss Lambeth-Whitely had the sort of voice that can break glass or embarrass one at a church function. As Oswaldo topped her glass up she twitched, blushed, and shrieked:

“Oh, you are a naughty little Latin, aren’t you?”

Denzil and I withdrew to the kitchen. Mama Wanjiru, the maid, shuffled around us on leathery toes, giggling. We licked out the bowls she had used to make cake icing, as a string of orders in high-pitched, mispronounced Swahili emanated from the other room.

Miss Finklefirn, who was soon to depart Africa, passed around slabs of chocolate fudge cake. The mollusc-man had interred the murdered insect and returned to swallow lumps of gooey chocolate. He gave me a pernicious stare as if I had abetted the execution of helpless wildlife. I turned to Miss Finklefirn and asked politely why she was leaving Kenya after so many years. She stopped passing out cake, and looked me straight in the eye.

“Young man,” she said, “I have been here forty-two years and quite frankly can no longer stand all those blacks!”

* * *

Kennedy and I became firm friends. Although he was from Nairobi, his father had a small decorating business in Marsabit which, he imparted in a whisper, was on the verge of bankruptcy. Kennedy invited me to drive north into the wilds of Samburuland and up to Marsabit itself to deliver some paints to the construction project. I had wanted to visit the northern regions of Kenya for a long time. For it was there, near a small town called Maralal, that the most formidable English explorer still resided: his name, Wilfred Thesiger. The Afghans had been proud to receive him in our country. I wanted to return the compliment to him, in his own adopted home.

Oswaldo and Denzil were far too busy to leave Nairobi. They had become instant socialites. Great-aunt Rósela and Miss Finklefirn wined and dined them in a most unconventional manner. When they were not playing golf, they were playing bridge, and when they were not playing bridge they slurped at gin and tonics in the Muthaiga Club’s bar. The canny old dames taught Oswaldo to shuffle cards like a Las Vegas croupier, which he liked very much.

Kennedy drove the dilapidated silver pick-up through the groves of blazing jacaranda out on the road to Thika. Stands selling fowls, pineapples and Tusker beer died away as we left the city’s outskirts. A cluster of pots containing purple paint bumped about behind as we sped northwards. All was engulfed in a bright yellow light.

The sun beat down and I groaned about the extreme heat. I longed to gulp chilled water, or to suck at a cube of ice. Kennedy said that it was quite normal for nomadic people who graze their cattle on the plains of the Rift Valley never to have seen ice. Some drinks rattled about at the back of the pick-up in a cooler, covered with several large lumps of ice. When we next saw a Masai woman walking, from what seemed to be nowhere to nowhere, Kennedy stopped the pick-up.

“What are you doing?”

“Look at this,” he replied and, fishing out one of the melting pieces of ice, he presented it to the woman.

One might have thought that she would be grateful at seeing such a wonderful thing for the first time: but her response was quite unexpected by me. She screeched and dropped the shiny block on the ground.

“Why did she do that?” I asked Kennedy, in an almost angry tone.

“She has never felt coldness like that,” he said; “For her cold means night and night means danger.”

The Masai woman looked at us with intense distaste: as if we had been performing magic. She turned her back and began to walk away from us towards the distant emptiness.

The road was little more than a dust track as it broke across into the northern hemisphere. I stared out of the window and, for a moment, thought I was seeing the whole world spread before me.

Giant termite mounds sprang up out of the desert savannah, and birds with bright tail feathers darted about. Kennedy realized that I had been affected by the power of the place.

Kennedy said: “Tahir, this is where life itself began. Its energy filled our bones with marrow.”

At Isiolo we ate a roast chicken divided down the breastbone. Kennedy would not start until I was ready to have a second helping. His uncontrollable laughter revealed a set of teeth stained dark brown by the high fluoride content of Nairobi’s water. When I washed the grease from my hands, Kennedy scurried away and paid for the meal. I argued that I ought to pay. He replied: “When the river flows through your land, you may feed the fish.”

The silver Datsun began to move once again, and we entered Samburuland. A pair of warriors flagged us down. Although they looked like members of the Masai tribe, their adornments were quite different. Kennedy said that originally the Samburu had been the same tribe as the Masai, but they split away and ventured to the northern territories. The two jumped into the back of the truck and banged the signal to start on the roof.

Zebra and ostriches took shade under Afzelia “magic bean” trees, whose giant pods dangled down above their heads. The warriors seemed contented, as if they were surveying all that was theirs. Then there was another bang of a palm hitting the roof and Kennedy stopped. The Samburus clambered out and walked resolutely off into the desert — as if to a pressing appointment in the middle of nowhere.

“This is the land of the Samburu,” said Kennedy. “For them, there is no middle, no beginning or end. For them it’s as you see our planet. It is round.”

* * *

When we arrived at Maralal, Kennedy ambled off to meet some old acquaintances, and I asked at the petrol station where I might find Wilfred Thesiger.

“Ah, you mean MizeeJuu,” said the clerk; “Follow that track out of Maralal and continue up the hill to the big house.”

Ten minutes later I found myself sitting beside the great explorer, invited to a rather late lunch.

“I hate cooking and I always have,” said Thesiger as he stared into a dish of over-cooked goat stew.

As we sat in the sun-room of his green-roofed shack I observed the great man carefully. Wrapped neatly in a fraying Gieves and Hawkes coat, Thesiger began to tell me about his most extraordinary life.

Widely acknowleged as the last of the great explorers, his knowledge of the Middle East and Africa was encyclopaedic. Indeed, he was perhaps the only man alive to be revered as a legend in both East and West.

“You’re the first Afghan we”ve had up here!” Thesiger panted as he led me on a tour of the shack. “This is Bush Baby, and that over there is Laputa. He came to me many years ago with the words “My name is Tommy Gun, please give me a real name.” So I did.”

Thesiger pounced on one of the children of his adopted Samburu family, crying out, “Do you know where Afghanistan is?” The infant looked up at the towering Englishman and whispered, “I think it’s near Germany, Mizeejuu.”

Thesiger shook his head in regret that the child should have such little geographical knowledge.

“We are a long way from Germany, let alone Afghanistan,” I said weakly. But the old explorer was not satisfied. “I’m going to get my maps out later!” he threatened, as the child scampered away to play with his hoop.

“This is the best house in the world!” cried Thesiger as he led me from one room to the next, “Well, it’s the best house in Maralal at least.”

A scattered herd of zebra lingered in the valley below, languid as if scarcely able to move in the tremendous heat. The valley had once, not long before, been covered with trees that gave shade to the goats and droves of wild animals.

“There’s a disease that attacks the juniper trees, the top first, then the affliction spreads downwards,” said Thesiger, as we looked out towards Maralal. “I see nothing stopping it killing the whole forest over there. No one has done anything about it. I don’t know if they could.”

The old explorer swept his arm in an arc and said sadly, “As far as you can see was once forest. Now it’s all dead.”

Change has ravished many lands to which Wilfred Thesiger had traveled in his long and distinguished life. Yet, unlike so many explorers and adventurers before him, he had borne witness to the changes in landscape and society.

“It is a great mistake to go back to a place,” he said, staring at the fibers of his coat. “I was horrified to go back to Arabia.”

Wilfred Thesiger was born in 1910 in Abyssinia, now Ethiopia. It was there that his father was instrumental in helping Ras Tafari, later to become Emperor Haile Selassie, to the throne. This influenced Thesiger’s whole life. His earliest years in Abyssinia cultivated a passion for the wild; a passion which Thesiger never relinquished. His remarkable books are, of course, classics.

Although he had a flat in Chelsea, London, it seemed as if he dreaded the prospect of returning to the industrialized world.

“I go home on leave once a year,” he said. “The housekeeper who I had for forty-seven years is no longer with me.”

Haile Selassie never forgot the services that Thesiger’s father had given him. Thesiger, while studying at Oxford in the late 1920s, was invited to call upon the potentate. “I said to him,” remarked Thesiger recalling the events some sixty years before, “There is one thing that I want to do more than any other... that is, to return to your country.”

The wish was granted soon after: Thesiger was the only westerner personally invited to the Emperor’s coronation. “The most decisive thing I ever did was when I made that trip to Abyssinia. I took a rifle with me and went on to the Danakil Country. After that there was no question of settling down to a nine-to-five job.”

“God I hate cars!” roared Thesiger suddenly. He had been stirred from his reminiscences by the sound of a Land Rover braving the dry riverbed. “The biggest misfortune in human history was the invention of the internal combustion engine!” he barked. “Cars diminish the world and rob it of its diversity!”

Thesiger slipped back into his memories once more.

“The years I spent with the Bedu were by far the most important years of my life,” he said. “I went to them deciding that there would be no concessions: I was going to live as a Bedu.”

Indeed, he accomplished exactly that. His travels with the Bedouins, and two crossings of Rub” al Khali, the Empty Quarter of the Arabian Desert, made him a legend in his own lifetime. His travels brought him face to face with despondency, danger, and starvation.

“The desert is a place of almost unbelievable hardship,” muttered Thesiger, leaning back into a tattered armchair. “There was constant anxiety that the camels would collapse. If it hadn’t been for the Bedu, the journeys would have been a meaningless penance.”

The Bedouins’ unfaltering belief in themselves, as well as their unsurpassed generosity, gained Thesiger’s undying respect. “The challenge of the desert kept them on their toes,” he said. “They accepted no one as their equal... they would say, “I am Bedu and the cold does not matter to me.” “

Thesiger’s memories, as clear as his piercing gaze, spanned eighty years. One moment he would be recounting details of his first trip to India, in 1917; and the next he would be speaking of hunger in Arabia.

“I remember one day,” he recounted, “we were longing to eat the hare we’d caught that morning. We hadn’t tasted meat for ages. I kept suggesting that we stop and cook it there and then. But each time the answer was that we could only rest when there was water for the camels. At last a suitable spot was found. The camels drank and we cooked the hare. I can still smell it now, it was a smell from paradise.

“Just before we were about to begin eating, someone noticed three Arabs approaching in the distance. When they arrived the hare was presented to them. One of our party said “Please feast, it is a blessed day that you have come.”

As the old explorer conjured his recollections before me, the door was flung open. In its frame was hunched an aged Samburu woman. Completely blind, she had been led up the hillside by a child. She and Thesiger were old friends.

She stumbled into the room and began to embrace me, kissing my hands. Multi-colored beads adorned her neck, and her ear lobes had been cut in the traditional Samburu manner. I looked over to Thesiger. He let out a roar and shouted, “She thinks you’re me!”

The herd of zebra moved about uneasily in the valley as if a predator were nearby. It was almost too hot to move. I was very lightly dressed, yet sat palpitating in the tremendous heat. Sweat ran down my face as I took in the indefatigable explorer’s tales.

Pausing for a moment, Thesiger glanced over to where I was slumped. An apparition had begun to haunt me, blotting out all else. It was a glass of freezing cold water with tiny droplets of condensation on the sides. My head began to spin at the very thought of gulping such a deliciously cold liquid. Thesiger pulled his Savile Row coat closer about him, as if an icy chill had run down his spine. He rearranged himself in the armchair and said, softly, “Let’s have a nice hot cup of tea shall we?”

* * *

Marsabit is a dusty enclave in the desert. Kennedy’s schedule forced us to travel further northwards to attend to his family’s business. I had left the great explorer — now retired — vowing to return if time allowed.

Samburu warriors were lounging about, chewing on roots and trying to keep cool. Some plaited their hair, covering it with red ocher. We were about the same age and for a moment I contrasted our lives. Was it possible to compare them? We had been exposed to such different aspects of life, yet being with them I felt a common link.

Kennedy drove to the building site so that we could deliver the paint to the foreman. His name was Julius. He wore pink Wellington boots and greeted us with a grin which seemed to bisect his face. We were escorted behind a row of unfinished houses. Julius stopped frequently to point out the quality of the workmanship and the materials used. I praised both, and handfuls of soft insulation asbestos were brought for me to fondle and appreciate.

The buildings were at an early stage of construction: still having no roofs or doors. However, painting had begun, and now we had delivered the topcoat it would be used immediately.

In a banda, a small round hut, we were given tea. Two-litre tins of bronze emulsion were drawn together in a circle so that we might sit, cushioned with wads of fluffy white asbestos fibers. With the collapse of the asbestos market in the west, stocks of the hazardous material had been shrewdly sold to developing nations.

The world was warm yet seemed remote, as the sun fell behind a row of the unfinished houses. I sipped the hot sweet tea, no longer bothering to scrape off the black film of drowned insects from its surface.

Julius stood up and exclaimed in a deep, proud voice that Kennedy and I were invited to his home. We were to be the guests of honour.

Big Ben looked down at me from a faded postcard on one wall. We had been hurried away to rest in Julius’ house. He was happy that I noticed the card and said:

“My friend, Francis, is in London. He sends me pictures and I pack up special maize-flour porridge, ugali, which he likes to get.”

A goat was led into the kitchen: it skipped along with a degree of curiosity. Then there was the glint of a knife in the moonlight and it was announced that dinner was soon to be served. The foreman’s young son was paraded in front of us and prodded, to demonstrate an unusual talent. A beer bottle was handed to him and he removed the top with his milk teeth. Julius was proud of the boy.

He cleared his throat and announced that there would be no salt with the meal. It was far too dangerous to venture out to the shop after dark. Four people had already been killed that month by elephants running amok.

The oil lamp was dimmed and a large tray bearing a whole goat was trundled in. The animal had acute rigour mortis. A limb was hacked off and presented to me. It was absolutely raw. I held the hoof in my fingers and tried to look pleased. The other three legs stood perpendicular to the corpse and were removed with some degree of surgical precision, Julius using a rather blunt hatchet. I pretended to gnaw enthusiastically, before exclaiming that I was far too full to eat another bite.

A bed was made up, its pillows plump with asbestos and newspaper, and I lay down to sleep. As I drifted off, a picture of Rick and Gracie Schmetman rolled in front of my eyes. Each was wrapped in a golden raincoat with transparent buttons. Rick looked at Gracie and Gracie looked at me. Then they both shook their heads slowly, in disappointment.

* * *

Back in Nairobi, a flock of ravens had crossed Oswaldo’s path and he knew that he was cursed. As we sat at the Impala bar in Westlands, drinking mango juice from molded Chinese glasses, he spoke tenderly:

“Meng, Patagonia calleng me. Dose eyes mounteens at me hoome waiteng me.”

The news of his father’s death had been a severe blow to the Patagonian and, although he had obtained new strength from the talisman, it was clearly not enough. His left eye had developed a disconcerting twitch and from time to time his top lip ruffled upwards for no reason at all. Concern for omens occupied his time. We began to take elaborate routes around the town as he trod on every crack and avoided ladders, old women and black cats. Sometimes he would sit and stare into space, his eyelashes would quiver as if he were remembering Patagonia, of whose beauty he so frequently spoke.

Then, one day, he put his hand on my arm while we were walking, as his feet juggled with the crazed paving:

“Chappy, came to South America...” he said; “Vee goo Amazon, vee goo leoopard hunting! Yoo like us Latin peeples... vee crazee meng!”

Images of lost cities, jungles thicker than any on earth, and visions of mountains made of ice, ran through my mind. The thought of venturing to the last piece of the Gondwanaland puzzle began to tug. I told Oswaldo of my thoughts.

“Vats Goondwannahland?” he asked, screwing up his face.

“Well,” I explained, ‘scientists say that once, long, long ago, India, Africa and South America formed one giant continent. This was called Gondwanaland.”

The Patagonian seemed confused.

“But that’s not all!” I cried, hoping to recapture his attention, which was flagging. “You see, this super-continent got its name from a mysterious, barbaric tribe who used to Uve in Central India... they were called the Gonds.”

Without warning, Oswaldo suddenly slapped me on the back. As I recoiled from the blow, he chortled, “Khey chippy, Patagonia once coled Patagondia... mean “foot of dee Gonds’ eat ees home of dee Gonds, chap!”

Oswaldo had a point: I was quite ready to be sure. Patagonia could have evolved from Patagondia. This remote region of southern Argentina might indeed have played a key role in the Gondwanaland story. I glanced at Oswaldo. Smiling broadly, with his arms akimbo, he was revelling in his new role as an amateur philologist.

Oswaldo’s link between Patagonia and the Gonds almost seemed plausible. I would certainly try to look into the connection, once having reached the area.

But my interest in Macumba still superseded any other. I was enthraled that such a cult existed and was growing; a creed whose heritage was based in three continents. I had not told Oswaldo much of Macumba, as my curiosity for it might have upset him. Yet I was determined to learn more of this fantastic Brazilian art. I knew no other way to get the compelling itch of curiosity out of my system.

I pledged that I would venture across the continent from the north to the southern edge: and yes, I would journey to Patagonia, where my extraordinary companion had been born.

* * *

Mich and Denzil had lost all their money gambling with some card-sharps in Nairobi’s International Casino. They mumbled that a Mafia element had short-changed them. Now, sick of city vices, they wanted to leave that very night for the hills. I suspected an ulterior motive for such a speedy getaway. Mich broke down under interrogation and said:

“Those Sicilians gave us till tomorrow to pay our debts... otherwise they would take necessary action.”

“How much do you owe?” I asked.

“Nine,” said Mich.

“Nine hundred shillings?”

“No, nine thousand shillings.”

“And...” murmured Denzil “a side bet of two camels and a race horse with another player.”

The first matatu leaving Nairobi was heading towards Ngorengore, a small town west of Narok. Mich managed to send a message to Kennedy of our whereabouts. I tagged along to give moral support. Fifteen bodies and thirty chickens pressed tightly together as the matatu wound down into the Great Rift Valley.

It was very late by the time Ngorengore’s single street-lamp lit our descent down the rutted road. Oswaldo, Mich, Denzil and I huddled in one clump, wondering what to do. A man wearing dark glasses and 1973 silver disco boots whistled and we followed. His name was Basil. In a strange way, he resembled a crocodile. Taking pity on our motley group, he invited us to come and stay in his hut, to meet his family, and to share with them what little they had.

A yellow tin can was passed to me and in the darkness I began to drink. It contained a muddy brown mixture: a special homemade potion, concocted from fruit, I was told, within the very black walls of the room in which we sat. Basil was jubilant when I complimented him on the brew, “It”ll make you potent forever and women will run to your side,” he said.

But he stopped speaking as I began to chew on the grit at the bottom. The lumps would not grind up and so I swallowed what felt like bits of broken glass. Basil said that we were to stay forever and become his new children. We thanked him in chorus. He wore a three-piece suit. I could make out the lines of wide stripes which rolled up and down the cloth, undulating around the creases, giving it character. When he noticed me looking in admiration at the silver disco boot strapped firmly to each foot, he removed one and handed it to me for closer inspection. Here, as elsewhere in the Developing World, boots and shoes are talking-points, for they bespeak sophistication, and even relative wealth.

Three women in the one-room dwelling lolled about and giggled, as if in confusion at everything that was said or done. I was not sure whether they were Basil’s sisters, wives or even his daughters, but it hardly mattered, as everyone was having such a nice time.

The yellow tin can was taken away and refilled with a new potion. It was hot, and the vapours which poured off made my head spin. This was changa”a, a drink prepared locally. I managed to avoid it, as the women climbed over each other to get to the liquid.

At that moment the babies appeared. Their small, round torsos were passed from one lap to the next, as they passed water with surprising frequency.

The tea-chest table was removed and Basil announced that it was time to dance. Denzil passed out cigarettes, hoping this would frustrate Basil’s intention. Basil grabbed the carton and lit two. He drew in smoke from alternate hands. The women were too drunk to appreciate his skill. They lit cigarettes and started to choke, violently. They had obviously never smoked before.

As the confined chamber filled with tobacco smoke, the babies screamed as one. The largest of the women pulled me up to dance. Her enormous breasts closed in around me, engulfing me like an amoeba, against the wall. I shouted out. No one heard me, except for a baby who threw up with excitement. Then, in one movement, another of the women stripped off all her clothes and ran around the room. No one showed any surprise at all. Only I stared in dread. She plucked a yellow dress from beneath an infant and put it on. She looked like a marigold. When I told her this, she tried to drag me into a corner.

Basil said he had a secret to show us. He went to one corner of the room and removed a large piece of dry mud from a cavity in the wall. He turned back, holding a shiny, brightly colored object in his palm.

“This comes from Ethiopia,” Basil began. “An Ethiopian chief gave it to me in exchange for four cockerels.”

He held it out at arms’ length with confidence: almost as if the object radiated an invisible power. We sat in silence and stared at the cube. Was it a new kind of magical device, perhaps in some way related to the Borfima? Each of the six sides was made up of nine colored squares: it slowly penetrated my fuddled brain that it was a Rubik cube.

“I, too, was surprised when I saw this magic block,” Basil continued, “it seemed a very odd thing; then, after many days, I understood the power that it has. Shall I tell you the secret?”

Mich and Oswaldo nodded, mesmerized by Basil’s cube.

“When I move one of the sides, it may seem a very small thing that happens. But when the colors turn over at the body of a sick person, he is healed. Those little children who run about in here were all covered in a rash. One of the ladies used to shout out at night, another had a bad fever.”

“Is it really that easy?” asked Mich.

Basil looked deep into his eyes and said:

“No. I close my eyes and must say some words of magic. It is only then that the spell will be made.”

The next morning a row of ill people loitered outside the hut. Mich rearranged a set of five stones around under a cloth. In his trick, one of the stones magically appeared above the cloth. The woman in the marigold dress sat and watched for hours. Now and again she prodded Mich’s legs, suggesting that he go round to the back of the hut with her.

Basil’s makeshift clinic was really thriving. He stumbled about in his disco boots, between lines of bodies which were scattered outside the hut. Each patient paid one shilling and was given a sip of changa”a.

On our fourth day a whirling cloud of dust approached at speed from the distance. It cut between the mud houses of the town and I recognized the pick-up’s driver. It was Kennedy. He greeted us, then led Mich aside.

They returned a few minutes later to where we were sitting. Mich’s eyes were bulging with tears; he clasped Kennedy’s shoulder. I asked him later what had moved him so. He replied:

“Kennedy came out here to offer me all his savings. He knew that my debt must be very big.”

“How much did he have?” I asked.

“Nine hundred and thirty-four shillings. He said that his father would give me another five thousand, but it would take a week before they could sell their animals to raise the money. Of course I couldn’t take it.”

Denzil and Mich said they would stay with Basil until things in Nairobi quietened down.

Oswaldo, Kennedy and I climbed into the cab of the little silver pick-up and sped along towards the capital. I stared at the ground as it ran by beneath the car’s shadow. We entered the expanse of the Great Rift Valley, where human life, it was said, began.

Suspicious now of anything with the word “Great” in its title, I had learned my lesson from the Great Thar Desert.

The Great Rift Valley surrounded us in all directions until the earth curved away.

In the late afternoon we ascended one of the steep slopes of Ngong and sat on the grass to watch the world. A lone thorn tree stood as the last perpendicular object before the horizon. Vultures and eagles rode high on the thermals and swooped past each other in diagonal lines.

At that moment I felt the force which embraces the African continent — the power which bonds man to nature and nature to mankind. Kennedy came over to where I sat and whispered, “There is a story in East Africa,” he said. “One day a Luo herdsman was leading his cattle across the valley in search of water and new grass. His name was Joseph. In the far distance he noticed a tall warrior approaching. The cattle grew restless and moved their feet in circles when the tall man arrived. The two men were from the same tribe and embraced each other. Joseph said to the tall warrior, “Why have you returned to this place?” The other replied, “I went far away to live with those people in the north. It was a very nice place, and eh, I would have liked to stay there very much.”

“But what made you come back?” asked Joseph.

“You see,” said the other, “I had seen this sight before I left and the memory tormented me. I had to come back, for I need it as a cheetah needs meat.”

Kennedy turned and pointed far across the Great Rift Valley and continued, “Tahir, those two Luo warriors were standing where we now sit. Like the tall one, you will return. The memory of all this will draw you back, Africa is now your real home.”

Oswaldo, Kennedy and I sat for a long time, looking to where the savannah became the sky. I thought over what Kennedy had said. Then I smiled.

PART THREE: WEST GONDWANALAND

South America

THIRTEEN - Beyond the Devil’s Teeth

FOURTEEN - Opera in the Jungle

FIFTEEN - For the Need of a Thneed

SIXTEEN - The Mountains of Blue Ice

THIRTEEN

Beyond the Devil’s Teeth

Then they rose and followed Lingo,

Followed onwards to the forest,

From the mountain Dewalgiri,

Followed on till night descended.

Jesús poured himself a beer and blew the foam from the top. The corners of his mouth were turned up, so that it seemed that he was smiling even when he was not. Before drinking from the glass of the Polar lager, he tipped a little liquid onto the dusty café floor.

“Are the flies bothering you?” I asked.

“No,” said Jesús, “it is for the saints.”

We sat on the veranda of a Café Popular in Ciudad Bolívar: on the southern banks of the Orinoco. The sky suddenly turned inky black and the Venezuelan rains gushed down.

I had come in search of Macumba. The cult’s existence had intrigued me since Blake had first spoken of it on his roof in Mumbai. And I was eager to learn more and understand the mechanics of a society whose roots were imbedded so interculturally.

The route from East Africa had been straightforward enough. A cheap courier flight had taken me from Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, at Nairobi, to Amsterdam. From there, I had flown standby to Miami, in time to catch a direct, discounted flight to the Venezuelan capital.

Brazil was my target, in particular its Amazonian capital: Manaus. I was careful not to reveal the reason for my quest to anyone. Previous experience had shown that esoteric matters are either derided by most people, or else tend to scare them.

Even from Oswaldo, whom I planned to visit in Patagonia, I had kept secret my thoughts, my deep fascination for Macumba.

A child selling cigarettes crawled under an amphibious army truck and kept his chin high, waiting for the rain to cease. His friend pushed a tub of purple ice cream under one of the wheel arches and climbed in after it. Jesús took a gulp of the lager, and continued with his stories.

We had met on the bus from Caracas, the Venezuelan capital. He had pressed his tanned fingers tightly into mine, laughing through a bearded mouth, exclaiming that our friendship would last forever.

Giant moths fluttered above the crowded café life, taking refuge from the tropical storm. One landed on the pelt of a dead cat, which hung high up on a wall: its wings matched perfectly with the cat’s matted fur, and it was invisible for a moment.

Jesús cut me a piece of cachapas, a maize pancake filled with white cheese. It had been, he said, a favourite dish of the country’s liberator, Simón Bolívar. He offered the rest of the pancake to a table full of soldiers who sat next to us. One stood guard, his hands gripped around a nine-millimetre UZI machine-gun, while the others drank beer and played drafts. It all seemed so like Africa: the beer and the tropical rains, and nature’s domination of the land.

Jesús talked for hours about his country.

“Yes, of course there is corruption here,” he said, “but there is corruption everywhere. God gave Venezuela all the minerals it would ever need: he gave us oil and aluminum, mangrove bark and tonka beans. Education is free and there are ten universities in the country. Bolivar would be pleased if he came back now. My father wants me to join him in business. He has a little land that farms balata gum. You must come and meet him and stay with us.”

Putting down my drink — a tall glass of coconut milk — I broke in: “Jesús, I have to go southwards. I am heading for Belo Horizonte, in Brazil. My friend Oswaldo Rodríguez Oswaldo gave me a letter of introduction to his cousin who lives there. Then I want to go south, to Buenos Aires and beyond: to walk amongst the ice mountains of Patagonia.”

“Where have you come from?” Jesús inquired.

“From the east.”

“Did you go to that place... India?” asked Jesús.

“Yes, I stayed there for a long time.”

“What are the people like?”

“Well,” I began, “the first thing is that there are so many of them, almost nine hundred million.”

Jesús looked at me as if I were mad, “In Venezuela,” he said, “we have seventeen million people!”

“They are fine once you get used to them. But they have some unconventional customs and traditions.”

“What do you mean?” said Jesús pouring himself another beer.

“Hindu people revere cows as sacred... they worship them.”

“Worship them?” Jesús yelled. “In Venezuela, we don’t worship cows, we barbecue them! India must be an amusing place: tell me more!”

“There is a God called Ganesh,” I began. “He has the head of an elephant and the body of a man. He’d got four arms and rides upon a mouse.”

Jesús started to roll about, crippled with laughter.

“These customs might seem peculiar but they are very ancient. People have worshipped cows in India for four thousand years. I find such ideas strange as well, but I respect them, if only for their longevity.”

The Venezuelan nodded in agreement and wiped the tears from his eyes.

“We may not have as many people, but this is a big continent. And, remember, the map might look very pretty, but its colors can deceive!”

I promised that I would return to talk with Jesús again after leaving Patagonia. It all seemed so easy. Jesús’ watery green eyes rolled, perhaps in awe at my naive confidence. Then he fell off his chair. For he was very drunk indeed.

As I walked back to the Roma Hotel, winged insects of all types buzzed around the street lamps, and wide-bodied lizards scuffled around my feet. The hotel’s owner was asleep in the garden, stretched out on a rope bed. I opened the door of my room. There was no lock, and the hinges squeaked as I pressed the door inwards.

Since my travels in West Africa I preferred not to turn on the light before I slept: it only revealed where the biggest of the insects were and attracted more creatures around the bulb. The bed was large and the pillow molded around my head as I lay down to sleep.

There was the sound of a cricket moving restlessly on my bed. I edged away and was just about to drift into sleep, when a hand lunged down against the sheets and squashed the insect and its noise with a single blow. I leapt up and ran to the light switch. A stubby figure was sitting up. He had almond eyes and one-inch bristles radiated sparsely from his face in all directions.

“Herro,” he lisped, “my name is Kiato.”

He stared at me and blinked, almost as if telling me his name explained why he was sleeping in my bed. Fumbling for a pair of wire-framed glasses, he slowly unscrewed his eyes which had been blinded by the light.

“The managel said I could stay with you, I am flom Japan,” he said, through a slight American accent; “Does that bother you?”

“No, since you’re here you might as well stay.” I was too exhausted to argue, and made a mental note to claim half my money back in the morning. “I have to leave early, anyway. I am going to El Dorado and then towards Brazil,” I said.

“Learry? That’s where I’m going. The bus reaves at six,” said Kiato.

I turned off the light.

No sooner, it felt, had my head touched the pillow, than Kiato shook me and said that it was time to leave. When traveling alone it can sometimes be hard to refuse company.

At the bus station people lounged around eating purple ice cream and drinking pineapple juice. There was a shout: a man was running towards me through the damp morning air. He waved a piece of paper and moved with wide athletic strides.

“Amigo Tahir, mi amigo!” he called.

It was Jesús. He gave me his address so that I could find him on my return. It was time to get on the bus. As I stepped aboard, Jesús handed me a leather pouch.

“They are tonka beans,” he gasped; “they will bring you your fortune.”

We shook hands and the bus moved away towards El Dorado.

Oil processing plants and nodding donkeys, for pumping oil to the surface, mingled with the jungle and lined the route. The landscape was identical to that of Uganda. Berries and fruits of all colors weighed down the branches of rubbery trees, which sprouted from the brick-red earth. Kiato whistled and took pictures of all he saw with an autofocus Minolta. He was, he said, from Kyoto, the ancient Imperial Japanese capital.

“I studied at the Amelican school in Tokyo,” he stammered. “My father wanted me to work for his company. So I went to the ailport and took a fright to Guatemara. It’s best not to algue with him, just to reave.”

Kiato stopped speaking. Then we both stared in horror at our first encounter with serious deforestation. One hillside after the next lay barren, like shaven scalps. The oncoming lane of the newly macadamized road carried massive tree-bearing trucks towards the ports. It was as if the very soul of Venezuela was being exchanged for yet another petrochemical processing plant. A receding hne of jungle was the only witness.

Kiato was now too shaken to take photographs. He moved about uneasily, put the camera on his lap, and said, “My country buys the wood and gives Venezuera technorogy to exproit its minelars in exchange. I am ashamed of what I see, knowing that my people are to brame.”

Kiato spoke wonderful English, but it took a while to become adept at recognizing problems with the letters, “L” and “R”, a tendency that struck quite randomly. Sometimes I would confuse him, for fun, by asking: “Do you mean “L” as in Rome?” to which he would reply, “No, I mean “R” as in London!”

The bus’ brakes were slammed on and we all trooped out at a military checkpoint. Our passports and malaria tablets were scrutinized by an officer with two red shoulder-stripes — attached with safety pins. Another soldier touch-typed in triplicate and handed the bus driver a permit to proceed.

More than a hundred butterflies were squashed against the radiator grille. Some were still moving like dying soldiers on a battlefield, their pink and blue wings twitching in minute movements.

Eight hours later we reached El Dorado. It was a place surpassed by its reputation and would have been easy to miss. Surely this was not El Dorado, the lost city of gold? I suspected that it was not: a lost city would be more glamorous, of that I was certain.

Two men and a dog lay out asleep in the full scorching afternoon sun. I had the feeling that I was stepping down onto a film set. The dog woke up, barked at Kiato, and waddled away, to sit in the shade. We moved into a hotel with no visible name, off the main square. The room, which was despicably filthy, had a defective fan and was divided in two by a spotted plastic table covering. Yet, curiously, I was surprised to find that the bathroom, down the hall, was immaculate. Paintings of romantic French landscapes hung on the walls, freshly laundered towels were waiting to be used and, the shower emitted a geyser-like jet of water. Puzzled that such a dingy rest-house should offer impeccable bathing facilities, I made inquiries. An assistant to the manager confided the reason. He said that when the gold-miners arrive back to El Dorado — city of sin — the first thing on their minds is a long, soothing shower. After spending weeks without washing, the bodies of these gold-miners or prospectors are awash with traces of the precious metal. Conniving landlords install filtration systems and high-pressure showers to relieve them of the grains of gold.

Kiato wanted to see one thing more than anything else: the Angel Falls. They are said to have the longest drop in the world: over three thousand two hundred feet, and are on the Churun river, a tributary of the Caroni.

Kiato’s guidebook said that an old German and his Guyanese wife led expeditions to the Falls. The weather-worn trailblazer, however, was asleep on the veranda of his house when we found him. And he had led no trips into the jungle for over ten years.

At the town’s small airport a hammock had been slung between a six-seater Cessna 206 and a tree. Inside was Roberto, the pilot. Although he had no map, he said that he knew the route and agreed to take us to the Angel Falls. But the problem was the weather. Storms were forecast for the following two days; Roberto would contact us at the right time. We thanked him and went to eat spaghetti.

The café in the centre of town was square-shaped and trapped the heat, as if designed by an oven-maker. Those around us gulped down glass after glass of warm dark lager. It was almost as if a spell had been cast to ensure the room was always baking hot, inducing the clientele to consume ever larger quantities of alcoholic liquid.

Waving my arms about, I tried to distract the unnaturally large population of flies which were swarming above my plate of over-cooked pasta. The insects were certainly breeding well in the damp café heat: and lived long, robust lives on Bolognese sauce.

A man at the next table passed me a part of his newspaper to swat the insects. One fly, larger than the others, had landed on the wall next to where I sat. Rolling up the paper, I aimed, then lunged with all my strength. The fly died a sudden death. As I scraped its remains from the cement, I noticed something curious. An almost spherical object, like a gourd, dyed blue and decorated with etched vertical lines, hung from a nail in the wall. I took it down to inspect it closer.

The man who had given me his newspaper was watching me. I glanced at him, half expecting an explanation of the object. He folded the remaining pages of his paper and laid it down, and said slowly:

“Macumba.”

I sat up, startled by the word.

“I want to know more on this Macumba; can you advise me how I might learn more?” I asked eagerly.

“What you are holding comes from Brazil,” said the man, in excellent English, “although Macumba does exist in Venezuela. That comes from Manaus, in Amazonas, it’s designed to give protection to everyone who comes here, and to make sure that no catastrophes happen in this little café.”

“What actually is Macumba?” I asked.

“It’s a belief that developed in Brazil, although much of what it counts as sacred originated in Africa. When slaves were taken to South America by the Portuguese, they brought with them their ancient gods. Those gods, and their knowledge of magic, herbs and nature, are at the centre of what is called Macumba now. Macumba concentrates on spirit possession.”

The man lit a cigar and sucked hard on it. I invited him to sit with me. And, as soon as he had sat, he began to speak again:

“I became interested in Macumba, Umbanda and Candomblé when I was living in southern Brazil. Many of my friends took part in the ceremonies at the time, and one of my closest colleagues at work was a medium.”

“Who or what possesses the mediums?” I asked.

“Usually the gods of the Nigerian Yoruba tribe. They are known as Orishas, and it is thought that they control everything that happens to us and around us. You must pay homage to them and worship them, and then they will be happy and make circumstances favourable towards you. If you want to make them very happy you can let them enter your body.

“There were problems when the slaves came to Brazil, because the Portuguese wanted to make them Catholic. The Africans did a very ingenious thing. They pretended to be worshipping the Catholic saints, yet really they were praying to their own gods. Each of the gods was asigned the image of a Catholic saint.”

“Is Macumba used to cause harm?” I asked.

“Are you referring to Black Magic?”

“Yes, that type of thing.”

“No, Macumba itself is rarely used to inflict pain. That isn’t the nature of it. It has come to be used very widely throughout South and North America — often known as Santería: for it does something very important. It acts as a system that gives social, psychological, and even medicinal aid. It also helps people relieve themselves of stress.

“But there is a cult which is known for its evil practices. It exists mainly in Cuba and is known as Mayombero. Its spells can maim, or put an end to life: they are designed eventually to destroy. Mayombero works in league with the Devil, whilst Macumba works with God.”

“I want to find out more about Macumba,” I said. “Where can I find a group that practises it?”

“I heard recently that Manaus has a lot of ceremonies going on; why don’t you try there? Failing that, Belem is famous for its special kind of rites.” He pulled a visiting card from his pocket and clicked it down before me. The gentleman nodded politely and, as I scanned the card’s neat italic script, he left the cafe. It read: Professor Francisco Femander.

Kiato took pictures of a little boy who was dressed in a colorful Hawaiian shirt. His mother sat down next to us and began to chat. Her name was Maria. She had long, jet-black hair, alabaster-white skin, and eyes the deep-blue color of the finest lapis lazuli.

At thirteen she had been married in Caracas, then had left her husband and settled in El Dorado, I asked what she did all day long.

“I take care of people,” she said. “You know, this town revolves around mining gold. That’s the only reason anyone’s here at all. At night the prospectors would spend everything on beer and prostitutes, so I take care of their money for them. They trust me.”

Every few moments she would wave or turn to greet someone: she seemed to be very popular. We walked around the town with Maria as she collected money and noted down figures on a blue pad. She would introduce us to people, slipping in a side comment like, “he killed his wife” or “watch your wallets.”

One man, called Princess, was delighted that Maria had brought two young men for him to meet. He winked and removed his shirt so that I could admire his biceps. Kiato shuffled to the door uneasily. Princess said his job was to wash the prison guards’ uniforms and darn their socks. Sometimes he made dresses in his spare time. Maria whispered that he performed other duties too. He blushed, and we left.

I had read Henri Charriere’s work Papillon and been moved by his story. Papillon had been incarcerated at El Dorado prison after leaving Devil’s Island in Guyana. When I asked Maria if it was possible to get into the prison, she became serious all of a sudden, “Do you really want to go?” she asked.

I replied that I did.

“Then I shall see what I can do.”

By the end of the afternoon we seemed to have met everyone in El Dorado. There was not much to do, so we went to eat more spaghetti. Kiato set up a solar charger to replenish the batteries for his camera. Eventually I heard Maria calling my name, and turned around. She was sitting in a black Ford Sierra Cosworth. Such a splendid car — easily capable of one hundred and fifty miles an hour — looked very peculiar in such a dilapidated place as El Dorado.

Kiato and I climbed into the back and breathed in the odour of the cool leather seats. A young man was at the wheel. He pulled up in front of a bar at the edge of town.

Maria went inside, and soon returned with a fat, bald man who was very drunk. He was pushed into the back with Kiato and me, his face slouched against the window. He writhed and muttered as if in a state of delirium.

“Okay, now we can go to the prison,” said Maria.

“Who’s the drunk?”

“He’d the head of security.”

Five miles from El Dorado we tore across a wooden truss bridge, as the young driver demonstrated the full capacity of his machine.

“This is La Colonia, as the prison is known,” said Maria. “It’s surrounded by the man-eating river: there are so many piranha in these parts.”

At the checkpoint, the police chief was prodded and he managed to salute with his left hand before throwing up over the white leather upholstery. A row of uniformed guards saluted back and raised a barrier.

Eight hundred men were serving sentences at El Dorado Prison. They hung about, chatting and making little souvenirs to be sold to the few tourists who visit El Dorado.

Some cheered when they saw Maria and she blew them kisses. Various sections of the prison were pointed out. One wing was set aside for homosexuals, another for the most dangerous men: that was where Papillon had been. A couple of rather unenthusiastic offenders were painting the high-security area bright yellow.

Maria said that one man in particular would like to speak to us. We walked through gates with iron bars and locks that clicked behind us. Under the wide branches of a tropical tree we met Leroy. He had been sent here thirteen years before, convicted of murder, and was the only prisoner who spoke English. His voice wavered as he spoke to us. Now and again he chuckled loudly and his head shook from side to side.

“You can’t imagine how it is for me to speak English,” he said. “To use these words is like being able to breathe again. At first when I was locked up, away from my home country, Trinidad, I used to talk to myself in English. Even, oh, until a few years ago, then I gave it up. There’s seven more years left, but I should get out before that for good behavior. The guards here like me and are kind. I brew them fermented drinks and they sometimes give me cigarettes.”

“Is there anything we can bling you, Reloy?” Kiato asked.

“Nothing I need, I’m used to it here.” Then he thought for a moment and said gently, “But there is one small thing that I’ve been craving for a very long time.”

“Anything; what is it?” I asked him.

“It might seem strange, but could you say the word “melodramatic” out aloud?”

Giant moths flapped like bats above our heads at El Dorado’s most popular bar. The insects tried in desperation to obtain camouflage on the walls. Music blared from two colossal speakers. I hoped it was below the decibel level necessary to perforate eardrums. The habitat had been created by the ruthless clientele native to El Dorado.

When a teenager of a more refined aspect sauntered over, declaring that he knew a quieter place, we needed no further persuasion to follow. His name was Hubert.

El Dorado seemed an unlikely place for luxury to exist. The last thing I had expected was for the door of a discotheque to be swung open by a white bouncer in a dinner coat.

He stood square in the door frame like a peg in a hole, taking the last drags from a very pungent cigarette with no filter. The room was dark and insipid. Air conditioning units rumbled in each corner, producing an arctic environment.

Hubert, Kiato and I made for a corner booth and sat. Hubert snapped his fingers and a forty-dollar bottle of Bacardi arrived on a silver tray.

Kiato and I glanced at each other in surprise as Hubert threw down a wad of new bolivar notes and motioned the waiter away. We had been living on no more than two dollars each a day. Hubert swallowed a glass full of the neat white rum and left. He said that he was going to get some women. He never came back.

The elite crowd of El Dorado swanned languidly about on the disco dance floor which dominated the nightclub.

Kiato started talking to a man at the bar, whose friend was also out hunting for women. We offered him some of Hubert’s rum and he sat with us. His head was bald; a thick red beard sprang from his face and bounced against his chest when he spoke. It impressed Kiato enormously as his own beard was very sparse.

The friend, who had been looking for women, returned. He looked like a desperado, and dragged me out, telling me to keep an eye out for under-age girls.

My lungs seemed to seize up when we entered the humid evening air. Two whale-like creatures approached us. My companion kissed his fingertips and nudged me in the ribs. I wondered for a moment if we were looking at the same women. They ambled up, both looking as if they might be suffering from the latter stages of some unpleasant, nameless and virulent illness.

Both had revolving, roving eyes.

The desperado leapt about with joy. He started to pull the heftier woman towards an overflowing gutter. Protesting, I returned to the disco.

A few minutes later the wild man returned to the icy air-conditioned atmosphere and came over to where I sat. The huge women loomed behind with unsure steps. Kiato and the red-bearded man were horrified, and blamed me for the desperado’s choice.

The larger woman pulled me up to dance. As she acclimatized to the arctic surroundings — romping about — the nature of her movements began to alarm me.

But the dance ended very suddenly. The record was removed and the strobe turned off. Without any words, everyone from the disco moved outside. The time was exactly three A.M. People were walking towards a dark back street from all over town.

A man shepherded everyone into one of the shops. I recognized him: it was Princess, the laundry-man. An audience had assembled, all eager to get a glimpse of the action. S till not understanding what was going on, I asked the bald, red-bearded man.

“Don’t you know?” he said. “You must be from far away; Princess’s fashion shows are famous.”

“Are they always held at this time of night?” I asked.

“Of course they are!” said the mouth swamped in red bristles.

Girls more beautiful than I had seen before paraded about in dresses of red and green. As they twirled around, the crowd clapped and whistled and Princess beamed with pride.

When I was leaving the shop, Maria came over to me and whispered:

“Now you have seen El Dorado. Now I think you know why I stay here.”

We were woken late. A little urchin girl brought word from Roberto, the pilot, that the weather had cleared and he was ready to fly to the Angel Falls. Kiato and I entered the bright sunshine and the innocence of day. There was no sign of the prostitutes and alcohol. Princess was darning socks again; and pots of spaghetti were being brought to the boil at the café.

At the airport Roberto slipped from his hammock and stretched.

“It’s a great day for flying,” he said, pulling on a pair of worn Levi’s jeans.

We spoke for a while. I asked how he came to speak such good English. In El Dorado, few seemed to know the language.

“I’m from British Guyana. Started flying in Canada back in sixty-six. There isn’t much call for a pilot these days. I ferry gold-miners around mostly, to the less accessible areas of the jungle.”

“Have you seen the Angel Falls before?” Kiato asked.

“Yup, but not for about twenty years. They”re beyond the Devil’s Teeth-, shouldn’t be too hard to find.”

We walked to the plane. Three men were hoisting two forty-gallon drums of petrol up into the fuselage.

Roberto put out his cigarette and muttered, “Probably best not to smoke around those babies. You don’t mind if we drop them off at the Mission along the way?”

There was no choice. I climbed into the co-pilot seat, which was jammed at the most forward position. This made it impossible to use the foot-operated rudder controls if I had wanted to. Kiato was wedged in the rear of the aircraft, his face squashed against the window, and with a slow-leaking oil drum between him and the exit. We exchanged looks of dismay as Roberto turned into the wind, pushed in the throttle, and slid back the stick. The Cessna 206 felt very heavy indeed. As my seat soaked up the petrol like a sponge, I forced myself to stop imagining a gloriously explosive end. Kiato hummed. His face was tight and paralyzed with fear.

The Cessna’s controls were still very familiar. When I was seventeen, my father had sent me off to learn to fly. Biff, the most relaxed pilot in history, had taught me to solo a similar Cessna over the swamps of northwest Florida. The one hard rule Biff had ground into me was that one must always have an emergency landing-spot in mind. Roberto set the direction indicator and adjusted the altimeter. Two thousand feet below, the jungle sprawled out in all directions. One tree’s canopy merged into the next. Where would we land if there was a crisis? I plucked up courage and asked Roberto. Pulling out a silver hip-flask from his back pocket, he opened it with his teeth, and drained it dry. Then he cackled with deranged laughter.

The flying bomb proceeded for more than half an hour over dense jungle. From time to time palaeozoic rock formations jutted from the jungle floor. The Cessna buzzed like a moth between giant flat-topped cliffs, sprouting like mushrooms from between the trees. Roberto pointed to a clearing in the distance where a large white building stood. It was the Mission. Circling twice, we landed into the wind. The forty-gallon tanks were carried away.

An Indian dialect was spoken by the people who lived at the Mission. They had become used to the insects which infested everything. Slapping one’s legs would leave a pair of blood-streaked hands.

Soon the irritation of insect bites was a memory. Roberto pushed the throttle in again and we soared high above the bumpy grass strip.

Small mining communities could be spotted on the banks of some rivers; their panning turned the water yellow. Roberto pulled the stick further back and we climbed to six thousand feet. The crumbling mountains, covered in green forest, gave way to spectacular gorges.

Roberto put his hand on my knee. His voice trembling, he shouted, “Below are the Devil’s Teeth: the entrance to the canyon of the Angel Falls.”

It was as if we were venturing into a primeval land where dinosaurs and extinct monsters still roamed. The stone walls of the canyon were gray and crumbled with age. Our Cessna soared like an eagle round and around. Then, whilst banking steeply, we caught a first glimpse of the Angel Falls.

They plunged from the Caroni River down to the jungle floor. The distance of their vault was so great that the water turned into mist halfway down. I could understand how the American aviator, Jimmy Angel, might have felt on discovering the Falls in 1935.

Kiato’s camera clicked. He, Roberto, and I whooped with wild exhilaration. We circled around the canyon four times.

Roberto was now, for some reason, very relaxed. He took his hands from the control column and fumbled for his own camera. The Cessna’s nose began to fall. The altimeter’s hands started to wind downwards. The trees grew bigger and bigger. As the engine made a tortured, droning noise, I grabbed the stick — gently easing it back.

Roberto banked left, and we flew through the Devil’s Teeth and out from that prehistoric land — back into our own time.

On the return flight to El Dorado we stopped at a mining village to collect some prospectors. A cut-throat looking bunch of men, they were hardened by the gruelling conditions of their jungle work. Their hands were rough and caloused, and their burnt, worn faces were mostly hidden beneath tattered beards. Each clutched a nugget of gold. Rubbing their palms together in their relief at escaping the jungle for a time, they chatted of their favourite prostitutes who would be awaiting them in El Dorado.

When we landed, Kiato and I left Roberto and walked back into town. We were both silent. Our minds had been captured by the force of nature.

There was time for one last bowl of spaghetti before the bus bound for Kilometro 88 arrived in the square. I looked round at El Dorado — that most extraordinary place — and climbed aboard.

Kilometro 88 was about as exciting as its name suggests. The town was almost an exact replica of El Dorado. Kiato and I took shelter from the torrential rain in a cavernous drinking house. In the bar, which was hung with bunting, I pulled up a beer-stained chair. Just before sitting, I noticed the beer stains were moving. A pair of eyes amongst the stains blinked.

Almost every free surface in the room was covered with giant moths, which were perfectly camouflaged in the sordid atmosphere. The floor seemed to be littered with piles of decaying brown leaves, which twitched even though there was no breeze.

Kiato ordered a large steak with macaroni piled on top. The bus to Santa Elena, at the Brazilian border, arrived as he sucked up the first pieces of pasta. There was no hurry to bolt the food. The driver and passengers waited courteously until we were ready to leave.

For fifteen hours the silver bus labored towards Brazil. When it rained, water drenched us, seeping through a thousand holes in the ceiling. When it became dark we ploughed on at three miles an hour. The driver’s friend walked in front, guiding the way and forcing all wandering animals to clear the road.

Just before noon the next day the bus pulled into Santa Elena; the town had a sense of greater social cohesion than El Dorado or Kilómetro 88. It seemed as if people resided there because they really wanted to be there.

Old crones sat in doorways knitting, and their grandchildren played in the dirt at their feet.

The previous week had seen the heaviest rain in the region for a very long time. A major bridge en route to Manaus, the Amazonian capital, had been washed away two days before. It would be at least a month before repairs were completed.

Under a magnificent statue of Simón Bolívar, an assorted group of travelers had gathered. Kiato sat down and waited for them to introduce themselves. Like us, they were heading towards Manaus. And, like us, they had heard of the bridge which had been washed away.

The tallest was called Rudolf van den Bosch-Drakenburgh. Standing six foot two, he had a Daks tweed coat over his shoulders, and wore a paisley-patterned silk cravat, knee-length breeches, and riding boots.

“What’s all this nonsense about?” he began in a light Dutch accent, “Luigi, get my brogues!”

A monstrously large creature unpacked clothes from an antique sea trunk. Although taller than the Dutchman, he lacked any air of sophistication. His clothing was tattered, his hair was oily and unkempt, and his severely sunburnt face was peppered with grotesque sores.

“The suede ones or the black pair?” he asked gently, ducking with subservience.

Luigi was a batman and general factotum to den Bosch-Drakenburgh. Foamy saliva filtered through one corner of his mouth, dripping onto his torn shirt front. He had not adapted to the climate well. Originally from Galway, in western Ireland, he was now living in Shepherd’s Bush, London, where, he assured me, a good pint of Guinness was to be had. It remained a mystery why an Irishman, even though resident at London, had a traditionally Italian name. Yet perhaps even more mysterious was the reason for his utter subservience to Rudolf, who had gained complete domination over the Irishman. Luigi seemed to crave a sadistic master.

Kiato demonstrated how to use the solar battery-charger to another man, who sat beside him. He was thin and his face was drawn and white. He was a Russian named Yuri.

We spoke for a long time and, out of the three, Yuri’s comments and expressions were by far the most interesting to me. He had been born in Volgograd, the only son of Orthodox Jewish parents.

“My father died when I was eight,” he said. “And for my mother there was great prejudice against her for being Jewish and a widow.” He lit a Belmont cigarette before continuing in his poetic English. “I studied English and German in Moscow.

It was so wonderful to be in that city, you can’t imagine. My mother was very proud, I think. Then in 1982, when I was twenty, the Red Army sent me to Afghanistan. The initial eagerness soon evaporated. They told us lies, they said that we would be fighting the Americans! Can you believe that?”

“Where were you stationed?” I asked.

“At first near Kandahar. I thought that was bad. The rations would often be cut in half because the Mujahedin had hit the supply convoy to our base.

“Then one spring morning my unit was moved to fight in the hopeless offensive against Commander Ahmad Shah, at the Panjshir Valley. Many of my friends were killed. Others committed suicide, or went mad because of bad treatment or drinking engine coolant: there was no alcohol. We were like rats in a cage, shaking with terror whenever the rockets fell like rain. I vowed that when I got free I would see something of this world. Twelve months later I was sent back to Moscow. There had been no news from my mother for over half that time. Then I found out that she had died from depression a month before.”

* * *

Rudolf, the Dutchman, held still as Luigi’s clumsy hands fumbled, trying to tie the plaited leather laces of his brogues. Having acquired exit stamps from a small police outpost, we walked towards the Brazilian border. A truck with no bonnet picked us up and dropped us at the frontier army post. Rudolf spelt out his various titles to an officer who wrote them all in the register.

The officer’s face was three inches from the page. Crouching with concentration, he formed each letter individually, using a blunt pencil. A gust of wind shook the tree above, and an avocado fell to the ground. The officer dropped the pencil and scampered over to the fruit. Another produced a knife and they split it in two.

Luigi hauled Kiato off to look for toads, saying that toad-spotting was a popular sport in his native town. The rest of us took shelter from the evening rains and slept our first night in Brazil.

At six the next morning clouds of blue smoke drew closer with a noise like an approaching tank. A truck with no exhaust-pipe trundled up. Two blonde German girls were riding in the back. They pulled us up and we set off for the bridge which had been washed away.

All but Kiato and I were strong swimmers, and were confident that we would be able to cross the water. Luigi passed around handfuls of toads, and snuggled up to the Germans, who were called Elaine and Seline. They looked uneasy as the Irishman jerked something from his coat pocket. He pulled out a creature, as large as his palm, with eight furry legs which moved in opposite directions.

The girls screamed, and Elaine punched Luigi, who — recoiling from the force of the blow — dropped the spider on Seline’s lap. Rudolf stretched out and struck Luigi on the other side of his face. Wrapped in gloom, Luigi edged over to where Kiato sat.

The truck pressed on, deeper into the jungle. Snakes slid across the road, monkeys and colorful birds moved amongst the greenery, and called out from the forest. The pot-holed track ended where the water began. A hammock had been slung from one petrol tanker to another, and a workman was cradled in it, asleep. At the river’s bank the current was fast moving. A hundred feet separated us from the other side.

Luigi crouched on all fours without being instructed to do so. Rudolf sat on his arched back and removed his shoes. It seemed natural for the Irishman to assume this position, leading me to suspect that the two men had been together for a long time. Kiato and Yuri went off to look for something to use as a float. Somewhere in my saddle-bags I found a hundred and fifty feet of parachute cord.

Rudolf took charge. Handing the line to Luigi, he told him to swim across the river and tie it to something on the other side. The Irishman, who was evidently embarrassed at removing his clothes in public, dived in — the cord in his mouth — and swam to the other side completely dressed. The German girls looked at him as if he were mad. In an easy movement, each stripped off all her clothes and leapt naked into the water.

A mechanism for hoisting the packs across the water was slowly developed. Yuri had found an inner tube. It was attached to the line. Rudolf commanded Luigi to swim across with every pack. As always, he was compelled to obey. The two complemented each other perfectly: one was a sadist, the other resigned to a life of masochism. Each was dependent on the other.

The inner tube, which had a slow leak, was pressed deep into the water by the weight of Rudolf’s trunk. The Dutchman removed his cravat, but refused to undress. He said that he was light enough to ride aboard the trunk. We all watched. Rudolfs twitching lips strained to be confident.

The Irishman tugged gently at the line. The tube, trunk, and master, glided across the choppy surface of the river. Halfway over, Rudolf began to shake. He scrabbled to keep level. But the well-traveled sea trunk, which had begun to list badly, slid into the river like a sinking ship. The Dutchman went with it. Kiato, Yuri and I cheered. The German girls whistled and shrieked with laughter. Only Luigi looked sad. Either he sincerely cared for Rudolf’s safety, or — as I suspected — he knew that he would be beaten.

Elaine and I walked ahead of the party. We both wanted to keep at a distance from Rudolf, who was in a very bad mood indeed.

Along the red sand track we strode, splashing through the puddles of rainwater. Elaine talked of her life. I was impressed by the great strength of her character. Sweat dripped into her eyes as she spoke.

“I don’t understand weakness,” she said. “I’ve always believed that if one person in the world can achieve something, then there’s no reason why I, or others, can’t do the same. I don’t know how someone like that Irish guy can put up with being treated that way.”

We both glanced round to see Luigi stumbling slowly under the weight of Rudolf’s sodden trunk and his own pack. Foam oozed from both corners of his mouth, and his thick mop of black hair stood on end. The Irishman was like an animal trained by a cruel master; but in a distressing way had become addicted to the torture.

Shouts of joy broke the monotony of Luigi’s groans. Yuri had spotted a small round hut at the point where the straight red sand road met the skyline. Rudolf was complaining that he had blisters and was thirsty. Indeed, we were all utterly exhausted, having walked for five hours.

The evening air was thick with mosquitos. The owner of the round hut gave us some hot water and pointed to a group of trees from which we could sling hammocks. Rudolf ordered the proprietor to give him a chair. When comfortably seated, he made Luigi bathe, bandage, and dry his blistered toes.

Yuri and I stared up at the night sky. His voice trembled in awe as we watched shooting stars cascade across the galaxy.

“In Volgograd, I had a telescope,” he said. “It was the only escape from a childhood of oppression. Every night I would sit and watch satellites spinning through space. It’s strange that here, far from Russia, I see the same stars. It’s wonderful to think that people all over the earth stare up and see the same planets, the same constellations. Yet at the time you feel a very personal sensation, as if they are invisible to all but you.”

He pointed at the constellations, slowly naming each in turn, and speaking of the new ones — of the southern hemisphere region — which he had not seen before.

A generator rumbled in the background. The man in the hut moved in the flickering light of a black and white television. A broad satellite dish fixed to the top of a tree trapped pictures beamed from Boa Vista. Dallas — the American soap opera — was starting, and the Amazon night had just begun.

Kiato had mastered the art of sleeping perfectly still in his hammock — something which I was incapable of doing. As I floundered about, experimenting with random positions, Kiato had analyzed the problems. A colony of ants shared my hammock. They climbed around my body and explored the creases of my skin.

In the middle of the night, my hammock turned inside out and I was thrown face down onto the ground. The grass was warm and smelt of liquorice, and I felt closer to nature than I had ever done before. I dreamt of Papillon’s tale and of the Angel Falls.

As the sun rose over the jungle treetops, I sensed a snout snuffling up my trouser leg. At first I tried to ignore it, but the probing persisted. I opened one eye, then the other. The spiny nose of an ant-eater was foraging up my pants for breakfast. It was very happy. I could feel the warmth of its mouth and the lapping of its rasping tongue, sucking up the insect colony to which I had become host.

A little girl with bright blonde hair ran out of the hut shouting, “Oscar, Oscar, you are very naughty!”

Grabbing the ant-eater’s snout, she dragged the creature away to play with her in a ditch.

The jungle turned into low-lying green savannah as we continued pacing deeper into Brazil. The landscape bore an uncanny resemblance to that of Africa. People waved and whistled, and had the same air of open hospitality as the friends I had left from Dakar to Ngong. Once joined to Africa, now thousands of miles away, this was the last segment of the puzzle that had formed Gondwanaland.

We entered Boa Vista in the late afternoon. Kiato, who had drunk stream water the night before, was feeling very ill. Cramps stunned his abdomen every ten minutes and he was drenched with sweat. He started a course of antibiotics, swearing he was strong enough to continue to Manaus.

Yuri and the two German girls decided to rest in Boa Vista for a few days.

The road southwards to Manaus had only been recently completed, yet it was already washed away. Nature had reclaimed it for herself. The fastest way to the Amazonian capital was by boat — which left from Caracarai — on the Rio Branco.

Yuri shook my hand as Kiato and I mounted a bus bound for Caracarai.

“Never forget,” he said, “that we inherit the world and all her problems. Walk softly upon the earth and you will achieve great things.” It seemed a very philosophical, very Russian, departure.

Kiato lay down and slept most of the way until we reached Caracarai. He seemed to be getting a little better. Rudolf fed us with red boiled sweets, as the Irish batman sat and sulked. The bag of sweets passed him by.

“Doesn’t Luigi like sugary things?” I asked.

“No,” was the reply, “they’re bad for his teeth. I don’t let him indulge. You’d expect him to thank me, but he was brought up without manners.”

Luigi’s eyes were as wide as fish bowls. His lips were cracked and swollen, and a coarse rash had developed under his chin. He looked at Rudolf, then a single tear ran from the corner of his left eye towards his lips.

A lone riverboat bobbed up and down on the Rio Branco. She was called the Rio Uaquiry. We climbed up a steep plank from the shore onto her dull boards. The captain said he was leaving that night for Manaus. The journey would take three days. He could provide food along the way for a small price.

A pair of cockrels were fighting in the street which ran to the jetty. And a huddle of dogs sat gnawing at a buffalo’s head outside the butcher’s shop. Hammocks of all colors were displayed on a fence: a boy with a kite was their salesman. I bought a yellow hammock for myself and a packet of chicken soup powder for Kiato.

Back at the boat three blond men were ascending the gangplank. Each had an athletic build, and carried a surf-board. I recognized them immediately as native Californians of the surfer variety.

“Hey Pops, is this tub heading for Manaus?” one of them called out. Rudolf donned a blue cravat, slipped on his riding boots and came to introduce himself.

“My name is Rudolf van den Bosch-Drakenburgh... I am from Holland, and this is Luigi, my assistant.”

“Oh man, that’s great. I’m Marvin, this is Leo and Pete.” The men shook hands and the Californians told their tale.

“We came overland from Los Angeles. We bought this great car in L.A. for fifty bucks and started to drive south, but after thirty miles she caught fire and burnt out. So we left her and hitched through Central America as far as here.”

I slung my hammock and asked Marvin why they had brought surf-boards to central Brazil. Marvin looked at me, then at his two friends. I had the feeling that I had asked an idiotic question. Pete swept back his long blond locks of hair and replied, “Dude, we”ve come to surf the Amazon!”

“Guys, this is one awesome tub!” shouted Leo and Marvin simultaneously. They set about making a pirate flag. A skull and crossed bones were sketched out on an old shirt, which was hoisted up on the flagpole.

The boat had two decks. It was forty feet long and half as wide. At nine that evening, diesel fumes belched upwards and the engine gave out a spluttering groan.

A single bulb flickered above the captain’s dining table and he invited us to come and eat. A dish of hard-boiled eggs, dried beef and rice, was passed around. Kiato threw up as soon as his eyes saw food.

Marvin sat beside me and began to tell of grotesque diseases endemic to Amazonas. Disease — in particular bubonic plague — was his only interest other than surfing. As there was one plate and only a single spoon, we took it in turns to eat. The glass was passed from one hand to the next, like the witch sisters sharing a single eye.

After the meal, the captain, whose name was César, offered to take me to the bridge.

César relieved his eight-year-old son at the helm. As the craft broke through new waters of the Rio Branco, César made jokes and drew long breaths through a cigarette.

“I have never left Amazonas,” he said. “But I want my boy to travel when he is older. He must see the wonders of the world.

“You know, I sent my son to school in Caracarai and they tried to tell him about all kinds of imaginary animals. One, they said, was like a horse, but was covered in stripes! Can you believe it?” he exclaimed, spinning the boat’s wheel through his fingers. “I was worried that his teacher was telling him lies, so I went to meet the man. ‘What is all this garbage you’re telling my son?’ I demanded. ‘Have you ever seen such creatures with your own eyes?’ I asked him. He had not, so I brought the boy to live with me on the boat. When he’d old enough I’ll give him money and send him away to see the world. Then he can come and teach proper knowledge, not fairy-tales, in the school at Caracarai.”

FOURTEEN

Opera in the Jungle

And the Alligator Pusé,

Looming long upon the water,

Bore the Gonds into the torrent,

Through the black and roaring water...

The map was bright green and had blue lines running across its folds. There were few place-names and no roads. I remembered all the fuss in London about saving the rain forest. It had never seemed particularly important as I rushed to catch the tube, or battled down crowded Oxford Street on a Thursday late-shopping night. But, as the twin-decked riverboat cut down the Rio Branco towards Manaus, I could feel real nature all around. I had never encountered a region so utterly free from humankind.

Every so often, vast areas would He cleared. Tree stumps stretched as far as the eye could see, their roots clutching like tentacles into the red soil. The trunks of great trees were being loaded onto long trailers. Twigs and vegetation blazed in fires which were dotted about.

Each branch divided into smaller branches: and they divided into twigs, which split still further. They looked like the bronchioles in a lung. But then, as fire engulfed them, their capacity to breathe was destroyed.

The surfers were sitting around Kiato. Marvin had studied pathology and knew which bits of the patient’s body to prod and poke. Pete pulled back Kiato’s eyelids and shone the penlite into his pupils.

“Guys, is this gonna do any good?” cried Kiato as he wriggled on the upper deck.

“I don’t believe this!” said Pete, his mouth gaping open in disbelief. “Look at the way his iris twitches... that’s awesome, I think there’s definite evidence of a paranormal presence.”

“What are you getting at, Pete?” I asked.

“I’m writing a thesis on perceived paranormal manifestations in Los Angeles’ suburban population. Your friend here has the same nervous eye movements as some of my most advanced patients. I’d like to examine him further.”

At that moment, as we crouched over Kiato, he spewed out the contents of his stomach. Partially-digested chicken soup, and what had once been locally-canned corned beef, dripped from our faces. It slithered onto the deck and César came to protest at the mess. Leo went back to reading his book.

“Looks like he’d gonna live,” he said.

Hollowed-out tree trunks, basic canoes, would approach our vessel from the dense canopy of the jungle: the paddlers wanted to trade meat and fresh fruit. The following afternoon, three wild boar were shown to César. They scurried about the hollowed-log craft, looking for an escape route.

César nodded and, with one blow, a machete had sliced off all three heads. Blood shot into the air and the carcases were washed in the river. A gut parasite several feet long wriggled from the flesh of one, and slithered away into the water. Another man hoisted a load of date-shaped berries aboard. They and the boars’ bodies were taken away to be cooked.

Leo called out over the side to the boars’ executioner. They motioned to each other and both laughed. One of the boar heads was thrown up to Leo as a gift. He hurried into one corner of the boat to dissect the skull with a chisel and mallet on loan from César.

Early that evening we crossed into the southern hemisphere. Birds with red bills flew overhead to roost in the tall trees; monkeys chattered deep in the jungle undergrowth. César’s son had poached two of the boars. Their partially boiled flesh was served up to complement the meat of a small unidentifiable rodent. The food was passed around.

César chewed at a lump of boar’s heart which was deep red and exceedingly muscular. The bones in the boar meat had been crushed, using the mallet. Consequently there were sharp splinters in the meat which everyone spat out onto the floor. Although I managed to avoid the boar, a sliver from the unknown rodent gashed the inside of my right cheek.

The berries on stems were mashed up. As the juice was collected, César said that it would ferment in a couple of days. I sat at the helm with him while he steered the little white craft to where the Rio Branco met the Rio Negro. The water grew dark and pushed about under the flat-bottomed boat. Storm clouds formed and, in an awesome display of nature’s force, it began to pour with torrential, blinding, monsoon-like rain.

Rudolf spent much of the passage reading aloud from the works of Leo Tolstoy. Luigi sat at his feet and listened. He was forbidden to ask questions. The contents of the Dutchman’s coffer were hung in the sunshine to dry, after their immersion in the river.

The belongings which Rudolf had chosen for such an expedition — and had transported to South America on the boat from Rotterdam — were quite astonishing. Five washing-lines criss-crossed the upper deck, weighted down by numerous sets of evening dress: both tails and dinner suits. On top of the trunk, selected items were laid out to dry. They included a bowler hat made, it said inside, by Frederick Harold of Wimbledon, an extensive amount of hardbacked reading material; a ceremonial sword; a very large wooden shield, emblazoned with a coat of arms; and the steel scaled-down model of a battleship.

“Malingerers!” cried Rudolf, catching me gawping at his possessions. “Look at that stupid slit-eyed little whipster. Hasn’t done an honest day’s work in his life! All he can do is shirk about, pretending he’d sick.”

Before I could defend Kiato’s honour, Marvin walked over.

In a single movement he picked up the Dutchman by the neck and tossed him into the water. Then he returned to his book.

Muffled cries could be heard as Rudolf van den Bosch-Drakenburgh started to swim through the piranha-infested water towards the boat. As Luigi grabbed at his master, there were tears in his eyes. Was it possible to convert a masochist into a sadist? I wondered, and watched as Rudolf took his anger out on the Irishman from London’s Shepherd’s Bush. Perhaps it was not.

* * *

The Rio Negro’s current grew faster as we moved between the large islands in her midst. River barges became more frequent and I realized that Manaus was drawing near.

The first signs of civilization were the sprawling shantytowns whose wooden shacks spread for miles along the river’s banks. Some children were splashing about in the oily black water. They laughed as we approached, their dark brown eyes framed in angelic faces. César threw a rope to the shore.

A flight of steps was cut into the soft purple bank and we climbed up one by one. Kiato led the way between houses built on stilts. Piles of broken television sets were guarded by anxious children, as if frightened that we had come to rob them of their family’s assets. Pete shook hands with a line of smiling infants. Each was covered from head to toe in the slimy purple clay. Two of them began to fight over a dead cat which they had found. Children and babies squirmed about wherever one looked. Every woman held a child. Infant bodies were being scrubbed in tin baths, and bananas were stuffed down their throats by exhausted mothers.

Kiato removed his shirt at the King Henry Hotel. Then he spent an hour writing postcards to his family in Kyoto.

We had arrived in Manaus: capital of Amazonas, centre of Macumba.

Whenever possible I would creep away in search of contacts which might introduce me to a Macumba group. Kiato was very inquisitive of my interest in the darker alleys of the town. But I was determined to keep all knowledge of my fascination away from him. I was adamant that he should be shielded from any possible danger by his innocence. I remembered Oswaldo and the Babalawo.

Rudolf had read that one needed the Mayor’s permission to enter the famous botanical garden. He set off immediately, with Luigi in tow, to contact such a powerful pillar of society.

We had taken accommodation in a green container box in the rougher area of Manaus. Kiato assured me that this bargain could not be passed by. One green container, such as are used for commercial cargoes, was piled on top of another: a spiral staircase linked them together. The group of six containers was grandly named the King Henry Hotel. I suspected that the real profit of the establishment derived from its manifest activity as a bordello.

Shadowy figures trampled up and down the spiral steps both day and night. Whenever I dared to leave our windowless box, a group of naked Amazonian women sitting beside the stairs fluttered their eyelids, motioning towards another windowless green-walled room.

Then Rudolf returned. Overcome by heatstroke, he lay supine on a smelly black mattress for three days. Luigi poured water from a jug into his master’s mouth, and fanned him with the Life and Work of Leo Tolstoy. The Mayor had left town.

Manaus lies in the deepest part of the Amazon basin. At the turn of the century, the city became the world’s rubber capital. It was in those days that Amazonian trees supplied the world with caoutchouc, the sap from which rubber is made. Prosperity resulted in an extraordinary flamboyance.

Monstrous buildings had been constructed in European styles, under the guidance of a handful of super-affluent rubber barons. The stage of the Teatro Amazonas, the opera house, was once graced by the world’s finest singers and dancers. They would perform to a thousand people at a time, drowning out the sounds of the jungle night.

The cathedral stared down at a city bathed in pomposity and an ornamental opulence — a city that depended on the jungle — but was disconnected from it.

When rubber trees were exported and successfully grown in Malaya, the empire of the rubber barons collapsed. Their great city lies dormant now, surrounded by a wall of jungle on every side.

Kiato and I wandered about the cobbled streets in awe. In the main square, next to the university, a band was playing New Orleans jazz on an ornate Portuguese bandstand. Stuffed piranha fish were sold door-to-door by an old seaman with scarred ridges across his face. We sat at Café Florentina and sucked up bowls of fettucine. Kiato laughed; he was well again. He sketched the tiled Portuguese facades and tittered when I complimented him on his skill. Then we took refuge from the afternoon heat in the great cathedral.

Generations of misbehaving children had carved their initials into the hardwood pews. Yellow sunlight poured in through the open doorway and illuminated the walls. They and the ceiling were adorned by frescos in the classical style.

The latest Japanese technology was displayed at every shop. In an effort to popularize Amazonas, the government had declared Manaus a duty-free zone. Video cameras and notebook computers were demonstrated by hard-sell salesmen, of the type one finds in New York or Hong Kong.

Microchip equipment of the greatest sophistication is assembled by cheap labor in factories deep in Amazonas. Paradoxically, Manaus is a city that — until recently — had no airport of any size and no road linking it to the outside world.

Outside the opera house, the evening game of bingo was being set up. Kiato pushed a wad of notes towards the bearded woman in charge, and was handed a stack of bingo cards. An hour or so later he wandered away with the first, second and third prizes: three live chickens.

Back at the green box Marvin was boasting. He held up a large X-ray, exclaiming that every bone from his thumb to his elbow had shattered while punching a barkeeper. The fight had arisen when the surfer made a pass at the barman’s wife. Putting his Hawaiian surfboard under his good arm, he left for Panama to have the bones properly set.

Kiato gave Marvin one of the chickens and a handful of grain to feed it. We gave another to Rudolf, who threw it into the corridor late at night, roaring that it kept him awake. Kiato was grieved when, the next morning, he discovered a line of prostitutes sitting down to a roast chicken breakfast.

The hole in my cheek, caused by the unknown rodent’s bone, became infected. One of the women, whose giant eye was often pressed against the crack in my door, took me aside. She rubbed roots from two plants on her hands and stuffed her fingertips into my mouth. As I choked for air, she forced the nails, with black beneath, deeper down my throat. When I managed to ask what she was doing, she cackled and winked. Then she strutted off to solicit customers and, strangely enough, the infection soon ceased.

Three black panthers lay on their backs at the military zoo. They were too fat to move. The big cats and boas were fed a diet which looked like the zoo’s smaller mammals. The panthers chewed engagingly at a collection of sundried bones as the heat of the afternoon reached its peak.

Kiato posed for a picture. Suddenly, he took to his heels screaming as I focused my camera. On turning I saw a leopard stalking towards me. A conscript dived at the enormous tail just as muscular back legs clenched to jump. He led the animal away for another meal, saying, “I told you about escaping before!”

A lot of time was spent pursuing my quest for Macumba. Some locals shrieked when they heard the very word uttered; others simply shrugged or shook their heads. At the back of bars I had loitered, trying to make a contact. I had spoken to street-cleaners, to workmen, and even to a terrified lady missionary, but no one could help me.

Kiato had begun to suspect that I had an ulterior motive for what I assured him were sorties to meet the people of Manaus. In desperation I went down to the fish market.

Fish of all shapes lay belly-up in the heat of the cavernous market hall. The early evening light streamed down through multi-colored windows — stained by the Portuguese many years before. The stench reminded me of the tilapia at the source of the Nile.

On one bench a pile of eels and other creatures twisted about awkwardly, before being hacked into even-sized lumps. Their blood dripped to the floor where it congealed in a few seconds.

At one end of the hall a group of three or four men sat about smoking. Each had a pair of flip-flops molded to his feet; and each was drenched in blood as if he had taken a mortal blow. I sidled up. A sack was dusted off and laid down so that I might sit for a while. We talked of fish and the heat and then of fish again. The men were happy that I should want to spend time in their city.

On meeting someone for the first time, the moment comes when one has done with the pleasantries, and either says nothing, or embarks on a major new subject of conversation. As we sat, the men smoked and the reek of rotting fish surrounded us. It was then that I decided to test for a knowledge of Macumba.

“Someone was telling me,” I began with the usual unease, “that Brazil, and in particular Amazonas, is famous for some old idea called...” I paused to check that I still had the men’s attention: they stared into my eyes, waiting for the word; ‘something called Macumba.”

The man covered in the most blood — the foreman — nodded slowly. He had learnt English while working as a taxi driver in Miami.

“My friend,” he said, “a word may be simple but its meaning may fill many long books.”

The butchers looked at me inquiringly and then the foreman began to speak again:

“Remember that you must have a reason to follow a quest; you must understand why you are choosing to explore something, even if it is hidden behind the veil of a pretty little word.”

The foreman and his colleagues seemed to realize that my interest in Macumba had not come about recently. It was almost as if they sensed that the thing had become an obsession. I replied:

“I do understand the importance of this belief, and I have come to learn more of it and to pay my respects to it.”

The men glanced at each other through telepathic silence. Then the foreman spoke again:

“Come here just before midnight. The market will be closed, so stand in front of the main doorway. I shall meet you here.”

He stood up, stamped out his cigarette, and led the group back to work.

Strolling back to the King Henry Hotel, I thought about my conversation with the men. It had all happened so easily: I had the feeling that one day I would look back and realize how naive I had been.

Kiato had found some second-hand Japanese children’s books in a hat shop near the hotel. He said that their owner had been selling them as decoration, they had been very cheap.

“The guy said they were Kolean! Can you berieve that he thought Japanese was Kolean?” he said, bursting into laughter. Then he began to sing a selection of his favourite Japanese nursery rhymes aloud, before stopping abruptly in mid-sentence.

He peered up from above the vertical lines of text, narrowed his eyes until they were no more than a slit, and said accusingly:

“Have you been eating fish?”

Luiz was the man that Marvin had hit. Although the disagreement still stood, the surfers suggested that if we change money we should — for the best rates — do it with him. Luiz lived up a staircase in a darkened house. There was no sign of him at the residence, which would not have been out of place in a Hitchcock thriller.

Luiz’s wife said that we should wait. Her name was Claudia. She was only twenty years old and sat with us talking. Long brown hair flowed down the edges of her face.

She had a mischievous smile and dimpled cheeks.

“My husband is much older than me,” she began in passable English, “he works so much, but I still have fun.”

“How do you enjoy yourself in Manaus?” I asked.

“I go to discolandia... and so many good parties in Manaus. Then there are my lovers...”

“Rovels!” said Kiato, “but you’re so young, have you had more than one?”

“Yes,” said Claudia, wriggling about, “I’ve had nine; would you like to see their pictures?”

We nodded and she gathered up two armfuls of photographs, each neatly displayed in its own frame. She named them one by one: army officers and businessmen, doctors and pilots.

“This was Sergio, he was so adorable; and this one is Leo, he knew exactly how to touch a girl; oh, naughty little Francois, see how he stares up, those eyes drive me crazy...”

“What does your husband think?” burst out Kiato.

“He’d used to my ways, but he gets so jealous. I don’t know why.”

“Our friend, an American, had a fight with him,” I said.

“The big one?” she said clasping her cheeks. “Was he very hurt? I shall never forgive Luiz for that.”

A baby screamed in the other room. It was a lonely, pitiful cry.

“That’s your baby?” I asked. She blushed.

“Yes, his name is Sergio.” She went to bring the child, and continued to speak.

“Of course it made Luiz very unhappy at first when he saw that his own child was black. I managed to persuade him that sometimes, even to white parents, a black child is born.”

“Did he believe you?” I asked weakly.

“Yes, deep down Luiz is a sweetie. But I named the boy after his real father, I shall never forget that brave, wonderful man.”

Claudia lit another Hollywood cigarette each time the last had burnt down. She squirmed about on the tattered sofa, sitting with her knees pressed up against her chin, and told at length of discolandia and her friends.

Sergio’s huge brown eyes swam in his face. His dark skin was soft and rubbed against the bare floorboards as he crawled about. A fat ginger cat appeared and the two began to spar. Sergio stuck one of the paws in his mouth, screwed up his face, and sucked.

It was then that Luiz arrived. His body seemed as broad as it was tall. Two enormous arms sprouted from his shoulders and led to hands capable of wicked deeds. We were taken to the bathroom, where wads of notes were counted at speed. I stared up at Luiz’s crude, barbaric features: a nose deformed, no doubt, by many bar brawls, a cauliflower ear and eyes as cold as ice.

“In future,” he growled, “make sure you don’t talk to my wife, she’d got enough to do without your distraction!”

Kiato and I bowed in unison, and we returned down the ill-lit stairs and back onto the street.

Kiato discovered that under his bed the air was cooler. Although the ground was infested with all manner of creeping things, he was prepared to sacrifice relative comfort to remain cool. At eleven-thirty that evening I slipped on my shoes and silently crept from the green box — leaving Kiato snoring beneath his bed.

Outside the King Henry Hotel a group of men were lounging about. I suspected that they had been customers of the women who worked inside. As I walked by them I smelt their marijuana and heard their laughs as they discussed which woman each had visited.

A figure was lounging with his back pressed to the main gates of the fish hall. He chewed at the end of a cigarette restlessly. I checked my watch, it was five to twelve. The man stood up straight, pushed his hand into mine, and said:

“So you came, my friend! My name is Alfonso: stick close to me and then you will learn.”

The former Miami taxi-driver had kept the appointment. Now the working apron had been replaced by a spotted white shirt and a pair of white pants which reflected the moonlight.

Alfonso led me down a street behind the fish market where rows of boarded-up shops housed their sleeping owners. As we walked through the alleyways, which radiated in all directions, Alfonso clicked his heels on the cobblestones, and hummed a tune. His left foot tended to drag slightly.

“Have you hurt your foot?” I asked.

Alfonso stopped humming, and I could hear the tap of his boots more clearly. He breathed in deeper as we began to ascend a gradient. The clicking grew more irregular.

“About ten years ago,” he said, “I was in a car crash when I was living in Belem. A bus smashed into my friend’s jeep. He was killed outright and I was left — thought to be dead by the people who found me. My foot was broken in six places... the doctors wanted to cut it off. They said it would never heal properly and I’d be better without it.” Alfonso paused: he pulled a cigarette from a soft pack, threw it in the air, and caught it between his teeth. “No way was I going to let anyone chop my foot off,” he said, ‘so I checked out of the hospital and, in desperation, I went to see an acquaintance whom I knew to practice Macumba. I’d never taken it seriously, but I was ready to try anything. My friend took me to a Babalawo, a healer... for eight days I stayed in his care and we prayed every hour to the Orishas.”

Babalawo, the word was more than familiar. Oswaldo’s face came to mind, looking at me harshly, his forehead knotted with disappointment. Alfonso had more to say:

“Macumba has great power. My foot is fine, see the proof! Respect it and it will respect you. But if you look towards it lightly, or don’t take it seriously, the consequences will be very terrible.”

Agreeing to remember his words, I promised to stay by him.

A narrow doorway was concealed behind what seemed to be a mulberry tree. There was the faint smell of its fruit — a smell that sent my thoughts back to Peshawar.

Alfonso paused for a few seconds outside the doorway.

“Is everything all right?” I felt distinctly nervous.

“There is something different...” muttered the Brazilian.

“Is it because I’m here?” I asked.

“No, it’s not you... it’s something else, some strong force that isn’t human. I’ve only felt it once before...” Alfonso seemed quite dazed, giving me cause me to wonder whether accompanying him was such a sensible idea. It was almost as if he were frightened of this power.

“C”mon,” he said at last, noticing my concern, “they’ll be waiting for us.”

I followed him through the doorway into a courtyard. My feet trod exactly where his had. At the far end of the rectangular yard a curtain covered an arched doorway. We proceeded towards it. As we made the fifteen paces or so, I caught one last scent of the mulberries. Alfonso reached for the curtain but, before his fingers had touched the cloth, it was pulled aside from within. We stepped across the threshold and entered the Macumba shrine.

Nothing had prepared me for the layout of the chamber, or for the atmosphere of the ceremony which was about to take place. I still wonder why I should have been permitted, as a complete alien to the society, to be present at such an orthodox Macumba ritual. Perhaps the reason was so that I, as someone who had come from Europe, might witness the unassailable energy and dynamism that is so deeply embedded in this faith.

Alfonso began to remove his clothes. He passed me a loincloth and told me to put it on. Having wrapped the blue fabric around my waist, I placed my clothes on the floor together with the other bundles. It was only then that my eyes fully adjusted to the candlelight. I slowly scanned the room and its occupants.

Twelve figures were seated in a circle on the dark floorboards. Each was dressed as I now was, in a bluish cloth. No one moved, but sat with crossed legs and closed eyes. Alfonso and I assumed our place in the circle. I noticed that four of the twelve were women, they were covered by tunics made from the same blue material as the men wore.

The chamber was lit by several dozen candles, which too seemed blue in color. They had been placed randomly, and illuminated almost every part of the room. Only one corner was shrouded in darkness.

Shadows flickered about the room like phantoms. They were distorted where the low ceiling met each wall. A large frieze, which seemed to be of some Biblical scene, was half-consumed by the shadows. It was if the saints depicted had been possessed by the roaming spirits.

One corner was more decorated and illuminated than any other part of the room. Seven statues had been arranged on a raised platform; and in the candlelight I noticed that each had been painted with intricate detail. Four of these forms were familiar. One was the Virgin Mary, and beside her was Saint Christopher, then Christ on the Cross, and what seemed to be Saint Peter. The other three figurines did not look like Catholic saints. Although they were finely crafted, their features were harder and rougher than those of the angelic-looking Catholic saints which I knew.

The largest of these non-Catholic statues had been painted with concentric blue circles. His bare chest had the broadest design. On his face the features were almost completely obscured by the arrangement of circles: which were centred about each eye. His left hand clutched what I made out to be a rock; the fingers of his right hand were locked around a bow.

Alfonso stood up and went over to the dark corner, returning a moment later with a hide-covered drum. Two of the other men did the same. Then, sitting once again, they beat out a rhythm in unison. The palms of their hands struck the drums with a force the sound of which sent shivers down my back. Each hand was raised up to eye-level and then thundered down on the hide. The blows grew faster and more powerful. Sweat streamed from Alfonso’s face, and I could almost feel the energy pour out though his arms and the palms of his hands.

The other members of the circle began to clap their hands as one. I was the only person not creating noise. As I wondered what to do, a giant figure appeared from the dark corner. I realized later that a small antechamber led off from the corner.

As soon as the huge man showed himself to those gathered, they stiffened. The chamber was suddenly plunged into silence, as the giant took his place in the centre of our circle. He knelt on the floor in an odd posture. His knees dug into the boards and his feet splayed outwards.

Alfonso began to thump at his drum gently. They were slow, solid beats, that acted as some kind of introduction for the priest. For this was, without doubt, the Babalawo: and he was about to speak.

A man of some fifty years, his dark skin had been painted elaborately. Blue circles, similar to yet smaller than those of the deity on the altar, covered him. Each eye was encircled by five concentric rings. But strangest of all were the tattoos on the back of each hand. They depicted a kind of spider’s web which had trapped all manner of creatures. In the candlelight it was not possible to make out much of the detail. As I tried to focus on these designs, the hands moved around each other and clapped together slowly. It was then that the members of the circle began to sing.

Alfonso and one of the women hummed to the words of the group. The sound that they created was like that of a dragonfly, a buzzing sound, made by humming while pressing the tongue onto the roof of the mouth.

As I listened to these droning tones and the rhythmic song of the group, and saw the shadows play about the chamber’s walls, I began to fall into a stupor.

The Babalawo squatted and turned round and around. As he revolved, pivoted to one spot, he cried out the words: “Dai-umba! Dai-umba!”. Then, rising to his feet, he went over to the altar, spread his arms out, and repeated the cry, over and over again: “Dai-umba! Dai-umba!”

One of the group made for the antechamber, returning a few moments later with a live chicken in each hand. The birds were held by the feet and hung upside-down. They made no effort to escape. The drumming began once more; soft taps to the hides generated a dull thudding sound. The Babalawo lit one last candle at the altar. He placed it in the centre of the ring of devotees, who had started to produce buzzing sounds again.

The man sitting on the other side of Alfonso stood up and joined the priest in the centre of the ring. His head had been shaven, except for about two inches of hair at the back, above the collar. He sat obediently next to the Babalawo, who reached for a bag tied to his waist. I watched in silence as a small quantity of the pouch’s ointment was applied to the crown of the shaven man’s head. This man was about to undergo part of his formal initiation.

Various dark dried leaves were rubbed into the chest of the neophyte, who sat upright with his eyes tightly closed. The drumming continued and was accompanied by the dragonfly sounds of the rest of the group. I sensed Alfonso close to me. Although we had only just met, it was reassuring that he was there. Yet a single image of the fish market kept springing to mind: Alfonso and his workmates standing before me, drenched in blood.

The candidate began to writhe about. His body squirmed and twisted as he entered a state of silent convulsion. The ring of followers seethed forward, their shadows roaming the walls as they moved. One of the chickens’ heads was suddenly torn off by the priest’s hands. A long spurt of blood gushed and the Babalawo directed it towards the neophyte’s lips. He lapped at the blood which covered his face, chest and loins. As Alfonso explained later, it was not the man himself drinking, but the spirit which had possessed him.

The Babalawo changed his tone towards the new initiate, addressing him with great veneration. He welcomed the Orisha to our world, and into the body of the neophyte. Then, as we sat now silent and transfixed, the priest began a conversation with the spirit. The words he uttered were not Portuguese, the usual language of Brazil; indeed, they did not even sound like Yoruba words. For it was an Amerindian deity who had been invoked, and it was his language that the Babalawo now used.

The initiate’s eyes were wide open, but the eyeballs had rolled upwards. He crawled about in the centre of our circle, murmuring through the voice of the god.

The other chicken was decapitated and offered as refreshment. The initiate sucked up the blood with a crazed ecstasy. Blood dripped from his face onto his belly.

Then, as the humming began again, the neophyte leapt to his feet and spun in circles. The priest motioned with his bloodied hands and a goat was brought from the anteroom. The animal bleated continuously as it entered the candlelight. Alfonso beat a solid rhythm from his drum and the Babalawo began to stab at the goat’s jugular. The beast kicked its legs and wriggled as the priest grabbed hold and plunged the pocket-knife’s blade deeper into the wound.

The initiate twisted as if in a rage. He yelled in a voice coarser than thunder: “Dai-raamatoo! Dai-raamatoo!,

The Babalawo, who was saturated in the dead goat’s blood, presented the sacrificed animal to the Orisha. Through the novice, the Orisha drank for what seemed an age: locking his mouth onto the fatal wound.

I had not realized that the ceremony had only just begun. What I had already witnessed seemed horrific at the time. For, as the Macumba priest produced ointments, potions, and more animals to slaughter, my stomach churned and I felt more and more nauseated.

Alfonso was next to me throughout. His presence alone represented the outside world. I had met him in the fish market: and the image of him there haunted me.

In the course of the rites, the Babalawo turned to me. His creased and painted face, splattered with blood, reflected the candlelight and the shadows of the chamber. He seemed interested that I had come; but he did not show any suspicion why I should want to attend. Before I assumed an active role in this most sinister of Macumba rites, the Babalawo made me swear an oath. Alfonso explained his orders and, after him, I repeated the pledge: solemnly promising not to reveal the knowledge imparted to me.

Alfonso touched my arm as we were leaving. The sun was bringing natural light back to Manaus. We walked slowly towards the fish market: the town seemed very different from when I had left it. “Always honour the Orishas,” said Alfonso softly, “and they will honour you in return.”

* * *

Rudolf lay in a state of delirium in the green box next to mine. Sweat dripped from his brow and evaporated as it came in contact with the floor. There was no sign of Luigi. Where was he? I could not believe that the Irishman would desert his master, especially in a crisis.

Rudolf began to whine and bark like a dog.

“Luigi!” he cried. “Where are you, Luigi?”

It was painful to see a sadist without his disconsolate prey. I was sure that somewhere, not too far away, Luigi would be pining for punishment.

With a vacant expression, the delirious Dutchman reverted to child-like prattle. And in English. Why not in Dutch? I never discovered.

“My mother wanted to call me Lucas... but father would have nothing of it. He said I was to have the name of a real man. Don’t worry mother, I shall be home soon. We shall dine at the Amstel when I return... when I return...”

The words echoed around the green box. “Rodolfo Oswaldo Raffaele Pierre Philibert Gugliemi, I will bear your name and do it justice.”

Had Rudolf been named after Rudolf Valentino, whose real name he repeated over and over again?

A naked woman came to say that the police had arrested a man from London for stealing. We would have to go and pay his fine. I realized that it must be Luigi.

Kiato and I sat in the chiefs office at the police station. Piles of unopened letters were strewn about on a large school-master’s desk. Lists covered the walls and a peaked cap hung on a hook. A secretary sat in one corner and slowly picked out the details of the offence on an antique Olivetti. Luigi was brought from his cell and made to stand in front of us. He stood accused of robbing a chemist’s shop that morning. A man in blue suede shoes was asleep in the middle of the floor. One hundred and fifty-three bottles of Campari had been arranged around his foetal form. He lay quite still while Luigi explained what had happened.

“I took the medicine from the chemist without paying the full amount by mistake. It was my fault.”

His face melted with shame and despair. The officer-in-charge reached down, picked a bottle of aperitif from the floor and poured himself a drink.

“The fine will be twenty American dollars. You may pay and leave.”

The woman who had cured the hole in my cheek was sent for. She twirled round and round in Rudolf’s green box, clapping her hands, and shuffled from one wall to the next. She was fairly drunk. I explained that Rudolf’s fever seemed very serious and perhaps she could treat him. The woman looked at me and then at Rudolf. She removed his shirt and pants and pushed her hands across his chest.

“He’d so muscular,” she said.

“Is there anything you can do?” I asked.

“Of course,” was the reply. She soaked the stems of two dried plants in water and I propped him up as she gave the potion to Rudolf to drink.

He called out in delirium, “Mother, mother, you know how I hate schnapps!” Then he lay back, inert.

The woman gulped down the rest of the elixir and lay down next to Rudolf. Both sprawled out on the bed, comatose, with Luigi at their feet.

FIFTEEN

For the Need of a Thneed

Then they traveled through the forest,

Over mountains, over valley,

To the Glens of Seven Mountains,

To the Twelve Hills in the valleys.

There remained with Holy Lingo.

The sun rose over Brasilia and its red desert sand. No birds sang, no leaves rustled in the morning breeze. An eerie silence engulfed Brazil’s ghost-town capital. Kiato and I rubbed our eyes and wondered if it was all a bad dream. Our hotel was in sector S2MW-702 of the world’s most planned, but perhaps most dead, city.

An assortment of unscheduled flights, begged on executive jets, on crop-dusters, aerobatic planes, and on long distance buses, had brought us from Amazonas to the nation’s capital.

Brasilia is like an experiment that went terribly wrong. It incorporates the idea that man is happy living shrouded in concrete, in the middle of a desert. A former President of Brazil, Juscelino Kubitschek, seemed to think it the perfect solution to unite the country economically and politically. As Head of State, he had ordered Brasilia to be constructed: a myriad paper-pushers and politicians were banished to his new capital. The city was opened in April 1960.

Arriving on a weekend decades later, Kiato and I found the multi-lane highways and concrete monoliths all but deserted. At the weekends everyone of consequence jetted off to Rio or Sao Paulo.

On the journey from Manaus southwards to Brasilia I had caught Rudolf’s mysterious fever. I had been delirious for most of the trip. My dreams were dominated by the priest-like woman who had brewed a potion to dispel all ills. My face pressed against endless bus windows as my eyes absorbed the contours of the road. Kiato frog-marched me from one vehicle to the next, poured chicken soup down my throat and always made sure that mine was the seat away from the draft. He was adept at begging rides for himself and his cafe ying friend”.

On a bus nearing Brasilia I was slipping in and out of consciousness. My eyeballs felt as if they revolved in an opposite directions. Kiato found me, incredibly, a small bar of white chocolate. Until that moment, I had craved it with a desperate longing: its name had been the only word on my lips. When the bus stopped he had risked being left behind, in the hope that tasting the sweetmeat would bring me back from the edge of death. He whispered my name, and I turned, my mouth foaming and my face twisted into a paranoid mask.

“Tahil,” he said softly, “I have blought you something special.”

He held out the bar, coated in a crinkled red wrapper, cupping it in his hands as if it were a few drops of holy water. Glancing at the chocolate and then at him, my eyes burning as I saw what seemed an enemy with poison, I screamed:

“Kiato, you bastard! Just leave me alone. I never want to see you again!”

* * *

The bus to Belo Horizonte stopped every hour for a similar amount of time. My fever had cleared, but I felt like a limp rag. We approached the city through a darkened suburb. It could have been anywhere, perhaps Africa or India: we were just passing through, visitors to that land.

At the bus station a tall figure in a black leather coat waved. I handed him the letter written all that time before by his cousin, Oswaldo Rodríguez Oswaldo. The tall, clean-shaven figure wrapped his arms around my back and squeezed.

“Have been waiting for you, hombre!” he said in a rubbery voice. “I am Leonardo Domingo de Rosas. Oswaldo wrote to me saying you’re arriving. I have met every bus in the last three days. Many buses, amigo.”

He laughed like a hyena and then stared deep into my bloodshot eyes with almost psychopathic friendliness.

“I will show you my city, then we shall go to other places. I will take you to Ouro Preto... the city of Black Gold.” He paused for dramatic effect and waited for us to gasp. “I have made a schedule and we have not a moment to lose.”

Our watches were synchronized and we set off, down the ramp from the bus station towards his house.

Coffee as thick as treacle was poured into thimble-sized glasses and passed around. Leonardo still lived at home. His mother, a decent-looking woman, made subtle hints that perhaps he should move out as he was well over thirty. Grey-haired, bespectacled and kindly in manner, she caught me in a questioning glance. First she looked at my unshaven face, then at my shabby, unwashed clothes: as if to say, “Why can’t Leonardo have respectable friends?”

At the far end of the table a silent man crouched solemnly over a plate of simple peasant food: rice and beans.

“Who’s that?” I asked.

“That’s Justo, he’d my stepfather,” replied Leonardo coldly. “He and my mother got married ten years ago... in that time Justo has only spoken to me twice.” Leonardo pulled a face at the man, then changed the subject. He was eager to hear stories of his little cousin, Oswaldo.

“That madman and me grew up together,” he said. “Does he still keep a dagger down his cowboy boot, which he never takes off?” When I answered that he did, Leonardo looked at his watch and laughed for seven seconds.

“We must be very organized so that you get to see everything in the time you stay with me,” he said. “Firstly you must change out of those crazy jungle rags and get some proper clothes.”

We were driven straight to a shopping centre and kitted out with suitable accoutrements for day and night disco dancing.

Kiato disappeared into a changing room. A creature emerged, dressed from top to bottom in luminescent red leather.

“Wow hombres, that’s nice, isn’t it?” cried Leonardo.

Black and gold threads ran vertically down the front and back of the suit which he chose for me. A waistcoat embroidered with purple sequins was worn beneath.

“Girls gonna go crazy when they see you chappies!” the Brazilian shrieked as we sped off towards Upstairs, the hottest discotheque in town.

Leonardo secured a large crucifix around his neck with a heavy gold chain.

“Agua, agua! When the girls know you guys are foreign they’ll be fighting for you,” he said.

Kiato pushed back the giant red leather cuffs of his outfit and we marched into Upstairs.

Three hundred people, sitting at tables adorned with cut glass, silver and starched napery, each wearing neat dinner dress, turned around. Kiato stopped dead in his tracks. I pulled my coat closed to hide the purple sequin waistcoat. Leonardo scanned the room with a tortured expression. He walked to the bar and ordered a drink: gulping it down in one. Then, looking me straight in the eye, he whispered:

“Sunday night, old people night, poppy!”

The next morning was the one that we had been waiting for. Leonardo was to take us to Ouro Preto... the city of Black Gold. His younger brother, Julio, turned up in an Italian sports car. He grinned incessantly and chortled “Shall I take you to see poor people? I know where some live!”

Leonardo told Ids brother to behave. We piled into the alcohol-run car and drove out of the city. Julio, a well-known parachute champion in Brazil, spoke about his narrow escapes.

Leonardo cut him short.

“Don’t talk to me about escapes, Julio! I decided to learn “cos you were getting all those girls,” he grumbled. “I turned up early in the morning. The instructor told me to wait as he was just going up to jump. I watched his plane go up and level off. Then a man in a black suit jumped out. He fell and fell. I watched, wondering when the “chute would open. He kept falling and went through the roof of a house. There was a terrible mess and they made me clear it up. That’s not very nice of them is it, amigo?”

We drove for several hours until signs for Rio de Janeiro came up on the highway. Leonardo, in his enthusiasm for the adventure, had driven in the wrong direction. It was nearly evening when we finally arrived at Ouro Preto.

The town was filled with churches and monuments. Ouro Preto had been the Portuguese colonial mountain base, where many Republicans had been executed. For it was there that the first Brazilian rebellion against the Portuguese was started. And, in the town square, the first martyr of the rebellion — the white bearded victim known as Tiradentes (“The Tooth-puller”) was savagely executed. Clothes and manacles for the infant slaves were on display in the Inconfidecia, a great baroque building, which is now the museum of Ouro Preto. At one time the home of the Municipal Congress, the building was started in 1748, but only completed in 1846.

Leonardo made sure that we commented on each item before moving to the next.

The architecture of Ouro Preto was staggering. Portugal’s most eminent artists and artisans worked for decades to construct the town’s dozen magnificent churches, and its fine public buildings. Perhaps the greatest virtuoso ever to toil at Ouro Preto was a crippled mulatto sculptor named Aleijadinho. Although unmatched in his sculptural talent, his own facial features grew ever more hideously deformed. The disfigurement, which were put down to his “diseased blood” was unfortunate, particularly as Aleijadinho lusted zealously after any woman he saw. As the deformity grew steadily worse, the maestro took to wearing a sack over his head, so as not to frighten away those who glanced at him. At last, as Aleijadinho lost all co-ordination, his assistants resorted to tying the hammer and chisel to his hands using leather thongs. But observers of Aleijadinho — Ouro Preto’s finest artist — said that as his outer ugliness grew more horrible, so the beauty of his sculpture increased.

Kiato had gone into a decline following the humiliation of Upstairs. He staggered about in the red leather outfit, moaning woefully, complaining of our “Ross of Face”. He seemed to take the episode so seriously that, for a moment, I had feared he would commit seppuku — Japanese ritual suicide.

Leonardo marched us up and down the cobbled streets with the ruthlessness of a Nazi leader. We felt obliged to follow, even when he stepped into an underground bar.

The owner of the tavern, who revealed himself to be a communist, ran off, asking us to take charge. He said there was a party at the other end of town. Julio sidled up to customers, taking their orders and mixing them exotic cocktails. He made up the prices as he went along, allowing those he liked to have drinks on the house. We were involved in several fights.

Time dragged by very slowly.

At three the next morning the communist returned. He led Kiato into a hidden vault and handed him a human skull in payment for our assistance. Leonardo — who was jealous — forced Kiato to return the skull, as he held the crucifix high in the air, with the words:

“This city of Black Gold can be dangerous! It has a history like that, burrito. Never take a skull from a stranger and you will live a nice life.”

Leonardo dragged us to Sao Paulo to see the shopping malls. At the bus station a family was huddled at the bottom of an escalator. They had come from the countryside with their belongings in a single smallish brown box. The father looked at the mother and they both scratched their heads. Why were the stairs moving? And since they were moving, how were people expected to get on? Kiato showed them how, as the mother choked with fright at the enormous complexity of simply climbing some stairs.

Leonardo marched us from one super deluxe concrete complex to another, demonstrating the modernity of Brazil.

“Brazil is a great country!” he shouted to make himself heard above Sao Paulo’s grating traffic. “This makes for a nice sightseeing doesn’t it, chap?” We agreed that it did as we were led onwards between the buses and cars to admire the city’s drainage system.

In a suburb of a suburb lived Thomas. He had studied with Leonardo, and invited us to meet his family. Sweet tea was poured and shortcake slices passed from one person to the next. Thomas had been lucky enough to study abroad with Leonardo, in Bournemouth. He spoke of that coastal town with reverence, as if it were a magical place filled with royalty and palaces.

“Ah, Baornemowth,” he said in a dreamy voice as if for those few months he had touched paradise. “I miss the Alcatraz disco. It’s where I met my fiancée.”

It seemed that Bournemouth was somehow an extension of Brazilian territory. All the Brazilian students I met had either come from or were going to Bournemouth.

Leonardo’s stepfather, Justo, had an apartment in Guaruja, a beach town near Sao Paulo. I proposed that we stay there for a few days to get out of the city. Leonardo supported the plan and we jumped on a bus.

The road to Guaruja passed through some of the world’s most dramatic and beautiful tropical scenery. One valley replaced another, mountains were overhung with creepers and rubbery plants. Wild birds, their beaks striped with color, squawked from the undergrowth and Kiato captured all he saw on film.

The road snaked around mountain passes, and waterfalls poured down either side. Then we drove down into Cubatao.

The sky was black with industrial smog. Rivers still flowed in abundance, but they ran in fluorescent, polluted greens and bright oranges. The trees had been felled and their stumps stretched for miles. There were no sounds of life save for the roaring of the turbines from the innumerable factories. Chimneys spewed noxious gases into the atmosphere, their bright colors mixed with the dense black pollution of death.

I stared in horror and was ashamed of even my own small share in the culture of the West. It reminded me of a book — by Dr. Seuss — called the Lorax, which I had read as a child.

Its story told of a land where Truffula trees grew in their thousands, Humming-Fish hummed and Bar-ba-loot bears played in the sunshine. This was paradise. But one day the Once-ler arrived. He chopped down a Truffula tree and knitted a Thneed. His Thneed sold.

Soon everyone wanted a Thneed. All the Truffula trees were chopped down and the Lorax appeared. He, as the spirit of nature, asked the Once-ler to stop. But the Once-ler cut down the last Truffula tree. He looked around to see the sky was polluted and the rivers clogged with mud; the Humming-Fish and the Bar-ba-loots had all gone. The land of the Lorax was destroyed, and looked exactly like what faced us now, in Cubatao.

I told the story of the Lorax to Leonardo, in the hope that he would understand the destruction of his countryside.

“What is those Thneeds, mate?” he said.

“Leonardo, don’t you realize that Brazil’s being destroyed. Look at all those chimneys out there!” I cried.

“But hombre, we have to pay our foreign debt,” he said. I pointed to the fluorescent green rivers and the throbbing factories which had created them, and shouted:

“Who owns all those monstrous processing plants, who the hell would be deranged and evil enough as to own factories like those?”

Leonardo stooped his head slightly, blushed, and said:

“My stepfather Justo does, Justo owns them.”

Kiato made sandcastles on the beach at Guaruja while helicopters passed high overhead — flying towards a string of private islands — like yachts moored offshore. A few miles away, in Cubatao, children are regularly born with brain damage. They live short painful lives in what is thought to be the world’s most polluted city.

The mansions on the private islands have their front windows pointing towards the ocean: so that the rich will not witness the poverty they create. I thought constantly of the Lorax whose land was destroyed by the greed of a Once-ler, for the lack of a Thneed.

Brazilians are well known for their willingness to have fun. Even so, some looked twice when they saw our group of three young men — dressed in fraying, sequined waistcoats and red leather pants — slouching on the beach.

Leonardo was now overcome with shame as my continual railing against the polluters took effect. His country’s beauty was being ravaged as day and night discotheques softened the population’s minds and shook the very foundations of city life. He stood up and rubbed at the patches of damp sand on his clothes, then walked off alone. Kiato and I returned to the apartment, sensing that we ought to leave Leonardo to himself Realising that it would be hard for such a person to come to terms with his nation’s troubles, I feared the worst.

An ant-like figure, viewed from the apartment window, moved with haste along the promenade of the beach two hours later. It made for our apartment block. I came away from the window as the door burst open. Leonardo, crippled with exhaustion, shrieked a few disjointed syllables before collapsing:

“Partee-ng, to-ga partee-ng!” He had seen several women, apparently wrapped tightly in togas, heading towards a downtown bar. Everyone, it was obvious — Leonardo swore — would be there.

“Such things is tradition in Guaruja!” he cried.

The Brazilian had obviously found it impossible to contemplate matters of a serious nature for long: matters of importance not only to him, but to all his countrymen.

Starched sheets were pulled from the beds and Leonardo wound the makeshift togas around each of us. I was reluctant to participate, locked in a somber mood.

Leonardo grinned and wet down his hair at the same time. Before I knew it, I, too, was soon wriggling about under the layers of white cloth. Like Kiato, I was bitter at the Brazilian for forcing us to wear our disco clothes underneath.

We walked down the dank corridors and the steep steps to the street. Another Brazilian night was under way. The metal tips of Leonardo’s alligator skin shoes from Miami clicked along. We stumbled forward — like three certified madmen in our white strait-coats — towards the toga party.

A strange darkness hung within the bar’s four walls. We shuffled inside in single file. It was then that I smelt a familiar odour: that of Mumbai’s local bin cigarettes. I made out a few syllables of Hindi being spoken at the bar. Leonardo pinched me and pointed. A group of women were lined up against one wall as if waiting for a firing-squad to arrive. Each was swathed in an embroidered saree; a red felt bindi was pressed onto each frowning forehead. They stared at us as we gaped back at them. Then they wobbled their heads from side to side in smiling admiration of our outfits.

Perhaps Leonardo’s mistake at taking a saree to be a toga was forgivable. He thought it very peculiar indeed that it was only the women who were wrapped in togas, while the men huddled in one corner in western dress. So he sidled up to the widest of the women and attempted to make polite conversation to put them at ease. Her saree was partly concealed beneath a voluminous navy trench coat, and a luminous pair of Reebok running shoes adorned her size ten feet.

Bowls of blancmange were brought by a gangling waiter. The large Indian lady tilted back her head and let a great quantity of the runny confection slide down her oesophagus. Kiato’s eyes bulged in amazement at the volume of her internal digestive tract. A little of the creamy blancmange dripped down the front of the lady’s navy trench coat. Rubbing the drops into the fabric, she whispered:

“Eat, my coat, eat!”

Leonardo dominated the small dance floor with carefully choreographed movements; made within the constriction of a tightly-wrapped bed sheet. He thrived on the attention of the Indian tour group, who had just arrived from Mumbai. That was, when we had convinced them that we were not eunuch transvestites. Kiato became pally with the wide lady in the trench coat. They told stories to each other. Kiato told her about Sumo, Japanese wresting, and his appreciation of it.

Then he admired a cornelian ring she was wearing. She twisted the silver band round on her finger.

“This is a magic ring,” she said. “It brings good fortune to any who wear it. For my whole life I wanted to come to Brazil, and now I have had my wish: see I am here!” She translated a faint Hindi inscription from the bezel:

Glory to he who holds me, luck and fortune to that one,

When I have aided you give me to another,

Let him benefit from my charm.”

Kiato touched the ring and closed his eyes. His fingers trembled as if they drew a magical force from the centre of the stone. The lady pulled the collar of her coat tight to her neck and said to him:

“My wishes have come true. I must now pass on this magic ring. Remember to respect the spell, then protection and wishes will be yours.”

Leonardo spun round and around like a cross between a whirling dervish and a Cossack dancer somewhat out of control. Each wall was lined with clapping spectators, whose applause echoed like thunder in the smoke-filled bar. Kiato felt guilty at taking the Indian lady’s ring, but she had forced it upon him. It was unlucky, she said, to keep it after it had done its work.

In this atmosphere of insanity — as we fumbled about in bed sheets — Leonardo gave the key of the apartment to a young couple. They said that they wanted to be alone. Leonardo’s head seemed to split in two as he howled with laughter.

The dancing continued and the wide lady removed her heavy coat and danced lambada with Kiato. My sequined waistcoat had become like a second skin, bonded by sweat. At five A.M. a bouncer threw us all out onto the street.

The clicking of the alligator shoes led the way back to the apartment. When the door was opened, Kiato was the first to enter. There was no sign of the young couple. There was no sign of anyone. The ornaments had been taken from above the fireplace, and all our bags were gone. The alligator shoes stopped tapping across the parquet and Leonardo stood motionless. I threw my bed sheet on the couch and sat beside it. Leonardo broke the silence:

“They were not from Guaruja, mates; local people are friendly.”

He sat next to me with his hands clasped about his ears. I patted him on the back, but deep down I knew that I could never forgive him.

It was not the fact that my camera had been stolen, nor that my saddle-bags were gone. But the thought of having nothing to wear but a set of fluorescent disco clothes, made my hands want to close around Leonardo’s neck. Kiato breathed on his wishing ring. I waited for our bags to spontaneously appear. They did not.

“It’s rucky,” Kiato began, “that I hid our passports and money before going out.” He held up the pouches of notes.

“Leonardo,” I said, “I’m sorry this has happened but I have to leave and go far from here.”

“Ret’s go to Algentina as soon as it gets right!” shouted Kiato. His words brought a glimmer of hope back to the depressed atmosphere.

“How can you, the dearest friends of my little cousin, ever forgive me?” asked Leonardo despondently.

Then, plucking the alligator shoes from his feet, Leonardo handed them to me at arm’s length. There was a faint smell of foot odour.

“Take these,” he said. “They are my most treasured possession. I don’t want forgiveness or pity, but just to be your friend.”

It was a miserable moment. I said that we could not leave our host and comrade barefoot as well as clad in disco paraphernalia. He must keep the shoes. Besides they were far too small. He smiled broadly as if to cement our friendship, and the next morning we left for Argentina.

SIXTEEN

The Mountains of Blue Ice

Thus he taught them, Holy Lingo;

And his last words then he uttered —

Keep your promise to the Turtle,

To the River-Turtle Dame;

To the Gods I now am going.

The basin in our room at the Hotel Ushuaia, in Buenos Aires, was as long as a cattle trough. Crafted by Shanks of England, it reeked of an era when Argentina had been one of the richest nations on earth. Three beds were separated by pieces of mahogany furniture painted with cream gloss; a set of French windows opened out onto Avenida Córdoba and the bedspreads, with embroidered blue flowers, felt uncannily soft to the touch.

Kiato picked up the solid black telephone and ordered room service. His words ran down the line and a few moments later a lad in a pillbox hat knocked at the door.

We had traveled for days and nights on a journey where one bus had stopped when another had begun. Sequins and red leather, stained and sodden, still hung from our crippled forms.

Kiato sat in the basin and stared hard into the mirror. His eyes were bloodshot, and his manner was like that of an ex-convict, attempting to get to grips with freedom after a very long time.

Two days were spent lying on our backs and learning to adjust our spines from a chronic sitting position. Out of our hibernation we finally came, out into the bright sunshine of downtown Buenos Aires. My waistcoat was reversed to hide the motley sequin pattern. Kiato could not take the disapproving looks from every passer-by. His red leather disco outfit, which was more than torn and worn, smelt of many things, including long-distance bus terminals.

Scott Joplin’s tune “The Entertainer” permeated out from a large departmental store. The building’s long windows were filled with sophisticated costumes. Silk ties, tweed coats and an assortment of bags and cases — sculpted in the finest leather — had been artistically arranged. I looked up to see the name of this marvellous shop. It read quite simply: Harrods.

An army of assistants appeared with tapes in their fingers and pencils behind their ears. One took away our disco clothes at arm’s length, his face contorted with disgust.

We strolled about the town in crisp starched shirts, and gaped in disbelief at the components of this almost European capital.

The buildings might have been in Paris or London, the farrago and bustle of people like that of New York. I felt more at home there than in any other place. An almost eastern courtesy enveloped the society, as did a sensation that one could live there in contentment forever.

Argentina’s enormous former prosperity based upon meat and wheat — which had existed until the middle of the century — was reflected in the extent and grandeur of the avenues, and the facades which run along them. Ladies strutted about in wide-brimmed hats or with parasols and their escorts held open the doors to small cafés. But the signs of a former malevolent totalitarianism abounded.

Tea was poured into china cups with real saucers beneath at the Richmond Tea House on Avenida Florida. A young lady took off her tweed coat and slowly stroked back her rich auburn hair. Lipstick was fresh on her lips. Her dilated eyes gazed lovingly, across the green leather-topped table, into those of her date. We had seen such sights but rarely, if at all, for many months.

Foxes ran from dogs and from horsemen clad in red, in paintings across the walls. The young couple fed each other crumbs of teacake and whispered secrets from mouth to ear. Beside them two gaunt women clutched at their cheeks and swapped their gossip across the green leather. Kiato leaned back into the rounded chair and smiled. He rubbed at the bezel of his cornelian band and said, “My wish of paladise has come. You learry are a magicar ling.”

Below the tea-room Argentines of all ages were playing chess and drinking beer. The air was thick with cigar smoke, as slouched figures, old and young, pushed carved pieces from one square to the next.

At the far wall a crouched but somehow imperious figure was moving two queens in succession towards a sole black pawn. He was large and familiar. Opposite him Luigi, the Irishman from Shepherd’s Bush, pushed his single chess piece in random terrified movements.

Luigi saw me and bounded up like a Great Dane, embracing Kiato and myself warmly. Rudolf van den Boch-Drackenburgh seemed astounded to see us. Then he produced a set of manicured nails for me to shake.

“Bet you never expected to see me again,” Rudolf began in a very confident manner. “You left me with that drunk witch!”

“Did she cure you?” I asked.

“Cure me?” said Rudolf. “I couldn’t get rid of the damn woman. She was besotted with me. There was only one thing to do.” He stopped speaking and I bent forward to hear the secret.

“What was that?” asked Kiato.

“I gave her a bottle of my musk aftershave which she took a liking to. She drank half of it and poured the other half over her head. I had to give her my Swiss Army penknife with sixteen blades as well.”

“Actually,” butted in Luigi in a frail voice, “it was my Swiss Army penknife.”

“Shut up, you Irish idiot!” said Rudolf.

Luigi’s face dropped for a moment, then he nuzzled up to Kiato, elated that he was with friends once again.

Rudolf led the way down Avenida Nueve de Julio, one of the widest streets in the world. He seemed to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of Argentine history and events. Plucking up courage, I asked how he had acquired such a gigantic amount of information, challenging him at the same moment on his always flawless English. Rudolf caught me in his steely stare, pausing for a moment. His jaws parted, and he said coldly:

“I read.”

Oswaldo’s tales of Patagonia and its ice mountains were more vivid in my mind than ever. I had told them over and over to Kiato and he, too, was heartened at the prospect of a new adventure.

I longed to walk in Patagonia and see my old friend Oswaldo. Resisting Luigi’s whines that we should all go to dance at the Hippopotamus Club, we went to buy train tickets for Bariloche instead.

Rudolf looked up from a hardback copy of The House of Dread, by Dostoevsky, and said that he had no intention of being cold. Luigi looked at his master in clear anticipation that he might be allowed to make the trip.

“You are forbidden to go anywhere without my permission,” said the Dutchman.

Luigi cringed deeply and asked:

“Then do I have your permission to go with them to Patagonia?” Rudolf looked the stooping masochist up and down. He narrowed his eyes and slowly mouthed the word, “No”.

Next evening Kiato and I left the Hotel Ushuaia. We went to the railway station for the eleven o”clock train to San Carlos de Bariloche. I crawled down onto the floor to sleep beneath the seats. The wheels ground on the tracks a few inches below my head. And the faint smell of shoe leather and cigarette ends made me cough as I lay stretched out. Feet of all kinds tripped over my legs during the night.

At six A.M. the sun rose and a waiter in crimson garb rushed through the carriage calling,

“Cafay-Cafay Oy-Cafay! Cafay-Cafay Oy-Cafay!”

Juggling an urn and cups like skittles, he moved down the aisle. Children scampered from one seat to the next, avoiding the floor. Their mothers sat about sucking mate through a bombilla, straw. The tea-like drink is made from the leaves and green shoots of the yerba mate tree — Ilex paraguayensis, a kind of holly which grows in northeastern Argentina. A sealed cup, with a bombilla tube often embedded in it, is passed from one person to the next.

Out on the pampas, cattle ran from gauchos; and the sun rose high above the scrub, which had replaced the greenery of Buenos Aires in the night. The train hummed as we sped across the boundless plains of Argentina.

From time to time it would pull to a stop and various characters would climb aboard. Some would sit before descending a few miles on. Others would stand at the front of the carriage with bags of marvels and cry their wares. The audience was captivated by frequent demonstrations of useful objects. One man exhibited a device to stamp patties from a pound of minced meat. Another sold knitted tablecloths covered in geometric designs.

At one such stop an elderly gentleman with red sideburns, and a flat cloth cap, climbed aboard. He removed his checked green overcoat and a very worn pair of rubber galoshes, then sat next to me. I smiled and he began to read a book in English. I tilted my head unobtrusively, so as to be able to make out the small lettering on the spine. It read, Eskimo-English Dictionary, and was by Rev. Edmund J. Peck. The gentleman noticed my interest. I cricked my neck in straightening it, guiltily, at speed; he peered over his half-moon bifocals and introduced himself as Morris Meadowcroft, from Grimsby.

Now retired, Mr. Meadowcroft was indulging in his favourite hobby of fifty years: train-spotting.

“There’s nothing better than taking a long train ride with a good book,” he said.

“Is an Eskimo-English dictionary as interesting as it looks?” I asked politely.

“Interesting?” he said. “This is a marvellous edition, simply marvellous! Of course, we must now bear in mind that it is not Eskimo, but Inuit.”

“Are there any simple phrases that you could teach me, should I ever need them?” I asked.

Morris Meadowcroft beamed with joy that I was showing a regard for his marvellous edition. He scanned a page and his forehead crumpled into troughs.

“What about Passijaksavngijutiksarsivok, to start with?” he said.

“What on ealth does that mean?” Kiato asked.

“He finds cause for an excuse,” was the answer from the train-spotter from Grimsby. He continued...

“Pattingovokit, means, he is tired of eating marrow. Iglovikamepok, stands for he is in the snow house. Or what about Kannilerungnarpok?”

“What does that mean?” I inquired.

Morris Meadowcroft looked serious for a moment and then said:

“It may snow.”

The cabin lights were switched on when it became dark. Morris Meadowcroft stepped down the ladder in the middle of nowhere. With the checked green overcoat coat on his shoulders, rubber galoshes on his feet, and the Eskimo-English dictionary under one arm, he seemed prepared for anything.

It was Kiato’s turn to sleep on the floor. He stretched out and murmured disjointed syllables, apparently in Eskimo and Japanese, before falling asleep.

As I lay on my back and watched the moon shine from above the flat Argentine landscape, I thought for a moment about all the unusual characters I had met. What surprises were there still in store? The next day we would sleep in Patagonia.

Kiato woke up in the middle of the night and said he could smell snow. An icy wind gusted down the centre of the carriage. We peered through a frosted window: there was a blizzard outside. I went to the lavatory and slipped about on the skating-rink floor. Kiato’s knees seized up with cold and we huddled together in our starched cotton shirts: as always, unprepared for what was about to come.

Bariloche sits on Lake Nahuel Huapi, and is mirrored within her waters. We walked from the railway station towards the cluster of wooden houses of Swiss design, a few miles from the Chilean border. Oswaldo’s village was a little higher in the mountains. I went to the post office and rang his house. When he heard my voice, he screamed with laughter. Within the hour, Kiato and I found ourselves bundled up and sitting in front of a crackling log fire. Oswaldo crushed my ribs and chortled three times. I had never seen him happier.

“Yoo crazee chappy!” he gurgled. “Yoo gooing to love Patagonia, dese ees me hoome, dese ees your hoome. Vee all gonna live together in Patagonia!”

Oswaldo’s mother — a female version of her son — rocked back and forth in one corner of the room. She moved two long knitting needles about each other with a degree of expertise.

“Mama gonna made yoo dee sweatering soots,” said Oswaldo, “dose seellee seetee cloothes not for Patagonia.”

Kiato rasped his fingers over the flames; he had never once complained at having all his possessions stolen. He turned to Oswaldo and asked if we could walk amongst the ice mountains.

“Vee walk over every one meng!” shouted the Patagonian.

Five layers of blankets sheltered me as I slept. Yet only the hardest concentration ensured that I did not move at all, and thus remained warm.

Suddenly, a stream of yellow light pushed into the room as the door slowly swung open. Oswaldo crept in with plates of boiled salt cod — bacalao — broth, and a heap of what seemed to be itchy horsehair sweaters. I fumbled for Kiato’s watch: it was three A.M.

“Oswaldo, is it really necessary to get up this early?” I groaned.

“Caramba! Everyone getteng up eerly in Patagonia. Hooray, vee gooing on expeedition. Today vee walking on dee bloo mounteens.”

I gulped a pint of chicken broth, but my stomach was clenched asleep. And the back of my neck was rasped by the horsehair sweater as I pulled it over my head. But outside the snow was falling and we knew that warm clothes would be a necessity.

A van with bald tires — and rusting snow-chains wrapped around them — pulled up. Kiato and I were bundled into the back. Two burly creatures lounged in the front, chain-smoking. Oswaldo murmured some syllables in a local dialect. The chains slid across the slush, and we moved out towards the mountains of blue ice.

The driver had a peg-leg and looked like a pirate; his companion had a bird’s nest beard, which obscured much of his face. A one-legged mountaineer? Before I had seen India I would have thought such a thing impossible. Yet Maindra Pal, with one leg, at forty-nine climbed the Himalayas. He broke a world record, scaling Mount Abi-Gamin, 24,140 feet. Something in common for the two Gondwanaland extremes.

From time to time we would have to jump out and push the vehicle for a mile or so up the steeper parts of the icy track. Whenever I moaned, a hip-flask of chicken broth was handed to me — in the apparent belief that one taste of such an elixir would cure my discomfort. The soup contained Jaborandi, a South American aromatic herb which causes, as I soon discovered, sweating and salivation.

The Pegleg and his friend, who boasted that they were trained guides, would lead the trek.

“Can we drive all the way to the ice mountains?” I asked.

“No Señor,” was the pirate’s answer.

“Where will we stop?” I asked. The Pegleg looked around. There was thick forest on three sides and an endless wall of snow on the fourth. He switched off the engine and mumbled, “Okay here, caballeros.”

We ploughed through what seemed to be a cross between bamboo and bracken. Oswaldo told tall tales of a mythical jabberwock that was said to lurk amongst the fibrous stems. He reminded me that Zak had spoken of a colossal mythical creature — a toxodont — which was thought still to roam the highlands. Kiato believed every word. He soon spotted giant footprints which he claimed were those of a great pachyderm.

I dared not reveal to him Zak’s description of a toxodont — which he had alleged was of the rhinoceros family — only with coarser hair. Even without these details Kiato grew very worried indeed.

Streams ran under a layer of ice which had trapped fallen leaves as it froze. Where the forest’s canopy was tightly-knit, a carpet of fine green moss cushioned each footstep.

So this was Patagonia, the place of which Oswaldo had spoken as we had tramped across those African lands. He had been right to be so proud of his homeland.

One waterfall cascaded into another, tumbling down into a pool carved from the forest’s floor. Oswaldo wanted me to see everything: he seemed almost to point to each frozen berry, each twig that we passed.

“Dees ees Patagonia!” he repeated, over and over. As Kiato put it, he was “positivery leverring” in it.

Pegleg knocked on the door of a shack which broke the undergrowth’s symmetry. A youth, whose beard was just starting to come through, pulled back the door, as a little fresh snow fell from the lintel. Three wolf-like dogs leapt out and sniffed around our ankles. The boy called for them to sit. Their orange eyes burned in gray-white faces, as they pranced about in defiance of all command.

“They”re three-quarters wolf and one quarter dog,” said the boy as we sat about an open fire drying our socks. “I raised them from day-old puppies, they’re supposed to obey me, but they always pretend not to understand.”

The Pegleg said that darkness tended to fall suddenly, and even though it was now only late afternoon, it would be wise to spend the night in the shack. My feet were freezing — water had seeped in around them — and the horsehair sweater had rubbed the skin from my neck.

I lay back and breathed in the smell of melting plastic. Kiato fished Oswaldo’s hiking boot from the flames. Deformed with heat, a taper of noxious fumes rose from where the laces had been.

When I asked the young man about his life, with Oswaldo translating, he responded to my questions in a lethargic manner, which seemed quite characteristic in Patagonia. It was an attitude that Oswaldo did not have: perhaps this lack of it had caused him to travel elsewhere. We gulped as much chicken broth as our stomachs could take, then bedded down for the night. One of the puppies clambered about on a set of over-sized paws, wanting to be cuddled. He crawled into Oswaldo’s sleeping bag and whined all night.

In the morning the wolf-dogs nuzzled between the boy’s legs as he sat. He asked if I had ever visited Caleefomeeah. I said that I had.

“I’m going there,” he replied. I perked up a little, surprised and pleased that he wanted to travel.

“When are you going?” I asked. He thought for a moment, rubbed his chin, and replied vaguely, “Oh, any day now.”

Oswaldo was eager to hurry out again into the forest. He had secured the damaged shoe to his sock-covered foot with string. The wolf-dogs howling behind, we pressed on into the bracken.

Soon there was silence again, but for the crunching of our shoes on the icy ground. We moved in single file, each stepping in the footprints of the one in front. Pegleg was at the head of the party: he claimed to know the layout of all Patagonia. His best friend, the man with the bird’s nest beard, was second. The two were inseparable, and chattered away in what sounded like a slurred and garbled dialect.

Kiato, Oswaldo and I stumbled along behind the two professionals: we were new to the trekking business.

The snow-covered path, that had weaved through the forest and bracken, suddenly divided. One fork led towards the sound of gushing water. We took the second branch. After five minutes the trail came to an abrupt end. A rock-face sheered upwards.

At first it seemed obvious that the experts had brought us the wrong way. Kiato and I turned round and started to walk back to the junction. Pegleg whistled like a parrot and pointed to the top of the bluff. Then he began to climb.

Forty feet above the ground, Oswaldo clung spread-eagled and whimpering to the rock-face. The two old Patagonians had scaled the precipice effortlessly and had left the rest of the party wobbling in their wake.

Ten feet below Oswaldo, Kiato’s left cheek was pressed against the bare rock. His fingers grappled for niches, as he began to recite lines from a Buddhist prayer. My hands wrestled for the same nooks as Kiato’s feet and, in a moment of agony, my fingers and his boots agreed on the same holes. In my anguish I gaped upwards. Some sixty feet above, the two old professionals were roaring with laughter.

It was noon by the time we had overcome our fear and conquered the rock-face.

In the distance we could now see the precipitous slopes of a gigantic glacier rising even higher upwards. We stood gazing, captivated by its beauty and the brilliance of its aquamarine form. Oswaldo, who had instantly forgotten the terror of his rock-climbing experience, started to sprint towards the peak, screaming in Spanish. He ran and ran until all we could see was an ant-like speck. I was nervous that he had finally lost all sanity. Then he suddenly disappeared. No one rushed to help him.

The snow grew deeper and more compact as we crossed a wide plain and neared the glacier. We trudged in a single line towards the ice mountain. I wondered what we would do when we got there. We tramped on, past a heap clothed in horsehair and embedded in a drift. It was Oswaldo. He lay face-down, hoping that we would take pity on him. Each of us carried on, hardened by the expedition, and united only in our belief in the survival of the fittest. Oswaldo realized that we would not stop and solemnly joined the rear of the column.

The idea of trekking back, and scaling down the rock-face was most unwelcome. At least the rough sweater no longer rasped at my neck — it was lubricated copiously with perspiration. Kiato and I were suffering from acute headaches, having not fully acclimatized to the Patagonian elevation. The jaborandi and the effort had dehydrated me. I stumbled over to the man with the bird’s nest beard and pleaded for a sip of water. The old Patagonian lit a new cigarette with the butt of the last and pointed to the ground.

“Drink that!” he said.

Oswaldo pulled out a neatly furled umbrella: his mother had forced him to bring it along. Like her son, she seemed to have no understanding or knowledge of the dire climatic conditions present in her native Patagonia. As we each took our first uneasy steps on the edge of the glacier’s back, Oswaldo poked about for crevasses. The umbrella had suddenly become an invaluable tool, and Oswaldo pretended that he had brought it along especially for that purpose.

Some time after mounting the glacier we reached a severe fissure in its surface, about two feet across. Although not a fully-fledged crevasse, the furrow was a distinct hazard, especially to us amateurs in the party. The bank on which we stood was higher than the one on the other side. In single file we clenched knees and jumped. A great sense of achievement accompanied the landing. But then Kiato, who had made a brief study of the icy structure, realized that — as the two banks were of differing heights — it would be impossible to return by this route. When the point was raised, the guides said that we would be using another route to exit the glacier.

By late afternoon we were all exhausted. Pegleg said that we should camp for the night. It was a popular plan. I offered to start putting up the tents. Pegleg looked at me blankly and shook his head. There were no tents. Only Oswaldo had one. I felt dissociated: at the same time, being part of such an ill-equipped expedition now felt quite normal, and characteristic of my jaunts through Gondwanaland.

Kiato and I stood speechless, wondering what the odds of survival would be against dying of exposure or frostbite. Oswaldo broke the silence.

“Een Patagonia,” he said, “meng soo stroong need noo teents!” He was obviously trying to conceal the fact that the tents had been forgotten in the enthusiasm for the expedition.

The Pegleg, grinning, now removed his grubby pack and brought out three rather tattered lightweight tents. I had not appreciated his joke.

An area of snow was cleared and, shamed by the hoax of the veterans, we arranged the camp. The bird’s nest man, smirking, gave Kiato and me small but adequate sleeping-bags. Oswaldo had his own homemade sleeping-bag: partly knitted and partly formed from black bin liners, it was padded with down.

The sun went down and with the night came bitter coldness.

As usual on a trip that lacks preparation, one of the group tried to rectify things by posing a solution to relieve the discomfort. Oswaldo had read about the prison of Alcatraz. He explained the special method of sleeping in the steel-floored isolation block. The body’s weight is rested only on the elbows, knees and toes — thus keeping direct contact with the ground to a minimum.

Kiato, Oswaldo and I wriggled to stay balanced in the new position. This was made all the harder as we were shrouded in sleeping-bags. There are no words with which to describe such inexorable cold. It was impossible to sleep.

As the snores of the man with the bird’s nest beard growled around us, images of my travels entertained me. I thought of Prideep and Osman in Mumbai: would they still remember me if I ever returned? I was sure they would. No doubt Blake was still training the vultures to do tricks, and Abdul the Warrior was probably crooning over his glass lampshade from Birmingham at that very moment. Perhaps Zak and Marcus had discovered their mythical animals, and Luigi had escaped from Rudolf’s clutches. Kennedy’s face merged with that of Jesú; then the features of all those I had met ran together. It had been an extraordinary expedition, and I had crossed Gondwanaland, right to its southernmost tip.

By the morning I had lost all feeling in my legs. Kiato, who tried to straighten out his back, was sure that it would be permanently arched following a night in the Alcatraz position. Our guides began chain-smoking well before dawn. They had slept solidly and were eager to get going. Oswaldo refused to go anywhere until he had eaten.

We warmed up some of the powerfully smelling bacalao, and forced down a little more chicken broth. The mountaineers imparted that most of the provisions had been left behind. This time they were telling the truth. Oswaldo was about to throw a tantrum, but I sensed that he realized it would use up valuable energy.

The man with the bird’s nest beard emptied the contents of his pack onto the ice. He had run out of cigarettes and was very miserable. As he stooped to stuff the junk back into the bag, I noticed a small bottle made from brown glass. I picked it up. It had no label.

“What’s in here?” I asked.

The mass of beard looked up and the man answered me slowly and clearly in perfect English, a language which he had not spoken before:

“That’s the antivenom for a Desert Death Adder’s bite.”

I thought for a second and remembered that Desert Death Adders are only found in Australia, and then only in the scorching heat. I told him. He stood completely still. Then, staring me straight in the eye, his chapped lips slowly parted, and he said:

“You never know.”

Again, we formed a single file and began to slip our haphazard path across the ice.

After an hour or so, Pegleg signaled for us to stop. A new emotion contorted his face. It was that of fear. He pointed downwards: three feet in front, the glacier ended abruptly in a crevasse. Kiato, Oswaldo and I exchanged glances of horror. There was no way forward and none back. Recently, said Pegleg, the ice must have split open, in an icequake. We were trapped.

Morale hit an all-time low. The veterans, who now seemed very worried indeed, sat down and shook their heads slowly from side to side. My horsehair sweater was as stiff as card, my face was paralyzed with cold, and my feet had lost all sensation.

The numbness was moving up my legs. We were trapped on a glacier in the company of two now useless guides, with no way out. It seemed as if the circumstances could not deteriorate any further. But, at that moment, they did.

Oswaldo, who had collapsed on the ice and was huddled in the foetal position, suddenly thrust his right arm toward the sky.

“Loook, dere’s beeeg storrm comeng!” he cried.

He was right. A vast snowstorm was approaching fast. I tried to rally enthusiasm to come up with a solution. But the group had resigned themselves to the fact that this time they had been beaten. Bizarre associations began to form in my brain, instead of rational thought. Why were there legless people in all three sections of Gondwanaland? Were the waiter in India, the dancing men on crutches in Africa, now Pegleg, part of some conspiracy?

Had fate planted in my mind that I should visit all three parts of Gondwanaland — and then, perversely, left me here to die?

The first stray flakes of snow began to fall. Oswaldo lay motionless on the ice along with his fellow Patagonians. Kiato was muttering, no doubt reciting a prayer in Japanese.

In minutes we would all be dead.

Never a great talker, Pegleg now gave voice. “Muerto” — death — he said.

The other tracker raised his head in agreement: “Seguro” —— for sure — was his contribution.

Suddenly furious that my epic journey, and my life, should end so disastrously, I searched for an answer. There was little to work with: no real equipment and a team which had lost all hope. But the rush of adrenalin seemed to have done something. The delirium had gone. Now, if I could only think what to do... I racked my chilled brains for a solution. The snow was falling faster.

“Cien mil diablos,” A hundred thousand devils? It was Oswaldo shouting. Devils? Magic? Then I remembered the ring, the magic ring.

“Kiato, quickly, give me the ring, I have a wish to make!”

When I had made my wish, I lay back, exhausted. It was then that the faint whisper of sound in the distance became the thudding of rotor-blades.

The ice patrol...

THE END

Glossary

Abyssinia: former name for Ethiopia.

Achhoot: The lowest Hindu caste. Often called “Untouchables”. Mahatma Gandhi renamed them Harijans, “people of God.”

Afzelia: Tree — bearing giant beans — common in the savannah of East Africa.

Aga: Sir; term of respect; loan-word from Persian and Turkish.

Alé: South American cult, related to Santería and Macumba, but devoted to evil.

Agua!: (Water!) Exclamation of delight.

AK47: see Kalashnikov.

Ameranthropoides loysii: A great ape, thought by some to roam the forests of Venezuela.

Amigo: Friend.

Baba: Father or old man. Loan-word from Arabic and Persian. In India may also mean “baby.”

Babu: Clerk, sometimes used as a pejorative.

Babalawo: Medicine man and spiritual guide involved in Macumba, Santería and also in ju-ju.

Bacalao: Salted dried cod, popular in Africa and South America.

Balatagum: Gum from the bully tree (used in making golf ball covers).

Banda: Small round — often temporary — hut.

Bedu: (Correctly Badawi), nomad of the Arab deserts. Plural: Bedouin.

Bindi: Dot — usually red — worn on the forehead by many Hindu women.

Bin: Small hand-rolled tobacco cigarette, popular in India and Pakistan.

Baobab: Tree of the bombax family, (Adansonia digitata) found in tropical Western regions of Africa, with a vast gray trunk and gourd-like fruit (“Monkey-Bread”), rich in vitamin C.

Bombilla: Metal tube used with a drinking vessel, usually a small gourd, from which mate is drunk.

Borfima: Object used by many West African secret societies; usually a bag filled with entrails, etc., believed to emanate magical power.

Brahmin: The highest caste in Hinduism.

Burqa: Full-length veil worn by some Muslim women in public.

Burrito: (“Little donkey”) term of affection.

Butwa: Secret society of West Africa, particularly Angola.

Buz Kashi: An Afghan game played by horsemen who score goals with a stuffed goatskin.

C-5: A plastic explosive with the consistency of marzipan, it was frequently used by the Mujahedin in Afghanistan.

Caballeros: Gentlemen.

Cachapas: Type of maize pancake (often served with cheese) popular in Argentina.

Candomblé: South American cult, related to Santeria and Macumba.

Caramba: (Appoximately) Good Heavens!

C.F.A.: Central Franc of Africa, the currency of Senegal and some other African nations.

Chadar: Shawl worn by women as a veil. Loan-word from Persian, in which it originally means “tent.”

Chai: Tea.

Changa”a: Strong home-brewed alcoholic beverage drunk in Kenya.

Chapati: Unleavened flour bread common in India.

Chappal: Sandal, common in Pakistan, correctly chapli.

Che: Argentine slang word (pronounced chay): “pal”.

Chor: Thief; Chor Bazaar, The Thieves’ Market.

Colt .38: Small American-made handgun.

Coss: A measure of distance; equal to 2.5 miles.

Creole: A pidgin dialect.

Crypto-zoology: Study of “hidden animals”; i.e. creatures of fable thought to exist in reality.

Dabba: Cylindrical steel lunch-box.

Dabba-wallah: Person who delivers a dabba.

Dalasi: National currency of Gambia.

Damascene: Inlay of one metal on another. Often gold on steel or silver/copper on brass.

Doh: Two.

Dragunov: Russian-made, highly accurate, sniper rifle.

Dravidian: Non-Aryan people of southern India and Sri Lanka: the Hindus, later arrivals, call themselves Aryans (“Arya”) by ancient tradition; as do the Persians (“Irani”).

Duiker: Small African antelope with short, spiky horns; of the genera Cephalophus or Sylvicapra.

Durbar: Court, correctly

Darbar Khana — The large reception room in an aristocratic eastern home.

Ek: One.

Filpai: Elephant foot. Central Asian stylized pattern, often used as a carpet design.

Ganesh: Hindu deity — popular in Mumbai — usually represented with the head of an elephant and the body of a man.

Gaucho: South American cowboy: particularly one in Argentina.

Glyptodon: Giant, armadillo-like creature, thought by some crypto-zoologists to live in the Patagonian highlands.

Gond: Dravidian, pre-Hindu people of Central India.

Gondwana: Region of Central India named after the Gonds.

Gondwanaland: Name given to the super-continent, thought to have comprized of India, Africa, and South America. Name derived from Gondwana.

Guru: Teacher or mentor; Guruji where -ji is a suffix denoting respect.

Halal: Food conforming to Islamic dietary requirements.

Haveli: Mansion; the home of a person of standing in India.

Hijra: Eunuch, a castrate in India.

Hindi: One of the most widely spoken languages of India.

Hindustan: India. Hombre: Fellow.

Hutu: Agriculturalist tribe located mainly in Rwanda and Burundi.

Jaborandi: Aromatic South American herb.

Jan: Affectionate or familiar suffix to a name: viz. Saira Jan.

Ji: (as in Guruji, etc.) term of respect, roughly “Sir”.

Ju-ju: Fetish used in a ritual or rite (from French joujou) but often now used to denote a West African system of magic.

Kalashnikov: Russian-made assault rifle; (also: Kalashnikov AK47; AK47).

Kamikaze: Japanese suicide pilot in World War II.

KHAD: Afghan Secret Police, operating during the Soviet attempted occupation of Afghanistan.

Kishmish: Mixture of dried fruits and nuts, popular in Afghanistan.

Kohl: Antimony; brittle, silvery metal, used powdered as eye make-up.

Lambada: Erotic South American dance.

Lingala: One of the main African languages of Zaire.

Lingo: The prophet of the Gond people of Central India.

Las Madres: “The Mothers” (of children who disappeared) during Argentina’s “dirty war” in the 1970s.

Lungi: Loincloth, worn in India and some neighboring countries. Loan-word from Persian, in which it correctly means “turban cloth”.

Luo: East African tribe, living largely in western Kenya.

Macanudo: Great!

Masai: Cattle-herding tribe found in Kenya and Tanzania.

Macumba: Brazilian cult based on Yoruba lore, involving spirit possession and the invocation of Yoruba deities in the form of Catholic saints.

Masala: Spice (Arabic-Persian loan-word: originally “stuff, materials”) in Arabic.

Matatu: Privately-owned van offering communal taxi rides: common throughout East Africa.

Mate: Herbal infusion, drunk in Argentina and other South American countries, made from the leaves and shoots of the yerba mate tree.

Matoke: Kind of stewed banana porridge, popular in Central and East Africa.

Mayombero: Form of Santería, based in Cuba, involving black magic and other rites.

Medeso: Central African dish prepared from black beans. Megatherium: Giant sloth with hooked claws, once believed to have inhabited southern regions of South America. Mi”G: Russian-built jet fighter.

Mira: Plant containing a stimulant, chewed in East Africa.

Mizee Juu: Term of endearment, literally “number one old man.”

Mughal: Dynasty of Mongols, of the line of Genghiz Khan, who conquered India and were its Emperors immediately before the British advent.

Mokele-Mbembe: Fabulous creature the size of an elephant, thought by some to live in central Africa.

Mujahed: One who fights in a holy war (literally: “struggler”). There are two kinds of Muslim Jihad: The Lesser, armed struggle, and The Greater, with the mind and tongue, according to the Traditions.

Mujahedin: Plural of Mujahed.

Naan: Unleavened bread eaten in Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.

Namaskar: Hindu greeting, of bowing the head and placing the palms together.

Namaste: Common Hindi greeting (literally: “I salute all divine qualities in you”); often accompanied by Namaskar.

Nodding donkey: Apparatus used for pumping oil or water from the ground.

Orisha: Deity venerated by the Yoruba tribe of West Africa; as well as by followers of Macumba and Santería.

Paan: Leaf of the betel palm, combined with an astringent mixture of areca nut, lime, tobacco etc.; the concoction — which is chewed — is very popular in India.

Paisa: One hundredth part of a rupee.

Pakol: Flat woolen hat worn in northern Pakistan (especially in Chitral), and in Afghanistan.

Pampas: Vast grassy plains covering much of southern Argentina.

Panch: Five.

Parsee: Persian Zoroastrians, who settled in Mumbai in 1670 at the invitation of the British.

Pashtu: Language of the Pashtuns (incorrectly called Pathans) the most common language in eastern Afghanistan.

Pashtun: Mountain people numbering some twelve million, fabled for their bravery, located mainly in eastern Afghanistan and north-west Pakistan.

Pavarti: Hindu deity, sacred also to the Gond tribe and patroness of Mumbai.

PIA: Pakistan International Airlines.

Pilau: (Correctly Palao) Central Asian spiced rice dish, popular in Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.

Rouss: (“Russian”) Afghan term for the Soviet invasion forces.

Rupia: Rupee, the currency of India and Pakistan.

SA-7 Grail Missile: A Russian-made heat-seeking ground-to-air rocket. Fired from the shoulder, its accuracy and small size have made it popular with guerrillas.

Sahib: Honorific title of address meaning “Sir” or “Mr.” in India. Arabic loan-word, it signifies both Friend, Owner and Sir in various usages.

Samburu: Pastoral tribe found in central and northern Kenya, thought to be related to the Masai.

Sarnosa: Fried pastry triangle filled with meat or cooked vegetables.

Santería: South American cult, based on West African lore: involving invocations made to Yoruba deities depicted as Catholic saints.

Saree: Long piece of cloth worn by women in India as a robe.

Sayed: (Lord, Prince) Title borne by descendants of the Prophet Mohammed.

Seppuku: Japanese ritual suicide.

Serengi: Stringed Indian musical instrument.

Shah: Title (literally “King”) borne by descendants of the Prophet Mohammed, who also trace their ancestry from the Sassanian Emperors. In India, occurs as a surname among Hindus: who are not of this family.

Shalwar kameez: Pyjama suit worn by men and women, popular in Pakistan. Originating in Iran, its correct name is Shalwar wa qamisa: “Trousers and shirt.”

Shashlik: Pieces of meat and vegetable cooked on a skewer over charcoal.

Shilling: Currency used in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania.

Silverback: Dominant male of a troop of mountain gorillas, the hairs on whose back may have turned silvery gray with age.

Songo: Central African dish prepared from stewed cassava.

Sitar: Indian stringed instrument, similar to the lute, with a long fretted neck.

Stinger: American-made ground-to-air missile.

Sushi: Japanese dish, usually of bite-sized pieces of rice and raw fish.

Swami: A Hindu religious instructor.

Talwar: Long Indian Saber.

Tanpura: Large Indian stringed instrument made from a giant gourd.

Thali: Metal tray on which several small individual dishes are placed; originally from south India, now found across the country.

Tilapia: Freshwater fish similar to perch, found in Lake Victoria and other African waterways, forming an important part of local diet.

Tonka beans: Fragrant black bean from a tree in America’s tropical regions; used in perfume manufacture. Thought in Venezuela to be lucky.

Toxodont: Giant rhinoceros-like creature covered with coarse hair and thought by some to live in the mountains of Patagonia.

Tutsi: Cattle-herding tribe living mainly in Rwanda and Burundi.

UCLA: University of California, at Los Angeles.

Ugali: Starchy maize flour meal, forming an important part of the East African diet.

Umbanda: South American cult, related to Macumba and found particularly in Brazil.

UZI: Compact Israeli-made 9-millimetre machine-gun.

Wolof: African language spoken in Gambia and parts of Senegal. Takes its name from the Wolof tribe.

Yataghan: Turkish Saber — often slightly curved. The hilt, which has no guard, generally ends in two ear-like protrusions. Also used by Afghans.

Yerba mate: The Ilex paraguayensis tree, from whose dried leaves and shoots the mate infusion is made.

Yoruba: People of southwest Nigeria, Togo and Benin: whose lore forms the basis of Macumba and Santería.

HOUSE OF THE TIGER KING

A Jungle Obsession

TAHIR SHAH

SECRETUM MUNDI PUBLISHING

Contents

Arab proverb

Introduction

ONE - Blistered Feet

TWO - Qualifications of a Traveller

THREE - Size of the Party

FOUR - Conditions in Success and Failure in Travel

FIVE - Presents and Articles for Payment

SIX - Reputed Dangers of Travel

SEVEN - Engaging Natives

EIGHT - Bones

NINE - Warm Carcasses

TEN - Porters for Delicate Instruments

ELEVEN - Wasp and Scorpion Stings

TWELVE - Drowning

THIRTEEN - Fever

FOURTEEN - Good Temper

FIFTEEN - Pitching A Tent

SIXTEEN - Portable Food

SEVENTEEN - Bivouac

EIGHTEEN - Seizing Food

EPILOGUE - On Concluding the Journey

Glossary

Bibliography

A Tomás, un gran viajero y un gran amigo

A journey is a fragment of Hell

Arab proverb

House of the Tiger King

Introduction

House of the Tiger King was a journey into an obsession – an obsession with the bleakest, most magical, most dangerous, jungle on Earth.

The expedition was characteristic for me in that I hadn’t given more than a passing thought to the book I might write at the end of it.

Like so many other quests on which I have embarked, I never really considered writing it up. Doing so was the furthest thing from my mind.

When you are shaking each night from dengue fever, the flesh on your feet rotted away, worms boring out from the soft skin of the inner thighs, the idea of a comfortable writing room is a distant luxury.

My quest for the lost city of Paititi – the greatest lost city of the Americas – was about keeping myself going, and about keeping my men with from deserting me.

It was a tortuous journey, one that almost broke us all.

Looking back to the initial plan, to scour deep jungle for a vast lost city, I cringe at my ingenuousness. But, more than that, I can only shrink away at the absurd desire to find a “lost” city. How stupid could I have been to think that there was merit in the mission?

After all, there is only one reason to embark on such a quest – to become the most feted, revered, explorer in existence.

Now that I look back, I glimpse that there are far more important things in life than attaining the adulation of some meaningless prize. And, I am ashamed at having pitted myself against the jungle.

But, then again, without the lure of the quest in the first place, I might not have been tested, and the ripened writer that I am, may have remained as guileless as I was before.

In the jungles of Madre de Dios, I learned humility. I learned, too, that there is very little difference between a Machiguenga warrior and someone from our over-complicated preposterous world.

More than that, I discovered – as Pancho used to tell me – there is no reason to strive for a lost city, one empty of people, a sloughed huddle of broken homes.

Find Paititi, and the jungle would be chopped down. Urban sprawl would quickly take its place, the tribesmen employed as bell-hops in a hundred horrific hotels.

And so, we decided that if we ever came upon the ruins, we would pretend that we had never found them at all…

Tahir Shah

ONE

BLISTERED FEET

To prevent the feet from blistering, it is a good plan to soap the inside of the stocking before setting out, making a thick lather all over it. A raw egg broken into the boot, before putting it on, greatly softens the leather.

The Art of Travel, Francis Galton, 1872

The men had lost their smiles and their cheap grins.

Their cheeks were gaunt and unshaven, their eyes ringed with dark circles. I felt their hatred, their judgment. They would have killed me if they had thought they could get away with it. But their fatigue was so extreme that none of them could devise a plan by which to end my life.

We crouched on the shore, cold, crunching pebbles beneath our boots. No one had the energy to speak. We had progressed, or regressed, to a state of dumbness. Conversation merely reminded us of the suffering. With a fleeting telepathic glance I could now quiz the porters about their loads, tell them to rest, or give the detested order to move on.

The canopy of jungle hung like a tremendous barricade, concealing us from our world. There was an energy about it, a despicable power, a sense of consciousness. It watched you, scanning your movements, observing minutely as you stumbled ahead through the river. Thank God for the river. It was the only blessed thing for a thousand miles. The slick ribbon of water had allowed us to traverse the densest cloud forest on earth, Madre de Dios, the Mother of God.

Morale was low, and with every mile it waned a little more. We had all lost the skin on our feet, eroded by the sand in the strong current, and each man had succumbed to the fits of dengue fever that savaged us in the long, insect-ridden nights. There was diarrhoea too, but the most accursed affliction was the guinea worms. They bored out from the soft tissue of our inner thighs mocking our feebleness.

The team of twelve porters had been chosen for their brute strength. It seemed like a lifetime ago that I had hired them, down at their village where the river was wide. They had been all smiles then, boasting of their muscles, their courage, their love of adversity. It had been I with the doubt, the fear, the dread. But after sixteen weeks in the jungle our roles had reversed. I had lost all fear and all doubt. I knew now that the ruins were up there, waiting for us. I was certain of it. It was a simple matter of perseverance, pushing ahead behind Pancho, our guide. Endure the unendurable a little longer, and the greatest lost city in history, Paititi, the El Dorado of the Incas, would be mine.

As we crouched there on our haunches, pack straps biting into our shoulders, Pancho straightened his left index finger, then directed it slowly towards the top of a mountainous ridge. The men took a sudden breath. No one dared say a word.

“Arriba, up,” he said, in a whisper. “Up there.”

Following the course of the river was arduous, but at least it was possible. We all knew that hacking up into the undergrowth would be tantamount to suicide. As leader of the expedition, it fell to me to drag the others forward. But men stripped of health and enthusiasm are dead weight. They had no interest in the instant glory that is showered on the man who finds the ultimate goal of exploration: a Lost City.

The porters were only half the problem. Also in tow was a small knot of Europeans: two Swedes, one Ukranian and a listless Bulgarian. The Swedes were diehard film-makers – a father and his son. They were making a documentary of my quest. The Bulgarian was making a film of them making a film about me. As for the Ukranian, he was a millionaire banker who was paying his own way. I had agreed to allow the Swedes to come with me in the hope it would lead to a gravy-train of TV funding. That bonanza never came, so the Swedes leeched off the banker and I leeched off them.

Drowning in tripods and cameras, film-stock and lights, the documentary team threatened to snuff out the frail flame it sought to preserve on celluloid. The vast quantity of their gear, strapped to the porters’ backs, made for painfully slow progress. And now Pancho was pointing to the ridge.

I led him aside. Fine-boned, nervous of outsiders and unable ever to look me in the eye, he squatted on an uneven granite block and glanced away as I addressed him.

“Are you sure, Pancho?”

He did not answer. He never answered.

“Pancho, you know that climbing the ridge will kill the men?”

The fragile warrior of the Machiguenga tribe remained silent. He extended his index finger for a second time and poked it mutely at the solid canopy of trees.

“Is that the place... where you found the ruins as a young man?”

Pancho’s cheeks lifted for an instant as he smiled, a faint glimmer of pleasure. “Sí, arriba, arriba.”

I instructed the men to untie their packs and gather round. They were suspicious of my charity. Never before had I granted permission to remove packs during a march. Ours was not a pleasure trip to the French Riviera or the Costa de Sol: we were on an expedition where the only certainty was pain. The porters might have hated me, but I do believe that they appreciated my consistency.

Very slowly, they rested their burdens on the pebbles, and clustered round.

“We have arrived at the crossroads,” I said. “It is here that we leave the river and take a new road. Up there.”

I motioned to the swirling fog seeping between the cordon of trees. It filtered down to the river like a phantom, rinsing our faces in moisture.

“There is no road there,” said Julio, the tallest and most confident of the porters. Unlike the others, who had been broken long before, Julio remained resilient despite the appalling conditions. “There is no path, no way ahead,” he declared. “Si entramos a la selva estamos muertos, enter the forest and we are dead.”

The other porters regarded him as their leader, and when he spoke, they listened. It would have been wiser never to have hired Julio, but I had done so in the hope that I could dominate him. Control their leader and I would control the porters. My plan had been flawed, for Julio was a radical. He had no fear, but used an abiding sense of terror to influence his peers.

“Los hombres no entrarán en la selva, the men will not enter the jungle,” he said, with calm assurance. “There is danger in there.... El Tigre está esperando. The Tiger is waiting.”

That word was in the air again, that infuriating word. Our search for the last refuge of the Incas, known to the Machiguenga tribe as the House of the Tiger King, had been blighted by the fear of an imaginary cat. The entire team knew as well as I that tigers are not native to the Americas, but to them Tigre was not flesh and blood. They would have been able to deal with that. To them, the Tiger was a specter, an apparition of an ancient empire, the ghost of the jungle. It was invisible, haunting, terrifying in the most elemental way. The porters would speak of it at night as they lazed beneath their flea-ridden blankets. Julio would tell them of the myth. He would whisper it as a slow incantation, syllable by syllable, word by word. My Spanish is unimpressive, but I would find myself drawn in, as terrified as the others.

The quest for a lost city erodes your body, damaging you beyond all reason. But it is your mind that bears the heaviest toll. Listen to the doubters, the worriers and the weak, and the vaguest hope of success evaporates. The men despised me because I pushed them as hard as I pushed myself. I was fortified by the prospect of triumph; I could already taste the glory. But the porters had nothing to keep them going.

The only tool I knew strong enough to mobilise them was to dent their sense of machismo. They might have been exhausted, covered in sores and riddled with worms, but calling them a soft-skinned bunch of sissies had a magical effect. Each one would grit his teeth, wearily pronounce his manliness, and carry on. But after weeks of overuse the efficiency of this mobilising device had weakened.

As we paused there on the riverbank, I launched into my usual harangue, lampooning the team’s pathetic state as a sordid mishmash of femininity. None said a word, except Julio.

Raising himself to his full height, well over six feet, he lowered his eyelids, stretched his arms towards the trees, fingers splayed. Then, as we all watched, motionless, he began to whistle. Monotone, echoing, unforgettable, the sound swept round us. I wondered if it was a spell of some kind, but there was nothing protective about it.

The porters cowered together rigidly. Their leader was communicating directly with El Tigre, the phantom of the jungle. I shifted my gaze from Julio to the men. They looked on, like believers witnessing the miracle of a saint, the whites of their eyes swollen with conviction and with fear.

“El Tigre me ha hablado, the Tiger has spoken to me,” Julio said, when he had finished. “Enter the forest and he will gorge on our blood tonight.”

Forty minutes of silence passed. My mind was racing but I dared not speak. Utter the wrong words, and the expedition would end right there, on the rough pebble shore of the Palatoa river. I had come too far to give up the search for Paititi, especially now that Pancho was at last pointing to the trees. So we sat there, each waiting for the other to break.

All I could think of was Henry Stanley, the nineteenth-century explorer, celebrated for finding Livingstone in central Africa, and famed, too, for his barbarity. Stanley would think nothing of having dissenters thrown in irons, or lashed until the verge of death. He was heartless and cruel, but he had a knack of keeping his men going.

What would Stanley have done in my situation? I wondered. Perhaps he would have used force, threatening to shoot anyone who fell behind. But there comes a stage at which a man would rather die cleanly by a bullet than by the unknown terror of the phantom in the forest. I believe Stanley would have resorted to a more cunning tactic. He would have taken control of what the men held most dear.

I ordered the porters to unload their packs and display the contents on the lean stretch of beach. They complied willingly: they liked nothing more than to stare in wonderment at the tantalizing array of equipment and supplies. Even though we had stripped down again and again, there was still no shortage of gear: giant green tarpaulins for the evening camps, climbing tackle, machetes and sharpening stones, lanterns, shovels and saws, pots, pans, kerosene and gasoline, and even a metal-detector for finding gold. The food consisted of rice, beans, spices, dried jungle meat, and an assortment of dead birds trussed up in a sack. Beside the birds lay a rotting British army kit-bag. I spread its neck wide and observed the contents. As I did so, I realized I had found the men’s one weakness. The bag contained Pot Noodles.

Ours was an expedition born of economy. There had been no funds for upmarket rations. I had spent my own meager budget on the cheapest, lightest food I could find – six hundred Pot Noodles. I had never expected them to become an obsession, but however weary their state, the porters could always be coaxed to continue a little further through driving rain by the mere suggestion of a Pot Noodle at the end.

After months in the jungle we were down to the last dozen white plastic pots. The men regarded them as a symbol of extraordinary sophistication, fare fashioned from the most advanced additives and E-numbers.

I lashed up the neck of the Pot Noodle kit-bag and slung it on to my shoulder. The porters cringed anxiously, then gasped, as I tramped up the steep, root-encrusted bank into the jungle. Down on the shore I could make out Julio reminding the others of the terror of El Tigre: “Enter the forest and you will not come out alive!” he yelled.

But his companions did not listen: there was too much at stake for them not to follow. There were still Pot Noodles to be eaten. They scrabbled the equipment into the packs, fell into line and marched behind me into the twilight. Left with no choice, Julio joined the rear of the procession.

Entering the cloud forest was like crawling beneath a great velvet curtain of secrecy to witness some clandestine ritual. What struck me first was the silence, and the lack of animal life. A million eyes might have been watching our wretched procession, and as many ears listening to the Ting! Ting! Ting! of machetes cleaving vines, but they were invisible. The only obvious form of life was that of the insects. The ground between the trees was crisscrossed with trails of soldier ants. The trees themselves were striped up and down with termite tracks, which ran to the nests, the great balls of clay, hanging like lanterns in the uppermost branches. Giant moths flapped across our faces, brushing the sweat from our cheeks, then flitted back to the instant camouflage of the jungle floor.

We pushed into the suffocation of trees, drowning in perspiration, impelled by a kind of madness. It must have been madness, for no sane man would ever have left the river and ventured into that green hell. The fact that the men were trudging forward gave me great satisfaction and renewed my energy. If I could keep them going a little further, the ruins of the lost city would be within reach. More comforting still was that Pancho had taken the initiative and, for the first time, he was leading the way. I had spent weeks courting him, coaxing him. Without Pancho there was no chance of success.

Like most Machiguenga, he went barefoot and, like all the others, he took delight in cackling at my clumsiness. Behind the pretended veil of political correctness, our society so often ridicules the primitiveness of tribal people. But spend a moment with them under the sprawling canopy, and you grasp at once the proficiency of their own society. The Machiguenga are masters of jungle movement, as serene in their world as ballerinas in ours.

The team chopped a route towards the ridge and, as they did so, my bitterness evaporated. Until then I had felt that Pancho was flirting with my greed, luring me on with a vision of unattainable victory. I would spend hours watching him, desperate to understand. I knew that if I could get inside his mind, and see what he was thinking, there was a real chance of success. Yet I realized now that Pancho wasn’t going to do all the work for me. If I was lucky, he would point out the way, but if I wanted to find Paititi, then in many ways I was on my own. In Pancho’s world you had to work out the answers for yourself.

Three hours after leaving the river, we found the first block of stone. Straight-edged and uniform, measuring four feet by two, it was obviously the work of Inca stonemasons. You could make out the subtle chisel marks on the sides. I wondered if it was a marking post of some kind, a pointer to the ruins. We excavated the surrounding area, hacking wildly with machetes. Three more of the stones were unearthed, and what looked like a lintel for a door.

I applauded Pancho and the others, and roared the order to continue at full speed to the crest of the ridge. Six of the men were armed with machetes; they sliced a narrow corridor through the oppressive foliage. The ascent was brutal beyond description. The porters heaved themselves up a step at a time, the agony framed in their faces.

Halfway up the ridge we made a camp. The men were reluctant to stay in the jungle, but the prospect of a piping hot Pot Noodle was too much for all except Julio. He stormed back down to the river with Alfonso’s ancient shotgun, ranting that El Tigre would feast on our blood.

The ground was so uneven that we cut staves of cedar wood and created a crude platform across which we lay. We were used to a good deal of space at the camps pitched near the river’s edge. The situation was different in the jungle. Every inch of ground had to be earned, and was done so through much exertion with the blade.

I was pleased that Julio had chosen to leave us: it quashed the talk of malevolent spirits. Giovanni, who usually prepared the food, heated a little water gathered from sections of giant bamboo and dished up the Pot Noodles. The porters’ fatigue was eased by the sudden injection of monosodium glutamate: the chemical had an impressive ability to restore one’s strength; I had noticed that it helped to protect us from mosquito bites as well.

The Pot Noodle appetizer was followed by the usual main course of jungle birds stewed with an assortment of extra-bony fish. Copious hot food is the only thing that can keep tired men from mutiny. My great fear was for the next day: after breakfast the treasured Pot Noodles would all be gone.

It poured with torrential rain all night. The water cascaded downhill and drenched us as we fought to sleep. I drifted in and out of consciousness, hounded by a recurring nightmare... a phantom with foot-long fangs, coarse whiskers and wicked soot-black eyes.

Before the first shafts of pale gray light had cut through the trees, we were woken to the report of Julio’s gun. The sound was close by. A second later, a large, bulky creature was falling downwards, crashing through the lattice of branches. It smashed on to the bottle-green tarpaulin under which we lay huddled in a sodden line. From the weight I could tell immediately it was no bird. Julio leapt through the trees to claim his prize – a full-grown howler monkey, the size of a toddler.

As the hunter knew well, the one vice that appalled me was the killing of monkeys. The animal was skinned, dismembered, and sliced up for breakfast without delay. Pancho built a small fire, fueled it with a fresh termite nest, and soon had the primate roasting. I had eaten monkey before, while a guest of the Shuar, a tribe in the Upper Amazon formerly celebrated for making tsantsas, shrunken heads. I cannot say that I shared the other men’s enthusiasm for the meat, largely on account of the worms.

We set off once the last strands of flesh had been consumed, and the bones shattered for their marrow. Despite the protein, the porters were weak and getting weaker. They craved carbohydrate, but lack of it was not life-threatening. More worrying was that one might slip and we would have another casualty. As any platoon commander knows, an injured man is a terrible liability, requiring one or two others to attend him. A few days before one of the porters, Francisco, had vomited blood one morning. By lunchtime he had lost his sight. Going blind in deep jungle has to be the most fearful prospect imaginable. Fortunately Francisco’s vision had returned. Suspecting he had had a mild stroke, I had been forced to leave him in a cave with a trusted companion.

The main thing on my mind now was to push on to the top of the ridge. From my research I knew the Incas built simple stone roads along ridges, and on high land, linking up distant points within their empire. Others who have searched for Paititi have talked of a secret stone road running north-west through the Cordillera. I was certain that if I could discover it, I would find the city. Every night for months I had studied the contours on the maps, and had replayed Pancho’s story through my mind.

As a young man searching for new hunting grounds, he had ventured far up the Rio Palatoa, before hacking into the jungle. There, beside a deep expanse of crystal water, he said he had found a series of large ruins. Digging at the foot of a towering stone wall, he had discovered a metal hatchet, its blade highlighted in gold. Pancho took the hatchet back to his father, who was the tribal chief. Rather than praising his son, the old warrior exhorted him to return the weapon at once, and to forget about it for fear of activating a curse. El Tigre was waiting to punish not only him but the entire tribe, he said. Pancho did as his father bade him. Three decades passed, but he could not forget about the ruins or the golden hatchet.

It had taken me months to get Pancho involved in the expedition, partly because the tribe had forbidden him to co-operate, and partly because he saw it as an empty cause. As far as Pancho was concerned, there was no reason to search for the ruins. Why look for a ruined city, overgrown and deserted, when there are plenty of live cities, bustling with people and traffic? Pancho had heard the tales of civilization from the missionaries. They had spoken of the wickedness of development, a wickedness that the warrior had found appealing. They had told him of Lima’s dens of vice, the “high-class” brothels where girls line up in tall shoes, their mouths circled in paint, the color of scarlet macaws. They had told him, too, of meeting-places where immoral men served up sinful, intoxicating drinks, places at which there was always plenty of liquor to go round. But, best of all, he liked the sound of the third fantasy: a house with drinks and colored lights that flash on and off as music plays, even though no one’s playing it.

Pancho’s dream was the mirror image of my own. He longed to go to the place of which the missionaries had spoken, to carouse, to drink till he dropped, dance, and to have a look at how the other world lived. We had made a pact: if Pancho took me to the deserted ruins of Paititi, I would take him to the city of Cusco.

In the early afternoon we came upon more hand-cut blocks of stone. This time they were standing upright, like sentries. We scraped away the moss and lichen to find them gargoyle-gray beneath. My investigation of them was brief: I feared that a prolonged stop would cause the men to desert. Julio had been speaking of the specter again, and someone had reminded him of the curse. Such talk had the immediate effect of obliterating what little optimism we had earned through the climb.

A few feet on we reached a sheering granite rock face. It towered upward like the supporting wall of a medieval cathedral, indomitable and encrusted in lichens and silky olive-green moss. The men slumped at its base. With Pancho’s help I managed eventually to get a rope to the top. It was threaded through the mass of roots and the medley of branches. One look at the porters and I knew full well that they would not be going on. They were not tribesmen, but members of a chainsaw gang whose ancestors had emigrated from the mountains to the forest. For them, the jungle was an awe-inspiring backdrop, a twilight zone of life to be felled as swiftly as possible. None of them understood the attraction of seeing a tree in the perpendicular position.

The granite rock face was a natural parting point, a crossroads, a place of decision and indecision. I didn’t ask for volunteers to accompany Pancho and me because the men had proved their honor. Perhaps it was at that moment I should have pressed them harder than before, but I had lost my nerve. The last push was my own challenge, a contest for myself against myself.

The film crew were tough beyond words, but their batteries were exhausted, and the Peruvian cameraman suffered from vertigo. We whispered goodbye, and made a plan to keep in touch by radio.

I slipped on the climbing harness, attached an ascender and began the excruciating climb in search of the stone road. Pancho had shunned the rope and scaled the rock face barefoot, with great ease. A glance up and I could make out his spindly frame waiting for me between the trees far above. A glance down and the cluster of men was smaller than before. A moment later I looked down for the last time, but they were gone.

TWO

Qualifications of a Traveller

If you have health, a great craving for adventure, at least a moderate fortune, and can set your heart on a definite object, which old travelers do not think impracticable, then – travel by all means.

The Art of Travel

My search for the last refuge of the Incas had begun in the snug surroundings of our illusionary world. Only a man who has his health, a full stomach and wears clean clothes would ever entertain the notion of tracking down the greatest lost city on Earth, or venturing from such comfort into the bitter reality of the jungle.

My obsession with the ruins had begun a decade before, when my eyes had been drawn to the cursed name “Paititi” in the footnote of an obscure historical text. From the first moment I read the word, I sensed it beckoning, daring me to try my luck. It would have been so easy to turn the page and move on. But, instead, I gazed coldly at the type, took a deep breath and shut the book.

Once inside me, the corrosive allure of Paititi ran wild. For months, then years, I tried to suppress all thoughts of the Incas and their lost treasure. I undertook other projects, other journeys, but Paititi was never far from my mind. Like so many before me, my motivation was founded on greed, an overwhelming greed. Not for gold, but for glory.

Locate a lost city and your name is etched in the history books. Find Paititi, and I would be transformed overnight from a humble traveler into the world’s most famous explorer.

To have a hope of discovering the lost city, I knew the key lay in the archives of the Spanish conquistadores. They had documented their invasion of the Americas in fine detail, but they were too busy suppressing native people to piece together the clues. For months I studied the history, reading and rereading the chronicles of Francisco de Jerez, Garcilaso de la Vega, Cristóbal de Molina, and of Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala. The clues would be hidden, for they had eluded explorers, adventurers, archaeologists and warrior-priests for almost five hundred years. Yes, they would be concealed well, waiting to be teased out — that is, if there were any clues at all.

In the West, we are brought up to solve a puzzle with fragments of collected information, rather than by placing ourselves in the mind of the person who devised the riddle. By steeping myself in the Spanish chronicles, detailing the Incas’ daily lives, folklore and beliefs, I hoped to understand how they thought. Understand that and, I hoped, I would be closer to rooting out the trail to Paititi.

When the Spanish first arrived at the coastline of Peru, in the first half of the sixteenth century, they were searching for El Dorado, a land of unimaginable wealth. An Indian chief in Panama had spoken of a kingdom to the south where the only known metal was gold: where it was used for pots and pans, plates and jewelry, for hunting bows, ritualistic daggers and flutes. The conquistadores made a beeline southwards.

They found a vast empire that had been established only a century before, known to its people as Tahuantinsuya, the Land of Four Quarters. Centred at the capital of Cusco, the realm stretched from Chinchaysuyu in the north to Lake Titicaca in the south, and from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to the endless cloud forest of Madre de Dios in the east. It was a land of contrasts: stark altiplano, seething jungle and snow-capped mountains, populated by a people whose barbaric rituals shocked even the cruel sensibilities of the conquistadores. The religious figurehead of the society was the scion of the sun itself, the Inca Atahualpa.

Had it not been cut short by such an unlikely foreign invasion, the Inca Empire would surely have endured for centuries, amassing even more treasure than it did. And what of the treasure? The Spanish imprisoned Atahualpa, who feared imminent execution. He had noticed the invaders’ obsession with gold and silver and, although surprised by it, he proposed what must surely be the most famous ransom in history He scratched a line high on one wall of his cell, and pledged to fill the chamber once with gold and twice with silver in exchange for his freedom. Amazed and delighted, the Spanish readily agreed. One can only imagine their astonishment: the room measured more than twenty feet by seventeen, and the line on the wall was higher than a man: a volume of more than two thousand cubic feet.

Gold and silver were ushered forth from across the Inca Empire, a quantity that exceeded the Spaniards’ wildest dreams. As one would expect, the pledge to Atahualpa was broken; the conquerors executed him, then set out to plunder his capital. But in Cusco they found relatively little gold. A rumor circulated that the bulk of the golden treasure had been hurried from the city by the Incas’ supporters. It was said that they had retreated deep into the jungle, east of Cusco, where they established a magnificent city in the most inaccessible corner of the cloud forest. They called it Paititi.

I tried to put myself in the mind of the Incas, asking myself how they might have secretly passed to one another the whereabouts of their El Dorado. With the conquistadores all around them, they would no doubt have resorted to ciphers, unlikely to arouse the suspicions of the invading Spanish. But they had no tradition of writing, no paper or ink.

We know that they placed relatively little importance on gold. A civilization without iron, they favoured the soft yellow metal for its easy malleability, and regarded it as utilitarian rather than as a valuable commodity. The Incas placed utmost value on their fine textiles, woven in alpaca and vicuña wool. Early conquistador reports tell of the first meetings with the Incas, who came alongside the Spanish ships in flimsy craft. They presented the European visitors with exquisite woven garments, their highest honor. Horrified at what they assumed to be an open insult, the Spanish set fire to the textiles and chased the Incas away.

The fabulous arts of weaving and embroidery had been developed by the ancient communities at Paracas and Nazca on the Peruvian coast, which flourished almost two thousand years ago. It was from them that the Incas acquired their knowledge and further developed the craft, using it to record information and ideas. These embroidered patterns, known as quellca, a word that is sometimes used to mean “writing”, might well have been employed to conceal the location of Paititi.

I studied hundreds of Inca textiles, hoping to decipher the meanings of the geometric patterns; and I spent a great deal of time attempting to trace the finest Inca textile ever made. It was sent to King Philip II of Spain in 1570 for the monastic walls at El Escorial, but it has disappeared without trace. One of the greatest historical treasures ever to come from the Americas, it was probably thrown away.

My studies of the quellca embroideries led me to consider what treasure the Incas would have taken to Paititi for safe keeping. If they did not consider gold the ultimate possession, then perhaps they would have taken their textiles instead. I knew from previous experience that the humidity of the rainforest is ruinous for cloth. If Paititi had lain in the jungle, there was little hope of any woven riches remaining intact. None the less, the draw for me was the ruins themselves, the vast stone walls like those at Machu Picchu, which would surely form the foundation of the lost city.

My obsession with Paititi, and the glory that finding it could bring, gnawed away at me. I traveled to Peru in search of the Birdmen of the Upper Amazon, a project that culminated in a book on the subject. It gave me the opportunity to do much more research, and to quiz hundreds of Peruvians on what they knew of the Incas and their last place of refuge.

I spent months combing library stacks, trawling through miles of manuscripts, many written more than four centuries ago. There were so many books, but so few clues. The only one was the recurring name Madre de Dios, the vast impenetrable jungle, east of the Andes, on the southern cusp of the Amazon.

The lure of the last great lost city of the Americas had not attracted me alone: at least a dozen of the world’s most seasoned explorers had just returned or were about to leave for the cloud forest. Teams from the United States and the UK, Poland, Australia and Peru itself had isolated a relatively small “hot zone”, which lay between the Piñi-Piñi and Palatoa rivers. Somewhere in there, they all claimed, lay the ruins of a tremendous civilization. Although, geographically speaking, the area is small, it’s regarded as the densest stretch of jungle in the world. One adventurer told me: “You could hide New York City in there and walk right by without knowing it.” He added that the race was reaching fever pitch. “If Paititi exists at all,” he said firmly, “it will be found in the next six months.”

That prediction got my blood racing. It might be the last chance I would ever get at easy fame. I had been fixated by the lure of the Inca stronghold for too long for the prize to be snatched by some other less deserving adventurer. I bought the cheapest flight to Lima I could find. It was scheduled to leave in a week’s time, on Christmas Day.

Unlike most of the competition, I didn’t have corporate sponsorship or a fat expense account. Nor could I boast a support team of scientists, or high-level contacts in the Peruvian government. I didn’t have a headquarters either, or much in the way of specialist equipment. I owned a second-hand GPS, but hadn’t a clue how it worked. It was just for show, proof of my serious intentions, as was my Gold Bug metal-detector, which I had bought on my Ethiopian search for King Solomon’s mines. Like a rebel fighter in a guerrilla war, I viewed my weaknesses as strengths. I was lean and mean, free from excess people and a glut of equipment. I had no one to report to, and no one except myself to please.

My wife rolled her eyes when I explained that I had to leave our poky flat in London’s East End almost at once. The jungle was calling me, I said theatrically. She was very understanding, considering our little daughter’s first birthday was a few days away.

I bought a copy of Loot, a newspaper with classified ads, and withdrew two hundred pounds from my bank account. I spread the sheets of advertisements on the sitting-room floor, and searched for equipment worthy of a budget lost-city expedition. In less than an hour, I had found an old Zodiac rubber dinghy, a pair of used jungle boots, two shovels, six canvas kit-bags, three tarpaulins and a pair of cheap lanterns. With the money that was left, I went to a local hardware store and bought some plastic rubble sacks, the kind used by builders to carry gravel. I splashed out on some extra batteries and a roll of bin-liners too. Lastly, I went down to Safeway with my credit card and snapped up some packet soup and their entire stock of Pot Noodles. Previous experience had taught me that any expedition marches on its stomach.

It always amazes me how much money people spend on nonessential knick-knacks and mountaineering food at camping shops. A whole industry has developed touting nicely packaged rubbish to ingenuous adventurers. You’re far better off buying everything second-hand, from a hardware store, supermarket or, better still, on a market stall in the country you’re visiting.

These days, explorers tend to take with them from the start everything they expect to need. It’s an inefficient way of operating; you get lumbered down and can hardly move. It’s wiser to take only a basic core of equipment and to compensate by making anything you find you need. On rough journeys, ingenuity is the mother of success. The Victorians were masters of exploration and of solving problems, and they turned problem solving into an art form. They could knock up just about anything from a few feet of waxed canvas, some stout cord and a cleft stick or two. For those who wanted handy tips on how to bivouac, build a camp, or cross quicksand in heavy rain, there was an invaluable guide entitled The Art of Travel. The book’s editor was Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin and a renowned scholar and adventurer in his own right. Galton’s book, which was first published by John Murray in 1855, ran to four editions, the final and most comprehensive one appearing in 1872. It was carried by explorers and soldiers, missionaries and government officials, and is an encyclopaedia of ingenuity. Much of it is regarded now as horrendously politically incorrect — especially the section on “the management of savages” — but it contains many titbits of invaluable information. Fortunately, The Art of Travel had recently been reprinted. It was the last purchase I made and, without doubt, the best value.

The day after buying the equipment, I was talking to a television-producer friend, blustering on about my grand plans to find the lost city of Paititi. Like my wife, he rolled his eyes for, again like her, he had heard of my grand quests before. Just before we parted, he said that a friend of his, a Swedish film-maker, might be interested in coming along. I barked at the thought of European company; my friend pointed out the benefit. Find Paititi, and the film-maker could record my discovery: surely it would only add to my glory. After all, who would have cared about the lunar landings if we had not received the grainy footage of Armstrong climbing down from the NASA module on to the dusty lunar surface?

I took the Swede’s number and gave him a call. We arranged to meet next day in an East End coffee-house where the grease on the walls reflected the mud on the floor. I lurked at the back, away from the usual assortment of weirdos, a soft-covered book of Inca textiles on the table before me. As I sat there, staring at the geometric designs, two men approached. One was a good twenty years older than the other. They were both dressed in leather, the first in black suede, the younger in tan-colored buckskin. The older was short, five foot three at the most, with dark, receding hair, swarthy complexion, pursed lips, and shoulders that were noticeably relaxed, so much so that his hands hung down at his sides like cured hams in a butcher’s window. The younger had long, russet-brown hair, which covered his ears and curled down over the collar of a torn denim shirt. His face was tight and energetic, partially concealed by a straggly beard and moustaches. He looked as if he had stepped from a seventies pop-idol poster.

The pair introduced themselves as Leon and David Flamholc. They worked as a team, the father producing, the son directing. They made art-house feature films in Sweden, but they had come to London to break into the English language. Sweden was too small, too conventional, they confided darkly, and its people were too easily shocked.

I told them about my plan to venture deep into the densest jungle in the world on the trail of the fleeing Incas. “I could do with someone to document the ruins,” I said.

I expected a barrage of questions, beginning with “Do you really think you’ll find the lost city?” But the Swedes didn’t ask any questions at all. They cackled enthusiastically in their mother tongue, and noted down a few details. As they did so, I noticed a man with a large video camera standing outside the café. He was pointing the device in our direction, filming through the filthy window. “Do you know him?” I asked.

“He follows us everywhere,” said Leon, distantly.

That afternoon I visited the hallowed halls of the Royal Geographical Society in London’s South Kensington. I was in search of a map. The RGS takes the subject of exploration very seriously indeed, and tends to frown on low-budget expeditions. As far as they are concerned, the business of exploration is best left to professionals.

The secretary wrote my name in a ledger and ushered me past long, dark oils of the great explorers, Stanley, Livingstone, Burton, and some others of equal fame. Then he marched me down a corridor, striding solemnly as if we were pall-bearers in a funeral cortege. A central carpet, laid over the parquet, cushioned the sound of our steps. Along the corridor ran a finely tooled display case. It housed the holy of holies, Livingstone’s peaked cap and Stanley’s jungle kepi, Amundsen’s cooking stove and Sven Hedin’s sextant. Each item bore the scars of ordeal: the ordeal of exploration.

The Map Room was lightless and cold, its walls lined with cabinets, each filled with charts and plans and miniature globes. Every inch of available space was stacked with clusters of maps, a million, billion maps. There were maps of hamlets in obscure corners of the southern African veld, city maps of Shanghai, Manila, Santiago and Trieste; maps of rivers and mountain ranges, of endless deserts and deltas, Arctic tundra and trenches on the ocean floor.

A clerk asked me to write my destination on a scrap of paper. I did so, inscribing “MADRE DE DIOS” in small, neat capitals at the centre of the page. I slid it back across the counter. The clerk licked his thumb, scooped it up and strained through bifocals at the words. Then he scratched a rounded fingernail on his cheek.

“No, sir,” he said, in a shrill tone. “No, sir, there is no map of Madre de Dios. There is no map at all.”

Before I knew it, I had been ushered back to the street. I felt like an outcast, as if I had sought to embarrass the Map Room by seeking out its Achilles’ heel.

Much time has passed since brave Englishmen dressed in tweeds were dispatched by the RGS to fill in the blank outlines of the continents. The business of exploration has changed. There is still danger, but these days when you embark on an expedition you expect to return alive. Adventure is no longer about providing a service to humanity, but about bettering yourself, testing yourself and striving for glory.

Two days later, I had a second rendezvous with the Swedes. We met in the immense tropical greenhouse at Kew Gardens. On a hard jungle journey nothing is so important as having a team you can trust. The Swedes symbolized a lucrative source of TV funding, but there was no point in having them along if they would crack up in the climate.

As before, they arrived trussed from head to toe in leather. And, again, they were being stalked by the broad-shouldered blond man, armed with a video camera and an oversized microphone. He tracked them through the undergrowth, moving between the shrubs and fronds with impressive nimbleness.

“Who is that man?” I asked.

“It’s Boris.”

“Boris?”

“He’s a Bulgarian film student,” David replied.

“Oh.”

“We have a cult following in Bulgaria,” he added, by way of explanation.

Miniature beads of condensation had formed on David’s costume. They grew larger and larger and ran together, then dripped silently to earth. This time his outfit was complemented by a golden medallion, hanging at the centre of his bald chest. As he moved through the festering humidity of the hothouse, it caught the light, which broke occasionally through the layers of rubbery leaves.

I warned him and his father of the certain hardship that lay ahead. The Swedes seemed unfazed by the prospect of adversity. They had been preparing, they said, grinning.

“What do you mean, preparing?”

“We sealed up the windows in our flat,” said Leon, “and installed a heater from a sauna. It’s a hundred per cent humidity at home, and as hot as Hell.”

I was struck by their dedication, and comforted myself that Swedes knew about saunas, and could probably endure the heat better than I. The conversation moved on quickly to money. I asked what their budget was for equipment and supplies. Their confidence plunged.

“There’s no money yet,” said Leon.

“But we’re leaving in five days!”

“Don’t worry, we have a patron.”

“Who?”

“A banker, a very rich Ukranian banker.”

“Excellent.”

“There’s a small catch,” said David, wiping his medallion with his thumb. “We can sting him for lots of cash, but he wants to come along.”

At first I disapproved of my expedition to find the lost city becoming an upmarket package tour for middle-aged bankers, arty Swedish film-makers and their Bulgarian groupies. But the more I thought of it, the more I came to understand that there might be strength in such an odd line-up. Ours was not going to be a clone of the usual expeditions, oozing with sleekness. It was clear from the start that oddity was our advantage.

There are two ways to find a lost city. The first is to rely on luck alone; the second is to control all the information. My historical research had filled in some of the gaps, but it was important to hear first-hand from other Paititi-hunters. I wanted to know where they had been and what they had found. To this end, I interviewed as many as I could find, pretending that I was preparing an article about the search for Paititi. The cover story seemed to put the explorers at ease. They spoke freely about locations and methods, without fearing that I was about to steal their information. It might have been underhand, but successful explorers have always resorted to scheming, even depraved methods to ensure success.

Exploration is a dirty game. I sometimes wonder with what red herrings the great adventurers like Captain Cook and Columbus, Walter Raleigh and Drake had thrown their competition off the scent. Perhaps they were more gentlemanly then as there were more unexplored chunks of the world to go round. But now, with so few jewels in the crown of exploration still remaining, the competition is cut-throat.

I would frequently root through library stacks only to find that the relevant page of a key text had been torn out. And seasoned trailblazers would often “shuffle” co-ordinates while recounting tales of their journeys. I didn’t blame them. As I progressed in my search, I became as conniving as everyone else. Obsession and greed can compel a reasonable man to behave in the most appalling way.

Through a strange kind of geographic arrogance, Europeans like to think that the world was a silent, dark, unknown place until they trooped out and discovered it. They forget that when Columbus arrived in the Caribbean he came upon an orderly indigenous society, just as Pizarro did in Peru, and Captain Cook did in the Antipodes. Of course, these native peoples were regarded at the time as wild and untamed, to be taught discipline and the wisdom of the Bible.

In the same way that newly discovered landmasses had always been known about by the people who lived on them, a lost city can never really be lost at all. Tribal people know their territory inside and out. They always know where the ruins lie although, unlike us, they may have little or no interest in them. When tribal warriors stumble upon ruins overgrown in their ancestral lands, they don’t waste time inspecting them. Their attention is focused on acquiring food, not antique possessions with which to spruce up their homes, indigenous people are not gripped as we are with notions of ownership, urbanism or cultural history. Just as the British developed a mania for climbing the Alps in the Victorian era, searching for a lost city is a particularly European obsession.

For this reason, I became aware early on that the best way to find Paititi was to go directly to the people who surely knew where it lay. Most expeditions don’t integrate with the societies through whose lands they travel. They remain apart, superior, judgmental. As a result they are mistrusted and disliked by the locals. I had heard of the Machiguenga, a tribe whose hunting grounds stretch across much of the Madre de Dios cloud forest. They have been portrayed as a ruthless, warlike people, more eager to slay invaders than to welcome them. Thirty years ago they wiped out a French-led Paititi expedition, near the jungle village of Mantacolla.

My approach was to venture to that same village and gain the trust of the Machiguenga, the very warriors who supposedly killed the French group. We would come as equals, as friends, rather than adversaries. Gradually, with time, I hoped to broach the subject of the lost city itself.

THREE

SIZE OF THE PARTY

In travel through a disorganized country, where there are small chiefs and bands of marauders, a large party is necessary.

The Art of Travel

Lima is a frenetic mass of people, all residing beneath an impermeable blanket of man-made smog. There are those who have and those who have not. You get the feeling that the haves are clinging on by their fingernails, and the have-nots could do wonders given half a chance. From time to time the people at the top are forced into exile, chased away with their bulging sacks of swag. They’re simply replaced by the next tier of would-be swindlers, who start lining their pockets from the first moment of their first day in power. The clock is always ticking for such people, a fact of which they are very well aware.

Somewhere down at the very bottom, way below the desamparados, the Helpless Ones, who make up Peru’s silent majority, are the tribal people. Their voice is less than mute. To most Peruvians they’re at best a curiosity and at worst a faceless symbol of how far the urban society has come. The same people regard the asphyxiating clouds of pollution as an emblem of national prosperity.

The tribes have little contact with their national politicians. They hear from them only at election time, when the men in hand-cut suits send gifts in exchange for precious jungle votes. The lengths Peruvian politicians will go to in order to secure a few tribal votes suggest how desperate some of them have become.

Four years before I had ventured to Peru to make a long journey by boat through the Upper Amazon in search of the legendary Birdmen. These members of the Shuar tribe use a complex hallucinogenic preparation called ayahuasca to fly into what they say is the “real” world. The Shuar despised their political leaders, and boiled over whenever politics was mentioned. They shunned all politicians because they had placed their trust in another group of outsiders: evangelist missionaries from Alabama.

The missionaries had translated the Bible into the Shuar dialect, handed out little pink pills and condemned the tribe’s ancient and perfected tradition of shrinking their enemies’ heads to the size of grapefruits. I became outspoken on the curbing of the practice. Although it sounds barbaric, and it is, the custom held the society together and kept everyone on their toes.

My great fear was that the Machiguenga had, like the Shuar, succumbed to the beguiling charm of missionaries from the Bible Belt. As far as I was concerned, a little danger of head-shrinking is a small price to pay in return for a people who have remained true to an ancient code.

On my journey to the Shuar, I had been protected by a former American army ranger from 101st Airborne Division, named Richard Fowler. He was an expert on psychotropic plants, and had lived in the jungle since enlisting for two tours of Vietnam back in 1968. I would need a security man if, as I hoped, the missionaries had not got to the Machiguenga. Richard Fowler’s name was the last on my list. He was an impossible character and I had vowed never to communicate with him again, let alone work with him. But time had tempered my resolve, and I had few options. The day after I arrived in Lima, I arranged to fly up to Iquitos, a small town in the Upper Amazon built a century ago by the rubber barons. It was there that Fowler could be found, when he wasn’t living it up in the jungle.

The night before I went in search of Richard, the desk clerk at my hotel took me aside. “Señor, I hear you want to find Paititi,” he said.

“Who told you that?”

“It is the word on the street,” he said, with sinister intonation. “Listen, if you want to find Paititi, there is a man who can help you.”

“Who?”

“El Jefe de la Policía, the Chief of Police, Señor Martín.”

Where can I find him?”

“At the cock-fight.”

The clerk scrawled an unintelligible note and handed it to the security man at the front door. He flagged a cab and, in turn, passed the note to the driver. The Swedes, the Bulgarian, the Ukranian banker and I squeezed into the car, which sped away.

The taxi ride was my first experience of “full on” documentary-making. The Bulgarian was filming the Swedes, as usual, and they were filming me. The banker was recording the sound and giving direction, too. As with most millionaire bankers, he wasn’t used to doing as he was told.

Outside the taxi, downtown Lima was closing up for the night. I have never come across a city that’s shut down as firmly as Lima. It was as if the shopkeepers were expecting street warfare to ensue. They unclipped the neon bulbs and wrapped them in newspaper. They bolted inch-thick sheets of steel to their windows, and wove strands of razor wire across them. They battened down hatches, fixed sharp spikes to anything left unprotected, chained double-locked doors, and positioned armed guards in bulletproof vests.

Previous journeys in search of treasure have taught me that a zigzag strategy is the best way to get ahead. It may seem like madness to the uninitiated, but the worst method is to head straight for the target. Do that, and you miss out on nuggets of information that can be invaluable later on. More importantly, the zigzag method sometimes reveals the trail to the goal.

At first the Swedes didn’t appreciate the detour into Lima’s cock-fighting underworld. They couldn’t grasp its connection with Paititi. I said that I had been passed a tip-off by one of my informants.

The Ukranian, Marco, tapped a thumb to his nose. “Just like in the KGB,” he said shrewdly, in his thick Ukranian voice. “There’s nothing like a good informant.”

The taxi pulled up at a large pollería, a roast-chicken restaurant. Hundreds of birds were sizzling on spits outside, reflecting the cherry-red neon lights. The air was warm, perfumed with the pungent smell of roasting meat. Peruvians adore grilled chicken. They can’t get enough of it. No Sunday evening would be complete without a roasted bird or two, washed down with a few bottles of Pilsen. Dozens of families were milling about expectantly, many with three or more generations in tow. Everyone was scrubbed clean, like potatoes ready for the pot, and decked out in their best clothes.

Marco pushed his way through the lines of families who were waiting obediently to be served. He buttonholed the manager and stuffed a hundred-dollar bill into his shirt pocket. The man clicked his fingers, like a gypsy performing a flamenco dance, then yelled a volley of orders to his waiters. The throng of honest, chicken-loving families was roped back, a moth-eaten scarlet carpet was rolled out and we were ushered to the far end of the hall.

The only thing Peruvians like more than gorging themselves on grilled chicken on Sunday night, then massaging the grease into their squeaky clean cheeks, is cock-fighting. The sport is a national obsession.

At the rear of the dining hall lay the Palacio de Gallos, the cock-fighting arena. I was stirred by the size of the place. The ring must have been sixty foot across, encircled by more than five hundred red plastic seats, with a low domed ceiling hanging above it like a Chinese parasol. Offset to one side stood a digital scoreboard. The fuchsia numbers flashed importantly from time to time, but no one took any notice. Everyone was watching the warring birds.

The audience consisted of about two hundred overweight middle-aged men. Some were scowling, others were drunk. They all had money at stake, and were clapping, screeching, roaring orders at the birds.

A man with no legs and cropped, oyster-gray hair was taking the bets. He lurched around the ring on his hands, raising his stout body up on the knuckles, a wad of betting slips and a pencil gripped in his teeth.

In the middle of the arena, the fight was a whirlwind of wings, beaks and sharpened spurs. It was hard to see which bird was winning. Both were stripped of their plumage and dignity, both drenched in blood. All of a sudden one collapsed sideways. The victor continued to attack. A few of the gamblers erupted in cheers and accosted the legless man, demanding their winnings. The dead cockerel’s owner made for the stage, moving with fast, sombre strides. He scooped up his lifeless bird and peered into its eye, flipped the head, and peered into the other. There was no question about it: his prized fighting cock was dead.

Not far from the scoreboard, an awkwardly tall man in a blood-stained medical coat was binding spurs to a bird’s ankles. His small, devious eyes were magnified by thick lenses. I watched him for a moment or two, as he fixed the spikes in position and clipped them sharp. He filled a syringe from a vial of clear liquid, which I suspected was adrenaline, and jabbed the needle into the rooster’s thigh. After that, he put the bird’s head into his mouth, and sucked it.

When the creature had been taken off to fight, I approached the medical man. He was tidying his syringes, scalpels and other implements. “I am looking for Señor Martín,” I said.

The vet didn’t look round. He could tell I had no interest in cock-fighting, that I had come on less important business.

“Go to the weighing-pit,” he replied. “He’ll be over there.” Straightening his arm and index finger in one slick motion, he pointed to the far end of the arena. I could make out a simple leather sling suspended from a set of scales. Birds were being weighed, like boxers before a title fight.

I went over. The man in charge of weighing had a dirty crepe bandage wrapped round one hand, and a patch of dry blood on the back of his shirt. He took great care in weighing each bird, then growled a number to his assistant. I moved in close, so close I could smell him. He reeked of black tobacco, the kind you get in the jungle, which they call mapacho.

“I’m looking for Martín,” I said.

“Sí, yo soy Martín.”

“Martín, the chief of police?”

“Sí. ¿Qué quieres? What do you want?”

I felt like a fool, not because the Swedes were filming me and the Bulgarian was filming them, but because it seemed daft to ask anyone about the lost city in the weighing-pit of a cock-fight. But since we were there, I dived in: “I’m looking for Paititi,” I said, with implausible confidence, “and I have heard that you may have some advice.”

Martín called out the weight of the bird, and looked at me. Then he looked at the Swedes, the Bulgarian and the banker. “Are all of you looking for Paititi?” he asked.

“It’s me, mostly,” I said. “I’m going into the jungle to search for it.”

“¿Tienes protección? Do you have protection?” snarled Martín.

“I’m planning on taking a former soldier. He served in Vietnam.”

“No, not that kind of protection... Protección contra las brujerías, protection against witchcraft.”

Martín paused from weighing fighting cocks and looked at me. The scent of stale mapacho hung between us like a veil. We stared at each other: he observing my inexperience, and I peering into his lizard-green eyes. Those eyes. They can only be described in cliché. They were haunting, tempting, wicked, supreme. They hinted of terror on an unknown scale, the kind of terror created by fantasy.

“Las brujerías pueden matar a un hombre, the witchcraft can kill a man,” said Martín, after a long pause.

“Do you know where I should look for Paititi?” I asked. “I’ve heard that the Machiguenga know.”

“Without protection you are not prepared,” he said frostily. “And without preparation you are a fool.”

I was keen to ask Martín about his own interest in Paititi, but he was unwilling to tell me anything else. In parting, he said: “Get protection and prepare your mind. Prepare it very carefully. If you fail to do so, the jungle will make a madman out of you, and it will take your soul.”

Richard Fowler had swapped his soul for the jungle long ago, in the dark days when his home was a foxhole east of Saigon. He said he went to Vietnam because the rainforest called him, and because its foliage gave reason to the chaos of his life.

As our passenger plane descended closer and closer to the mantle of green, I reflected on Richard. I was already mad, I mused, for only a madman would employ Richard Fowler once and then again. The jungle was his only friend. It listened silently to his endless saga of war, death and high times in Indochina a generation ago. On our long voyage up the Rio Tigre in search of the Birdmen, Richard had talked non-stop about his search for reality. At regular intervals he would pause to swallow a tonic, brewed by his personal shaman, Rodrigo. The blend of flora-based hallucinogens and nerve agents kept him functional. They helped him control the pangs of enmity that welled up in the night, when the suffocating jungle air choked us as we struggled to sleep.

The Swedish director, David, was sitting beside me on the flight. As if he had read my thoughts, he asked me about Richard. Like the others, he had seen the glowing account of the Vietnam vet in my book Trail of Feathers and, like them, he was taken by the description of a real-life Rambo. As the aircraft touched down at Iquitos airport, I felt a sharp jab of anxiety in the pit of my stomach. I considered staying on the plane and going straight back to Lima, but the fact remained: I needed a security man. However impossible he was, Richard was a known entity.

Very little had altered in Iquitos, last outpost of the Upper Amazon. Wizened señoras still sat beneath their porches, tilting back on hardwood chairs, fanning their faces and dreaming of the wealthy tourists who had never come. The main street was still potholed, the café clientele still slurping aguaje juice at shaded tables, plagued by a thousand schoolboy salesmen. Even their wares were unchanged: stuffed piranha paperweights with open mouths, jaguar-tooth pendants, and pink-toed tarantulas pinned out in frames.

In 1854, a European traveler had described Iquitos as a “sparse and miserable hamlet consisting of no more than thirty houses and a straw-thatched church”. Fifty years later it was a city with twenty thousand Peruvians and four thousand Europeans, all of them involved in the rubber business. With Charles Goodyear’s invention of vulcanization in 1839, rubber became an invaluable product and was used for everything from making sidewalks to a covering for raincoats.

Along with Manaus, downstream in the Brazilian Amazon, Iquitos became a pleasure dome of decadence. The wealthy spent money like water. They imported crystal chandeliers, silk furnishings and entire cellars of vintage Champagne; they ate off the finest porcelain, gambled a fortune on the toss of a coin, and lit their cigars with five-dollar bills. But in 1912 an Englishman named Henry Wickham smuggled seventy thousand rubber seeds to Malaya. With no indigenous diseases to attack them, and arranged in neat plantations, the rubber trees thrived. Overnight Iquitos went from boom to bust.

As in many Amazonian towns, Iquitos had a mysterious surplus of women — about eight to every man. In an effort to win the female vote, and to boost municipal funds, the town’s authorities had worked ceaselessly to lure gringos there. They had promoted lavish hotels, discos with outrageous “jungle” shows, beauty pageants, gambling parlours and cut-price beer. But tour companies had struggled to sell an outpost in the middle of the Amazon as the next big nightlife destination.

I headed for the favourite haunt of the resident foreigners, the appropriately named Gringo Bar. We pushed through the bustle of seductively dressed young women, each of whom was hoping to gain the attention of a gringo man. As we entered the dim light of the bar, they swooned and pressed close to stroke the Swedes’ slick leather outfits.

Inside, a short, balding American barman was serving drinks. He was dressed in the same lilac Hawaiian shirt he had been wearing four years earlier. Behind him a display of jungle liqueurs was reflected in a tinted mirror. A middle-aged Englishman was propped up at the bar. He was sipping a cocktail through a straw that poked out from a clutch of paper parasols. On either arm hung a fifteen-year-old girl. The barman introduced him as Mad Mike. It was only later that I remembered him as a timid insurance salesman from Wigan, who had sold up everything and moved to Iquitos to reinvent himself and search for loose, easy women. I asked if he had seen Richard Fowler.

He motioned to a corner table, set back from the others. At first I couldn’t make out what Mad Mike was pointing to but, gradually, I noticed a man sitting there, his head on the dim vinyl surface. I approached cautiously, with the Swedes watching from the front of the room. The man was snoring loudly, comatose, drunk. He stank of vomit and cigarettes, and was dressed in familiar rip-stop camouflage fatigues, Altama jungle boots and a black, Ninja-style singlet.

I uttered Richard’s name once, and then again. The snoring rose in volume, reached a crescendo and died away. I prodded one arm.

No reaction. I prodded the other, and the shoulders moved back, raising the head. A pair of worn military dog-tags scraped over the surface of the table as the torso became vertical. My eyes tracked up from the tags to the face. The cheeks were puffed up, bloated by the heat and drink, and in need of a shave. The whites of the eyes were jaundiced, a pale beeswax yellow. Their enlarged pupils strained to focus on me.

“Go on, buy a drink for an old soldier,” he said.

“Don’t you recognize me, Richard?”

“A whiskey will help my memory.”

In the four years I had been away, Richard Fowler had fallen on hard times. The little work he had once secured as a guide had all but dried up. An increased dependence on mind-altering substances, gleaned from jungle plants, had made him unreliable and prone to fits of ferocity. The Swedes asked if this was the same Richard Fowler who had protected me so valiantly on the voyage to the land of the head-shrinkers. I assured them it was, and promised that he’d be back to top form in no time. He just needed a little time to detox.

A petite teenaged woman sidled over and sank her teeth into the lobe of Richard’s left ear. She was wearing a strapless pink dress, with matching pink pouting lips. A strand of brunette hair hung over one eye, as if it had been trained to do so. She slid her sharp tongue over the flamingo-colored lips and glared at me, then at the film team, anxious to be introduced.

“Meet my girlfriend,” said Richard hoarsely. “Her name is Delicious.”

The first stage of Richard’s detoxification took two days. I told him that if he could get the poisons out of his bloodstream, there might be work with a pay check at the end. Delicious took charge of the treatment, which involved Richard sitting in a tin bathtub on the fetid landing of Hotel Peru, drinking gallons of aguaje juice. As he sat there, with Delicious rubbing a poultice of red achiote seeds on his chest, I revealed details of the expedition.

Richard listened as best as he could, pausing from time to time to vomit over the side of the bath. I lectured him on the lost wealth of the Incas, highlighting difficulties faced by previous explorers. Then I described my plan. “We will search out the Machiguenga tribe, get to know them and gain their trust,” I said. “They must know where Paititi lies, and they’ll take us. We just have to talk them into it. You’ll be there to give us protection, to cover our backs. Are you game to come along?”

Richard didn’t reply at once. A quantity of moss-green bile spewed from his mouth and ran down his chest. It was an involuntary action, but alarming all the same. I stared down at him. He was naked except for his dog-tags, his upper body tinted red with achiote balm. I cursed myself for being so stupid as to give him another chance. I opened my mouth, inhaled enough air to declare my change of mind, but he cut me short.

“I’ll join you on one condition,” he said.

“Huh?”

“It’s that Rodrigo can come along.”

Richard and Rodrigo were the odd couple of the Upper Amazon: a washed-up Vietnam veteran and his mate, a shaman who specialized in suspect preparations with hallucinatory effects. They were both out of work, largely because they were a danger to honest society. Any other expedition would have shown them the door. Perhaps it was for that reason that I changed my mind once again. I told Richard to gather his things together and find Rodrigo. We would leave for Lima on the morning flight.

In the afternoon I strolled down to the floating market of Belén, at the edge of town. The citrus-yellow light bathed the workers’ backs as they parcelled up a thousand jungle products. Spend a few minutes at an Amazonian market and you get an idea of the jungle’s wealth. There’s nothing like it anywhere on earth. You see rolls of black tobacco, live turtles with primeval shells, and triangular fruits encased in feathery barbs. There are blind blue fish with tiger stripes, slivers of medicinal tree bark oozing amber-like sap, and pens of agouti rodents, shaking with dread, waiting for the knife.

Iquitos is a captivating place, the kind you only discover on long, insuperable journeys when you least expect to find anything at all. It’s a blend of people, some wicked, some good, living it up at the edge of a great dreaded expanse. Most never venture beyond the city’s perimeter, as they are terrified of reptiles, spirits and untamed tribes. I wondered if Paititi had shared the happy-go-lucky atmosphere of Iquitos. After all, if the city had lain in the uncharted depths of the jungle, its Inca citizens would surely have been touched by the awful fear of what lay beyond.

Before dawn Rodrigo appeared as if by magic at the blistered front door of Hotel Perú. I went down to greet him. He was about five foot one, and skinnier than he had been. The gauntness emphasized his long, pale cheeks, the deep-set eyes, and the flat, misshapen nose that hung at the centre of his face, like the shaft of a modeling tool. He was wearing flip-flops, checkred pants pulled tight at the waist, and a faded velvet T-shirt, whose American slogan read “Beware of the Werewolf”. On the ground beside him lay a five-gallon cauldron, blackened and wretched, and a small denim satchel from which poked a spray of roots.

The shaman had no trust for me, and I little for him. We were acquaintances, the kind who endure each other and struggle to make do with a bad situation. Previous experience had taught me that without Rodrigo, Richard would be even more trouble than he was likely to be. My main concern stemmed from the fact that where you had Rodrigo you also had an incessant stream of mind-altering drugs.

Before Richard came down from his room, I cautioned Rodrigo, warning him to refrain from brewing up any Amazonian psychedelia. On his mother’s grave, he promised to resist, kissing his knuckles as a pledge. A moment later the sound of jungle boots could be heard rapping across the warped floorboards above. Then Richard was standing in the doorframe. Over one shoulder was slung a compact camouflage backpack, and over the other a twelve-gauge Brazilian pump-action shotgun, designed to kill rioting slum dwellers. The American was a shadow of his former self, his muscles were wasted from inaction, but at least he wasn’t drunk.

The film team had been on the town all night, taking advantage of Iquitos’ unlikely ratio of women to men. No one spoke as we drove to the airport for the flight to Lima. The silence was appropriate: we were at last the nucleus of a team, ready to undertake a grave duty.

At the airport Richard kissed Delicious, a long, passionate kiss, as if to prove to everyone in the departure hall that she was his girl. As soon as they were parted, she howled like a lamb being led away to slaughter.

“Fucking whore!” Richard said, under his breath. “That dog’s got no self-respect.”

FOUR

CONDITIONS IN SUCCESS AND FAILURE IN TRAVEL

An exploring expedition is daily exposed to a succession of accidents, any one of which may be fatal to its further progress. Interest yourself chiefly in the progress of your journey, and do not look forward to its end with eagerness.

The Art of Travel

In the hope of bonding with Rodrigo, I sat beside him on the flight to Lima and spent the time asking for his advice on finding a lost city. I thought the chatter might put him at ease, as he had never flown before. But the shaman wasn’t in the least perturbed by his first experience of jet travel. Leaning back in his seat, with his knees pressed against his chest, he looked like a cheerful Amazonian leprechaun.

When he had listened to my question, he plugged his thumbs deep into his nostrils, sniffed hard, and pondered for several minutes. I thought he hadn’t heard me, or had not made sense of my inquiry. But at length, he withdrew his thumbs, licked them front and back, then ranted about the danger.

The thing about shamans is that they aren’t preoccupied by the matters that concern the rest of us. They don’t care about brushing their teeth, eating healthy food, or what others might think of their overall appearance. Their feet may walk the earth, but their minds are roaming in another dimension.

Rodrigo reported dreamily that he’d flown over the jungle a thousand times “in the secrecy of his mind”. There was danger all around, he said, nowhere more so than in the cold, spectral landscape of the Madre de Dios cloud forest. I asked him to clarify what he meant by danger.

“The curses,” he said coldly. “They run up and down the rivers and through the trees, hovering like humming-birds before a passion flower. Look at one and it will turn you blind. Touch one and you will drop dead.”

“Can’t you protect yourself?” I asked.

“Seguro que se puede, certainly you can.”

“How?”

“Take someone who has a connection to the place.”

“We’re going to make friends with the Machiguenga and go with them,” I said importantly.

Rodrigo thought for a moment, scratched a long thumbnail down his flat nose. “That’s not good enough. The invisible curses will still be there.”

“Well, who else has a connection with that jungle?”

“The Incas,” said the shaman.

“But the Incas who lived at Paititi are dead, long gone. It’s a lost city.”

“You can take a dead Inca with you,” he said.

“A corpse? You think we should take a corpse?”

“Not a corpse, but una momia, a mummy,” Rodrigo corrected me meekly. “Nos guiará a Paititi, it will lead us to Paititi.”

The shaman stuffed his thumbs up his nose again, lowered his eyelids, and began to hum.

I am all for respecting the advice of a spiritualist, but grave-robbing seemed a little extreme. I would have dismissed the shaman’s suggestion as lunacy, but experience has taught me the power of trophies. You may have every knick-knack and useless contraption ever devised, but while they weigh you down, a simple trophy can go a long, long way. Such artefacts can keep the porters calm, boost morale and pacify a native people.

Better still, I reflected, I happened to know a good source of mummies within stabbing distance of Lima. I had once befriended a family of sympathetic huaqueros, grave-robbers, living in the Nazca desert, while on the murky trail of the Birdmen. The ancient communities of the Peruvian coast had predated the Incas by more than a thousand years. Their societies had placed great value on mummification, and had developed elaborate embalming techniques. Unlike the ancient Egyptians, who tended to preserve only aristocrats and royalty, the ancient coastal culture of Peru mummified everyone. The desert is still littered with tens of thousands of mummy bundles, entombed in the desiccated fringes of the Atacama. You know they are there because of the unmistakable humps on the deserts stark surface.

I had been drawn to learn about the ancient culture because of its expertise in weaving. A great many funerary textiles were decorated with flying men, Birdmen, clutching human trophy heads and what appear to be hallucinogens. When the grave-robbers dig them up, after they have been buried in the sand for almost two millennia, the colors are blindingly bright. The ancient coastal societies’ knowledge and repertoire of textiles was passed down to the Incas, along with their mummification skills.

From the start of the journey, I had made it clear to the film crew that they would be documenting, not deciding. I didn’t want their opinions influencing my own decisions. But I wondered how they would react to the idea of taking along a mummified body I intended to run the plan past them that evening, once we were secure in the fortress of our hotel downtown. Rarely do I have difficulty in broaching a subject, especially one in which I have a deep interest, but I hadn’t spent long enough with the team to judg how they would react.

Marco, the banker, had ordered a bottle of vintage Veuve Clicquot to toast the expedition. I was surprised that such an atrocious hotel would keep such a fine Champagne. Marco’s appetite for the drink was considerable. He ordered it whenever it was available, which halved in likelihood with every mile we covered. Although usually unruffled, he snapped at the waitress because the bottle was insufficiently chilled. Warm Champagne, he scowled, was a drink fit only for pigs. The remark filled me with a new concern: how would the big banker deal with the jungle if he was so disturbed by the temperature of a sparkling wine?

In the awkward silence, as the waitress fumbled to find ice, I raised the idea of bringing a mummy to the jungle. The banker grimaced, but the Swedes clapped in unexpected delight.

“A mummy will look fabulous on film!” shouted the young director, forming a rectangular frame with his hands.

I tapped the Bulgarian, Boris, on the knee. He slid his eye away from the viewfinder of his video camera and squinted at me in confusion.

“What do you think about taking a mummy?”

“Mummy, Daddy, baby... Sure, no problem,” he said, in his heavy accent.

“If Rodrigo says we gotta take a fuckin’ mummy,” said Richard, wringing his hands together, “then we’ll take one. He knows...” Richard paused for dramatic effect. “He can see the invisible beams, the rays, the Curse Lines.” He shaded his eyes with his hands, and pretended to seek out the invisible rays.

The decision to take a mummy trophy touched a vein of lunacy, and set us a little further apart from our competition. I had heard from the Explorer’s Club in Lima that a famous Polish adventurer had just departed for the high jungle east of Machu Picchu, in search of the lost city. On the phone, the club secretary’s voice was trembling as he listed the inventory of the equipment and supplies, the team of learned men and women who made up the expedition.

I, on the other hand, had almost no equipment, limited food stores, consisting chiefly of Pot Noodles, and a team made up of a washed-up Vietnam vet, a shaman, a Ukranian banker with a penchant for chilled Champagne, a clueless Bulgarian and a pair of ever-optimistic Swedes.

My line-up might have been suspect, but I felt sure we could gain the upper hand by putting ourselves in the mindset of the Incas. Think like the Incas, act like them and, I felt, we could only be strengthened. We know that the Incas took their mummies along on journeys. It’s conceivable that some were even taken to Paititi, to form a kind of spiritual nucleus of the society. So, in some warped way, having an embalmed body with us made perfect sense.

Before setting out to acquire a mummy, I broke away from the team and visited the library at the ancient monastery of San Francisco, a few blocks away from Lima’s central square. The whitewashed walls of the central courtyard were hung with paintings, some dating back to the time of the conquistadores. The floors were laid with large, waxed terracotta tiles, the color of blood oranges, and a cedar ceiling above the stairwell, clearly inspired by Islamic geometric design. I ascended the wide, low stairs, turned right and slipped into the magical library.

Sombre wooden shelves ran the length of the room and every inch was caked with dust, oily and aromatic like rappee snuff. The subjects were clearly labelled — Liturgia, Ciencia, Historia, Topografía; the fragile vellum texts were pressed tight together, a reminder of the days when the written word was sacred. A pair of symmetrical staircases, rising in spirals, connected the upper gallery to the one below. I was on the trail of a book written four centuries before, the lost manuscript of Aguirre, self-styled Spanish king of the Amazon. A scholar in Seville had contacted me out of the blue and said that the text had been written in 1622 by Héctor Gómez of Castile. I was surprised the man knew about my quest, and would bother to track me down to pass on such invaluable research for free. He swore that the manuscript gave the true location of Paititi. What he meant by “true”, I wasn’t sure. But an original clue is worth its weight in gold. My source told me that he thought there was a copy of the manuscript at Lima’s San Francisco monastery.

The monk on duty had permitted me entrance to the library on condition I donate generously in advance. I counted a selection of damaged Peruvian bills into his hand, until his voracious eyes shimmered like fire opals.

Like all Paititi-hunters, I had read the existing account of Lope de Aguirre’s expedition, which is presented in a text written by Friar Pedro Simón, published in 1625. It is hard to overstate the author’s contempt for Aguirre, a veritable bad boy of Spanish exploration. Of him, Simon wrote:

He was the Demonio himself, this Aguirre! About fifty years, short of stature, sparsely built, coarse-featured, of a villainous weasand, which any hangman would have slit with pleasure. His face was small and lean, his neck and cheeks pock-marked, his beard black as coal, and when he looked at you, out of dark eyes piercing as a falcon, his gaze was stern and threatening. But withal, he was a noisy talker and a boaster, if well backed by the compañeros, and bold and determined; otherwise, he was an arrant coward. So hardy was his habit of body that he could endure endless fatigue, afoot or on horseback. Never was he seen without two coats of mail, or a steel breastplate, and he always carried a sword, dagger, arquebus or lance. He slept mostly by day, being careful of his throat, for he was afraid of resting at night, lest one steal on him in the dark. Never did he take off his armor altogether, nor hang up his weapons. Turbulent was this Señor Aguirre, lover of the broils and breeder of mutinies, enemy of all good men and deeds.

Lope de Aguirre, a Basque, had been sent to accompany a Spanish general, Pedro de Ursúa, on his journey in search of El Dorado. The year was 1560. They were hunting for the secret Inca city hidden deep in the jungle, said by contemporary accounts to be abundant with gems and gold. It is a dream that has driven honest men mad for centuries.

The expedition was colossal: hundreds of Europeans – warriors, religious men and common adventurers – and thousands of Indians from the Andes. They descended from the mountains, down, down, down, with their horses, weaponry and palanquins, into the grotesque vastness of the jungle. The general, Pedro de Ursúa, had brought along his lover, a young widow. Her name was Inés de Atienza; either she was out of her mind, or the bravest woman ever to live. Soon after the procession arrived in the jungle, Aguirre slit the frail widow’s throat, then killed Ursúa and declared himself King of the Amazon.

My informant in Seville had described the lost manuscript of Aguirre as “the last perfect chiselled piece to the Paititi riddle”. Find it, he assured me, and I would possess the key to the lost ruins. I hadn’t told the film crew of the lead, partly through paranoia and partly through a desire to control the information. After nine hours, checking ten thousand books, I came to a horrid conclusion. The book did not exist... not in the library, not anywhere. Months later, I realized that the Andalucian scholar was a fraud, his story a fabrication, dreamed up by the Paititi-hunting competition to draw me away from real research and waste my time.

Talk of Curse Lines, black magic and embalmed bodies dominated the fifteen-hour journey to Nazca. The driver became so fearful of the conversation that he made a detour to a chapel, and prayed there all afternoon. Most visitors to the small desert town of Nazca take the air-conditioned luxury bus: the service had the distinct advantages of speed, comfort and reliability. But we were on a budget and so we hitch-hiked instead.

Never before in the history of television could a film crew — or, for that matter, a lost-city expedition – have hitched with so much gear. We split up into two groups to increase our chances. I stood out in the road with Rodrigo and Richard, surrounded by a sea of kit-bags and boxes. It was a long time before anyone stopped. Eventually a 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air ground to a halt two hundred feet ahead. It was a sleek vehicle, plum-red, dented, and missing the chevron from the front. The driver was a burly, dark-skinned man called José, with a scarred neck and impressively muscular hands. He was eager to talk about the jungle and the danger. At the same time I realized that he harbored strong suicidal tendencies; he was the kind of person who becomes addicted to horror movies, not because he likes them but because he can’t help himself.

Every so often he would swerve the steering-wheel to the left, throwing the old wreck of a car into the oncoming lane as a truck approached. As a veteran of India’s highways I am not easily frightened, but José would wait until you were drowning in adrenaline before veering the crumbling roadster back to the right side of the road. His enthusiasm for dicing with death seemed at odds with the fear he derived from talk of bewitching.

“The legend of Paititi is as true and as sincere as a newborn baby,” he said. “Nurture the legend, love it as a mother loves that child, and it will return the love.”

“Do you think it will be a dangerous journey?” I asked.

José flared his lips wide so I could see the rotten teeth hanging from bloodied gums, like crumbling tombstones in a deserted burial ground.

“El peligro es diabólico, the danger is diabolical!” he yelled. “It could make an executioner of a priest.”

We must have been the only visitors to Nazca in fifty years who had no interest in seeing the famous “Lines” etched into the basalt surface of the desert. People come from every country in the world to soar above them in small airplanes and marvel at the mystery. No one is certain how the strange symbols got there, or when, so they show their foolishness by dreaming up implausible hypotheses.

We had no time to solve the mysteries of Nazca: we were already engaged, committed to a far darker business. These days, the town is prosperous, enlivened by the wealth of tourist cash, every cent of it lured there by the Lines. We found a cheap, squalid boarding-house at the end of the main street. It perched there like a sparrow on a branch. You had the feeling that a sudden gust of wind might send it crashing to the ground.

As soon as we reached the hotel, Rodrigo stripped down to his boxer shorts and prepared a ritual. He said it was for the carcass, the cadaver of a man whom we would meet next day. The ceremony involved the shaman drinking a murky tar-like fluid, more usually stored in a Fanta bottle at the bottom of his bag. When the cork was pulled out, a putrid smell issued forth. Rodrigo refused to tell me what the concoction contained, but said it was to wake the sleeping. He chanted for an hour or two, rattling the dried fronds of his chacapa, drifting on the sound. Richard was on the journey too, having sucked the dregs from the bottle while the shaman wasn’t looking.

The film crew and I turned in early and were up at dawn in time to see the fresh glow of pink rise like a halo above the horizon. The odd couple were passed out cold. They had both thrown up in their sleep, no doubt a side-effect of the medicine. We roused them, feasted on an economic loaf of dry brown bread, and made our way to meet the grave-robbers at the burial ground of Barillo.

A campesino gave us a lift to the cemetery in his sleek new pickup truck. He didn’t think it odd to be asked to drive off the main road and veer on to the pampa in search of mummies. In the hope that he wouldn’t inquire about our motives, I praised his vehicle’s immaculate condition.

“¡Sí, sí, Señor!” He cackled. “It’s all thanks to our ancestors. They scratched those mysterious signs out there. Why did they do a thing like that? That’s what everyone asks. The answer is simple, my friend, it was so that centuries later their descendants would get an easy living.”

The old farmer reflected on this for a moment or two, changed from third to second gear and went on: “We should be like them,” he said, “and do something that will help out our great-grandchildren a century from now.” He turned up the air-conditioning a little higher, for the heat outride was already fierce. He accelerated, swerving down on to a dry riverbed, the same route I had taken four years before. The sand was fine, like sieved cake flour, and it exploded away from the wheels as we swept through.

We glided past a grove of warango trees, then caught sight of the farmhouse: a low adobe building with a rusted tin roof, circled by a slapdash fence of thorns. A pair of savage dogs rushed at the car, blurred in movement.

“Who’s there?” shouted a man. We couldn’t see him, but he was close. “Who’s there?” he called again.

I shouted my name, exclaiming that I had visited four years previously. The voice whistled back the dogs. A minute of silence passed, and a man appeared. He stood before the vehicle, his back arched over, his grimy shirt ripped like a rag mop. I stepped over to him and put out my hand. The figure did not offer his.

“Juan! ¿No te acuerdas de mí? Don’t you remember me?” I asked. “You showed me your mummified trophy head. You took me to the cemetery over there.”

I pointed beyond the warango trees, but the farmer didn’t see the sweep of my arm. He was sightless. Stooping a fraction, I observed his face. It was crafted from the same sheet of coarse leather as before, chapped and blistered like rawhide. His eyes were open but damaged in some way.

“The head’s gone,” said Juan sullenly. “It was taken by the thieves.”

“Thieves?”

“Sí, vinieron por la noche, they came in the night. They said we were taking too much loot from the cemetery. They wanted it all for themselves. So they killed my wife, took my sight and beat me with a cane. If I took anything else from the graveyard, they said that they’d return and cut off my hands.”

“When did this happen?”

“Dos años atrás, two years ago.”

“Did you tell the police?”

Juan spat at the dust. “Police? What good are they?”

He might have been blind, but Juan could still lead the way unaided up the steep embankment to the burial ground. He had walked it a thousand times for sure, so often laden with riches from newly opened graves. We ascended the natural bulwark of sand, and went over the top like soldiers at the Somme. The cratered panorama was like a repulsive no man’s land. Bleached white bones were scattered all around, tattered clothing, scalps of brunette hair and fragments of human skin: a postcard of apocalypse.

The grave-robbers’ front line had advanced considerably since my previous visit. The huaqueros were far more organized now, using bulldozers and chainsaws to open the graves.

The Swedes were shocked by what they saw. They shot a few feet of film uneasily, as Richard knocked the teeth from a broken lower jaw. “I’m gonna make a necklace for Delicious,” he said.

We all looked at the Vietnam vet, appalled at his insensitivity. But I was as guilty as he. I had conspired with Rodrigo to pilfer a mummy for our protection.

I asked the slim shaman for an alternative defence against the invisible Curse Lines. “If we take a mummy,” I explained, “Juan here will have his hands cut off, and we don’t want that to happen.”

The shaman tightened the strap of his wide-brimmed cloth hat to his chin, and nodded vigorously. “I will ask the spirits, the dead, to leave their graves,” he replied, “and to join us on our journey to find Paititi.”

Crouching low on his haunches, Rodrigo opened his denim bag, and pulled out a homemade cigar. It was stuffed with mapacho, black jungle tobacco, and was as thick as my wrist. He lit it, sucked at it, kissing with his cheeks until the tip was burning evenly. Then he took a long, measured drag, his chest swelling with smoke, as he traversed into another cerebral plane.

While the shaman called the spirits from their sleep, I escorted Juan back to the farmhouse. We sat there on rough-cut logs fanning our faces with our hands. On the far cracked mud wall the poster of Diana, Princess of Wales, was still hanging, a little dustier and more yellowed than before. Nothing had altered since my last visit, except three new pieces of furniture, positioned in the corners of the room. For some reason they were hidden under dirty sackcloth sheets.

“My wife is dead, mi amada esposa, my beloved wife,” said Juan forlornly. “She was the light of my life. How I miss her!”

I tried to console the retired grave-robber as he squatted on the log, his blind eyes weeping. “She lives in your heart,” I said. “She is with you. She is here. Fight the loneliness.”

Juan stared blindly at the poster of the princess. “¿Soledad? Loneliness?” he whispered. “I am not alone.”

I assumed that he was referring to his children, or to the image of the dead princess. But he was not. Leaning over to one of the sackcloth sheets, he fumbled for the corner and tugged hard. I am not easily surprised, but I was certainly taken aback by Juan’s secret friend. For under the cloth was the embalmed cadaver of a man, crouched in the foetal position, all leathery and calm. His hands were grasped together, the fingers contorted like tubular roots; his spindly limbs were slender and crooked, and his face a crazed, glaring mask of disbelief.

Juan got up, and lifted the veils on his other two mummified companions. He did so with extraordinary composure, as if pulling the coverings away from disused chairs. The other two people were similar to the first, one male, the other female. They were perched awkwardly, wrapped in gloomy layers of cloth, their desiccated features leering like grotesque fiends from a child’s imagination. Juan could not see his embalmed friends. But he stared at them all the same, caressing his rough palms over their faces, moving his fingers lovingly over the furrows and the grooves.

As I sat there, watching, part in horror and part in awe, I reflected that, in any other society, an old man who lived with mummies might have been dragged off to an institution. But Juan wasn’t harming anyone. He was the one who had been duped by society.

A long while passed. There was still no sign of the film team or the odd couple. Juan and I sat in silence, reflecting, thinking, hoping. Then, spontaneously, he wept again.

“Estamos malditos, we are cursed people,” he said, in a dry, raspy voice, when the tears had dried. “All of us, cursed, certain to face damnation. No hay escapatoria, there is no escape.”

FIVE

PRESENTS AND ARTICLES FOR PAYMENT

It is of the utmost importance to a traveler to be well and judiciously supplied with these: they are his money, and without money a person can no more travel in Savagedom than in Christendom.

The Art of Travel

A journey to Peru would be meaningless without at least one fifty-hour bus ride over the Cordillera, the mountains that run down the country like the spine on a chameleon’s back. The distance between Nazca and Cusco is pitifully small, but the drive is an endurance test of jolting, the kind used to see if a new model of car is roadworthy or not.

The trip was made worse by Richard, who entertained himself by boasting about every girl he had savaged. The list was long, the details obscene, especially the conquests of prepubescent girls in the riotous days of Vietnam. There’s nothing like a French whorehouse to service a man’s needs,” he said, rattling the mummy’s teeth in his hand like dice. “Those little Asian chicas could bring tears to a grown man’s eyes. I’ll tell ya, I’ve killed people, what the heck? I’m not ashamed of it. War’s just like that. Sure, I’ve killed gooks, scalped “em too, but I’ve never shed a tear over it. They’re dead and that’s that. Then I hustle down to Saigon with a couple of chums, and I’m weeping like a kitten within the hour.”

I asked about taking scalps.

Richard stared out at the coffee-brown panorama, lost in concentration. “You need a sharp knife,” he said slowly. “It’s got to be real, real sharp, so sharp you could do someone an injury. You lie “em face down with your boot on the back of their neck. Then you slice from the temple, at the hairline, cutting down through the fat, real gentle, with an arc-like movement. You have to make sure to get enough of the flesh, otherwise it’ll go wrong and you’ll start losing the hair.” Richard paused, his eyes wide as he peered into the past. “I did a lovely one once. It was a woman’s scalp. Had it hanging from my belt.”

It was too easy to judg Richard, to condemn him. His first experiences as a man had carved out his life, charging him with hatred, a terrible bitterness. He was traumatized beyond the point of redemption, broken, unwanted, loved by no one except Delicious. Richard had his sight, but was sightless; just as Juan was blind but could see.

The bus rolled on to the east, lurching over the mountains like a fairground ride. It stopped frequently and, when it did, an army of short round women with plaits and black sombreros scuttled up and touted purply-pink jelly. They completed the carnival atmosphere, howling with laughter for no reason at all.

I sat with my face pressed up against the window, pondering life and entertaining dark thoughts. I shared Juan’s sadness, then found myself raging that Richard should have been wounded by the generation he had served. After that, my thoughts turned to Paititi.

Perhaps the lost city wasn’t a haven for the Incas’ mummies or their gold, I thought. Instead, it might have been a place of sacrifice. The carved sacrificial stones at Machu Picchu, with their cupped conduits for blood, have been well discussed. So, perhaps it’s conceivable that Paititi was in fact a killing ground, a zone dedicated to ritual sacrifice. After all, the Spanish frowned on the slaughter of innocent child victims, a practice to which the Incas were rather partial. Without such executions they had no way of placating the wrath of the Sun. Down there in some corner of Madre de Dios, I reflected, perhaps there lay the remains of ten thousand dismembered children: their blood tapped by a deranged officer, veteran of a depraved campaign, an Inca Colonel Kurtz.

After six punctures and fifty-one hours we arrived at Cusco, broken and dishevelled. I suggested to Leon, the producer, that he suck some funds from the Ukranian banker. But he said Marco was enjoying the hardship: it was new to him, a feature of life he had not tasted before.

As soon as we had settled into a fleapit off Avenida del Sol, I set about tracking down a man called Sánchez Esmeralda. A friend of a friend had slipped me the name in London, exclaiming he’d found more lost cities “than Indiana Jones”.

Finding Sánchez took about twelve minutes. This was partly because Cusco is quite a small town, the kind where everyone knows everyone else; and partly because he happened to sell ice cream from a booth a hundred yards from where we were staying.

He was an earnest-looking man, bespectacled and bald, with bushy eyebrows that hung above his face like thunderclouds. He smiled between sentences, and talked very fast, about ice cream, mostly. He gave me an ice-lolly for free. It was shocking pink and tasted of walnuts.

“It’s a new one,” he said smugly, “getting quite popular... It’s called la Sangre de los Incas, Blood of the Incas.”

I asked him about lost cities.

“There’s no such thing,” he said quickly.

“But I thought you’d found lots of them.”

Sánchez ripped the wrapper from a second ice-lolly and sucked on it hard. “Cusco’s full of people searching for El Dorado,” he said, “pero son idiotas, but they’re idiots. They have no brains. Sure, I did have a quick look in the jungle, dipped my toes into it. But I’ve got brains, so I came back and settled down to an honorable life. Search for a lost city and you understand there’s no honor in it... that it’s a worthless way to spend your time.”

I swept my tongue over the Blood of the Incas, and grimaced at the taste. “What about Paititi, then?”

Sánchez giggled and slid the bridge of his glasses to the top of his nose. “Paititi is a myth created by los que están en la sombra, the men in the shadows.”

“Who are they?”

“The men in gray suits who run the country.”

“You mean the President?”

“No, no,” Sánchez corrected me. “Presidents come and go, but the men in the shadows are always with us.”

“But why spread a rumor, a myth, the myth of Paititi?”

“Por el petróleo, por supuesto, because of the oil, of course.”

Sánchez stopped talking, and paused to serve fluorescent yellow ice creams to a group of schoolgirls.

“Oil? What’s oil got to do with Paititi?”

“Have you seen the oil charts for Madre de Dios?”

“No.”

“Well, go to INRENA and take a look,” said Sánchez, smiling. “There’s ten million barrels of oil under the trees. If the government started drilling, there’d be an international outcry. It’s virgin jungle after all. So they’ve closed the area off, saying it’s to protect the nature and the ruins... the ruins of Paititi.”

Sánchez’s conspiracy theory and the Blood of the Incas gave me a terrible stomach-ache. I did not agree with his theory that Paititi simply didn’t exist. But I was alarmed by the government’s eagerness for oil. I have come across suspect oil projects before, and where you find them, you find problems. Next morning, with the film crew trailing me, and the odd couple still asleep, I went to ask hard questions at the National Institute of Natural Resources, otherwise known as INRENA.

The department had that odious air of officialdom, the kind that drains the life out of visitors and employees alike. Everyone who worked there staggered around with furtive movements, clutching dusty files to their chests. They spoke in whispers — if they ever spoke at all. It was as if an invisible sign ordered silence on pain of execution. The only sound was the clunk-click of manual typewriters spewing out official reports on reports.

Not daring to speak, I waved at the clerk to attract his attention. His index fingers were pecking at the keys of an antique Remington typewriter, like a pair of peahens feasting on grain. Eventually he looked at me and came over. There was a patch of grime in the middle of his shirtfront, where dusty files had pressed while being transported surreptitiously from one desk to the next. “¿Sí, Señor?”

“I am interested in going into Madre de Dios,” I said.

The clerk didn’t reply at once. He stooped low, pulled back a deep wooden drawer, and snatched an inch of papers. “Fill them in triplicate, all triplicate,” he hissed.

It was then that on the far wall, beyond a sea of gray-skinned clerks with grime patches on their chests, I saw a map. The reason it caught my eye was that at the top, printed prominently in brash type, was the name of an oil company, a household name all over the world. The map was green. It was a map of the jungle, the Madre de Dios jungle.

I motioned for Marco to engage the clerk in grave conversation. As a banker, he was good at such things, while remaining charming. Then I hurried between the maze of desks, bobbing and weaving like a frail sailing boat balanced upon a curl of ocean wave. I was soon standing at the great lime-green jungle chart, struggling to make sense of the contours and waterways.

I found the Madre de Dios River. Some distance northwest a clutch of pins, with miniature flags attached, poked triumphantly through the sheet, like markers of an immense treasure. All around, a zone had been drawn with a red Chinagraph marker, warning ordinary folk to stay away.

Until that moment, as the clerk chased me back through the labyrinth of desks, I had considered ice-cream-selling Sánchez to be a bit of a crackpot, the sort of man who kills someone famous for no reason at all. But the map pins had suggested there was oil, and if there was oil there was money at stake. I rushed back to have a chat with Sánchez. But, mysteriously, his booth was boarded up.

“Él se ha ido, he’s gone away,” said a shoeshine boy. “Two men came this morning and took him away.”

“Where? Where did they go?”

The boy shook his head. “Al infierno, to Hell,” he said.

I’m not good with forms or official documents, so we got Marco to complete the application. He pored over it for hours, while the Swedes and I went to the market to buy supplies with his money.

Cusco is the Kathmandu of South America. The main square, Plaza de Armas, was flooded with sickly yellow light, backpackers and prim little boutiques selling junk: llama-shaped toothpick holders, condor-feather fans and paperweights crafted from rusty tin cans. On the other side of town there lay a fabulous covered market, where stout Andean women scurried past, heaving bundles on their backs. We bought a pair of blue plastic barrels with tight-fitting lids and filled them with basics: rice, raisins, coca leaves and nuts, flour and cooking oil, garlic and spices, spaghetti, canned fish and plenty of sugar. Elsewhere, we stocked up on size-nine rubber boots for the porters, fishhooks and plastic sheeting, pots, pans, cutlery and plates. We bought some cheap Chinese flashlights, too, and batteries and candles, and a Manchester United football. My journey to the land of the Shuar tribe had taught me the importance of practical gifts. Last time I had made the mistake of buying beads and trinkets, and learned quickly that tribal people all want the same thing: twelve-gauge shotgun cartridges. So we bought six boxes of them. The only thing they valued higher than ammunition were Man United footballs.

Back at the hotel, Richard and Rodrigo had been experimenting with a shrub called sinicuichi. More commonly found in Mexico than Peru it was used by the Aztecs. Ingestion of the plant leads to strong auditory hallucinations, radically distorting any sound. Richard’s condition made it quite impossible to have a sensible conversation, so I went downstairs.

In the foyer, the manager had heard about Sánchez. “They’ve taken him away,” he explained glumly.

“Because of his outspoken views on the government?”

“No, no, on account of his ice creams. He makes them himself, and they keep poisoning people.”

We got talking about Paititi. The manager dabbed a handkerchief to his temples, as if trying to soak up a stain. “Have you spoken to Navarre?” he asked.

It took another twelve minutes to track down Señor Navarre. He was a professor of tourism at the university, and had written a treatise entitled Paititi: The Truth of the El Dorado Legend. I flicked through it and realized the book was designed to throw other Paititi-hunters off the trail. Its author was about forty-five, had sleek Mongolian eyes, a thick beard and a slippery disposition.

“Why are you interested in Paititi?” he asked at once.

“We’re making a film about great explorers who have searched for the ruins.”

“You’ll never find them,” he said. You have no hope at all.”

“You mean we’ll not find explorers?”

“No, the ruins. I know you are hunting for them. I can see it in your eyes.”

I lowered my head and stared wide-eyed at the floor. Gosh, I thought to myself, this man’s really good.

“I suppose you want me to tell you where to find Paititi,” Navarre went on. “Well, I won’t. I won’t help you at all. I’ll just give you some advice: keep your team small, a handful of men at the most. Take the bare minimum of food, and plenty of coca leaves for stamina, and don’t forget the lifta to activate it. But, most important of all, take your time. A man with no hope has even less hope if he has no time.”

We waited and waited, and hoped, and waited some more, but our permission to enter the restricted area didn’t come from INRENA. The morning before we were scheduled to leave Cusco for the jungle, I rose before dawn and walked out of town, up the hill to the ruined fortress Sachsayhuaman. It’s said that the Incas built Cusco in the shape of a puma and that the stronghold of Sachsayhuaman formed its head and jaws. The puma, or tigre, as everyone in Peru calls it, was regarded as a sacred animal by the Incas. No one is quite sure how long it took to construct the unfinished fortress, or how the stone blocks were moved into place.

Sachsayhuaman is undoubtedly the most impressive feat of known engineering left by the Incas. The stones range in size from small rocks to colossal shaped granite boulders, which weigh more than three hundred tons each. They are fitted together without the slightest gap between them, a fact that has bewildered archaeologists for generations. As usual, the mystery has led to a great number of theories, some of them possible, others far-fetched. One of the least plausible suggestions was that a plant-based potion was poured on the stone. When left for an hour or two, it supposedly softened even the hardest granite to the consistency of clay.

As I climbed up to the fortress, a family brushed past me, all dressed up in tight Andean clothes, a pet llama led behind on a frayed string. They, and hundreds of other Cusqueños, made the same trek each morning, posing for tourist pictures in the alleyways of the Plaza de Armas. For such people tourists are manna from heaven, ever-willing to sprinkle a few coins in return for a glimpse of how Peru might once have been.

The mighty fortress was still sleeping, enshrouded in darkness, cold and surly as if betrayed by the people who had built it. I walked down into its heart, and marvelled at the massiveness of the stones. They sit flush, cheek by jowl, taller than a man, daring you not to be impressed. You can set eyes on those blocks a thousand times, and each time you are forced to regard them with the same awe, the same fascination.

I was certain that somewhere, deep in the jungle, there were other immense walls like those at Sachsayhuaman. They would be overgrown with foliage and vines, but they would be there all the same. Of that I had no doubt.

Later that day Marco went to the INRENA office to see if the paperwork had been approved. He was armed with a roll of hundred-dollar bills and a box of Cohiba cigars. He returned an hour or so later with our application. It had been stamped all over: “refused”.

“What shall we do?” the Swedes asked nervously.

“We’ll go without a permit, and get on with it,” I said.

I suggested we prepare the equipment to take the film crew’s minds off the paperwork. We took great care that all the bags were waterproof, their contents double-wrapped in polythene. For an expedition with a non-existent budget, we had accumulated a striking amount of gear. Most of it was the Swedes’ camera equipment. They were shooting principally on film, digital video as backup. Film gives much grander results; the other advantage was that the 16mm Arriflex camera was virtually indestructible, a sharp contrast to the video, which was to seize up frequently in the humidity. They had eighty cans of film stock, each ten minutes in length. That alone weighed ninety pounds. Then there was the tripod, another fifty pounds; and a bag filled with tapes, chargers and batteries, a clapperboard, cables and lights, weighing another hundred and forty pounds. They had a seventy-pound Honda generator, too, for charging batteries and to run the hair-dryer, needed for drying out circuitry. There was sound equipment as well, and spare lenses for the Arriflex, the video system, and a mountain of other odds and ends. Another expanse of technical paraphernalia was positioned nearby in the shade. There were three steel boxes with padlocks, and a set of four black indestructible cases, more lights, another tripod and half a dozen tote bags, which felt as if they were filled with lead.

“That’s not our stuff,” said the Swedes, icily. “It’s Boris’s gear.”

“But he’s just a film student,” I snarled. “Why does he need all this junk?”

Leon looked over the sea of technical apparatus. “Bulgarians are like that,” he said.

I begged the film crew again to cut down their equipment, but they chased me back to my room. There, heaped against the far whitewashed wall, was the food and my own odds and ends. The pile rose up to the ceiling, like a bonfire waiting for the touch-paper. The Pot Noodles were still stowed in cardboard cartons, the size and shape of coffins. The food and supplies we had bought in Cusco had been stashed in the plastic barrels. Beside them was a set of tatty climbing gear and ropes, and the thirty-six-year-old Zodiac dinghy, deflated and packed, then a dozen machetes with various lengths of blade, the sharpening stones and shotgun cartridges, shovels, kerosene, lanterns and saws.

Previous journeys had taught me the danger of taking too much stuff. You end up spending all your time bogged down, feverishly protecting gear that’s of little value anyway. The worst part is that you need an army of men to carry it, and an army of men needs food. It’s a vicious circle: the more gear you have, the more men you need, and the more men you need, the more food you must have for them, and the more food you have, the more men you need.

On my expedition to the Shuar I had found that any item that couldn’t be broken up, or cannibalized into something else if required, was worthless.

With gnashing teeth, I marched over to the Swedes’ room and told them that if we hit hard times, nothing could be regarded as too precious. We had to be prepared to cannibalize everything.

“Everything?”

“Yes, everything, even the Arriflex!”

It might have been cruel to taunt them with such threats but, as I saw it, a little threatening was a good thing. It kept the men on their toes.

In the next room, the odd couple were waking up for the day. Their room stank of excrement, as the toilet had overflowed, sending a tidal wave of sewage as far as the beds. The film crew had come to my room in the night to tell me of their fear. Lined up, like cadet officers on parade, they reported the problem.

“It’s Richard,” said Leon, gravely. “He’s very unstable.”

“He’s a Vietnam vet,” I said. “He’s been trained to kill a man with a single blow. A guy like that finds it hard to adapt to the city. He’ll be fine once we’re in the jungle.”

Leon and the others didn’t actually say it, but they were hinting Richard should be left behind. What passed for his usual conduct put the fear of God into ordinary men. I was no longer troubled when he pulled out a machete in a crowded bar, tried to pick up schoolgirls, or threatened to scalp us, then rip off our heads and scoop out our brains. To me it was quite normal, the kind of behavior one would expect from a man who had walked the fine line between life and death.

A worn-out bus ran the route twice weekly from Cusco to the brink of the Madre de Dios jungle. We loaded up our gear and scoffed omelette sandwiches before the bald tires grumbled away down the cobbles. There can be few drives on earth quite so spectacular as the one from the highlands to the cloud forest east of the Andes. The landscape began as desolate, forsaken, abandoned, a thousand shades of gray. There was the odd thicket of eucalyptus trees, tall and huddled, like giants sheltering in the wind. The stark beauty was bisected from time to time by rivers, their high waters rolling down from the hills towards the secret heart of the jungle.

We passed infrequent hamlets, thatched houses crafted from honey-colored blocks of mud. Outside each one an old man was chopping wood, and a pair of savage dogs basked in the late-morning sun. There were children, too, tossing marbles in the dust, and llamas striding about haughtily, as if they owned the world.

Drive down from the altiplano and you get a sense of how little the Peruvian countryside has changed in centuries. I wondered whether the Incas might have taken the very same route to Paititi with the Spanish at their heels. There would have been thousands of them on the move, some carrying the treasures perhaps, whatever they had been, as well as stone-masons and artisans, engineers, soldiers and priests. The Incas had scant understanding of the jungle. They traded with the tribes, but to live in the jungle themselves, they would have needed know-how. For me, that was the greatest mystery of Paititi. How did the Incas, a mountain people, learn to adapt to the ferocious jungle environment? How did they endure the mosquitoes and the damp, and stay safe from the predators and the tribes?

As the road spiralled downwards, the vegetation changed. Gone were the meticulous eucalyptus groves and the filigree of ferns, replaced by a riot of lichen-encrusted trees. From the moment I saw it, something clicked in my mind. This was an ancient, mesmerizing place, the kind the fleeing Incas would have found irresistible.

In a handful of miles, the meagerness of the highlands had been exchanged for a realm of prehistoric flowers with bronze-green fronds, of cecropria, bamboo and bromeliads, a place where every square inch of flora was a world of its own.

There were sheering rock faces, too, shadow mountains, veiled by the variation in light, and sleek waterfalls, tumbling from one ledge to the next. Through it all, permeating like a dragon’s breath, was the vapour. It was moist and haunting, cool, but above all it was cautionary, warning intruders to turn back while there was still time.

As we traveled into the jungle, I gave much thought to the ruins and what we would do when and if we found them. My concern from the start was that the Peruvian authorities would muscle in and try to take the place over. We were on tourist visas, after all, and had nothing in the way of formal accreditation: a point that was sure to be held against us. One possibility was the idea of licensing Paititi, or buying it outright. It may sound far-fetched, but there was a precedent. In 1839, while traveling through the jungles of Honduras, the American traveler John Lloyd Stephens discovered and then bought the lost Mayan city of Copan. On buying a lost city, he wrote:

The reader is perhaps curious to know how old cities sell in Central America. Like other articles of trade, they are regulated by the quantity in the market and the demand; but, not being staple articles like cotton and indigo, they were held at fancy prices, and at that time were dull of sale. I paid fifty dollars for Copán. There was never any difficulty about the price. I offered that sum, for which Don José María thought me only a fool; if I had offered more, he would have probably considered me something worse.

The bus driver stayed alert with a quid of coca leaves stuffed up in his cheek. He was a timid man who took each bend with hesitation, as if it was his first day out. His face was long and anxious, with chicken-feet wrinkles to the sides of his eyes, and a field of deep furrows on his brow. His wife sat beside him, swivelled in her seat. She was a buxom woman, whose alluring eyes scanned the male passengers flirtatiously. The Swedes, the banker, the Bulgarian and I managed to avoid her gaze out of respect for her husband.

The further the decrepit bus lurched down towards the jungle core, the more suggestively she teased the audience, until Richard could stand it no longer. He beckoned her over. In a heartbeat, she had flown from the front, and was perched like a bird on his knee. She clung there precariously, whispering into his ear, pouting with delight.

When eventually the bus slunk into the modest town of Pillcopata, Richard disappeared with the woman. He whooped loudly, declaring in his atrocious Spanish how he would give her a night to remember. As his employer I felt responsible in some way. I was unhappy that the bus driver’s honor had been flayed so publicly. So, I went to apologize.

He was sitting alone, timidly, at the only bar in town, with a glass of warm beer and a damp cigarette. A rumba was playing in the back, the melody wafting through the evening air. I nodded in greeting and the bus driver pointed to a chair.

“I am burning inside,” I said. “I feel terrible for the way my colleague has behaved. He has no manners. If you can forgive him...”

“¿Por qué te preocupas? Why do you worry?” asked the bus driver.

“Because I am embarrassed, and ashamed.”

The man said nothing for a moment or two. He took a long, refreshing sip of his beer, stared out at the dismal mud street, and then he smiled very gently. “Mi esposa, my wife...” he said, under his breath. “She’s got two gifts for your friend tonight.”

“Gifts?”

“Sí. El primero es gonorrea, the first is gonorrhoea,” he said, “and the second is syphilis.”

SIX

REPUTED DANGERS OF TRAVEL

Savages rarely murder new-comers; they fear their guns, and have a superstitious awe of the white man’s power: they require time to discover that he is not very different to themselves, and easily to be made away with.

The Art of Travel

Pillcopata was hardly a town at all. There were no more than a few hundred residents, a blend of urbanized natives and adventurers, who wiled away their days in the broken shade. You wouldn’t have realized it at first, but they were all waiting for the same thing: a tourist bonanza to roll into town. The men sat on the jerry-built verandas, smoking black tobacco, with their wives flustering in the gloomy wooden houses behind. Sometimes the sweltering silence of midday was pierced by the shriek of a small child being mauled by a savage dog. The dogs of Pillcopata had a vigour that I have encountered nowhere else. They could withstand the blazing temperature, but were exceedingly ferocious as a result.

Next morning the manager of the only hotel sat down beside me on the veranda. He was meek, yet severe, had a swarthy complexion, short graying hair and small hands that never stopped moving. He told me, almost as an apology, that his name was Walter.

He asked me to describe in detail the desert town of Nazca. I began to explain about the famous Nazca Lines.

“No, no, Señor,” he said, with a smile. “I know about the Lines. But tell me of the tourists. What are they like?”

“Well, there are all kinds... from all over the world. Some are rich, others less so, but they all want the same thing — to fly over the symbols on the desert.”

“¿De todas partes del mundo? From all over the world?” said Walter dreamily.

“Yes, they come from everywhere.”

“And they bring money?”

“Oh, yes,” I said authoritatively, “they have made Nazca very rich.”

Walter puffed on a hand-rolled cigarette, and flicked the ash on the floor. “One day Pillcopata will be like that,” he said, with certainty.

“But you don’t have the Nazca Lines.”

“We have something better, far better.”

“What’s that?”

“The ruins of the Incas.”

I slid my tongue over my parched lips. “You mean, Paititi?”

“That’s it,” said Walter. “It’s there, out there. It’s just a matter of days now, weeks at the most, and it’ll be found.”

“Do you really believe it’s there?”

“¡Claro! Of course! Why do you think I have this hotel? I’m waiting out the bad times, ready... ready for the shout, “¡Paititi!” When it comes, I’ll be a millionaire.”

I took a sip of my coffee, leaned back on my chair, and scanned the main street. “If the lost city was discovered,” I asked, “how would Pillcopata change?”

Walter jumped to his feet, the veneer of meekness gone. “We’d build a line of hotels with fifteen floors on each, and a dance hall, and a bus station, restaurants and shops. There’d be banks and beauty parlours, too, and an international airport, and Tarmac roads carving their way deep into the jungle... to Paititi.”

“But what about the native tribes?”

Walter clicked his tongue. “They’ll all have jobs,” he quipped. “It would do them some good. They’ll help with the tourists, carrying their bags, that sort of thing. Think, my friend, think!”

“Of what?”

“Think how quiet and terrible Machu Picchu must have been before the ruins were discovered! Now there are helicopters and hotels and shops selling nice little things, and tourists... so many lovely tourists!”

We were on the verge of entering the jungle to make contact with the Machiguenga tribe, but my conversation with Walter somehow soured my eagerness for the search. I sat gloomily in the sunshine, away from everyone else, fending off the ferocious dogs. I am outspoken against missionaries, who force an alien framework on people who don’t need it. But, as I see the world, there’s one element that’s even more corrosive than missionaries: tourists. It’s not that I feel above them in any way, but that the very places they patronize are destroyed by their affection.

Suddenly I understood the great curse. It was the real curse of Paititi, which will be activated only when the lost city has been found. The virgin jungle will be opened up, vast towering trees hewn down to make room for hotels and themed restaurants. Highways will be laid, crammed with a snake of gridlock traffic, all the way to the mountains. As for the tribes, their culture will be erased within weeks. Within a year or two, they will all be studying tourism at a local university, just as they are in Cusco.

I left the dogs in the heat and rushed to the rank-smelling bathroom at Walter’s hotel. Standing there, sweat running down the edges of my face, I stared into the mirror. How could I be so stupid? How could I yearn for glory if its price was so high? I ran out of the bathroom and down the corridor to the room where the film crew were huddled, wrapped in wet towels. “I know the future,” I said bleakly. “I’ve seen it at Machu Picchu.”

The crew must have thought the heat was getting to me. They didn’t say anything.

“You must promise me something,” I said. “If we find Paititi, when we find Paititi, we’ll take a good hard look and then we’ll walk away.”

“No pictures?” asked David.

“None.”

“What about GPS co-ordinates?”

“We’ll erase them,” I said. “It will be hard, but we’ll go to great lengths to pretend we didn’t find it at all.”

The tin-roofed market at Pillcopata was the last chance to stock up on kit. Most of the items on sale had been shipped in from mainland China. The developing world is flooded with such gear: functional, durable and tantalizingly cheap. When it comes to affordable Chinese goods, I’m a shopaholic. I can’t help myself. I cadged some pocket money off Marco, and snapped up two dozen enamel mess cups, adorned with views of the Great Wall. I bought cheap sewing kits, too, to hand out to the tribe, and a sack of salted pork bellies. They looked vile and smelt even worse, but I remembered how the Shuar had lusted after salted meat.

Then I went to the health post, where a doctor sold me a box of fifty morphine vials and a handful of syringes. I had a good medical kit from London’s Hospital of Tropical Diseases, but it didn’t contain anything strong enough to keep an injured man comatose. From reading accounts of other lost city expeditions, I had learned the high risk of snapping ankles while wading through rivers and traversing steep jungle.

Richard sloped into the hotel at noon. His neck had been badly bitten, but there was no sign of the bus driver’s wife. He joined Rodrigo upstairs for a “smoke bath”. The shaman had spent most of the night engaged in the mysterious smoke ritual. I’m all for shamans doing their ceremonies, but as a diehard anti-smoker, I found sleeping in the room next to the makeshift smoke tent too much to bear.

“Rodrigo is being taunted by the Curse Lines,” Richard said later. “The invisible spirits are firing darts at him. The only way to keep them at peace is to smoke those bastards out. He says he’s brought seven spirits from Nazca. They’re looking after us, and if we’re lucky they’ll point the way to the ruins.”

We spent most of the afternoon, and that of the next day, trying to find transport to the end of the road. It seemed to extend about another thirty miles, twisting close to the east bank of the Madre de Dios River, ending at a village called Shintuya. I had heard that the settlement was a point of contact for the Machiguenga tribe. The problem was that there were no vehicles at all.

Being becalmed in a small Peruvian town is possibly the worst feeling in the world. We were soon getting on each other’s nerves. The Swedes felt it necessary to document my frustration, filming from every angle, as I sat in the shade, swishing away the packs of malicious dogs. The odd couple stayed in their room for more than twenty-four hours, smoked out to the very limits of life.

When explorers get home from a trip, they always bask in the wonder of it all. But they forget to mention hours, days, weeks of sitting around waiting for something to happen. In the West we expect time to be filled with events. Not so in the Peruvian outback. Entire lifetimes begin, mature and end without a single major event happening.

Walter must have taken pity on us. He staggered out of his bedroom from a long siesta with a cardboard box weighing heavy in his hands. He placed it on the hotel’s dining-table. “This stuff was left by another expedition,” he said. “Help yourself.”

I sifted through the contents, a variety of notebooks, printed booklets and maps. The notebooks were packed with tight black handwriting, interspersed with sketches of birds and details of flora. All the writing was in Czech, a language none of us understood. We studied the maps. They had been prepared by the Peruvian National Institute of Geography to a scale of 1:1,000,000. They showed the Pillcopata area, the Madre de Dios river and the jungle to the north-west, where the oil exploration was going on. They were extremely useful, the only drawback being that vast swathes of white cut across the green. These were marked with the words datos insuficientes, insufficient data.

I asked Walter who had left the notebooks and maps.

“La expedición grande, the great expedition,” he said. “They came through about four months ago.”

“How many people?”

He slapped a hand to his cheek. “¡Fue magnifica! It was tremendous!” he claimed. “I’ve never seen anything like it. They were like an army, their supplies glistening in the sun. They were like warriors heading to battle. There must have been fifty men: scientists, anthropologists, engineers and porters. They had computers and special tents that self-inflate, and food from New York City.”

Where were they from?”

Walter thought for a few moments. “From Czechoslovakia,” he said. “They were led by a man who seemed to have a confidence like no other man alive. He was dark-skinned and handsome. The women in town went wild when they saw him. They begged him to sit in their homes and take a drink. But the man waved a finger in the air. “No, no,” he said to them all. “I am on a mission, a mission sponsored by my government, for the benefit of all free men!” And, with that, he waved his army forward, and it rolled on out of Pillcopata into the jungle.”

The Czech explorer sounded like the kind of man who makes a mockery of ordinary adventurers. We hadn’t been feted or invited into anyone’s homes. The only attention we had attracted was from a married monster of a woman with raging syphilis. The Czech expedition might have been overloaded with gear, but they hadn’t found Paititi. The lost city was still out there, still hiding in the foliage.

Eventually we negotiated a ride to Shintuya on the back of a truck full of pigs. The vehicle was in truly terrible condition, destroyed by the weekly runs from Cusco. On Thursdays it drove with pigs to the end of the road, and returned with bananas each Monday. Richard and Rodrigo, the odd couple, were both gasping for breath after the marathon smoke session; they spread out across the floor planks and tried to sleep. They didn’t seem to mind the pigs charging all over them.

In one corner of the truck, away from the pigs, there was a knot of people, a mother with her twin daughters, and an old man whose arm was paralyzed. A young Chilean man called Jorge was squatting near them. He had a hooked beak of a nose, big teeth and hazelnut eyes, which made you feel warm inside when he looked at you. I trusted him at once. Like every other foreigner passing that way, he was searching for the last refuge of the Incas.

He explained that he had hunted for the ruins for a decade or more, mounting regular trips into Madre de Dios, from his adopted home of Cusco. “You don’t need fancy equipment to find a lost city,” he said, “you just need time. Don’t expect to find anything if you don’t put in the time.”

I asked if he’d heard of the Czech team. “Yes, of course,” he said quickly, “everyone knows about Count Josef Capek. He’s an aristocrat who likes to put on a big show. It makes him feel important. He’s nothing but a Boy Scout.”

“The taste for glory can make ordinary men behave in extraordinary ways,” I said.

Jorge held on tight as the truck speeded up to ford a stream. “There are easier ways to find glory,” he replied. “If you want glory then stay out of the jungle.”

“What about the Machiguenga?

“Be wary of them,” said Jorge. “They are sick of people searching for ruins in their lands. Haven’t you heard of the French expedition?”

“The one that was wiped out?”

“Yes, the French-American group, headed by Nichols. They ran out of food, entered a Machiguenga village and found it deserted. So they helped themselves to some of the tribe’s food. While they were eating, the villagers came back from their hunting trip, and shot them all with their three-foot-long arrows.”

On either side of the track, the undergrowth was seething, insect wings echoing like the whine of a radio searching for a station. From time to time we glimpsed the mighty Madre de Dios, its furious current boiling with life. The pigs rattled around us like white mice in a box, as I took stock of our situation. Things were falling into shape, I thought. We must be in the right area, because everyone we met seemed to be looking for Paititi, or had something to say about it. The jungle was dense and, with each hundred yards, it grew denser. Like a giant web of concentric silk spirals, it became more perfidious the closer one got to the centre. At the outset of the journey I had worried about the film crew: their mountain of luggage was a great concern. But as we moved closer to the tribal lands of the Machiguenga, my anxiety shifted from them to the shaman and the Vietnam vet.

Rodrigo had started moaning about missing his family, even though he had little to return to. His children were grown up, and his wife had recently taken a lover, who had moved into their shack upstream from Iquitos. She had kicked Rodrigo out, along with his cauldron, and the ever-present bag of psychotropic vines. As I understood it, Rodrigo had become the laughing-stock of the Upper Amazon after a love-spell he had cast had gone horribly wrong. His patient had been treated with a potion to increase his sexual desire. The potion worked, but instead of lusting after women, the man found a new and insatiable urge for men. Our expedition provided the shaman with a chance to lie low for a while, to earn some money and have his shamanic skill taken more seriously again.

As we descended, closer to the river, Richard became increasingly unstable. We had hardly arrived in the jungle and he was picking fights with us all. His brief flirtation with detoxification was over. He now chewed coca leaves incessantly, took hallucinogenic snuff each morning, and spent the afternoons passed out after guzzling a bottle of jungle juice”. The preparation, brewed up fresh by Rodrigo each night, contained a variety of hallucinogens. In his waking hours, Richard behaved like a petulant teenager. But the danger was that he was armed with a Brazilian riot shotgun, its magazine packed with enough ammunition to dispatch us all.

At Shintuya, six or seven houses clung to a ridge above the riverbank like molluscs on a sea wall. They were built of upright planks, gaps between them, with ragged tin roofs, amber brown with rust. We unloaded our immense assortment of equipment and food, and erected a tarpaulin over a makeshift wooden frame, following the diagram in Galton’s book, The Art of Travel. As we prepared the camp, the pigs were hounded out of the truck by its driver, and corralled in a crude pen at the water’s edge. They knew instinctively that something of importance was about to take place. I think they could smell it; either that, or they had caught a glimpse of the crazed eyes of their assassin. Without wasting a second, the truck driver stormed into the pen, wielding a sharp-pointed knife. The pigs screamed loudly, as you would have expected them to do, their final, frantic cries dissipating into the descending darkness like the exclamation of condemned men. By the end of it, the truck driver was drenched. His face, bare arms, hands and clothes glistened with scarlet blood. It was a horrible, yet beautiful sight.

The only place to buy anything in Shintuya was a shop owned by a large, boisterous woman with warts, called Gloria. She was covered with them. They ran up and down her arms, and across her face, like the miniature bumps on Lego. I entered her shop to relieve the instant boredom conjured up by the community. She greeted me loudly, smiling, eyes creased.

“¿Has venido por Paititi? Have you come for Paititi?” she asked, as if it was a funfair ride at the water’s edge.

“We’ve come to meet the Machiguenga,” I said.

Gloria scoffed. “Son piratas, they’re pirates,” she said knowingly. “They will kill you and steal your stuff. Watch out!”

I thanked her for the advice and bought a can of tuna, not that we needed it but it seemed like a way of showing that we had come in peace.

As I left the shop, I spotted a group of short, lean men getting out of a hollowed-out canoe. There were four of them. They walked without shoes, and were dressed in tattered Peruvian football strip, green and blue. Two were carrying sturdy bows fashioned from black wood; the other two were holding arrows, each well over three feet in length. The arrows ended in serrated wooden barbs.

“There are your Machiguenga,” said Gloria, who had moved into the veranda’s shade. “They have come here to buy salt.”

“Where do they live?”

“Not far,” she said, “a few miles upriver, at Mantacolla.”

I felt like rushing over and shaking them by the hand. But experience has taught me to go slow.

At the camp, Richard was out cold. Rodrigo was staring down at him in disappointment. “He didn’t take much of the drink,” he said, “but it is very, very strong.”

“What was it? What did you give him?”

“It’s datura,” he said. “I found it growing over there.”

The shaman pointed to a low tree, with thin foliage and a multitude of giant lemon-colored flowers: la trompeta del diablo, the so-called Trumpet of the Devil. I had taken that wicked plant myself as an admixture in ayahuasca with the Shuar. They use it as an agent, a way to fly into the next world — a world they claim is reality. The alkaloids in datura give a sensation of flight, of soaring above the jungle canopy like a bird. So potent is its effect that the Shuar rarely take it these days. Instead, they reserve it for their hunting dogs and their guests.

Datura was known to the Incas, and its alluring flowers were soon noticed by the Spanish invaders, who brought the plant back to Europe in the sixteenth century. Medieval witches got hold of it and used it in their flying potions. They prepared a paste with the flowers, and applied it to their inner thighs. They would stand astride a besom, easing the ointment into the skin with the shaft, hence the idea of a witch riding on a broomstick. Within a few minutes they would pass out, and when they woke many hours later, they assumed they had been flying.

That evening we discovered that three sacks of food had been stolen since we had got down from the truck. I cursed Richard for having become so ineffectual, and yelled at Rodrigo for feeding him so many drugs. From that moment on I outlawed the serving up of any more hallucinogens. Rodrigo was forbidden to prepare potions; he could cook potatoes instead.

We sat under the stars on a sheet of blue plastic, brooding on Richard’s shortcomings, while the film crew rubbed sun cream into, their charred skin. The veteran was supposed to be protecting us, but was instead plunging the expedition into danger. I could not trust him with the Machiguenga. He would have to be left at the camp.

Sitting there, bristling with anger, I counselled myself to be harder on my employees. As the head of an expedition, you can’t pussyfoot around being polite to everyone. You have to show your teeth once in a while; a little growling goes a long way.

The next morning Richard was still unconscious. He had soiled himself in the night, and was covered with ants, rather like a corpse abandoned in the woods. It was a deplorable sight, a grown man capable of so much and reduced to so little. We stood around him in a huddle, the film crew shocked that I had ever placed my trust in the former soldier.

As the sun’s early rays touched the river like a wand, I questioned aloud how we would get to the Machiguenga village.

A local man meandered over. He had long arms, a vice-like handshake and a slow manner. After introducing himself as Jesús, he looked down at Richard despondently. “I bet he’s not a Christian,” he said coolly.

“He was in Vietnam,” I replied. “It messed him up inside.”

I asked Jesús about the tribe.

“I’ve got a peki-peki” he said. “Te llevaré, I’ll take you.”

We negotiated a price, and the film crew and I clambered into the canoe. Squatting at the stern, the boatman whipped the starting cord and the engine came alive. Roaring like a steam train into the wind, the narrow canoe pushed out into the river’s current. The camp grew smaller and smaller as we gained our distance. My anger with Richard gave me strength, strength from fear of the tribesmen. We didn’t have a weapon between us. I felt strong, resilient, like a condemned man before a firing squad.

The hum of the peki-pekis engine resounded off the steep mud banks as we inched our way up towards Mantacolla. The river quickly narrowed, and was suddenly no more than fifty feet wide, but the current was fast. A peki-peki engine, which cannot provide more than five horsepower at best, feeds a cheap aluminum propeller at the end of a long shaft. The system’s advantage is that the propeller can be swung out of the water in a split second at any sign of shallows.

It took about an hour to travel the short distance to Mantacolla. I was half expecting a village set on the riverbank, with people and commotion. Jesús stopped the engine and jumped into the water, guiding his craft up on to the shale beach. There was no sign of anyone.

“Wait here, and the tribe will come,” he said. “I’ll be back for you this evening.”

“Are you sure we’re in the right place?” I asked.

But Jesús didn’t reply. He slid the canoe out into the water and hopped in, allowing the current to ease him back to Shintuya.

We sat there for an hour, blinded and burnt by the sun. Then a boy appeared from nowhere. He was naked, about seven years old, and had a fish skewered on a stick. He watched us from a distance, taking occasional nibbles at the meat. We waved, then gesticulated wildly The child ran off into the undergrowth. A few minutes later a line of figures stepped out on to the beach. Like the men we had seen at Shintuya, they carried long arrows and black chonta palm bows. But these men had saffron-yellow faces. They didn’t look up, but gazed at the ground before them as they approached, as if lost in thought. The man at the front walked with a limp.

When they were close we smiled falsely, baring our teeth in friendship. Now I think back to it, it seems mad to greet strangers with a display of teeth, as we do in the West. But I don’t suppose the warriors saw us smiling. They never lifted their heads, as if eye-contact would afflict them with a disease of some kind.

Leon, who spoke the best Spanish, began the conversation. “Hace calor, it is hot,” he said.

“Sí, mucho calor,” said the man with the limp.

“The sun is bright, too.”

“Yes, yes, the sun is bright,” said the tribesman.

“We have come here as your friends,” Leon went on, “and we have gifts.”

The men looked nervously at each other. I sensed a silent wave of expectation pass between them.

I dished out some shotgun cartridges from a tattered plastic bag, as if they were boiled sweets. The men smiled and took a handful each.

“We have food as well,” said Leon.

“Food,” said one of the other men. “Bien por traer comida, food is good.”

We all agreed, nodding animatedly, that food was a good thing.

“There were some foreigners here once,” said the third man. “They didn’t have any food. They came into our village and stole food. Eran malos, they were bad men.”

“The French,” I said softly. “It must have been the French.”

But to the warriors, all white men looked the same.

“It is bad to steal food,” I said.

“Yes,” intoned the first man, “it made us sad. We were very sad. Toda la aldea estaba triste, the whole village was sad.”

The tribesmen looked at each other and chattered in a high-pitched language for a minute or two.

“If you want to go through our territory,” the first man continued, “you will have to pay us money.” There was a pause. “If you do not pay us money we will be sad.”

The film crew and I exchanged worried glances. The last thing we wanted was for the Machiguenga to be sad again. Sadness appeared to bring out their violence.

Again, there was a long pause. After which the man with the limp said we could come to the village and talk about money. I was reluctant to discuss matters of business so early in the palaver, but there was little choice. The tribesmen stood up and led the way from the pebbles into the undergrowth. We walked after them down a track no wider than a doorway, the jungle rearing up on either side. Despite their reputation, the warriors seemed quite a straightforward group of men. As long as we kept handing out shotgun shells, I thought, we would stay on their good side.

Eventually we came to a clearing. A large number of trees had been felled, creating an open grassland, with a smattering of malocas, frail wooden houses, at the far end. They were made from narrow strips of hard wood and thatched with hay. Each one had a low door, necessitating extraordinary limberness to enter or exit. Between the huts there stood a hearth, protected by a shelter of woven banana leaves; in the hearth a fire was smoldering, and on the fire there was a pot. A woman, whose face was caked with yellow paint like the others, was stirring the pot. It was blackened, and filled with a mushy white porridge. I recognized it from my time in the Upper Amazon.

“Masato,” I said coldly.

“¡Sí! ¡Sí!” said the Machiguengas, grinning. “Masato.”

A bowl of dirty river water was mixed into the brew, and stirred by a clumsy hand. The bowl was dipped into the liquid, which now resembled pancake batter. It was passed to me. I closed my eyes tight and gulped down about two pints. The Swedes went next, then Boris and Marco. Unlike me, they had the benefit of ignorance – they had no idea how the beverage was prepared. Masato is drunk across the western Amazon and the surrounding jungle region. It is made from yuca, the tubular cassava root, which is boiled in water and mashed. Then the women making it, invariably the oldest, ugliest crones in the community, stuff handfuls of the mashed yuca into their mouths, chew for a minute or so, then toss it back into the pot. Within hours, the cassava has fermented in the saliva and is mildly alcoholic.

Masato featured prominently in Machiguenga hospitality, as did roasted armadillo meat. I picked restlessly at the jumble of armadillo bones on my lap, the leftovers of an animal that had been killed a few days before. It had been cooked over a termite nest in the usual way.

When the man with the limp had downed almost a gallon of masato, he addressed us again. “Some white men came here recently,” he said slowly. “They told us they were looking for the walls of Paititi. Then they said they would give us money and gifts if we showed them where to find the walls.”

“Paititi?” I said keenly. “Isn’t that just a myth?”

“Yes, it’s a myth,” said the headman, gnawing at the armadillo’s jawbone. “It’s very nice, though. People come here looking for it. They give us lots of money for passing through our lands. If they don’t give money we get sad.”

The film crew and I exchanged a firm look. We understood what he was saying. In the world of the Machiguenga, sadness could be equated with anger, and anger was a perilous emotion, by which a foreigner could lose his life.

I asked how much people paid to travel through their stretch of the river.

“We charge twenty thousand soles” he said.

“That’s more than five thousand dollars,” I said.

The headman did not reply. But he seemed pleased that the figure was regarded as large.

Late that afternoon, we heard the rumble of Jesús’s peki-peki pushing upstream. I didn’t feel we had yet made the breakthrough we needed with the tribe, but it seemed that we had covered as much ground as possible in the initial meeting. We thanked the tribal leaders and walked back to the beach, each of us wondering how we could evade paying the fee, while at the same time keeping the Machiguenga happy.

SEVEN

ENGAGING NATIVES

On engaging natives, the people with whom they have lived, and to whom they have become attached and learnt to fear, should impress on them that, unless they bring you back in safety, they must never show their faces again, nor expect the balance of their pay, which will only be delivered to them on your return.

The Art of Travel

Back at the camp, Richard had wakened from his hallucinogenic sleep. He was sitting in the twilight with his pants down. Rodrigo was shining the beam of a flashlight carefully at the veteran’s genitals. It made for a curious scene. As soon as he saw us approaching, Richard struggled to pull on his camouflage fatigues.

“Itching?” I said.

“That’s my business.”

Our conversation was cut short by the sound of English being spoken on the road. A few minutes later a hippie was standing before us. He was five foot tall, with a gangling frame as if he had suffered from recurring malaria; a long carpet of beard ran down from his face. His legs were hidden by what appeared to be homemade tie-dye pants, and he wore bedroom slippers on his feet. He was an Australian from Darwin, who, coincidentally, was called Darwin as well.

“Let me guess,” I said, “you’re looking for Paititi.”

But Darwin didn’t know what I meant. He had never heard the name before. “I’ve come to stay with the monks,” he said.

“Monks?”

He pointed downriver.

“It may sound weird, man,” he said, “but someone in Cusco told me that ten miles south of here there’s a community of monks. When the leader of their fraternity dies, they cook him and eat him.”

“Cannibals?” I asked.

“In exceptional circumstances,” said Darwin.

Normally, I would have been the first to go in search of cannibal monks, particularly as I had heard of a similar tradition at a nunnery in the Philippines. It’s the sort of quest I can’t resist. But Paititi was still beckoning, and I felt as if we were making real progress. I left Darwin to listen to Richard’s tiresome repertoire of Vietnam tales, and walked up to the shop to extract more information from Gloria.

She was sitting in the dimness on a bench, caressing a kitten’s back with the tips of her fingers. As soon as I stepped up on to the floorboards, she let the cat slide from her lap and turned up the flame of her paraffin lamp. “Did you meet the Machiguenga?” she asked.

“They gave us masato and armadillo meat,” I said.

“Don’t be misled by their hospitality. They’ll rob you blind.”

“If someone wanted to find Paititi,” I said cautiously, “who would he talk to?”

“Not the tribesmen, for sure,” said Gloria.

“Then who? Who knows?”

The shopkeeper rubbed a palm across the warts on her cheek. “Hay solo un hombre, there is a man,” she said.

“Does he know about Paititi?”

“Sí. Él conoce, he knows.”

“What’s his name?”

“He’s called Héctor. He lives across the river.”

“Is he a tribesman?”

“No,” she said, “they’re not from the tribe over there. They follow the way of Jesus.”

We hadn’t been down at the edge of the jungle for long, but our presence there was already paying dividends. Perhaps, I pondered, as I wandered back down to the camp, we would have beginner’s luck and we would find the ruins with no trouble at all.

At the camp the Australian had succumbed to the noxious effects of datura.

“It seemed a shame to waste it,” said Rodrigo.

Next morning, Leon and I left the others on the riverbank, and took a ride across the mighty Madre de Dios in a hollowed-out canoe. The water was much faster than it had been the day before, and the young boatman fought with the flat paddle as if our lives depended on it. He shouted that it had been raining heavily upstream, that the water would rise much higher in the coming days.

I asked if he knew Héctor.

“Sí, ese hombre es un Mesías, that man is a Messiah,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Él tiene un aura, un carisma, he has an aura, a presence. He has been touched by God.”

On the far side of the river, we jumped into the water and marched up to the wall of jungle. With time we eventually found a path, and took to it, slipping on the mud like half-wits tramping across ice. On either side of the track there were banana plants and breadfruit trees, suggesting a village nearby.

We walked for about forty minutes, the morning sun scorching our necks, the flies bathing in our sweat. Then, quite suddenly, as we came to the village, the skies opened and it poured with torrential rain. Within five seconds we were drenched. A man waved to us from his porch. We ran over and took refuge in his house.

He had a big square head, broad shoulders and short-sighted vision, which caused him to scrunch up his eyes when he was talking to you. He announced modestly that he was the headman.

“We are looking for Héctor,” I said.

“You mean El Maestro, the master?”

“We were told he knows about Paititi.”

“Ah, yes,” said the chief, “él conoce, sí, él conoce, he knows, yes, he knows.”

“Where does he live?”

“Usually he’s here in the village, but now he’s out at his chacra, his farmstead, planting a crop of yuca. He’ll get back in a week.”

“We have to go there now,” I said.

The rain was growing heavier, and in the jungle heavy rain can fall for many hours without letting up. The headman peered out at the mud. “You could wait until tomorrow,” he said.

“I cannot wait a moment longer,” I replied.

The inertia of a jungle village is a dangerous thing. Before you know it your whole life has slipped by and you are still sitting there. I tapped my watch. “Debemos irnos ya, we must leave at once.”

“Then my boy will take you.”

He called to his oldest son, Sergio, and instructed him to take us to meet El Maestro.

We set off at once, sliding up and down the narrow path as it wound through the undergrowth like the body of a snake. Sometimes we scrambled -to grasp at roots; at others, we forded streams up to our waists. All the while it poured and poured with rain, freezing us to the bone. Then, after four hours of misery, we spotted banana trees again. Our pace increased. A cluster of simple shacks came into view. There was no one about, just a few chickens looking wretched in the wet. We called, but no one came. We took off our shirts and wrung them out.

Our guide, the headman’s son, said that Paititi was thirty days’ walk through the jungle. Even then, I knew better than anyone the local inaccuracy of distance. In the Upper Amazon, I had found that the Shuar hardly ever ventured more than a few miles in any direction. They had a reasonable knowledge of the surrounding area, but their language did not contain the words to express distance, weight or any other measurement.

“The government air force fly over our village very often,” said the teenager. “My father believes that they may have already found Paititi, and that they’re clearing out the gold bit by bit.”

“How much gold does he think there is?”

The boy stretched his arms above his head and swung them down to his waist. “That much, or more,” he said.

A few minutes passed, and then a young, athletic-looking woman appeared. She was no more than about twenty. Unlike everyone else in the region, her teeth were not rotten. It was as if she was from a different genetic stock. Her name was Mariela; she was Héctor’s daughter.

“Where is your father?”

“He will be here soon.”

Five minutes more, and I glimpsed a gray-white beard moving through the trees. It was wrapped round the cheeks of a muscular man. His shirt was unbuttoned, its tails tied in a knot about his waist. Over one shoulder hung an axe, the blade ground down by years of sharpening. His expression was focused and the glint of a secret obsession shone in his eyes. From the first moment I saw him, I knew he was a key that could help unlock the puzzle of Paititi.

Héctor did not seem surprised to find a pair of drenched strangers, shaking with cold, taking shelter at his shack. He strode over and introduced himself. A silence followed, a silence that called for explanation.

“We are here because we share the same interest as you,” I said.

“You like growing yuca,” he replied, regarding our soft hands. “No, I don’t think so.”

“We are on a quest,” I said solemnly, “searching for the lost city of Paititi.”

“Aaaaah,” said Héctor. “You are the fresh moth attracted by an old flame.”

“We were told that you have experience.”

Héctor took off his shirt and wiped it across his face. He seemed very serious. “People have died searching for Paititi,” he said. “Others have returned different from when they set out. They all made sacrifices.”

“You mean they went mad?”

“Locura, madness.” Héctor uttered the word slowly, studiously. “Why do you want to find Paititi?” he asked. “Por el oro, for the gold?”

“At first it was for the glory,” I said, “but now I’m not so sure.”

“Paititi is up there,” said the old man obliquely. “There is no doubt. If you have doubt, then turn and walk back on that path.”

Héctor was quite different from most other Peruvians. He had the charisma of a politician, and a form of compacted energy I have only ever encountered in men with resolute belief. It came as little surprise that he was a Seventh Day Adventist.

I asked if he was a missionary. He said he was not. He had never converted anyone, he explained, for he saw it as each man’s right to seek out his own faith.

“I came here from Arequipa with my young family eighteen years ago,” he said. “I was searching for something. If you are searching, the jungle is a good place to find an answer.”

“Was it Paititi?”

“No, no, that was long before I’d heard about Paititi,” he said. “I was searching for a cure for deafness. I’d been working in the mineral mines in the north of Peru, drilling in tunnels. I lost my hearing as a result, so I threw in my hard hat and came here, dragging my wife and children along.”

“You obviously got healed,” I said.

“Oh, yes, by a shaman. He’s dead now, but he was a remarkable man. He forbade me to speak for an entire year. Utter a single word, even to myself, and, he said, I would never hear again.”

Héctor brushed his sinewy hands over his face. “¡Qué difícil fue! Oh, how hard that was!” he said, laughing. “I thought I’d go mad. But then one morning I woke up and heard a cockerel crowing. It was the most wonderful sound I have ever heard. There were so many delicious sounds!”

“What of Paititi?”

“Ah,” said the old man, “the shaman used to tell me about it. He said it was upriver, that his father had been there. Naturally, I was interested.”

“Have you mounted expeditions for Paititi?”

“You need money, lots of it,” he replied, “and time to prepare. Without preparation you could lose your life.”

“You mean to prepare your body and build up your muscles, that sort of thing?”

“No, no tus músculos, not your muscles,” said the old man, “but your mind.”

Héctor stopped talking and stared down at the swirl of smoke spiralling up from the fire. He sat down on a homemade chair and looked at me, studying my face. “To find Paititi,” he said, “you must not look for it. But even then you have to purify your spirit, cleanse your soul.”

“How long will that take?”

“Llevará seis meses, it will take six months,” he replied.

Leon and I glared at each other.

“I feel quite pure inside,” I said. “I think I could get away with a quick bout of purifying, a few days at the most.”

“Me too,” said Leon earnestly.

El Maestro gazed at me, not to examine my face or clothes, but my soul. I struggled to think pure thoughts, as Héctor sucked out my psyche with his eyes. When he had finished, he glanced down at the fire again. Like the Indians, his vision seemed unclouded by trifling insignificances: his mind had been washed clean by the jungle.

“What of the Machiguenga?” I asked, hoping to draw him from his inquisition. “Do they believe in Paititi?”

“Of course they believe,” he said, without hesitation, “but don’t mention the word to them. It will turn them wild.”

“With envy?”

“No, con temor, with fear.”

Héctor suddenly seemed overcome with tiredness.

“Hay mucho peligro, there is much danger,” he said sternly.

It sounded like a line from a B-grade horror movie, but he really meant it.

“I will be back at the village in a week,” he said. “Come and see me. We can talk further then.”

Two days after drinking the preparation of datura, Darwin, the Australian hippie, came to. He couldn’t stand at first, and complained of severe soreness in his arms and back. “I flew, man,” he said gently, as if he believed it.

“Where did you fly?”

“Up the river, and over the jungle, low above the water, over the tops of the trees. It was magical. I smelt the wind.”

The film crew and I didn’t pay much attention. We discussed what the next course of action was to be, and agreed unanimously that Héctor, El Maestro, was our best bet so far. Although sitting there for a week was an unwelcome prospect, we had little choice. Meanwhile, Richard listened intently to the hippie’s story. His eyes were encircled with shadowy rings. He looked worse than I had ever seen him, like a man woken from death. “Did you speak with the spirits?” he asked.

Darwin appeared confused by the question. “Yes, spirits, there were spirits,” he replied at length. “They washed me, they touched me, they loved me, man.” He smiled tenderly. It was the smile of a hippie who has been comforted in an endless blanket of free love.

“Yes, man,” he said, “yes, they loved me and they showed me the hills.”

“What hills?” asked Richard.

“Over there. There are twelve of them.”

The hippie’s mention of hills would have been lost if Richard had not been listening. The veteran said Jesús the boatman had spoken of a series of pinnacles due west of Shintuya. “They’re kind of pyramids,” he said, “man-made pyramids.”

I would not have paid any attention, but I had read that the Incas built stone pyramids and worshipped the sun from them. So we looked for Jesús to ask him about the pinnacles. He wasn’t at home. His wife said he had run off to his mistress’s house. “She’s a witch,” said the woman, “but I don’t care. One day he’ll come home but I’ll be gone. There’s a man in Santa Cruz, a good man, who looks at me nicely when I pass his house. He needs a wife. He must do, his house is all messy.”

“Do you know about the pinnacles?” I asked.

“Don’t believe anything Jesús has to say,” she snapped. “He’s a fool, a fool with a big dick.”

Back in the camp, Darwin had gathered up his belongings and disappeared on a canoe filled with bananas in search of the cannibal monks. I was glad to be rid of him. We strolled up to Gloria’s veranda and inspected the map in its shade. About twelve miles due west, up the winding Inchipata river, there was a curious series of what looked like hillocks, jagged with contours, like the grooves of a saw. It was impossible to say if they were man-made or not, but they were mysterious. My mind filled with the image of an Inca priest, slitting llamas’ throats in honor of the sun.

The only way to know something for sure is to go there yourself, so we set about hiring men and mounting a reconnaissance trip to the so-called pinnacles. It was a good way of testing the equipment. Gloria said she would look after the luggage we did not need.

“Get your porters from Panataua, Héctors village,” she said. “You don’t want men from Shintuya, they’re lazy and weak.”

We crossed the river and marched over to Panataua. The headman was blowing cigarette smoke into his infant daughter’s hair in the hope of killing the lice.

“We need to hire some porters,” I said.

“¿Cuántos necesitas? How many do you need?”

“Fifteen at the most.”

“Wait here until dusk.”

Passing time in a Peruvian hamlet can drive a reasonable man berserk. The village was thin on entertainment. There was no electricity, so no television, and no theatres, or shops, or anything to help pass the time; nothing except a church. As we soon found, it was the one attraction, patronized energetically by every member of the community. It was a bright, whitewashed building, set at the far end of the village in a thicket of breadfruit trees. Open-sided, with a sloping tin roof, there was a space under the floor where feral dogs took dust baths and fought.

Twice a day the entire village donned their best clothes and tramped into the church to pledge their love to God. Most of them carried oversized Bibles wherever they went. While we were waiting, I asked the headman about Héctor. “If anyone knows about Paititi, it is Héctor,” he said. “He is trusted by the Machiguenga. They tell him things. They come to his house and whisper to him.”

“He is a bridge between our world and the world of the natives,” I said.

“¡Sí! El puente, the bridge.”

That evening, when dusk had turned into darkness, and the air was filled with the rustling of cicada wings, ten men arrived at the headman’s shack. Most of them were farmers, earning a meager living by growing bananas and yuca for Cusco. They were all clutching well-thumbed Bibles, dressed in their best clothes, ready for church. None looked at all strong. They looked like preachers.

“How many pounds can you carry?” I asked them.

“Eighty,” said a very short, feeble man. “We can carry eighty pounds at least.”

Boris, who had served as a conscript in the Bulgarian military, weighed out eighty pounds, and stuffed it into a kit-bag. I marked out a distance of a hundred yards through the village. The first puny man stepped up, wrestled to pick up the pack, and staggered ahead for a few feet, before dropping it. Behind him, the other young farmers looked sheepish. We cut the weight by half. The farmers still found it a struggle. I asked how many of them would come with us for fifteen soles a day. They all put up their hands. I fished out a bottle of Peruvian grape brandy from the supplies. “We don’t drink,” said the feeblest of them all. “We are Adventists.”

“Fuckin’ girlies,” said Richard. “I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

We planned to leave Shintuya at dawn the day after next. The Adventists’ frailty meant we would have to deposit the bulk of our equipment at Gloria’s shop.

After I forbade him to prepare hallucinogens, Rodrigo turned his shamanic hands to cooking, and became quite an accomplished chef. Everything he served up from his magic cauldron was wonderful, not least of all his pont-neuf potatoes. That evening, after the pot had been scraped clean, he went down to the river to drink his last batch of ayahuasca. He said it was to search for Paititi.

It rained all night, a torrential downpour that found crevices in the tarpaulin, soaking us as we slept. When we woke at about six, we found the river had encroached all around us, turning our sandbank into a miniature island. The equipment was drenched. Three hours of hauling the gear up to higher ground followed. At the end of it, Rodrigo seemed to have something to say.

“La muerte nos espera más adelante, death is waiting up ahead,” he said, through a grin of broken teeth.

“The Curse Lines?”

“Sí, una pared de energía, a wall of energy, of power, a power of death. Touch it and you will die.” Nothing pleased Rodrigo so much as the prospect of misery being visited on his friends. “The only way through it is to burrow under it, like dogs. After that is a stone wall, a thousand yards tall, covered in vines.”

“Like the wall of Sachsayhuaman?”

Rodrigo didn’t reply to the question.

“Después de la pared hay un lago, after the wall is a lake,” he said, “it’s very deep, like an ocean, and filled with dolphins with fangs. If they smell your fat, they will eat you. Beyond the lake is another wall. It’s made of gold. And after that is Paititi. It is waiting, eager for visitors.”

“That’s excellent,” I said.

The shaman regarded me with a poisonous glance. “It’s waiting for visitors,” he repeated, “para poder matarlos, so it can kill them.”

EIGHT

BONES

Another remarkable substitute for firewood is bones; a fact which Mr Darwin was, I believe, the first to mention. The bones of an animal, when freshly killed, make good fuel; and even those of cooked meat, and such as have been exposed to the air for some days, will greatly increase the heat of a scanty fire.

The Art of Travel

Rodrigo was the first to succumb to madness. At six thirty that evening, after scrubbing his cauldron clean, he grabbed a cooking knife and held it at arm’s length at the film crew. He didn’t say anything at first. His eyes seemed clouded, and his mouth was dry. His long tongue poked out from between his teeth at intervals, like a viper tasting the air. I called Richard. He came over to see what the fuss was about.

“I’m going to kill you,” said Rodrigo, jabbing the knife at me.

“What’s wrong with you?” I said sternly.

“The potatoes! You are forcing me to cook potatoes. I am a shaman, not a chef.”

I had not imagined Rodrigo could make such a protest; until then he had never raised his voice. Leon begged him to put the knife down.

“We’re not forcing you to do anything,” he said, “but the hallucinogens are destabilizing Richard, and he’s frightening when he’s unstable.”

Richard strode over and grabbed the knife. “Pull yourself together!” he shouted at Rodrigo. “Or I’ll kick your ass all the way back to Iquitos.”

“I’m going back to Iquitos anyway,” replied the shaman. “I don’t need a knife to kill you. I’ll do it with a curse.”

With that, Rodrigo stood up, took up his wet cauldron and his cloth bag, and walked away into the night.

“Shall we go after him?” I asked.

“Fuckin’ phoney,” barked Richard. “Let him rot in Hell!”

We never saw the shaman again.

Next morning, disbanding the camp did much to boost morale. The tarpaulin was removed from its frame and furled up like a bed sheet. The film crew insisted on bringing most of their equipment, which piqued my anger and caused me to shake my fist. The porters were too feeble to carry much, even though we were taking only a fraction of the equipment with us. We agreed that if we did find ruins, I would send some of the men back to ferry the rest of the gear up there. The porters didn’t turn up until noon. They said they had been in church, praying for our souls. I lined them up and paced up and down like a sergeant inspecting his troops.

“From this moment forward,” I said, “if there’s any praying to be done, it has to be done in your own time.”

The men didn’t say anything. They just looked at their bare feet timidly.

“Don’t any of you own shoes?”

Again, they strained to look meek. Marco fished out the kit-bag full of rubber boots, and handed them out. I had learned years before that the majority of Peruvians have wide Central Asian feet, and most take size-nine boots. Their universal foot-size is a legacy of their ancestors who crossed the frozen Bering Straits from Asia twenty thousand years ago.

Then the packs were divided and we moved on out, with Richard in the lead. For the first time he seemed revitalized. I wondered if it had anything to do with Rodrigo’s sudden departure, or with the large quid of coca leaves pressed tightly into his cheek. He was dressed in his usual camouflage fatigues, the Ninja singlet, and a bandanna tied over his head. Across his chest was the Brazilian riot shotgun, loaded, he said, with buckshot. The weapon took seven cartridges, and could spray fire across forty-five degrees.

“Any trouble with these kids,” he said acerbically, “and it’ll be show time.”

The procession moved in single file, heading due west through low jungle. Words cannot describe my elation at moving. Venture to a remote corner of a faraway land and, from the moment you get there, every person and every thing becomes an obstacle, designed to entrap you, to stop you proceeding on your way. The crew were documenting the momentous departure, which slowed us down considerably. It took them precious time to get out the cameras and put them away once they were finished.

I watched the path before me like a hawk. One moment it was as level as a bowling green, the next it had become an acute wall of mud and roots and, beyond that, a downhill slope. The mud was terrible. It came up to our thighs in places. Dodging round it was difficult because of the weight of our packs. Shift the weight too much in one direction and you could snap an ankle.

Over the first three miles we made good progress, having essentially followed the course of the river back down to near the porters’ village at Panataua. The men moaned from time to time about their burdens, but the sight of Richard’s riot shotgun muted their protests. We crossed the river in relays, taking our chances in the unsteady hollowed-out canoes. Then, after regrouping on the other side, we cut a path due west so as to bisect the Rio Inchipata.

Ten minutes after entering the forest, the men put down their packs and sat on them. They did this simultaneously, without the faintest whisper between them. It was as if each man had an identical threshold of imagined discomfort.

“What’s the matter?

“Es trabajo duro, it’s hard work,” said the farmers. “We don’t like walking like this.”

Richard cocked a cartridge into the chamber of his weapon.

“Force is not the way,” I said to him. “If any man wants to leave, let him leave right now.”

The farmers looked at one another tautly.

“Does anyone want to go back?” I asked again.

The smallest of the porters, a slender wisp of bone, called Máximo, stood up as their leader. “We will not be threatened by the American,” he said. “If you want us to walk hard you have to feed us well.”

“There’s good food,” I told him, “food from England. It’s special food called Pot Noodle.”

The men seemed pleased for a moment.

“Pota Noodel?” said Máximo.

“Yes. It will make you feel stronger than you have ever felt before.”

“Does Pota Noodel make you strong down there?” Máximo jabbed a finger between his legs.

“Yes!” I smirked. “Your wife will boast that you are a king of kings!”

The men cackled, took up their packs and strode ahead through the mud. There were sometimes paths in the undergrowth when we neared a village. The advantage was that the macheteros did not need to do so much chopping, except where the path had been reclaimed by the jungle. The drawback was the glutinous mud that took us constantly by surprise, sucking the men down to within an inch of their lives.

By late afternoon, we reached the Inchipata River. I had planned to float the old rubber boat, but the water was no more than ankle deep. A tense moment passed, during which the farmers realized they would have to carry their loads the entire way. Again, Richard brandished his weapon menacingly, as if ready to dispatch a band of Vietcong lurking between the trees.

“We will camp here for the night,” I said.

The first camp took a long while to build, there being no routine. We erected two tarpaulins, one for us and one for the men. They had put down their loads and were waiting for Pot Noodles, and for someone else to prepare the camp. I gave a volley of orders: collect firewood, secure the gear, put up the tarps. Máximo shook his head, smiling the smile of an obsequious salesman who thinks he knows best. He took off his boots and lay back.

“We are praying,” he said.

“No work, no Pot Noodles,” I responded.

The farmers were galvanized into action, even though they had still to taste the exotic English dish.

I had known from the start that I could not expect a local team to be charged with the insatiable enthusiasm that drove me on. As I saw it, the single objective was to keep going. Anything that did not aid this goal was against me and against us all. Running an expedition can bring out the worst in a man. It can make you a power-crazed monster. Even if you keep hold of your senses, you find those under your command detest you from the start. When I read in historical memoirs how a commander was adored by his troops, I take it with a pinch of salt. For if the commander pushed his troops through landscapes of unendurable hardship, they would have no choice but to despise him.

I took comfort in the expeditions of the great Victorian explorers. Their methods were at best ruthless, at worst criminal. But men like Stanley, Livingstone and Samuel Baker could maintain movement for months, even years. I had to respect them for that whatever their methods.

The farmers said prayers before dinner, each reading a passage aloud from his Bible. Then they ate their Pot Noodles in silence, as if they were a religious symbol of some kind, a jungle Eucharist. Rogerio, the most sullen of the men, was overcome with pleasure. He said he could feel blood gushing like a waterfall into his boxer shorts. “Un afrodisíaco” he said, gloating.

“¡Si!” exclaimed the others, “¡un afrodisíaco!”

On the first night, I lay on my back wrapped in my sleeping-bag, my head propped up with a tangle of wet clothes. If I looked out from the end of the makeshift tent, I could see the stars. They were like a million fragments of chalk dust blown across a sheet of black card. I gazed at them, adoring them, worshipping them. The air was still, motionless, punctuated from time to time by the sound of one creature caught by another, the chorus of death.

The film crew lay still, lined up like anchovies in a can. Richard was sitting up at the far end of the tent, smoking Marlboros and chewing coca leaves. Like me, I think he appreciated the calm. It reminded him of Vietnam. Then, from the distance, my ears registered a faint sound. It was the sound of a man groaning, a man in pain. It grew louder and louder, as if the pain was increasing. I sat up. “What’s that?”

“Nothing to worry about,” said Richard.

“It sounds serious.”

“Go back to sleep.”

“But what is it?”

The veteran exhaled a cloud of smoke. “It’s just the farm boys buggering each other,” he said.

We walked all next day, the porters groaning about their packs, and the smirking of other wounds, fresh from the night. Morale was tremendously low, pathetically low, considering we had covered little ground and endured nothing in the way of real hardship. The jungle grew very thick, a snarled mess of paka, fine thorny bamboo; brush against it and it lacerated your skin. The undergrowth was too thick to traverse with machetes, so we marched up the river in a line, slipping on the flat round stones on the bottom. The new danger was the sudden dips, which took us by surprise. A misplaced foot, and you were underwater, pulled down by your pack, struggling to get upright, flailing like a drowning man.

Sometimes there was a slender strand of silt that formed a beach along which we could walk. The difficulty of walking on wet sand was tremendous. From time to time it was dotted with the haphazard tracks of a large quadruped.

“Sachavaca, giant tapir,” said Richard. “Good meat if you can catch it.”

The farmers squirmed and moaned with every step, like schoolboys lost on a cross-country run. The film crew and I were carrying the same weight; we found we could endure our packs with comfort.

“I’ve been around,” Richard explained menacingly,” and I’ve never seen a bunch of sissies like this. If we were in the army, I’d get physical with “em, beat the shit out of “em.”

Then, as the Inchipata veered north-west, we caught the first glimpse of the mountain ridge, on the windward side of which the pinnacles were said to lie. The farmers stopped trudging as soon as they caught sight of the ridge. They took out their Bibles and held an impromptu prayer session.

At four that afternoon we made camp. Richard had found some “magic” psilocybe mushrooms and planned to chew them once it was dark. He had been performing well since Rodrigo’s departure, so for once I didn’t berate him for giving in to his addiction.

“It’s medicine,” he said, under his breath.

That night I gave the order for some spaghetti to be cooked with two cans of sardines. I wanted to keep the aphrodisiac out of the farmers’ blood. They ate heartily, gorging themselves on the food. Later they prayed long and hard, until the full moon was high above the camp, hanging there like a disc of antique ivory.

Richard took his military hammock, a candle and a machete, and went to be alone. He climbed up into the undergrowth and made a simple camp, slinging the hammock between a pair of kapok trees. Then he lit the candle and, I assume, he chewed his magic mushrooms. The film crew didn’t say it, but I knew they were now fearful of the veteran soldier. In the four years since he and I had worked together, his mind had become eroded, damaged by the constant stream of nerve agents and, perhaps, by the jungle itself. We were all part of the same unit, the same team, but somehow Richard saw us as a threat.

I stumbled down to the water’s edge to fill my canteen. The moon’s platinum light reflected off the river, as if the surface had been burnished in some way. I stood there for many minutes, staring out over the silhouette of trees, wondering about Richard, the film crew, the porters and Paititi. I wondered, too, why I find it so necessary to set myself impossible quests. It would be far easier to stay at home and get more gainful employment.

Then I turned back towards the pair of tarpaulin canopies. Beyond them I caught a glimpse of Richard’s candle, its wick flickering between the intertwined foliage. Very silently, I crept over. Richard was standing naked, a bandanna tied tight around his scalp, a machete in his hands. He was stoned out of his mind, dancing in slow motion round the candle, like a man who had been separated from his sanity. It was so easy to pity him, to see he had been betrayed by his people. He was adrift, clinging to a frail memory, a memory of the time that had both created and destroyed him.

My eagerness for an early start was never fulfilled. The porters started praying an hour before breakfast. They then insisted on eating a vast amount of fish soup, which the cook had brewed up. While eating, they moaned and groaned about the pain of the straps, which they said cut into their shoulders. It was almost eleven a.m. before we were once again wading through the river.

The chief danger of late morning was the stingrays, which liked the warm shallow water close to the banks. Most of us cut bamboo staves and stabbed them ahead of our feet. Richard looked very off-color, as if he had been up all night. He didn’t utter a word all day, to the thrill of the Swedes. They were distressed that their bags were being drenched in the river, hour after hour. Then in the afternoon, the Arriflex’s lens fogged up. They had to get the generator going, and use the hairdryer to warm the glass.

We walked for four hours, bursts of movement punctured by regular breaks for rest and prayer. By the late afternoon we were being plagued by sweat bees. The vile nature of those creatures is indescribable. They swarmed over us, silently sipping the sweat from our faces, hair and arms. As soon as we removed our packs, they flocked to the damp patches where the packs had pressed up to our shirts. I tried removing my shirt entirely, but my skin was soon covered with a thick layer of ecstatic bees.

The river zigzagged to the west, doubling back on itself every mile or two. The only compensation was that the current was slow: walking upstream would have been much harder work in heavy water. From time to time we cut a trail through the jungle where the river formed a horseshoe. The porters liked to stop in the forest, take off their packs and gather wild berries. It was at one of these berry breaks that we learned of the cook’s obsession.

He was called Roberto, a young man of no more than about nineteen, with close-cropped hair, and a youthful cleanliness. His skin was fresh and undamaged by hardship, his hands smooth, his voice feminine and soft. The porters were eating the berries they had collected, giggling and poking fun at Roberto. It was gentle fun, like women playing in a harem. I asked them for the joke.

“It’s Roberto,” said one of the others. “Él está enamorado de Richard, he’s in love with Richard.”

That night, when the sun had set and the moon ascended to its full height, Roberto plucked up the courage to sneak from the porters’ tent to Richard’s alcove in the jungle. I was almost asleep but, through half-open eyes, I saw a slender shadow move across the beach and into the undergrowth. A minute went by. It was followed by a high-pitched, terrifying shriek of fear, and the sound of the cook’s bare feet tearing back to bed.

Richard had mistaken the naked young suitor as a predator, and had lashed out with his machete. By a great stroke of good fortune, the blade had missed the boy’s throat.

The routine of wading through the river continued for three more days. The porters whinged about the pain at every opportunity, scowling at me as if I had murdered their families in the night. So great was their anger that the Swedes suggested I sleep with a machete under the knot of clothes I used as a pillow. They said it was just a question of who snapped first: the porters or Richard.

The men might have reviled me as their tormentor, but Richard’s condition was far graver. From the moment Roberto had sought to attract his affections, Richard had been behaving very oddly indeed. He stopped talking, plugged his ears with candle wax, and if anyone addressed him, he would tremble uncontrollably. We tried to stay out of his way, fearful that his withdrawal symptoms might be reaching a climax. The focus of my overriding concern was the shotgun, designed to bring down a maximum number of people in the least time. His hands were always molded around it as he walked. It had become an extension of his body, just as an M16 must have been in Vietnam.

Every so often I went to Richard to make reconciliations. But he stared through me, as he did with all the other men. The only one he struggled to focus on was the cook. He watched the boy like a hawk, as if waiting for the right moment to kill him. Worse still was that the more threatening Richard’s gaze became, the more Roberto adored it.

As much as I disliked the porters, I went to them after their early-evening prayer session, and advised them in the strongest terms to rein in Roberto. “If he carries on like this,” I said coldly, “the gun will claim its first victim.”

Máximo spoke for them all: “Le hemos advertido, también, we have warned him, too,” he said, “but Roberto has the fire of a woman who has been rejected. It cannot be put out, but must blaze on and on. My friend,” he continued, with increased drama, “éste es el fuego del verdadero amor, this is the fire of true love.”

In the evening Richard made his usual modest camp in the forest, built a campfire, and sharpened his machete on a stone. We could hear the blade rasping up and down, again and again, like the sound of the sea breaking over rocks. Roberto was looking on in the darkness, timid and bewildered. He had removed his clothes and was crouching low. For a moment, in the silver light, I thought I saw him clench his knees as if he was ready to hurl himself upon his true love. It would, of course, have been suicide.

At 10.24 a.m. on the fifth day, we spotted the so-called pinnacles. It was hard to make them out at first, as they were densely covered in trees and shrubs, lying in the shadow of the low ridge. They didn’t look like pinnacles or pyramids at all. From the first moment I saw them, I knew the journey had been a waste of time, that the pinnacles were no more connected to Paititi than anything else. They were certainly not man-made.

The porters took one look and refused to go another step. They stripped down to their boxer shorts, sprawled out on the warm sun-baked rocks, and were soon covered from head to toe in sweat bees. If I had been Stanley, I would have resorted to corporal punishment — but, I reflected, a great explorer such as he would never have hired such a pathetic bunch of men in the first place. “What’s the matter with you all?” I shouted.

“Es demasiado caluroso, it’s too hot,” said one.

“Our backs are hurting us,” said another.

“The devil is up there on the pinnacles,” said a third.

“¡Sí, el diablo! Yes, the devil! The devil!” cried the others.

With the porters almost naked and on the point of mutiny, I invited the film crew to carry on with me, on a reconnaissance expedition. We took two climbing ropes and left most of the other gear and food beside the river. I was concerned that the farmers might pilfer the supplies, then mutiny. And so, before we left for the recon mission, I made them give me their boots and the Bibles just in case. We hid them in the jungle a few hundred yards away. Most jungle porters would happily have walked barefoot, but not these softies.

After following the watercourse for days, it was a wonderful feeling to climb above it. Within an hour of slashing and traipsing through undergrowth, we reached a natural mirador. From there we got a good look at the pinnacles. There were about a dozen, all odd angular shapes, probably having fallen away from the ridge in ancient times. To get to them, we had to cut a trail in an arc, veering down to the south. Without the porters, and the equipment they bore so unhappily, we made fast progress.

Three hours after setting out, we had managed to climb one of the structures. As we ascended, the vegetation quickly changed, from trees and bamboo to ferns and other higher-altitude flora. There were orchids now, and bromeliads, and every branch and twig was encrusted with green-gray lichens. The temperature fell sharply, too. It was as if we had crossed an invisible barrier, a divide between one realm and the next.

Despite the coolness of the air, we sweated uncontrollably from exertion, and were caked with sweat bees and small black flies. They crawled over our skin and clothes, desperate to suck liquid from our dry mouths and from our eyes. With the river so close, I couldn’t understand why their thirst was so great.

Near to the top of the pinnacle, we were forced to haul ourselves up over decomposing vegetation. The granite base was lost beneath many layers of dead branches and fallen trees. We used one of the static ropes, but it wasn’t much good. The amateur climbers for whom they were made rarely have the inconvenience of such a deluge of roots and twisted stems.

Finally we made it to the top and surveyed the area. It was a place of astonishing natural beauty, and of some secrecy. But it lacked a key ingredient: enchantment. The Incas would have liked it there, I thought, as we went down, but they would never have constructed Paititi in such an obvious place. For them nothing was quite so important as a landscape in which they felt the enduring presence of their god.

NINE

WARM CARCASSES

In Napoleon’s retreat, after his campaign in Russia, many a soldier saved or prolonged his life by creeping within the warm and reeking carcass of a horse that had died by the way.

The Art of Travel

We arrived back at the camp at twilight. The temperature had continued to fall through the afternoon and the air was now filled with a sinister calm, the kind that can only lead to a massive, unrelenting downpour of rain. The porters were snuggled up together, some naked, others not. Richard was sitting alone by the river. He didn’t say a word when we got back. He was shaking, rocking back and forth, as if he was very, very cold indeed.

The porters were reluctant to talk to me, and when they did it was only to say that Richard had been acting strangely all day. They said he had urinated into a cup and stared into the liquid for an hour or more; and that he had wept uncontrollably while they were praying after lunch.

“What’s the matter with him?” asked Roberto. “¿Qué pasa con mi verdadero amor? What’s the matter with my true love?”

I said that I didn’t know, but that I was frightened.

“He has been trained to kill people,” I told them, “so we must forget our differences and protect each other.”

I would have devised a plan to wrestle the shotgun away from Richard, but feared it would enrage him further. In any case, a man like that, I reflected, could kill us all with his bare hands. He was a killing machine.

Roberto got up in the night and made a secret meal for the old warrior. He took it to him in his lair in the forest. I don’t know what he was expecting, or hoping, but he was chased away, yelping like a small dog that had been kicked hard by an unkind man.

At about two a.m. the temperature cooled a fraction of a degree, a rustle of wind streamed over our faces and it began to pour. The rain of Madre de Dios is similar to that of the Amazon, but there is a petrifying aspect to it, as if it seeks to wound rather than to nurture. It rips down in sheets, with anger, with hatred. We lay in our sleeping-bags hoping desperately, as always, that the water would stay out. But, as always, it found its path in, and was soon being sponged up by our bedding.

The rain continued to fall. It fell through the remainder of the night, all the next morning, through the next day and the following night. All the while, the river rose, inch by inch, until it was ten feet from our camp. We had the option of moving, pitching again in the forest, but the farmers didn’t want to budge. They said that the rain would stop... and, sure enough, it did. It was how the world must have been in the wake of the biblical flood. Birds were seen twittering in the chonta palms, bright sunshine spilling between the fronds.

The river, which so recently had been little more than a creek, was now a surging body of water. Transformed from innocence to maturity, it was now our greatest foe. The current was so tremendous that we could not get across, let alone wade down it.

That morning the porters were slower than usual. At eight a.m. they were still cuddled up with each other beneath their long green tarpaulin.

“What’s the matter with you?” I shouted.

“Es sábado, it’s Saturday,” said Máximo. “Seventh Day Adventists don’t do anything on Saturday.”

So they lay there all day. Their only breaks were to eat a meal of roasted fish heads and yuca, and to pray.

The next day, the river was still far too high for wading. There was only one solution: to blow life into the rubber boat. Máximo and Rogerio took out the Zodiac and unfurled it. Since I had purchased the boat, from a used-car salesman in London’s East End, it had remained untested. Now was the chance to impress the locals, I thought. The porters gathered round. Their amazement lasted until the fragile foot-pump had begun to work. It was soon apparent that the craft was riddled with holes, twenty-three of them.

Marco, the Ukranian banker, got to work with a repair kit. He glued and glued, until the boat was covered in patches. The problem was that in addition to the holes, the wooden floor was about to fall out, as the seams were in a terrible state. We decided to use it only for luggage, which would be placed on a platform above the waterline.

As the gluing was in progress, the farmers went out into the forest and hacked down a thicket of balsa trees. They felled about eighteen in all. Within an hour or two, they had stripped the bark of the smooth trunks and nailed them together, using pins made from chonta wood, the same wood that the Machiguenga used for their bows. Their skill and speed in making the rafts astonished me. Until that moment I had regarded them as good for nothing.

The equipment was packed on to the rafts and wrapped twice in polythene. Then they were launched, along with the antique Zodiac, and we set off back to Panataua.

The pinnacles might have been a disappointment but, as I saw it, there is nothing like testing equipment and men. As my grandfather would always say: “Time spent on reconnaissance is seldom wasted.”

The Zodiac took in water the moment it was eased into the raging current. The balsa rafts fared much better: unlike the rubber boat, floating came naturally to them. Their other great advantage was their strength: they could be hauled effortlessly over the sharpest rocks.

It took only two days to retrace our route down the Inchipata. The farmers were thrilled at the prospect of returning to their homes. I longed to get to Panataua so I could talk Héctor into setting out with us. If the porters from his village were the best around, I had no idea how we would ever transport our gear on a larger scale journey.

For the moment the greatest concern was Richard. He lay on one of the rafts, outstretched and delirious, trembling with fever. At first I thought he was putting it on, that it was a bizarre act, perhaps to pull out of the main expedition. But as time wore on, I began to wonder if he was genuinely ill. The Richard Fowler we all knew and endured would have torn your head off for making fun of his past. But now he put up with the porters’ taunts, and even allowed Roberto to stroke his thighs — until I ordered the young cook to move away. It seemed unfair to allow him to caress a man incapable of defending himself.

At Panataua, the porters lined up to be paid. They looked like a concert party about to put on a performance, rather than serious jungle porters. I counted out a wad of notes for each and forced myself to shake their hands.

“Nunca encontrarás Paititi, you will never find Paititi,” said Máximo, when his turn came.

“Why do you say that?”

“Because you do not have Jesus in your heart.”

I thanked him for his observation and handed him his money. Rogerio was next. He asked me if he and the other men could be given a Pot Noodle as a bonus. I said that none of them deserved a bonus but, as a gesture of goodwill, they would each be presented with one of the tasty dehydrated meals. They thanked me.

“You know, they are not to fill our stomachs,” said Máximo darkly, “son para satisfacer a nuestras mujeres, they are to satisfy our wives.”

It took me a moment to make the connection. He had referred to the supposed aphrodisiacal properties of the white plastic pots.

When the men had been given their Pot Noodles, we received word from Héctor that we should come to his shack. I didn’t know what to do with all the gear, so I coaxed the farmers to ferry it to his part of the village as their gesture of goodwill. Héctor was standing under a wayuru tree, waiting for us. It was good to see him again. He was smiling, his mouth framed with white beard, a baseball cap pulled down tight on his head. “I see that you survived the jokers,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“The farm boys, son débiles como los niños, they’re as weak as children.”

“Why didn’t you warn me?”

The old man laughed ominously. “If you really want to find Paititi,” he replied, “you have to learn how to choose a team. Without the right people you will never succeed.”

Héctor owned two modest wooden shacks. The one on the right was used for cooking and eating; there was an antechamber filled with general bric-á-brac and week-old chicks. The other building was larger. It consisted of a small sitting area open to the elements, a storeroom, and a room in which Héctor, his wife, daughter and son slept. The shacks were surrounded by a mud garden. The arrangement was as primitive as one could imagine. Héctor had come from the big city of Arequipa eighteen years before, but had not bothered to build a more permanent home. There was no running water, no lavatory or stove and, of course, no electricity. The family relied on candlelight, cooked on an open fire and washed at the stream like everyone else in the village.

The old man took one look at Richard, who was barely able to stand, and shook his head. “You must all stay here with us,” he said. “This man is in a bad condition, and he should not be moved.”

“He’s used to a diet of hallucinogens,” I responded, “but he can’t get them. So he’s getting weaker and weaker.”

El Maestro helped the old soldier to lie down on a bench in the shade. “There is only one thing that can save him,” he said, “el amor de Jesús, the love of Jesus.”

With that, Héctor ushered us in to eat. His wife, Doris, was cooking a meal in the cramped kitchen. She was a short woman, hunched from years of stooping at the hearth, her head crowned with dull gray hair, her childlike eyes reflecting the flames.

We told Héctor about the pinnacles, the porters, and what we had learned. I declared that the journey had been a waste of time.

“No, it certainly was not,” said Héctor. “It was the beginning of your preparation.”

We sat at the rough table and held hands in prayer. The old man’s son, Paolo, said grace. He was about twelve, with the face of an angel, a complexion so delicate that we all gazed at it. The food was brought in by Mariela, the teenage daughter we had met at the chacra. There were wide enamel bowls filled with creamy maize porridge, and boiled yuca on a bed of rice.

We ate in silence, and when the meal was over, Héctor thanked Jesus on behalf of us all for providing the food. At first I felt I ought to confess my aversion to missionaries. Then I realized Héctor might find it necessary to convert me. I asked the Swedes what to do. They talked animatedly in Swedish for a minute or two.

“Don’t confess anything,” they said. “It’ll blow our cover.”

So we all agreed to endure the message of Adventism as best we could. After lunch Doris spoon-fed Richard a bowl of chicken broth. His eyes had rolled up in an alarming way. I thought he might die. Héctor was cordial, but wouldn’t approach the sick soldier. He disliked even looking at him. “He is filled with bitterness, with evil,” he declared, slapping his hands together. “Only a diet of prayer can return his health. Este hombre le ha dado la espalda a Dios, this man has turned his back on God.”

“He’s here to protect us,” I said, in a moment of enthusiasm.

Héctor peered down at the outstretched figure, regarding him with absolute loathing. “My friend,” he said, “this man here could not protect anyone from anything. But let us pray for a miracle.”

We held hands and formed a circle around Richard: Héctor, Doris, Paolo and Mariela, Leon and David, Marco, Boris and myself. It was as if we were attempting to will life into the body of a dead man. Héctor led the prayers, beseeching Jesus to give Richard another chance.

“He will be born again!” he cried. “And will learn to walk and talk, and will be your child. He will love you, oh, Jesus, he will be your son.”

The film crew and I exchanged troubled glances. We were all concerned for our host. He was a religious maniac, but at the same time he was our best hope of finding the ruins.

That evening we sat on home-made benches on Héctor’s veranda. The candle wicks were long, their flames fanned by a gentle breeze from the west. Richard hadn’t moved since we had arrived at the shack. He was still lying on the bench, his military clothing soaked with sweat. From time to time he would stir, ranting as if he was looking death in the eye.

Héctor thrived in the darkness, when the candles were burning, projecting shadows across the walls like phantoms. He sat back, rubbed his beard and conjured his own world with words: “Tienes que venir con el espíritu limpio, you have to come with a clean spirit,” he said softly. “It must be like a child who has not lost his innocence. To gain that purity you must cleanse your soul.”

“But how do we find Paititi?” I asked.

“I told you,” he said. “The only way to find it is not to look for it at all. Only a man who has no greed, no avarice, can succeed. When you find Paititi you can take nothing from it. Touch anything at all and you will go blind.” Héctor paused, picked up his tattered Bible, and pressed the soft leather cover to his lips in a kiss. “If you do find Paititi,” he continued, “you will have to repay the earth. How do you do that? Well, if you find a few ruins you will have to kill something small, a dog, perhaps. But if the ruins are great, you will have to kill something far larger.” Again Héctor paused, but this time he looked at me through the ocher light. “Si las ruinas son grandiosas, if the ruins are great,” he repeated, “tendrás que matar a un hombre, you will have to kill a man.”

Héctor walked the tightrope between lunacy and genius. Like everyone else, I was drawn in, willing to suspend judgment, for the Maestro mesmerized his audience, daring them to believe.

Before we knew it a week had passed, each day filled with a rigid routine of prayer, and sermons on how one might find Paititi. It felt as if we were growing roots, planting ourselves on the mud floor of Héctor’s home. Richard barely moved. He grew increasingly frail, and swore in a whisper at anyone who spoke to him. An attractive young nurse came from the village to examine him. In more usual circumstances, the veteran would have been all over her, but he was broken.

“What’s the matter with him?” I asked her.

“No es más que un resfrío, it’s nothing but a cold,” she said. “Please try to make sure he washes. He smells very bad!”

Before she left, the nurse inquired about the strong medicine I had brought from my home country.

“The painkillers?”

“No, Señor,” she said, holding a hand over her mouth as if she was about to utter an obscenity. “Los afrodisíacos, the aphrodisiacs.”

I squinted in confusion, then remembered the potent medication.

“Women all over the village are asking me for the medicine,” she said. “They have heard it makes a man fiery, passionate.”

I handed her a Pot Noodle. “It’s a special new kind of drug from Europe,” I said. “You take it orally.”

Every day Héctor’s harangues grew longer, and wilder, and every day I sensed that we were farther from reaching our goal, Paititi. The scruff of white beard that hid his mouth and quivered when he spoke gave our host an aura of sophistication. And when he spoke, those around him listened. You couldn’t help yourself. You were drawn in, like a swarm of insects desperate to touch a flame on a tropical night. Héctor would speak of veiled evil on a Biblical scale, hinting of curses and brujería and ferocious, diabolical forces lurking between the trees, and in the mists of the waterfalls.

One night, he claimed to have seen a UFO. He said it wasn’t a “normal” extraterrestrial, but was created by sorcerers upriver: the very same place to which we were planning to travel.

“Era una bola de luz, it was a ball of light,” he said, “a sphere burning brilliantly like phosphorus. It glided through the sky, and down, down, down over the trees. Then, when it reached the river, it dived into the water.”

“Weren’t you fearful?” I asked.

“No,” El Maestro replied stolidly, “we had no fear, because we have Jesus.”

On the eighth day Héctor had a visitor, a man we had not met before. He was wearing a simple uniform, part military, part civilian, and was called Señor Franco. He was tall and had an uninteresting face; the kind of man your eyes would not pick out in a crowd. He walked with a dead straight back and chewed the corner of his mouth between sentences. The frosty reception put on by Héctor and his family indicated their feelings for him. It turned out that he worked for the government and he had not come to speak to Héctor but to us.

“If you go to look for Paititi,” he said, in a clear, practised voice, “we will have you arrested and incarcerated.”

“Paititi? What’s Paititi?” I asked flippantly.

“You heard what I said,” he riposted. “I am waiting for you. I am watching you.”

When he was gone, Héctor warned us of the authorities. “There is a layer of bad men plundering our country’s wealth,” he said. “It’s big business, the business of a few.”

“Is Señor Franco one of them?”

“No, no, he’s low down in the chain of command,” Héctor replied. “He’s employed by the government, but is really working for the oil company.”

A second week slipped by and, with each day, it was as if our roots anchored us a little more firmly to Héctor’s shack. He was now saying there was no point in leaving for the lost city before the next year. He had crops to plant, and money to repay. Again and again he declared that we were still not pure, our souls were not yet cleansed.

“Will we ever be ready to search for the ruins of the Incas?” I shouted in despair.

“Quizás no, perhaps not,” was his reply.

Meanwhile, Richard grew ever weaker. The villagers would troop m from time to time and look at him slouched in his camouflage hammock. Some would stretch out their arms and poke him, as if jabbing a strange animal to see if it was alive. They all had the same diagnosis: that the Vietnam veteran had descended into Hell and turned his back on Jesus. They were praying for his soul, they said coyly.

But then, one morning, Richard was standing up outside the house. We rushed over. He was smiling. We applauded. No one had seen him smiling in a very long time.

“I’m better,” he said angrily.

Héctor praised Jesus for the miracle.

We must have been at the house too long, for we prayed to the Lord and were happy to do so.

“What’s wrong with you?” Richard snapped at me. “You gone all fuckin’ religious or something?”

It was a great moment. The soldier was back to his old self. We were a team again. I went up and hugged him. “It’s good to have you back,” I said.

Yeah, well, get me some chow, will ya?”

Doris piled a plate high with roasted yuca and handed it to Richard as if her prodigal son had returned. Then, after the meal, we sat in the sunshine and Richard told tales of the wild times of his youth.

David was the one to stir the memories from him. “What about Vietnam?” he said.

To us it was a single word, the name of a place, but to Richard it was a word whose intensity he had never found elsewhere. Like so many veterans, he relived it in his mind every day.

“Vietnam?” said Richard, drawing deep on his Marlboro. “I’ll tell you about Vietnam. Sure it was ugly, it was fucking obscene. But I had a ball down there. I’d be camped out in the jungle, inserted behind enemy lines and all that shit you see in the movies. If I got bored, and you did get bored, I could call in a fuckin’ airstrike. There I was, a kid of nineteen, calling in a two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar airstrike. It blew your mind.”

“What about the killing?”

“Yeah, there was killing and death and plenty of it,” said Richard. “They called our platoon the Widow Makers, and there was a reason for it. When you were new what they’d do was to take you out on a trail with an experienced guy. All your life you’re taught that killing is wrong, and all that Christian shit. But now you’re out there, trained to do the shit. It’s like cowboys and Indians when you were a kid. You’re with these guys and they set you up. They put you in the bushes and you’re sitting there watching, waiting. All of a sudden you see part of a guy and he’s lookin” around and he’s coming along... and now you’re getting ready to kill him. He could have a wife but you don’t think about that kind of shit. You got your weapon on automatic “cos you’re new to the game. You raise it up and lock on to the body. You let out a burst... Brrrrr! Then you take off, running like a madman up the trail.

“After a while, when you’re more experienced, you get cool at it, and you can kill with one or two rounds. Then you got people saying to you, “Way to go, man! You rock! You finally got yourself a gook!” You get a case of beer and they’re shaking your hand and you get this kinda sick fucking feeling. To do your job is one thing, but all of a sudden you’ve crossed the line with these guys and you’re one of them. You’ve been initiated.”

Richard’s illness had destabilized us all. I think it was because we feared he might kill us in the night. That evening, as I struggled to sleep, I thanked Jesus for bringing him back to us intact.

TEN

PORTERS FOR DELICATE INSTRUMENTS

Entrust surveying instruments and fragile articles to some respectable old savage, whose infirmities compel him to walk steadily. He will be delighted at the prospect of picking up a living by such easy service.

The Art of Travel

Life at Héctor’s shack continued as a routine of prayer, sleep and mental preparation. Days drifted by and, as they did so, I felt myself losing grasp of the expedition. Sometimes it seemed as though Héctor had us there like captive animals in a strange menagerie. We would listen to his stories, his warnings of what lay upriver. It was crazed talk but it relieved the boredom.

The routine began with hymns. They were sung at five each morning, usually led by Paolo, whose voice had not yet broken. Then we would saunter off into the woods and wash down by the stream. After that, Doris would provide some rice and roasted chicken for breakfast. Then the harangues would begin. Héctor could sit at the kitchen table for six hours or more. With narrowed eyes and flailing arms, he conjured a realm of terrifying danger.

“We will pass through a vast chasm filled with rapids,” he said one morning. “We will know it because the walls will be so steep that merely looking upon them will send shocks of electricity pulsing down our spines. After that will come three more pongos, great rapids. It will be impossible to use boats or rafts. You have no idea how hard it will be!”

Héctor cut himself short. He was about to continue, but for some reason he sat in silence, slid his fingertips over each other and prayed to Jesus. Doris looked on from the kitchen area. “Espíritu Santo” she whispered, “the sacred spirit.”

“Is there a problem?” I asked.

“Sí, muchos problemas, yes, many problems,” said El Maestro. “If you knew the hazards that lie between us and Paititi, your hair would turn white in a moment, just like my own.”

“What problems lie ahead?”

Héctor peered down at the worn table, blew a spider from its surface, and said: “After the fourth pongo we will come to a place of negative energy. It will affect us all, turning friends into enemies and enemies into friends. The compass will spin round and round, and we will lose all orientation.”

“But we have the river,” I interjected.

“Ah, sí, el río,” said Héctor, disdainfully. “The river is the greatest enemy of all. It will try to drown us, sucking us into an underwater world of spirits and demons.”

There was a point in all Héctor’s rants at which he crossed a dividing line. It separated two worlds: one of questionable but interesting possibility, the other in which his fantasy ran amok. I would always notice the dividing line approaching and seek to halt the conversation before we crossed the threshold.

“Underground tunnels connect Paititi with other places,” he exclaimed, in one such tirade. “You may laugh at me, but Paititi is linked with the lost continents of Atlantis and Mu.”

The film crew and I regarded each other with disappointment. Our host had descended once again into the twilight zone of his own imagination.

One way to deflect Héctor’s attention away from the fantasy, back into the natural world, was to mention the name of the Machiguenga tribe. He despised them, although he would never admit it. In his eyes they were not noble savages but a barbaric, atheist people. “The time for conversion will come,” he would say grandly. “It’s time for them to grow up, to taste the Word of God on their tongues.”

It was at one such debate about Paititi, the tribe and the Word of Jesus, that we first heard of Pancho. Héctor uttered the name in passing, as part of another tale.

“Who’s Pancho?” I asked.

Héctor inhaled a deep breath of air, and let it out gently, in a prolonged sigh.

“Pancho,” he said, “is the man you will need if you want to find Paititi,” he said.

“Why? What does he know?”

The old man caught my eye. It was like a paralyzed man signaling to me, signaling a grave danger and a secret solution.

“Pancho has seen the ruins of Paititi, con sus propios ojos, with his own eyes,” he said calmly.

I wanted to slap Héctor on the back and curse him for not telling us before. But he must have had reasons not to reveal Pancho until then.

“As a young man seeking new hunting grounds,” said Héctor, “Pancho spotted a big wall deep in the jungle. It was overgrown with creepers and vines. Nearby he found another, and then another. He realized that it was a series of vast ruins, from the time of the Incas. He saw something poking out from beneath a big stone, so he dug with his hands and discovered a hatchet, its blade adorned with gold. He was very excited, so he took the thing to his father, who was then head of the tribe. But his father grew very angry. He shouted at the boy, ordering him to return the hatchet at once and to forget about the ruins... for fear of activating the curse, the curse of Paititi.”

Again Héctor paused, this time to heighten the dramatic effect. “Pancho returned the hatchet, but...” he said slowly “... pero él nunca pudo olvidar, but he could not forget.”

“Where did he find the ruins?”

“Only Pancho knows exactly,” Héctor replied. “Sólo él puede llevarnos allá, only he can take us there.”

“Let’s go and meet him now. Let’s beg him,” I said. “Surely there’s something he wants in return.”

“You are not ready yet,” he responded. “You are not cleansed of your sins.”

Héctor stood up, put on his clean white shirt and went to church to pray. As far as he was concerned, we ought to have been living in the church: it was the best route to Paititi. I was buoyed by Pancho’s story, but until I heard it from his own lips, I suspected it was just another tale from the dark side of the old man’s mind.

Another week drifted by. We hardly saw Richard in that time. He would get up at night and walk round the village, scurrying from one shadow to the next. He never turned up for meals, and refused to pray.

“Un hombre que no reza, a man who does not pray,” said Héctor one morning, “es un hombre que tiene el alma envenenada, is a man who has a poisoned soul.”

He didn’t say so, but I knew he was referring to the Vietnam veteran. Word spread in the village that Richard was in league with the devil. The headman said he had seen him jumping on chickens, ripping off their heads and drinking the blood. And Héctor’s neighbor, a kind woman with gold front teeth called Dolores, said she had seen the veteran “raping the pigs”. Richard and I might have been at each other’s throats much of the time, but I had to protest at the allegation. Even he, I felt, would have drawn a line at bestiality.

Then, one morning, Richard approached us as we sat in the shade studying the maps. He was chewing a big quid of coca leaves. I noticed that his jungle boots were laced, as if he was ready to set out on a journey. I asked him what was going on.

“I’m leaving,” he said, “pulling out.”

We all showed surprise.

“Yeah, well, just remember,” he said, “that I’m no pussycat. I got friends, people of influence. Mess me around and the Lima police will be buggering you before you know it.”

Héctor and his family got wind of the departure and fled to the church to pray for Richard’s poisoned soul. They said later that they didn’t want to say farewell. It was left to the film crew and me to walk him down to the river to begin his long journey back to Iquitos.

A moment before he stepped on to the rickety hollowed-out canoe to cross the Madre de Dios River, Richard shouted back, “You’ll be hearing from me.”

Sure enough we did hear from him a few days later, through a middleman. The communication came via the film crew’s satellite telephone. A voice at the other end was asking for twenty-five thousand dollars in used fifty-dollar bills. “It’s for the tapes,” said the voice. “Take down this number and call me at dusk.”

A sick, panicked feeling washed over us all. David and Leon ran to their camera bags and counted their videotapes. Twenty-five hours’ worth of material was missing. The two Swedes huddled in a corner for a long time, chattering in their native tongue. At first they seemed in the depths of despair. But then their voices strengthened. They stopped talking and came to where the rest of us were sitting.

“How can we ever raise that much money?” I asked.

“We don’t have to,” said David.

“What do you mean? Shall we call the police?”

“We’ve decided not even to return the call,” said Leon. “It’s like kidnapping a man who no one wants. We’ll shoot more film. It’s as easy as that.”

The next day Héctor was up as usual at five a.m. But that morning he did not sing hymns. Instead he had taken out his rubber hunting boots and his best machete. He was sharpening the knife on a block of oiled granite.

“No hymns?” I said quizzically.

“No hay tiempo para canciones, there is no time for songs,” he replied.

“But what has changed?”

Héctor, El Maestro, looked at me down the razor-sharp blade of his machete.

“The wickedness that cloaked you has vanished,” he said. “Estamos listos para partir, we are ready to leave.”

As if he had been listening from behind a tree, the Peruvian official Señor Franco appeared from nowhere. He said he was passing and merely wanted to remind us of the danger of breaking sanctioned boundaries. It was obvious that Richard had tipped him off on his way back to civilization.

Héctor said we would need to spend a little time getting a good group of porters together, and making contact with Pancho. “You need chainsaw men,” he said, slapping his biceps, “not feeble farm boys. You need men who can uproot trees with their bare hands, and live on raw jungle meat if they have to.”

“Do such men exist around here?” I asked.

“Of course,” the Maestro replied, “but they’re deep in the forest cutting down trees. You have no idea how many trees there are to be felled. I will call for them.”

The next problem to overcome was Pancho. Although he supposedly knew where the ruins lay, he had refused to return to them. He was not so fearful of activating the curse as he was of his own tribe. They had threatened to burn down his hut if he even talked of Paititi. I begged Héctor to think of something that might tempt Pancho into taking us. Surely there was something we could give him worth more than his wattle-and-daub maloca, and the land it was on.

“There is something that Pancho wants very, very much,” Héctor replied. “He would risk everything he had on it.”

“What is it?”

“He wants to go to Cusco.”

“We can arrange that,” I said. “We can take him.”

Héctor smiled softly. Then his look of pleasure turned to one of contempt.

“It is worse than that,” he said. “You see, Pancho wants to go to a brothel with “high class” women, with big breasts, and he wants to go dancing in a discotheque.”

I looked at the Swedes. They looked at me. We all looked at Héctor, and said together, “We can arrange that.”

With the Maestro fighting us every inch of the way, we marched out of Panataua and up along the jungle route to the Machiguenga village at Mantacolla. Our visit coincided with their annual carnival. Rather than being linked in any way to the tribe’s culture or heritage, it was centred around their unremitting desire to get extremely drunk on masato, the manioc-root beer.

By the time we got to the village, the festivities had been going on for about three days. Many tribesmen were so drunk they couldn’t stand. In our society a person may have a few drinks in the evening. But in Machiguenga culture, a man will drink all day and all night for days on end, with short periods of stupor-like sleep in between. The sight of fifty inebriated men and women was made all the stranger by the fact that most of them were painted fuchsia pink. Those who could stand were dancing around a tree in ankle-deep mud, swiping at its trunk with axes and singing.

Héctor forbade us to mention the name of the lost city to any of them. Do so, he said sternly, and they might kill us, so strong was their fear of the curse. I asked him to go and find Pancho. Two hours passed, and Héctor returned. He said he had found his friend, who had agreed to come to Lima. “Pancho’s very happy” he said, “but he won’t go now, because everyone is watching. The tribe have told him they’ll kill him if he breaks the bond of secrecy.”

We stayed at the carnival for two days, in the hope of befriending the tribe. They were suspicious, and only began to warm to us when they saw us drinking their unpleasant saliva-fermented beer. They sat in the middle of the village, watching the sun go down, a glorious backdrop against which the theatre of the Machiguenga carnival was played out. As we sat there, drinking the vile masato, declaring how delicious we found it, I reflected.

Pancho’s ambition was the mirror image of my own. I yearned to find a lost city, all overgrown and deserted, while Pancho dreamed of a live city, bustling with people and traffic. Taking a Peruvian tribesman from the jungle to the city was certainly not a politically correct thing to do, but I didn’t see that I had much choice. Pancho was the only man who could lead me to Paititi... or was he? I asked Héctor.

“His brother knows the location of the ruins as well,” he replied. “He is called Javier, and he lives upriver at Aboroa.”

“Do you know him?”

“Sí, por supuesto, yes, of course I do,” said Héctor. “I’ve known them both since they were young men.”

With the Machiguenga festivities in full swing, it seemed as if the carnival might last many days longer. Héctor said they would celebrate until no one had the strength to stand. “In some ways it’s a good thing,” he said. “They go crazy from time to time and get it out of their system, then they go back to their ordinary lives.”

Héctor was careful not to condemn the tribe, a people whose souls he obviously regarded as damned. They all knew him, from the old crones to the strapping young warriors who wore bands of black toucan feathers across their brows. They would offer him a bowl of warm masato or try to rub fuchsia dye on his face. Héctor would simply smile, thank them for thinking of him, and shy back into the shadows.

Before we left Mantacolla to walk back to Panataua, Héctor pointed to a glade that lay between the village and the forest. He seemed overcome for a moment, as if a higher power were signaling to him. “That would be a lovely place to build a church,” he said.

That night Doris served stewed bananas. They were lightly salted, sitting on a bed of macaroni. Since Richard’s departure, Héctor’s wife had been filled with an intense energy. She said it was the soul of Jesus filling her veins. You could see it in her eyes, in her manner. She no longer stooped, but swaggered around the shack, singing, laughing.

“El diablo estuvo acá, there was evil here,” she said, “pero ahora el mal se ha ido, but now the evil has gone.”

Héctor was equally buoyant. He was ready for the journey, and spent all the next morning looking at the map. What surprised me was his lack of knowledge of the great jungle that lay west of the village. But no one else in Panataua knew any more than he: only the Machiguenga had explored the wilderness of Madre de Dios. As far as everyone else was concerned, the jungle was a place where blood-drinking phantoms lurked, a place to be avoided at all costs.

Just before lunch a squat, crag-faced man in blue denim shorts came to the house. We had often seen him stalking us as we wandered through the village. Héctor had once said that this man, who was called Francisco, had killed his wife but that no one could prove it. The woman had disappeared one night, fifteen years before, after a night of rain. Rather than show remorse, Francisco had been seen dancing drunk in his shack. He was universally despised for being a busybody. I was taken aback to find Héctor welcoming him into his home. “Francisco will be coming with us on the journey,” he said.

The crag face lit up for a moment, before its mouth barked, “Well, you’d better give me enough food, or you will see my anger!”

I regarded Héctor incredulously. Francisco shook our hands and stumbled away into the bright light.

“What do you mean?” I asked, once Crag-face had gone. “He’s terrible. He can’t come with us. Everyone hates him. He is an enemy, not a friend!”

“Precisely!” said the Maestro. “I told you... we will reach a place of negative energy, que hará amigos a los enemigos y enemigos a los amigos, it will turn friends into enemies, and enemies into friends.” He paused to allow the warped logic to sink in. As he saw it, we would have to take along an enemy who would ultimately become a friend. “On the journey to find Paititi,” he said, “you have to prepare, and use your mind. Francisco is indeed my enemy, we loathe each other, and as my enemy he could be the one man to save our expedition.”

“But why didn’t you want Richard to come on the trip, then?”

The old man looked at me hard, blinked, and said, “Because there is a difference between an enemy and the devil.”

Héctor could see I was worried. We might have had a mountain of Pot Noodles to feed our porters, but we still didn’t have any porters, except the village busybody whom no one could stand. We had a map with gaping white spaces across it, Peruvian officials snapping at our heels, and the one man who could take us to the ruins, Pancho, was too fearful to join us.

“Put your trust in Jesus, and clear your mind,” Héctor counselled. “The problems will melt like butter on the desert sand.”

“When will the porters get here?”

Héctor looked at his wristwatch. It ran two hours slow, but in the jungle precision timing was not important. “They should be here in a few minutes,” he said.

Sure enough, the sound of men in rubber boots was heard soon after, stomping across the baked-mud path. I opened the door and peered out. Even through the twilight it was instantly clear that they were not farm boys but chainsaw men. There were fifteen of them. Their arms were bulky and over-developed, part attractive, part grotesque. They walked with confidence, purpose, as if they knew where they were going, and they had no fear of the destination. Best of all, they were not carrying Bibles.

Héctor nudged me as they approached. “These men don’t need aphrodisiacs,” he said.

When they had greeted the old man, I asked them if they would work as porters, for eight dollars per man per day. They did not show much excitement about the wage. But Héctor said it was merely their manner, confident yet reserved. The porters agreed to carry as much as they could for as long as the journey took. I asked whether they were frightened of the jungle. The men showed humour for the first time, laughing until their eyes were glazed with tears.

“We have no fear of the jungle,” said one man, “but it is terrified of us, because we are the chainsaw gang.”

The day before leaving upriver, Boris, the Bulgarian film student, woke up in the night. He ran out of the dining shack, where the five of us were sleeping in a line on the floor. We found him in the morning, crouching on the path outside. He was gripping his belly. Leon asked what was wrong, if he had stomach problems.

“The spirits entered me through my dreams,” he said. “I can feel them in there.”

Until that morning Boris had seemed to me an intelligent young man, not the type you would expect to believe in such nonsense. I warned him not to mention the dream or the spirits to Héctor and Doris. But, unfortunately, they had overheard the conversation. They rushed out of the shack with an oversized Bible.

“Los espíritus, the spirits,” said Doris darkly, “they are battling for Boris’s soul. We must take him to church at once.”

The expedition was put on hold as Héctor led the Bulgarian to the wooden church at the edge of the village. They stayed there all day, praying, beseeching Jesus to cast out the malevolent forces from Boris’s intestines. Two further days of praying followed. The rest of the film crew and I went mad with waiting, but there was no alternative. Then, on the morning of the fourth day, Héctor said that Boris was healed. We could leave at once.

ELEVEN

WASP AND SCORPION STINGS

The oil scraped out of a tobacco-pipe is a good application; should the scorpion be large, his sting must be treated like a snake-bite.

The Art of Travel

The full moon reflected off the surface of the river, glinting, teasing, luring us upstream. It was as if an unseen force had lit a beacon to light the way. Héctor insisted that we leave his village at midnight to avoid the penetrating eye of Señor Franco. In the hours before our departure, he had spread a rumor through the community that we were heading to another river, the Rio Negro, in search of boutou, pink dolphins. The rumor wasn’t strictly necessary, as I had already bribed the villagers with a promise to buy a new Bible for every man, woman and child if they pointed the official in the wrong direction.

To make faster progress, we had hired a pair of clinker-built boats to navigate the course as far as the western mouth of the Palatoa river. Shortly before midnight, the chainsaw gang heaved the mass of equipment and food down to the water and stowed it in the boats. They were moored to the bank of a rivulet, which fed into the Madre de Dios. The water was low there, the moonlight shaded by tall kapok trees.

There is no feeling quite like the nocturnal commencement to a journey. It was a rich blend of anticipation and secrecy, as if we were a part of something devious and depraved.

The one major setback had come at dusk when we had done a full inventory of equipment. Richard had not only taken the video cassettes but had stolen our entire stock of morphine as well. He was planning, no doubt, to use it for recreational purposes. It was too late to replenish our supply, so we would have to head into the jungle without it. It would be needed, though, if a man snapped an ankle on the slippery stones that lined the river.

From the start the crag-faced Francisco was irate. He didn’t approve of leaving in the middle of the night. Late nights, he said, gave him a migraine, and migraines made him very angry indeed.

Héctor simply laughed at the protestations. “Think of it like this,” he whispered, as we covered the bags with tarpaulins, “the greater his fury now, the greater his friendship later.”

Just before we pushed off, Héctor’s young son, Paolo, hurried through the jungle and called to us: “Señor Franco knows you are leaving,” he said. “He’s at the main branch of the river with his launch, flashlights and six of his men.”

Francisco cackled bitterly, insisting we should turn ourselves in or, better still, go back to the village and call off the trip. His expression was sour, as if he had sucked down a plate of limes, his cheeks pulled back to the ears, all stretched and tight.

But Héctor had already come up with a plan. “It’s too risky for so many of us to travel past Franco with the boats,” he said. “He will know we are up to something. We will walk through the forest and meet the boats at the second bend.”

Héctor said he was concerned about the boats. They were so heavy that they were terribly low in the water. While they often ventured downstream fully laden with yuca and bananas, they rarely went upriver with a load. The cargo was covered first with our tarpaulins, and second, with ragged sackcloth sheets, forming a primitive disguise. Unlike the tarps, the sacking did not reflect the moonlight.

The film crew were unhappy at being separated from their precious camera equipment. I had little sympathy because they had not heeded my pleas to cut down their gear. Film may look far grander than video, but the film cans were bulky and an awful nuisance.

One minute before one a.m. we tramped into the forest, moving in single file. Héctor and the other locals knew the path so well they needed no light. The film, crew and I had more difficulty: the trail ascended and descended sharply without warning, there were roots and armadillo holes to catch our feet, and a mesh of low branches that whipped us in the face every few feet. We walked in silence, the ghostly curve of the moon breaking through the trees from time to time.

In the distance we could hear the faint grumble of the engines, the boatmen forcing their craft against the fast current of the Madre de Dios. With hidden boulders so common, even the most experienced pilot risked much by navigating the river at night. Franco was certainly aware of the danger. His curiosity would surely have been piqued by a pair of craft pushing upstream in the middle of the night.

We walked due north for two hours. In that time not a word was spoken, yet we were deafened by the din of the jungle. Insects with wings no bigger than postage stamps created a sound as loud and piercing as a siren; their noise was drowned out in turn by the chorus of tree frogs, and the clamour of barking rats.

The men were unladen but I could sense their strength and eagerness. As we pushed on, I considered the importance of enthusiasm: with an enthusiastic team you can achieve virtually anything. When I am selecting people with whom to work, it is the one quality I look for. I don’t care if someone doesn’t have a specific skill, they can learn it. With enthusiasm, a man can overcome his limitations; without it, he is a dead weight.

Suddenly my train of thought shifted. I realized that Héctor and most of the chainsaw gang were armed with machetes. We had been parted from our equipment, were walking through the jungle at night, and no one but they knew where we were heading. They could have slit our throats, hacked up our bodies and grabbed the boatloads of gear without a second thought. Within a few days the jungle fauna would have consumed us, and we would be a memory, a cautionary tale, like the Nichols expedition had become.

I was about to urge the film crew to be vigilant for signs of imminent execution, but Héctor spoke first: “Can you see the river down there?” he said, pointing through the trees. “It looks as if we’re ahead of the boats.”

I glanced down to the water’s mirrored surface, a scene of absolute peace, in stark contrast to the undergrowth. The river moved with an angelic ease. On either side of it, the gray-green foliage was charged with life, the savage fauna within it feeding on itself and on intruders. My legs were running with blood, released by an army of microscopic insect teeth. In more usual circumstances I would have complained, but I noticed that everyone else was affected in a similar way.

We crouched there, mopping our shins, waiting for the rumble of the peki-peki engines. They didn’t come.

“We have not yet passed into the restricted area,” Héctor said quietly, “so Señor Franco cannot confiscate the equipment.”

“But he can cause trouble,” I said.

“Sí,” said the Maestro, with a deep sigh. “That man can cause trouble.”

Another hour passed. Héctor was going to send one of the men to spy on the official’s position but just before he dispatched him I made out the faintest murmur of mechanical sound. It was low, rhythmic and consistent, and was getting louder, increasing in echo and pitch. Héctor slapped his palms together. “Here are the boats,” he said.

They pulled up a few minutes later. We stayed in the shadows lest Señor Franco had come upriver as well, but there was no sign of him. The boatmen reported that the official had swung a bright searchlight across their bows, but the boats had carried on without stopping.

“There must be so much oil up there,” said Héctor. “I cannot believe that a place so beautiful can shelter a commodity so wicked:

“Is it safe for us to travel on the boats?”

“Climb aboard,” said the old man. “Franco won’t bother us now. He has to check in with Cusco every morning at six.”

We lay outstretched over the packed boats, which moved in fits and starts against the current. The moon had gone, replaced by a blush of pink in the east. I stared up at the sky, my eyes picking out the last trace of stars.

It was eight thirty when I was wakened, forced with the others to jump into the water and ease the boats through the shallows.

The payloads were pressing the craft deep, and the boatmen were becoming bitter. They said they would charge us if their boats were damaged on the rocks and, if we didn’t pay up, they would report us to Señor Franco.

My temper almost got the better of me, but Héctor cautioned me: “Let them shout like children,” he said. “There are bigger problems to take our attention.”

He was right. Fifty yards ahead a throng of Machiguenga warriors were waiting on the shore, many armed with bows and elongated arrows. There must have been about forty men, women and children. Twenty more were squatting on homemade rafts. It was obvious that they were not out fishing.

“They want money for passing through their stretch of river,” said Héctor calmly. “We must talk to them. They’ll kill us if we trespass.”

The boats struggled over to the huddle of Indians. They greeted us nervously, suspiciously, as if they had thought up a devious plan.

Héctor jumped out and waded ashore. The tribe knew him and, although they did not share his belief in Christianity, they liked the old man, and he made an effort to be liked. The rest of us sat in the boats, waiting for Héctor’s command. In such circumstances your trump card is the man with experience. He chatted with them, sharing jokes, lifting the atmosphere. He knew as well as they that money was the only subject of discussion, but he eased the conversation along, warming it, readying it for the matter at hand.

Eventually the dialog of negotiation began. Numbers were called out in Machiguenga and Spanish, fingers counting sums. After a long while, Héctor approached the boat in which I was sitting. “Shall I give them some alcohol?” I asked.

“No, no, that will make them even greedier,” said Héctor, “and they are far too greedy already. They have nothing to use this money on — they don’t even know the value of it — but the missionaries have told them to demand currency.”

“How much do they want?”

“Cincuenta mil soles, fifty thousand soles,” he replied.

“That’s four thousand dollars! It’s nothing short of piracy.”

“Of course it is,” said Héctor. “Most of them have never even seen a shop.”

I sent the Maestro back to get the price down, or to offer them some equipment after the expedition. Two hours of discussion followed. At the end of it, gourds of warm bubbling masato were served up and the warriors were grinning. “I’ve offered them your rubber boat and five hundred dollars,” said Héctor. “Regard it as the value of our lives.”

By dusk, the boatmen were seething with anger. They had been enraged for a good long while, surpassed only by Francisco, who was driving us all mad. He moaned about anything and everything, from the condition of the boats to the sound of their engines to the scent of the air. Whenever he heard Crag-face’s reprimands, Héctor would exclaim how fortunate we were to have him along, and how valuable he would be once we reached the zone of negative energy.

We had seen no houses on the shore since leaving Panataua, except for two or three at the tribe’s village. In the Upper Amazon, communities were much more common along the rivers, but the Madre de Dios jungle is higher and sustains far fewer animals, and therefore fewer people.

Venus was visible, and I spotted a triangle of bamboo malocas three hundred yards ahead. At first it was an unnerving sight; I feared more Machiguenga wanting yet more money. But Héctor’s spirits were boosted at the sight. “It’s Aboroa,” he said, “the home of Pancho’s mother, and her other son, Javier.”

“The one who also knows the location of the ruins?”

¡Sí, sí” he replied. “Él puede ayudarnos, he can help us.”

The boatmen put us ashore and fled back downriver. They were both incandescent with rage. It seemed miraculous that they had taken us as far as Aboroa. All around the water was filled with boulders, rising up like miniature black icebergs. I was sorry to see the craft retreat; it meant that we would be carrying the luggage from then on.

Before we could ask about Pancho’s brother, we greeted his mother. She was a wizened woman with a bald head, twig-like limbs and a mouth naked of teeth. I am uncertain of her name, as I never heard it spoken. Héctor and the others called her Tía, aunt. He hugged her, and she rewarded him with half a gallon of masato, its raw ingredient chewed by her gums.

When we had all greeted the old woman, and drunk a similar quantity of the wretched beverage, Héctor asked her about Javier.

“He’s gone upriver to trap parrots and hunt tapir,” she said. “Go up there and you will find him.” She made it sound so easy, as if we would spot him straight away among a million trees.

We pitched a camp beside her shack, and she presented us with a male curassow. One of the porters tore off the bird’s head and the jet-black feathers; he said he was very hungry. We had brought a large amount of yuca. It was boiled up as well. The roots were so heavy that I was keen for them to be eaten, rather than carry them. I strained a little of the starchy water from the pan and poured it into a Chicken and Mushroom Pot Noodle for the old woman. She took a nibble with her gums and grimaced.

“It tastes like pacamama”, she said.

“What’s pacamama? I asked.

“It’s bamboo rat,” said Héctor.

Tia fed the Pot Noodle to a cluster of chicks that she kept as pets. She had woven them a kind of wicker nest; it was an impressive example of craftsmanship. Her home was awash with jungle animals — there was a clutch of matamata turtles, a spider monkey, four toucans and a pair of young anteaters. It was like a zoo without cages, but it was clear that all the creatures were being raised for the table. The Machiguenga regarded the jungle as a giant larder that is always stocked. If they needed something to eat, they looked around for an animal to catch. If they saw one, they killed it. They never hunted for sport, and always ate what they killed.

The porters were eager to try the Pot Noodles for themselves. Since our trip to the pinnacles, word had spread about the additive-rich snacks brought from far away. Their leader was a strong-willed man called Julio, whose chest was ribbed with muscle; he begged me to let him try a mouthful.

“Is it true that one Pot Noodle can make a man potent all night long?” he asked, when there was a pause in conversation.

“Sí, sí,” said another, “I have heard that you can satisfy six women and still not get tired!”

I warned the men against believing misinformation. Do so, I said, and our expedition’s success would be plunged into danger.

Pancho’s mother had much to say on the subject of danger. When she had heard of my mission to discover Paititi, she declared simply that we would all perish on the trip: “El río los tragará, the river will swallow you up,” she said.

We came across remarkably few people in the jungle. But all of them, without exception, foresaw disaster. Some said that a giant serpent would rise up from the river and drown us, others that a storm would slay us with lightning, or that El Tigre would pounce, and swallow us while we slept.

We found one of Tia’s old neighbors pilfering our supplies that night. He took one look at me and shouted something.

“What did he say?”

Julio seemed anxious. I repeated the question.

“Él dijo que eres un hombre malvado, he said you are an evil man,” he replied.

Perhaps the warnings were expressed because of the wretchedness of our equipment; after all, most other expeditions must have seemed far more glamorous. But, looking back, I assume our gear had nothing to do with their reasoning. As far as the tribe was concerned, any outsiders — by that they meant non-Machiguenga — were intruders. To them intruders had the power to trigger the wrath of the jungle. They regarded the cloud forest as a single being, a creature, an animate object capable of thought. They believed that the jungle could be made happy, just as it could become enraged.

I took the cautions of danger lightly. They flooded in from all sides, most strongly from Héctor. He ranted on all the time about wild renegade warriors lurking in the undergrowth. He said they carried special arrows designed to pass straight through a man’s chest. It seemed ludicrous that he believed in such hazards; but danger, or the myth of it, was his own twisted currency. Like Tia and everyone else we met, the idea of sinister forces waiting to prey on our feebleness fed his mind and gave him strength.

My concern was that the men were listening to the tales of impending disaster, and they were believing what their ears took in. The more they heard, the more they chattered together in the darkness; and the more they chattered, the more fiercely they regarded me each morning. Sometimes they would approach me in ones and twos, hoping to discuss the risk. I knew that I had to keep them moving at all costs. There was no time to speculate on phantom predators, and no sense in it. Speculation was perhaps the most dangerous enemy of all.

Héctor might have been the originator of many rumors and legends, but I was realizing his great value. He charged the men with fear, but he motivated them at the same time. I wondered if the talk of terror was in fact a tool by which he sought to control others. The porters looked up to him as a kind of superhuman. As far as they were concerned, he was a man in tune with the mortal and spiritual dimensions. Unlike the previous team of porters, the new group were not Adventists, although they were Christians.

The day after arriving at Aboroa, we left it. I was pleased to have escaped Tia’s unending supply of masato. The first dose had given me a bad stomach, which was to plague me for weeks. The film crew were equally affected, all except Boris, the Bulgarian, who became strangely addicted to the saliva-based alcohol. He couldn’t drink enough to satisfy his thirst.

We had spent the morning building a pair of balsa rafts, and swapped some yuca for a large raft owned by Pancho’s mother. The dilapidated rubber boat was inflated, much to the Machiguenga’s amusement. By the late morning we were on the move again.

Heading upstream without even the feeble peki-peki engines to propel us forwards was gruelling beyond belief. The water was high, the current fast, the rapids endless. With hindsight I can say that it was impossible, but I was unaware of that then so I drove the men on. The previous porters would have mutinied in the first hour, but the chainsaw gang thrived on the physical pain. We tied the long climbing ropes to the rafts and to the Zodiac, and split into teams, four men to a craft, two pushing, two pulling. The ropes were paid out a hundred yards or more. The longer the distance between the boat and the pulling team, the faster the progress.

A week of routine passed, during which we covered no more than a mile or two a day. It was an absurdly slow advance but, as I saw it, any advance was good going in such intolerable conditions.

We would begin at nine a.m., after a meal of fish stew and rice. The team would pull like mad for two hours, break for raisins, and pull again for three hours. By mid-afternoon they were too exhausted to continue. I would start scouting for a suitable place to camp. Fortunately the river was teeming with fish, which allowed us to conserve the precious supply of Pot Noodles.

Only one thing can maintain the stamina of hard-worked men: an unending supply of hot food. For this reason, I encouraged the porters to fish from the moment camp was struck until we sat for the evening meal. Others would go into the jungle and search for roots and for chonta palm, the heart of which is a rather bland delicacy. Sometimes Julio and his friend Alfonso would shoot a bird with their old shotgun. Whatever was caught was skinned and tossed into the pot.

After a handful of days in the fast current, we had all sustained terrible injuries to our feet. The sand in the river eroded the skin between the toes, and eventually stripped it away completely. Constant immersion prevented new skin becoming hard. The damage was severe, irrespective of the quality of one’s boots.

Each evening after the meal I would sit on a rock and tend my wounds. The only way of preventing our feet rotting was to lubricate them morning and night with petroleum jelly. Feet were not the only cause of discomfort. An expedition on the move sustains all manner of minor injuries. If not treated, they quickly escalate. While making the rafts, one man’s forearm was slashed with a machete and another lost a considerable amount of blood from a knife wound on his hand. Every inch of every man was pocked with insect bites and bee stings. We were all stung so frequently that no one bothered mentioning the pain. My own face was badly swollen — I was stung more than thirty times when I walked face first into a wasps’ nest. I thanked God that my eyes had been spared.

The stones became more slippery with each mile we covered, adding to my fear of snapped ankles.

None of us mentioned Richard, except to voice our delight at his departure. Héctor was the veteran’s loudest critic. “Él es un hombre sin alma, he is a man with no soul,” he barked one morning, “and a man with no soul is empty, like a corked bottle adrift on the ocean.” “But Vietnam damaged his mind.”

“Mi amigo,” he said solemnly, “no hay palabras suficientes para justificar tanta debilidad, my friend, no words are sufficient to excuse such weakness.”

TWELVE

DROWNING

A half-drowned man must be put to bed in dry, heated clothes, hot stones placed against the feet, and his head must be raised moderately. Human warmth is excellent, such as that of two men made to lie close up against him, one on each side.

The Art of Travel

On the morning of the eighth day from Aboroa, Francisco, the crag-faced enemy of us all, spotted a thin plume of smoke rising up from a pile of banana leaves on the far bank of the river. Near to it was a severe rapid, and a series of natural caves carved by the river in ancient times. As we approached, it became clear that the banana leaves formed a primitive dwelling. The earth around it was scuffed up, as if a commotion had recently taken place. Other than the smoke, there was no sign of life.

Héctor clapped his hands, whistled, and clapped again. Still no one came. “This place is Pusharo,” he said ominously. “That must be Javier’s camp.”

“Pancho’s brother?”

The Maestro ducked his head in a nod. A second or two after that, a squat, wispy figure climbed out from the shelter and peered over at our group. He studied us cautiously, his weight balanced as if to take immediate flight if required. Héctor called again. The figure stooped a fraction, then stood tall.

“It’s Javier,” Héctor said.

“Call him over.”

“He won’t come. He has no curiosity.”

“But we have to talk to him, to ask him about the ruins.”

Héctor slunk away to be alone on the rough, stony beach. He had a curious manner of hunting down a contact, getting very close to it, then drifting off, as if he were fearful of something. I went over and asked what was the matter.

“You can’t ask Javier about the ruins,” he said. “Do so and he may kill us.”

“But he’s your friend,” I said.

“I know, but we are nearing the place of negative energy. I can no longer trust my friends. We are nearing Paititi now,” he said.

“Are you sure?”

He blinked in confirmation and rapped his palm over the rock on which he sat. “Míralo, look at it,” he said.

The block was about three feet by two, with straight edges, carved from a slate-gray stone.

“Hand-cut... by the Incas,” he said.

Again, I pleaded with the old man to invite Javier for some food. At last he agreed, as long as the film crew and I conceded to more mental preparation. In turn we agreed, and Héctor called to Pancho’s brother.

A great deal of negotiation followed, loud shouts across the boiling rush of water. Eventually, the nimble figure was lured over to our side with a label-less plastic bottle filled with clear liquid. If hot food is the key to maintaining an expedition’s stamina, then low grade gut-rot alcohol is the key to sustaining its sense of pleasure.

As soon as Javier set eyes on the bottle, he appeared more energetic. Without wasting a fraction of a second, he ran upstream, and dived into the foaming river above the rapids. For thirty seconds we all focused on the miniature head bobbing among the white curl of waves.

“He will drown,” I said. But I was wrong. Javier clambered out of the water, naked but for a band of toucan feathers on his brow, and a pair of tattered boxer shorts. He was five foot tall at the most, his lean frame glistening in the bright jungle light. We welcomed him, oozing with friendliness. He had a kind face, quite round, muscular and smooth. There was the faintest hint of hair on his chin, and a look of innocence in his eye, as if he had never seen a bad deed done. He grew anxious when the Swedes began documenting the scene, with Boris the Bulgarian filming them.

Héctor handed him an enamel cup half filled with pisco, Peruvian grape brandy. He smiled, sniggered, and pressed the rim of the cup to the bridge of his nose. In a moment the liquid was gone. More laughter followed, and another cup of the intoxicating drink.

We made camp, clearing the rocks away from an area of beach. There were many hand-cut blocks of stone; I counted about forty. It looked as if they had been washed downriver. They were so large in size that it was improbable they could have been carried far, even by the most turbulent water.

That evening, I tended the men’s wounds as usual. Their feet were getting worse. I had no choice but to call a two-day halt to allow our feet to harden. At the same time, I urged Héctor to interrogate Javier, but he held an index finger to his lips. “You do not eat an apple until it’s ripe,” he said.

So we waited, all of us drying our feet round the campfire. At dusk Javier passed out; and I reprimanded Héctor for feeding him so much pisco. It was like offering cigarettes to children.

“You are the one who needs purifying,” he said sharply, “not Javier.”

Before turning in for the night, the Maestro lit three candles, and waxed them on to one of the hand-carved blocks of stone as a simple altar. He said a prayer, then reminded us of the danger. We are near the place of negative energy now,” he said, the candlelight washing his face with color. “We need to remain strong, and stay together. You will soon be at each other’s throats, fighting like dogs. But resist, resist!”

He paused to look me in the eye. I could feel the warmth of his presence, his charisma.

“Remember what I told you before,” he said. “To find Paititi you must not look for it, and if you do find it, you will have to repay the earth. Do not look for the ruins, but let them look for you.”

The Maestro paused once again, this time to blow out the candles. “To have a hope of success, you must clear your mind,” he whispered, “wipe it clean, forget your family, your life, your world... and prepare to enter the Gateway to Paititi.”

The sound of Héctor’s low, sleek voice affected all who listened, charging the audience with energy. You could fight it, but were powerless to prevent it seeping in. The old man was attentive in locating flaws in the psychology of the team, but it was for his own sanity that I was growing increasingly alarmed. The further we progressed up the Palatoa, the more he ranted on about witches and extraterrestrial forces. I was surprised that a Seventh Day Adventist would believe in magic at all, or would resort to his own particular blend of witchcraft to confront the supernatural. After his long harangue, he ordered us to strip to the waists and rub ash from the fire into each other’s chests. I was about to reverse the command, the words were on my lips, but I halted. If the ritual gave the Maestro comfort, I thought, then let him enact it.

I slept soundly that night, until I felt someone tug at my arm. I squinted at my watch. It was a few minutes before three. Héctor was standing over me. “Javier wants to show us something,” he said.

The warrior had come to, and was brandishing a burning branch. It was crackling furiously, giving off a good light. Javier was smiling now, his almond eyes glowing.

“What is happening?”

“Let’s follow him,” Héctor replied.

We walked a few paces into the foliage which ran along the margin of the beach. I smelt the fragrance of passion fruit, and was deafened by the piercing chorus of cicada wings. Javier was leading the way, with Héctor in his footsteps and I in his. We climbed over a fallen tree trunk, then another, and rounded a bend. The torch flames spat in the breeze as if to warn of a conspiracy. A moment later the undergrowth ended.

Before us was a massive granite rock face. It stood like a curtain in the jungle. As we drew nearer, I saw that its surface was etched with symbols and signs – labyrinths and serpents, faces and suns. “What is this?” I asked, in a whisper.

Héctor ran his hand across an icon of a face: two holes for eyes and the curve of a mouth. “Es la llave hacia Paititi, it is the key to Paititi,” he said.

The sun rose in an arc above Pusharo and dried the porters’ feet. I had forbidden them to go near the water, an order that brought much pleasure. They sat together powdering each other’s toes, boasting of the levels of pain they could endure. After breakfast I returned to the wall and showed its petroglyphs to the film crew. Marco, the banker, said he had seen similar symbols in his childhood, scored into a cave wall in the Urals. “They are very, very ancient,” he said sombrely.

“Older than the Incas?”

“For certain they are,” he replied.

We stared at them, trying desperately to unlock the puzzle. Most of the petroglyphs were within the height of a man; but a few were considerably higher on the wall, as if one man had stood on another to reach. I dug down with a spade, to see if any more symbols were hiding below the surface of the ground. The wall continued very far down. The effort of digging was rewarded with a dozen more petroglyphs: faces, the outline of men, birds and other mysterious signs. The most alluring of all of them was a serpent. It ran horizontally at the right of the wall, etched deep into the granite, a zigzag body ending in a diamond-shaped head.

Héctor was sure the serpent depicted the route to Paititi. He believed we were poised on the creature’s tail, struggling to reach the ruins at its head. The river was the body, he said, running jagged through canyons, gushing down from the headwaters in the Andes. The Maestro regarded Pusharo and its petroglyphs with awe, and said the place was a source of energy, of magic. I had to agree. There was a sense that ancient man had worshipped there, and the legacy of signs was certainly puzzling. But if the symbols had been carved before the Incas, how could they have a connection with Paititi? Héctor said the link was obvious. He declared that Paititi was built on a pre-Inca site. It was the first sensible thing he had said for a long time, and sounded plausible. The Incas had established a society based on overrunning others, and converting conquered assets into their own.

I explored the area to the right of the main granite rock face, climbing on to a narrow ledge. There I found more petroglyphs, including one that depicted a warrior in what seemed to be a feathered robe. It reminded me of the intricate textile designs from Nazca, and helped to support the link to a pre-Incan people.

I had not wanted the porters to see the petroglyphs, for fear they would become alarmed and decide to retreat. Some of the men asked me to allow them to go hunting. I was against the slaughter of wildlife but it provided food for the pot, which meant our dried rations would last longer, so I sent them off. Javier led them into the forest. The hunting also kept the men away from the wall. Francisco was the only one with curiosity. He followed me behind the screen of foliage during the afternoon. When he saw it, he shielded his eyes with his hands. The wall was impressive, but his reaction was over the top.

“They are pre-Incan, I think,” I said.

Crag-face was shaken: he fell to his knees and prayed silently, his lips flickering with words. When he had finished, I asked him for his impressions.

“Can’t you hear them speaking?” he said.

“No.”

Francisco led me by the hand to the rock face. He motioned to one of the smiling faces. “Pon tu oreja sobre la boca, put your ear to the mouth.”

I did as he requested. I could not hear a thing, except for the beating of cicada wings in the trees.

“Listen harder!”

Still I could hear nothing.

Suddenly Crag-face was overcome with rage. He pushed me away from the wall. “Estúpido, you fool!” he bellowed. “Why do you endanger the lives of so many men?”

With that, he ran back to the camp, where he sat alone in the shade of a cashapona palm. I was unsure of the reason for his outburst, but he was becoming more disturbed all the time. In the late afternoon I noticed him at the far end of the beach, where the smooth pebbles gave way to sand. He had stripped off his clothes, and was performing what looked like exercises. The Swedes saw him too, and asked me what he was doing. I said I had no idea, but in truth I thought the river was tipping the balance of his mind.

As dusk fell, Javier led the porters back to the camp. The hunting party had been successful, bagging seven or eight scrawny birds. They were plucked, gutted, and flung into a pot of cold river water.

But the last bird was not cooked immediately. The team clustered round it, marvelling. I went over to inspect. It was the size of a grouse, clad in royal-blue feathers, and had a dainty crest, similar to that of a peacock. But the most curious thing about it was the tube of miniature feathers hanging down from the throat. Javier, who had lived in the jungle all his life, had never seen such a bird before.

“Es lindo, it’s nice,” he said, grinning broadly, then stripped away the feathers and tossing the naked bird in with the others.

We spent a second night at Pusharo. The Maestro wrapped himself in a blanket cocoon and went to bed before everyone else. The porters’ morale had been boosted by the rare flesh of the blue bird. They said it tasted like the meat from a hoatzin’s breast.

“I have never eaten that,” I said, rather gladly.

Giovanni, the cook, looked at me with wide eyes. “Entonces nunca has vivido, then you have never lived,” he said.

I lay awake on the second night, weighed down with worry. A mist had rolled in and made it difficult to breathe. At about four a.m. Héctor unfurled himself from his cocoon, fumbled for a torch, and crept out from the tarpaulin. It looked as if he was making his way to the rock face. I pulled on my boots and followed, leaving the distance between us long enough so as not to arouse his suspicion. The path was moist with dew, the air heavy and white with the mist. The Maestro had a long stride and reached the petroglyphs quickly. I stayed well back, watching through a gap in the undergrowth.

He had switched on the torch and was arching its yellow beam over the symbols as if he was looking for something. I would have approached and asked what he was up to, but thought it wiser to leave him alone. For fifteen minutes he swung the light, skimming it over the contours of rugged stone. Then he put it down, thrust out his hands before him and rubbed them over one of the petroglyphs. I could not see clearly, but realized next morning it had been the symbol of the snake. He pushed against it with all his strength, as if struggling to hold up the wall. I could hear him wheezing, then he fell to the ground, exhausted.

In the morning, Héctor did not eat with the rest of us. He had a distant look in his eye, and seemed tremendously sad. I half expected him to fall away, as Rodrigo and Richard had done. I went over to him with an enamel mug of weak black coffee, with four tablespoons of sugar, just how he liked it. He took it, glancing up in thanks. But our eyes did not meet.

“We must question Javier about the ruins,” I said.

“He knows but he will not take us,” Héctor said gently.

“Can we at least talk to him?”

The old man gazed out at the raging water, and swivelled round to look me in the eye. “All right,” he said. “We will talk to Javier.”

An hour later, the tribesman was back in our camp, with a mug of pisco in his hand. I had dug out a few postcards showing the giant stone walls at Sachsayhuaman. I passed them to him. “That’s what we are looking for,” I said.

Héctor put his arm round the warrior’s shoulders and swung him to face me. But Javier tried to shy away, shifting his weight on to his back foot. “Mira, look,” Héctor said. “Look at these pictures.”

Nervously, the warrior squinted at them. He said nothing.

“Have you seen this?” Héctor urged.

Still Javier said nothing.

“He knows, I’m sure he knows,” said the old man, “but he’s frightened. You cannot imagine the depth of his fear. Outsiders are not supposed to go there.”

I was irritated that Héctor would work against me. He was the one man who had the tribe’s respect, yet he would never press them for answers.

A moment later my irritation turned to dismay. The Maestro called together the film crew and me. “We cannot go any further,” he said.

I was too struck, too angry to answer at first.

“What is the problem?” asked the banker.

“There are many problems,” he replied. “The rapids are so perilous that we will drown, and if we do get ahead, the savage tribe upriver will slit our throats. But, worst of all, the spirits are waiting.”

The leader of an expedition has two responsibilities. The first is to solve problems, and the second is to drag his team ahead, whether they like it or not. I brooded in silence, waiting for Héctor to finish. Condemning him as a coward would have served no purpose, for he was our link with the tribe. But then, as I saw it, the tribe were next to no good at all. For all his grand talk about Paititi, Héctor was proving himself a dreamer – a strong man, but a dreamer none the less.

The sun was not yet hovering above the trees. It was still early.

“We will leave in an hour,” I said. “There is no point wasting time with Javier, at least until we have forded the rapids. We will move on with the gear, then send a team back to talk him into coming.”

The film crew went to gather their equipment together. Héctor and I were left alone.

“No tienes miedo, mi amigo, you have no fear, my friend,” he said, with a wry smile.

“My ignorance protects me.”

Search for a lost city and you need heroes. They provide solace in the days of miserable rain, illness and fatigue, and are a beacon of hope at times when the only certainty is failure. On hard journeys, as I huddle in the tent waiting for sleep and the wretched night to pass, I find myself standing before my pantheon of heroes. They sit in judgment, peering down at me in the dock. They are all in shadow, except one whose face I see quite clearly. Each night the face is different. Sometimes it speaks, urging advice, or simply leers down, as if to remind me of its triumph over adversity.

The face that I was to see most often was that of Hiram Bingham, the American explorer celebrated for discovering Machu Picchu in 1911. For any man on the quest of Paititi, Bingham is the example of excellence. At thirty-six, he was the same age as I was then when he found Machu Picchu. The portrait I would see of him in my mind was the one so often presented in history books: Bingham the glorious, posing before his canvas tent, dressed in safari jacket, puttee leggings, stout walking shoes and gray trilby Glorious he might have been, but his expression was almost sullen, as if he was not quite content with his achievement.

Bingham was a scholar and an expert on Incan history. He was associated with Yale University, which funded his expedition, and was a man who pursued his goals with single-minded determination. He scanned the historical treatises for clues and quizzed the local people, but his success was largely a result of good calculation and time spent on the ground. On 24 July 1911, he reached Machu Picchu, and first set eyes on the ruins of which he had dreamed for so long. He saw houses, built “of the finest Inca stone work”, overgrown with creepers and vines; there were walls of white granite blocks, funerary caves, flights of stone steps, sacrificial places and, of course, the intihuatana, the stone post to which the Incas tied the sun.

Locating Machu Picchu set Bingham up for a life of celebrity, and made him a household name. He mixed with the rich and famous, lectured all over the world, and was even elected to the US Senate.

If Hiram Bingham was to teach me anything it was to keep going, however rotten the conditions, and to drive on the team mercilessly; but, most important of all, Bingham’s example taught me never to give up on any account.

We pushed ahead for six more days, enduring miles of rapids. At the time I could not imagine a terrain more terrible. The water cascaded down from the mountains, churning with unimaginable ferocity. It was white, always white, alive, like some horrible creature desperate for revenge. The porters pulled the boats ahead an inch at a time, like an army pitting all in the hope of gaining a few feet of no man’s land.

They proved their strength. They heaved at the ropes, until their hands bled and the muscles in their arms were raw. The film crew were forced often to stop filming and help. Every hand was needed to haul at the ropes, to clear away rocks and create an easier passage. Inch by inch, we progressed, but as soon as one rapid ended, another began. I asked for Héctor’s advice.

“Éstos no son los verdaderos rápidos, these are not the real rapids,” he said.

On the third evening a new problem visited the camp: the great fever. We had learned to put up with the guinea worms, which bored out of our thighs. They were alarming, but small. We also endured the other great scourge of the Madre de Dios jungle, the chigger fly, which burrows into the skin and inserts its eggs into a cavity beneath the subcutaneous fat. The chigger fly, known locally as uta, has beset jungle explorers for centuries. It plagued our legs, as it must have done those of the conquistadores five hundred years before. Once the larvae have hatched, the wounds turn to sores and then go septic. The pain was severe and, as we spent each day in the water, the infected skin could not heal. In the sixties an American socialite traveler in the Amazon, called Nicole Maxwell, discovered that the best way to kill the unhatched larvae was to dab the spot with red nail varnish. Unfortunately we had taken no beauty products with us.

The chiggers grew worse every day, and affected us all. But the new torment to hit us was the fever, which caused the victim to sweat so uncontrollably that the shape of his face changed. I realized, some time later, that it was dengue fever.

The Swedes were the first to go down with it. They lay beneath the tarpaulin, shaking like madmen in a cell. River travel ensured that most of our clothes were always wet, but for them this no longer mattered. Sweat poured from their bodies in astonishing quantities. The rest of us stood and marvelled as they wrung out their shirts.

Héctor did not say so, but I knew he wanted to turn back. The Swedes’ condition grew worse, as did the pressure on me to call the retreat. The film crew were my friends, but they were there only to document the journey. Stubbornly I ordered the team to continue upriver.

On the afternoon of the fifth day, I felt the air temperature cool a fraction. We were resting, having secured the cargo on the rafts, and rubbing our feet with Vaseline. The chill was followed by a distinctive silence, a calm, an indication of change. I glanced up at the sky, and noticed a faint wisp of cloud in the west. I asked Julio for his opinion.

“It will rain in an hour or so,” he said.

“Then we will push on for a little longer.”

The chief porter narrowed his eyes.

“Muy bien, very well,” he said.

In the jungle things can change very fast. We continued hauling the rubber boat and the rafts for thirty minutes. Then, suddenly, darkness fell, and at the same time a storm of demonic proportions descended.

It began with a sprinkling of rain: heavy droplets at first, a messenger of the tempest. We were in the water negotiating an arching staircase of boulders, the river ripping round us like a hurricane. There was no beach on either side, just towering walls of paka, thorny bamboo.

With no riverbank, and nowhere to anchor the boats, we had little choice but to continue. Let the craft go, and our precious equipment and supplies would have been dashed on the rocks. We struggled ahead. Then the full force of the storm broke. The rain hurled down in sheets with such force that it bruised our arms. It threatened to drown us right there and then. The water level rose instantly. Within five minutes the river had doubled in its cruelty. After that the wind whipped up, tossing us about like skittles. I called to the porters, but no one could hear me. Each man was fighting to save his raft or boat.

The film crew clutched their black Pelican cases, and wrestled through the waves. We took it in turns to throw ourselves upon the mercy of the riverbank, only to have our hands and faces gashed by the thorns. As if the scene was not bad enough, the darkness was suddenly illuminated by arc lightning, which tore across the sky, claps of thunder fast on its tail. The heavens were lit up for minutes at a time.

My head was forced under the waves, smashing against one boulder and the next, as I was swept away. It was like being flushed down a sewage pipe. My shirt and shorts were ripped off by the current, leaving me naked except for my boots. Instinct told me to count: one, two, three, four... I’m not certain why, perhaps it was a countdown to my own death. But the counting suddenly stopped. I had become wedged on my back in a crevice between two boulders. I struggled to thrust my mouth above the surface, and suck in air, glorious air.

I expected to be washed away at any minute. It would have meant certain death. The fury of the water was like when the sluice gates of a dam are flung open wide. All efforts to pull myself round, to sit upright, failed. So I lay there, waiting for the torrential rain to cease, and for the men to spot me.

An hour or so later Francisco arrived. He had been running up and down through the rapids, searching for my remains. I did not see his face at first, just the shadow of a man moving in slow motion through the white water. He struggled over and whistled to the others, sounding the alarm. I was so firmly lodged in the cleft that it took the strength of Francisco and Héctor to release me. Crag-face was laughing, the first time I had seen him do so. But there was no smile on Héctor’s lips: he was stirred with anger. “You will get us all killed,” he shouted, against the noise of the water.

The porters were equally enraged. I couldn’t understand it. They had tied one of the tarps in a copse of saplings, and were sheltering beneath it like sodden chickens on a roost. I thanked them for their endurance, but the line of their faces scowled back. Julio said he wanted more money, and Oscar snapped that he would slit my throat if he did not get some hot food. Another exclaimed he had been robbed, and accused his best friend of the theft. Then Héctor strode up and castigated the men for allowing the supplies to get drenched.

There was only one explanation for the hostility: we must have reached the place of negative energy.

THIRTEEN

FEVER

The number of travelers that have fallen victims to fever in certain lands is terrible; it is a matter of serious consideration whether any motives, short of imperious duty, justify a person in braving a fever-ridden country.

The Art of Travel

The storm died as quickly as it had been born. Shortly before midnight, the lightning ceased, as if an enormous electric switch had been turned off. The rain stopped, too, but the river rose all night, ascending to the high ground on which we were camped. I had ordered that some of the valuable kerosene be used to start a fire, and that each man could eat two Pot Noodles. In usual circumstances, they would have responded with cheers, but on that bleak night, they cursed me, and swore that the expedition was a waste of time. They picked fights with each other, like children brawling over toys. No one was unaffected, except Francisco. He scurried from man to man, muttering words of encouragement.

“He is a stupid fool,” said Héctor, “they’re all stupid fools!”

I accosted the old man. “Don’t you see what’s happening?” I shouted. “We are at the place of negative energy. Friends have turned into enemies, and enemies into friends.”

Héctor slapped his hands together, grimaced, and stormed off into the rain. The film crew were busy drying out the Arriflex and their other camera equipment. They were all bitter beyond belief. I stood apart from them, for fear of an exchange of anger I might regret. Boris scolded Marco for his clumsiness, and the Ukranian rebuked the Swedes for nothing at all. They were both very frail, still sweating despite the cold.

By morning, water was lapping around us. We were lucky no one had drowned in the night. I woke at about six to find everything I owned soaked through. The camp was like a scene from a shipwreck. The men were all asleep, except Héctor. He was standing in the water, gazing upstream. I called to him, then plodded over. After a long while he turned. “You are right,” he said.

“About what?”

“The place of negative energy.” He motioned to an old military compass sitting in his palm. “Mira eso, look at that,” he said.

The needle of the instrument was flitting back and forth. There must have been a scientific reason for it, but at the time it filled me with a terrible haunted sensation, as if we were being watched from the trees. The Maestro had no doubt. As far as he was concerned, the field of energy was part of a divine curse. It had caused the storm and had whipped up hostility between the men. Wait another hour at that place, he said, and no man would escape alive.

We packed up our soaking gear and moved out.

By noon the sky had cleared, and a fresh cool breeze blew in from the west. I didn’t subscribe to Héctor’s belief in witchcraft, but it certainly seemed as if we had crossed a barrier of some kind. The smell of the river had changed, too: it was no longer sour and hard on the nose, it was perfumed with a scent of ripe fruit.

By the afternoon, the place of negative energy, if it had existed at all, was behind us. The current was stronger than ever before, but now the high water helped to ease the boats ahead. We advanced fast, covering four miles or more, the progress boosting the porters’ spirits. Their resentment had dissolved, as had Héctor’s.

That evening, seeing that Francisco was sitting alone, I went over to thank him for saving my life. “Is the earth a better place that you walk upon it?” he asked, and turned away angrily.

When the team had eaten, their feet had been greased and their sores smeared with iodine, I told them we were closing in on Paititi.

“We need a volunteer to go back for Javier,” I said. “Without the Machiguenga, we have no hope of finding the ruins.”

The porters stared down at their boots, their lips tight shut. I said I would double the pay of the one who escorted Javier upriver to our camp. No one volunteered. I rooted through the small black pouch I carried at my waist. It contained a Leatherman knife, a bottle of alcohol wash, a miniature torch, Vaseline, and a few feet of damp loo paper wrapped twice in plastic. None of the items was of sufficient value to entice the porters to volunteer for the mission. Then I noticed a small white plastic box at the bottom of the pouch. I took it out. The men’s eyes followed the object, as I weighed it in my hand. To them, the thin cord contained inside the box was the most useful substance ever devised. They were always asking for a few inches, to sew up their boots, to go fishing, or for hanging the snake-bite antidote piri-piri round their necks. It was waxed dental tape.

I offered the entire box to the man who would fetch Javier. All the porters jumped forward, puffing out their chests like sprinters at the finish line.

That night the long, bearded face of the explorer F. A. Mitchell-Hedges appeared in my mind before I slept. All but forgotten now, Mitchell-Hedges discovered the ruined Mayan city of Lubaantun in Belize back in 1924. As well as an explorer, he was a big-game hunter and adventurer, a yachtsman and an amateur archaeologist. The story of his life reads like a Boy’s Own annual. He claimed to have ridden with Mexico’s Pancho Villa, to have sheltered Leon Trotsky for the night, and to have found ruins on a massive scale.

If anyone has ever proved that you need no credentials to be an explorer, it was Mitchell-Hedges. For years he traipsed around the Caribbean and the Pacific with his adopted daughter Sammy in tow. Like many others of the time, he was a master of self-promotion. His Who’s Who entry of 1928 includes: “Life devoted to exploration and deep-sea research work... holds numerous world records for capture of giant fish, penetrated unknown portion of the hinterland of Panama, 1922-3, discovering a new race of people.”

Mitchell-Hedges is best remembered not for the great lost city he found, but for owning the finest rock crystal skull in existence, known as the Skull of Doom. He always claimed that his daughter had found it glinting among the ruins of Lubaantun on her seventeenth birthday. The skull, which has a hinged lower jaw and rectangular ocular cavities, has been a centre of attention for the lunatic crystal-believing fringe for decades.

Cast an eye over Mitchell-Hedges’ curriculum vitae, and you see light shining through the holes — he massaged the facts or made them up. But to me that was not the point: he was a man whose life was never confined by nine-to-five, never restricted by the opinions of others.

All next day we pushed on, as we did the day after, and the day after that. The team was working together like never before, energized, raring to cover ground. They had become expert at rearranging the stones in the rapids to allow the craft an easier passage. Oscar had gone back for Javier, holding the dental floss high like an Olympic torch. I would have sent two men back, but we needed everyone else on the boats.

Héctor counselled me often on the price of doubt. Fail to believe in Paititi strongly enough, he would say, and we had no chance of success. Believe in it, like a sinner touched by God, and, he told me, I would be rewarded. I did believe: I believed that Paititi was there, hidden in the cloud forest, and I believed that, with Javier’s help, we could find it. Every river bend we passed made me more certain that we would triumph, and that locating the ruins without him was impossible.

The routine on the river was matched by the routine on land. We worked together to build a camp each afternoon and to strike it the following morning. We all had duties, including the film crew, who had the added burden of having to clean their equipment each night. They would take immense care to ensure that the damp didn’t penetrate the Arriflex and the lenses. Their most valuable tool was the hairdryer. It was powered by the generator, surely the greatest burden of all.

On the fourth day after the great storm, we rose early and prepared to move out. The camp was criss-crossed with the oversized tracks of a sachavaca, giant tapir. The footprints were deep in the sand, hinting of the creature’s considerable weight. Héctor had been up in the night, and appeared depressed and anxious. He was sitting on a stone beside the smoldering fire, his palms pressed over his white beard. I asked what was the matter.

“The energy is becoming stronger,” he said.

I was going to beg him to be optimistic, but Marco nudged me. “Héctor is a dreamer,” he said. “Let him dream.”

So I did, and we pushed out into the chill water. One bend followed another, and the jungle came alive with hyacinth macaws, which cluster on the riverbanks to feast on the clay. The Palatoa had long been following a ridge, which ran to the north like an impassable bulwark. It was shrouded in trees. Perspective made them seem like seedlings, but in reality they were a hundred feet high.

A great swarm of sweat bees appeared at about noon. They covered our faces, suffocating us as we struggled ahead. Suddenly the river was swept into a vast chasm. It came with no warning at all. We stood there, up to our chests in water, gaping at the canyon walls. Our gaze descended in unison from the top of the canyon, down across the sheering gray granite walls, to their base. We had been hardened by weeks of river travel, but the sight that greeted us was awful beyond belief. A series of immense rocks had created a pongo, rapids, on a grand scale. I could not compare them to anything we had seen. The boulders were shale-black, worn smooth by millennia of turmoil.

“God help us,” murmured Julio.

“There is no hope,” said another.

“This is the Gateway to Paititi,” Héctor whispered.

We stood for many minutes, staring as the sea of water raged through the chasm, charging at the walls. If it was the Gateway, then the Gateway was shut. The porters managed to moor the rafts and the old rubber boat. Their morale had been crushed. The Maestro was similarly despondent. I begged him to continue, at least until our lives were in danger. But he warned me: I was becoming overpowered by greed, he said.

I struggled to find a route along the periphery of the gorge. The scant foliage and slimy rocks hindered my efforts. From the corner of my eye, I saw Héctor piling up stones, one on another. Perhaps he had a plan. I called: “What are you doing?”

The old man shook his head glumly. “I am building a memorial to the place of your death,” he said.

There was no choice but to retreat. Héctor said it would be months before the water level was low enough for us to pass through the Gateway. We could wait until later in the year, he said, and next time, he promised, we would return with Pancho as our guide.

In early March I left the cloud forest and flew back to Europe. It was like exchanging one life for another. Time has never passed so slowly as it did during those five tortuous months in London.

The journey back to Héctor’s village had ground us down, rubbing in the sense of failure. The only advantage was that we were no longer warring against the current, even though the rapids were still precarious. The old man had no idea what returning to Europe involved. He had suggested it as if it was nothing more than a stroll from one village to the next. The journey from the Gateway of Paititi to my London apartment took more than three weeks. It entailed wading through rivers, and traveling by dugout canoe, tractor and truck, by bus, taxi and airplane.

The film crew came with me. On the way home I went down with dengue fever, the “broken bone” disease. My wife found me collapsed on the doorstep, sweating buckets, ranting about ruins, warrior tribes and curses. I had lost a third of my body weight, was covered from head to toe in septic insect bites and sores. “Thank God you are home,” she said. I looked at her hard, my eyes burning into hers. I didn’t have the heart to tell her I was going back.

I stayed in bed for a week, sweating, raving, calling commands to the porters in the night. My home was a palace of comfort, yet I was an outsider there. I had dreamed of its luxuries while deep in the jungle, now they frightened me. My life had been stripped down to the bare mettle, trained to survive, to progress upriver.

On the ninth day, I met the film crew in a dismal café. We hugged each other, and felt a bond, the bond of shared anguish. I remember that meeting so well. We sat there with cups of tepid coffee on our laps, staring at one another, not needing to speak. It was enough that we were together again. Marco had contracted the fever as well.

He mopped his brow with a monogrammed handkerchief, and looked close to death.

In the second week, I received a call out of the blue. The voice was gritty and cold, like the sound of footsteps on broken glass. It said that I would fail, that I had no hope. “Fail at what?” I asked. The man didn’t reply, then he hung up. I tried to trace the call, but without success. The week after, I had lunch with an old school-friend who was working in the oil business. When I mentioned the name of the oil firm prospecting in Madre de Dios, he told me they were rotten to the core. “Beware of them,” he said.

The next day I was invited to talk about exploration on the radio. I got in a fast jab against the oil company, without naming it exactly. To my surprise, the gritty voice called again late that night. My wife picked up the telephone and passed it to me.

“Do not go back to Peru,” said the voice.

“Who are you?”

Again, the caller hung up.

Another week slipped by. I stocked up with more provisions, and ordered a pair of new Zodiacs. Although I had promised it to the tribe, I had not yet given them the antique rubber inflatable, so on the return trip we would have three boats. The balsa rafts had proved themselves extremely durable, and they were free, but I wanted to be ready for any conditions that lay beyond the Gateway. The added expenses, and the cost of the second trip to Peru, put me in debt. But I was lured back by the thought of Pancho, and by Héctor’s promise: that the tribesman would guide me when I returned.

For five months I lived in limbo, unable to think of anything but going back to the Madre de Dios jungle and progressing beyond the great pongo. Every day I waited, other expeditions were preparing themselves, gearing up and moving out. I stopped buying newspapers or watching television for fear of hearing that a rival expedition had located the ruins of Paititi. Friends would invite me to their houses, expecting a dependable entertainer at the dinner table. But my animation, my zeal for the exotic, was dead. I would sit in a corner, numbed by my distance from the jungle. Everyone wanted soundbites of expedition life, but I shunned their requests. How could they begin to understand the depth of our experience?

Each night the jungle tormented me in dream: the sound of macaws flying overhead in pairs, the clatter of rain on the river, the smell of termites rubbed into one’s skin. But it was the river itself that beckoned most strongly. It was calling me, urging like a siren, goading me to return, to continue the search.

In early August I kissed my wife and our little daughter goodbye, and boarded a flight back to Lima. As before the film crew were in tow. Our dynamic was still the same: they leeching off Marco, the banker, and I freeloading off them.

I had sent the two new Zodiacs and many more Pot Noodles by air cargo, having done a deal with an airline. Marco’s platinum credit card had paid for everything late one evening when he was in high spirits. It had been a valuable session, which earned us all new jungle boots and wristwatches with electronic compasses built in.

I spent three days begging Lima’s cargo office to give me the boats. They had evolved a system of red tape that surpassed even Indian bureaucracy in its ruthlessness. Forms had to be filled out in quadruplicate, stamped in pink, then blue, then black, signed once and signed again. I queued for the stamps, then to pay, and again to collect my change. Finally, after three days of wasted time, the boats were expelled from the great bureaucratic machine.

That night Leon unwrapped one, and discovered it had been slashed open on the left side. We checked the second. It, too, had been damaged, then rewrapped. I suspected the evil hand of Paititi saboteurs.

The manager of our hotel, lost in the war-lands of downtown Lima, was a short Japanese Peruvian, named Señor Kanagawa. He had made a career of telling people what he thought they should know. He already knew about our expedition. I dragged one of the Zodiacs down to Reception and asked for his advice. The manager pulled off his bifocals to get a better look at the damage. “You are not the only people searching for el gran Paititi,” he said. “To you the search is an entertainment, but to others it’s big business.” Señor Kanagawa ran the tip of his index finger down the gash in the boat. “If I were you,” he said softly, “I would be careful to avoid treading on tall men’s toes.”

The night before, I had read a far-fetched newspaper piece that claimed Sendero Luminoso, the infamous Shining Path, might be searching for Paititi. The article said that the Marxist organization would use the lost city’s gold to relaunch itself. I asked the manager for his opinion.

“It’s not their style,” he replied, “and in any case their leader, Abimael Guzmán, is locked up in jail. But there are equally powerful people in this country, and abroad, who want to get to Paititi before you.”

“Then whom should we fear most?”

Señor Kanagawa thought for a moment, and pressed his hands down on his desk. “You should fear each other,” he said.

A week later we arrived by bus at Cusco, dusty and cold. Our spirits were high, even though winter had descended on the Andean town. On every street corner young boys were touting alpaca sweaters, embroidered with vistas of the mountains. The alleyways behind Plaza de Armas were teeming as always with backpackers, walking softly with a glint in their eye.

We spent two days in the town, stocking up on fresh provisions and morsels of cheap equipment that we really didn’t need. Marco managed to get the Zodiacs repaired by an army of mechanics. Their workshop was oily and overlooked, the kind of place normal people crossed the street to avoid. The workers took a liking to the banker, and invited him to drink beer with them while the adhesive dried. When they heard he was going to Madre de Dios, they were all overcome with fear. “¡El Tigre!” one had shouted. “He will gobble you up.”

“He will bite off your face,” said another.

“¡No!” exclaimed a third. “He’ll suck out your blood and then he will bite off your face!”

On the morning of our departure, I went to buy some vials of morphine at a clinic off Avenida del Sol. A doctor in a filthy white medical coat asked me why I needed so much of the drug. I explained our mission, saying that this was our second trip to find Paititi.

“When you came before,” he said, “did you have a sickly-looking American man with you?”

I replied that we did. “He was a Vietnam veteran,” I said, tapping my brow, “all messed up in the head. Do you know him?”

“I treated him.”

“For fever?”

“No, no,” said the physician, “for chronic venereal disease.”

The bus to the edge of the jungle was seven hours late. When it finally rolled up, its driver jumped down and threw up in the gutter. He was a broad man, with a neck as wide as an elephant’s foot, and dark, bloodied knuckles. He stank of alcohol. We stowed the cartons of Pot Noodles and the rubber boats in the hold, and climbed up. The driver hardly waited for the passengers to take their places. He jumped into his seat, spewed beer and half-digested chicken over the dashboard, then shouted, “¡Comencemos nuestro largo viaje hacia el infierno! Let us begin our long journey to Hell!”

The driver’s inebriated condition and the poor state of the road made for slow, painful progress. The vehicle rumbled out over the altiplano, and began the descent down into the forest. I can hardly describe the joy that welled inside me. Returning after five months had strengthened us, filling each man with the highest expectations. The ruins continued to elude our competitors, a point that energized me beyond all else. As the mist filtered through the web of trees, I counselled myself to be strong, to stop at nothing until we had found Paititi.

In the middle of the night we arrived at Pillcopata. The sky was lined with storm clouds, darker than on any night I can remember, the air silent and chilled. As soon as the bus pulled up, a pack of the town’s most savage dogs surrounded it, circling like sharks round a bleeding whale. We spent the remainder of the night at the only hotel. The owner, Walter, remembered me from before. At breakfast he sat on the slim veranda, smoking an Inca brand cigarette, pondering the future.

I asked him for the latest news on the Paititi-hunters. He wiped a rag over his bronzed face. “There are French and Americans, Chileans and Peruvians all looking for it now,” he said buoyantly. “Someone will find the ruins any day. This time next year Pillcopata will be a boom town.”

We made a grotesque heap of our bags, boxes and packs in the middle of the town, and waited, and waited. There was no transport heading towards Héctor’s village. There was no transport heading anywhere on account of the torrential rain. Walter screwed up his face when he saw us trying to hitchhike in the rain with so much gear.

“All the other expeditions have their own transport,” he said. “Some have helicopters as well.”

Two days later we were still poised in the middle of town, ready for immediate evacuation, but no vehicles had come or gone in that time. The ferocious dogs no longer baited us: they reserved their energy for fresh targets who were filled with the great fear they so enjoyed.

In the afternoon of the fourth day, a high-sided truck stopped near the hotel. The driver said he was going to the end of the road at Shintuya. He could take us. I didn’t want to alert the official at Santa Cruz, Señor Franco, that we were back in the area so we decided to alight at the hamlet of José Olaya and take a dugout canoe from there.

By evening, we had crossed the Madre de Dios. In the five months we had been away, it had transformed from a massive waterway with entire trees coursing down it to a modest river with a near glassy surface. Paddling across in dugouts was easy, even when they were laden with the gear.

An hour later, at about eight p.m., the film crew and I staggered up the steep mud bank into Panataua, and made our way to Héctor’s shack. We could hear singing from a distance, muffled by kapok trees. It was Paolo’s voice, perfect and innocent. We stood at the empty window waiting for the family to see us. Nothing had changed. The Maestro was poring over his Bible, and Doris was sitting over a tray of beans, picking out the rotten ones. The dining area was illuminated by three or four candle stubs, long wicks feeding the flames. It was like looking back in time at a place far away.

I said Héctor’s name. He looked up, startled. Then he smiled. “El Señor Paititi ha regresado, Señor Paititi is back,” he said.

We lined up to hug the old man. There was a remote look in his eyes, as if he had seen something he had not wanted to see, like death.

No one in the village could understand the great distances we had traveled since leaving for Europe. Except when venturing to their farmsteads, none of the villagers, Héctor included, ever left the area. For them, travel was one of the many pointless activities with which we fill our lives.

On the night of our arrival I didn’t mention the second expedition. I was itching to quiz Héctor about Pancho but I knew it was more sensible to wait.

In the morning we had a meeting. I spread out the map on the coarse wooden dining-table, and boasted of our new equipment. I exclaimed that we had two rubber boats, and hundreds more Pot Noodles. Héctor did not utter a word, until he was sure I could think of nothing more to say. Then, lowering his head, as if a great weight had been placed on his shoulders, he said: “Muchos problemas, many problems.”

I pretended not to have heard the remark, but Héctor pressed his hand on my arm. “Escúchame, listen to me. We will never find Paititi now,” he declared.

“Why? What’s wrong?”

Héctor stared down at the floor. “Pancho is dead,” he said.

FOURTEEN

GOOD TEMPER

Tedious journeys are apt to make companions irritable one to another; but under hard circumstances, a traveler does his duty best who doubles his kindliness of manner to those about him, and takes harsh words gently, and without retort.

The Art of Travel

The reunion with Héctor was followed by a tidal wave of gloom.

There seemed hardly any reason to ask how Pancho had died as it would not bring him back. When I did ask, the Maestro said that Pancho had gone upriver three months earlier and had not returned.

“In his village people are saying El Tigre slayed him,” he said, “for offering to be our guide. His wife has run off with another man, and his house has been burned down to the ground. His brother is so ashamed and frightened he’ll be next that he is hiding in the forest.”

Héctor clicked his tongue in remorse. “El destino es algo terrible, fate is a terrible thing,” he said.

“But if no one has seen a body,” I said, “then there’s no proof that Pancho is dead.”

“Believe me,” said the old man coldly, “Pancho is not coming back.”

We turned to other matters and Héctor listed more difficulties. He said my maps were wrong, that there were no men to be porters, and that Señor Franco had put a bounty on our heads.

The film crew and I huddled in the bright afternoon light and tried to formulate a plan. We had traveled halfway round the world and none of us was ready to give in. But Héctor seemed to have lost all hope. Perhaps it was because he had lost interest, or that he did not have the energy needed for another hard expedition. I asked him if he would come with us even if we did not have Pancho. “You can count on me, my friend,” he said desolately, “but what of the porters? We need the same men as before.”

We sent messages to the various logging sites, asking for the men to regroup in Panataua. I knew that if I could get the expedition moving upriver, everything would fall into place. Without Pancho, it was true we had little chance, but I hoped we could find another Machiguenga warrior, as someone else must know where the ruins lay.

A few days passed while we waited to hear from the men. As soon as Héctor was busying himself with preparations, his morale picked up. He harangued us, declaring that we had been violated by the depravities of the West, that we could go nowhere without purifying our souls once again. For five days we sang hymns, prayed to Jesus and drank creamy tinned milk, which Doris assured us would chase the devil out from our hearts.

A week after arriving at Héctor’s home, Julio turned up. He said the old team of porters were ready and willing to leave. They would come at dawn the next morning. We might have not had Pancho as a guide, but I was thrilled that the chainsaw gang was on board.

That night Héctor locked his precious Bible into a tin chest, which he kept stowed under his bed, along with a photograph album, his father’s dentures and a rat-trap baited with a piece of dried fruit. I asked him what he was doing.

“Llamaré a los espíritus, I will call the spirits,” he said.

“But why lock up your Bible?”

“There are some things Jesus should not see,” he replied.

The Maestro lit as many candle stubs as he could find, placing them at equal spaces in diagonal lines across the dining-table. There must have been twenty of them, none more than an inch in height. The flames cast shadows across the bamboo walls like a warlock’s den. Outside, the long grass and shrubs rustled with cicadas.

Doris locked Paolo and her daughter into the family’s bedroom. She was fuming that her husband would invite dark forces into their home. “He is a damn fool, that man!” she shouted, then joined her children.

The Swedes, Boris, Marco and I sat at the table, waiting for Héctor. The moment he had locked away the Bible his character changed. Gone were his constant references to Jesus, replaced by more sinister subject matter, talk of phantoms, curses and witchcraft. His eyes had become frozen with a kind of wickedness, his expression switching from one of benevolence to one brooding with mistrust. We sat waiting while he prepared himself in the kitchen.

After a long delay, the Maestro swept into the room. He was wearing his best cotton shirt, and had wetted his hair, as if he had been getting ready for church. I asked some unnecessary question, but he waved it aside and took his usual seat at the head of the table.

“¡Oh espíritus sagrados! Oh sacred spirit!” he called, gazing at the shadows playing across the cobwebbed rafters. “Visit us, you are most welcome, visit us here.”

There was no reply, of course, except for the sound of bats in the trees and a lone bamboo rat far away. Again, Héctor called: “Oh sacred spirit, talk to us!”

I felt the old man had been trapped for far too long in the inflexible regime of Adventism. It was clear that he would rather have been a high priest of the witches. I made a mental note to discuss the matter with him later, but he had more to say: “Spirits, tell us where Paititi lies, where the ruins of the great city are hidden. Tell us and we will protect the secret!”

The candles began to burn down, smoke, and then extinguish themselves one by one. Héctor called to the spirits one last time, but still there was no reply. He undid the top button of his shirt, signifying an end to the rite, and laughed at his own foolishness. “Why should the spirits reveal anything to a stupid old man like me?” he said.

We moved the dining-table aside, unfurled our sleeping-bags and the film crew and I lay down on the floor in our usual positions. As I lay there, trying to make sense of the old man’s ceremony, I understood his motives. Héctor had long begged Jesus to take him to Paititi. He was a dreamer, but a believer. He knew very well that locating the lost city would transform his fortunes, and would save his face. In the years Héctor had lived at Panataua, Jesus had not been forthcoming with the co-ordinates of Paititi. His desire was now so great that he was willing to conspire with the forces of darkness to get results.

The porters arrived at dawn, just as Julio had said they would. It was good to see their faces, all smiling and cheery like children home from school. Their memories of the previous journey had transformed into a picture of perfection, glazed over and false. They regarded the film crew and me as wise men, saviours from the routine of their everyday lives. I warned them that hardship and danger awaited us beyond the Gateway to Paititi. They could stay in the village and dream, I said boldly, or join the expedition and learn the truth. A roar of delight surged through their ranks, and they lined up to shake my hand and pat me on the back. For a brief moment, I felt like a hero. Only Francisco remained reserved. He stood behind the others, staring at me like a man with cruel intentions. I greeted him, saying how good it was to look at him again. He screwed up his face and let out a high-pitched sigh. Julio begged me to leave Crag-face behind but, as I reminded him, the village busybody had saved me from drowning in the place of negative energy.

As always, there were problems to be addressed. The first was getting to the mouth of the Rio Palatoa. The Madre de Dios River was so much lower than before that it was no longer passable in peki-pekis. We would be forced to use rafts, the Zodiacs, and to carry much of the equipment.

The greater problem was the official, Señor Franco. For five months he had been awaiting my return. His superiors in Cusco had recently commended him for catching a team of Spanish Paititi-hunters. Rumor said they had been deported, and Franco had been presented with a pension direct from the oil company. Héctor said that Franco’s elevated status had boosted his confidence, and heightened his desire to catch others sneaking into the restricted zone. Someone had apparently informed him that we had returned.

Since our arrival in Peru a few days previously, the newspapers had been filled with stories about the government’s wish to exploit national oil reserves. The multinational petroleum firm with interests in the jungle was being heralded as the potential saviour of the country. The authorities would surely now be policing the restricted area more fervently than ever.

My fear, of course, was that Franco would come after us. His recent success would have enlarged the resources at his disposal, perhaps including military assistance. There was no point in continuing upriver if Señor Franco and his cronies were going to follow. I spread the map on the cracked mud outside Héctor’s shack, and had a good look. The Madre de Dios River ran north—south, with a dog’s leg bend between Shintuya and another community, a gold-mining area named Bonanza. The Palatoa ran to the west, uniting with another branch of the Madre de Dios near Aboroa. The only road was the one running from Pillcopata down to Shintuya.

As the film crew divided up their gear, I stared at the network of rivers and contours against a backdrop of green. Even though there were blank areas all over the map further up the Palatoa, there was good detail on the main branch of the Madre de Dios. I stared and stared, hoping a plan would emerge. Gradually an outline took shape.

For Señor Franco to be assured we were not heading into the restricted area, he would have to see us traveling in another direction. My plan was to send the porters with Héctor and the gear upstream, towards the mouth of the Palatoa. They would wait for us in the shaded rushes where the Rio Negro flowed out into the Madre de Dios. Meanwhile, the film crew and I would travel downstream in a rented boat. We would make efforts to be seen by the officials, and would then backtrack, and rendezvous with the others.

I explained the ruse to the film crew, Héctor and the men. None seemed convinced, except Francisco. He thought it was an excellent idea, a bad omen by any standards.

The previous journey upriver had taught me the value of continuity of orders. To gain this sense of continuity, you need one man giving the instructions, just as in the military you must have a clear chain of command. The man in charge may make blunders or miscalculate from time to time, but at least he is consistent. The more time I spent in charge of the expedition, the better I understood the workings of a military machine. We were faced with a similar range of problems: transporting large amounts of equipment, feeding the men, keeping morale high and staving off illness. The only way to function with any degree of efficiency was for me to dish out the orders and to assume full responsibility for the misery they caused.

I instructed the porters to haul the gear through the undergrowth as far as the second bend. There, they were to inflate the three rubber boats, and to construct a pair of rafts if they could find enough balsa trees. After that, they were to look out for Franco’s spies and, if the coast was clear, they could continue up to the rendezvous point.

Héctor set out with the men, leaving Julio to guide us downriver. The water beyond Panataua was sufficiently high for peki-pekis so we hired two. I had brought fifteen woven nylon laundry sacks from England to give away as gifts. We filled them with inflated garbage bags, and stowed them on the boats. They looked suitably burdensome. Then, we pushed away.

The grind of the primitive engines announced action on the river. As the boats rounded the bend near Santa Cruz, I saw a tall, straight-backed figure on the shore. He was squinting at us through field glasses, jolting them left and right. Then he let them swing down on their strap and shouted: “¡Hola! ¡Hola!” I ordered the motoristas to steer us into the shore. They arced to the right, but drew short of the bank, idling in the shallows. I called out enthusiastic greetings to Señor Franco. He was dripping with sweat, almost overcome by the sight of us.

“Where are you going?” he asked, obviously surprised at our direction.

“To Bonanza,” I said, “to look at the gold mines.”

The official glanced an eye over the laundry bags. I thought it unlikely he would request to see inside them. Instead he asked how long we were expecting to remain downstream.

“We’re planning to build rafts there and sail all the way down to Puerto Maldonado,” I lied.

“Where is your friend Héctor?”

I shrugged. “Haven’t a clue,” I said, tapping the motorista on the shoulder. A moment later we were cruising back into the middle of the waterway.

We stopped a few miles later, and camped for the night. It was hard to put myself in Franco’s mind, but I felt as if he believed the cover story. At least, there was no way for him to call Bonanza, as they did not have a radio at the outpost, which was why Héctor had suggested it in the first place.

At first light we deflated the garbage sacks and set off upstream. Everyone who had ever crossed paths with Señor Franco despised him, and the motoristas were only too happy to conspire against him. They said he was always giving them trouble about permits. “One day,” said the elder of the boatmen, “someone will tie a big stone to his ankles and throw him in the river. Each morning when I get up I wonder if that glorious day has at last come.”

As we neared Santa Cruz, we lay down in the boats, and covered ourselves with rotting sacking sheets. They ran wild with wolf spiders and stank of decomposing life. Minutes later we were heaving upriver towards the meeting point. I had expected the water to be too shallow for the boats, but the motoristas made good progress, easing their craft from one pool of deep water to the next. It was a fine day, the sky abundant with cumulus clouds, the sunlight dazzling as it reflected off the water’s surface.

A dozen Machiguenga tribesmen were waiting for us at Mantacolla, armed with their short chonta bows and elongated arrows. They had seen the porters ferrying the equipment to the place of rendezvous, and knew instantly that a debt had been incurred. The tribesmen were restrained in their greetings; the eldest warrior grimaced when I ducked my head politely. He was frail and oyster-white, the tips of his fingers pale blue, as if he was about to expire. Unlike the others, he spoke good Spanish.

This time our mutual friend, Héctor, was not present. I feared that negotiating without him would lead to us being overcharged, and forced to drink gallons of the wretched masato. I explained that we still intended to give them a rubber boat once we had finished with it, but that they would have to wait. The warriors didn’t like waiting. They mistrusted matters relating to the future.

While in Cusco I had managed to get fifty dollars converted into the smallest Peruvian coin. I had thousands of them, heavy and jingling in a bag. I handed them over. The warriors shuffled forwards like cattle advancing to be fed. They seemed pleased.

“Dinero en metálico, metal money,” said the elder.

I nodded.

“Bueno,” he said, spreading the neck of the bag to peer in. “Mejor que el papel, much better than paper.” The others crowded around and cackled.

I said it would be easier for them to divide the money as it was in small denominations.

“Yes,” said the elder, “and it is more useful than that paper you gave us last time. We used it to light a fire, but it was soon gone... These little pieces of metal, they have a hundred uses.”

I was going to ask about Pancho’s death, or express my condolences, but something held me back. In Héctor’s absence I didn’t want to make a faux pas, or say something that might endanger us. I bowed again, and cued the film crew to show the same respect. Ducking our heads and smiling obsequiously, we walked backwards to the boats, leaving the tribesmen to their chips of metal.

At the bend following Mantacolla, the water was no more than three feet deep. We were forced to jump out and walk the remaining few miles. I was filled with new energy, and was anxious to begin the trek beyond the great pongo. The only question was, who would be our guide? My plan of action was to petition Pancho’s mother to tell us what she knew. She must surely have had an inkling of where the ruins lay.

At five that afternoon, we arrived at the designated meeting point. Héctor and the porters were waiting, their shirts soaked with sweat. I used the opportunity to chastise the film crew for their ridiculous amount of luggage. Then I singled out Marco. Hoping to make an example of him I emptied his bag. The hardship of the previous expedition had encouraged him to pack a few extra luxuries. These included an unopened box of Montecristo No. 5 cigars, a monogrammed bathrobe, a pair of black velvet bedroom slippers, and a bottle of vintage Armagnac. The porters looked on in wonder. None of them had brought anything except a change of shorts.

Héctor cautioned us. He said that Señor Franco had a sixth sense, that he would soon work out the ruse and come after us. We had to make fast progress, he said, and get beyond the great rapids. Even then, Franco could search for us in a military helicopter, although the noise of its rotor blades would give us time to hide.

We camped for the night beneath the branches of a magnificent mahogany tree. Morale was high, the men ready and willing for the big push. I rewarded them with Kendal Mint Cake. I had bought a huge quantity of it cheaply in London, as it had long passed its sell-by date. They loved it.

That night, the flames flickered like orange ribbons touched by a breeze, sparks spitting into the darkness. I found myself reflecting on my life, my good fortune in being able to follow a path of my choosing. The porters told me they dreamed of traveling the world, but they had no documents or money to do so. I thought of my friends in Europe: they had the funds and permits to travel, but were trapped in comfortable lives.

Héctor seemed to have pulled himself out of his melancholic state. I didn’t want to quiz him on the plan until we were further from his village. The same went for the porters: push them too hard at the outset of the journey and they were liable to scurry home at first light. I handed out more Mint Cake and droned on about how happy I was with their work.

They sat on their haunches, chewing the peppermint squares. Sometimes they would talk about me after dinner, when they were alone. I could understand little of their conversations, as they tended to speak in their native Quechua, the language of the mountains. From what I could make out, they called me El Tormentoso, The Tormentor, and they referred to the mission to find Paititi as El Loco, The Madness.

I rose early, and sat on a stone beside the smoldering fire, worrying. An expedition to find a lost city can fill its leader with terror: the terror of sickness and of injured men, of running out of food, of getting lost, of failure.

Giovanni was up before the others. He stewed a dead bird, cooked some rice, and boiled some peekhwaya, a fibrous savoury jungle fruit. Out of all the porters, Giovanni was one of the best, always brimming with enthusiasm. “Será un buen día, it will be a good day,” he said, smiling, an honest smile.

“I hope so,” I said.

“Oh, yes,” he replied. “With weather so fine only good things are possible.”

I didn’t reply, but stared into the spiral of gray smoke, fretting to myself about the passage beyond the pongo. God knows how we’re going to pull this off, I thought. I took a deep breath, and was about to release it in a sigh, when I noticed a figure walking towards the camp through the water. It was a man, striding slowly against a curtain of morning light. He was dressed in a black T-shirt and torn blue shorts. In his hands he was carrying a bow and long arrows, preferred weaponry of the Machiguenga. I squinted hard. He looked familiar, his face vacant of expression.

Giovanni had seen him too, and was also squinting in the man’s direction.

“I hope it’s not the Machiguenga wanting more money,” I said.

A moment passed. There was silence. The figure drew closer, his stout form now silhouetted against the river’s brilliant surface. Giovanni held a hand above his eyes and strained forward.

“My God,” he said. “It’s Pancho.”

FIFTEEN

PITCHING A TENT

A tent should never be pitched in a slovenly way: it is so far more roomy, secure and pretty, when tightly stretched out, that no pains should be spared in drilling the men to do it well.

The Art of Travel

We rolled out the red carpet for the warrior, and showered him with gifts. He was presented with a pair of sturdy walking-boots, an electric lantern and clothes, a digital watch, sewing kit, cigarettes and a big stiff drink. I even tied his shoelaces. The very sight of Pancho had boosted our spirits beyond all imagination. He crouched on the upturned cooking-pot, grinning.

“We thought you were dead,” I said.

The warrior took a deep swig of pisco and grinned even wider than before.

“The villagers said you had run away,” said Oscar.

“They said you’d been eaten by El Tigre.”

Pancho slapped his knee to kill a wasp.

“They are bad people,” he replied. “They chased me away, said I should have stolen your bags. My wife went to another man. The people burned down my house.”

I apologized that our arrival had led to so much turmoil. The tribesman glanced adoringly at his lantern and asked to be shown how it worked. I flicked on the switch. “I have been waiting for you to come back,” he said, “because I have not forgotten your promise.”

“Will you now take us to Paititi?” I asked.

“Sí,” he replied.

“And we will take you to the city,” I said.

We shook hands, and grinned at each other like Cheshire cats, each delighted with his side of the bargain. I knew that if I could keep Pancho on board we had a real chance of victory. The warrior’s well-being became my obsession. There was little I would not have given him to keep him happy. But Pancho’s requests were modest. He asked if he might look through the Arriflex’s lens, and smell the strange white powder that Marco frequently rubbed under his arms; and he asked if he could have a few feet of 16mm celluloid film. Leon gave him as much of this as he wanted, and he tied it round his neck in a crude necklace.

“Voy a mantener alejado a El Tigre, I will keep El Tigre away,” he said.

Héctor found a grove of balsa trees set back from the water. The men chopped them down for rafts. As members of the chainsaw gang, nothing gave them more pleasure than hacking down healthy trees. I sometimes felt that, if they had their way, they would have felled the entire jungle for firewood.

By late morning, the expedition was on the move again, pushing through the low water with tremendous difficulty. In the five months since we had been away, the river had lost more than fifteen feet in depth. Héctor said it was still falling, and by our return it would be lower still. I dreaded the thought. From time to time, we were forced to unload the Zodiacs and the rafts, and heave them up over rocks. It made for a punishing routine. As before, the great advantage of rafts was that they could be slid over sharp surfaces without any damage.

It took two days to reach Aboroa, the home of Pancho’s mother. She seemed pleased to see her son. The tribe had told her he was dead. In the West, she might have displayed a riot of emotion, but she merely laughed, and passed him a gourd of masato to drink.

“The villagers are bad,” she said. “They will all die of chamaga.”

I asked Pancho what she was referring to. He pointed to his genitals. “Sífilis,” he said.

For eleven days we pushed on, fighting to cover the same ground as before. Our supplies and equipment were drenched in the river by day, and our makeshift camps were lashed by storms at night.

Our feet had healed during our months of luxury in Europe, but the repair was quickly undone. Within days of our return, all of us were lame. I had anticipated the problem, bringing ajar of petroleum jelly for each man. At every rest break, the entire team would pull off their boots and grease their feet. I had presented Pancho with a tub of Vaseline, but he didn’t use it for the intended purpose. Instead, Giovanni found him eating it with a plastic spoon.

Each morning the first thing I did was to look around to see if the tribesman was still in the camp. He had no idea of the effect his presence had on me and the team. But the porters did not share my fear that he would abandon us: they had other worries, most notably of El Tigre. That old anxiety had resurfaced on the eighth day upriver.

It had been a full moon, silver light charging the air with an eerie electricity. None of us could sleep, not even Héctor, the soundest sleeper of all. There was a sense that something sinister, something wicked, was about to take place, like the second before a murder in a low-budget Hollywood film. I opened my mouth a fraction, to help me hear, and held my breath. In the distance there was a faint sound of branches breaking, of feet moving, a sound of fear. I sat upright. The noise was getting louder, smashing and crashing through the trees. Within a moment the entire team was awake, poised for flight. Then came the moment of death: an animal struggling from a predator, wrestling, clawing for life.

“What is it?” I whispered.

To the porters it was an inane question. They all knew what it was: El Tigre, the ghost of the jungle.

The cloud forest had a powerful effect. It could bring happiness, a relief from society, but it could also fill ordinary men with unspeakable terror. The porters had spent most of their lives traipsing in and out of the jungle, but they were traumatized by it. They would never admit it, but their fear ran deep, like the hanging roots of a banyan grove. Héctor was the only one who would speak of the hazards. He thrived on the subject, tantalizing the others with his lust for the supernatural. I asked him repeatedly to cease reminding the men of imagined danger, but he couldn’t help himself. The porters would gather round, their jaws locked with fright, their faces frozen, as the Maestro revealed the limit of his fantasy.

By the time we reached Pusharo, and its wall of petroglyphs, the men were in a bad state. They might have been bristling with muscles, but they were jelly inside. I pleaded with Héctor to refrain from telling ghost stories at night.

“They are not ghost stories,” he snapped. “They are the world around us.”

My concern that Pancho would leave was now compounded with worry that the porters might mutiny. I didn’t know what to do. I tried sycophantic kindness, oozing praise and offering double rations to anyone who admitted aloud that El Tigre didn’t exist. But no one took up the offer. They were too scared. So I tried a harsher approach, calling them sissies. They didn’t like that at all. Latin men loathe having their sense of machismo dented.

Marco rambled on about fear and the havoc it can wreak. He told me of the days when the KGB roamed the streets in his hometown of Kiev, hauling away innocent men. “The fear was terrible,” he said. “Your father might go out for some milk for the tea, and never come back.”

“How did you cope?”

Marco sucked at a long, thin Cuban cigar and winced as the smoke swirled into his eyes. “We used to buy as much vodka as we could afford,” he said, “and get so drunk that we passed out.”

“How often did you do that?”

The Ukranian narrowed his eyes and pulled at the panatella. “Every night,” he said.

I knew that beyond Pusharo the water would be too low to continue with the Zodiacs and the rafts. We would have to resort to carrying the equipment and supplies. Again I implored the film crew to cut down their gear, calculating that they could easily shed two hundred pounds and not feel the difference. They went through their endless Pelican cases and bags, and separated out a handful of odds and ends. They disliked cutting down, and regarded me as a spoilsport for hounding them. Setting an example, I reduced my backpack’s contents by three-quarters. Then I went through the food supplies, weeding out the tin cans and anything too heavy to be taken upriver. There was no point in bringing the alcohol either, as it was so heavy. We had about five gallons of it, gut-rot pisco, distiled grape juice. The porters adored it, so I let them drink it all, hoping it might stave off their fear.

Giovanni opened the cans and tossed their contents into the big metal pot, along with a few bony sábalo fish, and a couple of ripe-smelling birds. He poured in a bucket of river water, and boiled until the stew was thick like tar scraped from the hull of an ocean-going ship. The men gorged themselves until their eyes bulged with excess. I passed out the enamel mugs and filled each one to the brim with the firewater. By the second mug the men were drunk like sailors on shore leave; and by the third they had all passed out.

Héctor had crept off to be alone at the petroglyphs. When he returned, the team were lying sprawled on the ground.

“It is medicine,” I said.

“Pisco is strong stuff,” he replied, “but it cannot lessen the fear of frightened men.”

Next morning the porters were still lying where they had fallen. They looked like soldiers slain in battle. I hid the rest of the alcohol in the undergrowth, along with much of my gear, and the deflated Zodiacs. Then I walked back to the camp and was about to write my journal when I saw three people approaching. They were not tribesmen, but were dressed in Western clothes, with smart khaki safari shirts and black Stetsons. I rubbed my eyes, astonished that there should be any other foreigners in the area. They were traveling light, no more than ten or fifteen pounds per man, and were moving quickly along the far riverbank. I pointed them out to Héctor, who had just woken up.

“They are the competition,” he said.

“Looking for Paititi?”

“Si”

They did not stop but crept nimbly past. Like a stealth force on a mission through enemy territory, they moved swiftly, with nothing more than bare necessities. When they had rounded the bend and were out of sight, I surveyed our camp. The ground was littered with the porters and mounds of luggage. I shouted for the men to get up, but no one responded. They were still too drunk to stand.

I cursed them with a deafening exclamation of fury. But, as Héctor reminded me timidly, it had been I who had served up the alcohol. He tapped his hand on a stone block, inviting me to sit. “Don’t be in too great a hurry” he counselled. “Haste is the enemy of success.”

I might have been guilty of plying the men with pisco, but it was a tonic to quell their fear. I could not restrain myself from feeling bitter at their weakness. My anger towards them was matched only by my resentment of the film crew. They had volunteered to document the expedition, but their presence was now affecting its progress. I had slimmed down my personal gear to a fraction of what I needed; and the porters carried next to nothing in the way of personal effects. The food and basic equipment were bulky, but that weight was exceeded many times by the possessions of the crew.

Whenever I looked round, they were amusing themselves with new trifles, new gadgets pulled from their bags. I would pounce, ordering them to leave the luxuries behind. But they would respond sharply, declaring the devices were for the film. Sometimes I would see them pressed tight, hiding together in the bushes, gorging themselves on sweetmeats from Marco’s pack. I sensed their shame, and it fanned my anger.

The day after the porters’ drinking session, we moved no more than a mile upriver. I kept an eye open for the foreigners, but assumed they were way ahead by now. There was no sign of anyone at all. Pancho said his brother had probably scaled the ridge on the western bank of the river in search of monkeys to eat. It was like a mountain chain, a granite spine, enveloped in dense forest. I couldn’t imagine how a man would ever enter it and hope to come out alive.

That night, as we sat in silence around the fire, I quizzed Pancho about the ruins he claimed to have seen. He grew nervous when I eased into the interview, offering him a cup of tepid tea, and praising his strength. The air was cooler than it had been for a long time, and was thick with insects, attracted by our lanterns. We sat together awkwardly, as I wondered how best to draw the truth from the warrior’s mind.

In our world a simple question is so often answered with an equally simple answer. We have a tradition of asking and replying, and have rigid divides between fact and fiction, legend and reality. Anyone who blends the two beyond an acceptable point is regarded as a liar, or a madman. But the world of the Machiguenga has developed a curious hybrid of fact and fantasy, a world in which they are one and the same.

The first time I realized the extent of the blurred dividing line was that night when I spoke to Pancho. I asked him if the tribe feared the jungle. He did not seem to understand the question. Héctor, who was sitting with us, explained it to him. The warrior pulled his arms into his chest, covered his mouth with his hands, and smiled apprehensively.

“El Tigre está allá,” he said, in a muffled voice. “The tiger is there.”

“Where?”

Pancho drew a circle with his finger in the air. “Everywhere.”

“Why do the tribe fear the ruins?” I asked.

Again, Pancho seemed reluctant to speak and, again, Héctor coaxed him. “Hay peligro, there is danger,” he said.

“At the ruins?”

“Sí!”

“What kind of danger?”

Pancho said nothing. He closed his eyes and seemed hardly to be breathing. I repeated the question once, and then again. “What is the danger?”

“Pai-ti-ti,” he said.

“You fear it?”

The tribesman nodded. “Mucho peligro, much danger,” he whispered.

I asked him about the ruins he had seen. Could he describe them? I yearned for him to recount the tale, but it was like getting blood out of a stone. “Have you seen the ruins yourself?”

“Sí”

“Were there stone walls?” I asked.

“Sí”

“Can you tell me what they looked like?”

Silence.

“Did you find a hatchet with gold on it?”

“Sí”.

“Were the walls made of big blocks of stone?”

More silence. Héctor helped me, working to extract the details. “Las ruinas,” he said, motioning with his hands, “what did they look like?”

As before, Pancho closed his eyes, but this time he let silence be his answer. I built up the fire, so that it would burn all night and ward off El Tigre, then I crept into the tent. Héctor and the film crew had already turned in for the night, and were snoring loudly. I could just make out their calm, satisfied expressions — freed from the discomfort of consciousness. As I followed them into dream-state, I saw Colonel Percy Fawcett glowering down at me. He was dressed in tweeds, layers of heavy cloth with a necktie tight round his throat. His face was bearded and serious, the stem of a briar pipe poking from the corner of his mouth. Fawcett has been a hero to many before me. He is not famous for ever locating the great lost city of gold, a place he called Z, but is remembered for disappearing without trace while on the quest. God knows what terror he witnessed or how he died, but to anyone searching for Paititi, Colonel Fawcett holds a special place. He vanished at his height, and his disappearance is almost as great a mystery as Paititi itself.

The Colonel’s deep-set eyes regarded me studiously. He looked down at my filthy clothes, my sunburnt face and wounded feet. Then, in a raspy voice, he ordered me to get rid of half my men, and to keep tighter control of those I retained.

“But who will carry all the gear?” I asked.

Colonel Fawcett stiffened his back, narrowed his eyes, and barked:

“Throw it on the fire!”

With so much equipment, we were forced to leapfrog forwards, the men struggling under the tremendous weight. The only path was the river itself; walking through it fully laden was extremely precarious. It was paved with slippery rocks and abounded with hidden dips and holes. The current stirred up the water, making it impossible to see one’s feet. I dreaded the advance, and constantly expected to hear the cry of an injured man. But good fortune was watching over our haphazard column.

The chainsaw gang proved their ability to endure hardship, if ever I needed proof, and exhaustion appeared to assuage their fear of El Tigre. They held off talking of it for three days.

We pushed on, each mile an achievement in itself. Morale was neither high nor low. The men were too tired to consider their feelings. Their hands were now as raw as their feet, and their legs were covered with suppurating sores. They lived from one stride to the next, unable to think of anything but food and sleep. I ordered Giovanni to dish up extra rations at every meal. The men had earned it. There were always real concerns about our supplies, but hot food was the single element that could instantly raise morale. Every two days we would pause for half a day to allow time for rest, and to butcher a new selection of endangered animals.

Early one morning, one of the porters, Pepe, spotted a pair of vultures circling above our camp. He pointed them out to the others and, before I could protest, a plan was hatched to trap one. Unfortunately I had translated a passage from Galton’s The Art of Travel a few days previously. It explained exactly how to catch a condor or a vulture. The method was to spread out a raw ox-hide on the ground. A man lies under it, armed with some cord to tie the bird’s feet, with another two men ready nearby to leap out. We didn’t have a raw ox hide, so the porters hacked up the rear end of an agouti they had caught, and laid it out on my green military poncho. Julio crawled beneath it. The men waited in the bushes, ready to jump out. An hour passed, and then another. I whispered disparaging remarks from the shade but at that moment one of the great birds swooped down to feast. Julio thrust his arms up and wrestled with the vulture’s wings. The porters jumped out and broke the poor creature’s neck. They plucked it immediately and revelled in their success. I was shocked that they would eat a vulture’s meat, but they were delighted by it.

I see now why hunting has been so popular a pastime throughout history. It allows a man to exercise his body and mind with a chance of filling his stomach at the end of it. Alfonso had brought with him a decrepit sixteen-gauge shotgun. He and the others took it in turns to stalk through the jungle in search of prey. They knew how I detested them executing innocent animals, but the more I condemned them, the greater their slaughter became.

One afternoon, we had been walking almost without pause when Héctor called me to the front of the procession. He said that Pancho had drifted away from the river and was climbing into the trees. “He said there are ruins!” the old man exclaimed.

My heart raced. I gave the order to stop and rest. Pancho! Where was Pancho? I ran to the embankment and peered up into the forest. He was standing at the foot of a high granite rock face, about forty feet away. I clambered up, ran towards him, and made a quick inspection of the natural wall.

“These are the first ruins,” said Pancho, wide-eyed.

I looked back at the wall. It was hanging with liana, jagged and oblique. Halfway up there was a very large hornet’s nest, vigorous with life. But there were no carvings or petroglyphs. It was clear the wall had nothing to do with the Incas.

“This is a natural wall,” I said.

Pancho seemed not to have heard my remark. He pointed a thumb at the rock. “Las ruinas,” he said.

I am rarely gripped by violent rage, but I felt my veins swell with anger. For Pancho the journey upriver was a jaunt, a pleasure trip; for the rest of us it was an experience charged with responsibility. The warrior moved away from the granite and gazed into my eyes, one of the first and only times we ever achieved full eye-contact. It was as if he was laughing at me inside.

Back at the river the men were lolling about, wondering what was going on. Héctor took Pancho aside and enticed him to reveal the truth.

“He says these are the small ruins,” said Héctor later. “The great set of ruins is upriver.”

But when I asked Pancho again if he could take us to them, he jolted his head to the left, and then the right. In a whisper so faint as to be barely audible, he said he did not know where the ruins of the lost city lay. If he did, he said, he would gladly take me.

We pressed on, although I no longer knew why we bothered. The expedition had developed a pace of its own, moving ahead through inertia alone. I fell into a state of deep despair, unable to go on. I sat on a stone and could not lift myself up. There was no point in advancing any further, but I was too fearful to turn back. The Swedes filmed me, bent down, broken with dejection. It was good material for them: an explorer shattered by the experience of exploration. They seemed revitalized by my gloom, as did the porters. They headed off hunting in a pack, and killed an endangered sachavaca, a giant tapir.

The animal was as large as a small donkey, with a long snout and speckled coat of gray-brown hair. Julio used a machete to chop off its head and limbs. Then he cleaved steaks from its thighs. The meat was flame-scarlet, shining as if it had been lacquered. Pancho spent two days smoking it over a burning termite nest. He said the roasted termites gave it flavour. The animal was cooked until it was so hard as to be almost indigestible. The porters said that only a madman would eat a tapir rare because of the worms.

The Swedes were delighted with the meat. It reminded them of elk steaks from Lapland. I did not have the stomach for overdone tapir, so I sat by myself away from the others. Héctor patted me on the back. “No te preocupes, don’t worry,” he declared. “Paititi está allá arriba, Paititi is up there.”

“My belief is flagging,” I said.

“Pancho is playing with you,” he replied. “He is playing with your mind.”

Again, the old man cautioned me on the price of doubt. It could cost us everything, he warned. The only way to succeed was to believe, and to keep moving upriver.

Héctor’s steadfast belief, that Pancho did know where the lost city lay, made me realize how short-sighted I had been. I kicked myself for doubting: how could I expect to succeed if I had any doubt? I took Héctor’s advice, placed total belief in Pancho and vowed to go on until we found the ruins of Paititi, or until we met disaster.

The cloak of despair was suddenly lifted, and I awoke the next morning feeling like a new man. The porters were in high spirits, too, having feasted on huge quantities of tapir meat. They had picked the animal clean, and had even roasted its bones for the marrow.

Two days later we were at the place of negative energy once again. Despite witnessing the curious atmosphere of the zone on the previous trip, I put down any bad feeling to coincidence. Héctor lined up the porters at the start of the day and told them they would soon be fighting like dogs. “You will feel discouraged and tired,” he said, “and will gladly tear at each other with your bare hands — but resist!”

The warning, quite obviously, seeded animosity in their minds. We hadn’t gone a mile when the first fight broke out. Oscar accused his best friend, Carlos, of trying to trip him up. They started punching each other. Then Julio spat insults at Boris. This time even Francisco did not escape the zone of negativity. He attacked me, declaring I was paying extra low wages and forcing the men to work in impossible conditions. Héctor called the busybody to heel.

As before, I was certain the tension was nothing more than fluke. The burden of such a colossal amount of equipment was quite sufficient to turn inseparable friends into enemies. Two miles on, and the men appeared to be back to normal, if there was any normality in the wretchedness. But it was now Héctor who was causing alarm. He was talking about witches and wickedness again, hinting that the spirit of the jungle would bear down upon us and consume us all.

“It is written in the Old Testament,” he said. “The jungle shall rise up and slay each man who walks upon it.”

Unable to remember any mention of cloud forest in the Bible, I begged him to resist the urge to frighten the porters. His belief in Paititi was a driving force, but it was outweighed by the talk of imminent disaster. That night, as a shark-gray eddy of cloud pushed across the crescent moon, Héctor addressed the men once again. They sat at his feet, like the disciples of a guru, on the riverbank. A light breeze cut through the valley, sweeping his tirade downstream. From time to time the wind changed direction, and I caught the odd word: “terror”, “diabolical”, “revenge”. The porters were crouching low, like tigers waiting to pounce on a gazelle. When Héctor had finished his harangue, he slunk under the canopy, where I was scratching out my notes.

He glanced at the men, who were now whispering to one another, like convicts on a chain-gang. Then he looked over at me. His characteristic air of humility was gone; he seemed visibly shaken, as if an unbearable secret had been confided to him.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

The old Maestro pressed the tip of his index finger to his mouth, holding back the secret. I repeated my question. “No te lo puedo decir, I cannot say,” he replied.

“Tell me.”

The Maestro bit his upper lip in shame. “The porters will return home at dawn,” he said.

SIXTEEN

PORTABLE FOOD

The kinds of food that are the most portable in the ordinary sense of the term are: Pemmican; meat-biscuit; dried meat; dried fish; wheat flour; biscuit; oatmeal; barley; peas; cheese; sugar; preserved potatoes; and Chollet’s compressed vegetables.

The Art of Travel

A journey of considerable hardship requires a strong team, a team with the physical strength to persevere in dreadful conditions, and the mental stability with which to stare danger in the eye. Years of sawing down the jungle had given the porters muscles that would put body-builders to shame, but their reserves of mental strength were pathetically lean. Before the night had been tinged with the subtle blush of first light, I crawled out of my moist sleeping-bag to confront the men. Their spirit was broken, shattered by the fantasy conjured up by Héctor.

Giovanni was stewing up the last of the tapir, along with an agouti he had found dead on the forest floor. He would not look at me. When I approached, he pretended to be inspecting the sores on his feet. I had always been touched by Giovanni’s humour, his honesty. If any man would tell the truth, I felt it would be he.

“If we push hard,” I said, “we will reach the Gateway to Paititi by late afternoon.”

The cook did not look up. He was poking at a slender white worm issuing from his thigh.

“Please make sure the men eat well, and fast,” I added.

Giovanni swallowed hard, his face tilting down. “We are going back,” he said.

“We are going upriver,” I snapped.

“You are,” he retorted.” We are not.”

A moment later the men were gathered around Giovanni, standing shoulder to shoulder like planks in a fence. They were not smiling, and when I took a step forward, they shuffled back as if I would harm them. I didn’t know what to do, what to say. Ordinarily I might have turned to Héctor for his advice, but it had been he who had fanned the flames of mutiny.

I ranted on for a time about dreams and aspirations, preaching a sermon that a man must follow what is in his heart. The porters’ heads were low and their spirits not bolstered by my discourse. I said that Paititi was the magic wand that could transform our lives. It was there, I exclaimed, to test us, to unite us towards a greater glory. The porters stood motionless as I raged with an invented philosophy. I threw my arms heavenward and promised them that the invisible, all-seeing force of nature was looking over us.

“It will kill us,” Julio quipped.

“El Tigre,” muttered Oscar.

“No somos estúpidos, we are not stupid,” said another.

I turned to gaze upriver, taking in the screen of chonta palms perched at the next bend. Six pairs of green macaws flew overhead, wings flapping, beaks tweeting as they went.

“What do you want to change your minds?” I asked.

The men looked at each other, swapping quizzical side-glances.

“There is one thing that will make us happier,” said Julio.

I readied myself for an appeal for more money or increased rations. “What is it?”

“Queremos una ceremonia, we want a ceremony.”

The ritual was a crutch by which the porters could prop up their floundering spirits. I did not condone it, but if that was what it took to continue, I was powerless to stand in their way.

Héctor flew into a rage when he heard the team’s demand. “It is the phantoms inside them,” he shouted. “Don’t you see it?!”

“Let them have a ceremony,” I said, “if it will keep them with us.”

It had been the Maestro who had worked them up into such a state and now I was justifying the remedy. I strode over to where the porters were huddled, all cosy and warm, beneath shreds of coarse blanket. “You can have a ceremony,” I told them virtuously, “as long as you are ready to move out first thing in the morning.”

There were no smiles, no glimmers of cheer, just a gallery of scowls. I went back to my nest of damp clothing and attended to my feet. The full day of rest would allow me to dry out the rotting skin between the toes. Meanwhile, the diet of Pot Noodles and bad jungle meat had given me terrible constipation. In recent days I had become obsessed by bowel movements. I had once read that Livingstone was similarly preoccupied, and had been plagued by bad bowels throughout his great African journeys. In my diaries I noted each movement in increasing detail, with estimations of weight, notes on firmness and color. It seems like a sordid preoccupation to mention, but in the jungle, close inspection of one’s stools makes for valuable research.

The day progressed with little sound from the porters. They lazed about, leading me to suspect that the ceremony was merely a stalling device. But then, as the half-light of dusk turned into night, their ritual began.

Oscar had trapped a black pig-like creature in a net. From a distance, it looked like a paca, a solitary nocturnal rodent that was always a welcome addition to the evening pot. The others had cut one of the blankets into thin strips, put them into enamel mess mugs, poured in a little kerosene and set them alight. The effect was of a dozen impressive torches, blazing with secret light. Once the mess mugs were burning, the porters called me over. They had gathered in a circle, stripped to the waist, their torsos washed in yellow and orange, their faces haunted by charcoal shadows. Carlos rapped the back of a spoon against a metal bowl, in a sharp Morse code. The rhythm rang out across the veil of trees, warding away the spirits and luring the attentions of superstitious men.

Héctor, Pancho and the film crew watched from a distance. I was planning to do the same, but Julio pulled me from the sidelines. “This ceremony is for you as well,” he said.

The first phase continued for an hour. The spoon-rapping was joined by a chorus of grunts, the kind a rugby team makes before a match. Then a sharp knife glinted in the moonlight, and the paca’s life ended. Its blood was drained into a Pot Noodle tub, which was passed round. We each rinsed our faces in the crimson liquid. Then Juan hacked off the creature’s feet. These were passed around as the blood had been. In the uncertain atmosphere, the men spent a moment or two sucking a foot, before passing it on. I cannot accurately describe the sensation of sucking a rodent’s foot. I wondered who had thought up the ceremony and how it could have anything to do with the placation of evil. Once the sucking was at an end, and our faces had been daubed with blood a second time, the men squatted on the riverbank and whined like sows being led to slaughter. I followed their example, for fear of being ostracized.

It was at that point that Francisco told me to go back and sit with Héctor. I walked over to the tent and watched from a distance. The ritual continued for another hour, with each man addressing the others in a peculiar high-pitched tone. Then, each one threw something into a low fire, burning between a tripod of stones.

“What are they burning?” I wondered aloud.

“Su honor, their honor,” replied Héctor, “y su dignidad, and their dignity.”

Next morning we rose early, packed up the camp, and set off before anyone could protest. It had not rained, but the river had risen mysteriously during the night, most probably caused by rain falling on the leeward slope of the ridge further upstream. The porters’ faces were rusty brown with dried blood, and their hair was curiously matted. I had not stayed awake to watch them, but Marco told me they had continued long into the night. The ritual, he said, had involved rubbing silt from the river into each other’s scalps. Whatever the details, the ceremony seemed to have had the desired effect. The men were moving upriver.

We walked all morning, and through the first part of the afternoon, carrying the equipment up one set of rapids after another. There was no more talk of ghosts. The porters fell into a fine routine, relaying their burdens a few hundred yards at a time. In the many weeks we spent in the jungle, I cannot remember a day with less moaning and groaning, and less dissent. Even Héctor noticed the change of heart. “The spirits are resting,” he said smugly.

“I don’t believe in that rubbish,” I replied, as we greased our feet.

Héctor reached out to grasp my arm. He held it tight, crushing the bones together. “You will condemn us to death,” he said.

By late afternoon I spotted a wide bend in the river, a signal that the chasm was close. Despite the team’s exhaustion, I pressed them to continue until we had reached the Gateway. That night we camped on the rocks above the gorge. In retrospect it was a foolish choice. A downpour upstream would have flooded the river and we would have drowned, unable to escape. The water flowing through the chasm was much lower than before, but it was a treacherous passage none the less. To get to the other side, we would have to negotiate a three-hundred-yard trench of white water and rocks.

After the usual Pot Noodle appetizer and the main course of suspect stew at dinner, I rallied the team, thanked them for keeping the faith and staying with me. They pressed around me, their meek faces reflecting the candlelight, like a choir at evensong.

“Tomorrow we will pass through the Gateway,” I said, “and we will walk into the future, with our heads held high. Paititi is close now.”

The men might not have been impressed by the speech, but I raised morale by promising double wages for every day we spent beyond the great chasm. Julio led the others in a round of applause, and they broke into spontaneous laughter. Much had changed in a single day. The porters were back on my side, and we had reached the new ground. It seemed as if, once again, the expedition had a future.

Passing through the chasm required bravery and folly in equal measure. Looking back is easy, and of little help. If we had known the price of the toll, we might never have journeyed through the Gateway at all. We began at dawn, our minds lulled by a night of sound sleep, our bodies energized by a hot breakfast of roasted caramacha fish. I harangued the men for a few moments as they loaded up like pack mules. Most had bandaged their hands with tough white tape and some had wound bandages tightly round their knees. They said it helped them deal with the strain.

The procession left camp on the dot of nine, snaking its way through the pouring rain up to the rim of the chasm. I was somewhere in the middle, enveloped in a green British army poncho, which did little to keep out the water.

Héctor was at the front, as always setting an example to the others by carrying an impossible load. Pancho, who was supposed to be guiding us, was at the rear of the procession. He kept silent all morning, even when he walked into a wasps’ nest. Like the other local people I had met, he cackled with laughter at the misfortune, and went on.

The best route through the chasm was a point of contention. No one could agree on which way to go, and each man seemed reluctant to trust his life to another’s plan. In the end, I overruled everyone, and insisted on the path with the least overt risk. Even then, it was necessary to clamber over a series of grotesquely large rocks, each more slippery than the last. After that we were forced to wade up through the white-water trench.

The ability to tell a good route from a terrible one is a valuable skill when leading an expedition. Unfortunately for us all, it was a skill I did not possess. I had failed to take into account the invisible currents. The first three men who stepped uneasily into the frothing water were instantly carried away, along with their packs. The film crew, whose precious equipment they were transporting, whimpered like distressed damsels, as their exposed film raced downriver towards rocks.

That morning Pancho had been of little use. But as soon as he heard the frenzied shouts, he glanced at the river and took in the situation. His experience of fishing near rapids had taught him the way water flows. Within five seconds, he had ripped down a stave, calculated the route of the flow, barred the way and saved the bags.

For eight hours we persevered through the white water, gaining a few feet an hour. Rarely have I felt so drained, so wretched, as on that day. The torrential rain did not cease for a moment. There was water above, below, and all around us. It shrouded us, froze us, and almost drowned us all.

At the end of the experience there was a beach, no more than a few yards of oily claylike silt. We lay on it outstretched, exhausted, tearful and triumphant. I thanked the men for their endurance, but my words were scant payment for their efforts. They disliked me very much, but we had bonded, whether any of us wanted it or not.

Those who had the strength raised their heads a fraction and peered back at the Gateway. The chaos of rocks, grit and white foam, the waves and the ferocity of nature were overwhelming. I marvelled at it, as perhaps a condemned man might be awed by the workmanship of his noose.

As ever, Héctor read my thoughts: “The executioner will get us on our return,” he said.

His words were to haunt me over the next weeks: each mile I dragged the team on was a mile further to be covered on the way home. Only God knew how we would ever get through the chasm again. But then, if I was to believe Héctor, the Gateway to Paititi was nothing compared to the journey ahead.

That evening, as we all crouched around a great bonfire, set back from the river on a plain of needlegrass, the old man spoke again about the danger. His words drifted into the night with the sparks. “Paititi will rob our souls,” he said. “It will feast on our guts, spit them out and laugh at our inanity!”

“We are getting near,” I said.

Héctor spat into the fire: an unlikely gesture for such a refined man. “What do you know of Paititi?” he snapped.

“That we have a chance at finding it.”

“Huh!”

“We have Pancho,” I said firmly. “He knows, you told me so yourself.”

“I said that long ago,” Héctor replied, “when the river was an angel.”

“And now what is it?”

The Maestro wiped a tear from his left eye. “From here on, the river is Death,” he said.

The first night beyond the chasm was humid, despite the increased altitude. No one slept well. I heard the men talking to each other, and shouting out in their dreams. I let them lie in until eight, to make up for the hardship of the previous day. They were uneasy at breakfast. I could sense that something was wrong.

“What is it?” I asked Julio.

“Oscar saw a ghost,” he said, “in the trees... It’s there whether you like it or not.”

“I do not like it,” I said curtly. “Ignore it!”

We put on our clothes, loaded up and moved out. A tense, anxious air hung over the procession. I would have rallied the team and urged them with words of support, but my rallying talk was spent. I knew that, from that point on, no amount of coaxing would work. If I wanted the men to stay with me, I would have to drag them forward an inch at a time.

The way ahead was a monotony of shallow water, sandbanks and heavy rain. Every tree looked like the one beside it, and every bend like the one before. I marched on without thought. It was the most dangerous way to continue. When I could be bothered I worried about the threat of shattered ankles, but most of the time I didn’t waste my energy.

Boris started to moan about deadlines. He said something about having shot enough film. He suggested camping at the edge of the river, and waiting for us until we came back. I wouldn’t have it, and forced him to continue. On a harsh expedition there’s no space for anyone who does not intend to finish. In the army such men are shot as deserters. I told Boris, jokingly, that I would have him shot. We looked at each other when the threat had passed through the air from my mouth to his ear. The Bulgarian’s face was taut. “You would do it, wouldn’t you?” he said at length.

“Perhaps,” I replied.

We carried on and each day melted into the next. It was a routine of getting up, putting on damp clothing, eating stew, trudging in agony, eating Pot Noodles, more trudging, building camps, sleeping and getting up again. The days were filled with painful movement upriver and the nights with fever.

We all dealt with the hardship in different ways, and clung to obsessions, in the hope they would help us through. I sought salvation in preoccupation with my bowels, the Swedes were devoted to keeping the Arriflex dry, and Marco thought of nothing but the well-being of his cigars. As for the porters, they became universally obsessed with collecting the spent Pot Noodle tubs, and invented a thousand ways to use them. Back in England, I had given little thought to the snack’s flavours. Most of what I had brought were Chicken and Vegetable, and came in a standard white pot. But a few were spicy curry flavour, called Bombay Bad Boy, and came in a black pot. A black-market developed between the men, in which the rare black tubs were regarded as equal in value to a pair of rubber boots. I would have stamped out the trade, but allowed it to continue because it kept them occupied.

On other journeys I had found myself craving the luxuries of home, but not in the Madre de Dios jungle. I did not miss having clean water to wash in, a flush lavatory or laundered clothes. As time passed, I rarely thought of home, except of my wife and our baby daughter, whose first birthday I had missed.

As time progressed we all developed a crude routine. It enabled us to endure what might normally be considered unendurable. Each morning I would put on my wet clothing just before setting out, and stay wet until breaking for camp each evening. I had become obsessed with keeping a single change of clothes bone dry. I would wrap the sacred dry shirt and shorts in multiple layers of plastic when not in use. I never washed them; clothes hanging out to dry invariably got soaked in an unexpected shower. My dry outfit was black with dirt and it stank.

Personal hygiene was equally hard to maintain. Like most of the men, I washed in the river each afternoon. The cleanliness of the water depended on whether it had rained. If it had, then the river’s silt would be swirled up into it like lamb broth, and rinsing yourself did more harm than good.

Despite the Vaseline our feet continued to suffer. To make matters worse, a few of the porters developed alarming sores on their backs. They were as wide as coffee cups, with dead white skin round the edges and shiny pink in the middle, like an exotic species of anemone. I experimented with a range of treatments, but none proved satisfactory. I would have handed out antibiotics, but our stocks had been ruined in the rapids.

Ten days after he had passed through the great chasm, Héctor ranted on about a curse. He was always going on about curses and sin, exclaiming how Adventism was a defence against evil, so I didn’t take him very seriously We were traipsing through the river, making adequate headway, Pancho at the rear, Héctor somewhere near the front. For once it wasn’t raining; the sky was a great canvas of indigo, ribbed with cirrus clouds. Better still, the plague of sweat bees had vanished. I was about to give voice to my satisfaction, but the old man suddenly shouted out from the front: “¡Paren! ¡Paren! Stop! Stop!”

“What is it?”

I ran forward, stumbling across the rocks, and passed the porters, who had come to an abrupt halt. “What is it?” I repeated, in a low voice.

The old man wiped a hand over his mouth. “We cannot go on,” he said.

“Of course we can!”

“And risk such danger?”

“What danger?”

“Las líneas malditas, the Curse Lines,” he said.

Rodrigo had often taunted me with talk of the lines. He had said that only an embalmed cadaver could reveal the safe path between them. Héctor’s knowledge of the Curse Lines took me by surprise, for I had thought they were a figment of the shaman’s expansive imagination.

My worry was not for Héctor and his fears, but for the men. If they got a whiff of the new invisible danger, they would drop everything and run back to their village. Again, I pleaded with the Maestro to keep the hazards to himself.

“If we cross this point,” he said, jerking his thumb at the ground, “we may not return here alive.”

Danger is the companion of hardship. I was prepared to bear risks, but unwilling to be beaten by hysteria. Héctor’s greatest strength, his humanity, was now working against me. Whenever he spoke, the porters listened. They trusted his judgment and believed every word that slipped from his lips. But I sensed that his usefulness was coming to an end. He was invaluable, but his ability to incite mutiny made him worthless.

We camped early so that I could quiz Pancho and get the old man back on my side. Some of the men took advantage of the remaining light and went to hunt birds in the marshes that formed a floodplain to the river. They returned with a number of straggly-looking ducks, which they plucked and cooked.

I had stopped eating Giovanni’s stews because of the fish bones. A great variety of fish could be found in the high jungle, some of which looked primeval. Their common feature was an astonishing skeleton, fragments of which would tear into your cheeks and gums as you struggled to get at the meat. All the others thought I was mad to pass up the nightly blend of fish, game and rodent.

While the men prepared the camp, I went over to where Pancho was sitting. His expression was calm, like that of a mannequin, neither happy nor sad. He was making flights for his arrows from bristly black feathers. I asked him for his opinion on the Curse Lines. He didn’t reply.

“Do you know about them?” I asked, again.

“Sí,” he said, at some length.

“Do you believe in them?”

Pancho preened half a feather through his lips. “No los puedo ver, I cannot see them,” he said.

“But do you fear them?”

The warrior did not answer. In the world of the Machiguenga it was considered polite to ignore a foolish question. After several minutes of silence, he turned to me and, staring out over the river, he said: “Paititi no existe. There is no Paititi.”

Across from where we were sitting, I could see Héctor rallying the men. I could not hear his words, but it was evident that he was whipping up their fears. I rushed over, and took him aside. “We can find Paititi!” I said earnestly. “You must believe... If we believe, we will find it!”

The old man shook his head. “No, my friend,” he said. “Paititi is a fantasy. It is a dream. It does not exist.”

I found myself incensed by Héctor’s inconsistency. The hardship was dragging him down. He was trying to come up with excuses to pull out, and to take the porters with him. The worst aspect was that we had no idea how far there was still to travel. I started to ration the Pot Noodles, encouraging Giovanni to serve up as much of his devilish stew as possible. There was still enough dried food for a few more days, but I had to take into account the return journey We had stashed supplies en route, but almost certainly too little.

During the night Oscar jumped up and ran off into the jungle, screaming and waking us all. I thought we were under attack. Before I could give an order or find my lamp, two or three men went after him. I could make out the sound of limbs ripping through the dense undergrowth, of panting, and shouts of desperation. Eventually they brought the boy back. He was sweating, and hyperventilating. There was pasty white spit around his mouth; his eyes were dilated, and he was trembling.

“What is wrong?” I asked sternly.

Oscar’s mouth chewed at the air. He swallowed hard.

“He’s gone mad,” said Francisco.

I asked Oscar again what was the matter. He said nothing. His eyes streamed with tears.

“I am sorry,” he said, weeping.

An hour later the disturbance was over and the team were asleep again, but I lay awake, worrying about Pancho, Héctor and the men. They were all much stronger than I, much more at home in the jungle, but I had the solemn duty of pulling them all ahead. It brought out the worst in me, and they began to call me El Diablo behind my back.

I didn’t like being the brunt of their jokes, the focus of their whining, but as long as they were with me, I didn’t care what insults they came out with. The more they jeered in private, the more determined I became to carry them with me to the very end.

SEVENTEEN

BIVOUAC

Bivouacking is miserable work in a wet or unhealthy climate, but in a dry and healthy one, there is no question of its superiority over tenting. Men who sleep habitually in the open, breathe fresher air and are far more imbued with the spirit of wild life, than those who pass the night within the stuffy enclosure of a tent.

The Art of Travel

By the next morning a dense fog had descended over the valley. The camp looked like the steam room of a Turkish bath but it was chilled, rather than hot, freezing us all to the bone. Héctor didn’t comment on the mist. The only things on his mind were the spirits and the Curse Lines. He called out a warning from the other end of the camp, but I pretended not to hear and gave the order to move on out.

We walked for five hours over the familiar terrain of algae-encrusted stones, criss-crossing the river dozens of times. The fog made the going slow and more hazardous than ever. I dared not mention it, but it seemed as if we had entered a new region.

The air was suddenly scented with a pungent citrus smell. At first we inhaled it deep into our lungs and blessed its existence. But as the morning progressed, the pleasure turned to pain. It burned our chests and we found ourselves struggling for breath. I asked Pancho what plant could produce such an aroma. He said it was the scent of tarapa flowers.

“I would like to see one,” I said. “Can you show me?”

The warrior blinked slowly. “If you look at a tarapa flower,” he said, “you will go blind.”

None of the porters heard Pancho’s remark, but its timing was uncanny. That night, as we camped in the blur of mist on a long sandbar, Julio called my name. There was fear in his voice. “¡Ven, ven! Come, come!” he shouted.

I rushed over. Francisco was lying on the ground, a rolled-up shirt pushed under his head for a pillow. He was speaking very fast in Quechua.

“What’s he saying?” I asked.

“He can’t see anything,” Julio said.

Francisco said that his lower field of vision had gone black, and then the upper vision had disappeared. That morning he had vomited blood, he said.

“Do you have a headache?” I asked.

“Sí, muy fuerte, very strong,” he said.

No one much liked the village busybody, but the thought of him going blind was too terrible to bear. I suspected a stroke or cerebral malaria. Héctor held a prayer session for Francisco’s eyes and I rooted through the medical supplies, but there was nothing to treat the poor man’s condition. We wrapped his head in cool, damp cloths, and took turns to sit with him, comforting him. He was calm, but terrified.

The night dragged on, beset with fog and an eerie, low-pitched echo that seeped from between the trees, like the howl of wolves. No one slept. The film crew and I crouched round the campfire reasoning what to do. Getting a blind man back through the chasm would be testing. Taking him ahead was out of the question. Pancho was the only one who was at ease. He caught fireflies in his cupped hands and rubbed them on his cheeks to make them glow. I asked him what the tribe did when a man went blind. He laughed at the question. “Los ciegos se mueren, blind men die,” he said.

All the next day, we delayed at the camp, which was perched on the gritty gray sandbar like the outpost of a vast empire. The fog was dense and seemed to get thicker with every hour. It prowled around us, inspecting our wretched congregation; it was devoid of emotion, and at the same time it was haunting, horrifying. You could taste its moisture on your tongue, feel it in your nose, at the back of your throat and on your chest. Slowly, quite pleasurably, it suffocated us. Maybe, I pondered, Héctor was right and the place was cursed.

He curled up under his blanket and read the Old Testament. He said it gave him strength, and made him feel young again. The porters hung around the camp with the fog. They were all ready for the order to retreat, to return to their lives chopping down the jungle. There was longevity in the profession, and they knew it well.

I glanced at the maps. It was a pastime that helped me to remember why our ragtag expedition was there at all. The Palatoa River was now no more than a slim streak of blue running north-west towards the Cordillera. West of it was a solid ridge; the region to the east was a corridor of blank white paper, marked datos insuficientes, insufficient data. It seemed ludicrous, as if the authorities were trying to keep people out. The corridor of missing data was about a mile wide and twenty miles long. All around it the detail was accurate. I felt certain that the ruins were in the blank zone, along with the oil.

In the afternoon, I showed the map to Héctor, and pointed out the shaft of white. “What do you make of that?” I asked.

The old man looked down at the chart, and shrugged. “What do you want me to say?”

“That you believe in the ruins,” I replied.

“No hay esperanza, there is no hope,” he said dismally.

I slapped my hands together, indignant that the man who had driven away my doubt could not read the signs for himself. “Have you gone blind?” I snapped.

Héctor was displeased with my over-familiarity. He inhaled a breath of mist sharply. “Todos nos hemos vuelto ciegos, we have all gone blind,” he said.

The afternoon became night, somehow bypassing evening altogether. The vapour did not let up for a moment. None of the men asked me, but I could sense they wanted to know the plan. The loss of Francisco’s sight had unnerved us all. It had demonstrated to me the fragility of our existence; and it had proved to the men that malicious forces were all around us. I said we could not move until Francisco had rested. It was a weak decision, devised through my own uncertainty.

I suggested that we stay at the camp for two more days. After that, I hoped a natural resolution would rise to the surface. The team agreed that it was best to wait, especially as it would allow their crippled feet to dry out. But then, in the late morning of the next day, Pancho gave voice to his fear. He said a great storm was brewing in the west. He could hear it. We would have to move to higher ground. There was a cave where we could take sanctuary.

“How many miles is it?”

Pancho did not understand miles, yards or feet. He did not think in terms of rigid distance or fixed ideas.

“If we go, we will get there,” he said.

We packed up and moved out within the hour. There was a sense of urgency, a sense that Pancho was playing down the gravity of the situation. I gave the order to stow some of the food. It could be collected later and would free us to carry Francisco. Julio wove a gurney from saplings, spread a blanket over it, and eased the village busybody aboard. The men took it in turns to carry him. I was touched by the way they rallied round and took care of his needs.

We struggled upriver for two hours, with Pancho leading the way. The dense fog hampered progress: if you lost sight of the man ahead, you were damned. One porter would whistle to the next, but their shrill signals struggled to pass through the mist. The litter on which Francisco lay was borne forward at waist height. Behind it were the film crew and most of the porters. I took up the rear, and was the last to know that Pancho had moved away from the river, up a narrow stream. Fifty paces ahead, on higher ground, we reached the cave. Its existence proved to me Pancho’s knowledge of the area’s geography, and warmed my spirits.

The cave formed a natural canopy against the elements, a magnificent arc of stone, ribbed with algae where moisture ran down the walls. It made for a fine shelter, and smelt of prehistory. If it were not for the approaching storm we might never have known it was there, and would have been poorer for it. The men fetched dry sticks, got a fire going, and others hurried out to catch fish. I asked Pancho when the storm would break. He did not answer at once, but glanced out to the stream. “Vendrá pronto, it will come soon,” he said.

Fifteen minutes later a spine-chilling breeze ripped in from the west, and dispersed the fog. Every leaf on every tree quivered individually, as if the wind was speaking a language they understood. Then the first droplets hit the earth. They were large but infrequent, and quite genteel: an inaccurate hint of what was to follow. A minute later, the storm arrived. The wind seared through the valley like a djinn released from an eternity of servitude. The trees were bent back by the force, the dust swept into a sandstorm that slashed a path downriver.

Howling, whistling, tormenting, the current of air alarmed us: for we all knew it was merely the precursor of the gale. Ten minutes on, rain lashed down more heavily than I had ever thought possible. The force of the downpour was shocking. Anyone caught in it would surely have been killed outright, cloven to pieces by the giant natural scythe.

The porters were fearful beyond words, as was I. Only Pancho grinned, but I believe it was his own expression of terror. I suggested that we sing songs to keep up morale, but the men were uninterested. Against the backdrop of sound — trees crashing down, diabolic wind and thunderous rain — they revealed their fears.

“La serpiente está en el río, the serpent is in the river,” said Carlos.

“Ella, es el río, she is the river,” Pepe corrected.

“We have broken the Curse Lines,” Julio stammered, “and will now pay for it, like our friend has already done!”

We all swivelled round to look at Francisco’s poor blind crag face. His eyes were open yet ineffective.

“You will see again, I promise you,” I said pathetically.

Of course it was an empty oath, and he knew it as well as I.

When eventually we gave in to fatigue and slipped into our damp sleeping-bags, the men fell into a deep slumber. I lay awake for a few minutes, comforted by the apparition of the Victorian explorer Samuel White Baker. My other heroes always appeared to be looming downwards, scowling at my frailty, but Baker approached me and stretched out his hands. His thick-set face, scrubbed clean and pink, was smiling, as if urging me to keep faith. The Victorians were masters of endurance, of succeeding when all hope is gone — none more so than Samuel Baker. If anyone knew about keeping faith and carrying on, it was he.

He never discovered a lost city, but he did find Lake Albert in East Africa, and assisted John Hanning Speke in establishing the source of the Nile. He was set apart from the other great Victorian explorers by his gentlemanliness and courtesy, and was the only explorer to be ennobled as a direct result of his travels.

While on a bear-hunting expedition to Transylvania with the impetuous Maharajah Duleep Singh, Baker attended a Bulgarian slave auction. It was there that he first set eyes on Florence, the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. He bought her, and in time they were married. Florence accompanied Baker on all his major expeditions, to the horror of genteel Victorian society. On one occasion she went down with a terrible fever, became unconscious and her eyes rolled back. A grave was dug outside the camp by one of the servants, but Baker himself kept faith. Within days Florence had made a full recovery.

The storm raged for a day and a night. By the end of it, it seemed as if a lifetime had passed. I had felt gentle sadness, total despair, and every mood between them. I was drained by emotion, cold and numb. I missed my little daughter, the face of my wife, and tried to calculate how long it would take to get to them. Christ! I thought, they are a world away. I contemplated giving in, ordering the retreat. I was separated from it by three words: “Let’s go back.” I sucked air into my chest to make the sounds. But they didn’t come out right. Instead, I said: “Let’s go on.”

The porters choked. They were macho but I could feel their eagerness to weep. I strode out to test the depth of the river. The water was running fast, hurtling down from the ridges with pleasing efficiency. The mist had not returned; I climbed to a vantage point to gain a better view of the path ahead. The ground was sodden, heavy like lead, the air cool yet clement. From the mirador I could see for about half a mile. There were small rapids, but the river was high and it was moving fast, unhindered except where a group of fallen trees had plunged across.

I called to Oscar and asked him to build a raft as quickly as he could. If we wanted to take advantage of the high water, we would have to act fast. He rushed away to find balsa trees. As I was making my way back to the camp, I heard Julio shouting from the cave at the top of his voice. “He can see me!” he was shouting. “He can see me!”

Everyone rushed to where Francisco was lying. He was sitting up a little, squinting through half-open eyes.

“What can you see?” I asked cautiously.

“Todo, everything,” said the busybody. “I can see you all.”

The relief was enormous. I felt as if a great burden had been lifted from my shoulders. The return of Francisco’s sight elevated our communal spirits. Giovanni cooked a special meal in his honor. He went into the forest and gathered herbs and the bark of a raspy russet-colored vine. He boiled them with five or six extra bony fish and a rank-smelling bird, which had been killed and plucked several days before. Everyone ate mountains of the stew, except me. I kept well away.

The first hint that the dish had been poisonous came at sunrise. Julio and Carlos leaped up and ran into jungle, whimpering. Oscar, Marco, David, Boris and the others followed soon after with similar noises of discomfort. Giovanni was the last to succumb to his own lethal cuisine. When his diarrhoea had abated, the disgraced cook raided what was left of the medical supplies. He handed out a variety of random-colored pills and the men swigged them down with the green-gray river water.

At least Francisco seemed much better. But I couldn’t risk allowing the condition to return, and gave serious thought to the problem. Richard had once told me that in Vietnam a platoon would insert and deploy men as it moved forward. Each unit would keep in contact with the next and, if necessary, supplies and munitions could be easily ferried up the chain. I decided to adopt a similar tactic. Francisco and one man would stay at the cave, along with surplus equipment. Then, as we advanced, other teams would be positioned, with runners passing back and forth.

Héctor had again begun to disturb the men. I had no doubt that he was the man to leave with Francisco, for his conversation was now endangering the expedition. I led him aside and asked if he could stay at the cave and nurse the busybody. He agreed without a breath of resentment.

By noon a single balsa raft was ready and waiting. We lashed a load to it, and set off. It was good to be moving again, even though we were now wading in deep water. The storm had caused havoc. Dozens of trees had fallen into the water and many blocked the route. The simplest way to pass was to unload the raft and lift it over the fallen trees, then load it again.

It was strange not to have Héctor with us. I felt remarkably free, like an adolescent who had broken away from parental control. The porters trudged on, but I realized they were now suffering from exhaustion. I could see it in their eyes, their hanging, dark-encircled eyes. They hated me. Of course they would not have admitted it, not then, but the sentiment was in them all.

My reaction to their fatigue was to drive them harder than ever before. I was powerless to help myself. Any man who has ever led an army, an expedition, or a group of Boy Scouts has sadism in his bones. My renewed belief in the ruins of Paititi gave me strength. I found myself charging ahead, even though I carried as much weight as any of the men. Unlike them, I was fueled by an unspeakable anger.

At dusk we camped, ate a little rice in a sour broth, and rinsed our bruised bodies in the current. Pancho managed to catch a giant oval fish even though the water was opaque. It was served up as dessert.

The next day Pepe spotted a faint wisp of smoke curling up from the high ground, far away on the western ridge. The men grew anxious at the sight of it, although I was eager to make contact. Pancho said he knew who had made the fire.

“He is a Machiguenga,” he said. “He lives up there with his sons. Sometimes they go downriver and carry away women.”

“From your village?”

As usual, the warrior paused before answering. “A veces, sometimes,” he said.

Later on in the day, I found Pancho entertaining the men with the story of a fabulous land. “The trees are laden with ripe fruit,” he said, “and the water is so clear that you can see all the fish at once, and there are delicious animals all around, and flowers that make a musical sound when you smell them.”

It sounded like Paradise. The men asked if we could make a detour on the way to the lost city. I asked Pancho if he had ever been to the place. He smiled broadly and coughed into his hand. “Sí,” he said.

“Is it near to Paititi?”

Pancho flicked his head in a nod. “Puede ser, perhaps.”

Two days on, I left Carlos and his brother, Ramón, at the second position. The following night the fog descended once again. I detested it because it sucked the little remaining energy from the men. We thrashed about like flies caught in an immense web, making pitiful progress. The terrible conditions forced us to leave the raft and continue lugging the gear on foot. A more sensible leader would have turned back right then, but I had lost my level-headedness long before.

I clung to the faintest glimmer of hope, and pleaded with God to deliver us to Paititi. My request remained unfulfilled, and the misery continued. Our fortunes turned from bad to worse. Four of the men were struck down by fever, and another two developed dreadful black lumps on their thighs. They lay together sullenly like foundlings in the rain. I dismissed the injuries as a passing rash, but privately I was alarmed.

The film crew’s health also declined. The Swedes had been plagued by recurrent bouts of fever for weeks, and the septic insect bites on Leon’s back were as bad as any I had seen. Marco’s hands had swollen, and were round and hard like Seville oranges. He could hardly use them, and had taken to eating his food direct from the bowl.

In the evening we built a tremendous fire. It lit up the fog, causing it to glow like a Japanese lantern. We sat around it, marvelling at the light, eating Pot Noodles and telling tales. The hostility that had developed between the porters and myself had given way to a curious camaraderie. I asked the men about their dreams.

“I’m going to Lima,” said Rafael, “and I will marry a beautiful chica with long brown hair. She will be rich, with teeth like pearls and eyes the color of opals.”

The others chuckled at the fantasy.

“I will go to the United States of America,” said Juan. “I will work hard and buy a big car, and then, maybe, one day, I will be President of Peru.”

“What about you, Pancho?” I said.

The tribesman stared into the flames, and peered into the limits of his imagination. We are going to the city,” he said. “Don’t you remember?”

“You mean, when you have taken me to Paititi?”

“Sí, sí, when we have been to the ruins,” he said.

“Are we near to them, Pancho?”

Pancho looked at me and held my gaze as we peered into each other’s minds. It seemed like an eternity before he spoke.

“Sí,” he said, very softly, “estamos cerca, we are near.”

EIGHTEEN

SEIZING FOOD

On arriving at an encampment, the natives commonly run away in fright. If you are hungry, or in serious need of anything that they have, go boldly into their huts, take just what you want, and leave fully adequate payment. It is absurd to be over-scrupulous in these cases.

The Art of Travel

Spend sixteen weeks in the jungle and you begin to question your own sanity, especially when you are the one goading everyone else ahead. I believed that the ruins were in there, somewhere; I had arrived at a mind-set in which there was no doubt. It was just a matter of time before Pancho lifted the veil on the greatest lost city on earth.

To Hollywood, the idea of ruins obscured in an abyss of trees and overgrown with vines is a glamorous prospect. The man who goes in search of such a place is portrayed as a hero, bold and gallant beyond words. The reality is the other extreme. There is no glamor, no beauty, in such a quest. Even now, as I look back at our deteriorated condition, I marvel at the sordidness of it all. We were riddled with worms and shaking with fever, and all of us, even me, were suffering from terrible diarrhoea, but our physical state was irrelevant. It was a mere discomfort. Far more grave was the hostility between one man and another.

Over several days a sense of utter hatred infected us all. At first we fought against it, struggling to apologize to those we had wronged. But the hatred, and that is what it was, took root and overwhelmed each of us. I knew then that if we could not redeem the situation the expedition would flounder in the most spectacular way.

I did not understand how the team had lost hope, and why they blamed their misery on me. I might have felt pity for them, but I did not. Instead, their gloom fueled my heartlessness. Even now, with the facility of hindsight, compassion does not come easily. We were in the cloud forest for a reason and, the way I saw it, anything or anyone who was not working flat out to reach that goal was my opponent.

A day passed, perhaps two. We rounded a sharp bend and caught sight of a colossal pongo, breakers cascading over rocks. Some of the men crossed themselves, and kissed their knuckles. Oscar broke down and wept. I did not allow anyone to stop, to ponder the danger or the size of the obstacle. Instead I commanded them to charge up through the rapids. The forlorn procession moved on, like a column of spent soldiers on a suicide run. I knew that if they paused for a single moment there would be no hope in making an advance.

So we struggled up through the wall of water, the chaos of stones and waves, the slime and dissipating fog. In the middle of it, sucked down by the current, I was overcome with a sense of futility. It lasted for a full minute and almost caused my death. My eyes poured with tears, which were washed from my face and swept downstream by the unrelenting rage of water. The forest did not tolerate frailty of body or mind. Show your weakness, and it would consume you without hesitation.

Beyond the great rapids I permitted the men to rest. They huffed at the command and would certainly have mutinied right there if my order had been any different. They sprawled on a patch of gravel, panting. A flock of small black birds flew over, beating the air with miniature wings. Pancho pointed to them. “They are going to the lake,” he said.

“What lake?”

The tribesman motioned upriver, where the eastern ridge swept down to the forest floor. “It is there, up there,” he said.

“Is it the lake at the ruins?”

Pancho grinned. I didn’t wait for a reply, but clapped my hands. “¡Vamos! Let’s go!”

The porters did not respond to the order. They were too fatigued. I feared they would revolt if pressed, but without coaxing they would have given up. The ever-enthusiastic Swedes pointed out that I was losing the support of the men. “They might kill us,” they warned earnestly.

After consideration, I agreed that the best solution was to camp there overnight. It would give the film crew a chance to mediate a truce. The extent of the gulf dividing the porters and myself became apparent after the evening meal. Leon went to speak to the men, who were huddled round a fire, the glow of the embers illuminating their faces. Twenty minutes of talking passed and then Leon came over to me. “The situation is bad,” he said. “They are threatening to go back. They want double wages.”

“But they are already on double wages!”

“They want them doubled again,” he said.

I would rather have let them run off. I was sick of them all, and felt I could do much better on my own. But Leon made me see reason. “If we don’t pay up,” he said, “the expedition is over. We will never find Paititi.”

He was right, of course, but I resented what I regarded as outright blackmail.

Next morning hostilities with the porters reached new heights. They had decided to take the day off, and wanted to be paid for resting. I am sure they dreamed up the plan to pique my anger; if they did, it worked. I lined them up and berated them for making a mockery of the quest.

To my surprise, they backed down, gathered up their loads and followed me into the river. We walked up through a smaller set of rapids, and covered a considerable distance. No one spoke. The only sound was that of the water surging round our waists as we pressed forward. I asked Pancho time and time again if we were closing in on the lake, but he would merely point ahead and say, “Arriba.”

We trudged on all that day and all the next. It was obvious now that we had reached the furthest limit of our resources. There was still some food, but the men were broken. They had lost the will to carry on. I felt a pang of satisfaction easing through me. It is terrible to admit it, but I took pleasure in the knowledge that I had subjugated my team.

They had started to follow my orders without dispute. None of them had the energy to contest the plan, none except Julio. He was still strong, his mind still sharp. I sensed that he was waiting, biding his time. Perhaps unwisely, I made the most of the team’s co-operation, driving them on hard before they bit back.

In the early afternoon the mist returned, ebbing through the jungle like steam off piping hot bisque. It gave a ghostly aspect to the place, and compounded the sense of fear. I found myself wishing that Héctor was still there. He was a madman, but he possessed an unwavering confidence, the ability to remain composed. The cloud forest had an energy about it, a cold, calculating presence, as if it was waiting too — waiting for our dismal parade to surrender.

The men reached a slender scrap of beach, and crouched on their haunches, pack straps cutting into their shoulders. They were waiting for my signal to move on. I was about to give it, but it was then that Pancho nudged a finger at the ridge and emitted the reviled word: “Arriba.”

Twenty-four hours later I was alone, deserted by the film crew, the porters and Pancho. The willowy warrior had led the way up the granite rock face to the top of the ridge. He climbed nimbly, a sharp contrast to my display of wheezing and puffing. I envied him, and hated him at the same time.

At the top, we parted ways. He wasn’t going on. He left as quickly as he had come. The message I got from his silence was that he wanted me to go on. But I would have to take the last steps by myself.

I felt sure that Pancho had brought me to the brink, but he had sworn to the tribe never to reveal the actual location of the ruins. Without him and the porters the expedition was crippled, but I knew Paititi was close. If need be, I was prepared to go on alone for days. The Swedes had begged me to turn back. They had said there was no hope. I was adamant that we were on the verge of victory.

I had all I needed to survive in a kit-bag: some plastic sheeting, matches, a machete, sleeping-bag and flashlight, a change of clothes, plenty of food and some water. Once Pancho was gone, I took stock of the situation, and made a small camp at the foot of a rubber tree. I erected a canopy, tied the corners down tight, and set about gathering wood for a fire. My only fear was of Tremarctos ornatus, the so-called spectacled bear, but I hoped the fire would keep them away.

To be there alone in that wilderness was the most daunting yet elevating experience. I felt alive, truly alive. I was almost lame, my feet severely damaged by weeks in the river, and I was ground down by the recurring fever. But at the same time I felt stronger than I ever had before.

I passed the night quite peacefully, protected by my ingenuousness. The fog lingered until first light, shrouding my camp like a muslin veil. I slept on and off, and talked to myself a great deal. When the sun was up and the air was touched by its heat, I marched on, searching for the Inca stone road or the lake. Words cannot describe the sensation. It was as if I was on top of the world, looking down across an unending carpet of trees, millions and millions of trees. I was small, and getting smaller. The jungle was massive and, with every step, it doubled in size and magnificence.

I took great care to stay in radio contact with the film crew who, along with the men, had made their way back down to the river. Every few hundred feet I put a marker in the GPS, the limit of my skill. I was wearing gloves for the first time: without them the bamboo lacerated my hands. I staggered ahead, hoping, praying, bleeding.

The highlight of the first day was the meal. I cooked two Pot Noodles and gorged myself on them. Pancho had shown me how to take water from bamboo, but still I rationed it, using the bare minimum, and became dehydrated as a result.

The lack of water probably added to my mental infirmity. By the second day my mind was raging with a ferocious anger, a madness that called for revenge. I was against the world, against humanity, against my men. I didn’t give a damn about them. I wanted Paititi. I deserved it. To Hell with the rest of them. I hoped they would rot in their horrible contortion of life. I pushed on.

The trees teemed with termites and soldier ants, and monkeys howled high in the branches, baiting me, boosting my rage. There were so many monkeys, no doubt kin of the one Julio had shot and cooked. I cursed them all. The wildlife coveted by package tourists on peaceful safaris is not the same odious life-taking fauna as exists in deep jungle. Real wildlife is an executioner, a barbaric devourer of the dead. It was waiting for me to expire, longing to carve me up. I could sense the jungle placing bets on how long I would survive. Every ant, termite, tapir and macaw was guilty, each vying for a piece of my flesh.

As for the others, they were cowards. I cursed them, slandering their names, even those of the Swedes. Their film had destroyed my expedition. They had stifled the search, the quest, with their ludicrous luggage. In a cruel, deranged moment, I prayed that they would all lose their way home, and pass from this world to the next in the most appalling agony.

The hunt for Paititi brings out the best and the worst. But in some people, like myself, it only brought out the worst. The fuel that energized me was a blend of anger, bitterness and bile. I spat insults, cursed, begged for retribution.

On the third night alone on that mountain ridge, I squatted on the ground in misery. The fire had not caught, the wood was far too wet. The nocturnal sounds pressed close. Pancho, no doubt, would have found them comforting. To me, they were the choir of the devil. I removed my boots and unwound the bandages from my feet, anointed the skin with rubbing alcohol, and allowed the sores to touch the breeze. The sensation was soothing. One lives for such moments in times of hardship.

Crouching there, I pondered our own world, and the notion that one only knows a place by going far from it. We live in an illusion of comfort and invented luxury. We dwell on aspects of life that are framed in absolute insignificance. Such hollowness consumes us and we forget how to live. The jungle was at the other extreme: a seething, accursed champion of vitality, uncontrollable and untamed.

Next morning I cut a path north-west down the ridge, charting the slow progress on the GPS. A machete is a clumsy tool in inexperienced, blistered hands. Pancho and the others had an inbuilt dexterity; most had used the long, unwieldy blades since infancy. They would have choked with laughter to see me thrashing forward in search of the great stone road.

But the road never came.

The enormity of the cloud forest was overpowering. I was a speck moving through it like any insect marching across the jungle floor. The only difference between us was that I thought I had a vague comprehension of the scale.

I climbed a tree to gain vantage over the panorama, and stared out, my eyes streaming. I was overcome with shame at my wretched state.

A man who embarks on a journey must know when to end it. The ending had come. Perhaps it had come long before and I had not had the bravery to face it. Sitting in the tree, gazing out at the emerald mantle before me, I considered my expedition to locate Paititi. I had encountered good men, madmen and dreamers, and had descended into the real world to be with them.

The golden city of Paititi, last outpost of the Incas, has stood the test of time astonishingly well. Constructed as a secret haven from European greed, it has remained undefiled for five centuries: that is, if it exists at all.

I have no idea whether the House of the Tiger King is legend or fact. To the natives fact and fantasy were blurred, two inseparable elements. To them, the search for ruins was empty of any meaning. As one who had spent months in their world, I too now realized how meaningless it would be to find a lost city.

EPILOGUE

ON CONCLUDING THE JOURNEY

When your journey draws near its close, resist restless feelings; make every effort before it is too late to supplement deficiencies in your various collections; take stock of what you have gathered together and think how the things will serve in England to illustrate your journey or your book.

The Art of Travel

The last night I slept alone on the ridge I had a powerful dream that Pancho had come back up the granite rock face, found me nestled in my sleeping-bag and led me by the arm on a night journey. I had moved with the sleekness of a Machiguenga, almost as if I were floating through the forest. I had asked where we were going, but the warrior only smiled.

We drifted along for some time. I was oblivious to the sounds, to the danger, breathing easily like a man who is at peace in a hostile world. Pancho pointed upwards. I followed the line of his arm and saw a jaguar asleep in the fork of a cacao tree. Beyond it, the ridge fell away to the east. We moved past it, drifting like the souls of dead men, down through a curtain of tall trees. Down further and further until we came to a mirrored surface of silent water, glinting in the moon’s light, lustrous and calm.

Pancho did not look at me and did not speak. He led me along the edge of the water, until we came to a wall built from massive stone blocks. It was overgrown, shrouded with vines, secret, vast. I asked him how we would ever scale such a thing. The warrior smiled again and motioned for me to climb on to his back. I did so and he carried me effortlessly up and over the barrier. We found ourselves in another realm, in the sacred city of Paititi.

Pancho didn’t utter a word. If I had not known better, I might have thought he was smug. He led me through the remnants of what must have been a great city, the outpost of an empire. There were walls everywhere, all built with the same massive stone blocks, the roofs long fallen in, ravaged with creepers and vines. There was a central heap of stones, a sacrificial place, a site of execution, perhaps. I asked Pancho, but he led me away, taking my arm again. We crossed the city, a diameter of about half a mile, gliding over the tumbled ruins like birds in flight.

“Te lo mostraré, I will show you,” the warrior said earnestly.

“What?”

“Come, follow me.”

Pancho took me to a place where three high walls met at an angle like the spokes of a wheel. He started to dig down with his hands. I watched as his fingers pushed into the soft earth beneath the ferns.

“What are you searching for?”

The warrior burst out laughing: uproarious, wild laughter. In his hands was a hatchet, its blade clearly adorned with gold.

Pancho had not taken me to Paititi, but then again he had. He might not have shown me tangible stone ruins, but he had led me to the lost city, the one that lived in his mind. His world was the bridge between fact and fantasy, two realms blurred into one. It may sound like foolish reasoning, but I felt it right now to uphold my side of our pact.

A month later, after a truly horrifying return through the jungle, I arrived with Pancho in Cusco. I was unsure whether it was correct to take him there, whether I was crossing a line of what is considered acceptable. But he begged me to take him and, at the time, I saw I had little choice.

The week we spent together in Cusco was one of the most evocative, rewarding experiences of my life. And I can hope that the Machiguenga warrior gained from it as I did. The days were spent in experimentation, interacting with things that we take for granted: sitting on a chair, looking at a television, walking upstairs, eating ice-cream, driving in a car. One morning we walked down a side-street where the walls were made of new concrete. Pancho ran his hands over them in wonder, searching for a break, a cleft of some kind.

“It is stone,” he said, in a puzzled voice, “but it is not stone.”

As we walked around the town, Pancho observed everything I showed him with interest, but he remained remote, almost if he was not there at all.

I took him shopping for clothes and he selected a voluminous yellow and blue anorak, bright red sweatpants and a billowing pink fluorescent shirt. He slipped them on over the ubiquitous football strip that forms the second skin of all Machiguengas. In the next shop he chose Nike running shoes for his bare feet, and an American baseball cap embroidered with the words “No Fear”. He peered into a full-length mirror for the first time in his life and giggled.

“You look like a rap-star,” I said.

The warrior stared at himself, crossed his arms, grimaced and giggled some more.

One problem was that Pancho lived according to jungle time. He rose with the birds. At about four a.m. he would sit in his room in the hotel, staring out of the window as the darkness became dawn. The city might have been quiet but it was too dangerous for him to go out unescorted. Just as the jungle all looked the same to me, the streets all looked the same to him. Then there was the traffic. On his first day Pancho was nearly knocked down twice. In the jungle man has few predators, and almost everything yields to him. In the city the danger is all around, all of it caused by other men.

He murmured constantly of his dream to visit a brothel, to mix with painted girls in high-heeled shoes. He had heard that white women had large cleavages, and he wanted one of them naked, sprawled out on a bed, ready and willing to service his needs. It was an obsession of which he spoke often, sometimes in the lewdest detail.

I was against this craving and wore Pancho down. I suggested instead that we visit a disco and he could find a nice girl, dance with her and invite her out. Pancho was happy because his other ambition was to dance in a room with colored flashing lights and music that no one was making.

The warrior’s internal clock struck again. He could not stay awake after seven p.m., and none of the discos opened until ten. I would ply him with coffee, and make him walk up and down. But by six thirty he had invariably fallen into a deep stupor-like sleep.

He liked his room in the hotel. It was furnished simply: a bed, a table, a chair and an electric bedside lamp. He switched it on and off incessantly, intrigued that he could control the darkness so easily. He shunned the bed, preferring to sleep on the floor furled up in a sheet, his new possessions nestled around him. His favourite mod con by far was the lavatory. I showed him how it was used on the first morning, and he was delighted with it, although he disapproved strongly of using loo paper. He thought it a waste to wipe his bottom on it, and took to winding it round his neck as a scarf. As for the lavatory itself, he was so delighted that he found another use for it — washing his head. He would bend down, knees on the tiled floor, stuff his head into the bowl and pull the handle sharply. The result was an immediate, impressive head flush. The warrior’s enthusiasm did not extend to the shower, of which he was suspicious. The only time he used it as it was designed, he kept on his second skin, the blue and green football strip.

On the last day, we spent the morning trawling through Cusco’s shops. I bought virtually anything Pancho pointed to. By noon we were laden with gifts for his entire family: blankets and beads, fishing tackle and extra clothes, machetes and rope, acres of plastic and a wind-up radio. I hoped that the warrior’s status would now rise in the estimation of the tribe.

“Ellos dirán, “¡Pancho estuvo en Cusco!”. They will say, “Pancho has been to Cusco!”” he said solemnly. “Maybe now my wife will come back.” He paused to think for a moment. He folded his arms again and smiled. “Maybe,” he said, “I will meet a girl in the disco and she will come with me to the jungle. Then if my wife comes back, I will beat her with a sharp stick.”

We passed the afternoon drinking espresso to keep the warrior awake. I longed to ask him about the ruins again, to quiz him now that we were out of the jungle. But I knew the answers would be ambiguous, couched in mystery, just as the expedition itself had been.

By six p.m. Pancho was falling asleep. He begged me to let him go for a quick head flush and then to bed. “I’m taking you back to the jungle tomorrow,” I said. “This is your last chance for disco-dancing and kissing high-heeled girls.”

Pancho glared at me. A single tear formed in the corner of his eye and rolled silently down his cheek. “The women in the city are beautiful,” he said. “Why will they want to dance with me?”

“Because you are a warrior,” I said grandly.

A little later Pancho gave himself a long head flush, put on his rap-star clothes and followed me on to Cusco’s cobbled streets. His hair was wet and slicked back, his eyelids heavy. He walked with a swagger, like a cowboy with a six-shooter on his hip. The air was cold, and we could see our breath. The night was filled with expectation, as if it were Christmas Eve. We went into the first disco we came to, a hole in the wall called El Cerebro, The Brain.

I paid the entrance fee, and we were frisked for concealed weapons, as one often is in Peru. A bouncer pulled apart the swing doors and we were thrust into a bedlam of bright lights and blaring techno music. The room was heaving with local youths, overfed and underdressed, the floor a skating rink of warm beer. I tried to apologize to Pancho, but he could not hear me. He swaggered past a line of striking girls, licking his lips like a hunting dog on the prowl.

“¡Chinani!” he said boisterously. “Chicas, girls.”

Without another word Pancho grabbed the prettiest girl and dragged her on to the dance-floor by the hair. She struggled at first, but soon understood that the warrior was giving her no choice. I was expecting a fight to ensue, but Pancho danced like I have never before seen a man dance. He spun the girl round and round, sliding her between his open legs, caressing her with his coarse fingers, his body gyrating, his face dripping with sweat. The other dancers stopped, hustled to the edge of the floor, and watched. Pancho’s routine gathered speed and sleekness. He moved faster and faster, tossing his partner around like a rag doll. He may have been dressed like a rap-star of the techno age, but his moves were pure Disco 1975.

At the end of it, the warrior was left on his knees, panting, his arms out and the girl laid across them. The applause was tremendous, as was the line of other women longing to dance with the master.

“Vamos, let’s go,” Pancho said.

“What about the other women? They love you!”

The warrior blew into his cupped hands. “The jungle is waiting,” he said.

Glossary

Achiote: plant whose oily red seeds are used as facial paints by Shuar and other Upper Amazonian peoples.

Agouti: medium-sized tropical rodent, popular as food.

Aguaje: hard-shelled fruit, high in vitamin C, with yellow-orange flesh, popular in Upper Amazon.

Alpaca: domesticated llama, prized for its wool.

Altiplano: high plateau of southern Peru and northern Bolivia.

Arriflex: brand of cinematic film camera, celebrated for its durability.

Atlantis: legendary island said to have existed in the Atlantic, only to have sunk below the ocean.

Ayahuasca (Banisteriopsis caapi): complex hallucinogen prepared in the Upper Amazon, based on the juice of a vine that allows the body to absorb alkaloids which it would normally filter out.

Banisteriopsis caapi: vine containing harmaline, used in preparing ayahuasca.

Birdmen: Term for a member of the Shuar tribe who takes a hallucinogen — generally ayahuasca — with the intention to “fly” into another spiritual plane.

Boutou: indigenous name for pink river dolphins found in the Amazon basin.

Breadfruit: tall, tropical tree of the mulberry family that produces a large starchy fruit.

Brujería: Spanish for “witchcraft”.

Campesino: Spanish for “country person”.

Cassava: long, starchy tubular root popular with tribal communities in the Madre de Dios area, especially for making masato.

Cecropia: leafy jungle plant which induces drowsiness when eaten by sloths.

Chacapa: ritualistic rattle used by Amazonian shamans.

Chatnaga: Machiguenga word for “syphilis”.

Chica: Spanish for “girl”.

Chigger fly: six-legged fly that burrows beneath the skin to lay its eggs; known to the Machiguenga as uta.

Chinani: Machiguenga word for “girl”.

Chonta: jungle palm, the heart of whose inner stem is regarded as a delicacy.

Conquistadores: Spanish conquering army that subdued the Inca empire in the sixteenth century.

Curassow: various species of large tree-dwelling birds, native to Peru, prized for their meat.

Curse Lines: invisible malevolent lines supposed by shamans to run through the jungle.

Datura (Brugmansia arbori): member of the potato family, native to the Americas, with long alluring yellow or white flowers, known as the Trumpet of the Devil. The plant is regarded highly for its strong hallucinogenic properties.

Dengue fever: infectious viral illness transmitted by mosquitoes, whose symptoms are acute aching, extreme perspiration and headaches.

El Dorado: mythical land thought to be made of gold.

El Escorial: site of a famous monastic complex in the Guadarrama mountains, north-west of Madrid, associated with several generations of Spanish royalty.

GPS: Global Positioning System, device that uses multiple satellites to locate one’s position.

Green Hell: “El Infierno Verde”, name used by Spanish conquistadores to describe the Amazon and surrounding region.

Guinea worm: long parasitic worm, indigenous to tropical regions.

Howler monkey: indigenous monkey found in Central and South America, noted for its prehensile tail and loud cry.

Huaquero: Spanish for “grave-robber”.

Inca: Quechua-speaking people of Peru, whose empire was destroyed by the invading conquistadores in the sixteenth century; also the title name of the reigning emperor.

INRENA: acronym for Peru’s National Institute of Natural Resources, responsible for giving permission for entering restricted areas.

Intihuatana: stone post at Machu Picchu to which the Incas ceremoniously tied the sun.

Kapok: tropical tree whose seed pods contain a silky fluff traditionally used for mattress stuffing, etc.

Leatherman: brand of folding knife tool, regarded as the most durable of its type.

Lifta: Quechua term for slaked lime, which is used to help absorb the cocaine in coca leaves.

Machetero: man who cuts a passage through the jungle with a machete.

Machiguenga: tribe native to the Madre de Dios jungle region of Peru.

Maestro: master; a traditional healer or shaman.

Maloca: traditional thatched hut or long-house.

Mapacho: strong jungle tobacco used in shamanic ceremonies.

Masato: masticated cassava beverage.

Matamata (Chelus fimbriatus): species of “prehistoric” turtle found in the Upper Amazon.

Mirador: vantage-point from which one can see a landscape.

Motorista: man in charge of driving a boat.

Mu: lost landmass said by some to have existed in the Pacific Ocean; possibly connected with the Mayan civilization.

Nazca: desert town on the Peruvian coast, famous for the mysterious symbols etched on the surface of the desert that are known as the “Nazca Lines”.

Paca: solitary nocturnal rodent.

Pacamama: species of rat found in the Peruvian jungle, known for its loud, dog-like bark.

Paititi: city to which the fleeing Incas are thought to have retreated, commonly believed to be in the Madre de Dios jungle in Peru.

Paka: thorny bamboo.

Palicio de Gallos: place where cock-fighting bouts are held for public entertainment.

Pampa: extensive flatlands of western Peru, as at Nazca.

Paracas: town on the Peruvian coast, and the community that flourished there fifteen centuries ago.

Peekhwayo: fibrous savoury fruit with a hard exterior, which is boiled and eaten in the Madre de Dios jungle.

Peki-peki: local name in the Peruvian Amazon for a dugout canoe driven by a crude motor.

Pemmican: a concentrated meal used on expeditions until the early twentieth century; made from fat melted over dried meat.

Petroglyph: rock carving, inscribed in ancient times.

Piri-piri: indigenous root found in the Madre de Dios jungle, believed to be a strong antidote for snake-bite.

Pisco: grape brandy made in the coastal town of Pisco.

Pollería: restaurant in which grilled chicken is prepared.

Pongo: indigenous word for rapids.

Pont-neuf potatoes: fried, chipped potato in the shape of a wedge.

Psilocybe (Psilocybe mexicana): mushroom from which is derived a hallucinogen called psilocybin.

Quechua: ancient Andean language, supposedly predating the Incas.

Quellca: fabulous embroidered patterns made at the time of the Incas, used for recording or passing on information.

Sachavaca: local name for tapir — nocturnal tropical animal with a short snout, prized for its meat.

Sachsayhuaman: massive Inca fortress on the edge of Cusco, which was never completed.

Selva: Spanish for “jungle”.

Sendero Luminoso: Shining Path, Marxist organization that terrorized Peru from about 1980 until 1992.

Seventh Day Adventist: millennialist Christian sect that believes in the second coming of Christ, and keeps the Sabbath sacred.

Shuar: native tribe residing in the Pastaza region, near the Peruvian-Ecuadorian border. Formerly known as Jívaro, which means “savage”. Until the arrival of missionaries in the 1950s, they shrank the heads of their enemies.

Sinicuichi (Heimia salicifolia): an auditory hallucinogen, from a shrub, usually found in Mexico.

Sol (pl., soles): currency of Peru.

Spider monkey: agile South American monkey with slender limbs and long prehensile tail.

Tapir: see Sachavaca.

Tarapa: tropical flowering plant found in the Peruvian jungle, sight of which is believed by indigenous peoples to blind a man.

Tia: Spanish for “aunt”.

Tigre: literally “tiger”, used to describe jungle cats, as well as the idea of the malicious spirit of the jungle.

Tsantsa: trophy head taken in a Shuar raid and shrunk to the size of an orange.

Uta: Machiguenga word for the wound caused by the chigger fly.

Vicuña: wild member of the llama family, prized for the softness of its wool.

Warango: species of tree that grows in the desert of the Peruvian coast; its hard wood was favoured in ancient times for the construction of tombs.

Yuca: see Cassava.

Zodiac: French brand of inflatable dinghy.

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SORCERER’S APPRENTICE

TAHIR SHAH

SECRETUM MUNDI PUBLISHING

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to the memory of my father, Sayed Idries Shah

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Some names and locations have been changed in order to respect privacy

Foreword

I never planned to write Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

Setting down my experiences amid the underbelly of Indian magic was the furthest thing from my mind. The haphazard journeys I had made through the subcontinent on the heels of illusion were very personal adventures – adventures I never expected to share with anyone.

They were part of my preoccupation with the kind of stage magic that was pioneered by Harry Houdini, and by others, more than a century ago.

From the first moment I reached India, I was transfixed by the intense cultural color. It hit me like a bucket of ice water, and was like nothing I had ever experienced before. Whereas Europe is so often little more than thin consumé, India is a mesmerizing, intoxicating goulash of a land.

I found that I couldn’t help but drink it all in – feasting on the details and the interwoven layers of life. For the first time ever I felt that I had arrived at a place with a full spectrum. There was more life in a few feet of the Calcutta sidewalk than in entire cities elsewhere. And, as I was to learn, the most ordinary-looking people were the gatekeepers into a world of mystery and marvel, the kind of place that has bewitched Occidental travelers for centuries.

When I wrote Sorcerer’s Apprentice, the critics were kind but rather disbelieving. Some of them even implied that I’d made the whole thing up. What I have been trying to explain ever since the first copies hit bookshop shelves is that this is a story of India – a land where the unbelievable is the norm.

I wish people who don’t get this point would leave their tedious lives in Europe, North America or wherever, and would travel to the Indian subcontinent. If they left right away, they could be having breakfast there tomorrow morning… and they’d understand that India is a realm crafted in a magic of its own.

As for myself, I was well aware that the idea of writing of my experiences with the incomparable magician, Hakim Feroze, would be extremely unpopular with him.

And they were.

Feroze telephoned me one Monsoon night. I could hear the rain coming down in sheets behind him. And, I can remember the quavering anger in his voice. As soon as I had heard the click click of the international line, I’d known it was Feroze. He was fuming. As far as he was concerned, I had denigrated my time with him to fodder for a travel book.

It is a view that upset me greatly.

I have always held Feroze in the highest respect. When he died in 2001, I felt an emptiness that I have rarely experienced. It was a sense that a life had ended that could never be lived again.

Hindsight is the most remarkable privilege.

I can now look back with some amusement at the trials and tribulations to which I was subjected, a sadistic pleasure for the Master. And, I can smile at it all.

But, far more importantly, I can see that what Feroze had wanted was for me to be exposed to levels of thought and understanding that pass almost everyone else by. He reduced me to the raw mettle and, only then, began the laborious process of building me up.

The quest for illusion was what had kept my attention, and was the catalyst that had got me started. But it wasn’t the thing of real value. The value was in learning to see what I thought I understood with fresh eyes.

My favorite axiom is from Arabia – Much travel is needed before the raw man is ripened. There is no place better for ripening rawness than India. And, there’s no better way at opening oneself to being ripened than following a quest. It’s a theme which has run through much of my work, because I have learned that a quest – however inane and zigzag – can open doors that had been invisible before.

I spend my life encouraging young people to head off into the wild unknown without preparing, or giving a journey too much thought. We live in a society that’s obsessed with preparation, with planning, and with analyzing, but one that is blinkered to the Oriental concept of absorbing through cultural osmosis.

Stand on a street corner in any Indian city, with the maelstrom of traffic swirling around you.

Close your eyes.

Take a deep breath, and let it all wash in.

You can be certain of one thing: that you will leave a very different person than when you arrived.

Tahir Shah

2013

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Author’s Note

Foreword

PART ONE

ONE - He Who Scatters Souls

TWO - Snake Jugglers and Liposuction

THREE - Land of Warriors

FOUR - City of Light

FIVE - Waiting Out the Jinns

SIX - Renting Babies

PART TWO

SEVEN - Calcutta Torture

EIGHT - Sorcerer’s Apprentice

NINE - Swallowing Stones

TEN - Insider Information

ELEVEN - Metro Marriage

TWELVE - Curse of the Skeleton Dealers

PART THREE

THIRTEEN - Dick Whittington and the Black Hole

FOURTEEN - The Secret Army

FIFTEEN - Witch

SIXTEEN - No Little Girls

SEVENTEEN - Disneyland of the Soul

EIGHTEEN - The Yogi’s Last Breath

NINETEEN - Real Power

TWENTY - The Penniless Billionaire

TWENTY-ONE - Take One Live Murrel Fish…

TWENTY-TWO - Lord Elvis

TWENTY-THREE - Duel of Miracles

TWENTY-FOUR - Jimmy, the Part-time God

Glossary

PART ONE

Three things can not be retrieved:

The arrow once sped from the bow

The word spoken in the haste

The missed opportunity.

Ali the Lion, Caliph of Islam.

Son-in-law of Mohammed the Prophet

ONE

He Who Scatters Souls

We failed to realize it was an omen when it came.

Sunshine streamed down through an almost cloudless indigo sky, warming the dew-covered lawn. The gardener had fished out his dilapidated machine for the first mow of the summer. The great yew tree, basking in sunlight, threw long shadows across the grass. Squirrels dashed about in the monkey-puzzle and copper beech. A bank of azaleas perfumed the early-morning air.

Then, quite suddenly, hailstones the size of conkers showered down from above, shattering the peace. A lone cloud in an unending blue sky had spawned the freak bombardment, which persisted for about three minutes. And, as the last nuggets of ice struck the lawn, the doorbell echoed the arrival of an unexpected visitor.

My family’s home in an isolated English village was not unused to bizarre guests. The house was a magnet for the peculiar. One could never be certain whom the next to arrive would be. But, even by normal unpredictable standards, the man standing at the porch, waiting to be welcomed, was anything but typical.

The first thing that struck me about the towering Pashtun was his extraordinary bristliness. An immense bush of wooly beard masked much of his face. Hanging like an inverted ink-black mass of cotton candy, it fanned out in all directions. His hands, ears, and the nostrils of his hooked beak of a nose were also thick with waxy hair. In the few places where the skin was bald – the fingertips, palms and below the eyes – it was creased and scaly as an armadillo’s snout. The sable eyes spoke of honesty and the furrowed forehead hinted of an anxious past.

The giant bear of a man teaseled the froth of beard outwards with a scarlet plastic comb, and dusted down his filthy khaki salwaar kameez, shirt and baggy pants – the preferred outfit in the Hindu Kush. Straightening the knotted Kabuli turban, which perched on his head like a crown, he peered down at the ground bashfully, as the front door was pulled inwards. My father, recognizing Hafiz Jan, son of Mohammed ibn Maqbul, embraced him.

The Pashtun’s luggage – a single sealed tea chest bearing the word “ASSAM” in black stenciled lettering – was carried in ceremoniously. It was heavy as an elephant-calf and stank of rotting fish.

Although received at no notice, Hafiz Jan was welcomed with great decorum. Tea and refreshments were brought and pleasantries exchanged. Blessings and gifts were conferred upon him. According to Eastern Tradition, my father expounded in detail the pedigree of our distinguished visitor.

His forefathers had fought alongside my own ancestor, the Afghan warlord and statesman Jan Fishan Khan (a nom de guerre, translating literally as “He Who Scatters Souls”). None had been so courageous, or trusted, as the progenitors of Hafiz Jan. They had accompanied the warrior on all his campaigns. Many had died in battle, side by side with members of my own family. When, in 1842, their lord had traveled with his enormous retinue of soldiers from Afghanistan to India, they had escorted him. With his sudden death at the tranquil Indian town of Burhana, they had pledged to guard for eternity the mausoleum of their commander, Jan Fishan Khan.

More than a century on, Hafiz Jan was proud to have assumed the inherited position: keeper of my great-great-great-grandfather’s tomb.

“The shrine of Jan Fishan,” he said in faultless English, “is the shrine of shrines, and as noble as He who lies there. It will last ten thousand years and longer!”

A lengthy harangue followed, in which the Pashtun showered praise on the memory of Jan Fishan. Such orations, more familiar as the conclusion to a great Afghan feast rather than a dainty tea, are designed to verify well-established facts.

“His Highness Prince Mohammed Jan Fishan Khan, son of Sayed Qutubuddin Khan of Paghman,” began Hafiz Jan with deep, growling intonation, “was pious, generous, chivalrous, honorable, and the greatest horseman that ever lived. Known as Shah-Saz, ‘the King-Maker’, he was a tactician, diplomat, philosopher and leader of great wisdom. Still today,” continued Hafiz Jan, working himself into a frenzy, “the descendants of his opponents tremble on hearing that legendary name – Jan Fishan Khan, the Soul-Scatterer!”

Suddenly, as if ordered to do so, Hafiz Jan fell silent. His face contorted with anxiety, he led my father into the garden. Twenty minutes later, the two men returned. My father was taciturn at first. Hafiz Jan was equally reserved.

“Our brother, Hafiz Jan,” began my father hesitantly, “has crossed continents to be with us. He left the tomb of our forefather and hurried here. His journey was inspired by a disturbing dream.”

His brow ridged in thought, my father related the dream of Hafiz Jan. Prolonged and elaborate, it had depicted many things. At the core of the tale, fringed by a series of confusing and interlinked events, was one gruesome incident. It centered on my own future.

Deceived by a concealed well-shaft, the dream had shown me meeting a sudden, undignified end. Hafiz Jan had hastened across land and sea to protect me from what he could only assume was a premonition. Rising up to his full height, the Pashtun thrust an arm in the air,

“Rest assured,” he barked,” that I shall not stir from this place until the threat is vanquished!”

The sudden arrival of a gallant and honorable Pashtun, pledging to defend an eleven-year-old boy, might have seemed incongruous. However, a precedent gave the visitor’s dream greater significance.

At the time of the British retreat from Kabul, an insurgent had crept into Jan Fishan Khan’s sleeping quarters. As he drew his dagger to murder the warlord, one of Jan Fishan’s most trusted men stepped nimbly from behind a screen and severed the throat of the intruder. The incident, which had passed into legend, is a favored tale in our family. Jan Fishan’s defender – himself a forebear of Hafiz Jan – had been alerted to the murder plan by a premonition.

Refusing all further hospitality, Hafiz Jan strode from the sitting-room, and hauled his tea chest up the four flights of stairs to the landing outside my attic bedroom. Removing the lid, he plucked out a mattress and set it down in front of my door.

“Be at ease,” he whispered, as he lay down on the bedroll. “I will seize the danger and tear it limb from limb!”

I would constantly remind Hafiz Jan that he was not waiting for a mortal assassin, but an uncovered well-shaft – a hazard I was unlikely to encounter on the upper-most floor of the house. Filling his lungs sharply with air, thrusting his fists upward like pistons, the Pashtun would reply:

“Never underestimate the slyness of Shaitan, the Devil!”

With summer stretching out before us, Hafiz Jan and I spent a great deal of time together. I would teach him tongue-twisters, and he would recount the many remarkable exploits of Jan Fishan Khan. These tales, as with all Hafiz Jan’s conversation, were peppered with Pashtun proverbs.

“An intelligent enemy,” he would say, stroking his beard as if it were a bristly pet, “rather than a foolish friend.” Or, “He learnt the language of pigeons, and forgot his own.” Or, the favorite of Jan Fishan Khan: “Hits shay haghase nu dai che khkari … nothing is what it seems.”

Only when he had done justice to the memory of my ancestors would Hafiz Jan agree to reveal a little more of his bewildering excursion from northern India to our small village. The voyage comprised a series of journeys by container ship and tramp steamer. It had taken in an astonishing array of distant and exotic ports. Aboard ships loaded with alfalfa seeds, pinking shears, salted ox tongues, and hypodermic syringes, Hafiz Jan had earned his passage by peeling potatoes and amusing the crew.

Entertainment, I soon discovered, was the Pashtun’s forte.

Over the weeks he stayed, Hafiz Jan disinterred a variety of apparatus and oddities from the depth of his tea chest. The deeper his stout, hairy fingers delved into the crate, the greater the reward. The more I saw, the more alarmed I became that Her Majesty's Customs at Southampton would have permitted such hazardous belongings ashore.

At the bottom of the tea chest, below a Webley and Scott Mark VI revolver, twin sets of buffalo-hide bandoleers, a flare gun with six distress beacons, and a large dented tin of naswar, a green narcotic snuff, nestled a selection of oversized antique moss-green glass bottles. Speckled with miniature bubbles, plugged with waxed glass stoppers, the collection had been packed in straw. Removing them one at a time, like priceless eggs from a great auk’s nest, Hafiz Jan held them up to the light. Each was embossed with skull and crossbones and bore a label advertising a virulent solution.

Arsenic, cyanide and sodium; strychnine, phosphorous, and nitric acid: their names read like the tools of a homicidal maniac. So enthralled was I with the newcomer’s fine clutch of poisons that I never questioned his motives. For all I knew, Hafiz Jan had resolved to slay us all, to break his ancestral slavery to the tomb. With his tea chest of chemicals, nothing would have been simpler.

But the Pashtun had an unexpected and abiding passion, for which he required all his lethal chemicals. Hafiz Jan loved conjuring tricks.

If not for his hereditary role as guardian of a shrine, he would certainly have become a full-time stage magician. Until the death of his father, five years before, he had studied conjuring and illusion under one of India’s greatest masters. Yet now, with a career as a warden already staked out for him, Hafiz Jan was forced to perfect his illusory skills in his spare time.

After breakfast each morning, having wiped his beard like a hand-towel over the full expanse of his face, our guest would lead me into my bedroom and close the door firmly. An assortment of concoctions and equipment would be fished from the crate. Hafiz Jan would, for protection, tuck his swath of beard beneath his shirt. Then, in the silence of my attic retreat, we would begin work.

Each day brought a new conjuring skill. “Sleight-of-hand” – an act of deception through a furtive movement of the wrist and hand – formed the basis of so many tricks. Under Hafiz Jan’s impromptu tuition, I would often practice the basic movements until dawn. Sleights were essential for demonstrating to my parents the new and harmless skills I had acquired. But they lacked the daring, heinous effect which the leaf-green bottles could so effortlessly provide.

Hafiz Jan had noticed my keen interest in chemicals and severe procedures. Within the makeshift laboratory which my bedroom had become, bottles and jars were readied for use.

First, a handful of potassium permanganate was sprinkled over a sheet of card on the floor. Pour on a few drops of glycerin and flames were soon licking upward. Then came the “Bloody Battle” experiment, as Hafiz Jan liked to call it. He always used the word “experiment”, rather than “illusion”, for he felt that it added importance to what we were doing. The Bloody Battle transformed old-fashioned conjuring into high art.

A solution of ferric chloride was painted on to my leg. Before the liquid dried, Hafiz Jan seized a carving knife and surreptitiously dipped it into a solution of sodium sulpho-cyanide. Forcing the knife against the coated section of skin, he motioned melodramatically, as if slicing into my thigh. As I tumbled about, feigning death, Hafiz Jan would roar with delight. Crimson streaks were left where blade had met skin. The Pashtun demonstrated how the scarlet liquid could be wiped away without leaving a mark. Magicians throughout the world, he said, used the experiment to prove they had the power to make wounds vanish at will.

Hafiz Jan’s ceaseless stream of chemical enlightenment continued. My family rarely saw me. Brief sightings every so often assured them I had not yet succumbed to the well-shaft. As days turned into weeks, my parents began to consider the hirsute Pashtun’s lessons as a malign influence on their prepubescent son.

When collared by either parent on the landing, where he insisted on living, Hafiz Jan would mumble Pashtu aphorisms. His great lugubrious eyes would seem meek and trustworthy. The parent would leave with renewed confidence in our guest. As if by magic, Hafiz Jan would materialize a bottle of mercuric chloride, and grinning a broad conjuror’s grin would lead me back to work.

“Now you are ready to mesmerize an audience,” said Hafiz Jan at breakfast one morning. “We will bewitch them with our magic.”

“Them?”

Smiling broadly, the Pashtun pointed at my parents who were sitting in the garden. Surely he was forgetting that in the circumstances public exposure was unwise. I voiced my apprehension.

“Don’t be so modest,” roared Hafiz Jan, “I want to show you off, my little apprentice!”

“But …”

“We’ll put on a grand display of our work. How about next Saturday night?”

For days I practiced sleights and chemical feats, perfecting the new skills. Every spare moment was devoted to magical study. One session took us into the field behind the house. I led the way to a secluded spot in a copse at the far end of the field, where a cottage had once stood. First, Hafiz Jan demonstrated “burning water”. The magician pours some water into a tin mug, and takes a sip to prove that it’s ordinary water. He pours another mug of water from the same jug. As soon as the cup has been filled, the water catches fire. Hidden at the bottom of the second mug is a pea-sized nugget of potassium and three tablespoons of ether. When the water is poured into the mug, the potassium ignites, setting fire to the ether, which surges to the surface of the liquid.

“Now,” announced Hafiz Jan, “I’ll teach you a trick with my magic ring.” He twisted the gold-flecked lapis lazuli ring off the little finger of his right hand. “But first I’ll need three wild mushrooms, can you find some?”

I tramped over to a scrub thicket in search of fungi. In the undergrowth I uncovered an old plimsoll shoe, a coil of rusty wire and a brown beer bottle. No mushrooms in sight. I was just about to report back to Hafiz Jan when my foot caught in an overgrown dip in the ground. I tripped, cutting my knee.

The Pashtun heard my cry and hurried over. He bandaged my leg with a rag ripped from his turban. Then he excavated the mesh of sticks, leaves and soil to see what had cut me. I looked on as his hands tore away at the earth. When the debris had been cleared, we both found ourselves staring at the ground in stupefaction. I had tripped on what appeared to be a disused well.

Filled in long before, the concealed shaft had not posed a life-threatening hazard. Even so, the Pashtun, who was triumphant with his find, spent two full days sealing it with cement.

“Shaitan,” he said, “will be hungry in Hell tonight!”

The great day of our exposition arrived. A row of chairs was laid out in the kitchen. Hafiz Jan groomed his beard, trimmed his nostril hair. The various chemicals and apparatus were installed in the tea chest, which doubled as a conjuror’s cabinet. My parents, sisters, the gardener, housekeeper, and secretary were ushered to their seats. The audience waited politely for the show to commence.

As Hafiz Jan clapped his giant hands together like cymbals, alarm bells were sounding in my mind. Fortunately, I had managed to tone down the inventory of illusions at the last minute. The Pashtun had intended to burn a section of mysterious coarse gray bark during the show. He had explained that the bark, of the Indian chaitan, “devil’s tree”, is used by Eastern magicians to stun an audience. Some say the bark’s hallucinogenic smoke is the secret behind the fabled Indian rope trick.

Hafiz Jan began by performing a selection of sleights; materializing objects from thin air. The gardener was invited up to the front. His wristwatch vanished as the Pashtun shook hands with him. A moment later, the watch was pulled from my sister’s pocket. I scanned the room. My parents seemed relaxed. So far, so good.

Next, a pot of boiling vegetable oil was taken from the stove and placed before me. Without hesitation, I thrust my left arm into it. The audience breathed in deeply, tricked by the simple illusion. Lime juice is added to the oil before it’s heated. The juice boils when only tepid, sending a cascade of bubbles to the surface, and giving the appearance that the oil is boiling.

As I wiped the oil from my arm, Hafiz Jan pulled a fired poker from the oven, and began to lick it. An alarming sizzling sound, and the fragrance of barbecued flesh billowed outwards as tongue met iron. Hafiz Jan had washed his mouth out moments before with liquid storax, which absorbs the heat.

My parents seemed impressed. I wondered how long their enthusiasm would last. Bloody Battle came and went, as did a variety of inoffensive illusions.

The next trick was austere by any standards. An ordinary light-bulb was materialized from nowhere by Hafiz Jan. Placing it in a handkerchief, the Pashtun crushed it with his right foot. He handed me a banana, which I ate. He ate one, too, then placed a shard of glass on his tongue and began to chew. Then it was my turn. Positioning a jagged piece of glass in my mouth, I began to munch.

My father looked on in disbelief, overwhelmed that his son had been taught to eat glass and relish it. The shock quickly turned to anger, but he suppressed his rage for fear of insulting the visitor. The tiny fragments of glass, which get embedded in the banana, pass easily through the body. Hafiz Jan had taught me to always use clear light-bulbs, as the opaque ones contain poisonous mercury oxide.

Moving swiftly along, the Pashtun got ready to perform the piece de resistance. It was a brave decision. He lit a large beeswax church candle, placed before our stage. Its wick was at the audience’s eye level. Then, pulling a fistful of dust from beneath his shirt, he murmured a magic phrase, and hurled the fine powder at the candle. Covering his eyes with the end of his turban, Hafiz Jan winced with pleasure as a golden fireball rocketed sideways towards my family and their associates.

The conjuror had not anticipated the remarkable force of the combustion. He had been more used to igniting powdered camphor outside. As the spectators rubbed at their singed hair and blackened faces, I wondered what to say. Silence seemed safest.

Hafiz Jan was up at dawn the next day. I could hear him moving uneasily about the landing on tiptoe. By seven o’ clock the tea chest was packed with his possessions. Padded with the horsehair mattress, the half-filled bottles of poison sloshed about as the crate was hauled downstairs.

The front door was pulled inwards once again. The great Pashtun lifted me by the cheeks and smiled somberly.

“Now that the well-shaft – that vile tunnel to Hell – is covered over,” he said, “I ought to be on my way. I must return to the mausoleum, it's there that I belong. Jan Fishan,” he said softly, “will be waiting for me.”

As Hafiz Jan, son of Mohammed ibn Maqbul, prepared to retrace his wayward route back to northern India, I made my own pledge. One day – although I did not know when – I would seek him out, and continue with my magical pupillage.

TWO

Snake-Jugglers and Liposuction

Almost twenty years had passed since the inimitable Hafiz Jan had blasted the vast fireball at my family. Despite reliving the performance over and over in a recurring nightmare, my interest in conjuring had never waned. The vanilla odor of liquid storax still haunted my olfactory nerve. The idea of chewing glass caused my pulse to race. And the deep, secret longing to study illusion was always there. But the spark to rekindle my motivation was wanting.

That spark arrived late one night in an ill-lit, smoky flat somewhere in west London. A roomful of supposed friends jabbered on about their sensible cars, their sensible jobs, and their sensible plans for a sensible future. Theirs was a world of ruched curtains, floral print wallpaper, asparagus souffle and French cuff shirts.

Such preoccupations were at odds with my own. I yearned to rediscover the thrill of spontaneity, once fostered so intensely by Hafiz Jan’s magic. I longed for adventure, for discovery and wonder. The idea of a secure, planned future was severely disturbing.

My sensible friends swiveled to face me. Would I at last buy a sensible pad, with ruched curtains and florid wallpaper? Could I be counted on to fall into line? Why didn’t I take up golf, or learn to dish up an asparagus souffle once in a while? Surely the time had come to get some decent shirts with proper French cuffs?

Swilling their port, the inquisition awaited my answer. I mulled over my position. Why should I adopt their bourgeois lifestyle? Their materialistic trappings were nothing but illusion. The blood-red port whirled about like one of Hafiz Jan’s precious chemicals. Illusion … Hafiz Jan … my mind set to work. Why not escape? Why not leave all this behind, and embark on a great adventure?

“You can keep your sensible cars, clothes, and prim little houses!” I bellowed. “I'm off to India to become a magician!”

* * * *

Hotel foyers across the Indian capital were resounding with restless anticipation. Throngs of visitors were pouring into the city, all in a state of high excitement. They swanned about greeting long-lost friends, laughing, weeping, embracing triumphantly. I wondered what was going on. Then, at one large hotel, I noticed an impressive daffodil yellow banner, slung like a washing-line between a pair of chandeliers. It read: “ALL INDIAN ASTROLOGERS’ CONFERENCE.”

The event which had drawn seers from all corners of India, explained why every hotel bed in New Delhi was full. Palmists and horoscope-readers brushed shoulders with numerologists and tarotists. Crystal-gazers, face-readers, and dream diviners – they had come to swap secrets, to tell tales, and to be seen.

Pushing my way out past the bustle of crystal balls, dog-eared tarot cards and hand-reading charts, I waited for an auto-rickshaw. Mediums were still arriving in droves, many weighed down with phrenological busts and new-fangled fortune-telling machines.

All the hotels on my list were full to bursting with astrologers. Where would I find a spare bed? Then I had an idea. When a rickshaw pulled up, I told its driver to hasten to the most misfortunate, accursed establishment in the city. Such unlucky lodgings would surely ward away the superstitious astrologers. Without questioning my request, the driver rubbed his hands together and headed north to the Old City.

With the vehicle charged up to full speed, we careened through Old Delhi’s back-streets, swerving to miss incense-sellers and sacred cows. Past the colossal Jami'a Masjid and noble Red Fort. Left down Chandni Chowk, fabled Silver Bazaar of Shah Jehan. An abrupt left again into Dariba Kalan – “Street of the Incomparable Pearl” – where jalebis boil like lobsters in foaming oil-filled urns. Reining in his rickshaw, the driver wrenched its handlebars sharply to the right. A moment later we were skidding to a halt in the Kinari Bazaar.

A small, quiet market, Kinari peddles wedding brocades, tinsel, and garlands fashioned from rupee notes. An air of jubilation surrounded all the stalls. The bazaar was packed with happy people.

Tapping the driver on the shoulder, I asked him if this spirited lane was home to the damnedest, most ill-fated hotel in all of Delhi. The driver pulled his coarse blanket tighter about him and nodded earnestly. Then, cringing as low as he could, he pointed upwards.

Looming over on the south side of the bazaar stood the dilapidated Hostel. A rusting signboard publicized its unfittingly optimistic name, “Hotel Bliss”. Its walls were caked in lizard-green slime, its windows broken, and its corrugated iron roof pocked with holes. A curse of doom and catastrophe hung over the place like a death-cloud. It was the sort of place whose door is marked by a bloody cross in times of plague. But there was no door. As I took in the features of the wretched shelter, a chill surged down my spine. The rickshaw driver, who appeared anxious to leave, unloaded my bags. I handed over the fare. Then I presented him with a large tip. He had done himself proud.

The shock of the building’s exterior continued inside. The ground floor, which was well below street level, was two feet under water, presumably the result of a leaking pipe. I waded through the flood. A vomit-strewn staircase led to the reception desk, which had been relocated to the third floor. Cautioning myself to be bold, I ascended the steps. The hostel’s walls were soot-black, scorched by fire. The rotting floorboards were as soft as wet clay; the stench of drowned, decomposing rats was suffocating.

Lolling back in a wicker chair, the manager picked his teeth with a neem stick. His closely cropped hair was seal-brown; his eyes were wily and foreboding. I introduced myself, declaring I’d heard of the residence’s fine reputation. The man carved the neem twig between the gap in his front teeth. He could tell I was lying, for he knew as well as I that the hotel had no reputation at all.

“Are there any astrologers here?” I asked cordially.

“No one here,” came the reply.

“Do you have a room for a few days?”

“Why not?”

Hotel Bliss, with its less than charming aura and rising tide, encouraged its patrons to spend their days off the premises. After a vile night spent in room two, even a lunatic would have satisfied a craving for self-punishment. In the dead of night, the rats which had survived the flood could be heard nibbling cockroaches in the dank corridor outside my room. Bedbugs swarmed about the prison-issue blankets, relishing their banquet of foreign blood.

The manger had lied when reporting that his hostel was empty. From the cubicle opposite mine came the intermittent, echoing groans of a heroin addict. As I tiptoed past the unfortunate’s room, preparing to breach the floodwaters, I pondered whether the entire place was a dope fiend’s den.

Were it not for the cheery atmosphere of the Kinari Bazaar, I would have abandoned Hotel Bliss right away. The street provided a welcome distraction from the reality of room two. Its fabulous stalls brimmed with colorful ornaments. At one were piles of cherry-red plastic bunting, coconuts and panniers of rose petals. Another offered heaps of pink balloons fashioned in the form of Ganesha, the elephant god. Sandalwood incense smoldered in burners, warding away the flies. Rich brocades and glass bangles, sachets of mehendi, henna powder and silver tinsel glowed in the bright December sunlight.

Behind the bustling Chandni Chowk, adjacent to the Jain Bird Hospital, I rested at an open-air tea stall to watch the world go by. A glass of sweet chai-i-sabs, green tea, was poured and placed before me by the young waiter. Sipping the refreshing drink, I focused on the Old City’s teeming blend of life. Cyclists and auto-rickshaws raced ahead, swooping through the traffic like eagles. A group of women tottered past, baskets of fish on their heads. A blind leper led by an infant appealed for alms. Hawkers came and went: touting ball-point pens and gingham dishcloths; crepe-paper party hats and bundles of fenugreek.

As I requested a second glass of chai-i-sabs, a middle-aged Western woman approached the tea stall. A full-length red fox fur protected her from the winter cold; a patterned Gucci scarf was tied over the confection of bleached-blonde curls. She sat on a chair across from me. Her complexion was anemic, her face tired and wan. I wondered what a well-dressed woman was doing at the type of low tea stall I like to frequent.

Without waiting for her order, the waiter – who seemed to recognize the woman – poured a glass of tea and set it before her. I straightened my back and tried to appear respectable. Without looking at me, the lady struck up a conversation.

“I come here every Friday,” she said in a strong, unfamiliar accent. “You see, I adore to hear the Muslim call to prayer. We do not have it in Moskva. It is so romantic. I adore it … you hear me? I adore it!”

Pulling a packet of imported American cigarettes from her purse, she lit one. Then, waving her hands through the smoke with exaggerated movements, she told me why she had come to the subcontinent.

Her native land had, I learned, a limited supply of surgeons, private hospitals and human livers. India, on the other hand, has many skilled surgeons, several exclusive hospitals, and best of all, an unending supply of livers.

“Finding a nice fresh leever is a problem in Russia,” she intoned darkly.

“Is that so?”

“A juicy, tender leever is a wonderful thing,” she continued, licking her lips like a hungry borzoi.

Forced to agree that we take our livers for granted, I hoped that we might move on to a less morbid topic. But the Russian had more to say. She lit another cigarette, filled her capacious lungs to bursting point with dense smoke, and exhaled.

“You see,” she hissed, “we Russians drink too much. That is the problem. Too much vodkaSubcontinent and not enough leevers!” The Muscovite chuckled at her joke, rubbing a smear of lipstick from her glass. “I am waiting for my new leever now,” she seethed, glancing at her watch. She said it in such a way that I half-expected a man to turn up right then with a polystyrene carton marked “Fresh Liver”.

I wondered what luckless person would have their organ hacked out on the Russian’s account. In India, the body parts business is thriving. That very morning, The Hindustan Times had carried a typical story. Days before his beloved sister’s wedding, a young man in southern India had committed suicide. Beside his body, a note was found in the boy’s handwriting. It asked for his organs to be sold, to pay for his sister’s dowry. But even if the organs were to be traded, there was no hope. Without refrigeration, donor organs spoil within hours of death.

Eyes, livers, kidneys, even hearts and lungs, are transplanted in New Delhi’s private hospitals – nicknamed the “body parts bazaar”. Attracted by the prospect of no waiting lists, and inexpensive treatment, more foreigners than ever are traveling to India for transplants. They arrive drawn and ill. When they leave they quite literally take a part of India with them.

The Muscovite opened her purse a crack, removed a Chanel lipstick, and coated her lips with fire-engine red. The silver stick moved easily around the perimeter of her mouth. As it painted her lips, it reminded me of a supposedly true story – possibly an urban legend – when the subcontinent fought back.

A woman from Chicago had some time to spare while in Karachi, in neighboring Pakistan. Rather overweight after too many heavy tandoori meals, she had considered taking up a new dieting regime. As she rambled through Karachi’s crowded streets, a billboard caught her eye. It publicized the services of a local cosmetic surgeon.

More eager than ever to shed a few pounds, she entered the building and apprehended a surgeon. Could he remove some extraneous fat through liposuction? The physician seemed uneasy for a moment. But then, shrugging his shoulders, raising his palms in the air, and smiling broadly, he replied, “Why not?”

A modest fee was agreed and the woman arranged to return for the operation the next day.

Insisting that a full general anesthetic was necessary for a procedure of this kind, the surgeon scrubbed up and went to work. Some hours later, as the effect of the anesthetic wore off, the American patient began to revive. Sensation gradually returned to her fingers. As it did so, she reached out to touch her new fat-free thighs. Were they as slim-line and elegant as she hoped? It was then that her distress began.

Even the most proficient physicians, she thought to herself, have to bandage a patient’s thighs after removing fat through liposuction. The woman tried to whisper her concern to the nurse. Then the full horror of her new condition became apparent. Her lips were missing.

Although baffled as to why a woman with pretty lips would want them surgically removed – lip-o-sucked away – the doctor had agreed to perform the strange operation, if only to make the foreign patient happy. To him, sucking away the lips must have seemed like the latest in American chic. Distraught at her loss, the woman claimed that without lips, her gums dried out and insects flew into her mouth. Robbed of even the weakest smile, she returned to Chicago, lipless and in considerable pain.

I decided not to share the tale with the Russian. Instead, I wished her luck with the second-hand Indian liver, and wandered back through Chandni Chowk to the odious Hotel Bliss.

* * * *

Next day, before the stalls of Kinari Bazaar had opened their shutters to the light; I took my bags and waded from the hotel. Outside, the residents of the street were performing their ablutions and bathing at the standpipe. The scents of soap and hair oil were heavy in the air.

Down a passage off the back-street, behind a booth selling aromatic herbs, a wizened figure was making ready to perform. Emaciated and lame, with cataracts that had stolen his sight many years before, the man stretched his arms before him. His fingers were bent with arthritis, their skin creased with wrinkles. Lifting the cover from a cool stone jar, he removed a heaving mass of entwined miniature vipers. As the infant reptiles squirmed about, coiling with displeasure, the serpent-handler paused to drink three mugs of water. Then, tilting back his head and opening his mouth very wide, he swallowed the snakes one by one like ribbons of emerald licorice.

The veteran performer rubbed at his blind eyes, scratched his nose, and coughed. As he did so, a helix of five twisting regurgitated snakes, interwoven like mangrove roots, spewed anxiously from his mouth.

The tiny serpents were returned to the jar. Then a second, larger container was opened. Three adolescent pit vipers were jerked from their rest. Propping himself against the low wall, the blind serpent-handler began to toss the reptiles up into the air, juggling them. The two-foot snakes rotated silently. As gravity snatched them earthward, each was caught by the head and hurled up again.

Indifferent to the spectacle, the residents of the lane continued with their chores, without turning. In the twisting alleyways of Old Delhi, Amjed the blind snake-juggler hardly merited a second glance.

Juggling snakes, murmured the ancient when he had finished his routine, is no easy task. Decades of practice are vital to cultivate the skill. But alas, time is an ingredient that novices inevitably lack – most drop dead during the first weeks of practice. Die-hard snake-jugglers like Amjed frown on those who sap the venom from their serpents. Milking instills an alarmingly carefree attitude which is incompatible with the career. Amjed rubbed his fingertips together in reflection. Juggling snakes, he agreed remorsefully, is a dying art.

With the straps of my two cases cutting into my shoulders, I marched out from the Kinari Bazaar towards the Red Fort. By late morning I was aboard a bus bound for Ghaziabad – first stop en route to my reunion with Hafiz Jan.

The vehicle pushed eastwards, across the border into Uttar Pradesh. I took time to think about Hafiz Jan: that black fleece of beard, the eagle’s beak, and those gigantic hands. The Pashtun had made a deep impression upon me. Whether it was his features, his dress, or his bearing that had affected me most, I was not certain. Now, after almost two decades, I was to be with him again.

As we left the outermost suburbs of Delhi, the auto-rickshaws died away. Instead, a stream of tangerine-colored Ashok Leyland trucks shot past in the other direction. In an endless caravan of merchandize, they heaved sugar cane and calico, water melons and live chickens towards the capital.

Beside me sat a gangling young man with wetted-down hair. He was as keen as a whippet. His olive eyes stared agog at the world. His shoes were well-polished, his shirt free of stains, and pants pressed with razor-edge creases.

We began talking. The man’s name was Maruti, which is one of the names of Ganesha, the Hindu elephant god. He had recently qualified as a professional mahout, and was now traveling to a job interview in Ghaziabad. The position was for a junior elephant driver at an elephant “taxi” service in New Delhi. Hired by the city’s wealthy for weddings, parties and ceremonial journeys, the elephants could be provided painted with elaborate colors, or decorated with religious motifs.

Maruti rattled on about the training course he had done in the enchanted forest of Pecci, near Kerala’s Malabar Coast. A hardback manila envelope on his lap contained the graduation certificate.

“Down there in Kerala,” said Maruti enthusiastically, “people love elephants very much. A mahout from Pecci will see to his elephant’s well-being before that of his eldest son. You see, for a mahout, an elephant is a father, brother, son and best friend, all rolled into one. Give an elephant love and respect, and he will return it ten times over.”

Maruti glanced out of the window. But he didn’t see the traffic jam which now gripped the bus, or the roadside guava-sellers. He saw elephants instead.

“When sitting in position, steering with his feet,” the youth continued, “a mahout from Pecci will never order his elephant to do something. You would never order your best friend to do something. No …” said the young man pointedly, “the mahout will invite the elephant courteously to move.”

In late spring each year, as a cooling breeze streams in eastward from the Malabar Coast, the Pooram Festival takes place at Thrissur, in central Kerala. At the town’s maidan, central park, beside the ancient Vadakkunnatha Temple, a crowd of many thousands gathers. Then a cavalcade of thirty great tuskers marches out of Pecci Forest towards the magnificent temple. Richly adorned in ceremonial finery, the elephants – ridden by students from the Mahout School – have colossal Hindu idols strapped to their backs.

The procession of caparisoned elephants parades forward. Music blares from loudspeakers, children caper about in the moonlight, and fireworks shoot into the night sky.

“Pooram is our moment of glory,” said Maruti sentimentally. “But the elephants also love the grandeur just as much. They may take slow, dignified steps towards the temple, but inside they are dancing!”

On a self-imposed crusade to teach all mahouts to be friendly to their steeds, Maruti had much to say about evil elephant-handlers.

‘Some mahouts beat their elephants and goad them with sharp spikes,” he said. “If they won’t get up, the mahouts make them go without food. The saddest thing of all,” continued Maruti, anxious to share his knowledge, “is that over time even the most abused elephant will begin to love its master.”

With no easing of the traffic jam, I wondered how much more elephant talk I would be able to stand. My own deep fascination, conjuring, had made me realize that an obsession is often a good thing. Everyone should be obsessed about something. In the hope of redirecting our conversation to my own interest, I told Maruti that I was heading for Burhana to begin an apprenticeship in conjuring.

Staring out of the scratched window, Maruti clasped his long spindly fingers together, and sighed loudly. It was not a sigh of boredom. For he had not heard a word I had said. It was a sigh of true love. Love for his elephants. His fixation seemed to run very deeply. Here was a man whose whole life had been mapped out – steered by a single devotion.

Maruti prodded me eagerly in the stomach. He had more trivia to vent and was in need of a captive audience. I was that audience. He revealed to me that elephants are the only animals to have four knees; they have “fingerprints” like humans, and they make different sounds to express their emotions. It seemed as if there was little to tell us apart.

But then, enough of the trivia. Maruti had a more pressing message to pass on.

“Innocent wild elephants are being attacked daily in Assam,” he reported mournfully. “When I have enough money, I’m going to go and protect them.”

“Why are they being attacked?” I asked.

Lowering his head like a vulture, the lanky-framed youth told me of the conspiracy.

“People say the elephants are drunk – that they’re out of control and stampeding in massive herds!”

“Is it true? Are they drunk?”

“Well, it’s no secret that elephants – like all mammals – enjoy a drink from time to time. They don’t mean any harm. Humans don’t behave well when they’re drunk either.”

“How do they get the alcohol?” I asked, picturing a smoky saloon bar filled with tuskers, slurping stout from gallon glasses.

“They come across illegal stills hidden in the forest, and they have a little sip,” Maruti replied, sniffing. “One misdirected foot, the still falls to pieces, and liquor’s all over the place. They’re thirsty, so they drink it up. It’s not their fault if they become a bit delinquent.”

Some time later an Indian newspaper headline caught my eye: “DRUNK ELEPHANTS RUN AMOK”. Maruti had severely underestimated what had become a national problem. A herd of three hundred and fifty inebriated elephants had descended on a small Assamese village, trampling thirteen people to death, and causing destruction on an unknown scale. The report said the creatures had pilfered a vast quantity of rice beer from a “tea garden,” and that alcoholic elephants were ravaging communities across India’s north-east every week.

At long last, as the knot of traffic cleared, we sped toward Ghaziabad. At the bus stop in the town center, Maruti clasped his brown manila envelope to his chest and set off in search of his interview. Just before he disappeared into the frenzy of bobbing heads, he turned. Then, sweeping his right arm in the air like a bull elephant’s trunk, he saluted.

THREE

Land of Warriors

The bus jarred its way towards Meerut. Sprawling pipal trees lined the route, their whitewashed trunks hinting at the days when the region was a cornerstone of the British Raj. It was hard to imagine that May morning in 1857 when discontent led the Bengal Army to revolt. It was harder still to believe that the great Indian mutiny had begun right here, in the city of Meerut.

History records that the rebellion began when a batch of new Lee Enfield rifles arrived for the Indian Troops stationed at the Meerut barracks. When the cartridges were handed out – smeared as they were with Pig and Cow fat – the troops could not contain their fury. The ranks, comprised of a large number of high-caste Hindus and pious Muslims, saw the fact as a direct insult to their religious beliefs.

Once north of Meerut, the bus turned left, detouring onto the minor road. Thirty miles further along, heading north-west towards Karnal, and we arrived at the small settlement of Burhana.

Without wasting time I hurried from the bus stop through Burhana’s back-streets towards the sepulcher of my ancestor. Hafiz Jan had described the town in extraordinary detail. But there had been no order to the information. He had reported, what he remembered, in random sequence. I fought to piece together the best route to the shrine.

I crossed the grassy paddock to the right of the main street. Beyond that, buried in a copse of date palms and encircled by the low wall, stood a large square building. Despite the surrounding foliage, I could make out its basic structure. Fashioned from dandelion-yellow stone, and replete with Mughal-style arches, it was capped by an exquisite dome. This was the mausoleum of Jan Fishan Khan.

Approaching slowly, I made my way to the entrance of the tomb’s enclosure. The tall wrought-iron gates were open. A sudden gust of wind moved the fronds of the surrounding date palms. Several Islamic tombstones poked out from the undergrowth around the main memorial. Inching forward, I walked down the narrow path to the shrine’s portal.

On a stool in the doorway sat a figure dressed in a khaki salwaar kameez and buffalo-hide chappals, with innumerable bandoleers and a black cotton turban. His face was dominated by familiar features: a hooked, aquiline nose, deep-set eyes and ears brimming over with tufts of hair. And longer than ever was the profusion of now graying beard. I stood silently, observing my childhood hero, the incomparable Hafiz Jan.

The Pashtun was honing a bayonet on a smooth block, gritting his teeth as the knife’s edge rasped again and again across the surface of the whetstone. So engaged was he with sharpening the blade that he had not seen me. I continued to stare, capturing the moment.

Unsure of what to do, or how to greet him, I shuffled my shoes firmly on the cement path. The sound rose above the rustle of palm leaves and the scrape of metal on the stone. Hafiz Jan stopped grinding. Jumping to his feet, he snatched the bayonet to his chest. Then he looked me full in the face. His mouth opened wide and gasped air. His features seemed to knot together. I said my name. Still mute, he nodded, dropping the bayonet, his black eyes brimming with tears. In slow motion he struggled to push forward, like a man moving underwater. Then, in a single, awkward movement he picked me up and tossed me into the air.

It was some time before Hafiz Jan recovered from the shock of the reunion. We sat quietly for several minutes as he hyperventilated with satisfaction. I apologized for not providing advance notice of my visit, but the ancestral guardian waved my apologies asides.

“This is your home,” he said over and over. “Why should you tell the humble guardian of your plans to come? Welcome to this land, your land – the Land of Warriors. Welcome! I have waited for this day from so many years.”

I replied that I, too, had long dreamt of making the journey to the mausoleum of my great ancestor.

Hafiz Jan was eager to serve refreshments and introduce me to his wife and sons. But more important duties came before the pleasantries. Removing his chappals, the guardian led me inside the great sepulcher.

As my bare feet took their first steps on the cool stone floor, I sensed the wave of energy. The chamber was illuminated by light, streaming through a lattice window set into the wall opposite the door. Tilting my head backwards, I scanned the room. As I did so I sensed a great, unyielding force. It seemed to help me collect my thoughts. Perhaps it was the spirit of Jan Fishan.

The Pashtun pointed at the broad rectangular cenotaph in the center of the chamber, beneath which lay the crypt. The curved marble was inscribed in Persian lettering.

Hafiz Jan read the legend:

The Prince, Lord of Magnificence, exalted and full of virtue:

From whose aroma itself Paghman was swelled with pride;

He was of the children of Ali Musa Raja,

A resplendent sun following as auspicious dawning.

From Kabul he came to visit India –

His steps turn Burhana into a garden of paradise.

When the inner urge of a return to Heaven took hold of him:

He left this abode of mortality, taking nothing.

For the date of his going, O Sidq, weigher of words,

Say: Sayed Mohammed Jan Fishan Khan.

As dusk fell over Burhana I sat and reminisced with Hafiz Jan on the veranda of his house. His teenage sons served us with pomegranate juice and khishmish, a mixture of fruits and nuts. His wife busied herself arranging an elaborate feast of welcome. The evening muezzin rang out over the rooftops, and as it did so, Hafiz Jan grabbed his older son by the cheek.

“Mohammed is now fifteen”, he said, as the boy withstood the vice-like grip of his father's hand. “And what do you want to do when you grow up, Mohammed?” he probed.

“I want to guard the tomb of Nawab Jan Fishan Khan,” came the reply.

Hafiz Jan raked his huge fingers through his beard, satisfied that his son was prepared to continue the family tradition.

A meal of leviathan proportions followed. Three enormous mounds of pilau rice were bought in on brass trays. Chunks of mutton were buried in one, chicken in another, fish in the last. Hafiz Jan’s sons invited me to eat. Their mother remained in the kitchen. An Afghan naan, the size of a lambskin, was ripped up and also set before me. The Pashtun would pick out the largest chunks of meat and hand them to me one by one, like nuggets of gold. Only when I had finished my third helping did my hosts begin to eat.

“This is a blessed day!” Hafiz Jan repeated continually. “Every anguish passes but the anguish of hunger! You are honoring us. Eat! Eat! Eat!”

Although desperate to ask whether the great conjuror would take me on as trainee, I bit my lip. The time for such questions would come once the prolonged formalities were at an end.

When the lavish meal was over, Hafiz Jan rubbed his finger in his beard in his own inimitable fashion. He stretched backward and thanked God again that I had come. Then he thanked Jan Fishan Khan for drawing me here.

I replied by saying that Jan Fishan Khan had been one of the two magnets that led me to Burhana. The order, I confirmed, had been Hafiz Jan himself.

Then I seized the moment. Charged with a much enthusiasm as I could muster with several kilos of assorted meats digesting inside me, I inquired about the Pashtun’s fascination for magic and illusion.

Hafiz Jan seemed confused for a moment. Then, twisting his ear tufts anti-clockwise, he replied: “oh, those old tricks. Silly, weren’t they?”

“What do you mean, silly? They were incredible! You taught me how to do so much – how to eat glass... how to suck red-hot pokers as if they were lollipops...how to....”

The Pashtun cut me short: “How to almost kill the great- great-grandson of Jan Fishan with giant ball of fire.”

Silence pervaded as we both though back, reliving the horror of that moment.

“That was an unfortunate miscalculation”, I said weakly.

“The blunder brought shame on my family,” asserted Hafiz Jan. “From that moment forth I vowed never to perform another illusion. What if something had happened to your father?”

“Aga,” I continued,” I have come here to Burhana to ask you to teach me all you know about illusion and conjuring. Please consider accepting me as your pupil.”

Thrust into an uncomfortable position, the Pashtun rubbed his beard between his palms. Only when it had furled into one long, rope-like fiber did he reply.

“Tahir Shah,” he said,” you honor me by requesting any favor. Ask me to be of any service, however great, and it is truly a privilege. Make any request – however impossible, I will rise to the challenge. But Sahib, you are asking me to break a solemn oath which I swore on the grave of Jan Fishan Khan. Nearly twenty years have passed since I made my pledge. I have married since, and brought up two sons. I have forgotten – forced myself to forget – all that I knew. I'm sorry.”

We sat in silence for several minutes. I understood Hafiz Jan’s position and respected his sense of honor. The hush was awkward. Not because I felt any vein of condemnation – but because, selfishly, I wondered what to do next.

Again thanking God for bringing me to his home, the Pashtun whispered to his younger son to fetch the tea. I attempted to revive conversation by asking about trivial matters. Hafiz Jan did not answer. He was in deep thought.

A magenta porcelain Gardiner teapot, filled with chai-i-sabs, was brought from the kitchens. With great ceremony the tea was poured as if it were a magical potion. Only when he had swallowed three mouthfuls of green tea did Hafiz Jan speak.

“When you were eleven years old,” he said in a rather solemn tone, “I came to your village in England. Together we practiced many illusions and I explained how I had myself been a student of conjury”.

I nodded, rounding my lips upwards in a smile. When the Pashtun had seen that I was listening, he continued.

“Tahir Shah, when I was a child, I wanted to be the greatest stage magician in the world. I thought about nothing else. I dreamt, ate and talked nothing but illusion. My father thought I was insane, for no member of our family had ever been interested in such a subject before. A doctor was summoned. He looked deep into my eyes. Fearful that I had contracted some potent disease, he ran away. My parents grew more and more worried. They begged God for guidance.

“In the months that followed I searched for a teacher. Only after much hunting did I find a brilliant tutor at Ghaziabad. He was an expert illusionist and conjuror. He was reputed to be the finest of his kind in Asia. I stayed with him and learnt from him. But, as my father’s eldest son, I knew, I could never embark on a career in that profession.”

Hafiz Jan swallowed a second glass of tea in a single gulp.

“Do you understand?” he asked.

“Yes I do.”

Then as I resigned myself to the prospect of an early return to Europe, Hafiz Jan addressed me again.

“I have an idea,” he said. “It is a humble, worthless idea, but you may consider it.”

“What is it?”

“In those days when I was fascinated with conjuring,” he said reflectively, “I knew that nothing could satisfy my craving but hard study with a tutor.”

Faltering, as if resolving whether to continue, Hafiz Jan inched his way forward.

“My teacher…” he went on, “left Ghaziabad many years ago. He traveled east and made his home there. I think he now lives in Calcutta. Go to him. He will teach you every trick and illusion ever devised. His name is Hakim Feroze.”

* * * *

That evening another sumptuous meal was borne forth from the modest kitchen of Hafiz Jan. But my mind wasn’t on food. I was considering the Pashtun’s suggestion that I trace his own teacher. I would have preferred to remain at Burhana rather than embarking on what was sure to be a wild-goose chase. Even though the prospect of studying under such a renowned magician was intriguing, would he accept me as a pupil?

On each night that followed, as I deliberated harder, the feasts grew more opulent. The Pashtun insisted that every meal was another special occasion: honoring yet another battle which our forefathers had waged side by side. By the fourth night, the platters of pilau were so heavy that Hafiz Jan’s sons could barely lift them. Beneath the great mound of rice were buried whole marinated pigeons, an Afghan delicacy. On the fifth evening an entire roasted sheep was trundled in, still attached to the spit. The chunks of tender meat were served on a bed of special rice, floured with saffron, pine kernels and cardamoms.

On the six day my concern had almost reached fever pitch. Hafiz Jan’s wife was now cooking day and night. I noticed she had dragged her bedding roll into the kitchen and was sleeping in there, too. The Pashtun’s family would be bankrupted for generations if something was not done immediately. I pleaded with my hosts, begging them not to cook such absurd quantities of food. But when I questioned the catering arrangements, Hafiz Jan would rear up like a king cobra preparing to strike.

“How can we mere mortals not salute the triumphs of our ancestors?” he would demand.

I feared that Hafiz Jan might be tempted to replicate the fabled Muslim feast of his Bedouin antecedents. The meal, which is customary at great desert weddings, holds the world record for comestible extravagance. Cooked eggs are stuffed into fish, which are packed into whole chickens, which themselves are stuffed into a roasted ewe’s carcass. The sheep is then crammed into the belly of a female camel and borne by stewards to the awaiting guests.

Unable to stand such rich food any longer, I sought refuge in the tranquil surrounding of Jan Fishan’s shrine. A week of feasting under my belt, and I could at last consider the future of my journey. Hafiz Jan’s teacher seemed more appealing all the time. Another week in Burhana and I would be unfit to walk. Although fearful that this man Feroze might have nothing to do with me, I vowed to travel eastward to Calcutta.

As I sat in the doorway of the tomb, planning my next move, Hafiz Jan approached. He seemed restless. Before I could ask him what was wrong, he voiced his concerns;

“Tahir Shah”, he began with his characteristic greeting, “I know that you have been thinking about my suggestion of Hakim Feroze.”

I nodded.

“I recommend him. He is an excellent tutor. Indeed, there’s none finer… But beware!”

The Pashtun widened his eyes until they were as large as chestnuts. Feroze is a merciless teacher,” he said. “If he accepts you, he’ll crush you – that’s his method. He expects his students to toil without rest… destroying them thrills him. Don’t call on him unless you are certain this is what you really want.”

“But surely a simple course in stage magic would be harmless?”

Hafiz Jan’s cheeks turned milky white, his eyes became bloodshot, and his lower jaw dropped in trepidation. I waited for his advice. As I did the Pashtun trust his arms like rockets towards the sky.

“Are you out of your mind?” he bellowed. “You have no idea who you’re talking about! Hakim Feroze is no ordinary teacher. His training is no simple course for someone with a passing interest in conjury. It’s not a course at all – it’s a way of life… a tortuous regime – drill after drill under a sadist. As he torments those in his clutches, you wonder what act of insanity brought you to his door. Most of the time he makes you study absurd subjects. You hardly learn any ‘magic’ when you’re studying under him. Now that I think about it. You must not make contact with him. You are too precious to be mishandled by that man!”

“But respected Hafiz Jan,” I protested, “I can’t believe that your teacher – Hakim Feroze – could be so stern.”

The Pashtun cupped his head in his tremendous hands, and emitted a demonstrative shriek. I feared that recalling his former teacher had driven the man to hysteria.

“Hush!” he wailed. “Hush…don’t say another word and don’t ever say that name aloud!”

“What name?”

“Hakim Feroze’s name, of course!”

“Why? What’s wrong with saying his name?”

Grooming his beard, Hafiz Jan peered to the left and to the right.

“He has spies, that’s why. Feroze knows what everyone’s doing. I may not be certain where he is at this very moment, but he certainly knows every minuscule detail of my life.”

“But you have not been in touch with him for more than twenty years.”

“Irrelevant!” spat the Pashtun. “Like I said, he’s no ordinary mortal. He is a magician!”

Feroze sounded more like a monster than a master. Could he really be that bad? There was only one way to find out.

Again and again Hafiz Jan begged me to forget his “foolish” suggestion. He strove to terrify me from engaging in the course. “Spend one day with him and Feroze will turn your blood cold!” he would say. Or, “He will tear you apart… that’s his way. He thrives on others’ misfortunes.”

The more counseling I received to turn back, the more I longed to go forward: to meet the master, to meet Hakim Feroze.

I am not sure when it happened, but the point came at which Hafiz Jan ended his outbursts. He came to me late one morning, as the sun’s rays rose up above the tomb of Jan Fishan. I had been reading at my usual spot in the shrine’s doorway. Without a word, the Pashtun held out a clenched fist. The hand opened, revealing a ragged leather pouch. Inside was a curious reddish stone.

“I am giving this to you,” he said, “as Feroze gave it to me. Present it to him and he will believe I sent you.”

“What’s this inside?”

“It’s a bezoar.”

“What’s that?”

Hafiz Jan held the stone to the light.

“A healer of poisons, an amulet, and the symbol of a searcher for knowledge – this bezoar is said to have come from the stomach of an eagle.”

As I tied the locket’s leather thong around my neck, the Pashtun pulled me out beyond the enclosure’s gates. There, on a large Afghan rug, a picnic lunch had been arranged. But this was no frivolous snack of crustless cucumber sandwiches. It was a meal of dangerous proportions.

Hafiz Jan dug both hands into the mound of rice, pulled out a charred waterfowl, and passed it to me, wincing. It seemed to be a mallard duck, its annual migration terminated by a hunter’s gun.

“Khalifa Ashpaz!” cried the Pashtun, as he rammed the back end of another mallard into his mouth. “Khalifa Ashpaz!” he called again. “The famous master-chef of the Hindu Kush – this is his recipe!”

Four hours of eating came and went. By late afternoon, mutton, mallards, chickens, and immeasurable quantities of pilau had been consumed. I wondered if I would ever need to eat again. By the end of the meal I felt exonerated of any further duty. Hafiz Jan had obviously gone mad. He had decided that we were both to eat ourselves to death. Determined to put an end to this insanity of feasting, I protested vehemently – the food had to stop before someone was injured.

Hafiz Jan stared at me. The furrows of his brow deepened. But then, grinning broadly, he wrung his hands together, exclaiming:

“Imshab chi pukhta bekunem – what shall we cook tonight?”

FOUR

City of light

The mere mention of the Farakka Express, which jerks its way eastward each day from Delhi to Calcutta, is enough to throw even a seasoned traveler into fits of apoplexy. At a desert encampment on Namibia’s Skeleton Coast, a hard-bitten adventurer had downed a peg of local fire-water then told me the tale. Farakka was a ghost train, he said, haunted by ghouls, Thuggees, and thieves. Only a passenger with a death wish would go anywhere near it.

As I passed over a wad of rupee notes, the clerk at Delhi’s railway booking office paused. Without looking up, he mumbled, “Yamuna Express or Farakka Express?” The question was innocuous enough. But the locomotive’s name had triggered a violent subconscious reaction. I started to choke uncontrollably.

The clerk asked again. The next man in the queue was nudging me to decide, “jaldi! Hurry up!” As always happens in India when you’re deliberating under duress, a crowd gathered. They took it in turns to call out suggestions: “Farakka very nice,” said one, “No, no, too noisy,” replied another. ‘sahib, you like to buy handkerchief?” asked a third.

Apologizing aloud to the Namibian adventurer, I whispered, “Farakka Express, please.”

Later that afternoon I was installed in the second-class carriage, eager to begin the journey to Calcutta, in search of Hakim Feroze. With the bezoar locket hidden beneath my shirt, and a formal letter of introduction from Hafiz Jan, I felt that I was in with a real chance of securing the apprenticeship.

Peering around the compartment, I wondered what all the fuss had been about. The train seemed clean and orderly. Silly old travelers, I thought to myself, they deserve all they get. A knock from outside pulled me back to reality. The door slid away. A boot-boy with stark, beady eyes, dressed in a smart calamanco shirt, stood in its frame. In a single, expert movement, he scanned the cabin.

‘Shoe cleaning, Sahib?”

“No thanks, I had them cleaned yesterday.”

“Dirty now, I do good job?”

He motioned in circles with a large patterned rag. I shook my head and he scurried back into the corridor, closing the door firmly behind him.

Ten minutes later, as the train was due to depart, the door slid back once again. A well-dressed couple entered and took their seats. The woman was wearing a fine crimson-colored south Indian sari; her wrists were tinkling with glass bangles. Her hands and feet had been ornately decorated with mehendi. The extent of the pattern, like an exquisite filigree mesh, suggested she was recently married. Beside her sat a rather scrawny, unshaven figure – presumably the groom.

I broke the silence.

“Newlyweds?” I asked.

“Yes, we were married yesterday,” said the woman.

“You better be careful with your jewelery,” I warned. “I’ve heard horrible stories about this train.”

“I told you,” the bride protested to her husband boisterously, “we shouldn’t have brought my trousseau!”

Unable to contain myself, I expounded the ill-favored legends of the Farakka Express. I spoke of the ghouls, the Thuggee insurgents and the cunning thieves.

“The Farakka Express supposedly has its own breed of brigand,” I summed up. “They even dress up in disguises – or pretend to be blind – to win the other passengers’ sympathy.”

“Why did you take this train?” asked the bride.

“Well,” I said, “I don’t believe all that garbage – look around. This train’s as safe as anything. There’s no getting me, I know all the tricks!”

At eight p.m. a modest vegetarian supper was supplied by a bearer. After a week of gigantic meaty meals, it was a positive delight.

The newlyweds cooed to each other lovingly as I wolfed down my vegetables. When I had finished, the bride peeled a ripe juicy chakotra. She offered me a segment. The perfect way to round off a meal. I accepted gratefully. As the section of fruit slid down my throat, I sprawled out on my bunk. Then, taking care to wish the kind-hearted couple a comfortable night, I fell into a deep trance-like sleep.

Just before dawn I woke up. The train had stopped at a station to pick up supplies. Still half-asleep, I foraged for my travel alarm clock. My fingers fumbled like a blind person reading Braille. The clock wasn’t there. Expecting it to have fallen on to the floor, where I had left the smaller of my two cases, I peered down. The timepiece was not on the floor. Nor was the case. I lurched upwards. Wiping the sleep from my eyes, I called out to the newlyweds; had they too fallen victim to the vile curse of the Farakka Express?

But no one answered. The newly married couple was gone.

Five minutes later, I was huddled on the floor in a ball, my legs hugged up beneath my chin, my hands over ears, my face pressing in against my stomach. My passport, most of my money, and half my luggage were gone. I thanked God that the bezoar locket was still fastened around my neck, and that the letter of introduction in Hafiz Jan’s hand had not been stolen.

The Farakka Express sped towards the rising sun. I shunned the breakfast when it came. And when, at Allahabad, a new passenger entered the compartment, I shunned him, too. Screwing up my face miserably, I gazed out at the agricultural heartland of Uttar Pradesh. Workers were already toiling away, sprinkled across the landscape like peppercorns on a sheet of cloth. Some were busy winnowing grain, others combing ploughs through the sienna-red soil, straight-backed, carrying water-pots on heads, or dragging great spiders of kindling homeward.

I would have continued to stare at the paddy fields and palm-thatch houses, but I sensed the cabin’s new passenger watching me. Twisting round, I gawked back at him. His stout frame was topped by an egg-shaped head. Its face, rough as a loofah, was dominated by overgrown mustachios. His hair was matted with dirt, his clothes were tattered as a scarecrow’s. The figure emitted an odor similar to ripe Camembert.

Rather than glancing away as I scrutinized him, the man gaped back. We leered into each other’s eyes like dueling hypnotists. Neither blinked. Tears rolled down my cheeks as I strained to carry on.

“Been robbed, have you?” asked the man, swiveling abruptly to face the window.

“How did you guess that?”

“Remember what train you’re on. This is the Farakka Express – or don’t you know the legend of the Farakka Express?”

“I know all about this bloody train, thank you very much!”

“How did it happen?”

“I think I was drugged.”

“Was it fruit or Bengali sweets?”

“Fruit.”

“Chakotra or banana?”

“Chakotra.”

“Clever stuff,” hissed the man. “The taste masks diazepam very well indeed.”

“I feel so stupid. Especially as I’d been warning the couple about the dangers of this train. They must be paralyzed with laughter.”

Rising to his feet, the man opened the cabin door and leant out into the corridor. He seemed to be examining its outer glass.

“Before the train left Delhi Junction,” he said quizzically, “did a shoe cleaner come by?”

I agreed that one had.

“How did you know that?”

The man pushed the tip of his right index finger towards me. On the end was an ocher-brown smear.

“The shoe cleaner was in league with the fruit person,” the man explained. “It’s teamwork. First the boot-boy comes scouting for suitable prey. Seeing that you were a lone foreigner, he marked the door with a shoe polish thumbprint. The person with the drugged chakotra just follows the trail.”

“Ingenious,” I said weakly.

“Brilliant!” he corrected. “But then again, I wouldn’t expect anything less than brilliance on the Farakka Express.”

In the hours that followed, the portly, mustached passenger opposite revealed much to me. A private detective by profession – known as “Vatson” to his friends – he put the myth of the Farakka Express down to a few simple scams.

“Well before a train linked Delhi to Calcutta, the route was lined with thieves,” he noted. “Between these two important cities is Varanasi: holiest place in Hinduism. For three thousand years con-men of all kinds were drawn there. Everyone knows that pilgrims are trusting, naive and easily duped.”

“Do they?”

“Of course,” said Vatson sharply. “Look at your own situation. Although well aware of the dangers of this train, you were letting down your guard. Newlyweds, you thought. Instead of thinking, How sweet, you should have been thinking, Newlyweds: can’t trust them as far as you can throw them!”

“Well, how do I know that I can trust you?” I asked.

“You don’t,” said Vatson. “You’re learning already.”

A restless interval passed as I contemplated the problems caused by the grand theft.

“Chakotra fruit,” snapped the detective, clasping his cheeks after ten minutes of silence. “How could you have fallen for that one?”

“I was expecting far more sinister con-men,” I said defensively, puzzled that a complete stranger should be so reproachful.

Vatson was unimpressed at my gullibility. He seemed unable to discern that I required comfort not condemnation.

“Do you know how modern trickery developed in India?” he asked bluntly.

I shook my head.

“Thugs!” he clamored. “Phansigars, ‘People of the Noose’, ‘the Deceivers’: they’re the ancestors of these small-time charlatans. Theirs was a great tradition – it’s sad to think they've been reduced to such pitiable acts of thievery.”

“This was a heist of considerable ingenuity,” I responded.

But the detective wasn’t listening.

“Thuggee was a cult dedicated to ritual murder, in honor of the goddess Kali,” he declared. “You see, Thugs considered murder an art form. They felt no guilt about killing.”

“How many people did they actually kill?”

Vatson cracked the knuckles of his left hand.

“Millions!” he cried out. “Millions at least! In those days journeys were taking months, even years. By the time you realized your dearly beloved was late home, there was nothing to do!”

“So what happened to all the Thugs, then?”

“The Britishers realized they were destroying the country. You couldn’t travel anywhere. The roads were far too dangerous to use. Then a chap called Sleeman set about wiping them out. Bit of a pity really. He taught himself Ramasi, the secret Thug language, and worked out their formula for death.”

“What formula was that?”

“Number One,” cooed Vatson: “never let any member of a party escape alive – strangle them all with a rumaal, a knotted handkerchief. Number Two: always decapitate the victims, to make identification impossible. But most important, Number Three … prepare!

“Thugs would follow an intended victim for months, sometimes even years. They dispatched scouts, just like the boot-black who was sent ahead to find you. Then they would gain the trust of the servants by posing as holy men. But within thirty years they’d been broken. You Britishers got them off knotting handkerchiefs, and on to knotting carpets. They made lovely rugs.”

Shortly before noon my jinxed passage on the Farakka Express came to an end. The prospect of spending another uncertain night on the train disturbed me. Resolving instead to leave with what few possessions I had left, I climbed down at Mughal Sarai, the alighting point for Varanasi. After reporting the loss of my passport and money, I would continue to Calcutta by road.

Vatson disembarked at the same station. He claimed to be on an undercover mission for a client in Allahabad. We shared an Ambassador taxi. As the ramshackle vehicle trundled the short distance towards the holiest city in India, Vatson divulged the most private details of his assignment.

“I used to get much more interesting cases,” he began despondently. “Once I even had a murder case – I enjoyed that. But these days work is so humdrum. Most cases are involving checking if a groom’s family has any skeletons in their cupboard.”

“What if you find any?”

‘Show the boy’s side has skeletons,” said Vatson, “and the dowry gets reduced.”

Before we reached Varanasi – fabled “City of Light” – the private eye disclosed, in a deafening voice, that he was now to assume a disguise and go to ground.

* * * *

For three thousand years, and longer, Varanasi has been the center of the Hindu faith. Nestling on the western banks of the sacred River Ganges, the city attracts millions of pilgrims each year. Some stay a few days, praying and bathing in the waters of Mother Ganga. Others, once arrived, will never leave. They believe that to die within the boundaries of the ancient city – marked by the Panch Kosi Road – is to secure moksha, enlightenment. This state, of direct ascendance to Heaven, releases one from the perpetual cycle of reincarnation. Each day, thousands of pious Hindus are cremated on the banks of the Ganges at the “burning” ghats, steep stone steps which lead down to the river. As the eerie silence of dusk descends across it, the ashes of the dead are scattered upon the sacred waters.

Walking through the labyrinth of back lanes, teeming with sadhus and mendicants, mischievous children and water buffalo, I heard the sound of coins jingling on a beggar’s palm; the thumping of a funereal drum, and the cries of a cycle rickshawalla hurrying through. I smelled the sizzling puris on makeshift stalls, the heaps of turmeric, cinnamon and coriander, and the moist dung patties drying on shadowed walls.

Symbols were all around: swastikas painted above hidden doorways, ghee lamps burning at miniature shrines, and dense sandalwood smoke hanging like a thundercloud above the musty passages.

I probed forward little by little. Everyone but me understood the symbolism, everyone else knew the etiquette. Unable to grasp the inner meaning of it all, I was affected all the same. India is the most refined, well-practiced theater of life, and Varanasi is the pre-eminent act on its stage.

* * * *

I set off to the Dhobi Ghat where, I had heard, affordable accommodation could be found. After a night on the Farakka Express, lodgings at Varanasi would have to be cut-price. But the Dhobi Ghat had no guest houses at all. As the word dhobi – “laundry” – suggests, the ghat is where the washing is done. Dozens of men were kneading clothes like great balls of soda-bread dough. They hurled the lathered laundry in time with each other on the steps of the ghat. Fifty thousand Brahmins live at Varanasi. Many employ special dhobis to do their washing, as it guarantees their clothes are kept apart from those of the lower castes.

One of the dhobis saw me looking around for a hostel and came over to where I was standing. His face was flat as a shovel, his nose splayed out towards each ear, and his arms were reddened, scalded to the elbows by his trade. When I asked if he knew of a place to stay, he led me to his own one-room home.

Resembling an upturned coracle in size and shape, the gloomy wattle-and-daub dwelling was thick with steam. Once inside, the dhobi motioned to a horsehair mattress and smirked.

“Das rupia.”

“Ten rupees a night for this?”

I examined the mattress. Rotting, flea-infested, and positioned beside a kettle, in which a Brahmin’s shirt was boiling, it was the best feature of the room. A great deal of steam was generated by the constant cooking of clothes. The vapor had led to considerable rot. The decay was so extensive that I suspected it was actually holding the place up. Scrape away the rot and the walls would have caved in.

The lodgings were grim by any standards – far more basic, I mused, than those required for POWs by the Geneva Convention. But then, as the dhobi waited for an answer, I remembered that I was no prisoner of war. I might have feared my belongings would be filched, but I had very little of value left to steal.

“All right,” I said to the laundry-landlord, “I’ll take it, but I’m only doing it as a self-imposed penance – like Thomas Becket’s lice-infested horsehair shirt beneath his robe. While I think of it,” I joked, “Becket would have been rather at home here.”

The dhobi had understandably lost my drift long before. He spoke no English. Grinning again, he licked his fingers and rubbed them together, indicating that payment was due in advance. I fished out a crumpled note and passed it over.

Outside the room, a few feet from the Ganges, a young sadhu was squatting. His naked body was caked in fresh ash; his hair was a mass of matted dreadlocks, his face painted with esoteric symbols. The dhobi greeted the holy man with respectful salutations. But the salutation was not returned. Instead, the godman took up his chilam, and inhaled deeply. The chilam’s embers glowed brightly for a moment, before the mystic puffed out a turbid cloud of marijuana smoke.

Later that afternoon, after being almost boiled alive when bathing in the dhobi’s great cauldron, I roamed around Varanasi.

A bank located in the foyer of a plush hotel agreed to help me have money transferred. For some inexplicable reason the funds had to be collected at their other branch, in Calcutta. After the bank, I proceeded to the police station to report the train robbery. It was a humiliating experience as thirty officers of all ranks crowded round to hear another tale of the Farakka Express.

Shortly before dusk I walked through the slender bazaars which lead down to the ghats, at the water’s margin.

Down a secluded lane, off a larger passageway, I came across a series of cramped workshops. Huddled like hunchbacks over looms, sat a number of women. Some were young – in their early twenties – yet most were elderly and frail. They were all dressed in simple white saris; none wore jewelery. Some had shaven heads. I had heard of these forgotten women: the widows of Kashi.

Considered by most as untouchable, frequently regarded as witches, widows are outcasts in Hinduism. Disaster is said to befall anyone who talks with them. Thrown out by their families, shunned by their closest friends, thousands of widows journey to Varanasi each year to live out their days. Most will not consider suicide, for self-immolation will destroy their hope of attaining their dream of enlightenment.

Strolling about the busy passageways of the city, or sitting down by the steep steps of the ghats, you see them. They are everywhere. Some with cup in hand; others too proud to beg. A few take up employment. Those who do work toil long hours in sweat-shops for a fraction of the going rate. As if laboring in such conditions were not enough, many are raped or abused by unscrupulous employers.

At one of the looms crouched a young woman. Stony-faced and timid, with hennaed fingertips, a pronounced nose, and a crescent scar on her chin, she struggled to keep up with the other weavers. Her name was Devika. Married when she was thirteen to a man twenty-two years her senior, she became a widow young. When her husband died three years ago she was chased out of the house by her mother-in-law, who said she was a witch.

Like all the other widows at Varanasi, Devika, who was now twenty-three, longed for the day when God would call her to Paradise. In a society where widows rarely remarry, she knew that Varanasi could be her home for decades to come.

Ironically, widows are a relatively new sight in India. Until 1828, when the British outlawed the practice of sati, a widow would perish on her husband’s funeral pyre. Although barbaric, the repulsive practice provided an immediate solution. Since sati’s abolition, widows have journeyed like lost souls to the “City of Light”. Once installed on the banks of the Ganges, they begin a new existence: a life waiting for natural death.

“My mother-in-law sold my belongings,” confided Devika, making sure her employer was not around. “She gave me a third-class ticket to Varanasi. She swore if I ever returned, she would blind me.”

Her hazel eyes staring in concentration at the floor, Devika remembered the ordeal.

“When I arrived here it was as if I was a leper. People spat at me or shouted insults. Mothers whispered to their children, ‘Don’t look at her, she is diseased!’ I thank God for providing me with a job here. Of course it’s hard work,” she added, “but it is work. Each night I pray to Him to let me die soon.”

Would Devika ever marry again? Humored by the inane question, she grinned.

“How could I wed a second time?” she asked in bewilderment. “No, that’s impossible. I am a widow.”

* * * *

Darkness falls suddenly over Varanasi. As the widows’ looms clapped away like crude printing presses in the candlelight, the back-streets bustled with new energy. It is after dusk that Kashi’s ancient magic comes alive. With the silk merchants and barber shops shuttered up for the night, an endless procession of pilgrims issues forth. Barefoot, stooped and half-blind, they hurry to the great congregation of mandirs, temples, located in the tapering trails and along the waterfront.

Gas lamps hissing with fluorescent flames move forward on padded heads, the pungent scent of mogra flowers mingles with the shuffling of feet and the pealing of temple bells. Like a rendition of a Shakespeare play, the words and actions are known by all. Tight as a knot, the melange of pilgrims, priests and sacred cattle divide for a moment to allow a funeral cortege by. The corpse, bound in a saffron-yellow shawl, is borne on a bamboo litter down to the Jalasayin, “Burning Ghat”.

With impressive precision, the pallbearers negotiate their charge through an airport-style metal detecting frame. The haphazard contraption, decorated abundantly with orange garlands, was originally installed to deter terrorists from bombing Varanasi’s Golden Temple. Long since out of order, the metal detector has assumed an alternative, religious role. Pilgrims hustling to the Golden Temple stumble with cringing reverence through the ornamented frame – perhaps believing that the transition bestows benediction upon them.

On a platform at the water’s edge, more than a dozen funeral pyres send sparks crackling into the brisk night air. Behind them, great crests of timber – chopped into uniform lengths – lie ready for use.

Enlightenment, and the death which comes before it, is the primary business of Varanasi. But unlike elsewhere, death here is a wondrous, cheering event, so different from the Western preoccupation with hearses and tail-coated undertakers, shuffling forward in sensible shoes. There are no long faces, coffins, gravestones, cemeteries, or dramatic black veils. Instead, there’s a pragmatic acceptance of what is simply transition.

The body is carried forth. A quantity of timber is weighed out and paid for. When the pyre is constructed, the corpse is positioned. The sacred fire is applied. Only when the ashes have cooled are they gathered up and cast into the black waters of Mother Ganga.

Affected by the subtle simplicity of the Burning Ghat, I made my way, by boat, home to the dhobi’s flea-infested bed. Little bigger than a canoe, the craft was more usually hired by grieving families. In the bows a hunched figure strained at the oars, his long ivory beard tied in a granny-knot. As we cut through the sacred waters, illuminated by a thousand bobbing leaf-boat lamps, I looked back. Funeral pyres lit up the night. Ferocious with life, raging like forest fires, the mountains of flame licked upward. It was a breathtaking salutation to the dead.

The dhobi simpered through broken teeth when I tried to explain my adventure at the Jalasayin Ghat. He handed me a mug of murky gray Ganga water with which to rinse my mouth. Then he pouffed the home-made pillow; a pile of dirty clothes wrapped in a sheet.

As I reclined on the vile bed I felt virtuous. It was a fine feeling, one that was quite new to me. No wonder Thomas à Becket had so relished his lice shirt. Perhaps I would do penances more often, I thought. Then, as I closed my eyes to imagine the blazing funeral pyres … the mattress’s savage night-life began to feast.

By five a.m. the dhobi was already hard at work, boiling up another kettle of Brahmin clothes. Pulling the sheet around me like a toga, I sat up. It was still dark outside. A paraffin lamp provided a haze of platinum light. The dhobi seemed pleased I was awake. He handed me a neatly folded stack of clothes. Somehow, during the night, he had managed to wash and press my shirt, pants, socks and even my boxer shorts. They smelt of cinnamon. When I thanked him he crumpled up his nose, snorted twice, and grabbed my pillow, which was the next load of laundry.

Then, stooping over the cast-iron urn, he fished out a sock. Taking considerable care, he emptied out its contents – three very hard-boiled eggs.

As the darkness was gradually edged out by the first glimmer of light, I noticed a procession of women wending down to the water. Barefoot, and cloaked in plain white saris, they moved with slow, deliberate steps through the morning chill. Once at a secluded spot on the riverbank, they cleansed their bodies in the sacred Ganges.

With their bathing at an end, the widows seemed to pause in silent prayer. Immersed in the first rays of amber light, they stood motionless, their arms stretched towards the sun, as if supplicating God to summon them to Paradise.

* * * *

Leaving Varanasi was remarkably difficult. Millions of people in all comers of India would do anything to visit the city. No one deserts Kashi unless pressing business elsewhere forces them to do so. After less than a day in town I found myself falling victim to traveler’s inertia. My great plans of apprenticeship seemed to be ebbing away. I had been drugged, robbed, and was now holed up with a dhobi. What had happened to my dreams of studying magical science? Coming to, I remembered my priorities. Next day I would hurry on to Calcutta.

Enlivened by the decision, I trekked over to the Panchganga Ghat to dangle my feet in its water. With the ashes of countless dead flung into it – not to mention the half-charred bodies – you’d expect the Ganges to be filthy. Pilgrims and locals bathe in the river every day. They even drink Ganga water, considering it to be less tainted than the purest mountain stream. But given the abounding pollution, why aren’t its devotees dropping like flies? Scientists may have discovered the reason. They say the Ganges has the ability to re-oxygenate and cleanse itself. When cholera microbes were put in a sample of Ganga water, they died within three hours. Put in a sample of distilled water, the same microbes lived for twenty-four hours. Sailors have long recognized the water’s ability to stay fresh. Until recently, ships setting sail from Calcutta would stock up with as much Ganga water as they could carry.

When Jaipur’s Maharajah Sawai Madho Singh II traveled to England in 1902, he commissioned two colossal silver amphora to be built. Considered to be the largest single silver objects in the world – holding almost two thousand gallons each – they were filled with the river’s sacred waters and taken along.

At Panchganga Ghat I splashed about up to my shins in the hope of drowning some of the fleas. But the sense of sheer pleasure quickly turned to horror. A severed, badly charred human hand was floating my way. I tried to calm myself. As I did so, there was a tap on my shoulder. A plump robed figure held up a bottle of cloudy water and, in a thick accent, exclaimed:

“Saheeb, neyes Gaangaa varter … gut foor drinking. Fifteen rupee onlee.”

“No.” I recoiled. “Leave me alone, I’ve just had a nasty shock.”

I looked away, but the tap came again.

This time, ready to berate the salesman, I turned round to face him. Pulling off his robe, I realized he was no salesman. It was Vatson Private Eye. He was in deep disguise.

“How did you know I was here?”

“What do you expect? I’m a detective!”

Vatson told me to lace up my shoes. A strange performance was about to begin. Still shaken by the experience with the severed hand, I was slower than usual on my feet.

“What’s this all about, Vatson?” I asked, as we made haste through the endless maze of back lanes.

“You’ll be seeing soon enough.”

“Did you dig up any skeletons in that family’s closet?”

“Not an entire skeleton,” said Vatson, smiling. “A skull, a few ribs … but not the whole thing yet. It will be needing a little more time.”

We scrambled aboard a bicycle rickshaw. Vatson directed the driver to the Rani Ghat. As the rickshaw rattled ahead, Vatson reported on the case at hand.

“Research is going well,” he began. “This stakeout is going to take about two months. We've been busy checking all sorts of things.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, the usual,” retorted the sleuth casually. “Whether the groom’s school diplomas are the real McCoy; if he’s seeing any other girls, or if he has any repulsive moles, warts, genital growths. You know …”

“Well, I’m not sure that I do.”

“Then we have to check for family feuds, criminal records, secret debts, drug addictions, hereditary abnormalities, unwanted half brothers …”

Vatson broke off abruptly, and commanded the driver to stop. He led me to a deserted area behind the Rani Ghat. It seemed as if a building had recently been cleared from the land. A family of rag-pickers was recovering any odds and ends hidden under the stray bricks.

Sitting at the center of the ground was a sadhu. He was in deep meditation.

His face was haggard, probably before its time. His beard was tangled and oyster-gray; his hands were weathered with ridges; his costume was nothing more than a lungi and a string of coral beads. Beside his right foot was the cranium of a human skull.

The object explained a great deal. The man was an Aghori sadhu. My interest in the trophy heads of the Naga head-hunters had led me to the Aghoris. Their beliefs are close to those of traditional shamans. The Aghoris, said to have the power to overcome evil spirits, were traditionally confirmed cannibals. Their libations, which once included human blood, are drunk from the bowl of a human skull. But to an Aghori, the skull is far more than a simple drinking vessel. It contains the spirit of the deceased. The soul remains the Aghori’s prisoner until the skull is cremated. Such jinns, spirits, are tamed and put to work by the sadhu in his world of shadows.

The detective motioned for me to step closer to the holy man.

“What’s he here for? What’s going to happen?”

“Just watch.”

The ascetic continued to sit cross-legged in meditation. A few minutes later another man appeared, dug a shallow hole in the earth with his hands, and left. We continued to wait. A modest crowd, about fifteen people, turned up and circled around the Aghori. They appeared to know exactly what was going on. The godman stirred from his trance and rose to his feet. Then, having wrapped a rag shirt around his head, he leant over and pushed it into the hole. Sand was carefully filled in around the head, with the sadhu now balancing upside-down.

“Vatson, what’s happening?”

“The Aghori is going into hibernation,” said the sleuth.

“Why?”

“Why not?” said Vatson.

“Human hibernation … I’ve heard about this … it’s all an illusion!” I shouted.

Vatson gave me a stern look.

“I know it’s illusion,” he whispered, “but be quiet.”

An hour passed. The crowd watched the pandit’s upturned body with great concentration. Another hour went by. A pye dog was warded away with a stick when it made a run for the Aghori’s drinking skull.

After another hour of waiting I was mad with boredom. At last Vatson turned to me.

“Did you notice that very fine, dry sand was being filled in around the Aghori’s face?”

“Yes, I did, it was different from the earth around it.”

“Exactly: look closely, and you’ll see that the ground here is clay. The hole was filled with dry sand. The sadhu can breathe through it.”

Four hours after his hibernation had begun, the Aghori suddenly pulled his head from its sand-filled hole. He unwound the cloth from his face and took a sip of water from the skull. Vatson and I might not have been persuaded, but the crowd was visibly moved by the feat.

As Vatson Private Eye led me away, I told him about the most famous of all human hibernations, which I had once heard about.

In the 1830s, fabulous tales of hibernation came from a remote mountain community near Jammu. They told of a slight, dainty man with calculating eyes, named Haridas, and this soon reached the ears of the Maharajah of Lahore.

The Maharajah, who was a skeptic, sent for Haridas, requesting that he perform his feat under controlled test conditions. Haridas arrived, and the experiment began.

Various distinguished English physicians and soldiers were present at the Maharajah’s palace. At the initial examination, one of the doctors noticed that Haridas had cut away the muscles beneath his tongue, allowing him to push it backwards, sealing his throat. In the days preceding the burial, Haridas took hot baths up to his armpits, flushed out his bowels, and consumed only milk and yoghurt.

The day before the burial, he swallowed a piece of linen, thirty yards long. Officials and courtiers looked on in stupefaction as, before their eyes; Haridas withdrew the bandage, dislodging any remaining material from his digestive tract.

At last, preparing himself for hibernation, Haridas sat in the lotus position, sealed up his nostrils and ears with dainty wax plugs, closed up his throat with his flipped-back tongue, and folded his arms.

His pulse was no longer traceable, and the European physicians were already at a loss for words. Haridas was placed in a great chest, fastened with a padlock embossed with the Maharajah’s own seal.

The trunk was carried out ceremoniously into the palace gardens, a cavity was dug, the box was lowered down, and the hole was filled with earth. As a further precaution, a crop of barley was planted above where the hibernating sadhu lay. A towering wall was constructed around the entire area. Palace sentries guarded the spot day and night.

Forty days passed. The court was rife with anticipation. With the courtiers unable to stand the suspense any longer, the Maharajah gave the order for the wall, the barley and the soil to be removed. The chest was hauled from the hole, and the padlock was smashed away. Hesitantly, the box’s lid was opened. To everyone’s amazement, the godman was alive, sitting in the same position as when buried more than a month before.

A doctor removed the nostril and ear plugs, pulled the ascetic’s tongue forward into position, and breathed air into his lungs. Within an hour he was as fit as ever before.

Haridas was lauded by the Maharajah, who presented him with a handful of diamonds. The people of Lahore rejoiced in the streets and followed the sadhu wherever he went. Further public hibernations took place in cities across India. Haridas became a celebrity, shunning his simple clothes for more resplendent attire.

Wined and dined, and courted by high society, Haridas forgot his humble birth. When complaints accumulated that the godman had seduced a number of high-ranking ladies, it was too much for the government. Haridas was sent back to his mountain village, and was never heard from again.

I asked Vatson for his impressions.

He thought hard for a few seconds. Then, looking me in the eye, and screwing up his face, he barked:

“Poppycock!”

FIVE

Waiting Out the Jinns

Kipling called the Grand Trunk Road ‘such a river of life as nowhere else exists in the world”, and he was spot on.

Carving a route from Calcutta westwards, to the wilds of the Hindu Kush, the G.T. – pronounced “Geetee” – is not for the faint-hearted. My decision to continue to West Bengal by bus was one inspired by lunacy. What kind of deranged simpleton would give up the gentle rocking of a locomotive for the jarring, back-breaking ride of an Indian bus? This was a question I asked myself many times, as the antique vehicle of the Express Bus Company strained to reach its cruising speed of nine miles an hour.

Seething forward in a savage whirlwind race to the finish line, the maelstrom was thick and furious. There were bullock carts loaded with towers of sugar cane, buses with passengers swinging from the windows; Ashok Leyland trucks piled high with baskets of rotting fish, cows with nowhere else to go; gasoline tankers steered by chain-smoking drivers; taxis and rickshaws, steam-rollers and articulated trucks; a full traveling circus, complete with a wagon of clowns, a convoy of elephants, a cohort of cyclists with their families riding two up; and a man on crutches trying to keep up. At the eye of the tornado’s vortex, helpless amid the intense black fog of diesel fumes and blaring klaxon horns, was the Express bus.

After forty fearful hours, with other passengers and me bent double in the crash-landing position, the vehicle rumbled into Calcutta. I half expected a welcoming committee, a brass band, and a commandant with medals of valor for each survivor’s chest. But no one noticed us arrive. The bus slid to a halt in a rest area on the banks of the Hoogly River. Before being spewed out, I patted the driver on the back and saluted. He was a man with iron nerves. Like comrades in a forgotten war, we now shared a special bond. I gathered my few belongings together and heard the other passengers murmuring, “Geetee always drives someone crazy!”

* * * *

Calcutta has spectacular over-employment. In the West, where we’re obsessed with slashing the numbers of workers for the sake of it, we drool at the idea of more, faster computers, fewer humans. But as we struggle to adopt an ever-changing technology, we lose sight of the satisfaction that only a finely tuned human system can provide.

As I toured the city’s municipal bastions in search of Feroze, I marveled at just how many people were engrossed with work. The General Post Office, situated on the site of the infamous Black Hole, is a splendid place. The Renaissance dome, Corinthian colonnades and traces of Baroque adorn what is an imposing building. Yet far more impressive is the postal system itself. Purchase a postage stamp, and the extended machine of clerks activates.

The first clerk calls out to the next customer in the queue, the second listens to the customer’s order, the third writes it down, the fourth weighs the envelope in his hand, the fifth checks the price for that weight, the sixth explains to the seventh which stamp to select from the stamp folder, the eighth tears out the right stamp, the ninth applies glue to its underside, the tenth affixes it to the envelope, the eleventh takes the customer’s money, and the twelfth makes out the receipt.

Heartened by such a meticulous procedure, I hailed a taxi and directed its crew to the bank, where I had arranged to collect my money. In Calcutta, the driver has an assistant who interacts with the customer. Sitting in the front passenger seat, he also navigates, takes the money, mumbles pleasantries and maintains the taxi’s dashboard shrine. I reclined in the back seat safe in the hands of professionals. The hulk of a car veered into the fray like a battle tank on maneuvers.

As we swerved from one lane to the next, I took a moment to inspect the lavish dashboard shrine. Crafted with rare workmanship, it possessed multiple moving parts. The centerpiece was a foot-high golden figurine of Kali, weighed down by garlands of skulls. Six cleaver wielding arms flagellated rhythmically in time with the taxi’s 1970's disco sounds. Every nine seconds the mouth of the black-faced goddess flew open. Like some fiendish cuckoo-clock from Hell, she retched crimson blood-like dye down her torso. A miniature receptacle at the base of the statuette collected the liquid, which was then pumped back to the mouth. Excellent stuff, I meditated, as the driver and his subordinate swayed their heads to “Night Fever”, I wondered how many people were involved in making that.

As he handed over the money, the bank manager suggested I search for Feroze at Kalighat, Calcutta’s temple of Kali. It seemed a peculiar place to look but, being new in town, I took his advice.

With its rounded domes, lines of jostling beggars, widows, and pilgrims with shaven heads, you might expect Kalighat to be like any other of India’s temples. But rather than being a sanctuary designed to celebrate life, Kalighat is dedicated to venerating death. The overriding association with Kali ought to have hinted it was no place to find Hakim Feroze.

Non-Hindus are forbidden from entering Kalighat. But I went unchallenged, proceeding through a low doorway into the main courtyard. The first sight to greet me was that of infertile women tying oyster-sized stones to the branches of an enchanted cactus. The procedure is said to make any barren woman bear a child.

Despite the life-giving plant, a sense of gruesome debauchery hung like a curtain over the shrine. Glaring images of Kali scrutinized every footstep. Garlanded with decapitated heads of the vanquished, and feasting on human blood, Kali’s voluptuous form is far more ghoulish than anything Hollywood has ever dreamt up. Her tongue hangs out, lusting for death; her ten hands wield executioners’ swords; and her large, bloodthirsty eyes hypnotize her foes.

The temple was constructed in 1809 on the site of a former shrine. Hindu scriptures tell that it was built at the exact spot where one of Kali’s toes fell to Earth. It was here that Thugs would pray before rambling off to strangle unsuspecting travelers.

In one corner of the courtyard a goat was being tempted to a simple enclosure with some lush leaves. The animal chewed away at the foliage, green-eyed and trusting, content as all goats are. Greed blinkered it to the garnet-red goat blood in which it was standing. But even if the creature had attempted an escape, odds were against it. Within seconds, an executioner’s hand tilted its head east, and clamped it tightly in a vice. The glint of a blade followed. Before it could bleat in protest, the goat was dead.

At a second enclosure, opposite the first, a pair of butchers hacked up the meat. Heaped at their feet like a pile of bloodied boots were the goat heads.

Up to two dozen sacrifices to Kali are made at the shrine daily. Until the last century, human immolations formed an important part of the temple’s busy routine. Before an animal is slain, devotion is offered in honor of the mighty goddess – consisting of milk, blended with Ganga water and bhang, cannabis paste. The goat, or other offering, is washed and garlanded with jabba flowers, red hibiscus, before it’s sacrificed. Then, as the ritualistic knife is made ready, the devotee whispers a prayer into the goat’s ear. The message is taken directly to Kali by the goat’s soul.

I suspected the bank manager had been well aware that Kalighat was a red herring of the most bloodthirsty kind. Splendid, I mused as I made my escape from the macabre shrine. Practical joking is very much alive in this town. I think I’ll enjoy it here.

* * * *

For five days I did nothing but hunt Feroze.

Calcutta is a large city, but within a week I felt certain I was searching for someone who did not exist. Had Hafiz Jan been wrong in directing me to Calcutta? Or had Feroze moved elsewhere? Both were strong possibilities. Yet I knew very well such questions were liable to remain unanswered.

I suspected that the harder I pursued him, the less likely I was to come across Hakim Feroze. In honored tradition, the jinns had obviously seen me engaged in the chase. Having a bit of fun, as jinns like to do, they had hidden Feroze from me. In time, a virtuous spirit would pull back the shroud and reveal the teacher. Meanwhile, I would have to wait out the jinns.

Avoiding a tram rattling towards me like a hopper at a coal head, I crossed the road and turned left on to College Street. Famous for its hundreds of bookstalls, College Street must be the largest graveyard on Earth for out-of-date books. Faded by the sun, dampened by monsoon deluges, and eroded by the continuous abrasion of city life, all the books on sale have seen better days. I ferreted about in the skyscraper stacks. Half the books found on College Street are concerned with lost programming languages of early computers. The other half is romance. I inched my way down the central promenade and stumbled into the Mills and Boon Bazaar. Tussling over the squared-edge piles, businessmen and schoolgirls, office clerks and taxi drivers were searching zealously for a racy romantic read.

Peeking up from a disintegrating copy of A Chance Encounter, a stallholder in the Mills and Boon Bazaar suggested I have coffee at his beloved haunt. Guide books like to tell you that the Albert Hall is Calcutta’s answer to a cafe on Paris’ Left Bank. It’s a nice line which once – very long ago – might have been true.

Albert Hall Coffee Shop is a square second-floor room, where a high ceiling and steep walls hide beneath a thick layer of powdery soot. A score of antique fans rotate in slow motion, their sharp rounded blades slicing the air like scimitars. Inside the Albert Hall there were no vivacious intellectuals, debating important issues of the day. Nor was there the impenetrable silver smoke of Gauloises. The twenty or so tables were empty. Empty, that is, except for a single elderly, hunchbacked man at one end of the room, who was mounting stamps in an album.

The figure seemed lonely, a feeling which disturbed me. So I went over to his corner table and sat down. The hunchback’s head was round, like an orb, his clothing shabby, ingrained with Calcutta’s own indescribable blend of pollution. His complexion was so waxy it reflected the chipped pearl-blue vinyl tabletop over which he was leaning.

“Those are nice stamps,” I said admiringly.

“What? What is it you’re saying?” replied the man, who appeared to be hard of hearing.

“I said those stamps are nice. Very colorful.”

I hoped to endear myself to the gentleman through praise.

“What stamps?”

We seemed to be having trouble getting a conversation going.

“The ones in your album … those ones are very nice and colorful … Brazilian, aren’t they?”

“Oh, like stamps, do you?”

Marvelous, I thought, he’s getting the hang of it. There’s no stopping us now.

“Yes, I like stamps very much. Do you like stamps?”

The man’s expression suddenly turned from one of angelic tenderness to one of extreme acerbity.

“No!” he bellowed. “I hate stamps. Think they’re wretched little things.”

“Then what are you collecting them for?”

“This isn’t my album,” the hunchback confessed, lighting a cigarette. “It’s my friend’s. He’s in the bathroom.”

At that moment, a tall figure, suave as a toreador, with strong Pashtun features and turtle-green eyes, returned to the table and sat down. His zinc-gray hair was sculpted back with lavender brilliantine; his face was clean-shaven, save for a neatly clipped mustache. Over a white sailcloth shirt, he wore a tan vest, its last button undone. His fine beige twill-woven pants, and expertly polished Oxfords, hinted of a stern, wealthy upbringing. His hands, with manicured nails and plucked of their hair, were flecked with liver spots, leading me to suspect he was in his mid-sixties. Seldom does one come across such a well-presented gentleman. But far more forceful than his appearance was the aura of solemn confidence which encircled him.

Turning to his friend, he said in an exquisite low, silky voice:

“Rublu, who is your new acquaintance?”

The hunchback replied, without looking up:

“Haven’t any idea – he was interested in the stamps.”

“I couldn’t help noticing – a wonderful collection you have, sir,” I said.

“Oh, thank you, young man, I have been collecting stamps for many years. I’ve got all the Indian ones, and most of the British ones, too, going back about …” he thought for a few seconds. “ … Going back about eighty-three years, I suppose.”

‘Stamps are vile things …” the hunchback repeated pensively.

“Don’t pay any attention to Rublu, he’s jealous. You see, he doesn’t have a hobby – never has had.”

The hunchback flicked cigarette ash into his coffee. Then he slurped the treacle-like liquid from a saucer, held to his lips. I watched with some interest.

“Why do you put ash in your coffee?”

The hunchback looked at me with contempt.

“It makes the coffee taste more bitter,” he said with loathing.

It was obvious that I had much to learn in the way of local etiquette. Allowing him to savor his caustic drink in silence, I turned to the hunchback’s companion.

The gentleman seemed to be out of place in the dilapidated Albert Hall. Leaning back on his chair, he spoke about Calcutta’s history – of its role in the nation’s cultural life, of its peoples, and of its abiding artistic legacy. In return, I explained about my doomed journey on the Farakka Express. The gentleman appeared to know the accursed train well.

“Tell me,” he continued, as if ready to move the conversation on, “what has brought you to our little city?”

“Oh,” I began to explain rather uneasily, “I’ve come here to meet someone. But that’s the problem, I can’t find him.”

“Who exactly have you come to meet?”

“Um,” I stammered, “a well known illusionist, actually.”

“An illusionist, really?”

“Yes, that’s right, it’s a great interest of mine.”

“You mean, like Houdini and all that, conjuring?”

“Well, Houdini and many others.”

“What’s his name … the man you are looking for?”

“Oh, I’m sure you’ve never heard of him …”

The suave figure smoothed back a stray hair with the index finger of his right hand.

“Give it a try,” he said.

“I’m looking for a man called Feroze … Hakim Feroze.”

The hunchback looked up in silence. The sophisticate studied my face for a few moments.

“Have you heard of him?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact I have heard of him. But tell me, how did you hear of this illusionist?”

“He was the teacher of a family friend.”

“Whose name is …?”

I speculated why the gentleman was concerned with the precise details of my search.

“His name is Hafiz Jan.”

“If you find this Feroze,” continued the man, “how will you prove to him all these things?”

“I’ve got a letter of introduction and a locket to show him.”

I was supplying information far too freely to these complete strangers, but the well-dressed man seemed to draw answers from me.

“How will you know Feroze when you find him?”

“Oh,” I said thinking hard, “I’ll know Feroze because he’s the master of illusion. He can make things appear and disappear at will.”

I broke off to take a sip from my glass of tepid mint tea. But the glass was missing. So was the sugar bowl, the milk jug, the ashtray, my street-map of Calcutta, the stamp album, and even the miniature pile of Brazilian stamps. The hunchback slurped his coffee once again. As he slurped, his debonair friend burst into laughter.

“How do you do?” he smiled. “I am Hakim Feroze.”

SIX

Renting Babies

“How is Hafiz Jan?” Feroze asked fondly. “I hear the boys are growing up well, and that his wife’s sciatica is no longer as painful as it was.”

“That’s right; but how did you know? Hafiz Jan said he hasn’t been in touch with you in years.”

“Quite so,” murmured Feroze. “But you know how it is … I keep my ear to the ground.”

The hunchback stared across the table at his companion and raised an eyebrow.

“Hafiz Jan was one of my finest students,” Hakim Feroze persisted. “Did he tell you that? Please show me the letter and the locket … it must be the bezoar I gave him.”

I passed over the letter and the amulet. Feroze opened the envelope with great care. Before deciphering the Pashtun’s almost illegible writing, he touched the paper to his nostrils and inhaled lightly three times. Then, grinning through sharp teeth, he clasped the amulet in his fist and breathed in once again. I might, at first, have doubted that this was indeed Feroze. But having seen what the tokens meant to him, my doubts melted away.

Despite the one in ten million probability of such a chance meeting, Feroze – like any Indian I related the story to – was unfazed by the improbable encounter.

“So,” said the Master at length. “What can I do for you?”

My heart throbbed a little faster as I anticipated how my single question would be answered.

“Respected Feroze,” I uttered nervously, “I have heard you are the most accomplished illusionist alive. Sir, I would like to learn from you … Mr. Feroze …” I faltered, “I would like to become your student.”

Hakim Feroze seemed not to be listening. He was watching the waiter as he wove between the tables with S-shaped maneuvers, like an ice-skater. He sighed twice. I waited for an answer.

“I regret to tell you,” he revealed softly, “that I retired some time ago. I no longer take on students.”

“But I have come a long way to meet you,” I snapped selfishly. “I have been drugged and robbed; have bathed in a dhobi’s cauldron, and am still suffering from severe trauma from the Geetee.”

“Geetee!” winced the hunchback, distorting his face. “Very nasty.”

“Well,” rejoined the great conjuror, “it sounds as if you’ve had quite an adventure already. But again, I must advise you that I am retired, and am enjoying my retirement.”

Any further outbursts seemed futile. I was at a loss for words. I cursed myself for having pursued the ridiculous quest for so long.

Leaning forward, making ready to storm out from the Albert Hall like a prima donna, something made me pause.

“Could I beg one small favor of you?” I asked.

“Of course you may,” answered Feroze, his green eyes staring at me like bottle-glass beads.

“As a favor to your old pupil Hafiz Jan, would you let me know if you change your mind?”

Feroze smiled. He withdrew an antique orange fountain-pen from the welt pocket of his vest. Then, scribbling a few words on the back of my Calcutta street-map, he handed it to me.

“Come to this address tomorrow at noon,” he said. “If I have changed my mind, I will tell you.”

* * * *

While hunting for Feroze, I had stayed at a guest house near the main Park Street area in central Calcutta. Dingy as an oubliette, the hotel was packed with a tour group of Glaswegians. Downing bottle after bottle of local beer in the reception, they disclosed that they had come to Calcutta on a pilgrimage in honor of their champion – the legendary Bengali film-maker Satyajit Ray.

Only one of the groups stayed away from the drink. Unlike his companions, he was extremely reserved. As the others lurched about clinking bottles together rambunctiously, he perched primly on a high stool, like a cockatoo. His face was long and very pale, with bristly graying sideburns and a sharp nose; his eyes were magnified by clumsy black-framed spectacles. When I asked him if he was an admirer of Bengali films, he affirmed in a Yorkshire voice that he was. Leaning his torso towards me, he said his name was Horace, and that Calcutta was his passion.

A retired schoolmaster, Horace funded his annual trips to West Bengal by conducting cut-price tours for people with an interest in Bengali cinema. Surprisingly, there appeared to be no shortage of customers. He had spent years studying Calcutta’s history – but Horace’s preoccupation was with the present, not the past. In his twenty visits to the city, the former prep-school master had gained a rare understanding of Calcutta, one that eludes most foreigners.

“Calcutta’s indescribable!” he called, clearing his throat. “Not because it’s reprehensible – it certainly isn’t. But because it’s an astounding mixture of every element of humanity. Westerners dwell on the sordid aspects, blinkering themselves to the city’s secrets. Focus only on the beggars, the diseased, and the collapsing buildings, and you miss the sheer ingenuity.”

“Ingenuity?”

“It takes an Eastern mind to decipher Calcutta,” said Horace, peering over the black frames which had slipped down his nose. “Ask a room full of Bengalis to look beyond the city’s day-to-day routine and, without hesitation, they grasp its reality.”

“What about foreigners?” I asked.

“Calcutta has a strange effect on them,” said the schoolmaster, glancing nervously round at the group of rowdy Scotsmen. “It tends to destabilize them.”

“What does?”

“Everything … but most of all the buildings. The sight of the once-majestic architecture, which now lies derelict, is too much for them. Haven’t you seen tourists tearing their hair out in the streets?”

I shook my head. But Horace wasn’t interested in feedback. He was only halfway through his lecture.

“Calcutta has moved on,” he mused. “The facades may be crumbling, the streets may be a mass of potholes, and the traffic a frenzy of heaving buses and suicidal driving. And, granted, it may be dark as night at three in the afternoon – but this is Calcutta, the ‘genuine article’.”

I gazed across to the guest house’s front door and wondered how I could escape through it. The teacher clapped his hands to regain my attention.

“We British doted on a city which didn’t really exist,” he said. “We put up monuments to our heroes, whitewashed everything in sight, enjoyed our liveried servants and our airy bungalows on the banks of the Hoogly. We got everyone speaking English, and saluting our kings and queens: all in desperation to create a Kensington in West Bengal. But as soon as we steamed away, after Independence, Calcutta – the real city – began to burgeon forth.”

Horace drew a deep breath. I sensed he was reaching the crux of his lecture.

“Fifty years on,” he said studiously, “and the true character is still percolating forth. Every day Calcutta becomes a little more rounded, more lived in and loved. Spend time here, and what at first seemed like utter chaos reveals itself as quite methodical. Calcutta has a way of arranging systems. As they develop, they provide security for those who need it. Open the mind to the wider picture. Scan about for a minute or two, and these systems become visible … they’re everywhere.”

* * * *

As I sauntered past Flury’s, a cafe which was the height of fashion in about 1922, I mulled over the schoolmaster’s remarks. How could he see systems in what was, for me, a random jumble of people? I hoped that one day I, too, would learn to decipher the city’s secrets. Although I tried to make sense of Park Street, all I saw was the endless blend of cars and beggars.

I did notice a respectable man fraternizing with the beggars across from Flury’s. He appeared to know them well. Feeling lonely, I went over and struck up a conversation. Calcutta’s the only city I know where you are actively encouraged to stop strangers at random for a quick chat.

The man was dressed in a blue coat, with leather suspenders, a silk handkerchief in his top pocket. His face was swarthy, his ears protruding, and his hair shiny as greasepaint. When I asked him about Calcutta’s mysterious underbelly, he – like Horace – was eager to share his information.

Known locally as Nondan – everyone in Bengal goes by a nickname – he had made it his business to help out some of the beggars living in central Calcutta.

“The streets are a window into a million lives,” he recounted, poetically. “Beggars are a part of our society. We mustn’t shun them, but help them whenever we can. Who knows what will happen to us next week, or next month? We may end up out here, begging for a living, too.”

Nondan led me down Park Street. Outside the affluent shops and expensive restaurants, weaving between the yellow and black Ambassador taxis with their fish-mouth grills or squatting in the deep monsoon gutters: there were beggars everywhere.

“Ask yourself why others don’t come to beg here, too,” Nondan said, pausing outside the Moulin Rouge – Calcutta’s version of the celebrated Parisian nightclub. “No beggar would turn down the chance of working on Park Street. But you see, the homeless here aren’t positioned randomly.”

“Of course they’re random, they’re wandering around!”

“No they’re not,” contested Nondan firmly. “Take that woman over there …” He pointed at an elderly woman, her head veiled with the end of her lilac-colored sari. “Like all of them, she stays within the area that she rents.”

“Rents!”

“That’s right – she pays about half of the money she makes directly to the Dadas.”

“Who’re the Dadas?”

“The ‘Big Brothers’ – the men in control.”

“A Mafia?”

“Well,” said Nondan hesitantly, “you could call it that. They demand protection money from all the beggars working this area. Anyone who doesn’t pay is beaten up.”

“There can’t be much money in it for the Dadas,” I said. “Why don’t they go and get into some more profitable line of business?”

Nondan rolled his eyes.

“Not much money in it!” he choked. “Are you mad? Calcutta’s beggars are a multi-million-dollar business.”

“Nonsense …”

“Do the math,” said Nondan. “Calcutta has at least eighty thousand full-time beggars. If each one’s making about twelve rupees a day and, say, they’re working every day of the year …” Nondan gesticulated wildly, counting on his fingers. “Well, I make that about … about three hundred and fifty million rupees … that’s about …” Nondan thought for a few seconds. “That’s about ten million American dollars a year between them. And that’s only Calcutta – all Indian cities have lots of beggars.”

As I went over the figures myself, Nondan gave a stern caution.

“Be warned,” he remarked. “When in Calcutta, never underestimate what looks simple.”

“What do you mean?”

“All right,” said Nondan, surveying Park Street. “Take a look at that woman over there. What do you see?”

“I see a woman – like any of the others – holding a screaming baby.”

“How old would you say she is?”

“About fifty. That must be her grandson in her arms …”

“Wrong!” exclaimed Nondan.

“Then perhaps it’s her friend’s child.”

“Wrong again! Remember – in Calcutta, nothing’s that simple. I know that woman. She hires the baby.”

“Impossible!”

Nondan regarded me with an austere glance.

“My friend,” he said gruffly, “this is Calcutta. Nothing is impossible. That woman doesn’t have young children, they’re all grown up. It took her years to get a spot in this part of town. She knows that people pay more if you’re crippled or have an infant – so she rents the baby. It costs her about three rupees a day. She looks after it very well.”

The arrangement seemed back to front.

“In the West,” I said, “people pay to have someone baby-sit their child.”

Nondan shook his head from side to side, as if condemning such a primitive system.

“Does the woman have to feed the baby?”

“Of course not,” he declared, irritated at my stupidity. “The baby has to wail – if it doesn’t, no one will give money. What better way of ensuring a baby cries than not feeding it?”

One had to admit that, although a little on the ruthless side, the system was ingenious.

Nondan knew his way around the secret world of Calcutta’s streets. His information was inspiring, yet one question bothered me.

“There’s one last fact I need to know,” I said.

“What is it?” asked Nondan, greeting some street urchins.

“Where do the beggars hire their babies from?”

Nondan looked at me as if I were an imbecile. Then, answering what was to him the most elementary question of all time, he replied:

“From the baby dealer, of course.”

* * * *

Throughout the night, the fleas gnawed at my ankles like hyenas ripping at a carcass. Unable to stand any more of the hostel, I rose early and went out into the sleeping city.

First, I explored the maze of New Market. Even at dawn the air was heavy with the aroma of breakfast, simmering on a hundred sidewalk stalls. Puchkawallas, Calcutta’s fast-food merchants, were busy cooking up snacks to tout to the mass of commuters who would be along shortly.

Chowringhee Road, the main thoroughfare, which skirts the east perimeter of the Maiden, was virtually deserted. Like an eighteenth century etching of imperial Calcutta, the scene was stark: with just enough locals to give perspective to the opulent buildings of the British Raj.

Indeed, at first glance, little seems to have changed. The occasional rickshaw, pulled by a barefoot Bihari, rattles past. A groomed yellow labrador strains at a servant’s leash. A bhishtiwalla, water-carrier, pauses to fill his damp goat-hide sack from a hand-pump. But a second glimpse reminded me that the British left long ago.

The facade of a classical pavilion is now racked with billboards, advertising facial bleaching cream. Its Corinthian colonnades are crumbling; its walls are stained with algae, devoured by acidic rain, splattered with torn posters of Marx and Lenin; and the pair of granite lions which flank the gates are headless and forlorn. I felt a sudden pang of sorrow that such imposing buildings are in decay. But then, as Horace had made so clear, Calcutta is a city with a firm agenda of its own. It’s an agenda of survival. What good is a pavilion the size of Buckingham Palace to an office worker or a rickshawalla? The sumptuous palaces and mansions of the Raj have been shed, like a great slough. Like snakeskins, they lie discarded: an empty reminder of the departed serpent.

* * * *

At eleven-thirty I hailed a rickshaw. Calcutta is one of the few cities in the world where traditional hand-pulled rickshaws still exist. The first ones were brought to the city by the Chinese, around the turn of the century. At the time, the method of transport was considered far more humane than the palanquin, an enclosed litter suspended on poles and carried by bearers. Calcutta’s authorities – who realize that rickshaws add to their city’s negative image – are phasing them out. But although humanely motivated, their abolition will put more than thirty thousand rickshawallas out of a job.

“Happy Christmas, Sahib!” said the rickshawalla.

I looked at the calendar on my watch. He was right, it was Christmas Day. I thanked God I was in a Hindu nation – Christmas and I detest each other.

I read out Feroze’s address.

“Haa, jadoowalla,” the rickshawalla sniffed. “Want magician house?”

I was surprised he knew of Feroze, and that he spoke some English.

“How do you know this man?”

“Everybody know jadoowalla!”.

“Mr. Feroze?”

“Yes, Mister Magician!”

Later, I realized that, although few people knew Hakim Feroze by name, virtually every rickshawalla knew him as jadoowalla, the magician.

The rickshawalla reeked of chullu, bootleg alcohol made from distilled grain. He was sleek, fine-boned, without an ounce of fat. His legs were slender as sunflower stalks, his hands rippled with muscle, and his back gleamed like a burnished sheet of newly hammered copper. Despite his inebriated condition, the rickshawalla moved through the traffic with hushed concentration, covering the distance of about three miles in less than thirty minutes. He pulled up outside a large, traditional Calcutta home in the Alipore district, just south of the Zoological Gardens.

Before he left, I asked him how he had learnt English.

“Sahib,” he said, tucking the ten-rupee note into his lungi, “was runner – Purulia post office, West Bengal.”

At first the explanation meant nothing. Then I understood. A throwback to colonial times, West Bengal is the only state in India which still employs a relay of postal runners. They carry cumbersome sacks of mail through the jungles and wilds of outlying areas. Over their left shoulder hangs a rounded ax – traditionally a defense against dacoits and wild animals. Across the right shoulder is slung a sack of letters. As with so many Indian professions, runners’ routes tend to be hereditary. But in recent times, the younger generation has preferred to leave the forests for work in Calcutta, where they become rickshawallas.

Before ringing the bell of Feroze’s home, I checked the time. It was exactly noon.

An elderly servant staggered to the front gate. Apologizing that Mr. Feroze was not yet home from his late-morning stroll, he invited me in to wait.

The manservant led me on a short cut to the house: past the kitchen, which was located in a vine-covered outbuilding, through its vegetable patch, and across the central courtyard to the veranda. The main house was a cross between a Mediterranean villa and a Regency mansion. It was square with two stories, a flat roof, and imposing lichened walls. The veranda, which spread out like a grand stone doily, was shaded by a simple tiled portico. On the upper floor, set back above the veranda, was a wide balcony, replete with a molded balustrade. Either side, twin sets of French windows, fitted with wooden jalousie shutters, looked out across the courtyard. Below them were more windows, their glass mottled and sagging like distorted carnival mirrors. A century or so of Calcuttan wear and tear had exacted a heavy toll on the mansion. Random lumps of plasterwork had fallen away, revealing ketchup colored bricks. The pronounced cornicing of the window-ledges had crumbled; and the granite lintel above the front door was split at one side.

Once in the main building, the bearer led the way through the vestibule and down a long, book-lined corridor. At the far end of the passage, I was forced to negotiate an overwhelming accumulation of unneeded odds and ends – a number of men’s suits, – tennis rackets, a bicycle, three crude wicker chairs, and a gate-legged table. The manservant apologized for the hazard, noting that the bric-a-brac was waiting to be taken away to a charity sale.

Feroze was obviously a man of considerable cultivation. The sitting room was well-appointed, its walls lined with lacquered shelves; its floor, an exquisite Arenberg parquet, was partially concealed by a Baluchi rug. A revolving bookcase in one corner of the room stored oversized books. A Steinway upright piano stood on the far side, with a folio of Chopin waiting to be played. The center of the reception room was dominated by three Bergère chairs, upholstered in off-white leather and complete with lace antimacassars.

The servant shuffled ahead methodically in a pair of worn out mule slippers. Ancient and asthmatic, he was bent like a billhook, his expression benumbed with age.

We arrived at Feroze’s private study. The orderly escorted me to a cabriole chair. Closing the door behind him with a bang, he left. The room was dark, the windows shielded by wooden Venetian blinds. It was filled with an unnerving chill, as if someone was watching me. The chair on which I sat was adjacent to a walnut writing bureau. Three precise piles of correspondence lay upon it. A cylindrical brass box held down one of the piles. Damascened in silver, with Islamic lettering, it had been crafted from part of an artillery shell. The base was inscribed, Berndorf, 1917.

There were books everywhere. Not novels, but volumes of substance, in many languages. Many were bound in quarter Moroccan leather, and numbered on the spine. About half were concerned with illusion, conjuring and magic. One complete shelf was devoted to the work and life of the eminent American illusionist, Harry Houdini. Another was concerned with the feats of India’s religious ascetics and godmen. A third held the teacher’s numerous stamp albums.

Opposite the Houdini books, adjacent to the study’s main door, a two-foot section of Kiswah hung framed on the wall. The Kiswah, an immense black cloth mantle, embroidered with gold calligraphy, is crafted each year for the Kaaba at Mecca. Weighing more than two tons, it takes a hundred craftsmen a whole year to weave. That a strip of the revered cloth hung in the study suggested that Feroze was a pious Muslim, a Haji, who had attended the Pilgrimage at Mecca.

Leading off from the study was a storeroom, filled floor to ceiling with papers, journals, and more books. Beside this was a second door. I rotated the cool brass handle. It appeared to be locked.

As I turned my attentions back to the papers on the writing desk, I heard the soles of leather shoes scuffing across the parquet of the sitting room. The study door flew open. I spun round. Standing to attention in the door’s frame was Feroze.

He was dressed in a black astrakhan hat and a spinach-green Ulster coat of Irish frieze. And on his feet were brown suede chukka boots. Curious attire, as it was seventy-five degrees outside.

“I see that you’re having a good poke around …”

“Excuse me,” I replied. “I’m inquisitive by nature.”

“What else are you by nature?”

“I am modest,” I said, immodestly.

Assuming my place again on the cabriole chair, I waited for Feroze to take the lead. He hung his astrakhan cap and coat behind the door. Then, without looking at me, he sat at the great leather-topped writing desk. He collected the papers from the surface of the desk, shuffled them into a single wad, and locked them away in a cupboard beside the desk.

“Why do you want to learn illusion?” he asked.

“I’ve always been interested.”

“Are you only ‘interested’, or are you passionate?” Feroze’s teeth chewed on his words.

“I’m passionate,” I said, “but I realize that to be superlative, one needs an extraordinary teacher, and,” I said, hoping to make an impact, “I understand you are an extraordinary teacher.”

Feroze was not interested in whimsical flattery.

“Tell me,” he growled, “do you do as you’re told? Are you obedient?”

“Yes … I think l am.”

“If I became your teacher,” he said, “would you ever question me?”

“Would you want me to?”

“Answer my question.”

“I would question you if, by questioning, I could advance my understanding.”

The Master nodded.

“If I told you to do something,” he went on, “would you do it, even if it were painful?”

What tortuous designs had he in store? I sensed Hafiz Jan watching from afar, chewing on his fingers. Then I answered with circumspection.

“Sir,” I said, “if you asked me to do something, I’d make every effort to fulfill the command.”

Getting to his feet, Hakim Feroze picked a pair of navigational calipers from his desk and fingered them as he contemplated. Gazing out of the window to the central courtyard, with its mature mango tree, he forced the ends of the calipers together.

“Hafiz Jan was, as I told you, one of my best pupils,” he said. “He had passion; he loved illusion. It’s always saddened me he had an ancestral position to fulfill.”

Feroze broke off and stared at me. While he stared, I could feel him scrutinizing not myself, but my own ancestors.

“I know Hafiz Jan would not have sent you,” Feroze continued, “unless you meant a great deal to him. For this reason,” he said, again glancing into the courtyard, “I will give you one chance.”

I smiled, rearranging myself on the confined seat. Outside I could make out the shrill voices of carol singers at the property’s gates. The servant was calling for them to go home.

“I am not a patient man,” quipped Feroze. “If you fail any order, any task, I will ask you to leave.”

“Thank you for having faith in me.”

“My friend,” said Feroze derisively, “please note that I have no faith in anyone at all! Tell me, where are you staying?”

“Near Park Street, in a guest house.”

“Go and get your things. You are moving in here where I can keep an eye on you. This house is run along precise lines. Do you understand that?”

I gave a thumbs-up. Hakim Feroze glowered disapprovingly at my gesture. Toying with the calipers, he crossed the room. I noticed he was now wearing a pair of sturdy Oxfords. Odd, as I hadn’t actually seen him remove the stylish boots he’d arrived in.

“Once you’re within the walls of this house, you do as I say. You get up when I tell you to; eat what I tell you to; and follow my exact orders.”

“How am I to address you, Mr. Feroze?”

The magician ran a fingertip across the top edge of a picture frame, checking for dust.

“People like to call me ‘Master’,” he replied.

“When am I to begin lessons?”

Feroze snipped the calipers like castanets. Then, scowling across at me, his green eyes shimmering like fire-opals, he shouted:

“Immediately … We start immediately!”

PART TWO

The public see only the accomplished trick;

they have no conception of the tortuous

preliminary self-training that was necessary

to conquer that fear.

J.C. Cannell, The Secrets of Houdini

SEVEN

Calcutta Torture

At the center of Feroze’s courtyard, beneath the boughs of the mango tree, I stood to attention like a sentry. Chest out, heels clicked together; spine straight as a ship’s mast: frozen to the spot, like a hare before a car’s headlights. This was a proud moment. It was the moment for which I had longed. I felt accepted: secure in the knowledge that my apprenticeship with a famous tutor had finally begun.

Arms outstretched like those of a crucified convict, I awaited further instructions. Despite initial confusion at the odd training, I complied with unflagging respect: anxious to make a good impression on my first full day.

Lesson One: stand in the yard with arms extended sideways; palms turned upwards; fingers splayed outwards like a starfish; ten grains of rice on the left palm; a single peeled grape on the right. The drill’s relevance eluded me. But with one misplaced foot or questioning glance enough to merit expulsion, I obeyed in what soon became silent agony.

Every quarter of an hour I was permitted to rest both clenched fists on my head for a single minute. Each bout would be timed by Feroze’s precious silver pocket-watch; a possession which was never far from his hand. The respite’s end was signaled by three clinks of a teaspoon on an enameled mess mug. The cup hung from the Master’s belt like a rabbit-foot talisman. Every so often he left the shade of the mansion’s impressive veranda. Haughty as a llama, he would step over to ensure the grape was dust free, and that the ten grains remained as he had placed them.

The weather was unusually hot for late December. The heat of the winter sun seared down through the branches of the mango tree. I bore what I believed was unbearable. Twigging with electric spasms of pain, my arms quivered as if about to snap. Little did I know that, as the austere initiation into the magician’s world progressed, I would soon be craving the grape and rice ordeal.

The drill came to an abrupt end. With talons slashing like bayonets, a buzzard swooped down from the mango tree and seized the grape. As the colossal wings flapped around me, I tumbled to the ground. Feroze dropped his newspaper and marched over. I exhibited the gashes on my forearms, moaning loudly, hoping for pity. But the magician was not the sort of man concerned with trifling flesh wounds. He preferred broken bones.

“Did you see that?” he said.

“See it? Didn’t you notice me wrestling with it? Look at my wounds.”

I held out my arms once again.

“Butastur teesa, the white-eyed buzzards … don’t see those in Calcutta very often …” sniffed Feroze. “I think he might be making a nest up there. Better start keeping an eye on it.”

Yanking the mess mug up from his belt, he struck it thrice with the teaspoon. On to the next task.

Lesson Two: strip down to your boxer shorts and crawl around the courtyard on your stomach, picking up fragments of sea-shell. Stop only when you have found two hundred fragments of shell.

There is nothing quite as unpleasant as wearing a pair of briefs which have been trailed through a Calcutta courtyard. Nothing, that is, except having one’s elbows and knees lacerated by unseen slivers of glass and discarded razor blades. As I fumbled forward, whimpering, shards of broken bottles pierced my skin, and I struggled to think righteous thoughts.

Scholarship, my conscience cautioned me, is about making sacrifices. Success in any field always depends on forfeiture. Although unorthodox, the trials must be preparation for my studies in illusion. Without these basics, I told myself, I’ll never get through the course.

After three hours of crawling in zigzags like a maggot, I had managed to locate only three pieces of shell. One of them was questionable.

Feroze came over to inspect my work.

“Put them in this,” he said, dropping a rusty tobacco tin next to my bloodied elbow.

The sound of shells falling into the box displeased the teacher. Instead of a hailstorm, there was a dismal ting, ting, ting.

“Oh, dear,” Feroze said gruffly, “that won’t do. That won’t do at all. Better keep on at it.”

“There aren’t very many shells round about here,” I lamented, my nose pressed into the dirt.

But Hakim Feroze did not hear me. He had already marched back to the shade.

Three hours later, I had located another seven pieces of sea-shell. As I probed about haphazardly, I wondered how many other poor neophytes had been subjected to the same ordeal. The lack of shells implied that I was not the first. Had Hafiz Jan been forced to do this, too? I felt sure he had. Was this the terrific baptism by ordeal of which he had so persistently warned me? The more I thought about the regime, the more questions remained unanswered. Was the shell-picking a ritual to which all initiates of magic are subjected? I suspected not.

When afternoon had turned to evening, the magician returned from taking a nap. He was clean-shaven, dressed in a crisp gabardine shirt, herring-bone breeches and honey-yellow brogues. He looked down at me slithering around on my stomach, like an alligator. The front part of my boxer shorts had virtually disintegrated. Like a newly evolved chameleon-mole hybrid, my weary and injured body attempted to adapt.

Feroze pulled out his pocket-watch, studied it for a moment, and put it away. I gaped down at the muck and then back at the Master. A second before he had been standing tall, inspecting me like a drill sergeant on parade. Now he was reclining in a deckchair. I hadn’t seen him sit down, or even set up the seat.

“You’re pretty filthy!” he sneered as if surprised at my condition. “It’s almost eight o’clock. You better go and wash. Ask Gokul to give you something to eat and get you a mattress. We’ll begin early in the morning. Make sure you sleep well.”

“Thank you,” I said meekly, unsure of what exactly I was giving thanks for.

Gokul, the frail manservant, appeared from nowhere and helped me to my feet. After spending much of the afternoon on my belly, the abrupt transition from slithering reptile to Homo erectus was not an easy one to make. Sensing the problem of readjustment, Gokul instructed me to lie on the veranda. He removed his sandals, and climbed on to my back. Prancing up and down my spine like a gymnast on a beam, he nudged his toes into the dips between the vertebrae. Then, after I’d had a steaming bath in the servants’ antique cast-iron tub, he applied tincture of iodine to the raw wounds on my underside.

After this, he led me to the kitchen.

“Hot all day on stomach,” he said, cheerily.

“Yes, it was quite hard. Quite dusty.”

He opened a steaming pot and served me a bowl of daal and sukto – fried, diced vegetables.

“Tomorrow will be a nice day,” he said, as if hoping to elevate my spirits.

“Yes? Do you know what Mr. Feroze has planned for me tomorrow?”

A nervous expression crept across the manservant’s face.

“Eat more daal,” he said. “It make you strong.”

* * * *

The first phase of the initiation continued for seven days. Each evening Gokul would straighten out my back with his rubbery feet, apply iodine to my lacerations, and darn my boxer shorts. When Feroze’s piercing gaze was not upon me, the good-natured servant would throw over a chunk of coconut, or slip me a mug of bracing tamarind juice.

Each day seemed to bring a new and more horrible trial.

Lesson Three: dig a hole in the courtyard – two feet square, two feet deep – using a dessert spoon. The spoon may only be held in the left hand.

Lesson Four: jog round the courtyard backwards, holding a five kilogram block of sackcloth-covered ice. Stop only when the ice has melted.

Lesson Five: blindfolded, sort a jar of dried rice and lentils.

Lesson Six: catch twelve live cockroaches in a tin mug. No props permitted.

After a full week of the torture I could endure little more. The drills were exacting a heavy toll. My legs were afflicted with housemaid’s knee and my spine seemed permanently distorted. My hands had been badly slashed; my elbows were ridged with welts; my stomach was bruised like a plum fallen from the highest branches of a tree. My face had blistered, and my eyes were bloodshot and bulging after so many hours in the dazzling sunlight. The wounds were made worse by the lack of healing time, and the constant reapplication of dirt.

Feroze no longer signified a man of great skill and refinement. I had begun to despise everything he stood for. Always immaculate in tailored finery, with his hair slicked back like the barbs of a moist feather, his face scented with aftershave, he was the diametric opposite of what I had become. Even when blindfolded, fumbling for rice grains, I could sense him bending over me. A whiff of lavender eau de toilette preceded him, alerting one to the random inspection.

Perhaps the magician really had a deep-seated hatred of Hafiz Jan. Was torturing me the most pleasurable route to revenge? But then again, the Pashtun had warned me constantly of Feroze’s merciless methods.

A cross between a foreign legion boot-camp and a secret-society initiation ritual, the ordeals were grounded in pain. One thing was obvious: the agenda, which was dedicated to grave discomfort, had been drawn up by a passionate sadist.

Feroze relished the ever-expanding curriculum of tribulation. The more pain that was inflicted, the more successful the lesson had been. I was kept going by the idea that all the hardship might be leading somewhere.

The unconventional assignments were graded by an equally off-hand system. The few times I had managed to comply with the instructions, I was condemned more vigorously than if I had failed. The whole thing left me confused and further enfeebled.

As if the courtyard ordeals weren’t enough, additional chores were added to the schedule. In the middle of the night, Feroze would appear in my dingy, roach-infested room in the servants’ quarters. How he got in, I don’t know. After the first nocturnal intrusion, I kept the door bolted from the inside and a chair pressed up under the handle. I would have queried how he had traversed the barricades without disturbing them, but he was not the kind of man who took kindly to his movements being questioned. He would chime three times on the mess mug. The signal for my attendance.

“Yes?” I would wheeze, still half asleep.

“I want you to learn this Bengali poem. I will test you on it later.”

Four printed sheets would be dropped on the floor.

“But I don’t read Bengali.” I would murmur, knowing well such an excuse was not satisfactory.

“Then Feroze would say, “you had better find someone who does.”

Long before dawn, I would rouse Gokul from his slumber and beg him to read me the poem. Without an uncivil word, he would go through the stanzas.

At dawn, which was commencement time for lessons, I would ask the magician to test me on the poem. Sometimes he would do so. But on other occasions he would ask:

“Have you learnt it?”

“Yes, I have,” I would reply.

“Then what point is there in testing you? We aren’t in kindergarten now, you know.”

* * * *

At six p.m. on 31 December, Feroze came over to where I was lying face down like a fallen soldier. For most of the day I had been crawling on my knees, ferrying teaspoons of dirt from a bucket at one end of the courtyard to another at the other end.

I was close to tears. Until then I had maintained some sort of composure. During the first week there had been no mention of magic. For all I knew I had joined the wrong course.

Feroze’s ruthless regime had finally broken me. Dirt was still finding its way into the rent skin of my elbows and shins. My right knee, now copiously bandaged with strips of rag torn from an old sheet, was despicably damaged.

As always, Feroze was oblivious to the distress he had caused. Bending over me, he ruffled his shoulders like a rooster marking its displeasure. He handed me a fluffy handkerchief with which to wipe my nose. I buried my sunburnt face in the cool folds of silk and blew very hard. Plugs of compacted Calcutta dirt were discharged at high speed, like darts fired from a blow-pipe. It was a satisfying feeling. Unable to stand up unaided, I stretched up in the hope of returning the handkerchief to the magician. With a horrified grimace, he waved the cloth aside.

Rapping once on his tin cup, Feroze signaled for Gokul. The faithful valet pottered out from the kitchen. The staff of four servants had been trained to recognize their own individual signal, all of which were tapped out in Feroze’s own form of Morse.

“Gokul,” he instructed, “please help Mr. Shah to his feet. See that he’s bathed. Make sure his ears are very clean.”

“Yes, Sahib!”

“You won’t be staying here tonight,” Feroze said, peering down at me.

“Oh?”

“You will be spending the night on Park Street.”

Images of a whirlpool Jacuzzi and a double bed with crisp linen sheets overwhelmed me.

“Should I go and stay in a hotel?”

“That won’t be necessary,” replied the magician dryly. “I have arranged something special for you. Gokul knows the details. He’ll escort you.

“As I extracted the grime from the inner reaches of my nostrils and ears, I found myself filled with new energy. Park Street: Calcutta’s answer to Piccadilly … what could be a more capricious contrast to the teacher’s compound?

The manservant led me out into the street. It was already dark. Under his right arm was a brown paper package, tied up with string.

“Where are we going, Gokul?”

The servant chose not to respond verbally. Instead, with a solicitous expression, he looked me in the face somberly. Then he gazed down at the mysterious package.

“Are we going to a New Year’s party? Will there be fireworks?”

Gokul was silent.

“Is that a gift you’re holding?”

Still Gokul said nothing.

When the taxi ground to a halt at the quiet end of Park Street, I began to question exactly what was going on.

“All the fancy hotels are the other end of Park Street,” I said.

“Yes, all at other end,” replied Gokul.

“There’s nothing down this end except for some paan stalls, gasoline stations and …” Remembering the third thing which Park Street was well known for, I fell silent with mounting distress. “Paan, garages,” I recapped, “and the South Park Street Cemetery!”

Gokul ducked his head in confirmation. He was not taking me to a lavish fun-filled New Year’s bash, but to the cemetery – where I was to spend the night. Alone.

“Gokul,” I whispered as he pushed open the wrought-iron gates of the British burial grounds, “is there any chance we can come to an arrangement?”

The servant made it known that corruption was not a possibility.

“Master may be checking up on you,” he replied sternly. “Cannot cheat.”

We passed the gatehouse, making our way down one of the main paths to the end of the expansive graveyard. Without warning, Gokul froze in his tracks, placed the packet on a mid-sized tomb, and wished me luck. He would be back for me in the morning.

Turning on his heel, he walked through the blue-tinged darkness back to the gates. I sensed his fear of the cemetery; but despite it, he marched away with reserved dignity.

When he had gone, I opened up the parcel, fumbling its contents in the darkness. Inside were a candle, a box of matches, a nylon blanket, a handful of dates, six deep-fried samosas, and a low-quality pamphlet about the cemetery.

Park Street Cemetery is a fascinating place. Were it not for the abominable circumstances of my visit, I might now be publicizing it more enthusiastically. Built on what were once the furthest boundaries of the city, the cemetery is almost in the center of the modern Calcutta.

Deserted by everyone, even Gokul, whom I had begun to consider as a true confidant, I pondered what to do next. Within minutes my eyes adjusted to the unrelenting darkness. A high mildewed wall surrounded the entire graveyard, shrouding the disconcerting world within. Beyond it, I could hear the clash of evening traffic, enlivened by the prospect of ushering in the New Year. The wall was like a barrier between two worlds. Unfortunately for me, I had crossed the River Styx, into Hades.

Anxious to preserve morale, I decided to treat the night as a military reconnaissance exercise. This approach would keep me focused and might dispel any trepidation at enduring a night with the dead.

First I repeated my grandfather’s trusted maxim: Time spent on reconnaissance is seldom wasted. Then I tightened the muscles of my back, like a hunter stalking his prey. I was ready for a preliminary exploration.

With the candle burning brightly, I slunk forward, inching down overgrown paths, taking in the assortment of tombs. Pyramids – no doubt inspired by those at Giza – rose up into the night sky. Roman cupolas were dotted about like bandstands at Brighton. Wherever I stepped, there stood imposing monuments of stone – mausolea the size of country cottages; faced with Carrara marble, topped by imposing granite urns.

Flicking through the pamphlet in the candlelight, I read the history. Founded in 1769, the cemetery was closed twenty-three years later, bursting at the seams with Englishmen. Some of the most illustrious children of the Empire are buried there. The Calcutta they knew was very different from the modern city. Then it was a place of fearful illness, where the feeble expired in agonizing deaths. Struck down by cholera, rabies, smallpox, malaria and tuberculosis, the tender European constitution had little chance. Many more were slain by mysterious diseases of unknown name. The tomb of Jane Eliza Maclean – who died in 1826, five months after reaching Calcutta – records that her death was due to “one of the fatal diseases incident to the climate of India”.

As some perished at the hand of exotic disease, others met their end through lifestyle. Drink was the most notable executioner. But others died by more startling methods. Sir John D'Oyly, the sixth baronet and former Minister of Parliament for Ipswich, was buried at Park Street after expiring from “a nervous complaint due to an inordinate use of the hookah”. Another, Rose Aylmer, a girl of seventeen, was buried beneath a glorious twisted cenotaph, having expired from “eating too many pineapples.”

The largest of the pyramids was Elizabeth Jane Barwell’s mausoleum. It served as a landmark in my night wanderings. As I stumbled through the low undergrowth I came across many extraordinary graves: a great-granddaughter of King Charles II; a great-grandfather of William Makepeace Thackeray, and a son of Charles Dickens. They rest in the tranquility of their garden at the center of one of Asia’s most unwieldy cities.

Overshadowed by sprawling pongamia trees, planted by the British, the cemetery was more like an enchanted druid grove than an antique burial ground. Strangely, I felt no misgivings walking there at night. This sense of ease was perhaps because, in India, one can never be truly alone.

At its south-east corner the brick wall had been breached by a great hole, the kind which an iron cannonball makes. Through the opening I could easily make out the tail-lights of Ambassador taxis. They beckoned me like a mirage. Why not make an escape? Sneak into town for a gourmet meal … a night on the town … then skulk back to the cemetery before dawn. It was a fine plan. Lowering my head, I glanced left and right. Silence.

I made my way to the huge aperture. But someone was following me. I heard footsteps approaching from behind. I swung round, terrified. No one was there.

“Who is it?” I called.

“Where are you going?” said a voice, in fluent English.

“Nowhere,” I spluttered. “Just going to have a look at the hole.”

“You mustn’t leave the cemetery!”

“Oh,” I replied apprehensively. “Who are you?”

A figure slipped out from behind a crumbling tombstone. I squinted to get a better look at him. It was a boy, aged about fifteen. He was barefoot, dressed in a light-colored shirt and a checkered lungi. His back was long as an archer’s bow, his movements spry and over-accentuated.

“You’re supposed to stay here!” he shouted.

“Yes, I know. But how did you know?”

“It’s my business to know,” he said. “Come and sit with us.”

“Us?”

The cemetery’s brochure had said that brigands once lived in the tombs. It said they buried their treasure in pits between the mausolea. Was this a juvenile brigand? How did he know about my latest hardship?

“Come and sit with us,” repeated the young man.

“Who are you?” I asked again.

“My name’s Topu. I live here with the others,” he said, motioning me to follow him.

We came to a crude home-made tent. Located well away from the gatekeeper’s lodge, it was concealed from the main graveyard by a low earth bulwark. Outside it, three others – about the same age as the first – were hunched around a fire. They showed no surprise at seeing a foreigner.

“They don’t speak English,” said Topu.

“Are they your brothers?”

“No, we’re friends.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I told you already, this is where we live.”

“You live in the graveyard?”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing, I suppose.”

The boy clicked his knuckles.

“Of course we get thrown out quite often,” he said. “The workmen rip down our tents and burn them. But we always come back. Just outside the wall, a free soup stall is set up every morning. We’re usually first in line.”

“How did you know I was meant to spend the night here?”

“A man came and told us to watch out for you.”

“A man …? Was he an old, well-dressed man with a mustache?”

“Yes, he was old and very well dressed. He gave us a hundred rupees.”

“Feroze!” I choked. “He hired spies to make sure I didn’t cheat.”

“The man asked us to watch out for you,” said the child.

I had endured enough of Feroze’s barbaric treatment. Even when stripped of all dignity, abused like a convict in a Siberian gulag, I had put a brave face on things. But this time the magician had surpassed even his own despicable record. Beside me, the four boys stared into the flames – their faces illuminated like those of choirboys at a midnight Mass. For me, this, the year’s final night, was its most unconventional; for them, it was another night in a life spent under the open sky.

I had come in search of stage magic, and was spending New Year’s Eve in an abandoned cemetery. India has a way of perceiving what one lacks, before surreptitiously prescribing its own antidote. Rather than grounding in conjuring, was I getting what I really needed instead?

One of the boys held out a piece of burnt chapati. It tasted surprisingly good. Remembering that I, too, had a little food, I brought out the dates and samosas, and passed them round.

“This is a big graveyard,” I said, breaking the silence. “Why don’t more people live here?”

“Hundreds of people used to,” replied Topu, biting into a samosa, “but then they were thrown out when the cemetery was cleaned up. A lot of criminals lived here till recently.”

“Yes, I read that.”

“It’s true,” continued the boy. “Some of them hid their loot in the ground. There’s lots of treasure here. They even stole the skeletons to sell to the konkalwallas.”

“Who are they?”

The boy raised both his eyebrows at once. Lowering his voice, and leaning towards me, his face bathed in marigold light, he explained:

“The konkalwallas buy bodies dug up from cemeteries and from the unclaimed body dump. They dip them in an acid bath and then ship the bones abroad.”

“Who wants skeletons?”

“Schools that teach doctors, of course …” Topu paused to stuff another samosa into his mouth. “But now it’s illegal to export skeletons.”

“So has the business died out?”

“No, it’s just much quieter now. It’s gone undercover.”

Topu knew so much about the used-skeleton business that I suspected he was himself somehow involved in the illicit trade.

“How did you learn such good English?” I asked, changing the subject.

“I used to help at my friend’s bookstall at College Street. It sold medical textbooks. My friend taught me to read and speak English.”

“What do you do now?”

“Well,” said Topu, “we do odd jobs.”

“Why don’t you look for the cemetery’s buried treasures?”

Without saying a word, Topu looked across at me, and smiled.

The sound of Calcutta’s rooks woke me to the first sunrise of the year. Flapping their immense wings like pterodactyls, the great black birds soared round the graveyard, swooping down between the monuments. I looked at my wristwatch. It was already seven o’clock. I glanced round. The boys had fallen asleep, curled up beside the smoldering fire outside the tent.

Anxious that Feroze, or even Gokul, didn’t realize I had met the boys, I prepared to creep back to where I had left the manservant.

Topu heard me clambering to my feet. He opened his eyes and sat up.

“See you again,” he said.

“Yes, I hope so.”

“If you need anything in Calcutta, you know where to find us.”

“Thanks, Topu, I’ll remember that.”

The cemetery was as serene by day as it had been at night. Its tombs seemed distinctly out of place, like the remnants of a lost world. I could imagine with ease the solemn colonial corteges lowering their loved ones by torchlight. Brothers of the Raj, who had lived and died here – they were of another time. Like the opulent imperial buildings they had constructed, the mausolea at South Park Street were no longer on Calcutta’s agenda.

At eight o’clock Gokul found me, propped against Elizabeth Barwell’s pyramid, wrapped in the pink nylon blanket.

“Did you sleep?”

“Like the dead.”

“Good, Sahib,” he brooded, “because Master waiting for you.”

As the taxi pulled to a halt outside the Alipore mansion, I found myself yearning for the cemetery. At least I could do what I liked there. For someone who had come to India in search of magical tuition, I was accomplishing very little. Hafiz Jan had taught me more in my attic bedroom twenty years before. I rebuked myself for not persuading the Pashtun to take me on at Burhana. As I contemplated the situation, Feroze strolled over from the veranda.

“Happy New Year! How was your evening?” he asked.

“Quite interesting. I’ve learnt all about Park Street.”

“Meet anyone out of the ordinary?”

“Not especially.”

As usual, Feroze wasn’t listening.

“Tahir, please follow me,” he said in a loud, exultant tone.

The Master had used my first name. I hadn’t realized he even knew it.

“Where are we going?”

Feroze led me into the mansion: a place which, until then, had been out of bounds. We ascended the winding teak staircase with its exquisite carved banister. Once on the first-floor landing, the magician slipped a brass key into the lock of a solid white paneled door. A click to the left and the door swung open.

I entered an ample lavender-walled chamber. The room was dominated by a spectacular mahogany four-poster bedstead, with plumped-up pillows, scatter cushions, and an embroidered eiderdown. For a man who had spent the night in a cemetery, it was a sight for sore eyes.

Opposite the bed stood a pine commode; its front panel hinging down to reveal a washbasin and miniature shaving mirror. Standing in the far comer was a rosewood davenport, inlaid with ivory marquetry and geometric lines. The room smelt of naphthalene mothballs.

“As a New Year’s gift you can stay in here,” exclaimed Feroze.

“I’m fine out there in the servants’ quarters,” I replied meekly.

“Are you really sure?” rejoined the Master.

“Well, if you’re pressuring me to stay here,” I said, bouncing my hand on the bed, “I don’t want to disappoint you.”

Feroze scoffed: “As far as I’m concerned, you’re welcome to stay out there with Gokul!”

Without another word, I grabbed the key and followed the teacher downstairs. Had the reign of tyranny now come to an end? Would I at last be getting on with serious work?

I would have to wait and see.

“Show me your hands,” Feroze snapped once we had reached the study.

When my fists were presented before him, he observed them carefully, inspecting the skin between each finger. His piercing scrutiny took in the torn nails, the lacerated digits and bruised palms.

Sighing with a veiled hint of pleasure, he began to speak:

“It’s essential that when I tell you to do something, you do it – perfectly,” he said. “Only then can you progress as a student in the field of conjuring. Now,” he continued, “you have proved to me that you can obey … that you can be obedient.”

Feroze stood up and peered out the window in meditation, composing his thoughts. Rather than trying to drive me away, the trials of submission – as they were now being advertised – seemed similar to those employed by the Special Air Service. The British elite fighting forces adopt a regime of reduced severity. They begin training with the hardest exercises and work backwards. The approach serves to purge the stragglers at the first hurdle – hacking away the dead wood. Although damaged, perhaps beyond repair, I could rest assured. Like a sprightly young sapling, I was free from dead wood.

“Now that they’re over, can you tell me what relationship the ordeals bore to stage magic?” I inquired.

“You mean holding out the grape; digging with the teaspoon … crawling around for shells … all that?”

“Yes, all that … What relation did it have to the studies?”

The Master clicked his heels together and coughed.

“All that,” he quipped, “had nothing whatsoever to do with illusion or magic!”

“Then why did I have to go through it?”

Feroze’s face clenched tight with anger.

“Are you contesting my judgment?”

“Certainly not.”

“You say you want to learn about illusion and conjuring,” he blustered, regarding me straight on. “Before you learn anything … before we start work … there are some things that you should understand.”

“Of course.”

“You must remember that this is India. And in India, illusion is different from the version you find in the West.” Feroze paused to take a deep breath. “In India, illusion, magic, conjuring, sorcery – whatever you call it – is not a frivolous, whimsical thing. It’s an extremely serious matter. It’s a tool of incomparable capacity.

“Every day across this country,” the Master persisted, launching into a harangue, “people use illusory techniques for different reasons. Sadhus, healers and mendicants, mystics and astrologers, so-called ‘godmen’, and street entertainers: they all use stage magic. Some perform tricks to make an honest or a dishonest living. Yet through illusion, ordinary people realize their dreams of amassing astounding wealth and magnificent power.

“Remember what Europe was like two or three hundred years ago.” Feroze paused to unfasten his cuff-links. “People were superstitious. They believed in witchcraft, in magic, in miracles, and in all kinds of supernatural powers. Look throughout India today and you’ll find people with precisely the same beliefs. Pick anyone at random out there,” the magician motioned to the street, “pull a gold watch from thin air, and they’ll believe it’s real magic.”

Feroze was right. In the West we dismiss conjuring as mere sleight-of-hand. Everyone knows that a magician’s card trick is exactly that – a trick. But in India, simple feats of deception are enough to draw a following of thousands.

I have spent my life studying illusion,” said Feroze pointedly. “I have studied the effect of conjury on a man’s psyche; the intensity of a ‘miracle’ used in an Orissan village; and the power of the simplest trick seen by the pious in Varanasi.

“I have traveled through India’s most remote regions and its greatest cities: always searching for one thing.” Feroze stopped talking. He wiped a hand across his mouth. “I’m searching for those whose lives depend on deception: for those who conjure miracles for the masses!”

I leant back in my chair, watching as the sorcerer crossed the study. First he locked the door. Then he marched over to the bookshelf dedicated to Houdini. The shelf had been positioned at eye level. Or, rather, at nose level. Pressing his nostrils to the spine of the left-most volume, Feroze moved to the right, smelling each book in turn. As he sniffed, he tensed the muscles of his back, clenching his fists. He appeared to gain strength from the exercise. Only when he had smelt each book did he continue with his lecture.

“Now you have shown that you can follow orders,” he went on, “I am willing to go on to the next step. In due course I will teach you some of my techniques. It’s up to you to do with this knowledge what you will. When you have learnt from me, you may decide the material’s too powerful a tool ever to use. Only you can make that decision.”

My attention was distracted by the sound of two vehicles smashing together on the street outside. I peered out to have a good look, hoping that I might spy the carnage through the back hedge. Realizing that the blood and gore was out of sight, I swiveled round to face Feroze. But he had vanished.

The study’s door was locked from the inside. Its key was still in place. The two other doors leading from the room were also locked, as were the windows. I searched for a trapdoor, a secret lever … but with no success. The only possible clue lay beneath the Houdini bookshelf. Inky black and as thick as treacle, I found a pool of high-viscosity engine oil.

EIGHT

Sorcerer’s Apprentice

“To be a great illusionist,” said Feroze definitely, when we had convened for work at six the next morning, “you must study the experts.”

“Which experts?”

“First, you must immerse yourself in Robert-Houdin and Houdini, Cagliostro and Kellar. Then there are the illusions of godmen, sages and sadhus – India’s own sublime conjurors – to be examined.”

Dressed in equestrian costume, replete with jodhpurs, knee-length riding boots, and a hound’s-tooth coat, Feroze motioned with a bull’s pizzle riding crop to a set of shelves.

“Those are the classic texts,” he said. “You must read them all and learn them. But before that, there’s much preparation to do. Preparation is what it’s all about!”

The Master had taken down a biography of Alessandro Cagliostro, the eighteenth-century Italian illusionist and mountebank. He held the leather-bound volume in his hands, caressing the tooled spine with his fingers as if it were a bejeweled reliquary.

“Before Cagliostro can become your confidant,” he hissed, “there are other studies to attend to … Before Cagliostro’s wickedness comes Houdini’s genius.”

The monologue was interrupted as Gokul knocked at the door with a tray of tea. Feroze pointed the riding crop like a saber at the manservant’s chest, and then at the coffee table. Shuffling to the table, like a child in its mother’s shoes, Gokul dispatched his load.

“During your studies,” said the Master in a calculating tone, “I’ll disclose shocking things. You may scream when I reveal the truth. But to discern any of the courses, you must grasp a single key point.”

“I will try to understand it,” I said willingly. “What is it?”

“One central element links all the greatest masters of stage magic and conjuring.” Feroze poured himself a cup of tea and breathed in the steam as if it were perfume. “Each of them recognized the crux of all magic.”

“What’s the crux?”

One had to wait for answers. Feroze controlled his material, rationing it at will.

“Nothing in illusion,” he went on, “is so important as the cross-fertilization of information.”

“What do you mean?”

Feroze swished an “F” with his riding crop.

“Harry Houdini’s maxim …” he roared. “Polymathic proficiency makes a magician!

“Your studies must include multiple areas – both theoretical and tangible. Mathematics, chemistry, the arts, and psychology.” Feroze paused to gulp his tea. “Then you have to grasp everything from beekeeping to doxology!”

“Doxology?” I replied, limply.

The magician rubbed his chin, troubled at my lack of rudimentary knowledge.

“Doxology,” he elucidated, “the study of hymns.”

Leaving no time to consider the importance of such an under-patronized area, Feroze continued with his discourse:

“It’s upon these foundations that a magician builds,” he said. “There’s no point in learning a trick if your mind isn’t sufficiently exercised and developed. Preparation forms the first part of your curriculum. Complete the groundwork and you can move on. The illusions themselves are the next section. Then …” Feroze said, stretching, “then comes ‘insider information’.”

“Insider information? What’s that got to do with magic?”

“Excelling in illusion,” explained the Master, “is all about learning secrets and applying them. Find out a man’s trade secret: first, you have unlocked his puzzle; and second, you have a chip of information which – somewhere down the line – you may be able to apply yourself.”

Feroze’s course seemed comprehensive, but I was startled at the lack of hands-on training. Wouldn’t it have been better to cut to the chase and get on with the tricks themselves? I had so many questions, but when I expressed them, the magician would simply scrunch up his eyes and answer with another question:

“How long is the course to be?”

“How fast do you learn?”

“How much do you charge for the tuition?”

“Did you pay your father for teaching you to swim?”

“Why do you always answer one question with another question?”

“Do l?”

* * * *

Work began at six each morning, with four hours of private study, mostly from terse scientific textbooks. As with the grim trials of the courtyard, much of the academic tuition appeared pointless. What illusionist needed to know the full Periodic Table, Linnaean terms for cacti, or Boltzmann’s Constant?

As the schedule developed, I started to learn more of Feroze’s abnormal nature. Never before had I met a man so preoccupied with time and detail.

Considering meals as an absolute waste of time, he permitted exactly twelve minutes for each one. Even then, he only picked at Gokul’s offerings, rarely eating more than a mouthful or two. Lunch was taken at five past ten. A period of four hours followed, in which I was instructed on a wide range of sciences and unrelated areas. These ranged from coin collecting to the monastic architecture of thirteenth-century France. Dinner was consumed at five past two in the afternoon. After dinner, I was left to tackle the ever-expanding list of assignments and readings.

The odd timings of Feroze’s life, and his senseless concern for minutiae, suggested he was a man haunted by an extreme condition of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Only a true obsessive would go as far as timing every feature of his day. A pocket-watch was always within easy reach of the magician’s hand. Sometimes I would catch him noting down times: how long it had taken him to drink his tea; to walk from the kitchen to the study; to read a chapter of text; or to peruse his post.

The rigid agenda for everything began to drive me mad. But what I was subjected to was nothing in comparison to the magician’s private regime.

Gokul, a devoted servant of many years, knew each of his master’s eccentricities. Laughing them off, he listed a handful of the many obsessions one morning.

“He likes everything just so. His bath always at forty-five degrees; always shaves with seven sweeps of blade; shirt buttons fastened with the left hand; shoes must be replaced each day; his toenails clipped on Wednesday nights; the clothes in cupboard are hung facing west; he stirs tea clockwise, and coffee anticlockwise; he never enters or leaves a room without pressing his thumb to the doorknob twice; and,” said the servant, smiling, “he cannot sleep unless window is left open exactly three inches.”

“Tell me, Gokul, what happens if any of these compulsions are forgotten?”

The servant jumped to his feet in a rare display of verve. Gaping at me, his face rigid with terror, he spluttered:

“No! No! Nothing ever is forgotten!”

* * * *

At first I was rather lackadaisical about my studies. Although challenging, the curriculum was a far cry from the misery of the courtyard ordeals. The cockroach-free room, with its soft bed and exquisite furniture, was a great improvement on the servants’ quarters. But self-assurance soon turned to consternation, as the monumental workload began to take its toll. Feroze appeared to have no idea of the limits of a human’s capacity for study.

Each day he piled dozens of treatises, books and heavy calfskin volumes before me. “Another one or two for your pile,” he would smirk, loading five more editions atop the great ruck of books. As I stacked up the publications, I perceived the awesome artistry of the magician. His was a plan of unscrupulous cunning: first lull the student into a false sense of security: then bury him in work. Not content with damaging my body, he was now preparing to injure my mind.

The days began to pass, and I found myself exploring new thresholds of knowledge. I was learning about all kinds of things. All kinds of things, that is, except for stage magic. When Feroze caught me secretly reading one of Houdini’s books, he vented his rage.

“Finished with your other studies, have you?” he said, snorting like a charging warthog. “Well, you’d better plough on with these!” Half a dozen volumes on environmental pollution were thrown at me.

“Why do I have to study all this garbage?” I protested.

“Learn to prepare your mind,” said Feroze with placid reflection. “Without a foundation, even the mightiest building will collapse.”

“But I just want to learn something about conjuring! That’s what I came for … to learn about magic!”

The Master gazed at his pocket-watch. He remained silent as the second hand wound round in miniature increments. Two minutes went by. I waited for the order of expulsion, recompense for my outburst. But it didn’t come.

Instead of exile, Feroze doubled the workload. Every hour, the routine became more Draconian. Anything but a perfect score was unacceptable. Work graded below this – considered by him as sub-standard – was ripped up in a new orgy of humiliation. In the few instances praise was meted out, it was so brusque that most people would have regarded it as a mild rebuke. “Life,” the teacher would say, inspecting his knuckles, “doesn’t recognize good and bad – just excellence.”

Only after three nights in the four-poster bed did I genuinely understand the true genius of Hakim Feroze.

Rather than a soothing berth for a weary head and dislocated spine, the bedstead was a foul accessory of persecution. On Alcatraz, penal offenders were afforded one luxury: each morning they would be given a piping-hot shower. But instead of being a gesture of compassion, the scorching showers had a more devious purpose. Had the convicts grown used to icy water, they would easily have been able to survive in the surrounding waters of San Francisco Bay. In the same way, the lavish splendor of the new bedroom was designed to weaken me. After the third night I resolved that, henceforth, I would sleep on the floor.

The disconcerting sleeping arrangements were only one of many peculiarities a pupil resident at the mansion was required to withstand. The ceaseless workload and stringent system of trials and exams, the strange meal timings, studies of fringe fields and dawn sessions … none was easy to get used to. But no idiosyncrasy of the household unsettled one as much as Hakim Feroze’s inexplicable feats. By “feats”, I don’t refer to conjury. I had enrolled to become proficient in that art, and was fascinated by it. Rather, I allude to the Master’s other abilities – some of which seemed to have a grounding in what can only be called the occult.

How else could he change his shoes at will; or, in the dead of night, gain entry into a bedroom bolted from the inside? What explanation is there for popping up in different parts of the house without moving a step? How could he know the most recent details of people who had lost touch with him years before? Or, for that matter, how could he absorb information, “reading” by holding a closed book in his hands?

When I turned to Gokul for answers to the constant stream of inexplicable behavior, he avoided eye contact. Gazing at the ball of dough he was kneading in the kitchen, he said with ominous and uncharacteristic fluency:

“Do not ask these questions … dangerous questions make for dangerous answers.”

My interest in sleight-of-hand was built upon a foundation of skepticism. But the longer I spent at Alipore, the more unnerved I became at the prospect of bona fide necromancy. For the first time in my life I found myself doubting the foundation of cynicism that had always been my bedrock. On the one occasion that I confronted the Master directly, he exclaimed I was imagining his feats to be occult.

“True magic”, he contended, was nothing but successful illusion.

But my thoughts had already begun to churn … Was there such a thing as legitimate witchcraft? If there was, could Feroze be a real sorcerer, capable of genuine magic? Whereas godmen claim their conjury is “real magic”, was Feroze maintaining the opposite – that his real magic was an illusion?

As time passed, I found myself scrutinizing Feroze as closely as he was observing me. Like a pair of goldfish in bowls, placed opposite each other, we watched and watched … desperately hoping to catch the other out. I yearned to witness Feroze perform a feat of real magic. And he longed to discover gaps in my studies – which were to him a carte blanche to inflict chastisement.

* * * *

The low point of each day was the ritual of examination. With no advanced warning, I would be commanded to enter “examination stance”. The posture, which must have been borrowed from an elaborate Masonic ritual, was truly bizarre. Feroze insisted that the pose helped one concentrate. By this, I think he meant it helped him concentrate. I would position two chairs two feet apart in the center of the study. An indigo-colored velvet blindfold would be passed to me. Fastening it tightly about my eyes, as if readying myself for a firing squad, I would ascend. When in place, with my left foot on one chair, and my right on the other, the unrelenting inquisition would begin.

The exam took the form of five random questions. Any mistakes and I was expected to endure a further five questions. Feroze delighted in the fact that I had never managed to answer all five correctly. The examinations provided him with hours of entertainment.

A last-minute check that the blindfold was tight, and the test would begin:

“Tell me, what’s Coulomb’s Law?”

“It’s the fundamental law …” I would murmur uneasily.

“Louder! Louder! I can’t hear you, boy!”

“It’s the fundamental law which states that the electric force of attraction or repulsion between two point charges is proportional to the product of the charges and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.”

In any other examination one might have expected applause. But Feroze was not concerned with what I knew – he was searching for pockets of ignorance.

“Next question … What is the Joosten Process?”

“Um, er,” I would stutter. “But I studied that ages ago.”

“Again: what is the Joosten Process?”

“The Joosten Process is …” I would hold my head in my hands, taking care to keep balance astride the two chairs. “It’s the use of a chemical reaction between solutions of calcium chloride and sodium silicate to consolidate running soils or gravels when tunneling.”

“Third question … on the Mahabharata …”

An excruciating pain shot down my right side as I heard the title of the Indian epic. The tale, consisting of 220,000 lines, was a subject which obsessed the magician. Claiming to have committed most of the incredible narrative to memory, he said it was fine preparation for any student. Without doubt the greatest narrative poem ever recorded, it’s a feat to understand the convoluted plot of the Mahabharata, let alone to remember it.

“To start with,” he crowed, “tell me what happened after Dhritirastra captured the Kuru throne?”

“Well, as Dhritirastra was blind, his brother – Pandu – assumed the responsibility of governing. But a curse led his brother to relinquish his position. Dhritirastra took control again, as Pandu went off with his two wives to live a life as a hermit in the Himalayas. Now, Pandu’s five sons …”

“Enough! Tell me who wrote the poem.”

“No one knows for sure,” I replied, “but legend has it that the complete tale was dictated by Vyasa to Ganesha, the elephant god. Supposedly, Ganesha agreed only to undertake the job on the grounds that Vyasa didn’t stop for even a single break. The pace was furious, with Ganesha struggling to keep up. At one point he broke off a tusk to use as a pen after his stylus seized up.”

“All right!” barked Feroze. “Enough of that. Tell me, what is occipitalla?”

The sudden switch from Hindu mythology to cranial osteology was not an easy change to make.

“It’s the set of cartilage bones forming the posterior part of the brain casing in the vertebrate skull.”

“Last question … a bonus one. Tell me, what is …” The Master would rub his fingertips together as if counting a bundle of banknotes. “What’s the chemical formula for monosodium glutamate?”

“Impossible!” I would exclaim. “No one could remember that formula.”

Feroze would smile wryly.

“You know the rule,” he would say. “Tell it to me loud and clear!”

Like a law of physics, I would run it off: “Any error on the part of the student, however insignificant, permits the tutor to extend his examination with a further five questions.”

“Quite so!” the Master would shout. “Now, give me a minute while I think of some more.”

Feroze’s strict emphasis on subjects entirely unrelated to conjury became a bone of contention between us. The courtyard exercises, even the obscure mathematical formulas, may have had some bearing on the core subject. But surely, I pondered, before turning over to sleep, surely there was no need to study areas as esoteric as barbed-wire collecting and bagpipe infections.

Since I had come in from the cold of the cemetery, sleep had begun to elude me. Each night it seemed to take longer to drift off. My thoughts bounded from one recently studied subject to the next, as I struggled to get comfortable on the floor. First, it was the theory of quantum mechanics. Next, Russian espionage terms; followed by Indian cookery. After that came the ubiquitous heroes of the Mahabharata. As if highlighted by eerie cosmic search-lights, the stage of my subconscious mind ran wild. Krishna slipped a secret KGB code to a quantum physicist, while cooking up a dish of murgh mussallam.

As I thrashed about to rid myself of the vision, there came a scratch at the door. I sat bolt upright. The scraping came again. High-pitched and unwelcome, like a baby’s scream at dawn, it was repeated for a third time. As usual, the door was bolted from inside. There was no way he could get in. But as usual, he was already inside the bedroom. Sensing my insomnia, Feroze had arrived to offer his most effective soporific: an impromptu examination.

* * * *

Obsessive-compulsives often suffer from deeply entrenched fears. If you’re obsessive, there’s nothing quite so satisfying as being obsessive about a phobia. For years I’ve been keeping notes on phobics and obsessives. My note-taking is, in itself, bordering on the obsessive. Casting an eye through my notebooks, the correlation between obsessive-compulsive disorder and phobias becomes obvious. I’ve noticed that, the more extreme the obsessive, the more ludicrous the phobia. A friend of mine, who’s extremely obsessive, has pognophobia, a fear of facial hair. Show her a man with a mustache and she flips out.

With the Master’s disorder so pronounced, I felt certain that in the darkest reaches of his mind there was a choice, ripe phobia waiting to be exploited. It was just a matter of isolating this Achilles’ heel.

Nothing is so enjoyable as poking about someone else’s belongings. Abandoned by the magician, who had gone to meet his old friend Rublu, I laid down the treatise on phonetics, slipped into the study, and pressed the door firmly shut. Then, closing the blinds, I got down to business. Just a little poke about, a riffle through Feroze’s stuff … in search of his Achilles’ heel.

Although confined, the room was a cloister dedicated to illusion and the unusual. For the Master, the magical arts could only be conquered by his true infatuation – polymathic study. His office was testament to this curious fixation. Its walls were lined with lacquered oak bookcases, their numbered volumes arranged by subject. The shelves pointed to a man with a staggering range of interests. The titles included gems like: Selected Cuisine of Papua New Guinea; Advanced Volcanology; Cannibalism: A Question of Morality; and Elementary Techniques of Cosmetic Surgery.

The space between the bookshelves was a mosaic of medals, framed diplomas, photographs and awards. At the center of the arrangement, in a deep glass frame, was a golden twelve-pointed star, mounted on pink silk – a breast badge of the Sudanese Order of Distinction. Beside that, in another display frame, was hung an enameled neck badge, suspended on tricolor silk – the Order of the Niger, Third Class. Under it, between a Fijian military medal and the Gallantry Cross of Malawi, shone a silver and gold medallion, The Star of the Solomon Islands. Below the medals was a simple framed letter of thanks from Juan Perón of Argentina. Beside it hung a diploma from the Ecole Le Cordon Bleu de Paris. Lower down, below a pair of inscribed ceremonial jambiyas, curved Arabian daggers, was a studio photograph of an elderly black man with a trumpet at his lips. The picture was inscribed with the words “To my dear friend Feroze, all the best, Louis.”

A glass-fronted cabinet, tucked away behind the chesterfield sofa, provided yet more clues to the Master’s varied past. More than a dozen assorted silver trophies recorded his excellence in sports as eclectic as archery, rowing and epee. Beside the cabinet, a mahogany Prescot long case clock recorded Feroze’s obsession with time.

The drawers of the walnut writing bureau contained correspondence with well known writers, politicians and scientists. I scanned several of the letters. Most seemed to be thanking the Master for his judicious advice.

My being taken on as a student of such an unlikely man was astounding. Feroze was renowned as a magician, but his skills extended far beyond the realm of illusion. He was a polymath of prodigious scope. His skills, it seemed, were unlimited. Cordon Bleu chef, expert cartographer, linguist and scientist; authority on encryption and theoretical physics; arbiter on the stage of international relations; accomplished musician; connoisseur of ballet, opera and cinema; aficionado of philately – this was a man of unrestrained capacity. He was many things to many people. To me he was a slave-driver thirsting for blood. But, I counseled myself to remember, beyond that, he was my teacher.

Respect was one thing. Survival was another. It was important that I kept my priorities in the right order.

After an hour of rummaging around, I gave up. Not a hint of a phobia anywhere. Then I had an idea. If Feroze had an Achilles’ heel, there was one man who would be sure to know it – Gokul.

I hurried out to the kitchen. The frail manservant was chopping up vegetables.

“Gokul, I’ve been playing a hilarious game!”

The servant looked up and grinned.

“What game?”

“Well, you have to reveal what makes you more frightened than anything else. For example, I detest cockroaches … can’t stand them for a second.”

“Oh, and I hate a snake,” beamed Gokul, surrendering his own phobia.

“What about the Master?” I laughed. “What is it that he can’t stand?”

Stabbing the chopping knife into the board, Gokul stared at me coldly, his features locked in a fearful expression.

“There is something the Master not liking,” he said.

I leant forward, pretending to smile.

“Tell me what it is and we can carry on with the game!”

The sides of the servant’s mouth turned downwards.

“Can’t tell you.”

“C'mon, it’s only a game.”

After ten minutes of cajoling, Gokul agreed to divulge what he knew. He made clear he was only doing so in the spirit of sportsmanship. Bowing close to me, he whispered:

“Rubber bands. The Master hates rubber bands very very very much.”

Anyone who had not spent years jotting down people’s obsessions and phobias might have been surprised by Gokul’s information. However, I had heard of the rubber band phobia before. A friend once told me of how, as a child, she was introduced to the late financier Sir James Goldsmith. All was going well. Then, lapsing from her best behavior, my friend flicked an elastic band across the room. It landed at Sir James’ feet. The billionaire, so the story goes, became deeply disturbed.

Thanking Gokul for playing the game so well, I hurried back to the study. I searched the shelves, the desk, its drawers, the table-tops and windowsill. Not a single rubber band to be found. My face distorting maliciously, I returned to the sitting-room and to my studies. Nothing to fear now … I had Feroze by his Achilles’ heel.

* * * *

The pressures resulting from the Master’s reign spiraled out of control. A mysterious and virulent rash developed on my left shoulder. Within three days it had spread down to my elbow. When I exhibited it to the teacher, he explained it was dhobi’s itch – an unpleasant eruption of the skin, more commonly found on the inner thighs. In exceptional conditions it had been known to travel. Feroze instructed me to wash the area morning and night in potassium permanganate solution. A few days later it disappeared.

When I was cured, the Master made an announcement. It was almost time to move on to the next stage – to the actual study of illusion. The proclamation seemed long overdue.

“When will we be starting the new phase?”

“When you have passed the final exam!”

Although held in the customary “examination stance”, the final test would take a new form. Instead of fielding a series of specific questions, I would speak on a single subject of my own choice. If my deliberation was unsatisfactory, I would have to retake the complete segment of study. By “unsatisfactory”, the Master meant a single slip or inaccuracy. The test was scheduled for five minutes past five the next morning.

The thought of reliving the rigors of the previous three weeks was enough to turn anyone’s blood cold. Before retiring to bed that night, I mugged up the most esoteric topic I could think of. Feroze craved the extraordinary … I would give him the cutting-edge in outlandishness. My head was heavy on the pillow that night; my eyes bloodshot and circled by brick-red rings. The next morning would prove my worth.

The aggravated levels of stress revealed themselves before the night was through. Gokul found me crouching beneath the courtyard’s mango tree just after two a.m. Inspired by a mysterious dream, I had sleepwalked out of the mansion and into the yard. The tree had been calling to me. It told me to climb up into its branches, saying it would hide me from the tyrannical Master. It had once been a pupil, too, but having failed the final exam, the sorcerer had transformed him into a mango tree. “There’s one hope of escaping and dissolving the spell,” the tree called out in my dream. “Find a rubber band!”

Taking the fingers of my hand in his as softly as one would a butterfly; Gokul led me back to bed.

Three hours later, I was blindfolded and straddling a pair of cabriole chairs in Feroze’s study.

“Had a nice somnambulation?” he asked, rolling the syllables like marbles around his mouth.

“It’s the pressure,” I gasped. “It was beginning to get to me.”

“Are you ready for your little test?”

“Yes.”

“What’s your chosen subject?”

“I’ve selected the strange case of the Man in the Iron Mask.”

Feroze raised his left eyebrow.

“Dumas?”

“No, the other one.”

“What other one?”

“Harry Bensley … the lesser-known Man in the Iron Mask.”

“All right!” blustered Feroze, placing his pocket-watch on the desk. “You have four minutes to speak about your Man in the Iron Mask, starting … now!”

“In 1907,” I said, loosening the velvet blindfold, “Lord Lonsdale and John Pierpont Morgan were relaxing after a heavy lunch at their club. The two millionaires discussed matters of national importance before turning their attentions to more trivial concerns – namely, whether a man could walk around the world without showing his face. American financier J.P. Morgan felt sure it was impossible. His associate, sporting peer Lord Lonsdale, was certain it could be done. Without further ado, each placed a bet of $100,000 backing their claim. Now the millionaires needed someone foolish enough to undertake the assignment. Fortunately for them, a young man named Harry Bensley was also present in the smoking-room.

“A playboy by profession, and aged thirty-one, Bensley jumped at the chance. Investments in Russia provided him with a substantial income, permitting him to enjoy a life of leisure. Tired of the tedium of the club, he volunteered his services.

“Lonsdale and Morgan drew up an agenda of strict rules: Bensley would wear an iron mask at all times. He would push a pram on his journey around the world, and would set off with only one pound in his pocket. No luggage was permitted, except for a single change of underwear. Bensley would have to pass through a specified number of towns in Britain, then at least 125 cities in eighteen or more countries. Other stipulations were that he was required to find a wife on his journey, who would agree to marry him without seeing his face. The trip would be financed by Bensley himself, by selling postcards from the pram. An escort was employed by the two millionaires to ensure that the strict rules were not infringed.

“Strapping the four-and-a-half-pound iron helmet to his head, Bensley set out from Trafalgar Square on the first of January 1908, pushing a two-hundred-pound iron pram.

“For the next six years he pushed the pram across twelve nations, including the United States, Canada and Australia. More than two hundred women petitioned him for his hand; but he declined them all. Then, in August 1914, Bensley arrived in Genoa with only six more countries to visit. With the onslaught of the First World War, he was forced to call off the remainder of the trek. On his arrival in Britain, Morgan and Lonsdale offered him a consolation prize of $4,000, which he gave to charity. He enlisted soon after. Unfortunately, in 1917, with the Bolshevik Revolution, his Russian investments were nationalized. Harry Bensley died impoverished in 1956, in a bedsit in Brighton.”

When I had finished the tale, Feroze directed me to descend and remove the blindfold. Outside in the courtyard Gokul was peeling potatoes. It was not yet six a.m.

The Master stood up and strode over to the shelves which contained his magical texts. Without pausing, he removed a book from his Houdini collection. It had a torn violet dust jacket.

“This is for you,” he said, passing it over with both hands.

I read the title aloud:

“Houdini’s Magic.”

Feroze nodded.

“The Magnificent Houdini,” he said, frowning. “Acquire his eye for detail, develop his sense of timing, perfect his skills, master his tricks and …”

The magician fell silent. His nose twitched, the nostrils distending sharply.

“And … and what?”

Feroze smoothed a hand over his mustache.

“You will know when you have become it,” he said.

NINE

Swallowing Stones

The morning light drenched Feroze’s study like syrup, illuminating its gilt frames and warming the lacquered bookcases. Outside, a pye dog had found its way into the courtyard and was marking its new territory with a chorus of melancholic howls. Dogs rarely ventured anywhere near the mansion. A man who came to sharpen the knives told me in broken English that, like all animals, they were fearful of the Master’s witchcraft. Long ago, he said, Feroze had put a spell on a thief, turning him into a mange-ridden mutt.

Rublu, the hunched acquaintance, had turned up for a cup of tea and a twelve-minute lunch. Only a friend of many years would tolerate bolting down the midday meal at five past ten.

Feroze sat cross-legged on the study floor. He had removed his shoes and had undone the top three buttons of his twill shirt. Rolling up the cuff of his left sleeve, he asked me to take his pulse. I applied my index and middle fingers to his wrist. The rhythm seemed normal.

“Keep your fingers there,” instructed the magician.

I edged closer. Pushing his shoulders back, with his palms upturned, mouth closed, and eyes staring forward like a zombie’s, Feroze began to meditate. His body was soon trembling. Within seconds, he had fallen into a trance, a state known to Indian mystics as dhyaan, literally “concentration.” His eyeballs rolled back in their sockets. A trace of foamy saliva oozed from the right corner of his mouth. Crouched only inches from the Master, I watched with awe as something quite astonishing happened. Feroze’s pulse grew slower. And slower. Then it stopped altogether.

Concerned that my teacher was about to expire, I called out to the hunchback. His head bobbed up from the newspaper.

“His pulse – it’s vanished!” I yelled.

“Relax,” said Rublu, returning to the crossword. “I wouldn’t worry too much.”

“How can you be so unconcerned? I think he’s dead!”

“Really!” scoffed Rublu from behind his paper. “Better call an undertaker then.”

A spry Scottish nurse, who had been dressing an Afghan mujahed’s gangrenous leg, once passed on to me a trick of her trade. To check if someone’s dropped dead, tug both their earlobes down twice, as hard as you can. If they’re alive, they wake up. Until that moment I had never had a chance to try out the tip. But far more enticing than testing the nurse’s information was the prospect of yanking Feroze’s ears. On the off-chance he was still alive, a brusque yank of the lobes would pay him back for the suffering he had inflicted upon me.

So, stretching out, I grabbed the Master’s earlobes, and as if I were milking a cow I wrenched them twice.

The result was immediate. Feroze’s eyes spun back into position. His body ceased quivering, and his pulse was instantly normal again.

“I brought you back to life!” I clamored, my hands still clamped to his ears. “Even Rublu thought you were a goner!”

“I thought nothing of the sort,” puffed the hunchback.

“Nonsense,” declared the Master, rubbing his sore earlobes. “It was nothing more than a simple illusion. And, next time, leave my ears alone!”

“But, your pulse disappeared. You died … It was I who brought you back. I'm incredible,” I gasped, staring in disbelief at my miracle working hands.

“You aren’t incredible,” corrected Feroze. “But it is … What you saw was incredible. First I died. Then returned from limbo. If I were a godman, you might have fallen down and worshiped me. But unfortunately, I an illusionist, and I performed a simple trick.

“Anyone can return from the dead – they don’t have to be zombies,” said the magician. “This is the first piece of stage magic that you are to learn.”

Feroze slipped his right hand inside his shirt, and withdrew a miniature object from his armpit.

“This,” he said, holding up a walnut, “is the secret of returning from the dead.”

I might have asked how a humble walnut had played a part. But I was embarrassed at being taken in by what was now being hailed as a deception. Uplifted that my hands-on magical training had at last begun, I paid close attention.

“The illusion is elementary,” intoned Feroze when he had buttoned up his shirt. “First, stick the walnut in your armpit, and pretend you’re going into a state of pologi. Next, gently press down on the nut. The trembling of meditation masks the contraction of one’s shoulder muscles. Soon, as you saw, the nut reduces the pulse, by pressing on the axillary artery.”

The Master instructed me to clear away all the notes I had taken up until then. The trials beneath the mango tree had been a preparation for my body; and the random tutorials had prepared my mind. With the groundwork completed, the stage was set for the real lessons to begin.

It was with trepidation that I entered the new phase of instruction. But the prospect of at last getting down to serious magical scrutiny after the long build-up was thrilling. So appealing was it that I became blinkered to the anguish of the previous sections of the course. In a single, depraved moment I counseled myself to forgive and forget … to work towards détente. The regime had changed. I was already learning the magic of godmen.

The Master replaced the tarnished silver cuff-link at his wrist. Its familiar design – a set-square and compasses – confirmed my suspicions: Feroze was a Freemason. I had seen no overt symbols of Masonry in the mansion, but since we first shook hands at the Albert Hall, I had had little doubt. Feroze had pressed his right thumb between the knuckles of my middle and third finger: the cryptic sign of a Master Mason.

“Rublu,” he said dryly, “please excuse us for a moment.”

Opening the glass-fronted display cabinet, the magician snatched a square-edged key from one of the trophy cups. Then, leading me to the door beside the store-room, he slipped the key into the lock, clicked it anticlockwise, and pressed his thumb to the doorknob twice.

“Come with me,” he whispered, pulling the door towards him. “From now on this is where you will be studying.”

The chamber beyond was a scientist’s laboratory. Stinking of astringents and gamy meat, it was stone-floored and windowless, with pastel-blue walls. A broad workbench filled much of the space. Upon it lay an array of alembics: distillation retorts, test-tubes, beakers, Bunsen burners, a Van de Graff generator, and an assortment of chemicals. A thick layer of oily olive-black dust covered everything. Cobwebs dangled from the ceiling like silken parachutes; and rat droppings were scattered everywhere like hail. I showed surprise that a workplace should have fallen into such a state of disuse.

Well,” Feroze snapped curtly, “I told you I’d retired!”

Gokul was called. With a brush in one hand, and a rag mop in the other, he set to work spring-cleaning the laboratory. The magician led me back to the study. We would start lessons in the lab in due course. He launched into one of his many passionate orations on the theory of magical science. This time would I be given an opportunity to practice tricks?

“First,” said Feroze, as the crash of a glass flask echoed next door, “think of the word ‘illusion’. Ask yourself what it really means.”

I mulled over the question.

“It means ‘the effect of …”

Feroze interjected: “It means something that deceives by producing a false or misleading impression of reality.”

I repeated the magician’s definition; but he had already moved on.

“As I told you before,” he expounded, “you have to study all the great masters of illusion. Watch for what they find important … learn their techniques of sleight-of-hand … see how they manipulate a crowd … question everything that the audience does not. Then,” commanded the Master, “Practice, Practice, Practice!”

Gokul shuffled through the study in his mule slippers, ferrying a dustpan of rat droppings outside.

“But beyond all else,” grunted Feroze, his concentration unbroken, “you must pay attention to detail. From now on, detail – any detail – is of prime importance. Become a connoisseur of detail, and you will excel as an illusionist.”

“Is detail more important than the tricks themselves?”

“Of course the illusions are key,” replied the Master, “but you can go away and devise your own deceptions. I won’t be standing beside you forever. Before you leave me, your eyes have to be looking in the correct places; your ears must be tuned to pick up the right frequencies.”

The long-case clock chimed noon.

As if signaled to move by a clarion call, Rublu sprawled out on the chesterfield and promptly fell asleep. He must have had a hard life. His clothing was disheveled and reeked of stale tobacco; his shoes were scuffed, and his spine hopelessly contorted – most probably from years slouching in a stifling Calcutta office.

Feroze noticed me glance over at his friend.

“Close your eyes,” he ordered. “Now, tell me: what’s Rublu wearing? Describe his clothes in as great detail as you can remember.”

The disorderly figure slipped into my mind.

“He’s wearing brown lace-up shoes,” I reported. “His shirt is white; his cardigan is a sort of dusty green; and his pants are a blotchy shade of blue, I think.”

The magician was unimpressed at my description.

“Where was the detail?” he contested.

Closing his eyes, Feroze began to speak:

“Rublu is wearing one of my old cotton shirts. I believe the tailor called the shade of cloth ‘cornhusk’. It has a spread collar, an accentuated yoke, single cuffs, two gusseted breast pockets, in-box pleat and mother-of-pearl buttons. Over the shirt, he’s wearing a fern-green V-neck cardigan, knitted in moss stitch, with a single welt pocket on the left side, and with light ribbing on the cuffs. The cardigan is fastened by six elm-green shank buttons. His pants are tailored from a lightweight polyester-rayon blend.” Feroze paused for several seconds, his eyes twitching surreptitiously beneath their lids. “I recall that they have turn-ups,” he continued, “and button flies, a knife pleat and, as for the color … it’s Dresden blue.”

“Very good,” I sniffed. But Feroze had not yet finished.

“His shoes,” he went on, “are rather inferior Calcutta-made buffalo half-brogues. If I not mistaken, they were made in the Chinese district of Tangra. The leather has been dyed a rather uneven tint of iris leaf gray. The shoes’ back cuffs have been trodden down; the lace-tags are severely frayed; and the vamps are badly creased – a result of poor Rublu’s posture. I think that’s about it …” The sorcerer opened his eyes and smiled. “Oh no,” he remembered, “I quite forgot his wristwatch: it’s a Titan chronometer with a steel casing and a vinyl strap. It loses between three and six minutes a day.”

Feroze set an example which was hard – if not impossible – to emulate. He considered the observation of detail to be the most important factor in the course. “Learn to perceive the smallest insignificance,” he would say, “and the rest will follow.” This approach, I soon learnt, had been preached by the century’s most famous illusionist, Harry Houdini.

As I studied more of Houdini’s methods, I began to realize the similarity between his character and that of Feroze.

Both men understood the unlimited strength of conjuring and illusion – especially when used in the developing world. Both were arrogant beyond the point of reason; both accepted nothing short of miracles from their students; both were masters of crowd manipulation and showmanship, and were preoccupied with observing minutiae. Yet most significant of all, both were tormented by obsessive-compulsive behavior.

Now he had reached the main body of his course, Feroze moved speedily from one illusion to the next. After an initial demonstration, I was expected to explain how each trick was accomplished, before repeating it myself. Many of the simplest illusions involved sleight-of-hand. Although easy to grasp, sleights require hours of frustrating practice to perfect.

In India, one deception is performed by godmen and religious pundits more frequently than any other. It involves the sprinkling of silvery white holy ash, known as vibhuti. The chalky dust is materialized from nowhere by spiritual leaders and shaken on to the palms of their devotees. The faithful generally lap at the ash with their tongues. Anyone with the ability to produce vibhuti is considered to have supernatural powers.

I protested that the exercise would be of little use to me, for I had no intention of becoming a godman. Feroze insisted that mastering vibhuti would develop my sleight-of-hand abilities. Adept conjurors, he said, can eat, drink tea, and write with one or two of the pellets hidden in position – lodged in the web of skin between the thumb and forefinger. With a single circling movement of the hand, they can withdraw the pellet and crush it with the fingertips.

Feroze demonstrated how to make the tiny pellets. A quantity of perfume and ash is mixed in a pan with a few drops of kanji, starchy water in which rice has been washed. Stir in enough ash and one gets a form of dough. Pea-sized beads of the preparation are dried, ready for use.

As I had suspected, the practice schedule of the routines was relentless. Feroze introduced ten new illusions a day. He expected me to master each one before the next morning. My demonstration of the previous day’s tricks was followed by a random quiz on the life and work of famous illusionists. After that, I was ordered to describe an object of his choice in infinite detail.

Despite the concentration-camp style of Feroze’s tutelage, the study of illusions was supremely satisfying. The rules and regulations which surrounded every aspect of life at the house were still unbearable. The only consolation was that, for the first time, my concentration was applied to studies, rather than survival. Finally, I was learning what I had come to learn.

As I practiced the experiments in the hush of Feroze’s laboratory, it was as if I had traveled back two decades in time. I could almost sense Hafiz Jan breathing down my neck as he leant over the desk in my attic. To be learning from the man who had taught the Pashtun gave me a rush of joy. I was certain Hafiz Jan would feel proud that his own teacher had accepted me.

* * * *

One morning, Feroze came to the laboratory carrying a faded shoebox. A series of holes had been poked through the top with a ball-point pen. Placing the carton at the far end of the desk, the magician tested me on the illusions studied the previous day.

First, I demonstrated the “smoking fingers” routine. A mixture of yellow phosphorous and carbon disulphide is prepared, with a ratio of 1 : 6. Two drops of this are applied to the thumb and forefinger. When the two fingertips are rubbed together, a plume of smoke rises upwards from the hand.

Next, Feroze commanded me to sip a cup of tea and take dictation with two pellets of vibhuti concealed between my fingers. I complied with reasonable success. After that, he directed me to burn a cube of camphor and place it on my tongue. Despite regular practice sessions, the experiment is always distressing. A piece of camphor a little smaller than a sugar lump is set alight. As the flames lick upward, it’s quickly thrown on to the tongue, and the mouth is snapped shut. The cheeks glow for two or three seconds as the fire burns inside. Many Indians believe that camphor will only burn when offered in front of an idol. Although impressive to an audience, the trick is not overly dangerous. Even when the camphor is burning, the bottom of the cube – resting on the tongue – stays relatively cool. Before the fire has a chance to burn the saliva-coated tongue, carbon dioxide exhaled from the lungs extinguishes the flame.

Other illusions followed. Feroze awarded points for performance and general style. As one might expect, he was parsimonious when it came to awarding high grades. I never received more than three out of ten for any illusion.

When I asked what was in the shoebox, the magician called for me to describe the piano in the sitting-room. He disliked others steering the agenda. For the first time I could relax: the piano was my trump card.

“It’s a Steinway upright piano,” I asserted, “manufactured in Hamburg, with a standard eighty-eight-note keyboard. The keys, which are elephant ivory, have yellowed with age. Those most frequently played have worn down slightly at the ends. The middle-C key is cracked, filled at some point in the past with window putty. The casing is veneered in seasoned walnut, with a mahogany base frame. Its top flap has a circular scuff, where a jardinière may have stood. The brass pedals are well-polished; but the fronting board, into which they slot, is stained where the polish has spilt over on to it. One of the casters has broken off and has been replaced by a single book. I believe it’s a 1913 edition of The Land of the Peaks and the Pampas, by Jesse Page, bound in geranium-red cloth.”

When I had finished, Feroze twisted the knurled crown of his pocket watch.

“Is that all you can tell me?”

I nodded meekly.

“What about its sounds … its smell … or the way it feels to touch? What about its inner workings? How could you leave out all the most important details?”

The teaching profession, I recalled, attracts two types of sadist. The first, although ruthless, secretly hopes his students will improve. The second, who employs fierce, malignant methods for their own sake, couldn’t care less about the wretched pupils. Feroze was quite obviously that type.

“Enough of the piano,” he said with sinister delight. “Time for something rather special.”

Moving over to the far end of the table, he dislodged the lid of the shoebox and, with some care, lifted out a curled viper. With the snake’s head in his left hand, and its tail clasped between the fingers of his right, Feroze stretched the reptile straight.

“This morning,” he intoned, “I am to teach you one of the oldest and most important of all magical tricks. We are to turn a rod into a serpent. This illusion has beguiled both kings and peasants for over three thousand years. It’s shrouded in mystery, and is as significant in magical lore as the rope trick, the bed of nails, or even levitation. Master this, and you will be performing a trick that was key to the development of all magical illusion.”

“When was the trick first done?”

The magician examined the serpent’s head.

“Aaron is recorded as having performed this ‘miracle’ in the bible. You can read the account in Exodus, chapter seven, verse ten. But,” continued Feroze, “this illusion even pre-dates Aaron. The ancient Egyptian texts also chronicle the marvel of transforming a rod into a serpent. Dervishes of Central Asia and avatars throughout the East have used the feat to demonstrate what, to the audience, is genuine magic.”

“If this is the snake, then where’s the rod?”

“That’s it,” said Feroze. “There is no rod. This is illusion in its purest form. We’re going to use the instinct of the reptile to create an illusion.”

“Where does a snake’s instinct come into it?”

“Firstly, I should tell you that the serpent has been chilled for three hours. So it’s a bit more sluggish than usual. Now, notice how I pressing my thumb down firmly at the center of its head. My index finger is on the other side of the jaw, countering the pressure.

“The Master held the viper’s head to my face for inspection.

“The conjuror,” he went on, “keeps up the pressure for several minutes. Its effect is to stun the snake – which assumes that a predator of gigantic size is attacking it. Unable to defend itself, it’s gone into shock. Even if I lower its tail to the floor, it still can’t move.”

Feroze demonstrated. He was right. The snake was utterly paralyzed.

“Now, watch what happens when the viper is thrown to the floor.”

Taking care not to damage the delicate serpent, Feroze dropped it on the laboratory’s stone floor. Two or three minutes passed before it started slithering about.

“We know that – realizing it’s free – the snake jolts out of shock. But,” said Feroze, picking the viper up once again, “with correct lighting and so forth, the audience is certain they've seen a miracle!”

That afternoon, when Feroze had tested me on the life of Harry Kellar – American conjuror and close friend of Houdini – he pulled a large glass carafe from one of the teak cabinets mounted high on the laboratory’s back wall. The jar was about the size of an old-fashioned sweet jar. It was full of pebbles.

Feroze unscrewed the plastic lid and fished out seven pebbles, each the size of a quail’s egg. Having wiped the dirt off them with a rag, he gulped down a mug of water and then, one by one, he swallowed the stones. They went down as smoothly as vanilla ice cream.

“Now it’s your turn,” he announced, when he had finished off the seventh pebble.

“I not going to swallow stones!” I protested. “They won’t go through my system. I’ve just had my supper – I not hungry.”

“They aren’t dessert,” rejoined the Master facetiously. “In any case, the stones don’t go through your system.”

He spun round to face the door. Two minutes later, his eyes bloodshot and blinking, he slammed the seven nuggets of stone on the bench.

“There!” he shouted. “They didn’t go anywhere near my system!”

Some of the Master’s illusions had been distinctly unpleasant. But until this point, none had been truly life-threatening.

“I not going to swallow stones,” I repeated. “I sorry, but I draw the line at this. Call me a sissy, but I simply have to draw the line somewhere.”

Feroze said nothing. He washed his cherished pebbles under the tap and returned them to the jar. Then, rubbing a hand across his chin, he looked at me quizzically.

“Stones too big for you then, eh?”

“Very much too big,” I stammered.

“Then we’ll start you off with something a bit smaller.”

Feroze pulled a teaspoon from his left pocket and struck the tin mug which always hung from his belt. A second later Gokul appeared. Wherever the servant was, he never failed to be summoned by the Master’s gong.

“Gokul,” he roared, “go and fetch some new potatoes.”

“Yes, Sahib, how many to bring?”

“Oh,” said the Master, “about a dozen will do.”

Twenty minutes later I had swallowed my first raw potato. Admittedly, it was not a King Edward, but a baby one grown in the compound. Although modest, the stunt filled me with satisfaction. As I drew in a deep breath, and waited for my eyes to slope back into their sockets, Feroze tossed another potato over.

“Come on,” he said energetically, “there’re lots left!”

“I don’t want to hog them all. You have some, please, I feel so greedy.”

But the magician would have none of it. One after another, the miniature potatoes rattled down my esophagus like balls down a bowling alley.

“How many’s that now?” he prompted, delighted with the experiment.

“Five,” I choked. “I may be a killjoy, but I really don’t think my belly can take any more. You can quite clearly hear it churning.”

The sorcerer poured a mug of water. I gulped it down. It trickled towards the potatoes, soothing my gullet. But my stomach was in disarray. It was informing my nervous system I had coughed down a box of billiard balls. My brain warned my esophagus to reject any more of the unwelcome vegetables.

Feroze examined his right thumb from a distance, picked at a cuticle; then poured a cup of water from another jug.

“I don’t think I can take any more,” I stuttered. “My stomach is shutting down – you have it.”

“You must drink this.”

Unfit to argue, I complied with the demand. In mid-flow – as my mouth was awash with the fluid – I grasped that this was not water. There was none of the cool, soothing delectation which accompanies the liquid. Instead, my mouth, gullet, and then what was left of my stomach reeled in horror at what it had just consumed.

Within the blink of an eye, my whole abdomen became involved in a fit of unprecedented vomiting. A mass of half-digested daal and rice, pureed mango and mutter-paneer, coconut and yoghurt was propelled at momentous velocity from the innermost depths of my thorax. Like the wad which precedes a cannon’s grapeshot, the concoction heralded the ensuing barrage of vegetable missiles.

As the one who had fed me the powerful emetic, Feroze deserved the drenching he got. All thoughts of reaching an entente cordial evaporated. The elixir, syrup of ipecac, made from the root of Brazil’s ipecacuanha shrub, is preferred by hospital casualty departments for treating overdose patients.

The sight of the omnipotent magician, dripping with curry-based vomit, was ample pay-back. As the spew oozed down his face and shirtfront, I castigated myself. How could I have been so myopic? After what I had been through, how could I have put my trust in his fiendish hands again?

Although he knew my digestive tract had responded with reflex action, Feroze was not the kind of man to disregard involuntary behavior.

A series of harsh recriminations followed.

Directed at my subconscious mind, the retaliations were designed to discipline my stomach. In future, when practicing regurgitation routines, the organ was to accept the ipecac syrup in silence.

Over a period of six days, the Master introduced a regime of vile and barbaric magnitude. First, he canceled the twelve-minute lunch, claiming that it obstructed lessons. Next, he stepped up the regurgitation exercises to three sessions a day. Additional illusions were still woven into the curriculum. But now they were of the most repugnant variety. Extra sessions were devoted to lectures, sometimes held in the middle of the night, on conjuring and the great masters. Immediately after each discourse, I was expected to write an essay deliberating on the chosen subject. Like a half-price sale gone wrong, my grades were slashed with reckless abandon.

By the third day, my stomach was sore beyond belief. Like that of a new-born baby, it was no longer able to deal with solid food. As if dispatching desperate smoke signals, the organ made known that it had begun the countdown to ulceration. I drew its deteriorating condition to Feroze’s attention. Still recovering from the discomposure he had suffered – or which he thought he had suffered – he waved my petitions aside.

“You must learn to control your stomach,” he asserted. “Houdini taught himself to move every voluntary muscle independently. You must do the same. I can’t help it if you’re feeling a little discomfort!”

Feroze didn’t realize it, but he had tipped me over the edge. I revived my scheme for all-out revenge. Only one form of requital had the capacity to pierce the magician’s defenses. I would have to strike without delay at his phobia. But first, the ammunition … I needed a supply of rubber bands.

I scoured the mansion from top to bottom. Not an elastic band in sight. Worse still, I rarely had the chance to leave the compound. If he had found me sneaking out to buy rubber bands in the middle of the night, Feroze would have been rabid with fury. Gokul and Rublu frequently came and went. But I could trust neither. Only after considerable meditation did I come up with a secure method of smuggling in a supply. I asked Gokul if, on his next trip to the market, he could pick me up a bundle of neem sticks with which to clean my teeth. Everyone knows that bundles of neem sticks are always kept together with colored elastic bands. Pleased that I was forsaking my toothbrush for a more natural cleaning method, the elderly servant agreed to fetch me the twigs. Before he hurried off, he swore not to tell the Master, who was keen to control all matters relating to personal hygiene.

Meanwhile, the drills continued.

On the fourth day, I brought up my first pebble. The feat was all the more astounding for I had used no emetic. As if reaching a tacit understanding with my belly, I found that I was able to regurgitate merely by controlling internal muscles. The mouth, esophagus and stomach were willing to do all they could to help: so long as no ipecac syrup was administered.

Of course, Feroze took all the credit for my achievement. Motioning for me to replace the stone in the jar, he declared that we would return to regurgitation later. Instead of putting the pebble back, I wrapped it in my handkerchief. Like a first-born child, this one was special. I would keep it as a lucky charm.

Without wasting any time, the magician rapped once on his chipped enamel mess mug. Gokul emerged like a phantom from nowhere. He was shuffling even slower than usual, his upper body bent over his trembling arms. When he turned around, I realized he was carrying a pot. The vessel seemed to contain something of enormous weight.

“Put it down here,” instructed Feroze, pointing to a large iron tripod.

“Yes, Sahib,” gasped the valet, straining to do as he was told. I slipped him a glance as he exited the room. He shook his head evasively. No neem sticks yet.

When the pot was in place on the tripod, the Master lit a Bunsen burner beneath it. I peered in. No wonder Gokul had been so burdened. The container was full of molten lead.

“Now,” said Feroze, talking above the roar of the Bunsen burner, “you have to be careful with this stuff. Molten lead can be quite dangerous if not handled with care.”

“I understand,” I remarked, with mounting anxiety at what part a vat of boiling lead was to play in the lesson.

The Master brought down a Fortnum & Mason biscuit tin from the wall cabinet and pulled away the lid. It was filled with ordinary sand.

“I going to teach you how to put your hand into a pan of boiling lead,” explained Feroze. “Before we do the trick, you have to prepare. Without adequate preparation mistakes are made: then people get injured.”

“I see,” I grunted. “We don’t want any more injuries. Or at least I don’t.”

“Before plunging your hand in the lead,” the magician instructed, “you have to ‘wash’ your hands in dry sand. This soaks up all the moisture. You must attempt this trick immediately after rubbing the hands with sand. Wait a second longer and the hands perspire. Sweaty hands and molten lead don’t go well together. Understand?”

“Yes, I understand.”

“Good, now watch this.”

Feroze scraped away the thin film of residue from the surface of the lead. An alluring silvery sheen lay beneath. In a single expert movement, the teacher plunged the fingers of his right hand into the molten metal. He counted to three as hastily as possible; glanced me in the eye, and removed the digits.

“Now you do it,” he said.

When my hands were washed in the fine pheasant-brown sand, I positioned myself carefully over the pot of smoking lead.

“I’ll do a countdown,” said Feroze, loosening his cravat. He loved doing countdowns.

“Wait … let me prepare.”

“The time for preparation is over!” snapped the Master. “Your fingers will start to sweat. One … two … three … now!”

“Aaaah!” I screeched, as my left hand plunged up to the knuckles into the silvery metal. A fraction of a second later, I withdrew.

“What’s all that fuss you’re making?” said Feroze. “Anyone would think you’ve just pulled off a miracle.”

Raising his tin mug, Feroze summoned Gokul. But even before he had struck the bowl of the spoon on the enamel, the servant appeared. He turned off the Bunsen burner’s tap and shambled away with his pot of lead.

“Now,” said Feroze, grandly, “I want to tell you about Houdini.”

“But we’re always learning about Houdini.”

The Master countered my complaint with a wrathful glare. His eyes twitched three times. I deciphered the code. Three twitches threatened a recriminating bout of stone-swallowing. My stomach knotted in anticipation.

“Sorry for bursting out.”

Feroze smiled on the left side of his mouth.

“So,” he said, leading me out into the study. “Let’s consider the genius of Harry Houdini.”

Mindful that I would soon be writing a detailed essay on the lecture, I paid attention.

“Harry Houdini,” began Feroze, running the name across his tongue with grandiloquence, “was born Erich Weiss in 1874. He chose ‘Houdini’ as a stage name in honor of the great nineteenth-century illusionist Robert-Houdin. ‘Harry’ was adopted for the alliteration. This reverence for Houdin evaporated in later years. It culminated in Houdini’s tireless efforts to discredit his former idol.”

The magician paused and caught me with a crushing glance. Was he musing that I would, one day, turn against him? I returned Feroze’s gaze with a servile grin.

“Whatever his motives for slurring his hero,” he continued, “Houdini was an extraordinary illusionist. He was unusual in that he had the gifts and talents of many magicians all rolled into one. He was brilliant at sleights and complex tricks; a master of delivery, an actor; as well as being brave, fast-thinking, pugnacious, a maestro of the esoteric, and a connoisseur of detail. And we have seen the importance of detail.”

I nodded twice. Then again.

“Yes, detail is very important.” I confirmed.

“Houdini,” continued Feroze, satisfied with my alertness, “understood that without mystery there was no magic. He knew also that without publicity, word of one’s skill would not travel. Houdini built up the sense of mystery. He would keep the audience waiting. By the time he came on, they were already at fever pitch. His illusions would be peppered with red herrings … designed to distract the crowd’s attention. Of course it was Houdini’s ability as an escapologist which made him a legend. We’re not so concerned with escapology, but we can learn from his methods.

“When touring, he would challenge local safe-makers to deliver their strongest safe to his encampment a day before the show. During the performance, he would be locked inside the safe, trussed up in a straitjacket. A curtain would be drawn around the coffer. An hour of so later, Houdini would emerge from behind the curtain. The audience would be thrilled. But Houdini was always cautious not to be too good.”

“What do you mean? There’s no such thing as being too good!”

“Of course there is,” riposted Feroze. “Houdini could get out of the safe within five minutes. He’d spend the rest of the time reading a novel, or practicing another routine. If he had emerged after five minutes everyone would think the trick was rigged.”

“Was it rigged?”

Feroze glowered across the room.

“Of course it was rigged! When the safe was delivered, Houdini and his crew would remove its workings and replace them with locks from their own stores. Sometimes the task would take all night. Yet no one would suspect they’d go to such trouble. Before the safe was returned, all the original locks and hasps were replaced.”

“Did Houdini often rig his tricks?”

“What are you saying?” cried Feroze, clasping his cheeks in his hands. “Haven’t you learnt anything? Of course he rigged his tricks! He was an illusionist. They were illusions!”

Feroze went to the bookshelf and pulled down a worn hardback volume.

“The Secrets of Houdini,” I read aloud. “By J. C. Cannell.”

“You had better read it right now.” Quipped Feroze, pulling out his pocket-watch. “I’ll give you an hour.”

Cannell’s book described many of Houdini’s devilish schemes. Anyone who has fond images of “Houdini the incorruptible champion of magic” should not read the book. Houdini might, I brooded, have been strong, dexterous and quick-thinking, but he resorted to the most base deceptions ever devised. He used bogus handcuffs. His stooges would pose as bona fide members of the audience. The trunks from which he escaped had sliding panels; the armored vans had false floors; and the giant water-filled milk-churns even had sham rivets. But then, as Feroze had so correctly reminded me, Harry Houdini was a master of illusion.

“Remember,” the Master reminded me the next morning, as he examined my essay on Houdini, “half the secret of any illusion can be put down to building up the spectacle. The more incredible the feats, then the more the audience’s tongues will wag when they leave. The greater the mystery, the faster word of the skill will spread. People are the same here in India. If a godman thrills them, they hurry away to tell others.

“Houdini was a great conjuror,” continued Feroze. “Of that there’s no doubt. But he was a far greater showman. He charmed the crowds. He encouraged them to inspect his props and equipment. And he baited them, until they were feeding on the infectious suspense he conjured.”

The Master halted to pull a ruffle from the carpet.

“It’s a beautiful morning,” he said abruptly.

“Yes, it is. The first cool, sunny morning in more than a week. Are we going to start with regurgitation this morning?”

“Another time,” he said restlessly. “Today is such a fine day. So fine it merits something a little special.”

“What, more special than swallowing stones?”

“Oh, yes,” recoiled Feroze, “much more special than that.”

At nine-thirty Rublu arrived, anticipating a swift lunch. He was, I noticed, wearing new clothes. They were rather familiar. The cotton pants were a murky shade of olive green; the shirt, also cotton, was peach. Although peculiar, the combination wasn’t original. Feroze himself had worn identical colors five days before. Then I understood. These were the clothes over which I had spewed the contents of my stomach earlier that week. Appalled by the thought of ever wearing them again, the Master had passed them on.

“Let me know when you’re ready to eat,” mumbled Rublu as he picked up the newspaper.

“Oh, we have no time to eat today, Rublu,” replied Feroze airily, “but I'm sure Gokul has prepared something for you.”

The punishment for my indiscretion with the emetic still hung over the house like a storm-cloud.

“We’ll just have a cup of Darjeeling,” said Feroze wistfully, as he led me into the laboratory. As if by magic, Gokul appeared with a tray. He shared Feroze’s uncanny ability of materializing from nowhere. Was the ancient valet under the magician’s spell, I wondered, or was he a sorcerer as well?

Pouring my tea, Gokul looked me in the eye, and winked. It was a sign … a secret signal which could have alluded only to one thing. The neem sticks had arrived.

“Now … for that special little something,” sung Feroze in a sinister staccato.

Exercises which he billed as “special” tended to be distinctly unpleasant.

“First, for a warm-up,” he said, rolling up his sleeves. “This is one of the Israeli-born spoon-bender’s favorites.”

“You don’t mean Uri Geller?”

“Of course I do … Uri Geller – the Western world’s foremost illusionist, and,” Feroze went on, “the most famous conjuror to claim that his illusions are real magic”

“Maybe he is gifted,” I said.

“I don’t doubt he has a gift,” retorted Feroze, “but it isn’t magical. Remember … all Geller’s feats have been explained: from the spoon bending to the reading of sealed documents. We can speak about that later. But now there’s work to do!”

Feroze turned his back, then presented me with a crumpled ball of aluminum baking foil.

“I want you to hold this in your fist,” he directed. “When I say so, and only when I say so, the foil will become warmer. Are you ready?”

“Yes,” I responded, clasping the glittering metal tightly in my fist.

“All right,” said Feroze, clearing his throat. “I’ll concentrate very hard on the ball of foil.”

Applying his fingertips to his temples, the magician began to focus.

“Tell me when you begin to feel the metal heating up.”

A minute passed. Then another. Nothing. The metal was room temperature. But then, as I stared at the stone floor, it began to grow warm.

“I can feel the metal getting hotter!” I burst out. “Yes, it’s getting much warmer now.”

“Good,” said Feroze softly, still with his fingertips pressed against his temples. “Now, when I tell you, the metal will begin to heat up so much that you will have to drop it.”

Rublu broke my concentration, as he called us to eat from the study.

“Rublu!” cried the Master sharply, “I told you – we’re not eating lunch. Far too much work to be done. You go ahead!”

Footsteps could be heard pacing out to the dining-room.

“Where was I?” mumbled Feroze. “Oh, yes, when I count to three, you will find the metal almost too hot to handle … One! Two! Three!”

The aluminum was already exceedingly warm. Then, as I thought about it, the ball of crumpled metal foil became too hot to hold in my fist. I threw it on to the work-bench.

“Excellent!” announced Feroze. “My powers of concentration paid off!”

“What do you mean? Were real psychic powers used?”

“You should know better than that,” he quipped. “It was magic, but stage magic!”

“How’s it done?”

“This is the Hot Foil Trick,” remarked the Master. “You may have seen that, before passing you the foil ball, I turned my back to you.”

“Yes, I did notice.”

“Well, that was to cover one surface of the aluminum with a solution of mercuric nitrate. I painted it on with the back of a spoon, before rubbing the solution into the metal with a cloth.”

“Mercuric nitrate?” I said. “Isn’t that incredibly poisonous?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact it is,” said Feroze coldly. “It’s lethal. The toxicity is the drawback of the trick. But that’s irrelevant for now. The key point,” he continued, “is that the chemical causes the metal to oxidize very rapidly. The exothermic reaction creates the heat – not mind power!”

“And this is one of Geller’s tricks?”

“He loves this one. It’s great for modest audiences or for television demonstrations. But,” said Feroze, “it’s also been widely used by godmen. They take the trick a stage further. Insert an amulet or, say, a ring in the foil ball … When the devotee finds the charm in the ball of metal, he thinks that real magic’s been at work.”

As I washed all traces of the deadly mercuric nitrate from my fingers, Feroze clapped his hands together.

“Now we've dispensed with the warm-up,” he exclaimed, “on with the piece de resistance!”

“What is it to be?”

Feroze’s enthusiasm was always fueled by one thing – pain … someone else’s pain.

“This is a very antique piece of conjury. You find it in many forms across Asia, but the basic gist is always the same.”

“What is it?”

“I going to teach you how to raise your body temperature very dramatically.”

“What good’s that?”

Feroze seemed surprised that I had not grasped the immediate use of such a feat.

“The power to raise one’s temperature at will to 104 degrees Fahrenheit,” he said, “is enough to prove superhuman ability.”

“Tibetan lamas can raise their body temperature, can’t they?” I asked, remembering seeing a photo of naked lamas in the snow.

“Lamas can maintain their body warmth even in freezing conditions,” the sorcerer replied, “but they achieve it by anointing themselves with yak fat.”

His response was comforting: it implied we would not be rubbing yak fat across our naked bodies.

“If we’re not using yak fat,” I asked, “then how do we achieve a temperature increase?”

Ever serious when divulging a significant feat, the Master went over to the laboratory door to ensure that it was firmly closed.

“Today,” said Feroze, “you’re going to demonstrate the temperature rise. I will guide you through the procedure.”

Previous experience had taught me that the teacher only side-stepped the harshest, most exacting exercises.

“This isn’t going to be horribly upsetting for me, is it?”

“No, no,” replied Feroze frivolously, “I wouldn’t say that. No, I wouldn’t say that at all.”

“All right. Let’s get it over with. What do I do?”

“Well,” he continued, “first eat this. Make sure you chew it very well.”

He handed me a chalky white lump, about twice the size of a schoolchild’s eraser. It felt soft, yet firm, like soap. I placed it on the tip of my tongue and chewed. My initial reservations were confirmed. It was soap … of the coal-tar variety.

“How could you make me eat soap?”

“What? Don’t you like it?”

“It’s disgusting. Have you ever eaten soap?” I asked, my mouth spuming like shaving foam.

“Oh yes,” murmured the Master dreamily, “I’ve eaten soap many many times.”

When the chewing was at an end, I swallowed hard. The soap slid down my oesophagus like a scallop. My stomach, still suspicious and inflamed, squirmed with hostility as it began work digesting the detergent.

“Well done,” the Master said, when I had done as he had told me. “Now you can have your cup of tea.”

He poured a cup of Darjeeling to the brim, and slid it over to me.

“Make sure you drink the whole thing. Mustn’t leave a drop.”

The tea was boiling, but soothed my mouth. Only when it reached my stomach did I sense the familiar urge to retch. My eyes bulged with tears.

“Is this an emetic?” I asked gagging. “Am I going to be sick again?”

“No …” instructed Feroze, launching himself to the far end of the room. “Be sure not to throw up!”

My stomach was churning like a dishwasher loaded with too much soap powder. Stray bubbles were refluxing up into the back of my throat.

“What’s this got to do with body temperature?”

Feroze glanced at his pocket-watch and tapped it twice.

Give it five or ten more minutes and you’ll have your answer,” he said.

Three minutes later the soap, tea, and the acid of my stomach had moved on into my intestines. My head spun as the virulent concoction began to be absorbed into my bloodstream. My mouth was dry, my back was burning, my vision became clouded. The skin of my neck and face began to drip with sweat like never before.

“Feeling warm, are you?” asked Feroze a few minutes later.

“Yes, warm … feeling warm,” I panted.

“Toasty,” he chortled, “you’ll start feeling toasty!”

“Why’s this happening? What’s happening to me …”

Before I could finish I found myself choking. A chunk of undigested soap found its way back to my mouth.

“You ate a piece of fine Crabtree and Evelyn coal-tar soap,” explained Feroze as he fetched me a blanket from the study. “The soap – an alkaline – mixed with the tea, which contains tannic acid, causes a curious reaction when it reaches the stomach.”

“Curious?” I frothed.

“Stay still for a minute,” commanded Feroze, as he stuck a thermometer under my tongue.

“Excellent! You’re already up to one hundred and one.”

“How much higher?”

“Well, let’s give it five more minutes, shall we?”

Five minutes slipped by as I glided in and out of consciousness. The Master probed beneath my tongue with the glass thermometer, like a stoker attending to the fire hole.

“Bingo! You’re almost up to a hundred and four. Well done! This is impressive.”

Wrapped in the black, red and green blanket – a tribal shawl of the Angami Nagas – I was shaking uncontrollably.

Feroze appeared more stirred now than at any other time during my tutelage. But then again, he had never demonstrated admiration of any kind before.

“Rublu! Come in here and have a look at this!” he bellowed. “Gokul – you come and have a look as well. This is too good to miss!”

My body, now in spasm, was ignited to a temperature of inhuman severity. Shivering like a heroin addict without a fix, I tried to focus on the Master, Rublu, and the line of servants who had turned up for the unexpected treat. My mind might have entertained thoughts of revenge – but it was too preoccupied in the desperate business of maintaining homeostasis.

“Feroze,” said Rublu, “I hope you haven’t been mistreating your pupils again. You should know better.”

The Master raised one finger in the air, preparing to defend the accusation.

“Well,” he said stolidly, “perhaps I did prescribe a little more soap than I should have. But then how are we to breach the boundaries of science if we do not test them?”

TEN

Insider Information

Irritated by pebbles, potent emetics and coal-tar soap, the delicate lining of my stomach finally began to give. The magician’s latest wheeze had played havoc with my body’s finely-tuned homeostatic system. Mine was a case in which the scientist had lost control of his experiment. Decreasing the temperature of 104 degrees Fahrenheit had called for drastic action. Gokul had been instructed to find a barafwalla, an ice-seller. He ran out into the tree-lined streets of Alipore and commandeered two blocks of ice which were being lugged on the back of a cart to the nearby Zoological Gardens. Taking charge, Feroze pointed his bull’s pizzle riding crop at the servant’s bathtub; then at the ice and, lastly, at me. The barafwallas heaved their load into the bath and threw me on top.

Solace, at last.

The barafwallas, the Master, Rublu, and a gaggle of snorting servants gathered round to enjoy the spectacle. Each watched transfixed as I shuddered with cold and heat at the same time. First they observed the sea of soapy sweat surging like tainted spring-water from my pores. Then they gawked as my steaming perspiration melted the ice – revealing an entombed frozen sewer rat.

Like an amateur mammoth hunter, Gokul chipped away at the ice with the end of a spoon to excavate the rodent.

“Good work, Gokul,” said Feroze, who was having a whale of a time at my expense. “It’s a big one, even for Calcutta. When you’ve extracted it, put it in the fridge … we’ll do a dissection later.”

Three days passed before I could ingest any soft foods. Even then I limited myself to a diet of soupy daal and mashed bananas, washed down with warm water. Ever courteous, Gokul attempted to nurse my digestive tract back to its original condition. But the damage had been done. Abdominal pain, loss of appetite and severe vomiting followed: classic symptoms of a peptic ulcer. My malady would have alarmed the most hardened of surgeons.

Fortunately, despite the grave nature of my condition, I had an incentive to recover – the prospect of revenge.

On the afternoon of the third day after the trial by temperature, Gokul stuck a hand down his lungi and fished something out. It was a neat bunch of neem sticks. He blew on them lightly, apologizing that they had become dampened by his private parts. But his loins were the only place hidden from the magician’s continual scrutiny. I snatched the bundle to my chest and examined it. The neem sticks were fastened together with three turquoise elastic bands. I hurried the contraband to my room, and hid it beneath the inner sole of my left shoe. Ready for action … All I needed now was the right moment to attack.

When I informed him of my deteriorating gastric condition, Feroze regarded the office calendar on the wall.

“It’s the middle of February, fancy that …” he said dryly. “Suppose it’s about time you got out of the house … can’t keep you cooped up here forever.”

“I don’t know if you understand,” I said, retching. “I think I’ve got a peptic ulcer. It has to be treated without delay.”

Feroze removed a doctor’s notelet from a drawer in the writing bureau. Then, twisting the lid from his mandarin-colored Parker Duofold, he scribbled a prescription.

“Go to the Swastika Chemist on Shakespeare Sarani,” he said, peering up from the paper. “Give them this prescription and take the pills they give you … three times a day.”

As with eating, Feroze considered illness to be a waste of time. He disliked anyone associated with him to fall victim to the weaknesses of the human constitution.

“When you’ve got the medicine,” he went on, “you are to go out and find your first example of insider information – the third element of your course.”

I clutched my belly like an expectant mother.

“Shouldn’t I take a few days off?”

“For what?” he hissed viperously.

“Recovery,” I said. “I once read a novel called Broken Spirit … the hero died an agonizing death from an ulcer much like mine.”

The Master swished his riding crop like a camel’s tail.

“Sounds like a good read,” he gloated. “I’ll have to remember it.”

“What sort of ‘insider information’ do you want me to find?”

“You’ll know it when you find it,” replied Feroze. “Now leave me … I have a rat to dissect!”

* * * *

With one hand on my stomach, and the other wiping the stream of sweat from my brow, I set out into Calcutta.

Through disorientation, I headed south by mistake, instead of northeast into the heart of town. Before I knew it, I was inching my way down the macadamized surface of Judge’s Court Food. Famed as a haven of the sophisticated in days gone by, Judge’s Court is one of Alipore’s old imposing roads. Now a place of faded grandeur, it’s home to a ragtag assortment of used furniture shops. Packed from floor to ceiling with roll-top desks, chandeliers, organs, and wall cabinets, bracket clocks and card tables, the shops are testament to changed taste. No longer do Calcuttans cherish the Indo-Baroque masterpieces of the past. Who wants a classical rosewood throne when they can recline in the comfort of a fluffy nylon easy chair?

As I wandered through the wide avenues of Alipore in search of a rickshaw, I considered the magician’s medical prescription. How could I be taking medical advice from the person responsible for my condition?

“Bebtic ulcer very bainful,” mused the pharmacist at the Swastika Chemist.

“Yes,” I confirmed, “it’s desperately baneful.”

“Take six tablets every day for a week” explained the professional.

“Shouldn’t I be taking three tablets a day?”

The chemist shook his head.

“Oh, no, no, no,” he said, ‘special offer … double dosage, same brice!”

I made a note of the Swastika’s address. Mustn’t forget about this place, I thought. This is a hypochondriac’s fantasy.

“What about the pain?” I croaked. “Will these red and white ones take away the pain?”

“Bain …?” said the pharmacist. “Is the bain unbearable?”

“Yes, yes, yes!” I bellowed. “That’s just what it is … it’s unbearable!”

The chemist screwed up his eyes like balls of paper. Then, sliding open an ankle-level drawer, he took out a brown glass bottle of lozenges.

“These relieve all possible bain,” he crowed, slapping them down squarely before me.

“How much do I owe you for them?”

“Bain-blockers,” said the chemist grandly, tilting his head backwards, “bain-blockers, no charge … experimental.”

Sliding a wrinkled index finger to his lips, he winked.

Before choking down a bain-blocker, something crossed my mind. A dangerous misunderstanding may have been about to claim a fresh victim. From the abyss of my unconscious mind a timid, lipless woman was signaling furiously. Had the chemist meant “brain-blocker”, rather than “pain-blocker”? Was I about to induce a self-inflicted lobotomy? Prepared to try anything to dispel the gastric distress, I knocked a couple of the oversized chalky lozenges to the back of my throat and gulped. The experience was not unlike that of swallowing pebbles.

I counted to ten. Then to twenty. My brain still seemed to be intact. But, as I wandered down Shakespeare Sarani, I found myself floating like a ball of fluff in the wind. It was as if there were no gravity. The chemist’s experimental pain-killers obviously needed a little more work. But as I glided towards the Maiden – Calcutta’s immense central parkland – I reflected that, for the moment, the pills would be just fine.

Without faltering, I listed sloth-like and bewildered into the seething traffic of Chowringhee. In a country where sedate driving is unknown, Calcutta’s frenzied thoroughfare is the zenith of all motorway madness. Uncontrolled and maniacal, wild as a nine-headed Hydra, ferocious as ten thousand vampire bats, Calcutta’s main street is more tempestuous than any act of God.

Bullock carts and Ambassador cabs; buses, their sides gashed like armor-plating peppered with anti-tank shells; herds of goats charging like migrating wildebeest, and traction engines on suicide runs: fording the commotion is to play Space Invaders for one’s life. Dodge the heavy guns, and the stealthy cycle rickshaws creep up like assassins – laden high with sea trunks, and schoolchildren, hilsa fish and urinals, balloons and computer monitors. Miraculously, the press of wheels, spokes and tramping hooves parted, like a great sea, allowing me to cross.

In the Maidan, I wafted over to the Ochterlony Monument. A towering fluted minaret, staring out like an alabaster lighthouse, it was a beacon for street performers. Arriving in their droves, they entertained in the long shadows of Sunday afternoon.

Staggering somewhat, searching for insider information, I made my way from one performance to the next. At one, a girl of about twelve was demonstrating her ability to write with a pen held in her toes. For one rupee she would scrawl out a love poem or a secret astrological message. Opposite sat a young swami on crossed legs. His face was pasty, his hands tinged with orange specks. A single charred pot stood before him, positioned on a checkered handkerchief. The vessel contained crocodile fat, apparently a cure for arthritis, impotency and abdominal disorders. Beside it was a pile of “miracle” shells from the Andaman Islands. An hour earlier, I might have solicited the luminary’s advice and purchased a square of crocodile blubber. But now the pain of my peptic ulcer was nothing but a distant memory.

Further on, past a skinny boy and his tightrope-walking pye dog, was another chap with wire-walking rats. Beyond him stood yet another lad. Like the others, he was in his early teens. But he was different. He had an engaging Charlie Chaplin smile, blinding teeth, and dimples as deep as sugar-lumps. Although tattered, his clothes were well kept. Yet it wasn’t his dress which caught my attention. It was his demeanor. This boy may have been operating in Calcutta’s Maidan, but he was haughty beyond belief.

His pitch was being mobbed by enthusiastic punters, all eager to get his attention. Inquisitive at the source of the commotion, I floated over. Once I had pushed my way to the front, I watched the routine.

A member of the crowd would hand the lad a hundred-rupee ($2) note, itself a tidy sum of money in India. The bill would be folded in half; and then folded in half again. Then it would be slipped into a miniature manila envelope which was placed on a brick, before a green parakeet. The bird would grip the sachet in its bill, ripping the corner. Next, the boy would throw the marked envelope into a box containing other identical, yet unmarked envelopes. He would shake the box roughly. Only then would he invite the owner of the money to search for the envelope containing his banknote.

Invariably, the marked envelope had disappeared.

Despite swaying from the bain-blocker, I felt certain I could catch the boy out. What’s all my training been for, I asked myself, if I can’t trip up an under-age hoaxer?

So when the boy challenged me, I accepted. My hundred-rupee bill was folded in half, then in half again; before being inserted into a crisp manila pouch. The parrot did its duty, and the torn envelope was thrust into the box. When the carton’s lid was removed, the child – who was minting money – urged me to search for my note.

I waved the box aside. The crowd stared at me quizzically. The young magician frowned. Swaggering with all the pomposity I could muster, I ripped the stall’s tablecloth away.

“This is where you hid my money!” I cried, sweeping the cloth back.

But the table was bare.

The crowd seethed with delight. Obviously expecting trouble from the foreigner, the entertainer slipped me his Charlie Chaplin smile, grabbed his parrot and props, and made off.

Back at the Alipore mansion, Feroze was pacing up and down the courtyard like a stallion before a race.

“Ah, back at last?” he puffed.

Without his captive, the magician had obviously been distraught with boredom.

“How was the rat?” I inquired, crossing the yard.

“Very interesting, actually,” replied Feroze. “It had a tumor in its intestines. If it hadn’t been frozen solid, it would have had an early death.” The Master groomed back his hair with his hands. “That reminds me, did you get your pills?”

“Yes. Got some incredible pain-killers, too. They’re strong as a knockout punch.”

“Oh, can I see?”

Feroze examined the label-less bottle; then, removing the lid, he took a hesitant sniff. He raised one eyebrow, glanced at his pocket-watch, and then coughed.

“Do you mind if I take one away?” he asked.

“Help yourself. In pain, are you?”

The sorcerer chose not to answer. Instead, he inquired what example of insider information I had brought for him. When I retorted that I had come empty-handed – on account of medical reasons – he flew into a rage.

“Never …” he roared, “never return here without completing the assignment I have set!”

Only as I apologized did I conceive the true extent of the Master’s anger. By failing to bring him some nugget from my trip into town, I was in some way depriving him.

That night, in the dim light of my bedroom, I reflected on Feroze’s unfounded animosity. Brooding, I tugged the inner sole from my shoe and inspected the rubber bands. Revenge, when it came, would be sweet.

* * * *

Next morning Feroze met me as I descended the antique staircase. It was still not light outside.

“Good morning,” I said, inquisitive as to why the magician should be hovering at the foot of the stairs.

“Tahir,” he replied in an unusually sensitive tone, “do you remember those pills you brought back yesterday?”

“Yes, of course,” I replied, “the bain-blockers.”

“I’ve tested the one you gave me,” Feroze explained. “It contained mercuric chloride. Take two or three more and you’ll be dead.”

“Are you sure?”

“If you don’t believe me,” Feroze responded coldly, “keep taking them and see. Don’t forget, this is India – when a quack tells you a potion is ‘experimental’, take the hint and run off!”

For a few seconds I was touched by the magician’s compassionate veneer. But, as I set out in search of insider information, I remembered the past. I had endured far too much to forgive and forget.

Where does one go in a tremendous city like Calcutta to find insider information? I recalled India’s golden rule: do the opposite of what would be normal anywhere else.

The subcontinent is a fine-tuned and well-practiced place. To the outsider it may appear random, or directionless. But in India, what seems haphazard is the product of five thousand years of exertion. Go with the flow, I reminded myself – never strain against the nation’s natural forces … and success must soon follow.

If ordered to scour a Western metropolis for trade secrets, I would have headed straight to the heart of the city. This being India, I turned my back on central Calcutta, and strolled towards the serene banks of Tolly’s Nullah canal.

I sat beneath a banyan tree to eat a packed lunch prepared by Gokul. It was five past ten, but my constitution had grown used to the Master’s timetable. A group of men were gathering cress with sickles at the water’s edge. Others were fishing with wiry concertina keep-nets, wading up to their chests like gazelle fording a river. Behind them, a family were flipping cow dung fuel bricks in the winter sun. Four young boys were diving into the canal in turns, clouding the water, splashing carefree; shrieking like jackals under a full moon.

In Europe, the last person I would turn to for help would be someone with whom I did not share a common language. When applying the golden rule of India, such a person becomes the obvious guide.

Sidling over to a bearded man of about my age, who was flipping dung bricks like dinosaur eggs, I struck up a conversation.

“Do you know where I’d find some insider information?” I asked.

The man looked at me with blank, swollen eyes.

“In-sid-er know-ledge,” I repeated, motioning obscure gestures like a psychotic mime.

Frowning, as he strove to decipher my sign language, the brick flipping man shook his head.

“Haa,” he murmured, as if he had understood my inquiry.

With a dung-clad finger he pointed at a distant building surrounded by a wall.

When I pointed to the same building, he nodded vigorously.

Excellent, I thought, I’m on to something here.

Ten minutes later and the building’s details were coming into focus. Rust-red crenellated walls with creamy cornerstones, barred windows, a pair of flat-footed sentries standing outside. Black marias heaved back and forth like overheated water buffalo.

“Alipore Jail,” spluttered a boss-eyed paan-seller, crouched outside the gate.

“Oh,” I said, sheepishly. “That looks like a strange place to go searching for insider information, doesn’t it?”

The paan-seller clipped a pile of sopaari, areca nuts. “Looking for Bhola Das?” he asked.

“Um, I'm looking for insider information,” I replied. “Who’s Bhola Das?”

The paan-seller winked his good eye twice.

“Bhola Das … famous hangman of West Bengal!”

“Ah, yes … that’s who I’m looking for. Yes, that’s right. I’m looking for the hangman!”

Who could have better trade secrets than a hangman?

“Where do I go?”

The paan-seller motioned to a low hatch within the main studded portal.

Pausing for a moment to get my story straight, I knocked twice on the door. There was no reply. I knocked again. Only then did a guard put his face to the door’s grill.

“Bhola Das!” I shouted. “I have come to see Bhola Das – the famous hangman of West Bengal.”

The guard slid the visor back across the grill. A bunch of keys rattled inside. The door within a door creaked inwards.

One guard ferried me to the next. To each I whispered the cryptic password … the name of the hangman.

After a long wait I found myself sitting before the warden.

“I have come to see Bhola Das,” I explained. “I think you will find that he’s expecting me.”

“Very good, sir,” said the warden, signing the necessary paperwork to authorize my visit.

He pressed a button beside his desk. Before I could turn my head, a watchman stepped from the shadows and led me through the fabled jail of Alipore.

Up and down stairs, around corridors and along straight passageways. The soles of my shoes rasped on the flagstones as we proceeded through the maze. The liveried guard halted before a robust steel door.

“Bhola Das?” he confirmed.

“Yes, it’s the hangman I’ve come to see.”

“Very good, sir,” squirmed the watchman, as he knocked on the door. The door opened inwards.

Inside was a square, stone-walled chamber, illuminated by natural light. A solid wood table stood in one comer. On it was a noose, crafted from coarse hemp rope. Adjacent to the table a man was sitting on a three-legged stool. His hair was snowdrop-white; his cheeks were obscured by a rough gray beard, his steely eyes hidden behind scratched lenses, and his shirt and lungi were old, yet neat.

“Bhola Das?” I asked.

“Yes,” said the man. “I am Bhola Das.”

“I would like to speak with you for a few minutes.”

The hangman glanced at a clock mounted high on the wall.

“Do you have an execution to administer?”

“No,” said Das dolefully, “I have no work today.”

Whereas other states in India elect their executioners on their own merit, West Bengal employs hangmen from a single hereditary line.

“My father and his father and his father before him were all hangmen,” exclaimed Das, stretching his spindly arms behind him like locust wings. “My father killed more than six hundred convicts; but that was in the time of the Britishers, and there were far many more to execute then. My father was sent to Glasgow during the Raj. He hanged Indians at the prison there. I suppose,” said Das solemnly, “you could say that hanging is in my blood.”

“What’s it like to hang a man?”

The hangman stared at the floor, then with eyes cold as sleet, he gazed at me, taking in the features of my face.

“To kill a man,” he said softly, “is a dreadful thing. To bring a man’s life to an end is almost too much to bear. I am a hereditary executioner. This is the work of my forefathers. I do not judge the profession which they have chosen for my line. But I ensure each man I kill dies with dignity and without pain. I believe I am the finest executioner in India. I do not claim that for an idle boast. Before killing a convict I cannot sleep for three days. I cannot eat either. I spend time alone, thinking about the life which I am about to end. Then, before I place the noose in position, I ask the criminal’s forgiveness. I tell him I am only doing what the government and the court has asked me to do.

“When I hang a man,” declared Bhola Das, pressing his thick glasses to his nose, “the victim remains intact. Blood doesn’t ooze from his nostrils, from his ears or from his mouth. That’s the mark of the professional.”

“Tell me,” I intoned in a hushed voice, as the footsteps of a guard tramped past outside, “are there any secrets of the profession which have been passed on to you by your ancestors?”

Das nodded sagaciously, staring out at a pair of pigeons which were squatting on the window ledge.

“Yes,” he replied. “There are family secrets …”

“Could you tell me what they are?”

The hangman squinted.

“The secrets of which I speak are,” he said, “known only to me and to the man I execute.”

“Ah,” I winced, loosening my collar, “I understand. But isn’t there some meager tip you could give, to prove the care you take in your craft?”

Bhola Das rubbed his palms together.

“First,” he whispered, looking from right to left, “I lubricate the noose with a bar of soap. I make sure it gets into all the creases. This reduces friction. Then I rub it a second time, with a banana. Only after that can I be certain that the knot will slide easily. But,” continued the executioner in a low voice, “the most important thing is to weave a brass nut into the noose. While slipping the noose over the inmate’s head, I position the heavy nut at the side of the neck. As soon as the trap door opens, the nut swings round to the spinal cord and snaps it cleanly.

“Half an hour later,” the hangman went on, “when I release the rope, there’s sometimes an eerie scream from the convict’s mouth – it’s just air escaping from the prisoner’s lungs.”

“Is hanging the only method of execution in West Bengal?”

“Unfortunately, it is. Four men were recently convicted of raping a nine-year-old girl, continued Das. “I was told to hang them. They ought to have been thrown into a cage of lions. The noose was too good for them!”

Bhola Das removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. He was an honorable man, maintaining the work of his forefathers.

“Do your children want to carry on the tradition?”

“Yes,” said Bhola Das. “My elder son wants to join the business. I have taught him how to twine a rope and craft a noose. He has helped me on some occasions. But,” imparted the hangman wearily, “he wants the position to pay more and to have better job security. Without that,” he whispered, “he says there’s no future for the profession.”

Armed with the valuable insider information, I thanked the aging executioner and summoned the guard to escort me from the prison. Bhola Das clasped his callused hands around mine and pressed his lips to my ear.

“If you ever require my services,” he murmured darkly, as I left, “please don’t hesitate to call upon me.”

That was an honest man, I reflected, as I trekked north up Baker Road towards the magician’s compound. He had inner strength, and was compassionate under testing circumstances. As for Bhola Das’s offer – it was hard to say whether I would ever need to avail myself of the private services of an executioner. But the offer, I pondered, would be good to keep in reserve … for a rainy day.

* * * *

It was with elation that I entered the Master’s mansion. I was eager to share my new-found insider information. But before making my report, I slipped up to my room to shower and change. Gokul’s assistant was polishing the brass carpet rods on the stairs. Climbing over him, I made my way up to the first-floor corridor. My bedroom was situated at its far end. Several other rooms led off the passageway. These were usually kept locked. Feroze was obsessed that they remain so. Noticing that the second door on the right was ajar, I was suspicious. Pushing it inward, I poked my head around the door.

The casual nature of my intrusion added to the surprise.

It was a young boy’s bedroom. A home-made model airplane was suspended from the ceiling; below it, a clutch of toy animals sat on the bed. A leather satchel was propped up against a chair, its buckles unfastened. A child’s sketches were pinned to one wall. The low desk was strewn with the elements of childhood. A catapult, a nest of marbles, cotton reels and a dismembered doll’s head. It might have been like any other boy’s bedroom. But it was not. The chamber was lit by a single bare red bulb. Its shutters had been closed like an iron visor, preventing daylight from penetrating in. A ghastly scarlet light filled the place.

Rattled by the sight, I stepped back to shut the door. But as I did so, I noticed a hunched figure sitting on a low stool with his eyes closed. It was Feroze. Surprisingly, he had not heard me. I tiptoed away.

When I had changed, I went out to the kitchen to find Gokul. Surely the Master’s veteran servant would explain the room’s mystery.

Gokul was busy roasting a ladle of spices over a gas flame.

“Hello, Sahib!” he said, without turning round.

“How did you know it was me?”

“Very noisy walker,” he snorted.

“Gokul … I’ve just seen something rather strange.”

“What strange?”

“There’s a bedroom upstairs with a red light in it. The Master is sitting there with his eyes closed.”

The manservant raised the ladle from the heat. He turned to face me.

“Long time ago,” he said tensely, “Master’s son and wife was killed.”

“How? How did it happen?”

Gokul rubbed both eyes with his left hand, and sniffed.

“They taking cycle rickshaw in Calcutta,” he said. “Rickshaw hit by gasoline tanker … Master Sahib has kept son bedroom same way. Today,” mumbled the servant, “anniversary of death.”

Leaving Gokul to his spices, I returned to the main house, my head hung low. The magician may have been my tormentor, but I was willing to agree a temporary truce. Was his venomous attitude to his pupils connected to the death of his wife and child?

An hour later, Feroze found me in the study, where I was combing a copy of Hobson-Jobson for magical feats. He was less vitalized than usual. His eyes were circled by heavy rings, his face was drawn and pale, and his clothes quite disheveled.

“How did you get on?” he asked, through gritted teeth.

“Well …” I began, snapping the book closed euphorically.

“Did you find me any insider information?”

I reflected on Alipore Jail and upon the secrets of Bhola Das – hereditary hangman of West Bengal. Should I explain first about the soap, the banana, or the brass nut which snaps the spine? I glanced at Feroze. He wasn’t his usual self. How could I discuss an executioner’s tips with a man whose family had themselves met such a terrible end?

“I'm so sorry,” I said, “but my stomach has been troubling me again. I’ll make sure to bring back a double dose of insider information tomorrow.”

* * * *

Next day, well before Gokul had shuffled up the passageway with a pot of milky tea, I had slunk out of the house. Today, I told myself, I am going to restore my reputation.

Early morning in Calcutta is a bewitching time. Like the back lot of a Hollywood film studio, it’s either teeming with people, or silent as a ghost ship. Calcutta is either off or on. It’s the only city on Earth with no half-way setting.

At six a.m. – like scene shifters and extras in a film – the first people saunter on to the set. They are well rested and prepared for another day of furious activity. Some scrape out the gutters, or scrub down the cobblestones, like studio janitors making ready for the arrival of the cast. Others set out dog-eared copies of Time and National Geographic on makeshift wooden stalls. Nearby, beggars hobble into position, bracing themselves for the crowds. Street-side astrologers prop up their hand-painted boards depicting the constellations; perfume-sellers dust down their carved glass bottles; toothpick vendors arrange their stock; pickpockets step stealthily into doorways. Fruit-sellers divide sour green oranges into clusters of six. Traffic policemen tighten their white steel helmets and climb up on to their rostra. Then – and only then – as if an invisible director has ordered filming to begin, Calcutta is switched on.

Within moments, the streets are choked with vehicles. The air boils with exhaust fumes. And the sidewalks are packed with shoals of people, jammed shoulder to shoulder like lambs in a wagon.

Nothing in Calcutta is so important as the sidewalk. Far more than mere conduits for pedestrians, the walkways are dormitories, typing bureaus, markets, cafes, doctors’ surgeries and umbrella repair shops, rolled into an endless profusion of activity. Calcutta’s sidewalks are wider than in most other cities, constructed by the British for a grand imperial capital. Twenty yards of Calcutta sidewalk has more on offer than entire countries. Plastic combs and squashy toys, shower caps in camellia pink, hard-boiled eggs in trays, reconditioned engine-blocks, Bakelite telephones, mothballs in sackcloth pouches, beetroot and jackfruit, dental floss and wooden legs, Zimmer frames and pogo sticks, turbines and theodolites.

* * * *

As I recoiled from the force of the morning invasion, I noticed a man squatting outside the Writer’s Building. He had no hands or feet. His stumps were well healed, their skin tight and smooth. Dozens of unfortunates beg on Lal Bazaar Street. But this man was wearing a pair of alien antennae – popular with party-goers about twenty years before. As I bent over him, he twanged one of the springs with his stump. The bloodshot eyeball at the end jangled about, revolving wildly.

“Yes, Sahib …” he exclaimed eagerly, realizing that, as a customer from out of town, I was sure to buy the latest sensation. “Panch rupia, five rupees!”

“What would I use the apparatus for?”

“Very good-quality,” he stressed, “good price. I am crippling. No family. No money.”

I handed over the note and took the alien antennae. They might come in useful down the line, I thought. After all, this was Calcutta.

I tried on the tentacles for the first time. No one even looked round as I pushed through the crowds, the pair of demonic eyeballs jolting about above my head. Then I noticed a man waving at me from the far end of Lal Bazaar. Suspecting it to be another mendicant, impatient to make an easy sale, I turned and hurried off. But a grinding of wheels indicated that the man was in pursuit. Without looking round, I slipped down a side alley, my alien eyeballs flapping about like teasels in the wind. The wheels followed.

“All right,” I snarled, facing the pursuer. “What do you want?”

It was then I noticed that this was no cart-bound invalid, but a rickshawalla.

“Jadoowalla!” he shouted. “Remembering? Mister Magician …?”

The man spoke gibberish.

He was sleek as a gondola, barefoot and extremely lean. His torn saffron-colored vest revealed a scrawny back, pocked with dried sores, and with muscles as taut as a drum-skin. When standing still, his body swayed back and forth. He was very drunk indeed.

“What do you want?”

The man pointed at me, then the rickshaw, and then acted out a little sketch.

He was beginning to seem familiar.

“Aren’t you the rickshawalla who took me to Feroze’s house on that first day – you were the runner in Purulia, right?”

The rickshawalla tilted his head from one side to the other. “Haa, Sahib,” he said. “Runner. I am runner. Name … Venky.”

The rickshawalla cracked his knuckle joints, as if demonstrating his enduring strength.

“Where you want to go?” he asked, squinting.

“Well,” I said, “maybe you can help me.”

He shuffled forwards in concentration.

“I am looking for a special thing,” I explained. “I am searching for insider information.”

Venky the rickshawalla raised his eyebrows as high as he could, and swayed his head from left to right. It smelled as if he had taken a bath in chullu.

“Do you understand? I want to be taken to someone with insider information.”

The man patted the rickshaw’s seat with his leathery palm. I climbed up and we set off. He seemed to know where he was going.

Dodging the onslaught of taxis, juggernauts, and a great caravan of marching bandsmen, who were out drumming up business, the rickshawalla scuttled towards the Bow Bazaar. The market is famous for selling fine jewelry, produced in cramped back work-rooms behind each shop. The larger emporia have resident astrologers, advising on the appropriate design of jewelry.

Without warning, Venky dug his heels into the dirt and pointed to a cow. The animal, which had a wreath of flowers around its neck, was tied to a post. Beside it was a middle-aged woman, dressed in a simple white sari, tied in the Bengali way.

“How can an animal have insider information?”

The rickshawalla hesitated.

“No understand,” he said.

“Then why did you bring me to this cow?”

Venky stuck out his lower lip, revealing his gums. We had only just met, but somehow it was as if I had known him all my life.

“Well, since we’re here, can you ask the woman what she uses her cow for?”

Promoted from rickshawalla to translator, Venky struck up a conversation with the woman. She held up a bunch of rough grass stems and he slurred a number of disjointed questions.

‘”She says,” began Venky in his best English, “people paying little bit money feed cow.”

“Why do people want to pay to feed the cow?”

“Feed cow lucky,” responded the rickshawalla.

“Does the woman own the cow?”

Again, Venky chattered away in animated conversation.

“Haa,” he said after some time, “she not own cow. Milking man own cow. She is paying milking man for cow in day.”

“You mean that the woman hires the cow each day, once the milkman’s finished with it, and she lets strangers pay her money to feed it?”

Venky thought for a moment. Then he smiled.

“Yes, Sahib … very good!”

The genius of the arrangement bore the unrivaled hallmark of Calcutta. Where else could you find such an ingenious system? The milkman milks the cow and then, instead of looking after it all day, gives it to a woman who pays him for the privilege of looking after the animal. Far from being left out of pocket, the woman charges people to feed the creature a few strands of grass. In turn, the cow’s devotees attain a sense of inner calm from their charity. The woman sells the dung to fuel-brick makers as a profitable side-line. This was even better than the baby rental.

“Venky,” I said, as Mehboob’s Marching Band engulfed us like a sea of crude oil, “you’re a genius!”

Buoyed by the early success of Bow Bazaar, I set my sights on the street’s other professionals. If a humble cow could reveal such hidden wonders, then what could be waiting for me further along the street?

But even before I had a chance to put away my notebook, Venky pointed at a group of men cleaning out the gutters beside his rickshaw’s wheel. “Ghamelawalla!” he cried.

“What are you saying? What’s a Ghamelawalla?”

The rickshaw-puller was perplexed that I should not understand the term.

“Ghamelawalla,” he repeated, “gold-sweeper!”

“Venky,” I said, “you’re obviously wrong. These men are gutter cleaners. Look – they’re sweeping up all the dirt and heaving it on to a metal cart.”

The rickshawalla wagged a finger.

“Ghamelawalla, looking for gold,” he said.

With Venky translating, I resigned myself to the fact that seeking out the truth might be a slow, uphill task. His English was limited. It was like deciphering a garbled tape-recording made under water. I put his wavering linguistic ability down to the flask of opaque liquid stored in the pouch around his neck.

Bow Bazaar is a street of astounding financial wealth. Bearing this in mind, it wasn’t unreasonable that people should be dredging the gutters for gold. Renewing my faith in the man who had brought me the cow keeper’s secret, I licked my pencil.

Gold dealers in the West value the dirt swept from workshop floors. An old Hasid jeweler in Manhattan once told me he had sold the antique floorboards from his factory. Their purchaser incinerated the planks to extract the gold dust which had worked its way into the crevices over the years. But as I came to realize, the clan of the ghamelawallas, Calcutta’s unofficial army of gold-scroungers, put even the great recyclers of New York to shame.

Taking their name from their ghamela, heavy iron pans, the city’s ghamelawallas begin work in the middle of the night. Long before the bazaar’s jewelers are open for business, they turn up to sweep out the workshops. Like the tiny birds which peck the teeth inside crocodile mouths, ghamelawallas perform a vital, if not uncelebrated, service. Every grain of dust is meticulously collected. Handing the business’ owner a few rupees, the precious dirt is taken away to be treated.

Many ghamelawallas make their homes on the streets of Calcutta. Nearly all are migrant workers, with wives and children who they see once a year. Most begin their careers as apprentice ghamelawallas, arriving to work alongside their fathers at the age of six or seven. They sleep on charpoys, rope beds, in alleyways, and wash at hand-pumps. Wander the back-streets near the Bow Bazaar and you’ll see them sitting on the sidewalks, toiling over the jewelers’ dirt. Mixed amid the jumble of sidewalk life, one could easily dismiss the huddle of squatting figures without a second glance. But like so many in Calcutta, the ghamelawallas are masters of creating a living from almost nothing. The tattered sweepers, squatting at shin-level perform an intricate scientific procedure.

First, the scraps of paper and straw and larger pieces of garbage are removed. These will be sold later to ruddiwallas, “rag-pickers.” Then the actual dirt is washed in clean water. When it has been swilled about, a few drops of nitric acid are added. This dissolves all the metals except for the gold. The residue is then treated with a solution of barium, which amalgamates the gold particles. After this, the remaining compound is burned in a crucible, on a choolah, a small stove. As miniature hand-driven bellows blast air into the embers, a tiny nugget of gold is formed at the base of the crucible.

Some other Indian cities have ghamelawallas as well. But those in Calcutta dismiss their rivals as impostors. For nowhere on Earth has recycling been taken to such exalted levels as in Calcutta. Whereas ghamelawallas working in, say, Mumbai, treat the salvaged dirt once, their fellow gold-seekers in Calcutta are far more ingenious. When the initial burning is over, the first group of ghamelawallas sells the dirt from which they have extracted gold to another group of ghamelawallas. More impoverished than the first, the second group repeats the process, removing even more minute traces of the precious metal. These ghamelawallas sell the dust on to yet another team of washers, who pan it on the banks of the Hoogly. When they are finished with the dust, they peddle it to builders, who turn it into bricks.

By late morning, when the first set of ghamelawallas have done their round of the workshops, they turn their attentions to the gutters of the inimitable Bow Bazaar. Armed with hard brushes, they scrub the dirt from the streets and cart it away to process. Before they leave to rest in the scorching afternoons, the ghamelawallas set up a complex network of miniature dams to prevent any of the valuable dirt from seeping down into the sewers. But, this being Calcutta, another regiment of ghamelawallas are on hand to trawl the sewers at night. If too much garbage piles up for them to treat, they simply sub-contract the work.

Straining to translate the intricate lore of the ghamelawallas, Venky muttered that one lakh, a hundred thousand, people work as freelance ghamelawallas in Calcutta. If each is making, say, twenty rupees a day – and works eleven months out of twelve – then between them, Calcutta’s gold-sweepers alone must be bringing in more than thirteen million pounds a year. Not bad for making money from nothing. As they say in Calcutta, “Ak janar chai, annyar sona” – “One man’s waste, another man’s gold.”

ELEVEN

Metro Marriage

The Master sat motionless in his study as I delivered my report next morning. He had placed his pocket-watch on the desk and was timing my narration. When I had spoken of discovered treasure and sublet bovine deities, he clicked the heels of his brown suede brogues together.

“Tell me,” he said after several minutes of silence, “did you find the cow and the ghamelawallas by yourself?”

I mulled his question over. Was there any way that he could have followed me? Could he have seen Venky? Had he dispatched a cohort of spies to track my movements?

“Yes, I did it all on my own,” I said anxiously. “You know … like a bloodhound sniffing out its quarry … it’s all part of the job.”

Feroze rose from his chair and stood still for a moment in classic Masonic stance: feet at right angles to one another. Then stalking across the room’s fine Herizi rug like a tiger moving in for the kill, he drew near. When within six inches of my face, he withdrew a pair of demi-lune spectacles from his shirt pocket, and slipped them on. With great care, he examined the beads of perspiration on my hairline.

“Feeling a little bit warm, are you?” he prompted.

“No, not really.”

“Then please explain,” said the Master, returning to his chair, “how did you communicate with these people? My instructions forbid you from taking a translator on board.”

Nothing would have given me greater pleasure than to run Hakim Feroze through with a blunt broadsword. Then I remembered the rubber bands. The truce was over. Turning my back to the teacher, I pretended to tie my laces. My fingers fumbled for the elastic bands under the inner sole of my left shoe.

“Come on,” Feroze taunted, “how they related such detailed information? Did they speak Oxford English? Or have you mastered Bengali since yesterday?”

Determined not to reveal Venky, my secret weapon, I stashed the elastic bands in my shirt pocket and fought on. It was now just a matter of deployment.

“Well,” I proclaimed obstinately, “there was only one way I was going to understand such complex detail …”

“All right, what is it?”

“I used …”

“Yes, out with it!”

“I used sign language!”

Feroze moistened a fingertip with his tongue and groomed back an eyebrow. I waited for him to look away. All I needed was a split second to flick the bands on to the desk.

The magician stared into my eyes like a telepath. We both knew he was reading my mind. I swear I could sense him trawling through my library of memories. Gazing deeper and deeper, he drained the past from me until I was physically weak.

There was no choice but to abort the attack. As I drew a deep breath into my lungs, Feroze swiveled around to pick his tea-cup from the window-sill. I rubbed my eyes. Then I took my chance. With haphazard precision, I tossed the three turquoise elastic bands on to the desk. They seemed to fly across the room in slow motion, before landing beside the precious pocket-watch. My stomach turned fearfully. The Master sipped his tea. Then he glanced over at the watch. Time stood still. Was there a gush of phobic anguish as he scrutinized his nemesis? Alas, there was not. Had he sapped the truth from the deepest recesses of my mind? His lack of stupefaction led me to believe that he had.

Without a word, Feroze cast a silk polka-dot handkerchief over the elastic bands like a miniature fishing net. He crossed the room, locked in thought. Then he dropped the projectiles and the contaminated handkerchief in the waste-paper bin.

“You go out today,” he said after a long pause, “and do some more of your ‘sign language’. I want two fine examples by this afternoon. When you get back: a dozen more illusions to cover and a test on everything you’ve learnt so far. We’ll be working late tonight! You may go now.”

I rose from my seat and made for the door in silence. As I leant forward to grasp the knob, the Master called to me.

“Oh, by the way,” he growled, “I beat all my aversions years ago. I take a dim view of humor at another’s expense. But don’t worry about that, it’s Gokul who’s to be punished.”

* * * *

Deep down I had known that, however high my hopes, the magician wouldn’t be conquered by low-quality stationery. I had known, too, that my best efforts the day before would be judged inadequate. The hunch had spurred me to arrange in advance another meeting with Venky. Hiring the rickshawalla may have been against the Master’s will. But then, as I rationalized it, communicating with Venky was no easy task in itself.

Venky was quaffing a bottle of murky bootleg liquid at the place of rendezvous. Without discussing the day’s plan at all, he knurled his face as the hooch corroded his insides like battery acid on a sheet of zinc; tapped the seat for me to ascend, and set off at a furious pace.

Stopping once, to pull a shard of glass from his foot, Venky headed east to Bhawanipur Metro Station. He covered the short distance in a few minutes. Even when drunk, he was a man of startling physical endurance. The years of postal running through the wilds of Purulia had been good training. When he had recovered his breath, Venky stared directly at the sun.

“Early,” he said.

I looked at my wristwatch.

“It’s nine-forty … Early for what?”

Venky leant over and peered at the dial.

“Clock no good,” he said firmly. “Sun good … sun no breaking down!”

“Venky, what are we waiting for?”

“Wedding-man.”

“What do you mean?”

The rickshawalla splayed the fingers of his right hand and pushed them back and forth like a lunatic trying to wave. Look at this, Feroze – I thought – here’s sign language in action.

As we waited for the wedding-man to arrive, Venky told me about himself.

“Name Venkatraman … Born in Tamil Nadu. Father moving to Bihar,” he said. “My wife in Gomoh, near Dhanbad.”

“Do you have children?”

“Four sons,” replied the rickshawalla proudly. “Go home one time in year. Seeing children … seeing wife. Very nice.”

“When do you go back to Bihar next?”

“Easter.”

“Easter? You’re a Christian?”

Venky, who had turned his attentions to another sliver of glass in his foot, concurred that he was indeed a Christian.

“What about your life here? What’s it like working in Calcutta?”

“Hard work,” said Venky, tensing the muscles of his face until his cheeks shone like mirrors. “Calcutta hard city. Paying fifteen rupia for rickshaw renting … working all day making forty-five rupia. Sending money to wife.”

“Do your family friends come and visit you from Bihar?”

Venky rubbed at a callus on his right hand.

“Friend come here,” he said softly. “But friend see me … make me sad … Friend laughing at me … me rickshawalla only.”

Calcutta can be a lonely place. Venky had found one true friend in the city. It was called chullu.

“Liking drinking fenny,” he remarked shyly. “Fenny good … you liking fenny?”

“Well, actually, I don’t drink. And you should take care – fenny’s very strong stuff,” I said. “Besides, my stomach isn’t in very good shape … too many emetics – it got ruptured when I was swallowing stones.”

The rickshawalla’s brow furrowed as he translated the words ‘swallow” and ‘stone” into Bengali. He gave me a stern sideways glance.

“You eat stone?” he inquired apprehensively.

“Only on special occasions,” I said. “I don’t eat them every day.”

Venky smiled. He stared at the sun again.

“Is time now,” he said. “We go in.”

We crossed the street to the Bhawanipur Station. Leaving his rickshaw with a stall-keeper, Venky led me down into the Metro. He descended the marble stairs with unsure footsteps. I sensed he had not been in India’s only underground railway before. I purchased two tickets at three rupees each and we strolled down a staircase on to the platform. Deep in the bowels of Calcutta, with the city’s traffic raging above, the underground was like an urban Garden of Eden.

Calcutta’s single-line Metro was constructed in 1984 against all the odds. The cost is said to have been an estimated $300 million. In a land where three hundred pounds – let alone a million times that – is a monstrous sum, it’s hard to imagine why so much cash was required. But cast an eye around this, the pride of West Bengal, and you can’t deny that money has been spent.

The Metro is everything one would expect it not to be. It’s cool, spotlessly clean, silent as a grave, soothing on the senses, and it smells of lavender oil. The platforms, with their fresh, chilled air, boast satellite television and piped muzak. The train carriages, which are free from chewing gum and graffiti, exhibit original paintings of local artists.

Most unexpected of all is that the Metro is desperately underused. Whenever I asked Calcuttans why the pride of their city is so empty, they grinned tensely. Some put it down to the fact that Bengalis like to have their feet firmly planted on the ground. Others said the Metro was too cold; or that people were terrified that it would collapse. Judging by Venky’s response, it may have been a mixture of the three reasons. Even standing on the platform made him restless.

After waiting on the south-bound platform for twenty minutes, I started to wonder what was going on. Trains came and went. But Venky made it clear we had not come to ride the tracks.

Instead, he held up his hand, motioning for me to be patient.

“No traveling,” he explained. “Waiting for wedding-man.”

“You still haven’t told me who the wedding-man is …”

At that moment, a rotund figure with eyes like peeled green grapes sidled up. He was dressed in a tailored bran-colored suit, with wide lapels and six buttons on each cuff.

“Hello,” he said in faultless English. “I was delayed. Been arranging the wedding.”

When I had introduced myself, I explained that Venky had not told me why we were meeting.

“I organize weddings,” said the man casually. “Finding the right spot is getting very difficult, especially right now, in the marriage season. Families get very desperate. They want somewhere cool and relaxing away from the noise, the pollution, where there aren’t too many people. The place has to be easy to get to, clean and large enough to take the full wedding party. So,” said the man blithely, “that’s why I hire out Metro platforms.”

“I’m not sure if I understand.”

His grape-like eyes scanning from right to left like an iguana’s, the broker continued:

“Where better for a wedding than a Metro platform? It’s clean, cool, and convenient to get to. It has toilets, televisions, and speakers all around. What place could be more suitable?”

“But do you work for the Calcutta Metro?”

The man rubbed his belly, and laughed.

“Oh course not!” he said. “I tip the station manager something, and that’s all taken care of.

“We have a wedding here this evening,” he said. “I’m here making a few arrangements. The wedding party will come in from here …” He pointed to a turnstile. “The wedding ceremony will take place here …”

Puzzled that the rickshawalla had managed to line up such an impressive entrepreneur, I had one final question to put to him.

“Is there one secret that has made all this possible?” I asked.

The man shuffled his feet on the marble flooring. Then, grooming his spiv’s mustache, he leaned over the tracks to peek down the tunnel.

“Yes,” he said plainly, “there is one thing that ensures I don’t have any problems.”

“What is it?”

His wily features reflecting the neon lights, he whispered:

“I always make certain the wedding party have valid Metro tickets.”

* * * *

The best thing about the search for insider information was that I could roam wild far from the magician’s compound. The emphasis might have lapsed from illusory science, but at least I could eat what I liked, when I liked.

Venky became agitated when I offered to treat him to an excellent lunch.

“We’ll go to eat at a place on Park Street,” I said. “It serves quite good tandoori.”

The rickshawalla wiped his mouth with the comer of his shirt. Then he wiped the festering wound on his barefoot.

“Good eat Sealdah Station!” he replied.

Park Street’s snobbish set may have put Venky in an awkward position.

“To Sealdah Station we go,” I said.

Venky raised the twin poles of his rickshaw and lurched into the traffic of A. J. Chandra Bose Road. The prospect of eating at his favorite cafe seemed to put a bounce into his stride. As we jostled along – with Venky dinging the ghanti, a small bell, against the pole – I took a deep breath. Calcutta’s vintage blend of monoxides, mercuries and toxic trace elements swelled my lungs. My thoracic cavity tightened as I strained to exhale the cocktail of poison gas. For the first time in my life, I found myself falling victim to asthma.

By the time we reached the outlying railway station at Sealdah, I could hardly breathe. Observing my distress, Venky pressed his burly fingertips into the soft flesh at either side of my lower jaw. As I concentrated on the pulse above my left eye, my breathing slowed to a more regular pace.

“How did you know to do that?” I gasped, as my breath returned.

Venky grinned.

“Rickshawalla trick,” he said.

The cafe at Sealdah Station was unlike any restaurant I had visited before. Leaving his vehicle with another rickshawalla outside the station’s reservation office, Venky escorted me over the criss-crossing railway tracks to the diner. As we grew closer, his titillation mirrored my apprehension.

The eating house was located next to an overgrown points signal. It was already brimming with regulars. About thirty mendicants lolled about waiting to be fed. Shunned by society, scorned for their handicaps and afflictions, they were the destitute whose name is synonymous with that of Calcutta.

A large, boisterous woman in a fluorescent fuchsia-pink sari was in charge. She barked directions at half a dozen young helpers. One was busy chopping vegetables; another was stirring a bubbling pot with a spade-like spoon; a third was fanning the charcoal beneath the vessel. Venky murmured that the raucous woman was the owner. Her name was Sharmila Roy.

We sat on the grass-covered island beside the railway points, and Venky told me about this, his favorite eating place. Regrettably, the highlights dulled my appetite. Every morning, he told me, Sharmila Roy sends her children out to scavenge for food in the refuse heaps around the city. They gather as many unwanted and partially rotting ingredients as they can, hauling them back to the open-air railway diner. Using her considerable culinary skill, Sharmila Roy brews up a buffet of delectable dishes. Beggars and rickshawalla come from miles around to sample the food.

I had once seen a television report on a similar kind of cafe in Washington DC. An entrepreneur sent scouts to forage through the dustbins of the wealthy. The result was a menu which boasted a smorgasbord of epicurean delights – the finest caviar from the Caspian Sea, tournedos of beef with goat’s cheese and grilled pine nuts, a terrine of langoustines, roasted quails – all washed down with Japanese plum wine.

Although enthused by such tales of garbage banquets, I found myself growing increasingly uneasy. I sensed that a refuse meal in Calcutta may lack the elevated standards of the American capital. In the United States, a product is deemed dangerous thirty seconds beyond its sell-by date. But in Calcutta, a little surface mold or ingrained pestilence is considered to add to the taste.

Scrounged ingredients were only half the secret of Sharmila Roy’s diner. Most restaurateurs focus on feeding those with money to spend. But the Sealdah Station cafe had overcome the hurdle of destitution. The answer was simple. Clients were encouraged to pay in kind, rather than cash. Even for Calcutta – home to baby rental and gold-sweepers – the system deserved applause. If you can’t scrape together three rupees for a heavy lunch, no problem. Bring a knot of rags, a crumpled ball of telephone wire, an old shoe, a jam-jar, a used toothbrush, a light-bulb stolen from a commuter train, or a handful of rusty razor blades … and a lavish helping of fish-head curry will be placed ceremoniously before you.

Obviously one of the diner’s regulars, Venky was greeted tenderly by Sharmila Roy. As she welcomed us, some of the other clients voiced concern that a foreigner was amongst them. The rickshawalla passed me a mound of rags, a makeshift cushion on which to sit. One of Sharmila Roy’s daughters – a girl no older than about six – scurried over to us with three banana-leaf plates. As the tattered banana leaves were brought, I caught my first waft of the curry.

Venky’s eyes lit up like candles burning on a dark night.

“Good eating,” he said loudly, demonstrating his command of English.

Before I could say a word, a heap of fish-heads, stewed chicken bones and mixed vegetable was slapped down on the banana leaf. The food smelled highly spiced. I realized later that this was a precaution to mask the flavor of decay. Despite the strong aroma of chili, the pungent odor of rotting fish rose to the surface like oil in water. When my leaf was piled high with tempting morsels, Venky thrust his hand into his own food, stirred it around, and began to feast.

Vagabonds of all descriptions were in attendance. Those who could walk had formed a circle around us. On one side was half a dozen lepers. Beside them were squatting survivors of road accidents – two men with no legs between them, two more crippled by polio, and another, a victim of acute elephantiasis. In contrast to the lame were the dozen or so rickshawallas. Like Venky, they were hale almost beyond words.

My eyes streamed at the thought of eating a meal concocted from ingredients pilfered from a Calcutta dustbin. I am squeamish about food at the best of times. Yet I had to eat, for fear of offending the rickshawalla and his colleagues. How would Venky ever hold his head up high here again if I – his guest – did not dig in?

Nudging the thumb and index finger of my right hand into the food, I wondered how I would get through the meal. Sharmila Roy tottered over to see I was getting plenty to eat. At first I hoped I would have enough time to stall; or to think of something. Then it struck me that the entire clientele were glancing back and forth at my fingers and my mouth, waiting for the first bite.

Selecting a mass of fetid fish intestines, I squeezed out the juices with my fist and drew them up to my face. Sixty eyes scrutinized my movements. In a second it would all be over. My fingers trembled with alarm. My mouth twitched in anticipation. Then, as the first globule of fish entrails was about to pass between my lips, I had an idea. It was not one of unknown profundity, but, for a skin-of-the-teeth reaction, it would do. Rather than inserting the rotting fish guts into my mouth, I did a conjuror’s sleight-of-hand. The intestines never reached my terror-stricken digestive treat; they were slipped down my shirt instead.

“Delicious!” I exclaimed, after stashing several handfuls of food in the same way. “I must come here again. Venky, this is a wonderful place.”

The rickshawalla translated my applause, to the delight of Sharmila Roy. She was pleased with my ebullient appetite.

In my enthusiasm, I had stuffed two complete pabda fish-heads, a pair of chicken feet, some mushy vegetables and a selection of entrails down my brown corduroy shirt. By the sixth or seventh fraudulent mouthful, my shirt was dark with grease. But, I reasoned pensively, I was no greasier than any of the other patrons. Indeed, the stinking fish oil had helped me blend in with everyone else.

When the meal was finally at an end, I stood up to leave. As my lower abdomen became perpendicular once again, I sensed the fusion of fish heads, intestines and chicken’s feet slithering down into my boxer shorts. Venky led me back across the railway tracks. The forces of gravity drew the comestibles down further. Before I knew it, the rickshawalla was giving me unnerving glances … fish-heads had slimed down on to my shoes.

The worst possible reception was awaiting me at the mansion. A leading Far Eastern diplomat had dropped in on a flying visit to Calcutta. He was escorted by a military colleague, and by a uniformed factotum. Feroze was entertaining the guests on the veranda. Observing me entering the courtyard, he waved for me to join them. After a lunch at the down-and-outs’ cafe, I was in no condition to meet Feroze, or his foreign dignitaries.

Drenched in putrid curry sauce, with rotting fish intestines trailing from my cuffs, I was not a good advertisement for the Master’s tutelage.

With desperate fumbling movements, I straightened my shirt-front and buttoned up the cuffs.

“You’ll never guess what I’ve been through!” I chortled whimsically, as I approached the veranda.

Unfortunately, before my remark had reached the group of immaculately coutured gentlemen, the odor of putrefaction hit them. The subordinate officer gagged as the stench overpowered him. The diplomat whipped out a handkerchief and stuck its corners up his nostrils like home-made corks. The Master, who was inky blue with rage and trembling visibly, beckoned me forward with his index finger. I edged over to his wicker chair.

“Laboratory … now …” he whispered, smarting for revenge. “You look hungry. Have a meal on me … ten pebbles!”

* * * *

Two days passed. Feroze had been angered beyond all reason by my gaucherie. He slammed the shutters and roved about the darkened mansion, snarling. Outside trips were suspended. I was to practice elementary illusions until I could conduct myself better.

When I implored Feroze to understand the life-threatening circumstances of my meal, he dismissed all excuses. Neither would he listen to my report – a veritable orgy of insider information and obscure detail. I had failed the course and that was that.

“Please listen to me!” I urged him on the third day. “Please realize – I only got into such a messy state by a sly sleight-of-hand!”

The Master sniffed haughtily.

“I have practiced illusion for many years,” he said acrimoniously, “and I’ve never had cause to stick rotting fish down my pants.”

“All right … if you won’t listen to my rendezvous with the Metro rental man, or to the meal at the Sealdah Station, would you give me one more chance to study insider information?”

Snatching at a bluebottle with his hand, the Master turned to face me.

“Never say that I am not lenient,” he said coldly. “You have one chance to prove yourself. One slip up and the jar of stones will be your reward.”

Feroze was more like a villainous vizier from A Thousand and One Nights than a prominent conjuror. In times past such a person might have controlled an empire. Hafiz Jan had been right about the Master’s tyrannical course – it wasn’t a “course” at all. Rather, it was a tortuous regime run by a confirmed sadist. Although avid for revenge, I still wanted to impress Hakim Feroze. A single word of applause would have been remuneration for the suffering.

Looking back, I must have been deranged to consider infiltrating Calcutta’s most arcane profession. But as I reasoned it, the magician wanted insider information: and I would provide him with just that.

There would be no need for the services of Venky, at least not until I had done the reconnaissance myself.

During the six and a half weeks I had spent under the supervision of Feroze, a mysterious theme had distracted me. With my daily routine mapped out with illusory training and dead-end studies, I had not had time to explore the subject fully. Not, that is, until now.

Rather than searching for conventional fodder to requite the Master’s craving, I took a rickshaw to South Park Street Cemetery. The time had come to penetrate Calcutta’s most sinister realm – the world of the skeleton dealers.

Instead of entering the graveyard through the main gates, I climbed through the hole in the east wall. I could not chance being noticed.

As if enveloped by a spider’s web, everything in Calcutta is connected to everything else. To locate his prey, a hunter must navigate a course across the delicate gossamer of threads. Given enough time, everything in Calcutta would lead one to everything else. But with Feroze impatient for results, I had no time to waste.

Within the hour I had tracked down Topu, the youth who lived with his friends in the cemetery. I explained that I required an appointment with the city’s konkalwallas. Topu showed no surprise. He said that, for a fee, he could arrange such a meeting. I was to return to the cemetery shortly before midnight. It all seemed very easy – almost as if Topu was used to arranging rendezvous with the skeleton dealers. But as I handed over a few rupees to lubricate the wheels of efficiency, I was nagged by doubts. What if the konkalwallas thumped me on the head? Before I knew it, I’d be traveling freight class in a crate to Zurich as a medical skeleton.

The risks were high. But I was not going to be beaten by a few niggling doubts. Rather than descending into the Underworld alone, I would take a confidant with me. I pondered the situation. Who could I trust? The Master? No chance. He would have nothing to do with such a scheme. What about Gokul? Too old. Rublu? Too hunched. My shortlist was thin on names. With the others unsuitable, only one name remained. Venky. I had not known him long, and had not seen his reactions under fire.

But there was no other choice.

Topu had been hesitant in agreeing to let me bring an acquaintance along. A supplementary fee, paid in crisp hundred-rupee notes, quashed his indecision. Venky was worth the expense – he would be my Insurance policy against the acid bath.

Next stop after the burial ground was a roadside drinking den frequented by rickshawallas, in Chetla, south of Alipore.

Venky, who had been spending all his wages on fenny, had told me I could find him there when he was “off duty”. Unfortunately for his family in Purulia, Venky was off duty and inebriated much of the time. A wooden shack set in bushes off the main road, the bar was haunted by a select breed of cirrhotic alcoholics. In ambiance, it was like a contemporary version of a nineteenth-century opium den. Instead of opiates, gritty moonshine was poured from a single jug. An uncomfortable aroma of alcohol-based urine lingered about the room. Seven or eight hardened drinkers lay comatose in the dirt. One of them was Venky. When we were done with the konkalwallas, I would have to give him a few days to dry out.

“Venky,” I said in a solicitous tone, “I’d like you to come with me tonight.”

The rickshawalla was too intoxicated for conversation. He was singing in his sleep. I pushed back one of his eyelids. The eyeball was rolled upwards. As I felt for a pulse, the owner of the watering-hole wandered over. A great hulk of a man, his face was obscured by six days of beard. He pointed quizzically to the unconscious rickshawalla. I nodded. Seizing Venky by his throat, the manager pulled him to his feet. Venky opened one eye and surveyed the room.

“Haa, Sahib!” he choked as his single functioning eye focused on me. The pupil dilated sharply.

“Venky, wake up!” I shouted. “All this drinking is very bad. You should be ashamed of yourself!”

His neck still imprinted with finger marks, Venky stood to attention as best he could.

“You are to come with me later,” I said. “I need your services tonight.”

“OK,” he coughed. “Where to going?”

“First to Park Street,” I said, attempting to conceal the evening’s gruesome schedule, “then we’ll be going on to meet some old residents of Calcutta.”

“Very nice”, winced Venky, “elderly gentlemen?”

“Yes, elderly gentlemen,” I said. “I suppose you could call them that.”

TWELVE

Curse of the Skeleton Dealers

With the moon high overhead, and a chorus of bats screeching in the mango trees, Venky, Topu and I roved out of Calcutta, towards our nocturnal engagement with the skeleton dealers. The journey was too far to be made by rickshaw, and so we took a battered old Ambassador cab. By his quiet enthusiasm, I suspected this was Venky’s first time in a Calcutta taxi. The vehicle rumbled away from the deserted streets of central Calcutta, heading north-west over the Vidyasagar Setu Bridge. Venky chortled that we should have taken his rickshaw. But then, quite suddenly, he passed out. His blood was still pure alcohol.

Twenty minutes after crossing the Hoogly, Topu called for the taxi to pull up. The driver was paid, and we descended into the jungly undergrowth. Venky would not waken from his slumber. I feared he would be more of a liability than a life-saver. Topu bent over him, and pinched a nerve behind his left ear. Although I'm unclear which nerve it was, the reaction was startling. The rickshawalla jumped forwards, charged with adrenaline.

We waited in a drainage ditch beside an amber light. Every few seconds it would flash on, bathing us in a glorious surge of saffron. The road disappeared into the darkness about thirty meters ahead. When I asked Topu what we were doing, he told me to be patient.

Skeletons have always appealed to me. My fascination began when, as a child, I was taken to the crypt of a former Cistercian monastery in Sedlec, in what’s now the Czech Republic. The thirteenth-century vault had been designed as an ossuary, a bone store. Every so often, when the graveyard was full to capacity, the skeletal remains of the villagers would be dug up and stacked up in the crypt like logs ready for burning. By the 1870s more than forty thousand skeletons had been squirreled away in Sedlec’s ossuary.

Spurred on by eccentric whims, the Schwartzenberg family, who owned the church, commissioned an artist to create something special from the bones. The maestro, Frantisek Rint, yearned to convert the skeletons into magnificent art. He set to work transforming the crypt into his fantasy.

Twin bone urns line the steps which lead down to the vault. The chamber itself is crammed with exquisite cherubs, ships’ anchors, candlesticks, skull-and-crossbone bunting, and the formidable coat of arms of the House of Schwartzenberg: all created from human bones. Rint even signed his name in bones. But the masterpiece is the mighty chandelier. With at least one of every bone from a skeleton, it has seven candle-holders, each crafted from a human skull. As a child, the Sedlec crypt had affected me considerably, spawning a macabre curiosity for the used-body business.

A half hour passed. No sign of our contact. Only dismay as we realized that the gutter was full of cockroaches. Another half-hour slipped by. Venky was sleeping peacefully, unaware of our investigation. Then, just as I was about to quiz Topu for the hundredth time, a slender figure slipped from the undergrowth behind us. At first I couldn’t make out his face; just that he was wearing a checkered lumberjack’s coat.

Topu exchanged greetings with the man. Venky and I were introduced to him. I tried to sustain an air of solemnity, as if the used skeleton business was one of high stakes. As my eyes scrutinized the contours of his face, the amber light flashed on, bathing him in apricot light.

This was a man with truly hideous features. His eyes were pea-sized and unfriendly. His right cheek was bisected by a deep scar; and the lower portion of his face was dominated by a distinct lantern-jaw. One would have been hard pressed to imagine a more suitable facade to go along with his profession, of grave robber.

Well, “grave robber” implies one who exhumes buried corpses from the earth. Our contact was more of a straightforward body thief than an all-out grave robber.

Venky and I had had no idea, but the walled patch of land behind the main road was one of Calcutta’s leading body dumps. Moving in single file, we edged our way to the far end of the wall. The lantern-jaw man pulled a home-made ladder from the gutter and propped it against the barrier. One at a time we clambered up, and jumped down into the enclosed field.

His lungs filling with the stench of rotting flesh, Venky turned to me, as if ordering an explanation.

“Old gentlemen,” I whispered.

Dozens of pedestrians are killed in Calcutta’s traffic every month. Most of the corpses are claimed by relatives and taken away to be cremated. But a sizable number are never collected. Some are too mutilated to be accurately identified. Others are not claimed as their families can’t afford to have them cremated. With Calcutta so close to Bangladesh, the authorities are fearful of sparking another dispute between Muslims and Hindus. So, instead of automatically being cremated according to Hindu funerary rites, all unclaimed cadavers are abandoned in a secluded field on the outskirts of the city. Intentions are sound: the residents of the dumping ground are intended for burial. But with so many random forces hindering legitimate actions, the body-stealers slip by and spirit away what is, for them, a valuable commodity.

Even by moonlight, the body dump was extremely unpleasant. Dozens of corpses lay strewn about in varying stages of decomposition. Some had been gnawed by pye dogs and were missing their heads, hands, or entire limbs. Others were partially clothed. More still had rubbery Bengali weeds, what looked like liverwort, growing up through them. All were rotting. The odor of fetid flesh is especially unpleasant. Inhaling it is like being hit in the face again and again with a cudgel.

As I trod in the giant footsteps of Lantern Jaw, I chewed on my fist. I wasn’t cut out to be a skeleton thief. Staggering behind me was Venky, who had lapsed into a state of deep trauma.

Lantern Jaw poked about with a stick, searching for a corpse of good height, with good teeth. He selected a relatively new cadaver. It was that of a female. By the light of my key-fob flashlight, I made a swift examination of her face. Death is not a condition which live members of the human species are apt to understand. As I stared at this and other cadavers, so many questions came to me. How had the repulsive blemishes occurred? Why were the hands gnarled and distended like root-ginger? Was I going to look like this one day?

Topu observed me staring into the face of Lantern Jaw’s find. He placed a hand on my shoulder blade and tugged me away. Perhaps he sensed that I was already deeply disturbed. Whereas my agitation was inward, Venky’s was loud and overbearing. The rickshawalla was praying at the top of his voice. When I tried to hush him, he grew even more distressed.

Fearing we might be given away by Venky’s screams, Lantern Jaw wrenched the female cadaver from the soil like a discarded, decomposing mannequin. He hid it beneath branches at one end of the field. He would, I suspected, be back for it later.

Topu had sworn me to secrecy. He said it was he who would be held accountable if I were to reveal the factory’s location. In any case, I have no idea how he supposed I would remember details of the convoluted route.

By three a.m. we had reached the plant.

Lantern Jaw slid into the shadows like a cat-burglar, as the main door was pushed open. Topu went in first. Moments later he beckoned for Venky and me to follow. By the way Topu was greeted; it was evident that he was in some way involved. As the dozen or so workers welcomed him, I considered his motives. Had he been peddling antique English skeletons from the Park Street burial ground?

The two hours which Venky and I spent at the skeleton processing factory constituted one of the most unnerving experiences I have ever endured. It’s impossible to liken it to anything else. But rather than being repugnant, the business struck me as constructive. Its products – medical skeletons – were fashioned from unwanted raw material … rotting corpses.

Located in an abandoned brick-walled warehouse, the plant was formed from a series of small chambers. Lit by three or four low-watt bulbs, each was dedicated to a specific purpose. In the West we tend to think of factories as cavernous halls filled with unwieldy machines and uniformed workers. This misguided perception evaporated as we toured the plant.

The rickshawalla and I regrouped in the modest reception area. I whacked Venky on the back, hoping to reassure him. He perked up somewhat. A tattered sofa, a desk and tranquil posters of the Himalayas belied the grisly business of the next room. A manager had arrived to show us around the premises. He was introduced grandly as the “night operator.” By his fawning mannerisms and obsequious demeanor, it was obvious he was expecting a hefty bribe.

The manager’s body, with the proportions of a whiskey barrel, was balanced above a pair of child-sized feet. The ratio resulted in awkward, listing movements, like those of a Sumo wrestler in ballet shoes. Buffing his fingernails on his stained teal-green kitchen apron, the night operator filled me in on some of the details of his profession. Topu translated.

He explained that, until the mid-1980s, Calcutta was Asia’s largest exporter of human skeletons. At the height, about fifty thousand human skulls, and more than twenty thousand complete skeletons, were shipped from Calcutta to international buyers every year. Most were exported illegally to Europe via Bangladesh.

But this was just the tip of the bone-business iceberg. Impecunious states like Bihar and Orissa have two things in abundance. The first is live people. The second is dead people.

In 1988 at least seventy thousand human skeletons were smuggled abroad. Many were victims of road accidents. Thousands more were the decomposing corpses of the exhumed.

Doms, scavengers, across India snatch bodies from hospital morgues, newly dug graves, and crematoria. One distraught relative went to the newspapers when he saw a suspicious-looking man skinning heads at his local morgue. The thief, who was stuffing the skulls in a rough wooden box, was no doubt, about to dispatch them to Calcutta for a quick sale.

As he led Venky and me around his factory, the night operator warned us to cover our noses. His sense of smell must have withered years before, scotched by the vicious stench.

The first workshop was the size and shape of an inter-city railway carriage. Its walls were dark with grime and the floor was caked in mud like a pigsty. The room stank of death. Rotting human flesh radiates a rumbustious, chaotic smell. It bombards the full spectrum of the nasal senses like a stink bomb. Humans interpret the odor as irresistibly unpleasant – an instinctual alarm. Curious as to Venky’s reaction to the aroma, I glanced over at him. The muscles of his face had locked, creating a warped, petrified expression.

“Don’t worry,” I gagged through my handkerchief. “Think of it as a scientific exercise.”

The rickshawalla blinked once. The shock had made him mute. A single male corpse was being stripped by a pair of deferential assistants in front of him. The ease with which they handled the cadaver suggested they were not novices to the profession.

Weaned on censored television, the Western world has an erroneous idea of what a cadaver is like. We’re used to seeing clean, well-turned out corpses on marble slabs in low-budget police dramas. The toe-tags are orderly – the corpses lie straight-backed. Five minutes in a West Bengal skeleton factory amends such trim images. Cadavers are bloated with internal gas. Their skin is rotting, falling away from the bone. The limbs are twisted; the fingers gnarled like a bird’s talons. The face is swollen and contorted, with the mouth open and the nose knocked off. The skin itself is devoid of that refined, even tint of oyster gray from police dramas. It’s black with decay; blotched and hemorrhaged, like a gangrenous, suppurating lump of meat.

* * * *

As he led us through to the next chamber, the night operator lamented how difficult it was to get good-quality corpses.

“We get offered so many,” he said whimsically, “but the doms are very greedy. They don’t pay enough attention to the condition of the bones. What good is a corpse which has been mangled in a car crash? How can we export such a thing?”

I grunted once, then again, echoing the manager’s despondency.

“We only deal with perfect cadavers,” he continued. “Before all the restrictions, we would export only the skull if the actual body was damaged. But now we’re much more careful. Fewer skeletons are being sold from Calcutta, and so we make sure they’re in good condition. The hardest thing to get right is the teeth. What scientist would want a nice white skeleton in his office that’s missing its front teeth? Most of the older cadavers have awful teeth; and the young ones tend to have been killed in traffic accidents.”

“So what’s the perfect specimen?” I asked, slipping the handkerchief away for a second to splutter out my question.

The night operator, who seemed to have a genuine fondness for his vocation, smiled.

“Well,” he said, with Topu still translating, “often the best examples are young men who have died of a disease.”

“What kind of disease?” I snapped, fearful of what contagious infections were inhabiting the premises.

“Oh, all types …” the manager said casually. “We get a lot of tuberculosis, smallpox, cholera, and venereal diseases. As long as the illness hasn’t corroded or distorted the bones, we consider them. Doms get very angry when they have their corpse refused. But if, say, it’s got polio, rickets, or elephantiasis, how can we accept it?” The night operator paused to shoo away a rat. “Sometimes we get in a nice example,” he continued. “It’s a young man of good size, with good teeth. You think it’ll look really nice when it’s cleaned up. But then, when the flesh has been removed, we see that the bones have been eaten away by syphilis. And it’s us who lose out. We pay the doms before the corpse has been stripped.”

“Syphilis …” intoned Topu somberly. “It’s the curse of the skeleton dealers.”

“How long have the bodies been dead when you get them?”

“It’s often hard to say,” the manager explained. “Sometimes we get them when they’re quite fresh – a week or two old. Other times, they’re much older – months, even years. With the restrictions, it takes doms longer to bring them from other states, like Orissa.”

The official ushered us into the next chamber. Much wider than the last, but with a lower ceiling, the room was filled with a series of dented gray metal troughs. Each contained a dark, pungent liquid.

“The corpses are placed in the acid for a complete day,” said the night operator. “The acid dissolves most of the flesh; but it mustn’t start to work on the bone. If that happens, then the cadaver’s useless. We take care the acid isn’t too strong.”

We paced through into another workshop.

The night operator lit a biri, a hand-rolled Indian cigarette, and carried on outlining the factory’s task.

“After a day in the acid,” he said, “the corpse is pulled out and the workers clean off any flesh which remains. The vertebrae, feet, toes, and joints all need a lot of work. But hardest to prepare is the skull. What’s left of the brain is removed, even the smallest traces of flesh and skin are cleared away. Only very skilled workers clean the skull.”

Four men were squatting on the concrete floor. Without glancing up at us, they continued with their work. A jigsaw puzzle of bones was scattered before them. One, clutching a skull in his hands like an orb, cautiously brushed out the eye sockets. Another was scrubbing individual vertebrae with a toothbrush.

“See what care they take with their jobs!” the night operator exclaimed. “Our workmen like it here very much. Of course, before the ban, we had a much larger staff. We used to export all over the world, bringing a lot of valuable foreign currency into the country.”

Like any other small business executive, wounded by punitive legislation, the manager was bitter.

“After the bones have had the remaining flesh removed,” he said, “they get dipped in a series of other baths. First, a strong acid, and then a bleach solution.”

“What happens then – after the bleaching?”

“Then comes the most time-consuming and skilled part,” intoned the executive. “The bones are checked for damage, then they’re drilled and pinned. Synthetic cartilage is fitted between the vertebrae and in the ribcage. All that is now done at another factory.”

The night operator broke off, disturbed by a falsetto whining similar to the sound of a doodle-bug careering to earth. He, Topu, and I turned in unison. Behind us, trembling in the skull-filled comer, kneeling and rocking back and forth, his hands splayed across his face, was Venky.

* * * *

Back in Alipore, the magician listened with veiled interest to my description of the night’s sordid observations. Waving general descriptions of the skeleton factory aside, he searched for intricate details. What color was the flesh being scrubbed from the vertebrae? Was the metal of the acid baths corroded at the seams? Had I noticed any stray teeth on the floor?

As before, I bit my tongue when grilled about contacts. Feroze would have been displeased to learn that his own former agent had set up the rendezvous. The Master feigned ignorance of the body business, but he obviously knew all about it. A rummage through his desk drawers had revealed a metacarpus, a human finger bone. Before leaving the factory, I had handed the night operator an outrageously large tip. In return, he offered Venky and me souvenirs of our tour … finger bones.

“You have done well, haven’t you?” said Feroze sarcastically when I had finished.

“Thank you.”

The magician glanced at his watch.

“You can have the rest of the morning off,” he sneered.

It was a quarter to twelve. With a full fifteen minutes to squander, I went out to the kitchen to have a chat with Gokul.

The manservant was standing on a chair, hanging a new fly-paper from the ceiling.

“Your chest not sounding good,” he said as I entered.

“It’s the city’s pollution,” I responded. “I’ve never had asthma until now. Calcutta’s air should carry a health warning.”

“You know …” said Gokul quietly, “someone told me about special cure for asthma. In Hyderabad … Gowd family giving free miracle cures on one day at start of every June.”

“Miracle cure?” I replied. “What is it exactly?”

Gokul hunched his shoulders.

“Don’t know what,” he said. “But I always wanting to go there. I, too, having this asthma.”

Gokul wheezed severely to prove the advanced state of his condition.

“Sounds interesting … I’ll drop by if I ever happen to be in Hyderabad in June.”

As the long-case clock in the sorcerer’s study struck the last chime of noon, I stood to attention beside it.

Feroze peered up from his writing desk. He pointed to a stack of forty or so books, mostly on illusion.

“Have you read those?”

“Yes, all of them. Shall I put them back on the shelf?”

“Have you practiced all the illusions we learned last week?”

“Yes.”

“Did you scrub beneath your nails with bleach after your little foray last night?”

“Yes … twice.”

“All right,” replied the Master, standing on tiptoe for a moment. “Then you’re to come with me.”

Feroze led me into the street, where he hailed a taxi. Although he often slunk out of the house to meet Rublu at the Albert Hall, the magician had rarely invited me to accompany him anywhere.

“Are we going for coffee at the Albert Hall?” I asked optimistically.

The Master did not reply. He was concentrating on other matters.

“Are your shoes waterproof?” he asked at some length.

“Well, not very,” I retorted. “They’re suede. But I suppose they’re no worse than your loafers.”

“Don’t worry about me,” he barked.

The taxi bypassed central Calcutta, heading north-east towards the gridlock traffic of Tangra, the Chinese suburb. Calcutta’s suburbia was until recently patched with lakes; some salty, others freshwater. The pressure for new tenement blocks had spurred on the illicit draining of such entrancing pools. Calcutta’s climate was changing as a result. I asked Feroze what he thought of the destruction. He told me to hush. Other problems occupied his attention.

With gritted teeth, the taxi driver charged through the swarm of vehicles and incessant road-works. Once beyond Tangra, he turned on to a secluded tow-path and proceeded for half an hour. The trail became increasingly jungly and overgrown. Still deep in thought, the Master stared in concentration at his lap.

Five minutes more and the taxi veered sharply to negotiate an unexpected blind turn. As we recovered from the jolt, Feroze tapped the driver’s neck, signaling for him to stop. The brakes were applied with tremendous force, sending the vehicle into a prolonged skid.

“Come with me,” instructed Feroze sternly. “Welcome to East Calcutta Marshes.”

We marched down to the water, where a ramshackle launch was waiting. The boat’s owner helped us into the craft. The magician barked a set of instructions at him. Nodding, the man pushed the boat away from the bank. Very soon we were playing forward into the swampland ahead.

Every day about a third of Calcutta’s sewage seeps directly into the wetlands. With a little hard work and a lot of help from nature, the slurry is broken down. When the toxins are no more, fish and vegetables thrive.

The marshes lie due east from the rank-smelling tanneries of Chinatown and the mountainous refuse heaps of Dhapa. More than twenty-three million liters of sewage and industrial waste flow into them every day. Despite this, they provide hundreds of tonnes of food in return.

Part of the secret lies in the efficiency of the city’s rag-pickers. They sift out every morsel of reusable material – from scraps of metal and food to fragments of cloth, glass, and plastic. The rest of the secret lies in the marshes’ extraordinary plant life. The water hyacinth filters out the heavy metals, including mercury; while yet more plants strain out the oil, grease, and toxins. Cast an eye across the wetlands, and you see dozens of miniature rice paddies and vegetable plots poking above the reeds and tall grasses.

Politicians are eager to drain the marshes to provide yet more cheap housing for the masses. To them, an ecological recycling plant is of no use. Instead of a twenty-thousand-acre botanical paradise, their vision is of tenements for all the voters.

Feroze had no interest in discussing the marshes’ ecological web of life. Something was bothering him. When I quizzed him on where we were going in the leaking craft, he told me to shut up.

Only when I drifted off to sleep did he address me. “Godmen are having a field day in India!” he shouted.

“But they’re nothing new … they've been around for thousands of years.”

“That might be true,” the Master responded, “but they’re developing now like never before … they’re changing. And as they change, they’re increasing their power over every hamlet, village, town and city. Soon the whole country w ill be at their mercy!”

Sensationalism was not something which Feroze generally went in for. I suspected that, about to launch into one of his fearsome diatribes, he had a point to make.

“But you yourself have taught magical feats to godmen,” I said.

The Master looked out across the marshes. He sniffed the air like a spaniel.

“That may be so,” he replied. “I’m not condemning the rise of the godmen, but merely making an observation. Today in India there are about five thousand leading godmen. That’s five thousand deities in human form. The most celebrated attract hundreds of thousands as their followers … from peasants in the rice paddies to the Prime Minister.”

“You are against them?”

“Absolutely not,” intoned the Master. “I’ve known many of them most of their working careers. I taught illusions to dozens of them. Do you think they came up with those ‘miracles’ all on their own? Miracles are easy … you know that. But they’re not everything.”

“Then what’s the key?”

Feroze pressed his hand to his mouth.

“Presentation,” he said. “Spew out three hours of ‘wooly’ talk – preach about kundalini, self-purification, the cosmic soul or karmic forces – and you’ll keep your followers. Remember, the illusions are the flame which attracts the moth – the rest is down to the gift of the gab.” “What about all the Westerners who come here looking for a guru?”

Feroze shook his head.

“All those foreigners,” he said, “are looking for something quite different than the Indians. Both have contrasting demands on their gurus. Indian people – especially those in villages and small towns – are looking for a cure for illness and increased prosperity. Guru means ‘dispeller of darkness’, but that’s not what the Westerners are after. They’re looking for someone to praise them – to reinforce their self-confidence.”

The oarsman stood up and started to bail water from the center of the craft. Although relatively stable, we were sitting in eight inches of water. My suede brogues were ruined. I looked over to see how Feroze’s slip-ons were faring. He had somehow managed to change shoes en route. Instead of loafers, he was now kitted out in a sturdy pair of Gore-Tex hiking boots.

“Don’t forget,” he said after a minute of thought, “that illusion and magic are taken far more seriously in India than in the West. I’ve told you this before. The faddish superstition of Elizabethan Europe is a feature of modern-day India. Conjury is used by godmen, healers, priests, sadhus, and many others. All of them are seeking to create an impact. The metaphysical is a key facet to life here … Indians explain the natural through the supernatural.”

As Feroze ranted on about illusion, the boat’s pilot docked on a sandbank. Stepping out on to the beach, the Master’s thoughts returned to the situation at hand.

“Can’t you tell me where we’re going?” I moaned, as we tramped a mile east over mud flats.

“Wait and see.”

The earth was moist, and thick with a thorny form of reed. They snagged on my pants as I struggled to keep up. Every shade of green was represented there. I called out to Feroze, asking what he thought of the colors. But as always uninterested in my observations, he ordered me to hurry.

“We don’t have much time,” he said, glancing at his pocket-watch. “The assembly’s about to start.”

“What assembly? What’s this all about?”

As yet another question went unanswered; we arrived at the outskirts of a sprawling village. Feroze led the way to the central square. He seemed to know the layout of the village well.

About three hundred people were already in attendance at the north end of the square. Bunched up together like sheep in a pen, they formed a crude semi-circle. Most were standing. Mothers and their children, old men and gangling youths. All were concentrating on the figure standing before them.

We took our places on the extreme left of the audience.

I whispered to Feroze:

“Who’s that man?”

“That …” he replied grandly, “that is a psychic surgeon.”

“But I didn’t think Indian godmen did actual surgery.”

“They don’t,” said Feroze.

“But look, he’s Indian …”

“This is one of the only psychic surgeons on the subcontinent,” declared Feroze. “He was taught by a Filipino in Madras. He’s trying to make a name for himself in Calcutta … speaks Bengali quite well.”

Before the magician could disclose further details, the show began.

The surgeon was a tall, balding man with an expansive forehead and a flaccid complexion. His hands were broad as cymbals, his body was cloaked in a lavish aquamarine robe, belted at the waist with a fraying red sash. A distance of about twenty-five feet separated him from the crowd. Before him stood a large dining table, covered by a plastic sheet. In front of that was a rug.

“Pay close attention,” Feroze hissed, as the ritual got under way.

One of the surgeon’s assistants scuttled forward carrying a brass incense burner. Copious amounts of gargoyle-gray smoke poured from its latticed top. The burner was positioned at the right-hand corner of the carpet. As the surgeon sat cross-legged at the center of the rug, the attendant returned with a second, identical burner. This was placed at the rug’s top left corner. The physician closed his eyes, lolled his neck back like a loggerhead turtle, and started to chant mantras. A light southerly breeze conveyed the two plumes of dense sandalwood smoke into the audience.

When the prolonged session of chanting was at an end, the surgeon thrust his arms in the air and addressed the villagers.

“He’s telling them that God has sent him here,” said Feroze softly. “He is saying his hands have the power to restore the sick. No illness, he says, is too severe. There’s hope for everyone.”

A wave of expectation gripped the audience. An old man cheered; a young boy shouted praise. The three hundred villagers inched forward in anticipation. As they did so, the surgeon commanded them to stay back.

“Now,” said the Master, “he’s saying his powers only work if everyone stands perfectly still. If anyone moves, even an inch, his magic will vanish and no one will be healed.”

The doctor appealed to the crowd. Which of them had an illness? Virtually everyone stuck up their hands.

The first patient selected by the surgeon was an elderly, anemic looking woman. She claimed to have an ulcer in her stomach. When she was asked to point to the pain, she motioned to her chest. Nonetheless, she was lifted up on to the doctor’s examination table, to the delight of the audience. The table had been placed on a raised bank of ground, with the onlookers standing lower, at the very edge of the square. The table’s height – which was obviously intended – made it impossible for the audience to get a good view of the tabletop.

The physician performed a superficial examination on his patient. From where I was standing, it appeared as if he was probing specific lymph nodes at points on her abdomen. He took care to obstruct the view by standing on the outer side of the operating table. With the external scrutiny over, the doctor pressed his palms together and touched them to his mouth. The villagers stretched forward for a better look. Some were straight-faced. Others chattered away, giggling to their friends in anticipation.

They watched in awe as the doctor drew a grubby scalpel from his belt, flailing it to and fro like a cavalry officer signaling the charge. Inhaling all at once, the villagers inched forward. The assistant poured ghee on to the incense burners. The operating table was veiled in an impenetrable cloud of greasy smoke.

As the surgeon motioned wild, slicing movements with the scalpel, one of the helpers tapped out a rhythm on a tambourine. The drumming, the asphyxiating smoke, the perfume of sandalwood, and the glint of the blade mesmerized the audience. The beat grew faster. And faster. Another assistant bounded in front of the table and twirled round and around like a ballerina. As the drumming reached a climax, the dancer leapt towards the crowd, emitting a terrible scream. The surgeon thrust a chunk of meat into the air. Caught expertly by the aide, the trophy was exhibited to the villagers. The meat was said to be the woman’s ulcer. It was white and bore an uncanny resemblance to a lump of mutton fat. I asked the assistant if I could inspect the ulcer at closer quarters. But as I made my petition, he threw the flesh to a ravenous pye dog. A second later and the evidence had been gobbled up.

The surgeon wiped his bloodied hands on a cloth and helped the woman from the operating table. The villagers watched as he sponged away a patch of blood from her stomach. The wound and all scars had vanished, healed by the psychic surgeon’s magical powers. The grandmother thanked her benefactor and confessed that she felt much better.

When the audience had finished cheering, the surgeon called for a second patient. A boy of about seven was pushed forward by his friends. He conferred with the physician, who made an announcement.

“He says that the child has tonsillitis,” explained Feroze. “He’s going to chop out the tonsils. Again, watch how the smoke and the drumming distract the audience.”

As before, the patient lay still on the operating couch. The scalpel flashed in the sunlight like the eye of a demon as it was lunged towards the boy’s mouth. A ladle of ghee was poured on each incense burner, creating a riot of billowing smoke. The tambourine’s sound echoed like a clap of thunder. The assistant shrieked and the child’s tonsils were hurled into the air. The pye dog had another snack. A moment later, the boy stood up, spat out a mouthful of blood, and returned to his friends – miraculously healed.

Psychic surgeons have had an uneasy honeymoon with the Indian public. When they first appeared during the early 1980s, they were discredited largely because of a single foreign “surgeon-priest.” Professing to have the ability to heal through mind-power, the self-taught surgeon arrived in India and started holding regular sessions. But then he himself fell sick after eating some local food. He called for an ambulance and was rushed to hospital. Rather than being pleased that the mystic was being cared for in hospital, people turned against him. “If he’s a miracle-maker,” they asked, “why doesn’t he cure himself?”

Manila, capital of the Philippines, is the world center for psychic surgery. As at the village in the marshes, Filipino surgeons generally feign the operation – pretending to excise a morsel of cancerous flesh. In some cases, a “doctor” performs actual minor operations without anesthetic. The patient’s surges of adrenaline as the audience cheers them on, and their natural endorphins, mask the discomfort. In Latin America, genuine cataract surgery and tonsillectomies are often carried out by so-called psychic surgeons. Yet there’s very little one could call “psychic” about their work at all.

Feroze nudged me to pay attention. The next patient was on the table. A woman of about forty, she had been complaining of severe abdominal pains. When the physician pressed his fingers to her appendix area, the lady screeched wildly. The doctor felt certain she had appendicitis. Immediate surgery was necessary to save her life.

This time, the operation was longer and more involved. A blindfold was placed over the woman’s face to keep her from seeing her own intestines. A fresh scalpel was passed to the surgeon. Its blade was tested on a strand of hair. It was as sharp as a sickle. Ghee was applied to the burners. The drum beat out a mysterious rhythm. The pye dog licked its lips expectantly. The villagers stood on tiptoe to get the best view possible.

Pulling me to his own vantage point, Feroze gestured to the surgeon.

“Watch the front fold of his robe,” he whispered. “Don’t be distracted by all the song and dance.”

Locking my eyes on the surgeon’s hands, I watched in astonishment as he slipped a large lump of meat from the lining of his garment. The costume’s bright color was well-suited to concealing raw mutton. As one of the surgeon’s hands slashed about with the blade, the other squeezed blood from a sponge across the woman’s abdomen. None of the villagers queried that a human appendix could so resemble a chunk of meat carved from a sheep’s thigh. They were too enthused with the presentation to voice questions.

“All right,” said Feroze as the fourth patient was getting ready to have a tumor excised, “that’s enough. Let’s go back to Calcutta.”

We tramped back across the mud flats to where the boatman was waiting. Spreading the fingers of his left hand in a crude salute, he helped us into his waterlogged craft.

Against all the odds, the taxi driver had remembered to fetch us from the embankment. It was good to be on dry land again. Soaked through below the waist, I tugged off my shoes to check for trench foot.

“How did you enjoy the surgeries?” Feroze asked in a clement tone.

“Not bad at all … especially the appendectomy.”

“I’m glad the display met with your approval,” mused the magician.

“You’ll be able to think about it when you go away …”

“Go away?” I said. “Go away where?”

“Oh,” he exclaimed with a phony blank expression. “Didn’t I tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“You’re going on a journey.”

“Am I? What sort of journey?”

The Master wound down the taxi’s window and drew in a sharp breath of Chinatown’s turbid air.

“A journey of observation!”

“Tell me more …” I said, recoiling from the sudden announcement.

“The journey is the next phase in your course,” Feroze declared, picking his teeth with his tongue. “You’re to spend time watching people.”

“People? Only people? What of the scenery? What about landscapes?”

“Rubbish,” said the magician. “Don’t give a damn bit of notice to the scenery. People change, they’re changing all the time … they’re doing things … the bloody scenery will be there forever. No – people are the thing you’re to observe!”

“What kind of people?”

“All kinds. But I want you to search out godmen, sadhus, astrologers, and anyone who’s out of the ordinary. Remember Houdini’s principle: everyone, however unlikely, has something from which one can learn. You are to make notes on all that you observe – they’re to be sent back regularly for my attention.”

“But where am I to go, on this journey?”

The Master prodded me in the chest.

“Anywhere you like!”

“How long is the trip supposed to go on?”

“A day … a month … a year … a lifetime: however long it takes!”

The lack of guidelines was galling. Feroze knew how I liked basic, straightforward questions to be answered. He had clearly dreamt up the scheme to harass me. Or, more likely still, to get rid of me.

“If you won’t tell me where to go, or how long to go for … will you at least tell me when I am to leave?”

Handing a rupee coin to a beggar as the taxi paused at a stop sign, Feroze pivoted to regard me straight on.

“You are to leave at sunrise,” he said.

PART THREE

Much travel is needed before the raw man is ripened

Proverb

THIRTEEN

Dick Whittington and the Black Hole

Gokul slipped into my room in the middle of the night and packed my bags, as stealthily as a secret agent on assignment. At five-thirty a.m. he tweaked the little finger of my left hand.

“Time for shower,” he sniffed, as I woke from a nightmare.

“Gokul …” I yawned. “I’ve been having the most unpleasant dreams.”

“What you dream?” he asked sensitively.

“I dreamt that Feroze was sending me away …”

Gokul did not reply. He was too busy stuffing my shaving kit into a side pocket of my case.

“Must waste no time,” he said a few moments later. “Master say you must go by six. Twenty-five minute time.”

My stomach knotted like a bullwhip. The future was suddenly so uncertain. Where was I to go? How was I to get there? Was I being expelled from the course?

Ordering the elderly valet to unpack my things, I charged downstairs to confront the Master. I was tired of being used as a pawn in his grand scheme. As always he was merely toying with me; abusing my pledge of unequivocal obedience. I searched the study, laboratory, sitting-room, and even the kitchen. The magician was not to be found.

Gokul, who had ignored my instructions, was dragging my case to the foot of the stairs.

“Do you know where the Master is?”

“He gone out,” said the servant. “He wish you luck and say he see you when you return in few months.”

“A few months?” I swallowed hard. “Is that how long I'm supposed to be gone?”

Gokul hunched one shoulder. Then the other.

“Yes,” he replied innocently, “I am thinking so.”

“Didn’t he want too see me off himself?”

“Oh, no, he too busy. He having business across town.”

“What, at six in the morning?”

Fumbling, Gokul dislodged a packet from the inner depths of his lungi. It was wrapped in green sugar paper.

“Master ask me to give you this. Almost forgot.”

“Ah, excellent!” I said. “This must have all the directions in it for my trip.”

I tore the sheets of sugar paper apart. Inside was a map and a note written in the magician’s hand. I read the message aloud:

“Have a productive journey. All the best, Feroze.”

The valet smiled through the right corner of his mouth. He continued to haul my case out into the yard.

“Is that it?”

Gokul nodded.

I unfolded the cloth-backed map, which was rather like unfurling a starched ship’s sail. It depicted the entire Indian subcontinent. Scanning it gingerly, I searched for random pencil lines, an arrow, an “X”. Anything. Despite its great age, the chart – manufactured by Sifton, Praed and Co. of St James’s – was unblemished. The only mark was a Chinagraph circle around Hyderabad.

“Hyderabad … What’s in Hyderabad?”

“Gowd family asthma cure,” said Gokul.

“But … that’s not until the first week of June.”

I looked at the date on my watch.

“Today’s the third of March.”

Gokul warned me that it was one minute to six. The Master, he exhorted, would be incensed if I were there when he returned. We hurried through the courtyard.

“Good journey …” exclaimed Gokul abruptly, pulling back the gate for me to leave, “and watch out!”

“What for?”

The manservant raised his right palm to his brow in a crude salute.

“You will be knowing … soon you will be knowing,” he said.

* * * *

With no one else to turn to for advice, I sallied down to the other end of Alipore, in the hope of finding Venky at his usual bar. The rickshawalla would probably be passed out on the floor after a wild night of carousing. It was time to rouse my secret weapon.

The sudden proclamation that I was to hasten away on an epic journey of observation worried me deeply. Feroze was an expert at destabilizing those around him. He must have noticed that I had begun to actually relish his intolerably sadistic regime. Despite being savaged by the unbearable pressures of the course, I had developed dour masochistic tendencies. Doubtless an instinctual tactic of survival. The very prospect of digging trenches with a teaspoon, memorizing formulae, or selected works of Plato, raising my temperature to suicidal levels, even swallowing pebbles now filled me with ominous delight. Suddenly, the magician was swiping all these indulgences away. He was revoking the outlandish lifestyle of the past two months. In doing so he was sentencing me to the most sadistic ordeal so far – an existence without routine oppression. Cast back into the world like an ex-con who had done his time, I had become dependent on incarceration.

I considered the journey. My neck stooped downwards with despondency. What was I going to do? As I stumbled ahead I sensed an invisible force clutching my shoulders. I stopped in my tracks. The sensation was still there. Although forceful, it was warm and pleasing. “Don’t be beaten by this!” growled a familiar voice. “Remember your ancestor Nawab Jan Fishan … Even when his own sons were slaughtered in battle, he continued fighting until victory!” An instant later Hafiz Jan’s embrace had disappeared. But his words had stirred me. He was right. Why be conquered by uncertainty? Why not roam about India for a while, searching for godmen and illusions? I hadn’t spent much money while staying with Feroze. Living on the cheap I could afford to survive for months.

All right, I mused, I will fulfill the sorcerer’s orders. I’ll go on a trip – and not some pathetic little jaunt, but a great journey.

Venky was not, as I had expected to find him, unconscious at his Alipore drinking den. Instead, he was dressed in a fine new lungi and poly-cotton shirt, with a large tikka on his forehead. He was in the street washing his rickshaw.

“Venky … is that you?” I asked, aghast he was even fit to stand.

“What’s going on?

The rickshawalla probed the spokes of the cartwheel with an oily rag. They had not been cleaned for a very long time. He greeted me with namaskar, and offered me his clay cup of cold, milky tea. When I refused it, he gulped it down and dropped the cup in the gutter, breaking it.

Everything in Calcutta – from tea leaves to sticking plasters – is reused. Nothing is ever thrown away after one use … nothing, that is, except for bharh, the minuscule bisque cups. Little bigger than thimbles, they fill every gutter. Calcuttans laugh hysterically when the mad foreigner suggests reusing them. To me, the cups were dainty objects of art. To Venky, and everyone else, they were the most worthless things around.

“Sahib,” the rickshwalla said, “you were sended to me!”

“What are you talking about, Venky? I found you all by myself. No one knows about you … you’re my secret weapon.”

But the rickshawalla had more to say:

“No, Sahib, you no understanding! You were sended to me by angels … from Heaven!”

Venky was obviously drunk.

“I thought you were sober,” I said. “You should know better than this.”

“But Sahib,” he replied earnestly, “I am no drunk. I will no be drinking again. You were sended to me … you are warning from God. I was drinking … wasting money. Sending little bit to wife in Purulia only. God sending you to me!”

“Venky,” I replied, “if you’re not drunk, then you’ve gone mad. How could you possibly think I was sent from Heaven?”

He lay out on the ground, as if mimicking a corpse.

“Konkalwallas,” he shouted, “this was sign!”

Venky was eager to explain how the horrors of the skeleton factory had jerked him into a new, unknown life of moral rectitude. He had witnessed a vision … not God or angels, but skeleton dealers and their corpses. Somehow, he now saw me as his savior. But there was no time for the adulation.

“Venky,” I said, “I’m going on a trip. I need your help.”

“Trip? Oh, very nice. Where you to going?”

“I don’t know.”

“When you are going?”

I tapped my watch.

“Immediately,” I said.

The rickshawalla gave me an uneasy glance.

“I need some ideas,” I said. “If you could go anywhere in India to meet a godman … where would you go?”

“Holy man … sadhu?”

“Yes, that’s right …”

Venky thought long and hard. He masked his face with his spindly fingers. A minute passed. Five more minutes slipped away. The rickshawalla seemed to have fallen into a trance. Perhaps the sudden shortage of alcohol had been too much for his addicted system.

“Venky!” I shouted. “What are you doing?”

“I thinking, Sahib.”

“All right, well stop thinking now. What have you come up with?”

Venky raised a finger in the air, as if he were testing the direction of the wind.

“I going to Jamshedpur Mental Hospital,” he said, pointedly.

“Where’s that?”

“Bihar.”

“But I'm not mad. At least, I don’t think I am.”

“Yes, Sahib. You no loony. Famous sadhu at Jamshedpur Mental Hospital. Very popular.”

“Is he mad?”

“Oh, no, Sahib,” came the reply. “He no loony … he just living there.”

“Hmm, an asylum for sane people: sounds like a great idea.”

I pulled the map from my back pocket and hunted for Jamshedpur.

“Well, that’s quite close … due west,” I said when I had found it. “I suppose it’s a start.”

Venky patted the seat of his rickshaw and widened his eyes.

“Train leaving Howrah Junction,” he said knowingly. “I take you there.”

Heaving the rickshaw’s handles up to his armpits like upturned hockey sticks, Venky padded his way north to the famous Calcutta Strand. I was horrified he should still be working barefoot. On many occasions I had offered to buy him a pair of shoes. But Venky insisted he had never worn footwear – even when he was a postal runner in Purulia. Shoes made his feet itch and sweat, and that made his work impossible. So, it was with bare feet that he dodged the potholes on that bright yet uncertain morning.

India is accustomed to pandemonium on a grand scale. At any one time, it seems as if all nine hundred million people are careering about, guided by their own evolved form of Brownian motion. Like constellations in a distant cosmos, they move according to predestined trajectories. And at the center of each unending galaxy is India’s version of a Black Hole: a central railway terminus.

Amid the structured chaos of the subcontinent, a special and venerated place is reserved for major railway stations. Those who enter them can never be certain of when, or where, they will emerge. Indeed, some never reappear at all. They become trapped in the cycle of polishing shoes, picking pockets and selling frothy mango drinks.

Howrah railway station is the most visually spectacular Black Hole of all. It might not have the architectural appeal of Mumbai’s Indo-Gothic Victoria Terminus, but it boasts an inexorable blend of life. The floor’s rich patchwork stretched out like a grand kelim, covering every inch of the station. Knotted together, sealed in position like frozen atoms, there was almost no room to move. Even if they could have moved, no one would have dared. As in a perpetual game of musical chairs – without music or chairs – stand up and you would be out.

Every conceivable type was locked in the human traffic jam. Flower sellers with bundles of lilies; a dentist with his mobile clinic – a pair of pliers; a company of Jain pilgrims with white cardboard masks; fifty schoolboys searching for cigarette ends; a nest of kittens abandoned by their mother; sixty turbaned porters, each with a bale of hemp at his side; a blind beggar with his crippled monkey; a Kali-following sadhu with a clip-on tongue, strap-on arms, a crown, and clutching a sword dipped in red paint … to them all I was an untouchable with nowhere to sit.

When the ticket booth opened I purchased a second-class ticket on the Hatia Express to Jamshedpur. It was to leave at 21:35 hours. There was exactly thirteen hours to wait.

Venky offered to take me back into town. But I had already fallen victim to the listless indifference of life in the Black Hole. When I explained this, the rickshawalla asked me if it was the same sort of Black Hole into which the British prisoners had been crammed in central Calcutta. I replied that, although not entirely dissimilar, there were fundamental differences. Both were dingy, pungent and packed to the point of bursting; both kept prisoner those ensnared within. But, I said, as far as I knew, the Black Hole of Calcutta had no electric fortune-telling machines, no tea stalls or eunuchs soliciting alms.

Bidding farewell to my secret weapon, I ordered him to leave me. I would have to hurry if I was to get prime waiting position on platform nine. Once again, Venky thanked God for sending me to him. He would, he said, never drink chullu again. He was a new man.

The first five hours passed very slowly. The platform’s newspaper stall had never seen such brisk business. In the first hour alone, I slurped my way through five Frooti mango drinks, flicked through six Bengali film magazines, and began reading a book entitled How to Breed Reptiles. When I had learnt all about breeding boxes for expectant iguanas, I mugged up How to Renovate Dentures and How to Draw Cathedrals. Magazine kiosks on Indian railway platforms always specialize in “How to” books. Shrewd passengers realize there’s no better time for self-help than when waylaid in a railway Black Hole.

By the tenth hour, the Hole had taken total control. All earthly concepts of time and place had been suspended. Sustained by the stream of self-help publications and frothy fruit drinks, I yielded to an infant boot-boy’s petitions for employment. My shoes had, somehow, become covered in cow dung. As soon the boy had scampered away to splurge his five rupees, a herd of platform salesmen bustled around. Did I want to buy a set of billiard balls, a lime-green mohair balaclava, an eyelash curler, ten gallons of lubricating oil for a diesel locomotive, a box of live white mice, a green parrot, or a lava-lamp?

I waved them all aside. Another shoe lad stumbled over. This one had a trolley in tow.

“Sahib, shoe cleaning?”

“No, thanks, I’ve just had them done.”

The child screwed up his face. I peered down. My shoes were covered in diluted cow dung. I was about to say “How did that happen again?” when I noticed a lilac paint tin dangling from the back of the boot boy’s trolley. It was full of cow dung mix. The child hurried away, fearful of my vows of retribution. Then I scanned the platform. Far too engrossed in their newly purchased self-help books, the other passengers hadn’t noticed the scam. First a boot boy would surreptitiously splatter the potential customer’s shoes with excrement, then he would offer to clean them. The perpetual cycle – the Calcutta Special – guaranteed a lifetime of employment.

Two hours before the Hatia Express was to arrive, something curious happened on platform nine: the epicenter of the Black Hole. A young street entertainer set up his stall a few yards away from where I was sitting. He performed various simple sleights-of-hand and feats of conjury. A discreet crowd of porters, white-mice-sellers and browbeaten travelers huddled around. Then the boy – who was aged about thirteen – started a new routine. He coaxed a member of the crowd to hand over a fifty-rupee note. The bill was folded twice and placed in a brown envelope. The owner of the money wrote his initials on the envelope; which was then thrown into a box with similar sachets. When the man dug into the box and searched for his own envelope, it had gone. The trick was executed very skillfully. The crowd clapped each time the child duped another unsuspecting person. As I watched the young conjuror perform his trick, he began to seem familiar. Shooing away a brigade of platform salesmen, I stood up to get a better view. The boy’s face … that was it. The Charlie Chaplin smile … I knew that smile. It was the boy from the Median: the one who had tricked a hundred rupees from me.

Wasting no time, I marched over and ordered the boy to hand over my money. I made a series of empty threats: I would tell his parents; I would call the station manager; I would expose him as a fraud. But the lad pulled a face and cackled something to his faithful audience, who turned against me. Handing over her fifty rupees, one woman commanded me to pick on someone my own size. Another shouted that I should go back to my home country. I had not seen an assembly turn so quickly from rapture to anger. With them baying for my blood, I returned to my seat, vowing revenge.

Still an hour to wait. I wolfed down a handful of paan-flavored Polo mints. To take my mind off thoughts of retribution, I pulled out the cloth-backed map of India, and laid it down on the ground.

After the mental hospital, where was it to be? What cities and provinces should a journey of observation take in? Narrowing my eyes, I stared at the multitude of names. First, I circled Calcutta, then Jamshedpur. Why was Hyderabad already marked? Did the Master intend me to go there? After all, this was his map. Gokul’s miracle asthma cure was a good enough reason to go there. My breathing had become more strained each day, and an asthmatic inhaler had had little effect. I needed a miracle. Another motive to visit the city was to see the Rock Castle Hotel: favored as a writing haunt by the explorer Sir Wilfred Thesiger.

Although sketchy, Gokul’s information was that the Gowd family’s miraculous asthma cure took place in early June. That was still three months away. I required another destination before Hyderabad. What about Bangalore? Nowhere had ever seemed more exotic than the city’s sixteenth-century Bull Temple. I etched a circle around Bangalore. I would ramble south first, then backtrack to Hyderabad by the start of June.

Enough map work for now, I mused, putting the cloth-backed chart away. A journey of observation must leave as much as possible to chance. Random movement is the best plan for maximum observation.

Twenty minutes ahead of schedule, the Hatia Express gushed into the station. The Black Hole was galvanized into action. A thousand red shirted bearers scuttled about, swaggering like junior seamen after a night on shore. Each of their heads bore a sinister palm-leaf package.

As waves of passengers clambered over each other to board the train, I again noticed the young ruffian. This time there was no militant crowd supporting him. So, I collared him.

“Give me back my hundred rupees!”

“Oh, there you are,” said the boy, almost as if he was pleased to see me. “All right, here’s your money. I was just looking after it for you.”

The child handed over two fifty-rupee notes. His afternoon’s hoaxing must have brought in a considerable sum if he was prepared to reimburse his victims.

“You must need the money more than me,” he said arrogantly, in fluent English. “You’re dressed worse than a beggar! Where are you going … to sleep with the sewer rats?”

“How dare you insult me?” I said. “I’ve got no time to talk to you, you horrible child … I’m off to Jamshedpur on the start of an important journey.”

With that, I scrabbled up the thrashing ladder of passengers into the appropriate carriage. The thought of a window seat all to myself was almost too much to take. I lounged about, flexing my arms like a psychotic whose straitjacket had been untied. The sense of glorious extra space didn’t last long. Well before the train pulled out of Howrah, I was squashed up against hundreds of others like a dried date in a box.

On the dot of nine thirty-five the Hatia Express sheered out from Howrah Station and into the unknown.

The man sitting beside me whipped open a reinforced pewter-gray attache case which was resting on his lap. I told him that I felt like Dick Whittington heading off for fame and fortune; and that all I needed was a cat. The man’s face twisted in a confused smile.

“It is a pleasure to meet you, Mr. White-ting-don,” he said politely. “J. P. Kamaraj at your service. Call me J.P.”

“No, no … I'm not Whittington. I just feel like him.”

The man adjusted his hairpiece, which was skew-whiff. The crude swath of dark hair resembled a horsehair oven mitt.

“You have a cat?” he asked.

“No, I’m afraid not. I’m on a journey of observation.” I tapped my bag. “No space for cats,” I said.

With his wig once again realigned, J.P. poked about in his own case. Indian trains are full of bewigged gentlemen with reinforced VIP Luggage attache cases. Most are salesmen. Those who are not are scientists. Traveling the subcontinent in second-class carriages, they are responsible for keeping the country together.

“I am a scientist,” said J.P. as the train gathered speed to break from the gravitational orbit of the Howrah Black Hole.

“Really?” I said earnestly. “What’s your area of research?”

J. P. Kamaraj clicked his attache case shut furtively.

“Very secret project,” he said.

“Oh, I see … well, I don’t want to pry.”

At that moment the carriage door slid back. The brash young scam artist was standing in its frame.

“Oh, God, not you!” I said loudly.

J.P. looked up, as if he ought to be introduced.

“Your friend?” he asked.

The child sat in the seat adjacent to mine.

“Certainly not my friend,” I said. “This is a worthless trouble-maker. He’s a contriver of the worst kind – he dupes money from the unsuspecting.”

“I gave you back your money,” protested the child. “I didn’t need it anyway. A hundred rupees is nothing to me.”

“Go and leave me in peace,” I said. “I'm having a conversation with this professional gentleman.”

The child pulled a wad of worn fifty-rupee notes from his underwear. He licked his thumb and counted them with a croupier’s dexterity.

“Five thousand …” he said. “Not worthless!”

“Each one of those notes represents someone you’ve ripped off. You should be ashamed.”

Turning my shoulder to the lad, I told J.P. about my pupilage to Feroze and the journey of observation. As he praised the journey on which I was embarking, the boy cut in:

“I’m coming with you,” he said.

“You most certainly are not.”

“Oh, yes I am, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

“Why don’t you go off and defraud a few more innocents and leave me alone?”

“Because I'm staying here with you.”

“All right,” I said. “See if I care.”

I was certain he would trundle away after minutes. After all, he was very young.

“I'm sorry, J.P.,” I said. “Before we were interrupted you were telling me of your project.”

Forgetting that he had just advertised the secrecy surrounding it, the scientist explained all.

“We’re developing a kind of Habbakuk,” he said.

“Habba-what?”

J.P. slid his reinforced case on to the floor and leant over to me.

“It’s another codename for Pykrete,” he whispered. “We are developing an Indian version …”

“What’s Pykrete … a kind of soap?”

J.P. laughed.

“Not soap,” he said. “In the war a British scientist called Geoffrey Pyke made an amalgam of ice and wood pulp, it was twelve times stronger than concrete, cheap to make, and it floated. Mountbatten and Churchill used it for ‘Operation Habbakuk’.”

“What was that?”

“Wait, I am telling you,” said J.P. “You see, their idea was to build huge Pykrete battleships, two thousand feet long – weighing two million tons.”

“So what happened?”

The scientist frowned.

“After successful secret tests in Canada, the Pykrete project was mysteriously shelved.”

“But why?”

“They ran into difficulties,” said J.P. intently. “You see, they wanted to use the product to make war.”

“Well, the tests were being done during World War Two!”

“That’s no excuse,” riposted J.P., wagging his index finger at me.

“Well, if you’re not intending on using it for war … what are you developing Pykrete for?”

A warm, confident smile crossed the scientist’s face.

“We,” he said majestically, “are building a temple on a Pykrete base … it will be dedicated to Krishna and will travel around the coast of India. The ship will stop at towns along the way and people will come aboard to worship!”

“That’s a stupid idea,” said the scammer, who was listening in.

“Shut up!” I snapped vociferously. But I had to agree, it was an absurd idea.

Bolstered by the audience of skeptics, J.P. ranted on for two hours. He had grand plans for the floating Pykrete mandir. The construction would have ice gardens and fountains, a meditation center, a hospital, lodgings for the staff, a bathhouse, a library and refectory, a spacious assembly hall and a dairy farm.

“Wouldn’t the cows get a bit cold?” I asked. “After all, they would be on a gigantic frozen ship.”

J.P. Kamaraj let out a piercing shriek of laughter.

“Oh, no!” he shouted. “Of course cows wouldn’t get a chill … they’ll be snug and warm.”

“But it would be absolutely freezing!”

The scientist shook his head. He had worked everything out. Cupping a hand around his mouth, he pressed it to my ear.

“Central heating …” he whispered. “Every cow will be having central heating.”

FOURTEEN

The Secret Army

A few minutes before seven a.m., the scam-artist tugged at my collar, waking me from a deep slumber. He said the train had been held up for five hours in the night; and that Tatanagar, Jamshedpur’s station, was a mile or so away.

“I don’t need your help, thank you very much!” I snarled.

The delay was fortuitous. Without it, I would undoubtedly have missed the stop. A heifer had been struck by the locomotive on a remote stretch. Obviously a pious Hindu, the driver had alighted to offer prayers to the beast’s spirit.

As I was making ready to descend at Jamshedpur’s station, J.P. Kamaraj, the Pykrete scientist, wished me luck on my journey of observation. He was proceeding on a connecting train to Hatia to buy wood pulp for his floating Pykrete temple. Before getting down, I looked over to where the mischievous boy had been sitting. But he had gone.

Jamshedpur was a change from the faded pomp and grandeur of Calcutta. Although boasting a population of almost a million, it seemed strangely deserted. Gone were the colonial palaces and the jarring hordes of people. Gone, too, was the iron-black, corrosive air of Calcutta, now replaced by a lighter variety of pollution.

One of the only planned modern cities in India, Jamshedpur was the idea of Jamshedji Tata, Parsi industrialist and pioneer of Indian steel production. Tata realized that with its rich coal deposits and limestone quarries, the site was perfectly suited to heavy industry. Work on the city began in 1908, with the first of Tata’s steel hitting the market four years later.

Whereas the majority of Indian towns support a hotchpotch of unrelated businesses and professions, Tata’s metropolis is dedicated to the glory of metal. You only make your home there if cast-iron is your passion. For the thousands of workers who reside in the neat lines of white-roofed bungalows, iron is the most magical substance on Earth.

Before seeking out the psychiatric hospital, in search of the godman, I went into town to get some breakfast. As I sat at Quality Restaurant on Main Road, slurping milky coffee and leaning back dangerously on my chair, I made out a familiar high-pitched patter. It came from the far end of the room beside the confectionery counter. Quality’s customers were being invited to try their luck in a trick of simple conjury. On offer was a lump of flint-like rock the size of an ice-hockey puck, said by the boy to contain gold.

One or two hopefuls had already parted with their money. The boy’s threat to accompany me seemed to have been more than a passing remark. Wrapping the magician’s map around my head like an Edwardian bonnet, I hoped to remain disguised until the danger had passed. Five minutes went by, and I sensed the rascal had taken his routine elsewhere. With caution, I peeled the chart away from my left eye. He seemed to have gone. But then there was a tap on my shoulder.

“Are you lost?”

“Oh, no … why don’t you leave me alone?”

“I told you,” said the boy, slipping easily on to a chair at my table, “I’m coming with you on your journey. I’ve already made up my mind.”

“If you don’t leave me alone I’ll call the police,” I said firmly.

“That’s fine with me,” he replied. “The police are so stupid … I make more money from tricking them than anyone else! My name is Bhalu,” he said.

“I don’t care what your name is … you’re a nasty little trickster who should be at school.”

“Trickster,” repeated the boy, “I like that … I’m a trickster. From now on I’m the Trickster!”

I paid the waiter and left the cafe. What else could motivate a junior con-artist but the prospect of liberating my already limited funds? The experience on the Farakka Express had hardened me. No longer was I the gullible, pathetic traveler I had so recently been.

The boy followed me outside. Before insisting once again that he was going to join me, he tossed the precious gold ore pebble into some bushes.

“Wasn’t that a bit too valuable to get rid of like that?” I asked.

The child guffawed menacingly.

“No …” he cackled. “I just picked it up before going in there. Those people were so stupid, weren’t they?”

When a rickety taxi pulled up, I took it to the mental asylum on the western outskirts of town, alone.

Not having called at an institution for the insane before, I was, I must admit, rather apprehensive. The nature of my visit further added to my anxiety. This being India, anything could happen, the worst case being that I would be mistaken for an inmate and pushed into a padded cell.

A refined group of what looked like respectful pilgrims had clustered on a strip of grass outside the asylum’s entrance. They stared at the ground sheepishly as my taxi passed them.

Twenty minutes after arriving at the small psychiatric hospital, I had managed to get access to the building. The overriding problem was that no one spoke a word of English. I began to mime out what a luminary might look like, but soon curtailed such gesticulations, for fear of being thought to be insane myself. I repeated the name of the godman – Gupta – four times, to a man who was typing at an old Triumph. He hunched his shoulders and rolled his lower lip downwards, revealing a set of rotting teeth.

My own stupidity had brought me to the institution without a translator. I turned to leave the reception. But someone was standing in the doorway. It was the Trickster.

“How did you find me here?” I yelled. “Why the hell are you spying on me?”

“You need someone to talk to the officials?”

“Yes …”

Addressing the typist respectfully, Bhalu the Trickster explained who I was looking for. The official glanced at me, then at the ceiling and the floor. Then he laughed.

“Guptaji!” he cried.

“Yes, he knows the godman,” said the Trickster. “I can translate for you if you want.”

Before I could protest, the street conjuror was leading the way through the low-security asylum to meet the ascetic. It was as if he had been there before. Perhaps, I mused, he was a former inmate.

The sanatorium was crowded with middle-aged men. Its white-washed corridors stank of extra strength bleach and what appeared to be musk aftershave. Dormitories led off to the left and right, confined rooms with six or seven beds, a single barred window and a bare light bulb. Most of the doors, although wide open, were fitted with twin locks. There were no guards to be seen. As I passed them, the patients stared at me, giggling and laughing out loud. Some had an air of despondency; others, a silent acceptance of their situation.

The godman was sitting cross-legged in a shaded graveled square, formed where four of the dormitory buildings came together in a cross. A dozen or so other patients were dotted about nearby. Some were reading; others chatting to each other or themselves.

I observed the swami attentively. He was exceedingly old; his features gnarled and mutated, like a sculptor’s putty model. He wore a simple white lungi, a shabby string vest, and a leather amulet around his neck. Venky’s information was, I suspected, extremely out-of-date.

The asylum’s clerk bent down and tapped the master on the shoulder. The mystic did not move.

“Is he dead?”

“No, he’s in a trance,” explained Bhalu.

Again the clerk tapped, and this time the ancient stirred.

Bhalu translated his frail words:

“Visitors?” he puffed. “You know I don’t like visitors!”

“But, swami, this man has come from Englezabad, the city of English!”

“All the way from the city of English?”

The clerk nodded.

“From the Bangladesh border?”

“Yes,” said the clerk, “all the way from the border with Bangladesh.”

There seemed to be some confusion. I had come from the country of England, not the former British trading post called Englezabad, or English Bazar, near Malda in West Bengal. Surely it was obvious I was not a Bengali? I corrected the clerk. He informed the pandit.

Drawing his fingers through the dirt beside him like the prongs of a rake, the sage gestured for me to sit.

“Oh great swami,” I said reverently, “I am on a journey of observation, sent by my respected teacher, Hakim Feroze.”

The godman did not respond. Emitting a feeble cough, he slouched his head forward. There was little life left in him.

“Exalted swami,” I said to Bhalu, expecting the boy to translate, “I have come in search of miracles. You are a mystic of great repute … I have heard about the wondrous feats which you perform. Could you demonstrate a miracle to me?”

Opening his eyes no more than a crack, the guru choked out a string of words.

“He’s asking if you doubt his abilities,” said the Trickster.

“No … no,” I said, “but I have come a long way to see his miracles.”

“Yes,” said the swami solemnly, “you have come from Englezabad. That is a long way.”

Without further conversation, he pulled something from his lungi. It was a nail. But this was no ordinary nail. Crafted from twisted steel, it was about five inches long, and as wide as an HB pencil. Tilting his head back, he rammed the sliver of metal up his right nostril. Inch by inch, it disappeared. One or two inches would be understandable. Every schoolboy has experimented with sticking hair-pins up his nose. Two inches, perhaps three, is the extent of a child’s ability. But the godman’s proficiency went far beyond a child’s experimentation. Five inches. Where did it go? How could it have avoided puncturing the brain? The swami withdrew the nail with his fingertips.

“That’s no miracle,” whispered the Trickster. “I have done it myself so many times. The nail just goes up into the sinus. It’s a street trick!”

Bhalu was probably right. This was a simple illusion.

The sage seemed pleased at the praise which I lavished upon him. He confirmed the nail had not killed him outright because of a miracle of notable potency.

As I applauded, the godman performed another trick.

“Now,” he explained slowly, “I am going to stop my heart beating.”

He called for the clerk to fetch a doctor’s stethoscope from the sanatorium’s surgery. The typist, who was enjoying the demonstrations, hurried away, returning a few minutes later with the well-worn apparatus.

The avatar pulled up his string vest, revealing a torso ridged with deep horizontal lines. He pressed his thumb to his chest, indicating that the contrivance was to be applied to the skin over the heart. The clerk passed me the stethoscope. I put the earpieces in place and pressed the cool metal of the sound receiver to the guru’s chest. As we crouched on the gravel of the asylum’s courtyard, in the comfortable shade of champa trees, I realized I was examining a man who ought to have been dead.

“There’s no heartbeat at all.”

The swami, who had closed his eyes again, seemed to have slipped into unconsciousness. His heart appeared to have stopped. Was the miracle done in the same way as Feroze’s walnut trick? I searched for walnuts. There were none.

“I think he may have actually died,” I said anxiously. After all, I had come in search of miracles, not to kill the inmates.

The clerk seemed quite blase about the godman’s condition.

“He always recovers,” he said lackadaisically.

“You mean he performs this miracle often?”

“Oh, very frequently.”

As he spoke, the swami emerged from his coma. The sound of his heartbeat grew from the faintest whisper to that of a healthy man.

The avatar stared at the dirt on which we sat.

“I first developed miraculous feats when I was just a boy,” he explained.

“That was no miracle,” proclaimed the Trickster in English.

“But there wasn’t any heartbeat at all,” I said. “I know how to stop the pulse in an arm with a walnut, but this is quite something else.”

Bhalu, the street conjuror, looked at me with disgust.

“Look at the illusion,” he said.

“What illusion? What am I missing?”

The scam-artist explained:

“When you raised the stethoscope to the old man’s chest, did you notice how he filled his lungs very full of air?”

“Yes, I did observe that.”

“Well,” said Bhalu, “the air is like a cushion … it soaks up the force of the heartbeat. In any case, he’s an old man, so his beats are not so strong.”

I had to admit, the Trickster was very observant. And yet it was I who had embarked on the journey of observation.

I wondered how Guptaji had landed up in the clinic in the first place.

“Oh great master,” I said, oozing with adulation, “why do they keep you here? What deranged behavior do they accuse you of?”

Twisting his neck in slow motion like that of a turtle, the godman faced me.

“No one keeps me here,” he replied. “I’m not mad, you know.”

I prodded the Trickster. He looked at the clerk.

“Of course he’s not demented,” said the typist. “Half the patients here are totally sane – they have been cured. They even have certificates to prove it.”

“But then why don’t they leave?”

The clerk shook his head.

“They have nowhere to go,” he responded. “Most have been disowned by their families. Many don’t even know where their families are. When they move house, they don’t inform us. People consider it a curse to have an insane relative.”

“But when was the guru remedied and permitted to leave?”

The typist scratched his head and thought for a moment.

“In 1969,” he said.

* * * *

The encounter with the ancient swami came to a premature end. Exhausted after performing only two miracles, he fell into a deep sleep. The clerk advised me that, now in his nineties, the mystic was finding it difficult to perform the feats which had brought him fame.

The Trickster led me back through the hospital’s corridors to the main gate. I sensed that he was hoping to muscle in on my journey. As before, I was distinctly distrustful of his motives. Like a member of the Thuggee brotherhood, he was, I felt sure, prepared to spend as much time as necessary in gaining my trust. Then, when I least expected it, he would relieve me of my few belongings. My conscience warned me of the danger. He may have had the appearance of a child, but this was no meek schoolboy; he was a walking crime wave.

At the hospital gates I thanked Bhalu for his help in translating. The service had been recompense for the inconvenience of tricking me in Calcutta. Our arrangement was now at an end. Thank you and goodbye.

As it was a fine afternoon – warm air scented with fir trees – I grasped my bag and started to walk the three or four miles back to Jamshedpur. The asylum, which attracted few visitors, had no need for a taxi rank.

Bhalu asked again if he could accompany me on my journey. He said he’d pay his own way and keep out of trouble. Replying that he could not tag along, I pressed on down the long, dusty trail heading east. Stepping in my footprints, the Trickster followed.

After half an hour we were nearing Jamshedpur. I was regretting the choice of walking, for my bag was quite heavy. Bhalu was still treading in my footsteps, about ten paces behind.

As we approached a bend in the road, he suddenly ran up and pushed me into the ditch which ran alongside the road. I fell head-first into a layer of fermenting filth.

“Damn you! You horrible boy!” I scolded, clambering out. “I'm covered in muck. I'm going to kill you when I catch you.”

One would have expected him to have scampered off after waging such an unprovoked attack. But Bhalu stood his ground. He was pointing to something on the side of the road. It was the severed body of a large toffee-brown scorpion. Picking up the tail-end in one hand, he displayed an unwieldy hunting knife in the other.

“You were about to stand on this scorpion,” he said. “There was no time to explain.”

But I’ve got shoes on, the sting wouldn’t have penetrated their soles.”

Haven’t you ever heard of jumping Bihari scorpions?” he asked.

I looked at the boy, the knife, and what was left of the scorpion. He had certainly acted with honed reflexes. Who knows what would have happened if I had been taken unawares by a jumping scorpion? The Trickster threw the arachnid’s tail into the ditch. He shuffled back into line, preparing to stamp forward in my footsteps again. His eyes were focused on the ground; his features frozen in a pathetic expression exuding meekness.

“All right,” I said coldly, “you can accompany me for a while. But any trouble and that’s it.”

My attitude may have been brusque, but I was adamant I would not fall victim to my customary myopia again. Even as I agreed to let the scam-artist tag along, I was having grave doubts.

* * * *

Over breakfast the next day, I filled Bhalu in on my catalog of misfortune. First, I told him of how as a student I was deceived in southern Spain. Then of how my belongings were pilfered in Brazil.

Then I explained how I was drugged and robbed on the infamous Farakka Express. All over the world people were traveling on my passports, driving on my licenses, spending my money; and whole communities were kitted out with my belongings. I had had enough.

“Ah, chakotra,” said the Trickster fondly, “that’s a great one, I use it often.”

“You mean you have drugged people on trains and then robbed them?”

“Many times,” said the boy casually, lighting a biri.

“Stop smoking! You’re much too young to smoke. How old are you anyway?”

Bhalu scrunched up his eyes.

“I’m seventeen.”

“You’re nothing of the sort. You’re not even through puberty!”

“Well,” he brooded, reviewing his answer. “People often think I’m seventeen.”

“How long have you been tricking people, living on the streets?”

“About six years … I ran away from that stupid orphanage when I was six.”

“You’ve spent half your life on the streets of Calcutta?”

“Yup … and I make a good living, too.”

There could be nothing more fat-headed than a Calcutta-born trickster flaunting his successes. One after another, Bhalu advertised his deceptions, boasting like a playground bully. Many were illusions of a sort, but illusions executed to gyp the unsuspecting.

From card tricks and simple sleights to advanced feats of escapology and mind-reading, the Trickster’s inventory was one to marvel at.

But, as well as a straightforward con man, Bhalu had achieved extraordinary success as a salesman. Give him anything and he would have a go at hawking it.

“Let me see,” he said, shading his young eyes from the early-morning sunlight, “I have sold bottles of dirty water: say it with enough confidence and everyone believes it’s Ganga water. Once I took out the microphone discs from twenty telephones in Howrah and sold them on the trains. Old men always believe they’re special sex aids. Put them under the pillow and they send out invisible rays to make any wife passionate!”

As Bhalu laughed, I put my head in my hands.

“Then,” he continued, “I’ve sold rat tails as lucky charms; cigarette ash as a special ‘miracle’ beauty treatment, and soap pellets as aphrodisiacs. Women,” he went on, shaking his head in disbelief, “they’ll buy anything. Slip into the Ladies Only carriage of a commuter train, offer fake beauty products to the ugliest women – you make a fortune. They lap the stuff up!”

The Trickster may have had entertaining tales, and was amiable enough when he wasn’t ripping people off. But still I was wary. I felt certain that – any time now – when I least expected it, he would strike like a disturbed adder in long grass waiting for his moment. Why had he selected me? Out of all the people on platform nine of Howrah Junction, why me? When I put such questions to him, Bhalu replied that our meeting, and this journey, was fate.

“Don’t you want to meet the ‘gasoline Man’?” he asked abruptly, changing the subject.

“Who’s he?”

Bhalu rolled his eyes.

“He turns water into gasoline, of course. He’s just south of here, at Rourkela.”

A man who could actually transform ordinary water into gasoline certainly deserved a visit. So we went back to Tatanagar Station and boarded the slow train heading south. The Trickster had already cottoned on to my prime weakness – I’ll drop everything in search of oddity.

We took advantage of the free window seats. A salubrious middle-aged figure squashed up beside me. There was no reason to get so close so soon, as the coach was still almost empty. So I stared at the man sternly, and grunted, warding him off. He held his ground. I looked over at him again. On his nose was balanced a pair of oversized glasses; like a welder’s goggles they masked much of his face. His eyes were enlarged fourfold, giving him a meek, trustworthy mien. On his lap rested a brand new reinforced plastic VIP Luggage attache case. Another member of the Secret Army.

Before long, he introduced himself.

“P.D. Roy is pleased to meet you,” he said, running his fingers effortlessly through his bushy toupee, as if it were his own hair.

“Happy to meet you, too. Are you from Jamshedpur?”

“No, no …” he responded. “I am salesman … I’m in vigs.”

“Excuse me, but I didn’t catch your line of business.”

“Vigs.”

“Figs?” I looked at the Trickster.

“He’s in wigs. He sells wigs!” the boy sniggered. “You know, for taklu, baldies!”

Since hair loss is a sensitive subject in any country, I would rather have progressed to another topic. But launching in at the deep end, Bhalu interrogated the salesman on his profession.

The passenger had all the accoutrements of a member of the Secret Army – the VIP case, the red coral ring on the little finger of his left hand; the stainless-steel ball-point poking from his shirt pocket. However, P.D. was a salesman with a difference.

At one time, he recounted, he had traveled India’s local railway lines touting braking assemblies for auto-rickshaws. Every year he endured months away from home: months spent on trains, with their balding, attache-case-carrying salesmen. Brake assemblies were a product line devoid of emotion. Either you need one or you do not. P.D. was tired of talking brakes. He yearned for merchandize which people could get passionate about. It was then that he had a brainwave.

Why not create a special product, suited specifically to the Secret Army of salesmen who peddle their wares on India’s local line trains? After all, VIP Luggage had done it. No self-respecting sales executive would be seen dead without VIP’s finest. So, P.D. came up with his “Director Brand” wig.

The true brilliance of the product is not that it covers a bald patch – the secret is far more subtle than that. Fashioned for businessmen, P.D.’s toupees are all the same color and shape. Director Brand wearers are proud of their splendid hairpieces. They sport them with pride, wearing them like a medal, rather than an accessory for the follically challenged, and take comfort in owning what they consider is a membership card to India’s most exclusive club.

I asked the wig merchant when he had first gone bald. It was a delicate question which, I hoped, would divert the conversation from the mercenary subject of the used-hair business.

P.D. tugged the Director Brand toupee from his head and held it out at arm’s length towards me. It resembled a miniature three-toed sloth. I stroked the length of its back with my palm, for fear of offending the executive.

“You don’t understand,” P.D. Roy responded when I had petted his hairpiece. “I’m not a baldie.”

A close glance at his scalp corroborated this.

“I shave my head,” he went on. “You see, the best thing a salesman can do is to use his own product. I don’t need the product I sell … but this is irrelevant. When customers see me proudly sporting a Director’s Brand – even though I don’t require one – they are even more eager to snap one or two up!”

“You ought to be put up for an award!” I roared. “It’s brilliant.”

Even the Trickster had to admit that P.D. Roy was taking salesmanship to new heights.

“Where do you get all the hair from?”

P.D.’s answer was a single word: “Tirupati.”

“Where’s that?”

“In Tamil Nadu, just north-west of Madras. It’s where the Temple of Lord Venkateshvara is located.”

“What’s that got to do with wigs?”

P.D. Roy, salesman extraordinaire, smiled broadly.

“Tirupati is India’s only ‘vig temple’.”

As the local train pulled away from a station of uncertain name, en route to Rourkela, the chief executive of Director Brand toupees revealed the legend:

“At Tirupati, in southern India, the people were always unhappy,” he said. ‘They had no gold mines like the nearby towns; they couldn’t grow wheat as the ground was too stony; and the drinking water was naturally salty. In their misery, the townspeople gathered together for a meeting. They looked at their poor situation and at the prosperity of their neighbors. Tirupati, they thought, must be cursed by an evil spirit. The only thing to do was to construct a vast temple at Tirumala, in the hills above the village, and implore the help of the gods. So this was done.

“When completed,” P.D. Roy went on, “the temple was impressive in every way. Its walls were faced with shining white marble. Its floors were scattered with rose petals. The people were so happy they spent every spare moment worshiping there. But still their fortunes didn’t improve. The water was saltier than ever; the ground seemed more stony now than before; and there wasn’t a gold mine in sight. Then someone had an idea.

“The people of Tirupati would spread the word that praying at their fine temple at Tirumala could cure even the most debilitating disease. Anyone who sought divine help at their temple would be made well again. The news spread like wildfire. Soon there was a line of ten thousand cripples wending its way to the temple. As the first lame person prepared to step over the shrine’s threshold, the priest threw his arms in the air. He ordered that each pilgrim must have their head shaved in honor of Lord Venkateshvara. The afflicted agreed, and barbers set to work shaving the ten thousand heads. Every day another ten thousand handicapped pilgrims turned up. Each had their head shaved. Weeks went by, and the people of Tirupati met again. They congratulated themselves, for their temple had become very famous. But someone pointed out that – as the sick were permitted to pray for free – the community was still impoverished. Then a child at the meeting had a bright idea. Why not bundle up all the hair which had been sheared from people’s scalps and sell it for vigs?

“Hair from Tirumala became very sought after,” P.D. Roy continued. “These days most dark-colored vigs in the world are made from hair shaved off at the temple. The once-impoverished village is now a thriving town; and the people who live at Tirumala are wealthy beyond their dreams … all because of the vigs.”

“I have to see this for myself,” I said, circling Tirupati on the Master’s chart. “I’ll go there straight away.”

Leaving the wig merchant to his case of toupees, Bhalu and I descended at Rourkela, in search of the man who turned water into gasoline. As we stepped on to the platform, the Trickster nudged me in the ribs.

“Tirumala’s famous for all the hair that’s shaved off the pilgrims,” he said. “And wigs are made from the hair,” he said. “But as for the story … he’s made most of it up. Take it from me: it’s pure sales pitch.”

So, I pondered, as we walked into town, even the used-hair business… has sharp-talking salesmen these days. Whatever is the world coming to?

* * * *

After a night killing mosquitoes at the Aspara Hotel, the Trickster led me into the maze of Rourkela’s back-streets. Like all industrial towns, Rourkela is a miniature world … a world of interminable shifts. Day or night you can buy a tin of local fertilizer, get your watch repaired, or gorge yourself on a street stall meal. Barbers were busy snipping hair, or running ice cubes across newly shaven faces. Their wives were hanging out the washing; their children sifting dirt through their infant fingers as if it were gold dust. A man was touting a cart of yellow plastic sandals. An old crone rambled by with a dried mango seed balanced on her head. A swarm of union workers followed somewhere behind, protesting their right to protest with garish banners, like a flank of Janissary warriors heading to war.

One shop was doing particularly brisk business. It was more of a specialized booth than a full-scale emporium. Off-duty barbers, sandal-sellers and hags were wrestling forward, desperate to reach the counter. The lucky ones hurried away clutching blue and white tins.

“Looks like a dispensary to me,” I warned Bhalu. “We’d better stock up with whatever it is while stocks last.”

Bhalu pushed his way to the front, fighting off the droves of barbers and crones. Without asking what the tins contained, he bought two. They only cost ten rupees each. Snatching one away from him, I scrutinized the label.

“Shellac,” I read, “‘Pure shellac flakes’ … I’ve never heard of them before. Must be a new kind of liver tonic or something. We can try it out later.”

Bhalu gave me a restless glance.

“One spoon of this stuff and you won’t have a liver,” he said.

“Nonsense! Look at those women over there; the mere thought of it has given them a new lease of life.”

“You haven’t got a clue what shellac is, have you?”

I stuck my nose in the air. It was usually I who doled out medicinal information.

“So what is it, then?”

“It’s made from the waxy gum which oozes from the female lac beetle’s back.”

“That doesn’t sound like much of a liver tonic…”

“Don’t be stupid,” said the Trickster, “it’s a not medicine … it’s a varnish. Where do you think the word ‘lacquer’ comes from?”

Before I could answer, Bhalu was proceeding down the lane. Minutes later, he had located the gasoline maker’s workshop. It seemed impossible that he could have located the place with such ease. I asked how he knew the man’s whereabouts, but he declined to reveal his sources.

The workshop’s door was crafted from a single sheet of copper. A series of religious symbols had been etched into the verdigris. Among those I recognized were a swastika, a cross, a crescent and a Star of David. At the base of the door was a pile of about ten broken beer bottles. Someone had placed a dozen chicken’s feet in the middle of the glass. Was it a mysterious offering to the gods? There was only one way to find out.

I knocked twice. As the door swung inwards, I wondered whether the dilapidated shed was indeed the workplace of a man claiming miraculous powers. Surely, anyone with a bona fide system of turning water into gasoline would be working out of a modern, high-tech laboratory.

A single beam of blinding sunlight bisected the chamber. Three or four forty-gallon drums were lined up against the back wall. A number of dirty tea crates filled much of the room. The walls, which had been painted a rich shade of magenta, were etched with more crude diagrams, almost like pharaonic hieroglyphs. Standing in the center of the shack, bathed in the brilliant shaft of sunlight, stood Mr. Jafar.

Bandy-legged and with skin as dark as ebony, Mr. Jafar fluttered his nimble fingers in the light. His breath was heavy with garlic; his countenance one of greedy anticipation. He wasn’t surprised we had come. Indeed, it was almost as if he had been awaiting our arrival. I presented him with a tin of shellac, as a token of goodwill. Thanking me courteously, he begged me to sit on an upturned oil drum.

Then he told of his amazing discovery.

“You may think that I am telling lies,” he announced gingerly, in a voice as shrill as a piccolo. “Skeptics always prod fun at me: but I understand their suspicions. My process is one of high chemistry. Why should the ignorant be capable of understanding?”

Mr. Jafar gazed over to me with his piercing eyes, as if warning me not to doubt him. As he stared, he disclosed a little more:

“I sat in this room experimenting for fifteen years,” he said. “Every day I drew closer to my aim; to turn simple drinking water into gasoline. Only when I was at the end of my tether did I finally chance upon the answer … the key to turn in the lock of nature.”

“What is the answer?” I asked, bidding Bhalu to translate my question.

“The answer!” shouted the scientist. “That’s what the whole world wants to know. Of course I can’t reveal the formula.”

“Well, can you describe the process?”

Mr. Jafar picked up a glass beaker and filled it with water from the tap. He held it up to the light. The color of milk, it had a fluorescent green tinge. I suspected run-off sludge from the steel plants of Rourkela had already given the local drinking water a high octane level.

“This is the raw ingredient,” said the chemist. “Pure water.”

“What do you do with it?”

“First,” he replied, “the water is filtered through a pad of hay; then it’s mixed with the juice of bark extracts and berries, like this … When the solution has been stirred for a few minutes, it’s warmed under a naked gas flame.”

Jafar paused to light a gas burner. Within seconds, the liquid was foaming.

“Now for the magic!” said Jafar, beaming. “Can you see what I’m doing? I'm adding the special ingredient. It’s a blend of fifteen more herbs and spices.”

The chemist was beginning to sound like a commercial for Kentucky Fried Chicken.

“Is that gasoline now?”

“No … before it can be used to power a vehicle, it has to be stored in a cool aluminum tin for thirty days.”

“Thirty days? But I can’t sit here for a month waiting for your liquid to mature …”

“Well,” snapped Jafar, “luckily I have some to show you that’s been brewing for more than a month.”

Stepping over to one of the forty-gallon oil drums, he siphoned off five gallons into a more manageable gasoline canister.

“Here you are,” he said, handing me the plastic container. “That will be six hundred rupees.”

“Six hundred rupees? That’s far more expensive than ordinary gasoline. In any case, I don’t have a car to use it in.”

Mr. Jafar seemed very displeased.

“Fifteen years I have labored in this chamber,” he thundered. “I have achieved something that scientists in your country could only hope to accomplish. Look me in the eye and tell me again you are turning down the chance of buying what is nothing short of magic!”

With great reluctance I pulled six hundred rupees from my shoe and handed it to the chemist.

“Here’s the money.”

Mr. Jafar jerked the wad of bills from my hand and inspected them for irregularities. As he stuffed them into his shirt pocket, I sensed him snorting to himself with laughter. He opened the door for us to leave. The interview was at an end.

“Get out quickly,” he lisped, “or the dogs will get in.”

“What dogs?”

“Dogs! Dogs! All kinds of dogs! They’re lured by the smell of my ingredients. It drives them mad! They stand here at the door, waiting to sneak inside. That’s when they fall victim to my trap.”

“Trap?”

“The chicken’s feet … they’re too much of a temptation for them … then the glass cuts their feet!”

Mr. Jafar let out an abhorrent guffaw.

“Have a good journey. Oh, and you had better be careful,” he murmured through a crack in the door frame. “My special gasoline doesn’t travel well.”

Not long after Bhalu and I had tramped off with the leaking container full of Mr. Jafar’s magic potion, another gasoline-making chemist hit the headlines. Scientists across India stepped forward to back the farmer and his process.

The man, named Poonaiah Pillai, from a village in Tamil Nadu, alleged that while on a picnic in the 1970s, he watched a spark from a stove ignite a low-lying bush. After years of primitive scientific testing, he refined a chemical process by which the herb could be transformed into gasoline.

First, the leaves of the mystery plant were boiled in water for about ten minutes. Salt and lemon juice were added, and the mixture – a kind of seasoned broth – was left to settle. As it cooled, certain chemicals were mixed in. Soon after, the herbal fuel rose to the surface and could be siphoned away.

Despite the similarities with Mr. Jafar’s process, Pillai’s product – which only cost about one rupee a liter to make – was in hot demand. So much so that Pillai was kidnapped by brigands and tortured. Even though the bandits burned him with cigarettes and suspended him from a ceiling fan, the farmer refused to reveal the secret formula.

In his native Tamil Nadu, Pillai became a folk hero overnight. Everyone, from rickshawallas to ministers, was discussing the mysterious chemical process, speculating what the secret herb might be. The state government awarded him a hefty grant with which to continue his research. Petro-chemical multinationals dispatched representatives to India to learn the secret. Diplomats were briefed by their governments to solve the mystery. The Nobel Foundation was put on alert for a possible candidate for their next chemistry award.

Then came the big demonstration. India’s most respected scientists filed into a hall in Delhi. A nervous anticipation filled the room. If the farmer could once again prove his process to be genuine, India might soon find itself to be an economic superpower.

Poonaiah Pillai arranged the apparatus. The audience waited with bated breath. The failure of an initial experiment was put down to the new apparatus. Before the second attempt, Pillai asked to use his own stirring rod. The request was granted. Moments later he turned a blend of herbs and water into a thin form of gasoline.

But as the audience applauded, someone noticed a key point, which had been overlooked. Pillai’s own large stirring rod was hollow. It appeared to have been filled with a gasoline solution and then plugged with beeswax. When immersed in the hot soupy, herbal water, the wax plug melted, releasing the motor fuel.

As red-faced experts scuttled back to their laboratories, skeptics suggested that the chicanery had been clearly visible all along; the most obvious indication being that Pillai had asked the audience whether they wanted him to make diesel or gasoline. A simple selection of the right stirring rod would guarantee either.

* * * *

Bhalu and I spent two more days at Rourkela. We poked about the steel mills and I wrote to Feroze with details of my journey. I told him of the godman’s illusions at Jamshedpur; of the Pykrete and the wigs from Tirumala; and about Mr. Jafar’s ability. Even the Master, I mused, could not fail to be impressed by these observations.

Next morning, before the sun had risen above the smoke stacks, Bhalu woke me with a loud cry.

“Leave me alone!” I protested, “I was planning on sleeping in.”

“But we have to go,” said the Trickster. “The truck’s leaving in twenty minutes.”

“What truck?”

Wheeling-dealing and, I suspected, picking pockets since dawn, the boy had negotiated a ride heading south, towards Tirupati. My decision to take the train had been overruled. For Bhalu had been struck by an idea. The five gallons of precious herbal-based gasoline could be part exchanged for passage as far as Sambalpur, about a hundred and fifty kilometers south-west of Rourkela.

As I struggled to lace up my shoes, I heard the screech of brakes outside the hotel. I peered from the window. A tangerine-orange Ashok Leyland truck, piled high with sugar cane, was waiting.

The driver grabbed the five-gallon jerrycan and stashed it away for later. He seemed more than pleased with the deal. Bhalu was also satisfied. Chance had found us an Ashok Leyland which ran on gasoline, rather than the more common diesel.

We ventured out into the web of potholes, the laden hulk huffing like a bloodhound in pursuit. Three hours passed, and the Ashok Leyland truck had fishtailed its way as far as Sundagarh, about halfway to Sambalpur.

Bhalu selected one of the poles of sugar cane and chewed its end. As he did so, the Ashok Leyland spluttered to a halt. It had run out of gasoline. The driver emerged from his cab and, wasting no time, funneled the freshly brewed herbal gasoline into the vehicle’s tank. Bhalu sucked at the sweet-tasting stem. I stretched out on the bed of sugar cane, soaking up the sun. Things could not have been better, thanks to Mr. Jafar and his miracle mix.

The driver fired up his wagon. But no longer was it huffing merrily. The engine was groaning like a great tusker run through with a lance. No petty growl induced by wear and tear: this was the last wail of a dying beast. Like a mahout whose elephant was expiring before him, the driver leapt, howling from his cockpit. Half-paralyzed by shock, he comforted his beloved Ashok Leyland in its dying moment. When it had wheezed its last grim sigh, the driver turned his attentions to Bhalu and me. Accusing us of administering a lethal potion to his beloved steed, he climbed up on to the crest of sugar cane and routed us from the back of its carcass.

FIFTEEN

Witch

Marooned at the side of the road, Bhalu and I waited for a fresh tangerine-orange Ashok Leyland truck. But nothing came. The driver of the defunct cane-laden vehicle had chased us away, swearing that he would cut off our ears if he caught us. We walked a couple of miles southward and waited. Well, I reflected quietly to myself as we dug in for a long wait, although the price was exacting, at least we now knew that Mr. Jafar’s preparation was an expensive imitation of the real thing.

Two hours had passed. Every so often a jalopy would clatter by in the opposite direction. But there was no traffic heading south. Another three hours went by.

Bhalu befriended a girl his own age who was selling wicker baskets at the side of the road. Her face was young and innocent, its complexion a soft amber brown. An embroidered headscarf veiled her plaited hair; a profusion of hefty silver bangles and anklets weighed down her limbs. For now the jewelry was no more than an encumbrance; but one day, not far off, it would form her dowry.

When it came to philandering with local maidens, the Trickster was an expert. One flutter of his eyelashes and any girl was putty in his hands. I watched as, turning his back to the girl, he slid a dark object from his pocket and slipped it up his left sleeve. Meanwhile, the lass had seen a vehicle approaching. She picked up a wicker basket and stepped towards the road. Bhalu took advantage of her distraction. He tossed the henna-colored object on the ground between him and the road. When the vehicle had driven into the distance, the girl walked solemnly back towards us. As she did so, Bhalu yelled at her not to move. Drawing the hunting knife from its sheath on his belt, he strode over to where his belle was standing. With dramatic flair, he plunged the blade into the back of a toffee-brown scorpion lying at her feet. The girl may have been overjoyed at having her life saved to gallantly. I, on the other hand, was enraged. Unlike her, I had seen the stunt before. Only the most devious scam-artist would stoop to carrying a dead scorpion around, ready to be deployed for the purpose of endearing himself to others. After castigating Bhalu for his dishonesty, I told the basket girl all about the deception. But as she didn’t speak English, she had no idea what I was going on about.

Fifteen minutes after saving her from certain death, Bhalu was serenading the child with a distorted rendition of Elton John’s song “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”. She masked her mouth with the palm of her hand to hide her laughter.

Edging closer, he took her hand in his and kissed the knuckles as suavely as he could. He may have only been twelve or so, but the Trickster was a fast operator. Moving with the serpentine determination of a python, his right hand slunk its way up across the girl’s nubile form. Her giggles turned to wonder as she realized that the stranger was moving in for the kill. The maiden leapt up, declaring she had to return home. Her parents would be wondering where she was. Offering to accompany her, Bhalu said he would go in search of sustenance. I feared that a hurried liaison with a local lass was inviting disaster.

As the last rays of light dissipated around us, I made out the rumbling of a truck. By the grating sounds of its bodywork writhing on a battle-worn chassis, I suspected it was a trusty Ashok Leyland. Sure enough, a great pumpkin-orange truck was veering around the bend and heading straight for us. Bhalu and I leapt up and waved our arms, screaming as loudly as we could. The vehicle slowed to walking pace. Then it stopped. We hurried over. But just as we about to clamber aboard, it accelerated at high speed. This was no ordinary truck: it was a vehicle which had returned from the dead. At the wheel, tormenting us, the driver gnashed his teeth. He had resurrected his charger.

If the Trickster was going to kill me and plunder my belongings, he would have done it on that inglorious night, spent in an Orissan ditch. Even a veteran Thug would have given his front teeth to be alone with his quarry in such a remote spot. Bhalu was eager to track down the basket girl’s village. He filled my mind with fantasies of food, silk bed sheets … and loose women.

“Come with me to the village,” he whined, “and I’ll teach you the secret to get Orissan girls.”

“You mean kiss their knuckles and choke out a couple of old Elton John songs?”

“No … no, that was just the start …”

“What comes next?”

“Why should I tell you?”

“You don’t have to … I wouldn’t trust your advice for a second!”

“OK,” retorted the Trickster, “ I’ll tell you … but only if you promise not to tell a soul.”

“It’s a deal: I won’t tell.”

“The way to get any woman is simple … You have to rub honey into their toes, of course.””

After a night fighting off red ants and scorpions, I woke to the smell of roasted manioc. A smell I had known while traveling in eastern Zaire, manioc, or cassava as it’s known in Africa, is a staple. Bhalu had unearthed several of the roots and toasted them until they were charred. Preparing breakfast had taken his mind off the basket weaver’s daughter. I was surprised by the boy’s aptitude for survival in the countryside. Until now, he had struck me as an urban creature.

At six-thirty a works employee from the nearby Hirakud Dam made an emergency stop when Bhalu threw himself at the bonnet of his vehicle. Recovering from the severity of the deceleration, the driver agreed reluctantly to take us all the way to Sambalpur, located at the southern edge of the Hirakud Reservoir.

A few miles before reaching the destination, we caught a glimpse of the Hirakud Dam. One of the largest of its kind, it’s formed from the damming of the Mahanadi River. Illuminated by the morning sunshine, the reservoir stretched westward likes an unending silver blanket. With the car’s windows wide open, I closed my eyes and filled my lungs with wonderful undefiled air. At that moment, it seemed as if Orissa was the richest, most fertile spot in all India. Yet nothing, as we were soon to find, could have been farther from the truth.

At Sambalpur I checked into the extravagant Hotel Uphar. Having cut costs the night before I was ready to splash out. I made straight for the bazaar to look at the famous ikat weaving. Bhalu, who had heard tall tales of the diamonds washed up in the Mahanadi River, hurried off in search of card sharps. By midnight, with no sign of Bhalu, I went to bed. An hour later, the window was pulled open from outside, sending a draft of cool nocturnal air through the room.

“Who is it? Who’s there?” I called out, as the curtains ruffled about.

“It’s me, it’s Bhalu. I’m back!”

As in Rourkela, the Trickster had climbed into my single hotel room in an effort to avoid paying the bill. In any case, he preferred to sleep on the bathroom floor. He said the cool tiled surface reminded him of his dormitory at the orphanage.

“Go to sleep, Bhalu … I’m planning on heading on to Tirupati tomorrow.”

“No chance of that,” said the Trickster, in a loud whisper.

“I’ll go where I like, “ I said sharply.

“A woman’s being tried as a witch near Bolangir.”

“Where’s that? Where is Bolangir?”

“Three hours away by train,” replied Bhalu, shuffling through the darkness to the bathroom, “don’t worry … leave it all to me.”

The second-class carriage heading south was brimming with chickens, chickens and more chickens. With their feet manacled together, trussed up as if the birds were convicts, they filled all the luggage racks, the aisles, and every inch of corridor. The Trickster watched me as I thumbed a copy of Houdini’s Miracle Mongers and their Methods. He seemed especially agitated. He couldn’t still be thinking of the basket seller. Girls were a quaint frivolity to him. Only one thing could give a con man such an expression – as sour as rhubarb. Money. I suspected he had been devoured in the low-life gambling den, the wrong side of Sambalpur’s railway tracks.

“So, how did you do?” I asked from behind my book. “Show me the bag of diamonds!”

Bhalu remained taciturn. He didn’t need to say a word. His miserable expression said it all. The diamonds had not materialized. Neither had the good hand of cards he had planned on acquiring. The Trickster had been cleaned out. They say there’s no one more doleful than a bankrupted millionaire. That may be true. But take a Bengali scam-artist, swindle him of his cash, and he soon bounces back. To survive in Calcutta, a con-merchant has to get back on his feet … fast.

As I returned to Houdini’s wisdom, Bhalu sprang up and hurried off to the next carriage. For him, a train journey was not a time to relax, or immerse oneself in a good book; it was a time to get down to the big sale.

Fifteen minutes went by, and the carriage door slipped open. Ignoring me, the Trickster called out for the passengers to view his remarkable wares. I glanced over to see what he had on offer. Bhalu had stripped down my hotel room while I had been settling the bill. Curtain rings and bed springs, miniature bars of soap, mothballs and hotel stationery. The entire stock was on sale at knockdown prices.

At Bolangir we wasted no time. Bhalu had heard that the witch trial was taking place in a village off the main road running west between Bolangir and Patnagarh. As we took a series of rides on passing vehicles, I began to wonder if we would actually find the witch’s village. It seemed unlikely.

About twenty miles out of Bolangir, Bhalu and I first witnessed the severe drought that was crippling Orissa. Crops were almost nonexistent: the remains of dry plants, blanched by the relentless sun. The local people had largely deserted the area – heading for Bolangir and other towns in the region. Their children looked thin and sickly. Their mothers, veiled in the bright tie-dye for which Orissa is famous, nursed the infants listlessly, as if waiting for the end to come.

The authorities had done their bit to counter the mass migration. But with their efforts hardly leading to a tangible improvement, it was easier to deny that the drought existed. Curbing the panic of frightened, thirsty people is an insurmountable task. As we waited for the next, infrequent vehicle to edge us a little closer towards Patnagarh, I questioned whether we ought not to follow the evacuees – and return to the town.

Bhalu spotted a group of figures working in the open, a little less than a mile north of the main road. I suspected that they were over-zealous farmers who had refused to leave their lands. The Trickster led me over to where they were toiling. He said they would have water to share with us. Rather than tending crops, the group, of three men, two women and a child, were making coarse bricks from the chutney-brown soil.

Bhalu greeted them. As soon as he heard their voices he seemed troubled.

“What’s wrong?”

“They aren’t farmers,” he said. “They are bonded laborers.”

Straining to understand their dialect, which must have been related to Oriya, Bhalu asked the youngest of the men where everyone else had gone.

“They left about two months ago,” was the reply. “There’s no water here and the crops have failed. All the animals are dying. We would leave, but we have nowhere to go. We haven’t got any money or food.”

“What about your master?”

“Well, he went away,” retorted the man, whisking a fly from a sore near his eye. “He told us not to leave. So we are continuing to work.”

“How long have you been working for the master?”

The man’s mouth twitched, and for a moment I expected him to smile. He was obviously not used to discussing with strangers the details of his arrangement.

“My father …” he said softly, “it was my father who was in debt. He borrowed five hundred rupees, for his sister’s dowry. When he died I had to start work to pay off the loan.”

“When was the money borrowed?”

The man shook his head.

“I don’t know,” he intoned forlornly. “A long time ago.”

“Are the rest of them bonded as well?”

“Yes, all.”

“Why don’t you run off? Now’s your chance, the master has gone away.”

The laborers looked up together. Their eyes spoke of fear, a great and unknown fear. Their expressions told of the terror: that their master would hunt them. Their features hinted at the indescribable pain they would endure once caught. When he had made examples of them, he would surely sell each one on to an even more despicable lord.

“Why are you bonded?” Bhalu asked the child, who must have been about ten or eleven.

The lad blinked nervously.

“I was caught on the train without a ticket,” he explained. “A policeman at the station took me home to work at his house. He said he would send me to prison if I did not obey him.”

“What happened then?”

“The policeman’s brother owed a lot of money to a money-lender, the boy went on. “As he didn’t have the money to repay the loan, he sold me in exchange for his debt. Then the money-lender sold me to the brickmaker.”

I found the situation almost unbelievable. When I told Bhalu that in the West people had no idea that bonded labor still exists, his usual jocund approach to life disappeared.

“This is slavery,” he said. “There’s little hope for these people. None of them will ever pay off the interest owed to the master. Laborers like these end up selling a kidney or an eye to pay back what started off as a tiny debt.”

Like me, the Trickster was moved by the laborers on the Patnagarh road. I forced them to take some money; and Bhalu handed them each a miniature bar of hotel soap. In a place in which there was little water to drink, let alone wash, the gift was an odd one. But it was the gesture that mattered.

After a second night sleeping rough, bartering soap bars for food, we finally arrived at the witch’s village. The journey had led us through half a dozen other villages and hamlets, most of which were all but deserted. As we persevered on foot, hiking north of the Patnagarh road, the Trickster asked an assortment of farmers, laborers, and woolgathering girls if they had heard of the witch. Invariably, they greeted us with bewilderment, waving a hand ahead.

Each mile brought new signs of famine. All the rivers in this once lush basin had run dry. The parched trees were being felled by those who had not yet left their ancestral lands. Once they had chopped up the timber they, too, would be away, hauling it to Bolangir for a sure sale. Orissa is well known for its famine. Eighty per cent of its people live below the poverty line. Disturb their finely-tuned existence by a fraction, and they cannot survive.

No one Bhalu spoke to could remember a drought such as this. In one hamlet we met a widow who had refused to accompany her entire family on their migration to the city. Her skin was creased and swollen with sores. She had not left her home since her marriage, decades before. Even now, in the face of certain death, she had decided to stay behind.

At another village we heard that a young mother had sold her infant daughter. With six other children to feed, she had resorted to the most drastic measure conceivable. Four other women, supporting the first – who was too ashamed to show her face – declared that they, too, would give their daughters away if they had a chance. We continued on, more depressed with every step. And as I entreated Bhalu to give up the search and lead me back to the main road, we reached the witch’s village.

Surrounded on all sides by dusty ancestral fields, the community could never have housed more than fifty farmers and their families. Most of the simple mud houses were empty. Their owners had already left. Some of the buildings had begun to collapse, their walls crumbling like dry Oxo cubes. The few villagers who had stayed were loath to admit their community was home to a witch. After prolonged negotiations, Bhalu discovered the wattle-and-daub dwelling in which the woman, an aged widow, was held.

With great unwillingness, the self-appointed head man related the case.

The widow’s children had fled the village some two months before, journeying to Cuttack in search of secure jobs. The old woman had always acted strangely, but only when her sons departed did she resort to actual witchcraft. For two years in a row the village’s crops of jute and groundnuts had failed. The widow had been seen pacing the fields at night, soliciting evil forces. A neighbor said she observed her transform into a wild dog. Someone else noticed that some seeds she had planted had actually grown in the parched soil. Another purported that the ancient had turned a tank of water sour merely by glancing at it. A fourth claimed she had made three eggs disappear into thin air. The remaining villagers had gathered together to decide a course of action.

Fortunately for the widow, many of her neighbors had departed the village for nearby towns. Had there been a full turn-out, the general state of mass hysteria would certainly have found her guilty without even the most simplistic of trials. In Orissa, a woman condemned as a witch is customarily stoned to death on the spot. Whereas a man – or even a younger woman – accused of sorcery might use it to his advantage, claiming to be a godman, a widow with magical powers is invariably considered to be a witch.

Fortunately for her, the lack of senior villagers had led to indecision. Now that the sorceress had been arrested, no one was quite sure what to do next. The hesitation proved the extraordinary force of mass hysteria. An enraged mob of amateur witch-hunters spontaneously derives solutions.

With no need for me to prompt him, Bhalu instructed the head man that we had been sent to decide the fate of the witch. The arrival of a twelve-year-old boy and a foreigner, both ready to adjudicate, must have seemed implausible. But surprisingly, the head man nodded once and opened the door to the communal store-room where the witch was being held.

Blinded by the daylight, and cringing as if she were about to be guillotined, the widow was pulled out and thrown on the ground. Her head was shaven, her lips were caked in dried white foam, her arms were covered in putrescent lesions, and her torn sari was stained with blood.

The woman was as fearful of me as the head man was. She appeared not to have set eyes upon a foreigner before. Bhalu tried to explain that we had come to judge her case. We would listen to the evidence against her a point at a time.

The first witness was called.

A man in his fifties, he had spied the witch strolling in the fields beneath a full moon. She had been speaking to hidden spirits.

“Bhalu,” I said, “please ask the widow why she was in the field at night, talking to herself.”

The Trickster translated my question and, with distinct difficulty, her reply.

“She says she had been unable to sleep. Her sons had left her all alone. She was miserable because the family’s crop of jute had not grown. So she went out into the field and asked Varuna to bring rain.”

“There’s no witchcraft in that,” I said. “Move on to the next point. Ask her if she turned into a wild dog.”

The scam-artist inquired if the widow had indeed transformed herself into a “werewolf”. Ducking her head to veil her face with the hem of her white sari, the woman mimed out an answer.

“Bhalu, can you understand what she’s saying?”

“Yes … she says the whole village knows the problem of wild dogs. Last year two children were killed and eaten by the hounds. But on both occasions, she was with her neighbors in the village.”

“Ask the head man if this is true.”

Bhalu interpreted the question and, grudgingly, the chief villager nodded.

“Next point … tell her to take us to the place where her seeds grew.”

Bhalu helped the widow to her feet. Stumbling forward, she led us, and the frantic crowd which had gathered, to a spot at the eastern edge of the village. As her shadow fell over a row of limp green shoots, the woman pointed to the bed of cultivated soil. Curiously, the area of ground was damp. Yet the surrounding earth was cracked and dry. I was about to ask Bhalu for his opinion when he pointed to a pair of water drums at the back of a nearby hut. Without saying a word, the Trickster went over and lifted the edge of the barrel. The soil beneath it was dark with moisture.

“It’s got a slow leak,” he said, calling us over. “The ground over there’s wet because of this barrel of stagnant water.”

Accepting this as a plausible explanation, the head man asked the huddle of villagers for their opinion. Most remained silent. They were obviously fueled by jealousy: the widow had succeeded in germinating a few seeds while all the other village crops had withered.

“If she’s a witch,” I said, “why didn’t she make her family’s field prosper instead of this pathetic patch of waste ground?”

The villagers stared at their leader and shuffled their feet. They had hunted and caught the witch and now wanted the satisfaction of punishing her.

A man called out from the back of the group.

“What’s he saying, Bhalu?”

The Trickster listened to the man’s protest; which was repeated several times in a loud, heckling voice.

“He says that you can explain why the seeds grew, but he wants to know why the village water soured when the witch looked at it.”

“Take us to the tank of undrinkable water.”

The inquisition crossed the village in silence.

A group of young women, each with large silver bangles on their wrists, were taking it in turns digging a well-shaft at the other side of the settlement. Their scant frames were, we were told, best suited to clambering down the narrow well-shaft. As the women ferried away dishes of the parched Orissan earth on their heads, we approached a large free-standing water tank next to the well.

“Is this the cistern of sour water?”

The chief villager and the heckler agreed that it was.

Bhalu removed the heap of chipped bricks holding down the water tank’s cover. He signaled to three men in the mob, who helped him heave away the steel lid. As soon as I set eyes on the brackish water, I understood why it was the source of numerous afflictions. The swollen bodies of seven gray-backed bandicoot rats were floating on the surface.

At that moment a man with a club-foot hobbled over to where Bhalu, the head man and I were standing. One hand was straining to manage a crutch. In the other was an enameled mug, filled to the brim with water. The liquid was crystal clear; the chipped mug identical to that which had hung from Feroze’s belt. The drink was as translucent as water from a mountain stream. When it was offered to him, I noticed that the Trickster refused courteously. Touched by the club-footed man’s kindness, and parched with thirst, I took a long, satisfying draft.

Bhalu explained to the rabble that the rats had soured the water, not the widow’s glance. The facts were all well and good, but the villagers were eager for a less scientific trial. The heckler called for the old woman to be subjected to the traditional tests which would prove her guilt.

Orissa is well known for its witch trials. The procedure is usually the same. A local Jan-guru, a witch-hunter and amateur exorcist, is summoned. Often he starts by shaving the sorceress’ head to eliminate her evil powers. Then, when the entire village has assembled, the testing begins.

Isolated from the outside world, officials find it near-impossible to regulate the trials. In any case, the authorities regard trial by ordeal as crude entertainment, and as a way for a solitary community to vent its emotions.

Before starting his elaborate inquisition, the Jan-guru whips up the wrath of the mob. Like hounds frenzied before a hunt, they long for the kill. The exorcist shouts the order, and the suspected witch is brought out.

Any number of tests follow. To go free the witch must pass each one. First, she may be given a talwaar, sword, to hold out in front of her. If the blade wavers, she’s definitely a witch. Next, her mouth may be filled with dry white rice. If it’s still dry when she spits it out, she’s guilty. The crowd tend to overlook the fact that one’s mouth is likely to dry up in the face of death.

Back in the village, the heckler was again jeering from the rear of the crowd. He was asking for the disappearing eggs to be explained.

I asked Bhalu to take a poll. If I could explain how three ordinary eggs could disappear, would they pledge a solemn oath, permitting the widow go free? The mob fell silent. At first they seemed uneasy. What if I, too, was a witch – who had come to save my fellow sorcerer? This, the unthinkable, was brushed aside. A whispered undertone rose above the hush. The head man asked his fellow villagers for their decision. Enthused at the prospect of testing me, they agreed.

Three fresh hen’s eggs were brought forward by a young child. The audience gathered in an arc and watched my fingers. Some sat down, others shaded their eyes from the sun. The heckler pushed his way to the front. Beside him stood the Trickster, who wished me luck. Like the villagers he, too, fell silent. I waited for the moment. Fifty pairs of eyes gazed at me as I remembered all those hours in the Master’s study. We had performed sleights so many times. Three eggs was a breeze for someone hardened by swallowing stones almost as large. I sensed Feroze watching the spectacle from a great height. Beside him, I imagined Hafiz Jan peering down at me in the center of that dusty Orissan village. The Master was betting the Pashtun that I would fail. “Go on!” I seemed to hear Hafiz Jan command. “Do it for Jan Fishan Khan!”

A pye dog hobbled from the shadows of one of the houses. It was obviously concerned why the entire village was lined up. Taking advantage of the situation, the dog meandered over to a child on the extreme left of the arc and sank its fangs into the infant’s arm. The boy let out a piercing cry. The murderous rabble lost concentration as they turned in unison to behold the child’s injuries. Seizing the moment, I flung my arms backwards and dropped the eggs down my collar. A split second later, the mob’s gaze was on me again. But the eggs were nowhere to be seen.

SIXTEEN

No Little Girls

Only a madman would have ingenuously accepted a mug of drinking water in a drought-stricken Orissan village. Without pausing to question from where the thirst-quenching liquid had come, I had gulped it down. Now that I think of it, the refreshing water had been flavored with that certain je ne sais quoi, otherwise known as the tang of gray-backed bandicoot.

But by the time my alarm systems were activated, it was too late.

Bhalu and I were waiting for an Ashok Leyland to ferry us back to Bolangir when I collapsed. Somehow, the Trickster managed to transport me to one of Bolangir’s more sordid rest-houses, hidden down an unlit alley. For ten days I lay on a charpoy, weak and dehydrated. I must have dreamt every dream in the world. Yet the only dreams I can remember were of elephants. No longer were the tuskers swigging tequila from the bottle. This time, they were in ancient Egypt.

A cohort of elephant slaves hauled great slabs of stone to the crack of a tyrant’s whip. One by one, the massive honey-colored blocks were piled high on each other, forming a mighty pyramid. Not far away, in a lustrous palace whose walls were bedecked with hieroglyphs, the Queen of all Elephants lay on her back, while an elephant maid servant dropped peeled grapes into her open mouth. Two tuskers stood guard at the door. A dozen infant calves scurried about with urns of fresh buffalo milk for the royal bath. As the team of servants hastened to and fro, the sweet melody of a lone minstrel elephant radiated out from behind a filigree screen.

As I drifted in and out of consciousness, I could make out the young street lad’s face. He left my side only to fetch medicine and mineral water with which to restore my health.

On the eleventh day, after a night of unprecedented sweating, I found myself sitting bolt upright, wide awake. I knew the illness had come to an end. Bhalu was squatting on the edge of the charpoy, his Charlie Chaplin smile leering at me, a bottle of sterilized water in his hand.

“Why did you look after me?” I rasped once the strength had returned to me. “What’s your reason? You’re not my guardian angel … are you?”

The Trickster smiled broadly, like a Cheshire cat, telling me to lie still and rest.

A week later and we were on the road once again, heading south in the general direction of Tirupati. I was almost back to normal, except for the occasional spasm of stomach muscle. Our route passed some of the most spectacular scenery I had come across in eastern India. Dense forests gave way to wide vistas. Yet still everything was tinder dry. One carelessly discarded match would surely have set the entire region ablaze.

We stopped at the quiet town of Titlagarth to wait out the heat of early afternoon. Recognizing my continued weakness, Bhalu insisted that I took no chances. Our pace had slowed to a crawl. Indeed, with my prolonged recuperation at Bolangir, there was a danger that I would not make it to Hyderabad in time for the asthma cure.

* * * *

It was Bhalu who first noticed the wide, sagging canopy, suspended between two sal trees. Pointing to the makeshift tent, he wondered aloud why it was attracting such a crowd. Dozens of men and women were turning up. They would hand a single rupee coin to a grubby-looking man standing guard, and disappear into the hessian tent. The doorman had one leg shorter than the other, leading to a cringing gait. His face sneered at the world like a gargoyle, his lengthy neck drooping with vulturine conspiracy.

At first I thought the tent must be a traveling cinema. Judging by the abundance of high-spirited customers, the playhouse was screening a gem of a show. But as we approached the unctuous man on the door and paid our money, I perceived that this was no cinema.

A hundred or so people were pressed up inside the tent like sheep before the dip. Some sitting, others standing, all were focused on a mysterious contraption at the front of the room.

The machine was resting on a collapsible table. It consisted of an electronic casing, a transducer, an undersized QUERTY keyboard and a viewing monitor. Beside it stood a low-quality hospital couch. Casting an eye around the tent, I noticed a row of seven or eight women crouching on the ground. Two were visibly pregnant. I suspected that the others were also expecting.

The filthy man who had been collecting the entrance fees moved over to the sophisticated apparatus. He flicked a couple of switches, turned a dial, and pulled the recoil cord of a small generator. As the tent filled with dense diesel exhaust fumes, the man raised his voice above the noise of the engine.

“What’s he saying, Bhalu?”

“He’s welcoming everyone … and now he’s calling for the first patient.”

“What patient?”

Before the Trickster could answer, the first pregnant woman stepped forward. She greeted the man – who appeared to be some sort of physician – and slipped him a wad of rupee notes. Only when the money had been counted, and each bill had been checked for perforations, did the clinic begin.

The woman was assisted on to the couch. A lattice screen was then pulled in front of her abdomen, and the machine’s monitor was tilted towards the audience. The doctor described what he was doing.

“This machine has the power to tell whether the patient will have a boy or a girl baby,” he explained. “I am applying an electrode to the stomach. Watch the screen carefully. You will see the unborn child!”

The doctor’s contraption was an undersized ultrasound unit: a more common fixture in a hospital than in a playhouse-clinic. As he spoke, the first hazy images could be seen on the black and white screen. Instinctively, the audience lurched forward like cattle in a pen. They had paid good money for the sight. I made out the silhouette of the expecting mother’s abdomen through the lattice screen.

Peering into the monitor as though it were a space-age crystal ball, the quack drew a deep breath. Then, screwing up his face, he looked out at the audience and shook his head from left to right.

“Does that mean the baby’s sick?” I asked Bhalu.

“No …” he responded. “It means she’s carrying a girl.”

A wave of tense energy surged through the crowd. The pregnant woman broke down in tears. To hear she was expecting a daughter was the worst news she could have anticipated.

“What happens now?”

Bhalu wiped his nose.

“She pays the doctor another fifty rupees for an abortion.”

“The same man?”

“Of course … but the audience don’t watch that part. They just like to hear whether it’s going to be a boy or a girl. Look at those men over there … they’re placing bets with the doctor’s sidekick.”

Bhalu was right. At the far end of the tent four men were handing over their stakes to a fifth. Betting on the gender of a fetus was too low even for Bhalu.

The next pregnant woman, aged no more than about fifteen, handed over her money and took her place on the couch. Without wasting time the doctor squirted a little Aquasonic® gel on to the girl’s belly and applied the transducer. Like the expectant mother before her, she must have been praying that the murky image on the monitor was that of a son.

Ultrasound may have been designed to check for abnormalities in the unborn, but the apparatus has found a new and far more puissant role in India. Sex determination is now illegal across the nation, but it’s bigger business than ever. Worn out Western ultrasound units criss-cross the subcontinent, making a fortune for their untrained operators.

Only a skilled gynecologist can accurately determine the gender of a fetus using ultrasound. So much of the time the quacks tell the patient that they’re expecting a daughter, even when they aren’t. This disposes of any embarrassment later, and secures them the lucrative bonus of performing the abortion.

Ultrasound is just the latest weapon in the war against female children. But the concept is nothing new. Communities throughout India have long perfected their own ingenious methods of eliminating unwanted daughters. The Kallar tribe from Tamil Nadu, for instance, can only afford to pay the dowry of one daughter. So when a mother gives birth to a second, third or fourth girl, it’s fed milk laced with the white sap of the madder shrub. The baby soon expires from nausea and diarrhea. Other clans suffocate the infant, or feed it the juice of oleander berries, or the milk extracted from the erukkam flower.

The use of the American-made ultrasound at Titlagarth was shocking. Its villainous operator had been no innocent illusionist. He was playing with a device so powerful as to affect the very balance of nature.

Only later, when Bhalu and I were rambling our way towards Bhawanipatna, did the full horror of Indian child-killing become apparent. I was scribbling a report to Feroze, detailing my latest observations. As I wrote, I pondered what effect ultrasound would have on the society. I stared out across the parched fields of Kalahandi. Three boys were throwing stones at a dog; another group of lads were rolling their hoops in the dust. A father was showing off his new-born son to a neighbor. Then it hit me. The future – a land without little girls – had already arrived.

I scouted about, urging Bhalu to ask fathers how many daughters each had. Grinning with calm satisfaction, most replied that they had only sons. There were virtually no daughters aged six years or below, anywhere. With time, perhaps the lack of women will turn the system on its head – with men paying women for the privilege of their hand. But as it stands now, the problem of dowries has led to a stripping-down of the system. The warped logic is clear: dowries are paid by the bride’s family to the groom’s … Instead of doing away with dowries, why not do away with women?

* * * *

Hoping to refocus my attention, Bhalu suggested we travel to a village near Nandul. He wouldn’t say why the diversion was necessary. But I had a hunch the boy was on to something. How my traveling companion maintained his source of precious information, I had no idea. Names of significant places, contacts of key importance, little-known data and fascinating lore … it all just came to him. Bhalu’s education on Calcutta’s streets had provided him with a sixth sense for survival. His knack for navigation, and luck at bumping into the right contacts, was more than merely impressive. It was uncanny.

We traveled by ox-cart, rode pillion on passing bicycles, and hitched lifts on the ever less frequent supply of tangerine-orange Ashok Leyland trucks. The roads went from rough, to rougher, to almost impassable. As we crossed spectacular expanses of open country, Bhalu swore he would never return to Calcutta. Despite being gripped by his city, I agreed that its pollution and frenetic pace of life was no match for the wilds of the Orissan country.

At the town of Sargigora a man with a red shoe on his left foot and a green one on his right told of a seer working at Nandul. The man’s clothing was a jumble of New York City’s hippest costume and Hawaiian beachwear. He seemed very contented with the look. From the unusual combination, it was evident he had been fitted out with clothes donated to a Western charity. He spoke of Nandul as if it were a great city.

By the time we arrived at the town, the Trickster and I had guessed that the odd-shoe man had never been there himself. Rather, he had been weaned on the exaggerated rumors. Located on a small river, Nandul was a drowsy agricultural community, affected by relentless drought. India’s great industrial cities may be raging hotspots of activity; but the country towns are the complete antithesis. For a start, they’re virtually silent. The din of rickshaws, generators and clapped-out buses is replaced by bicycles, paraffin lamps and people walking on foot. Yet the most overwhelming difference is the sense of innocence. The streets of Nandul were teeming with incorruptible souls. In contrast, take any street comer in Calcutta and examine it closely. Lurking in the shadows there’ll be three or four agents of the underworld; a baby-renting beggar; a pickpocket; a couple of bootleggers; and half a dozen others touting anything from second-hand skeletons to fire-engine bells.

Bhalu took up the trail for the godman supposedly working nearby. Some locals pointed left; others indicated right. One man roped in a lame friend to help, who coaxed another to assist. That man and his associates became involved. Then all their friends turned up. Before we knew it, a teeming concourse had gathered to debate the directions. Teasellers, fruit merchants, a palm-reader, a brocade-seller, and a man with a tray of paan balanced on his head all hurried over to take advantage of the impromptu audience. Every manner of question was asked. Where were we staying? Were we the police? What were our names? Was I related to Mr. Harshad Shah of Mohammed Ali Road, Mumbai? How were we enjoying our visit to Nandul? Where had we come from? Where were we going? Would we be needing a taxi? Why didn’t we hitch up in town for a few days? The more questions that were asked, the more people came. And the more people who came, the more were drawn. Like a snowball careering down a mountainside, the gathering soon grew from two men and a dog into an entire caravanserai.

A boy of about eight who had a pet mongoose in a cage, pushed his way to the front and befriended Bhalu. He seemed to regard the Calcutta-born Trickster as some kind of god. Widening his eyes in awe as Bhalu lit a biri, he told us that the seer moved from one community to another. The boy had seen the mystic at a nearby village two days before. He would take us at once … as long as we would buy a handful of meat to feed to the mongoose.

Three hours later, Bhalu and I were crouching at the front of a large audience, assembled in the open air. About two hundred villagers had gathered to watch the godman perform miracles. For such an under populated village, the turn-out was impressively high. Bhalu’s young confidant concluded that the drought had boosted the godman’s standing. For he, and only he, had the power to ease the suffering … and to bring rain.

Like a stand-up comedian stepping from the wings, the magician appeared from a thatched mud-brick house to begin his show. He announced his name, Narashima; but everyone present already knew who he was and why he had come. They were growing impatient for the magic. As he took up his position at the center of a tattered drugget rug, I caught my first sight of the godman. One glimpse and it became obvious why the villagers were so keen to place their faith in him. Unlike theirs, the magician’s skin was not dark brown. It wasn’t even light brown. Rather, it was frosty white, the color of chalk. His hair was not black, but platinum. And he blinked through watery eyes, devoid of pigment. The seer was an albino.

Before the sorcery could begin, the populace was expected to endure an hour of theological ranting. They waited patiently for the sermon to end, and the miracles to start. Like worshipers the world over, they preferred the worthless mumbo-jumbo to the real message. At last, perhaps sensing that his congregation could not bear much more of the exhortation, the sage announced that, to prove his powers, he would perform a series of miracles. An anxious ripple of electric excitement ran through the audience.

Miracles are more common in Hinduism than in almost any other religion. Indians, I noticed, are far better accustomed to accepting the miraculous in everyday life. Other religions, like Christianity, do put faith in the unexplainable, but their miracles are few and far between.

First, the godman announced that through mental powers he would cook a pot of rice. He decreed that any young woman who swallowed a single grain of the rice would give birth to a son. Unlike the rest of us, the albino had no need for a stove. A large urn was placed on a straw mat before him. Chanting incantations, and swirling the hem of his robe in a figure of eight, he circled the blackened pot of rice seven times. A sinister, unnerving hush had fallen across the audience. They focused on the pot. A few minutes went by. A single wisp of steam spiraled from the vessel. Then the godman began convulsing. All around, the spectators watched in wonderment as their prophet writhed about. The more he squirmed, the more vapor rose up from the pot. Fifteen minutes passed. Then, emerging from his trance, the godman returned to the pot. He fished out a ladle of rice. It was fully cooked.

Next, the magician gathered several brown coconuts from his box of props. Five volunteers were called out from the crowd. The lucky spectators were each handed a coconut and told to break it open. They obeyed, smashing the nuts on a stone. Examining the pieces, they fell back in wonderment. The coconuts were filled with jasmine flowers.

Delighted by the stir his second miracle had caused, the holy man moved on to his next trick. He asked a member of the audience to loan him a banknote. The spectators appeared sheepish. None had any money. In any case few, I suspected, would have volunteered their precious savings to assist a godman; even one of the albino’s caliber. The visionary called again for a single note of any denomination. Bhalu stepped forward and handed him a ten-rupee note. The audience breathed a sigh of relief. The last thing they wanted was to enrage the magician.

The serial numbers of the bill were called out. The guru’s assistant – a young boy with a straying eye – etched the numbers into the soil with the end of a stick. Next, the godman set fire to the banknote. Soon it was nothing but ash. Calling out to the spectators theatrically, he added the ashes to a cup of water, stirred them in, and gulped the mixture down. The assembly was severely agitated by the demonstration. Ten rupees is a lot of money, especially in the uncertainty of drought. But before anyone could protest, the albino tensed his stomach, retched four times, and pulled the crisp banknote from his mouth. The serial number was identical to that of Bhalu’s own ten-rupee note.

With his repertoire of miracles apparently exhausted, the magician asked the villagers what problems were troubling them. They stared at him in disbelief. Surely it was obvious. Their lands were as dry as parchment. Most of their animals had already perished. Forest fires had consumed the little available firewood. Without heavy rain they would soon starve to death. Just as the godman must have known the problem well, he would have anticipated the answer. Clambering back to his position on the rug, he fell into a trance again. For forty minutes he chanted mantras. The audience peered on, open-mouthed and trustful. They genuinely hoped that he could bring rain.

The albino’s assistant scurried away, while his master opened his eyes and addressed the audience:

“An evil spirit has come to this village,” he shouted out. “That spirit has chased away the rains. I can feel the force of evil all around me! Have none of you witnessed phantoms as well?”

The villagers nodded enthusiastically. They had observed many recent signs of evil. Some had seen flames shooting out from the ground on the outskirts of the village. Another said her neighbor’s laundry had caught fire while it hung to dry.

The avatar raised his arms in the air. He called to the villagers to put their faith in him. He would demonstrate that he could bring the rain. But first, everyone would have to focus their eyes upon him. His power would only be activated if everyone stared directly at his solar plexus. Four hundred eyes converged on the mystic, who had begun to chant mantras once more.

Five minutes slipped by. The spectators’ concentration didn’t waver. As they gawked towards the seer’s chest, almost hypnotized, a remarkable thing happened. It began to rain.

The dust beneath our feet smelt fresh and clean as the spray of minute droplets touched it. I breathed in deep. That haunting smell – of the first rain – can only be understood by one who has encountered it. Some of the villagers, many screaming, licked their arms; others danced about. Their fantasy had come true. But as quickly as it had begun, it stopped.

The sadhu announced that he could bring further rains. He, and he alone, could restore water to their arid fields. But the villagers would have to contribute to the procedure … which, as most had already grasped, wouldn’t come cheap.

As the godman’s assistant made ready to collect a donation from all those present, a tall, broad-shouldered man stepped from the back of the audience. Without removing his shoes, he paced over and stood on the magician’s hallowed carpet. A shudder of fear undulated through the crowd. Who was this man? Who dared be so disrespectful to the rainmaker?

Before the seer, his aide, or the assembly could question his motives, the newcomer called out to the throng. Bhalu gave me a running translation of his words.

“This man is a hoaxer!” he cried. “You must not trust him, and I will show you why!”

Claiming to be a member of India’s ever more popular Rationalist Movement, he jeered at the holy man, ordering him to step aside. I was surprised that the Rationalists were targeting such unimportant godmen, deep in Orissa’s hinterland.

An instant later, three more Rationalists were beside the first. They too dared to stand on the sacred rug. In unison they declared they would expose the albino’s miracles. He was, they said, nothing but a con man.

First, they showed how the godman had secretly slipped a cup of quick-lime into the aluminum pot of rice. When the lime – taken from a kiln – had come in contact with the water, it had started a chemical reaction. The result was enough heat to boil the liquid, and cook the rice. Then, while the seer proclaimed that it was the Rationalists who were corrupt, not he, more miracles were exposed.

The coconuts had had their milk drained through the eyes at the top. The night before the demonstration, jasmine buds had been pushed through the holes into the nuts’ cavities. Given a little time, they blossomed in the dampness. As for the ten-rupee note: it was nothing more than simple sleight-of-hand.

By this point, tempers were fraying. The pandit was incensed that his livelihood was being attacked by the merciless band of Rationalists. To them, the illusionist was just another target on their National Miracle Exposure Campaign. Surprisingly, the villagers showed little interest in the public debunking. As far as they were concerned, the godman was a miracle-worker of the highest caliber. He had made it rain and would, surely, do so again.

As the slanging match continued, the Rationalists unveiled yet more trickery. The flames which had been seen in the night fields were no poltergeist, they said. They were created by the magician, lying in a ditch, spitting kerosene on to a burning torch. And the spontaneous combustion of laundry? The godman’s assistant had, no doubt, dabbed the clothing with a solution of phosphorous and carbon disulphide.

To a Westerner, it may sound dubious that a tantrik like Narashima would have a ready supply of such potent chemicals. But trawl any Indian small-town bazaar … caustic acids, all types of poison, base chemicals and experimental solvents are all available cheaply over the counter. For India is a land untouched by the West’s preoccupation with safety.

Meanwhile, the Rationalists moved on to their coup de maitre: debunking the rain. Simple enough, they said: the godman’s helper had sprayed the audience from behind with a fine jet of water, using a modified bicycle pump.

The albino was not going to be put off by a few allegations of chicanery. He had gathered up his props and was busy setting up his clinic at the other end of the village. He had a mission – to breathe new life into his livelihood.

Godmen who work in small towns and villages are, for the first part, entertainers. They have little in common with the affluent jet-set mystics, with their Western devotees, Rolls-Royces and penthouse apartments. Holy men like Narashima are largely harmless performers, employing simple illusions – about as sophisticated as those used at the time of Houdini. Indeed, I realized that the majority of the tricks regularly performed in India were of Houdini’s vintage. Many of the feats of swallowing objects, the sleights-of-hand, and the chemical illusions were developed by the great American conjuror himself. Of course there’s one key difference: like all Western “magicians,” Houdini claimed to be nothing more than an illusionist. But here, in India, godmen have taken the feats a stage further: they are passing them off as actual magic.

Within minutes of the Rationalists’ exposé, the villagers were back in position, clustered round their master, who had started to cure the indisposed.

First, a woman with a displeasing skin condition came up to be healed. Veiling her face with the hem of her violet ikat sari, she attempted to conceal the numerous pus-ridden sores. It being a small community, the villagers must all have known the woman well. But they leered forward all the same, for a better inspection of the disease.

She appeared to be suffering from severe vitamin deficiency. A course of appropriate medication may well have expunged the affliction. The mystic examined the woman. Acting melodramatically to the gathering, he proclaimed she had offended Yakshi, the tree goddess, by chopping branches from a tree outside the village.

“But, I had to take wood, to sell,” retorted the woman.

“Do you want to be cured?” snapped the albino.

“Yes, I will do anything.”

The remedy was meted out. A folded sal leaf was passed to the diseased woman. It contained a teaspoon or two of potassium permanganate. She must wash her hands and feet with a few grains of the powder each morning. When there was no more left, she was to leave the village at dusk and spend the night meditating beneath the tree from which she had chopped wood. Even before she had paid the ten-rupee fee for the powder, the next client had come forward.

“What’s wrong with him?” the magician asked the teenage mother who had placed her baby son at his feet.

“He was bitten by a snake.”

Shrouding the child’s head with a scrap of ocher-colored cloth, the albino murmured incantations.

“The child will live,” he whispered, “but only if you follow my directions.”

Trembling in the presence of a living god, the young woman agreed to obey the seer’s commands.

“Take these special neem leaves and mix them with cow’s milk,” he explained. “Warm the mixture and let it stand overnight before you feed the drink to the child.”

The woman was ushered away.

I nudged Bhalu to ask him what was wrong with the godman’s next patient. But he had no time to translate. He was making his own way over to the magical carpet, in search of treatment.

“Bhalu!” I called. “What are you doing? Are you mad?”

The Trickster turned.

“He’s still got my ten rupees,” he replied. “I’m seeing him on account!”

SEVENTEEN

Disneyland of the Soul

Almost six weeks had passed since Feroze had ordered me from the house. Although still a daunting duty, the journey of observation was making some headway. I had met a selection of curious characters, including a supposed witch, an albino godman, not to mention many intrepid foot-soldiers from a Secret Army. Each evening, before going to sleep, I scribbled down a few words of the day’s encounters. The next day I would post them off to be examined by the magician. Wondering how my commentaries had been received, I decided to telephone Calcutta.

The man at the telephone booth tucked away in Jagdalpur’s vegetable market licked the palm of his hand and ran it over the seat of a stool, begging me to sit. Then, tugging a frayed velvet cloth away to reveal a fine Bakelite telephone, he dialed the Master’s number. I pressed the receiver to my ear.

A conversation in English was already occupying the line.

“Gangu,” said the first voice, “how are the preparations going for the murders?”

“Very well, sir,” said the second, “very well indeed. Everything under control.”

“Who will be doing the killing?”

“The vampires will, isn’t that what you wanted, sir?”

“OK. But do the vampires have their own costumes?”

“Yes, sir, affirmative, they are looking very nice!”

“Why don’t we hire a dwarf vampire … it would be a great touch.”

Vampire dwarfs? What a monstrous idea. I had to tell someone of the murderous plan. But who to inform? I was just about to ask the telephonist’s advice when I caught more of the sinister conversation:

“But Gangu, make sure the vampires have very fine, pointed teeth. That’s imperative. Everyone will be watching them closely.”

“Yes, boss, they will all be given proper sets of vampire dentures.”

Vampires without their own teeth? I pressed the receiver closer to my ear to make sense of the chat:

“Well done, Gangu, it sounds good … what time shall we begin the shoot?”

“Sir, the extras will turn up at eight o’clock, and the lighting crew an hour or so before.”

As I wiped my brow with relief, the telephonist managed to make the connection to Feroze’s mansion.

“Halloooo?”

“Gokul, is that you?”

“Yes, it me. What name of your party?”

“This is Tahir Shah … Gokul, greetings from Jagdalpur. Can I speak with the Master?”

A pause followed as the jumble of voices encroached again.

“No, Tahir Shah Sahib,” Gokul yelled. “Master not in Alipore … Master on journey.”

“When did he leave?”

“He gone for long time …”

“Where did he go?”

“Out of Calcutta … Master having business outside West Bengal.”

“But has he received my letters, Gokul, can you tell me that?”

“Tahir Shah Sahib,” shouted the elderly manservant, “Master not read letters … he been away long time. Very busy.”

“Feroze had not mentioned that he planned to leave Calcutta for an extended trip. As I squatted on the saliva-coated stool, I thought of the cozy study, with its soft carpet, its clutter of trophies and its bookshelves. It seemed a million miles from the telephone booth at Jagdalpur. Thinking of it brought on a wave of homesickness for the mansion and its appalling regime.

The telephonist watched me as I stared into space. He was waiting to be handed a wad of rupee notes, but was in no great hurry for payment.

“What you do now?” he asked.

“Continue on my journey,” I said. “You see, I'm on a journey of observation … looking for the unusual.”

The telephonist nodded.

“Laxmi Circus very nice,” he said.

“Where’s that?”

Replacing the velvet kerchief squarely over his precious telephone, he opened a drawer, pulled out a flier and passed it over. It was headed: Laxmi’s Circus and popcorn.

“Is it any good?”

The man licked his lips and cackled menacingly.

“First class,” he said.

The telephonist’s high recommendation had been an introduction too enticing to overlook. I spent the next day with Laxmi’s popcorn chef and the troupe, which was performing to a full house each night. It seemed to enjoy a far-reaching reputation. Even those unimpressed by the routines were won over by the circus’ other sly crowd-puller: free popcorn for all.

Bhalu accompanied me, albeit reluctantly. He had spent most of the night guzzling country liquor in a truck driver’s drinking hole, and was severely hung-over.

Unsure of what acts had brought such fame to the Laxmi’s Circus, I approached their heavily patched, grubby marquee with some trepidation. The Trickster entered the tent to announce our arrival. A minute or two passed. Bhalu emerged, his face pale with dread. Five more minutes went by. Then, slowly, the canvas entrance flap was drawn back by an attractive girl. I smiled, taking in the attributes of her unexpected appearance. Aged about fourteen, she was crouching low on the ground. Nothing odd about that. Yet I couldn’t help noticing that the peculiarities ran deeper than her posture. The girl had lovely features. Her lips had been painted with cherry-red gloss; her eyes had been lined with kohl; her nose was pierced with a silver pin. And she had two heads. I rubbed my eyes. She still had two heads, four eyes, a pair of noses and twenty fingers. Bhalu was sure his hangover was playing tricks on him. When I jabbed him in the small of the back, he explained that we had come to speak to the troupe’s members.

Anila and Amrita had been born to a villager near Nagpur in central India. They were joined by a thick band of tissue at the sternum. On realizing she had given birth to conjoined – “Siamese” – twins, what she assumed to be a monster, their mother had drunk poison. Their father assumed the girls were the incarnation of some malevolent spirit. Fearing the wrath of the supernatural, he resolved not to kill them. Instead, he shoved the new-born babies into a sack and hurried with them to Nagpur. The girls were sold from one unscrupulous freak dealer to the next.

“We were shown at circuses across India,” said Anila, brushing her long hair. “The owners would burn our arms with cigarettes to make us move.”

“If we cried out,” said Amrita, continuing where her sister left off, “we would be beaten. If one wept, the other was punished. When we were ten, a circus owner sold us to a brothel.”

“Where was that?”

“In Chennai, Madras,” muttered Anila. “We were locked in a room not much bigger than the bed. Men would come all night to sleep with us. They found us strange. We screamed every night.”

“When our screams disturbed the other girls,” persisted Amrita, “the pimp would bring a knife and threaten to cut us apart.”

Amrita paused to rub rouge into her cheeks. Like her sister, she had a soft, feminine complexion. Both their faces appeared to have been lightened with bleaching cream.

“Did you escape from the brothel?”

“After two years,” said Anila, “its owner said we weren’t bringing in enough money. So he threw us out into the street in Chennai. We were forced to beg for a living. Then, one day, Laxmi heard about us … he asked us to work with him and the others.”

“Is Laxmi here today?”

Amrita pointed a foot to a very ordinary-looking man standing nearby.

“Go and talk to him, “ she said.

So I did.

Laxmi was of average build and very hirsute. His hands were large, but not excessively so. His lower jaw was as angular as a set-square, with a bristly mole on its left side. When I asked him what his performance entailed, he said he ate things.

A man with a digestive tract like no other, Laxmi’s stage routine was to gulp down whatever the audience threw up to him. Razor blades, nails, door knobs and shoe horns, they found their way into Laxmi’s stomach on a nightly basis. Some items would be regurgitated after the act, others would proceed through his intestines.

As an amateur who had toyed with swallowing stones, I could only pay homage to the true maestro. Laxmi had made an art form out of what was for me a deeply unpleasant activity.

“When I was a boy,” he said, explaining how he got started, “I used to swallow things for fun. At first I swallowed coins and paperclips to make my friends laugh. Then I tried nuts and bolts, marbles, door hinges, keys and belt buckles. The more I swallowed, the more I liked it.”

Laxmi’s expertise at swallowing large or sharp-edged objects was impressive. My ingestion of smooth pebbles paled in comparison. I was about to ask him what his most impressive feat of swallowing had been but, quite suddenly, he excused himself. He had a touch of indigestion.

Noticing that the swallower had disappeared, Anila and Amrita crawled over, and introduced us to two veteran members of the circus.

The first was a turbaned hulk of a man with a walrus mustache. Pressing his hand to mine, he wasted no time in demonstrating his skill. He fell down on all fours and performed twenty faultless press-ups. Then, clambering to his feet, he instructed Bhalu and me to examine his forehead. We did so. Miniature beads of perspiration were forming in the furrowed ridges of his brow. But this was no ordinary sweat. It was black. As the inky droplets joined up and ran towards the great mustache, I examined the man’s face very carefully. Although there was no way of telling, I felt sure that this colored sweat was nothing more than an illusion. Perhaps he had painted his skin with a transparent chemical which reacted with the sweat. I would ask Feroze for his opinion when we next spoke.

The second turbaned man – called Vikram Singh – then demonstrated his expertise. In his left hand he held an illuminated glass light-bulb. The bulb, which was flickering gently, wasn’t plugged into a socket. When he handed the bulb to me it ceased giving light. As far as I could see there was no battery concealed in the base. For his second feat, Vikram Singh unbuttoned his shirt. He stooped to remove a selection of household objects from a tattered cardboard box. A couple of spoons, a kitchen sieve, a saucepan lid and a bottle opener: one by one, he pressed the items to his chest. Rather than falling to the ground, the items stuck to his torso. I inspected each of them. There was no apparent sign of adhesive. Even so, I thought that, like his associate, Vikram Singh’s skills were nothing but crafty conjury.

As we wandered away from the marquee, Anila and Amrita begged Bhalu to drop by after the show. Both seemed to have taken a fancy to him, and were flirting outrageously. Rather than ignoring their affections, he was thrilled at the prospect of entertaining two girls at once.

“How dare you even contemplate leading them on!” I growled, as we moved away from the marquee.

The Trickster licked his palms and pressed down his dirty hair. Soon he would be locked in a passionate embrace … like none other. I reminded him that he was getting himself into hot water. Sordid relations with conjoined sisters might, for all we knew, be breaking the law.

Bhalu twisted round to wave to the girls. Once they had shuffled inside, he turned his attention to me.

“What’s wrong with them?”

“Bhalu look at what you’re saying … I’m having nothing to do with this.”

“You’re just jealous!” he said.

* * * *

The following morning, Bhalu was eager to relate the details of his nocturnal encounter with the conjoined sisters. Insisting I had no interest in his sordid love life, I dressed and left the guest house in a huff. I would be taking the noon bus to Kottagudem. If the Trickster didn’t appear at the bus stop, I would be only too delighted to leave without him.

Traveling with a twelve-year-old, who acted like a washed up middle-aged rock star, was not an easy experience. Again, I found myself questioning what had induced the boy to tag along. It wasn’t as if I were supporting him. He was always adamant that he paid his way – albeit in black money. And it wasn’t as if I was an affable companion. I treated him like a menopausal mother would have done. I shouted him down when he gave his opinion; ridiculed him in public for his manners; and ordered him about as if he were a serf. Sooner or later I knew I would discover the reasoning behind his decision to accompany me.

After an hour of hanging around at the town’s main bus stop, a dilapidated Tata bus rolled up. The front two tires were hissing unnervingly. Never one to let a trivial puncture or two get in the way, the driver set off at considerable speed. Bhalu had not turned up. Maybe, I ruminated, his tryst the night before had been true love. If the relationship led to wedlock, was a marriage to conjoined sisters considered to be bigamy?

The bus pushed southwards, crossing one river after the next, slicing through the fertile agricultural lands of the Sabari Valley. The horrific drought of Orissa was nothing but a memory. Every fifteen minutes the driver would jam on the brakes. His assistant, a fawning reprobate of a man wearing a fine coral necklace, would jump down and pump air into the perforated tires. The regular stops more than doubled our journey time.

On the few occasions that the vehicle managed to gather speed, I thought about the riddle of colored sweat. Then I wondered what had happened to the Trickster. Would I ever see him again? Perhaps he had decided to head back to Calcutta, where he belonged.

Shortly before dusk, the bus – which had not been in fit shape to undertake the journey in the first place – had ground to a halt at the town of Borgampad, about thirty-five kilometers from Kottagudem. We were now in Andhra Pradesh. The driver announced that all the passengers were invited to pass the night in the vehicle, because of a major puncture. When I offered to help put on the spare wheels, the driver laughed feebly. Of course, there were no spares.

Descending into the dispersing light, in search of a meal, I found refuge at an outdoor roadside cafe. A series of paraffin gas burners bathed the area in phosphorescent light. The air was thick with moths. A man in a lungi and T-shirt bearing an image of the Mona Lisa swaggered over and slapped a thick paneer-filled pancake in front of me.

As I sank my teeth into the fritter, I noticed a robed figure slouching beneath a banyan tree, adjacent to the cafe. His forehead was masked in a large barberry-red tilak, outlined in white; his form was caped in yellow; and his neck was thick with wilting mogra blossom. The flowers, the red tilak and the yellow dress: all were the emblems of a sadhu who follows Rama.

There was something else about the old sadhu at Borgampad which struck me. His kamandal, the ritualistic water vessel carried by all sadhus, was extraordinary. Generally crafted from wood, gourds, brass or steel, the traditional water containers are revered as sacred objects in themselves. But the one held in the hands of the Rama sadhu was quite unusual. It was fashioned from a coconut of the enchanting coco-de-mer palm.

Native only to the island of Praslin, in the Seychelles, the coco-de-mer is one of the most astounding of all trees. The coconuts, which closely resemble the shape of a female pelvis, take seven years to mature. Their similarity to the female form may explain some of the wondrous properties which have been ascribed to them. Well designed to cross the turbulent waters of the Indian Ocean, the distinct double nuts have been washed up on the beaches of India’s west coast for centuries.

Ancient legends tell of how the nuts grew on trees beneath the sea. Societies along India’s western coastline pounded them up to make medicines, elixirs and potent aphrodisiacs. A cult even developed, dedicated to worshiping the coconut. When General Gordon visited Praslin in 1881, he declared that the island was the Garden of Eden, and the mystical coco-de-mer its forbidden fruit.

* * * *

Late the next morning, after an uncomfortable night spent aboard the stationary bus, the driver turned up with an assortment of inner tubes, for which he had traded his assistant’s coral necklace. The auxiliary, who was petulant at having his prized possession swapped for a heap of lousy inner tubes, set about with a jack and tire levers.

Less than two hours later, the machine was heaving into Kottagudem. Defying the sceptics – for whom I was the spokesman – it negotiated the remaining miles without another stop.

After a wash beneath a standpipe in the market area, I tramped over to the railway station. By a great stroke of luck, a slow train bound for Vijayawada, the last sizable city en route to Tirupati, was about to depart.

Once I had got comfortable in my second-class seat, I again pondered what had happened to Bhalu. If he had been there on the train, he would already be scamming a small fortune from what he considered to be fresh blood. Maybe I had been too abrupt in dashing off without him. But his behavior had really begun to deteriorate. One-night stands with Siamese twins … what would be next?

At Khammam, the largest of the many stops we made, a portly figure entered the carriage and took the seat opposite mine. The baldness and VIP gray attaché case gave him away as a member of the Secret Army. I was about to suggest that he rush out and buy a Director’s Brand hairpiece when he clicked open his VIP.

Pretending to be jolted forward as the locomotive took a sudden bend, I attempted to peek over the top of his case. No good; too slow.

Could I work out his business by observing the signs? His open-toed sandals were constructed from good-quality leather; his shirt was indigo silk; a top-of-the-range Indian-made watch was strapped to his wrist; and the deep scar on his left cheek seemed to have been attended to by a skilful surgeon. He was, quite obviously, an important salesman.

Unable to bear my overt investigation any longer, the man pulled a large, shiny oval object from his case and handed it to me.

“Egg?” he said. “Would you like an Easter egg?”

“Thank you very much,” I replied. “That’s the last thing I’d expect to see on a train in Andhra Pradesh. Are you sure you can spare it?”

The salesman removed his glasses to rub his eyes.

“Oh, yes, of course I can,” he retorted, “I’ve got thousands of them.”

Why were the Secret Army of Indian executives breaking into chocolate Easter eggs? One thing was for certain: their motives had nothing to do with Easter. I examined the egg. Its wrapper advertised a cache of jelly babies inside. I also observed that the egg, from Safeway Supermarkets, was eight months past the sell-by date.

“Excuse me for prying,” I said, “but are you a member of the Christian Church?”

The salesman clutched his case to his chest, as if I had insulted him gravely.

“Certainly not!” he quipped, “I’m a Hindu.”

“Then why the interest in Easter eggs?”

I had to get to the bottom of it all.

“Vedding-eggs!” he said, squirming back in his seat. “They’re vedding-eggs!”

“Vedic eggs?”

“No, no, vedding-eggs … matrimony.”

Clearly, I had missed a key snippet of information. What do chocolate Easter eggs from Safeway have to do with Indian weddings? I asked the executive. He was warming to my interest in his product.

“The bride’s family gives one to each guest who comes to the marriage. It’s a symbol … a bountiful future.”

“Was this your own idea, by any chance?”

The salesman beamed with the smile of a man who had come up with a great invention.

“Yes, all my idea,” he said.

“But where do you get the Easter eggs from?”

“My cousin in Blackburn buys up all out-of-date eggs after Easter and ships them over to me. I supply them to veddings across southern India.”

This was a project on a par with Pykrete and Tirupati toupees. Transmutation of a symbol from one religion to another. An anthropologist would kill for a whiff of this. But the concept of the wedding egg was far more than an anthropological curiosity. It was an example of Indian genius at the highest level. Easter eggs are made by the million in countries across Europe and the Americas. The day after Easter they’re virtually worthless. So, enter the calculating mind of the Indian Secret Army executive.

* * * *

One of eastern India’s most ancient cities, Vijayawada nestles on the north bank of the mighty Krishna River. Not far from the coast, set on a great floodplain, and bathed in history: one might expect the city to be a key tourist destination. Having installed myself at an open air tea house near the city center, I dug out my Cadogan guide to south India. What lavish praise had its writers afforded Vijayawada? Opening it at the appropriate page, I began to read: “ … Vijayawada is a classic textbook example of an Indian hell-hole and should be avoided …” Below the write-up was a line-drawing of a supine traveler, his hand wearily stroking his brow.

Pressing the book to my face, I glanced to the left and then to the right, without moving my head. The place had not seemed as bad as all that. Granted, it was rather stifling, and most of the tourists appeared to have been frightened away, but this was no hell-hole. Then it struck me. Of course, instead of being a classic textbook example of a hell-hole, this was a classic textbook example of a travel-guide writer’s infatuation. As the author of a guide myself, I knew well the routine of slandering one’s favorite spots. How else can an overworked, underpaid travel writer ensure that the riffraff will stay away? I’ll stay here a couple of days, I mused. If it’s as bad as the guide insists, it must be terrific.

Leaning back on my chair, I ordered another idli and a second glass of tea. Then I withdrew my notepad and dashed off a report to Feroze; he would surely be interested in the wedding-egg business. Even if he was out of Calcutta, I was certain that he would eventually arrange for my letters to be sent on. As I scrawled the details down, a gargantuan Westerner approached the restaurant. He was fifty-something, as tall as an oak, with sagging jowls and a face that bore the scars of tropical illness. Even before he sidled over to my table, I knew he was an Australian. My supposition involved little guesswork. This was a man, who must have tramped across the Outback, fought crocodiles barehanded, and feasted on mealy grubs beneath the stars. His hat gave it all away. It was wide-brimmed and made of tightly woven straw. And corks dangled from its outer edge on strings.

“G’day,” said the man, obviously intrigued that another foreigner had ignored the guide-book warnings to turn back.

“Good afternoon.”

“Don’t get many strangers in these parts,” he said, removing his hat. “Had a couple a Kiwis last month, they decorated my hat with the corks. Keeps the flies away pretty well …”

“I “m not surprised there are so few tourists: the guide books are virtually pleading with visitors to bypass Vijayawada.”

As I asked the Australian what had brought him to such an outlying locality, I noticed an odd scar, a sort of pock, about an inch above his brow. The advanced state of his baldness drew my eyes to the mark. Although healed, it was as if the wound had originally been quite deep: far more than a superficial break of the skin.

“I’m researching earth eaters,” he said, answering my question.

“Earth eaters? What do they do?”

Even before the words had left my mouth, I was blushing at the stupidity of my question.

“Earth eaters …” replied the man with an ominous inflection, “eat earth.”

“Golly …” I said, hoping to claw myself back to the realms of credibility.

The Australian had more to say:

“Unusual cravings, they’re my line,” he said, introducing himself as Fisher. Like everything in the Antipodes, his name had been abbreviated, to “Fish”.

“Earth eating sounds more like a sign of derangement than a craving,” I said.

My attitude to the unusual appetite had not pleased the Australian.

“Geophagy, earth craving is rare in Asia,” he said coldly. “I’ve discovered a local pregnant woman who eats more than half a pound of earth a day.”

“Maybe she’s starving,” I said.

Fish, who had taken on a pseudo-scientific air, was not impressed with my hypothesis. Pulling out a pair of bifocals, he twirled them around his index finger. I imagined he had condescended to speak to me only as no one else in Vijayawada was in the least bit interested in earth eaters.

“So, why do people eat earth?” I probed, hoping to conclude the conversation. “It can’t taste that good, or everyone would be gorging themselves on it.”

Fish sucked on the arm of his spectacles.

“More people eat it than you think.”

“Really?”

“Oh yes,” he said, straining forward to pass on what he knew. “In Ghana, five thousand tons of clay are mined each year … not to be made into pots, or to build houses, but to be eaten. It’s sieved and mixed with water to form a kind of dough.”

“Yes, but all kinds of amazing things are going on in Africa …”

“Well, what about Mississippi?”

“What about it?”

“There’s a well-known earth-eating tradition there. People near the river say their soil tastes like sherbet. And what about the slaves in the New World? Everyone knows that when they were brought to the Americas, they ate earth out of fear. They got addicted to it.”

“Are there any similarities between the earth eaten in Ghana, Mississippi and Vijayawada?”

“That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question,” he replied.

From the furtive way Fish rubbed his palms together, I sensed he knew more than he was giving away.

“Earth eating,” he continued after a few minutes of silence, “is probably the most primitive side of our brain somehow kicking in. What if one could activate this area of the mind in everyone? Think what it could mean for marketing!”

“Fish, I don’t want to denigrate earth eaters,” I said, “but I really don’t think the business community’s going to get too worked up about them.”

The Australian called the waiter and asked for a cup of milky tea.

“You don’t understand,” he sniffed. “The implications are tremendous. Find out how these ancient, primeval brain patterns work – why some individuals are ruled by their cravings – and you can control the way people think … then you can determine what they buy.”

“But who’d want food that tasted like earth?”

“Forget earth-flavored anything,” said Fish. “That doesn’t even come into it. The earth eaters are just the key!”

Had Fish been dressed in a Sevile Row suit, sitting in a swish Los Angeles office, I might have been reeling in awe at the ramifications of primeval appetite. The fact that he was lying low in Vijayawada, discussing his plans with random foreigners, made me suspicious. Perhaps he was himself an undercover earth eater. For a moment I wished Bhalu was still around. He would have cut straight through to Fish’s real intentions.

As far as I was concerned, anyone investigating unusual cravings on the banks of the River Krishna had to be a little eccentric, irrespective of their motives. The more the Australian and I conversed, the more convinced I became that a maniac was sitting before me.

The majority of Westerners one meets in India are on a quest. They’re searching for truth, for enlightenment, for themselves, or, like Fish, are hunting for the bizarre. Unlike the West, India – a country dedicated to assisting those on a journey – comforts them, nurturing their peculiarities.

Fish and I discussed all kinds of subjects, and spoke of distant places, until late into the afternoon. He came across as a man of considerable acumen, but whose brilliance was marred by disturbing undertones. He claimed to speak six languages, including Tagalog; to have written extensively on the Japanese board-game Go; and to play the marimba. Impressive stuff. I didn’t doubt any of his accomplishments. But Fish ought to have stopped with the marimba.

Fired by the Master’s order to observe at all costs, I bombarded the Australian with questions. He, goaded by my insatiable curiosity, lifted the veil on his deep and peculiar past.

Before dispatching me on my journey of observation, Feroze had instilled in me an important rule of thumb. Never, he said, disclose too much at the first meeting; rather, extract information from your interlocutor. At the time, I had wondered what exactly the magician had meant. But my lengthy conversation with the headstrong Australian was a good example of how not to behave.

Having deliberated on the flavor of Ghanaian soil, the merits of the marimba, and the winning strategies of Go, Fish shifted the conversation into the Twilight Zone of his youth.

I asked whether he had been to the subcontinent before.

“I certainly have,” he said languidly. “It was in the early seventies. Went to Goa, to Kashmir and West Bengal … you can’t beat this country. Or we couldn’t then.”

“Why not? What was so special about India?”

Fish made fists with his hands and banged them together.

“Because,” he called out, “we were on a quest …”

“A quest for what?”

“For a third eye. You see, in the seventies, India was Disneyland … it was the Disneyland of the soul.”

The waiter circled our table like a shark. We had not ordered anything for a long time, and the management was ready for us to leave. With the Antipodean just opening up, I had to stall. So, pulling out a hundred rupee note, I rustled it in my hand like a dry leaf.

Speaking at full speed, Fish revealed a deeper obsession … trephination.

His tale began with an interest in the work of the Dutch physician Dr Bart Huges. While at a party in 1962, Huges had seen a man stand on his head. The act had given him a flash of inspiration. Surely, he thought, the more blood you have in your brain, the higher your consciousness? So Huges experimented by standing on his head, and by pinching the veins draining blood from his neck. The results were encouraging. But Huges yearned for a more permanent increase in consciousness. He longed to return to the consciousness of infancy. For this, he thought, the skull would have to be unsealed, like a child’s. He realized a third eye could be created by excising a small disc of bone from the head … using an electric masonry drill.

Huges was carted away to an asylum when he went public with his ideas. But an Englishman called Mellen took up the gauntlet. He bored a hole into his skull, using a high-speed electric drill. It was uneven, so he drilled another. His friend, a woman called Amanda Fielding, began noticing improvements in Mellen’s character. So persuaded was she by the development that she drilled a hole in her own skull. Amanda Fielding grew so thrilled with the operation that she saw it as her duty to campaign for trephination for everyone with only two eyes. She stood as an independent candidate in the 1979 and 1983 parliamentary elections. Her central manifesto pledge was to get head-drilling free for all on the National Health.

“So, where did you get yours done?”

Fish probed the inner reaches of his mouth with his index finger. He suddenly seemed contemplative. But then, one would expect anyone who had applied a high-speed masonry drill to their skull to take the subject seriously. Three or four minutes passed. He said nothing. Perhaps my question had brought back painful memories. Fish was staring into space.

“Sydney in 1976,” he whispered, without changing his focus. “We were high as kites and looking for stimulation … the permanent kind.”

“Golly,” I said, gulping.

“A group of us had heard of Huges and Mellen, and thought we’d have a go ourselves. You see, we had all been to India in search of the third eye, but had left with nothing but diarrhea.”

“What did it feel like when the drill went in? Did you reach higher consciousness? Do you recommend boring out a third eye? How does it feel now?”

Fish drew a hand across his chin, and paused as my rapid volley of questions struck him.

“There’s only one answer I can give,” he responded gently.

“Yes … yes, please tell me.”

“If you’re so interested,” he replied defensively, “drill a hole in your own skull …”

EIGHTEEN

The Yogi’s Last Breath

The ravens in the rafters of Vijayawada’s railway station were very large indeed. Passengers and red-shirted luggage bearers hurried about, all laden with packages wrapped in greasy newspaper. The coal-black birds peered down, secure in the knowledge that they were untouchable. A herd of boot-boys weaved through the crowds, rapping their brushes together like the keys of a glockenspiel to attract customers. A madman hopped about on one foot, swearing. Fifteen clocks all advertised a different time. A bewigged Secret Army executive spat paan against a wall and coughed. Hawkers jostled from one platform to the next, selling padlocks and toilet chains, rubber gloves and rolling-pins. Just another morning in the railway Black Hole.

Muttering something about making a long-distance telephone call, Fish had left me to find a room for the night. I had risen at dawn and made for the railway station. After an hour of waiting, the ticket officer had sold me a seat on the 0810 service direct to Tirupati. The second-class carriages were full, which meant I would have to travel south in third-class.

Twenty minutes before the train arrived, I observed a crowd gathering at one end of the platform. Always enthusiastic to see another performance, I went over and made my way to the front of the throng. But this was not a new trick. It was one that I knew well. For it was being performed by none other than Bhalu.

“Ah, “ he said loudly, “I was wondering when you’d turn up!”

“I thought you had run off with the twin sisters.”

The Trickster grinned his Charlie Chaplin grin and followed after me as I walked away.

“How have you managed without me?” he chirped. “You must be missing me a lot.”

Hafiz Jan had once told me that my ancestor, Jan Fishan Khan, had burst out laughing on hearing that India’s first railway had been built. That was back in 1853. The thirty-four kilometer track stretched between Mumbai and Thane. Rising up like a Siberian bear, the great warlord had poured scorn on the preposterous Western invention. He had proclaimed that railway tracks would never be laid in his homeland, Afghanistan. “Your trains may suit you in Europe,” he thundered, “but Afghans would never keep to the tracks!” While Jan Fishan’s prediction remained true in his homeland – Afghanistan has no railways – rail travel caught on in India … in a big way.

Even for Bhalu, the third-class train heading southward to Nellore was unpleasant. I made a big song and dance about the drop in comfort, until, that is, I realized that the really destitute travelers were sitting on the carriage’s roof. Crowded with dark, silent faces, the compartment had hard wooden benches and an oily layer of mud on the floor. Until now, the Trickster had preyed on middle-class travelers. As far as he was concerned, they made the perfect customers. They had just enough money to splurge on cut-price products – such as cigarette ash beauty powder – and were too new to the business of luxury to doubt the effectiveness of his wares. Now presented with the lower-income echelon of south Indian society, he would need a fresh patter with which to entice our impecunious companions.

But as the Trickster contemplated his vast repertoire for an ingenious money-making scam, a stocky man leapt at the train as it was passing a small station. Defying all laws of physics, the man caught hold, and pulled himself aboard. It was a remarkable feat of strength and recklessness. Stumbling through the cabin, he began to tout a single item.

Bhalu was anxious that another was trespassing on his patch. He was about to hound the man away when I called him to heel. I wanted to inspect what the peddler had on offer.

One by one, the dim faces twitched, dismissing the hawker. Within a few minutes, the man was standing before us. He was dressed in a heavy-knit pullover and canary-yellow pants. His eyes were the color of egg yolks; a dark plume of hair sprouted forth from his nose.

“Can you ask him what he’s got on offer, Bhalu?”

The Trickster gritted his teeth and translated my question. The man with egg yolk eyes blinked once and withdrew a half-size vodka bottle from his pocket. The bottle was empty.

“He says he’s a follower of Yogi Radhakrishan, and that he has something very unusual to give away … for a donation.”

“What is it? What’s he trying to give away that no one in a third-class carriage wants?”

Bhalu put the question and juggled with the unwieldy response.

“What’s he selling, tell me, Bhalu!”

The Trickster seemed gravely impressed; not by the merchandise, but by the story which went along with it.

“This man spent fifteen years at the foot of Yogi Radhakrishan, the famous sadhu from Madhya Pradesh,” Bhalu explained. “His master practiced many tapasya, austerities. For the last thirty years, the yogi consumed nothing but milk. He was ninety when he died, but he never changed his routine. He had spent twenty years in another penance, ekbahu, his arm raised up, propped by a crutch. Then, in his youth, he had tied a thick cast-iron chain around his genitals, to destroy all feelings of lust. And,” continued Bhalu, “the sadhu was said to have had supernatural powers. This man standing here was with his master when he died.”

“That’s all very well,” I said, “but what’s in the bottle? It looks empty to me.”

The Trickster asked the disciple to go over the key points again. Then he informed me of the contents of the bottle.

“You’re right,” he winced, “there’s nothing in the bottle … just air … but it’s special air. It’s the yogi’s last breath.”

* * * *

Only once before had I heard of a dying breath being bottled. Even then it wasn’t for sale on the open market. Unlike the yogi’s voluminous exhalation, it was a far more dainty sample. The American automobile magnate Henry Ford was a known admirer of Thomas Edison. He was said to have bought anything connected to the great inventor’s life. His collection included all manner of personal and scientific objects. But pride of place was devoted to a small glass vial, labeled “Edison’s Last Breath”.

I would have forked out a hundred rupees for the holy man’s last exhalation, but, as ever, my funds were too low for such luxuries. Bhalu could easily have afforded the bottle and its contents; but he was horrified at my gullibility. Wads of tattered rupee notes were stashed in each of his pockets, in a pouch around his neck, and in the folds of his underwear. He had been minting money since the trip began. Nothing was easier than fleecing unsuspecting citizens in the provinces. Such profitability must, I mused, have been the motivation behind the Trickster’s eagerness to embark on a grand Indian tour.

There was little to observe on the train journey south from Vijayawada. Not that the landscape was dull; it certainly wasn’t. But my face was pressed up against a crate of over-ripe mangoes for most of the journey. The third-class carriage had a stupendous agitation of life. Gone were the wig-wearing, VIP-case-carrying salesmen of second-class. They had been replaced by another Secret Army … of astrologers.

India is the most capitalistic nation on Earth. The Western world may think it has a fine tradition of commerce, but sadly, it’s quite mistaken. Give any executive from Frankfurt or London a dessert spoon, drop him down in Andhra Pradesh, and he would be starving inside of a week. But present an Indian with such a simple item of cutlery, and he has a foolproof way of supporting his extended family, for life.

Two other ingredients aid capitalism in India. The first is people. The subcontinent has a billion potential customers for any product. The other is an unquestioning belief in the supernatural. Put the two together and, as I found out, a dessert spoon is more than enough to reap the rewards of a market economy.

When the train stopped at Ongole, a stone’s throw from the Bay of Bengal, the carriage swelled into a makeshift bazaar. Boot-boys and peanut-sellers pushed each other aside, vying for custom. Hucksters, touting Rubik’s cubes, whistles and water pistols, showed off their wares. Blinking through milk-bottle-glass lenses, the mob of largely, elderly passengers seemed nonplussed. They had no need for water pistols or Rubik’s cubes. At their advanced stage of life, they were far more concerned about another matter … their destiny in the next life.

Then, as the train surged from the station, the tide of pedlars ebbed away. Seizing the moment, the fortune-tellers revealed themselves.

The infantry of astrologers appeared to be members of one extended family. Each had perfected a different method of peering into the unknown. One would read a person’s shadow; another could interpret the pattern of flies landing on a mango seed; a third deciphered a strand of one’s hair; and yet another would describe one’s horoscope merely by taking the pulse.

Before I could select which method of divination most appealed to me, a man with an enormous frothy white turban, gnarled features, a patch over one eye, and a large amulet bound to his arm had pushed a dessert spoon at my face. In its bowl I glimpsed the distorted reflection of carriage life. Like upside-down specters, the fray of mendicants, mangoes, and boss-eyed travelers loomed up behind me. The medium spoke in a thick, raspy tone. Although the accent and appearance were unfamiliar, there was something recognizable about the clairvoyant. It was his smell. He smelt of lavender, a fragrance favored by Feroze. And his hands … they were very much like the magician’s. For a foolish moment, I wondered if my teacher had resorted to following me on my journey. No, I reasoned, Feroze would not have bothered himself with that. A mendicant’s life was not for him … he would never have endured the ragged costume and third-class travel.

But this was not the time to question the man’s appearance or the Master’s schemes. The polished dessert spoon, which was being thrust back and forth towards my face as sharply as a piston, was in danger of blinding me.

“What’s going on?” I bleated. “Get that spoon away from me!”

But the implement did not move away. Instead, it began to fluctuate more wildly than before, from side to side. Was this a crude form of hypnosis? Had the mystic lost his own eye in practicing the specialized system of divination? I asked Bhalu what was happening.

“The man is saying that he can tell your fortune,” he explained. “Stare into the shiny spoon and he will read your eyeballs.”

“I don’t want my eyeballs read. They’re private!”

But the reading had already begun.

Chanting mantras and pressing his bristly face closer to mine, the astrologer stared deeply into my eyes. He paused to lick the spoon with his tongue. Then he choked out my fate a few words at a time.

Bhalu translated the reading of my destiny:

“You came to India to study illusion,” he declared, interpreting the seer’s words. “After visiting the tomb of your ancestor, you traveled to Calcutta to begin an apprenticeship with Hakim Feroze, the master illusionist. And now you are on a great journey … of observation.”

“That’s impossible,” I scoffed. “How could he know all that just from my eyes?”

The Trickster, who appeared blasé at the man’s information, continued with the translation:

“Now you are traveling to Tirupati and then to the temple at Tirumala. After that, you plan to venture to Bangalore and then up to Hyderabad, for the mysterious cure … for your asthma.”

Again the astrologer licked the spoon with his eel-like tongue. Without a coating of saliva, the magic did not work. As before, he studied my eyeballs with considerable attention.

“All right,” I said, “enough of my past and my plans, tell me the details of my actual future!”

Bhalu leaned a little closer to heed my fate.

“The destiny,” he said, “is to bring many good things. But if you know in advance what they will be, your actions may change. The result could send you on another path … leading to a different, less pleasing fate.”

“Can’t he tell me a single thing that’s going to happen? He doesn’t have the right attitude … after all, he is a fortune-teller.”

The spoon was licked for a third time.

“All he will say is that your journey will end with a tremendous conclusion.”

I handed over a rupee for the pleasure of having the man peer into my eyeballs. Then I launched into a studious analysis of the reading. Certain that this was nothing more than simple deception, I broke it down bit by bit. Since a blind dwarf fortune-teller and his accomplice had once hijacked my wallet to learn all about me in Mumbai, I had become far more skeptical in the face of supposed clairvoyants. Even so, I had no idea where the lavender-scented mystic had acquired his data. An hour after the man and his family had moved on from our carriage, the Trickster was tiring of my dissection. He couldn’t understand why I was taking the spoon-reading so seriously.

“Let’s go through it one more time,” I blustered.

Bhalu, who had been eying a girl sitting opposite, glowered at me.

“Will you try to act normally?” he snapped. “You’re scaring away my little friend over there!”

* * * *

Ten hours after leaving Vijayawada, train 8079 heaved into Tirupati. Very often, when the locomotive screeched into a station, I couldn’t be certain whether it was my stop or not. The signs were either in an unfamiliar script, or were obscured by the general mass of porters, forlorn travelers and soda-water-sellers. But this time it was different. As soon as the hailstorm of porters threw themselves suicidally at the arriving train, I knew we had reached Tirupati. It was an easy deduction.

Because everyone was bald.

We alighted and pushed down the platform through the jam of pilgrims. I found myself staring at each one. Their shaven heads were powdery white, their expressions sorrowful and drawn. They looked like human guinea-pigs at a concentration camp, waiting lethargically for orders. The air was heavy with melancholy; one might have concluded that the departing pilgrims were sad. Far from it. Each had achieved a lifetime ambition: to pray at the temple of Venkateshvara.

When traveling about India, it always seemed that everyone, except me, knew what was going on … rather as if the entire population had mugged up a set of crib notes which I hadn’t seen. But Tirupati was different. We were all strangers, all anxious. All, that is, except for Bhalu. As others trembled with trepidation, he shifted into a new gear of mercenary activity. I observed the unending supply of bald pilgrims around us. I was touched by their self-sacrifice, moved that they should have journeyed to Tirupati to worship Lord Venkateshvara. The Trickster’s sight was not tinted by the same rose-colored lens of compassion. Instead of bald devotees, he saw an infinite stock of clients.

Next morning, as we boarded the tattered old bus bound for the temple complex at Tirumala, I asked Bhalu for his impressions.

“Great, isn’t it?” he said.

“It certainly is … I’m pleased you’re so uplifted.”

“Going to make a lot of money here …”

“Bhalu! How can you be thinking of money at a time like this? This is a place of pilgrimage … look at these people. They’re dressed so simply. Most of them are barefoot.”

The Trickster was too busy planning to pay much attention.

“There’s plenty of money, don’t be deceived,” he said. “No one’s as generous as a pilgrim who’s surrounded by other pilgrims.”

P.D. Roy’s tale of Tirupati and his line of Director’s Brand wigs had been an appealing enticement. But now we had actually arrived I was, I must confess, rather embarrassed. For the other passengers taking the hour-long ride up to the hilltop temple, the head shaving was only a fragment of what was a profoundly religious experience. Although I was trying to appear appropriately meager, I had been lured by the idea of wigs. Bhalu wasn’t even bothering to keep up my meager level of pretense. He was in it for the money and nothing else.

The road from Tirupati to Tirumala was formed from one hairpin bend after another. The bus jolted obliquely to the left, then the right, throwing us about like astronauts in a space capsule. Lazy visitors – like Bhalu and myself – risked life and limb driving by bus to the shrine. Pious pilgrims wouldn’t have been seen dead taking the bus. They made the journey on foot – barefoot – or even on their knees.

Grinding and moaning like a battle-worn Panzer division, the turmoil of shuttle buses to Tirumala destroyed what might have been a harmonious experience. As they strolled, or crawled, through the wooded groves of mango and sandalwood, the pious must have been cursing us for shattering the peace.

Tirumala was a pristine community built in what must once have been a sublime glade in the forest. The air was clean and warm. The place was as orderly as a military cantonment. There was no litter, no pye dogs, no sound of Hindi pop music, no stench of biris, and no one was spitting paan on to the ground. It wasn’t like real India at all.

The passengers exited the bus like conscripts arriving at the base for the first time. They were eager to be part of the brotherhood, but they didn’t know what to do or where to go. They stuck out from the throng of initiated pilgrims. For they still had hair.

Instead of following the newly arrived acolytes straight to the barbers’ hall, Bhalu suggested we first get our bearings. I sat beneath a mottled tree in a communal area, taking in the almost carnival atmosphere. All types of products were on offer, none of them any practical use. Balloons on bamboo sticks, cuddly toys with button eyes, yellow and pink cotton candy, plastic flowers, yo-yos and fairy lights – the range was certainly impressive. Bhalu hurried about from one stall to the next. Anyone else might have thought he was looking for a bargain. I knew otherwise. He was searching for a gap in the market.

“So, what’s it going to be?” I asked him.

“Nice and warm, isn’t it?” he said.

“You’re right, it’s only nine-thirty and it’s baking already. Imagine what it’s like for all these people with shaven heads. Their scalps must be frying.”

“Exactly,” said Bhalu. “Frying scalps means one thing …”

“A soothing lotion to stop the burning?”

Bhalu cupped his hands and clapped them together.

“You go and work on your potion,” I said. “I’ll meet you later on.”

Several thousand pilgrims had lined up to have their heads shaved in the barbers’ hall, which was set apart from the main temple complex. Up to fifty thousand people have their heads shaved at Tirumala every day. Most spend months growing their hair as long as possible. The longer the hair, the greater the sacrifice, and the more raw material there is for wigs. I queued up with the neophytes, hoping to sneak into the tonsure chamber with them. After about an hour, the line had only moved a few feet. The man behind me was keen to pass on details of his unlikely devotion for Wycombe Wanderers Football Club. He had spent ten years running a corner shop in High Wycombe but, beset with arthritis, had recently returned to India. The pilgrimage to Tirumala was his last hope of assuaging the affliction. We talked football talk. Great tackles, fouls and memorable scores, conditions of the home pitch … we even discussed the stitching of the club strip. Another hour dragged by. For someone with no more than a passing interest in football, an hour on tackle-talk was an eternity.

The queue had hardly moved. By my estimation, there was at least six hours to go of football purgatory. Unable to take a second more, I pretended to have forgotten my money. The Wycombe supporter replied that a full head shave was only two rupees. As a gesture of charity from one football supporter to another, he was willing to pay for my haircut. I responded with a catalog of implausible excuses. I had spotted a long-lost friend at the back of the line … I was about to have a nosebleed … I was claustrophobic. Once away from Wycombe Wanderers Man, I hurried to find a back door into the barbers’ hall.

A flight of steps led up to the chamber’s back door. The stairs were guarded by a uniformed chowkidar, watchman. He caught me sneaking in, against the one-way flow of bald pilgrims. I explained that I was not intending to have a tonsure, only to see the bundles of hair. I persisted that I was solely concerned with the buying and selling of old hair … my regard was for the shrine’s part in the wig business, rather than its religious role. It was obviously the wrong thing to have said. The guard ordered me to leave. To him – and to everyone else – I was a sick-minded voyeur.

I sat at the foot of the steps wondering how to get past the sentry. Bhalu, who was running a scam near the exit gate, came over to see what the problem was. He had brewed up a pot of some foul-smelling liquid.

“Get that away from me”, I said.

“Rub in a spoon of it and your sunburn will disappear.”

“But I don’t have sunburn.”

“Well, it’ll cure all other skin problems too.”

“What’s in it?”

Bhalu disliked revealing the exact recipes of his potions, fearing a copycat scam-artist might be listening in. I stared into the pot. It was certainly attracting a great deal of attention from Tirumala’s flies.

“Got something sweet in it, has it? The flies love it … so do the bluebottles.”

Only after considerable persuasion did the Trickster lift the veil on his concoction. Even for him, it was particularly inventive. Among the main ingredients were a kilo of sugar, two teaspoons of salt, a knob of ghee and a liter of stolen creosote.

Bhalu said he would get me past the chowkidar if I promised to publicize the sunburn lotion. I agreed to do what I could to help. Without wasting a moment, he showed me the secret. He waited for a knot of newly shaven pilgrims to exit and, choosing the moment, told me to walk backwards into the chamber. Everyone, he said, would assume I was leaving rather than entering. He was right.

There were actually several tonsuring halls arranged beside each other in a line. All were severely unpleasant. Marble-floored, with strip lighting, no ventilation, thick with flies, and strewn with haystack-like heaps of black hair, they were like a cross between a sheep-shearing shed in the Australian Outback and a rundown Turkish bath. Along one wall of the main chamber were the barbers – about fifty of them. Squatting on low wooden stools, they chattered away to each other, wielding cut-throat razors like boy scouts with bowie knives. Before them, cross-legged on the floor, heads tilted forward, arms by their sides, fifty pilgrims sat frozen to the spot, as the razor blades pared away every strand of hair.

There was no question of a bit off the top, a light trim, or even a short back and sides. The standard cut being dished out was a zero on any scale. Spend a few minutes observing the shrine’s barbers, and you realize what frivolous stuff hair is. We preen ourselves like macaws, pampering our mops with expensive shampoos, conditioners and oils. We fling ourselves at the mercy of coiffeurs in up market salons. But forty-five seconds before a Tirumala barber shatters even the most outrageous delusion.

The head is first dipped in a bucket. When the barber’s waxy palm has fondled the water into the scalp, the shearing begins. The blade begins at the crown, sweeping down to the brow in a single dextrous movement. Then back towards the neck. Four more strokes in quick succession and it’s all over … total baldness.

At one end of the chamber an army of haggard men were gathering the hair into a single heap. Exceptionally fine locks were ferreted out by a special foreman. They were kept aside to be put in one of the frequent hair auctions. Yet many of these never reach the international wig trade. Instead, they’re bustled away to the black market outside. P.D. Roy had told me that his team of craftsmen would regularly visit Tirumala for the pick of the crop. Because nothing less than the best, he had said, would do for a Director’s Brand wig.

Remembering my promise to Bhalu, I waylaid a group of hairless pilgrims who were preparing to leave the hall. I advertised the miraculous potion, saying that a limited supply was available outside. They asked a string of questions. Was it suitable for sensitive skin? How much did it cost? Was it made from the purest ingredients? Did it protect the scalp from the harshest sunlight? I fielded the inquiries with appropriate inventiveness and went back over to the barbers. Perhaps, I thought, it would be worth drawing people’s attention to the potion while they were lining up.

My sales pitch, which had started as a shy apology, soon turned into a merciless harangue. Before I knew it, I was claiming wide-ranging applications for the brew. It was, I said, a panacea … it would protect against sunburn, dandruff, scabies, lice, ringworm, and any known diseases of the head. Apply it once and your scalp would be as soft as suede, but protected from the elements like the tarred hull of a brigantine. Any unsatisfied customers; I went on, would be given a full refund. As I congratulated myself for an effort worthy of the Secret Army, Bhalu charged into the tonsuring hall and grabbed me by the collar.

“We”ve got to get out of here right now!” he said.

“What do you mean? Listen to my pitch … I’ve got really good at selling.”

“Well, maybe you’ve got too good,” riposted the Trickster. “Everyone’s demanding their money back …”

“What’s wrong with the potion? I thought it was the best stuff around.”

For the first time Bhalu appeared genuinely nervous.

“It’s the flies,” he said, once we had made our escape from the hall. “They loved the stuff … they stick to it like glue.”

NINETEEN

Real Power

Only those who have been sucked down in the maelstrom of an ecstatic south Indian crowd can understand the hateful nature of the sensation. Intoxicated with zeal, and fanatic beyond all reason, the mass of devotees waiting to hear swami Sri Gobind speak pressed around. Some were cackling – gripped by the laughter of lunacy. Others were wailing for no apparent reason. Bhalu and I fought to stand upright, snatching at air. Around us, three thousand of the godman’s supporters surged forward. Conceiving that their need was, quite obviously, greater than ours, I called the Trickster back. We would attend an audience with the famous Madrasi guru another day.

By way of consolation, I suggested we visit a special festival, being held at a local sanctuary.

When I had heard that a shelter for mistreated cattle was having an “Open Day”, I thought it was a joke. Bhalu was the first to rebuke me for finding humor in what even he considered to be a sacred creature. For, in India, cows are taken very seriously indeed.

A great painted banner welcomed us to the annual bovine Open Day. Beyond it, the modest sanctuary was showing off its work, and encouraging visitors to express their affection for cows. About seventy cattle were being cared for at the shelter. Some had been hit by vehicles and left for dead; others were the victims of starvation, disease or stress. But the center was far more than a simple resting place for recuperating cattle. It offered a variety of complementary therapies for the sacred creatures. Massage and acupuncture, light therapy and Ayurvedic treatments, each had been adapted for the bovine community.

Most of the shelter’s cows were the familiar zebu cattle: the powerhouse of India. Long-horned and with a distinctive hump, the country’s two hundred million zebu cows do the work of fifteen million tractors. But they do far more than hauling carts and ploughs. They provide milk and dung for fuel, and play a central role in the religious spirit of the nation.

After greeting a number of convalescing cattle, a tall, rather severe young lady apprehended me. She had dressed up for the bovine fete. A mazarine-blue frock hung from her slender form. Very swish, I thought, tucking my grimy shirt into my pants. We exchanged pleasantries. When I told her that I had spent much of my time in England, her initial courtesy turned to hostility.

“Murderer!” she shrieked, as other respectable members of Madras society craned their necks to see what was going on.

“What do you mean? I’ve never murdered anything in my life.”

“Bovine spongiform encephalopathy,” she snarled. “You Britishers treat your cows so ruthlessly that they’re dying of plague!”

It seemed a bit unfair to blame the so-called “mad cow” scare on me. After all, I hadn’t eaten British beef for years. Long before the scandal had hit the headlines, a journalist friend had slipped me a rather unnerving dossier, warning of the risks. The confidential report would have put a butcher off beef.

But the woman had set her sights on me.

“The deities are now punishing you damn Britishers!” she announced, before the respectable audience of socialites and abused cattle. “You’re all getting infected from eating our holy animal. It serves you bloody well right!”

There was nothing I could say to quell the woman’s fury.

“When will you people stop messing with nature?” she barked, prodding my solar plexus with her index finger. “That’s what’s at the root of the problem … your meddling.”

“Please understand, I’m not involved in this, I’m innocent.”

“First you mistreat cows, next you test cosmetics on rabbits, and you’re evil! Why do you think the poor zebu cow is losing its hump?”

The woman pushed her crimson glass bangles up her arms, as if she was spoiling for a fight.

“Vanishing hump? What are you going on about?”

“The hump! The hump! It’s disappearing … a few more years and there won’t be a zebu hump left in India!”

I had heard of the famous case of the zebu’s vanishing hump. The problem had begun when “unholy” European cows were brought to India and bred with sacred Hindu zebu cattle. The project, which was supposed to lead to a higher yield of milk, worked better than anyone had dared to hope. But it had never crossed the scientists’ minds that the famous zebu hump might be lost in the new gene cocktail. The loss of a cow’s hump doesn’t sound like much, but it’s a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions.

For three thousand years India’s zebu cattle have drawn carts and ploughs. The simplest form of yoke – a straight wooden bar placed across the hump – is used as standard from Amritsar to Alleppey. Without the hump, farmers can’t plough their fields. With eighty-three million ploughs and carts to be redesigned, the very future of India seems suddenly in jeopardy.

I apologized to the militant bovinophile. I had been blinkered until that moment. Henceforth, I explained, I would dedicate my life to saving the zebu’s hump. I would go and live in a mountain monastery and tend dear zebu cattle, drinking nothing but milk.

The radical woman was not pleased with my facetious attitude.

“How dare you make fun of milk?” she lisped. “It is a miracle … it is the Milk Miracle!”

“Miracle! What are you talking about?”

“Ganesha drinking milk … I saw it with my own eyes!”

The Milk Miracle: it was all coming back to me. In England, fish have been found to rain from the sky; in the United States, people regularly spontaneously combust. And in India, deities drink milk. Well, to be more exact, effigies of the four-armed elephant god Ganesha quaffed milk in temples and homes around the world on a single day in 1995.

The day Ganesha drank milk was a curious one. It began with a man in Delhi claiming he had seen an idol of the deity drink a spoonful of milk in his neighbor’s house. News of the miracle spread … first through the back-streets of Old Delhi, then across the capital, throughout India, and on. By dawn, Hindus across the known world were hurrying to feed cow’s milk to their statues. Temples were mobbed by the pious, all clutching tablespoons of milk. Millions of Indians, from Calcutta to California, reported having witnessed the miracle themselves. By the end of the second day, Ganesha had had enough, he would drink no more.

Mad cow disease, milk miracles, and a tale of the vanishing hump: there was much to explain. But the militant lady at the cow shelter was in no mood for scientific deliberation. Thrusting her bird-like wrist up in the air, she ordered me to leave. I was unwelcome. My hands were stained with bovine blood.

* * * *

I spent much of the afternoon ferreting about at the back of Higginbotham’s Bookshop on Anna Salai Road. Amid the racks of turgid textbooks and biographies on the first-floor, I came across a volume extolling the pleasures of toilet seat collecting. I have a passing interest in obscure collections. A snippet which later began to obsess me was this: before President Nixon departed for China in 1972 on his ground-breaking journey of diplomacy, he sent a special covert team ahead. Presidential missions regularly necessitate such reconnaissance units. But the squad’s job was not to search for concealed bugs in hotel rooms, or to make sure the red carpets weren’t moth-eaten. Their brief was to double-check every toilet seat to be used by the President. The book divulged a little-known fact – many Chinese loo seats are made from the poisonous sumal tree. When a tender Western posterior engages the wooden seat, an allergic reaction can occur.

Think of it. The President’s bottom gets an embarrassing rash: what humiliation. One thing leads to another. The CIA is sent into defame the Chinese Premier’s own behind. Tit-for-tat expulsions from each other’s embassies follow. Then massing of troops, the launching of spy planes, AWACS and extreme-depth submarines. Before you know it, someone’s pressing the nuclear button. Armageddon, all because of a toilet seat.

As I was deliberating how the Cold War might have been, I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was Bhalu. He was beaming expansively.

“OK, I’ve set it all up!” he announced, folding his arms.

“How did you find me here? What have you set up? Look, have a listen to this story about Nixon’s Chinese trip …”

“We must leave right away,” maintained the Trickster.

“Where?”

“To Sri Gobind … he’s waiting to see you.”

* * * *

The forecourt of the luminary’s ashram was choked with even more devotees than before. Thousands had traveled across India merely to catch a glimpse of the man they revered as a deity. Others were in search of salvation. More still yearned to be healed: to cast away crutches or rid themselves of their white sticks, neck braces and bandages. Knotted together like a knitted quilt, they stood firm; an impassable barrier between us and the ashram.

“Bhalu,” I said, as we approached the crowds, “look at them, we’ll never get through!”

But the Trickster apprehended one of the guru’s cronies and whispered something to him. Mysteriously, the concourse of infirm and fanatic acolytes parted down the middle, like butter carved with a heated knife. Calling for us to follow, the godman’s henchman led the way into the compound.

The activity of a large ashram is quite bewildering. In some respects it’s like a military encampment. Sentries are posted at the gates. Staff supervises the serving of meals, meditation sessions, seminars, and workshops. The place is a closed unit, run along strict, unwavering lines. Yet, in other respects a spiritual ashram couldn’t be less like a battalion’s camp. No one speaks in normal voices; they go about whispering. Neither do they frown, gloat, whinge, like real human beings. With bare feet and faces rapt with dreamy expressions, they list about like lotus-eaters.

Far too twisted to appreciate the compassionate atmosphere, my instinct was to escape. But the henchman beckoned us forward to a private apartment within the compound. As we snaked through corridors lit with yellow light, past offices where main-frame computers were crunching numbers, I questioned how Bhalu had gained us such easy access into the nerve center of the cult. When I asked him what falsehood he had dreamt up, he grinned and pointed ahead.

A male secretary with a shaven scalp led us through a carpeted conference room, replete with a tortoiseshell-veneered table, into a modest-sized library. The walls were lined with dozens of exquisite volumes, most bound in turquoise leather with finely tooled spines. Mounted high on one wall was a pastel portrait of the yogi, his palms pressed together, his expression oozing meekness. Twin garlands of marigolds had been tied across the sketch. The secretary directed us to a chintz-covered sofa. Then he left.

I tugged the Trickster’s shirt-tail as the aide tottered off to bring refreshments.

“What did you tell them, Bhalu?”

The boy had no time to reply. The door was swept back by a hulkish American bodyguard, who towered up like a jinn. Two young women scurried in, sprinkling pink rose petals on the carpet. Another girl followed closely behind, strumming her manicured nails across a lyre. Each was clothed in a simple pink-colored cotton garment. After the maidens came the avatar himself, with the same airy expression as his admirers. Behind him, a dozen or so factotums, yes-men, secretaries, bearers, and acolytes gamboled in. All of them – male and female – were attired in orchid-pink raiments. By the time the entire entourage had filed in, the library was close to capacity.

Amid the scent of rose petals and the mellifluous harping, the swami paced over to where Bhalu and I were sitting.

His skin seemed to have a purply-brown glow; the unusual tinge complemented a voluminous mantle of lavender silk in which the guru was wrapped. A white polka-dot tikka was painted squarely on his divine brow. I studied the features of his face. They were not unlike those of Bhola Das, the indefatigable hangman of West Bengal.

Taking his time, the sadhu greeted us:

“Tahir Shah,” he said, cheerily, “it is a great honor to meet you at last.”

Perplexed at how the godman might have heard of me, I replied that the honor was all mine. After all, it is not every day one meets a god. The guru clustered the fingertips of his right hand together. With a dexterous swiveling of the wrist, he had materialized something from thin air. I raised an eyebrow. This was a sleight which Feroze had made me practice feverishly. The godman pressed the object into the center of my palm. It was cold and hard. I looked down at the gift – a miniature silver effigy of Ganesha.

I thanked Sri Gobind. Waving my praise aside, he flicked his fingers at the entourage. He gave no direct instructions yet, like automata, they each performed their own duty for a moment or two. The bodyguard flexed his back; the rose-petal girls sprinkled; the lyre-player strummed; the factotums ducked their heads sycophantically; the yes-men agreed; the secretaries scribbled on shorthand pads; and the bearers bore.

Gosh, I thought to myself, that’s real power.

“You will stay with us for a few days, of course …” said the holy man.

“If there is anything you need, please ask for it. Tell my secretary where to collect your belongings and they will be fetched.”

Bhalu twitched his fingers restlessly. The notion of having all his wishes catered for was one which pleased him. No sooner had the swami strolled away – preceded by the backward-walking sprinklers – than Bhalu began a long, uncompromising list of requests.

Still bewildered as to why we were being given preferential treatment, again I urged Bhalu to come clean. As before, he refused to reveal the lies. Ignorant of the nature of our alibi, I resolved to make use of the circumstances. I would study the sage’s methods first-hand.

Three hours after our arrival, the ashram’s members entered the central heart-shaped auditorium in single file. Most were barefoot; all were dressed in the association’s symbolic hue of orchid pink. The believers appeared to have come from many backgrounds, across the subcontinent. There were foreigners too. I heard them whispering in Japanese, French, Spanish, Arabic and Russian. Wherever they had come from was irrelevant now. Their allegiance to Sri Gobind transcended national boundaries. Each devotee wore a thin pinkish cotton band around the left wrist; a simple yet earnest token of their obeisance.

I scanned the assembly hall for Bhalu, who was absent. He was, no doubt, making use of the fraternity’s mixed bathing pool. To the Trickster, the idea of naked rose-petal-sprinkling girls was far more intriguing than a public audience with a deity in human form.

Before the swami entered the hall, his disciples clasped hands, forming a single chain. In unison they chanted a short mantra, over and over. At first the verse was slow and distinct. But with each repetition it became a little more blurred by the acceleration of the delivery. To the words were added lurching, writhing movements of the torso. One by one, the followers broke the daisy chain of hands, veering off in their own directions, their bodies quivering. Some rocked their heads back and forth; others rubbed their hands lasciviously over their thighs. All seemed well practiced in the obscure ritual. Like any group with its own traditions, they drew strength from what was alien to others, but central to themselves.

Again, the flower-sprinkling maidens heralded the arrival of the yogi’s retinue. As the first wilting petals touched the central dais, an ominous hush fell across the hall. The master was surrounded by those who worshiped him. Rather, he was above them, seated on a golden throne, up on the dais. Placated by the presence of their leader, the disciples’ frantic expressions were calmed.

It was then, at that moment, that I understood the key aspects of the cult environment. Give people a symbol – whether an emblem, a movement of the hand, a secret word, a color, or an amulet. Tell them to hand over all their worries, and place absolute trust in you. Better still, never actually say this, but imply it. Preach lessons which no one can fully understand. Exhort notions that contradict everything the followers have ever learned. Fill a hall with five hundred people; but don’t let them forget that each communicates with the other through you. Without you, they are blind, deaf, and dumb. But, most importantly, prove your occult competence in real terms … through miracles.

Concoct the right blend of the mysterious, and the disciples will follow you anywhere. You can laugh, cry, rant, and rave; or merely sit for hours in silence. Hone that balance and you can do what you like: for the equilibrium of mystery has made you a god.

On that first evening, half a dozen Chinese businessmen were attending the darshan, the service. They had, I heard later, been dragooned into visiting the ashram by a local politician. Once he was comfortable on his golden throne, his hands stroking the panther-head arm rests, the yogi called out for the Chinese, and then for me, to join him on the dais. As visitors to the commune we stood out by the nature of our dress. Only the initiated were permitted to wear the orchid pink robes of the clan.

The Chinese and I scrambled up on to the platform, which was positioned at the acute end of the heart-shaped auditorium. I perched on a pink satin cushion to the left of the holy man, slightly further back than his throne.

When we were in position, the lyre player strummed a few chords, and as she did so, the followers prostrated themselves on the floor and prayed. Sitting on the stage, I understood how a guru feels when his acolytes pay homage. My instinct was to thrust up my arms and plead with them to stop. I would, I mused, not make a good godman.

Standing, the lyrist began to play again; this time she was accompanied by a sitar player. As the chamber filled with soft, soothing music, the swami began his oration. He spoke of love, of truth, hope and peace. His language was sugar-sweet like the messages on greeting cards which make you cringe. He rambled on about the merits of free love, invincible joy and faith. The Chinese sat stony-faced, staring at the cushions before them. Perhaps sensing that the concentration of his guests was waning, Sri Gobind began a series of superb miracles.

No explanation was given why the illusions were done at all. If this was a god standing before us, why should he need to prove his abilities? Nonetheless, in the most devoted disciple lies a kernel of doubt.

Circling his wrist three times, the yogi created vibhuti, as if from nowhere, and sprinkled it on the cupped palms of the Chinese executives and myself. Then, lifting his left hand up to his ear, he pulled out a shiny oval object. It was about three centimeters high and made from milk chocolate. It was an Easter egg. He handed it to me, telling me the egg was a symbol of new life and purity. The devotees applauded rabidly. Far more cynical than they, I checked the sell-by date. As I suspected, it was three months past due. The wedding-egg salesman had obviously found another outlet for his products.

When the Chinese had been presented with eggs, the godman moved on to the next illusion. He asked someone from the audience to come up and give him a coin. The smaller the value, the better, he said. A voluptuous Bavarian woman leapt to her feet and bounded up on to the stage. She presented the pandit with a ten-paisa coin. He held it up to the devotees, like an amateur magician would do at a child’s party. The followers squirmed with delight. Chanting mantras and twisting about on the platform like a disco dancer in slow motion, the mystic fell into an impromptu trance. A moment later, the coin had vanished and reappeared. Touching it to his brow, Gobind returned it to the disciple. The Chinese narrowed their eyes. The devotees drew a deep breath. I craned my neck to scrutinize the guru’s hands.

Suddenly, the German lady screamed that the coin was secreting ash. She had witnessed a miracle and wanted everyone to know it.

Back in Calcutta, Feroze had demonstrated the “ash from coins” illusion on several occasions. He had mentioned that the routine was popular with Indian godmen.

The secret is very simple. A five-, ten- or twenty-paisa coin must be used. They are the only aluminum coins circulated in India. Distracting his acolytes by dancing around, the guru rubs the coin on a sponge concealed in a pocket of his robe. The sponge has been dipped in a saturated solution of mercuric chloride. When it comes into contact with the soft aluminum, a chemical reaction begins. After a moment or two on the warm palm of the follower, the aluminum metal sweats ash. Even if it’s washed in water, it continues to give off heat and gray ash.

The Bavarian woman buzzed through the hall like a spinning top, showing off her ash-covered coin to anyone interested. Another handful of miniature Easter eggs were materialized and thrown to the audience to halt feelings of jealousy. Unlike the Chinese and I, who had scoffed our eggs, the followers clutched theirs reverentially, as if they were holding divine objects.

With another prolonged discourse at an end, the yogi called for a volunteer. Fifty devotees jumped to their feet, begging to be selected. Snapping his fingers at a short, rotund Indian, Sri Gobind instructed him to draw an image on a blank card. He did so, and the card was placed in an envelope. Sellotape was used to secure the pouch. The participant scrawled his signature across the seal. He handed it back to the guru. Staring at the cushioned floor of the dais, Gobind went into deep and introspective thought. Again, the auditorium fell silent. Could he reveal what had been written on the card without unsealing the envelope? The Chinese and I, who were hoping for another hand-out of Easter eggs, were skeptical. The followers knew that another miracle was on the way.

As I had practiced tricks under Feroze’s guidance, I had recognized that without showmanship, even the most dazzling conjuring was two-dimensional. For the first time I was witnessing illusions being carried off before a large audience, by a formidable Thespian. The prosaic air of the Master’s study had been replaced by a hall crammed full of believers.

Sri Gobind manipulated his spectators like a true professional. He molded their emotions; feeding them with his magic. I sensed the expectation, and then the surge of rapture as a second miracle was delivered. This was a performance which might have stirred even Feroze. Indeed, the more I considered it, the more I realized that the godman’s conjury was very similar to that of my own teacher.

So while his devoted brethren twitched like wind-up toys, the showman did his stuff. When five or six minutes of chanting were at an end, the yogi announced the nature of the unseen symbol. The fanatic had drawn a Hand of Fatima. A potent sign, which appears in numerous religions, the Hand was a favored emblem of the cult.

Tearing through the envelope, the godman displayed the card to the followers. It did indeed bear a large, crudely drawn Hand of Fatima.

The auditorium echoed to the sounds of crazed applause. A woman at the back of the hall began to rip at her locks ecstatically, screaming out her adoration. She pulled out two handfuls of thick mouse colored hair. The tall Anglo-Saxon man beside her was similarly awestruck. Prostrating himself on the floor, he declared Sri Gobind to be “the True God”. But he was preaching to the converted. Even the skeptical Chinese businessmen were now being swayed by the godman’s magic.

I was the only unbeliever. From my position on the stage, I had scrutinized the miracle at close quarters. The meeting hall’s shape – a heart – was obviously more than symbolic. The design, with the dais at the pointed end, ensured that no one could position himself behind Sri Gobind. From where I was sitting, on the sidelines, the second miracle had melted away into illusion. But even I, a hard-bitten skeptic, could not fail to applaud the mastery with which the yogi had performed.

With deft-handed artifice, he had furtively wiped the front of the envelope across one corner of his mantle. The fabric had probably been treated with ordinary lighter fluid. When the oil came in contact with the paper of the envelope, it turned it from opaque to transparent – allowing the pandit to glimpse the symbol inside. A couple of minutes later, once the lighter fuel had evaporated, the paper was opaque again.

When the darshan was at an end, I searched out the Trickster. He had raided the cult’s hospitality stores, and was stuffing all manner of booty into a pillowcase in his suite. Disposable Bic razors, shower caps, toothbrushes and sachets of eau de toilette: they represented loot of the most valuable kind. We had been invited to stay as honored guests; and all he could do was steal from the host. Did he feel no shame? Bhalu, who was busy unhooking a shower curtain in the bathroom, told me he had no choice. Theft was in his blood.

By the next morning, the Trickster had filled eight pillowcases with booty. They were stacked like sandbags in his cupboard. Again, I rebuked my young companion. But to him, a thousand sachets of eau de toilette represented spoils gained on a subversive mission. The plunder would, I suspected, turn him into the premier trading magnate of the railways overnight.

As I hurried off to another public audience with Sri Gobind, Bhalu pondered how to convey his sacks from the compound unseen.

Like the audience hall, the ashram itself was constructed in a heart shape. For, as the guru said so often, everything we know and have is created from love … hot love. Five heart-shaped buildings formed the backbone of the compound. In their heart-shaped rooms devotees meditated and read, slept and ate. When not swimming in a heart shaped pool, they were encouraged to explore the heart-shaped maze, or sit beneath the great heart-shaped water-clock to consider the swami’s teachings.

As I strolled over to the compound’s heart-shaped auditorium, I noticed a number of modest stone shrines dotted about the paths. One could not help noticing them; for each one – about three feet high – had a follower sitting in meditation beside it. Rather than sheltering a miniature effigy, the shrines housed something far more precious: the hand-print of the yogi.

All godmen and godwomen are expected to be eccentric. The more worshiped and wealthy they are, the more outlandishly they are supposed to behave. Some religious leaders have drunk their own urine; others have advocated unthinkable sexual practices or have swanned about in fleets of Rolls-Royces. An anthropologist friend once suggested to me that godmen are like politicians. Articulate and well-dressed, they travel first-class, invent new rules, amass great fortunes at the public’s expense and, given half a chance, cavort about with licentious abandon.

When it came to divine eccentricity, Sri Gobind was no exception. His followers took great pride in the tales of their teacher’s irregularities. Every so often, gripped by an insatiable desire, the guru would jump naked from his bed. Running into the heart-shaped gardens, he would relieve himself in the bushes. Or, in the middle of an address, he had been known to rip off all his clothes and anoint his flabby belly with buffalo-milk butter. Each morning, his fans averred, the holy man would douse himself in a bath of potassium permanganate. The immersion gave his skin its exotic purply-brown tinge. He would dress his hair with a pomade of seasoned egg whites; dab his earlobes with witch hazel; and spray his nether regions with his own blend of catnip cologne.

Several hundred followers, with frozen lotus-eater smiles, were loitering at the heart-shaped meeting hall by the time I arrived. As well as the hard-core devotees, hundreds of others turned up to be cured and blessed. The sick and ailing, each rapt with expectant hope, reminded me of the psychic healer in the Calcutta marshes. But here, in Madras, the stakes were far higher. Sri Gobind was no two-bit village prestidigitator: he was the helmsman of an immense money-making operation.

Like some sublime ruler, he didn’t travel in search of partisans; he waited for them to attend him. And they came in their droves, prostrating themselves at his feet. Politicians and scholars, Hollywood actors, aging hippies, and ordinary folk, they embraced Sri Gobind with equal zest, bringing him all their woes. Questions of religious identity, marriage problems, financial difficulties, or relief from illness: nothing was beyond the expertise of their lord.

With the sun high above the heart-shaped theater, packed with pilgrims and adherents, the faint whisper of a hand rasping at a lyre’s strings hinted that the godman’s retinue was approaching.

First came the pink petal girls; then the stooping factotums; the amiable yes-men and nodders followed; and on their heels hastened the farrago of secretaries, bearers and bodyguards, punkhawallas and bandsmen. At the center of the multitude, cooled by a dozen heart shaped fans, was the yogi himself.

The retinue advanced to the dais. As the mystic stepped up on to the platform, the first marvel occurred. Two banks of red tulips – in tubs either side of the stage – bowed their heads in honor of the omnipotent god. The effect of this feat was awesome. A woman with turquoise nail varnish threw her arms in the air and exclaimed her devotion. A contingent of Uruguayan beatniks gaped wide-eyed at the miracle. Unable to contain himself, an old Punjabi scrambled on to the podium, crawled over to the godman, and began to lick his feet. The jinn-like henchman grabbed the ancient by the neck and flung him into the crowd.

Feroze had demonstrated the “flowers bow down” routine in the laboratory. A concealed jet sprays chloroform over the blooms. Like humans, they are susceptible to anesthesia, and quickly droop.

As before, Sri Gobind beckoned for me to join him on the dais. Once on the stage, I greeted him. He looked me in the eye and wished me boundless hot love. Returning the remark anxiously, I noticed that the godman’s eyes had changed color overnight. The day before, they had been a dusty brown. Now they had mutated to a deep shade of royal purple. The tint complemented the guru’s lavender shot-silk robes rather well. I glanced down at the spectators. They seemed blasé at their deity’s astonishing eye color. What significance is a spontaneous change of eye color to an immortal capable of far greater feats? I had heard of another godman who would tour Indian villages wearing mirror-like contact lenses. Who would doubt that a man with reflective eyes was not a deity?

Every Thursday, Sri Gobind treated the ill and dying. Those who could walk would congregate at one side of the dais. Others, too sick to stand, would be lined up on the stage on cots. That day about eighty patients had been admitted to the ashram to be healed. None would be charged for the treatment, which was laid on more as a public-relations exercise than an organized clinic. In any case, I suspected Sri Gobind had little need to accept petty fees from the infirm: his coffers must already have been brimming over with donations from his disciples.

Before the healing could commence, the yogi performed a selection of miracles to put the ailing at ease and to titillate the audience.

First, he materialized vibhuti and sprinkled it into the palms of the infirm. Then he pulled a gold bracelet from nowhere and offered it to the wife of a wealthy businessman. She had come to have her angina treated. As the guru moved to his next miracle, four large church candles at each corner of the dais lit themselves spontaneously. Sri Gobind said it was hot love, not he, which had ignited their wicks. I knew differently. Feroze had taught me the trick. The wicks are dipped in a solution of white phosphorous, mixed with carbon disulphide. When the solvent has evaporated, the wick catches light.

The last miracle was the most intriguing. Although certain that it was achieved by illusion, I couldn’t see how the deception was done. A rusty tin chest – the size of a school tuck box – was carried to the center of the dais by the swami. The box appeared light enough. It was filled with heart-shaped sweets, which were distributed to the infirm. Once in position, the purple-eyed godman invited members of the congregation to lift it up and carry it away. Twenty impatient fanatics scrabbled up and tried their luck. None could wrest the tin tuck box from the floor. Warning his devotees that only true hot love could provide real strength, Gobind went over to the box and raised it effortlessly above his head.

Over the next three hours, Sri Gobind cured one patient after the next. Cancer, emphysema, angina, intestinal hemorrhaging, and tuberculosis: all were assuaged without medicine or surgery. Such methods, the guru insisted, were the tools of quacks. He merely waved half a coconut over the head of each patient. An assistant followed, tying a pink cotton band around the left ankle of those who had been treated. The string was, they were told, an amulet. It would protect them as they recuperated from the avatar’s therapy.

Early that evening, when the disciples and pilgrims had hurried away to frolic in the heart-shaped pool, I returned to the heart-shaped auditorium and examined the dais. First, I noticed a series of inconspicuous nozzles located where the tulips had stood, presumably used to spray the chloroform mist. On the left side of the stage was a trap door. Making sure no one was watching, I prized it open and climbed down into the chamber beneath. Enough daylight was filtering through the cracks between the floorboards of the stage to provide illumination. In the middle of the room stood an electrical contraption, the top of which was connected to a sheet of metal on the dais. The device was wired up to the electricity mains, and consisted of two magnets, cables and some wire coils. The metal chest must have been held to the floor using this, a crudely made electromagnet. When the yogi had wanted to pick up the box, a lackey had obviously switched off the power supply, disabling the magnet.

Unlike the small-time godman working in an Indian village, Sri Gobind had a fully developed magician’s stage at his disposal. The facilities permitted complex illusions to be carried off faultlessly. However tempted I was to condemn such illusionists – who pretended their tricks were miracles – I had to admit it: this was impressive stuff.

* * * *

Later that night I told Bhalu what I had found. He was more interested in recounting his own exploits than listening to the details of my investigation. While I had been scrutinizing miracles, he had smuggled his pillowcase sacks out of the ashram in a workman’s truck. The loot was now stashed in the bushes behind the compound. He pleaded with me to take flight while the going was good.

Reluctantly, I scrawled a simple letter to the swami, thanking him for his hospitality and blessings of hot love. There was no point in disturbing him again. More importantly, I was unsure whether the cult had discovered that their toiletry supplies had been plundered. Handing the note to the sentry at the main gate, we slipped from the ashram before dawn the next morning.

Despite arriving at Chennai Central Station before breakfast, the first express to Bangalore wasn’t due to leave until 13:30 hours. The seven hours of waiting were spent taking it in turns to protect the pillowcases. When train 6023 arrived we struggled aboard with the swag. Once we were aboard, I secured a window seat for myself. In the luggage racks above me were lodged eight pillowcases of booty. Promenading up and down the aisle, proud as a bulldog, was Bhalu. The usual fraternity of salesmen, with their potato-peelers and pinking shears, had shied away. None could compete with the Trickster. After all, who would buy a potato-peeler when they could spend their savings on a sachet or two of cut-price Givenchy aftershave?

Shortly before midnight, the express screeched into Bangalore City Station. Virtually every descending passenger had an assortment of newly acquired goodies tucked away. Hand-towels and shower caps, talcum powder and tiny sewing kits, shoe horns and sun block, moisturizer and French perfume: none had resisted Bhalu’s tantalizing sales pitch. Stuffing a fortune in coins and paper money into another pillowcase, the Trickster grinned his Charlie Chaplin grin. Even he had never known a sale quite like it.

TWENTY

The Penniless Billionaire

Bhalu, who had not owned many belongings before, was fast learning the drawbacks that assets bring. Traveling with the pillowcase sacks of valuable cargo was a nightmare. For the first time, he had become paranoid about falling victim to thieves. For this reason – and the late time of our arrival – he talked me into staying at the Bangalore City Station’s retiring rooms.

All next day, the Trickster sat in the railway suite, crooning over his hoard. I invited him to accompany me to see the town. He sniffed at the idea. Why would someone who had just cornered the miniature soap market want to go sight-seeing?

Bangalore has been described as the Silicon Valley of India. Much of the world’s cutting-edge computer software is written in air-conditioned bunkers around town. News magazines are always pointing to the foreign companies relocating to Bangalore in droves. Stirring as this was, I had come in search of the city’s more archaic sights. First on my list was the Bull Temple on the south-western corner of Bangalore, at Basavanagudi. Its gray granite statue of Nandi, Shiva’s bull, was rumored to be growing in size.

I made my way south from the station down Bhashyam Road, and on towards the southern extremity of town. It was a stifling day. Before I knew it, sweat was pouring from my brow and I was feeling faint. Better get some pills, I thought. So I meandered into the Gandhi Bazaar area in search of a pharmacy.

Sandwiched between a video rental shop and a cloth merchant’s, I found an impressive-looking chemist’s shop. A flight of steps led up to the door. I ascended and entered. The emporium was like the den of corsairs who had knocked off a hospital ship. Medical equipment was piled up in stacks. Stretchers, wheelchairs, and irrigation syringes; drip stands, forceps, and clamps. With such an impressive Inventory of medical accessories, I could only imagine what the pharmaceuticals were like. I hurried over to the sales desk. Before I put in my order, the chemist slapped a kilo tin of potassium permanganate crystals down on the counter.

“This is it, “ he said.

“No, you misunderstand … I’d like some pills, please.”

“Only having potassium permanganate.”

The shop-keeper, who stank of liquor, waved his arm in a grand arc across the display cabinets behind him. They were filled top to bottom with identical tins of potassium permanganate.

“I see, you’re a specialist shop, are you?”

The chemist grunted, swaying back and forth on the balls of his feet. An open bottle of Mohgul Monarch whiskey on the counter hinted at how he had spent the morning.

The thought of a potassium permanganate bath was, for some inexplicable reason, suddenly very tempting. After all, Sri Gobind appeared to favor it greatly. Why not follow his example? Or that of my own paternal grandfather, Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah. Like the Madrasi godman, my grandfather had been very keen on potassium permanganate. He used it to kill germs in the food, a habit which began when he was living with the Bedouin in the 1930s. Everything he ate was washed liberally in potassium permanganate which, he said, cleaned out his digestive tract as well as disinfecting food. Whatever he ate – from chicken to strawberries – was dyed sludgy brown.

The chemist had begun to wrap the tin in newspaper. His movements were extremely disjointed.

“Are you drunk?” I inquired.

“No, Sahib, not drunk.”

“By the way, how much is it?”

“How much what?”

I pointed to the wrapped tin.

“Two hundred twenty rupees,” the shop-keeper slurred.

“That’s an awful lot. Can’t I get a discount?”

The chemist shook his head violently from side to side in a savage sweeping motion. Then he threw up over the counter. The sudden swiveling movement had been too jarring.

“Yuck! Why did you do that?”

“Sorry, Sahib,” wheezed the shop-keeper, “feeling not well.”

“Why don’t you take some medicine?”

Again, the chemist shook his head.

“Indian medicine garbage,” he said. “No working. Potassium permanganate good.”

“You’ve got the wrong attitude,” I retorted, dabbing at the residue of half-digested egg which had splattered on to my shirt. “I happen to be a great fan of Indian potions and pills … actually, I can’t resist them. That’s my trouble!”

I pulled a few crumpled notes from my pocket and held them out in front of me.

“Look, I haven’t got a lot of cash,” I said. “Bit impoverished … you know.”

Mopping a splash of vomit from my purchase, the pharmacist let out a great hoot of laughter.

“Not like Krishnan!” he cackled.

I didn’t understand what he had meant.

“Who’s Krishnan?”

The pharmacist stared at me bleary-eyed and disbelieving.

“Richest man in world,” he said.

“Really? Where does he live?”

“Round the corner, Bugle Rock Lane.”

“Are you sure?”

“Why not?” said the chemist. “Everyone’s knowing him round here.”

If I were the richest man in the world, I would move into a cliff-top palace in Monte Carlo, or to a tropical island paradise in the Caribbean. For this reason I found it odd that the world’s wealthiest tycoon should live in a secluded lane in Bangalore.

The pharmacist passed me the telephone directory. I flicked to “K” and scanned the columns.

“There it is … Krishnan, B … Bugle Rock Lane …”

“Are you sure he’s got more money than anyone else?” I quizzed as I dialed the number.

“Of course not,” riposted the pharmacist, taking a swig of his whiskey. “Krishnan is having no money at all! “

Feroze had once said that riches and deception always go hand in hand. Where you find one, you’re sure to find the other. So, praising Mr. Krishnan’s legendary philanthropy, I strained to arrange a rendezvous.

Thirty minutes later, I found myself sitting straight-backed and correct at a secret location in central Bangalore. My clothing stank of the chemist’s alcohol-pickled vomit. My shoes were disintegrating, and my hair needed cutting. I was in no state to meet the wealthiest man in the world. What if he had intended to fly me to his desert castle for dinner? The private jet might be refueling at that very moment. My eyes glazed over at the thought of wealth beyond my wildest dreams. Then Mr. Krishnan arrived.

Taking both his hands in mine, bowing acutely, I greeted him with dutiful respect. Such veneration seemed appropriate. After all, the rest of my life might hinge on the meeting; and first impressions are rarely revised. Krishnan waved me to a seat and sat back. He was a short man, about five feet four. His face, although engaging, bore many wrinkles – no doubt gained through weighty responsibilities. And his attire was decidedly modest. Indeed, it was almost as shabby as mine. He was wrapped in a ragged beige blanket. On his feet were carpet slippers. This man, I puzzled to myself, is so rich he can dress as he likes. He doesn’t have to impress people. To act like this, he really must be as rich as the rumors say.

Sipping a glass of sweet mint tea, Mr. B. Krishnan swept back his silvery hair in his hands and told the extraordinary tale of how he became the richest man on Earth.

The son of a penniless farmer, he was born a little over sixty years ago into an impoverished village family on the outskirts of Bangalore. Determined to seek fame and fortune, he fled the countryside in his youth, adamant that he would carve out a career for himself in the big city.

“My ancestors were direct descendants of the ancient Vijayanagaram kings,” Krishnan began, in slow and precise English. “Our family was once in the ruling class. Heirlooms were passed down from one generation to the next. Seemingly worthless objects, but nonetheless each was worshiped by our family for centuries.”

The old tycoon paused to wipe his mouth with his hand.

“A special room was set aside in the farmhouse,” he said, continuing with the story. “Inside was a variety of icons, idols and other objects. My father used to worship those things in the ceremony room. Amongst the items there were four odd-shaped black lumps. On all auspicious occasions they would be taken down and worshiped with great reverence.”

Krishnan explained how one generation after the next performed rituals in respect of the mysterious black lumps.

“Nobody knew exactly what they were,” expounded the billionaire, with a glint of excitement in his eye. “All that was known was the lumps were very special. They were always protected and worshiped.”

The years passed. Krishnan went off to Bangalore, where he began his career as a legal advocate. He moved into a tiny apartment. He married, had four children and, after thirty-two years of practice, retired due to ill health. His life, which had been very ordinary, in no way, prepared him for the events that were to come.

Krishnan had never been a religious man. But when his parents and the other children of his generation had died, he inherited the room filled with icons, objects, and the four black lumps. He was far too busy and impatient to perform the pujas necessary to keep the gods content. Instead, he shut the heirlooms up in a cupboard and forgot about them.

“My wife used to nag me for locking the relics away,” moaned Krishnan. “She has always been much more religious than I. So, to please her, I agreed we would donate the artifacts and the four lumps to the temple of Nanjundeswara, at Nanjangud, south-west of Bangalore.”

At the temple, Krishnan was met with endless forms and bureaucracy.

“Being an advocate,” he said authoritatively, “I knew how to make an application, and that getting through all the red tape was not worthwhile. I had no intention of getting permission from the High Commissioner just to donate some old heirlooms.

So Krishnan took his family back to Bangalore. On the way his wife pestered him again. She feared ill fortune would prevail if the objects were not worshipped at all. But Krishnan, whose mind had set to work, had other plans.

“As we made our way home,” he carried on, staring at me without moving, “it struck me that the black lumps were very heavy. Perhaps, I thought, they might contain gold. Even if there was a trace of gold, it could be extracted … and I would make some money. When I told my wife, she was horrified at the idea of desecrating the sacred objects. She pressured me not to melt down the lumps or change their shape.”

The thought of the gold nagged at Krishnan’s conscience. He tried to forget about it, but was unable to do so. Everything reminded him of the possible ore, the gold, and the instant wealth. So one night Krishnan sent his wife and daughters off to the cinema. Then he set to work.

“I embarked on an investigation,” he began softly, speaking in formal English. “There was a thick black crust of soot and grime covering the lumps. I took an old toothbrush and a bar of soap and began to wash. At first, I assumed I was washing metal. The dirt was so hard that only some came away. After a lot of cleaning with the toothbrush, I held the lumps up to the light. In one I could see specks of red, and in another blue specks. It was then I realized these were not metal, but minerals, and that they might be very valuable indeed.”

For months Krishnan kept his discovery secret. He immersed himself in the study of gemstones from books and articles borrowed from Bangalore’s public library. He was dogged by worries that news of his find would leak out. No one could be trusted with the secret.

“I thought,” he went on, “if I took them to a jeweler, I might be hoodwinked and misguided. Such people might try to work for their own benefit. So I studied the gemological sciences for a year or two.”

Gradually the retired advocate learned the experiments necessary to identify a precious gemstone. In the seclusion of his book-lined chamber, he performed the vital tests. At last he could pronounce with certainty the minerals’ true identities.

Three of the stones were enormous rose-colored double-star rubies; the fourth was a colossal sapphire.

How did four of the world’s biggest gemstones end up in Krishnan’s cupboard in the first place? They may have been passed down through generations, from his ancestors – the Vijayanagaram kings. For safe keeping, the gems could have been dyed black, and then covered in soot and dirt. Over time, members of the family may have forgotten exactly what they were, remembering only that they were important religious artifacts.

Krishnan’s discovery filled him with fear for his safety. Constant anxiety, long hours of gemological study, not to mention his diabetic condition, hampered his health. But still he could confide his great secret to no one. Having read a little about the art of lapidary, the advocate bought a hand-driven grinding wheel. One evening, in the darkened study at his home, he set to work with the grinder to remove the top portions of the stones himself.

For months, Krishnan continued to maintain his secrecy. He would attend to his chores by day, and study gemology by night. One by one, he had the three rubies and the sapphire cut by a trusted professional. Over the next months and years, he announced their existence to the world.

All the gems were cut in India. Krishnan himself admitted regret at rushing into having them cut. His knowledge, about how some of the biggest and most priceless gems in the world should be faceted was very limited indeed.

Krishnan amazed the gemological world by first producing a colossal ruby of 215 karats. A second great ruby was the next to be put on show. It weighed 650 karats: having been cut from the original stone of 1,125 karats.

For two more years Krishnan kept silent. Then, quite unexpectedly, he announced his ownership of a ruby of truly phenomenal proportions. It weighed 2,475 karats when fully cut.

“It’s about the size of a tennis ball,” mumbled Krishnan, draining his cup of tea.

Had the heirlooms been a few gold coins, or even a hoard of smaller gems, the aging advocate would have found it far easier to cash in his fortune. Rubies and sapphires the size of tennis balls are worth a lot of money. So much money that no one on Earth can afford them. For starters, calculating their value is no easy matter.

Krishnan used the rule of the celebrated French traveler and jeweler Jean-Baptist Tavernier to estimate the value of his gems. Tavernier said that the value of a precious stone is directly proportional to the square of its weight. So, if one karat of a ruby is worth $3,000, the value of Krishnan’s largest ruby would be $3,000 x 2,475 x 2,475 – more than $18 billion. Krishnan said that the rarity value of the stone would double its price, to about $36 billion.

But Krishnan’s treasure did not stop with rubies. His collection was also home to one of the greatest sapphires in existence. Weighing 1,370 karats, according to Krishnan, it was worth up to $5 billion.

They say I am the richest man in the world!” he exclaimed, counting the billions on his fingers. “Next comes the Sultan of Brunei, Bill Gates, and others. These people have money, so let them come forward and buy my gemstones!”

B. Krishnan, the billionaire who lives in a rented flat for about one hundred and fifty rupees a month, was willing to sell his gems off at bargain-basement prices. He needed the money. His daughters were soon to be married, but the solicitor-turned-penniless-tycoon, was worrying about their dowries. “A wedding in India is very expensive these days,” he grumbled. “It costs good money – money which I don’t have.”

One morning the press got word of the advocate’s priceless gems. Only then did his obsession with The Guinness Book of Records begin. It’s an obsession which seems to grip many Indians. After months of correspondence he gained an entry into the columns of the hallowed book. Nothing could have made him happier. Indeed, he appeared more interested in his Guinness record than in the actual value of the gems.

Krishnan was a confused man. Sick of poverty, of the threatening telephone calls, and worrying about the safety of his family, he was trapped in a no-win situation. He could cut up the gems into smaller and more affordable sizes: but then his most prized possession – the Guinness entry – would be lost.

He had begun to wonder whether the gems were a divine test. The tale smacked of irony. It was a resolute disbelief in the divine which helped Krishnan unveil the gems in the first place.

His conversation was peppered with references to God and supernatural energy. But Krishnan had good reason to believe in angelic powers. A strange incident many years ago had returned to haunt him.

“When I was a young man,” he recalled, “I was once taken by a friend to a famous astrologer. The man read my future and told me that all mundane things in my life would fail. He asked me to pick a card inscribed in Sanskrit.

“It was written that solar power is dominant in me. Rubies are associated with solar power. The fortune-teller told me that this solar power would bring me fame and fortune. Before I went away, he prophesied that in my late fifties I would become famous and extremely wealthy.”

So where was this billion-dollar fortune of gems? Perhaps they didn’t exist – was that the deception? Krishnan side-stepped all questions of their whereabouts.

“They are locked away in bank vaults, but even I am not knowing where they are right now,” he disclosed, pulling out a couple of scratched transparencies of his treasure. “Look at that!” he croaked. “They are the rarest of the rare gemological phenomena! What a great thing I have achieved!”

Shaking his head slowly to and fro, Mr. Krishnan got up and shuffled away in his bedroom slippers. His wife would be waiting. Under one arm was clutched his bible: The Guinness Book of Records. In his hand nestled the two blurred slides of the hoard which had brought so many worries.

“Oh, by the way,” he called back as he left, “do you know anyone who could afford my gems? Please bring buyers to me. If they are serious I could take them to see the stones. We could negotiate on the price.”

TWENTY-ONE

Take One Live Murrel Fish…

For fifteen hours the Trickster brooded over how he might relieve Mr. Krishnan of his hoard of gems. He considered it criminal that such wealth should have fallen to a man with so little foresight.

We were aboard a bus, heading north towards Hyderabad. Bhalu, whose sacks had been strapped to the roof of the vehicle, was busy scheming.

“I’m going to dress up as a buyer, and then you’re going to take me to Krishnan … then I’ll snatch the gems,” he explained, plotting aloud.

“You’re going to do no such thing! Besides, you’re only twelve years old. He’d never take you as a serious buyer.”

To the Trickster, the idea of becoming a gentleman gem thief was very appealing. I told him about Raffles, the infamous aristocratic jewel robber. He liked the sound of it very much. While the world scorned a Calcutta-born pickpocket, they would surely fall at the feet of a thief with breeding. Imagine the perks of such a profession … the fine clothes, the opulent estates, and, most importantly, the bawdy women of the court. For Bhalu, the dream was an easy one to picture. But then, Raffles had been at least twice his age. And in any case, Bhalu was no gentleman.

By the time the bus entered Kurnool, on the banks of the Tungabhadra River, it was extremely late. Taking charge, Bhalu clicked his fingers twice. A clapped-out rickshaw appeared from nowhere. Loading the filthy pillowcase sacks aboard, like bags of coal on to a tender, we clambered up. Bhalu exchanged a few words of Telugu with the driver. The boy never ceased to surprise me. He had an unrivaled gift for languages. Lowering his head as if he were an accomplice in some vile misdemeanor, the driver revved his vehicle and sped away.

Rather than heading towards the city center, the rickshaw slalomed down dim back-streets. One dark, rat-infested alleyway led to another. With each turn the streets became dingier and more deserted. As if taking care to select the dirtiest building in the most abhorrent corner of the suburbs, the driver brought his vehicle to a halt. We unloaded the booty, the rickshawalla explained what seemed to be directions, and then careered away.

“Bhalu,” I whispered, “I don’t think the driver understood your instructions. This is the most ghastly, forsaken place I’ve ever been. It’s even worse than Hotel Bliss in Delhi.”

“Relax,” replied the Trickster, motioning for me to be silent. “He understood exactly what I meant.”

“Are we at a hotel?”

“Well, it’s a sort of hotel,” he murmured.

We staggered ahead under the weight of the three remaining pillowcases of loot, and my own more modest luggage. Bhalu led the way round to the back of the building. The path which encircled the ramshackle squat of a building stank of ripe urine. Although I had seen no other patrons making for the hotel, the trail was remarkably well trodden. It was so late that everyone must already have been inside, tucked up for the night.

Once at the back of the inn, Bhalu fumbled around in the darkness. He found a Fanta bottle on the ground.

“What’s going on?” I griped impatiently. “Let’s just knock.”

“Do you have a coin?”

“Is it for a tip?”

“Just give me a coin, any coin.”

I handed over a one-rupee coin. Bhalu zipped its edge across the grooves in the bottle. A whirring sound was created.

Then a queer thing happened.

A sizeable trapdoor, leading to a cellar beneath the building, was opened from within. A young man ushered us down. The bottle and coin had been the hotel’s doorbell. But as my eyes adjusted to the candlelight of the subterranean chamber, I realized that this was no hotel. And what I had taken for a bell was actually a password.

The cavern was very big. Its brick walls were dappled with damp rot; its ceiling was low and caked in soot from the candles. Sixty or so men sat about. Some were moving bottle tops across home-made checker boards; others merely sat in silence, staring at the array of candles.

The Trickster led me to a pair of old car seats at one end of the underground saloon. My lungs filled with the cavern’s intoxicating smell. I shook Bhalu by the arm, suggesting we ought to leave and find a proper place to spend the night. But the Trickster took no notice. He was delighted with the surroundings. As he coaxed me to relax, a tall figure swanned over and clinked two glasses of fluorescent green liquid down in front of us.

It was impossible to avoid breathing in the asphyxiating vapor which was rising from the surface of the brew like mist from a peat bog. My eyes began to water, and I felt an asthmatic attack coming on.

“What’s going on, Bhalu? I want a hot bath and a filling meal. These people shouldn’t be serving alcohol; don’t they realize Andhra Pradesh is dry?”’

Bhalu drained his glass in one; then he drank mine.

“This is good stuff,” he coughed, motioning to the waiter for another round.

“I can’t believe you’re drinking in a dry state.”

“Well, what do you expect?” said the scam-artist. “This is a chat-slowly.”

“You mean speakeasy.”

In the movies, the American Prohibition always seemed like such a convivial time. Granted, there were plenty of mobsters massacring each other, but everyone else in the old films was having a ball. American speakeasies were wild with ambiance. There was always an old bar-back playing ragtime on the piano, damsels dancing, cigar smoking croupiers, roulette wheels, fancy cocktails, crystal chandeliers, and a genteel clientele with slicked-back, center-parted hair.

I scanned the cellar. No one was smoking Havana cigars. There was no piano, no chorus line, no croupiers, no cut-glass light-fittings, and no cocktails.

An elderly, cultivated man with almond eyes and fair skin pulled up a chair and joined us. He leant over and put his arm round Bhalu.

“One taste of this drink and you have an unquenchable thirst!” he said.

The Trickster hissed incorrigibly.

“But drink is illegal in Andhra Pradesh, so everyone here’s breaking the law,” I said righteously.

“My friend,” responded the old man, gulping his glass of rotgut as if it were orange squash, “this liquid is medicine … medicine for the soul.”

“Then why does it destroy the body?”

*Shortly after our visit to Andhra Pradesh, the state government lifted the Prohibition order.

The man gave me a cold look.

“I can’t help it,” he announced stolidly, “if elixir for the soul is poison for the flesh.”

As another round of moonshine was dished out by the waiter, Bhalu’s drinking partner introduced himself. He was a Christian businessman named A.B. Robert. I asked him what line of business he was in. Swirling the gritty, glowing liquid around his glass, he held it up as if ready to make a toast.

“I’m in this,” he snorted.

“You make moonshine?”

“Make it, supply it, own places which sell it …”

“But what about the police?”

A.B. Robert shrugged his shoulders.

“Yes, the police love it,” he said, smirking. “The problem’s the women.”

“Women police?”

“No,” sighed the old man. “I told you, the police aren’t a problem: it’s the wives who give us trouble. They thought their husbands would give up drinking when Prohibition came. But the men love this – it’s much stronger than the usual stuff.”

“But how exactly do the wives give you trouble?”

Again, A.B. sighed.

“They break all our bottles,” he said. “They burn down our warehouses and smash our stills. They've become very violent. We tell husbands not to overdo it – but they won’t listen. Of course they’re going to die if they drink too much. This is strong stuff!”

“What about the people who find your chullu too strong?”

“Yes, some don’t have the stomach for it,” said A.B. Robert. “That’s why we give them something special.”

“Soft drinks?”

“No … not soft drinks!” barked the businessman.

He stared at me acerbically. To him, the thought of a beverage devoid of alcohol was sacrilege. “Not soft drinks!” he repeated.

“Then what?”

“Cocktails … we give cocktails to the weak ones.”

Cocktails – it sounded very sophisticated. I pictured a frozen daiquiri with a sliver of lime. A.B. called instructions to the bartender, who presented me with a delicate brown bottle. It was wrapped in a grimy cloth and contained a sludge-brown liquid, which smelt faintly of mint.

“It’s a refreshing, smooth little cocktail made locally,” elucidated the liquor magnate.

I peeled away the knotted rag to inspect the orange and white label. The word MUKUF was written in bold lettering. Beneath that was more writing: “Herbal Cough Syrup. Take Two Teaspoonfuls Three Times Daily.”

* * * *

Despite my experiences, it was still as an innocent that I arrived disheveled and gasping for breath at the great Mughal stronghold of Hyderabad. By the time we alighted from the wicked country bus, it was late afternoon. Eight hours of rush-hour traffic had turned the air charcoal gray with diesel fumes. My asthma was now so acute that every breath was a strain. I was panting like a wolf after the kill. I had longed to explore the secret corners of the city; to track down Thesiger’s beloved Rock Castle Hotel; to trek out to Golconda Fort. But far more pressing matters first demanded my attention.

Bhalu hailed an auto-rickshaw and commanded the driver to hurry to the Old City. He agreed that in my deteriorating condition, the Gowd brothers’ miracle asthma cure might be my only hope. Not once had the Trickster shown impatience with my constant infirmity. A childhood spent on the hidden back-streets of Calcutta had ensured that his was a cast-iron constitution. His own lungs were hardy as a blacksmith’s bellows; his stomach was robust as granite; and his stamina was unflagging. My handicaps were the product of the familiar luxuries of our world: central heating, sterilized foods and regular doses of antibiotics.

Even though I was aware of the approximate date of the asthma cure, and the name of its guardian family, I knew nothing more. In any other country the distinct lack of key information would have been a setback. Yet in India, only the barest nugget – in this case, a single sentence from Gokul – is usually enough to go on.

The rickshaw skidded to a halt beside the gateway of Charminar: the four spectacular minarets which loom up, marking the center of the Old City. Bhalu directed the driver to take us to the Gowds’ house.

“We want the cure for asthma,” I explained.

The driver bit his lower lip.

“Fish medicine?” he groaned.

“No, asthma cure.”

“Haa, fish medicine asthma cure.”

Gokul had never said anything about fish. I’ve never been one for seafood. The manservant, who was aware of this, had obviously overlooked the fact deliberately.

Before I had time to protest, the rickshaw had veered right, down into the labyrinth of back-streets east of the Charminar monument. A cluster of women veiled in black were haggling for glass bangles on lowset stalls; another knot of wives were wrangling for melons, guavas and grapes, piled high like trophies of war. A group of elderly gentlemen were standing in an arched doorway, bemoaning married life; beside them, a goat was gazing affectionately at his owner, a butcher, oblivious to its fate. Everywhere children ran through the dirt pulling kites and hoops and home-made toys on strings. As we ventured on at break-neck pace, down one passage after the next, the secret lanes of the Old City revealed themselves. Then we turned into Dood Bholi, the street where the Gowd brothers lived.

As we turned the corner, the rickshawalla slammed on the brakes and emitted a demonic shriek. Never one to show surprise, Bhalu also released a piercing cry of terror. Unlike the others, I made no sound. The shock had turned me dumb.

Before us lay an ocean of people. Tens of thousands of them, packed together like grains of salt in a sack. Every inch of cobblestone was thick with feet. Arms thrashed upwards, as the strong trampled the infirm down into the quagmire of mud. People everywhere jostled like bees around their queen. All were gasping for breath; gripped by an ecstasy of hyperventilation. All knew their objective – to reach a mottled cloisonné-blue door, which led to a tiny whitewashed home at the center of the lane.

There was no question of the date … and we had certainly come to the right place. I sent Bhalu to gather background information for a preliminary report. He returned with the gossip, which read like a ticker-tape bulletin: the treatment would begin the next day, with the first sighting of the Margashirsa Karthe star. Special trains, buses and flights had been laid on to ferry people to Hyderabad from the furthest reaches of India. More than half a million people had already turned up. Many had staked their life savings to make the journey. Others were arriving with their entire families for the expedition of a lifetime. In a rare show of solidarity, Muslims, Buddhists, Jains, and Hindus, from every caste, were gathering at the Gowds’ house. Every hotel and guest house in town was full to bursting. Mosques and temples, wayside cafes, bus depots, and railway stations were cluttered with panting asthmatics from far and wide.

I indicated to the Trickster that a little queue-barging would be in order. When on a journey of observation, one is occasionally required to get straight to the point. We climbed up to a roof at one end of the lane and, scurrying on our hands and knees, made a beeline for the Gowds’ refuge.

Harinath Gowd was sitting in the courtyard of the family home, casting an uneasy eye at the main entrance. The battered blue door bent inwards as the half-million-strong crowd pressed against the other side. The Old City’s narrow streets were clogged with asthmatics for miles around. Second eldest of the five brothers, Harinath greeted us cordially, without questioning why we had leapt into his house from the roof.

He was busy attending to last-minute arrangements. Two hundred kilos of a magical paste had been prepared, concocted according to a secret Ayurvedic recipe. Pujas were taking place around the clock to appease malevolent forces. The air, thick with incense, aggravated my breathing difficulties. The police had been briefed in case of rioting. Astrological tables had been checked and double-checked.

Harinath asked us to sit, before excusing himself. The tattered door urgently required reinforcing with a plank of wood. Once he had taken his seat on a charpoy in the courtyard, he clarified the central details of the cure.

“Every year more and more people come,” he declared, swaying from side to side. “See how popular is this miracle of miracles! It all started with my ancestor.”

“Which one?”

“My great-great-great-grandfather. You see, he was a very generous man,” winced Harinath. “He was known throughout Hyderabad for his good deeds. During the monsoon of 1845, he saw a sadhu sitting in the pouring rain. The mystic was cold, hungry, and abandoned by the world. So my ancestor – Veerana Gowd – brought him here, into this house. He fed him, and nursed him back to health. Weeks passed. Then, just before the sadhu was about to go on his way, he revealed the fish miracle to my forefather.”

“Fish miracle?” I mumbled. “Where exactly do the fish come into it?”

Harinath Gowd recited a string of orders to his son.

“The holy man,” he continued, evading my question, “said that from henceforth the well in the courtyard would be full of magical water … we were to use it to make a special paste. The water, the ingredients of the paste and the astrological timing together form the magic of the miracle. The sadhu said my family were to serve a free cure for asthma on the first day of the monsoon. If any fee was charged for the remedy, it would have no effect… charge money, and the magic would be broken. That was about a hundred and fifty years ago. True to our word, my family has never charged for the cure.”

Initially, news of the miraculous remedy was slow to spread. In the first few years, asthmatics from the back-streets adjacent to the Gowds’ house turned up. But as the years passed, more and more people heard of the miracle. And as more heard of it, and tried it, word spread faster and further.

In any other country, if half a million patients arrived at your house appealing for a miracle, the authorities would demand forms to be filled and permits to be signed. But in India, where miracle remedies are a way of life, things are far more straightforward.

Watching a Hindi movie on television the night before the asthma extravaganza, the five Gowd brothers seemed remarkably relaxed. Didn’t it bother them that five hundred thousand asthmatics were pounding on the door?

Shivram Gowd, the eldest of the brothers, stretched out to turn up the TV’s volume, to drown out the frenzied groans of asthmatics in the street.

“Of course we’re not worried,” he said. “Remember: this isn’t a feeble allopathic medicine … but a miracle cure!”

The sheer number of patients demanding the unconventional prescription has meant that, in recent years, the Gowds have had to take on extra staff. More than five hundred volunteers were ready to make sure things went smoothly. Hundreds more were at action stations, preparing to hand out free drinking water and custard creams donated by local businesses and charities. Whereas sufferers were all once treated in the Gowds’ ancestral home, now special stalls were erected in neighboring streets to administer the physic to the maximum number over the twenty-four-hour period.

The sadhu’s directions ensured that the Gowds make no profit from their miracle cure. But it was obvious they enjoyed being the center of attention for one day a year.

“We are proud to be helping people in this way,” intoned Shivram Gowd warmly.

Would he prefer the miracle cure to be handed out on more than one day a year? Shivram Gowd paused to take in the cries of the half-million patients outside. Rolling his eyes, he whispered, “No, one day a year is quite sufficient.”

Bhalu and I had no hope of leaving the Gowds’ home, which was totally besieged by asthmatics. Hyperventilating and bent double after the arduous journey, the majority were planning on spending the night standing upright, crushed in the crowd. All night, mantras were repeated over the great basins of mysterious beeswax-colored paste, which had the consistency of marzipan and the smell of purifying offal. We bedded down on the flat roof of the Gowds’ home.

As dawn rose over the Mughal city of Hyderabad, a prolonged ritual began in the confined courtyard of the Gowds’ ancestral home. The five brothers sat on a raised platform surrounded by their families, as their forefathers had done before them. Dressed in sacred saffron robes, they blessed the tubs of oily ointment. Out in the maze of winding lanes, the asthmatics and their families were jostling about with restless anticipation. The miracle was near.

Shortly after seven a.m., I poked my head out into the street. At the front of the queue was an aged farmer from Orissa. He said his name was Krishna Punji. In his hand was a transparent plastic bag. In the bag was a live gray fish.

“I’ve been here six weeks,” he announced feebly. “I wasn’t sure when the miracle was to be held. So I came a bit early. You see, I’ve got very bad asthma.” He let out a loud wheeze to prove his point.

“What’s the fish for, though?” I asked.

Krishna Punji scratched his head. “This is a miracle fish cure … that’s why I have murrel fish.”

I scanned the crowd. Everyone was clutching an identical polythene bag. In each bag was a live fish. Like children bringing goldfish home from the fair, they held them up to the light.

Unable to get a clear explanation from anyone, I pulled my head back inside. I sidled up to Harinath, who had been so helpful. I tried to ask about the significance of the fish; but he had no chance to respond. Like his brother, Shivram, he was also too occupied, praying at the family shrine. Bhalu was of no use either. Having spied an attractive girl trapped in the throng, he had hurled himself over the wall to be with her. So I stood next to the shrine, in silence, waiting for the miracle cure like everyone else.

On the stroke of eight, Harinath Gowd made it known that the crucial moment for the annual miracle asthma cure had arrived. The members of the extended family hustled around the elder brothers. Shivram declared that the Gowds always started by taking the medicine themselves. As a guest, I could go first. Great, I thought to myself, I’ve got ahead of five hundred thousand others. This is what I call real queue-barging.

The sense of elation was short-lived.

Shivram juggled with a polythene bag for a moment or two, emptying a live three-inch murrel fish into his hand. The creature’s miniature jaws were prized apart. A pellet of the foul-smelling yellow paste – the size of a walnut – was forced into the fish’s mouth and around its head. The Gowds’ extended family strained closer to watch my moment of joy. One of them indicted for me to stick out my tongue. The fish and I exchanged a troubled glance. The murrel seemed to be demanding an explanation. Alas, I was as bewildered as he. What came next was a new experience for both the fish and me.

In a single, expert movement, Shivram Gowd thrust his hand at my face. Having a grown man’s fingers lunging to the back of one’s throat is deeply unpleasant. But it’s nothing in comparison to the sensation of a live and terrified murrel fish – bearing fetid miracle ointment – swimming down one’s esophagus.

As my torso folded at the waist, my throat retching uncontrollably, the battered doors of the Gowds’ home were pulled inward. A great surging tidal wave of asthmatics flooded into the courtyard. At its crest was Krishna Punji. Still gagging as my poor murrel fish fought to swim upward – like a salmon returning to its spawning waters – I watched as the Orissan farmer handed over his fish. Obediently, he opened his toothless mouth as wide as he could and, before he knew it, the speckled murrel fish was slithering south towards his stomach.

Nervously, I voiced my disapproval at the medicine. But supporters were reserved in backing my campaign. Rather than being appalled by the unorthodox treatment, the half a million asthmatics couldn’t seem to get enough of it.

Out on the street every urchin was crying out, “Machhi! Machhi!”, “Fish! Fish!” The competition between sellers kept the prices down. The emphasis was very much on size, everyone believing that the larger the fish, the better it would clean out the throat as it went down.

“The wringling of the fish is very beneficial,” Harinath Gowd called out to me, as he shoved his complete hand into a south Indian woman’s mouth. The patient began to choke. Her fish was almost seven inches long – far too large to negotiate anyone’s throat. A harsh thump on her back dislodged it. The murrel fish could be seen amid rows of teeth, frantically trying to swim backwards, towards safety. Engulfed by the waves of asthmatics, Harinath Gowd again jammed his fingers down the woman’s throat. The seven-inch fish headed into the dark abyss of the patient’s esophagus, never to surface again.

If you recoil at the prospect of swallowing an oversized antibiotic, forget the Gowds’ miracle cure. It’s traumatic for the patient; and is no easy remedy to administer. Every step of the procedure had its own hazards. When removing it from the bag, the fish tended to flail about and fall into the mud underfoot. With the throng so tight, bending down to search for a lost fish was distinctly hazardous. More difficult still was the business of levering the murrel’s jaws apart and inserting the nugget of paste. Even when this had been achieved, the creature had to be propelled head-first down the sufferer’s throat. Administering the medicine a single time would be an achievement worthy of praise. But performing it half a million times in a single day was a miracle in itself.

Every city, town and village of the subcontinent seemed to be represented at the Gowds’ tiny home. Buddhist monks, Assamese tribesmen, businessmen from Bangalore, Goans and Tamils, Pashtuns and Sikhs: all had congregated together into a whirlwind of life, all frantic for the miracle. Many were gasping for breath, seized by asthmatic attacks brought on by the swarm of bodies pressing tighter and tighter. Others were screaming hysterically as they were separated from their children. Every moment the turmoil heightened to a new pitch. The mob was compressed like liquid injected through a syringe. Then, suddenly, it was rife with rumors. The stocks of fish are running out. The supplies of miracle paste are almost at an end. Stampede followed. Babies were clutched above heads to prevent them from being sucked down. Pots of murrel fish were held high in the air. Moments later, the half-million murrel fish were not the only casualties of the day. Two elderly men were killed in the stampede, trampled underfoot.

With news of the Gowds’ medication spreading throughout India, and abroad, a regular stream of fraudsters have tried to capitalize on the miracle cure. Quacks and charlatans in every large city advertise a similar antidote on the same day each year. Most claim to be related to the Gowds. Unlike the five brothers from Hyderabad, they charge handsome sums for their medicine.

“It’s expected that fakes will try to make money from this,” said Harinath Gowd pragmatically. “We have been offered millions of rupees by multinational drug companies for the formula, too. But we don’t have any fear of the con-men, or of people copying our recipe through reverse engineering. They can copy us all they like, but we have one thing they can never have … the magical blessing of the sadhu.”

Not surprisingly, the Gowd family’s miracle cure for asthma is the laughing stock of the medical establishment. Gulping down live fish may sound like nothing more than mumbo-jumbo. But the remedy could have a scientific grounding after all. Scientists at the Royal Prince Alfred Institute of Respiratory Medicine in Sydney recently published a possible cure for asthma. And it happens to be – very fresh oily fish. Fresh fish, they say, has anti-inflammatory properties which can soothe an asthmatic’s airway passages.

Back outside the Gowds’ ancestral home, the local police officers had all but given up trying to keep control. Pickpockets from across India were busy taking advantage of the crowds. Amongst them somewhere, I feared, was the inimitable Bhalu.

Hour after hour, thousands of asthmatics received the treatment. All through the day, the afternoon, and then the night. By six a.m. the next morning, the short-lived shantytown around the Gowds’ two-room house began to break up. The pickpockets were boarding trains for other cities. The balloon-sellers, beggars, and most of the five hundred thousand asthmatics had disappeared. By seven a.m., the fish merchants were frantic to get rid of their supplies. The bottom had fallen out of the murrel-fish market for another year.

TWENTY-TWO

Lord Elvis

My asthmatic condition had improved overnight. But I was quite unsure whether the Gowds’ ancient prescription had anything to do with my recovery, which may have resulted from Hyderabad’s pleasant climate. Now that the murrel fish was swimming about inside me, I considered what to do next. Should I hasten back to Calcutta? Surely the magician would be back from his trip by now. I could pick up the Madras Mail and be back in time for bed the next day. It was a tempting option. I had much to report on to Feroze … everything from trephination and earth eaters to petunia-colored contact lenses, vast gemstones, and now miraculous murrel fish.

But a nagging insecurity pushed me on. If I arrived back at the mansion without crossing the subcontinent – from the Bay of Bengal to the Arabian Sea – the Master would doubtless feel it necessary to humiliate me. He had not ordered me to traverse the nation, but I had a feeling he expected it. Having borne the brunt of his animosity so often before, I pledged to continue westward … to Mumbai. Maybe I would be in time to watch the monsoon break over Back Bay. It may be a mad dash, I reflected, but I will return to Calcutta with my head held high.

As always, the Trickster was enthusiastic about continuing the journey. We had developed a curious symbiotic relationship. I needed him to translate and listen to my tedious stories; and he relied on me as the one trusted person who would haul about his pillowcase sacks of swag.

As we went to Nampally Railway Station, to catch the train to Mumbai, I exchanged a quizzical glance with Bhalu. “Tell me your motives,” it said. The Trickster rubbed his nose, smiled, and looked away. He had secret reasons for accompanying me: reasons which I hoped, one day soon, I would learn.

* * * *

Shortly after three-thirty, the Minar Express heaved westward from Hyderabad, bound for Mumbai. By breakfast next morning we would be strolling down Colaba Causeway, breathing air fresh from the Arabian Sea.

I crouched forward on my seat and peered out through the open window. Within minutes, the train was carving its way through the endless shanties. I watched rag-pickers and goats foraging for scraps in the rotting piles of waste. Three boys, who had made crumpled kites from plastic bags and string, were running through the sludge with their arms high like triumphant athletes. Not far away, a veiled corpse was being conveyed at waist height by mourning relatives. The light paled to platinum and silence followed. The whining of the locomotive faded. The air outside chilled very slightly … the leaves of a jamun tree rustled like crisp crepe-paper. The indigo storm clouds grew a little darker, the wind whipped up, the light turned bluer. Then, and only then, the first bewitching drops of the monsoon burst forth.

I thrust my head from the carriage window into the downpour, whooping like a rodeo star. By the time I retracted, a foreign couple was sitting adjacent to me. I knew instantly that they were from the American Deep South. Even before I heard their accents, I had read the clues. Both were dressed identically: neat London Fog raincoats, Reebok running shoes, and waterproof money belts. There was no hint of Californian ostentation about them; nor was there the crumpled, carefree clothing favored by New Yorkers. Both in their late fifties, the couple were sensibly dressed. Their large physiques implied a diet rich in fried food. These were not finicky nouvelle cuisine vegetarians from the coasts. An entirely different strain of human altogether: they were catfish folk. During my time in Tennessee, I had developed a great fondness for deep-fried fish. And only a Southerner understands the joys of catfish.

As I scanned their shirt-fronts for tell-tale stains of catfish oil, they smiled in time with each other. Friendliness to fellow travelers is a hallowed rule of the South.

“I'm Jake Dorfman, and this here is my wife, Matilda,” intoned the man warmly.

I surrendered my name. As always, it was awkward for untrained vocal cords to create the sound. Jake and Matilda repeated my name numerous times, as if they were learning a foreign language using a cassette tape.

“No catfish here!” I blurted out, hoping to jump straight into a conversation.

In hindsight, I agree it was an odd opening gambit.

“Thank God for that,” laughed Jake, as he straightened his maroon cloth cap. “We’re vegans, can’t stand catfish … its horrible stuff.”

“You don’t eat meat?”

“Nope, we don’t believe in killing animals for food,” cooed Matilda.

“Oh, I love meat,” I muttered, without thinking. “Can’t get enough of it. And catfish – all deep-fried and crunchy – it’s the only fish I like. I lived on it in Memphis.”

The couple exchanged a solicitous glance. They seemed troubled at my lack of tact. Whenever I'm planning ahead to say the right thing, I put my foot in it. Somehow, I had to back-pedal enough to steer the conversation towards safe ground. I prayed no one would ask what had taken me to the South in the first place. But I was too slow off the mark.

“What brought you to Tennessee, Turhur?”

“Urn, er, um … I was writing about something there.”

“Oh?” winced Jake, leaning across expectantly. “What might that have been about?”

“Um, er, well … I was writing about the local social issues …”

“Oh, yeah? What aspects of social life?”

“Um, well …”

I stared out of the window and prayed the train would plunge off a cliff, or that a freak plague of locusts would engulf us. But the cliff and the locusts didn’t come in time. Jake and his wife were waiting for their answer.

“I was writing about a group of people in Pulaski,” I said.

“Oh, yeah? Who would that have been?” snorted the vegans together.

“The Ku Klux Klan,” I said.

Jake comforted his wife, who had begun to sniff into a tissue. Her reaction seemed rather excessive. After all, my magazine articles had brought the full wrath of the KKK upon me.

“Honey,” moaned Matilda, “I told you – people always think of the Klan when they think of Tennessee!”

“That’s not true,” I retorted. “Tennessee’s got so much more than the Ku Klux Klan.”

Jake pecked his wife on the cheek.

“What?” he asked. “What else does Tennessee have?”

It was a difficult question. Bhalu, who had returned to grab another handful of mini soap bars, shrugged his shoulders. The other travelers in the second-class carriage looked at their feet nervously. Like me, their knowledge of the American Deep South was, at best, sketchy.

“Well,” I declared, “you’ve got catfish!”

“What else d'we have?” probed Jake.

Again, I deliberated hard. Then it came to me.

“You’ve got Elvis!” I shrieked. “Well, you had him.”

An expansive grin swept across Jake’s face. He jabbed Matilda in the ribs, and she started to smile as well.

“How did you know?” they chortled. “How d'you know “bout Elvis?”

“Um, Elvis – everyone knows about him.”

“No, no, how did you know 'bout Elvis and us?” gasped Matilda.

“You like him? Is that it?”

One could not be sure. After all, Jake and his wife were vegans. I had never known a Tennessean to condemn catfish before. But Elvis is different. No one from the “Volunteer State” would dare to speak against the King.

“Like him?” snarled Jake. “We love him!”

The Southern couple held each other’s hands and cooed like turtle doves. Then they revealed the reason for their visit to India. A friend of a friend had sent them a clipping from an Indian newspaper. Reaching into his back pocket, Jake withdrew the article. It told of how a man called V.N. Gajarajan, living in a hamlet near Bangalore, worships a photograph of Elvis Presley at his family shrine. Gajarajan also gained public attention recently for his monograph entitled “Why My Daughter Married Michael Jackson.”

I handed the article back to Jake.

“Funny, isn’t it?” I exclaimed. “Just like that temple – Karnidevi, near Bikaner – where they worship rats. I’ve heard there’re thousands of the little fellows. Devotees flock to the temple from across India. They feed the rats great trays of food. Only when the rodents can devour no more, do the pilgrims eat what they've left.”

“Worshipping rats?” quipped the Southerner. “That’s not the same as venerating the father of world music.”

“You mean …?”

I gave the couple a sharp, anxious look.

“Yes,” said Jake portentously, “I'm referring to none other than Mr. Elvis Presley.”

Jake and Matilda Dorfman had traveled across eleven time zones to pray at the shrine of Lord Elvis the Divine. It was more than a pilgrimage.

But first things first. Had they brought an offering to leave at the shrine?

Jake Dorfman squinted at his wife. She gestured back to him. Only then did he pull a scratched tobacco tin from his money belt.

“This is our humble contribution,” he said. “It’s a small token, but we feel it’s appropriate.”

He handed me the tin. Taking it from him reverently, I slipped off the rubber band. Then, very cautiously, I prized away the lid.

Whatever I had expected to be inside, was not what I found.

“It’s soil …” I said.

“That’s right,” agreed Jake tenderly. “But it’s not ordinary soil … it’s from Graceland.”

TWENTY-THREE

Duel of Miracles

At Gulbarga, the American couple shook my hand, clenched their faces in courteous smiles, and stepped off the train. I would have inquired why they were taking such an unconventional route to Bangalore, but I had asked enough questions already.

The Minar Express rumbled across the border to Maharashtra, Mumbai’s state. Drifting off to sleep, I filled my mind with images of the city, recently rechristened as “Mumbai.” I saw Churchgate Station and the Chateau Windsor Guest House, the Eros Cinema, and my cherished restaurant, Gaylord’s. As I slipped into a deep slumber, I felt something tugging my earlobe. Without even opening my eyes, I knew who it was.

“Bhalu, go and sell your damn soap bars and leave me alone!”

“Sorry,” said the Trickster, “unexpected stop. We’re getting off at the next station … Sholapur.”

“What are you talking about? What about Mumbai? Only ten hours to go now … let’s go on to Mumbai!”

“Hurry and get off the train – it’s slowing down for the station.”

“I’ll meet you in Mumbai,” I said. “I’ve got nothing to do in Sholapur.”

But the Trickster had already made the decision for both of us. He was hauling his grubby pillowcase sacks down from the luggage rack, and pulling them to the door. With great reluctance I followed him down on to the platform.

After hiring a convoy of taxis at enormous cost to bear our combined luggage to Hotel Khajuraho, Bhalu disappeared, leaving me to pay off the drivers. It was unlike him not to pay his way, and was even more unusual for the Trickster not to insist on supervising his loot himself. Without giving his irregular behavior much thought, I checked into the hotel. As it was late I was forced to pay an eighty per cent surcharge.

* * * *

Next morning the door of my room arched inwards as a fist struck its outer side. The overly zealous bell-hop announced that a guest was waiting for me in the reception. I wondered who it could be. It certainly wasn’t Bhalu, who had not yet reappeared – he would have come through the window.

After the taxi ride and hotel surcharge, word would surely spread through Sholapur that the world’s most gullible man had come to town. My curiosity heightened by the prospect of an unexpected guest, I hurried down to the reception.

Before I could ask for the visitor, a man sidled up and shook both my hands. Aged about forty, he was of average height, average build and average of appearance: except for a rather splendid Vandyke beard.

“Hello hello hello,” he said, continuing to waggle my hands in his, “I have come to meet Mr. Shah.”

“I am Mr. Shah.”

The Vandyke beard twitched with delight.

“Can we sit together?” asked the man, gargling as if there were marbles in his mouth.

“Excuse me for being so forward … but do I know you?”

Vandyke twitched again.

“I am Goadbaba,” he said.

I ran the name around my mind. Even with my inexpert grasp of Marathi – the language of Maharashtra – I could decipher the name.

“That means Mr. Sweet,” I said.

“Precisely!”

Goadbaba lured me out on to the terrace of the Hotel Khajuraho. A contingent of gardeners and their lackeys were watering plants, scrubbing the flagstones and repotting seedlings. With the monsoon well under way, it was a busy time in the garden. Goadbaba and I sat in silence under a large parasol, shading our eyes from the bright morning sunlight.

A waiter pranced over, laden with a tray of tea. He unloaded the teapot, spoons, two cups, slices of lemon, and a jug of milk. As he stooped to place the sugar bowl at the center of the table, the man with the Vandyke beard brushed him away.

“Do you mind?” I said pertly. “I’d like some sugar.”

Goadbaba wrung his hands together. I had the feeling I was about to learn the reason for his visit.

“How many spoons do you take?” he asked.

“Two … I like two spoons of sugar in my tea.”

Without hesitation, the self-invited guest dipped the thumb and forefinger of his left hand into my tea. In the East, where it’s important to observe conventions of courtesy, a guest can get away with a lot more than in the West. But in the East, there’s another convention that’s followed rigorously. Everyone wipes their posterior with the left hand. This second custom led to distinct misgivings. Where had Vandyke’s left hand been?

As his fingers were withdrawn from my tea, I craned my neck to inspect the man’s fingernails. An ebony-black crescent of dirt was concealed beneath each one.

“Go on!” sniffed Goadbaba. “Try it. Taste your tea!”

I mumbled a range of feeble excuses. The guest lifted the cup to my lips like a chalice of Eucharistic wine. I gulped down half a mouthful of the straw-colored liquid.

“Darjeeling,” I said. “I like Darjeeling very much.”

“But what about the sugar:” said the stranger.

“You’re right: it tastes very sweet – maybe it’s a freak batch.”

“No, Sahib.” Goadbaba sniffed again. “This is not freaky, this is my talent.”

“What talent’s that?”

The man dried his fingers on his beard.

“I make things sweet!” he said.

My fears had been realized. Word had spread that Tahir Shah – the most ingenuous person in the world – had arrived in Sholapur.

Goadbaba touched everything on the table and begged me to verify his skill.

“Taste this spoon,” he said, “or taste this, the cup, or the table itself!”

I licked a couple of random objects. Sure enough: they were all unusually sweet.

“So, how did you acquire this talent?”

Goadbaba pressed his magic fingertips together and explained:

“I was an office clerk here in Sholapur. Last year, after a big meal, I picked something from my tooth. To my surprise, I tasted sweetness. Suddenly I realized that anything I touch goes sweet.”

“What other things have you touched?”

“I have touched so many things,” he said innocently. “I touched a bowl of rice, a loaf of bread, a cigarette, my friend’s shoe, a wallet, a car …” Goadbaba’s list was certainly extensive.

“And?”

“And … they all went sweet … like sugar.”

Mr. Sweet pulled up his sleeves in the middle of the conversation. He was keen to prove there were no sugar cubes hidden up his arms. This put my mind at rest. I had expected the talent to be nothing more than a sleight-of-hand illusion, like vibhuti pellets.

“Thank you for sharing this,” I said. “But what do you want me to do?”

Like the man with the Midas touch, Goadbaba stretched up and pressed his thumb to the parasol … turning it sweet.

“I was hoping you could take me to London,” he said optimistically.

“What ever for?”

“I want to prove my skill to The Guinness Book of Records,” said Goadbaba, breaking out into a broad smile. “I am thinking they will be liking me very much!”

Not again, I mused. Why can’t I get away from the Indian preoccupation with The Guinness Book of Records? Every other person one meets in India seems to be perfecting an outlandish skill, in the earnest hope of getting their name into the venerated book.

One fifth of all Guinness’ mail comes from India. The records book is deluged with material from the subcontinent on a daily basis. One can only sympathize with the chaps at Guinness. What could life be like at an office bombarded day and night with letters from deserving Indians? One single “greetings” fax sent by a Delhi man to the Guinness headquarters was supposedly a hundred meters long. There’s so much interest that The Guinness Book of Records is published in four Indian languages.

But whereas many nationalities concentrate on breaking the more meager records, Indians prefer to perform extraordinary feats. The obsession may, I suppose, have resulted from the tantalising records of endurance set by the nation’s holy men.

Dozens of ordinary Indians are world record holders. Surendra Apharya, for instance, has the record for inscribing a grain of rice. He burned 1,749 characters into a single grain using a magnifying glass. Others hold records for limbo dancing on roller-skates (5 1/8 inches); for crawling (870 miles); for milk bottle balancing (more than 64 miles); for continuous standing (17 years); and for needle threading (11,796 times in two hours).

Con-men tour small Indian towns masquerading as agents from the sacred Guinness Book of Records. For a steep charge they judge the applicant’s entry, promising to include it in the book.

I told Goadbaba I would inform Guinness of his exceptional talent. He was thrilled and, clenching my hand in his, shook it up and down vigorously. When he was gone I licked my palm. It was very sweet indeed.

* * * *

Soon after my meeting with Goadbaba, I was talking to an Indian journalist. When I mentioned the queer skill, the reporter cited half a dozen other Indians claiming the same ability. He told me how the trick was done. Most Goadbaba’s, he said, were nothing more than copycat illusionists. They wash their hands in a strong solution of saccharin – which is five hundred times sweeter than sugar. Within seconds they go from being ordinary people to men with the Sweet “N” Low touch.

* * * *

Bhalu had still not reappeared. He often vanished for a day or two at a time. But this time he was gone much longer. Six days passed. Each day I became more and more irritated, especially as he had coerced me into stopping at Sholapur in the first place.

At dawn on the seventh day, I rose early to get ready to take the bus to Mumbai. As I emerged from the shower a rustling noise startled me. I spun round. It was Bhalu. He was climbing in through the window.

“Come on and follow me,” he called, climbing back outside and shinning down the outside of the hotel.

“Bhalu, where have you been?”

“I’ll tell you later. Just follow me.”

With great unwillingness, I followed the Trickster out of the window. My room, which was on the third-floor, enjoyed a fine view across the southern portion of Sholapur. But as I grappled for a hand-hold, the city’s sights were the last thing on my mind.

“What the hell are you up to? You don’t just turn up after a week away and get someone to risk life and limb scurrying down a drainpipe. Why don’t we use the stairs like everyone else?”

“Don’t be lazy,” he retorted, lighting up a biri. “There’s something you’ll want to see.”

Bhalu led me at break-neck speed through the main area of the town. As we hastened past boarded shops, stand-pipe bathers, and tea-stall attendants, I wondered what the scam du jour was to be. The week without Bhalu had been a welcome break from my new role as a conman’s accomplice. Every day, the Trickster encouraged me to turn my hand to another and more unlawful activity, hissing that such knowledge might be useful to me in the future. But when would I need to concoct beauty products from bleach, spent tea leaves, and grease scraped from the door hinges of a first-class railway carriage? Or, for that matter, when would anyone ask me to create aphrodisiacs from dried mango skins; turn all-purpose miniature bars of Lux soap into medicated suppositories; or pass putrescent drainage liquid off as holy Ganga water?

Bhalu’s childhood had molded him into an incorrigible con-artist. He may not have known the key dates of Indian history, or the correct way to eat peas with a knife and fork: but he had no need for such profitless information. A professional scammer requires far more practical expertise. The Trickster’s qualifications were unsurpassed for life on the street. He had a salesman’s tongue, a forger’s fingers, a gambler’s nerve, the million-dollar smile of a chat-show host, and the mathematical artifice of a Nobelist. He spoke faultless English, passable Italian and German, and could communicate in a dozen Indian languages. On their own, none of these attributes may have been enough to survive on the streets of Calcutta. But Bhalu had been blessed with a far scarcer virtue – natural charisma.

And so, as on many other occasions, I found myself hurrying behind him, wondering what depravity was to be next on the agenda.

Twenty minutes after being bundled from the window of the Hotel Khajuraho, we were walking on grass. Bhalu had brought me to a wide hockey pitch on the outskirts of Sholapur.

As I was about to declare my disapproval, I heard voices coming from the far end of the hockey ground. To be more precise, I heard what sounded like a gargantuan, bloodthirsty demon. Screeching as if its baby demons had been snatched by another monster, it was severely distressed. Bhalu said to take no notice of the noise. We had come for a far more important encounter. More important than a female demon robbed of her babies? The Trickster nodded ominously. The demon was trifling in comparison to what he had arranged.

The monster’s shrieks did not subside. Instead, they became louder and more aroused. I peered over to where the sound was coming from. Even when narrowing my eyes to focus better, I could see no demon. The pitch was flat, with a large, dense bush bordering it. Telling Bhalu to send for help if I were attacked, I went over to investigate.

When it comes to bewilderment, India has its own scale. No other country on Earth can mystify a foreigner so utterly. Sometimes, when traveling in the subcontinent, one has no choice but to concede total defeat. This was one such instance. I leant forward to peer round the shrub, prepared for anything. Standing behind the bush there was no weeping demon: but something far more unexpected.

Ten men and women, each dressed in sports clothes, were exercising.

Yet instead of performing familiar training drills, they were laughing. It was no timid tittering … rather, it was a puissant, hostile form of laughter.

“Excuse me,” I said, “what are you doing?”

Hearing my question, the leader of the group abruptly stopped guffawing. He pulled up his white cotton ankle socks.

“We’re members of the Sholapur Laughter Club,” he said grandly.

“Members of what?”

“The Laughter Club … We meet here every morning to laugh.”

“Forgive me for my ignorance … but why do you laugh?”

The team leader gave me a stern look.

“For exercise, of course! Laughter is the best way to keep the heart and lungs in shape. A powerful spate of early-morning laughter is equal to a three-mile jog.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes, it is,” replied the class in unison.

“Who tells the jokes, then?”

“We don’t use jokes,” called out a scrawny woman at the back of the group. “They’re forbidden.”

“Forbidden? That seems a bit hard going – especially if you’re doing laughter exercise.”

The team leader seemed keen to get on with the routine.

“Sooner or later a joke would offend someone,” he said. “So we've outlawed them. In any case, we can laugh on cue.”

He clapped his hands twice. Within an instant, the sound of the wailing demon echoed out across the hockey field. I would have thanked the fitness fanatics for their time. But they were too busy laughing.

* * * *

At eight o’clock the first spectator arrived.

“Is it going to be here?” he asked.

Bhalu dipped his head in a nod. He pointed to the center of the hockey pitch. The man handed the boy two rupees, then sat down in the middle of the field.

“Is what going to be here? Why did that chap give you two rupees?”

The Trickster told me to be quiet.

By nine o’clock the sun was high. Five hundred people had turned up to watch the mysterious spectacle. On arrival, each dropped two rupees into a large empty paint can held by Bhalu. Whatever it was for, the audience seemed to feel it was money well spent.

An hour later, a thousand people were loitering about on the hockey pitch. More were turning up all the time. Each obediently dropped their two rupees into the tin. I had never seen Indians so willing to pay money for anything before.

“Bhalu,” I snorted, “what are you up to? You could get into a lot of trouble for this.”

The Trickster waved me out of the way. He had entrance fees to collect.

At ten-thirty, an official in a tattered uniform accosted Bhalu. A weighty pouch was handed over. The man turned on his heel and hurried away.

I was growing increasingly alarmed. Always at the cutting-edge of fraud, my traveling companion was now navigating in uncharted territory of deceit. I warned him of the consequences. Again, he brushed me aside.

Then, promptly on the stroke of noon, a man and a woman pranced over to the hockey pitch. Both were heavily laden with accessories and equipment. They appeared to be ignoring each other. Their arrival was greeted by a resounding cheer from the audience.

“You’ve got to tell me what’s going on,” I hollered at Bhalu, who appeared relieved at the couple’s arrival.

“Prepare yourself for a fantastic show,” he said. “I heard two gurus were trying to ‘control’ a group of villages near Tirth – just west of here. Both claim supernatural powers. I went to meet them on your behalf.”

“Why didn’t you take me along?”

“Because,” said the Trickster, running his hand through the paint can of coins, “they wouldn’t have agreed if a foreigner was around.”

“Agreed to what?”

“Agreed to a duel.”

“Are they going to kill each other?”

“Of course they aren’t,” snapped Bhalu. “They’re going to have a duel of miracles.”

“How ever did you get them to trek all the way over here?”

The Trickster stuck his nose in the air haughtily.

“They’re letting me referee,” he said. “As the judge, I said the duel must be held on neutral ground.”

“And what about your tin of cash?”

“Well,” he replied derisively, “you wouldn’t begrudge me my wages, would you?”

* * * *

The crowd was getting agitated. They were ready for the duel to commence. Bhalu had taken great care to advertise the special form of combat. He had hired an army of street children to spread the word in the villages surrounding Sholapur. Potential spectators had been advised that one of the godmen would undoubtedly suffer terrible humiliation. There is only one thing an Indian villager enjoys more than a miracle: and that’s to see someone publicly embarrassed. The Trickster had made a considerable cash profit on the entrance fee alone. But one would not expect a fraudster from Calcutta to stop at that.

To Bhalu, the crowd was not merely a potential audience, but a captive market in itself. The avatars had been ordered to delay for as long as possible. That is, until the referee gave the word. As the spectators waited for the singular blend of miracles and humiliation to ensue, the army of street urchins scurried about selling wares from the Trickster’s pillowcase sacks. Soap bars and shower caps, hand-towels and sachets of French perfume: all were touted at knock-down prices.

Even after the entrance fee, and snapping up a few bargain toiletries, Bhalu noticed that some of the spectators still had money left. And so he turned his hand from soap-bar magnate to bookmaker. The ability to swap one profession for another in a split second is a gift which turns humble entrepreneurs into billionaires. Bhalu had that gift.

I went over to have a look at the godmen. They were both unquestionably odd.

On the left was Sri Kasbekar. Probably in his fifties, he had the appearance of someone who had been dragged round the keel of an eighteenth-century sloop. His features were gnarled; his apparel bedraggled beyond description; and his hands crudely tattooed with indistinct symbols. Yet there was something far more unusual about the guru. He was polydactylic: he had six fingers on each hand. Polydactyly is not uncommon in India. From time to time one sees people with a sixth digit protruding from another finger. Sri Kasbekar’s condition was far rarer – for his two extra digits were perfectly formed.

Without counting his fingers individually, one might not have noticed the difference. Rather, without counting them, I might not have noticed them. The two thousand bystanders observed them immediately. While in the West people are wary of genetic mutations, in India an extra appendage has an uncanny significance. Hindu deities are frequently portrayed with an additional set of arms and hands. To many in the Sholapur district, a perfectly formed sixth finger on each hand suggested miraculous powers.

On the right side of the makeshift arena was Srimati Kulkami. Svelte in a butch kind of way, she had long auburn hair, a square mouth filled with square teeth, and alluring midnight eyes. She was dressed in a vibrant fuchsia cotton sari. But, it was her ears which first attracted one’s attention. Their outer edges were thick with neatly clipped hair. The bristles were about the size and shape of an eyebrow. It looked as if a hairy caterpillar was crawling up into each ear.

The Trickster addressed the gathering, whipping them up into a frenzy. He announced the ground rules. Each seer would be permitted to perform four miracles. No member of the audience would be allowed to participate, although props were admissible. The referee could disqualify either dueler at his discretion. The guru with the best miracles would be permitted to offer divine salvation in the villages near Sholapur.

Seething with anticipation, the spectators swayed forward. I sensed that many villagers’ fortunes were riding on the contest. Bhalu curled two fingers around his tongue and whistled.

The duel of miracles began.

First up was Srimati Kulkami. Brushing back her hair, she addressed the audience in Marathi. She told them she did not like to use her abilities frivolously; but she had to prove her competitor was a fraud. Indeed, she claimed he was worse than a mere con-artist – he was Shaitan, the Devil.

Srimati Kulkarni’s oration went down very well. Bhalu paused from translating for me, and noted down half a dozen last-minute bets.

Without hesitation, Kulkami began to weave her magic. She pulled a hundred-rupee note from her blouse, dipped it in water, and then set it alight. Remarkably, the paper did not burn, although it was engulfed in flames. This was the first miracle.

Feroze had taught me variations on the illusion. It can be done with most kinds of paper, cloth, or even wood. In this case, the paper was probably treated with a solution of carbon disulphide and carbon tetrachloride.

For her second act of wonderment, Srimati Kulkami announced that the Shaitan had created an unfavorable atmosphere. If she, a divine being, did not alleviate the hex, a plague would strike the audience down. Such side-comments of impending destruction proved very popular with the assembly. Delighted, they nudged each other in the ribs, and jostled a little closer to the godwoman.

To assuage the evil forces, Kulkarni took up a large brown coconut, and held it above her head. Wailing incantations, she called for the demons to stir from their hiding places and flow into the body of the nut. No place, she said, was safe for them but the confines of the coconut. Then, crouching over, she crimped the nut between her sari-covered legs. As two thousand eyes scrutinized her, the mystic held the coconut at arm’s length, towards the gathering. A minute passed. The same thought went through everyone’s mind: had the miracle failed? Such failure would spell divine disgrace. Another minute passed. As the audience held their breath, the end of the coconut blew out. Like some kind of schoolboy’s bomb, a jet of flame and oily smoke issued from the hole. We all stared in wonderment; this was impressive stuff. But there was more to come.

Seizing the nut in both hands, Srirmati Kulkarni flung it at a stony patch on the arena. It split open. A quantity of what looked like blood soaked into the ground. Raising her frame to its maximum height, the godwoman cried that the villagers were safe now from her competitor’s evil: for the blood had been that of the demons.

Only later did I work out how the illusion had been achieved. Coconuts have three eyes at one end. One of these is soft, and can easily be bored out. The guru perforates the soft eye and fills the nut with a saturated solution of potassium permanganate. From a distance, this resembles blood. The hole is sealed with wax. For the explosion, the mendicant surreptitiously inserts a pellet of sodium through the soft eye. As it reacts with the water in the potassium permanganate solution, it causes a violent eruption.

After Kulkarni’s two miracles, the spectators were beside themselves with enthusiasm. A live display of what they considered to be real magic was even better than the special effects of Bollywood movies.

To further exacerbate the sense of tension, Bhalu ordered that Sri Kasbekar should now present two miracles. This was a popular decision. The godwoman was led away to the sidelines, and the polydactyl addressed the villagers.

He told them he was not their god, but their servant: he would heal them, not dictate to them. If they selected his opponent, they would live below a sky made dark with malevolence. The recitation, which carried on for about fifteen minutes, sounded like a party political broadcast.

Cautioning both duelists to refrain from bad-mouthing the other, Bhalu commanded Sri Kasbekar to get on with his routine.

Before the performance began, the polydactyl waved his fingers at the crowd. Titillated like old women at the sight of a naked man, they edged forward for a closer look at the mutation.

For his first miracle, Sri Kasbekar carried a bucket full of greenish lemons into the center of the arena. Next, he held up a needle and thread and removed his shirt. Grabbing a chunk of flab on his stomach, he stabbed the needle through it, and sewed on a lemon. The audience watched nonplussed as the yogi sewed one lemon after the next on to his belly. Instead of grimacing with pain, he chanted mantras, and maintained an airy smile.

“Isn’t that hurting him?” I asked the Trickster.

“Don’t be so stupid,” he replied. “Watch how he’s pinching the fat tightly with his fingers before jabbing in the needle. Do that and it doesn’t hurt … it hardly even bleeds.”

Bhalu was right. There was no blood. Within ten minutes, Sri Kasbekar had a dozen fruits hanging from his abdomen like spiders on silk. He seemed in no discomfort at all. Fluttering his fingers once more, with the lemons still dangling, he moved on to his second feat.

With great care he pulled a three-foot viper from his bag of props. Dazzled by the sunlight, the snake reeled about as its owner explained to the bystanders that this was an extremely poisonous reptile. The serpent, he told them, came from the wastelands of the Great Thar Desert. One drop of its venom would bring an agonizing death.

The spectators listed backwards. Twisting the viper about his twelve fingers, the godman induced a brave villager to come forward and try his luck with the snake.

The referee shouted out from the perimeter of the arena that volunteers were prohibited under the rules. A communal sigh of relief swept through the audience. The macho villagers had had their pride saved by officialdom. For Bhalu’s part, the rule had been a shrewd calculation. If one of the spectators had been struck down by a Rajasthani serpent, he would have had hell to pay.

With no takers allowed, Sri Kasbekar waved the snake around his head like a lasso. Then he prized its mouth open and forced its fangs on to his neck. A stream of blood issued from the swami’s jugular. He then threw the viper on the ground and stamped on its head. It might have been a harsh move, but the reptile could have killed the godman, who was none the worse after the encounter.

From where I was standing, the snake bite was plausible. The crowd had also been impressed by the stunt. As they applauded wildly, I remembered something Feroze had told me in Calcutta. Standing one morning at the window of his study, he had declared that ninety per cent of Indian snakes are non-venomous. Ignorant of the many species of serpent, most villagers assume that any snake bite is fatal. For his illusion, Sri Kasbekar had used a harmless snake. It didn’t actually have fangs. As its mouth was pulled from his neck, he had squeezed a blood-filled sponge over the area.

Two miracles each. The score was even. Anxious to keep up the tension, Bhalu called for Srimati Kulkarni to perform her next feat.

Taking her place in the circle, she informed the audience that her twelve-fingered rival had used an innocuous species of serpent for his demonstration. The godwoman had hoped to secure victory through denouncing the opposition, but the villagers were far too astute to declare a winner halfway through. Having paid two rupees each to watch the duel, they expected value for money. In their eyes, value meant quantity.

For her third miracle, Kulkarni pulled up the hem of her sari and washed her feet in a bucket of water. As she sloshed about, she emitted a series of shrill gasps. The spectators were unimpressed by the woman’s manner. I sensed the tide was turning against her: largely for her outbursts against Polydactyl Man.

After three or four minutes of washing, Srimati Kulkarni jerked her body about as if it were being entered by angelic forces. She then pushed the bucket away, and walked calmly down a long piece of dusty yellow cloth. Moments later the miracle was visible. Distinct rusty-red footprints had been left where her feet had stepped. The material was held up to the audience. Their reaction was sober. The miracle had none of the anguish of snakebite or of sewing fruit on to the skin.

As with so many other illusions I had seen on my journey of observation, Feroze had accommodated me with a faultless rendering of the trick at his mansion. The deception is very simple. The feet are not washed with ordinary water. It’s a mixture of slaked lime and water. Shortly before use, the cloth is dipped in a light turmeric solution and dried. As the seer’s holy feet press against the fabric, a chemical reaction occurs. A red mark is left where the turmeric and lime meet.

Sri Kasbekar’s third miracle was one I shall not readily forget. It wasn’t that the feat was so impressive; but the response it drew touched me. Like a stage magician of the old school, Polydactyl Man walked into the arena in silence. He had removed the lemons from his belly and replaced his shirt. A thousand people surrounded him, but none said a word. I sensed that they were now truly awed by his presence.

Frivolously, he withdrew something from his lungi and placed it on the ground. It was a thick black ball-point pen, with four small buttons up the side. Chanting a cryptic mantra beneath his breath, the godman walked around the pen in a figure of eight. When he had completed the circuit in one direction, he repeated it the other way. He did this seven times. Only then did he pluck the pen from the ground.

I was ready for the implement to squirt blood, or to write with invisible ink. But what happened was totally unexpected. Polydactyl Man held the ball-point out before him in the way a fencer holds a foil. Then, as the mystic closed his eyes in concentration, the pen began to speak. It was no random voice, but that of the godman. Sri Kasbekar was speaking through the pen.

The audience went apoplectic. This was surely proof that he was a higher being. Even Bhalu recoiled at the feat. By chance, I could explain the miracle. About a year before, I had been glancing through an airline’s in-flight magazine when I spotted the same ball-point “Memo Pen”. Advertised as the gadget that every weary executive needs, the pen has a microchip which stores a few seconds of one’s voice. Perfect, the ad had claimed, for the businessman on the move – make a note of that brilliant idea when driving, or when out and about. I wondered whether the American manufacturers had dreamt their executive toy would ever become a divine object.

The villagers had already made up their minds. They liked the oracle pen and Polydactyl Man. But a heckler at the back of the crowd was calling for the last two miracles.

The referee clapped his hands. As he was riding on a high of public adulation, Sri Kasbekar was allowed to go first.

A shallow pit had been dug in the hockey pitch and filled with red-hot coals. I had warned Bhalu that he could get into trouble for defacing city property, but he waved my outburst aside. Calling out a fantastic set of magical words, Polydactyl Man approached the coals. Then, with great self-control, he stepped on to them. Halfway across, his face seemed to buckle from pain. But he continued, without giving voice to his discomfort.

Fire walking has occurred in the East for thousands of years. It’s recently been introduced in the West, too. Tired Memo Pen-carrying executives now hurry across hot coals as part of special bonding seminars. Contrary to popular belief, firewalking is dead simple. The skin on the soles of the feet and the ash which covers the coals are both poor conductors of heat. Anyone can do it. But the villagers didn’t know this. For them, Polydactyl Man was the hero of the day.

A quick glance at his feet proved he was indeed the hero, but for another reason – sabotage. While his back was turned, the godwoman had stealthily sprinkled sugar on to the coals. The sugar melts and sticks to the feet, burning them.

Determined not to be beaten by subversion of any kind, Sri Kasbekar took the pain. After all, he was passing himself off as a living god. As more and more godmen earn a living from healing and performing miracles, an increasing number are falling victim not to Rationalists, but to sabotage from their own kind.

When the time came for her last miracle, Srimati Kulkami crawled beneath a heavy blanket positioned at the center of the arena. I could sense the spectators wishing her to fail. Very slowly, her head, and then her body, began to leave the ground. An inch at a time, it rose above the grass. The seer paused at about three feet, her body quivering slightly under the blanket. This was the first time I had seen a full levitation performed.

Just as I was going to ask Bhalu how he thought the illusion was done, something rather embarrassing happened. Embarrassing, that is, for the godwoman. The thick wool blanket which had covered her slipped away. In an instant the secret of full body levitation was revealed. The secret was that there was no levitation. Srimati Kulkami had been standing under the blanket, her arms outstretched; holding two chipped hockey sticks by the handles. The sticks’ blades had been pointing upwards, giving the impression of feet.

Her face red as a beetroot, she proclaimed that Sri Kasbekar – the Devil – had bewitched her with a curse. But no one listened. The villagers were far too preoccupied with something else to pay attention to a fraudulent goddess. Besotted with Polydactyl Man’s miracles, they yearned for more revelations from his miracle of miracles … the sacred oracle pen.

TWENTY-FOUR

Jimmy, the Part-Time God

The glass-fronted cabinets were filled with neat rows of disintegrating volumes. Labeled with yellowed tags, and stained with damp, most of the books had not been opened for decades. The tables, chairs, wainscot, floor, and even the reading lecterns had been anointed with liberal coats of furniture oil generations before. Dusty marble busts loomed down from their plinths like those of Roman emperors; a freestanding brass fan churned the dank monsoon air; and, mounted on the far wall, an antique regulator clock, its burr walnut inlay severely warped, recorded the passing of time. Nothing had altered for years in this, the reading-room of Mumbai’s Native General Library.

Favored by the city’s dwindling Parsi community, the library is a mysterious sanctuary where Parsi elders lounge away the afternoons as if reclining at a gentlemen’s club. They talk of the good old days, when their existence was not under threat. They speak of their formidable heritage; their belief in Zarathustra, and how they came from Persia long ago.

When the duel of the godmen had come to an end, Bhalu had scooped up his sizable takings and accompanied me on the Netravati Express to Mumbai. He spent most of the journey counting his new fortune, all of which was in small change.

Returning to a city that one has known and loved fills you with a delicious sense of warmth. Unbridled greed had brought me to Mumbai some time before. Like the Trickster, I had hoped to make a fortune from others’ naivety. Unlike him, I had a distinct handicap. I had not grown up on the streets of Calcutta. My conniving idea – to buy up European antiques in Mumbai’s infamous Chor Bazaar, the Thieves’ Market, and sell them back in England – had come to nothing. Now, returned to the city which I had hoped once to take by storm, I castigated myself. How could I have been so foolish? How had I expected to bamboozle Mumbai’s hard-bitten antique dealers into selling their artifacts cheaply?

As Bhalu went in search of an old pal from Calcutta, I waited in the Parsi reading-room for D. Blake to turn up.

Friend, confidant, and mentor, Blake was an American musician who had made his home in Mumbai. He had first come to the city in search of a teacher of Indian music. Years spent in Mumbai had shown Blake many things, and he was now a mine of the city’s most arcane information. I felt certain that he could direct me towards the unusual.

Unfortunately, Blake had become detribalized beyond recovery. Tell-tale signs of his degeneration popped up in many forms – the most notable being that he was always extremely late for an appointment.

As the regulator clock chimed three, a white-haired Parsi gentleman sat down in the tattered armchair beside mine. He must have been in his nineties. I wished him a pleasant afternoon, and said I thought it would rain. The man drew a long, deep breath into his lungs, and let out a sharp cough. Whatever his condition was, it was obviously very advanced.

“Got asthma, have you?” I chirped. “If you do, I can recommend a wonderful cure in Hyderabad. The treatment was a little distressing, but it’s cured me.”

The old gentleman thumped a fist on his chest.

“It’s not asthma,” he grunted. “I don’t have asthma.”

“I’m glad to hear it. Then you’re probably in fine shape.”

Coughing phlegm into a handkerchief, the old Parsi continued the inane conversation.

He introduced himself as Mr. Sodawaterwala. It was an unlikely name, but the Parsi community used to take their job titles as a surname during the British Raj, and some of the stranger surnames have endured.

“Do you want to hear something?” he asked.

“Of course, what?”

“Well, “ said the wrinkled mouth, “when I was a baby, my parents took me to have my horoscope read. The astrologer foretold my future in great detail. He said that I would become an industrialist, which I am. And he said I would have three sons, which I have. But he prophesied that I would die by drowning.”

“Oh, dear, I hope you can swim.”

“I can’t,” replied Mr. Sodawaterwala. “My parents were so fearful of the Prediction, they made sure that I never learned. They thought that if I could swim, I might be tempted to go near water … and the astrologer’s horoscope would come true. So,” the old gentleman continued, “I have spent my entire life avoiding water. I have never paddled in a river, bathed in the ocean, splashed about in a swimming pool. I’ve never even taken a bath. Imagine what a curse the astrologer’s horoscope has been all these years!”

“But avoiding water so cautiously sounds very sensible to me.”

Mr. Sodawaterwala regarded me for an instant.

“Maybe not so sensible,” he said. “You see, I’ve just come back from my doctor. I have a heart condition. This means my heart doesn’t work as well as it should. It should be pumping hard enough to drain the fluid from my lungs. But it isn’t. The result is my lungs are filling with water. In short – I’m drowning.”

When D. Blake finally turned up more than three hours late, I told him about Mr. Sodawaterwala, who had gone home.

“Don’t you just love this place?” he said. “It’s the greatest hang-out in town. There’s never a dull moment when there are Parsis around.”

Blake had altered little in appearance since my previous visit to Mumbai. He was still dressed like a Cuban revolutionary: black beret, dark glasses, and scraggly beard. His conversation was the same florid blend of sardonic remarks and witticisms.

“So, what’s all this about studying illusion?” he sniffed, when we had done with pleasantries.

“You know, I’ve always been fascinated with illusion and conjuring. Always – since the guardian of Jan Fishan’s tomb got me interested as a kid.”

Blake removed his dark glasses and waved them around as he spoke. His emerald eyes flashed subversively.

“Oh yeah?” he cracked. “So pull a rabbit out of my beret then!”

“I’m not here to practice illusions,” I said, “I’m here to observe. You see, I'm on a journey of observation.”

Straightening his beret, Blake thought for a moment.

“Who told you to go on this journey then, man?”

“Feroze did, of course.”

“Feroze?”

“Yes, Feroze, he’s my teacher.”

D. Blake’s face dropped. He was obviously taken aback. For he had himself been my mentor.

“Feroze is an illusionist,” I said. “He’s instructing me in the illusory Sciences.”

“I know when I'm not wanted,” Blake whimpered. “I’ll just go back to my rooftop.”

“Listen to me, Blake! I need help. What’s going on in town? You know … unusual stuff.”

Blake perked up a bit. Like me, he had a penchant for the bizarre.

“You know there’s no shortage of oddballs here,” he said. “What about the guy who’s spinning spider’s webs into silk for bullet-proof jackets? Or there are the street kids who’re being kidnapped and shipped to the Persian Gulf to work as under-age camel jockeys. Or what about the dude who’s making dolphin-milk cheese? Or,” cried Blake, flailing his arms about briskly, “what about Jimmy, the part-time god?”

D. Blake told me that as far as he knew Jimmy held a darshan, a session of worship, every second Tuesday. Thousands of devotees from across town flocked to the meetings held in north Mumbai. When I had asked Blake what motivated the part-time god, he had replied that such matters were for me to find out.

A brawny male masseur at the secret Iraqi hammaam off Mohammed Ali Road revealed that Jimmy’s sign was a cobra, and that he had at least one lakh, a hundred thousand, followers. The masseur sent me to a laborer in the nearby Fighting-Kite Bazaar. As he blended a paste of powdered light-bulbs and glue, to cover the strings of fighting-kites, he disclosed that Jimmy was always accompanied by his adoptive mother: an elderly goddess named Gururani. He disclosed, too, that Jimmy had worked as a clerk in a bank, until his position became untenable. The bank manager, who himself was a follower of Jimmy’s, felt obliged to crawl past the clerk on his hands and knees. Since leaving the bank, Jimmy had started his own business making “Jimmy Brand” incenses. The information seemed to have the hallmarks of fabrication. Only a face-to-face encounter with the deity would, I was sure, shed light on the truth.

From the Fighting-Kite Bazaar, I made my way to the Chor Bazaar, to meet an old associate. He was a shop-keeper with a cavern of European artifacts. His name was Anwar Sadat.

Anyone in Mumbai in need of a rusty World War I dental drill, an HMV gramophone, an old set of golf clubs or a tuba from Berlin knows to drop in on Anwar. For two hundred years his family have been purveyors of European antiques. Now almost lost in time, his wares lie like an attic of souvenirs from Mumbai’s past. I adored glancing around the cluttered shelves, imagining the private histories of Anwar’s paraphernalia. Each object, encased in oil and dust, hides a tale. Stethoscopes and tinplate toys, sextants and barometers, chandeliers of Belgian crystal, plate cameras and warped violas, a scale model of a four-masted barque, a set of silver fish knives, a Meissen figurine, and a doll’s house with a damaged roof.

Years had passed since I last sat and chatted to Anwar Sadat. He was a soft-spoken man, a jewel in a trade which tends to attract the more mendacious members of Mumbai society. But then again, as I always reminded myself, this was the Thieves’ Bazaar.

With two pots of hot sweet tea inside us, Anwar called for his young son to come down from the attic room above the shop. The sound of infant footsteps on the precipitous staircase followed. A moment later, the boy’s hand squeezed mine in a strong greeting, and I wondered how I could have forgotten about him. For his name was Saddam Hussein.

Anwar listened to my inquiry. When I had finished, he stared at the floor tiles of his shop and thought hard. If anyone knew where Jimmy held his meetings, I felt sure it would be Anwar Sadat.

A third pot of tea came and went. The pet goat, Rustam, gamboled over in search of food. Anwar rubbed the sides of his bristly face, furrowed his brow, and pondered the riddle of Jimmy, the part-time god. As a pious Muslim, the shop-keeper might have derided the notion of a less than full-time supreme being. He might too have scorned the thought of a god in human form. Although not condoning the godman, he was willing to help me seek him out.

“I don’t know what life’s coming to,” he lisped. “All sorts of unlikely things are going on. Look at this …”

Anwar held up the morning’s newspaper. He pointed to a report about a Western doctor’s work on implanting pigs’ hearts into humans. It might be a life-saving operation, but for Muslims the very idea is monstrous.

“First pigs' hearts and now a god called Jimmy,” moaned Anwar Sadat. “I don’t know where the world is going. But then,” he said, squeezing his son’s cheek, as Hafiz Jan had once done to me, “we are just observers, aren’t we?”

Anwar shooed Rustam away from nibbling volume nine of a rotting Encyclopedia Britannica. He scribbled something on a corner of his newspaper. Tearing it off, he handed the scrap to me.

“Go and see this man,” he said. “He deals in freight, but I have a feeling that he will know your god.”

* * * *

The directions took me to a building in north Mumbai, near the city’s domestic airport at Santacruz. At first, I felt sure I had misread the address. The business was not a freight or haulage company. It was an undertaker’s. Coffins were stacked up either side of the doorway like crates at the dockside. A number of seasoned carpenters were squatting at the back of the room, smoking biris. I handed the fragment of newspaper to a rather dapper character inside the office. There were seven telephones on his desk, each a different color. He shook my hand.

“Are you a friend of Anwar Sadat?” I inquired.

“Ah, Anwar,” he said warmly, “I haven’t visited him for a long time. And how’s little Saddam Hussein?”

“He’s very well. Anwar told me you were in the freight business. So I am a little puzzled to see so many coffins.”

“But I am in shipping,” said the man, scanning his telephones. “I’m a corpse shipper. Ship them all over India, and abroad, too.”

When pleasantries were at an end, I asked the undertaker what he knew about Jimmy.

“Sri Jimmy Nagputhra and Gururani Nagkanya,” he proclaimed. “Of course I know them. A couple of my employees follow them.”

A pair of elderly carpenters were called from the workshop. Both wore a badge depicting a multi-headed cobra. The older of the two artisans invited me to the Tuesday-evening darshan, in two days’ time. All were welcome to hear Sri Jimmy speak. The meeting would commence at eight p.m., and would continue well into the night.

The corpse shipper snapped his fingers, and his employees slipped back to the workshop. Unable to contain my enthusiasm, I reflected aloud.

“This sounds wonderful,” I said. “Imagine a part-time god called Jimmy, whose symbol is the cobra, and whose devotees number over one hundred thousand!”

The corpse shipper straightened the telephones on his desk. Then, very slowly, he shook his head from right to left.

“Why?” he asked acerbically. “Why do you waste your time with these fly-by-night gods?”

* * * *

Tuesday night eventually came. By the time darkness fell, I could hardly contain my enthusiasm. After an excellent meal at Gaylord’s – most of which was spent press-ganging Bhalu into joining me – we took a taxi to Lalbag in north Mumbai. I never thought I would be imploring the Trickster to follow me.

As the vehicle stop-started its way through the ever-denser traffic, I stared out at the apocalyptic clouds. The monsoon was well under way. Its storms had been pounding the city’s streets nightly. All the elements were there: a tip-off from Blake, a secret location, a considerable following and, best of all, a part-time god.

We arrived at the Samaj Mandir Hall some time after nine p.m. There was no doubt that this was where the darshan would be held. About four thousand people – representing a cross-section of society – were milling about. All the women were wearing headscarves; all the men had plain white handkerchiefs tied over their heads. Bhalu and I copied them, for fear of standing out. The deities had obviously not yet arrived, for an electric wave of apprehension seemed to bind all the devotees. Some chatted together; others flicked through pamphlets bearing a cobra’s image. Still more stood in silent meditation.

Soon after ten p.m. the followers flew into a panic.

An Indian-made Pal car was approaching. The vehicle – bedecked in marigold flowers – had taken on the aura of an emblazoned chariot. Some of the devotees shielded their eyes; others prostrated themselves as the motorcar drew up to the red carpet. Very slowly, the car’s doors opened, and the gods descended.

Gururani got out first. She looked rather ordinary. Aged somewhere between sixty and seventy-five, her face bore an apathetic expression, like a rock star tired of the road. Numerous garlands weighed down her fragile neck; a sensible handbag dangled from her wrist. She was cloaked in a shimmering raspberry-colored mantle.

Jimmy followed her from the vehicle on to the crimson carpet. Bhalu pulled me to the front of the crowd to get a good view. Tall, robust, and no more than about forty, he had a great square-shaped face, most of which was obscured by beard. Like Gururani, Jimmy was resplendent in a garish silvery-blue robe; and, as with his adoptive mother, he wore a golden filigree crown.

The deities swaggered on platform shoes into the hall. I took a deep breath. It was a moment to savor. Rose petals were scattered from baskets clasped by a row of onlookers. Adoring devotees fell to the floor as the gods made their way past. When the deities had entered the capacious hall, the followers scurried barefoot behind.

Once inside, the supreme beings ascended a dais; their followers taking their places on the main floor beneath. On the left side of the room sat the men; on the right, the women. No more than five hundred of the most respectable acolytes were permitted inside. The rest, who by this time must have numbered more than eight thousand, occupied a sizable football field outside.

The Trickster and I took our places with the men. I wondered whether I might have a chance to chat to Jimmy. As if reading my thoughts, an elderly Parsi behind tapped me on the back.

“The Divine Lights are the purest of all godly creatures,” he said. “Of course no one can speak to them directly, except for those who’ve been cleansed.”

“Is that really true?”

The Parsi agreed it was.

“Could I be cleansed?” I asked optimistically.

The gentleman looked me up and down and grimaced.

“Certainly not!” he fumed. “But you can think clean thoughts. The Divine Lights can read what you’re thinking.”

“Divine Lights?”

The man gave me an austere glance.

“Their holinesses,” he said. “They’re powerful … their energy can unlock a man in chains … it can release the ignorance of the soul.”

It sounded like strong stuff.

Jimmy and Gururani were alone on the dais. Behind them rose up an extraordinary scene. Like some backdrop to a Hollywood – or, rather, a Bollywood – fantasy, it depicted ice mountains, forests, mythical creatures, and ten-headed cobras. Directly above the deities’ crowns loomed an oversized rotating parasol, emblazoned with the words “Jimmy” and “Gururani”. Behind their holinesses' heads were mounted immense glitter-encrusted golden halos. With sharp serrated edges like great circular saws, they, too, rotated, emphasizing the couple’s divinity.

The prohibition from speaking to, or even greeting, Jimmy directly hindered the interview process. Fortunately, the devotees were more than willing to surrender fragments of background about their god.

When he was aged only seven years, Gururani had seen Jimmy emanating divine light. She adopted the boy and raised him as a deity. Like Gururani, Jimmy was a Parsi. But the couple seemed not to condone or condemn any creed. One of their faithful explained this by saying they were above religion. Another imparted that, as deities, they never wore the same set of robes twice. Re-using garments was beneath them. A film producer who I met later suggested the duo rented their tawdry mantles from a costume-hire firm in Bollywood. He swore the very same gowns had been worn in the popular Indian television soap opera of the Ramayana.

While the disciples took their places, the deities attended to the more mundane business of preparing for the show. Sitting on their thrones, they were greeted by a stream of aides and sycophants. Some seemed to be holding up letters which needed answering; others may have been hoping to place bulk orders for Jimmy’s special brand of incense.

The goddess Gururani opened her sensible handbag and whipped out a scarlet lipstick. When her lips were suitably adorned, the festivities began.

An accordionist ran a set of manicured nails across his instrument’s keys. The hall was filled with the soothing sounds of Hindi music. A primitive system of wires and loud-speakers broadcast the music to the devotees outside. Poised on their thrones, with the electric halos whirring behind them, Jimmy and Gururani held their right palms towards the back of the hall, like Native American chiefs offering a greeting. Then they did what they did best – sat quiescently as those around them prostrated themselves.

The night’s ritual was long and elaborate. When the band had warmed up, Gururani took a microphone in her right hand, stepped into the center of the stage, and began to sing. An Arab friend of mine says that, to his untrained ear, Italian opera sounds like the wailing of she-camels. In the same way, my ears failed to appreciate the goddess’ ability.

For almost an hour I endured an agonizing cross-legged position. When Gururani had returned to her throne, and her halo had been reactivated, Jimmy grabbed the microphone. A deep, rhythmical voice streamed from his mouth. The words blared from speakers mounted on every wall.

Outside, it had begun to rain: not a modest April shower, but a full-blown monsoon downpour. I peered out. The eight thousand adherents were sitting cross-legged and obedient as the water soaked them. They might have left, but the powerful strains of Jimmy’s voice wafted around them, soothing them in their discomfort.

The shimmering blue robes and the music – which was not dissimilar to an early Elvis ballad – would have delighted the Dorfmans. Jimmy could certainly pound out the tunes. Although I understand no Gujarati, I was mesmerized by the sheer force of his voice. For a split second I entertained the thought of getting Sri Jimmy a recording contract. His alternative clothing, his mellow attitude to life, and his incense know-how would have gone down well at any Los Angeles record label. But communication would be the stumbling block. What record producer would sign a man who was too pure to speak to him?

The solo ballads came and went. After the music, each devotee lit a miniature ghee lamp. These were handed to footmen, who bore them up to the dais on silver trays. When the gods had blessed each tray, the lamps were conveyed back down to the followers. Only then did the audience participation ensue. With the lamps balanced precariously on their laps, the devotees swayed back and forth ecstatically. Every so often a member of the congregation would jump up and run all around, gripped by the divine light. In the commotion a woman’s sari caught alight. She flapped her arms back and forth frantically like a moth’s wings. Eventually those around her realized their companion was all but a ball of flames. The inferno was quietly extinguished.

Outside the hall, the eight thousand weather-worn disciples were still struggling to light their ghee lamps with damp matches. The monsoon and the winds were not making the task any easier.

When all the lamps had been blessed by the deities, the band struck up again. I leaned back and savored the encounter. The folk music, the headscarves worn by all, the flaming colors of the robes, the flickering lamps, and the scenic backdrop – they were all reminiscent of a gypsy encampment. I nudged Bhalu and asked him what he thought of my analogy. He had not been to a Romany encampment and so refrained from commenting. But the bearded man beside me was more than willing to offer his opinion. He told me that if I denigrated Sri Jimmy further, he would take me outside and deal with me.

The last thing on my mind was knocking the part-time god. It would have been wrong to vilify Jimmy and his group. Certainly, international cults with their multi-million-dollar turnovers may be fair game. Yet here was a man who was taking nothing from his disciples. He wasn’t even performing pseudo-miracles. His followers seemed content with a selection of gypsy ballads. Granted, they provided him with opulent gowns, but there were none of the tell-tale signs hinting at a big business dynamic. The hall was rented on an ad hoc basis. The robes were, supposedly, hired when needed; and I didn’t hear the swiping of credit card donations or the nervous laughter of foreign supporters.

Jimmy’s incense was on sale at a stall outside the auditorium. Priced at ten rupees a box, it was cheaper than competing brands; as were the key fobs and badges which bore the haunting image of the five-headed cobra.

Jimmy’s extravaganza ended abruptly at three a.m. As Bhalu and I made our way from the hall, I felt deflated. At first I wondered why I had been hit by the sudden change of mood. Was it that I had been lured by the prospect of deception, and found none? Or had my twisted alter ego been craving to make fun of the deity? Perhaps it was a little of both. On reflection I had to admit the truth: Jimmy, the part-time god, may have been a showman of unparalleled expertise … but he was no laughing matter.

* * * *

Sitting in the doorway of Jan Fishan’s tomb, Hafiz Jan had recounted all he knew about the Anglo-Afghan Wars. He had told me of the blood and gore; and he had deliberated on how the British had been routed on three occasions from Afghan soil.

The British may have forgotten the three wars they fought in Afghanistan. But in a neglected corner of Mumbai a memory of the sanguinary encounters remains. It was Hafiz Jan who had first mentioned the Afghan Church, located at the southern tip of Colaba. I remember our conversation well. I had said an Afghan church was a contradiction in terms. Almost all Afghans are followers of Islam. The guardian of Jan Fishan’s mausoleum had rolled about with laughter. The Afghan Church was, he had said, a nickname. It was there, overlooking the Arabian Sea that the British war dead from the Anglo-Afghan campaigns had been honored.

Before my triumphant return to Calcutta, I had an afternoon to spare. A second meeting with Blake had reminded me of Hafiz Jan’s conversation about the church. Bhalu had no interest in inspecting the names of dead colonials carved into floor slabs. And so I set out by myself.

Colaba may be part of Mumbai’s bustling downtown area, but its southern expanse, towards Cuffe Parade, is seldom visited by well-dressed professionals or by the city’s share of emaciated, low-budget tourists. I meandered down Colaba Causeway. It was still early. Street vendors were setting up their stalls. Visitors from the Arabian Gulf, who favor the district’s sea-front hotels, were still in bed. On Strand Road a ball-point-pen-seller was displaying his new range of Japanese pens. He demonstrated the subtle clicking action of their mechanism. When I rejected his wares, the merchant threw stones at a three-legged pye dog. It was a dastardly retaliation. Like everyone else, he knew that Westerners cannot stand to see a dog in pain. I bought a pen and strolled on.

On past the Sassoon Docks and the Koli fisherwomen. Fine-boned, with baskets of pomfret on their heads, they hurried about in the early-morning light. Fish is a scarce commodity in the monsoon. The strengthened currents and the seasonal rains are the bane of fishermen across Asia.

Very soon the tarmac road was wending its way through groves of palms and lush vegetation. It was hard to imagine that the turbulent streets of Mumbai were only a mile or so to the north. Turning a corner, I set eyes upon the so-called Afghan Church.

Officially known as the Church of St. John, the Neo-Gothic building is topped by a formidable steeple, reaching over two hundred feet into the sky. Its coarse buff basalt facing was in excellent condition, considering it was over a hundred and thirty years old.

As I pushed open the gate to the enclosure, large irregular droplets of rain started to fall: warning that a far heavier monsoon downpour would soon follow. I rushed to the church’s main door, twisted the iron handle. Within moments I was transported back in time.

The interior of the Afghan Church was silent and austere. It reeked of an era when the subcontinent was in the grip of the British Raj. Walking on the cool flagstones at the back of the nave, one could almost sense the survivors of the Anglo-Afghan campaigns praying there. The air was stale and dank. Dim monsoon light filtered through the stained-glass friezes of the chancel. The church was like a remote isle, sequestered from the clamor of modern Mumbai. It was as if the spirits of the dead haunted the place, unwilling to relinquish it.

Tiny, insignificant reminders of their presence were all around. The scuff of a hobnailed boot on the skirting; the initials of an infantryman, etched into a lacquered frame; and, most poignant of all, the actual British battle standards from the First Anglo-Afghan War. Shrouded behind antique glass like anatomical specimens, they were at the point of disintegration. Delicate as dragonfly wings, they hung like medieval pennons from a knight’s lance. Had my own ancestor – Jan Fishan Khan – ridden against these standards during the battles of 1842?

Outside, the day’s first monsoon deluge was well under way. Drops of rain were splattering on to the granite flagstones through multiple perforations in the roof. I ran a hand over the row of lacquered chairs at the back of the church. Each had a notch for a soldier’s rifle – insurance against being taken unawares, instituted after the Revolt of 1857. As my fingers progressed over the glossed wood, a chill ran down my spine.

A man was sitting in the front row.

From where I was standing, I could just see the back of his head. His hair was pigeon-gray and brushed back. At first I thought it might be a ghost. Perhaps one of the soldiers. Had he been slain by Jan Fishan and, realizing who I was, come for retribution? My forebear would, I was sure, have wanted me to face any ghost head on. And so I marched down the nave to confront whatever spirit it might be.

Five rows before the altar, and I felt a sharp pang at the base of my stomach. Was it a warning to turn on my heel and flee? Three more rows and my nose warned me of a well known aroma. One more step. I was inches from the figure. Just as I was about to touch him on the shoulder, he swiveled sharply to face me.

No face – living or dead – could have filled me with a greater sensation of astonishment.

It was Feroze.

Delighted that I had collapsed into the chair behind his, the Master stood up.

“Surprised to see me?” he sniffed.

“Well, er …”

Feroze swished an “F” in the air with his reliable bull’s pizzle riding crop. He was obviously jubilant.

“There’s no time to dilly-dally,” he said. “Haven’t heard from you in ages. Thought I’d better come and check you hadn’t run off.”

I wiped the perspiration from my top lip.

“How did you know to find me here? Wait a minute – how did you know I was in Mumbai, let alone here?”

The magician tilted his head back and stroked his Adam’s apple. He was relishing the moment.

“You underestimate me,” he said.

“I could never do that,” I answered. “But this was the last place I expected to see you …”

“Why haven’t you posted any reports in the last two weeks?”

“I’d given up. I called the house … Gokul said you were away. He said you’d been gone for a long time.”

Feroze gazed up at the rafters.

“Yes … I’ve been on a journey myself,” he said absently.

“Really? What kind of journey?”

Clicking his heels together like a sergeant on the parade ground, the Master faced me in profile.

“I’ve been on a journey of observation,” he said.

It was a familiar phrase.

“What do you mean?”

“You tell me what I mean … With one eye examine the detail, with the other look at the entire picture.”

I thought hard and, as I thought, a second frozen chill shot down my spine.

“Your journey,” I said. “Did it by any chance have anything to do with my own journey?”

Feroze licked his lips with furtive anticipation.

“Had your eyeballs read recently?” he asked, bending over to tie a shoelace.

“Eyeballs? Yes, as a matter of …

I looked across at the Master, who was looming over me with folded arms like an executioner. His brilliantined hair had been miraculously concealed beneath a giant off-white turban. A moth-eaten patch was covering his right eye. He fished a dessert spoon from the welt pocket of his vest, and licked it.

“The eyeball-reader at Ongole … that was you!”

Rising up on tiptoe, the Master smiled wryly. Without a word, he waited for me to ferret out the truth myself. Feroze always disliked doing someone else’s thinking for them.

As I sat there in the draft of the church hall, I began to understand.

“The journey, my journey, was really your journey of observation, wasn’t it? It was designed for you to observe me.”

Hakim Feroze tugged off the eyeball-reader’s disguise and stuffed away the spoon.

“Had a very lucky trip, meeting so many interesting people, haven’t you?” he said, without answering my question.

“What do you mean?”

“You tell me …”

I contemplated his words. He had a point. Even for India, with its constant stream of improbable characters, I had crossed paths with an excess of sages, swamis and eccentrics.

I thought back to the many unlikely episodes of the expedition.

“Sri Gobind in Madras … is that why he welcomed me so hospitably? And the duel at Sholapur?”

Feroze narrowed his eyes and smiled.

I scrolled back, remembering the other outlandish characters.

“Mr. Jafar and his lousy over-priced herbal gasoline … did you have anything to do with him? And what about the godman at Nandul … and the witch and, for that matter, what about Goadbaba?”

Climbing up on to the church’s altar, the Master rubbed his hands together and burst into laughter.

“We all need a little help from time to time,” he said.

“Help?”

Feroze smacked his hands together five times in a slow clap, until the nave echoed like a belfry at midnight. Outside, the rain was still pelting down. The church door seemed to open and slam. I assumed it was the wind.

“What’s all this about help?”

As usual, the Master wasn’t listening to my question. He was staring at something behind me. I turned round to face the aisle. Then came the morning’s second moment of perplexity.

Behind me, standing to attention in the church’s nave, was Bhalu.

In silence he went over to Feroze and greeted him. Then he turned to me and scratched his ear.

“What would you have done without me?” he laughed.

Like a Grand-Master who has checkmated the opponent in four moves, Feroze bathed in the satisfaction of it all.

“I don’t believe this,” I stammered. “It’s impossible!”

“Impossible as your chance meeting with Guptaji at Jamshedpur?”

“What are you talking about? That was Venky’s idea,” I said, biting my lip at revealing my own secret weapon.

“Ah, yes, Venkatraman the rickshawalla,” spat Feroze. “Nice chap, isn’t he?”

“You know him? You know Venky?”

The magician raised an eyebrow.

“Next thing,” I said, “you’ll be telling me you were responsible for Vatson and the Aghori sadhu in Varanasi.”

Feroze looked at the floor bashfully. He descended from the altar and sat down on the chair beside mine.

“So you knew all along I was coming to Calcutta? That chance meeting at the Albert Hall … it wasn’t chance at all, was it?”

The sorcerer remained tight-lipped. Instead of replying, he took a deep breath, timing the inhalation with his trusty pocket-watch.

“I suppose,” I said astringently, “you arranged for me to be robbed on the Farakka Express as well.”

At that, Feroze leapt to his feet.

“My friend,” he responded, “don’t blame me for your own negligence.”

“But what do I do now?” I asked, hoping to break the awkward silence which followed the Master’s outburst. “What’s the next part of the course?”

Feroze Hakim hurled his beloved bull’s pizzle riding crop to the floor. Then, seething with fury as I had never seen him before, he yelled:

“The course is over!”

“Over? So suddenly? Is that it?”

“Am I obliged to forewarn you of my decisions?”

“Have I passed?”

“How dare you denigrate this work by speaking in terms of pass and failure,” said the magician with characteristic iciness. “The pursuit of illusion is not about studying for prizes, or for study’s sake. There’s no right or wrong, no pass or fail. I have revealed to you the basic principles, and shown you what to look for. The rest is up to you …”

The Master was interrupted by a rapping at the church door. A second later it came again, louder than before. Strange, I thought, because when Bhalu had entered, the door hadn’t been locked. I asked Feroze who it might be. A fist struck the door a third time.

“Curious, aren’t you?” he said. “Better go and have a look.”

I stood up and paced back down the nave like a sleep-walker. Of course I was inquisitive. But after the events of the Afghan Church, little could surprise me. I twisted the handle clockwise, and wrenched the hefty oak portal inwards.

There was no one waiting on the outside. Slamming the door shut, I went back into the nave and marched back down the central aisle to the altar.

But Feroze and Bhalu had disappeared.

I called their names. There was no reply.

Glossary

Aga: sir; term of respect; loan-word from Persian and Turkish.

Aghori: one of several specific kinds of sadhu found in India, traditionally said to have been cannibalistic. Close to traditional shamans in their beliefs, they are thought to have the power to control spirits.

Anglo-Afghan Wars: three wars fought on Afghan soil between the British and Afghans – waged between 1839 and 1919 – in which the British were defeated conclusively each time.

Aquasonic® gel: a gel solution applied to an area (especially of the abdomen) before an ultrasound examination. See ultrasound.

areca: nut from the betel palm (sopaari in Hindi); essential ingredient for the preparation of paan.

Ashpaz, Khalifa: the master chef of the Hindu Kush, renowned for his colossal feasts, employed by Jan Fishan Khan.

ashram: center for spiritual learning.

Avatar: the incarnation of a Hindu god, usually Vishnu; a godman.

Ayurvedic: the ancient art of Hindu medicine, relying on the use of herbs, massage and meditation.

Bandicota indica: infamous gray-backed bandicoot common in India; one of the largest and hungriest rats in the world.

barafwalla: ice merchant or haulier; common sight in Indian cities and towns, where refrigeration still relies on blocks of ice.

Berndorf: town in Austria (south-west of Vienna) famous for its metal works and shell-casing factories at the time of the World War I.

bezoar. reddish stone found in the entrails of animals; concretion like a kidney stone. Also said to be extracted from an aged toad’s head. Forms a powerful amulet or talisman; especially against poison.

bhang: (Cannabis indica); preparation of pounded marijuana, from the hemp plant which is used in offerings at temples – such as Calcutta’s Kali temple.

bharh: miniature fired clay cup used to drink tea in Bengal and other regions; afforded no value and disposed of after a single use.

bhishtiwalia: one who sells drinking water carried in a goat hide; popular sight in Calcutta.

Bihari: person from the state of Bihar in north-eastern India. Many menial jobs in Calcutta are performed by impoverished Biharis.

bindi: dot – usually vermilion – frequently worn on the forehead of Hindu women. See tikka.

biri: small hand-rolled tobacco cigarette, popular in India. Often made by bonded laborers in Tamil Nadu.

Black Hole of Calcutta: prison cell where 146 British captives – held by the Nawab of Bengal – were incarcerated on the night of 20TH June 1756; all but 23 suffocated.

Bollywood: India’s most famous film studios, responsible for making hundreds of three-hour movie extravaganzas each year.

Brahmin: highest caste in India.

BSE: bovine spongiform encephalopathy; a neurological disease occurring in the brain and spinal column of infected cattle.

Cagliostro, Alessandro: “Prince of Quacks”; celebrated eighteenth-century Italian mountebank, magician and illusionist.

Cannabis indica: hemp plant commonly found in India from which marijuana, or bhang, is prepared.

chai-i-sabs: green tea; a popular drink frequently served in Afghanistan, Pakistan and northern India.

chaitan: the “devil’s tree”, the bark of which is powdered and burned by magicians to stupefy an audience.

chakotra: grapefruit, popular citrus fruit in India.

champa: [Michelia champa); low tree sacred to Hindus bearing fragrant creamy-white flowers.

chandni: silver.

chapatti: unleavened wheat bread.

chappal: slipper; used to mean “sandal”.

charpoy. literally “four legs”; simple rope bed without a mattress commonly seen on the streets of Indian towns and villages.

Chennai: original Indian name for Madras.

chilam: ritual clay pipe, as used by sadhus; regularly used for smoking marijuana or hashish.

chloroform: colorless sweet-smelling liquid formerly used as an anesthetic.

Chowkidar. Watchman.

Choolah: small stove.

Chor Bazaar: Thieves’ Market; the area in Mumbai where antique European and Indian objects can be found.

Chor: thief.

chowk: square, market area.

chukka: ankle-high laced boot, usually crafted from suede, resembling a polo boot, hence the name.

chullu: bootleg liquor, generally made from distilled grain.

coco-de-mer. mysterious nut of the coco-de-mer palm, which takes seven years to mature; native only to the island of Praslin in the Seychelles; wondrous mystical and medicinal properties have been attributed to the nuts in eastern Africa, the Middle East and in India.

daal: dish of cooked lentils popular throughout India.

dada: literally “Big Brother”; used to refer to gangster leaders and members of the Mafia operating at street level in Calcutta and other Indian cities.

darshan: audience with a holy person.

das: ten.

dhobi: laundry; also person who does laundry, usually by hand.

Dhobi’S itch: unpleasant eruption of the skin, particularly that of the inner thighs.

dhyaan: literally “concentration”, state of trance entered by Hindu mystics,

diazepam: sleeping pill and muscle relaxant containing benzodiazepine.

dom: person infamous in West Bengal for stealing skeletons. See: konkalwalla.

doxology: the study of hymns,

drugget: coarse hair and cotton woven rug.

ek: one.

ek-bahu: ritual penance as performed by a sadhu; such as standing on one foot or holding an arm upright for a number of years.

Englezabad: town on the border with Bangladesh, founded by the British in the late seventeenth-century as a trading post; also known as English (or “Ingraz”) Bazar.

erukkam: plant, the poisonous milk of whose flowers is used as a preparation to kill unwanted (female) new-born babies.

Fakir: Muslim holy man.

Fenny: distileded drink made from cashew or coconut, especially popular in Goa.

Ganesha: Hindu deity – especially popular in Maharashtra – usually represented with the head of an elephant and the body of a man.

Ganga: River Ganges; sacred water obtained from the river.

Gardiner: type of teapot named after an Englishman who founded a legendary ceramics factory in imperial Russia.

geophagy: condition whereby humans eat earth.

ghamela: crude shovel used by ghamelawallas.

ghamelawalla: person who buys dirt from a jeweler workshop’s floor and extracts minimal amounts of gold from it.

ghanti: literally “bell”; especially the small bell carried by all rickshawallas in Calcutta to announce their presence so that people to move out of their way.

ghat: steps leading down to a river or waterline; especially those in the holy city of Varanasi at which Hindus descend to the River Ganges.

ghee: clarified butter used in numerous Indian dishes.

Go: Japanese board game for two players, similar to draughts, but exceedingly difficult to master.

Goadbaba: literally “Mr. Sweet”; person who claims the ability of making anything taste of sugar merely by touching it.

godman: holy man claiming divine and miraculous powers, typically resorting to dubious methods to create illusions.

Grey-backed bandicoot: see Bandicota indica.

guru: teacher or mentor; literally “he who dispels darkness”; also guruji, where -ji is a suffix denoting respect.

haa: yes.

Habbakuk: codename used during World War II for Pyke’S invention “Pykrete”. See Pykrete.

Haji: Muslim who has been on the pilgrimage to Mecca.

Hammaam: Turkish-style steam bath.

Hand of Fatima: symbolic outstretched hand, commonly found across the Islamic world, associated with Fatima – daughter of the Prophet Mohammed – signifying his family and the duties of every Muslim. Herizi: relating to the Heriz region of Azerbaijan, known for its fabulous coarse tribal rugs, usually displaying geometric patterns and a central medallion.

hilsa: medium-sized salt-water fish which spawns in freshwater.

Hindi: one of the most widely spoken languages in India; especially in the north of the country. Hindustan: India; literally “Land of Hindus”.

Hobson-Jobson: dictionary of colloquial Anglo-Indian words and phrases, first published in 1886; renowned for its lore and extraneous information.

Houdini, Harry: legendary American illusionist and escapologist (1874- 1926); credited with devising hundreds of illusions, as well as exposing mediums and others (claimed by him) to be fakes.

Hydra: ferocious nine-headed water monster of Greek myth.

idli: steamed rice-cake popular in southern India.

Ikat: highly specialized system of weaving, perfected in India, where the warp, weft, or both threads, are tie-dyed before being woven; creating subtle designs on the cloth.

Ipecac: (Cephaelis ipecacuanha); South American shrub, a preparation of whose root is used as an emetic. Correctly called ipecacuanha,

jabba: (Hibiscus rosa-siensis); red hibiscus or China rose, whose large red flowers are popular adornments at temples.

jadoo: magic.

jadoowalla: magician; person said to have miraculous powers.

Jain: peaceful religious group in India, whose founder – Mahavira – broke away from Hinduism during the sixth-century BC.

Jalasayin: ghat at Varanasi where the deceased are cremated on enormous funeral pyres on the banks of the Ganges; also known as “Burning Ghat”.

jaldi: hurry up; quickly!

jalebi: deep-fried syrupy batter snack, yellow orange in color, popular throughout India.

jalousie shutters: slatted shutters built into a window-frame or door, the angle of whose horizontal slats can be adjusted to admit light and air, but to exclude sun and rain.

jambiya: curved Arab dagger, often with a silver scabbard and a rhino-horn hilt; the most prized examples are produced in Yemen.

Jami”a Masjid: great mosque near the Red Fort in Old Delhi; the largest mosque in India.

Jamun: (Stzygium cumini); Java plum tree, found throughout India, especially abundant in the south. Known for its rough bark, oval leathery leaves and white flowers.

Jan-guru: witch-hunter and exorcist whose trials (especially in remote Indian villages) supposedly detect “genuine” witches.

Janissary: member of an elite military unit of the Turkish army, formed during the fourteenth century, and famed for their marching band – the oldest in the world.

jinn: spirit, especially a kindly or mischievous one.

Kaaba: cubical building standing in the courtyard at the central mosque in the holy city of Mecca, containing a sacred black stone; the central focus of pilgrimage for Muslims.

Kabuli: relating to Kabul, capital city of Afghanistan.

Kali: devouring, destructive goddess (meaning “black” in Sanskrit); depicted as a vile woman bathed in blood, with a protruding tongue.

Kalighat: name from which “Calcutta” is derived.

kamandal: ritualistic water vessel carried by many sadhus.

Kanji: starchy water in which rice has been washed.

Klashi: name for the holy city of Varanasi, sacred to Hindus, situated on the River Ganges.

kelim: pile-less tapestry-woven rug frequently produced in bright colors; crafted in Turkey and other Near Eastern countries.

Kellar, Harry: American illusionist and conjuror, contemporary and great friend of Harry Houdini.

Kishmish: mixture of nuts and dried fruit popular in Afghanistan, Pakistan and northern India.

Kiswah: immense black cloth mantle, embroidered with gold calligraphy, crafted each year for the Kaaba at Mecca.

Kohl: antimony; brittle, silvery metal used powdered as an eye make-up.

Koli: traditional fishermen of Mumbai.

konkalwalla: literally “skeleton-man”; i.e. someone engaged (especially in Calcutta) in the business of selling human skeletons. See: dom.

kundalini: yogic idea of a divine energy coiled like a serpent at the base of the spine, which is activated by exercise.

lakh: one hundred thousand.

lungi: loincloth, worn in India and some neighboring countries; loanword from Persian, in which it correctly means “turban cloth”.

machhi: fish.

Mahabharata: ancient Sanskrit epic poem consisting of more than 220,000 lines, recounting the war between the Pandavas and the Kauravas.

Mahout: person who trains, keeps, or drives an elephant.

maidan: open space, especially a grassland, in a town.

Mandir: temple.

Marathi: Indo-Aryan language spoken in the state of Maharashtra.

Margashitsa Karthe star: star in the Hindu solar system whose appearance in early summer marks the start of the Gowds’ miracle asthma cure in Hyderabad.

masjid: mosque.

mattar-paneer: spiced dish of peas and curd cheese.

mehendi: reddish-orange preparation made from the leaves of the henna shrub [Lawsonia inermis), used to dye the hair and hands, especially at time of marriage.

mogra: [Jasminum ambac); fragrant off-white flower of the Arabian jasmine plant, used in garlands for a woman’s hair.

moksha: salvation, spiritual liberation, when the soul ascends to Paradise,

monosodium glutamate: white crystalline powder used to enhance the flavor of savory food, (chemical formula: HOOC.CH(NH_2)CH_2CH_2COONa).

muezzin: the Muslim call to prayer.

Mughal: dynasty of Mongols, of the line of Genghis Khan, who conquered India and were its Emperors immediately before the British advent.

mujahed: one who fights in a holy war (literally “struggler”). According to traditions, there are two kinds of Muslim Jihad: the lesser, armed struggle, and the Greater, with the mind and tongue.

Mumbai: original Indian name for Mumbai.

murgh mussallam: spiced chicken dish especially popular in northern India.

Mutiny of 1857: major revolt of Hindu and Muslim troops within the British Army; known as the “sepoy Mutiny” by the British, and the Revolt of 1857 by Indians.

naan: unleavened bread popular in the northern areas of India, as well as in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Naga: people from several distinct warrior tribes from north-east India, known traditionally for their head-hunting practices.

namaskar: Hindu greeting of bowing the head and placing the palms together.

namaste: common Hindi greeting (literally “I salute all divine qualities in you”); often accompanied by namaskar.

naswar: green-colored snuff favored by those living in the Himalayas.

Nawab: landowner or governor of an area of land; title relating to “prince”.

neem: (Azadirachta indica); a large evergreen tree common in India, used in the preparation of medicinal oils; its twigs are used to clean the teeth.

obsessive-compulsive disorder: anxiety disorder in which a person is preoccupied by recurrent activities or habits.

Oriya: Indo-Aryan language spoken in the state of Orissa, in eastern India,

ossuary: chamber in which bones are stored; especially those periodically exhumed from a small cemetery.

paan: leaf of the betel palm, combined with an astringent mixture of areca nut, lime, tobacco, etc.; the concoction – which is chewed – is very popular in India. The remains are generally spat out after chewing, staining the ground crimson.

pabda: small salt-water fish popular in West Bengal.

paisa: one hundredth part of a rupee; also used to mean “money”,

palanquin: covered litter suspended from four poles, borne by attendants; common in India until late nineteenth-century, superseded in Calcutta and other cities by the rickshaw.

Punch: five.

Panchganga: one of the ghats at Varanasi.

Parsi: Persian Zoroastrians, who settled in Mumbai in 1670 at the invitation of the British. Parsis fled Persia during the seventh-century AD and settled in what is now the Indian state of Gujarat.

Partition: process of the splitting of the Hindu-Muslim India, in 1947 to form what is now Pakistan, Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) and India.

Pashtu: language of the Pashtuns (incorrectly called “Pathans”); the most common language in eastern Afghanistan.

Pashtun: mountain people numbering about twelve million, fabled for their bravery, located mainly in eastern Afghanistan and north-west Pakistan.

Phansigar: one of the secret fraternity of Thugs who strangled travelers in honor of Kali; known as “the People of the Noose”. See: Thuggee.

pilau: (more correctly “palao”); Central Asian spiced rice dish, popular in northern India, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Pipal: [Ficus religiosa); large long-living fig tree common in India; the tree under which Buddha is said to have been sitting when he attained enlightenment,

pognophobia: the fear of facial hair, especially beards.

pomfret: flat fish of the Stromateidae family, abundant in the Arabian Sea; common dish in Mumbai.

pongamia: [Pongamia pinnata); commonly seen tree in avenues and along river banks throughout India, with pale bark and wide sprawling branches.

puchkawalla: person who prepares snacks on street stalls and sells them to passers-by.

puja: rites performed in worship of the Hindu deities.

Pandit: religious scholar versed in the ancient Sanskrit texts who oversee religious ceremonies and rites.

punkhawalla: person responsible for fanning others before electric fans or air-conditioning were available.

puri: small circular fried wheat bread.

Pykrete: amalgam of wood pulp and ice said to be twelve times stronger than concrete; the brainchild of eccentric British inventor Geoffrey Pyke, who enthused Mountbatten and Churchill with the idea of constructing 2,000-feet-long Pykrete battleships, during World War II.

Raj: rule, commonly referring to the British colonial rule of India.

Rajput: princely rulers whose dynasties reigned over much of north-west India, especially Rajasthan.

Rama: seventh incarnation of Vishnu, the heroic son of King Dasaratha of Ayodhya, dedicated to ridding the earth of evil-doers. See: Ramayana.

Ramasi: secret language of the brotherhood of Thugs.

Ramayana: ancient Sanskrit epic describing the deeds of Rama, the seventh incarnation of Vishnu; also popular Indian soap opera based on the ancient text, renowned for its lavish costumes and flamboyant portrayals of the deities.

Rationalist: national movement in India seeking to curb the rise of mendacious godmen.

rickshaw: (correctly “jinrickisha”); two-wheeled passenger cart pulled by one person, brought to India in 1880s by the Chinese; now only found in Calcutta, they are being phased out. Motorized version popular across India, indeed across Asia, is known as an “auto-rickshaw”, or simply “rickshaw”.

Robert-Houdin, Jean-Eugene: French stage magician (1805-1871), regarded as the father of modern conjuring. Harry Houdini named himself after Robert-Houdin but later sought to expose his former hero.

ruddiwalla: “rag-picker”; person who searches for rags or other scraps to be recycled.

rumaal: handkerchief; especially a knotted one, as used by Thugs to strangle their victims.

rupia: rupee, the currency of India.

sadhu: holy man or sage.

sahib: honorific title of address, meaning “sir” or “Mr.” in India; Arabic loanword, it signifies friend, owner and sir in various usages.

sal: (Shorea robusta); evergreen hardwood tree prized for its timber; second in importance only to teak.

salwaar kameer: lose-fitting shirt and pants, popular in northern India, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

samadhi: state of profound meditation.

sari: long piece of cloth worn by women in India as a robe.

sati: custom of a Hindu widow immolating herself on her deceased husband’s funeral pyre, supposedly in emulation of Siva’s consort; literally “a virtuous woman”.

Sayed: honorific title borne by descendants of the Prophet Mohammed.

Shah: title (literally, “king”) borne by descendants of the Prophet Mohammed, who also trace their ancestry to the Sassanian emperors.

In India, the name occurs as a surname in Hindus, particularly those from Gujarat, although they are not from the Prophet’s family.

Shah-Saz: “King-Maker”; the epithet of Nawab Jan Fishan Khan.

Shaitan: the Devil; Hindi loan-word taken from Arabic; derived from shatn, “opposition”.

Sitar: Indian stringed instrument, similar to the lute, with a long, fretted neck.

sopaari: see areca.

sukto : Bengali dish of fried, diced vegetables.

sumal: tree from mainland China whose wood irritates sensitive skin.

swami: a Hindu religious instructor.

taklu: “baldie”; derogatory slang term in Hindi for a balding person.

talwaar: long Indian saber.

tandoori: food cooked in a tandoor, a cylindrical clay oven, especially bread and meat marinated in yoghurt and spices and threaded on to skewers.

tantra: religious texts laying out the path to enlightenment.

tantrik: practitioner of tantra; a holy man.

tapasya: self-inflicted regime of austerity or penance employed by Hindu holy men.

Telugu: Dravidian language spoken across the state of Andhra Pradesh in south-east India.

thali: metal tray in which an array of grains and vegetables are placed; originally from south of India, now found across the country.

Thuggee: cult of ritual murderers dedicated to the goddess Kali, who strangled tens of thousands of travelers until their persecution in the mid-nineteenth-century. See: Phansigar.

tikka: vermilion powder smeared on the forehead by Hindus during religious ritual as a symbol of the divine; now used by women as a decorative accessory; also known as “tilak”.

tilak: see: tikka.

transducer: sensitive probe arm attached to an ultrasound unit which scans a pregnant woman’s abdomen when detecting the development of a fetus.

trephination: adaptation of trepanation – conceived by Dutch physician Dr Bart Huges in 1962; to drill a “ third eye” above a patient’s forehead using a high-speed masonry drill.

Ultrasound: electronic medical unit designed to detect the development of an unborn child by use of a transducer; commonly used in India to ascertain the gender of a fetus, so that unwanted female fetuses can be aborted.

yogi: a person on a mystical path; one who practices yoga.

Vedic: relating to the Vedas, the ancient sacred Hindu texts.

Vibhuti: gray-colored ash commonly produced from nowhere by Indian godmen, and sprinkled on to the hands of devotees.

Vyasa: “the Compiler”; poet of the great Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata.

Yakshi: goddess who represents the forces of nature, especially trees.

Felling a tree rouses the anger of the deity.

Zarathustra: (also “Zoroaster”); deity revered by Parsis, who lived as a sage in Persia during the sixth century BC.

TRAVELS WITH MYSELF

Collected Work

TAHIR SHAH

MOSAÏQUE BOOKS

For Rachana, with much love

and twenty years of memories together.

Contents

ONE - Aboard the Maharajah Express

TWO - A Conversation Paid for in Postage Stamps

THREE - A Labyrinth in Fès

FOUR - A Price on Their Heads

FIVE - Brazil’s Sanctuaries From Abuse

SIX - Buying A Home in Morocco

SEVEN - Café Clock Cookbook

EIGHT - Cairo’s City of the Dead

NINE - Casablanca Junk

TEN - Chatwin and The Songlines

ELEVEN - Chefchaouen

TWELVE - Colonial Clubs of India

THIRTEEN - Damascus

FOURTEEN - Desert Stopover

FIFTEEN - Essaouira, A Portrait

SIXTEEN - Fès

SEVENTEEN - Friendship, Morocco

EIGHTEEN - Gendercide

NINETEEN - Goldeneye

TWENTY - In Cambodia’s New Killing Fields

TWENTY-ONE - In Search of King Solomon’s Mines

TWENTY-TWO - In the Scorpion Palace

TWENTY-THREE - The Islamic Legacy of Timbuktu

TWENTY-FOUR - Jinn Lore

TWENTY-FIVE - Jma el Fna

TWENTY-SIX - Little Lhasa

TWENTY-SEVEN - Love in the Desert

TWENTY-EIGHT - Memoir of a Torture Jail

TWENTY-NINE - Morocco’s Alpine Hideaway

THIRTY - Morocco’s Pirate Realm

THIRTY-ONE - Moulay Idriss

THIRTY-TWO - Of All the Medinas in the World

THIRTY-THREE - Old Cape Town

THIRTY-FOUR - On The River of God

THIRTY-FIVE - On the Skeleton Coast

THIRTY-SIX - Ostrich Hats and Model T’s

THIRTY-SEVEN - The People of the Cloak

THIRTY-EIGHT - Queen of the Ku Klux Klan

THIRTY-NINE - Remembering Sir Wilfred

FORTY - Romantic Travel

FORTY-ONE - The Royal Mansour, Marrakech

FORTY-TWO - Subcontinent of Miracles

FORTY-THREE - Swallowing Live Fish

FORTY-FOUR - Swiss Movement

FORTY-FIVE - Tetouan

FORTY-SIX - The Afghan Notebook

FORTY-SEVEN - The Fattening Rooms

FORTY-EIGHT - The Favour Network

FORTY-NINE - The Forgotten Women of Bhopal

FIFTY - The Guerrilla Girls

FIFTY-ONE - The Khalili Collection of Islamic Art

FIFTY-TWO - The Laughter Club

FIFTY-THREE - The Magic of the Ordinary

FIFTY-FOUR - The Mango Rains

FIFTY-FIVE - The Mother Teresa Bandwagon

FIFTY-SIX - The Penniless Trillionaire

FIFTY-SEVEN - The Queen of Assamese Hearts

FIFTY-EIGHT - The Romance of Richard Halliburton

FIFTY-NINE - The Sanctuary of Lot

SIXTY - To Tibet

SIXTY-ONE - Where Widows Go to Die

SIXTY-TWO - Women on Death Row

ONCE UPON A TIME there was a little boy who loved picking up pebbles on the beach.

No journey was complete until he’d spent time selecting the very choicest pebble, and stuffed it in his pocket. As soon as he got home, he put the pebble on his bedroom window ledge.

Some of the pebbles in the collection were smooth, cool and black, others were jade-green, more still were coarse and, yet more, seemed to smell of a secret island far away.

As the years passed, the little boy took comfort in his pebble collection. In times of sadness they were there for him, a reminder of happier days – triggering memories of a beach, of rolling waves, or of the setting sun.

One day, the little boy grew up.

It was time to leave home. He longed to leave on a journey in search of the Mango Rains. But, before setting out, he packed up all his belongings in tea crates, and put most of them into a storage locker, an eternity of waiting for things he once had loved.

Before clearing his bedroom, he went over to the pebble shelf, stroked a hand over one or two of the stones, breathed in deep. Then, taking a battered old shoebox from under his bed, he laid out the collection in nests of crumpled newspaper.

Twenty years passed.

The box was never opened, not once. The little boy, now a man, kept it locked up in a cupboard. He never forgot it was there, and would take comfort that it was with him.

The pebbles had been chosen at random over so many years, selected then studied, turned into the light, and observed from every angle once again. As the years passed, the types of stones he chose differed depending on his mood or age, the latter ones being quite different from the first one of all.

The stories in this book are like the pebbles in the little boy’s collection. They’re all different shapes and styles, and come from all corners of the world. Some will satisfy the curiosity of a select few, while others will appeal to all. I hope that the words will remind you of encounters you have had yourself, and stimulate thoughts you have never entertained before.

The common thread, if there is one, is fascination.

I’ve written about people, places, and things that have had a genuine and even mesmerizing grip over me. Whether they be the women on America’s death row, or the thousands who live in Cairo’s cemeteries, or portraits of lands through which my feet have strayed.

For me, this is a collection of work that exemplifies travels through many realms – north, south, east and west. Each story is a fragment of a journey, a memory to me of happiness or hardship. Designed to be opened at random, this book will, I hope, be a companion on a journey or in an idle moment at home. Although in random order, the styles and the quality of the writing vary – a reflection of my own journey on the writer’s path.

The collection is a kaleidoscope of adventure, a lens held over humanity and oddity, and the ordinary as well.

As for the little boy and his precious collection of pebbles, he’s now living in Casablanca, and has a little boy of his own.

Yesterday I took him down to the beach just before dusk. Together, we watched the sun slip down into the calm waters of the Atlantic. When it was gone, we stood there in the twilight in silence. After a long while he asked:

‘Shall we go home, Baba?’

I tapped a hand down to the beach.

‘Pick up a pebble,’ I said.

‘But why?’

‘Because it’s time you started a collection of your own.’

ONE

Aboard the Maharajah Express

A WILD RUMPUS of Indo-Gothic style, Mumbai’s CST station stands as a glorious monument to the excesses of the British Raj. The evening’s rush hour is well underway amid its turrets and spires, great sprawling domes, leering gargoyles and, of course, the towering statues of Imperial Britannia.

Moving at break-neck speed through the building’s cavernous heart, the oceans of commuters make a beeline for the waiting trains. Once the blur of humanity is safely aboard, with many more clinging to the outside, there’s a whirring of diesel engines. A jolt, then another, a grinding of steel, and the packed carriages heave away into the night.

India’s rail network is vast and efficient, but low on frills.

It’s all about getting a whole lot of people across town – or across the country – with the least amount of fuss. The network has more than sixty-four thousand kilometres of track, fourth most in the world.

Despite the faded grandeur of its exterior, CST station has a stripped-down functionality, catering to more than three million passengers each day.

In their rush to get home, most of the commuters don’t notice the commotion at the far end of the terminus.

On the last platform, well away from the crowds, there’s the distinct whiff of luxury, on a scale that would have impressed even the British Raj.

A small army of staff are rolling out a lengthy red carpet – up the steps from the VIP parking and along the platform. As soon as it’s laid, a bearer sprinkles it in pink rose petals, while another steps forward with a silver salver laden with flutes of chilled Champagne.

A moment later, a brass band is in position. And, as they begin to play, the sleek crimson carriages of India’s most luxurious train, the Maharajah Express, glide into place.

Then, right on cue, the passengers arrive.

Hailing from the United States, Europe, and from India itself, they are soon festooned in fragrant garlands, symbolic red tikka dabbed onto their foreheads, their fingers washed in rose water. And, while they admire the spotless livery of the train that will be their home for the next week, the hospitality staff lead them aboard to their cabins.

I boarded along with about seventy guests. To accommodate us, the Maharajah Express had sixteen guest carriages, two restaurants, two bars, and dozens and dozens of staff.

The cabin assigned to me was in a carriage called ‘Katela’, located about halfway down the train. Adorned with sumptuous fabrics and with mahogany furniture, it was panelled in teak, bathed in old-world charm. Best of all – even better than the fact there was WiFi everywhere – was the en suite bathroom. I’m a sucker for fabulous bathrooms. Ornamented with marble and with silver fittings, it boasted a flush-toilet and a power-shower. The larger cabins were even more decadent still, with roll-top baths.

As I stood there admiring the details, my valet – named Vikram – introduced himself. Turbanned, ever smiling, and exquisitely polite, he begged me to ask him for even the most insignificant request. As I was to soon find out, he lived in little more than a cupboard in the corridor. Whenever he heard me approaching, he’d dart out. And, standing to attention, he would await orders, grinning like a Cheshire cat.

A few minutes after boarding, the Maharajah Express slipped out of CST station on a schedule all of its own. As it did so, I tasted real luxury – a world in which the train waits for the passengers to be ready for it to leave.

Pushing out through Mumbai’s endless suburbs and slums, there was a sense of awkwardness at first. It was as if I was separated from appalling poverty – that was inches away – by nothing more than a pane of glass.

On the first evening I took dinner in the Rang Mahal restaurant. Beneath a hand-painted ceiling – a gold floral motif on vermillion – the dining car was beyond opulent. The plates were Limoges edged with gold, the glasses finest crystal, and the flatware monogrammed with the letter ‘M’.

With an entire carriage devoted to the kitchens – packed with chefs, equipment, and the freshest supplies, the two restaurants serve cuisine from both East and West. The beverage list, too, features a tremendous range of wines and Champagnes from France, the New World, and India as well – there’s even a sommelier to help you choose.

Sitting there, as I watched the slums give way to countryside, I found myself thinking of the Maharajahs and their obsession with locomotives.

With the coffers of the Princely States filled to bursting, funding railways between their dominions wasn’t held back by the usual constraints. Vying with each other to create the most over the top carriages, the Maharajahs installed salons and billiard rooms, private suites, and even air-conditioning – made from electric fans and blocks of ice.

The Nizam of Hyderabad’s carriages were said to be the most opulent of all. They were adorned with ivory and 24-carat gold. But the prize for sheer bling-bling surely went to the Maharajah of Vadodara. He had a throne installed aboard his royal train.

Coincidentally, it was along his stretch of track that the Maharajah Express took us first. The next morning we awoke to find ourselves in the city of Vadodara, capital of Gujarat.

Stepping down onto a red carpet once again, we were serenaded by musicians, and then led on a tour of the ancient Gaekwad culture. And with it, came the first of a royal flush of palaces – a banquet at the Jambughoda estate at lunch, and another at the awe-inspiring Laxmi Vilas Palace at dusk.

There, in the great durbar hall, the royal band was positioned on a low dais. With a full retinue of staff and factota, the Maharajah could have commanded anything in terms of musical entertainment. And so I appreciated all the more what had been laid on. A pair of musicians was strumming simple stringed instruments, with a third playing about forty soup bowls filled with varying levels of water, with the end of a spoon.

During the night the train roved northward, reaching the Rajasthani city of Udaipur as I took my last bite of toast.

One of the great treasures of India, Udaipur has palaces aplenty, each one more astounding than the next. At the centre of it all is the Lake Palace, floating like a magical marble island amid the serene waters of Lake Pichola. Famously, it featured in the 1980s James Bond film Octopussy. From a vantage point high above, we were given a private reception in the sixteenth century City Palace, in which the Maharajah and his family still reside.

On once again through the night to Jodhpur, Rajasthan’s ‘Blue City’. Set on the edge of the Great Thar Desert, Jodhpur bustles with life, with wares, and with a kaleidoscope of colour. Many of the buildings are dyed blue with indigo, signifying the homes of aristocracy.

During a famine in the 1930s, the Maharajah there commissioned the Umaid Bhavan, a vast Art Deco palace, to give the starving populace paid work. The colossal dome was only accomplished by the ingenuity of a local engineer. The stones fitted together so tightly that there was no space for them to be pushed into position by hand. The engineer came up with a brilliant solution. The giant corner stones were placed on blocks of ice. As the ice melted, the stones dropped slowly into place.

On the evening of our visit to Jodhpur, we were treated to a banquet on the battlements of the colossal Meherangarh Fort, itself one of my most memorable experiences of recent years.

Yet, on the Maharajah Express there was almost no time to stop and ponder the wonders, which were coming thick and fast.

The red carpet was awaiting us once again.

Climbing back aboard, we sped northward once more, this time to the city of Bikaner.

The next afternoon was spent touring the exquisite Lalgarh Palace, its red sandstone structure adorned with sublime filigree work. Then, just before nightfall, we mounted a convoy of camel carts and trouped into the Thar Desert. A banquet had been prepared under the stars, Rajasthani tribal dancers and campfires illuminating the night.

Another day, and another city.

This time, the crème de la crème – Jaipur. Capital of Rajasthan, it’s a raw and regal fusion of medieval and modern. One of the must-visit destinations for anyone, the ‘Pink City’ is steeped in nostalgia and in a dazzlingly vibrant charm unlike anything else.

The highlight of the entire journey came for me that afternoon. Having reached the Jai Mahal Palace, we were invited to take part in the sport of kings – a match of ‘elephant polo’.

Mahouts steer the elephants, while the riders lean down with their mallets, in a desperate attempt to knock a football into the goal. Quite unlike the rip-roaring speed of equestrian polo, the game played on elephant back is sedate to put it mildly – the overwhelming problem being that the elephants tend to burst the ball by treading on it.

After Jaipur, the Maharajah Express rumbled on to the tiger reserve at Ranthambore, one of the only sanctuaries of the noblest of cats left on the Subcontinent. And on again to the deserted Mughal city of Fatehpur Sikri. Constructed by Emperor Akbar, it’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and remains as pristine as the day it was built four centuries ago.

The following morning, we reached the most famous landmark of all – the Taj Mahal. Lost in an eerie mist, the Taj is one of those buildings whose chilling beauty can grasp even the most wayward attention for hours at a time. That the Maharajah Express should deliver us so close to such a jewel of human endeavour seemed like the ultimate perfection.

Late that afternoon, the bubble of opulence that we all now regarded as our home, chugged through an eternity of slums, the lead up to any sprawling Indian city. And, eventually, we came to a halt on a platform at Delhi’s Safdarjung station just in time for the evening rush. By now, there was a definite sense that it was our train, just as the thought of leaving it was almost too much to bear.

Before stepping down onto the red carpet for the last time, my valet, Vikram, eased himself out from his cupboard in the corridor and saluted me. Then he shook me by the hand.

‘Very sad you leaving, Sahib,’ he said.

I thanked him. He shook my hand a second time, and saluted again for good measure.

A moment later, I was just another lost soul adrift on a sea of commuters. I glanced back at the platform. The Maharajah Express had vanished.

I wondered if it had ever been there at all.

TWO

A Conversation Paid for in Postage Stamps

HICHAM HARRASS LIVES in a one-room shack he built himself on the western-most edge of Casablanca.

The walls are made from third-hand breeze blocks and the roof is laid with rusting tin. His home does not have an address, but it does have a number. It is number 2043. All around it there’s a jumble of other shacks, each with their number daubed on the wall in dripping red paint. If you turned up at the bidonville, the shanty-town, you’d have no hope in finding Hicham’s place in the maze of alleyways. But ask for him by name and every man, woman and smallest child, will jab a finger towards his door.

I met Hicham because of his passion for postage stamps.

Our house is half a mile from the Atlantic. Its gardens are an oasis of date palms and mimosa trees, and are surrounded on all sides by the breeze block shanty-town. When we first moved into the house I must admit I was anxious. We had no idea how our neighbours would greet us, whether they could get used to a family of foreigners living in their midst.

One morning during our first week in Casablanca, there was a tap at the door. I went to open it, and found an elderly man standing in the frame. His skin was the colour of roasted almonds. He had a long shiny face with a scrub of white beard at the end of his chin. He wore a frayed black and white wool jelaba, and old yellow baboush slippers on his feet.

Before I could ask how I could help him, the man extended a hand, smiled, said his name was Hicham, and that he collected postage stamps.

‘Do you have any to spare?’ he enquired politely. ‘I could pay you money for them, a few dirhams.’

I thought for a moment.

‘We haven’t received any mail yet,’ I replied. ‘We’ve just arrived.’

Hicham’s smile melted. I told him to come back in a week.

‘Will you forget?’ he asked.

I promised not to.

A week later Hicham was at the door again. I had collected five British stamps, all bearing the Queen’s head. I handed them over, and a remarkable friendship began.

After that I collected all the stamps on my letters and gave them to Hicham. He was a proud man and insisted on paying me, although he had almost no money at all. I didn’t want to offend him by refusing payment, and so we came up with a solution.

We agreed to meet at his home at the same time each week. I would pass over the postage stamps and, in return, he could tell me about his life.

Hicham Harrass was born in a village three days’ walk from the southern city of Agadir. His father had been a farmer, with half an acre of dusty land. Along with five brothers and a sister, he grew up in a house made from flotsam, gleaned from the Atlantic waves.

When Hicham was seven years old, a sehura, a witch, came to the house and declared that he would drop dead within the next cycle of the moon. The only way to avoid such a fate, she said, was for Hicham’s parents to give the boy away to a stranger. The family was very upset but, believing the witch’s prediction would come true, they gave him to the next man who came into the village. Fortunately for Hicham, that man was a trader, a man called Ayman.

‘He needed a boy to help him,’ said Hicham, ‘and so I travelled around Morocco with him and his cart, buying and selling scrap metal as we went. On the long journeys between small towns he taught me,’ Hicham continued. ‘He taught me about life, and how to live it.’

I asked what he meant.

The old man’s wife flustered over with more mint tea.

‘Ayman taught me to be selfless,’ he said. ‘That means giving more to the people you meet than you take from them. And it means walking softly on the Earth.’

As the years had passed, Ayman and the young Hicham crisscrossed the Kingdom again and again. They travelled from Agadir to Essaouira, from Marrakech to Fès, from Tangier to Casablanca, always on the donkey cart piled high with scrap metal.

‘We visited places that aren’t on any maps,’ said Hicham. ‘It was adventure. Real adventure. You can’t understand what it was like – it was like waking from a dream! Every mile that we travelled, Ayman would talk. Every mile was a lesson. He taught me about honour, and to tell the truth. It’s because of Ayman that I cannot lie. Truth is the backbone of my life. It’s my religion.’

‘But Islam is your religion,’ I said.

‘It’s the same thing,’ said Hicham. ‘Islam is Truth. It’s the truth to believe in yourself, in those around you, and in God.’

Almost every week for a year, Hicham and I met and talked and talked, in conversation paid for in postage stamps. There are so many memorable conversations in my head, but few have ever been quite so revealing as those with Hicham. Over the months, I found myself grasping the basics of what must surely be real Islam.

One afternoon, Hicham invited me in, served me a ubiquitous glass of steaming mint tea, and said:

‘You are young, your eyes are wide open, your mind is clear. But you must take care to understand.’

‘To understand what?’

‘To understand the right Path.’

Hicham called out the door to his wife, who was chatting to a neighbour in the street. He apologized.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘she forgets the duty of honouring a guest with food.’

I asked about the Path.

‘To understand the right Path,’ Hicham said, stroking his tuft of beard, ‘you must understand what it is not. It’s easy. It’s a lesson in life. Islam is not complicated, or cruel, or unfair. Anyone who cannot describe it in the most simplistic way is telling falsehoods. He’s telling lies. He’s as bad as the fanatics.’

I asked about the fanatics – about Al-Qaeda, and other radical groups.

Hicham rubbed his eyes.

‘They pretend that what they are doing is in the name of Allah, but it’s in the name of Satan,’ he said very softly. ‘They are hijacking our religion. Open your eyes and see it for yourself! Islam teaches tolerance and modesty. It doesn’t tell people to fly passenger jets into skyscrapers, or to strap plastic explosives to the waists and to slaughter innocent women and children. These people must be stopped.’

The next week, I handed over a fresh crop of postage stamps.

As always, the old man spent a few moments poring over them, commenting on each one. His favourites were from England but, ‘not those silly ones with the Queen,’ he would say. ‘I like the big, more unusual ones. They hint at the society, the tradition.’

I steered the conversation away from postage stamps, and onto the problems of the world. I asked Hicham how Islam could stop Al-Qaeda. He didn’t say anything at first; he was too busy sorting through the stamps.

‘I’ll tell you,’ he said at length. ‘You have to starve them of publicity. That’s what to do. Don’t report their misdeeds. Ignore them. Pretend they don’t exist.’

‘Won’t that just make them wilder for publicity?’

Hicham laughed. He laughed and he laughed until his old sagging cheeks were the colour of beetroot.

‘Of course it would,’ he said. ‘But it doesn’t matter how angry they get, so long as we rise up tall and spread the truth about Islam. We must tell people the facts, the real facts. That’s what I’m saying.’

‘What are the real facts?’

‘Tell them that Islam doesn’t order women to veil,’ he said. ‘The tradition was copied from the Christians of Byzantium. And tell them that Islam doesn’t say you cannot drink wine – it just says you can’t become intoxicated. And,’ Hicham went on, his voice rising in volume, ‘you can tell them that Islam says that all Muslims are equal. We are brothers. That means an imam or a religious scholar is equal to us. He can’t tell us what to do!’

Three weeks ago I flew to London for a few days, leaving my wife and the children at our oasis in the shanty-town. On the evening I returned to Casablanca, there was a knock at the door.

‘That will be Hicham,’ I said to my wife, ‘he’ll be wondering where I have been.’

I opened the door, expecting to see the old man’s face. But it wasn’t him. It was his wife, Khadija. She was crying.

‘My husband died three days ago,’ she said. ‘He told me if anything ever happened to him, that I should give you this.’

The old woman was holding a box. She held it out towards me. I thanked her. A moment later she was gone. I went inside to my desk, turned on the lamp, and opened the box.

In it were Hicham’s stamp albums. I sat down in the dim light. I was sad to have lost a wise friend, but at the same time I was happy – happy that we had found each other at all, and had so many good conversations, each one paid for in postage stamps.

THREE

A Labyrinth in Fès

THEIR HOOVES STUMBLING over the flagstones, a procession of clove-brown pack mules lurch downhill into the ancient labyrinth.

Laden with tanned sheepskins and sacks of cement, with soap powder and TV sets in crates, the mules ply a route trodden by animals and men for a thousand years and more.

The Fès medina is a vast sprawling honeycomb of interwoven lanes, many of them no wider than a barrel’s length. They form a kaleidoscope of life that’s changed little in centuries, the spiritual heart of Morocco. Wander the streets and you’re cast back in time as your senses are overpowered. The pungent scent of lamb roasting on spits, the muffled sound of hammers striking great sheets of burnished brass; the sight of camel heads hanging outside butchers’ stalls.

In recent years it’s Marrakech that’s attracted the bulk of Morocco’s tourists. But, as that city inches ever closer to becoming a Disneyland distortion of reality, it’s Fès that stands as a beacon for the genuine article – without doubt the only medieval Arab city on Earth left almost completely in tact.

Moroccans regard Fès as nothing short of a sacred treasure trove. In whispers they describe the dark authenticity which doesn’t exist anywhere else. It’s true that some visitors find the medina’s labyrinth bewitching, even unsettling, but all who reach out and grasp it, are mesmerized by what they find.

Founded in the year 789 by King Idriss I, on the river whose name it bears, Fès has been a centre of culture and learning since the days of Harun ar-Rachid. Once part of a network of interconnected cities, spread throughout the Islamic world, Fès was linked by pilgrimage routes to Cordoba, Baghdad, Cairo and Samarkand. At the forefront of knowledge, and home to the greatest thinkers of its day, it was a city where breakthroughs were made – in science and technology, in literature and the arts.

But time is a great leveller.

For centuries Fès lay asleep – its palaces, fondouks, medrasas and mosaic fountains, each one a jewel of craftsmanship, hidden beneath a veil. Although proud of their city, the rich gradually moved away to the new town, or to Casablanca – the kingdom’s economic hub – leaving the ancient medina to languish.

Only now is the veil being lifted.

And, nowhere is the change faster than on Talaa Kebir. A main thoroughfare bustling with people and animals, feet and hooves jostling for space, the street almost defies description. Angled steeply downhill, (its name translates as ‘great climb’), it snakes down all the way to the ancient Karaouiyine Mosque.

Beginning at the fabulous arched blue gate of Bab Boujloud, Talaa Kebir runs deep into the rabbit warren of alleyways and lanes, spanning centuries of life. To stroll down it is to strip away the layers of humanity towards its medieval core.

Every inch of the way, it’s packed with action.

There are street stalls heaped with melons, pomegranates and prickly pears. Fish sellers, their battered old carts serenaded by cats. Knife sharpeners grinding away at rusty blades, barbers and blind men, merchants, musicians and mendicants. Either side of the street, there are stalls piled high with ordinary wares – flour sieves, sneakers and underpants, bunches of fresh mint furled up in newspaper, loofahs and Man United football strips.

While there’s an abundance of tourist kitsch, most of the stuff on offer is aimed at ordinary Moroccans – in a way the magic of the place. And, as if the daily bustle weren’t enough, weaving through the crowds like shuttles on a loom are the pack mules. Almost everything on sale is heaved into the medina on their trusty backs.

But centuries of slumber have taken a heavy toll on Talaa Kebir, a theatre of the ordinary – and extraordinary. The wooden shop-fronts are rotting, their foundations battered by the elements – searing summer heat and austere winter cold. Most of the merchants can’t afford to make repairs. They struggle to make a living as it is.

Fortunately though, UNESCO spearheaded an international campaign, adding the ancient medina to its roll call of World Heritage sites. Although not actually paying for repairs – which were funded by the Moroccan government under the auspices of the King – UNESCO made a master plan for the old city’s revival. The first job undertaken was to erect wooden scaffolding around more than a thousand buildings regarded as in danger of collapsing.

One of the most prominent success stories – not to mention one of the greatest architectural masterpieces in Fès – is the Bouinania Medrasa, the celebrated religious school. Found on Talaa Kebir, it’s recently been restored, and offers a window into a medieval realm that has vanished throughout the Arab world. Get there early, stand in the central courtyard, and you can’t help but travel back in time.

Another renovated marvel, a stone’s throw from the central thoroughfare, is the Fondouk el-Nejjarine, a fabulous galleried caravanserai. Nearby it is the Attarine Medrasa, yet another newly-restored tour de force of culture, built seven centuries ago.

Spend a little time traipsing through the medina, and you come to realize that it’s all about detail. Wherever you look, it’s there: A pattern sculpted into the plaster frieze above a doorway, a tarnished appliqué lamp that’s a work of art in its own right; a mosaic fountain at which a pack mule is pausing to slake its thirst.

And, according to some of the foreigners obsessed by Fès, it’s the attention to detail that makes all the difference.

An American scholar who’s lived in the medina for more than a decade, David Amster is one of them. He believes in ‘guerilla restoration’ on a micro scale. Whenever he’s raised a little money through his tiny 18th century guest house, called Dar Bennis, David ploughs the funds into hiring a team of master craftsmen. Often working at night when the streets are empty, they restore the ancient zellij mosaic fountains, and repair centuries-old walls with medluk,a traditional lime rendering.

‘The work isn’t fast,’ says David over a glass of tar-like morning café noir, ‘but what’s important is getting it right.’ He fumbles in his coat pocket and pulls out a crumpled twist of iron. ‘Look at this nail,’ he says dreamily, ‘it was handmade three hundred years ago by someone who cared about detail. If he cared so much about a single insignificant nail like this, imagine how much he cared about an entire building!’

Half way down Talaa Kebir, opposite the Bouinania Medrasa, is a small alley, beneath what’s left of the medieval water clock. Venture down it and, as it telescopes into nothingness, take a left again. You emerge into a small courtyard, once a home and now the celebrated Café Clock.

The Clock, as it’s known by all, is set over half a dozen levels, and is one of the medina’s most lively oases – popular with locals and foreigners alike. Serving up a mélange of Moroccan and continental dishes, it’s the brainchild of Englishman and former maitre d’, Mike Richardson.

Decorating a camel burger with a little garnishing as it leaves the kitchen, Mike flutters a hand out towards the labyrinth through which Talaa Kebir wends a path. ‘It takes time to understand Fès,’ he says. ‘And in some ways you’re more baffled the longer you stay here. I can’t claim to be an expert, but I admit that the city has seeped into my blood. Now I’ve lived here I don’t know if I could ever put roots down anywhere else. Look around you – Fès is a splinter of Paradise!’

Arranged inwards around central courtyards, many cooled by fragrant orange trees, traditional Moroccan architecture tends to be hidden from an outsider’s view. Roam the lanes of the medina and you can find yourself desperate to glimpse the jewels that lie behind firmly bolted doors.

A tip for anyone eager to peek inside – go in search of your very own home in Fès. Instantly, the arched cedar portals are pulled open from within, and you find yourself ushered in. It’s the best way to conjure the doors to open.

For the last five years, Fred Sola has been finding homes for foreigners and assisting them in renovations. A Frenchman born in Casablanca, he’s the owner of the palatial Riad Laaroussa, and has an eye for a home with potential. ‘House hunting in Fès is like nowhere else,’ he says, his eyes ablaze with delight. ‘This is the only city I know where you can find a palace for the price of a terraced house anywhere else…’

Pausing in mid-conversation, Fred Sola stares out at the street. He squints, then smiles gradually, as a bridal party pushes through. With much whooping and trumpeting, the bride is borne forwards waist-height on a dais. The Frenchman combs a hand back through his hair.

‘You really must believe me,’ he says gently, ‘life just doesn’t get any better than this.’

FOUR

A Price on Their Heads

EVER SINCE MY AUNT lifted me up to a glass case at the back of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum, at the impressionable age of eight, I have been hooked on shrunken heads.

Like so many schoolboys before me, my lower jaw dropped as I gazed in awe at the array of miniature human heads, correctly known as tsantsas. There was something wholly captivating about their gnarled features, the sewn lips, little hollow necks and manes of jet black hair.

I longed to learn the secret processes, known to a tribe deep in the South American jungle, which enabled decapitated human heads to be shrunk to the size of a grapefruit.

Despite an ongoing debate about whether museums should harbour human remains, the Pitt Rivers Museum still holds five, and the British Museum has at least ten. Interest in the gruesome exhibits remains strong. A roaring private trade in the illicit handicraft has developed, with heads being snapped up by wealthy collectors, many from the Far East and Japan.

The genuine article comes from the Upper Amazon, a region on the Pastaza river between Peru and Ecuador.

For thousands of years a tribe called the Shuar (misnamed by Western observers as Jivaro, meaning ‘savage’), shrunk the heads of their slain enemies. Although historically dozens of tribal societies have taken trophy heads, only the Shuar ever came up with the curious idea of reducing these trophies in size. One possible exception is the ancient Nazcan and coastal civilizations of the Atacama desert, with whom the Shuar share a common ancestry.

The Shuar’s victims were subject to swift and brutal attacks. During surprise raids on enemy villages, warriors would hack off as many heads as they could. The tsantsa raids were their raison d’etre. They proved a warrior’s bravery and the community’s superiority.

Retreating into the jungle with their fresh harvest of heads, the Shuar would immediately begin work on their trophies. They believed that humans have three souls. One of these – the musiak – is charged with avenging the victim’s death. The only way of pacifying the enraged soul was by shrinking the head in which it lay.

During decapitation, a knife was used to peel back the victim’s skin from the upper part of the chest, the shoulders and the back. Then the head was chopped as far as possible, close to the collar bone using a stone-edged knife. The warrior would remove his own headband and thread it through the neck and out of the mouth, making it easier to carry, slung over the shoulder.

The face was literally peeled off the skull, before being sewn up into a neat pouch of skin. This was steeped in hot water for a few minutes. Baked pebbles were then placed in the pouch, causing it to shrivel and shrink, taking great care not to damage the features. When the pouch was too small for pebbles, hot sand scooped from a riverbank was carefully swished about inside.

Next, the lips were sewn tightly shut with a strand of twine. A machete’s blade was heated and pressed against the lips to dry them. Then the facial skin was repeatedly rubbed with charcoal. Sometimes a large red seed was placed beneath the eyelids, filling the hole, preventing the musiak from peering out.

Between four and six days of treatment were needed for the basic tsantsa to be completed, at which time it was about the size of a man’s fist. A hole was made at the top of the head and a string attached to it, so that the warrior could wear it around his neck for the celebratory tsantsa feast.

As far as the Shuar people were concerned, the tsantsas had no intrinsic value, and they were merely tossed back into the jungle as soon as the avenging souls had been appeased. But once Victorian trailblazers got their hands on the curious trophies, a thriving market began.

Search the Internet and you come across plenty of examples. Most of them are fakes, or made for the tourist trade, and are often fashioned from plucked goat skin, which has overly large pores. Genuine tsantsas have delicate nasal hair, and a light oily shine to the skin. Only a finished one will have twine hanging from the lips, which signifies that three enormous feasts have been held in honour of the head.

On the Internet you can find black, white, and even Chinese shrunken heads. They are outright fakes – generally made in Guatemalan workshops at the turn of the last century. The Shuar would never have any cause to shrink a foreigner’s head, because they don’t believe that outsiders have souls.

On one expedition to the Upper Amazon, I hired a ramshackle boat and made for the remote Pastaza in search of the Shuar. My guide was a veteran of the USA-Vietnam war who told me that the Shuar tribe, ‘made the Viet Cong look like pussy cats’. Everyone en route warded us away. ‘The Shuar will chop off your heads,’ they told us, ‘and drink your blood and eat your brains.’

When we finally reached Shuar territory late in the evening, a man ran down to greet our boat and present me with a gift of a roasted monkey. In the background we could hear singing, which I was sure was the ancient ballads of the Shuar. Shrunken heads would be nearby.

In the dawn light we climbed the steep bank up to the village, where the chief was waiting. He plied us with a strange white creamy beverage, called masato.

Only later did I realize how it is made.

Manioc roots are boiled up and mashed with a stick. As they mash, the makers grab handfuls of the goo, chew it, and spit it back into the bowl. The enzymes in their saliva start off the fermenting process.

After downing a third bowl of masato, I asked the chief if he had problems with the neighbouring villages. I motioned the shape of a small head with my hands.

‘We love our neighbours,’ said the chief, ‘they are our friends. We all pray together when the people in the flying boats come.’

‘Flying boats?’

The chief nodded.

‘The friendly people from Alabama. They bring us tambourines and little pink pills – but best of all, they brought us Jesus.’

‘What about war? What about heads?’ I asked.

‘Why do we need to kill or shrink heads when we have the son of God?’ he replied.

In little more than a generation the ancient ways of the Shuar have been changed forever. Small-scale petroleum projects in the deep jungle are one reason for this. But the overbearing responsibility must be assumed by a variety of missionary groups who have sought to cast the Shuar into the modern world, and to save their souls.

Landing in remote jungle enclaves in ‘flying boats’, the white man has wrought change on an unprecedented scale. The Shuar peoples have also been devastated by the measles, tuberculosis, venereal diseases and the common cold. The cures no longer come from traditional plant-based medicines but by handfuls of ‘little pink pills’. The only positive factor in terms of population is that the cessation of tsantsa raids has led to a reduction of death through warfare.

After a tour of the village, the chief invited us to the makeshift church, built by the missionaries from Alabama. The proud former head-shrinkers stood in neat rows. As the noises of the jungle night echoed around us, the villagers sang Onward Christian Soldiers, translated into Shuar.

But although most of the villagers were keen to sing hymns and show off their Shuar Bibles, one man – the village shaman – was less happy.

‘The missionaries don’t understand what their religion has done,’ he explained. ‘Head-hunting was a brutal practice, but it was our culture. It developed over a very long time, and had meant much more to us than Jesus and the Bible.’

The shaman lit a home-made cigar of mapacho, black jungle tobacco, as thick as his wrist. His eyes seemed to glaze over.

‘Head shrinking gave reason to our existence,’ he went on, exhaling a plume of pungent smoke. ‘Without the head-raiding parties our lives have changed, we are not the same people as we were in our fathers’ time. We are weaker. We are timid now. But worst of all, we have lost our honour.’

FIVE

Brazil’s Sanctuaries From Abuse

IT’S LIKE ANY OTHER Saturday night in São Paulo’s infamous Pedreira slums.

Music blares out from a line of makeshift bars. Dark brown bottles clang together as neighbours celebrate the end of another week. The air is filled with cheap cigar smoke and with laughter. A young couple is samba dancing in the muddy main street. Everyone, it seems, is in a jubilant mood. But away from the revelling drinkers the atmosphere is far less cheerful.

Martina Alberto, a young mother of two, sits on her bed waiting for her husband’s return. For Martina, surviving unscathed until Sunday morning is always an achievement. Her husband, Rogerio, an unemployed labourer, bursts in soon after midnight. In one hand is a bottle of home-brewed cane liquor, and in the other there’s a carving knife.

In a fit of drunken rage Rogerio swears that he’ll chop up their two small daughters. Weeping hysterically, Martina pleads with him to take his fury out on her rather than the children. Eagerly, he agrees. An hour later and Martina has been kicked, beaten, stabbed with the knife, and raped.

With her eyes swollen, her body bruised from the kicks, and her face badly cut, Martina runs from the house. It’s three a.m. Clutching her daughters, Andresa, six months, and Paola, three years, she staggers through São Paulo’s dark streets. The sound of singing from the backstreet bars has now been replaced by high-pitched police sirens and sporadic exchanges of gunfire. The only men still out are drunks, and the only women, prostitutes. Calming her daughters as best she can, Martina heads for a large, modern building at Campo Grande, a sprawling suburb in São Paulo’s south zone. This, the 9th Police Precinct, is located at the violent heart of Brazil’s largest city.

With determined strides, Martina hurries her daughters inside. She heads straight for a stark waiting-room. She knows the way well. Since her marriage to Rogerio, she’s been a regular visitor there.

It looks like any other precinct, but this is a police station with a difference. Named Delegacia de Policia de Defesa da Mulher, the station is run by women officers, for women in trouble. The imposing size of the building hints at the number of women in the community who need police help. There are more than a hundred and twenty similar stations in São Paulo alone. Delegacia, which were first established in Brazil in the ’eighties, play an important role in the war against household violence.

From the outset, the stations were an instant success, taking seriously battered women’s pleas for help. Like much of Latin America, Brazilian society suffers from machismo syndrome, a society that closes ranks to protect abusive men.

Before there were Delegacia, women reporting domestic violence, even rape, were usually chased away from regular police stations. For the few sympathetic male officers, domestic violence was a matter beyond their jurisdiction.

More than three hundred thousand women take refuge at Delegacia across Brazil each year. Most of them, like Martina, are too terrified at first to report their spouses’ crimes. But genuinely fearing for their lives, and those of their children, Martina and thousands like her have no other choice.

Waiting for her name to be called, Martina glances around the room. About two dozen other women sit about on red plastic chairs. Some are weeping. Others nurse fresh wounds, or comfort their children. A teenage mother sitting beside Martina holds a bloodied bandage to her thigh. The early hours of Sunday morning are always the most eventful at São Paulo’s Delegacias.

At six a.m., Martina is still waiting.

Her baby daughter is crying for food. The officer, a tall middle aged woman wearing a dark blue uniform, leads her to an interview room. Staring at her across the desk, Martina says simply: ‘I want him put in jail. You must do it. Please help me.’

In charge of the 9th Women’s Division, Detective Katia Marinelli notes down the complaint and sighs deeply. ‘We will do all we can to help you,’ she replies, ‘but will you assist us this time, by taking him to court?’ Staring blankly into space, Martina nods her head, and is taken away by a clerk for an examination.

Detective Marinelli rubs her eyes and looks at her watch. It’s almost six-thirty. ‘Tonight we’ve had about seventy women here,’ she explains. ‘We often get many more than that. The worst is when “Corinthians” – one of the most popular soccer teams in São Paulo – have lost their game. I’m not a follower of football, but I always pray that the Corinthians win.’

The detective pauses to sign an official document, ‘Most of the women we get here are in their twenties,’ she continues, ‘but an increasing number are teenage wives. Those are the saddest cases. They’ve usually been made pregnant and have got married to abusive, alcoholic men. Most don’t have a clue what they’ve got themselves into. For them, this is an escape from Hell.’

Next door, Martina is being examined by Roseli, a clerk of about the same age. Roseli lifts up the blood-splattered blouse to examine the mass of plum-coloured bruises. The cut on Martina’s face and another on her forearm are scrutinized. Then Roseli types in the statement at a computer terminal. With its details of drunken debauchery, rape and stabbing, the report is so usual that Roseli feels as if she knows it by heart.

‘When I first met Rogerio,’ Martina says softly, ‘I knew he was an ex-convict. But I was in love with him and he seemed intent on bettering his life. Soon after our marriage he lost his job. Then he started drinking heavily. Now I want him in jail, otherwise he will kill me and the kids. He’s already sworn to cut off their fingers when I bring them home.’

Martina puts her signature beneath the printout of her statement, and wonders what to do next. She is too afraid to return to their home. ‘I think I will go and stay with a cousin in Belo Horizonte,’ she says. ‘I’ll have to find a job. I never want to see Rogerio again.’

The Delegacia has a special shelter for women too afraid to go home. The abrigos, shelters, support homeless and vulnerable women and their children for up to three months. The details of such safe houses are kept secret, for fear that a violent husband would come to get revenge on his wife.

At nine a.m. officer Marinelli is still at her desk.

Sunlight is streaming in through the window. ‘All the drunks will be sobering up by now,’ she says weakly, ‘getting ready for another evening of drinking. At least ninety-nine per cent of the cases we deal with involve alcohol. Illegal cane liquor is cheap and strong. They should put a warning in the bottle: drinking it won’t just damage your health, but the health of your family.

‘We always try to reconcile the parties involved,’ continues Marinelli. ‘Slamming an abusive husband in jail may get rid of him, but it often leaves a family without a breadwinner.’

When Governor Franco Montoro originally decreed that women-only police stations were to be built, the idea was met with a mixed reception. Pressure groups insisted that special treatment was necessary for women in such a macho society. But the powerful male lobby greeted the proposal with skepticism. Nowhere else in the world had women’s police stations, they said, so why did they need them?

Brazil’s first all-woman police station was at Parque de San Pedro, a run-down area near São Paulo’s long distance bus terminal. From the first day, the office was over-flowing with female victims. In the years since, the Delegacia have spread like wildfire through Brazil’s major cities and beyond. Now they are not only found throughout Brazil, but across Latin America, from Argentina to Venezuela. Dozens of other countries around the world now are calling for their own forms of Delegacia as well.

Inspector Maria Valente has been with the Delegacia project right from the start. From her spacious ninth floor office at the Public Security Headquarters Building in downtown São Paulo, she controls more than a hundred women’s police stations across the city and its state.

São Paulo, which is regarded by the United Nations as one of the world’s most dangerous places to live, boasts an average of forty murders each weekend. The majority of the city’s twelve million inhabitants live below the poverty line. For many men, unemployment is a reality they bear uneasily. Large numbers turn to alcohol, drugs, and wife battering to alleviate the frustrations of poverty.

Facing domestic violence head on, Inspector Valente and her team are used to the tales of savage attacks and stabbings, rape, and even incest.

‘Beating up women is as old as history and happens everywhere,’ says Valente sharply. ‘Of course we register more wife abuse amongst the poor, simply because there are more poor than rich in Brazil. Rich men do terrible things to women too, but they have money to pay good lawyers when a case gets to court. We had one case where a wealthy businessman smashed his wife’s head against a wall for dropping a plate of food; and another where a teenage girl came to us, made pregnant by her father – himself a pillar of society.’

For Valente and her staff, the problem of getting women to come forward to testify in court against their spouses, is a vexing one. ‘Women are terrified that if the husband gets off, he’ll hunt them down and kill them. It’s that simple,’ she says.

In a society where beating up your wife is sometimes almost seen as a man’s birthright, his prerogative, the challenge is breathtaking. To meet that challenge at hand, Inspector Valente and her colleagues look for female officers who have what it takes to deal with the traumas of the job. ‘Most of the officers we recruit are aged below thirty,’ says the Inspector, as she stares out across São Paulo’s rooftops. ‘They can empathize with the young mothers who seek our help. We need women who are patient, caring, and who are unlikely to be deterred by the sight of blood, or by the intimate details of a rape.’

Officers working at the Delegacia encounter a wide range of frustrations every day. ‘One of our biggest problems,’ continues Valente, ‘is that when battered women arrive here, they’re often hysterical. They beg us to throw their violent husband in prison and throw away the key. Unfortunately, we have to act according to the law. That’s one reason why officers are advised to avoid striking personal friendships with the victims, even in the most heartbreaking cases.’

With a view to reconciliation, the Delegacia often summon the husbands to explain themselves. ‘When men turn up to give their side of the story they can behave very arrogantly,’ explains Sandra Claro, a new officer at the 9th Precinct. ‘They swear and jeer at us, but soon they realize that although we’re women we are police officers, like any others. It’s then that they get nervous at the prospect of a spell in jail.’

Back at the reception of the 9th Precinct a steady stream of assaulted women have wandered in during the day. As usual, the waiting-room is full to capacity. Some of the tired, frail figures sitting there refuse to file complaints. Too fearful to formally document the crimes, they come in to have a chat with the officers, and to pause for breath in the security of the station.

Deputy Sandra Claro is dealing with a typical case in interview room Number Three. A young woman called Olivia is sitting across from her. Married just three weeks before, Olivia, who’s only nineteen, has seen her husband’s true character revealed for the first time. ‘On Friday night he went out with his friends. At two in the morning he came back… and he brought another woman with him. I found him with her on the couch,’ she says. ‘When I asked him what was going on he slapped me on the face and said that he’d bite off my nose if I didn’t leave him alone.’

Olivia’s statement is typed out and presented for her signature. An illiterate, she whispers for an ink pad. Then, almost ceremonially, she adds her thumbprint at the end of the document and bursts into tears.

Two doors down, in another interview suite, Marcia is telling her tale. ‘My husband doesn’t drink much,’ she explains. ‘But he’s addicted to heroin. It’s always in the morning when he’s craving the drug he gets so violent. We have no money. We can’t pay the rent. And now he threatens to pour gasoline over me when I’m asleep and set me alight, unless I go out and steal to pay for his addiction. I don’t know what to do.’

Marcia stares at the young female officer beside her, tears rolling down her face. ‘I’m so frightened, can you please, please help me?’

When an abusive husband refuses to make an appearance at the Delegacia Precinct, officers are sent on a mobile patrol to investigate the situation. The 9th Precinct’s territory covers all kinds of areas, ranging from millionaires’ mansions to the perilous shanty-towns of south São Paulo.

Silvia Rodrigues has been with the all-female police force for six years. Carefully checking her .38 calibre black service revolver, she prepares for an investigation along with her partner, Vera Lucia. ‘Most men don’t believe it when we turn up and ask them to accompany us to the Precinct,’ she says. ‘For archetypal Brazilian macho males, the ultimate humiliation is to be arrested by a woman. When we handcuff the suspect and lead him away, a crowd often gathers. Then the gossip spreads – everyone recognizes us and our vehicle. They know why we’ve come.’

‘We do get shot at from time to time,’ says Vera Lucia. ‘We’ve had to wrestle men to the ground so many times. I’d never go on patrol without my .38. You see, especially in the slums some men think they’re gods. They’re worshipped by everyone. Our job is to make it known that there’s only one God, and it’s not them. We want to increase the equality level between men and women. Equality between the sexes is something that just doesn’t exist in Brazil. When we enter poor neighbourhoods we’re greeted by the women and children with great respect.’

It’s evening again at the 9th Precinct. The waiting-room is packed with familiar faces. Detective Marinelli is in a sombre mood. Her worst nightmare has been realized – the Corinthians have just lost their game.

‘You better put some extra chairs in the waiting-room,’ she says to her assistant. ‘It looks as if things will get really busy here tonight.’

SIX

Buying A Home in Morocco

THE SMELL OF PAPRIKA, cardamom, rose water, of freshly tanned leather; the braying of donkeys and the shrill echo of the muezzin’s call to prayer ringing over the high flat roofs, are seared into my memory. In a childhood of conventional English life, our journeys to Morocco were a time to escape, to dream, and to slip into the Arabian Nights.

Three decades passed and I found myself living in a microscopic London flat, with a toddler and an expectant wife. I felt deceived, bitter at myself for not achieving more. Then I remembered Morocco. I thought back to the scent of spices, to the blazing light, to the intoxicating blend of cultural colour. In a moment of high drama, I stood on a chair, punched the air, and yelled:

‘We’re moving to Morocco!’

Sometimes the best way to realize your dream is to go at it headlong, without thinking about it very much. That was my approach to buying a riad, a traditional home, in Morocco. I knew that if I listened too much to my family or friends, the momentum would be lost and I would never break free. I had heard that Marrakech was the place to go, and so I flew down and had a look.

It seemed that most Moroccans living in the old city had the same ambition – to sell their ancestral home and to move to the new town. I could find no formal estate agents, but every second barber’s shop and fruit stall seemed to double as a makeshift one.

My advice to anyone searching for a Moroccan dream home is firstly to look at dozens of houses. That way you get a feeling for what is good and what is questionable or downright rotten. And look at houses that have been renovated as well, as they’ll boost your morale. Secondly, talk to people who have bought and renovated homes of their own. Learn from the communal melting pot of mistakes.

Living in the medina is like living in the corner of a great sprawling honeycomb. So when you look at a house, you must take into account what else is around it. Is there an abattoir uncomfortably near, or a leather tannery (both of which stink in the summer heat), or is the local mosque’s loudspeaker poking into your bedroom window? How far is the house from a road which is accessible by car? It can be expensive to cart rubble and bricks to and from a main road. Another downer is that a riad four centuries old may have its walls inside covered with modern factory-made tiles, or its floor concealed in lino. It can make for a depressing sight. But the great joy of Morocco is that the same work is being done today as it was five hundred years ago – which means you can renovate (and affordably so) with the very finest crafts. Better still is that the current boom in restoration has kick-started and strengthened workshops producing exquisite mosaic, terracotta tiles, carved plaster and wood.

Early on my quest for a Moroccan home I was fortunate to meet a local businessman named Abel Damoussi, who had spent twenty years in London, before returning to his native Marrakech. His dream was to buy and then restore a kasbah, a fortress home, outside the city. Looking back at the ‘before’ photos of his now magnificent luxury hotel Kasbah Agafay, you can only admire the man.

The fortress was being used as a barn for livestock when he found it. To look beyond what was a derelict building, took indefatigable willpower and the ability to dream. Abel was a fountain of advice. He told me to look beyond what was obviously apparent, and to concentrate on what you could not see.

‘When you buy a place in the medina,’ he said, ‘you have to ask yourself first what shape the houses around you are in – they’re more than just neighbours. Their houses are a part of your home. Look after their houses before you even think about your own.’ Abel’s shrewdest advice was on the subject of sewers. ‘Don’t start working on the house itself,’ he warned, ‘until you’ve opened up the sewers and shored them up.’

Traditionally, most riads had a single toilet, if they had one at all. The modern craze of renovating medina homes has meant that luxury-hungry foreigners want each bedroom to have an en suite bathroom. The sheer number of toilets and baths, coupled with the fact that Marrakech’s sewers were designed before the invention of toilet paper, can lead to an overwhelming stench, especially in the blazing summer heat.

On my own quest for a home in Morocco, I started by looking at about seventy Marrakech riads – some no more than a crumbling shell, others palatial, and way beyond my budget. And I toured houses which had been restored to a high standard, to get an idea of what work could be done. Prices in the medina have risen sharply over the last few years and well exceed traditional homes elsewhere in the country.

It so happened that I was eventually offered a magnificent rambling villa in Casablanca. The house had been empty for almost a decade and was in need of tremendous repairs. I decided to use traditional Moroccan crafts, and to source the majority of the artisans from Marrakech and from Fès.

Dozens of workmen arrived, and most of them lived in the house. They would sleep in the sitting-room, and cook their meals on a small brazier there. The advantage was that while they were there they worked hard and as fast as they could. You have to remember that traditional Moroccan crafts are executed almost entirely by hand. You never hear the whirr of a Black & Decker drill, or an electric saw. The downside is that, as a result, the work can seem to take forever.

But as with anything else Moroccan – a little faith and, with time, even the most exacting of problems melts away.

SEVEN

Café Clock Cookbook

MY EARLIEST MEMORIES are tinged with the scent of Moroccan cuisine.

I was born in England and subjected to a childhood of grey school uniforms, even greyer skies, and to food so bland that it tasted of almost nothing at all. But, unlike my friends in the playground, I was certain the real world was out there – somewhere. It was a fantasy, a Promised Land, a realm of rich textures and dazzling light, a place where the air was fragrant with spices, and the kitchens abundant with the most magical ingredients.

This secret knowledge came about because of my family’s love affair with Morocco. My first journeys there were made as a small child in the early ’seventies – a time when the kingdom was awash with stoned-out hippies, tie-dye and bongo drums, VW Combis, and Rolling Stones’ songs. I didn’t quite understand how a place could be so different from the world in which I lived. It was so utterly mesmerising, vibrant, and so culturally colourful.

I can remember the pungent, intoxicating scent of orange blossom on Tangier’s rue de la Plage, and the taste of summer melons in Marrakech. My tongue still tingles at the thought of the warm almond pastry passed to me one balmy September afternoon in Chefchaouen. And, as for my first sugar-sprinkled pastilla – it stole my heart.

Then decades passed.

My feet traipsed through forgotten corners of the world, but never found their way back to my first true love – Morocco. Sometimes on my journeys I would close my eyes and be transported back – to the windswept sea wall of Essaouira, or to Marrakech’s Jma el Fna square, or to the twisting, labyrinthine streets of medieval Fès. With eyes closed as if in a dream, I would breathe in deep and sigh, feasting on the smells and on the memories.

Then, one morning, living in an East End flat no bigger than a postage stamp, I had a Eureka! moment. It was so obvious. We would embrace the land of my fantasy: we’d go and live in Morocco.

And we did.

It was like stepping through a keyhole into a world touched by a magician’s wand. In the years we have lived here, we have glimpsed an unbroken circle of life that’s been eroded and disjointed elsewhere. It’s a world dominated by values – by chivalry and honesty, by charity and, above all, by a sense of family.

And at the same time, it’s a world dominated by food.

Anyone who has ever spent time in Morocco has been charmed from the first meal by the kingdom’s astonishing range of cuisine. Through succulent flavours, textures, ingredients, and through sheer artistry – they go together to form an ancient kind of alchemy all of their own.

One of the first things I learned while living here is that most Moroccans prefer eating their own cuisine at home. A meal, especially one prepared for guests, is a sumptuous blend of hospitality and abundance, and is about honouring the invited as much as it is about feeding them. The dishes presented tend to be enjoyed communally, eaten from a central platter or tagine. And, of course, each home has its own carefully-guarded recipes, passed on through centuries from mother to daughter.

Like most of my Moroccan friends, I too am sometimes reluctant at eating in restaurants. As with them, I know that what we have at home is superior to almost anything found outside.

But there are exceptions.

When I first heard that an Englishman had given up a promising culinary career in London’s West End, swapping it for the Fès medina – where he planned to start afresh – I rolled my eyes. Then I put my head in my hands. It sounded like a recipe for catastrophe.

But, stepping across the threshold of the Café Clock, I was utterly enthralled. Not only was its founder, Mike Richardson, a man of magnetic charm, but he had conjured a spellbinding ambience in the heart of a city I hold so dear.

And, as for the food… it’s the exception to the rule. At last there is a restaurant that equals the cuisine found in Moroccan homes.

Café Clock’s success lies in the subtle flavours of a culinary tradition which itself stands at a crossroads of geography and culture. It’s made possible by seasonal foods, by spices, and by raw ingredients that have found their way to the medieval city through centuries, along the pilgrimage routes. After all, for more than a thousand years, Fès has been connected to the farthest reaches of the Islamic world, to destinations as variant as Seville, Cairo, and Timbuktu, Bokhara, Kabul, and Samarkand.

With time, Café Clock has become far more than a place to dine well. In the tradition of the ancient caravanserais, once found in every town and city between it and Mecca, and beyond, it’s a place where people gather. Some are locals, while many more are travellers, gorging themselves on the intensity of Fès for the first time. Together, they swap stories, talk, listen, laugh, and learn from the endless range of cultural events laid on in the crucible that is Café Clock.

Just as I had been anxious at hearing of an Englishman opening a restaurant in Fès, I had wondered a little anxiously how the Café Clock’s cookbook might look. Making the shift from the experimental fluidity of a kitchen, to the restricted world of the printed page, is not easy. It’s a realm in which too many talented food writers have failed.

But what strikes me squarely between the eyes is how the author, Tara Stevens, has approached this project. From the outset she’s harnessed an astonishing perspicacity, and a clear sense of observation. Through watching, tasting, and, above all, through listening, she has brought to this book’s pages a rare and comprehensive culinary experience.

At the same time, Tara has explained how and where specific ingredients are sourced, and has clarified the ways in which they are used in the kitchens of Café Clock.

The result is far more than a cookbook. It’s a key. Immerse yourself in its pages and, in return, it will unlock a domain that’s more usually cloaked in mystery, and quite off limits to the outside world. Study the pages well, and the ancient alchemy is revealed.

N.B. Clock Book, published by 33books, 2010.

EIGHT

Cairo’s City of the Dead

MUSTAPHA SITS IN THE SHADE of a sprawling fig tree, listening to the birdsong and whisking away the flies with the end of his scarf.

Every day he sits there, in a chair he made himself from old scraps of wood, just as he’s done since his childhood seven decades ago. From time to time one of his grandchildren hurtles out of their imposing stone home, whooping and hollering into the light. The scene is so usual that it could be anywhere in Egypt, or in any corner of the Arab world. But it’s made unique by the fact that Mustapha and his family live not in a residential street, but in Cairo’s vast cemetery, Al Qarafa, The City of the Dead.

No one’s quite sure how many people live there in the sprawling burial grounds among the graves. The number banded around is anything between five hundred thousand and five million. But to the people who make it their home, the numbers don’t really matter. For Mustapha and the other families, it’s a place where they can live quietly without the outside world intruding on their lives.

Drawing a wrinkled hand over his face, Mustapha sighs.

‘I have seen a universe of life,’ he says, ‘right here in the cemetery. Birth, life, and of course I have seen death. Plenty of it. They are all parts of the same thing, a cycle that never ends.’

Asked how it feels to live amongst the dead, the old man shrugs.

‘The dead have been truer friends to me than many of the living I’ve known,’ he says breaking into a smile, ‘and in any case, they don’t have tongues wagging nonsense and lies.’

Spend a little time in the cemetery and you realize that the title ‘City of the Dead’ is something of a misnomer. In Cairo there’s not just one main burial ground, but five – the Northern and Southern Cemeteries, the Bab el Wazir and the Bab Nasr, and the Cemetery of the Great.

Viewed from a distance, and from the comfort of the city’s highways, the most impressive is the Northern Cemetery. It stretches out in a honeycomb of sand-coloured shacks. Every so often there’s a fabulous dome sticking out, hinting at a grand mausoleum hiding in the jumble of more ordinary tombs. Visitors to Cairo could be excused in thinking the expanse of buildings is just another quarter of the old city. And in a way they’d be right.

Cairo’s great cemeteries were developed at least a thousand years ago in the Fatimid era, if not before, at the time of the Arab Conquest. Egypt is of course well-known for its burial traditions. After all, the Pyramids up the road in Giza are arguably the most celebrated tombs ever created by Man. Some believe that certain beliefs dating back to Pharaonic Egypt may have survived, most notably the way that Egyptians perceive death. For many, death is not regarded as the end but the beginning, and cemeteries are not places to be avoided or dreaded, but visited and respected.

The tradition of travelling to a family grave on certain days during the calendar, and on Fridays, is a part of Egyptian culture, and in part it’s a reason that so many people live in the burial grounds. The tombs of the rich or powerful have always had guardians who attend to their families when they visit the deceased, and during the forty days of mourning after a death. Many others look after the pilgrims who flock to the city’s Sufi shrines, and to the graves of members of the Prophet’s family.

Centuries ago when the cemeteries were first established, they were far from the medina of medieval Cairo. But as the city’s urban sprawl has raged forwards like wildfire, the City of the Dead finds itself as being remarkably central. Free from the press of tenement blocks, and choking traffic, the vast burial grounds are not such a bad place to live. It’s true that the plumbing is almost non-existent, and the lack of sewerage leads to the insufferable stench during the summer heat, but there is often electricity, and a few mod cons as well.

Mustapha’s little home has a battered old television and, his pride and joy, a Chinese-made refrigerator. Keen to show them off, he pours from a two-litre bottle of Coca Cola. As elsewhere in the Arab world, hospitality to a guest is taken very seriously indeed.

‘I can keep drinks cool for days,’ he says enthusiastically.

‘Where do you buy the drinks?’

The old man waves a hand towards the end of his lane.

‘Down there… haven’t you seen all the shops?’

Far from being a place of just desolation and death, parts of the cemetery are alive with the most vibrant life. There are cafés and small restaurants, where skewers of lamb are being grilled for lunch, food stalls, barbershops and, of course, there are thousands and thousands of homes. Some people even come from outside the cemetery to buy fruit and veg, declaring that the prices are lower because there are none of the overheads that there are elsewhere.

Around the corner from where Mustapha lives, at the end of a narrow alley, thick with dust, Fatima is hanging out the laundry in the blazing spring sunshine. She seems oblivious to the fact that there are three elaborate marble headstones a few feet away, or that the skeletons of an entire family lie beneath her feet.

‘I’ve lived here all my life,’ she says, reaching for another clothes’ peg, ‘and there’s nothing usual about the cemetery. If you ask me, it’s the safest place in Cairo to live. The people are good here. There’s plenty of space, and a sense of right and wrong.’

Fatima nudges a hand towards her little son, Yussef, who’s trundling about on his trike.

‘If we lived anywhere else we would not have a yard like this, a place where the children can play safely. I thank God for providing us with this.’

The laundry dripping in the sun, Fatima leads the way into her home, a squat cinderblock shack on the west side of the yard. Her father is lying in bed in the small sitting-room, squinting at a soap opera on the TV.

Fatima brews up a pot of tea, pours it out, steam billowing from the spout.

‘My husband has a cart from which he sells sweet yams,’ she says. ‘He makes enough for us to live. And besides, we get a little money for guarding this ancestral tomb. The relatives live far from here and so they rely on us to make sure the place is kept in order and clean.’

While there are now many times more people living in the cemetery than ever before, the tradition is one that goes back centuries. Some of the mausolea found in the City of the Dead are imposing structures, built during the Mameluk and Ottoman times. A great number of them contain precious details of ornamental art. Wary of thieves, the rich have always employed guardians to watch over their family graves. It’s a system that suits everyone. The families can rest assured that the graves are kept free from desecration, and the guardians can be sure that their own families have somewhere safe, central, and affordable to live.

According to Islamic tradition, bodies are usually not covered with earth as in the West, but wrapped in muslin and lain out on their sides, facing toward the holy city of Mecca. The entrance and the staircase into the vault are concealed by a series of stone slabs. Above ground, the site is marked by a tombstone, set within a courtyard or covered by a mausoleum.

Large Egyptian tombs often have one or more outhouses for use by visiting relatives or caretakers. Some of them have sets of chairs kept in storage to be laid out on days when the entire family is there.

A short distance from where Fatima lives, is a dusty lane which ends in the grand nineteenth century mausoleum of a Pasha. Half way down the lane is a less opulent building, a rough brick dwelling in which a young woman is sitting on an upturned packing crate. Her name is Hasna, and she has lived in the cemetery for three years, since her husband died in a car crash.

‘After my husband’s death,’ she says, ‘my in-laws threw me out of the house. They said I brought shame on the family, because I was unable to have children. I had a friend who lives here and she told me to come. She said it was safe, that it was a place where others do not judge you, where they leave you alone. And she was right. The people who live here are mostly good, the kind of people who work hard and are pious. They respect the fact that I am alone, and they have become my family.’

From time to time Hasna gets some work sewing clothes, and sometimes cleans apartments on the other side of the city. She says she dreams of a time when she’ll be reunited with her husband. When asked if she will ever marry again, she wipes a tear from her eye.

‘I don’t ever want to be married again,’ she says solemnly. ‘Anyway, who would marry a widow?’

I ask Hasna of her greatest fear. Her faces freezes and she glances down at her lap.

‘Every day people come here and ask if there’s any space. They come from the countryside, and know that the cemetery is a cheap place to live. My great worry is that the man who rents this little room to me will throw me out onto the street, or put up the rent. If that happened, I don’t know where I would go.’

Hasna touches a hand to her headscarf and sighs.

‘Thank God most people forget that we are here,’ she says.

Hasna might be surprised if she knew the irony of her remark. In recent years foreigners visiting the Egyptian capital have become increasingly fascinated with the City of the Dead, itself a uniquely Egyptian phenomenon. Although still limited in number, a few tour operators offer visits to groups of two or three tourists at a time through the cemetery maze, so that they can see it for themselves.

Not far from Hasna’s home, a young Australian couple, Jack and Marty, are taking one such tour. Both towering and blonde, they look a little incongruous, as if they made a wrong turn on the way to the Pyramids. But they’re savouring the experience.

‘When we saw the City of the Dead from a distance,’ says Jack, ‘we just assumed it was low-income housing. And when we realized it was the cemetery, we never imagined there’d be so much life here. I’ve even seen cyber cafés. Imagine that – surfing the Internet in a cemetery! It’s as if we’re seeing a side of Cairo that’s very traditional – very Egyptian – but one that’s been hidden and inaccessible until now. I’d recommend this to anyone who wants a new take on one of the oldest cities on Earth.’

Back in his courtyard, Mustapha is hammering a nail into his homemade chair. He hits his thumb by mistake and curses.

I ask if he’s seen the tour groups in his neighbourhood. He shakes his head, glances at his injured thumb.

‘That is absurd,’ he says. ‘What kind of a fool would want to take a tour of a cemetery?’ Mustapha smiles again. ‘But I suppose it isn’t quite so foolish… after all I bet you they charge more to see the Pyramids.’

NINE

Casablanca Junk

SAÏD BEN SAÏD SITS in a pool of sunlight at the front of his shop and waits for the rush of customers, a rush that never comes.

In the darkness behind him is a treasure hoard worthy of Ali Baba. Stacked up on shelves and piled high in orderly heaps, lies an assortment of antique wares – brown Bakelite radios the size of suitcases, gramophone players and gilt clocks, graceful bronze statuettes, espresso machines, vintage posters and chamber pots. What makes the collection unusual is that it comes, almost in entirety, from the Art Deco glory days of Casablanca. The city, created as a showcase of French Imperial style and might, boomed from the ’twenties until the ’forties, when began its gradual and ignominious decline.

The little junk shop owned by Saïd ben Saïd sits at the far end of a labyrinthine flea-market in the working class quarter of Hay Hasseni, on the western edge of Casablanca. With almost no tourists attracted to the city, and few Moroccans interested in anything second hand, Ben Saïd is glum.

His passion for Art Deco tends to be met with scorn from his peers, and has certainly not made him rich.

‘Everyone here has the same dream,’ he says, wiping a hand over three days’ of grey stubble, ‘they dream of living in a new house, filled with brand new things. They look at the treasures I have collected, and they laugh!’

Soon after moving to a ramshackle mansion in Casablanca, I discovered the junk yards in nearby Hay Hasseni, and found myself drawn into a dream world of bargains. A shameless hoarder, I snapped up what others considered to be worthless junk – aspidistra stands, tea caddies and porcelain urns, all decorated with zigzag lines, silver sets of cutlery, posters, cocktail shakers, ice buckets, and tin-plate toys.

But the objets d’art are only the start.

One morning I was bemoaning the low quality of new washbasins to Saïd ben Saïd. He shook his head in despair.

‘The stuff you find downtown in the fancy shops is all rubbish,’ he said. ‘You’d better go out back behind the flea market.’ I followed his advice and came across a place with a striking resemble to the end of the world. There were heaps of twisted scrap metal fifty feet high, mountains of third-hand bricks, mahogany doors and battered window frames, and an ocean of what we might call ‘architectural salvage’.

In the middle of it all I found a lovely roll-top bath, cast iron with ball and claw feet. Inside it was a huddle of newborn puppies. Nearby there were more than a dozen enormous Art Deco washbasins, ripped out from a villa in the nick of time, before the building was torn down the week before.

As the months passed, I sniffed out Casablanca’s other affordable antique shops. There must be a dozen or so, scattered across the city, most of them hidden down back streets, awaiting the intrepid. It’s true that the arrival of a fresh-faced foreigner tends to nudge the prices up. But, in time-honoured Moroccan tradition, a little hard bargaining or feigned disinterest, can have a magical effect.

Corrosion from the Atlantic breeze, and cowboy repair jobs has taken a toll on some of the more fragile pieces. But I am constantly surprised at what has survived, and the general good condition of it all. There’s plenty of less than perfect bric-à-brac, as well as toe-cringing reproductions of Louis XIV but, for all of that, there are museum-quality gems.

Tucked away in the textile market of Derb Omar is a new and rather well-heeled gallery named Memo-Arts. The showroom has a few exquisite pieces, including a rosewood writing desk with ormolu legs, a davenport, and a pair of Art Nouveau bronze nymphs. In the middle of the room sits a magnificent grand piano from about 1925, crafted in by the celebrated Parisian house of Erard.

In the last two or three years a few high-end antique galleries have sprung up. Like Memo-Arts, or the impressive Galerie Moulay Youssef, they cater to the richest Moroccan clientele. You tend to get the feeling that people buy from them in a perverse show of wealth, rather than for their fondness of antiques. The same can be said for the two or three new auction houses, established for the local market, where the rich delight in publicly flashing their cash.

Most visitors find Casablanca bewildering in its size and scope, and few bother to spend any time there, except to change trains or to visit the great Mosque of Hassan II. On the surface, the city can seem overly European, after all it was built largely by the French. But just under the surface, there’s Morocco’s ubiquitous blend of vibrant colour, rich aromas and sounds – donkeys braying, dogs barking, and the clamour of water-sellers pushing through the traffic.

And there is of course the allure of the Bogart and Bergman, and their Casablanca. Rick’s Café does exist, having opened recently for tourists not far from the Port. But the real flavour of that time is kept alive in the flea-markets, the junk yards and antique shops in town. Tracking them down is a way of seeing the city, and exploring hidden corners to which tourists rarely venture.

Back in the labyrinth at Hay Hasseni, Saïd ben Saïd is asleep with a newspaper over his face. He stirs at the sound of footsteps, the prospect of a customer. When asked if he can acquire a grand piano at flea-market prices, he shrugs.

‘I have a friend with a warehouse full of grand pianos,’ he says absently. ‘You can find them in any size. When the French ran away from Morocco, they left them behind in their hundreds. But who would ever want one?’

‘I would,’ I said.

The shopkeeper scratched a thumbnail to his neck, and glanced back into his Aladdin’s den.

‘Well you are wise,’ he said. ‘If there were others like you, I would be a far richer man with a far happier wife.’

TEN

Chatwin and The Songlines

ONCE IN A VERY LONG TIME you come across a book that is far, far more than the ink, the glue and the paper, a book that seeps into your blood.

With such a book the impact isn’t necessarily obvious at first… but the more you read it and re-read it, and live with it, and travel with it, the more it speaks to you, and the more you realize that you cannot live without that book. It’s then that the wisdom hidden inside, the seed, is passed on.

The Songlines first appeared more than twenty years ago. It was the book that made British travel writer Bruce Chatwin a bestselling author. And it is the book that established him as an oddball genius, a giant of the travel genre, and a writer whose works commented on the human condition as much as they did on the lands which passed beneath his feet.

During his short life, Chatwin published only a handful of books. Some were fact, others fiction, and all were a blend of both. They were the kind of books that many people had waited a lifetime to read: pithy, lyrical, and capable of easing the reader down through layer after layer until they hit raw metal, a mirror in which they saw themselves.

The Songlines is Chatwin’s masterwork. I remember the day I first saw it.

I was standing outside a bookshop in Nairobi, staring in at the window display of titles I couldn’t afford. A man sidled up, nudged me in the ribs, and jabbed a thumb at the hardback book:

‘That’s a cracker,’ he said.

‘I can’t afford it,’ I replied. ‘I’ve only got enough cash for lunch.’

The man nudged me again.

‘Go hungry,’ he said.

I handed over my money and entered a world where the sharpest realism touches far-flung fantasy. Since then I have carried the book with me on almost all my journeys. It’s always there, at the bottom of my bag, a trusted friend that can be opened at random and can pacify me in moments of solitude.

My copy has been through the Namib Desert and the Sahara, across the Amazon, twice, over the Himalayas, and through the Madre de Dios cloud forest in Peru, where I was almost tempted to trade it for an exquisite macaw-feather crown. It has been a pillow, and a fly-swat, and entertainment in a small Ethiopian village when I had the runs, for days. And, it was one of two books I was permitted in my cell during the weeks I spent in solitary confinement in a Pakistani prison.

The Songlines is about the Australian Outback and the Aboriginals, who, through history, have roamed the vast, desert region, walking softly on the Earth. It is a journey of sorts, and a catalogue of meetings with ordinary people and eccentrics, each of them making do in the furnace of central Australia. It is about the essence of humanity, the lust of a nomadic existence, and about rejecting a world of materialism, a world that Chatwin must have suspected he might soon depart. While writing it, he had already been diagnosed with HIV.

Chatwin’s career began in the art world. He used to say he picked up the skill of writing detailed descriptions while working at Sotheby’s, where he had been made the youngest partner in the firm’s history. It’s a skill that resonates through all his writing, no more brilliantly than in this book. The initial character descriptions in particular are works of art.

The Songlines kicks off with Chatwin meeting Arkady Volchok, an Australian of Russian heritage, whose father was a Cossack. For Chatwin there was nothing so irresistible as a person found in a habitat that was at odds to the one from which he had come. He was of course a character for his collection, as was Arkady, who was surely an extension of himself. The people he collected were woven into his books, and described, turned into the light, and described again. None of them do very much in The Songlines, except to spit out a few succinct lines of words; but their appearance is enough – gems glinting for our delight.

No one fascinated Chatwin more than polymaths, people with a diverse range of knowledge and experience. He was one himself, of course, as was Theodor Strehlow, the character whose book Songs of Central Australia first activated his interest in so-called Songlines. Strehlow was an anthropologist of Austrian extraction, who had spent years in the Outback, and was adopted into an Aboriginal clan, the elders of which had entrusted him with their secrets. In his youth, he had been schooled in the Aboriginal dialect Aranda, as well as in Classical Greek, Latin, German and English, while raised at a Lutheran mission: all of it food for Chatwin’s vivid imagination.

Strehlow recorded the native Australian concepts of Songlines, and Dreamtime, and he mapped out a kind of blueprint that may have been a template for all primitive man. Chatwin was hooked from the start, and must have found in Strehlow’s work, as his biographer Nicholas Shakespeare puts it, ‘a structure on which to hang not only his nomad theories, but more or less everything else in his notebooks…’

Then, a little over half way through the narrative, the reader hits just that – a long italicised section labelled ‘From The Notebooks’. It’s something that even divides diehard fans of the Chatwinesque: a collection of aphorisms, ideas, and obscure details of culture and history. For my money, it’s the icing on the cake, the treasury of a short but brilliant life of observation. The section reflects Chatwin’s essence. It covers a world of obscure destinations – Kabul, Omdurman, Yunnan and Timbuktu. And it shines a beam of light onto aspects of human belief from which we have become distanced or removed.

Since his death early in 1989, Chatwin has been feted for his good looks, his love of distinguished company, and for his personal life. An enormous amount has been written on him, not least by his official biographer Nicholas Shakespeare, whose warts-and-all life story is two inches thick.

Sometimes you get the feeling that Chatwin is famous for being famous, that people are so caught up with him as an icon, that they forget to read his books. They pore over his private life, tracing his long-lost love affairs, and searching for skeletons in closets that I believe would best be left alone. Or they waste their time in dissection – trying to work out where the fact comes to an end and where the fantasy begins. For me, that’s all nonsense: Chatwin ought to be remembered instead as the pre-eminent storyteller, the raconteur, the man whose prose has perfect rhythm, and whose books walk the fine tightrope between fact and fantasy.

The Songlines works so powerfully, because in the native Aboriginals of the Outback Chatwin found himself. He was drawn to their gentle interpretation of the world, and to the way their dreamtime ascended far above the black and white world in which our own lives are sometimes confined.

Literary reviewers may have attacked Chatwin for over-romanticizing his subject, but they were not the only critics. The Aboriginals themselves felt short-changed by the way they were depicted in the book – fodder for Chatwin’s theories on nomadic life. And some found it odd that for a book on Aboriginal belief, the author spent such little time actually with Aboriginals, and so much with the wacky cast of immigrants who people the Outback.

As for my own travels with the book, the most touching moment came in Senegal. One night in the capital, Dakar, I was sitting in a café waiting for the sun to go down. The heat was terrible, and the place was packed with femmes de la rue parading themselves, hoping to attract a fresh infection-free clientele. I was alone, and ferreted The Songlines from the bottom of my bag. The waiter slapped down a glass of café noir and looked at me sideways.

‘He came here once,’ he said.

‘Who did?’

‘That man?’

‘Who?’

‘The blonde one,’ he said, pointing to the author photo on the back of the book.

‘Chatwin?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you talk to him?’

‘Yes I did.’

‘Do you remember the conversation?’

‘Yes I do.’

‘What did you talk about?’

The waiter looked out at the road, and wiped a hand across his mouth.

‘We spoke about silence,’ he said.

He wafted away. I opened The Songlines at random, and my eyes found a Moorish proverb favoured by Chatwin:

‘He who does not travel does not know the value of men.’

ELEVEN

Chefchaouen

A WAITER IN FÈS first directed me to the small town of Chefchaouen, nestled in the foothills of the Rif Mountains.

I had praised a bowl of delicious harira, the wholesome soup Moroccans love to eat through the winter. He told me that the recipe had been prepared by his family for eight centuries at their home in Chefchaouen.

‘If you go there,’ he said, his eyes welling with tears, ‘your heart will dance with delight.’

The idea of my heart dancing with delight was far too good to pass up. I set off from Fès next morning, drove north across the agricultural heartland, through forests of cork oaks, and up into the Rif.

Northern Morocco couldn’t make for a sharper contrast from the deserts of the south. There were small rocky fields, scattered with cactus and sheep, wizened men perched on donkeys, their wives in conical straw hats, orange groves and farmsteads, and translucent winter streams.

The first view of Chaouen, as locals call it, sends a tingle down the spine. It sits cradled between two summits (from which it gets its name, meaning ‘two-horned’), above the Oued Laou Valley, gleaming white in the blazing afternoon sun. Entering it, is like stepping into a lost piece of Andalucian Spain. Chaouen was built as a secure citadel for the Islamic faith, a bastion from which the Muslim refugees pouring out from southern Spain, could regroup and plan their assault on Portugal, the rising power. It was founded in 1471 by an Idrissid prince, Cherif Moulay Ali bin Rachid, and was populated largely by Andalucian Muslims from Granada.

The town’s architecture, cuisine, and its unlikely Mediterranean feel are results of its curious Spanish heritage. Until 1920, when Spanish troops occupied northern Morocco, Chaouen was cut off from the Christian world. The invading Spanish found a time capsule of their own culture. They heard spoken a form of tenth century Catalan – a language brought by the Andalucian Jews – which had died out on the Iberian peninsula four centuries before. And they found Granada leatherwork, pottery, and other crafts long extinct from their native Iberia.

Chefchaouen provides a welcome break from the profound grandeur of the Imperial cities of Fès, Mèknes and Marrakech. It tends to feel more like a big walled village than a town. The streets are steep and cobbled, shaded by trellises erupting with clematis, the houses whitewashed or rinsed with indigo, their doors studded, their roofs tiled with terracotta. As you stroll up and down the alleys of the medina, what strikes you is the tranquility. It’s as if the outside world is still out there, somewhere, but you have broken free.

The first thing you notice is the absence of cars. There are almost none at all. Without them, the air is clean and crisp. Visitors amble about over the cobbles with a glazed look in their eyes, sustained by the thought they have discovered a little-known Moroccan jewel. They tour the fifteenth century kasbah, clambering along the battlements, examine its rank dungeons, and marvel at the Grand Mosque with its spectacular octagonal minaret.

Chaouen is popular with visitors from Spain, who come to peer into the looking-glass of their own history. There’s not a sense though that the town is overrun with tourists. Instead, there’s a sleepy innocence, a feeling that the locals are happy to share their world. And, of course, the visitors snap up bargains at the multitude of shops and stalls found throughout the medina. All sorts of merchandise is on sale, from the Andalucian-style pottery with its characteristic glazes, to the wide conical hats with wool bobbles worn by the women in the Rif.

There are rugged mountain tapestries, too, and stalls awash with musical instruments – ouds, goat-skin tambours, and giant metal castanets. And in the narrow passages veering steeply down the hill, you can find delicate homemade jewellery on sale, woollen sweaters, boxes inlaid with camel bone, and rock crystals cut from quarries in the Rif.

In the heart of the old town is the plaza of Uta el-Hammam, lined with trees, paved with pebbles, and the perfect place to flop down and watch life. The cafés there vie for your attention and your business, waiters fanning menu cards at passing visitors. The food on offer ranges from succulent pastilla (a savoury-sweet pie made with chicken or pigeon), to mouth-watering tagines, such as lamb stewed with apricots, to couscous served with seven vegetables, and harira, the robust winter soup which is a meal in itself. There are western delicacies too, especially dishes from Spain, such as paella, tortilla, and grilled fish caught in the local river.

In the labyrinth of backstreets that make up the medina, there are a wide number of small hotels and hostels, most of which fall into the ‘affordable’ category. There are one or two larger hotels, too, such as the Parador, which has a pool and bar. Elsewhere alcohol is not widely served, for Chaouen is regarded as a holy city of Islam. But some drinkers are prepared to forego their tipple, in the light of another vice.

The Rif’s rugged landscape has always been a hardship for those who farm the sheering mountain slopes. Few crops flourish there, few except for marijuana. The illicit crop may explain why there are so many imported foreign sports cars trundling on the open roads in the north, wealth gained from kif. On the drive up from Fès, I stopped in the middle of nowhere to relieve myself, and staggered into the undergrowth, only to realize it was an ocean of marijuana plants five foot high.

The upper floors of some cafés in Chaouen are smoking rooms for those with an affection for the weed. Although illegal, smoking kif seems to be tolerated. But visitors would be extremely unwise to take away what they could enjoy in the town.

Outside one of the smoking haunts, I came across a baby-boomer from San Francisco who had followed Jimi Hendrix to Morocco, as a groupie back in the summer of ’69. He was tall, a little hunched and spoke very slowly, as if the forbidden fruit had taken a severe toll. He held out his arms.

‘Welcome to Paradise,’ he said, lighting the end of a joint. ‘The home of Free Love.’

The pace of life in Chefchaouen is so serene that you forget about the pressures of checking email and chatting on a mobile phone – for me the test of a town’s true charm. Whether you venture there as a place to relax and regroup, or as a starting point for hill walking in the Rif, Chefchaouen is the kind of place one stumbles upon very rarely. As I took to the road once again, and headed north towards the nearby waters of the Med, I thought of the waiter who had directed me to his home town. Chaouen was as wonderful as he had described. And, just as he promised, it made my heart dance with delight.

TWELVE

Colonial Clubs of India

TO STAND AT THE CROSSROADS near Mumbais Haji Alis Tomb is to witness a slice of modern India at its most vibrant.

Giant-sized billboards loom down over the seething traffic, alluring the nouveau riche with the latest in must-have fashions and all mod cons.

Down below, reclining primly in their chauffeur-driven cars, this new self-made class do their level best to block out reality, a realm thats never more than a pane of glass away. They seem immune to the incessant hooting, the droves of beggars, the eunuchs, and the street hawkers, all of whom glide through the gridlock like sharks hunting prey.

Spend a little time out in Mumbais human stew, and you feel yourself being poached alive. But salvation is at hand – to a privileged few at least.

A stones throw away from the traffic jam, theres a gentle haven of calm, a throwback to another time – a world that couldnt be more incongruous if it tried. Drive in through the solemn silver-painted gateposts, and you enter a kind of fantasy island, albeit one adrift on turbulent seas.

Inside, there are sprawling verandas cooled by ancient swirling ceiling fans, manicured lawns, and waiters dressed in starched white shirts and little black bow ties. There are crustless sandwiches as well, and scones and lemon tea, chit books, jam tarts, and miniature brass bells for summoning the legions of staff.

A bastion of propriety and good form, The Willingdon Club is part of a legacy which dates back to the earliest days of the British Raj. Its a lost shard of a world in which old-fashioned values diehard. In a country more often regarded for its own blend of perfected chaos, The Willingdon, and other clubs like it, are run with almost military efficiency. Membership is valued as the epitome of social status, the dividing line between old wealth and the rising nouveau riche.

In the heyday of colonial rule there were many dozens of such clubs, found across the subcontinent, the Far East, and Africa. Established for the droves of bureaucrats who powered the colonial machine, they were as ruthless in their rules and membership requirements as any club on Pall Mall. Their drawing rooms were where colonial policy was thrashed out, and where the Rajs secrets were circulated among the privileged elite. It was a domain in which the old boy network thrived, one reserved for British gentlemen alone.

During the Raj, each club catered to a specific social strata. A tradesman or low-ranking bureaucrat would never have aspired, for example, to membership of Calcuttas exalted Bengal Club. And, membership for top-notch clubs had waiting lists so long that applicants often perished from consumption much before they ever came up for membership at all.

When the British set sail for home after Independence, sixty plus years ago, there could have been few who would have imagined that the colonial clubs could endure. After all, they were a symbol of decadence and, of course, of the despised British rule.

But endure they have.

Almost every major Indian city has at least one club. Mumbai has half a dozen, Delhi has several, as does Chennai, and as do the hill stations like Simla, Darjeeling and Dehradun.

The most snobbish and historical of all are the clubs in Calcutta, the capital of India under the Raj until 1911. The sniffiest of them all is the Bengal Club. Founded in 1827, with waiting lists that run into decades, its ambience has to be experienced to be believed. The highlight is the ‘Reynolds Room, a salon whose walls are adorned with murals inspired by the painters life work. Its great rival is The Tollygunge Club, known by all as ‘The Tolly, an oasis even now of decorum and stiff upper lip. Laid out over a hundred acres of former indigo plantation, once owned by Tipu Sultan himself, the clubhouse is more than two centuries old.

With the financial explosion gripping modern India, the clubs are a sure fire way for the old elite to set themselves apart. Basking effortlessly on the white-washed verandas or, playing bridge in the card rooms, the landed gentry manage to assert their social status by membership to a closed world. Its the perfect way of distancing oneself from the growing swathes of society who are cash-rich but culture-poor. Membership subscriptions arent usually cheap, but its not about money. Its about being approved.

As soon as I was married into a known Mumbai family, my in-laws put me up for The Willingdon Club. In the years that Ive had membership, I have been enthralled by a system that, despite all odds, has managed not only to survive, but to thrive. What impresses me is the way that theres almost no slack in the system. The rules, committees, and sub-committees, maintain a state of blissful harmony, and keep the prevailing state of mayhem outside the gates at bay.

Founded by the Marquess of Willingdon, in 1917, the club was supposedly established after the peer was refused entry for his guest, an Indian Maharajah, at the nearby Bombay Gymkhana. (According to legend, that club had a sign at its gates, bearing the slogan, ‘No dogs or Indians allowed). Needless to say, membership there was, like everywhere else at the time, restricted to whites. Incensed, the Marquess, later to become Viceroy, set up the first club with the radical new vision of membership for all.

But open membership doesnt mean for a moment the lowering of standards. Even now, Bollywood actors dont have a hope in getting their names onto the list. Nor do those who flout its rulebook. In a famous Mumbai moment, the celebrated artist M. F. Husain, who never wore shoes, was refused entry for arriving barefoot. (The rules also stipulate that rubber sandals or bedroom slippers are unacceptable).

Set in acres of greenery in the middle of the city, The Willingdons land value runs into billions of dollars. All around it, fashionable tower blocks are rising up, swish homes to the newly arrived.

As with many of the clubs established during the Raj, The Willingdon is predominantly a sports club. A little further south, in Colaba, is another – the Royal Bombay Yacht Club. Overlooking the Gateway of India, and next door to the Taj Mahal Hotel, the Yacht Club is set in a hulking Indo-Gothic building. One of the oldest of all Indian clubs, it was founded in 1846, and was awarded royal patronage by Queen Victoria.

For foreign visitors to India, temporary membership to a wide number of clubs is possible. The easiest way is to track down a local member to vouch for you. But if you cant find one, there are other ways of slipping in under the net. The Royal Over-Seas League in Londons St. Jamess, for instance, has reciprocal membership to a plenty of old colonial clubs across India and the Commonwealth, and it is forthcoming to new members.

Before being married I used to stay at the Yacht Club, in the grandest chambers imaginable. They were vast, had a view right over the Gateway of India, and they came with a manservant who was meek, fawning, and ever available. He even offered to dress me once, and did a great job killing the cat-sized rats that infested the upper floors. I used to spend months there at a time, fraternizing with characters straight out of a Graham Greene novel, and forgetting my responsibilities elsewhere.

In the evenings the resident members would congregate in the bar, its walls adorned with ensigns and naval insignia. Over pegs of whisky, they would swap tall tales from the high seas. The most colourful character of all was an Irishman. An Honorary Consul, who had managed to arrange for himself a grand apartment on the first floor, he was known to all as ‘Callaghan of India. A friend of his, an impeccable old member and former admiral in the Indian navy, once told me of the time during the monsoon that a sea of rats swarmed up from the sewers and into the Yacht Club.

‘They were simply everywhere, he said dreamily.

I asked what was done to quell them. The admiral shrugged.

‘One of chief members was a Jain, he replied, ‘and refused to allow them to be poisoned. So we just put up with them. A lot of them are still here. The old admiral sipped his Scotch. ‘I fear they outnumber the members six to one.

Although a great many of the colonial clubs now find themselves in the middle of sprawling cities across the Subcontinent, many more are tucked away in small towns and hill stations. In their ceaseless search for cool climes, the British would decamp en masse from the cities each summer, and move to higher ground. Hidden in the Nilgiri Hills is the hill station of Ootacamund (known as ‘Ooty by all). A bastion even now of English decorum, Ooty traditions die hard. Theres still fox-hunting in red jackets, even though there are no foxes at all. And, right at the centre of Englishness, is the Ootacamund Club.

Entering into the clubhouse is to step back into a sepia-tinted world right out of The Far Pavilions. The walls are hung with game trophies, the antique furniture carved from rosewood, mahogany and teak. The reading room has an imposing portrait of Queen Empress Victoria, and all around there are pictures of the Hunt.

Founded in the first half of the 19th century, the Ooty Club is a nugget of real England, albeit one far away from home.

Theres English fare (Spotted Dick and Yorkshire Pudding), snooker, croquet, and rigid codes of dress. But, most English of all is the weather. Indeed, the English must have been in seventh heaven there. Discovering the Nilgiri Hills for the first time, in 1819, Lord Lytton wrote home to his wife:

‘Such beautiful English rain and English mud!’

THIRTEEN

Damascus

SALIM THE SON OF SULEIMAN was reclining on an ancient Damascene throne at the back of his shop.

His eyes were closed, the face around them lined with creases, its cheeks obscured by a week’s growth of tattered grey beard. As he slept off a lunch of mutton kebabs, his fingertips caressed fragments of ivory inlaid on the throne’s regal arm. Lost in the shadows between the front door and the chair, lay a treasury of objects, a spider’s web of clutter gleaned from centuries of Damascus life.

There were Crusader battle standards blackened by fire, tortoise shell jewel boxes, and Qur’an stands carved from great slabs of teak, epaulettes and chamber pots, fountainheads fashioned in the form of gazelles, mosque lamps and astrolabes, vast gilt mirrors, and bull elephant tusks.

Before leaving home I had found a visiting card from the very same antique emporium, in a file packed with my grandfather’s papers. An Afghan writer and savant, he had visited Damascus seventy-five years before me, and had written a book about the journey, entitled Alone in Arabian Nights. I was pleased to not only see the shop still standing, but to find it filled with such a treasure trove of wares.

At the sound of a customer’s feet, Salim opened an eye. He scanned the room, jolted up, and let the kitten curled on his chest tumble to the floor.

‘Can I interest you in an amulet?’ he said with a grin, ‘to keep you safe on Syrian roads.’

‘I don’t believe in all that,’ I replied.

The shopkeeper’s smile melted away.

‘Shhhh!’ he hissed. ‘You mustn’t say such things.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because He is listening!’

We both cocked our heads to look at the ceiling, and I changed the subject. I asked the price of a fabulous ceremonial axe that had caught my eye. Its blade was crafted from watered steel, inscribed with a spell.

Suleiman wagged a finger in my direction.

‘Everything is for sale except that,’ he said.

‘Why’s it different?’

‘I cannot tell you.’

Salim the son of Suleiman brewed a pot of tea, and sat in silence, while I begged him to sell me the axe. The more I implored, the more he shook his head. After an hour of sweet tea and failed persuasion, I strolled out into the thin winter light, feeling as if somehow I had been robbed of the opportunity of parting with my money.

Visit the old city of Damascus and it’s impossible not to be struck by a sense of living antiquity, and by the gems that fill the emporia hidden within its shadows. Explore the teeming souqs and you descend down through layer upon layer, onion-skins of life, stretching back twenty centuries, and more.

I have never been in a place where the antiques and bric-à-brac fit so squarely against the backdrop of humanity.

Trawl through the loot on sale, and the waves of past invaders stare you in the face. The Greeks were there, and after them the Romans and Byzantine Christians. Then came the Umayyed Caliphate, its empire stretching from India to Islamic Spain and, after it, the Abbasids, the Fatimids and the Seljuq Turks. The Crusades gave way to Mameluk rule, itself followed by the conquest of Tamerlane, the Ottomans and, after them, the French.

Mark Twain was spot on when, in the 1860s, he wrote, ‘To Damascus, years are only moments, decades are only flitting trifles of time. She measures time not by days, months and years, but by the empires she has seen rise and prosper and crumble to ruin.’

The American author’s visit to Damascus coincided with the great Victorian preoccupation for all things Arabian. The interest was partly fuelled by the translation of A Thousand and One Nights, which made the Orient fashionable. European parlours were suddenly awash with exotic furniture, tiles, and silks from the Arab world. By far the best of it came from Damascus, where the remnants fill the antique shops today, and where the craftsmen still toil away making merchandise that has changed little in design in over a thousand years.

In the 1800s, intrepid adventurers like Twain visited Damascus and were awed by it, while others swapped their prim London townhouses for palaces hidden in the depths of the Old City.

The most famous of the Orientalists was Sir Richard Burton. He arrived on January 1st 1870, shortly after Mark Twain had passed through. Employed as British Consul, Burton found himself in a melting pot of ancient and modern, a rare blend of Arab life that he regarded as utter Paradise. It’s easy to imagine his delight, after all his Consulate was housed in one of the grandest palaces of all, the fabulous Bait Quwatli. Now divided into homes and storerooms, and in a terrible state of repair, the interior harks back to a time when the Syrian capital was one of the grandest, most sophisticated cities in existence.

For me, a journey to Damascus is an amazing hunt from beginning to end, a slice through layers of history in search of treasure. Seeking out the palaces – ruined and restored – is a great way to glimpse at centuries past. Some buildings have sadly been destroyed, and others have had their beauty savaged by botched restorations, but there are riches awaiting anyone with a sense of adventure.

Look for the old palaces and, when you find them, there aren’t any turn-styles or tourist lines – just a watchman if you’re lucky to open the door. The ceilings may have fallen in, and the frescoes might be cracked, but squint a little, use your imagination, and it all comes vibrantly to life. Very soon you can hear the sound of music and staccato conversation, and smell the scent of fleurs d’oranges, as the hostess sweeps through the room.

A Damascene mansion’s reception rooms were designed to astonish visitors, aweing them with a sense of wonder. Such buildings tended to be the property of powerful political families, rather than successful merchants. And so the mansions themselves were an expression of political power and aspiration. Of them all, the most extraordinary, and the easiest to visit now, is the eighteenth century Beit Nizam, located on a narrow residential lane off Straight Street.

From the outside nothing at all is given away. It looks quite unremarkable. But ring the bell, and wait for the guardian to get up from his afternoon siesta, and you enter a dream world of Arabian fantasy.

The house boasts three sprawling courtyards and many reception rooms as grand as any. There are alabaster colonnades and marble floors inset with quartz, octagonal fountains and lavish gilded doors, fabulous painted ceilings and stained glass, turquoise Iznik tiles, exquisite mosque lamps, and murals festooning the walls.

The house is silent now except for birdsong in the orange trees, the stillness bridging the century and a half since the mansion was a hub for high society. Stroll the courtyards and it’s easy to picture the exiled Algerian leader, Abd al-Qadir, sitting in the shade, chatting with Burton, or their scandalous friend Lady Jane Digby revealing her latest love affair.

But the longer you spend in palaces like Beit Nizam, the more you find yourself touched by melancholy. A sense of sadness is somehow reflected in it all, as if the bandwagon rolled on.

As I traipsed around the Old City, marvelling at the shattered time-capsules of splendour, I got a sense that no one really cared – except me. The guardians were blasé to the grandeur, as were the ubiquitous families of cats perched on the rooftops; and the local Damascenes were too busy struggling with the present to give much care to the past.

The most poignant example of this sense of sorrow surrounds the home of Jane Digby. An English socialite and aristocrat, she had exiled herself to Damascus at the age of forty-five. It must have been the one place she could think of where her reputation had not yet reached.

In Europe, the drawing-rooms of high society resounded to gossip of her indecent liaisons. She had been married young to an English Baron, before being divorced by him after a slew of scandalous affairs, including one with her own cousin. Freed from marriage, she embarked on a catalogue of liaisons with numerous nobles, including King Ludwig I of Bavaria and, after him, with his son, King Otto of Greece.

Lady Jane spent half the year near Palmyra in goat hair tents, with her lover, a Bedouin sheikh twenty years her junior. The other six months was passed in Damascus, in a house that lies just outside the walls of the Old City.

I had heard that the building had been rediscovered by Lady Jane’s biographer, Mary Lovell, a few years ago. With time to spare, I went in search of it for myself. The trouble was that no one in the Syrian capital was interested in a European woman who lived more than a century ago, and one celebrated for her promiscuity. I had inexact directions, which were of little use until, that is, I came across a little shop where electrical motors were being repaired.

Mohammed, the owner, was having lunch at a workbench strewn with wire, dismembered fans, and grease. As I entered with my makeshift map, he insisted I join him. In the Arab world, a visitor must be received with hospitality irrespective of circumstance.

Lunch was followed by tea and conversation mostly about Chinese-made fans, and a blow by blow account of Mohammed’s youth. After that, he guided me through an album of pictures of his extended family, and served yet more tea. Three hours after my arrival, I inquired politely if he might show me the house of Lady Jane. He seemed confused, then smiled.

‘Follow me,’ he said.

We left the workshop and went round the corner and down an alley no wider than a man. Mohammed rang a bell high on the doorframe. After some time, an old woman poked her veiled head out and I was ushered quickly inside. The palace of Beit Nizam had impressed me for its sheer grandeur and indulgence, but rarely have I been touched as I was by the home of Lady Jane.

In the many decades since her death, the house has been divided up among as many as thirty families, but the famous octagonal parlour remains in a near-perfect state. The walls are still covered with the original handmade paper, brought from London by Lady Jane herself. Fitted cupboards stand in each corner, their doors inlaid with delicate filigree. The ceiling – alas partly concealed by a crude mezzanine floor – is octagonal, its central medallion ornamented with little mirrors.

Three generations of a family live in the two rooms now. They were clustered on vinyl couches with bouquets of plastic flowers all around, watching Baywatch on an old Japanese TV. Before leaving, I took a mental snapshot, and found myself wondering what the scandalous Lady Jane might have made of the scene.

Back in the covered bazaar, the traders were getting ready for the evening rush, when Damascenes take a stroll before dinner. Brisk business was being done in saffron, mothballs and in underpants, in pumice, plastic buckets and olive oil soap.

One shop was far busier than all the rest.

Its back wall was lined with jars filled with curious ingredients – sulphur, dried chameleons, oak apples and antimony. Dangling from a string near the light was a clutch of tortoise shells, eagles’ wings, and a glass box filled with salamander’s tails. I watched as veiled women would wander over one by one. They would hand a scribbled list to the apothecary who, in turn, would weigh out a handful of roots, damask roses, poppy seeds or a dried starfish.

In a narrow alley a stone’s throw away, a hunched old craftsman was hammering a strand of steel beside a forge. His workshop was blackened with soot, his hands as coarse as glass-paper. The swordsmith paused to greet me, and held the blade into the light for me to examine his work. Damascus was once famed for so-called ‘watered steel’, a technique which leaves a fluid-like grain on the metal. Blades of astonishing sharpness were fashioned until about 1700, when the technique was lost.

Nearby, in Souq al Khayyatin, the tailor’s bazaar, I came across a series of chambers where red and white kafir headscarves were being woven on great cast iron looms, imported from France more than a century ago. The chambers were vaulted, their frescoed walls hinting at the former use of the place, as a hammam. The brocade spinners now populate the magnificent central steam room, its ceiling crowned by an octagonal cupola, songbirds tweeting in their cages all around.

Inspired by the ruined bathhouse, I decided to follow Arab tradition and visit a hammam. Bathing is extremely popular across the Islamic world, and is a way for friends to spend time together relaxing, as much as it is a means to get clean. The hammams of Damascus are legendary, many dating back more than a thousand years.

I had been recommended the Al Selsela, which lies close to the ancient Umayyed Mosque. Its owner, another Mohammed, was slouched on a chair near the doorway, watching an Egyptian soap opera on a portable TV.

‘A clean man has a pure heart,’ he whispered as I entered, quoting a favoured Syrian proverb. His family had run the establishment for generations, he said, and he knew all the customers by name. Some of them were lounging about in the central salon, chatting, smoking shisha, and drinking sweet tea.

Wrapped in a towel, I shuffled past them into the blistering steam room. The chamber was illuminated by shafts of natural light, pinpoints of radiance, like a night sky. After being scalded then scrubbed down to the bone with a hunk of pumice, I shuffled out again squeaky clean. As I changed, I found myself pondering how the Occidental world could have lost the tradition of communal bathing – one of the pillars on which the Arab world was born.

Mohammed spat out another proverb as he took my money: ‘Clean feet leave no footprints,’ he said. Then he directed me to the famous Nawfara Café on the other side of the Umayyed Mosque. He said that if I heard the storyteller there, I would be the happiest man alive, a prospect too good to let go by.

Out on the street, I made my way through a river of Shi’a pilgrims, most of them women, furled from head to toe in black. There were men, too, beating their chests rhythmically as they went. They come each winter in their thousands from Iran, to pray at the shrine of the daughter of Imam Husain.

I carried on down the lane.

Even before I had turned the corner and descended the steps, I smelled the scent of apple shisha on the breeze.

The Nawfara Café is an institution in Damascus. You get the feeling that entire lives have been swallowed up there, a ritual of conversation, tobacco, and the bitter Arabica blend.

Inside, a waiter hurried around replenishing the shisha with burning coals. In the middle of the room, propped against the wall was a kind of raised throne. Perched on it sat a grey-haired man. He was wrapped in a black robe, its lapel trimmed with gold. Nestled on his lap was a book filled with tight black handwriting. He was shouting out, waving a sword.

But no one paid any attention at all.

The reason for the lack of interest was a widescreen TV on the adjacent wall. Chelsea was playing Arsenal. Everyone in the room, except for me and the storyteller, was glued to the game.

Throughout history, Damascus has been famed for its hakawatis, storytellers, a tradition that was celebrated until as recently as a decade ago. But the ubiquitous satellite channels and televisions have killed the ancient Arab art of conversation. The result – a world in which storytellers are a dying breed.

And there is none in the Arab world more respected than Rachid Abu Shadi.

Silently, he finished the tale, put down the sword and the book, and slipped off his throne. The room was filled with applause, but it was not for the storyteller. No one noticed him leave, because Arsenal had just scored.

I invited Abu Shadi to join me for a cup of coffee.

‘When I was young,’ he said, a glint in his eye, ‘my father used to bring me here and I would listen for hours on end – to the tales of Antar and Abla. You see here at Nawfara there’s a tradition. Only the tales of Antar, the most famous Arab hero, are told.’

I asked about Alf Layla wa Layla, A Thousand and One Nights. The hakawati lit a Turkish cigarette and drew the smoke through his clenched fist.

‘They were told elsewhere,’ he said, ‘you see, each café had its own repertoire, but all that’s now gone. I am the last of my kind.’ He wiped his eye. ‘One day the television will break,’ he said darkly, and then they will remember me, not because of the stories, but because of the silence there will be without me, and without that vile contraption that hangs up there on the wall.’

The next day I awoke with Lady Jane on my mind.

I had dreamt of her octagonal parlour and wanted to see Palmyra for myself, where she lived half the year with her beloved sheikh. Standing two hundred kilometres to the north-east of Damascus, Palmyra once boasted a vast community, poised on the caravan routes between Persia and the Mediterranean.

Travelling there in the 1930s on camel, my Afghan grandfather was astonished by the Classical ruins. He wrote, ‘To set eyes on this remote oasis is to be reminded that, however mighty an empire imagines itself to be, it is as fragile as a child’s toy.’

The scale of the ruins at Palmyra are truly awe-inspiring. They stand like an ancient movie back-lot, all ruined and bleak like the end of the world. But it is the silence that made the strongest impression on me. I found myself picturing both Lady Jane and my own grandfather listening to it, and to the infrequent blasts of wind ripping across the plains. It was as if the breeze were singing a warning, that civilizations crumble and fall as sure as they take seed and flourish.

Still known to the Arabs by its pre-Semitic name, Tadmor, Palmyra was once a place of decadence and wealth. Walk the ruins and you get a sense of the power of the culture that shaped it.

There are vast colonnaded streets, temples and theatres, ceremonial arches and elaborate tombs, replete with exquisite funereal busts. It’s all fashioned from sumptuous honey-yellow stone, built with a confidence that must have defied anyone who questioned such a metropolis could exist in the desert. But then of course, the landscape has changed dramatically in the forty centuries or more since its founding. Palmyra’s name, meaning ‘the City of Palms’, hints at the fertility of the oasis long gone.

Not quite so certain are the origins of this now-desolate commercial and cultural outpost of antiquity. Its name appears on stone tablets dating to the nineteenth century before the birth of Christ, and is apparently the place mentioned in the Bible’s First Book of Kings, as ‘Tamor’, a city founded by Solomon. More clear is the Roman Empire’s delight at capturing the oasis, which they regarded as almost without equal. When Hadrian visited in 129 AD, he renamed it Palmyra Hadriana, and proclaimed it a free city.

Sitting among the ruins in the fading light of dusk, the image of Lady Jane Digby was irresistible. I could see her quite clearly in desert robes, strolling in the long shadows thrown by towering colonnades. Like me, I am sure she was taken by the romanticism of it all, and by the desperate beauty that is so alluring as to defy accurate description. By visiting Palmyra, I understood Damascus a little better, reminded that the circle of life stops for no man.

On arriving back in the capital, I paid Salim the son of Suleiman another visit.

As before, he was asleep, the tabby kitten curled up on his chest. In the background was the rumble of a generator, the sound drowning out the muezzin’s call to prayer.

When Salim was awake, and tea had been brewed and served, I brought up the subject of the ceremonial axe. The shopkeeper smiled. ‘You have earned it,’ he said. ‘What do you mean?’ ‘An object as special as that isn’t for the first day,’ he said, ‘the fact you came back means that the axe was in your dreams. You can have it half the price.’

FOURTEEN

Desert Stopover

MY JOURNEY BEGAN three weeks ago at Tangiers.

There’s no city like it: a heaving emporium of woollen jelabas and yellow baboush slippers, dark veiled faces, incense and antimony, spices and fruit. It is a place of sheer anticipation, where the ancient and modern mix, the point at which East meets West.

I was following a childhood dream, a trail southwards venturing from the north-west corner of Africa, south to Timbuktu. My budget was limited and so I opted to travel by local bus. A few miles from this town to that, squashed up at the back with live chickens, spare tyres, and baskets of fish. After all, real travel is not about luxury, but about endurance, and looking on all that passes with fresh eyes.

The vivid colours of Moroccan life were blinding. Every fruit stall, every kiosk was a blaze of reds and blues, dazzling pinks and sun-ripe yellows. But the colour was eventually traded for the stark desert. Dry terracotta browns, patches of withered maize, parched scrub… and then all of it replaced by a sea of rippled dunes.

The road became a track no wider than the bus. The sun arched west, and disappeared over the baked sand horizon. Coolness. Then the dark; the moon no more than a sliver of ivory in an ink-black sky. The other passengers and I breathed easy for the first time in as many hours. It was late – ten or eleven. And it was cold. I pulled on my filthy jacket and tried to sleep. We were running hours late, the dilapidated vehicle having overheated in the afternoon just before crossing the border into Mauritania.

I slipped into sleep, and gradually the discomfort melted away. An hour must have passed.

Then… BANG!

A jerk of tremendous force. The sound of glass shattering. The stench of dust and smoke. The bus was on its side. There was screaming and panic in the dark. Instinct took over. I clambered out of what was left of my seat, and crawled from the wreckage. One or two others had managed to do the same. They huddled on the ground, all in shock. Then the petrol tank erupted – a volcano of fire illuminating the night. I thanked fortune for sparing me, and covered my nose. My jacket was drenched in what I assumed at first to be sweat. But I realized it was blood, flowing from a gash on the side of my head.

It was then that I heard a voice, that of a man. He was calling out to me.

‘I am alive,’ I said, breaking into tears. ‘I am alive.’

The voice spoke again. It was nearer, and a moment later a hand was pressed on my shoulder. I saw the face in the reflection of the inferno. A furrowed brow above and scattered grey bristle below. The man tugged me away from the fire.

‘Come,’ he said, ‘I help you.’

We crossed a low ditch and traipsed over barren fields and sand. I was still dazed, shaking, my ears ringing. It was impossible to make out very much in the dark. The man might have slit my throat right then but I was too confused to care. I walked with my hand as a fist, and tried to prepare myself for danger.

‘Where are we going?’

‘To my home.’

I must have passed out. Because I can’t remember anything more. Suddenly it was day, bright light, scorching heat. I was lying on a mattress on a cracked mud floor. I could make out the muffled sound of a goat bleating outside, and of a child singing. The singing stopped and the child began to weep. A moment later the old man from the night before was crouching over me. I strained to open my eyes and saw him, a blur of features and yellow teeth. He offered me a tin cup filled with cool water. Struggling, I gulped down the liquid.

‘I am Hakim,’ he said.

‘Where is my rucksack?’

‘Destroyed,’ said the man. ‘The fire. Everything was destroyed.’

‘But my passport, my money…?’

‘All gone.’

‘What can I do?’

Hakim swept a hand over the stubble on his face.

‘Rest, and your fever will go.’

I lay back and the fever took hold again. It felt as if I was adrift on an ocean of sweat. As I prayed for salvation, my ears filled with the mumbled hum of the muezzin reciting the call to prayer far away.

Time passed.

Night, day, night, day, cold interleaved with heat.

From time to time I would break free from the delirium, just long enough to hear snatches of the world outside. The girl would be singing, or laughing, amidst a backdrop of farmyard sounds. The sounds couched in my desperate thirst.

It was dark again, and cold, and I was shaking, waiting for the old man or his wife to stumble in and fill my cup. I heard a fruit bat high up in the trees, and a dog worrying the goat. Then the sound of the old man’s voice.

‘We must do it,’ he said.

There was a pause, and the woman replied:

‘Let him live a few more days. There’s no need to slaughter him yet.’

‘No,’ said Hakim. ‘I will do it tonight.’

My body was suddenly charged with an almost primeval sense of fear. I was alert. Sweating like a madman, but alert all the same. My mind was racing. I jerked up off the mattress and searched for my clothes. They weren’t there. I scanned the room in which I had been recovering. I hadn’t really noticed it before. It measured about twelve feet by six, the walls made from hand cut planks, and the roof a sheet of crumpled tin. One corner was piled high with sacks of dried maize. There was a single window, glazed with a scrap of polythene, and one doorway. That was the obvious route of escape.

I moved over to it and listened hard. It led into another room, I supposed the kitchen. I could make out the girl singing softly to herself. There was a sense of peace. Then I made out the sound of the man’s feet entering the kitchen.

‘We will kill him tonight,’ said Hakim. ‘It is a matter of honour.’

The girl did not reply. Instead she broke into tears and seemed to run from the house. I could hear her bare feet darting over the baked mud. The old man must have been standing on the other side of the door. I could feel him there, weight balanced evenly over his feet, thinking, waiting. I felt a wave of fever rolling towards me again, swelling with force as it neared. My eyes watered. I struggled to keep still, and forced myself to think.

Travel far enough from home and you enter the real world, a realm where life and death are two inseparable facets of the same thing. I had not yet reached my goal, Timbuktu, but I was staring death in the eyes.

It was very real, cold, clinical.

Ten seconds later, the Hakim had shuffled outside. Taking my chance, I flung the door open and charged out into the night. I was naked, but for a pair of sweat-drenched boxer shorts, running on bare feet. Which way to go? God knows. It’s all pitch black. I hurtled towards the horizon, into the dark. There were shouts behind me, and the sound of a dog raising the alarm. I charged on, running for all I was worth. Running for my life. The shouting grew more muffled, and I felt the night air pressed on my back. It was cool. Pleasing.

I ran and ran like never before.

I hoped I would find a road, but this was wilderness. Thorn trees silhouetted by the full moon. I would have felt pity for myself, but I was too weak, too confused. Eventually I lay down at the foot of a gnarled tree and passed out.

The dawn touched my face, a blush of pink, gentle, innocent light. I strained to open my eyes, and glanced around fretfully. Lacerated feet, unclothed, lost in a wasteland of nature. The sun soared up overhead, and began to roast me alive. I cursed myself for setting out in search of adventure in the first place. Then I wondered how it might all end. I sat there crouched for most of the morning, unable to decide what to do, or in which direction to trudge.

Late that afternoon something remarkable happened.

On the horizon, I saw an object moving. It was low and black, and was too far away to make any noise. I waited and watched, and the object – a vehicle – moved closer. Half and hour passed and it closed in, wheels spinning, churning up the dust. I waved as vigorously as I could. The vehicle, a battered grey Land Rover, rolled to a halt beside the thorn tree under which I had been crouching. I heard the handbrake being pulled on hard.

A white man clambered out.

He was tall, young, and almost athletic, dressed in khaki, with an impressively wide canvas hat.

‘You’ve got to cover your head in this heat,’ he said, in a clipped English accent.

‘Someone was trying to kill me,’ I said feebly.

The Englishman peered at me, said his name was Rick. He kept a distance, didn’t even step over to shake me by the hand.

‘Oh,’ he said.

‘I was in a bus crash. There was an explosion. Then the man who saved me was going to kill me. I managed to escape.’

I hoped for pity. Rick broke into a grin. His teeth reflected the sunlight. He waved to the car.

‘You’d better get in,’ he said.

I climbed into the passenger seat and, before I could slam the door shut, we were hurtling forward at an alarming pace, jolting up and down and from side to side.

‘You’ve gotta be careful out here,’ shouted Rick over the noise of the engine.

Five minutes later I spotted a group of shacks, tall straight plank walls, roofed in crumpled tin. They were familiar. I felt a pang of fear shoot down my back.

‘I can’t go there!’ I shouted. ‘This is where they were keeping me. They were going to kill me.’

I tried to open the car door, but we were still moving too fast.

Rick slammed on the brakes, and looked me in the eye.

‘These are my friends,’ he said. ‘They sent their son to find me. He walked for two days to get to me. And he came to me because of you.’

A moment later, Hakim came rushing out. He looked concerned, confused. I shied away when he neared me.

‘I know your plan,’ I said bitterly.

‘What plan?’

‘I heard you… heard you plotting with your wife. Plotting to slit my throat.’

The old man peered at the dry mud beneath his feet. He didn’t reply at first. His head was drooped in thought. Then I saw the faintest glimmer of a smile at the corner of his mouth. A second later it had swept across his face. A moment after that he was roaring in laughter. He said something fast and Rick began to laugh as well.

I stood there, shirtless, shoeless, sunburned.

‘You don’t understand,’ said Hakim.

‘Yes I do,’ I said. ‘You were going to take advantage of me. You were going to kill me.’

‘Not you,’ said he replied. ‘We were not going to kill you, but the goat… in honour of you, our guest.’

That night we feasted on goat stew.

For me it was a celebration of a kind. I was thankful for having survived my partly self-made ordeal. The next morning, Rick drove me to the next town, gave me a little money, and waited with me for the local bus to arrive. I had changed my plan, a detour to Mauritania’s capital to obtain a new passport. The bus eventually rolled up. Rick, the Englishman, shook my hand hard and wished me luck.

‘The less wealth a man has to give,’ he said, as I clambered aboard, ‘the greater the depth of his heart.’

N.B. This piece is fiction.

FIFTEEN

Essaouira, A Portrait

ON MY FIRST NIGHT IN ESSAOUIRA a man tried to sell me a ghost.

We were sitting on the ramparts facing the sea, the searing winter wind on our faces, sipping our café noir. The man, a local, with a Portuguese name held a clenched fist in my direction.

‘It’s in here,’ he said.

‘What is?’

‘The ghost.’

‘How much is it?’

‘A hundred dirhams.’

‘Why’s it for sale?’

The vender frowned.

‘I’ve no need for it,’ he said.

‘Well, what use is it to me?’

‘Believe, really believe,’ he said, ‘and this ghost will be the keyhole into your dreams.’

There is something about Essaouira, the former Portuguese city clinging to Morocco’s Atlantic coast, which touches all who venture there. It’s a hybrid, a meeting point of East and West, one of those rare destinations where you never quite know who you’ll meet. The only certainty is that you will leave it different from when you came.

In atmosphere, Essaouira is quite unlike the imperial cities of Morocco’s interior. It’s magically desolate, almost like a forbidden enclave perched at the end of the world. The buildings are stone: thick grey walls, standing proud to the wind and to the freezing Atlantic waters. They form a stark and alluring canvas for a thousand colours – carpets hanging for sale in the souqs, skeins of wool dripping with dazzling dyes, panniers of glinting red mullet being hauled up from the port.

Spend a few days there, traipsing up and down the ramparts with their weatherworn Portuguese cannons, or down the orderly stone streets laid out by the French, and you forget that the rest of Morocco – or the rest of the world – exists. For me, that’s the extraordinary power of the place, a power that’s lured visitors for centuries.

The Phoenicians moored their ships at Essaouira in the seventh century BC. Five hundred years after them, the Romans arrived under Juba II. They used their base there as a manufactory for Tyrian purple dye, a colour derived from murex sea snails, prized for dyeing the Senatorial robes. Then came the Portuguese in the fifteenth century. They christened the city ‘Mogador’ and, after them, Essaouria became a haven for pirates, who plied the Atlantic waters raiding European ships. The medina was laid out in about 1760, by French engineers, on the orders of the Alaouite Sultan Mohammed III. Having glimpsed the natural strategic position, he built a naval base there, and one devoted to trade.

I myself was first drawn to Essaouira by the scent of the wood. The narrow lanes of the lime-washed media are packed with tiny workshops, carpenters busy in the shadows of each. They are master craftsmen, moualems, creating marquetry boxes, carved from the aromatic thuya tree, whose gnarled roots are harvested from the surrounding region. I first smelled the fragrance when taken there as an infant. Essaouira was a destination then on the hippy trail: VW combos, tie-dye and the fresh memory of Jimi Hendrix, who’d just swaggered out of town. Smell those roots, get their aroma deep into your chest, and they lure you back like the scent of lotus flowers on the wind.

The baby-boom hippies may be gone now, but you can still feel their presence. I am never sure whether they came to Essaouira because of the community’s free-thinking attitudes, or if they actually changed the place.

Go down to the beach and you’ll find surfers aplenty, some of them the children of hippies who were here a generation ago. They come from all over the world to do battle with the ferocious winter waves. And in the narrow streets of the old city, tie-dye, dreadlocks, and illicit tobaccos are also in plentiful supply.

As the severe winter chill melts into spring, Essaouira’s atmosphere transforms like a chameleon. The skies turn indigo blue, daubed with wisps of cirrus, the sharp light radiant against white-washed walls. And as spring slips into summer, the city is charged with electric anticipation at the annual Gnaoua Festival, held each June.

An ancient mystical fraternity with their roots sunk deep in African lore, the Gnaoua conjure music that’s a powerful blend of African and Arab, a bridge between this and the spirit world.

Sit at one of the medina cafés and from a distance you hear the distinctive clatter of qarkabeb, the oversized iron castanets, symbol of the Gnaoua. As they come closer, their rhythm shaking the soul, they have the power to send locals and foreigners into trance.

On the night I was offered a cut-price ghost, a group of four Gnaouas swept into the café in which we were sitting. The clatter of their iron castanets was like an exorcism rite, chasing out the demons.

The man beside me held his fist above his head.

‘They can smell it,’ he said.

‘Smell what?’

‘The ghost, the gnaoua… look at them!’

I turned in time to see one of the troupe collapse to the floor. He began writhing, his eyes rolled back.

‘It’s quite normal,’ said the man, darkly.

‘Are you sure?’

The ghost-seller nodded.

‘I speak the truth,’ he said. ‘I swear it, on all I hold sacred.’

SIXTEEN

Fès

LYING BEHIND A PLAIN STEEL DOOR on a dusty lane in Fès, stands one of the most unexpected treasures of North Africa – the Glaoui Palace.

To cross the threshold is to enter a medieval Twilight Zone, one touched by the fantasy of the Arabian Nights. It’s a place where straightforward questions posed by the Western mind go unanswered, and where visitors find themselves changed by the experience. A vast sprawling labyrinth of interlocking courtyards, the Glaoui is a jewel of the faded grandeur at Morocco’s secret heart.

Perched on a broken chair in the shade of an immense galleried courtyard, is Abdou, the guardian. He’s cloaked in a voluminous sky blue Tuareg desert robe, and is drowsy, having just stirred from a midmorning siesta. He smiles, his lips framing a clutch of infirm teeth, as he struggles to stand.

Abdou has lived at the Glaoui for as long as he can remember. If you ask him whether he was born there, or if he actually owns the palace, he looks away, stares across the heat haze, and widens his eyes. He gives the same response when you ask him what its future might bring, or why the courtyard is filled with ducks and geese. After visiting Abdou, as I have done over the years, I’ve come to learn that the best way to appreciate his home is to forget the questions that an Occidental education teaches us to ask, and to listen to the pearls of wisdom that tumble from his lips.

‘Fès is the heart of this kingdom,’ he says in a voice moulded by a fondness for Turkish tobacco, ‘and this is one of the hearts of Fès. It’s a place of secrets, of mystery, a home that has known love and betrayal, poverty and wealth.’

A single drop of perspiration wells up on Abdou’s brow and rolls down his dark cheek, evaporating before reaching his chin. The afternoon is swelteringly hot – the high thirties. The geese and ducks are flapping about because their basin of filthy water has dried up, turned into sludge. Abdou doesn’t seem to care. He lurches forwards in slow motion and leads the way down a dark, dank corridor running off the central courtyard.

A moment later we find ourselves in a kitchen that’s like something out of Henry VIII’s Hampton Court. A colossal chimney stands at the far side of the room. Beneath it there’s a clutter of cauldrons, ladles the size of spades, battered old kettles, and a mountain range of empty tin cans. Abdou flicks his fingers towards the inch-thick dust as if to excuse his disapproval for housework.

‘Come this way,’ he says in a whisper.

Another twist to the right and one to the left, and we’re in another courtyard. Smaller than the first, the walls are ornamented in zelij, mosaics in white and black. Above the mosaics, and the towering colonnades, there’s an upper terrace adorned fabulously with painted wood, all of it about to collapse from rot.

‘This is the harem,’ says Abdou dreamily. ‘Beautiful ladies guarded by eunuchs. Close your eyes, breathe in deep, and you can smell them!’

A little imagination goes a long way in Fès.

Do as Abdou suggests – close your eyes, take a deep breath – and you find yourself catapulted back through centuries. There’s the clatter of mules clip-clopping up the narrow alleyways, the scent of lamb roasting on spits, and the muffled sounds of bustle from the souq.

Fès is without doubt the greatest medieval Arab city still intact anywhere. To wander its streets is to be part of a way of life that has become fragmented or has disappeared entirely elsewhere across the East. Describing it to someone who’s not been there, is like trying to describe a computer circuit to a blind man. However hard you try, you just don’t know where to start.

One of my earliest memories is of arriving at the great city walls of Fès at dusk. I was only five or six, but I can vividly remember it. We had driven from London, and on reaching Fès it felt as if we had arrived at a citadel poised at the very end of the world. We spotted a group of old men huddled in their jelabas near the great Boujloud gate.

I asked my mother who they were.

‘They’re gamblers,’ she snapped disapprovingly.

‘They are not,’ my father corrected, ‘they are part of an ancient tradition that stretches back a thousand years. They are the storytellers,’ he said.

That first journey was like stepping through an aperture into a magical realm, where the senses came to life, touched by a frenzy of cultural colour. The vibrant sights, intoxicating sounds, delicious tastes and smells changed me, right deep down.

Everyone who journeys to Fès is affected in a similar way. Whereas Marrakech has become a Disneyland version of the Arabian Nights, Fès is the real thing.

Some visitors find it uncomfortable, even a little sinister. And in a way it is. The city is a religious centre, a place that’s content to have tourists but that’s quite nonchalant at the same time. You can’t escape the dark heart, or the city’s bewitching soul. It’s everywhere – in the rambling labyrinth of streets, where pack-mules stumble forward, laden with freshly-dyed skins from the tanneries; and in the ancient medrasas, in the palaces, and the simple courtyard homes.

Talaa Kebir, the main thoroughfare that runs downhill from Bab Boujloud, has more life on it than entire cities I have seen. There are a few emporia touting the usual tourist kitsch, but what’s so wonderful is that most of the shops are selling stuff for the locals – rip-off Nike sneakers and blue fluorescent bras, flour sieves and camel heads for boiling into soup, David Beckham football strip, candyfloss, and chicks dyed pink.

And with every step you hear the sound of artisans, hidden in the maze of workshops that back onto the main street. Some of them are carving appliqué designs from sheets of burnished brass, others sculpting cedar-wood, blowing glass, or weaving cloth for jelabas on enormous homemade looms.

Many of the wares on sale in Marrakech and other Moroccan cities are actually made in Fès where, for centuries, craftsmen have passed on secret techniques from father to son. As well as goods for the tourist emporia, most of Morocco’s mosaics and ceramic tiles are made near the city as well. The kilns are on the outskirts of town and are well worth a visit. They are fired with burning olive stones, and stacked by hand by the youngest apprentices, in a system that’s endured since Roman times.

While Europe languished in its Dark Ages, Fès was already a bustling centre of intellect and commerce. Linked to the great cities of the emerging Islamic world through ever-expanding pilgrimage routes, it found itself connected to Seville and Cordoba, to Cairo, Baghdad, Delhi and Samarkand.

The immense Haj caravans which crossed North Africa and Asia formed a kind of medieval Internet, and brought some of the most celebrated scholars of the age to Fès. Among them, men like the Sufi mystic Ibn Arabi, the scientific polymath Ibn Khaldun, and the Jewish scholar Maimonedes. Their work led to breakthroughs in science and urban planning and directly influenced the city that became their home. It boasted a state of the art sewage system, schools and universities, community hospitals, fountains, and even public water clocks.

Exploring Fès today, it’s quite challenging at times to imagine when the city was at the cutting edge of technology – a time when the mosaic fountains ran with water and were not just used as communal garbage bins, and a time when the delicate wooden shop façades weren’t all rotten, as they often are today. Even for diehard lovers of the city, people like me, there’s a sadness in the medina, a kind of melancholy. The wealthy merchants departed for the new town and for Casablanca decades ago. These days anyone still to be found in the labyrinth has been left behind. Many of them dream the same dream – to sell their homes and shops to rich foreigners, and to buy apartments with all mod cons in the ville nouvelle.

Thankfully, the love affair with Fès touches a great many Moroccans and foreigners as well. It’s something that none of us can really explain. When we meet, we mumble about details of ornaments and fragments of the city’s soul, in conversations that must mystify those who don’t share our obsession.

One man bitten deeply by the Fès bug is the American-born scholar David Amster. He moved to the medina more than a decade ago, and knows the twists and turns of the nine thousand streets as well as any child playing marbles in the shadows of the Karaouiyine Mosque.

Amster is a connoisseur of the kind of detail that tends to go unnoticed by the untrained eye. He has a passion for the handmade nails and hinges that once adorned every Fassi door. He waxes lyrical about the traditional medluk, a lime rendering which allows the ancient buildings to breathe (cement is the curse of renovation as it suffocates the walls); and he speaks of his dream with a glint in his eye – a time when all renovation is done with obsessive care and age-old skill.

Each month, David Amster’s small team of master craftsmen, known as moualems, restore a stretch of neglected street, or a fountain filled with trash. It’s a kind of guerrilla restoration on a micro scale that’s often done at night when everyone else is tucked up in bed. Amster pays for it all himself by renting out to foreigners a small riad he owns.

Even visitors who stay in the medina sometimes complain of how difficult it is to get under the skin of the city. Once you stray off the main streets, the arteries, you can find that the ever-narrowing web of alleyways are dark and even a little imposing. You quickly get the feeling that all kinds of life is going on behind the battered old doors, but as an outsider you can’t peer in to what is a secret world. A good way of getting instant access is to hint that you want to buy a little house, or even a palace, a dream home conjured from the pages of A Thousand and One Nights. The immobiliers, estate agents, are only too happy to take you round as many homes as you want to see.

In my experience, there’s no better way of getting a cross section of medina life – kitchens with grandmothers toiling away at the dishes and the couscous, laundry dripping in the sun, children scampering about on their trikes, families gripped in front of interminable Egyptian soap operas, and caged chickens up on the roof waiting to become lunch.

A few months ago I was shown a palace for sale with magnificent cedar ceilings, painted in fabulous geometric designs. An elderly craftsman lived in its great salon with a dozen white doves and a ferocious-looking cat. He spent his days cutting leather sandals from animal hides, and told me that he’d been born in the corner room eight decades before.

He looked me straight in the eye.

‘Some of my ancestors are buried in the basement,’ he said.

Nearby, I was taken to another a home at Bab Er-rsif, the most historic area of the medina. Its owner showed me the title document, a scroll twenty feet long. He said his family had lived there for many generations, and that the foundations had been laid at least five hundred years ago.

When I sighed loudly, exclaiming that I simply didn’t have the funds to buy it, the owner smiled. It was a wry, toothless smile of an old man with a plan.

‘Do not worry about money,’ he said dreamily, ‘because there is a secret, and I will tell it to you.’

I asked what it was.

‘Under the floor,’ he went on, jabbing a thumb at the exquisite ancient glazed terracotta tiles, ‘there’s a treasure. It’s vast and worth many times the price I am asking for the house.’

I thought for a moment, and then posed the obvious question:

‘If there is indeed a treasure under this floor,’ I said, ‘why have you not dug it up yourself?’

The owner wiped his eyes with the sleeve of his jelaba.

‘Do you have any idea,’ he said slowly, ‘what problems a treasure like that would give to an old man like me?’

In the end I didn’t buy the house, even though the lure of treasure was strong. But plenty of foreigners have bitten the bullet and snapped up houses – treasure or no treasure – most usually as second homes. There’s a small Anglophone community living permanently in the Fès medina. Of them all, the most indefatigable and offbeat is certainly Mike Richardson.

Mike was a maitre d’ at London’s swish Ivy Restaurant, and at the Wolseley on Piccadilly.

‘One day I was at a party and I overheard someone talking about Fès,’ he says. ‘It sounded absolutely glorious. Before I knew it, I’d moved here, bought a little house with my savings, and opened the Café Clock.’

Lodged in a narrow alley opposite the medieval Medrasa Bouinania, ‘The Clock’, as it’s known to all, is spread out over several levels and is immensely popular. Clambering up and down to all the terraces is such a strain on the legs, that Mike hired a waiter with a penchant for mountain-climbing.

In a back room off the staircase, the chef’s assistant is adding a pinch of dried damask rose petals and a handful of secret ingredients to a fresh batch of minced camel meat. After searching his entire culinary career for the perfect hamburger meat, Mike found it in Fès. As he says – ‘Camel meat sits so nicely on the bun.’

Another European to have realized his dream in Morocco’s secret heart, is Fred Sola, a Frenchman who was actually born in Casablanca. A few years ago he bought Riad Laaroussa, a seventeenth century palace, once owned by the Moroccan Minister for War. His intention was at first to have it as a private home.

The colossal property was in a terrible state of repair, and required renovation on a grand scale. It was so big that when it was finally done, Fred felt lonely. So he started inviting people to stay. Today, it’s an exclusive riad hotel with just eight sumptuous suites. There’s a serenity about the place that soothes everyone who steps across its threshold.

As you sit in the shade of the central courtyard, you’re lulled by the sound of birdsong, and water issuing gently from a marble fountain. The air is still, scented by orange blossom, the sky above indigo blue.

‘The secret of Fès is not to be in a hurry,’ says Fred, lounging back on a chaise longue, ‘if you hurry, all sorts of obstacles appear as if by magic. We had about fifty craftsmen working with us for a year and a half. They were so incredibly skilled, doing work that relies on pure expertise and not on power tools as is so often the case in the West. When we finished Riad Laaroussa I didn’t want to lose the craftsmen, and so we now renovate homes for other people who, like me, have been bewitched by the spell of Fès.’

A few streets away, back at the Glaoui Palace, Abdou is lowering his eyelids for a second siesta of the day. The only sound is the honking of the geese in the background and the muffled call to prayer far away. One day, Abdou’s home will surely be transformed into a name-brand chain hotel, the rot, old tin cans, and the geese long gone. There’ll be bell boys in smart little uniforms, piped music, and plumbing that actually works.

My own dream is that Fès – Morocco’s Sleeping Beauty – dozes off again like Abdou, and that the future waits a while longer to arrive.

SEVENTEEN

Friendship, Morocco

A POPULAR MOROCCAN PROVERB goes, ‘A man without friends is like a garden without flowers’.

It was told to me in the first week I arrived to live in Casablanca, by a plumber who had turned up to clean out the drains. He seemed distraught that I could have moved to a new home in a foreign land where I knew no one at all. I told him that it felt liberating.

‘I don’t have to avoid people any more,’ I said, beaming.

The plumber wiped a rag over the crown of his bald head.

‘But how will you live if you don’t have friends?’ he replied.

Looking back to that first week, I now understand what he meant.

For us in the West, friends are sometimes little more than people we go to the pub with so we aren’t there alone. That may sound bitter, I know. But in Morocco, friendship is quite a different thing. It’s a support structure par excellence, a system by which the old values of chivalry and honour are passed on. But more than that, it’s something that’s actively nurtured and raised, like a seedling in a garden.

My story is not unusual.

I had been lured to Morocco from London, to escape the damp grey sky and the exorbitant British living costs. My dream involved buying a rambling mansion, renovating it, and learning to live again.

Move to a new country and you quickly see that visiting a place as a tourist, and actually moving there for good, are two very different things.

Over the first year we renovated the house, exorcised the wayward Jinns who supposedly inhabited it, and battled the waves of conmen who beat a path to our door. At times I would find myself wondering if I would ever find anyone I could trust, a real friend.

Then, one Spring morning I met Abdelmalik.

I was having my hair cut in a rundown barber’s shop near to my house, when a tall, suave man strode in and sat on the chair beside mine. He asked for a shave. A pair of dark glasses were worn like a tiara across his slicked back hair. He smiled a great deal. I supposed he was in his late thirties. While the barber sharpened the cut-throat razor on a leather strop, the man made conversation.

He asked me if I missed England.

‘How do you know I’ve come from England?’ I asked.

‘Because you look too pale to be Moroccan and too content to be French.’

The man’s cheeks were shaved, and anointed with a home-brewed Cologne. He pressed a coin into the barber’s hand.

‘I will wait for you at the café opposite,’ he said.

I was still unfamiliar to Moroccan society and wondered if I should accept the invitation. But unable to resist, I crossed the street and found the man, Abdelmalik Leghmati, sipping a café noir. We both sketched out the broad details of our lives – wives, children, work, and exchanged telephone numbers. He expressed his great love for Arab horses, and his lifelong dream of owning one.

It was an interest we both shared.

We chatted about horses and life for an hour or more. Then Abdelmalik glanced at his watch.

‘We will be friends,’ he said firmly, as he left.

From then on the suave clean-shaven Moroccan swept into my life. He saw it as his duty to solve every one of my abundant problems and to help me settle in. First, he taught me local etiquette – how to be regarded as a local, how to receive and entertain a Moroccan guest, and how to prepare the sweet mint tea which everyone drinks constantly.

From the outset, Abdelmalik stressed again and again that I could ask anything of him. As my friend, it was his duty to be there for me. I found it strange at first that someone would make such a point about friendship, rather than just letting it develop as we do in the Occident. We would meet at least every two days on the terrace of Café Lugano, near Casablanca’s coast road, where we always sat at the same table. At the other tables the same people were usually seated as well. I commented on this, that the same people were always in position.

‘Of course that’s how it is,’ said Abdelmalik. ‘You see they are friends.’

In Morocco there is no occupation more honourable for a man that to be seen with his pals sitting at a café, drinking sweet mint tea. In the West, we might frown on spending so much leisure time in such a way. But, for Moroccans, time spent working on a friendship in public is extremely important indeed.

When I told an expatriate acquaintance about Abdelmalik, he waved his arms in caution.

‘Beware!’ he shouted. ‘Before you know it, this man will be demanding you to repay his kindness. What happens if he gets into a family feud?’ The expatriate paused. ‘You could find yourself at war,’ he said. ‘All because you’re his friend.’

After we had known each other for a month, Abdelmalik invited me to his apartment. It was small, cosy, and dominated by a low coffee table. On the table were laid at least ten plates, each one laden with sticky cakes, biscuits and buns. I asked how many other people had been invited.

‘Just you,’ replied my host, confused.

‘But I can’t eat this much,’ I said.

Abdelmalik grinned like a Cheshire cat. ‘You must try to eat it all,’ he lisped.

A few days later, he called me and announced he had a surprise. An hour later, I found myself in the steam room of a hammam, a Turkish style bath. For Moroccans, going to the hammam is a weekly ceremony. Abdelmalik taught me how to apply savon noir, and the ritual of gommage, scrubbing myself down until my body was raw. In the scalding fog of the steam room, he presented me with an expensive wash-case packed with the items I would need. When I choked out thanks, embarrassed at the costly gift, he whispered:

‘No price is too great for a friend.’

Months passed, and I found myself waiting for Abdelmalik’s ulterior motive. I felt sure he would eventually ask me for something, some kind of payment for our friendship. Then, one morning, after many coffee meetings, he leant over the table at Café Lugano and said:

‘I have a favour to ask you.’

I felt my stomach knot with selfishness.

‘Anything,’ I mumbled, bravely.

Abdelmalik edged closer and smiled very gently.

‘Would you allow me to buy you an Arab horse?’ he sked.

EIGHTEEN

Gendercide

AMBIKA RECLINES ON A STRETCHER as Dr. Gupta applies a patch of sticky gel to her stomach.

She lies quite still, staring up at the makeshift clinic’s bare lightbulb. The doctor gazes into a computer monitor as he runs an electrode across her belly. Then, as if peering deep into a crystal ball, he searches for an answer. Ambika clenches her fists and waits.

Suddenly the physician moves over from the machine, looks at Ambika, and shakes her head from side to side.

She is pregnant with a female foetus – a daughter.

Ten minutes later, Ambika, who had her twenty-first birthday a week before, is undergoing a termination.

Ambika lives in the small town of Sirsa, in north-west India. Under pressure from her husband and his family to a produce a son, she is one of millions of women in India whose families consider bearing a daughter to be a disgrace, especially when there’s no male heir.

India’s ancient custom decrees that, when wed, the bride’s family must pay a dowry to the groom’s – meaning that girls are far less wanted than boys.

For centuries female infanticide has been quite common in India. But, now, advanced technology is enabling women to determine the gender of the foetus during pregnancy. The result: hundreds of thousands of female foetuses are aborted each year in India alone.

Ambika is no newcomer to Dr. Gupta’s infamous surgery.

The waiting area with its aborted female foetuses preserved in formalin (proof to clients that females are being hunted down and disposed of) no longer impresses her. For she’s undergone five abortions already. Each abortion followed a brief scan using state of the art Ultrasound equipment.

Billboards all over Sirsa remind people about the joys of bearing a son, and they give details of clinics which will help mothers realize their dream. At least five thousand female foetus’ are estimated to be aborted in Sirsa (a town of about 120,000 people) each year.

Across the Indian subcontinent, often with only the most rudimentary training, doctors are purchasing Ultrasound diagnostic equipment, and setting themselves up in business.

Since the mid 1980s Ultrasound equipment has been filtering into India. Making use of bank loans to buy the apparatus, unscrupulous physicians can recoup the initial expenditure in a matter of weeks, or even days. For those who can’t get a bank loan, companies across India lease out advanced Ultrasound units.

At least two electronic corporations are known to be manufacturing Ultrasound diagnostic equipment in India. Groups such as the Mumbaibased Forum Against Sex Determination believe that this will lead to less control in the standards and quantity of units being produced.

The Forum seems to be fighting an uphill battle.

Mumbai’s state, Maharashtra, was the first in India to proclaim S.D.T. (Sex Determination Tests) illegal. Far from reducing the Ultrasound testing, the ban has merely driven such clinics deep underground. The billboards have been taken down, but the surgeries are still booming. Diagnostic testing is far from a lower or middle class phenomenon. High society requires male heirs for its business empires. Women come from across India and even from abroad (particularly the Arab Gulf), to have S.D.T. in Mumbai. Ultrasound equipment in the city is probably the best on the Indian Subcontinent.

Chaitna, a twenty-three year old mother living near the southern city of Bangalore, has two daughters and has been trying to conceive a son. When she gave birth to a third daughter, her husband’s mother fed the baby the sap of the lethal Errukum plant mixed with milk. Death came instantly. The next time Chaitna was pregnant she solicited the services of a surgeon who arrived at her village with mobile Ultrasound unit – powered by a generator. The scan was done. Chaitna was assured that the foetus was female. She opted for abortion: which was performed a few minutes later. Only then was it discovered that the foetus had in fact been male.

Misinterpretation of Ultrasound images is extremely common. Most systems are completely operator dependent. When in the hands of an inexperienced user, the results can be anything but accurate. If in doubt, doctors generally maintain the foetus is female – so curtailing the chance of a daughter being born. Other, even more dissolute physicians are known to assert that the foetus is female when it is not, thus assuring themselves extra business: through abortion.

Despite its relatively short history in India, Ultrasound sex testing is having a devastating effect on the ratio between men to women. A recent census found there were 929 females to 1,000 males in India. Ten years before, there were 972 females to 1,000 males. Across the nation there’s a distinct lack of girls aged twelve or below.

During a meeting in one reputable clinic, in the southern city of Chennai, the telephone rings. On the line is a pregnant woman who wants to know if she’s carrying a son. The doctor shakes his head wearily, and replies:

‘Why do you want to know? Why? This is God’s greatest surprise to you, why do you want to kill that joy?!’

One state in southern India, Tamil Nadu, openly acknowledges that female foeticide is a major problem. In October last year, the state government launched a ‘cradle scheme’. Now, every state hospital or clinic has to provide a cradle – often just a cardboard box – outside its doors, twenty-four hours a day, so women can anonymously leave their unwanted daughters. These girls are sent to the main hospitals for medical check-ups before being sent to orphanages. Later, the fortunate ones are adopted. Although not providing a solution, this system at least gives the girls a chance to live a life that’s otherwise denied to them.

NINETEEN

Goldeneye

IN A SPRAWLING APARTMENT block, a stone’s throw from Oxford Street, half a dozen well-dressed Arab men are crammed into a tiny office.

Mobile phones pressed tight to their cheeks, they are all calling out numbers, frenetically bidding in auctions around the world. Stacked all over the desks, the floor, and the shelves, are hundreds of auction catalogues. From this office one of the men peers nervously towards a spacious sitting-room decorated with indigo silk curtains, exquisite red leather chairs, and dotted with simple pieces of modern art.

One wall is covered with bookshelves; another is taken up with three large glass tanks, each containing brightly coloured Amazonian poison-arrow frogs. Every few minutes the door swings open and a courier staggers in with crates of fine art. In the hallway a dealer waits patiently to show off his wares. In the background there’s the constant buzz of telephones ringing, and feet hurrying across the polished parquet.

Watching the frenzy of activity from the far corner of this room, swishing a set of tiger’s eye worry beads, is Sheikh Saud bin Mohammed bin Ali Al-Thani. At thirty-seven, he has already overwhelmed the art world with his astonishing buying power.

He is in a restless mood.

One of his team is bidding for an important piece of Islamic glasswork. The price is going up and up. The sheikh swishes in anticipation. He crosses the room and peers into one of the tanks at the turquoise frogs, but his mind is on the sale. Just as the tension becomes almost too much, the aide puts down his mobile phone. He nods to his master.

Success.

Five years ago Sheikh Saud slipped quietly on to the international art scene and began to buy. It takes a great deal to stir the restrained world of fine art and no one took much notice of the softly spoken collector – not at first, anyway.

But auctioneers and dealers have realized that this buyer is different. His pockets are very deep indeed. With unprecedented zeal he has bought and bought: Mughal treasures and Islamic art, royal French furniture and vintage cars, statues, leather-bound libraries, even dinosaur skeletons. But what the dealers have also seen is that the mysterious Arab, widely regarded as the biggest buyer of fine art in modern times, has more than money. He has an eye for artistic excellence, and he has vision.

The sheikh has attained near legendary status as a collector, for the quantity of high-quality art he has procured on behalf of his country, Qatar. His buying power is so great that many established foundations and private collectors have been driven off. They just can’t compete.

Dealers all tell the same tale: if Sheikh Saud wants something, he will buy it, irrespective of the price.

At some auctions he has been known to acquire almost everything. Yet, remarkably for such a dominant force in the art world, Saud remains an enigma. Almost nothing has been written about him as little is known. Until now, he has never given an interview.

Born into the ruling family of Qatar, the tiny oil-rich peninsula in the Persian Gulf, he is first cousin to the country’s Emir, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani. Educated in Doha, the capital of Qatar, where he is based with his wife and their three young children, Saud never studied antiquities or art. He’s self-taught.

Only now is the extent of the dream that lies behind his buying spree becoming clear. Backed by the Emir himself, he plans to put the fabulously wealthy nation of Qatar firmly on the cultural map, with the capital becoming the chief artistic and architectural centre for the Persian Gulf.

Sheikh Saud is in charge of building half a dozen museums and a national library, as well as a new residence for himself. Once they are finished, he is going to fill them all with treasures. Many of the world’s foremost architects and artists are already involved.

The architect I. M. Pei has been commissioned to design the National Museum of Islamic Art; Santiago Calatrava (who built the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport) is planning a photographic museum; and Arata Isozaki is working on the National Library of Qatar, as well as the sheikh’s private villa. This will have a sculpture garden, with major pieces by Richard Serra, Jeff Koons and Eduardo Chillida (the veteran Spanish sculptor has produced his largest piece ever, which will stand seven metres high and weigh more than a hundred tons). David Hockney is said to be in discussions over designs for the swimming pool.

Qatar is lodged between the ancient traditions of the nomadic Bedouin people and the trappings of the modern world. The population of about three hundred thousand Qatari Arabs is easily outnumbered by migrant workers, largely from India and Pakistan. Islam is the bedrock of the society. Alcohol is forbidden, and most of the Arab women choose to wear the veil. In this tiny country, the size of an English county, crime is virtually unknown, the skies are crystal clear, and there’s almost no income tax to pay.

Until oil was discovered in the 1930s Qatar was a quiet, impecunious Emirate, famous for its pearls, tribal handicrafts and Arab hospitality. The peninsula has been ruled since the mid-1800s by the Al-Thani family. It formed part of the Ottoman Empire and became a British protectorate before gaining full independence in 1971. The reigning Emir overthrew his father in a bloodless coup in 1995, and has recently launched a major industrial modernization drive. The new commercial agenda has been accompanied by considerable cultural growth. Much of the money Sheikh Saud spends, is on behalf of the Qatari government.

The morning after my arrival in Doha, a sleek black Mercedes pulls up at my hotel and whisks me down avenues lined with whitewashed date palms. We drive due west from the capital. The city’s skyscrapers and luxurious villas die away as we enter the pancake-flat expanse of desert. The only road signs warn of wandering camels. After thirty minutes we veer off the highway and are soon poised outside a high wall.

As if by magic, the steel gates slide open electronically.

We have arrived at Al Wabra, Sheikh Saud’s desert retreat. It is here that he holds court, plans projects and enjoys some of the treasures he has bought. A flock of pink flamingos and grey pelicans preen themselves on the manicured lawns. Peacocks can be heard screeching in the distance. Sprinklers are working overtime to ensure the grass is kept alive in the scorching desert climate. Behind the pelicans stands a gleaming white building.

An aide runs up and ushers me in.

The audience hall is lit by three crystal chandeliers, its walls hung with Islamic textiles, and the floor covered by oriental rugs. At the far end of the hall, a slim man in Arab dress is hunched forward, his fingertips pressed together in thought. It’s Sheikh Saud. His features are prominent, piercing eyes radiating a calm confidence. A wisp of moustache hides his upper lip, mirrored by a hint of beard on his chin. Kafir and agal, the traditional headdress of Qatar, obscure his hair, and a finely woven white cotton robe runs down to his sandals, its French cuffs pinned neatly with small diamonds. The sheikh rises to greet me, welcoming me with a smile to his country and his home.

Miniature glasses of sweet tea are brought, and I enter the mysterious world of Sheikh Saud Al-Thani. At his feet a dozen catalogues from international auction houses are scattered, their pages marked thickly with yellow Post-it notes. Each is a sale of the superlative: ‘Important’ furniture, ‘Fine’ jewellery, ‘Exceptional’ carpets, ‘Rare’ clocks. There are loose colour photographs of valuable objects as well, offered by dealers from around the world.

The collections he has put together encompass many quite different and wide-ranging areas. Although each is important in its own right, the Islamic collection stands out as the most remarkable – virtually unequalled in terms of quality. Even so, it’s just one of several diverse collections.

The sheikh has assembled a comprehensive assortment of antique photographic equipment as well, and an astounding collection of photographs. The natural history collection comprises rare fossils, dinosaur skeletons, minerals and taxidermy; and the military collection boasts early cannons, muskets, armour and Napoleonic uniforms. The furniture covers a wide range of eras and styles, including Louis XV and Baroque, Regency and Art Deco. As well as the main collections, there are textiles, wrist-watches and woodworking tools, jewellery, glassware, statues and sculpture.

The sheikh leafs through auction catalogues and piles of photographs as he talks, sometimes stopping in mid-sentence to stare sharply at the picture of a particular object. An assistant in orange overalls staggers in under the weight of a wooden crate. He prises off the lid and removes its contents, a piece at a time. The first object is a narrow black leather shoe.

‘Look at this,’ says Sheikh Saud enthusiastically. ‘It was worn by Napoleon III. Can you see his monogram and the eagle crest on the sole? I bought the pair from one of his descendents living in Switzerland.’

Half a dozen more wooden crates are ferried into the meeting room. The sheikh’s latest acquisitions are unpacked and presented. There are early botanical illustrations, dervish hats and headdresses, an assortment of Leica cameras and glass mosque lamps, aspidistra stands, Ottoman textiles, fossils and uniforms, sporting trophies and dozens of antiquarian books.

‘Money isn’t everything,’ he says, sipping his tea. ‘The problem is getting extraordinary pieces: you see, the greatest objects are already in museums. And museums or entire collections rarely come up for sale.’

This may be true, but Saud has sometimes managed to use his position in the market to buy entire collections. His photography collection, for example, has been built by acquiring two extremely important groups. The first, the Bokelberg Collection, was amassed over more than twenty years by one man, the German Werner Bokelberg. The collection is not large – no more than about 150 images – but it is improbable that there is another that charts the history of photography so accurately, through such perfect and rare images. It includes the very best examples of Fox Talbot’s work, as well as some of the finest prints by Man Ray. Among those is the famous 1920s image of Man Ray’s mistress, Kiki de Montparnasse, with an African mask. The print, complete with Man Ray highlights, was the one originally made for Vogue.

Sheikh Saud added to the Bokelberg photographs by buying the key works from the Jammes photographic sale in 1999, which included a number of pioneering images by Gustave Le Gray, taken during the 1850s. The photographs are complemented by a dazzling array of rare cameras, many acquired from the Spira collection, itself regarded as one of the most comprehensive collections of photographic equipment in existence.

Photography, which Sheikh Saud so admires as an art form, may have been the inspiration behind his dream in the first place.

A few years ago he saw a photograph of an Indian prince taken by Man Ray. The prince, Rao Holkar, the former Maharaja of Indore, bore a striking resemblance to the sheikh.

An aesthete, and great collector in his own right, Holkar commissioned the German designer Eckart Muthesius in the ’thirties to build his new palace, and decorate it with Art Deco furniture and works of art. Some have suggested that the Maharaja’s photograph started off the sheikh’s quest for a complete artistic lifestyle.

While Holkar was photographed by Man Ray, Saud has sat for Henri Cartier-Bresson and Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Helmut Newton, David Bailey and Bruce Weber.

Whenever he is in Qatar, Sheikh Saud spends the scorching afternoons on the desert estate listening intently as his assistants’ report. Every detail of every project is cleared by him directly just as he selects each item to buy himself.

At the far end of the estate stands a pair of giant steel-sided warehouses, easily mistaken for grain silos or barns. But as you draw closer to the compound, you see the high wall, the razor wire, and the reinforced gate, which rolls back automatically as you approach.

Behind these walls another team of men in overalls is unpacking more wooden crates, hauling out statues and carved stone blocks. Some of the stones have already been reassembled, forming elaborate porticoes, marble fountains and an entire terrace replete with balustrades.

An Indian curator begins the tour of the treasures, kept in the cavernous, air-conditioned warehouses. Most objects still have their auction lot numbers attached. The curator points out the most unusual pieces. First there’s a pair of immense eighteenth century globes by Coronelli, sitting on carved walnut bases. They stand more than fifteen feet tall and five feet wide. Beside them is a Louis XV gilt wood screen and next to that is an Italian Baroque-style throne, painted gold.

We walk on past an Italian crib carved in the shape of a gondola, a clutch of mammoth tusks, a long narwhal’s tusk and skull, and a shoal of prehistoric fish. Next come petrified tree trunks from the Upper Triassic period, a complete triceratops dinosaur skeleton (labelled ‘Willy’), dozens of insects trapped in amber, and ‘an extremely rare nest of raptor eggs’.

We push ahead through a maze of bookshelves filled with oversized leather-bound volumes, all in mint condition. Sheikh Saud has a great interest in the large folio of works of natural history produced in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He has assembled a complete set of John Gould’s works on ornithology. Numbering more than forty volumes, they include some three thousand hand-painted lithographic plates. Saud has also acquired the Marquis of Bute’s copy of Audobon’s Birds of America, described as ‘a monumental masterwork’; as well as his personal favourite, Les Roses, the late eighteenth-century volume of floral prints by Pierre-Joseph Redoute.

We carry on, past marble benches and more fountains, carved alabaster panels from Mughal India and a set of massive wrought-iron gates with matching urns. And on again, past a giant silver birdcage, dozens of muskets, pouches of mammoth fur and a fossilized walrus skull found in a cave in Alaska.

Then we cross the courtyard into the second hangar-like warehouse. Inside it is a whole variety of different forms of transport. There is a magnificent Louis XV carriage with original lacquered paintings on the exterior panels, numerous three-wheel Messerschmitt cars, as well as E-type Jaguars, a Jaguar racing car and a 1911 Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost. The warehouse is packed with bicycles, too, including some of the rarest ever made: such as the ‘Hobby Horse’, a bike with a solid wood frame from 1820, and a four-seater model from about 1910.

Sheikh Saud suddenly whooshes in on an early form of penny-farthing, his robes billowing out behind.

‘I will show you some of the animals,’ he calls, cycling over to a chauffeured Mercedes.

He enjoys his antiques, but you get the feeling his real passion lies with the thousands of rare and exotic creatures which live on the desert estate.

The Mercedes limousine crawls out of the warehouse courtyard and on to one of the tree-lined paths. The driver is cautious: if he goes too fast the sheikh’s tumbler of iced Pepsi might spill on to the cream suede seats.

Even though he may be a man of few words, you can always sense Saud watching everything. He watches the peacocks as they scurry into the shade, and the migrating hoopoes in the alfalfa grass, the pens of long-horned gazelle from the Hindu Kush, and the cheetahs pacing in their pens. He watches the birds of paradise, too, and the Peruvian cocks-of-the-rock in their air-conditioned cages. He pauses to ask the team of German zoologists a few technical questions. As with his other collections, the sheikh likes to be well briefed. He can name many of the estate’s 1,700 species by their Latin names, and is a recognized authority on the gazelle: Al Wabra has about twelve hundred species of them alone.

‘We are keeping the genetic species apart as much as possible to avoid mixed breeding,’ he explains as the car rolls ahead at walking pace.

‘Soon we’ll start building a modern animal hospital here, complete with operating theatre and quarantine unit. Our target is to play a part in taking rare animals off the endangered list.’

There is a staff of more than twenty looking after the animals, the bulk of the feed is shipped in from Germany every few months, and the zoologists here share their research with San Diego Zoo and other major animal centres worldwide.

We roll on past a colossal flight cage for cockatoos which, when finished, will have a computerized watering system. Next stop is a series of large conservatories where the Sheikh is nurturing dozens of species of rare palm trees.

Far from the trees and rare animals of Al Wabra, Sheikh Saud’s most important project is gathering pace. The jewel in Qatar’s cultural crown will be the Emirate’s new Museum of Islamic Art. When he was initially approached to design the complex, I. M. Pei declined, explaining that he had retired. But Sheikh Saud who had been greatly impressed by his Miho Museum in Kyoto, decided he would do all he could to talk Pei into accepting the commission. What finally convinced Pei was when the Sheikh showed him some of treasures to be kept in the museum.

Before Pei began the designs, he spent months studying the region’s culture and its own Gulf architecture. The result is a unique blend of traditional and contemporary styles, which will be set out in the water and overlooking Doha’s corniche. The museum will house some of the world’s most important objects of Islamic culture.

The collection was founded with a rare bronze fountainhead in the form of a hind, crafted in tenth century Cordoba. The piece, described by dealers as ‘massively important’ established Sheikh Saud and Qatar as key players on the world art scene. All the major areas of Islamic art are represented in the collection, which contains treasures such as the fourteenth century glass Cavour Vase. Once owned by Count Cavour and Queen Margaret of Italy, it is considered to be the best piece of Mameluk enameled glass known. The ceramics include a spectacular tenth century epigraphic dish from Nishapur (in what is now Iran), inscribed with a proverb in Kufic script.

Among the scientific instruments, there is one of the two most important astrolabes in existence, dating from tenth century Baghdad. There are early illustrated Islamic texts, too, such as the Book of the Fixed Stars, by Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi, one of the eminent Arab astronomers of the early Islamic era. The armoury has the yataghan of Sultan Bayazid II (the earliest Imperial Ottoman sword of its kind), which is regarded as one of the greatest pieces of Islamic weaponry in existence. The metalwork collection boasts a unique pair of door knockers with interlacing arabesques, from a thirteenth century Iraqi mosque; and among the Mughal treasures there’s a rare jade huqqa (water pipe) base, set with rubies, gold and lapis lazuli, once owned by Emperor Quinlong of China. When asked if he has enough pieces for the Museum of Islamic Art, Saud replies with characteristic tenacity,

‘We are not filling the shelves of a supermarket,’ he says. ‘A single outstanding object would be enough.’

The tradition of the museum will be balanced by the modern style of the Sheikh’s new villa. Before commissioning Arata Isozaki the distinguished Japanese architect, to design the building, Saud took him to India to see the great monuments such as the Taj Mahal and Fatehpur Sikri.

Isozaki is responsible for building the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Disney Building in Lake Buena Vista, Florida, and the New Tokyo City Hall. After discussing the way the Mughal architects used empty spaces within buildings, they used similar techniques as they collaborated on the design for the villa. The residence will exhibit work by prominent artists such as Ellsworth Kelly, Antoni Tapies and Anish Kapoor. The bathrooms are being designed by Philippe Starck, and Saud has commissioned architect Santiago Calatrava to design a special set of cutlery for the house.

Spend a little time in Sheikh Saud’s company and you wonder what drives him. Some say members of his family die young, that the source for his restlessness is a desire to fulfill his dreams while there’s still time. As those who know him confirm, he’s not interested in the price he has paid for a work of art itself. Whatever fires him, Saud is a collector on a grand, Victorian scale. He has grown up with great wealth, but seems not to be obsessed by money. Some of his offices and private apartments are decidedly modest.

In any other country, Saud’s buying potential would probably make him far more conspicuous, but Qatar is a land where vast personal wealth is not rare. Many young Qataris are preoccupied by the latest mobile phones, foreign sports cars and drive-in fast food restaurants. They relish a lifestyle that their nomadic ancestors would have found bewildering. Most of Sheikh Saud’s peers seem perplexed by his collecting. They don’t understand what he is doing. When the subject is raised the young Sheikh answers,

‘We are trying to create collections that will last and will add to the heritage of Qatar. What we are doing here may not be understood for generations to come.’

TWENTY

In Cambodia’s New Killing Fields

LYING ON HER STOMACH with her legs spread far apart, Sokha Tun gently probes the clump of tall grass before her, using the blade of a bayonet.

With a fixed stare of concentration, as beads of sweat run down her face, Sokha cuts the grass away a stalk at a time. Clothed in a navy blue Kevlar bullet-proof vest, with a steel helmet protecting her head, she takes a long, deep breath in the suffocating humidity. Then, wiping the perspiration from her right hand, she pauses for a moment. At the base of the tuft of grass, six inches from her visor, sits a green plastic disc – no larger than a hockey puck.

The disc, a 72B type Chinese-made landmine, designed to maim rather than to kill, will explode if tilted through more than ten degrees. Sokha cautiously checks for booby-traps wired into the base of the mine. One careless movement, and her arms will be blown clean off.

Widowed four years ago, when her husband stepped on a landmine in the fields nearby, Sokha lives with her mother and three young children in Battambang Province, western Cambodia. With her husband dead, Sokha and her family had faced starvation. The choices for the region’s thousands of widows are stark: sell vegetables in the market, resort to begging, or turn to prostitution.

But eight months ago, as the future looked increasingly hopeless, Sokha got a job with a British-based organization. Now, together with a small team of other women, she clears landmines for a living.

This time last year, she was barefoot, dressed in rags, and had no home. With her children huddled around her, she slept in a doorway. But a year on, and her life has changed for the better. Sokha now makes $160 a month – an enormous wage, when compared with other local salaries in rural Cambodia.

Sokha, who has rented a large house in an affluent part of Battambang, can suddenly afford to ride to work on her new Honda motorcycle. She and her children are dressed in clean new clothes and, next month, she plans to buy the ultimate status symbol – a colour TV.

Once regarded as among the most fertile farmland in the Far East, Cambodia’s rural areas became known as the ‘Rice Bowl of Asia’. But two decades of conflict have left the nation’s fields, forests and hillsides, desperate and depleted of vegetation. The war with the Khmer Rouge may be over, but the enemy is still there, invisible and ever-present. For the people living in Cambodia’s countryside, simple daily tasks – fetching water and firewood, or planting rice – constantly expose them to the hidden foe which awaits them in the tall grass.

The British-based Mines Advisory Group (MAG) first came to Cambodia four years ago. After isolating the most afflicted areas, the charity began training teams of local people to clear landmines. Their three-month course offers a grounding in detecting and destroying all twenty-eight types of landmines commonly found in Cambodia.

From the outset, MAG was eager to employ people whom had been directly affected by mines. They created a team of amputee de-miners, all of whom had lost limbs to landmines. And, in a society where a woman’s place is more usually in the home, they established the first all-female mine clearance unit in the world.

The twenty-six women in the team are widows, their husbands all slain by landmines. Aged between twenty and thirty-five years, the women are playing a frontline role in tackling Cambodia’s overwhelming landmine problem. Accurate statistics are vague, but there’s at least one mine for every man, woman and child in the country. Each day, more than ten Cambodians lose one or more limbs when they tread on a mine; and every year hundreds of children are killed. Clearing the estimated ten million mines, a process which may take generations, is a necessity if any kind of development or normal life is to be achieved.

Chris Horwood, director of MAG’s project in Cambodia, oversaw the establishing of the first all-female de-mining team.

‘We thought there would be enormous pressure against the idea from the local community,’ he says, ‘we expected that, by sending young women out into an active minefield, we would be harshly condemned. But the project has been a massive success. So much so that we’re just about to hire another thirty women de-miners. And, from now on, we’re planning to actively recruit amputee women to clear mines. The mine clearance instructors continually report how studious and careful the women are – far more so, it seems, than the men.’

The struggle to clear landmines from rural Cambodia is likely to be longest war the country will ever face and, until the mines have been destroyed, Cambodia hangs in a state of limbo.

‘People can’t get to their fields, to their water sources, or to their schools,’ says Horwood, ‘while major roads, temples, and areas of housing, lie abandoned for fear of hidden explosives. Landmines, have almost single-handedly brought Cambodia to a standstill. It’s hard to imagine a more toxic form of pollution. Mines are “poverty creating”: once you’re in the poverty cycle, you’re forced to carry out highly hazardous risk-taking activities to break out of that cycle. So, although you know there are mines in the forest, you have to cut wood there – or else you starve.’

Like other humanitarian groups working to clear the world’s hundred million landmines, MAG practices what they call ‘humanitarian mine clearance’. Quite different from military de-mining (which recognizes that casualties are an inevitability of war) the humanitarian approach strives for a hundred per cent clearance with no civilian casualties.

‘Military de-mining’, Horwood continues, ‘is only ever conducted to create a path through a minefield to get to the enemy. Fatalities are expected. But, our units have to ensure that each mine, every fragment of metal, is cleared from the ground – whether it be on a hillside, in woodland, or in rice fields. Conventions of war do state that minefields must be mapped – but, in Cambodia, such maps are unreliable or entirely non-existent.’

The women clearing mines near Battambang – Cambodia’s second largest town – perform their de-mining work as well as attending to their endless household chores. Until recently, women in rural communities would tend to the family and raise the children, rarely holding down anything more than the most menial paid jobs. But the huge loss of male workers has led to rapid change. For the first time, Sokha Tun, and other young women like her, are finding themselves at the head of their extended families. As the sole breadwinners, they are winning new respect, and are gaining unprecedented levels of emancipation.

When Sokha first saw the advertisement for women to become de-miners pasted to a wall, she quickly walked away.

‘My husband was killed by a landmine,’ she says sombrely, ‘so I didn’t want to have anything to do with explosives. But we were very poor, and my children were going hungry. I would sell fruit at the market. On some days I made as much as 1500 riels (25 pence). Without my husband life was very hard. When my family heard that I was thinking of clearing landmines, they said it was very dangerous, and they tried to discourage me. But I thought very hard about it. We all know so many people here who have been killed or wounded by mines. I wanted to help rid Cambodia of this curse – so that my children could play in the fields.’

Sokha applied, was accepted into MAG’s first six-woman team, and was sent to Phnom Penn for a month for training.

‘It was so exciting,’ she whispers, ‘I had never left Battambang before. We were trained at the Cambodian Mine Action Centre and were taught about all types of explosives. There are many different types of landmines in Cambodia – made in the former USSR, Vietnam and China, as well as Czechoslovakia, Belgium, and even America. We had to learn about the problems that each kind of mine poses, and about booby-traps.’

The second stage of training took place beside a live minefield, in Battambang Province itself. It’s there that the women practiced using high-tech metal detecting equipment.

‘When I started the training course,’ says Sokha, I met Sophia Sien. She became my partner, and we’re now best friends. Working in a minefield teaches you to trust, and rely on your partner totally: we’ve become closer than sisters.’

Landmine clearance teams are subject to a series of rigid, unyielding rules designed to minimize risk, and to keep members alive. Danger is ever-present and can strike with the smallest lapse of concentration. When preparing to clear a new tract of ground, the team – which is always split into pairs – cordon off a ‘safe lane’. The lane, one metre wide, is cleared first. It is via this corridor that the de-miners enter the minefield.

Each morning, before setting out into the cordoned zone, the de-mining teams are given a briefing by their supervisors. They’re continually cautioned about safety, and warned about ground conditions: the level of moisture in the soil alters the sensitivity of the metal detector. After the briefing, the teams assemble their detecting equipment. Austrian-made Schiebel AN-1912 detectors are used, selected for their simplicity and general ruggedness. The units can detect metal down to fifteen centimetres, depending on the type of ground and the conditions. The morning ritual of testing the metal detectors is conducted with great care. A plastic testing block containing just seven millimetres of metal is used to check that all the detectors are in prime working order.

When working in the minefield, the de-miners scan the ground an inch at a time. They are trained to watch out for the latest generation of blast-mine, for some of the world’s most lethal, yet undetectable landmines lie in Cambodia’s new killing fields. The modern breed of minimum metallic mines can contain no more metal than the tiny ball at the tip of a Bic biro.

Sokha and her partner Sophia, take it in turns to enter the minefield. Sophia goes in first, holding the detector at arm’s length ahead of her. As she sweeps the circular twelve-inch head of the unit slowly across the ground, she listens out for the detector’s piercing screech. No sound is overlooked. It may be a harmless bottle top, but is just as likely to be a POMZ fragmentation mine – powerful enough to tear her body apart. When a metallic object has been isolated, Sokha puts on her RBR Kevlar jacket, and helmet. A bayonet in one hand, and a pair of gardener’s secateurs in the other, she approaches the suspect device.

The threat of distraction is a constant worry for Russell Bedford, MAG’s director at Battambang. Like the other ex-British army instructors working in Cambodia, Bedford has seen casualties arise from momentary lapses in concentration.

‘There’s always the danger that a de-miner will lose an arm, a leg or, will be killed,’ he says, ‘if he or she stops concentrating. We supervise the teams closely and have regular rest breaks. It’s important to switch round jobs often, if you want to keep concentration levels at a peak.’

And, when a mine is located, no risks are taken.

‘We never remove mines from the ground,’ says Bedford, ‘we always destroy them in situ. What’s the point of putting someone’s life on the line to disarm an explosive device? Worse still is the possibility of a disarmed mine being re-armed and laid again. There’s always the chance that the landmine is booby-trapped. Small mines can be linked to a much larger explosive charge – like an anti-tank mine. Remove an anti-personnel mine and you could trigger the anti-tank mine: so increasing the danger radius, and widening the killing zone.’

Freeing Cambodia from the scourge of landmines is an unrelenting, pitifully slow, and expensive task. A team of thirty de-miners can take a month, or longer, to clear a single acre of land. The cost to seek and destroy each landmine is put at between $250 and $1000. Ironically, mass production of anti-personnel mines make them one of the cheapest and most effective military tools available.

Although they often kill children, landmines tend to injure adults rather than kill them, burdening an army on the move. Wounded soldiers need transport and medical attention, and the constant fear of mines lowers overall morale. A 72A type mine is thought to cost less than two dollars to manufacture and lay. But, for Russell Bedford and the other supervisors, the speed and cost of de-mining is irrelevant.

‘We’re returning land to the community, so it can be used for housing and be farmed,’ he says, ‘so that it doesn’t lie as a permanent killing ground. So what if it takes a month to clear a square metre? At least that one square metre is positively a hundred per cent clear – it’s far better than clearing ten thousand square metres to ninety per cent safety levels!’

A shift clearing mines in western Cambodia is one of seven strenuous hours in asphyxiating tropical heat. But, for Sokha, Sophia, and the other widows who work for MAG, the day starts long before they arrive at the minefield. Sokha’s day begins at 4.20 a.m. with the sound of her Chinese-made alarm clock ringing in the darkness. After washing with a bucket of cold water, she puts on the pair of light green army fatigues and matching green jacket. Then, having stoked the fire, she cooks a small meal of rice and fish. Her children, fast asleep under a billowing mosquito net – a great luxury in Cambodia – are reluctant to get up.

‘They’re very lazy in the morning,’ Sokha grins, ‘they don’t like getting ready for school. When they’re older, I will tell them about my work in the minefields. At the moment, they are still too young to understand.’

At six a.m., Sophia arrives at Sokha’s large, thatched house, which is built on stilts. In a country where women are rarely seen riding a motorcycle, Sokha’s brand new Honda is an impressive status symbol.

Each morning, she and Sophia make the hour-long ride together, out through some of Cambodia’s most magnificent scenery to the minefield. When the de-mining shift is over, and all the equipment is dissembled, the couple rides back to Battambang together. Sokha’s afternoon is filled with chores as well. She shops for groceries at the market; washes her uniform and her children’s clothes; cooks an evening meal; cleans the motorcycle; supervises her eldest daughter’s homework; and studies English, before going to bed, at midnight. Most evenings, Sophia’s two daughters come to play at Sokha’s house. The two women have become inseparable. As widows, it’s unlikely that they will ever get married again. Not because they don’t want to, but because teenage brides are generally preferred.

‘If anything ever happened to Sokha in the minefield,’ Sophia says tenderly, ‘I would be devastated. We try not to think of accidents, but of course we know that the danger of triggering a mine is always there. Nothing matters to us more than clearing Cambodia of the mines. It hurts me to forbid my children from playing out in the fields. How can they understand what a PNM-2 blast-mine is capable of doing to them?’

Sophia is angry at the Khmer Rouge for laying the mines so densely. But she apportions equal blame to the companies that manufacture anti-personnel mines.

‘Dozens of countries are getting rich by developing new and more terrible kinds of landmine,’ she says, as she loosens the laces of her hobnailed boot, ‘sitting in their offices in England or China, the arms’ makers haven’t seen what their weapons are doing! They’re maiming our children and killing innocent people.’

Leng works in the same unit as Sokha and Sophia. When her husband was killed by an anti-personnel mine while searching for firewood, she thought she and her baby daughter would starve to death.

‘There’s almost no work for a widow in Battambang,’ she says despondently, ‘times are very hard, and women are generally thought to be too stupid to do a technical job. People used to say that I was just a woman, so I ought to sell bananas in the market.’

Leng now makes more money than almost anyone else in her community.

‘I support my family, and take care of my parents, who are very old,’ she says. ‘They rely on me totally. My salary pays for our rent, for our food, clothes and firewood. My parents worry continually for my safety, but I worry about getting sick myself – that would mean I’d be unable to work. Losing my job would effect us all.’

Leng’s partner in the minefield, is Sabun. Taking turns in sweeping with the detector, and prodding for booby-traps, they have a lot of time to mull over the life-threatening nature of their work.

‘When I get up and leave for work,’ says Sabun gingerly, ‘it’s still very early and my three children are still asleep. I look at them each morning all curled up together and, before I close the door behind me, I realize that I may never come home that evening.’

Surprising the widowed de-miners of MAG’s female unit is no easy task. Each of them has become an expert on the main types of landmine and unexploded ordinance. They can tell the difference between a Chinese 72A & a 72B type anti-personnel mine (the former is virtually undetectable, while the latter is fitted with a distinctive tilt-switch mechanism). They know the dangers of a Soviet-made PNM-2 model (which tends to lead to an above-the-knee amputation). And, they’re wary of anything unusual in the field: a cigarette packet, a discarded tin can, or a child’s toy may be a booby-trap. They know too that, if they survive, theirs is a profession with considerable longevity.

Cambodia is a country where one of the most booming industries makes artificial prosthetic limbs. The country claims the prize for having the largest minefield on Earth. Stretching for six hundred kilometres along the south-western coast and up the Thai border toward Laos, the Kor Bram, or K5 Barrier Belt, is said to contain no fewer than three million anti-personnel mines. With the technology for detecting mines about twenty-five years behind the technology which is creating them, Cambodia’s new killing fields are set to kill and maim many, many more innocent civilians.

Although the NATO, the UN, and even NASA, are said to be developing anti-landmine equipment, the results so far have been unimpressive. Mine clearance devices may look fine on paper, but they rarely take into account the varying types of minefield encountered. There is no quick, cheap way of destroying mines. It’s not as easy as setting fire to a mined area. A partially burned, or ‘deflagrated’ mine, is extremely dangerous, as is any ordinance that’s been left exposed to the elements for years on end.

Amazingly, it seems that only now we are discovering what a long term problem landmines can be. Areas of the Libyan Desert in North Africa are still heavily mined from World War II. In Flanders, there are tracts of land still sealed off because of unexploded ordinance, a legacy of the First World War. And, in Laos, BLU 3/B fragmentation mines, scattered from aircraft by American forces over forty years ago, are still very much alive.

As MAG, Greenpeace, and the United Nations, call for a moratorium on the production of landmines, two million new antipersonnel mines continue to be deployed each year, with many more millions being produced and stockpiled.

‘The situation we have right now is absurd,’ says Paul Davies, author of War of the Mines. ‘Landmines don’t recognize cease-fires: so when the heavy weapons of war have been carted off, they remain in the ground, praying on innocent civilians for decades to come. And, with each new generation of landmine far superior to the last, the future for Cambodia and other countries like it, is set to be a turbulent one.’

Far from the wrangling of diplomats at the UN and from the high-level talk of moratoria, the female de-mining unit near Battambang continues with its work. As a detonation charge is attached to Sokha’s most recent find – the 72B anti-personnel mine, the women rest in the shade of a sprawling apple tree.

‘This was once a beautiful orchard,’ declares Sokha, ‘but for twenty years the apples have rotted. No one has dared to pick them. Now that the area is almost cleared, a new village will be built here. There will be houses, a new temple, a school and a market. But best of all,’ says Sokha softly, casting an eye across the minefield, ‘children will play in this orchard safely once again.’

TWENTY-ONE

In Search of King Solomon’s Mines

AN INKY HAND-DRAWN MAP was hanging on the back wall of Ali Baba’s tourist shop, deep in the maze of Jerusalem’s Old City.

Little more than a sketch, and smudged by a clumsy hand, the map showed a river and mountains, a desert, a cave, and what looked like a trail between them. At the end of the trail was an oversized ‘X’.

‘Is it a treasure map?’ I asked.

Ali Baba, an old man with a pot-belly, glanced up from his newspaper.

‘It shows the way to the fabled gold mines of Suleiman,’ he said.

After an hour of negotiation, I slid a wad of Israeli shekels across the counter and left with the map. Anyone else may have scoffed at the object, or laughed at my gullibility. After all, Jerusalem’s Old City is cluttered with Holy Land bric-à-brac. I had a feeling from the start that Ali Baba’s map was suspect, for it had no place names or co-ordinates.

But to me it symbolized a family obsession.

In the 1920s my grandfather, Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah, an Afghan traveller and scholar, searched for King Solomon’s mines in southern Arabia. He felt certain that Solomon had acquired his gold in what is now Yemen. He was forced to cut his expedition short after being accused of spying. Thirty years later, my father carried on the search, scouring the Red Sea coast of Sudan. He found no gold either, but did come across a great labyrinth of what appeared to be ancient mine shafts.

Not long before his death, my father cautioned me not to continue the search, declaring it to be a waste of time and money. I had never given much thought to carrying on the family tradition, but Ali Baba’s map changed all that.

I spent almost two years researching the mines, turning to texts like the Septuagint, the oldest known version of the Old Testament. It describes the magnificent temple that Solomon constructed in Jerusalem, near to where the Dome of the Rock now stands. The building’s interior was overlaid with the purest gold, supposedly brought from the mysterious land of Ophir.

The Bible suggests that Ophir was a source of exotic merchandise, brimming with peacocks and apes, frankincense, ivory, silver and gold.

I realized that if I were to have a hope of discovering the source of Solomon’s wealth, I needed to find Ophir, a land searched for by scholars and adventurers for almost three millennia.

Ptolemy said it lay near the Straits of Malacca (off the Malaysia peninsula); Christopher Columbus was sure he had found it in modern-day Haiti; while Sir Walter Raleigh thought it was hidden in the jungles of Suriname. Others have said it was in India or Madagascar, China or even in Peru.

Eventually, in the 1880s, amid the gold and diamond bonanza in southern Africa and the discovery of the ‘Great Zimbabwe’ ruins, the Victorians felt that they had at last solved the mystery. The young writer Henry Rider Haggard capitalized on the hysteria, and his rattling novel King Solomon’s Mines first appeared in 1885.

As my research progressed, I became sure that Ptolemy, Columbus, Raleigh and Rider Haggard – not to mention my own father and grandfather – had all been looking in the wrong place.

They should have been searching in Ethiopia.

We know that the Israelites gained their knowledge of mining and working gold from the Egyptians, during their slavery under the Pharaohs. We know, too, that the Egyptians mined their gold in Nubia, near Ethiopia’s western border (nub meant gold in ancient Egyptian).

The imperial family of Ethiopia claims descent from the child born to King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. But, most significant of all, Ethiopia has an abundance of pure gold which – unlike in other parts of Africa – is close to the surface and can easily be mined.

So I packed a Bible, some old clothes, hiking boots, and Ali Baba’s map. Then I bought myself a Gold Bug metal detector, and a cut-price ticket to Addis Ababa.

As the plane landed at the Ethiopian capital, I was overcome with fear. I sensed my father and grandfather peering down at me, shaking their heads in disappointment.

When I was sitting comfortably at home in London, it was easy to talk about searching for King Solomon’s mines. But the task at hand was impossibly difficult: a foreigner travelling in Ethiopia with a metal detector and gold-mining manuals is immediately suspected of being a spy. I had to keep the real reasons for my journey a secret.

Then I met a young taxi driver called Samson.

It turned out that he had worked as a miner in the illegal gold mines of southern Ethiopia. He spoke several tribal languages, and had secretly studied the country’s history during the oppressive Derge regime (1974 – 1991). Taking one look at Ali Baba’s map, he cackled in laughter. It was complete rubbish, he said.

Impressed by his candidness, I hired him on the spot.

I had heard that an important manuscript was preserved at a monastery in the extreme north of the country. My informant said that the text – known as the Kebra Negast (meaning ‘The Glory of Kings’) – contains clues to the whereabouts of the mines. So we travelled northward, through the highlands and over the Simien Mountains, to a cliff face called Debra Damo.

The monastery, which is perched at the top of a precipice, is home to three hundred priests. No women or female creatures of any kind are permitted to ascend.

At the base of the cliff, we deliberated how we could scale it. As we stood there, gazing up, a plaited leather rope was lowered down. I wrapped it around my waist, tied it in a reef knot and, as if by magic, I was pulled upward.

An elderly monk led us through dark cloisters, thick with the smell of incense. Sweeping a scarlet cloth away from a lectern, he revealed a very large book: the Kebra Negast. Handwritten in Ge’ez, the ancient language of Ethiopia, it recounts in detail the story of Solomon and Sheba. The monk translated some of the text in a whisper. I asked him if it gave the exact location of Solomon’s gold mines. He narrowed his eyes, and barked at Samson ferociously in Amharic.

‘What’s he saying?’

Samson replied: ‘He says that the book does have the answers, but we’re not to reveal them to foreigners like you, or else you’ll steal all the gold for yourself!’

I pressed the monk with more questions about the gold, but Samson was growing nervous. He nudged me, insisting that we leave immediately. It was maddening, especially as I thought I was on to something with the ancient manuscript. Samson told me later that the monks at Debra Damo had a direct line to God. As far as he was concerned their wishes had to be respected.

We negotiated the cliff face once again, and beat a retreat.

Samson suggested we head to the south, where he’d mined gold for eight years. The journey took many days, taking us through some of the most dramatic landscape on the African continent. There were great expanses of farmland, endless forests, and rivers seething from heavy winter rain.

In the West, our impressions of Ethiopia have been moulded by television images of drought and starvation, yet much of the country is lush, and utterly breathtaking in its beauty. In a land where poverty is endemic, the illegal gold mines near the small town of Shakiso offer a chance of escape.

Nothing could have prepared me for the mines.

They were like a scene from a Hollywood epic of the Old Testament: hundreds of men, women and children drenched in mud, digging the ground, many with their bare hands. They had excavated a crater the size of a football pitch. At the bottom of the pit was alluvial silt, which Samson told me contained the gold dust. The silt was scooped onto rounded wooden pans and hurled to the surface in a relay.

The mine is one of many to have sprouted up in southern Ethiopia over the past fifty years. The alluvial seam probably wasn’t worked in ancient times, as it would have been entirely depleted. But what was so interesting was that the mining techniques were almost identical to those devised five millennia ago by the Egyptians.

Solomon’s slave labour mined tons of gold in the same way – using wooden trays, sluices and panning pools. The big difference was that the people I saw mining near Shakiso were not slaves. They were working for themselves.

Life is cheap there, especially for the fraternity of young miners, many of whom worked in tunnels, digging down to the seam. In the rainy season, when the ground is soft, fatalities are common. The tunnels collapse, burying brave men alive.

The risks may explain the miners’ way of life. In the makeshift village adjacent to the pit they spend their money as fast as they earn it. All kinds of illicit services are available in the dark grass-roofed shacks – including gut-rot araki, gambling and prostitution.

I was impressed that Samson had broken free from such a destructive existence. One morning, he told me, he had glanced into a sliver of broken mirror and seen not himself, but the Devil.

He fled to Addis Ababa to begin a new life.

Although I’d hoped at first that these mines could be those once worked by Solomon, I realized there was little real chance of that. Yet, as we left the mines and continued westward following another lead, I was buoyed by having seen such ancient methods in action.

In the 1920s an eccentric Englishman called Frank Hayter claimed to have found a cave on a remote mountain near the border with Sudan. There, he said, he came upon a cache of gold and precious stones. He thought the find was somehow connected to King Solomon’s mines.

In western Ethiopia we hired a herd of mules. They were savage, resented having to work, and bit anyone who got near them. They bucked, too, tossing both Samson and me to the ground.

We made the long trek to the mountain, through forests and stretches of deep mud, in search of Hayter’s cave. It rained non-stop for a week. I kept the muleteers going with handfuls of monosodium glutamate powder.

We scoured the mountain for days, but the only cave we came to ended after a few feet in a natural stone wall. If the cave was indeed there it eluded us, yet I felt certain that we were close to where Solomon mined the gold for his temple.

By the time we finally reached the main road, morale was very low, made worse by mule bites and the constant downpour. Samson and I hitch-hiked towards the capital. We stopped for the night in the small town of Nejo and put up at the only hotel which wasn’t a brothel.

Its Ethiopian owner, Berehane, overheard us talking of gold and Solomon’s mines. It turned out that his grandfather was an Italian prospector called Antillo Zappa. I knew from my research that Zappa had been a friend of Frank Hayter, and had mined gold nearby.

Next morning Berehane led us out of the town and across open fields. There, on an exposed hillside, we came to a series of pits. They had evidently once been much larger, but had been filled in over the centuries by natural erosion. Berehane said that local people often found shards of pottery here, and that his grandfather believed the pits were ancient.

Given the location and abundance of pure gold in the area, I think there is a strong possibility that these pits once formed part of Solomon’s mines. It is impossible to say for certain without mounting a full-scale archaeological dig, and to this end I have approached the British Museum and several biblical and archaeological foundations in the United States. If all else fails, it may eventually fall to my own children to raise the funds, and thus continue the family obsession with King Solomon’s mines.

TWENTY-TWO

In the Scorpion Palace

THE EXTRAVAGANCE OF THE Nizams of Hyderabad needs no introduction.

Until losing power at India’s Independence, their Princely State endured for two centuries, presiding over a huge chunk of the Deccan. A byword for profligacy and for spending on a truly lavish scale, the Nizams’ dynasty rivalled large countries in terms of its wealth.

Of the seven Nizams, who governed Hyderabad State from 1720 until 1948, the richest of all was the last – Mir Osman Ali Khan. Regarded as the wealthiest man on Earth, his portrait graced the cover of Time Magazine and, as recently as 2008, he was rated fifth highest on the Forbes’ ‘All Time Wealthiest List’ (Bill Gates ranked 20th).

He had his own mint, printing his own currency, the Hyderabadi rupee, and a vast private treasury. Its coffers were said to contain £100 million in gold and silver bullion, and a further £400 million worth of jewels. Among them, was the fabulously rare Jacob Diamond, valued some £60 million today, and used by the Nizam as a paperweight. There were pearls, too – enough to pave Piccadilly – hundreds of race horses, thousands of uniforms, tons of royal regalia, and Rolls Royces by the dozen.

But it was the Nizams’ great love affair with palaces that cost more than anything else to maintain. They owned more than a handful in Hyderabad alone, staffed by many thousands of servants, retainers, bodyguards, eunuchs and concubines.

The favourite of all was the Falaknuma.

Set on a hillock with sweeping views across Hyderabad below, the Falaknuma Palace was laid out in the shape of a scorpion with a double stinging tail. Known as ‘Mirror of the Sky’, it was constructed in the classical style from Italian marble, with hints of Art Nouveau. No expense was spared to create it, a European masterpiece on the plains of central India.

It was actually the Nizam’s Prime Minister, Viqar ul Omra, who conceived the palace as a lavish residence for himself. The foundation stone was laid in 1884, but the building wasn’t completed for almost another decade. In that time, the Prime Minister was forced to borrow increasing funds to finish it – money that even he had no chance of ever earning.

The story goes that to save face his wife suggested a wily plan. Inviting his master, Mehboob Ali Pasha, the sixth Nizam, to stay, the Prime Minister waited to be extolled for creating such a glorious pleasure dome. And, when the praise was lavished, Viqar ul Omra offered the building to the Nizam as a gift. Accepting graciously, the ruler reimbursed the full cost – a pittance to man of such colossal wealth. With so many homes already, he used it as a residence for his most distinguished guests.

The palace soon became a great favourite with royal visitors, among them King George V, Queen Mary, Edward VIII, Tsar Nicholas II, and a kaleidoscope of European aristocracy. It was for them an illusion of Europe in a principality whose affluence exceeded their wildest dreams. But, with the withdrawal of the privy purse, and the subsuming of Hyderabad into Independent India, the billionaire lifestyle came to an abrupt end.

The palaces were boarded up, their doors fastened with wax seals by order of the courts. And, for decades they slept, like something from a child’s fairytale. The Falaknuma was no exception. For thirty years or more almost no one was permitted entry, and the place went from rack to ruin.

Yet, just before reaching the point of no return, Princess Esra, the Turkish-born former wife of the current Nizam (he has the title but nothing else), stepped in. Realising the terrible loss about to occur, she brokered a deal that would save not only the Falaknuma, but other properties once owned by the Nizams.

For an extendable lease of thirty years, the Falaknuma has been signed over to the Taj Group. As part of the arrangement, the luxury hotel chain agreed to foot the jaw-dropping bill for renovations. Every detail was overseen by Princess Esra herself, in a transformation that took more than a decade to complete. Once again sparing no expense, the Princess brought in experts from all over world, each one charged with the solemn duty of returning the apple of the Nizam’s eye to its original state.

And the result is a royal palace fit for a Nizam again.

As the standard bearer leads the way up the great bowed staircase, the thing that strikes you first is the silence. There’s nothing for miles around and, in India, such seclusion is itself a symbol of wealth.

Inside, there’s a vestibule, its walls and ceilings adorned with lovely frescoes, Greek urns and alabaster nymphs. There’s no reception desk, no concierge, none of the trappings of a luxury hotel. Rather, there’s a sense that you are a guest in the Nizam’s own home.

Step through into the main body of the palace, and you enter a world that disappeared half a century ago. In the distance there’s the delicate chiming of a Louis XIV timepiece and, nearer by, a row of liveried factotums are standing to attention, awaiting instructions.

Once welcomed in whispers, and suitably indulged with refreshments, I was taken to my suite in the Zenana wing, where my luggage had already been unpacked by a valet. While lavish, the sixty or so rooms and suites of the Falaknuma exude the kind of understated luxury that only true prosperity can provide.

A little later the palace historian, Prabhakar Mahindrakar, took me on a palace tour. A towering figure of a man, dressed in a flowing black sherwani, he walks softly over the rosewood parquet.

We stroll into the ballroom, with its great Venetian chandeliers, gilt ceiling, teak and walnut furniture, and miles and miles of silk.

‘Before Princess Esra saved the palace,’ says Prabhakar, ‘I thought it would simply crumble into dust. You should have seen it. In this very room the curtains were rotting, the upholstery eaten away by termites and ants. There were cobwebs everywhere, rats the size of cats, and unimaginable amounts of dust.’

He leads the way out onto the landing, illuminated by Carrera marble lamps, and adorned with portraits of the Nizams looming down in giant rococo frames. Next door is the Jade Room. Haute Chinoiserie in style, it’s festooned with objets d’art, with yet more magnificent chandeliers above, and an intricate geometric parquet under foot.

Prabhakar paces softly through to the Hukka Lounge, replete with its multi-stemmed water pipe, chaise longues, and embossed leather walls. There’s a vast billiard table too, made by Burroughes & Watts of Soho Square and, beside it, a rack of ivory-tipped cues. And, slipping through a small doorway to the left, we emerge into the cavernous dining-room. Running down the centre is one of the longest dining tables in the world. Thirty-three metres in length, fashioned from teak and rosewood, it can seat one hundred and one guests, and was once laid with the Nizam’s solid gold cutlery and plates.

He may have owned the palace, but it was his Prime Minister, Viqar ul Omra, whose monogram is all over it. Just about everything from the dining chairs to the stained glass bears his initials – ‘V.O.’

Even the library ceiling is monogrammed. Inspired by the one at Windsor Castle, the room has six thousand rare volumes, including a series of oversized leather-bound tomes, entitled Glimpses of the Nizam’s Dominions. Flicking through them, you get a sense at the limitless power and wealth held by the Nizams – power and wealth that’s long gone.

The palace historian, Prabhakar, suddenly seems overcome with melancholy. Kissing his fingers, he touches them gently to the book.

‘We’re all equal now,’ he says, ‘but I must admit I wish the old days would come back if only for a while.’

TWENTY-THREE

The Islamic Legacy of Timbuktu

THE CARAVAN OF SULTAN MANSA MUSA, ruler of the Mali Empire, snaked its way through the scorching heat of the central Sahara on its long return from the pilgrimage to Mecca.

The year was 1324.

Eight thousand soldiers, courtiers and servants – some say as many as sixty thousand – drove fifteen thousand camels laden with gold, perfume, salt and stores of food in a procession of unrivaled size.

Their destination was the newly conquered city of Gao, on the Niger River. From there, they turned toward another metropolis recently added to the Mali Empire, one surrounded by unrelenting dunes, a fabled oasis city on which Mansa Musa had longed to make his mark – Timbuktu.

No word in English connotes remoteness more than that city’s name. Thanks to the astonishing wealth that Mansa Musa had displayed on his visits to Cairo and Mecca, it suggests riches too. For eight centuries, Timbuktu captured the imaginations of both East and West, albeit for very different reasons. In 1620, the English explorer Richard Jobson wrote:

The most flattering reports had reached Europe of the gold trade carried on at Timbuktu. The roofs of its houses were represented to be covered with plates of gold, the bottoms of the rivers to glisten with the precious metal, and the mountains had only to be excavated to yield a profusion of the metallic treasure.

Other reports said that rosewater flowed in the city’s fountains, that the sultan showered each visitor with priceless gifts. Europe’s greatest explorers set out to risk their lives in search of the riches of the fabled Timbuktu.

Exploration and travel societies sponsored competitions, with prizes for the man who reached there by the most difficult route. Most European travellers perished long before they ever saw the city rise above the desert horizon, and those who did get there found that the tales they had heard had missed the point.

Muslim travellers – most notably Ibn Battuta and Hasan al-Wazan, also known as Leo Africanus – were no less eager to visit the city, but for them, and a host of rulers, dignitaries and scholars from Morocco to Persia, the remote city held riches of another sort.

Timbuktu was the starting point for African pilgrims going on the Haj, a centre of some of the finest Islamic scholarship of the Middle Ages.

Located in modern Mali, just eight miles north of the Niger floodplain along the southern edge of the Sahara, Timbuktu today is little more than a sleepy, sweltering stop on the adventure-tourism trail. Most visitors fly in and out in a single afternoon. The city’s days as a caravanserai and desert entrepôt are long gone.

A more purposeful visit, however, has its rewards.

There is much to see as one strolls about the stark streets, lingers, looks beyond the soft-drink stalls and engages in casual conversation here and there. Although Timbuktu has been conquered over and over by many powers, absorbed into one empire after another, none ever sacked or looted it.

As a result, traces of its Islamic legacy appear at almost every turn. Qur’anic inscriptions decorate doorways. The tombs of hundreds of famous scholars and teachers dot the town – some unremembered, some within the knowledge of local guides. Most noticeably, a handful of fabulous mosques reel upward into the brilliant African sky and constitute the anchor points of the city’s plan.

Set on the Islamic world’s southwestern edge, Timbuktu was the product of an eclectic mixture of West African and Arab influences that found in Islam a common denominator. Its peoples often saw themselves as the faithful pitted against the pagans lurking beyond the city’s walls. Tuareg, Fulani, Berbers, Soninke and Songhoi lived side by side, in peace, bound together by their belief in God, their acceptance of the Qur’an, and their familiarity with Arabic.

Because the city lay on the periphery of the kingdoms that ruled it – and was left to its own devices by most of them – the community of Timbuktu was forced through isolation to look inward. This introspective attitude influenced all aspects of Timbuktu’s society, and nowhere did this become more apparent than in its pious pursuits.

Barely two centuries after being founded as a small Tuareg settlement around 1100, Timbuktu had earned its reputation as the most important Islamic centre in West Africa. Its quiet rise to high regard – against enormous odds of geography and climate – is quite remarkable. Equally astonishing is that Timbuktu also prospered economically, seemingly beyond reason, as if to spite the adversity of its surroundings.

At its height during the mid-sixteenth century, the city had a population of about sixty thousand. A prime caravan stop and centere of manufacturing, it dominated West Africa in trade and exports. Al-Wazan wrote that:

The rich king of Tombuto keeps a magnificent and well-furnished court. The coin of Tombuto is gold. There is a most stately temple to be seen, the walls of which are made of mortared stone; and a princely palace also built by a most excellent workman of Granada. Here are many shops of craftsmen and merchants, and especially of such as weave linen and cotton cloth.

Though undergirded by its economic success, Timbuktu’s key role was cultural, as a crucible of learning. The difficulty of the journey to or from Timbuktu induced pilgrims and traders alike, once they got there, to spend months, even years, in the city before moving on.

In time, local belief held that, by studying the Qur’an or donating generously to Timbuktu’s Islamic schools, one would be assured safe passage through the surrounding desert.

A rich account of Timbuktu’s history and Islamic heritage has come to us through a series of chronicles, known as tarikhs, written from the mid-17th and through the mid-eighteenth centuries. These texts – some plain and undeviating, others embroidered with ornate rhetoric – help us slip into the world of Timbuktu in the Middle Ages. Here we learn of its great mosques, of its ruling families, of the eminent schools of literature and learning, and of its golden age.

Of these chronicles, none is more detailed or intricate than the Tarikh al-Sudan, or History of the Sudan. Written in 1653 by the city’s most eminent scholar, ’Abd al-Rahman al-Sadi, the tarikh traces the history and society of Timbuktu from its founding until the time of writing. Al-Sadi’s work is so reliable, and his descriptions so exact, that two hundred and fifty years after it was written the French journalist Felix Dubois used it as his guidebook. ‘The author displays an unusual conscientiousness, never hesitating to give both versions of a doubtful event,’ wrote Dubois in 1897.

The two major tarikhs that followed al-Sadi’s were essentially less ambitious updates. The first, Mahmoud Kati's Tarikh al-Fattash, supplements al-Sadi’s work up to the early eighteenth century. Kati lacks the astute insight of his predecessor, but his book does contain important information on the legal and administrative heritage of Timbuktu. The anonymous Tadhkirat al-Nisyan, or A Reminder to the Oblivious, is similarly thin in detail, and it in turn brings the history up through the mid-eighteenth century. The two latter chronicles frequently lapse into nostalgia and lament the decline of Timbuktu’s fortunes.

Since its earliest beginnings, when the Tuareg would move down to the plateau each summer from the pastures of Arawan, Timbuktu has been dominated by its mosques. It is to them that the old city, with its triangular layout, owes its specific quarters – each with its unique character. Built literally of the desert itself, the adobe mosques of Timbuktu became famous throughout the Islamic world. They towered high above the sandy streets and afforded the city an impressively eccentric skyline.

The northern quarter, at the apex of the triangular city, takes its name from the Sankore Mosque. A great, tawny, pyramidal structure laced with protruding wooden support beams, Sankore was the bastion of learning in Timbuktu. Its imams were regarded with unequaled respect; its school attracted the noble and the rich as students. Indeed, mentors and scholars alike are said to have flocked to Sankore’s ja’iyyah, or university, from as far afield as the Arabian Peninsula.

Here, surrounded by the Sahara’s windswept dunes, students could concentrate their minds as nowhere else. And, as Timbuktu’s fame grew in the Islamic world, Sankore became the most important centre of Islamic scholarship in Africa.

The eastern corner of the city was home to the much smaller Jami’ al-Suq, the Market Mosque. Like many of the less grand mosques of Timbuktu, it has fallen into disrepair, been enlarged or been rebuilt many times. The adobe construction, characteristic of sub-Saharan buildings weakens when it rains. Each year, after the winter downpours – if they occur – many of the city’s major buildings must be patched up and reinforced, but it is unexpected thunderstorms that are the dread of Timbuktu.

The noted mosque Jami’ al-Hana collapsed in a storm in 1771 and killed forty people. Local legend relates that, rather than being embittered by catastrophe, the residents of Timbuktu believed that God had been so stirred by the prayers from the mosque that he had whisked the congregants up to heaven at once.

When the grand caravan of Mansa Musa arrived on that scorching day in 1325, the sultan ordered the Granadan architect and poet Abu Ishaq al-Sahili, who had travelled with him from Mecca, to build a magnificent mosque – one far larger than any the region had known – in the western corner of the city. Its name, Jingerebir, is a corruption of the Arabic Jami’ al-kabir, or ‘the great mosque’.

Five hundred years later, in 1858, the German traveller Henry Barth wrote that the mosque ‘by its stately appearance made a deep impression on my mind. [It]…includes nine naves, of different dimensions and structure.’

Giant and rambling, and one of the first mosques in Africa to be built with fired-brick walls, Jingerebir became at once the central mosque of the city, and it dominates Timbuktu to this day. In times of crisis, in years when rains failed and the Niger River had risen insufficiently or not at all in its annual, life-giving flood, the people of Timbuktu gathered at Jingerebir. Within the cool shade of its walls, the imam – who often doubled as the town’s ruler – would lead his congregants in prayer.

According to the tarikhs, Timbuktu’s religious leaders, judges and officials all tended to be graduates of the city’s illustrious schools. In the city where the study of Islamic principles was regarded as of supreme importance, Leo Africanus found ‘a great store of doctors, judges, priests, and other learned men’. This scholastic elite was underwritten largely by the city’s business class, who themselves formed a considerable part of the student body. Especially at Sankore, it was also these scholars who provided energy and direction to civil administration, commercial regulation, legislation, town planning and architectural projects – in addition to maintaining a number of superb libraries. The ranks of the city’s elite were limited, however: Six families have provided two-thirds of Timbuktu’s qadis, or judges, during the last five hundred years.

By the mid-sixteenth century – the so-called golden age of Timbuktu – the city boasted well over one hundred and fifty schools, and the curricula were rigorous. The Islamic sciences formed the core of the academic syllabus, including Qur’anic interpretation (tafsir), the traditions of the Prophet (hadith), jurisprudence (fiqh), sources of the law (usul), and doctrinal theology (tawhid). Apart from the religious courses, students were also required to study grammar (nahw), literary style and rhetoric (balaghah), and logic (mantiq). Scholars focused on the way that a person should behave within the context of Islamic society.

Only when religious and linguistic literacy had been achieved was a student assigned to a particular mentor. The relationship between pupil and master often grew to be a strong one, and favoured students might work as mulazama, or private secretaries, to their teachers. As the community grew, an intellectual genealogy developed, similar to those acknowledged elsewhere in the Islamic world, that linked masters to pupils and those pupils to their own students. Strong academic and religious ties with other scholastic centers of the Middle East and North Africa linked Timbuktu to the rest of the Islamic world.

As the number of students increased, so did the fields of study available. Subjects such as history, mathematics, astronomy and cartography in time joined the wealth of courses available.

Although Timbuktu prided itself on the rigour of its teaching for even the youngest of pupils, visiting traders or travellers were encouraged to enroll while they stayed in the city. Thus many itinerant non-Muslim merchants were led to conversion in Timbuktu through encounters with Muslim scholars. Even older visitors could be assured that the city’s scholastic community would educate them. Indeed, the people of Timbuktu were reputed to be so philanthropic that they would afford any visitor an education regardless of his means – maintaining that anyone who had endured the journey to their desert metropolis had earned himself a scholarship.

Likewise, those born in Timbuktu to humble families were guaranteed their education. So great was the fervour for Islamic learning that even the tailors of Timbuktu, among other craft guilds, founded their own centers of learning where instructors oversaw both the workshop and its college. In this environment, students worked as apprentice tailors while they were also instructed in the foundations of Islamic scholarship.

By the sixteenth century, Timbuktu is said to have had more than twenty-six establishments for tailor-scholars alone, many employing more than a hundred. Thus, these institutes also reinforced the city's role as a significant manufacturer of cloth.

At the height of the city’s golden age, Timbuktu boasted not only the impressive libraries of Sankore and the other mosques, but also a wealth of private ones. One of the greatest, containing more than seven hundred volumes, was left by the master scholar Hajji Ahmad bin ’Umar. His library was said to have included many of the rarest books ever written in Arabic, and he copied and annotated a considerable number of the volumes himself.

The libraries of Timbuktu grew through a regular process of hand-copying manuscripts. Scholars would visit the caravanserais and appeal to learned travellers to permit their precious volumes to be reproduced. Alternatively, they duplicated texts borrowed from their mentors’ collections, studying the material as they did so.

Al-Wazan, Leo the African, commented that ‘hither are brought manuscripts or written books, which are sold for more money than any other merchandise.’ As late as the close of the nineteenth century, Fèlix Dubois purchased a number of antique books in Timbuktu, including a copy of the Divan of Kings, a chronology of the rulers and events of the Sudan between 1656 and 1747.

Timbuktu’s position as a principal staging point along the pilgrimage route to Mecca may partly explain why so many books were available. Even so, modern scholars are staggered by the sheer quantity and rarity of Arabic texts and poems proffered and composed in the city.

Of the books written in Timbuktu, a number are surprising in their scope. Ahmed Baba’s biographical dictionary, for example, included the lives of notables from Arabia, Egypt, Morocco and Central Asia, as well as Timbuktu itself.

Of the city’s scholars, none is more lionised today than Muhammad Askia, called ‘Muhammad the Great’, who reigned over Timbuktu for more than three decades in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Regarded as the city’s saviour, it was he who wrested Timbuktu from the infamous Songhoi ruler Sunni Ali in 1493. Ali was despised as one who undermined Islam by persecuting the scholastic class, efforts that earned him uncomplimentary entries in the tarikhs. Under Askia, however, scholarship and Islam were again revered and supported, and a new era of stability began that led to Timbuktu’s sixteenth-century golden age.

Like any frontier town, the city also gained strength from the melting-pot of peoples who sought to make their lives within its walls. A mixture of North and West African tribes wove their unique ways into the framework of Timbuktu's culture.

The influence of the Songhoi people, for example, extended to the calendar, where Ramadan, the holy month of fasting, was popularly known by the Songhoi word haome, which translates, literally, as ‘closed mouth’. The end of the Ramadan fast was known similarly as ferme, or ‘open mouth’. Observance of the Ramadan fast has never been easy in Timbuktu, where the desert climate much resembles that of central Arabia, but the holy month has always been taken very seriously in the city.

Like Muslims everywhere, the people of Timbuktu were united by Ramadan. As the sun scorched down, or as the flour-fine Sahara sand squalled through the streets, the faithful would gather in the mosques, protected from the desert and enveloped in the simplicity of the adobe architecture, in order to renew their faith.

During Tyibsi, as Dhu al-Hijjah, the month which follows Ramadan, was called, feasting was in order. On the tenth day of the month, as pilgrims prepared to begin the taxing journey to Mecca, the men of Timbuktu would gather for special prayers, and the imam of Jingerebir would sacrifice a ram. Then everyone would hurry home, for a local tradition maintained that the first man to follow the imam’s sacrifice with one of his own would be the first to ride into paradise.

With desert dunes surrounding it in all directions, and trapped in a severe and perfidious climate, the fact that fabled Timbuktu rose and prospered for eight centuries is remarkable.

But more surprising still is that Timbuktu’s intellectual tradition remained largely intact generation after generation. Even during times of economic depression, caused by shifting caravan routes or spoiled crops, the community ensured that the Qur’anic academies survived.

Early in the nineteenth century, the young French explorer René Caille remarked that all the population of Timbuktu was apparently ‘able to read the Qur’an and even know it by heart’.

With some sixty-six years later, when the French colonized the region, they recorded that some two dozen key scholastic centres still flourished in Timbuktu. Continuing to teach Arabic, Qur’anic doctrine and traditional lore, the schools had altered little in five centuries.

Now, as the desert creeps slowly southward all across sub-Saharan Africa, Timbuktu stands more isolated by sand and heat than ever. At the same time, in the city that captivated both West and East, some of the richest parts of the legacy of Islam lie only just beneath the city’s baked-mud surface, waiting silently to be rediscovered, and perhaps reawakened.

TWENTY-FOUR

Jinn Lore

THE OCCIDENT HAS NEVER FOUND it easy to grasp the strange netherworld of spirits that followers of Islam universally believe exist in a realm overlaid our own.

Although descended from an Oriental family with its roots in the mountain fortress of Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush, I had been born and brought up in the West. I thought I knew the East. After all, I was well accustomed from childhood to understand the finer points of Arab etiquette, and I had been taught its tales, gleaned from Alf Layla wa Layla, A Thousand and One Nights.

That fabulous treasury of stories had introduced me early on to the extraordinary possibilities of a world peopled by invisible legions of Jinn. So when we came to live at Dar Khalifa, the Caliph’s House, I felt as if nothing could surprise me.

How wrong I was.

From the first moment that we crossed the threshold, I realized that I was way out of my depth. The house had been empty for almost a decade. Whereas in the West an empty home might appeal to squatters, in the East there is a danger of quite a different kind. The unlawful occupants of our new home were not human, but superhuman.

The guardians who came with the property, as if through some mediaeval right sale, warned us from the outset that there was extreme danger all around. When I declared that we would be moving into the house right away to supervise the renovations, they laughed nervously – until that is they realized I was serious. Terrified, contorted expressions then swept across their faces, and they begged us to leave post haste.

The Jinn would not take kindly to intruders, they told me. For in the years that the house had been empty, it had become their home. Dare to trespass and they might kill us, the leader of the guardians declared. Irritated, yet willing to go along with them for the sake of respecting local sensitivities, I asked what to do. The chief guardian, whose name was Osman, swept his out arms wide, and yelled: ‘You must hold an exorcism!’

Back in London I would have had no idea where to find an exorcist, let alone a troop of them. But Morocco is very different. It may be perched in Africa’s North West’s corner, just eight miles from the gates of Europe, but in many ways it is the deepest, darkest Orient.

And that is what is so appealing about it.

I asked around and, very soon, found myself in the old imperial city of Mèknes. According to all my informants it was the centre of exorcists. And they were right. A few minutes after my arrival I was offered dozens of exorcists from the Aissawa brotherhood. I negotiated a price for twenty, and the exorcist dealer threw in a further four of them for free. The only catch was that I was obliged to pay in advance.

A day or so later I arrived home and was greeted by the guardians’ long looks. The Jinn were already exacting their revenge, they told me. A dead cat had been found in the garden with its head cut off. A tree had fallen in the wind and broken a window. And the maid, hired to look after our baby son, had run off screaming for no reason at all. I held out a hand at arms length and whispered confidently, ‘Have no fear, the exorcists are coming.’

The guardians perked up.

They asked when exactly the visitors would arrive.

I shrugged.

‘They’ll come when they are ready,’ I said.

My wife insisted I was mad to have handed over wads of money to exorcists I didn’t know. She said she could hear them all the way in Mèknes, howling with laughter.

A day passed, then another.

I kicked myself to having been so ingenuous as to pay in advance. But then at that moment I heard the wild, whooping sound of men in high spirits, against a backdrop of grinding noise. A huge cement truck was inching its way down our lane. On the back were riding the exorcists, as if on some infernal chariot. I pointed at them and grinned, and the guardians grinned too.

Through days and nights the Aissawa wreaked their terrible work.

They slaughtered and skinned a goat at what they said was the heart of the house. As the person obliged to purchase the animal, I found myself naturally interested in how its execution would feature in the cleansing of my home of supernatural elements. When stripped of its skin, the carcass was beheaded, and its gallbladder swallowed by one of the group. The others slit open its belly and rifled through the organs, which gleamed like jewels in the candlelight.

One of the Aissawa then poured milk in all corners of the house, and another did the same with blood. Drums beat, and high-pitched homemade oboes wailed. The drumming grew faster and faster as the night wore on. And as it did so, the exorcists stepped into another plane, a kind of twilight zone of their own imagination.

They cut their wrists with knives and drank their own blood, then collapsed on the ground in trance. Yet more massed in a dark, damp room at the far end of the house. They barricaded themselves inside, killed chickens and drank more blood.

And all the while the drums beat and the oboes shrieked. I wondered if the walls would tumble down as they had done in Jericho.

I whispered sternly to the Aissawa leader that they could leave. He laughed, a wild hearty laugh, and I swear his eyes flashed red with fire. He would only quit our home, he said, when the Jinn had been sucked out of the walls and swallowed. I explained that my wife was growing impatient, and was uncomfortable at having the walls and floor strewn with freshly purged blood. The leader of the exorcists caught my glance in his. Widening his eyes in the most terrifying manner, he told me that he had never been in a house so consumed with evil spirits.

Then he asked for more money, and for another goat.

The next day, after brokering a deal which involved a handful of crisp hundred-dirham notes, the exorcists clambered aboard the cement truck. They rolled back down the lane and through the shanty-town to the open road. My wife gave me one of those looks that instilled pure fear. I bragged out loud that the house was now squeaky clean, that the last thing we ever needed to worry about again were Jinn.

In the years since, I have found myself living in a country where the belief in these normally invisible spirits is complete and unshakable. Jinn are described in the Qur’an, and they are a part of life for all God-fearing Muslims in Morocco and across the Islamic world. The Qur’an tells us that when God created Man from clay, he created a second race of beings – Jinn – from ‘smokeless fire’. Jinn are not ghosts, that is they are not spirits of the dead. Far from it. They are living entities just like us. They are born, get married, and die just like humans. Some are good and others bad, some ugly, while others are radiantly beautiful.

Indeed, there are many tales of mortal men being wooed by the charms of voluptuous women, only to realize later that they are not human, but Jinn. The difference between us and them is that they have magical powers, and can decide when to be visible and when not. They can fly through the air, change their form, and are capable of magical feats of the most extraordinary kind.

The nineteenth century’s fascination with The Arabian Nights saw the deeds and misdeeds of Jinn enter Victorian drawing-rooms. The creatures slipped into Western communal folklore through the tales of Aladdin, Sindbad and others, mixed in with epic quests, treasure, flying carpets and enchanted lands. And through the endless adaptations for children, and all the Hollywood renditions, Jinn became known to us all.

But gone was the Oriental imagery – the sly, ferocious race that lives among us, replaced by a comic jumble of towering, yet quite loveable creatures, who go by the name of ‘genies’.

Anyone who’s spent any time in the Arab world, knows the difference between Hollywood’s depiction and that which is found embedded deep in local culture.

Living in a country like Morocco, where belief in Jinn is all-pervasive, provides situations such as the ones we faced at the Caliph’s House. It brings an extraordinary level of cultural possibility that simply doesn’t exist in the Occidental world. Imagine it: that all around you there may be invisible spirits, sitting, standing, laughing, chatting, cackling, crouching on the floor. Some of them are minute, while others tower hundreds of feet into the air. The more you think about it, and live with it, the more appealing the idea of Jinn becomes. And the longer you live in a place where everyone believes, the more you find yourself believing, too.

Long before I moved to Morocco, I had searched for a readable book about Jinn and their world. But there wasn’t one. When I asked friends who were scholars in Islamic culture and tradition, they recommended barely readable texts written by academics for academics. Years passed. Then, through a kind of magic that was from the realm of Jinn themselves, Robert Lebling contacted me out of the blue. He spoke of a work, a great labour of love, which would reveal to the West all it needed to know about Jinn.

My prayers had been answered.

The boundaries of Lebling’s work surpassed by wildest dreams. The books’ scope exceeds simply listing stories of Jinn taken from Islamic texts and Arab folklore.

Lebling has left no stone unturned in his enquiry, roaming through traditional Eastern literature as well as the modern media, in search of anything which gives us a better understanding of Jinn and their world. The result is a truly extraordinary masterwork, a treasury within itself that can be consulted at random, dipped into as a bedside book, or read from cover to cover in a fabulous feast for the imagination and the enquiring mind.

Through its pages, we learn that the belief in Jinn is certainly Pre-Islamic, and that there are various distinct forms of these creatures. The Qur’an devotes an entire Sura to them, a form of life that is inextricably linked to the cultural and religious tapestry of Arab and Islamic lands.

Lebling details clearly how followers of Islam perceive the realm of Jinn, what the Prophet Mohammed said about them, and how regional and geographic divide has shaped them within local culture. An entire section is devoted to the study and appreciation of Jinn by geographic location – through Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt, to Arabia and Palestine, Turkey, Iraq and Iran; as well as through Nigeria, Malaysia, Zanzibar and beyond.

We learn that the Arabic word for ‘crazy’ – Majnun – comes from the same root as the word ‘Jinn’, suggesting that a deranged person is possessed in some way. And that Jinn are believed to lurk in wells and lavatories, in addition to their haunting empty buildings, such as our home. Space is given to King Solomon, the one human who could control Jinn through the magical ring he wore.

And Lebling describes the extraordinary encounters between those of us created from clay and the others, shaped from smokeless fire. These include examples of humans whom have married Jinn unwittingly, and others such as the fourteenth century Moroccan magician, Muhammad ibn al-Hajj al-Tilimsani, whose work Suns of Lights and Treasures of Secrets, provides a spell for anyone wishing to seduce the daughter of the White King of the Jinn.

Legends of the Fire Spirits provides a transparent window into Arab and Islamic society that is more usually clouded over, opaque to all except Arabists and scholars of Islam. The subject is one known to Muslims, embracing a belief that stands at the heart of the Islamic faith: but one that until now has been largely misrepresented and misunderstood in the West.

As for life at the Caliph’s House, all is not well.

One of the guardians recently almost severed his hand while sharpening an axe in the garden. Then, last week, the maid tripped and cut her foot badly, and on the same day the swimming pool turned an eerie shade of yellowy-green.

The guardians have been imploring me to hold another exorcism. The very thought of it fills me with anxiety. Most of all, I don’t know how I’ll break it to my wife. But, as all my friends assure me, everyone knows that even the best exorcism has to be renewed once in a while.

N.B. Legends of the Fire Spirits: Jinn and Genies from Arabia to Zanzibar, by Robert Leibling, I.B. Tauris 2010.

TWENTY-FIVE

Jma el Fna

PLAYED OUT AGAINST a backdrop of vibrant cultural colour, the late Marrakech afternoon is like nothing else on Earth.

The souqs are packed with bargains, bustle, and with people cloaked in hooded jelaba robes. Stacked up are bundles of wool carpets from the High Atlas, dazzling brass trays inscribed with the names of God, baskets of dried damask roses, mounds of pungent incense and sulphur, and endless shops, each one crammed with treasure from the remotest reaches of the desert.

For all the wonders of the medina though, it’s the great square of Jma el Fna that I find the most tantalizing spot of all. It lies at the heart of real Marrakech, the city of snake charmers, the crème de la crème of the Exotic East.

Most people hurry across it fast. Pause too long and you’re sure to be sucked in deep. But to me that’s the true magic… being pulled down through the layers like a man floundering on the ocean waves. Allow yourself to be free, and you glimpse the many facets of this mesmerizing stew of humanity.

The Halka: A circle of people stands in the darkness, shoulders pressed together tight, necks craning forward for a view… a great green parasol looming over them, and me as I push in closer. The outside world gradually fades away and then…is shut out. The sense of anticipation growing, palpable and electric.

I’m being sucked in… through the rows of onlookers to the source of this frenzied, primal rhythm. I’m descending back through time… to when this place, Jma el Fna, was no more than an oasis in the desert. Suddenly, I break into the centre of the circle, walled by shadows and men’s faces, illuminated by the jolting, jarring flame of a gas-lamp. It’s like the meeting of a secret fraternity.

In the middle of the halka – the circle of souls – leaps the riotous silhouette of a man, a violin grasped tight in his hand, the crowd gripped by the wild strains of his instrument. As he turns into the light, I catch his features… bearded, tight curly hair, smiling eyes upturned to the stars. Raw, energetic, hypnotic… a Moroccan Jimi Hendrix, a Berber master musician.

First Impressions: Anyone who’s ever been to Marrakech remembers the first time they stepped onto the frenetic expanse of Jma el Fna. For me it was a searing afternoon back in June ’71. I was four years old. My fingers were pressed tight in my father’s hand, my eyes blinking in the dazzling light.

Despite the heat, the square was crowded beyond belief. There were snake charmers and tumbling acrobats, medicine men in Toureg robes, blind men and water-sellers, madmen and doped out hippies crouching in the shade.

Stumbling forward through the waves of people, I was mesmerized. It was as if every man, woman, and child on Earth was right there. A seething stew of humanity set in random motion.

Watching over it all like a sentinel – the minaret of Jma el Fna itself, the mosque of the annihilation, the mosque of eternity, the mosque at the end of the world.

Over the years, and especially since I moved to Morocco, I have returned to Marrakech again and again, and always find myself crisscrossing the square, usually heading for shade of the ancient medina, whose twisting lanes stretch out behind it in a great secret labyrinth.

Soaking it up: My father used to say that the only way to absorb the atmosphere was to close your eyes. ‘Listen to the sounds that go unnoticed,’ he would tell me, ‘and breathe in the smells that the nostrils try to filter out… concentrate, and the reality will reveal itself.’

It’s a lesson that’s never failed me. And whenever I venture into Jma el Fna, I do as he suggested, and find myself transported to a space on the edge of the imagination, a cross-section of medieval Morocco that’s as real today as it’s ever been… but one whose true form is truly elusive.

Facts and figures: My father, who was from Afghanistan, would scowl when I would ask for facts and figures… when I begged to be told how big the square was, or when it was laid out.

‘You’ve been brainwashed by the West,’ he would say. ‘To understand Jma el Fna you must cut away Occidental thinking, release your mind, and absorb the place from the inside out.’

Zigzag: For my father, the zigzag approach was the only way to understand something. ‘Throw yourself in at the deep end,’ he would say, ‘run free, bouncing around like a billiard ball on the baize, and you’ll build up an accurate picture, a little at a time.’

Forty years later, and I’m back in the middle of the square, ready to step out, to zigzag. I’m itching to feel the waves of energy, to seek out the invisible, and to hear the sounds that are muffled to even the sharpest ears.

Day/Night: Just like the halkas, the circles of joy and entertainment, which are born and die through the day and the night, Jma el Fna is a place without a beginning or an end. It’s a circle of life, with its peaks and lulls, enacted from the first rays of dawn to the last strains of night.

Every day. Every night.

Fishing for drinks: Every time I visit the square there’s something new, a display of fresh ingenuity. This time it’s the man over there with scarred hands and a limp. For the last half hour he’s been laying out spiraling rows of plastic bottles, warm fizzy drinks. Everyone’s wondering what’s going on. He’s already pulling a crowd and he’s not even begun.

Jma el Fna is all about picquing the crowd’s curiosity, and one way to do that is to keep them guessing. When they can’t stand it any longer, he unfurls a clutch of homemade fishing rods, long bamboo staves, dangling strings with what look like curtain rings on the ends. The local preoccupation with fizzy drinks, and eagerness for a bargain, has made it an instant success.

Secret Police: Everyone says that the square’s crawling with secret police. Like a separate group of invisible performers, they’re masters of disguise, watching every hand, purse and pocket. The entertainers, healers, and food sellers all claim to know who’s who. But they’re not telling me. It’s one of many secrets here, I suppose, I’ll have to decipher for myself.

Tourists: The tourists stick out because of their pasty white skin and their clothing, but most of all because of the way they reel forwards between the halkas, enthralled by it all. Some of them are grinning, others scowling, all clicking photos instead of watching what’s really going on.

It’s as if they’re desperate to penetrate what is a secret society. Some of them think they’ve actually done it, that they’ve been accepted into the folds. But they never quite manage. They’re oil on the water. And although they can get mixed up for a moment, they separate out as they’re washed forward through the crowds.

Earning Marrakech: These days it’s far too easy to get to Marrakech. Budget airlines touch down at the new international terminal day and night, from across Europe and beyond. Waves of tourists emerge and, like moths to a flame, they’re lured by the mythical reputation of Jma el Fna, the heart of Marrakech, the heart of Morocco.

Feel the fire: It’s all too easy in a way. Until quite recently you had to struggle through the desert to get here. Sweat, thirst, heat, and even delirium. But you arrived changed by the journey, ready to receive something so magical that language can hardly convey. If I had my way, you’d still have to reach Marrakech by foot, for there’s no better way to soak up its core than as a wayfarer, ripened by travel.

Cigarette sellers: Some square-dwellers are almost invisible as they slip nimbly through the crowds. But you hear them. A fistful of coins jangling as they approach, an open packet of cigarettes, sold one at a time to anyone needing a nicotine fix.

Medicine-man: As the afternoon light peaks in intensity, a row of healers lay out their stalls in a line on the ground in a corner of the square. Drawing a crowd, they reel off numbers and cures. Dressed in billowing indigo robes, embroidered with gold, turbans crowning their heads, they claim to heal any disorder – of body or mind.

Their dusty old quilts are packed with wares: ostrich eggs and stork feathers, tortoise shells, dried reptiles, great lumps of sulphur, antimony and chalk. Phials filled with murky grey liquids, dried damask roses, aromatic seeds, and swathes of shocking pink silk.

Of all those making their living here, it’s the magico-medicine men who are doing the briskest trade. Customers hurry up one by one. They spit out the name of an affliction, in no more than a whisper… a rash, an eruption of sores, a need for revenge on a neighbour, or the yearning for a son.

The healer nods, his fingers conjuring a cure from the treasure chest of ingredients before him. His sales’ patter is unbroken as clients and onlookers stand spellbound. He wraps the mixture in a twist of paper, hands it over fast, and snatches the customer’s coins into the voluminous folds of his robe.

A desert lizard emerges from under the same robe, head held high, a string around its waist attached to its master’s finger. It blinks, as if in approval of the transaction.

Dentist: Nearby, in the shade of the mosque, is a dentist, sitting on a stool… in front of him a platter overflowing with human teeth. He’s got small darting eyes, a checkerboard smile, and confidence in his skill at bringing even the most severe toothache to a swift end. Whatever the condition, the treatment appears to be the same… a quick open air operation with a pair of rusted iron pliers, and a plug of grubby cotton wool to stem the flow of blood.

Henna women: It’s true that most of those who make their living in Jma el Fna are men. But look around and you realize there are professions reserved exclusively for women. They are the sorceresses and fortune tellers. And cast an eye through the square during the quiet hours of the afternoon and you see the henna women perched on stools under parasols. As soon as they spot a pallid foreigner, they hold up their henna-filled syringe and grin.

A catalogue of pictures is at the ready… decorated hands and feet. Squat on a stool for a minute or two, hold still as the hand grasping the syringe weaves its magic, and you’ve been initiated into the ancient sisterhood of Marrakech.

Snake charmers: There’s no noise so alluring, so utterly hypnotic as the rhaita, the snake charmer’s flute. A cliché maybe, but a mainstay of Jma el Fna, a backbone of sound and sight that bewitches tourists and locals alike.

Long before you reach the square, you hear its piercing tone. Riotous, fearful, yet somehow tamed, it cuts like a laser beam through the interminable din of the traffic, and the clip-clop of horses’ hooves.

Draw near, enchanted by the rawest streak of sound, and the serpents are knocked from their rest beneath a clutch of circular drums. Dazzled by the sudden blast of light, a pair of spitting cobras rear up, poised to strike. Despite the heat, the snake charmer’s wearing a thick woolen jelaba, a ragged strand of calico wrapped around his head. And around his neck a water snake, its tongue licking the afternoon heat, a desert accessory.

Food Stalls: Just after the muezzin calls the afternoon prayer, dozens of iron carts are propelled forward from all corners of the square. Like gun carriages made ready for war, they’re positioned precisely on the east side of Jma el Fna, and unloaded. Cast iron struts and staves, pots, pans, tables, benches and stools, are knocked into place.

These days the food stalls are fed by electricity, illuminated by bare bulbs, bathing the diners in platinum light. As soon as you draw near to the battery of stalls, the hustlers galvanize into action. They’re paid to entice anyone with a few coins going spare, to eat at their stall.

Fingers jabbing at the hodge-podge of dishes on offer, they can recount the menu in any language you chose – there’s sheep brains and lamb on skewers, octopus, squid, and fried slabs of fish, tripe, goat’s head, snails, all of it washed down with miniature glasses of hot sweet tea.

Denzil Washington: King of the Hustlers is a burly fresh-faced man of about thirty, who goes by the nickname ‘Denzil Washington’. Venture anywhere near his food-stall, Number 117, and he careens forward with a laminated plastic menu at the ready. Like the other hustlers, he’s skilled in working out where you’re from, long before you utter a word. This sixth sense, which must have evolved over centuries, makes the difference between survival and extinction.

Change: Travel back and forth to a place you love and it’s the change you notice first. It hits you side on, blurring your memories. Sometimes when I visit the square, I cry out in rage at the creeping gentrification. For me, Jma el Fna should be stuck in time, unaltered ever… a Peter Pan destination.

But the wonderful thing about the square is that change is quickly assimilated or undone. Here, nothing is set in stone. Efforts to introduce boundaries of any kind are thwarted by an ancient system far more powerful than the authorities who clamour for change.

A few years ago the orange juice sellers were corralled into a row of mock calèche carriages. I jumped up and down in ire when I saw them for the first time. But these days I realize that they have a place, and that it’s the content which is important, rather than the container itself.

Boxers: Another halka is forming. In the middle stands a rough-looking man with a woolly blue hat, a week’s growth of beard on his cheeks, and the end of a cigarette screwed into the corner of his mouth. He’s got a heap of third-hand boxing gloves beside him, and he’s cajoling anyone to come forward and try their luck.

As soon as the crowd senses action, their numbers swell. More and more people are turning up, the atmosphere stoked by a hardened accomplice in a flame-red tracksuit. He’s coaxing people to throw coins down onto the ground. He’ll let the fight start when there’s enough cash in the ring. The dirhams come slowly.

In one corner there’s a desperate looking contender, with a broken nose, ragged jelaba, and back-to-front baseball cap. In the other, a handsome teenager in a Barcelona football shirt. He’s got curly greased back hair. They raise their gloves, spar for a moment, but the fight’s short-lived. The youngster dodges a few swipes, then quickly abandons his hopes and his gloves.

But now, a young woman steps forward, puts on the gloves. I can’t believe it. Neither can the audience.

The secrets of Jma el Fna are only revealed to the patient, and to the observant. Turn up day after day and you’ll find the same girl stepping forward into the ring and strapping on the gloves. She’s the ring-master’s daughter and, like the other boxers, she’s in on the deal.

Gnaoua: The roots of Jma el Fna sink deep down into the sand beneath the entertainers’ feet. The place may now be paved over but it’s a square of desert, an oasis with a sacred soul. Most of all, it’s African, the vast expanse of sky above, boiling with cumulus clouds, a reminder to anyone who doubts it.

And of all the life-forces that pour through you in the square, the truest and most vibrant of all is surely the Gnaoua. A brotherhood of African troubadours, dressed in brightly-coloured desert robes with cowrie-shell hats, they’re forming a semi-circle now.

Great iron castanets, clattering like cymbals. Their rhythm gives the square its endless beating pulse, day and night. The sound is more like a cohort of warriors heading to battle, than a troupe of musicians touting for tourists’ change.

Appeal of Jma el Fna: Pass a little time in the square, and you begin to see that it’s peopled by ordinary Moroccans. It’s not a place for the bling bling set or the nouveau riche. They steer well clear, preferring the fashionable cafés of the new town.

Yet Jma el Fna’s great enduring appeal is that it turns no one away. It’s an ancient entertaining machine, a healer, a listener, a giver of sustenance, and a friend.

Flautist: A flautist has entered the square and sits without fuss in the centre, playing his wooden pipe, as at ease here as a shepherd on a mountainside. Hunched in his dark blue jelaba, the crowds move around him, unsure whether to dwell or linger, the cacophonous nature of the space pulling them in different directions, looking for other circles to join.

He plays, oblivious to the surrounding throng, his cap on the ground, upturned and coinless. He plays a tune which, to my ears, could have been played here a thousand years ago… as the camel caravans paused en route for sustenance and entertainment. A timeless witness, he plays and plays but no coins come.

Blind Musician: It’s true that some of the entertainers rely on their hustling skills to get by. But there are players with extraordinary talent as well. As evening slips into night, an old blind musician, with a microphone strapped around his neck, twists up the volume knob on his amplifier, and begins to play. He’s not doing it for the money, but because the square is his sweetheart, his theatre, his home.

Pin-striped Healer: The business of a specific halka tends to be clear from a distance. Glance at the faces of the audience and you see it right away, reflected like candlelight in a mirror. Most of the time entertainers keep the atmosphere jovial, because humour leads to laughter, and laughter leads to generosity.

But some performers have a far graver message. The darkest of all on this night is a man in a black wool pinstripe suit. He has a huge beard, like a great black inverted candyfloss. He’s missing his front teeth, and his creased face is gripped with an almost maniacal expression.

He’s ranting on about Jinn, the spirits that Muslims believe exist in a parallel world laid atop of our own. The subject is greeted with terrified looks, especially when the pin-stripe healer starts spewing numbers – the alphanumeric Abjad system, linchpin in a magician’s repertoire.

Row of Blindmen: Jma el Fna has its own telegraphy. It knows about you long before you know about it. A row of blind men begging for alms are alerted of my presence by a woman sitting on a stool nearby.

She calls to them, explaining that I’m recording them. They stand up and, staring directly at me with wide glassy eyes, wave their sticks. Commotion ensues and suddenly confusion and ill temper reign in a corner of the square. But the pervasive natural rhythm of el Fna soon restores order.

Bike Boy: Fleeting moments in the dark: a boy before me is suddenly pushed down to the ground on his bicycle by an older girl. She makes sure she hurts him, and is then gone, away into the night.

Storyteller: The storytellers (or hakawatis), draw the largest of all the crowds even if their own numbers are dwindling … when they are out, their halkas are lined with listeners, both old and young.

Recounting tales from Alf Layla wa Layla,A Thousand and One Nights, and other favourite collections like Antar wa Abla, they tap into a communal obsession for the fantastic.

The best storytellers are good businessmen as well. They know when to stop their tale on a cliffhanger, appealing for a few coins before they go on.

Like so much of what takes place at Jma el Fna, the stories are understood by few foreigners, as they’re recounted in Darija, the Moroccan dialect. The tourists might take pictures of the crowd, but they don’t penetrate… or receive the ancient message being passed on.

Order: Spend some time soaking up the atmosphere through all the senses, and patterns begin to emerge. It’s part of Jma el Fna’s own form of magic, an alchemy that transforms disorder into order.

Fears for the Future: I used to worry that the square would one day be destroyed, built over, its revelers disbanded. But now I see how impossible that would be. As a cornerstone of life, Jma el Fna is somehow indispensible to Marrakchis, as vital to them as the air they breathe.

Zigzag Conclusions: Standing in the ocean of people, circles forming, flourishing, and dissipating likes ripples all around, I’m reminded of my father’s words, that the best way to understand the square, and to experience it, is the zigzag way… zigzag back and forth for long enough, and you’re touched by the sorcery of the place… from the inside out.

Pass through it long enough and it begins to pass through you.

TWENTY-SIX

Little Lhasa

A CLUSTER OF TIBETAN LAMAS stand in the street, gorging themselves on juicy momo dumplings.

In the temple behind them, many more are prostrating towards a large statue of Buddha, while still more circumvent the compound, spinning prayer wheels clockwise as they go. All around, the streets teem with stalls selling Tibetan jewellery, embroidery, music and food.

At first glance you might be fooled into thinking you were in the back streets of Lhasa, the Tibetan capital. But this Buddhist community is far from there, in the northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh.

Fifty years ago, when Chinese forces streamed across the border, the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader, slipped over the mountains in disguise, along with his most trusted supporters. He sought sanctuary in India, where he was permitted to reside near the small hill station of Dharamsala. It’s been his home for half a decade, and has become an outpost of homeland away from Tibet. The community, known locally as ‘Little Lhasa’, is a place of pilgrimage for Buddhists the world over.

Driving up to Dharamsala, the road zigzags sharply, twisting and turning back on itself, one precarious bend following tight on the heels of the next. Either side of the tarmac, lush vegetation looms up, the trees and creepers alive with langur monkeys, butterflies and brightly coloured birds. As my taxi ascended, reaching cloud level, the greenery all around seemed to change, the conifers replaced by fabulous jungle plants and ferns.

I had arrived by over-night train from Delhi, which pulled into the sleepy station of Pathankot a little after breakfast. The drive up to Dharamsala took about two hours, most of it spent with my begging the driver to slow down. Wide-eyed and grinning, he spun the wheel easily through his hands, recounting the close calls that had so nearly claimed his life.

The Dalai Lama’s community is not actually based at Dharamsala, but a little further up the hillside, at McLeod Ganj. The incongruous place name, derives from Sir Donald Friell McLeod, a nineteenth century Governor of the Punjab. Set at six thousand eight hundred feet, the hill station enjoys spectacular sweeping views over the plateau below. Once favoured by the British, it offered a cool refuge from the ferocious summer heat of New Delhi.

As soon as you reach the outskirts of town, you see lamas strolling about, and wizened old Tibetan women, walking with canes, their legs hidden beneath striped aprons. From the first moment you arrive, the sense of tranquility hits you face on, as if the burdens of the outside world have somehow melted away. There’s irony in this, of course, because the several thousand Tibetans who make their home at McLeod Ganj do so because they’re unable to return home. Their struggle against the Chinese occupation of Tibet has been all about non-violence, after all.

Every year, hundreds of ordinary Tibetans travel in secret over the mountains to Nepal, and across into India, on a pilgrimage to Little Lhasa. For the first time in their lives they are permitted to celebrate the life of its most famous resident, the Dalai Lama. This religious freedom must come as a tremendous relief, for merely speaking his name in their homeland is a crime.

Many of the foreigners who arrive at McLeod Ganj stay for weeks, or even months, residing in the little guest houses and hostels found in the back streets and lanes. They fill the cafés on the main street, sipping green tea, chatting about Buddhism and the Dalai Lama’s teachings, or browsing the stalls for bargains. It’s not uncommon to find celebrities there as well. Richard Gere and other Hollywood A-listers are quite well known to the locals. Yet, unlike elsewhere in the world, when they come to Little Lhasa they are left alone.

Having visited Tibet a few months earlier, I had travelled to Mcleod Ganj in the hope of seeking an audience with the Dalai Lama. Two months before setting out to India, I had corresponded with His Holiness’ office.

I had heard that a private meeting is near impossible, a result of his packed programme and frequent travels. After all, there’s a neverending line of world dignitaries hoping to meet him.

Fortunately for me, there had been no last minute travel plans. His Holiness’ private secretary asked me to present myself at the main monastery in McLeod Ganj, called Namgyal, the afternoon after my arrival. Following an informal chat, and being looked over, he told me to return the next morning at ten a.m.

While waiting in the office, I was surprised how many dozens of tourists casually drop in, optimistically hoping for a spur of the moment rendezvous with the Dalai Lama. They are all politely turned away.

Having passed through airport style security, I was taken up to a private meeting room; and, after a short wait, was ushered down a long corridor into His Holiness’ study.

It’s always weird to see someone face to face who you know so well already – or, at least, someone you think you know. But, in this case, it was strangely comforting. Dressed in his trademark maroon robes, and wearing sturdy brown lace up shoes, the Dalai Lama shot up, and ushered me to a sofa.

In the three quarters of an hour we spent together, chatting about the situation in Tibet, and our shared affection for yaks, he struck me as someone utterly at peace with the world around him. Unlike anyone else robbed of their country, his pacifist approach was astonishing. But it isn’t to say he was ready to give up the fight for his homeland.

As a writer, he asked me several times, to do all I could to draw attention to the plight of Tibet, and to remind the world of the situation for his people.

On the evening of my audience, I was sitting on a low wall in McLeod Ganj, thinking about it all, when an old Tibetan woman staggered up, and rested herself there. She had plaits, was dressed in the traditional apron, and looked about eighty-five. I asked her if she had lived there long. She looked at me hard, her eyes watery with age.

‘I came here across the mountains with his Holiness,’ she said. ‘That was fifty summers ago. I was young then, and strong.’

I asked if she had ever returned back to Tibet. She shook her head slowly, left then right.

‘The soul has left our country, and who can live in a place without a soul?’

TWENTY-SEVEN

Love in the Desert

NESTLING AMONGST THE HILLS of Samburuland, in central Kenya, the tiny village of Bawaa goes about its daily life.

Women fetch water on their heads; young boys tend the herds of cattle; and a group of warriors preen themselves, as the sun blazes down from the expansive African sky. It seems as though nothing in this tranquil setting has changed in centuries. But then, without warning, a shrill cockney voice – radiating from a square-shaped hut – shatters the afternoon calm.

‘Dikola! Come ’ere and tell me what the ’ell’s goin’ on!’

A slender, lean Samburu warrior, with a rather downcast expression, moves nervously over to the hut. Inside, encased by windowless cow-dung walls, a handful of Samburu women are seated. Each is bedecked with a great collar of traditional bead-work. At the centre of the group crouches a chubby, blonde woman with an East End accent and a sun-roasted complexion.

Meet Cheryl Mason-Lekimenju, the newest member of the fearless Samburu warrior clan.

Cheryl hit the British headlines when she left her three young children to marry Dikola Lekimenju, a Samburu warrior and part time tribal dancer. The couple had met while Cheryl was on a package holiday to the Kenyan coast. After being granted a visa, Dikola – who’s ten years Cheryl’s junior – was forced to leave the UK by the Home Office. It suspected that the Samburu had married merely to qualify for a British passport. Determined not to be parted from this, her third husband, Cheryl accompanied Dikola to his tribal village. The unlikely couple now lives within the remote Samburu community of Dikola’s birth – encircled as it is by a rugged thorn stockade to ward off lions.

As Dikola takes his place on the floor beside his bride, his mother begins the lengthy business of making tea. Her shaven head, its face creased with age, melt into the darkness of the one-roomed hut. With care, she pours a precious calabash of cloudy brown water into an aluminium pot. The vessel is placed on a makeshift hearth in the middle of the room. Then, with the strike of a match, the neat bundle of kindling catches. The flames illuminate other life forms hiding within the room. Three little children are playing in the shadows, along with a nest of new-born puppies, and a clutch of hungry pecking chickens.

But the pride of place belongs to Cheryl Mason-Lekimenju who, squatting uneasily, rubs her hands with an unending supply of Superdrug wet-wipes. As she does so, her aged Samburu mother-inlaw looks on in bewilderment. One senses that, in these conditions, no amount of wet-wiping could bring true hygiene.

A few drops of milk are squeezed into the cooking pot straight from the cow’s udder. Then a handful of tea leaves are sprinkled into the bubbling brown water. And, as the dense blue smoke begins to billow sideways from the fire, Cheryl drops her beloved wet-wipes and begins to choke. No one takes any notice, except for Dikola’s elderly one-eyed father, Loperecho.

Grasping a spear in his right hand, he pierces a hole in the dung wall. Fresh air wafts in through the instant window. Moments later, Cheryl is sipping her tea, trying as best she can to settle back into her new lifestyle.

The Samburu village which Cheryl now calls home, is a million miles from the respectable middle class existence that she left behind. Surrounded by customs, climate, and dangers, that are all unfamiliar, she’s trying her level best to adapt. But the transition has not been an easy one.

For those not used to the hardy routine of Samburu life, the discomfort, boredom, and constant bouts of illness, can easily be too much to bear. The stress on Dikola, the swarthy warrior – ever present at Cheryl’s side – has been equally great. Once the favourite son, his family are confused as to what exactly’s going on. They wonder what the future with his cockney bride will hold. A man of few words at the best of times, Dikola mopes about with his head hung low, perhaps pondering how he got into such a peculiar situation in the first place.

Cheryl’s is the tale of a woman who, trapped in her second loveless marriage, traded in her young children, husband, belongings and home, for the tall dark warrior of her fantasy. Vilified in the tabloid press for abandoning her two sons – Stevie, thirteen; Tommie, eleven – and her angelic daughter, Chloe, four – Cheryl maintains that her own traumatic childhood explains all the irrational behaviour.

In a book, entitled White Mischief, she reveals the intimate account of her journey from a high-rise in Bromley, to a manyatta, (group of cow-dung huts), in Samburuland.

White Mischief, a cross between a Mills & Boon romance and a psychologist’s casebook, is peppered with italicized flashbacks to Cheryl’s abusive childhood. The text paints a picture of abuse that was by any standards severe. Cheryl claims to have been molested by not only her natural father, step-father and mother, but by her sister and first husband as well.

For Cheryl’s three kids, the separation from their mother has been filled with anxiety.

‘The children have lost faith in me,’ she says in a rather surprised tone, ‘especially the middle one, Tommie. He’s suffering from chronic depression. The boys have told me that there have been periods when Chloe’s cried solidly for three weeks, calling out my name. And, there have been times when she sees a woman in the street who looks similar to me and she’s clung onto her, screaming “Mummy! Mummy!”‘

The fact that their mother is six thousand miles away from home, living with a semi-nomadic blood-drinking tribe, has brought raillery from the boys’ classmates.

‘My children have been ridiculed at school,’ continues Cheryl as she lists all the damage that the relationship has done. ‘They’re told, “Oh, your mum’s got a Masaai warrior in a tent in the garden”; or, “Your mum’s gone off with a black man.” But they never complain to me. They’ve been absolute gems.’

Communication with the children, who are living with Cheryl’s second husband, Mike, is all but non-existent.

‘I’m waiting for them to contact me,’ she gasps, cleansing her hands with another wet-wipe. ‘I used to phone them regular, by reversing the charges once a month or so. But now I’m leaving it to them. I left them some aerogrammes but, as yet, they haven’t written.’

Throughout her life Cheryl has yearned to escape.

That escape finally came in the form of a package tour, on which she was accompanied by an elderly friend. The journey, to Mombasa, on the Kenyan coast, was blissful. And, it was there, while staying at a beach hotel, that Cheryl first set eyes on the timid tribal dancer Dikola Lekimenju.

The mother-of-three was captivated from the outset by the warrior’s sleek form, his enormous brown eyes and amiable character. They spent every waking moment together, as Cheryl slowly entered the warrior’s world. She learned that he had six siblings, that he belonged to one of Africa’s most fearless tribes, and that he had killed his first lion at seventeen – but that he hated killing.

‘Dikola is very gentle,’ says Cheryl defensively, ‘imagine what it’s like to be told to kill animals if you don’t want to. And Dikola didn’t want to.’ Performing in traditional tribal dances at tourist hotels, or selling trinkets on the beach, gave Dikola a break from the slaughter – which accompanies a warrior’s life, and a profession he so despised. Every few months he would return home to his village to give his earnings as a dancer to his family.

On one such journey northward, Dikola asked Cheryl to accompany him. Her first impression of his humble cow-dung hut – one step below a mud hut – was that it resembled ‘a hollowed out Oxo cube’.

‘At first I kicked up a right stink,’ remembers Cheryl, ‘shouting ‘I’m not going into no bush!’ But the more I didn’t want to go, the more he asked me to. We finally arrived at the manyatta in the late afternoon, having walked the twenty-six kilometres from Maralal, the nearest small town. The family were very hospitable though. They were lovely – gathering around to kiss my hands. I don’t think they really understood what I meant to Dikola, or how far our relationship would go. The first night was so uncomfortable and really cold.’

Sleeping on the hut’s main bed – a rough, hide-covered platform, without blankets – the couple huddled to keep warm.

The passages of Cheryl’s book, describing her interminable abuse as a child and adolescent, are suddenly replaced by romantic texts of the steamiest variety. ‘For the first time in my life’, she writes, ‘ the desire to make love came with animal passion… I was a woman with sexual feelings and carnal desires… we made love five times in those first three hours. Making love in the African bush stripped away all inhibitions, made it the most basic and essential of all functions… I had asked God not to allow me to be pregnant and we would make love for hours on the floor of Dikola’s hut.’

The passion, it seems, only ended when Cheryl’s digestive tract became infected from the local Samburu cuisine.

‘When I first became very ill with streptococci,’ she whispers softly, hinting that sickness has been frequent, ‘Dikola’s mother gave me a potion made from some sort of tree bark and roots, with a bit of honey in it to cut some of the bitterness. When they had boiled it up, it was put in the ground. Dikola fed it to me a spoon at a time. The Samburu don’t like letting out their secrets, so I don’t know quite what it was, except that it made my urine go red.’

Now certain that this was no mere holiday fling, Cheryl was ready to put her infatuation for Dikola before all else. In the months that followed, she returned to Kenya twice, to the dismay of her husband and deep sadness of her children. Then, having broken it to the kids that she was in love with an African warrior, Cheryl asked Mike for a divorce, and set about getting Dikola to emigrate to England. A tabloid newspaper helped financially in getting the young Samburu a passport and ticket. A few weeks later – when Dikola slipped into Britain on a tourist visa – the media frenzy began.

The first days in Europe together were spent locked in a hotel room in the custody of the tabloid. The pair were hounded by the paparazzi wherever they went. Dikola was encouraged to pose in full tribal dress beside London’s famous landmarks. He might have wondered why, but there was no time to answer questions.

As soon as one photo session ended, another began. One fashion shoot, held at a prominent studio, had the warrior dressing up in couture tuxedos. Another had him posing in full tribal regalia and war-paint with Cheryl’s children, at their Isle of Wight semi.

Fleet Street’s finest had a field day. Cheryl’s second husband, Mike, strained to protect the children from the media glare. After being introduced to Dikola for the first time, he was reported as saying, ‘it is odd meeting someone who is sleeping with your wife. But what do you say to a man who has killed a lion with his bare hands?’

The first thing Cheryl’s mother knew of the relationship was when she saw her daughter’s face splashed across the tabloids’ front pages. The two had not communicated for over three years.

‘My mother kept saying, “there’s no way my daughter would get involved with a black man”,’ recalls Cheryl, ‘she was sure that the whole story had been made up. When she found out that it was not, she called me up and said sarcastically, “Well, aren’t you a clever girl then?!” Later, I took Dikola to see my grandmother – just before she died. She told me that I was sordid and awful for leaving my kids and such a sweet man like Mike.’

When Cheryl was sixteen, she had a tattoo ‘shaved’ from her shoulder in an excruciating operation. The motif of a swallow, bearing the word ‘Mum’, was designed two years earlier – before Cheryl’s long-running feud with her mother had begun. Aware that his new bride would not be tattooed again with readiness, Dikola requested they both have their right breasts tattooed with each other’s name.

Meanwhile, newspaper hacks and film crews from across Europe – and beyond – devoured the story. They couldn’t believe their luck. But little did they know… the best was still to come.

Cheryl and Dikola suddenly revealed to the world their intentions to marry. And, on fourteenth February, St. Valentine’s Day, the couple rolled up to Newport’s registrar’s office in a borrowed 1927 Bentley. Standing tall in his traditional Samburu finery, Dikola braced himself against the cold. Beside him Cheryl posed for photographs, wrapped in a simple knotted red cloth, her body adorned with exquisite African jewellery. The media rubbed their hands with glee. It was as if Crocodile Dundee was marrying Shirley Valentine.

Cheryl regrets the way that she and Dikola have been treated by the press.

‘I blame the media a lot,’ she says in a bitter voice. ‘We have been severely abused. The worst is that everyone’s always saying we must have made a fortune out of all the publicity – I wish!’

Public ridicule, unpleasant as it was, may have been the more palatable consequence, from all the international attention. Anxious to show that permanent residency isn’t automatic when one weds a British citizen, the Home Office ruled that Dikola would have to return immediately to Kenya.

‘Dikola is my husband!’ Cheryl exclaims in an impassioned cry, ‘I’m English and have English children: the Home Office just can’t do what they’re doing. Of course we will win!’

Her anger at the Home Office and the press is largely rooted in the way her latest husband has been portrayed as a simpleton.

‘Dikola isn’t a primitive – he’s got a brain! I want him to have a chance in life… I’d like him to have the opportunity of doing a few open day training schemes in England, to see what he likes best.’

In the meantime, Dikola is practising the 3Rs with a view to securing a good job in Britain when (and if) he gets residency. A brief education from missionaries as a child complemented his tribal training in hunting wild animals and herding the family flocks.

Since fleeing back to Kenya from Britain, immigration troubles have continued to torment the Lekimenjus. Incensed that a Kenyan citizen has been expelled from the United Kingdom, some politicians in Kenya are pressing for Cheryl to now be thrown out of the country, in a tit-for-tat expulsion.

‘If London’s immigration officials found the couple’s behaviour unacceptable in that country, who are we to give them sanctuary here?’ Mr. Mbugua, a prominent Kenyan politician, was reported as saying. The political calls for Cheryl to be banished back to England, have reverberated through East Africa’s press. While numerous editorials have demanded justice and revenge. The ‘Lekimenju Affair’ – which has been simmering away – is escalating into what may become a full-blown diplomatic fracas.

Seemingly oblivious of the international furore they have stirred up, Cheryl and her warrior sit on a hillside just outside Bawaa village. As mosquitoes buzz about in the cool evening air, the couple watch the sun go down.

‘I can’t live without Dikola,’ says Cheryl suddenly, brimming with romantic verve. ‘I’ve never felt that about a single person in my life. I can even live without my children – I know they’ll survive – but I can’t live without Dikola!’

At her side as always, Dikola rolls his eyes as Cheryl continues another exuberant declaration of her love. ‘He may not be romantic in the English sense of the word,’ she says, ‘I’ve never had a gift from Dikola – except for a few warrior beads – but he shows his love in other ways. And he’s proved to me that he doesn’t just see me as a ticket out of Kenya. He only wants to be in England because I want to be there.’

The couple would have liked to have had children. But, after going through three caesarean births, Cheryl says that another pregnancy would be life-threatening. It’s a point that irks her, as she believes Dikola would have been a better father than her previous husbands.

‘I don’t regret the kids I’ve got,’ she says, ‘but I do regret the husbands I chose. I wasn’t ready to have kids – I was blackmailed into having children by my first husband. Then the second marriage happened because Mike came along and the children needed a father, more than I needed a husband. Shortly afterwards, Chloe was born.’

Cheryl is thought to be the first white woman ever to have married a Samburu. She says that she’s the only one in history to be honoured by being given a Samburu name. It is ‘Nicmarie’, meaning ‘good woman’. A few other European women have taken morans, warriors, as lovers. But, in most cases, the liaisons were short-lived.

‘All the white women I’ve met who have tried to make lives here have failed,’ says Cheryl. ‘Most of them meet, as we did, at the coast. Me and Dikola are the only ones who’re still together. The other women see the relationship as an escape. It usually ends with the European thinking that the warrior was making use of her.’

One of Cheryl’s acquaintances – an English woman in her sixties – had a twenty-year-old Samburu boyfriend. She bought him expensive gifts, and built him a fine concrete house over the hill from Bawaa village. When she left, the young warrior was scorned by the close-knit society.

‘Another English woman, called Pauline,’ recalls Cheryl, ‘left her husband for a young man from this area. She was sixteen stone and forty-four years old. One day I got a package of beads and stuff the boy had given her, together with an anonymous note. It said that Pauline was dead, and asked if I could inform the boy and his family. I found out soon after that Pauline, who had got back together with her husband, had written the note herself. She wasn’t dead at all. She was just tired of the affair!’

Like the other white women who come to Samburuland, Cheryl Lekimenju finds herself spending most of the time with the men-folk. A woman’s role in African village life is a subordinate one.

‘Women here do everything!’ says Cheryl angrily. ‘They don’t have a life. They build the houses, collect the firewood, have the babies and raise the children. And they’re treated like second rate citizens from the day they’re born. It’s lucky that I don’t speak maa, the Samburu language, because I’d tell them to rebel!’

Most men dislike being told what to do by their wives and, in Samburuland, an over-dominating wife is a source of great embarrassment. As night falls over Bawaa, Cheryl’s hard-edged tones can be heard over the nest of huts. Dikola, who seems to be a little more hen-pecked every moment, chaperones his English rose between the cow-dung homes of the village. The threat of wild animals is all around. Leopards come in the night and kill the goats; lions come during the day and kill the cattle. Blind to the dangers which surround her, Cheryl chirps on in the piercing voice that the community has come to know so well.

‘Dikola married me in my culture,’ she says matter-of-factly. ‘But I haven’t yet wedded him in his culture. Dikola’s younger brother won’t be able to marry, until we have been wed in a Samburu ceremony.’

A dedicated romantic, Cheryl wants the tribal wedding ceremony to be held on St. Valentine’s Day. Dikola understands the relevance of the date, but his family have never heard of St. Valentine. To the Samburu – most of whom don’t have calendars – one day is much like any other.

‘I’m not looking forward to the Samburu wedding,’ winces Cheryl restlessly, ‘because they wrap the bride up in an oily goat skin. I’m not quite sure what the actual procedure is, except that the groom’s mother shaves off all his hair, saying that he’s passing from a warrior and becoming a responsible husband.’

The outlandish wedding ritual may sound harrowing to Cheryl. But it ought to be the least of her worries. For, in Samburuland, a bride is expected to be circumcised. Samburu circumcision techniques – performed as a matter of course on men as well as women – are regarded as the harshest of their kind. Dikola’s mother and sisters (all circumcised and proud of it) are eager to get a knife to Cheryl’s private parts.

‘Usually the woman is circumcised when she is a child,’ says Dikola’s half-brother, Lmakayo, grinning broadly. ‘But sometimes, the circumcision is done just before the marriage… even on the wedding day itself.’

Cheryl, who – perhaps unwisely – takes the calls for her circumcision lightly, wants to see the operation modified or outlawed altogether.

‘Samburu women believe that their daughters won’t find husbands,’ she says, ‘unless they’ve gone through the agonizing surgery. They just hack away blindly in a dark hut. A lot of girls die because of unsterilized knives. The woman doing the cutting doesn’t know what to remove, so she cuts out the whole lot. I bet that if you threw chicken blood all over the hut, and got the woman to scream, the men would think that a circumcision had been done!’

Dikola’s one-eyed father, Loperecho, sits outside his hut, contemplating his family’s predicament. One senses an air of despondence hanging over the old warrior. Like most in the community, you get the feeling he would have preferred Dikola to have chosen a nice Samburu girl, and taken her as a wife. A family is disgraced if the favourite son leaves to live somewhere else. And the Lekimenjus sense that Dikola will soon leave them. To have one’s son go off to a distant land with a strange English woman – who’s neither circumcised, nor a Samburu – is depressing. But, for Dikola’s elderly father, there’s a far more pressing worry.

In Samburuland, the father of the groom is expected to pay a dowry to the bride’s family. No one else can pay the dowry – generally eight cows and two sheep – on his behalf. Loperecho, who lost most of his livestock in a drought several years ago, is concerned as to how he will raise the bridal gift. In line with customary protocol, he expects that Cheryl’s family will soon contact him for the required head of livestock. But, procuring the animals – which won’t be easy – is only half the problem. The real worry for Dikola’s father is that he will, according to tradition, have to make arrangements to transport the animals to Cheryl’s own ‘hillside’ – in England.

N.B. White Mischief, Summersdale Press, 1996.

TWENTY-EIGHT

Memoir of a Torture Jail

I SCANNED THE ROOM. It was arranged for torture.

There was a rack for breaking feet, a bar for hanging a man upside down, rows of manacles, straps and batons, and pliers for extracting teeth.

There were syringes with used needles, smelling salts, a medical drip, electrocution equipment, and dried blood strewn over the floor and walls.

Exactly where this dreadful place was I still do not know – I arrived and left in military blindfolds. All I do know is that it was near Peshawar on Pakistan’s northwest frontier, and it is run by Islamabad’s military intelligence.

I was arrested while travelling in Pakistan, just after the London bombs, and I was held for sixteen days, along with my two-man film crew, David and Leon Flamholc. We were heading overland from India to Afghanistan to research a documentary about a massive lost treasure of the Mughals.

From Peshawar our plan was to head down the Khyber Pass to Kabul, the Afghan capital. But I suggested a detour to find the house of a distant relative. As we searched, David videoed me, hoping to capture the reunion with old relatives. Suddenly a military police officer, armed with a sub-machinegun, strode up. He took our passports and the camera and led us to a military post.

We said we had not filmed anything sensitive and the atmosphere was calm – at first, anyway. They admitted there were no signs in English prohibiting filming but said there was a sign in Urdu, which none of us could read. They rummaged through our luggage, asked questions, and said they were waiting for a senior officer to turn up.

After about four hours, he swept in.

His tone was abrupt. He said we were being detained and had no right to call our embassies. We were blindfolded, our hands chained behind our backs, and led to a truck at gunpoint.

After a short drive we arrived at a medical installation. We were stripped and examined, still chained and blindfolded. Just to lose one’s vision is the most terrifying thing. The doctor told his assistant to prepare sedatives. It was a terrible moment. I crouched, waiting for the prick of a needle which, thankfully, never came.

Fearing I was about to pass out, I fought hard to take deep breaths. I was sweating so heavily that my blindfold was drenched. Through a tiny gap I could make out blurred details of the room: resuscitation equipment, manacles and a pool of fresh blood on the floor.

Suddenly, we were bundled back into the pick-up and driven at high speed to an interrogation unit. We spent the next thirty-six hours in a military dungeon – a large, cavernous cell with bare walls and a concrete floor. Armed soldiers stood at the door.

A plain-clothes officer interrogated. At first he emphasized that we had committed grave crimes and would have to pay the price. But after watching the video footage, however, he changed tack, agreeing that there was nothing wrong.

‘Then why are you charging us?’ I asked.

‘You are not charged,’ he replied.

‘Then can we go?’

‘No, I must write a report.’

‘How long will that take?’

‘Days, perhaps weeks.’

It became clear that I was being held on suspected terrorism charges. As a British citizen of Asian Muslim origin, I was suspected of being part of the world of suicide bombers, religious schools and Islamic fanaticism.

At ten p.m. on the second night we heard the sound of keys.

The cell was opened by a pair of towering plain-clothes officers. I noticed that the chains and blindfolds they carried were different from those of the military police. It seemed that we were being passed to another agency.

We were led to a jeep and driven through the streets of Peshawar, then out of the city and down a bumpy dirt track. My overwhelming fear was that we were about to be shot in the back of the head and dumped away from town.

Eventually the jeep braked.

I heard an iron gate open and we jerked in over what felt like a cattle grid. One by one we were then dragged out in chains and held squatting on the ground. Behind my blindfold I could smell jasmine and hear a man moaning in the distance.

We were led calmly into a cell block and isolated in solitary confinement cells. Mine was about two yards by three, with a concrete floor and no furniture of any kind. There was a rough lice-ridden blanket, a strip light that was never turned off, a squat lavatory and a hosepipe.

The walls were bare white, covered in graffiti, written mostly in faeces and blood – much of it in English.

I could not sleep, nor see what was happening beyond my cell. But there were the sounds of men weeping and what had to be the screams of others being tortured. The fear of being taken out and shot was constant, especially in the first days. Nobody outside would have known; nobody had a clue that we had been taken away.

The next day I concluded that we were being held by military intelligence. The guards, who were all dressed in plain clothes, refused to give their names. One, a young man who brought me water, said the unit was known to them as ‘The Farm’. He told me that keeping calm, and telling all I knew when interrogated, was the best way of staying alive.

My colleagues, Leon and David were in cells nearby, but speaking to each other was forbidden. When I needed the hosepipe to be turned on I would shout so the guards could hear me.

Late on the second night a guard came to my cell with chains and blindfold. I called out to David and Leon that I was being moved. They told me later that they thought I was being taken out to be executed.

I staggered down a long corridor and was pushed into a chair. A voice said that if I told the truth I would not be harmed but that I’d be in danger if I lied. I was so frightened that I felt weak and nauseous. And the fear brought sweat. But it wasn’t normal sweat. It was mixed with adrenalin, and stank like cat pee. For all the washing, I couldn’t get it off my body.

That first night, I was interviewed for three hours.

The questions ranged from my family to my knowledge of Islam, explosives and weaponry, my work as a writer and documentary maker, as well as on how much money I earned. They were also preoccupied with the fact that my two colleagues were Jewish – something which I had never really thought about.

My fears were increased when, after several nightly interrogations, the blindfolds were untied. It was then I saw an array of bloodied torture instruments, and the central drain. The implication was clear. Horrified, I was returned to my cell.

As the interrogations went on, I explained my life and details of the books I’d written. Recounting it all piece by piece, I realized how complex it all must have sounded. After all, I am of Afghan and British ancestry, brought up in Britain, married to an Indian, and living in Morocco – and my passport has stamps from dozens of obscure countries. Every answer seemed to provoke another slew of questions. One young interrogator in particular drove me crazy with his inane questioning.

Night after night he grilled me.

Eventually, during a long session one night he unlocked the handcuffs. I rubbed my wrists. As the questions continued, me staring into blinding interrogation lights, I reached forward and grabbed the interviewer’s face – digging my fingernails into his cheeks. Rather apologetically, he admitted that he was only a trainee.

The next night a colonel took over the interrogation. When I told him how grim the food was, he promised to send me some food from his own home. But he never did. On the second night, he asked if I could help get his son into Canadian university to study forestry. I remember almost smiling at the absurdity of the question. Blindfolded and chained once again, I replied that I could certainly have a go, but that in my current situation it was going to be difficult to help.

During the days I felt myself slipping into a kind of madness. Solitary confinement has an astonishing effect on the mind. The trick was to stay calm and keep myself occupied. I spent hours working out how to break free. But trying to escape would have been instant suicide.

Then I spent days and nights retelling myself all the stories I’d ever heard, playing them on the whitewashed walls as if I were in a psychotic form of cinema.

I forced myself to drink huge quantities of liquid to compensate for all the sweating, and spent the days in fitful sleep, worrying about my wife and two children who I had left in Mumbai, wondering when and how the outside world would begin to miss us.

Time and again I was interrogated, usually between midnight and about 3 a.m. Sometimes I was blindfolded and at other times not, but I was always chained.

One night I got a peek into other cells.

In one I saw two Afghan men crouching on the concrete floor. Both had long black beards. A guard said they had been there for months. Another prisoner was kept in a cell painted with black and white spirals to drive him mad.

The interrogators refused to let me contact my wife or the British embassy. One night I boasted that news of our incarceration could not be hushed up. The interrogator told me that two weeks earlier an American helicopter had strayed across the border from Afghanistan and strafed a truck, killing twenty-seven women and children. He said news of the atrocity had never got out – that anything could be covered up in Pakistan.

After about a week, however, I persuaded the young guard to leave a message for my sister-in-law in London, stating that my colleagues and I were alive.

I did not know that my family had assumed we had been kidnapped – or that my sister Saira Shah, known for her documentary about Afghanistan, Beneath the Veil, had jumped on a flight to Pakistan to try to find us.

The days dragged on.

I found that the best way to stay upbeat was to see the absurdity of it all. And there were moments of grotesque humour. One night I was stamping around the cell killing cockroaches. In the background I could hear the wild wailing of a man being worked over in the torture room. The guard came to my cell and ordered me to stop making so much noise. He said I was keeping the others awake.

There were also elements of touching humility. Late one evening a guard came to my cell. I was wearing just boxer shorts because of the summer heat. I started putting on my shirt, assuming another interrogation session was about to begin. He waved for me to relax and stuck his fist through the bars.

In his palm were three juicy pineapple cubes for me.

Then, after sixteen nights’ detention, a guard turned up at four a.m. and clipped our fingernails, the clippings taken for DNA testing. It seemed a rather high tech for a place without even Internet. Then our bags were brought to our cells and we were told to check nothing had been taken, then and ordered to sign a document confirming that we had not been tortured. An officer from the Pakistani Civilian Intelligence Agency stepped from the shadows.

An hour later we were sitting in the VIP lounge of Peshawar airport as the civilian officer apologized for the military’s ‘heavy-handed’ treatment. It was explained that we were being flown to London via Abu Dhabi and that we had no choice.

The officer informed me repeatedly that there were no charges against us, and that we would be welcome to return. I hope so. Despite the ordeal I remain a great admirer of Pakistan and long to walk in its mountains as a free man.

Arriving at Heathrow airport, we were met by the British Secret Service.

‘All right lads?’ said their leader, as he took us away for a debriefing. ‘Sounds like you’ve ’ad a damned hard time out there.’

After answering his questions in an interview room, he escorted us to the arrival area. Just before we walked through, he said: ‘No goodbyes if that’s OK. I’m just gonna slip away. Best if you don’t turn round. Just keep walking.’

Since my release I find myself often thinking of the solitary confinement cell where I spent so many days and nights. I can remember the smallest detail of the place. The graffiti, the stench, the sound of the industrial-sized fan which was switched off for just one hour a day, to allow the mechanism to cool down.

But most of all, I wonder.

I wonder who’s in that concrete box now and what’s going through his head.

TWENTY-NINE

Morocco’s Alpine Hideaway

THINK OF MOROCCO, and a treasure house of tradition comes to mind.

It’s a land of medieval medinas with their maze-like streets, of fabulous Almohad and Andalucían buildings adorned with intricate mosaics, and of unending beaches running along the Mediterranean and Atlantic shores. A crossroads par excellence, it’s where the Arab world meets the African and the Berber. But best of all, Morocco is a land that never fails to surprise in the most enchanting and alluring way.

Less than an hour’s drive from Fès, is the small town of Ifrane. Developed as an Alpine-style resort by the French during their Occupation, it is one of the Kingdom’s most unexpected and precious delights.

The drive from Fès to Ifrane, set high in the fir forests of the Atlas Mountains, begins with olive groves, and with roadside stalls selling honey and pomegranates. Then, as you progress upwards, the food stalls give way to others, where villagers tout fossils and nuggets of quartz, mined in the Atlas.

The road passes fields in which sheep and goats graze, in a land once farmed by the Romans – they grew vines there. Eventually, after a thousand twists and turns, you reach the snowline, with the little town of Ifrane a little further beyond.

Surrounded by nature trails and hiking routes, and packed with cafés, Ifrane surprises all first time visitors – whether they be Moroccans or from farther afield. Covered by a thick blanket of snow through much of the winter, the town is quite European in feel.

There’s none of the detail so readily associated with Morocco – no arched doorways, no mosaics, or geometric friezes carved into plasterwork. Instead, Ifrane is a haven of sloped Alpine roofs and timber frames, set against a backdrop of woodland. It’s straight out of Chamonix.

In the central square there’s the scent of chocolate-covered crêpes and the aroma of log-fires burning. The only tell-tale sign that you’re in Morocco are the flowing jelaba robes, worn by many to keep out the winter chill. And the storks. Their voluminous nests crown too many rooftops to count, and are more Moroccan than almost anything else.

At Café La Paix, a throwback to the days of the French era, I met a retired American couple, George and Gene. They had perma-tans, perfect teeth, and told me both at once that Morocco was their greatest love.

‘We come twice a year,’ said Gene. ‘After spending a few days in Fès, we come up here to Ifrane.’

‘It’s a kind of therapy to balance the frenzy of the Fès medina,’ added Harry.

I asked if he skied. Harry thumped a fist to his thigh. There was a metallic sound.

‘Duff leg,’ he said. ‘Korea’s to blame.’

We sat in awkward silence for a while – Harry lost in the memories of youth, Gene applying lipstick liberally to her oversized smile, and I staring up at a pair of storks robbing twigs from another pair to build their own nest. The birds were all filled with a wonderful enthusiasm, as if they couldn’t quite believe their luck. And, looking around, I could see the source of their zeal.

Ifrane is a mountain sanctuary like no other.

Much favoured by Hassan II, the former King of Morocco, the town has long hosted royalty, and is fêted for its celebrity associations. A champion of the outdoors life, Hassan II would spend months at a time there, moving his royal Court into the mountains when he tired of the capital, Rabat. With its long perimeter fence, the royal palace is in pride of place on the road towards Azrou. In the days of the former King’s rule, a constant stream of dignitaries would make their way up to Ifrane to be received at Court.

A great many of his VIP guests were accommodated at an imposing Alpinesque chalet set on a promontory just above the town. This mixture of royal guesthouse and luxury hotel grew a little tired in recent years. But, after six years of work, not to mention a fortune spent on it, Hotel Michlifen Ifrane – owned by King Mohammed VI – has risen like a phoenix above Morocco’s own Alpine backdrop. With the finishing touches complete, the hotel has reopened to visitors once again.

The Michlifen is one of the cosiest and most luxurious travel hideaways in the Kingdom. Inspired by the simple architecture of the Alps, it’s a sanctuary of natural pine panelling and of dressed stone walls, of painted Scandinavian wood, sculptures and antique furniture.

The hotel’s main lobby is vast but informal, filled with dazzling mountain sunshine by day and understated mood-lighting by night. The exposed stone pillars, the bare wooden floor, and the deep leather couches, give a sense of the American Rockies, rather than the Moroccan Atlas.

While the décor maybe Occidental, the service and warmth are definitely Moroccan. On weekends the hotel is filled with families who arrive mostly from Casablanca and Rabat. As elsewhere, the national obsession with doting over children certainly reaches Ifrane’s snow-covered peaks.

Visiting with my family, I tracked my little son down to the kitchen, where he was being indulged by the chef with a pot of chocolate and a spoon. And my daughter spent an entire afternoon playing checkers with the barman whom, I noticed, always let her win.

A stone’s throw from the hotel, laden in snow, the main square of Ifrane was alive with locals and with visitors through the short winter days. Students from the Al-Akhawayn University pack the cafés. Established through an entente cordiale between the Saudi Arabian and Moroccan Royal Families, the University is one of the most prestigious in Morocco. All around, there were storks building messy twig nests high on the rooftops, and children darting between the poplar trees down near the lake.

In dazzling sunshine, we set off on a hike through the forest.

The small town of Ifrane was soon well behind us, the snow crunching beneath our boots. We walked for miles, weaving a haphazard path between the firs, pausing every so often to hurl snowballs at each other. There was silence, except for birdsong, and the muffled cries of children down in the valley below.

After two hours of hiking, we came to a clearing where a family were gathering sticks. Their faces chapped from the wind, their hands bleeding from thorns, they seemed startled at seeing us. The husband dropped the branch he was holding, and raced over to greet us.

Welcoming us all to that part of the forest, he asked after our health in the prolonged salutations of Moroccan mountain life. His wife and daughters inched forward gingerly and kissed my wife and children.

Minutes later, we found ourselves invited to share their midday meal. No amount of excuses could curb their overwhelming hospitality. As we tucked into a feast of lamb tagine and fresh-baked bread, a fire was lit to warm us, the family throwing on all the twigs they had gathered that morning.

‘The children must eat!’ the husband exclaimed again and again, picking out the best pieces of meat and passing them to my little son and daughter, ‘because children are a gift from God.’

I asked how the winter had gone.

‘The snow’s been deep this year,’ said the man, ‘and that’s good because more people come and ski.’ He paused, wiped a hand over his mouth. ‘I have lived here my entire life,’ he said, ‘I was born in a little house just over there, as my own children were. And I must tell you there is something that I don’t understand.’

‘What?’

‘Why people do want to go up and down all day on skis? It just makes no sense at all!’

In the afternoon we drove to the resort of Michlifen, after which the hotel in Ifrane is named. We reached it through an unending fir forest, lost in the mountain crags of the Atlas.

Although far less organized than European resorts, it has an old world charm that’s been lost through commerciality from much of Europe. Hauled up the mountainside by a simple lift system, skiers were slaloming their way downhill with differing degrees of style. What amused me was the complete absence of pretension. It was as if no one was looking at anyone looking at them. And, for challenged skiers like me, there’s nothing so precious as the feeling that no one’s bothered about how many times you fall.

Huddled along the road were local people with sledges, clusters of used ski equipment for hire, and even horse-drawn sleighs.

While standing at the side of the road bartering for a pair of tenth-hand skis, I got talking to an aged Frenchman. He said he could remember the old days when Ifrane was packed with the chic European crowd through the winter season.

‘You should have seen it,’ he said a glint in his eye. ‘We used to drink Pastis on the square, and eat fondue until late in the night, washed down with a nice Muscadet.’

I asked if Ifrane had lost its magic. The Frenchman waved a finger at me hard.

‘Non, non, monsieur,’ he replied, ‘it’s better than ever.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Of course it is. Take a look around you! The French never would have permitted such joie de vivre as this!’

THIRTY

Morocco’s Pirate Realm

RELOCATE FROM A CRAMPED East End flat to a haunted mansion, in the middle of a Casablanca shanty-town, and you can’t help but slip into the Moroccan Twilight Zone.

It’s a world conjured straight from a child’s imagination – a realm of Jinn and exorcists, of dazzling colours, exotic foods and unending possibility.

During the years we have lived here, we have descended down through the interleaving layers of Moroccan society to its very bedrock. In that time I have become preoccupied with the Morocco that tourists rarely glimpse, the one that lies just beneath the surface, waiting to be discovered by anyone ready to receive it.

Every day Europe’s budget airlines ferry tourists back and forth, depositing them at the gates of a few key Moroccan cities – Marrakech, Agadir and Fès. Yet, the rest of the kingdom is left largely alone. So, stray a little off the beaten track, and the rewards can be immediate and quite extraordinary. And, as often happens in Morocco, the greatest treasures are where you expect them least of all.

I was reminded of this last week when my daughter, Ariane, came home and begged me to help with her pirate project. She’s obsessed with Johnny Depp, and imagines all pirates to be bumbling caricatures, rather than the ruthless killers of today’s African Horn.

Googling ‘Morocco Pirates’, she began a treasure trail which led right from our own door.

An hour’s drive up the coast from Casablanca is the capital, Rabat. It’s rather staid – orderly traffic, clipped hedges, and droves of diplomats. Across from it, nestled up on the windswept Atlantic shore is the small town of Salé. Most Rabatis like to stick their noses up at their down-at-heel neighbour. They regard it as sordid, squalid, a complete waste of time. I had bought in to the whole Salé-bashing syndrome, and found myself snarling at the mere mention of the name.

But Ariane insisted I’d got it all wrong.

She told a tale of a pirate realm worthy of Jack Sparrow himself, one where Robinson Crusoe had been taken as a slave. For eight centuries, she said, Salé had been a world centre of looting, pillaging, and of white slavery. The frenzied debauchery had reached its height in the 1600s, under the greatest marauder in the Barbary history, the infamous Jan Janszoon.

A Dutch freebooter, and former Christian slave himself, Janszoon made himself overlord of a pirate republic based at Salé. He waylaid many hundreds of ships across the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, possibly extending as far as Iceland and the Americas. In true pirate tradition, he sired countless children. His descendents are said to embrace a Who’s Who of celebrity, including the Marquis of Blandford, Humphrey Bogart, and Jackie O.

Intrigued by this curious nugget of international pirate trivia, I bundled Ariane into the car and sped north.

Soon we spied the skyline of Rabat, all proud and stately as a capital city should be. Across the estuary, the syrupy yellow light of late afternoon gave a glow to the ancient walls of what was once the pirate realm – the Republic of Salé.

Even from a distance there was something bleak and piratic about it.

Gnarled volcanic rocks, breakers, wine-dark sea, and walls right out of Treasure Island. Approaching from along the coast, we found ourselves at an immense and ancient burial ground – tens of thousands of graves packed tight together, the head-stones lost in each other’s shadows.

Unable to resist, we strolled slowly between the graves, the chill Atlantic wind ripping in our ears. Ariane said she could imagine the pirates sleeping there, cuddled up with their secrets and their treasure maps.

In the middle of the graveyard a fisherman was crouching with a long slim rod, and an empty paint can filled with fish heads. He was surrounded by cats. When I asked him about pirates he narrowed his eyes, nodded once, and pointed to a low fortress at the edge of the cemetery.

We went over to it.

Crafted from honey-yellow stone, the Sqala, as it’s known in Arabic, was built into the crenellated sea wall, rusted iron cannons still trained on the horizon. A policeman was standing outside. He had a weatherworn face, watery eyes, and a big toothy grin. Ariane asked him about pirates. Before we knew it, we’d been ushered inside.

He led the way through a cool stone passage and out onto a rounded terrace, bathed in blinding yellow light. There was something magical about it, as if it were so real that it was fake, like a Hollywood set. The cannons there were bronze, lizard-green with verdigris, each one bearing a different crest.

‘They were obviously captured by pirates,’ said Ariane knowledgeably. ‘If they weren’t, the crests would all be the same.’

Staring out to where the water joined the sky, the policeman suddenly recited a poem about unrequited love. He said there was no better place in all the world to compose poetry than right there, and that poetry was his true love.

I asked if he’d ever heard of Jan Janszoon. He cocked his face to the ground beneath his feet.

‘The dungeon,’ he said grimly.

We went down jagged steps, along a vaulted corridor bored out from the stone, lit by shafts of natural light. Home to nests of stray cats, it was damp and smelled of death. The officer showed us a truly miserable cell which looked as though it had been quite recently used. His grin subsiding, he explained awkwardly that the last prisoner had been forgotten, and had starved to death.

‘Was it the famous corsair, Jan Janszoon?’ I asked.

The policeman shook his head.

‘For him, you must go to the old city,’ he said.

After sweet mint tea, and yet more poetry, we escaped with directions scribbled in Arabic, directions to the home of Jan Janszoon lost in the maze of the old city.

After years living in Morocco, I am no stranger to walled medinas, and have traipsed through dozens of them – often searching for a cryptic address. In that time I’ve learned to be thick-skinned when approached by hustlers laden with tourist wares.

Slipping through the Malka Gate, we prepared ourselves for the usual onslaught of salesmen and mendicants. But it didn’t come. Instead, the silence was so pronounced that we could hear the children playing marbles in the labyrinth of lanes. Without waiting for us to ask, one of them led the way to the great mosque.

Built in the glorious twelfth century Almohad style, it’s one of the greatest treasures in the kingdom, and one of the least known. The boy said there were seven doors, one for each day of the week.

Twisting and turning our way down the whitewashed lanes, we found a time-capsule of Moroccan life from a century ago. There were vegetables piled high on carts, and chunks of fresh mutton laid out on fragrant beds of mint; tailors busily sewing kaftans, mattress-makers and carpenters, brocade-sellers, and dyers hanging skeins of wool out in the sun. And, rather than any tourists or tourist kitsch, there were local people out shopping, bargaining for underpants and melons, pumpkins, wedding robes, and socks.

When Ariane showed the scribbled directions to the marble-playing boy, he led us to a spacious square, the Souq el Gazelle, the Wool Market. It was packed with people buying and selling used clothes and brightly-coloured wool. The boy said it was where slaves had once been sold, having been dragged ashore from captured ships.

Nudging a thumb to the directions, I asked about the home of Jan Janszoon.

The boy beckoned us to follow him.

Winding our way through the Mellah, the old Jewish quarter, the air pungent with kebab smoke and baking macaroons, we reached the crumbling façade of a building. Once plastered, the dressed stone was exposed, ravaged by the elements. A fig tree had taken hold and was growing out from the side, and the studded wooden door was falling to bits. The boy glanced at the scribbled directions and gave a thumb’s up.

Ariane and I stood there in awe. We were on hallowed ground after all – at the home of the greatest pirate in Barbary history, the progenitor of Jackie O no less.

As the muezzin called the prayer, his voice singing out over the tiled rooftops of old Salé, I whispered thanks to Jan Janszoon and to his band of marauding corsairs. Through a special conjury of Moroccan magic, the Dutch-born freebooter had lured us through a keyhole into his own pirate realm, the Moroccan Twilight Zone, where nothing is ever quite what it seems.

THIRTY-ONE

Moulay Idriss

A MAN WITH A HEAVILY scarred face and a limp, sidled up and asked me to follow him.

I was standing in the central square of Moulay Idriss, Morocco’s most sacred and sinister town, peering at a map. I asked the man what he had to show. He tapped a finger below his eye, and motioned towards a narrow alleyway. My curiosity piqued, I slipped after him into the cool shadows behind the main square.

At the far end of the alley there was a turn, followed by another lane, then another, and another. Realising that I was deep in the labyrinth, I called out, but the man didn’t stop.

After fifteen minutes of trailing behind him, he tapped his eye again, and pointed to a door.

‘What is it?’ I asked in a timid voice.

‘A secret.’

‘What?’

The man nodded, pushed the door inwards, and led me into a dark building with a low ceiling. My nose picked up the scent of sandalwood, sparking a memory from childhood. I pushed open one of the shutters, while the man pointed at the floor. As light flooded in, I waited for my eyes to focus. Then I gasped in surprise.

Nestled on a cushion in the middle of a room was a large glass jar filled with what appeared to be olive oil. In the liquid was part of a human skull. It looked like it had been trepanned and was missing the lower jaw.

‘Where did you get it?’

‘In the ruins, near Volubilis. A farmer came across it in his field,’ the man paused, and rubbed a thumb and forefinger together. ‘It’s for sale,’ he said.

I didn’t want to appear rude, but explained that I’d be in the doghouse if I went home clutching a trepanned human skull. Making excuses, and smiling as widely as I could, I retraced my steps back to the main square. As I tramped back out of the maze, I found myself wondering what kind of maniac would buy part of a skull from a total stranger, in a place that seemed to scare most visitors away.

Read any of the guidebooks to Morocco and most of them tell the same story – that Moulay Idriss, the ancient spiritual heart of the kingdom, is unwelcoming to tourists, and unforgiving to any planning on sleeping there. Living in Casablanca as I do, I have often overheard travellers in the ramshackle cafés down by the port recounting the myth: that only the foolish or the unhinged would be crazed enough to stay over in Moulay Idriss.

When I asked my Moroccan friends about the town, which was founded by the great grandson of the Prophet Mohammed, most of them smiled. ‘It’s a little secret,’ one said, ‘a way of keeping the very best for ourselves.’

Unable to resist the temptation any longer, I dropped everything and jumped into the car. I headed north, following the coast road, and was soon turning inland away from the Atlantic on the road which runs eastwards to Fès.

Many visitors tend to think of Morocco as a desert land which, of course, is true. But the kingdom is a realm of contrasts, and none is starker than the nut-brown farmland of the Saïss Plateau, where vines have produced wine since Roman times.

Barely two hours after leaving Casablanca, I was trundling through Meknès, one of the most impressive walled imperial cities of all. Following the signs north towards the Roman ruins at Volubilis, I caught my first glimpse of Moulay Idriss.

Blazing white against a cobalt sky, it clings to the mountainside like a cluster of limpets bleached by the sun. A huddle of green roofs near the middle, stands as a reminder of why foreigners have felt threatened until now. Within the shrine beneath the green tiled roofs lie the mortal remains of Idriss I, the founder of the powerful Idrissid dynasty, and the man who brought Islam to Morocco in the first place, twelve centuries ago.

It’s easy to imagine Idriss I standing on the hillside, surveying the fertile plateau below, dreaming of a time when the new religion would be practiced by every man and woman between him and the horizon. He had fled the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad, and brought Islam to the Berber tribes, despite the disapproval of the Caliph, Harun ar-Rachid. After winning over the Berbers, and founding the city of Fès, Idriss I was poisoned, supposedly on the orders of the Caliph himself.

Each summer a moussem is held in honour of the founder of Islam in Morocco. Tens of thousands of pilgrims come from across North Africa, and beyond, to pay reverence at the shrine dedicated to Idriss I. The town of Moulay Idriss swells with visitors then, many of them covering the distance from his second capital at Fès, on foot. For the rest of the year, Moulay Idriss is almost silent, a landmark photographed from a distance by tourists as their coaches rattle up the road to Volubilis.

The Roman ruins there are no more than a couple of miles away. They boast some exquisite mosaic floors, triumphal arches, and capitals crowned by giant stork nests. Local children weave about between the tour buses, offering fossils they have dug from the fields, and splinters of quartz dyed ruby red with ink.

One of the reasons the tourists have always sidestepped Moulay Idriss is because of the general sensitivity of Islamic shrines. Non-Muslims visiting Morocco rarely have the opportunity of entering the mosques or other religious buildings. The exception is the great Mosque of Hassan II in Casablanca, which holds regular tours. The Qur’an and the teachings of the Prophet mention nothing about forbidding those of other faiths from entering holy Islamic sites – far from it.

The Prophet himself is known to have welcomed Najran Christians into a mosque at Medina, where they held talks and prayed together. The resolution to prohibit non-Muslims into mosques in Morocco was apparently a political one, introduced during the era of the French Protectorate. It’s likely that the Governor, Hubert Lyautey, made the decision to avoid intruding upon local sensitivities.

Another explanation for the lack of visitors to Moulay Idriss may be been the shortage of reliable places to stay. After the high-end riad-style boutique hotels of Fès and Marrakech, lodgings in Moulay Idriss have always been far more modest and thin on the ground. Since the ’seventies, when the hippy trail linked Casablanca with Kabul, local people in the town have taken in the odd visitor, squeezing them into their communal guest rooms. Anyone offered to stay as a guest in a Moroccan home should take advantage, as the hospitality is second to none.

Fortunately, it’s unlikely that things are going to change fast at Moulay Idriss, but there is change afoot nonetheless. Mike Richardson, an exuberant young redhead restaurateur, formerly maitre d’ at London’s prestigious Ivy Restaurant, is a partner in a tiny inn that’s just opened its doors.

Boasting five guest rooms in all, Dar Zerhoune as it’s called, has been renovated with painstaking care.

‘It’s about eight hundred years old,’ says Richardson, ‘which is nothing out of the usual for round here. The last thing on our minds is to turn the town into a tourist magnet, but we do want to encourage people to fall in love with Moulay Idriss as we have done.’

The main square of the town is ringed by arched arcades, in which locals hide in the shade, and barter for plastic buckets, cardamoms, and pastries dripping with syrup. The wonderful thing about the place is that life continues as it has done for centuries, and that no one’s very impressed when a fresh-faced tourist blusters in. They get on with what they’re doing – weighing out dried chameleons, measuring skeins of wool, tasting spices before they buy, and haggling for great domed tagines.

The pace of life must have been how things were everywhere at one time, before mechanization forced everything to go fast forward. I watched as an aged shopkeeper woke from his siesta, prayed, sipped a cup of tea, chatted to his neighbour, and lay down to sleep once again – all in the space of ten minutes. There was a sense of simplicity which Morocco’s cities lost long ago. The danger with Moulay Idriss is that the longer you spend there, the easier it is to forget a world ruled by reality of paperwork, traffic jams and e-mail. Stay there too long and one might never be able to go home.

I moved from one café to the next, following the sun, drinking tea and dreaming of escape to such a tranquil place. From time to time a beggar would amble up. The café’s owner would take a coin from his apron pouch and hand it over in the name of God. At the third café, the waiter slipped a glass onto the cracked vinyl tabletop, and raised the teapot above his head as he poured. With a cloud of steam billowing out from the arc of boiling liquid, he glanced at his wristwatch.

‘It’s almost dark,’ he said in a whisper, ‘are you not going to leave?’

I asked what he meant.

‘Foreigners always depart Moulay Idriss before dusk,’ he said darkly. ‘They’re frightened to spend the night.’

‘Well, I’m staying,’ I said defiantly.

The waiter scratched a thumbnail down his nose.

‘You are very brave, Monsieur,’ he said.

I drank more tea, and found myself talking to a pair of footloose backpackers from Auckland, their possessions in a fetid heap beside the table. The woman told me that they’d taken a communal Mercedes taxi from Fès to Mèknes, and then another up to Moulay Idriss. I asked how the journey was.

‘It was the most terrifying ride of my life,’ said the man. It was the only time he spoke.

I told them about the skull.

‘He offered it to us as well,’ said the woman coldly.

I asked if they were planning on spending the night in Moulay Idriss.

The man looked at the woman, and she combed a hand through her hair.

‘After the ride here on the old road from Fès nothing could scare us,’ she said. She then mumbled something about a quest for turquoise beads and they ambled away.

The waiter sauntered over again, poured yet more tea, and described the moussem held each summer.

‘It’s then that Moulay Idriss comes alive with people and dancing, and tremendous noise,’ he said. ‘All day and night there is the sound of voices, and the beating of drums. Thousands of people pour into the shrine, and the cafés are filled to bursting.’ His eyes glazed over as he relived the spectacle in his mind. ‘If only the moussem was every day of the year!’ he exclaimed.

I sipped my tea, peered out at the serene square, and watched a group of boys playing tag in the dusk light. A dog limped into the middle of their game, curled up and fell asleep.

Then I smiled to myself, thankful that Moulay Idriss was exactly how it was.

THIRTY-TWO

Of All the Medinas in the World

IT WAS THE PROSPECT of the real world that first lured me to Morocco.

I was living in a pokey London flat, but spent very little time there. I would walk the streets angry and desperate – enraged at the exorbitant taxes and at the crippling kindergarten fees, desperate for affordable sunshine and for danger. The way I saw it, England had become a nanny state par excellence. Any problems and the system would pick you up and dust you down. I yearned for a place where the safety nets had been cut away, where ordinary people walked on a high-wire of reality.

Rachana, my wife, didn’t share my lust for jeopardy. She clutched our toddler to her pregnant belly and ordered me to not be so irresponsible. Taking little notice of her concerns, I flew back and forth from London to Marrakech, where I had been taken often as a child. I remembered the droves of fire-eaters and snake-charmers in the Jma el Fna, the main square, and searched for a cosy little house to buy.

Unfortunately, just about everyone in Europe seemed to have already come up with the same idea. Prices for ‘riads’, courtyard houses in the medina, were soaring, with the influx of the Euro-jetset. Someone suggested to go house hunting in Fès. So I did, and eventually found a crumbling merchant’s house there.

Colossal in size, it was owned by seven ghoulish brothers, each one greedier than the last. In Morocco, before you even get to the matter of the sale, you have to coax the owner to sell. I sat with them for hours, coaxing, cajoling, begging them to allow me to buy their home. Spitting out a fantasy price, they narrowed their eyes with greed. I leapt up and ran out shouting. In that moment I broke the first rule of the Arab world.

Never lose your cool.

At long last, we were offered a wonderful sprawling home in the coastal city of Casablanca. It was called Dar Khalifa, meaning ‘The Caliph’s House’, and from the first moment I set eyes upon it, I was in love.

All I knew about the city, I had learned from the film. I expected it to be a showcase of the mysterious East, half-expecting Bogart and Bergman and be living it up at Rick’s Café Americain. But instead I found a French-built haven of fabulous Art Deco buildings and palm-lined boulevards.

On the night that I took possession of the great notched iron key to the Caliph’s House door, suicide bombs went off across Casablanca. I cursed myself for courting danger so openly, and feared for what Rachana would think watching the news at home. It was a terrible moment. A few weeks later she gave birth to our little son, Timur, and we moved to Morocco.

My father, an Afghan, could never take my sisters and me to his ancestral home in the Hindu Kush. It was always too dangerous. So, often in our childhood, the family station-wagon would be laden with tattered old suitcases, and we would all be lured inside. With our gardener at the wheel, we would drive south from the verdant county of Kent, through France, Spain, and would take the ferry over to Tangier.

The journeys were a chance for my father to reveal fragments of his homeland. As he would point out frequently, the cultures of Morocco and Afghanistan are remarkably similar – mountainous landscapes, Islamic customs, and fiercely proud tribal clans.

When we bought the Caliph’s House, I thought we’d be finished with all the work in about three months. But at the start I had no concept of the elastication in North African time.

With no power tools or specialized equipment, work progressed very slowly indeed. And as for money – renovate a large house anywhere and you exceed original budgets many times over. I was forced to take out huge bank loans to pay the bills which were stacked two feet high on my desk. Having had no previous experience in renovating a house – large or small – I found it impossible to ever see the big picture. I would go around buying last minute details, when I should have been concentrating on the structure of the project, and all the tedious stuff like water and wiring that no one ever sees.

Buy a house in a foreign country and, it seems, that anything which can go wrong usually does. Our experience was no exception. The first weeks and months were beyond miserable. There was no electricity, water or furniture, and there were so many rats that our shoes were eaten in the night. We found dead decapitated cats in the garden, supposedly left by someone who didn’t want us to live at the Caliph’s House.

Then there were locusts, followed by a swarm of ferocious bees. After that a workman fell through a glass roof, and hordes of police tried to break down the front door. If in England you found a troupe of bobbies trying to batter their way into your home, you would probably ask them why they were there. But in Morocco the police are kept out at all costs. I quizzed one of the guardians as to why we were the focus of such police attention.

‘Because the architect doesn’t have permission to do the work,’ he said.

‘Doesn’t he?’

‘No of course he doesn’t. In Morocco no one ever gets permission.’

The architect brought a trailer full of the most savage men I had ever seen. They had unusually-developed shoulder muscles and were all armed with sledge hammers. In a very short while they managed to smash down a large number of walls, ripping out wiring and water pipes as they went.

Then they ran off and the rain began.

Many weeks of stormy weather followed in which the architect was an infrequent visitor. The reason for this was that, as I later found out, I had broken the second rule of the Arab world – paying in advance. On those long windswept nights, I would huddle in a blanket on a green plastic garden chair and congratulate myself for having broken free from the cycle of school fees, zombie-commuting and triangular chicken tikka sandwiches. My friends in London, I would tell myself over and over like a mantra, weren’t having nearly as much fun.

Eventually the architect’s building team arrived.

They spent most of their time camped in our unfinished sitting-room brewing up enormous pots of chicken stew. When they did do any work it was during the short time in between their feasts and long naps. The construction phase was completed at a snail’s pace. After that we moved on to laying the floors with handmade terracotta tiles called bejmat, and coating the walls in tadelakt, a Moroccan form of Venetian plaster, made from eggs, lime, and marble dust. The architect brought a team whose work was so atrocious that I fired them all in a fit of fury. It meant sacrificing all the money I had paid to the architect in advance.

There was no choice but to locate and then to deal directly with real moualems, the master craftsmen. Morocco has an astonishing number of cowboy craftsmen. For every thousand there are one or two true masters who have learned their skills by long and ruthless apprenticeship. Moualem Aziz was one of them. A great barrel of a man, his bulk poised above nimble feet, he was in charge of the floors.

Over months, his team brought magic to the Caliph’s House. The only time he was caught out, was whilst laying a complex pattern of glazed tiles in the children’s nursery. On reaching the final row they saw they had misjudged the shape of the room. Without so much as a murmur they lifted the entire floor, rotated it through five degrees, and laid it again.

Now that the house is restored, I watch my little son and daughter in the courtyards, splashing in the fountains, prodding their tortoises across the lawn. I understand now that the difference between absolute failure and total success is less than a hair’s breadth. And I see that success is about endurance. Keep standing and you will get to the end. But most of all I see that a life without steep learning curves is no life at all.

THIRTY-THREE

Old Cape Town

ON MY LAST VISIT to Cape Town a decade ago I remember asking directions to the Company Gardens, from a homeless guy.

Standing on a street corner smack bang downtown, he was furled up in a nest of matted blankets. As he realized I was speaking to him, he did a double-take. Then his eyes slowly widened.

‘They’ll take ya shirt and ya shoes,’ he said dreamily, looking me up and down.

‘Who will?’

‘The Banana-men will,’ he said.

Unsure quite what he meant, I made a hurried escape, back to the plush Waterfront District from where I had come. In the years that passed, I’ve often found myself wondering about the dreaded Banana-men, and have come to conclude they were a fantasy conjured by a troubled mind.

Far less fantastic though was the very real danger lurking in Cape Town’s historic heart. In the old days, it was a no-go-zone, where muggers preyed on the unsuspecting, and where you were likely to be relieved of far more than just your shirt and shoes.

But with time – and a massive injection of cold hard cash from both private and public funds – the city’s magnificent colonial quarter has now been completely revamped.

And what a jewel it is.

Stretching out a few blocks in each direction, it comprises an assortment of old world architecture, most of it restored to perfection, and all of it spotlessly clean. Part of a colonial legacy, the buildings hark back to when the Cape Colony stood as a byword for bullion and diamonds, and for wealth on an unknown scale.

After decades of despair, it seems as though the good times are here again. And, in these glory days of Cape Town’s Renaissance, there’s nowhere in the city quite so alluring to roam as the old downtown.

A good place to set off is from the corner of Wale Street and the pedestrianized St. George’s Mall. On that intersection stands the old Reserve Bank of South Africa, a granite fortress and an erstwhile beacon of power. It’s recently been given a painstaking renovation, and is now home to the Cape Town Taj Hotel.

Beyond it, on St. George’s Mall, are a throng of bistros, bars, and cafés serving gourmet fare and fine wines from the Cape. There’s an old-fashioned sense, a primness that makes you feel warm inside and genuinely fortunate at being anywhere near there at all.

A stone’s throw away, on Long Street, I found an abundance of second hand bookshops and antique emporia packed with 1930s junk. It’s a real treasure trove of a place. And, in a wildly vibrant backdrop of cultural colour, you can find every imaginable cuisine too – from sushi to Ethiopian ngira, and from Indian thalis to Brazilian barbecue.

Pace slowly down Long Street and you can’t help but glimpse Cape Town’s past. What affects me most is the utterly genteel quality of it all. There’s a sense that this is where the seed of Cape Town fell long ago. Squint a little and, in the canary yellow light of afternoon, you savour the village feel beneath the bustle of city life.

A twist and a turn and you reach Adderley Street, where the shops are a little larger, but where the atmosphere is straight out of the ’fifties. Woolworths stands in pride of place – not a haven for the downtrodden, but a shelter of subtle sophistication. There’s a wonderful flower market, too, on the east side of the street, the stalls ablaze with tropical blooms.

It might not look like it, but this main thoroughfare dates back centuries, to the time of the first Dutch settlers – who arrived more than three hundred and fifty years ago. A sanctuary of safety from the dangers of the unknown lurking inland, Adderley Street quickly became the commercial hub for the Dutch East India Company, what eventually became the thriving Cape Colony.

The most heartrending reminder of this time – one forged on servitude – can be found at the Slave Lodge, now housing a museum of culture. Over the years, many thousands of slaves were imprisoned there, a great number succumbing to the terrible conditions, malnutrition and disease.

In line with Adderley Street, are the celebrated Company Gardens, which I failed to ever find on my last visit. It’s there that the East India Company’s master gardener, Hendrik Bloom, laid out the first garden in 1652. At first it was vegetables and fruit that were grown, to sustain the droves of immigrants who had begun to arrive. As time passed, the gardens were turned over to medicinal and botanical species, and gradually became the idyll they are today.

For me, the most touching place of all in old Cape Town is St. George’s Cathedral, on the north-east edge of the Company Gardens. It was from there that Archbishop Desmond Tutu led his peaceful protest against Apartheid, a demonstration of dignity.

Visit Cape Town and history is never far from your grasp. It lingers in the air, a scent on the breeze, an explanation of circumstance that shaped the Rainbow People. Stroll around the old downtown and it’s impossible not to be affected by the trials and tribulations of the struggle. But, in many ways, it is the sense of triumph in the face of such adversity that makes the experience all the more poignant.

THIRTY-FOUR

On The River of God

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, as if it were watching our miserable procession, faltering ahead through the interminable undergrowth. For more than sixteen weeks we had been in the cloud-forest. Most of that time had been 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. It turned strong men into whimpering wrecks, crushing their bones, and dessicating their flesh. During the long insect-ridden nights we would huddle under the makeshift tent, shaking like crack addicts going cold turkey.

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 for life are 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 felt sure, the El Dorado of the Incas would soon 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 clue.

The theory is 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, according to legend, they constructed a new city, more fabulous than anything South America had ever known.

After first hearing the legend ten years ago, the corrosive allure of Paititi ran wild in my mind. Like so many before me, my motivation was founded on 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 Madre de Dios, the vast impenetrable jungle, east of the Andes, on the southern cusp of the Amazon.

But there comes a point when the library research must come to an end. You must draw a line, and begin the expedition in earnest. From the outset, it was clear that mine would have to be an expedition born of economy. My bank balance was pathetically dry. All I managed to withdraw for expedition gear was £200.

So I bought a copy of the free advertisement newspaper, Loot, spread its 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 a 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, buy a cheap airline ticket, and set out on a grand adventure. You don’t have to be Indiana Jones to go in search of a lost city.

In addition to being overloaded with unnecessary supplies, I felt that the big expeditions which had searched for Paititi had failed for another key reason: their arrogance. They considered 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 made the Madre de Dios their home – the Machiguenga. 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 air-conditioned tents. They even had 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 acres of trees.

Where 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 too yearned to mount an expedition to find the ruined city. Yet his real value was in his close 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 youth, 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 late afternoon slipped into night, I realized that Pancho’s ambition was the mirror image of my own. While I yearned to find a lost city, overgrown and deserted, 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 coloured 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, 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 felled a copse of balsa trees and pinned the trunks together with homemade nails, carved from the wood of chonta palms. Rafts were the only craft that could ascend the rapids. The jagged rocks tore at our feet, crippling the porters, the freezing water sapping their strength. Each mile was a struggle, earned in sweat, sores and disease.

Each night I would rally the men, cajole them to face the dawn with the brevity and conviction of heroes. I would heap their plates high with food, and never eat until the last of them was full. After all, nothing was so important as the well-being as the men.

But, with each mile, their resentment grew a little more. At first they laughed it off, humoured me for my pushing them. And, as days became weeks, and weeks slipped into months, the mood changed.

All of a sudden, men who would have given everything at the start, regarded me with poisoned stares and hatred. It was then that I felt the greatest challenge. Not only did I have to talk myself into carrying on, but I had to drag the men along with me.

From a fireside armchair, in a home with central heating and all mod cons, the idea of searching for a lost city is appealing. But, spend months in the jungle with rotting feet and terrible stomach problems, infested with worms and shaking from fever, the glory of it all wears painfully thin.

And, as the weeks passed, I found myself questioning why anyone would want to set themselves such an insane quest, why I couldn’t make do with a nine to five job like everyone else.

I dared not allow the men know my feelings though.

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 realized that finding Paititi 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-hops 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.

As for Pancho, he returned to the city with me, where he tasted vice, and saw the curiosities of our 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. when I asked him what he thought of our world, he was silent for a moment. Then he screwed up his face:

‘What a terrible, terrible place this is,’ he said. ‘I thought it would be a lot better!’

The next day I took Pancho back to the emerald forest. He shook my hand and grinned hard once we were at his village. I said that I hoped we would meet again. The great hunter smiled one last time.

‘You know where to find me,’ he said.

THIRTY-FIVE

On the Skeleton Coast

STREWN WITH HUGE BLEACHED WHALE-BONES, shipwrecks, and the occasional human skull, Namibia’s Skeleton Coast is one of the most desolate shorelines on the African continent. Known to the Khoisan Bushmen of the interior as ‘The Land God Created in Anger’, it’s where the freezing waters of the Atlantic meet the scorched sands of the Namib desert.

Stretching from the Angolan border, at the Kunene River in the north, down beyond the diamond ghost-town of Kolmanskop in the south, the Namib is a vast swathe of undulating dunes. Far too dry to sustain much life, the flora and fauna found there have adapted, enabling them to glean just enough moisture from the ocean’s fog that spills inland at dawn.

Venture to the Skeleton Coast, and you get the sense that nature is warding you away right from the start. There are bones everywhere, flotsam and jetsam, the crumbling hulks of wrecks, dead plants, and the footprints of infrequent desert creatures, all of them on the constant and desperate search for sustenance.

Hanging in the balance, a slim no man’s land between life and death, I was reminded time and again by the struggle to survive. It was a point never more powerfully made than on my first morning on the Skeleton Coast.

I was moving clumsily across a towering sand dune which rolled down to the beach and into the foaming white breakers. There were no plants, no animals, no hint of anything alive, just the spectre of Death all around. As I took a swig of water from my flask, a male oryx came out of nowhere. Alone and weak from thirst, he stumbled down to the shore, tasted the salt water, and collapsed on the beach.

A great uncompromising chunk of Africa, Namibia is one of the last true wildernesses. It’s a place where a few drops of water have at times been far more precious than the diamonds that famously litter its coastal sands. Nonetheless, it’s blessed with a stable government and decent infrastructure, something you can’t say about a good many countries on the African continent.

Tearing south-west up from Antarctica, the trade winds of the Benguela system batter the shoreline night and day. No one knows quite how many ships they’ve swept onto the barren rocks of the Skeleton Coast. But, making your way southward, you spot wreckage every few miles.

There are the remnants of ocean liners and trawlers, galleons, clippers and gunboats – testament to the perfidious current and the unrelenting winds. The wreckage is only one piece of the puzzle, but one with which we all readily identify – the crushed remains a reminder of our own fragility.

The most infamous of the wrecks is the Dunedin Star. A Blue Star liner, it was washed ashore in 1942. Laden with munitions, crew, and a few paying passengers, the ship’s rescue has gone down in history as a catalogue of error. A Ventura bomber and a tug-boat, both sent to help, floundered as well. Their wreckage can still clearly be seen. And a slew of other vessels with good intentions were unable to get close. Forced to turn around, they left the stranded survivors on the desert. Yet, amazingly, most of them were rescued in the end.

Not so lucky was the shipwrecked crew of an unknown vessel, washed up in 1860. Seventy years ago their twelve headless skeletons were found clustered together on the beach, along with a slate buried in the sand. It read, ‘I am proceeding to a river sixty miles north, and should anyone find this and follow me, God will help him.’

The remains of the writer have never been found.

My guide, Gotfod, drove us towards another wreck a little further down the coast. A quiet man with oversized hands and a wry smile, he’d made sacrifices to be there. His wife and family lived so far away that he only saw them a few times a year. The Skeleton Coast is no place for family life.

Slowing the Land Rover, he cocked his head out towards a twisted heap of rust and old iron chains.

‘That’s the Suiderkus,’ he said darkly, ‘a trawler wrecked on her maiden voyage forty years ago. Every time I pass it, there’s a little less left.’ Gotfod glanced towards the rocks. ‘Sometimes I wonder how many ships have met their end here,’ he added pensively. ‘The wreckage disappears over time, but the ghosts are left.’

It’s not hard to imagine the elation of a shipwrecked survivor clawing his way to shore, only to be confronted by a new terror – yet another ocean stretching north, south and east, an endless barrier of dunes.

Shifting constantly, the mighty mountains of sand are born when a few grains collect around a nest of quick-grass. Gradually, the little mound gets larger, kills the plant, develops into a dune, and roams the desert for eternity.

Not far from the mortal remains of the Suiderkus, at Möwe Bay, is surely the word’s most remote police station. It’s so cut off that the handful of officers rush out at the sound of an engine. They man a tiny museum, filled with remnants of wreckage, bones, and more bones. Inside are human skulls, and life-vests from Japanese whalers, the sand-worn figurehead from an ancient galleon, delicate wooden balustrades, brass cannons, rigging and sea-worn chains.

Walk along the lines of skulls outside, and you’re reminded once again that the Skeleton Coast is a place where Death looms large.

But there is life, too.

Travelling down the shoreline, we came upon a huge colony of Cape fur seals. There were thousands of them. Jet black and glistening, they were basking on the rocks like mermaids, or slipping easily into the freezing Atlantic waters to feast on the schools of sardines.

And, on the beach itself, Gotfod pointed out canine footprints circling the putrefying carcass of a humpback whale – covered in ghost crabs. No one’s quite sure why, but dozens of such whales have been beached in recent months. The only consolation is that their death means life for others.

‘See how the black-backed jackals have been trying to get through the whale’s thick hide,’ Gotfod mumbled, pointing to teeth marks in the leather. ‘It’ll take a few more days before the rot softens it for them.’

We veered over dunes as high as any on earth, the sands roaring as the Land Rover descended. Then, jolting from side to side, we cut a path inland up a rock-strewn canyon.

Again, Gotfod nudged a hand to the distance. He was pointing to a straggly windswept plant, called Welwitchia mirabilis. Found only in a few areas of the parched Namib, it’s a living fossilized tree. Despite its humble profile, with a wide trunk that reaches no more than a few centimeters in height, individual specimens live for a thousand years or more.

Having crossed a moonscape of cracked grey mud and many more dunes, we reached the first place with any real vegetation. There was even the odd puddle of water.

Gotfod insisted it was actually a riverbed.

‘It’s the Waruseb,’ he told me, ‘but it’s dry most of the year. ‘We’re in the rainy season now, that’s why the oryx are here.’

Watching us from a distance, were a dozen or so of the antelopes, their straight tall horns rising like lances above them. Their innate curiosity must surely keep their numbers down. After all, there were predators around.

Grinding a path eastwards, Gotfod gave a thumb’s up, and almost grinned. He’d picked up a track. We progressed past a lone male ostrich, and a herd of springbok, who pronked away in all directions at the sight of us. Then, turning slowly to the right, Gotfod applied the brakes.

Touching a finger to his lips, he motioned out the window.

Twenty feet away, a dead oryx was lying on its back, blood dripping from the nose. It had just been killed. Craning his neck, Gotfod pointed again. A lioness was panting in the shade of a thorn bush, taking time to cool down before devouring her kill.

As we sat there watching, a desert elephant suddenly stormed up, blasting itself with a trunkful of dust to keep cool. Caught off-guard, the lioness retreated into the bush, vexed, but unwilling to attack a creature so many times her size. After a tense few minutes, the elephant rejoined the rest of the herd, trampling through bulrushes nearby.

Like the other creatures found on the Skeleton Coast, the elephants have adapted to the desert climate. Able to endure days of thirst, as they roam vast distances in search of sustenance, they can even cross the towering dunes. And, when they reach a dry riverbed like the Waruseb, they use their tusks to dig down, creating pools on which the entire food chain feeds.

Lured by the wilderness, and by the chance of spotting rare desert elephants, a few intrepid tourists make their way to the Skeleton Coast each year. It’s just about as remote as any tourist destination on earth, but one that pays fabulous dividends.

Visitors tend to fly in by Cessna for a few days, and stay at one of the handful of lodges. Lost in an expanse of rolling dunes, these rely completely on the air-link. All food and supplies are flown in, and everything – from garbage to dirty bed-sheets – are flown out. Only the fresh water supply is local. Beyond precious, it’s fetched by tractor at a borehole thirty miles away.

Apart from the odd tourist, the only other people to be found are the nomadic Himba. Adorning their bodies with ochre and butter, to protect from the ferocity of the sun, they have spent centuries roaming the Skeleton Coast and nearby regions. It’s thought they migrated from East Africa, and there’s proof of this in their language – it contains some Swahili.

Gotfod took me to a little Himba encampment some way inland from the shore. Surrounded by a crude stockade, much of it topped with thorns, the hamlet was well defended against predators from outside. Hailing from the Herero, sister tribe to the Himba, Gotfod could speak their language.

‘The Himba venerate their ancestors,’ he told me, pointing to a sacred fire. ‘They keep it burning in the centre of the community and they never allow it to go out.’ His smile suddenly vanishing, he added: ‘Please make sure not to pass between the dead tree and the fire.’

‘Why not?’

Gotfod seemed uneasy.

‘Because it will make them sad,’ he said.

The oldest man in the community beckoned us over. His neck hidden in a mass of beads, a woolly hat pulled down over his head, he was grinding snuff in a metal tube.

‘In the droughts the lions get hungry and try to attack us.’ he said. ‘One came last year,’ he said slowly; ‘it jumped over the stockade and ran round and round. We were frightened. After all, there were children playing on the dead tree.’

‘Did you kill it?’ I asked.

The old man grimaced.

‘We’re not allowed to kill lions any longer. It’s against the law.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘We made a great noise and chased it away!’

For the Himba, the temptation to embrace modern life must be very real, if only as a way to escape dire poverty. Their sister tribe, the Herero, were converted by Christian missionaries a century and more ago. Many of them have their own houses and plenty of possessions. Herero women still sport colourful home-made dresses, reminiscent of those worn by the Victorian missionaries who brought them the word of Christ.

Travelling by ox wagon, the Afrikaans-speaking Voortrekkers travelled from the Cape Colony into the interior, and up Namibia’s Atlantic Coast. They converted and conquered as they went, settling lands with European ranching methods.

Their ancestors are still found throughout Namibia, especially in the remote desert realm of the southern Namib. Proud of their ancestry, many of them now work with tourism, especially at Sossusvlei, where the massive red dunes are found.

Taking its name from the baked mud pan, dry for all but a few days each year, the dunes draw visitors from all corners of the earth. The highest soars to three hundred and eighty metres. Tinted red by the high iron content, it glows almost crimson at dusk.

Reeling over an eternity of dunes, scorching hot, fine, loose sand, I reached a second pan known as ‘Dead-vlei’. Like something out of a sci-fi film, it was peppered with the remnants of a wind-seared forest, encircled by dunes. The gnarled trees there are said to be more than six centuries’ old, relics of a time when there was more water and less sand.

A little further to the south, at the small town of Aus, I came across Piet Swiegers, whose ancestors have made their home in southern Africa since the seventeenth century. Passionate about Namibia, Piet makes a living by showing off the country’s raw beauty to others.

Wild desert horses are one of the marvels found on his family’s land. More than two hundred of them in total, their numbers rise and decline depending on the rains. They’re thought to be descended from horses set free by soldiers during the First World War almost a century ago. As with everything else, they cling to life in a place where day to day survival is in itself an achievement.

Another curiosity on the farm is the bullet-ridden 1934 Hudson Terraplane. The rounded bodywork now russet-brown with rust, it was supposedly the getaway car of diamond thieves, shot at long ago by police.

The story might sound farfetched, and anywhere else it would be. But Namibia is a land of diamonds like no other. And a stone’s throw from Piet’s farm is the greatest testament of all to diamond fever.

Known as Kolmanskop, it sprouted up as a prim German town a century ago, in the middle of the Namib. There were diamonds everywhere, many of them on the surface, allowing prospectors to simply crawl about on their bellies to find them.

Over millions of years, the gems were flushed into the Atlantic from the Orange River in Namibia’s south. Then the Benguela current forced the diamond-bearing sands ashore, forming the Namib desert.

The result was that easy pickings of the high quality stones led to plenty of instant millionaires. And overnight fortunes brought luxury.

There was a power station and tramway, a casino, a skittle hall, a Champagne and oyster bar, and an ice factory, a theatre, restaurants, and a huge hospital equipped with Africa’s first X-ray machine.

But intense mining saw boom lead to bust.

Abandoned in the early ’fifties, Kolmanskop is today a ghost-town. Sand dunes fill the houses now, the paint stripped away from the walls, blow-torched by the wind.

In one of the buildings down near the tramway, I found a torn scrap of photograph. Black and white and burned on one side, it showed a young German couple, in Sunday best. They were straining to look serious as people used to do when posing, the tramway sign ‘Kolmannskuppe’ behind them. Like everyone else, they must have left when the diamonds were all mined out.

But there are still plenty of the precious stones nearby.

Kolmanskop is located within the restricted diamond zone, known as the ‘Sperrgebiet’, an area of more than 10,000 square miles. Managed by De Beers, entry is forbidden, and it’s under armed guard round the clock.

Twenty minutes’ drive from Kolmanskop, the neat little German town of Lüderitz gives a hint of how life at the ghost town may once been. Although located on the coast, it was constructed about the same time, and with the same Teutonic attention to detail as at Kolmanskop. There’s a sense that the glory days are long gone, a faded grandeur and irresistible melancholy.

Basking in the genteel glow of mid-summer light, Lüderitz was once gripped by diamond fever, too. The boom began when, in 1908, a station-master on the diminutive Aus to Lüderitz railway line, spotted something glinting between the tracks. Quietly, he staked out a claim, made a fortune, and lost it, before dying penniless.

At the town’s Kegelbahn, the century-old skittles hall, the descendants of diamond miners and Voortrekkers bet over beers and hardwood balls on a Thursday night. Among them, Alexi, a Russian trawlerman, who was washed up in Lüderitz years ago. Downing his beer in one, he ordered another, then peered out at the street.

‘Perhaps I’m crazy to live here,’ he says all of a sudden. ‘It’s just as well if I am, because a little madness helps you to bear the silence of the Skeleton Coast.’

THIRTY-SIX

Ostrich Hats and Model T’s

IN A BIZARRE QUIRK OF HISTORY, it was the Model T Ford that spelled the end of ostrich feather hats.

Awash with great billowing plumage, the bonnets had been at the height of fashion during the Edwardian age. They were much admired when worn in equally-fashionable open-topped limousines. But, with its small doorway and cramped interior, Mr. Ford’s economic Model T meant that fashion had to take a back seat. The result – the collapse of South Africa’s burgeoning ostrich trade, and bankruptcy on an unimaginable scale.

But, almost a century on, and the former farmlands of South Africa’s big bird business are at last witnessing a come back. This time round the ostriches roam free, along with a full gamut of wildlife, on land where the only shots taken today are through long lenses.

It’s five a.m., and I’m furled up in a wool blanket, perched on the back of an open-topped Landcruiser – fretting because my Blackberry’s lost the signal. All I can think of is how my bloodstream needs caffeine, and how a day without e-mail will take months to set right. But then, suddenly, there’s a muffled cry against the first rays of silvery African light.

I glance up, squint uneasily into the middle distance.

Fifteen feet from where I’m crouching, still clutching my Blackberry, is a massive bull elephant. He’s looking at me disapprovingly, ears flapped forward, tusks bowed down, as if he’s about to charge.

The world slips into sharp focus while my adrenal glands prepare for fight or flight. As someone who spends his life mollycoddled by technology, and rather meaningless luxury, I realized right then how separated I’d become from the brutal reality of the natural world.

For me, nature is something you watch on the Discovery Channel, or on the evening news – as you learn how much more of it’s been savaged to make way for the Blackberry realm that is my home.

My ranger guide, a South African version of Crocodile Dundee, called Brendon, fishtailed the vehicle out of harm’s way a moment before the tusks reached their target. Sighing with relief, we continued on the morning game drive, and on our quest for lion cubs.

Nestled in the wilderness of the Eastern Cape, one hundred and sixty kilometres from Port Elisabeth, Kwandwe is one of a new breed of private game reserves. A great lure from the beginning has been that the region is malaria-free. Once populated by a full compliment of wildlife, it was ‘settled’ by white farmers in the 1830s, ringed with fences and farmed for ostriches. Regarded as little more than vermin, the original fauna was picked off for trophies and for sport, leaving a decimated animal population.

The original settler and his family worked the land and are buried beneath it. Beside their graves is another – oversized and angular – the farmer’s favourite horse. In one of the lodges there’s a faded sepia print of the family’s Edwardian generation. Sitting to attention, dressed in the Sunday best, the women are all sporting the fabulous ostrich hats that brought them such wealth. But when the bottom fell out of the ostrich business, the farmers’ own world collapsed.

For much of the twentieth century, the farmsteads lay silent. Then, following a dream, naturalist Angus Sholto-Douglas, who manages the reserve, was approached by an American investor. The rest is history. Over a decade, they bought up nine farms, encompassing more than twenty thousand hectares, and prepared them to receive wildlife once again.

‘It wasn’t so simple as trucking in animals and letting them get on with it,’ says Angus. ‘Painstaking planning was necessary to check the kinds and quantities of animals this vast property could sustain.’

Long before the first creatures arrived, two thousand miles of fencing had to be removed, along with telephone lines, water troughs, dangerous machinery, and the odd farm building. The result was a wilderness, returned to its natural state, a landscape unblemished by Man.

The foliage, known as ‘succulent thicket’, was in good shape and ready for the food chain. Gradually, over months and years, the animals were reintroduced.

Taking care to ensure they were as unstressed as possible after the drive, they were held in bomas, huge pens filled with trees and foliage – in which they could spend weeks getting used to their new environment.

Herds of elephant, Cape buffalo, hippos, giraffes, and six rare black rhinos were introduced early on, in a Noah’s Ark of creatures. Then came the cheetahs, the lions, the brown hyenas and the leopards. The carnivores had plenty to support them – oryx, eland, zebra, gemsbok and springbok, all of which graze on the grassland and scrub.

With the aid of a tracker, perched in a hot-seat mounted on the vehicle’s bull bars, Brendon takes great care to give the animals their space.

‘This is their home far more than it is ours,’ he says, ‘and it’s critical that we don’t do anything that will impact on their world.’ Pausing to steer up an abrupt incline, he adds: ‘I once saw a tortoise on its back out here. It was struggling to turn over and was about to become a predator’s lunch. I flipped it over and, by doing so, I changed the order. I think about it even now. Because I allowed a tortoise to live, a predator may have gone hungry.’

At Kwandwe you can’t help but be touched by the order of natural world, and by the humans who strive to maintain it. On a continent where the animal kingdom is under constant threat, there’s a sense that in this small corner of Africa great achievements are being made. Yet despite all the work, poachers still succeed in their dastardly work. Last year more than three hundred South African rhino were killed illegally, the black market value at their horns put at about £35,000 for a single kilogram.

Without doubt the way forward, the new breed of private game reserves, like Kwandwe, offer low impact safaris in which you’re far more likely to see animals rather than other tourists.

In addition to the balance of nature, the Kwandwe reserve has ensured another all-important balance – that of the local community. A number of small villages are found on the reserve, and those who live in them are at the heart of life. Some are employed as staff in the lodges, or as rangers and trackers, while others are involved in community projects. One endeavour is gathering the traditional knowledge of medicinal plants from the elderly, and recording its wisdom for generations to come.

Spend a few days watching animals in their native habitat, and you begin to forget all about the pressures of e-mails and the Internet. Even a diehard Crackberry addict like myself couldn’t care less about the world I’d left behind. My priorities had changed. After a couple of days all I could think about was seeing lions and their cubs.

On the last morning, with only minutes to go of the final game drive, Brendon Crocodile Dundee spotted fresh paw prints in the dust. Risking his life, the tracker clambered onto his hot-seat and, through a sixth sense of his own, led the way.

Minutes later, we came upon them.

A pair of lionesses in the early morning light, a nest of honey-yellow cubs scampering about beside them. It was one of those moments that gets etched onto your memory. And I hope it will stay with me always.

As we turned quietly round to head back to the lodge, I mumbled prayer of thanks to Henry Ford. After all, had he not come up with the Model T, ostrich hats might still be in vogue, and the magic of Kwandwe might never have been conjured at all.

THIRTY-SEVEN

The People of the Cloak

SINCE THE FOUNDING OF ISLAM, almost fourteen centuries ago, one family has remained at the centre of the Faith.

Revered by all Muslims, and bound by rigid codes of conduct, this clan has been responsible for the spread and diffusion of Islam. In times of uncertainty, such as these, its members have the solemn duty to speak out and steer the religion back to its true path.

Throughout the Islamic World, they are known simply as ‘The People of the Cloak’.

Lying on his death-bed, the Prophet Mohammed urged his closest followers to gather around. He would soon quit the mortal world, he said, but before departing, he wanted to bequeath to them the two most precious things in his possession: The Holy Qur’an, and his family. This second part of his legacy may have seemed strange, but it is one which has preoccupied the Islamic World ever since.

Often known in the East as The People of the Cloak, Mohammed’s immediate family and their descendants, are revered by all Muslims, whether they be Sunnis or Shi’a. No other family commands such respect or devotion, nor has any other had such a dynamic bearing on the Islamic World’s religious, political and cultural development.

A great number of the Prophet’s direct descendants have been people of astonishing ability. They have ruled as Caliphs and Kings, have excelled as philosophers and mathematicians, as poets, men and women of belle lettres and geographers, as warriors, military tacticians and, of course, as celebrated religious scholars. Others have been leading Sufis, members of the Islamic brotherhood of mystics.

The Prophet’s direct descendants are bound by a rigid verbal code of obligation. Raised to excel in everything they do, they are taught that achievement is of paramount importance: that they must uphold the pillars of the Islamic Faith, perform acts of anonymous charity, and lead by their own example. Most important of all, however, is the development of a sense of ‘selflessness’.

The People of the Cloak are believed by Muslims to embody the purity and virtues of the Prophet Mohammed himself. To them, his family carries this purity in their veins, the very bloodlines of the Prophet. Such sanctity, it is believed, allows the People of the Cloak alone to recognize the revelations hidden in the teachings of the Qur’an: teachings to which ordinary men are blind.

But this integrity comes at a price. Members of the Prophet’s close family are expected to live exemplary lives, according to an ancient framework of conduct and obligation. This states that in striving for modesty they must never be boastful or ostentatious, and that they must stand apart from all other men. The emphasis is on honour, chivalry and, above all, on generosity – especially in performing acts of anonymous charity.

This code binds the clan to uphold the true message of the Islamic Faith, and to speak out against misrepresentation. In times such as these, when deviant factions seek to ‘hijack’ the religion, its members are expected to act as a mouthpiece for moderation.

Mohammed’s family have been associated with the spread and development of Islam since the faith’s conception almost fourteen centuries ago. Indeed, it was a conflict over the succession after the Prophet’s death, which led to the only major sectarian split in Islamic history. The dramatic result was the Shi’a minority dividing from the Sunni majority.

In the years after Mohammed’s death, religious scholars collected every scrap of information about his life; and thousands of people who had known the Prophet, however briefly, were asked to recount his acts, aphorisms and teachings. Known as the ‘Hadith’, these fragments are regarded as sacred in themselves, ranking second only to the Qur’an in the reverence with which they are held. They are underpinned by the belief that, as a completely pure person, Mohammed’s every action can be taken as a lesson in Islamic behaviour.

The Hadith forms the extraordinary framework by which Muslims can be reminded of the true path. Covering virtually every conceivable area of life, it stresses modesty and moderation, good manners, high ideals, and decent behaviour towards the ill-fortunate. The Hadith can act as an invaluable guide for non-Muslims, too. If in doubt about on how to behave in an Eastern land, search the Hadith, follow the Prophet’s example, and one is unlikely to go wrong.

The Hadith’s scope is astonishing: ranging in scope from charity to the treatment of animals, from cleanliness to marital law, and from usury to self-control.

It is from the Hadith that The People of the Cloak are said to derive their name. The story goes that while staying at his daughter Fatima’s house, Mohammed complained of tiredness. Hearing this, his daughter fetched a fine camel-wool cloak and laid it over her father. The Prophet’s face is said to have lit up and ‘shined like the full moon’. As he lay there, his grandsons, Hassan and Hussain, arrived and asked if they might join their grandfather beneath the cloak. They did so, as did Ali (Mohammed’s son-in-law) and lastly, Fatima herself.

When all five were under the cloak, the Prophet prayed to God, beseeching Him to keep his flesh and blood untainted. Speaking through the archangel Gabriel, God confirmed the purity and the importance of the Prophetic line.

Mohammed’s clan, the Hashemites, are regarded with respect by Muslims as, to a lesser degree, is the Quraish, the wider tribe to which the clan belongs. But it is the descendants of Mohammed’s closest relatives – those who lay with him beneath the cloak – who are held in highest esteem. Sometimes simply known as ‘The Five’, they are respected by both major branches of the Muslim Faith, by Sunni and Shi’a alike.

According to Islam, Mohammed was descended from the Prophet Abraham; and like him, he sought to rid his community of idols, to transform it into a monotheistic society. He was selected by God not as a son, but as a messenger. Whilst the Islamic Faith reveres Abraham, Moses, Jesus, amongst other Biblical prophets, it asserts that they were just that – prophets. According to Islam, Mohammed was the last Prophet.

His daughter Fatima is regarded with extraordinary reverence, especially by the Shiites, because she was married to Ali.

When Ali’s own father lost his fortune and became impoverished, Mohammed took him in, he himself having been cared for as a child by Ali’s father. Then, when Mohammed was called by God to be His messenger, Ali was among the very first of his converts. Remaining loyal throughout his entire life he even, as the story goes, slept in Mohammed’s bed to impersonate him on the night that the Prophet made his famous flight to Medina. It was this allegiance, his loyalty which the Shi’a believe has automatically entitled Ali and his descendants to be the leaders of Islam.

Born to Fatima and Ali, Mohammed’s grandsons – Hassan, and his younger brother, Hussain – were forced to acquiesce to the rule of the Umayyed Caliphate who succeeded their father.

The sectarian split within Islam, which divided the religion into two main branches – Sunni and Shi’a – is often likened to the Protestant-Catholic divide in the Christian Church. Whilst the Christian split didn’t take place until over a thousand years or so after the death of Christ, the Sunni-Shi’a rift happened within a lifetime of the Prophet’s death.

Most importantly, the division of Islam took place not for doctrinal reasons, but because of succession: and the question of which members of the Prophet’s family ought to succeed him. Western observers on Islamic themes often tend to neglect this point. There is no better way to understand the Sunni-Shi’a division than to study The People of the Cloak’s role in the early years of Islamic history.

Upon Mohammed’s death, the leaders of the fledgling Muslim Faith gathered to decide who would be the Prophet’s political successor. Following a heated debate, Abu Bakr was elected the first Caliph (literally, ‘Successor’) in Islam. But Ali, Mohammed’s son-in-law, who had not been present at the meeting, later protested that he ought to have been considered. Whilst Ali did swear allegiance to Abu Bakr, however, and eventually became the Fourth Caliph of Islam in 656 AD, the damage had been done. His followers, known as Shiites, came to insist that only members of the Prophet’s family can lead the Islamic faith. It is their belief that Ali’s lineage is the truest line to follow and that only members of Ali’s family may lead. The Shi’a call this dynasty Ahlul Beit, ‘The People of the House’.

The Sunnis, by contrast, believe that any right-minded Muslim can be named as a Caliph, or a leader, although they too regard descendants of the Prophet with unequalled reverence. Sunnis accept the Prophet’s instruction that a person ought not to be taken merely on birth but also on his own merits. This theme, enduring through the development of Islam, raises the question as to whether Mohammed’s family enjoys privileges which it has not earned.

By the close of the eighth century, the Shi’a branch of Islam had begun to develop its own clear doctrines: rejecting, for instance, the tradition of the Hadith, and instead collecting their own doctrines, and interpreting the Qur’an in substantially different ways from the Sunni tradition. This key divergence in the interpretation of basic Islamic values came about directly as a result of allegiance to The People of the Cloak.

While Sunni Islam has no well-established hierarchy of priests, the Shi’a employ titles such as Ayatollah, and its clergy wear distinctive religious dress. The Shi’a revere a line of Imams – the word means literally ‘Leader’ – all of whom had Ali as their ancestor. Different groups of Shi’a stop at different Imams in Ali’s family tree – regarding theirs to be the final true guide – and, accordingly, these Shiite subgroupings are known as ‘Fivers’, ‘Seveners’ and ‘Twelvers’.

The People of the Cloak, this inner circle of Mohammed’s family, were largely responsible for the extraordinary speed with which the new Islamic Faith spread East and West. For, when the Prophet sent his closest relatives out to preach the Word, he placed absolute trust in them: certain that they would not corrupt his message nor be swayed by the spoils of war. Whilst Islam was still confined to the Arabian peninsula at the time of Mohammed’s death, within a century it had spread as far east as Persia, and as far west as the Atlantic shores of Morocco.

After the conversion of Arabia, and the subjugation of Syria and Jerusalem, Islam spread like a wildfire into the east: sweeping into Mesopotamia, Armenia, Persia, Afghanistan and Samarkand. At much the same time, the new Faith swept westwards, through Egypt, across North Africa and up into Spain. The fall of Toledo in 712 AD completed the conquest of Iberia’s Gothic kingdom. But Islam didn’t stop there. It conquered Sicily and, for a time, pushed on into southern France.

In the centuries after Mohammed’s death, Islam developed from a fledgling religion, into a structured political and cultural force, in which the Prophet’s family became interlinked with a sequence of Islamic dynasties, or Caliphates. Under some of these, the sciences and the arts were patronized, although others fostered nothing but nepotistic avarice.

Whilst the Sunnis, who make up about ninety per cent of all Muslims, believe that the Prophet died without naming a successor; the Shi’a maintain that he had named his chosen successor: his son-in-law, Ali. The Sunnis hold the First Caliphate in very high esteem, while the Shi’a therefore despise it, except for Ali, who was the last of its four Caliphs.

On Mohammed’s death, his father-in-law Abu Bakr was elected to lead Muslims with the title Khalifa, or ‘Caliph’. In Islam all men are to be regarded as equal and therefore, strictly speaking, this means that there is no convention of a monarchy. The Caliph’s role was to act simply as a guide, ensuring not only that the Islamic Faith remained pure, free from distortion, but also that it continued to spread.

Abu Bakr was the first in a line of four Caliphs, each of whom was elected upon his own merits, and none of whom founded a specific dynasty of his own. After Abu Bakr came Omar, then Othman, and eventually Ali, all four of whom were advisors and close companions during the Prophet’s life. Like him, they were all also warriors and military tacticians, and were committed to spread the mission of Islam.

The Abbasids were Hashemites, tracing their ancestry through the Prophet’s uncle, Abbas. When their dynasty replaced the Umayyeds, it regained the Islamic leadership for the Prophet’s family, for the Umayyeds (who preceded them) had not been People of the Cloak. The Abbasids reigned for five hundred years, until overthrown in the Mongol invasion of 1258 AD.

The Abbasid Caliphate concentrated not on the spread westward, as the Umayyeds had done, but pushed East – towards Persia – moving their capital to the new city of Baghdad; and promoting not just Islam, but the sciences, the arts, and trade as well. Under leaders such as al-Ma’mun and Harun ar-Rashid, Islam entered its golden age. The era saw the Islamic World grow larger and increasingly diverse, with wildly differing ethnic groups meeting and mingling as equals for the first time.

Taking their name from Fatima, the daughter of Mohammed through whom they were descended, the Fatimids were a strong Islamic dynasty, with a sphere of influence that dominated much of North Africa and Arabia. Their leadership lasted almost two centuries, from the middle of the tenth century.

The Fatimids were a distinct movement in that they were not Sunnis, but of the minority Shi’a branch of Islam and, as such, they totally rejected the co-existing Abbasid Caliphate, with its capital at Baghdad. Their view being that only Ali’s descendants could hold the title of Caliph, they saw their role as being to destroy the Abbasids and install a Shi’a Caliphate in their place.

The descendents of The People of the Cloak have, over centuries, radically affected the Islamic societies in which they lived. Their combined contribution has led to developments in the religion itself, as well as in areas of the sciences, literature, and the arts. Indeed, for The People of the Cloak, nothing is so important as scholarship. For this reason one finds that many of its members, who have been revered as kings or military tacticians, have excelled in literature and the sciences.

A selection of important figures from the Prophetic family:

Jalaluddin Rumi

The greatest Sufi mystic and poet, Jalaluddin Rumi was born in Balkh, Afghanistan, early in the thirteenth century, and died in Turkey, where his mausoleum can still be seen at Konya. Regarded not only as a scholar of extraordinary intellect, he was also a man who embodied the Sufi code of ‘selflessness’. His epic literary treatise, The Mathnavi, which runs to more than twenty-six thousand couplets, is considered to be one of the most important of all Sufi texts. Rumi’s scholarship spanned many disciplines, ranging from mathematics to botany; indeed, seven centuries before the birth of Charles Darwin, Rumi even published a paper on evolution in the natural world.

Following his death, Rumi’s disciples continued to study his work, from the centre they had established at Konya. There they established the order of Mawlawiyah, which involves a form of trance-induced dance. They are known in the West as ‘Whirling Dervishes’.

Al-Idrisi

At the height of its expansion, Islam was spreading at lightening speed. As its message moved both east and west, a geographical understanding developed, charting new peoples and far off lands. Born in 1100 AD, Al-Idrisi was the brightest light of his new Arab interest in geography, travelling widely from his birth place in Ceuta, (the tiny Spanish enclave in northern Morocco), through North Africa, much of Europe and as far as southern England. Eventually, he settled in Sicily, where he became an adviser to the Norman King, Roger II.

It was in the Sicilian Court he produced his greatest geographical work: Kitab nuzhat al-mushtaq fi ikhtiraq al-afaq (‘The Pleasure Excursion of One Who is Eager to Traverse the Regions of the World’). Accompanied by a silver planisphere, upon which was depicted a detailed map of the known world, Al-Idrisi’s monumental work was translated into Latin and other European languages in the years after his death. It formed the basis for all European geography of the age.

Harun ar-Rashid

Harun ar-Rashid, the celebrated Abbasid Caliph, is known in the Occident largely because his kingdom was immortalized in A Thousand and One Nights: a collection of tales that will give a European audience a wide variety of Arab folk heroes, including Ali Baba, Aladdin and Sindbad. Under Harun’s Caliphate, folklore and storytelling did indeed flourish, along with science, and the arts.

Harun himself was infamous for touring his kingdom by night in disguise to see first hand what his people wanted, and what they thought of his rule; and whilst his court brimmed with wealth, pomp and grandeur, Harun ar-Rashid himself strived for knowledge. Under his Caliphate, Baghdad reached unsurpassed heights of scientific development.

Al-Ma’mun

The illegitimate son of Harun ar-Rashid, Al-Ma’mun succeeded his half-brother Amin as Caliph of the Abassid dynasty; and it was under his patronage that the very greatest era of Islamic scholarship took place, centred at Beit al-Hikmah – ‘The House of Wisdom’ – which AlMa’mun established at Baghdad in 830 AD. Dedicated to gathering and translating ancient books, the Beit al-Hikmah was staffed by not only Muslims, but by Christians, Hindus, Jews and Buddhists. Its single aim was to make all the knowledge of the world available in the Arab language. With time, these translations ensured that many of the Latin and Greek texts were preserved during the European Dark Ages.

Among the scholars attached to the House of Wisdom was the legendary astronomer and mathematician, Al-Khwarizmi, whose works introduced ‘Arab’ numerals and the science of algebra to Europe.

Saladdin

With a name that translates as ‘Righteousness of the Faith, son of Joseph, son of Job’, Saladdin Yusuf ibn Ayyub was the feared adversary of the Christian Crusaders. In the West, his name is equalled in notoriety only by that of Harun ar-Rashid.

On July 4, 1187, aided by his own military good sense and by a phenomenal lack of it on the part of his enemy, Saladdin trapped and destroyed an exhausted and thirst-crazed army of crusaders at Hattin, near Tiberias in northern Palestine. So great were the losses in the crusader ranks in this one battle, that the Muslims were quickly able to overrun almost all of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, relieving the Franks of their eighty-eight-year hold on the city. In doing so, Saladdin established himself as the Sultan, forming the Ayyubid Dynasty – which encompassed much of modern Egypt, Syria, Yemen and Palestine.

Mir Sayed Ali

Regarded as the greatest Persian miniature painter of the sixteenth century, Mir Sayed Ali was born in Tabriz, and travelled to India at the invitation of the Mughal Emperor, Humayun. Leading the work at the Imperial atelier – first in Kabul, and then in Delhi – he oversaw the production of a series of gigantic paintings in the miniature style. The series is on an epic scale, running to more than fourteen hundred individual illustrations.

Mohammed ar-Razi

A celebrated alchemist and philosopher, as well as becoming the greatest physician of the tenth century, ar-Razi’s work was translated widely into Latin (in which he himself was known as Rhazes), where it formed one of the bases of Western medicine. His two most acclaimed medical works are the Kitab al-Mansuri, which he authored in honour of the ruler Mansur ibn Ishaq; and the Kitab al-hawi, the ‘Comprehensive Book’, which surveyed Greek, Syrian, Indian and early Arabic medicine. In addition to these two voluminous works, ar-Razi wrote dozens of medical treatises, among them an important paper on smallpox and measles which was translated into Latin, Byzantine Greek and many other languages.

Abu al Faraj al-Isbahani

Born into a Shiite family in the tenth century, al-Isbahani claimed descent from the Prophet through Ali. Also a descendant of Marwan II, the last Umayyed Caliph of Syria, al-Isbahani was a celebrated scholar of both literature and music, best known for the Kitab al-Aghani, his monumental ‘Book of Songs’, which provides a wide body of information on early Islamic music and musicians.

Selim I

Nicknamed Yavuz, ‘The Grim’, Sultan Selim I was largely responsible for the way in which the Ottoman Empire rose to become the predominant Muslim dynasty of their time. Although Selim I, his antecedents and descendants, have claimed direct ancestry to the Prophet, most modern scholars dispute their lineage.

Responsible for securing and holding onto one of the most formidable realms the Islamic World has known, the Ottomans were also great patrons the arts, using their phenomenal wealth in the service architecture, calligraphy, metalwork and ceramics.

Visitors to Istanbul’s Topkapi Palace can view a mesmerizing array of objects created for the Sultans. These include a cluster of relics brought from Egypt by Selim I, and amongst them are one of the Prophet’s hairs, one of his teeth, his mantle, and even his footprint.

The Mahadi of Sudan

Born the son of a Sudanese boat-builder who alleged descent from The People of the Cloak, Mohammed Ahmed ibn Abdullah, or the ‘Mahadi’, as he became known, was a messianic figure set on the reformation of Islam, on returning it to the pure Islamic values practised by the Prophet.

In some Muslim circles (most notably those of the Shiite branch) there is a tradition of a last messiah who will appear and lead for seven or eight years in a final golden age, before the end of the world. The most recent such messianic figure to achieve prominence in the Islamic World, the Mahadi of Sudan, called for revolution in 1881 against the Egyptian administration which, at that point, controlled much of Sudan.

Sweeping through Sudan, the Mahadists gained popular support among ordinary people. When they came up against the Egyptian army, which was led by a British colonel, they slaughtered all ten thousand of them and marched on to Khartoum. The famous British commander General Gordon was then dispatched to the Sudanese capital to put an end to the Mahadi’s revolt. Gordon and his troops were butchered, allowing the Mahadi national control. Five months after throwing out all colonial forces, however, the Mahadi suddenly died, and his once-powerful movement disintegrated.

Ibn Saud

As a child, Ibn Saud’s family lost their ancestral lands near Riyad on the Arabian Peninsula, and were forced to flee to Kuwait, impoverished. Ibn Saud yearned to regain his family’s dignity; and, as soon as he reached manhood, made a daring attack on the opposing Rashidi fortress, killing their leader. Over the next years he continued to wage war against the Rashidis. By 1924, he was victorious, having regained not only his ancestral lands, but adding to them the entire central Arabian and the Hejaz regions, which controlled the holy city of Mecca.

A leader of burning charisma, Ibn Saud himself was drawn from the Wahabis, who espouse a puritanical interpretation of Islamic values. Regarded as a leader of rock solid ability, he is viewed as a man whose personal course was charted with great deliberation.

Jan Fishan Khan

The great nineteenth century Afghan warrior and statesman was among the most adulated warlords in Central Asian history. With a name which means ‘He Who Scatters Souls in Battle’, Jan Fishan Khan is largely remembered today for helping hundreds of British women and children to escape the siege of Kabul in 1842: one of the greatest acts of humanity during the days of the British Empire. It was a feat that astonished the British, as much as it enraged the Afghan people.

Hussein of Jordan

King Hussein of Jordan was, arguably, one of the greatest modern adherents to the ways of The People of the Cloak. Born into the Hashemite line, his family had been guardians of Mecca for a thousand years until the establishment of their own kingdom in the 1920s. A spokesman for the voice of moderation within Islam, Hussein spent much of his political career battling against fanatical Islamic forces within his kingdom and the region. In 1958, his first cousin – the Hashemite King Faisal of Iraq – was butchered by Republican soldiers in a coup.

Surviving more than a dozen assassination attempts (including having his eye drops poisoned), Hussein soon became an effective bridgehead between East and West. On his death in 1999, his powers as monarch were transferred to his eldest son, Prince Abdullah, who continues Jordan’s Hashemite line.

Aga Khan IV

Prince Karim Hussain (otherwise known as ‘Aga Khan IV’) is the head of the Ismaili community. Half English by birth and schooled in Switzerland and at Harvard, he is recognized as a member of the jet-set elite: seen on the Côte d’Azur as often as he is in the Islamic World.

But the other side of the Aga Khan’s activities – namely his devotion to charity – is less well publicized. His philanthropic foundations have built schools and hospitals in a range of countries, especially in East Africa and south Asia. The Aga Khan’s current project of establishing a large Islamic museum and centre in London, is seen as aimed at drawing the West’s attention to the moderate side of Islam, and the religion’s rich cultural tradition.

From the earliest days of Islam there has been a grave temptation to invent fraudulent ancestry, linking a weak heritage to the Prophetic line. All kinds of people have been guilty of this practice – most notably an array of powerful Caliphs who have ruled over the Middle East and, more recently, a wide range of Arab leaders.

Harun ar-Rashid is said to have gone to great lengths to ensure that his genealogy reflected not merely the Prophet’s tribe, but his clan. The Ottoman Sultan Selim I was equally ambitious, and sponsored only genealogists who would agree to link his own name to that of Mohammed.

Fraudulent claimants are more common today than ever before, hailing from every rank and corner of the Islamic World, and ranging from destitute beggars to national presidents.

The irony is that bona fide People of the Cloak are brought up to despise misuse of their heritage. For them nothing is so deplorable as bragging about their ancestry, or using it to achieve commercial ends. It is for this reason that a great number of the Prophet’s ancestors refrain from using their hereditary titles, or ever mentioning their lineage at all. The fact that the family condemns the use of such titles for personal gain, makes fraudulent or misguided members all the more visible.

The Sufis are probably the most misunderstood group within the Islamic community, and their brotherhood is interlinked with the lives of The People of the Cloak. Regarded with awe throughout the Islamic World, their mystical fraternity is said to keep alive a secret knowledge. The most celebrated Sufi of all was the Prophet himself. His teachings – together with the codes of behaviour by which he lived – are entwined with the values held sacred by his line.

True Sufis believe that their brotherhood came into being long before Islam, and that consequently they are not bound to that Faith. But at the same time, many leading Sufis – including the most famous, Jalaluddin Rumi – have been People of the Cloak.

Central premises of Sufi life are the principles of ‘selflessness’, introspection and of anonymous charity: the very same ideals held so sacred by the Prophet’s descendants.

Some say that the Sufis were the precursors to Freemasons, others that they take their name from the woollen coats they once wore (suf, meaning ‘wool’ in Arabic), as they shunned silks and finery. But as far as real Sufis are concerned there is no merit in tracing their history, or deliberating on why they are called what they are. Instead, they prefer to spend time bettering themselves and striving towards their own form of inner enlightenment.

With the expansion of science and the arts in the early Islamic era, many Sufis put their minds to solving mathematical problems, while others studied artistic techniques, medicine, architecture, alchemy and other magical sciences. Their symbols can be seen in many disciplines to those who know where to find them. Nowhere is their message so strong as in their literature.

Western society has only in recent years begun to understand the phenomenal clarity of Sufi perception, the psychology of which stresses that the mind must first be ready to receive knowledge. One of the techniques employed to this end is the use of humour, which Sufis believe frees the mind, allowing it to absorb. To comprehend Sufi knowledge one must also be trained to understand a secret language, known to Sufis as ‘the Hidden Tongue’.

Literal translation of Sufi words or encoded terms has caused almost unbelievable confusion in the West, especially in the transmission of this secret lore. Sufi texts, many of them written by The People of the Cloak themselves, are misunderstood because their deeper allegorical meanings – which are clear only to the Sufi fraternity – are taken too literally by outsiders.

Complex methods of encryption used by the Sufi orders come in many forms, the most famous of which is the Abjad system – an alphanumeric substitution cipher – frequently found in Sufi literature and all forms of their art.

It is almost impossible to overemphasize the importance with which ancestry is held in the Middle East and North Africa. As has already been stressed, the Prophet Mohammed’s is regarded as by far the most important lineage of all. Ancestry is an Arab obsession, and virtually everyone can recount the names of their forebears, often dating back a dozen generations or more.

With the focus always on achievement, The People of the Cloak are ruthless with regard to genealogy. At the birth of a male child, they usually only mark its name in pencil. If the son becomes a person of merit and accomplishment, only then will his name be written over in ink. If the individual achieves nothing significant during their life, however, the name will be erased and forgotten.

When introductions are made in the East, mention is frequently made of a person’s famous ancestors or noble bloodlines. For the Westerner, these extended deliberations over ancestral lineage can be perplexing. It is a process which dates back to Arabia’s tribal past, and which is held as important today as it was centuries ago.

Spend a little time in the East, and one begins to sense who is (or claims to be) of noble ancestry. As well as Hashemi and Quraishi, you find the names Fatemi and Hussaini – descendants of Mohammed’s daughter and her son, Hussain. The latter two are especially revered by the Shiite community.

In addition, there are ancestral titles available for members of the Prophet’s family to use, should they wish to do so. These include Sayed, which means ‘Prince’; Sharif, meaning ‘Noble’; and Amir, meaning ‘Commander’.

THIRTY-EIGHT

Queen of the Ku Klux Klan

RACHEL PENDERGRAFT WAS PRESENTED with her first set of hooded robes even before she could walk.

Her earliest memories are of midnight ceremonies, of cross burnings, and oaths sworn in allegiance to the Ku Klux Klan.

Bought up in the very bosom of the Klan, Rachel is widely regarded as the most powerful female member of the KKK in America today. Hailed as a ‘Grand Dragon’, she is the only woman to sit on the Grand Council of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. With her smooth talk, good looks and designer wardrobe, Rachel Pendergraft is the new face of America’s most feared secret society.

The door swings open to room 117 at a run-down motel somewhere in east Tennessee. Rachel Pendergraft stands in the frame, grinning widely, as if she understands the importance of first impressions. She is buxom, blonde, and fair-skinned, with large hazel eyes and thick fuchsia lipgloss. Dressed in a tailored navy suit, with a cream blouse, dangly gold earrings, and sensible shoes, Rachel Pendergraft is the opposite of what you might expect.

The motel room is cluttered with vanity cases, Italian outfits and children’s clothes. Rachel’s daughters stare into a TV screen, giggling at cartoons. Charity, aged three, and Shelby, who is almost two, have long golden locks and alabaster complexions. Like their mother, they are dressed in their Sunday best. At first it seems like any other motel room in America’s Deep South: flowery wallpaper, cable TV, and vinyl-covered chairs. But look again. Hanging in one corner are two sets of white silky robes. Hooded and with face-veils, the full-length gowns bear the black stripes of high rank.

Stacked beside the hooded gowns are other clues: boxes filled with T-shirts and badges, banners and bumper-stickers, bearing the inimitable initials ‘KKK’.

But the Ku Klux Klan has re-thought its dogma, sharpened its image, become eco-friendly, and is learning to play the media game.

Perhaps the biggest change of all is their new focus on welcoming women to the society’s leadership. Gone is the foul-mouthed, grubby Klan of the past; gone too are the calls to take up arms. The Klan has a new message: Merchandising, Media, Massive Power.

The KKK no longer organizes lynchings, it holds coffee mornings instead.

‘When we were kids we used to go to Klan picnics and barbecues,’ explains Rachel, in her southern lilt. ‘Everyone at school knew that I was in the Klan and that my dad was a member. I didn’t have any black friends when I was a kid – but I did know a Mexican girl once. We weren’t close though. She understood that I belonged to the Ku Klux Klan.’

Rachel pauses as Charity squirms up onto her lap.

‘I’m really dedicated to the Klan,’ she says, ‘I’m committed because I care about the future of my children. I love my people because they’re white, I love my kids because they’re white – and I’ll love my grandchildren ’cos they’ll be white.’

‘You must understand,’ she bursts out energetically, ‘we don’t hate black people, we just love white people!’

This sound bite is the all too familiar new face of the Klan.

It rolls off the tongue smooth as silk. No neo-Klan interview would be complete without it.

‘We haven’t changed our attitudes,’ Rachel confides, as she inspects her long, manicured nails, ‘but we’re perfecting our image, making it sharper, and working on our professionalism.’

Rachel Pendergraft and her father, the veteran Klansman Thom Robb, run the largest and oldest Klan group in the United States. Known as the Knights of the KKK, the faction realizes that the only way the society can become a national force again is by changing its spots. The group’s radical programme of change has been greeted with rage from the die-hard Klan fringe. Indeed, the Knights, or ‘4K’ as they’re commonly known, lost about half their members when the reforms began.

Undeterred by the defection of Klansmen, Rachel and her father have encouraged their members to disrobe at public functions, to tone down their anti-ethnic rhetoric, and to embrace women members as well.

Marc Caplan of the Anti Defamation League in New York, feels that although the restructuring might be unpopular in the short term, it’s well thought out.

‘Women were always the weak link in the hate movement,’ he says. ‘The women, who were traditionally forbidden to attend male Klan meetings, held the men back. When, in recent years, they became fully integrated, everything changed. Women have the daunting role of indoctrinating children with Klan belief: and kids are the future of the Ku Klux Klan. The KKK is a brand name like Coca Cola, everyone has heard of it,’ cautions Caplan, ‘but unlike Coke it’s not a registered trademark. Anyone can call themselves “Ku Klux Klan” and that’s very damaging to the KKK’s image.’

Back in Tennessee, Rachel is working on drawing in other bright young women like herself into the society.

‘We have a lot of single women in all age groups,’ she says, ‘some are lawyers, others are businesswomen, students and office workers. Women make up about forty-five per cent of the Klan. When I was single, I converted my husband, Scott, who’s a professional screen printer. He wasn’t a KKK member when we met, just a nice young guy with the same white Christian values as me.’

Rachel and Scott are bringing up their children according to the code of the KKK. But, Rachel insists, she isn’t weaning them on Fascist propaganda.

‘I don’t say “nigger” around the house,’ she says grinning again, ‘I try not to put down non-whites when I’m with the kids. And when I go on a Klan trip I tell Charity and Shelby that I’m going to speak out for other little white children just like them.

‘It’s so important to instill in one’s kids racial pride when they’re as young as possible,’ she continues. ‘White kids in the US have been given a guilt trip for long enough, just ’cos they’re white. We’re developing a Youth Corps programme for American youngsters between twelve and seventeen. This is a special area that we’ve got to concentrate on.’

Rachel and her father recently bought a hundred acres of land in the Ozark Mountains. The site, which is to house the new national office, will accommodate a Youth Klan Training Camp, as well as a KKK two-year leadership school.

‘We’re working on nurturing leaders,’ says Rachel, as Charity plays on her lap with her Barbie doll, dressed in its designer Ku Klux Klan robes. ‘We’re like any business. If you have a message you need well turned out people to appeal to the masses.’

And it’s the masses that Rachel and the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan are working on. Shying away from the militant image of the old days, the Knights have set their sights on national leadership.

‘I think we’re going to see our organization becoming a major political force in this country,’ says Rachel earnestly. ‘The Klan has a sensible, sane approach to the turmoils of America, and women have a central part to play in the new Ku Klux Klan.’

Rachel Pendergraft stops midstream.

She glances at Charity and Shelby as a lump gathers in her throat. Then, ever so softly, she whispers in a faltering voice:

‘I see with all sincerity that the Klan will sit in the White House. I mean it sincerely. I believe a Klansman will lead the nation within the next twenty-five years. I could never see a black man in the White House, he wouldn’t belong there. The White House is white. It was built for a white leader!’

The rise of women in the Klan during the ’twenties is thought to have begun after they were given the power to vote, in 1920. When the Ku Klux Klan was at its height, there were an estimated three million Klanswomen in the United States. Known as Kleagles, the women developed their own Klan groups, which were set quite apart from those of the men. Ironically, when suffrage was granted, women began to focus on their own differences.

The roots of Ku Klux Klan go back to 1865, and the end of the American Civil War. Donning ominous white hooded robes, the original Klansmen hoped that their gowns would give them a supernatural aura. Taking its name from the Greek kuklos, meaning a ‘circle’, the Ku Klux Klan first came to life in a small wooden shack in Pulaski, a remote town in east Tennessee. In homage to the founders of their order, the Knights of the KKK return to Pulaski once a year. They return to honour their ancestors and to preach their reworked message.

On a stormy day in mid-December, Rachel Pendergraft leaves her motel room. Bundling her daughters aboard their rusting olive-green van, she joins the Klan convoy heading for Pulaski and the Homecoming.

Advertisements in the local press announce: Hey Kids! Come see Santa Klaus * Souvenirs * Krafts * Kountry Music * Klowns * Bagpipers * Have your picture taken with a robed Klansman.

As the rain pours down, the convoy reaches the centre of Pulaski. Ashamed of the town’s sordid legacy, the people of Pulaski have stayed at home. The mayor has no power to refuse the Klan its right to demonstrate.

‘Until a couple of years ago,’ he says wearily, ‘they used to yell “Nigger Out! Nigger Out!” and do Nazi salutes as they marched. They wanted to change the street names to things like “Ku Klux Klan Boulevard” and “KKK Hill”. But worst of all is hearing people from other communities referring to Pulaski as “The Klantown”.’

Once at the main square, Rachel and her associates set up stalls and Ku Klux Klan bunting. As Klansmen appear from the woodwork, the new face of the Klan is put on view. Merchandising and public donations form the basis of the Klan’s funds.

‘We have hot-dogs, nachos, T-shirts and baseball caps,’ says Rachel, unloading a stack of brown boxes. The merchandise is aimed to present the friendly face of the new Klan.

‘Klan Kitsch’, as it’s known by non-Klansmen, comprises of KKK ball-point pens, badges which read ‘Klan Kids Kare’; T-shirts with slogans such as ‘Racial Purity is America’s Security’; KKK Barbie dolls, and ceramic hooded Klansmen with eyes that glow red in the dark.

The current issue of The White Patriot newspaper, a monthly publication written and edited by Rachel Pendergraft, is passed around. Inside, along with articles telling Klansmen not to kill ‘Negroes’ or to pedal drugs, is a section enticing you to become ‘a friend of the Knights of the KKK’. For this, you have to remit a small fee and sign a form declaring ‘I am an Aryan and not of racially-mixed descent. I am not married to a non-white, nor do I date non-whites’.

On the right side of the square, a batch of hot-dogs are being cooked up by a grey-haired Klanswomen. Like many present, she’s dressed in the new politically-correct uniform of the Klan: black tie and white shirt, its front peppered with badges. She sports a KKK baseball cap as well, embroidered with a robed klanswoman and the slogan ‘girls in the hood’.

Rachel turns on a recording of the German Nazi Youth song Tomorrow Belongs to Me. Her smile turns to a look of disappointment as her father whispers something in her ear. Unfortunately, he tells her, the Klan bagpiper won’t be attending, on account of the fact he lost a finger in a fight the night before.

Standing over a stall selling hooded KKK Barbie dolls is Anastasia Robb, Rachel’s sister-in-law.

‘I made the Barbie robes myself,’ she winces. Aged just nineteen, Anastasia, who has been married to Rachel’s brother for a year, is a new recruit and already a diehard Klanswoman.

‘The Klan’s the main part of my life now,’ she says resolutely, ‘I’ve never had any close minority friends. I always knew that I wanted to marry an Aryan man and have Aryan children. When I became a member of the Klan my family was apprehensive at first. They had mixed feelings. Although they’re not members, they’re supportive.’

Anastasia, an intelligent, blonde all-American girl, is glad she joined the Klan when she did.

‘Women are important members of the KKK,’ she explains, ‘as the Klan becomes more liberal it’s attracting more and more women who see its message as the future they want for their children.

‘It’s important for kids to be involved. They should come to rallies. The media steers them in the wrong direction and gives them stereotypes. Children come here and learn what the Klan is all about. They learn about our white Christian heritage.’

Rank and file members of the Klan continue to arrive from across the country, pouring into Pulaski’s main square. Although attendance is hindered by the terrible weather, dozens have travelled thousands of miles to come home to the birthplace of the KKK. Shelley Watts, fifteen, whose family has made the three-day drive from Utah, has come with her parents and five sisters.

‘We’re Mormons,’ she says. ‘The Mormon Church doesn’t like us being members of the Klan, but the KKK is a very important part of our family. I want to stick up for the white race, and when I have children I’ll bring them up to be members of the Ku Klux Klan.’

As the Klan’s Homecoming gets underway, anti-Klan groups monitor the proceedings from a distance. Pat Kelly of Neighbours Network looks on through binoculars from the far end of the square.

‘Much of the hard day to day work is done by the women’, he says, ‘they tend to get on with running the organization while the men sit about talking. But don’t be deceived, the women don’t have an equal voice with the men. The Klan claims that it puts women on a pedestal, but that’s far from the truth. What we’re seeing increasingly is the attitude that “my skin colour is my nation”. This may be one of the new “female” effects on the Klan. We’re also seeing a severe drop in the average age of a Klan member: most are in their late teens or early twenties.’

Back at the T-shirt stall, Cheri, a middle-aged lady from New Orleans, is trying to find a KKK sweatshirt in her size. ‘I’m the new kid on the block,’ she says through a southern drawl. ‘Although I always wanted to join up, I’ve never had the courage to become a member until now. I’m super-patriotic: I care what happens to America! I saw a Klan advertisement on cable TV. Now I’m a member and I’m going to recruit all my friends!’

Thom Robb, Rachel’s father, saunters about ensuring that everyone is buying enough hot-dogs. Short and rather mousey, in a dark suit and shabby raincoat, he has struggled hard to bring the Ku Klux Klan up to date. In the past he called for the execution of gays and the shooting of illegal immigrants, but now, like his daughter, he’s careful to be PC.

Robb rose to power when his predecessor was thrown in jail for trying to overthrow the government of Dominica. As leader of the Knights, he ditched the designation ‘Imperial Wizard’, preferring ‘National Director’, and has striven to clamber aboard the political bandwagon.

‘We de-robed on our marches,’ he explains in his articulate manner, ‘because we wanted to identify with the American voters. We still wear robes at our private cross lightings because they’re part of tradition, in the same way that a judge wears a powdered wig to court.

‘My two sons and Rachel are very much involved in the Klan,’ he says. ‘Women have an important part to play in the KKK. We all have the same thing to lose – our white heritage. Remember that the majority of American voters are women. We must therefore appeal to women and appoint them to high levels of leadership.’

The de-robing of Klansmen was seen by KKK-watchers as an insane move. An undercover police officer, ensuring orderly behaviour, notes that the robes were always popular with the Klansmen.

‘Once you go public you lose the allure,’ he says, ‘you forfeit the mystique, and lose the people who are attracted by that. Stephen King said that you should never open the closet door all the way, or you’ll see the zipper up the monster’s back.’

When the hot-dogs are all gone, the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan prepare to march around Pulaski. Rachel gathers the children together, hands out KKK banners, and helps arrange the Klansmen ten feet apart. Orders are given that they are to march in silence. There are not be no racist slogans.

In absolute silence, the men, women, and children of the Klan march around the deserted streets of Pulaski. Some of the young generation clutch Klan flags and others balloons. At the head of the entourage is Rachel Pendergraft.

Walking on her right is the KKK Santa Klaus.

As the Klan marchers reach the house where their organization was born, they pause. Rachel’s face swiftly loses its characteristic, yet often forced, smile. With cold eyes, and an expression that could break glass, she raises her arm in a Nazi salute.

Beside her, Santa Klaus does the same.

THIRTY-NINE

Remembering Sir Wilfred

THE FIRST TIME I MET Sir Wilfred Thesiger, he was sitting in the shade of his porch in Kenya’s remote Samburuland, drinking piping hot tea.

The porch was attached to a shack, which looked as though the great English explorer had built it himself. It clung like a limpet to the side of the hill. The temperature was touching forty-five degrees and Thesiger was wearing a pair of thick twill trousers and a tweed jacket with tatty elbow-patches and a tear down one side. He was staring out dreamily at the zebras slumped under the thorn trees down in the valley below.

The noise of my final ascent up over the crags, panting and wheezing, caused him to turn slowly and to peer down. Narrowing his eyes, he shaded a wrinkled hand to his brow, and called out, ‘You’re fussing like an old woman, what’s wrong with you?!’

My first visit to Thesiger’s home began a friendship that lasted until the explorer’s death at ninety-three. It was a friendship of mentor and pupil, one that I value higher than any other of my life. Almost twenty-five years have passed since the afternoon I turned up in the Kenyan desert, and first set eyes on him, sitting there in tweeds. I was nineteen and was in need of raw encouragement, waiting for the order to seek out a path of my own

Thesiger was born a centenary ago, his life reflecting the stark hardship of the desert world in which he made his home. He is remembered as one who chronicled regions of Africa and the Middle East that hadn’t changed in centuries, documenting them in the nick of time – before they were reshaped forever. And he is remembered as an icon, the kind of man who endured the unendurable without any fuss, and refused to tow a politically correct line.

These days he’s regarded as an almost mythical character, someone unapproachable… the kind of lofty figure who’s cast in bronze and put on a plinth somewhere posh.

But, for me, Sir Wilfred was never aloof or distant in any way.

He was warm and caring, with a shockingly mischievous sense of humour, and the ability to inspire – not in a limp way, but deep down to the marrow of your bones.

His was inspiration right out of the Boy’s Own Annual.

As he told me again and again over the years, by my age he had already been invited to the coronation of Emperor Haile Selassie of Abyssinia. After the pomp and grandeur of it all, he set off to hunt lion in the land of the Dannakil, a tribe who wore the testicles of their slain victims around their necks. He was still little more than a schoolboy himself. But death-dicing travels among the Dannakil in the Afar desert, paved the way for a life of exploration, a life unbounded by the expectations of others.

After Eton, Thesiger went up to Oxford. It was there that he won a Blue in boxing, and acquired the profile that was in many ways to become his trademark. It was best described in Eric Newby’s classic travel narrative, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush: ‘…and Thesiger himself, a great, long-striding crag of a man, with an outcrop for a nose and bushy eyebrows, forty-five years old and as hard as nails…’ That meeting between the two extremes of English traveller was in the wilds of Afghanistan – yet it is for his travels in Arabia that Wilfred Thesiger is best known.

Following active service with the fledgling SAS during World War II, he spent more than five years with the nomadic Bedouin of the Arabian peninsular. He once told me that, from the first moment, he decided the only way to live with the Bedu was to do so without any compromise. He would live as they did, enduring levels of harshness that have become the thing of legend.

Along with them he twice crossed Rub al Kali, the fabled Empty Quarter, developing bonds of kinship that were far more important than anything else. Indeed, he would say that without his companions, a desert crossing would have been a meaningless penance. It was for the kinship alone that he travelled.

As a travel writer, I know too well the pressure which burdens one of getting a commission, the cold hard cash that will pay for the next great journey. But the wonderful thing about Thesiger’s writing is that it came about years later, almost as an after-thought. He never intended to write about the years with the Bedouin, and only did so when his mother and the respected publisher, Mark Longman, begged him to do so. The critically acclaimed Arabian Sands followed, and was first published in 1959. It established Thesiger as one of a kind – the last of the Victorian gentlemen-explorers.

After Arabia, Sir Wilfred travelled to the marshes of southern Iraq. The lure was at first the prospect of a little duck shooting. He stayed in the marshes for years, returning once in a while to his mother’s flat in Chelsea’s Tite Street, where Oscar Wilde had once made his home. Again, only after leaving the marshes, and the life he so loved there among the labyrinthine waterways, he published The Marsh Arabs, in 1964.

As one who had known the rugged beauty of Arabia, and traditions that had been moulded by the desert terrain, Thesiger was understandably critical of the change that seemed to follow on his coattails. No long conversation with him would ever be complete without periods of silence, in which he was transported back to his youth – to the world of the Dannakil, the Bedouin, and the Marsh Arabs. In the same way, no cup of tea in his company was quite complete without him snarling at the ‘infernal combustion engine’, or exclaiming that cars and aeroplanes were robbing the world of all diversity.

It wasn’t only motorized vehicles of which Thesiger disapproved. He despised anything mechanical. Towards the end of his life, he returned to England to live at the top-floor flat on Chelsea’s Tite Street that his mother had bought during the Blitz. I used to go over a great deal, thrilled that I no longer had to traipse up to the shack in Samburuland to see him.

One summer afternoon we were sitting in silence over mugs of weak tea. Sir Wilfred was ninety, and had become a great deal more frail. He enjoyed just sitting in his old armchair, in the company of another. I always felt it were as if we were squatting around a campfire in the desert, the two of us lost in our thoughts.

Something stirred me to break the silence.

I spat out an idea that I hadn’t thought through very well – said I was thinking of cycling from London down to Cape Town.

Thesiger looked up, squinted over at me hard, wiped his eyebrows away from his eyes. ‘Sounds like nothing but a stunt,’ he said coldly. I choked out an explanation, insisting that it was all about meeting people along the way. The great explorer winced, sipped his tea pensively. Then he seemed to rise up out of the chair, his lanky form looming over me like an executioner. ‘On a bicycle you won’t meet anyone or see anything at all!’ he barked. ‘You’ll be going too fast! If I were you, I would walk it.’

I breathed in deep, and championed the idea. ‘Walking, yes, I’ll walk it,’ I said nervously. Thesiger seemed pleased. He almost smiled. I asked if he had any advice, advice for walking. Sir Wilfred touched a long index finger to his lips and sunk back into his chair,

‘Get yourself a good pair of army boots,’ he said.

FORTY

Romantic Travel

IF MOROCCO IS A LAND of romance, then its heart is surely the remote Berber village of Imilchil, without doubt the most romantic place I have ever been.

Nestled in the Atlas, it lies beyond the Gorge of Ziz, in a wild and unforgiving frontier of narrow passes and sweeping mountain vistas.

Once each year, in September, a festival is held in which the young are permitted to choose a spouse for themselves. In a realm usually confined by tribal tradition, the would-be brides and grooms are free to pick whomever they wish to marry.

Dressed in roughly woven striped black robes, jangling silver amulets and amber beads heavy around their necks, the girls stream down from their villages. There’s a sense of frivolity, but one tempered with solemn apprehension, as they approach the doorway to a new life.

Reaching the village square, they catch first sight of the grooms. All of them are dressed in white woollen robes, their heads bound tight with woven red turbans, their eyes darkened with antimony.

The betrothal festival owes its existence to a legend, itself a blend of love and tragedy, a kind of Moroccan Romeo and Juliet. The story goes that, forbidden to marry, a couple who hailed from feuding tribes, drowned themselves in a pair of crystal clear lakes called Isli and Tislit. (One version of the tale says the lakes in which they drowned were made from their tears). So horrified were the local people at the loss, that they commenced the annual festival.

No one is quite sure when the tradition began, but everyone will tell you that the marriages which follow betrothal there are blessed in an almost magical way.

The first time I visited Imilchil almost twenty years ago, I met a young couple, Hicham and Hasna. They had met, fallen in love, and been betrothed, all on the same morning. They were glowing, their cheeks flushed with expectation and new love.

Last year, when I visited Imilchil again, I tracked down the pair. They look a little older now. Hicham’s hair had thinned and his face was lined from a life outdoors tending his goats; and Hasna looked fatigued. But then she had given birth to six children, four of them boys.

As we sat in the darkness of their home, a wooden shack nestled in a copse of poplar trees, I asked them how the years had been.

Hicham looked across at Hasna, and smiled.

‘On that day all those years ago,’ he said, ‘I became the happiest man in all the world. And each day since has been conjured from sheer joy.’ He glanced at the floor. ‘Do you want to know our secret?’ he asked me bashfully. I nodded. Hicham touched a hand to his heart. ‘To always remember the love of the first moment, the tingling feeling, the first time it touches you, and the first moment your hands touched.’

A few days after leaving Hicham and Hasna at their home in Imilchil, I reached my own home overlooking the Atlantic, in Casablanca. As I stepped in the door, my two little children, Ariane and Timur, ran up and threw their arms around my neck. They both asked where I’d been. I told them about the winding mountain roads, the Berber villages, and the Gorge of Ziz. ‘And what did you bring?’ they asked both at once, straining to look sheepishly at the ground.

‘I brought you a secret.’

‘What is it, Baba?’

‘Always to remember the feeling of tingling love,’ I said.

FORTY-ONE

The Royal Mansour, Marrakech

IN MOROCCO, REAL NEWS isn’t spread through the papers, but on whispers in the wind.

That was how I first learned of the Royal Mansour, the latest in top-notch grandeur on the Marrakech hospitality scene.

Our maid had heard from her brother, and he from his wife’s cousin’s friend, that a palace was being constructed, one that would put shame to almost anything else ever created by Moroccan artisanal hands. Years passed, and I quite forgot hearing of the rumour. Then, one morning recently the whisper came again:

‘It’s opened,’ said a low voice.

‘What has?’

‘A palace fit for a king.’

In a city that’s hemorrhaging hotels, the Royal Mansour is set apart by its sheer decadence. Slipping in through the gates, set into the ancient honey-coloured city walls, is like lifting the veil on a fantasy, one that’s usually off limits to mere mortals.

The first thing that hits you is the scent of jasmine piercing the evening air. It’s as overpowering as the silence. A handful of carefully positioned staff glide up without making any noise at all. They greet you in whispers, and offer the refreshment served in the desert to travellers – succulent dates and cool buttermilk. Then, only when you are ready, they lead you to your quarters, through a labyrinth of jaw-dropping opulence.

Wherever you look, every inch of every surface is adorned with exquisite workmanship and textures – acres of intricate zellij mosaics, hand-sculpted plasterwork, cedar ceilings, and geometric painted wood. The furnishings are equally lavish, including fabulous Suzani embroideries from Bokhara, suede cushions and throws, and miles and miles of silk.

At the heart of the hotel is a central courtyard open to the sky. Hanging like an ivory medallion above, is the full moon; fabulous bronze lamps suspended below, each one in itself a true work of art. All around there are Andalucian cabinets crafted in Cordoba, lovely mosaic and marble fountains, and Damascene banquettes, inlaid with fragments of mother of pearl. And the entire fantasy is bathed in the kind of hush that simply doesn’t exist elsewhere in Marrakech.

This being the Royal Mansour, there’s no clumsy bell-hop lumbering ahead with your luggage. Rather, the hotel’s impeccable manager escorts you himself to your quarters, making equally impeccable small-talk as he goes. Everyone you pass greets you by name, and exudes a warmth, as though they are genuinely thrilled to meet you. It is the feeling of real celebrity, as if you’re Mick Jagger and that, as soon as your back is turned, the staff rush off and call their friends to boast that they’ve seen you in the flesh.

Desperately trying to suppress all delusions of grandeur, you follow the manager into an Andalucian courtyard. It’s filled with the sound of trickling water and with fragrant trees, all of them laden with perfectly ripe fruit – pomegranates, oranges and mouth-watering dates. And, eventually, you arrive at a medina, a mirror of the old city in miniature.

Instead of rooms or suites, you are taken to your very own riad,a three-storey building set around a colonnaded courtyard. As you approach, the door opens magically inward. A manservant steps silently from the shadows. Coutured in flowing robes, with a turban crowning his head, he asks permission to serve you vintage Champagne. Oh, the hardship of making such difficult decisions.

Miraculously, your luggage has already arrived, and the genie-like steward, has unpacked. Whatever your wish, he’s already anticipated it, as if trained in mind-reading as well in hospitality. But the most extraordinary thing of all is how he, and everyone else, comes and goes invisibly, without ever stepping in or out through the door.

The Royal Mansour is a pleasure dome of magic, but none of the wizardry is more amazing than the great secret that makes its illusionary realm possible. For, beneath the entire property – laid out over eight acres – is a vast maze of secret tunnels, worthy of a James Bond villain’s den. A city in itself, it houses vast kitchens and warehouses, laundries and staff quarters. And, plying the wide subterranean passages, is a fleet of brand new golf carts.

Morocco is a land of tradition, and one where the tradition of royal patronage dies hard. The king is almost expected to champion projects that will keep the ancient crafts and traditions alive. In the ’nineties, the present monarch’s father, Hassan II, constructed a colossal mosque in Casablanca. Bearing his own name, it stands at the western edge of the Islamic world. Having reigned for a decade, King Mohammed VI, conceived the Royal Mansour himself, and directly oversaw every detail of the project.

Built from scratch in less than four years, twelve hundred moualems, master craftsmen, were called upon to do the best work of their lives. For each of them the challenge was all the greater because they were working directly for their king. And it’s this point which has ensured that the Royal Mansour isn’t just another plush address to stay in Marrakech, Morocco’s ultra chic desert retreat.

‘We have strived to create a landmark of Moroccan culture,’ says sales manager Soufiane Berrada, ‘through architecture, hospitality, cuisine and art, all of it in one place.’ Leading me on a tour, he points out details hidden from view, like the high tech air cushion heating system that allows the central courtyard to be open to the sky even in winter.

In the cigar lounge he shows me a cabinet of rare Cognacs, including an unopened bottle of 1888 Armagnac Laubade. On the wall above it, hangs a fabulously intricate bronze appliqué frieze, crafted by the British-born Moroccan artist, now so celebrated that he goes by his first name alone – Yahya.

We step through to the library. As I wonder aloud why there’s a giant telescope in the middle of the room, the manager presses a button set into the marquetry, and the cedarwood roof slides silently away.

Of the fifty-three riads, arranged in clusters, as they are in the actual Marrakech medina, most are two-and three-bedroom, with private salons, dining rooms, swimming pools, kitchens and roof-top terraces, from which you can glimpse the snow-clad Atlas mountains. There’s a Riad d’Honneur as well, a palace in its own right, with two pools, gardens, private spa and underground cinema. Former French President Jacques Chirac and his wife were in residence during my stay, the riad guarded by dozens of swarthy men in black.

After two days and nights of the high life, I found myself back on the street, the mayhem of Marrakchi traffic frothing all around. I felt like Maruf the Cobbler from A Thousand and One Nights, whose desert palace had appeared by magic, before vanishing in the blink of an eye.

As I crossed the street to get a bus, I smiled to myself. After all, what would luxury be if it were not tempered by a little hardship from time to time?

FORTY-TWO

Subcontinent of Miracles

THE AUDIENCE WAS QUAKING WITH FEAR.

The man standing before them was astounding, even by Indian standards. Stained in greasy black paint, his body adorned with mysterious symbols, his hair was matted with dirt and his eyes fixed in a maniacal stare. He had four arms, a vile protruding tongue, a golden filigree crown on his head, and a garland fashioned from human skulls hanging over his chest. In one hand was a cleaver dripping with blood, and in another was clenched the head of a butchered enemy.

The crowd of three hundred Bengali villagers edged backwards as the demonic figure addressed them. But, as I soon realized, their apprehension resulted not from fear, but from expectation.

For the deity was about to perform a miracle.

Whispering cryptic incantations, the avatar – a devotee of Hinduism’s bloodiest goddess, Kali – rubbed a thumb and forefinger together six times. Moments later, a plume of smoke was spiralling up from his fist. The villagers glanced at each other with wonder.

Then the godman performed his second feat.

Stepping over to an urn of boiling oil, he plunged one of his four arms into the pot. There was no time for applause. Wasting no time, the sadhu gargled a mouthful of secret liquid from a clay cup, pulled a red-hot poker from his ceremonial fire, and stuck it into his mouth. As before, he seemed oblivious to the pain and, as before, the throng of villagers clamoured with delight.

Traipse through the Indian countryside for long enough and you’re sure to cross paths with an avatar, like the Kali deity, who was weaving his magic in a small village two hours west of Calcutta.

Like him, thousands of others are making a good living as mystical advisers, healers, resolvers of disputes, dispensers of knowledge and as entertainers, all rolled into one. India’s illusion business, booming as never before, hasn’t enough godmen to go round. From Assam to Mumbai there are vacancies for anyone who can put on a good solid miracle performance. The main, if unlikely, reason for the sharp growth of the profession is Harry Houdini.

All but extinct in the West, Houdini’s magic is alive and thriving across India. In the greatest cities and smallest villages alike, his magical feats are performed daily as miracles by godmen, India’s mortal incarnations of the divine. Remembering Houdini only for his straitjacket and handcuff routines, we tend to forget he was the pioneer of modern stage magic as well as escapology.

Houdini’s vast repertoire of magic has migrated east and taken root in India. The explanation lies in the magician’s chest of formidable ingredients. For the majority of Houdini’s magic – and that of many other nineteenth-century illusionists – was based on hazardous chemicals, the likes of which are hard to come by in our safety-conscious society.

Ask at a British pharmacy for ferric chloride, ammonium salicylate or mercuric nitrate, and you risk being reported to the police. But visit the smallest Indian bazaar – far from the ‘nanny’ states of the West, and you can snap up oversized tubs of even the most noxious compounds at bargain basement prices. The result: godmen and avatars, sages and sadhus are drinking nitric acid, sucking red-hot pokers, eating glass, spitting fire and even levitating.

The four-armed, cleaver-wielding godman in West Bengal might have impressed Houdini with his dexterity and showmanship, if not with his originality. For each of the supposed miracles was developed by the great American maestro himself.

The sadhu’s fingers must have been treated with a solution of yellow phosphorus and carbon disulphide, which smokes on friction. And a cup of lime juice had doubtless been poured into the urn of oil. The citric juice sinks to the bottom and foams up at a low temperature, as if the oil is bubbling. As for the red-hot poker, the Kali godman had surely swilled his mouth with liquid storax, which absorbs the fiery poker’s heat.

Far from taking pleasure in the new popularity of his tricks, Houdini must surely be spinning in his grave. Whereas he always claimed that he was performing nothing more than skilful feats of illusion, India’s godmen are passing off their tricks as genuine miracles.

In his latter years, Houdini tried to debunk those whom he said pretended to have supernatural powers. He devoted an entire book to exposing his near-namesake and former hero, Robert Houdin.

But not all the miraculous feats one comes across in India can be attributed to Houdin. Some favourites are far older. Many sadhus know how to turn water into wine, and how to transform a rod into a snake.

Indeed, the ‘rod to snake’ illusion is said to be the oldest of all.

It was witnessed by Aaron at the court of the Egyptian pharaohs (Exodus vii, 10 –12). The snake is cooled, then pulled straight between outstretched hands. The magician’s thumb and index finger are clamped onto the reptile’s head. Fearing that a gigantic predator has caught hold of it, the snake goes rigid – like a rod. Only when it is cast to the floor does it revive and slither away.

Other feats were developed more recently, most notably by Uri Geller. Indian swamis and godmen have, it seems, just learned how to read sealed envelopes and to bend spoons with mind power.

As India’s brotherhood of godmen swell in number as never before, a small band of devoted men and women have vowed to expose them through public humiliation. Touring the country in a battered old van, they demonstrate how the tricks are done.

Dipak Ghosh is a leading member of India’s Rationalist Movement. He has seen it all and is keen to tell how Jesus fed the five thousand, how a godman levitates, and how Uri Geller bends spoons.

‘You cannot underestimate these fraudsters,’ he says. ‘They’re hoodwinking people of their life savings. It’s nothing more than common theft. Some are certainly excellent stage magicians, but they have no miraculous powers. With a few rupees they can purchase supplies of chemicals that will last them for months. They’re becoming more devious every week. Worst of all is that new deceptions are being thought up all the time.’

Mr. Ghosh may have declared all-out war on the avatars, but it appears that he’s fighting an uphill battle. India is a land where belief in miracles and the supernatural is a way of life.

Not long ago, I met a man in the small town of Solapur, known as ‘Goadbaba’ to his friends – which means ‘Mr. Sweet’ in Marathi.

Goadbaba is one of a new breed of illusionists.

He shook my hand and asked me to lick it. To my surprise, my palm tasted sweet. He touched a chair and a spoon. I licked them. Both tasted very sweet indeed. Goadbaba said that he had mysterious magical powers. He asked me to take him to London so that he could gain an entry into the Guinness Book of Records.

Some time after our meeting I learned the secret of the godman’s Midas touch magic. It was Sweet ’n Lo, a sachet of which he had rubbed onto his hands.

FORTY-THREE

Swallowing Live Fish

INDIA IS A LAND OF MIRACLES.

Godmen levitate or walk on water; oracles speak from mountainsides; effigies of elephant gods have even been known to spontaneously drink milk. But by far the greatest Indian miracle of all is revealed on a single day each year, a few hours before the first monsoon downpour.

Every June, at the first sighting of the Mrigasira Karthe star, about half a million people converge in a tiny whitewashed house in the old city of Hyderabad. They travel there from all corners of India. Frenzied, wheezing, and weary after the journey, they queue up to swallow live fish.

What’s more, most make the trip three years in a row. Animal rights groups are apoplectic: but their pleas fall on deaf ears. For in Hyderabad swallowing a live fish is part of a mysterious ‘miracle cure’ – for asthma.

The free miracle remedy is handed out by the Gowds, a modest, impecunious family whose home is embedded in the labyrinth of narrow lanes and back streets that make up Hyderabad’s old city. The current generation is continuing a tradition that began more than a century and a half ago.

With Indian cities as polluted as any others in the developing world, asthma is an ever more menacing problem. Spend a few days in Old Delhi, Calcutta or Mumbai, and you can find your chest tightening as if crushed by rogue elephants. Every year tens of thousands of Indians are diagnosed as asthmatics, the majority of them are children.

And, while the local pharmaceutical industry offers cost-price drugs for all, many are suspicious of the temporary relief that Western medicines provide. Why use an expensive inhaler all the time when a live fish can be swallowed for a permanent cure? It’s this straightforward thinking that brings asthmatics flocking in droves to the Gowds’ two-room residence.

Rather than being appalled by the unorthodox treatment, Indian asthmatics can’t seem to get enough of it. In the first week of June, special trains, buses and flights are laid on to ferry people to Hyderabad from the farthest reaches of India. Many stake their life savings to make the journey. Others bring their entire families for the expedition of a lifetime.

It has become a pilgrimage.

In a rare show of solidarity, Muslims, Buddhists, Jains, and Hindus from every caste, gather with their belongings. By the eve of monsoon, every hotel and guest house is full to bursting. Mosques and temples, wayside cafés, bus depots and railway stations are cluttered with asthmatics from far away.

Hyperventilating and bent double after the arduous journey, they spill onto the streets, waiting expectantly for the miracle. As word of the cure’s efficacy spreads, politicians hurry to endorse the event, and businessmen volunteer to fund it.

Each patient clutches a transparent water-filled plastic bag. Like children with goldfish home from the fair, they hold them up to the light. The bag contains a speckled black murrel fish, an oily cousin of the sardine.

The fish vary in size: anything from three to six inches. The longer the better. Their beady eyes blinking innocuously, they swim about in the limited confines of the plastic bag. They may be wondering what’s going on. But a murrel fish would have a hard time imagining the precise details of its fate.

When they get to the front of the queue each asthma sufferer hands over their plastic bag to a member of the Gowd family. First, the fish is removed from the bag. Then its miniature jaws are prized apart. A magical and foul-smelling yellow paste is stuffed into its mouth. And, as the patient sticks out his tongue, the fish, replete with ointment, is thrust down his throat.

There are less than twelve hours to go, for the star of Mrigasira Karthe will be in alignment at eight a.m.

Harinath Gowd, second eldest of the five brothers, sits in the tiny courtyard of the family home and casts an uneasy eye at the main entrance. The battered blue door bends inwards as the crowd presses against the other side. The old city’s narrow streets are clogged with asthmatics for miles around. Most arrived days ago, for fear of missing the astrological timing of the event.

Harinath attends to last-minute arrangements. Two hundred kilos of the magical paste have been prepared, concocted according to a secret Ayurvedic recipe. Pujas, religious ceremonies, carry on around the clock to appease malevolent forces. The air, which is thick with incense, only aggravates the asthmatics’ difficulties. Police are briefed in case of rioting.

The astrological tables are double-checked.

Rubbing his greying beard anxiously, Harinath Gowd reinforces the tattered door with a plank of wood.

‘Every year more and more people turn up,’ he declares. ‘See how popular is this miracle of miracles.’

‘It all started with my great-great-grandfather,’ says Harinath. ‘He was a very generous man. He was known throughout Hyderabad for his good deeds. During the monsoon of 1845 he saw a sadhu, a holy man, sitting in the pouring rain. The mystic was cold, hungry and abandoned by the world. So, my ancestor, Veerana Gowd, brought him here, into this house. He fed him and nursed him back to health. Weeks passed. Then, just before the sadhu was about to go on his way, he revealed the fish miracle to my forefather.’

Harinath pauses to recite a string of orders to his son.

‘The holy man,’ he continues, ‘said that from henceforth the well in the courtyard would be full of magical water. And that it was to be used in making a special paste which was to be put into the mouth of a living murrel fish. The water, the ingredients of the paste, and the astrological timing together form the magic of the miracle. The sadhu said that my family was to serve a free cure for asthma on the first day of the monsoon. But if any fee was charged for the remedy, it would have no effect. Charge money, and the magic would be broken. That was one hundred and fifty-two years ago. True to our word, my family has never charged for the cure.’

Initially, word of the miracle antidote was slow to spread. In the first few years, asthmatics from the back streets adjacent to the Gowds’ house turned up. But, as the years passed, more and more people heard of the miracle. And, as more tried it, word spread faster and further. Two years ago about a quarter of a million asthmatics ventured to the Gowds’ house to be cured. This year, an estimated five hundred and thirty thousand arrived.

In any other country, if half a million patients came to your house appealing for a miracle, the authorities would demand forms to be filled and permits to be signed. But in India, where miracle remedies are a way of life, things are more straightforward.

Watching a Hindi movie on television the night before, the five Gowd brothers seemed remarkably relaxed. Didn’t it bother them that half a million asthmatics were pounding on their door? Or that the responsibility of stuffing several tons of live oily fish down throats would prove too difficult?

Shivram Gowd, the eldest of the brothers, stretches out to turn up the TV’s volume, to drown out the frenzied groans of asthmatics out in the street.

‘Of course we’re not worried,’ he says. ‘Remember, this isn’t a feeble allopathic medicine – but a miracle cure.’

The sheer number of patients demanding the unconventional prescription has meant that, in recent years, the Gowds have had to take on extra volunteers. More than five hundred of them, speaking every major Indian language and dialect, help to make sure that things go smoothly. Hundreds more hand out free drinking water and custard creams, donated by local businesses and charities. And, whereas sufferers were all once treated in the Gowds’ ancestral home, special stalls are now erected in neighbouring streets to administer the physic to the maximum number over the twenty-four hour period.

The sadhu’s directions ensured that the Gowds make no profit from their miracle cure. But, it is obvious that they enjoy being the centre of attention for one day a year.

‘We are proud to help people in this way,’ intones Shivram Gowd warmly, ‘for the rest of the year we are humble toddy tappers.’

Would he prefer that the miracle cure be handed out on more than one day a year? Shivram Gowd pauses to take in the cries of the hopeful outside. Then rolls his eyes. ‘No, no,’ he whispers, ‘one day a year is quite sufficient.’

All night, mantras are repeated over the great basins of mysterious yellow paste. Then, as dawn rises over the Mughal city of Hyderabad, a prolonged ritual begins in the confined courtyard of the Gowd ancestral home. The five brothers sit on a raised platform surrounded by their families, as their forefathers did before them. Dressed in sacred saffron robes, they bless the tubs of oily ointment. Out in the maze of winding lanes, the asthmatics and their families jostle about with restless anticipation. The miracle is near.

At the front of the queue is Krishna Punji, an aged farmer from Orissa. He pokes a wrinkled finger into a small plastic bag to check that the murrel fish, which he bought from a vendor the night before, is still alive.

‘I’ve been here six weeks,’ he announces feebly, ‘I wasn’t sure when the miracle was to be held. So I came a bit early. You see, I’ve got very bad asthma.’ He lets out a deafening wheeze to prove his point.

At the stroke of eight, Harinath Gowd stuffs a pellet of the yellow paste into the waiting mouth of a murrel fish, and thrusts it down his brother Shivram’s throat. The Gowds always start by taking the medicine themselves.

They swear by it.

Moments later, the battered doors of their home are pulled inward and the great tidal wave of sufferers surges into the courtyard. At its crest is Krishna Punji. He hands over his fish, opens his toothless mouth as wide as he can and, before he knows it, the three-inch speckled charcoal murrel fish is swimming towards his stomach.

The miracle cure has begun.

Crushed together, and filling every inch of the old city, the legions of patients squirm forward. Many bought their fish the night before. For those who didn’t, hundreds of murrel fish dealers sprout up from nowhere. Every street urchin and miscreant are suddenly crying out ‘Machhi! Machhi!’, ‘Fish! Fish!’ The competition between sellers, who get their stocks from the Department of Fisheries, keeps the prices down. A standard-sized murrel (three to six inches) costs three rupees. The emphasis is very much on large. Everyone believes that the larger the fish, the better it will clean out the throat as it goes down.

‘The wriggling of the fish is very beneficial,’ calls Harinath Gowd, as he shoves his complete hand into a woman’s mouth. She begins to choke because her fish is so large – almost seven inches long. A harsh thump on her back dislodges it. The murrel fish can be seen, frantically trying to swim backwards, towards safety. Engulfed by the waves of asthmatics, all holding up their transparent bags, Harinath Gowd again rams his fingers down the woman’s throat. The seven-inch fish heads into the dark abyss of the patient’s oesophagus, never to surface again.

If you recoil at the prospect of swallowing an oversized antibiotic, forget the Gowds’ miracle cure. It’s traumatic for the patient; and is no easy remedy to administer. Every step of the procedure has its own obstacles. When removing it from the bag, the fish tends to flail about and often falls into the mud underfoot. With the throng so tight, bending down to search for a lost fish is hazardous in the extreme. More cumbersome still is the business of levering the murrel’s jaws apart and inserting the nugget of yellow paste. Even when this has been achieved, the creature has to be propelled head-first down the sufferer’s throat. Administering the medicine a single time would be an achievement worthy of praise. But performing it half a million times in a day is a miracle in itself.

Every city, town and village of the subcontinent seems to be represented at the Gowds’ tiny home. Buddhist monks, Assamese tribesmen, businessmen from Bangalore, Goans and Tamils, Pathans and Sikhs – all congregate together into a whirlwind of life; all frantic for the miracle. Many are gasping for breath, seized by asthmatic attacks brought on by the crush of bodies. Others scream hysterically as they are separated from their children. Every moment the turmoil heightens. The mob is compressed like liquid injected through a syringe.

Then, suddenly, it is rife with rumours. The stocks of fish are running out. The supplies of miracle paste are almost at an end. A stampede follows. Babies are clutched above heads to prevent them from being sucked down. Moments later, the half million murrel fish are not the only casualties of the day. Two elderly men are killed in the stampede, trampled underfoot.

For Anila Mathani, an Indian living in Singapore, swallowing a murrel fish is no longer a novelty. This is her third time.

‘You have to take the medicine three years running to get permanent relief from asthma,’ she says, holding up her carefullychosen specimen. ‘This year volunteers are handing out the cure in the streets around the Gowds’ home. I will only take it in the house itself; and from the hand of one of the Gowd brothers. This is where the magic spell was cast; and it was here that the sadhu revealed that the miracle would work.’

Does she believe in the remedy? Anila Mathani nods vigorously. ‘Of course it cures asthma,’ she says. ‘Three years ago I was confined to bed. My doctor said I hadn’t long to live. Now look at me. Remember, Indians are shrewd people: do you think they would spend time and money travelling here if there was nothing in it?’

Diehard believers in the miracle cure follow a strict regime in the days after their appointment with the murrel fish. They restrict their diet to a list of foods prescribed by the sadhu in 1845. These include such comestibles as snake gourd, old rice, dried chillies, mutton, dried pieces of old mango, and milk which has been left with a piece of porcelain in it. On the fifteenth, thirtieth and forty-fifth days after the miracle, the patient is expected to swallow two extra pellets of the magical yellow paste.

Vegetarians have it easy. They don’t have to swallow the fish but can consume the repellent salve in a mixture of molasses jaggery. But the Gowds frown on those without the will to gulp down a live fish.

With news of the Gowds’ medication spreading throughout India and abroad, a regular stream of fraudsters have tried to capitalize on the miracle cure. Quacks and charlatans in every large city advertise a similar antidote on the same day each year. Most claim to be related to the Gowds. Unlike the five brothers from Hyderabad, they charge for the medicine.

‘It’s expected that fakes will try to make money from this,’ says Harinath Gowd pragmatically. ‘We have been offered millions of rupees by multinational drug companies for the formula, too. But we don’t have any fear of the con-men, or of people copying our recipe through reverse engineering. They can copy us all they like, but we have one thing that they can never have – the magical blessing of the sadhu.’

As the multitude of asthmatics choke down live fish, supporters for the Society for Animal Rights, a local pressure group with modest support, stand on the sidelines. But their calls for an immediate end to the slaughter of innocent murrel fish go unheeded.

‘Imagine what an agonizing end those poor little fish are having,’ says Dilip Narayan, the society’s spokesman. ‘This is an act of primitive barbarism. It must be stopped.’

By and large, the medical profession is equally reproachful. Not because of the pain the murrel fish may suffer, but for the dubious effect that the cure has on treating asthma.

‘This isn’t miracle healing, but faith healing,’ explains Dr. Madan Kataria, a respected Mumbai physician. ‘People line up for hours and go through the traumatic experience of swallowing a live fish. Then they feel better. The improvement has got to be due to a psychosomatic effect.’

The Gowd family’s miracle cure for asthma may be the laughing stock of the medical establishment. And it may sound like nothing more than mumbo jumbo to the rest of us. But it seems that the remedy could have a scientific grounding after all. Scientists at the Royal Prince Alfred Institute of Respiratory Medicine in Sydney recently published a possible cure for asthma. And it happens to be very fresh, oily fish. A study at the institute found that only fresh fish (canned fish, for instance, doesn’t work) has anti-inflammatory properties. Oily fish such as murrel, which contain omega-3 fatty acids, can decrease the amount of inflammation in an asthmatic’s airway.

Back outside the Gowds’ ancestral home, the local police officers have given up trying to keep control. Pickpockets are busy taking advantage of the crowds. A contingent of Naga warriors is waging a full-blown military offensive to raid the stall dishing out free custard creams. But, worst of all, I find myself at the head of the queue.

I hand over the bag containing my four-inch murrel fish to Shivram Gowd. A blob of the vile miracle paste the size of a walnut is forced into the fish’s mouth and around its face. The paste, which has the consistency of marzipan, has the smell of putrefying offal.

A bystander indicates for me to stick out my tongue. At the last moment, the fish and I exchange a troubled glance. The murrel seems to be demanding an explanation. Alas, I am in no position to start justifying the unusual treatment. What comes next is a new experience for the both the fish and me.

Having a grown man’s hand lunging to the back of one’s throat is deeply unpleasant. But it is nothing in comparison to the sensation of a live and terrified fish bearing fetid miracle ointment swimming down one’s oesophagus.

Hour after hour, thousands of asthmatics receive the treatment. All through the day, the afternoon, and then the night. By six a.m. the next morning, the short-lived shanty-town around the Gowds’ two-room house begins to break up. The pickpockets board trains for other cities. Balloon-sellers, beggars, and most of the half-million asthmatics have disappeared. By seven a.m. the fish merchants are frantic to get rid of their supplies.

The bottom had fallen out of the murrel fish market for another year.

FORTY-FOUR

Swiss Movement

AS A TRAVEL WRITER I’ve specialized in gritty, fearful destinations, the kind of places that make a reader’s hair stick on end.

I’ve waded through swamps, hacked through jungles, done my time in war zones and in mine fields, and in rotten, rat-infested sewers the world over. Never before though, have I been asked to drop everything and journey to a place of sheer idyll.

Not until now.

So when an itinerary came through for a jaunt around the Swiss Alps, I balked. It all seemed too good to be true. My wife said they’d sent me the wrong trip, and that I’d better leave before they realized their mistake. So I packed my bags and left, post haste.

The next thing I knew, I was at Zurich airport picking up my Swiss Pass. It allows unlimited travel on most trains, buses and boats within the entire country. The clerk was a slim, small-eyed man with three clocks laid out neatly on his desk. I asked about getting to Appenzell, the heart of Alpine country.

‘There is a train leaving in three minutes, forty-five seconds,’ he said precisely.

‘Well, I’ll never make that.’

The clerk narrowed his eyes. ‘Of course you will, sir,’ he said, ‘this is Switzerland.’

Two minutes later, I was aboard a train so silent that, when it left the station, you could only tell it was actually moving by looking out the window. It didn’t grate along the tracks, so much as glide.

Lulled by the sense of safety and the silence of the carriage, I fell into a deep childlike sleep. When I awoke there were hillsides all around, rolling like waves and overlaid with fields, their grass the colour of crushed emeralds. There were mountains, too, great grey crags looming down like broken teeth, some still tinged with snow.

At Appenzell I alighted, and found myself in the backdrop for an Alpen commercial. No bigger than a village, it was the kind of place I never quite believed existed at all. Prim little chalets with window boxes overflowing in riotous reds and pinks, exquisitely painted buildings, cuckoo clocks, cow bells, and perfectly squared stacks of firewood awaiting the winter freeze.

In dazzling light of late afternoon I drove the short distance to Weissbad, where a smiling farmer named Johan showed me his cows. As someone who lives in a world shaped by crude reality, I was at first skeptical. It was as if the whole place had been conjured as a kind of tourist fantasy. But, the longer I stayed there, the more I came to see that the orderly perfection and sense of contentment were utterly real. Farmer Johan’s grin was always on his lips, even when my back was turned. And he wasn’t the only happy one. His cows were simply beaming delight as well.

If the surroundings were out of an Alpen commercial, then the cows were surely extras from a Milka chocolate ad. They were spotless, pale brown, pretty beyond belief, and had oversized bells fastened on leather collars around their necks. As they roamed the lush pastures ruminating, they made a wondrous music all of their own.

Johan told me that happy cows made lots of delicious milk, that he thought hard before naming them, and that they were all his girls. ‘This one is Lisa,’ he whispered, cupping the head of one lovingly in his arms as she licked him, ‘and this here is Carmen. She can be quite naughty sometimes,’ he said.

After much talk of cows and after a taste of the local weissbier, Johan showed off his trophies and the wreathes he’d won for scything grass. It turned out he was a champion. When I praised this little appreciated Swiss skill, the farmer grinned until his cheeks dimpled. Then, as a way of changing the subject modestly, he showed me to my room.

In actual fact it wasn’t so much as a room, but a barn. Instead of beds there were stalls filled with fresh straw. I got a flashback of the travelling hardship I’m more used to, and sighed contently. Johan demonstrated how to fluff up the straw to make a pillow. Grinning, he went out to check on the girls once more before turning in himself.

Early next morning, after a breakfast of cured ham and tangy Appenzeller cheese, I pinched myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. The hillsides were glazed in dew, cool morning shadows streaming over them like giants’ cloaks. Johan had just finished milking the herd, and was cooing over them like a mother hen. He introduced me to another farmer, called Willi, whose ample white beard sprouted from a creased face, and whose hands were the roughest I can remember ever shaking. He spoke of the past, of his eighteen grandchildren and, then he told me about his own herd.

As I wondered how much more talk of cows and milk I could take, Johan took me along winding roads to the cable car. He pointed up to a distant crag and clicked his tongue. Squinting against the sunlight, I made out a straw-coloured building nestled there. Johan nodded, cackled with laugher, and hugged me goodbye.

Minutes later, I was floating up towards the mountains in the cable car, sailing high above a seamless mantle of bottle-green conifers. The gondola was packed with hikers, most of them locals, whose lives are nailed firmly to nature. There was an extraordinary sense of anticipation, as if being in the mountains was a love affair.

The gondola delivered us to sixteen hundred and forty-four metres and to Ebenalp, one of the highest points in all Alpstein. After watching a flock of paragliders arcing and pirouetting on the summer thermals, I toured caves where prehistoric bears once lived, and where their bones can still be found. Nearby, nuzzled into the rock, I saw a tiny chapel built by hermits, who for centuries sought sanctuary in the Alpine solitude.

The next day, the wheels beneath me were moving once again.

I had boarded the fabled Glacier Express at Chur, which bills itself as ‘the world’s slowest express train’. On the exterior, the sleek carriages were gleaming grey and fire engine red, while inside was washed in blinding light, streaming in through special side-lights.

Outside, an idyllic canvas of nature rolled by, peppered with picturesque little villages, silent beneath boiling cumulus clouds; rivers swollen from weeks of late spring rain, their waters the hue of aquamarines, sided by forests as thick as any.

A contrast to the cutting-edge carriages, the train’s dining car was a throwback to the 1930s when it was built. It was compact and wood panelled, with floral velvet seats, brass fittings, starched table cloths, and wild flower posies arranged at each place.

The waitress, whose name was Elvira, was energetically polishing the silver. She seemed a little flustered at seeing me arrive for a late lunch. ‘We have already catered for one hundred and twenty,’ she said apologetically, as she handed me the menu, adding, ‘the kitchen may be small but we prepare everything from scratch.’

Uncertain of what to order, I asked Elvira to do so for me, and was rewarded with one of the most memorable meals of my life. The dining car had the ambience of a well-loved gentlemen’s club, its cuisine – presented silver service – was worthy of any gastronomic pleasure dome. There was Salsiz sausage and veal paillard, bouillon aux crêpe en lamelles, platters of Alpine cheese, and a wine list that would make the most pedantic sommelier proud.

Leaving the Glacier Express at Brig, I had a lump in my throat.

All I could think of was about clawing my way back to the dining car, for another meal under Elvira’s conscientious watch.

In most other countries, changing trains tends to be a sordid ordeal of waiting and of discomfort. You hang around for hours, switching platforms at the last moment, charging up and down, overstuffed cases dragging clumsily behind. But in Switzerland, things are very different. It’s a land in which rail travel is still a genteel pursuit, one of enjoyment rather than of endurance. The station masters are well-dressed and courteous, the platforms clean, the efficiency of the system as reliable as an Oyster Perpetual. It explains why the Swiss one meets off the beaten track sometimes appear alarmed at how the rest of the world grinds on.

In the afternoon I reached the Alpine village of Kandersteg, a favourite with the British since Victorian times. Set in a monumental amphitheatre of peaks, ridges and jagged stone bluffs, it’s far more rugged than the sweeping farmlands I had encountered at Appenzell.

I took a cable car up to the magnificent Lake Oeschinensee, whose azure waters mirrored the sky. The setting was lovely, abundant with wild flowers and lizard-green ferns, with soft, moist moss, lichens, the air thick with bumble bees and marbled white butterflies.

At the water’s edge I met an American woman in a wide-brimmed hat. She was searching for tiny wild orchids, and had one of those smiles that sticks in your mind. She told me that she’d been coming to Kandersteg every year on the same day for four decades. ‘My fiancé proposed right where we are standing,’ she said. When I asked if he was with her, her smile faded. ‘He died in Vietnam,’ she said.

In the days I spent at Kandersteg, I found myself reflecting on the courtesy of almost everyone I encountered. However rushed or busy, there was always time for good manners. In Swiss villages, complete strangers greet each other as they walk past. Men still tip their hats, and people live in a well-honed system with do-as-you-would-be-doneby at its core. When taking a train, there’s none of the usual fear that your belongings will be pinched if you slip to the loo. And, when you get to the loo, you find it immaculate, because the last person left it how they would want to find it themselves.

The journey north-west to Lake Lucerne involved three trains and a paddle steamer in a single afternoon, each one running on a schedule as precise as Swiss clockwork. I found myself flinching at the thought of ever travelling in any other country again. More worryingly, it was beginning to seem as if an on-time world was quite a normal place to be.

Set on the western edge of the lake, the town of Lucerne is as placid as the waters in which its medieval buildings are reflected. Rust-brown tiled rooftops, church spires and onion domes, its skyline is a credit to Swiss style and to diehard values. Thankfully lacking are the rows of grotesque package hotels which tend to accommodate tourists on a grander scale elsewhere.

Like everything else in Switzerland, when it comes to tourism, the emphasis is on quality rather than quantity. As a visitor you feel fortunate at being allowed in at all. It’s rather like peeking under the curtain to see a play for which all the tickets were long since sold.

The lake and the town exist in harmony, each one respectful of the other. And, gliding across it like princesses dancing at a ball, are the steamers. Although built in 1901, the one I climbed aboard looked brand spanking new, and was christened Wilhelm Tell. One of five such vessels plying Lake Lucerne’s gleaming waters for more than a century, its mechanism was a marvel of the Victorian age. Pistons heaving up and down, it ushered me gracefully past swans and pedalos, around the zigzag margins of the lake. As we moved slowly forward, I glimpsed a handful of fabulous chateaux poking out from between the trees high above the waterline – homes of the super rich.

The steamer pulled up at Weggis, little more than a hamlet. Having been thanked politely for my custom, I clambered off. Then, as the sun set, long shadows waning into night, I took a meal in the Weggiser Stübli.

A fragment of Swiss life from antiquity, the wood-panelled salon had escaped the ever-threatening need to renovate. With portraits of the hamlet’s leaders looming down, I dined on bratwurst and bauernrösti, washed down with a glass of crisp Les Murailles.

Seated at the next table was a wizened old man who looked as Swiss as Toblerone. I half thought he might break out yodeling any moment. Raising his glass of Riesling, he caught my eye.

‘We ought to keep it secret,’ he said with a smile.

‘Do you mean the food, or the wine… or the Stübli itself?’

The man sipped his drink, thought for a moment. He frowned.

‘All of it,’ he said. ‘Let’s keep it all to ourselves.’

FORTY-FIVE

Tetouan

THE CHESSBOARD WAS SO OLD and battered that you had to guess which squares were white and which were black.

The pieces were worn too, hand-carved from driftwood by my opponent, an old sailor named Abdel-Latif. He was wizened and frail, and had one of those blinding white denture grins that gives nothing away. Especially when he was lining up an attack.

We both opened with our pawns, breaking only to sip our café noir. I felt confident and somehow powerful, certain of early victory. But then, just five moves in, the old seaman’s queen swooped down, and knocked my king on his side. The dentures parted no more than a crack.

‘Checkmate.’

Abdel-Latif tapped a fingernail to the tabletop, indicating that his winnings were due. Like everyone else who frequented the hole in the wall café, in a lane off Tetouan’s souq, I knew the rules.

Once the makeshift capital of Spanish Morocco, the sleepy town of Tetouan, a stone’s throw from Morocco’s Mediterranean coast, is one of café culture, long siestas, and Andalucian charm. It’s a place forgotten by tourists, who make a beeline for Tangier, or the Imperial cities of the Moroccan hinterland. Inexplicably, they have always bypassed Tetouan, a whitewashed treasure trove of history, one that nestles between the Mediterranean and the Rif.

For me, it’s the ultimate de-stress destination. There’s nothing quite so wonderful as wasting long afternoons there. Bathed with Lotus Eater listlessness, I like to amble from café to café playing chess, a rough straw hat shading the blinding summer light. Tetouan is the kind of place that seeps into your bones, gently coaxing you to forget what you imagine to be reality.

But it wasn’t a desire to relax, or even my love of chess, that lured me to Tetouan last week. It was a quest. I wanted to track down the military barracks outside town where Franco had rallied his troops before the Spanish Civil War. I had seen a picture – faded sepia – Franco standing on a mound, haranguing the Guardia Mora, his personal cavalry regiment, the Moroccan bodyguards. They were dressed in fabulous Moorish costumes, capes slung over their backs, turbans crowning their heads, rifles tight across their chests.

It took me no more than an hour to locate the barracks. Abdel-Latif the chess player had whispered the way. He said he could remember as a child seeing the fascist dictator himself parading through the town, his horsemen charging before him like harbingers from Hell. I’d told him about the sepia photograph. His acrylic teeth had grinned.

‘There has been change,’ he said.

And there certainly had. The long barrack buildings were derelict and black with grime, their roofs caved in, the doors torn away. The parade ground was overgrown and forlorn, waist-high with tinder-dry grass, through which wild peacocks roamed.

At the far end of the quadrangle I made out the mound where Franco had stood almost eight decades before. Abdel-Latif was quite right, there had indeed been change.

Later, in the afternoon, dazzled by blinding pink bougainvillea against stark whitewashed walls, I bumped into the chess player again in the Mellah, the old Jewish quarter. He was staggering home, tracing a line through the shade, one that he made twice daily, back and forth from the café in the souq.

‘To know Tetouan, you must know Spain,’ he said slowly, clicking the tip of his cane down on the flagstones, ‘and to know Spain you must know Tetouan.’ I asked if the Andalucian motherland could still be found there. Again, he grinned. ‘You will find it hiding in the details,’ he said.

And Tetouan is all about detail. It’s bewitching and ubiquitous. You see it in the glorious tiled façades of the Hispano-Moorish architecture, and in the wrought iron arabesques, in the contraband from Andalucia that fills the shops, and in the way the young women tie their hair.

What I like best about Tetouan is the small-town feel, the sense that life carries on and no one’s looking, a life conjured by ideal simplicity. There’s none of the hustle and bustle of city life but, instead, a serenity, one that almost touches melancholy.

On a corner, just off the main square, Place Hassan II, a farmer was selling three goats and a sickly-looking lamb. Across from him, I found a boy standing with gleaming chips of painted amethyst cupped in his hands. And, next to him, a cluster of old men. They were touting moist cream cheese and parasols, cigarettes, and Spanish postcards from before the War.

I asked them if tourists ever strayed to their town. Two of the men shook their heads. But the last, a hunched figure in a thick camel-wool jelaba robe, cocked his head towards the square.

I looked round, and spied an Englishman standing there. I knew he was English because he was wearing those dull red trousers that the English wear on their holidays. He had horn-rims, a pallid, almost fearful expression, and a brow streaming with sweat. With nothing else to do, I went over and struck up conversation.

The Englishman said his name was George, explained that he lived in Guildford, and that his wife had got them the deal of a lifetime on a holiday home, bought online. I congratulated him on discovering Tetouan.

He tapped a finger to his nose.

‘Better keep this one to ourselves old boy,’ he said.

I’m not quite sure why, but George seemed unwilling to melt away into the shadows after our brief conversation. I turned towards the souq, and he followed. Down through narrow telescoping lanes, packed with wares – yellow baboush slippers and wool jelabas, golden kaftans and silk brocade, fresh meat, powdered henna, rose water, and savon noir for the hammam. And, like all the truest medinas anywhere, there were underpants and fake Reebok running shoes, wooden spoons, pots and pans, and wooden sieves dyed pink.

With every stride, I could feel George behind me, plodding forward in my footsteps. Just as I wondered how I might slip away, he sponged a giant polka-dot handkerchief over his cherry-red brow, and invited to see the villa he had bought. I accepted, and we drove south for twenty minutes, the slim ribbon of potholed tarmac shaded by olive trees.

The sun was low and the shadows long by the time we arrived. George pointed to an expansive clutch of villas and apartments, all of them whiter than white. He said you could get a villa there for next to nothing. We trooped out of the car and, a minute later, were in his sitting room, his wife was fussing around us. She took out a bottle of Bombay Sapphire and poured three enormous drinks. We clinked glasses. George from Guildford then made me swear a solemn oath not to publicize Tetouan in any way.

‘The last thing we want,’ he said, draining his gin, ‘is this little scrap of paradise going to the dogs!’

FORTY-SIX

The Afghan Notebook

ON THE MORNING OF HIS DEATH, my grandfather placed a tattered notebook in a brown manila envelope, sealed it with packing tape, and mailed it from his home in Tangier, to my father in Tunbridge Wells.

He must have stopped at the post office on his way up the hill to Gran Café de Paris, where he took tea late each morning, and where he was regarded as an eccentric by the other clientele.

An hour later my grandfather was dead, knocked down outside his house by a reversing Coca-Cola truck.

It almost seems like too much of a coincidence that the old man would have passed the notebook on to his oldest son on that of all mornings. After all, he had guarded the journal’s contents his entire adult life, updating it meticulously over the years, and had kept it secret from even his own family. Perhaps he had had a premonition of some kind, or had foreseen that his skull was about to be split open outside his small villa on Rue de la Plage.

Whatever the sequence of events that caused him to mail the slim package to England that morning, the important thing was that the notebook got away. As for my grandfather’s other possessions, most of them were stolen by his treacherous maid, Zohra, who had waited years for her master’s death. She ran off to the mountains laden with all she could carry, and was never seen again.

The death that morning closed a life wildly rich in diversity, the kind that is almost impossible to summarize in a line of words.

My grandfather’s name was Ikbal Ali Shah. An Afghan by ancestry, he had been born in northern India, the son of a Nawab, the Muslim equivalent of a Maharajah. His father presided over a Princely State named Sardhana, presented to our family by the British Raj a century and a half ago.

Unwilling to spend his life ruling ancestral lands in India or others in Afghanistan, my grandfather set sail for Scotland to study medicine. He arrived to find Edinburgh gripped by the Great War. While helping the War effort he met Morag Murray, known within the family as ‘Bobo’, the daughter of a well-known member of Edinburgh society.

They fell instantly in love and eloped to the Hindu Kush.

My grandfather was a polymath. He was the author of more than seventy books, a diplomat and scholar, an adviser to half a dozen heads of state. But far more important to him than any of these things was the prospect of pursuing a quest, and the overwhelming desire to have what he always referred to as ‘an interesting life’.

He spent years on the trail of the Yezidis of Iraq, the so-called ‘People of the Peacock Angel’; and made long expeditions through Tibet, Turkey, the Arabian peninsula and the Sudan. But none of those pursuits matched his secret obsession, the details of which he kept in the Afghan Notebook.

After more than forty years of marriage, in August 1960, my grandfather lost his beloved Bobo to cancer. He was a broken man, and vowed that he would never return to any place they had travelled together.

That was how he came to live in Tangier.

After the funeral, he packed his belongings in an old sea trunk and journeyed to Morocco, where he rented a small but well proportioned house on Rue de la Plage.

At the time of his own death, in November 1969, I was less than three years old. My great sadness is that I never really knew him. We had been taken to see him at his villa a few days before the accident, presented so as to make him proud. My sisters were dressed in silk kaftans embroidered with gold, and I was trussed up in a camel wool jelaba, my miniature head crowned in a giant turquoise turban. I can just see it, a blur of memory.

As a child, my grandfather was an irresistible figure.

I would beg to hear the stories of his expeditions, his encounters with warlords, mystics and kings. My father would recount the tales, often tingeing them with a vein of disapproval, as if he regarded his own father as irresponsible.

‘You cannot understand what it was like,’ he told me one day as we sat on the lawn of our home at Tunbridge Wells. ‘He would suddenly stand up at breakfast and order us out of the house, saying we were to leave our toys and all our things. Possessions, he would insist, were for the weak, and we were becoming far too attached. So we left everything, just walked out, and started afresh somewhere else.’

‘He was a nomad,’ I said.

My father regarded me hard, groomed his moustache with his hand.

‘He was a maniac,’ he replied.

My father’s eagerness for stability explains our childhood in Tunbridge Wells. Odd trips to Morocco injected us with cultural colour, and proved there was a real world out there, somewhere. Throughout my youth, the Afghan Notebook lay in a box file, waiting to be appreciated. My father knew about it, of course. He had opened the brown manila envelope, perhaps had even scanned the frail pages, before burying it in a tomb of forgotten paperwork in his secret cubbyhole.

I have a feeling he knew I would one day find it, and it would begin a journey, leading me to seek out people and places I would not have encountered without it. The fact he didn’t destroy the notebook or give it away, suggested he wanted me to take up the search – the search for the greatest lost treasure in history.

The Treasure

By the mid eighteenth century Mughal India was like a ripe fruit ready for the plucking. The Mughal Emperor Mohammed Shah had turned his back on his armed forces, and preferred to occupy his time with his harem and the arts. His coffers were overflowing with riches – diamonds the size of apples, emeralds, rubies, silver and millions of gold coins.

Word of the Mughals’ fabulous prosperity spread on the wind, and reached the ears of Nadir Shah, Emperor of Persia. The son of a shepherd, Nadir had built an empire on a bedrock of ruthlessness. The idea of seizing the wealth of Mughal India – which had been amassed over centuries since the time of Babur – was too much for him. Without delay, we planned an attack, and sent spies to infiltrate the Mughal Court. Then, with a massive army at his side, he rode eastward across Afghanistan and up the Khyber Pass into northern India.

At the Red Fort, Emperor Mohammed Shah relaxed in his harem, oblivious to the fact that the might of the Persian army was about rewrite history. North-west of Delhi, at Panipat, Nadir made camp. While his sixty thousand soldiers recovered from the long journey from Persia, he sent word to the Mughal Emperor, demanding reparations. In one of the greatest miscalculations in Asian military history, Mohammed Shah sent a pathetically small force to rebuff Nadir Shah at Panipat. The outcome was slaughter, with the Indian force being decimated.

The battle proved Nadir’s genius at warfare. Aware that camels are the only creatures without a blatant fear of fire, he ordered for his camel cavalry to be trussed in pairs, with a dais in the middle. On each dais a fire was constructed, onto which was thrown camphor. The clouds of pungent smoke sent fear into the Emperor’s ranks. His cavalry and elephants beat a frenzied retreat.

After his victory at Panipat, Nadir Shah took his time. He could have marched onto Delhi immediately. But instead he decided to send word to Mohammed Shah, ordering him to prepare for the victor’s arrival. When the messenger arrived at the Red Fort bearing the encoded communiqué, the Mughal Emperor was stupefied. He had expected Nadir to sweep into his capital, and begin a whirlwind of looting. Lulled into a false sense of security, Mohammed Shah ordered for Delhi to be festooned with decorations. He had the great Lahore Gate of the Red Fort flung open and, when the Persian ruler arrived on a caparisoned elephant, he welcomed him as a brother ruler and a guest.

While expressing amity to his fellow Emperor, Nadir wasted no time in pressing for reparations to pay for the cost of transporting his army and staff from Persia to India and back. He demanded a million rupees’ worth of precious gems and gold. Mohammed Shah protested, declaring that he could muster only a fraction of the amount. The Mughal Emperor withdrew into his state apartments to consult his advisers. And for three days, Nadir toured the Red Fort. Such was the opulence that Nadir was struck dumb by what he saw.

Historians suggest he was about to demand extra reparations from Mohammed Shah, when fate gave him a godsend. Although the Mughal Emperor had commanded his people not to attack the Persian army, a high-ranking officer was knocked down and killed in Chandni Chowk, the nearby silver market. Using the event to his advantage, Nadir gave his soldiers permission to attack for six hours.

By sunset the streets of Delhi were running with Indian blood. Tens of thousands of innocent civilians had been slain, their homes burned and looted, their wives and daughters raped. As the Mughal Emperor was being briefed on the carnage, Nadir Shah hammered on his door. He said that the price of his compensation had just risen nine-fold. Mohammed Shah was to pay nine million rupees at once, and annual reparations thereafter. If he did not, his entire Court would be beheaded, and the Emperor himself would be subjected to a far slower, more painful death.

The seals to the Imperial treasure magazines were broken, and the royal stables were opened. The wealth amassed through generations of Mughal dynasty was laden onto twelve thousand horses, ten thousand camels and a thousand elephants. Mohammed Shah, it is said, was wailing in his private apartment, distraught at the loss.

At that moment Nadir Shah arrived to bid his host farewell. Before quitting the Mughal Court, Nadir it is said removed his simple turban and offered it to Mohammed Shah. It was common for monarchs of the time to exchange headdresses as a gesture of fraternity and goodwill. The Mughal Emperor’s face turned crimson.

He had no goodwill to give.

Fearing death if he did not comply with the Imperial etiquette, he carefully removed his own silk turban and presented it to his victor. But there was another more important reason for his anger.

Concealed within the folds of cloth was his most prized jewel of all – the Koh-i-Noor diamond.

The Caravan

At dawn on the hundredth day following his march into Delhi, Nadir Shah led the treasure caravan out from the Lahore Gate of the Red Fort, westward, towards Persia.

Never in history could there have been a sight like it – thousands upon thousands of camels, elephants and horses, heaving under their burdens. Nadir not only stripped the Mughal capital of its wealth, but its finest craftsmen, too. His great army of veteran warriors, and his harem, were joined by thousands of stone masons, carpenters, jewellers and swordsmiths.

It’s said that the caravan’s entire length took three full days to pass a fixed point. The danger of starvation was very real for such a moving force, as few towns would possess enough food to feed animals and men. For this reason, Nadir ordered for flocks of sheep to be herded along with the train, as well as sending messengers to have encampments ready with animals along the way home. The pride with which the Persian emperor departed Delhi is easily imaginable. He was king of the world, the richest monarch in history, a man of unparalleled wealth and power. But, unfortunately for him, others nearby were already conspiring to relieve him of his new responsibility.

The caravan snaked its way north-west out from Delhi towards the fertile farmlands of what is modern Pakistan. They reached Lahore, a city famed for its scholarship, and pressed on westward, down the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan. With such an immense caravan to control, Nadir Shah must have been aware of the danger. The threat of having the hoard of Mughal India poached from his grasp was all too real. Nadir was obsessed with security, for himself, and for the treasure. Each night, along with his most trusted generals, he planned out the route the caravan would take through the badlands of Afghanistan, to his homeland, Persia. And, each night, his most trusted generals would then plan how best they could execute their master, and relieve him of his loot.

The history of Afghanistan fades in and out of focus.

At times it is little more than hearsay or myth. The difficulty for the historian is that Nadir covered his tracks, going to extreme lengths to hide his motives, and conceal his real strategy. He was a survivor, a tactician who had started off as a shepherd boy, and was now the richest ruler on earth. It seems that he split the caravan in two, sending part on a northern route to Persia, and part in a southern crescent through Kandahar. It is uncertain exactly when or where the generals unsheathed their swords and ended Nadir’s life. But legend tells that it happened in a tented camp somewhere in the south, and that the fatal blow was made by the Persian Emperor’s most trusted general, Ahmed Shah Durrani.

With the death of Nadir, Durrani seized control of the treasure caravans, and shortly after, he called a loyd jurga, a meeting of elders from the Afghan clans. Such assemblies, which are still used today, named Durrani King of Afghanistan. He was twenty-three years old. In the following years, Ahmed Shah went on to sack Delhi again, and shored up the boundaries of Afghanistan. Establishing his capital at Kandahar, he planned out the future of the kingdom. But suddenly, he fell sick, struck down with cancer of the face. An Afghan legend tells how a soothsayer visited Ahmed Shah one night in his campaign tent. The woman foretold the future of the kingdom – that Timur Shah, Durrani’s eldest son, would inherit, and would destroy all his father had established.

Terrified that his legacy would be undone, the dying king had his treasure storehouses emptied, and the immense hoard moved to a cave system somewhere in Afghanistan. There, it was concealed, in a series of vast chambers. So as to protect the location, Durrani ordered all those who hid the treasure to be executed.

For the last two centuries and a half, the whereabouts of the treasure of Ahmed Shah Durrani has been debated by generations of Afghans. Many have searched for it. More still have questioned whether it ever existed, or if it has already been found, by the British, or the Russians, or the Taliban.

FORTY-SEVEN

The Fattening Rooms

FOR THE LAST SIXTEEN DAYS, Adele Mopoti, has sat on a low wooden bench in a thatched hut on the edge of her village, eating.

As soon as she’s scraped up the last spoon of lumpy grey porridge, her grandmother barges in and hands her another bowlful. Once she’s finished it, she will munch her way through a platter of cooked yams, and another heaped high with plantains. Then she will be permitted to sleep off the meal in the suffocating summer heat, before starting all over again at dusk.

Adele, seventeen, who lives in a small village on the Nigerian border with Cameroon, is being fattened up in an ancient ritual which has traditionally preceded marriage in south-east Nigeria. She is expected to eat between four and five enormous meals a day. The hope is that, once she emerges after a month, her body will be layered in a healthy cushion of fat. The thinking behind the so-called ‘Fattening Rooms’ has corresponded with customary values of the Efik and neighbouring tribes for centuries.

A stay in the rooms – generally no more than a thatched hut – have long been the last stop on a pubescent girl’s journey to the altar. The residence is one part of a complex tribal initiation from childhood into womanhood. It’s a place where one learns the responsibilities expected in the years to come, a time for solitary reflection, as well as an opportunity to get the body ready for years, possibly decades, of childbearing.

In a land where excess food has never been easy to come by, a plump bride has always signified health, wealth, and hinted at the ability to produce numerous children. But the young generation of residents in the Fattening Rooms of Adele’s village don’t see the point.

These days, most of them have other things on their minds.

‘I’m only here, to please my father,’ says Adele as she pushes back her braided hair, ‘he told me that if I didn’t spend two months here, then he wouldn’t pay for me to go and study in Calabar. I have dreams, big plans. I want to study to be a nurse. But at the same time I understand the importance of tradition. If I did not, I would have run away by now. As soon as I get out of the village, I’m going to lose all the weight I’ve gained. In the city people laugh at fat women, they make fun of you, saying that you’re backwards, and from a village.’

Adele’s best friend, Gloria, shares the scant room with her. They entered the hut at the same time, and spend much of their time talking, that is when they’re not eating. Both girls are dressed in a rappas, a loose-fitting sarong, their feet bare. Unlike Adele, Gloria’s legs are bound with shiny copper bracelets.

For the first two or three days you feel very pampered,’ explains Gloria, ‘our grandmothers come in with food all the time. They won’t let us do any housework, or even do the washing. They tell us how nice we look, and that all the boys in the village are asking about us. Of course it makes you feel good! But then you start feeling disgusted with yourself, and bored… so bored.’

Gloria is cut short by a scratching at the boarded-up window. She giggles nervously. ‘It’s my boyfriend, he’s not allowed to come in here,’ she says. ‘He misses me very much. And I miss him. But I can’t see his face until I leave here. If I do, then my father will whip me, and our family’s reputation will be ruined.’

Bending down, Gloria rubs her legs. It’s a clumsy process, made difficult by the spiralling copper bracelets. When she is asked what they are for, she grimaces. ‘They’re like manacles that a slave wears,’ she says. ‘If I sneak out and meet my boyfriend, then my grandmother will hear the metal jangling, and she’ll call out to my brothers. Then they will beat me, and when they have beaten me, my father will whip me.’

Gloria’s grandmother is blind in one eye, but she watches out attentively for the two girls. She can’t remember how old she is or when she herself was married. But she does know that of the ten children she gave birth to long, long ago, at least six are still alive. ‘Maybe seven are still living,’ she mumbles, correcting herself, ‘the youngest son went away to Yaounde and never came back.’

The old woman, whose name is Walima, crouches outside the thatched hut, stirring an immense pot of millet porridge. ‘These girls are eating well,’ she says as she stirs. ‘But it’s not their appetite’s I’m worried about… I’m worried about their minds. They don’t understand about duty now, and when you say anything to them, they think they know better than the customs.

‘How can a girl know how to please her husband, how to care for him, how to cook for him, unless she has listened to the elders?’

Suddenly, footsteps can be heard from behind the hut.

With her one good eye, Walima moves her head about fitfully. ‘There’s been a boy coming here,’ she rasps, ‘if I catch him I’ll have him beaten. Oh, the young generation have no respect for tradition. It will lead to the downfall of all we have.’

Tradition is something of incalculable importance to the Efik tribe. It is the traditions which have formed a basis to life, and have allowed vital knowledge to be passed down from one generation to the next. For millennia the Efik have been a farming people, tilling the land for maize and millet, fishing in the rich waterways of the Calabar delta. But now the traditions are under threat.

‘We have talked and talked about what is right and wrong,’ says Thomas, Adele’s father. ‘When my wife went through the iria initiation, she was so happy to eat the food her grandmother cooked for her and then, soon after, we were wed, and then the children were born. Adele wants to go and get educated and become a nurse. That’s fine, but there’s so much else for her to know. The mbobi, the fattening hut, is a place where she can learn much deeper information… information about people, about life.’

Across Africa initiation rites abound for both young men and women, all of them drawing a firm line between youth and maturity.

The iria ritual is different from many other initiations, in that it shows the community who is ready to be married, and just how beautiful they are. The fattening rooms are essentially pampering parlours, in which the nubile girls are indulged with food, attention and advice. One cannot overstate the significance of this last ingredient – the advice.

The elders dote on the beauty of their daughters, pointing out the growing layers of fat, but you get the feeling their attention is really on the wealth of information that the fattening rooms pass down. In a changing society, the information may be out of date, but it is ancient and tested knowledge.

Throughout the iria ritual, the elder women of the community guide the iriabos, the initiates. No one takes a keener interest in the proceedings than the girls’ grandmothers. They take every opportunity to remind the young generation how things have not changed since the time they themselves passed through the ritual.

More than thirty years must have slipped by since Adele’s grandmother was initiated, but she remembers the routine in astonishing detail.

‘If you don’t do everything right,’ she says shrewdly, ‘then the ritual will be worthless. Make a mistake, and a blanket of shame will descend not only over my family, but over the entire community.’

The iria initiation usually begins about five months before the fattening period. A group of girls pass through the rituals at the same time, bonding them together for life. The first step in the process is the cutting of their hair. A knife is sharpened ceremoniously, before being wielded by one of the oldest, most respected women. After that, the girls strip off their clothes, their bodies anointed with a paste of ash, ground indigo seeds and red camwood powder. Intricate geometric designs are scored into the paste, highlighting the girls’ natural beauty, as well as repelling insects.

The second stage of the initiation is held on the morning of the entry into the fattening room. It involves the elderly matrons of the community inspecting the girls, scrutinizing their naked torsos, watchful for tell-tale signs of early pregnancy. Nothing is so important as for the iriabos to be seen to be chaste.

‘The great danger is at that moment,’ says Adele’s grandmother. ‘It is then that any mature woman can come forward and claim your daughter or granddaughter is not pure. Refuting such a charge is hard, and can only be done by a priest. I remember when I was an iriabo a bad woman with a grudge against one family said that their daughter had been immoral. A cloak of shame fell down on that family, and the girl had no choice but to drown herself.’

Then the girls are massaged with palm oil, and some of them have the spiralling copper bracelets, called ikpalla, wrapped round their legs. In some Efik villages, the leader of the community presents each girl with a wooden or paper tag, tangible proof of her purity. It’s a sombre moment, similar in its portent to graduation at a western high school. With the entire village looking on in pride, the iriabos are ushered into the cramped huts.

During the confinement period, the girls are either alone, or in pairs. The last intention is for them to spend their time chattering. The period is intended for quiet reflection – mouths are supposed to be eating, not talking. Sometimes the rooms are hung with raffia, onto which are tied the bones of fish that the initiate has consumed: partly as decoration, and partly to show her ravenous appetite.

In the days that follow, the girls are massaged frequently with palm oil, and smeared with clay and ash. All the while, plates of food are ushered in – fish, millet porridge, cooked yams and maize.

Traditionally, the confinement period could last as long as a year. It was a buffer between puberty and marriage, and an effective way for girls to postpone married life. But these days the girls are anxious to escape the fattening rooms as quickly as they can, just as they are eager to make a break with the village. For most, nothing is so powerfully alluring as the draw of the city.

A hundred miles to the south of where Adele and Gloria are sitting, Constance is impounded in another fattening room, on a backstreet of the bustling town of Calabar. Unlike the others, Constance, aged eighteen, is eager to put on weight.

‘I have been here for about a month,’ she explains, ‘and I will try and stay for another month or two. If I want to get married to a nice boy, I have to look my best, and boys here in Calabar like a girl with a full figure. I have seen the magazines from America… all those girls who look starved. That’s so nasty. Oh, no, we don’t want to look like that here in Calabar.’

Constance, who is of medium height, is doing well to achieve her ideal weight of ninety-five kilos. She is eating more food than she ever thought possible, all of it served up by her doting mother, Grace.

‘In the morning I eat three or four large bowls of millet porridge,’ she says, ‘and then a bunch of bananas, and some boiled yams. At lunch I have more porridge, and a plate of fatty meat, potatoes, more yams, maize and some fruit. Then in the evening, I eat whatever is left in the kitchen.’

Constance’s mother scurries around their three-room family house, attending to the cooking, giving orders to the younger daughter, who does the food shopping. ‘We are pleased that Constance is putting on weight so fast,’ she says. ‘Yes, all this food is expensive, but we have no choice but to bear the expense. It’s costing us about twelve thousand naira (£60) a month. We want our daughter to marry well, and for that we have to make sacrifices.’

Unlike many in Calabar, Constance’s family was reluctant to send their daughter to one of the established fattening rooms operating in the town. Usually owned by women of vast proportions, they double up as beauty salons, where stern regimes dedicated to pampering are the norm. For Constance’s parents, the commercial parlours were unnecessary, as they had space enough at home to turn a bedroom into a private fattening room for Constance. Then there’s the issue of young male visitors. A recent scandal involving midnight parties has tarnished the reputation of one of the town’s most established fattening rooms.

At home, the high-calorie diet has helped Constance gain weight fast. She’s put on about eight kilos in a month. But another, darker factor has led to the rapid weight gain – steroids.

Like many Nigerian girls of her generation, Constance has discovered the little strips of pills, called Easi-Gain, which can be bought from chemists without a prescription. They make her feel hungry and sleepy, but they help her to put on the pounds extremely fast. And, like most other young women, Constance has no idea of the damaging effects of the pills.

‘As a modern woman I am using modern methods to make myself more beautiful,’ she says, reclining on the sofa. ‘The pills are quite safe, and they are cheaper than all the food I have to eat to gain the same amount of weight. In any case, everyone is taking them.’

In a small office across town, a group of women is in the middle of a meeting at the, ‘Women Guiding Women’. The walls of their headquarters are adorned with colourful posters, bearing slogans like ‘THIN IS NATURAL’ and ‘SLENDERNESS IS NEXT TO GODLINESS’.

Leading the gathering is a woman called Ruth. ‘Our aim is a simple one,’ she says to the audience of new recruits, ‘we go through towns and villages and teach women that moderation is good, and that gluttony is bad. You don’t have to be the size of a whale to be happy with how you look.’

Ruth works part-time at WGW, an organization founded five years ago. It walks a fine line between traditional Nigerian rituals, like the fattening rooms, and the Western obsession of slenderness. As with many women of her tribe, Ruth spent more than a month being indulged with food before her marriage. After giving birth to four children, she realized that piling on the pounds for the sake of it wasn’t necessary.

‘Our society is changing fast,’ she says, ‘and as women we have to change with it. Our daughters need to be educated – taught how to use computers, not forced into fattening huts.’ Ruth pauses in mid-sentence. ‘There’s a new danger in our society, though,’ she says darkly. ‘We hardly even know how dangerous it is to become. But news of it and its “magic” is spreading like wildfire.’ As she speaks, she holds up a packet of pills. ‘This is it… it’s Easi-Gain.’

Back in their village, Adele and Gloria are sitting down to yet another high-calorie meal. A bulky pot of bubbling millet porridge has been carried in, and Adele’s grandmother is dishing it out with a ladle. Two plates of bananas and boiled yams are standing at the ready. The two girls frown at the sight of yet more food. They’re already full to bursting.

As she passes out the porridge, the old woman snaps: ‘Eat it up, eat up, you lazy girls! If you stay skinny like that we will never find a good husband for either of you!’

FORTY-EIGHT

The Favour Network

LAST WEEK ONE OF THE NEIGHBOURS near my home in Casablanca slipped a note under my door.

With almost toe-cringing politeness, he asked if I might introduce his niece to a friend of mine with connections in the art world. The girl, he explained, was eager to get an internship at a British auction house, but she was thin on contacts.

At first I wondered how the neighbour, a man I hardly know, had such good information on whom I know. But then I remembered that in Morocco everyone knows everything about everyone. They know how much money you make, the names and phone numbers that fill your address book and, most importantly, they know how you may be of help to them.

The matrix to pass on the minute details comes through the hierarchy of maids and cooks, drivers and guardians, who are relied upon by many to share each word that touches their ears. They know so much sensitive information that no employer in their right mind would ever fire them.

I sent a message to my friend with contacts at the auction house, and later advised my neighbour that his niece could be certain of an interview. The next day there was a knock at the door. I went and opened it, to find a delivery man straining under the weight of an enormous bouquet of exotic flowers. Having placed them on the table in the sitting-room, I sat back and smiled to myself.

It was a good example of the favour network in action.

You can’t live in Morocco long without brushing into it. The favour network is all around, a blurred backdrop to life. In a culture based on connections and trust, the only way forward – or upward – is to rely on favours.

All Moroccans live with the same niggling fear: withdraw from the system before you’ve paid in, and the creditors will come calling. That was the reason for the pricey bunch of flowers – a fear that if the favour wasn’t repaid at once, I would demand a favour in return. But as with the lure of instant credit in the West, there’s always the danger of taking a favour that you can’t pay back, and plunging into debt.

For anyone new to Arab society, the situation can be baffling. It’s a kind of silent language. Everyone knows who has helped whom, and what strings have been pulled – now, yesterday, or a century ago. The slate is never wiped clean, because it’s part of a system built on pride, written on an invisible chalkboard in the sky.

Our maid, Zohra, once told me of how her family’s fortunes had been swept away in repaying a favour left owing by her great, great grandfather. I had asked why she simply didn’t dispute the request.

She smiled.

‘Do you not know about honour?’ she said.

My father, who had been brought up in the East, drilled into my sisters and me his motto – ‘Never owe anyone anything!’ After moving to Morocco, I now understand his reasoning. He knew that, like Zohra, a family’s security can be lost in the blink of an eye while striving to uphold its honour.

As a policy, I rarely ask favours. If I do, I repay at once and with abundant dividends. Equally, I have come to learn that only a fool boasts about whom he knows, or what contacts – or favours – he has in his arsenal.

The only difficulty is when someone pays into the system covertly, before turning up to be repaid in kind. In such situations, even the most astute expert must tread with care. The conditions are usually the same. First comes an absolutely over-the-top box of chocolates, a bottle of expensive aftershave, or perfume, just like that – out of the blue. In Arab society refusing a gift is tantamount to a declaration of war. So you have no choice but to accept. Once the gift has been received, you must respond with an equally lavish gift. If you don’t, you can be certain that a request will be on its way.

If I’m unsure of how to act, I ask Zohra. She’s an expert on the right etiquette. When I told her about the neighbour, the favour, and the flowers, she wagged a finger towards the door.

‘Some people have no shame,’ she said.

FORTY-NINE

The Forgotten Women of Bhopal

TAKE A WALK THROUGH the narrow alleyways off the main road and you immediately know that something’s wrong.

It’s as if the spectre of death is hovering there, ready to speed away those who eluded it one December night, twenty-five years ago. Everyone bears the scars of that horrifying encounter.

Halfway down the lane, Ambereen Khan sits on a battered old chair outside her concrete home. Squinting through goggle-like glasses, she strains to make out the approaching visitor. Her body is emaciated, rigid with arthritis, her legs swollen, and her breathing forced. Ambereen could easily pass for a woman in her sixties, but she’s just thirty-two.

If a cloud of poison gas swept silently across London or New York, killing thousands and crippling many more, we would expect drastic action and answers. The injured would be given relief, the bereaved would be compensated, the guilty parties prosecuted. And, once the dust had settled, Parliament would pass laws ensuring such a catastrophe never happened again.

But in Bhopal things are different.

To the outside world the city’s name is still synonymous with a multi-national’s incompetence. To the people who live there still, Bhopal stands for a far greater misfortune. In the back streets, a stone’s throw south of the Union Carbide factory, they say that the lucky ones perished that night back in 1984. Those who survived have been dealt decades of pain, and the worst affected have been Bhopal’s women.

On breathing the toxic gas, hundreds of them had spontaneous abortions. Many more pregnant women later had still-births, or babies which died after a few days of life. Yet thousands more were made sterile by the disaster. In Bhopal, congenital deformities are common to children born in the years since the toxic leak.

The day before the poison cloud destroyed her life, Ambereen Khan was preparing for her wedding to a man from a neighbouring town.

‘As soon as his family heard about the gas leak,’ she whispers softly, ‘they forbid him to marry me. You see, people don’t want to marry girls from Bhopal. They’re scared that we will give birth to children with two heads.’

Ambereen was eventually married to a local man who had himself become handicapped by the calamity. The possibility of deformed children was never an issue though, for the gas had made Ambereen infertile.

‘Now I am waiting to die,’ she says resolutely. ‘Look around… there’s no joy here, only misery and death.’

As Ambereen pauses to rub her swollen eyes, I scan the street. She’s right. There are no children playing in the long shadows of the afternoon, and none of the usual bustle of Indian back-street life. In the distance, a funeral procession carries a cheap coffin to a nearby Muslim burial ground. Walking solemnly behind, their eyes fixed at the ground, are the relatives of the tragedy’s latest victim.

The area where Ambereen lives is called Jai Prakash Nagar. A predominantly Muslim area, it is home to hundreds of low-income families, most of which used to be casual labourers. They relied on their physical health to work.

A staunchly pious community, some considered the catastrophe to be a scourge sent by God. Accordingly, thousands refused to seek compensation but instead blamed themselves. Those that did seek justice – Ambereen and her husband among them – faced a steep uphill task. Most could not understand the paperwork needed to make a claim. Those who did receive a little money found themselves relieved of it by unscrupulous agents of the underworld.

But, for Ambereen and the women like her, some assistance is at hand. Twice a week, Aziza drops by to have a chat and make sure she’s coping with the pain. Aziza, who’s a health visitor from the Sambhavna Clinic, has to deal daily with the victims’ anger and their sense of betrayal.

‘They can’t understand why their teeth are falling out,’ she explains, ‘why their eyes are bloodshot, why they’re struggling for a single breath, or why arthritis is crippling them well before old age.’

After spending a little time with Ambereen, Aziza heads back to the clinic. Thirty women there are waiting to be treated. Dr. Rachana Pandey, sees each of them in turn.

‘I had just graduated from medical school in 1984,’ she says, ‘and was at Bhopal’s Hamidya Hospital the night of the gas leak. Words can’t explain the scene. There were bodies everywhere. Every inch of space was covered with the dying and the dead.’

The doctor motions for the next patient to enter the surgery.

‘My medical career has been devoted to helping those who were exposed to the poison gas,’ she continues. ‘We never thought that the suffering and death would go on like this. Women are getting their menopause decades before their time, children are suffering from stunted growth, while scores of others are mentally handicapped.’

Dr. Pandey smiles at the young woman who has come to her for treatment, suffering from chronic depression.

‘Look at her,’ she says. ‘Her husband’s been beating her because she can’t conceive, telling her she’s worthless, that she’s a witch. No wonder she’s depressed.’

The Sambhavna Clinic treats only victims of the Union Carbide seepage. More than a hundred a day flock through its doors and make use of its already stretched resources. Patients (eighty per cent of whom are women) are charged a small one-time registration fee, after which all treatment is free. The Clinic is kept afloat by donations, and was set up in the ’nineties with help from the British-based charity Pesticides Trust. There’s an emphasis on Ayurvedic healing, on yoga, and on Western-style counselling – sharing experiences of that life-changing night.

The scale of the situation is enormous.

The hundred thousand female children who were exposed and survived are now at a child-bearing age.

‘An additional problem,’ explains Sarangi, ‘is that women in this community aren’t used to discussing such personal problems within their own families, let alone with others.’

While their bodies ache and burn with the effects of the gas, the victims’ minds are haunted by the memory. Pick anyone at random and they’ll recount their tale.

December 3rd, 1984 was a warm night. Most people had left their windows open. Shortly after one a.m., more than half a million people woke in terror, fighting for breath, their lungs. Their eyes streaming and, gasping, they leapt from their beds and ran into the streets.

‘The gas came in a great fog, which wafted silently into the houses,’ says one women. ‘Outside there was a stampede. All around us our friends and relatives were dropping to the ground,’ adds another.

At that moment no one could have known the awful truth: that a venting pipe at the Union Carbide pesticide plant had fractured, releasing a cocktail of eighteen toxic chemicals, including hydrogen cyanide and the deadly, unstable gas methyl isocyanate.

Unsure of what to do, thousands fled through the streets, charging directly into the path of the poison, over forty tonnes of which was being carried on the wind. Those who made it to hospital had little hope, as no one knew the cause of the disaster.

Morning brought a sobering scene of carnage. There were corpses everywhere. Families huddled together, mothers clutching their children, their eyes bulged, blood vomited down their chests. Hundreds of cows and dogs were dead, too, as were the birds, fallen from the trees.

The official human death toll that night was put at 5,325. But as bodies were scooped into massive pits so quickly, to prevent the spread of disease, no one’s quite sure how many died. The real figure is probably closer to ten thousand.

Zenath was only a child in 1984. Now an adult, she’s still deeply traumatized by the disaster.

‘Everyone remembers,’ she says gently. ‘How can we forget? It’s burned into our memories. We try not to speak of it, but it is always here inside us. My mother led my sisters and me to the mosque. We clambered over bodies to get inside, and we sheltered there, crouching down as low as we could. Around us people were praying, screaming, and they were dying. Everyone was blinded by the gas, everyone choking, desperately clinging onto life.’

Zenath would like to be married, but there’s no money for her dowry. And, in any case, no one wants to marry a sterile woman. Not even in Bhopal. Her father, a watch-repairer, blinks through extra-thick lenses. His eyesight is bad and getting worse. He’s forced to concentrate on mending wall-clocks now, and soon he’ll have to give that up, too.

Across town, at the Bhopal Eye Hospital, senior Surgeon Dr. Dubey is preparing to operate on his seventh patient of the morning. More than three hundred people flock daily to the hospital.

‘Most of those who come here suffer from nebular cornea opacity,’ he explains, ‘it’s like a cataract. Some were blinded totally, while others rubbed their eyes afterwards and went blind as a result.’

Dr. Dubey peers out of his first floor window. A line of patients snakes its way around the building. Most of them have their eyes bandaged. ‘Look at that,’ he says, ‘I treat them as fast as I can, but each day dozens more arrive.’

Miriam is at the end of the line. A mother of three, she’s blind in her right eye. And now her left eye is clouding over. She has constant headaches and can’t walk very far these days. In the stampede that December night she was separated from her husband. She presumes he perished and was buried in one of the mass graves. Each of their children has illnesses resulting from the gas. Despite applying for compensation, the authorities insisted that Miriam had come from a neighbouring city, and was merely pretending to be a victim.

Every Tuesday, Abdul Jabar, a legal advocate, gives free help to women who were affected by the gas attack, in a park in central Bhopal. The founder of the Bhopal Gas Victim’s Association, he sees that the ailing fill out the compensation forms properly.

‘Had this tragedy taken place in the West,’ he says, ‘the factory would have been levelled straight away, but here people are too accepting. It’s inevitable that there will be another “Bhopal”. Indian factories haven’t learnt from our example. It’s just a matter of time. It could happen tomorrow.’

Thousands of women need Abdul Jabar’s help. As they wait to see the man they regard as a saviour, they swap details of their illnesses. Those who come to Abdul Jabar’s sessions need all the help they can get. Compensation for the Bhopal victims has become embroiled in one of the worst bureaucratic jams in Indian history, a nation famous for drawn-out legal actions.

From the very start, the signs were bad.

Union Carbide dragged its heels for years before paying up. Finally, they made a one-time settlement of $470 million to the Indian government – that was back in 1989. But, as a stream of people in Bhopal are quick to point out, the government is in no hurry to hand out the cash. Progressing at a snail’s place, its system is still collecting millions of dollars in interest on money that hasn’t reached those who so desperately deserve it.

Once the money was safely locked in the State’s coffers, those making a claim were forced to queue up for days for a token which would permit them to get a claim form. Then began the convoluted process of claim courts and endless hearings. Victims need to attend as many as thirty hearings to have their claim considered. The only way to oil the wheels of justice is a seven hundred rupee bribe. But few people have that kind of cash.

The former Chairman of Union Carbide, Warren Anderson, is deeply unpopular in Bhopal as one might expect. His name forms part of a common slogan on walls around town – reading simply ‘Hang Anderson’.

As he lives in quiet retirement in Florida, Union Carbide itself is eager to distance itself from responsibility. The Bhopal plant was, they say, owned by a separate entity Union Carbide (India), even though the American parent company is said to have owned more than half its stock. They protest, too, that the damaged venting pipe was sabotaged by a disgruntled employee.

Back in Jai Prakash Nagar, Ambereen’s neighbour, Amina Beeh, pulls a scratched chest X-ray from a box and wipes it with her scarf. Like many of Bhopal’s women, she’s suffered for years from a catalogue of health problems, problems that are getting worse.

‘My lungs were burnt, as if acid was poured into them,’ Amina says. ‘And I need regular treatment for a severe gynaecological disorder.’

Staring out at the former Union Carbide factory, Amina dabs her eyes. It’s time for her medicine. Putting away her X-ray, she gulps down an assortment of pink and white pills. Then, she leans back into her chair, and sighs.

‘Every day at this time I do this,’ she says, ‘I close my eyes and remember how different it used to be. I think of the faces of my family and all my friends,’ she whispers, ‘and I pretend the gas never came. For a moment I breathe easy, and I forget.’

FIFTY

The Guerrilla Girls

A PAPER TRAIL OF CLUES hidden at key points in downtown Manhattan leads you the basement chamber of a dilapidated office building.

The sect is distrustful of visitors and will go to any lengths to ensure security. Stone steps spiral down into the hide-out. A bare lightbulb hangs above a solid oak desk. And, reclining in a worn leather chair, disguised in a woolly gorilla mask, is Alice Neel, self-styled Guerrilla Girl.

New Yorkers pride themselves on their reputation of being impossible to surprise. They’ve seen it all. Businessmen roller-skate to work; exhibitionists run naked through the streets; and cow-girls do lasso tricks in subway trains. Weird fads come and go with the seasons. But few of the city’s oddities and bizarre underground cliques stand the test of time… none have survived like the ‘Guerrilla Girls’.

As plumes of vapour rise from the steam grates down in SoHo – Manhattan’s artistic quarter – a gang of figures dart through the shadows back to their hideaway where their leader is awaiting them. Their faces concealed in snarling gorilla masks, this secret quasi-terrorist cell is New York’s most belligerent feminist force. Scorning the male establishment, demonstrating against sexism in the art world, the band of die-hard feminists is known to all New Yorkers.

Formed a decade ago by a rebellious group of women artists, the Guerrilla Girls were galvanized into action by their disdane for what they regarded as New York’s male artistic mafia. They pledged to harass, humiliate, and even to raid, institutions opposed to the cause of women artists.

The Guerrilla Girls have been honoured by feminists in the United States and, indeed, throughout the world. But, as their followers praise them, the Guerrilla Girls are mocked by many New Yorkers as the biggest joke in town.

Despite this, what began as a contest against Manhattan’s misogynistic museums and art galleries, has now expanded to take in new themes. Today, the Guerrilla Girls’ devotees say they battle to give a voice to those fighting against issues such as abortion and AIDS, rape and even female circumcision. As the scope of their battleground extends, the Guerrilla Girls encourage women in other cities, and in far off nations, to make use of their tactics and take up struggles of their own.

In a society where one’s reputation is everything, the Guerrilla Girls have used humiliation as a terrorist tool. One night, lower Manhattan was plastered with thousands of simple black and white posters. The bulletins depicted no gruesome scenes, but instead listed names. The Guerrilla Girls’ own unmistakable artwork – naming sexist galleries and their associated officials – became their calling card.

Each poster, which bears the characteristic stamp of ridicule, along with the honorary epithet Conscience of the Art World, rocked the art establishment from the start. New York’s wealthy gallery district ran rife with rumours. Who were the Guerrilla Girls? How would they take out their fury? Were any of them – as the rumours suggested – famous artists themselves?

Overnight it seemed that feminism was back with a stylish, sleek and new bellicose face. During the ’eighties, when prices of art skyrocketed, as huge corporations began to invest in paintings and sculptures, very few female artists had their work represented by mainstream galleries.

Suddenly, the voice of female artists everywhere was visible. Refusing to reveal their identities, the Guerrilla Girls insisted on anonymity. This, they maintained, focused the limelight on their cause, and would not hinder their own artistic careers. The underground sect – who always wears gorilla masks when in public – takes the names of dead women artists. It was as if all the forsaken women artists from history were rising in torment from their graves.

As the great cultural bastions of New York tried to guess who the Guerrilla Girls were, the troupe hit randomly at gallery openings and shows. Gallery owners saw the attacks as a social conspiracy against them; many proprietors would not speak out for fear that their studios would be trashed. Rumours spread like wildfire – mingling with the facts – until it was no longer possible to distinguish actually how daring the Guerrilla Girls had been.

There are stories of galleries being daubed with slogans, of guests at grand society launches being trussed up with ropes, and tales of gallery owners having bottles of vintage red wine poured over them. And, as the art world speculated on the Guerrilla Girls, their spies, working at the city’s artistic treasure-houses, helped co-ordinate battle plans – relaying information to the Girls’ secret nerve centre downtown.

Among the main targets have been the most respected showcases of the art world, such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Guggenheim and The Whitney. Demonstrations take different forms depending on the whim and fancy of the Guerrilla Girls. Sometimes they turn up en masque to cause havoc with the authorities, in other instances they plaster galleries and art museums with their lewd, hard-hitting posters. Always, they aim to deride the brotherhood of male gallery owners and dealers in control.

As their campaign gained momentum, gathering support from other feminists within the community, the Guerrilla Girls began to appear on talk shows and on lecture circuits: always appearing in primate masks. Prominent gallery owners defended the lack of women artists they represented, by saying that women were just ‘less productive’ as male artists. At the same time, they played down the extent of the Guerrilla Girls’ infamous assaults.

For a decade New Yorkers have been divided over whether the Monkey Women, as they have become known, are a worthy cause, or just another clique on the lunatic fringe. ‘If I ever got one of them in my cab,’ says Lou Shrender – a yellow cab driver for thirty-two years, ‘I’d rip off her mask and take her to the police station. They’ve got nice cages at the police precincts, just right for a gorilla. People are sick of the Guerrilla Girls: they play the media like a fiddle – everyone’s frightened of speaking out against them for fear of being seen as sexist.’

Most gallery owners – like Pat Hearn of the well-respected Hearn Gallery – are careful to praise the cause of the Guerrilla Girls. After all, one’s never sure where Guerrilla Girl spies are lurking. ‘The Guerrilla Girls are no joke,’ says Hearn. ‘People take them very seriously in New York. I feel that their anonymity makes them a much more credible force. I, for one, would never try to find out who they really are.’

Alice Neel, self-styled Queen of the Guerrilla Girls, rests in the underground hide-out. The chamber is shaken every few minutes by a passing subway train. ‘We want to make feminism fashionable again,’ she says through the mask’s set of snarling yellow teeth. ‘It’s for us to show that feminists are a broad spectrum of women – they come in all shapes, forms and colours. People used to think that feminists came in one style… that was the media’s manipulation of the word “feminist”.’

‘Guerrilla Girls are anonymous because we want the issues we support to take centre stage, not individuals. The Guerrilla Girls are from a long tradition of masked avengers which include Robin Hood, Batman and Wonder Woman. I can’t tell you how many of us there are – maybe there are a hundred, maybe a hundred thousand.’

Under the deep cover of their secret lair, the Guerrilla Girls plot their next moves. Like any revolutionary unit, they spend hours planning which institutions to abase, and the individuals to lambaste. For such an enraged feminist sect, no member of society is more loathsome than the white male.

‘The majority of power is in the hands of white men,’ says Alice Neel as she adjusts her gorilla head. ‘Most gallery owners, dealers and art critics are white men. It’s obvious that if you’re a white male you see things in a certain way. Your vision – which is going to be a white male one… is therefore going to be limited.’

Despising the white masculine sector of society as they do, the Guerrilla Girls are careful to tow a diplomatic line at all times. ‘We’re not talking about eliminating white men altogether,’ cautions Alice Neel, ‘we’re advocating an opening up of the field to let in other sensibilities as well. That’s what the battle’s all about!’

As well as being hailed as heroes by their admirers, the Guerrilla Girls are denounced by those they attack. ‘We get a lot of hate mail,’ says Neel, ‘one guy wrote a long seething letter blaming us for AIDS. He went on and on that we were a bunch of dykes who were forcing women to hate men, and we were spreading AIDS to men as revenge.’

Over the first five years of Guerrilla Girl combat, New Yorkers witnessed a subtle and gradual shift in the art world. The major museums and plush galleries introduced exhibitions of female artists. But it’s impossible to say whether the welcoming of more female artwork was a result of guerrilla tactics, or the effect of the current era of political correctness.

As the fans of the Guerrilla Girls insisted that their attacks were making headway, the masked feminist avengers made a dramatic shift of their own. ‘With the onslaught of the first Gulf War,’ says Gertrude Stein, Guerrilla Girl, ‘we couldn’t ignore the fact that President Bush’s administration would go to war over oil. We knew that the Gulf War was very wrong. At the same time we realized that a lot of issues were affecting us as artists and women.’ Within days, the wrath of women throughout society seemed to be voiced by the new and omnipotent Guerrilla movement. The white male-dominated art world took a deep sigh of relief, as the feminists in woolly masks turned their attentions to government.

A caustic campaign began against both the major American political parties. The Monkey Women blamed the Republicans for the breaking down of society: insisting that they were in some way responsible for female circumcision, breast implants, liposuction and even foot-binding. Observers – including many Guerrilla Girl followers – were confused by what the Republicans had to do with the ancient Chinese foot-binding. Opponents to their causes, contended that the Girls had progressed from the lunatic fringe to the asylum itself.

Another campaign hit hard at the Democrats for their policies on homelessness, on gay issues, rape and abortion. The Guerrilla Girls’ prominent posters mock the establishment from every wall: (Q. What’s the difference been a prisoner of war and a homeless person? A. Under the Geneva Convention, a prisoner of war is entitled to food shelter & medical care).

Every time New York’s establishment is struck by a shocking act, the Guerrilla Girls’ involvement is called into question. But, as the scope of Guerrilla Girl activities widens, a new and possibly devastating situation is taking effect.

Encouraged by the group’s success, a spate of Guerrilla Girl impersonators have hit the street. Although discredited by the bona fide G.G. movement, the recent radical Guerrilla wave of rhetoric is threatening to undermine the original Guerrilla Girl triumphs.

‘When the Guerrilla Girls started out they had the right idea,’ says Mary Cassatt – leader of a Guerrilla Girl splinter group. ‘But now they’ve gone soft… they get paid thousands for lecturing at colleges – they’ve lost their focus.’

Mary Cassatt and her faction of hardened Guerrillas operates out of a secret East Village location. ‘We refuse to sell out like the founders of the movement have done,’ continues Cassatt. ‘If necessary we’ll resort to violence – we have to get the message across to a new generation, and we’ll do whatever it takes!’

Nearby, at her own secret den, Alice Neel – an original Guerrilla Girl – is wary of upcoming factions. ‘New groups calling themselves Guerrilla Girls are sprouting up,’ she splutters through the growling disguise. ‘We encourage others to use our methods but to distinguish themselves from us and our own work. The Guerrilla Girls are inherent to New York… our habitat is SoHo.’

Los Angeles, Dallas, Boston and Phoenix have all spawned their own G. G. splinter groups. Dozens more have appeared around the world as far afield as Mexico City, Berlin and Melbourne as well. And, as the subversive masked feminist message spreads like wildfire, newer and more radical pseudo Guerrilla Girl units are being born.

Back in New York the original movement is challenging the system with ever more political rhetoric. And, as the neo-radical branches of the Guerrillas defame officialdom, the unique poster art of the Guerrilla Girls is being snapped up by collectors. In a strange and unlikely irony, those eager to pay top dollar for the sorority’s art, are the New York Public Library, The Spencer and The Whitney Museums – all of which have been scourged by the Girls in the past.

FIFTY-ONE

The Khalili Collection of Islamic Art

DAVID NASSER KHALILI was born to collect.

As the son and grandson of dealers in carpets, lacquerware and other art in Isfahan, one of the greatest cities of ancient Persia and now Iran’s second city, Khalili himself maintains that from age fourteen he dreamed of amassing one of the greatest art collections in the world.

It is a dream which took decades, a discerning eye and a fortune to realize, but a dream that came true nonetheless. The result, the Khalili Collection embraces virtually every known area of craftsmanship ever pursued in Islamic lands. There are illuminated copies of the Qur’an, rare manuscripts and miniatures, papyri, calligraphy, ceramics, metalwork, talismans and seals, carpets and textiles, gems, coins, glass, jewel-encrusted daggers and medieval armour, astrolabes, maps, padlocks, stirrups and even more, all of it packed in vaults and warehouses around the world, awaiting a permanent home.

In many areas, the Khalili Collection is regarded as world class. The illuminated copies of the Qur’an number more than five hundred, compared to the British Library’s modest fifty, and they comprise one of the largest groups of fine Quranic manuscripts in private hands anywhere. The collection, that has grown exponentially since the early 1970s now lists more than twenty thousand items.

But all this is more than just a private indulgence. Nasser’s ultimate vision is that the collection will further spur the world’s appreciation of the artistic contributions of Islamic cultures. To this end, he insists that in his collecting he has not been ‘mesmerized by objects made for kings and queens’, and has attended also to the products of craftsmen made for everyday life.

Honorary curator of the Khalili Collection, Professor Michael Rogers, says Khalili’s achievement has been to buy in areas in which there’s been little interest to buy before. He’s not merely interested in the beautiful or the exquisite, but in the curious as well.

‘As a result,’ Rogers says, ‘the collection has shed a completely new light on practically every aspect of Islamic art. For the first time it will be possible to see the whole history of the cultures of Islam from the beginnings right up to the nineteenth century.’

The Khalili Collection, he adds, ‘is far more systematic and historical in approach than the collections of either the Victoria and Albert Museum or the British Museum.’

David Khalili himself is soft-spoken yet confident, in the manner of one whose seemingly impossible success has come as no grand surprise to himself. Sitting straight-backed at his north London research centre, he tells a little of the story of his passion. Beside him, an expert works meticulously on the restoration of a tenth-century rose-tinted cameo-glass bowl.

‘I grew up in Iran,’ he begins gently, ‘a country of Islamic culture which played a major role in the development of Islamic art. My father loved Islamic art, so I was brought up to appreciate it. Dealing in art and collecting is our family tradition; it was only natural that I should follow in my father’s and grandfather’s footsteps. I was drawn at first to Islamic lacquer. I was amazed by the quality of the painting and the absolute mastery that the craft required.’

In 1967, Khalili left Tehran bound for New York. Having earned a bachelor’s degree in computer sciences, he was by the early 1970s ready to begin building on the foundations of his father’s and grandfather’s trade.

For any serious collector of Islamic art, the world’s best marketplace is not in the Middle East. It is in London. During the centuries of Empire, a great many Islamic antiques made their way – legitimately and illegitimately – to England.

The thriving Islamic art market of the 1970s captivated Khalili. On trips from Iran, he began to frequent Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips’, the three leading auction houses at the time. His initial purchases were narrowly focused. From the outset, he bought Persian lacquerware, his first love in Islamic art, which, until the 1980s, was also regarded as undervalued. In 1978, when prices in much of the Islamic art market fell, setting off panic, Khalili kept on buying. This raised a few eyebrows, and earned the newcomer a measure of respect from London’s established old-timers.

It was also in 1978 that Khalili, seeking to buy a gift, walked into a jeweller’s shop on Bond Street. The woman across the counter was Marion Easton. Khalili proposed, and the two married later that year.

In 1980, they moved to London for good, and it was then that David Khalili began to buy on an unprecedented scale. Throughout the early 1980s, he bought and sold out of a gallery in London’s fashionable Mayfair.

Many art dealers maintain that Khalili achieved the status and credibility of a serious collector upon his purchase of the fabled manuscript of Jami’ al-Tawarikh, the ‘Universal History’ of Rashid al-Din, produced in Tabriz in 1314. Full of illustrations from the life of the Prophet Muhammad, it is widely considered the finest medieval manuscript ever produced in East or West. It was at the time the most expensive of its kind ever sold.

Khalili’s low-profile, unassuming manner enabled him to purchase an enormous number of objects without attracting commensurate public attention. But by the mid-1980s, however, he was buying such sensational quantities, at equally sensational prices, that the art world began to run with rumours. Khalili missed no opportunity, and scooped up many of the finest pieces in every gallery and every auction house. He no longer focused entirely on Islamic art, either, and went on to create another important collection, Meiji-period Japanese art.

The most discussed – and least answerable – question of all was, where did Khalili get his money? On this point he has always remained silent, maintaining that it is his private affair. Khalili continued buying – and buying – and replied to the press in only the most general of terms: His wealth, he said, was the result of successful business dealings in sugar and coffee, on the options market, in real estate in the British Isles and abroad, and, of course, in works of art.

The announcement that Khalili was in fact purchasing for the Nour Foundation (the name means ‘Light’), owned by the Khalili family trust, came as a surprise to many in the trade who had assumed all along that Khalili was actually buying on behalf of another collector.Khalili had, after all, written a catalogue of the Islamic art collection belonging to the Sultan of Brunei. ‘The Nour Foundation,’ Khalili says, ‘was formed many years ago by my father, to promote an understanding and appreciation of the great heritage of Islamic art.’

In the mid-’eighties, Khalili began work on a doctoral dissertation at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). In 1988, he presented his research on eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Persian lacquerware, his enduring love in Islamic art. Like almost no other student before him, Khalili was able to study largely within his own collection.

Not long afterward, he underwrote a $1 million chair of Islamic art at SOAS and a research fellowship in Islamic art at the University of Oxford. The University of London named him an honorary fellow and appointed him to its governing body. Khalili found a donor to give $16 million for a new Islamic Centre at the University of London, which complements Khalili’s endowed professorship, mounting exhibitions of Islamic art and provides a centre for research.

Today, Khalili is buying less and preparing more for the research and display dimensions of his collection. On this, he is straightforward: ‘The plan has always been first to conserve and document the collection in its entirety, publish it, and then to house it in a museum.’

Almost every item in the vast collection has been catalogued on a scale befitting the collection’s value. A single, overall catalogue of the greatest masterpieces was authored by Rogers, at the time that Khalili was Professor of Islamic Art at SOAS. But this volume was only a prelude.

A full series of thirty catalogues was produced, huge tomes that contained comprehensive scholarship and study. Directed not only to the academic and the collector, but to lay people as well, the catalogues include essays on particular themes in Islamic art. To assist him in organizing, drafting, and producing the catalogues, Khalili hired the world’s leading authorities in each field of study. More than thirty specialists were contracted along with a full editorial team, an in-house illustrator, a photographer, and one of the world’s most distinguished book designers, Misha Anikst.

In selecting scholars, Khalili comments, ‘I am also keen on introducing new blood into the system. Some of the young scholars, many of whose names have not been familiar to most, have actually made valuable contributions to the catalogues. These will combine both scholarship with visual splendour.’

Produced in a large format on acid-free paper, the photographs were complemented with technical drawings, to reveal delicate details so characteristic of Islamic art. ‘We are not cutting any corners,’ says Khalili, ‘but are aiming at the highest standards.’ He adds that the books, published by the Nour Foundation in association with Azimuth Editions, cost far more to produce than the profits made by sales. Such subsidization, he believes, will give them the wider readership they deserve.

Dr. Julian Raby, general editor of the catalogues and lecturer in Islamic art at the Oriental Institute at Oxford, was taken by surprise by the scale of the publishing task. ‘When I began,’ he says, ‘I didn't realize what I was taking on. I knew it was big, but didn't really have a sense of just how big. Indeed, I think there are only a handful of people working on the collection who do.’

Working closely with Khalili and designer Anikst, Raby has encouraged authors to highlight and emphasize what they, as individual art historians, are excited about in the collection. This spotlight approach, focusing on an object, a group of objects, or a particular issue, has resulted in a series of essays intended as a contribution to the scholarship of the subject. Since some of the catalogues consider overlapping areas of the collection, certain items will be studied from one or more viewpoints.

‘Where the Khalili Collection differs,’ Raby says, ‘is that it’s so large that it can be reconfigured in different ways. It’s not telling a simple story. It has not got one simple vision. Two traditions determine the make-up of most private collections today. One is that of the connoisseur, with a few select items chosen for their aesthetic merit. The other is the philatelic approach, where the emphasis of the collector is on assembling complete series of objects. The Khalili Collection is remarkable in that it belongs, as it were, to the heroic age of collecting, for it combines both these traditions within an overall scheme of providing a synoptic vision of the arts of the entire Islamic world. What I particularly enjoy about the collection,’ he says, ‘are some of the more quirky, whimsical sequences. ‘I said to one of the authors who is writing the Science, Tools and Magic volume, “We have some padlocks you might like to put into this part of the collection.” He asked, “How many?” I said, “Three hundred and forty-seven!” Since then, it’s grown by another six hundred!’

In addition to the catalogue series, the Nour Foundation embarked on a series of books focusing on specific areas of Islamic art. Entitled Studies in the Khalili Collection, this second series was aimed at students and academics. The first volume in the series, a supplemental study of thirty-six papyri titled Arabic Papyri, was published in 1992. Along with its main volume, Letters, Bills and Records: Arabic Papyri From Egypt, the book offers an unprecedented look at writing in the first three centuries of Islam.

Science, Tools and Magic covers astrology, astronomy, medicine and magic. Included was the collection's large number of astrolabes, globes, quadrants, scientific manuscripts and geomantic devices. In addition, it features practical items like padlocks, scissors, tweezers, spoons and weights and balances.

Since the written word is a central feature of Islam, calligraphy is of particular importance. Respected scholar Dr. Nabil Safwat says the volume on calligraphy ‘has been written from the calligrapher's point of view.’ It focuses on the collection’s vast cache of exceptional calligraphic pieces. And, in a selection of accompanying essays, Dr. Safwat highlights central themes in Islamic calligraphy that until now have been almost unknown to readers of the English language – such as muraqqa’.

From the Arabic root ruq’ah, muraqqa’ translates as ‘patch’, or a patch-work of pieces of exemplary calligraphy. Whether a complete volume or a single page, such manuscripts acted as calligrapher’s source books.

The collection houses various examples of the finest muraqqa’ever made; pride of place goes to the so-called Royal Muraqqa’ that combines the work of several grand masters of Islamic calligraphy – Shaykh Hamdullah, Hafiz Osman and Mehmet Rasim – on a single sheet.

In a third series of publications, the Nour Foundation also produced a selection of unabridged facsimile manuscripts. The first, says general editor Raby, was a reproduction of the work of the sixteenth-century Ottoman cartographer Piri Reis, whose 1513 world map included information derived from a map by Christopher Columbus that has never been found. Another provides a facsimile edition of the illustrated Jami’ al-Tawarikh manuscript, the Universal History, which includes detailed studies of the miniatures as well as a translation and critical analysis of the text.

‘Collecting,’ Khalili says, ‘is a fairly private activity. And it is my belief that, even if someone owns the greatest collection of art in the world, that collection is of no consequence so long as it is hidden from public view. There is a Persian proverb that is often used to decorate works of art: “Ultimately, all possessions are God’s alone; we are but custodians.”‘

As chairman of the Nour Foundation, Lord Young of Graffham negotiated with the British government in the hope of establishing a London museum to house the Khalili Collection. The foundation’s offer to lend the twenty thousand-piece collection for an initial period of fifteen years was met, however, with the skepticism.

In Britain there was no precedent for such a loan, and the cost of constructing a new museum was deemed too considerable. The offer was rejected.

All that is certain now, Khalili says, is that a museum will be built. But where is still a question. ‘You will have a museum with more than twenty thousand items which have been fully restored, conserved, catalogued, photographed and published even before it has opened its doors. We will be giving Islamic art the credit it deserves, perhaps for the first time on this scale.’

And what a scale it will be.

The collection’s Qur’anic manuscripts stretch from the first century of Islam until the late 1800s. Almost every type and subtype of Umayyad and Abbasid script categories is represented, often in rare complete manuscripts. Among them is the giant Baysunghur copy of the Qur’an, written for Timur Leng (Tamerlane) by the calligrapher ’Umar Aqta. The story goes that, in trying to impress the great Timur, ’Umar produced a copy of the Qur’an so small that it could slip beneath the signet ring of the great ruler. When Timur remained unimpressed, ’Umar went away and produced another copy, this one so huge it had to be wheeled into court on a cart.

The collection also houses the only copy of the Qur’an from twelfth-century Valencia known to be in private hands. Other copies of the Qur’an, originating from as far afield as Sicily and India, include one measuring a mere forty-seven by thirty-seven millimetres (1.85” by 1.45”), thought to have been written in fourteenth century Iraq.

As well as numerous astrolabes, the Khalili Collection houses some of the finest celestial globes in existence. One example was crafted by Muhammad ibn Mahmud al-Tabari in 1285 and 1286, and inlaid with more than a thousand silver dots indicating the major stars of various constellations. It is the original of an almost identical globe in the Louvre in Paris.

Khalili’s Islamic coins number over eight thousand, forming one of the most voluminous numismatic collections of its kind in private hands. Nearly ten per cent of them are either unique or unpublished, and more than twelve hundred are gold. Coins appear from across the Islamic world, from Africa to Asia. Of particular interest are the earliest Arab gold coins from North Africa, which bear Latin inscriptions. Others include a rare Abbasid dinar struck in the year 750, two more Abbasid dinars issued by Harun ar-Rashid in 787 and 788, and a variety of exquisite gold Qajar tomans.

No less diverse is a wide range of figures and figurines. Fashioned to function as door knockers, incense burners, jugs, and other useful objects, they demonstrate that the prohibition of portraying figures in Islam has, historically, often been ignored.

Dr. Sabiha Khemir, the author of the volume entitled Figures and Figurines: Sculptures of the Islamic Lands, points out that the Qur’an warns explicitly against the worship of idols. One of the most intriguing figures in the collection is that of a kneeling, bearded man thought to portray the Seljuk ruler Tughril Beg at prayer. It was produced in Kashan, Iran, under the Mongols in the thirteenth century.

The ceramics’ collection illuminates a thousand years of Islamic pottery. The two thousand items include an unparalleled collection of twelfth-and thirteenth-century Afghan pottery, rare Iznik pieces, early lustre-painted bowls and an extremely rare polychrome painted Persian bowl from the tenth century, incorporating a representation of the Prophet’s steed, Buraq.

The more than a thousand pieces of metal-work range from an early Islamic silver ewer in the Sassanian style to a rare thirteenth-century jazirah casket that once had an unusual combination lock, and an Ottoman silver fountain ladle dated 1577 or 1578.

Deputy curator of the Khalili Collection and co-author of the volume on Islamic metalwork, Nahla Nassar, says the metalwork collection ‘emphasizes similarities’. So numerous are the examples, she says, that ‘one can judge how a style has changed and developed’ over time and distance.

Islamic weaponry in the collections ranges from the most elegant of daggers to an important group of early stirrups. ‘The arms and armor in the collection,’ says Dr. David Alexander, author of the collection’s volume The Arts of War, ‘include items as varied and widely separated as a Crusader sword from the Mameluk arsenal at Alexandria and an eighteenth-century cannon from the palace of Tipu Sultan at Mysore.’ Of historical importance is the sword of the Sudanese warlord Ali Dinar, taken after his defeat and death in 1916. Alexander’s volume includes discussions of the belt in Islamic culture, the use of talismanic shirts, the ceremonial drum, and the advent of gunpowder.

In complete contrast to the weaponry is the assembly of Islamic glassware. Through the three hundred pre-Islamic and Islamic pieces, one can trace the entire story of glass-making. The collection’s cut glass and cameo vessels dating to the tenth and eleventh centuries are unequalled. With walls as thin as a tenth of a millimetre it seems miraculous that such pieces have survived the centuries at all.

Inspired as he was in childhood by Persian lacquerware, Khalili now holds the largest collection of lacquer objects in the world – more than five hundred penboxes, bookbindings, mirror cases and caskets.

It will take a substantial museum to do justice to the collection. Khalili wants that museum – regardless of the city in which it is built – to be a dynamic place, not just an exhibition hall of echoing footsteps.

Creating a fossilized museum is the last thing on my mind,’ he says. ‘There are millions of Muslims in Europe. A centre for Islamic art will work on different levels. It will show non-Muslim Europeans that their Muslim fellow-citizens are heirs to a great tradition that deserves their respect. It will stop them thinking of Muslims only in terms of fundamentalists, terrorists and hostage-takers. It will also give European Muslims access to their own culture, and make them even more proud of it.’

‘People from the forty-six Muslim countries have different traditions, and speak different languages. What unites them is their religion and the artistic heritage which was shaped by that religion,’ he continues. ‘It is true that until recently most scholars in the field were non-Muslims, but that’s changing dramatically as Islamic countries wake up to the importance of their artistic heritage.’

‘The moment has come for the “People of the Book” – Jews, Christians and Muslims – to speak openly to one another and to see clearly the close cultural, social, spiritual and intellectual ties that have existed among them for centuries.’

FIFTY-TWO

The Laughter Club

AS DAWN BREAKS over Mumbai, a group of figures hurries through the morning shadows.

Moving without a word, they assemble silently at the middle of a field, not far from the city centre. Then, as the first rays of crisp morning light stream down, the gathering take their places for what is surely Mumbai’s most mysterious ritual.

A distant clock-tower strikes seven a.m. and, as it does so, the congregation of seventy begin.

First, the members of the clan stand tall, hands above their heads. Then, in perfect synchronization, they start to smile. The smiles turn into giggles. The giggles become heavier sniggering. Moments later, the sniggering has become gut-wrenching laughter. By this point, a modest group of onlookers are exchanging uneasy glances. And, as they do so, the members of the secret league before them, are gyrating wildly – with arms thrashing, heads rolling, and feet stamping, in unison.

Meet Mumbai’s most recent sensation: meet ‘The Laughter Club International’.

Founded a year ago in north Mumbai, the Laughter Club meets each morning at fifty locations across the city. Its members believe that the most effective way of maintaining good health is by staying happy. And, they say, there’s no better way to get healthy, than to giggle yourself fit.

In our drug-obsessed society, doctors who have endorsed the use of comedy as a cure, have themselves tended to become the laughing stock. But, the tide on ‘Laughter Therapy’ seems to be changing. At last, hospitals across Europe and America have begun to reassess the merits of happiness and humour to patients. Researchers taking a good look at other societies, have noticed that humour and health have always gone together.

We know that healing centres in ancient Greece were located near amphitheatres – so that patients could use comedy as part of their treatment. Research shows, also, that remote tribes – living as far apart as South America, Africa and New Guinea – have held special festivals of laughter to boost public morale. All the major religions have incorporated humour in their scriptures: realising that, as well as healing, mirth makes the student more receptive to absorbing key ideas.

Sanjna joined The Laughter Club at Mumbai’s Hanging Gardens last October. A regular participant, she’s found that the early morning laughter sessions give her a sense of exhilaration which lasts all day long.

‘I know that laughing yourself fit sounds a bit unlikely,’ she says with a grin, ‘but there’s no better way to greet the world each morning than by rolling about, and laughing at it!’

Like most in her group, Sanjna was introduced by a friend. ‘When a pal told me about laughter fitness,’ she remembers, ‘I burst out in hysterics. It was the funniest thing I’d ever heard! So I came down and took a look. Before I knew it, I was hooked.’

Laughter Club International – which is spreading across India fast – was the brainchild of Dr. Madan Kataria, a respected Mumbai GP. His first session attracted just five members. The media was scathing, mocking what they thought was an insane idea. But within a week, Dr. Kataria had a following of one hundred.

A month later, membership was in the thousands, with Laughter Clubs mushrooming up all over Mumbai. The doctor’s appointments’ book is filled for months to come. And, across the sub-continent – from Calcutta to Calicut – people are clamouring for Laughing Clubs to be established in their cities.

‘At The Laughter Club we’re applying what’s been know for centuries,’ explains Dr. Kataria. ‘Laughter makes a person feel great – it aids relaxation, reduces shyness and fights depression: but its benefits for far deeper. Scientific studies on humour show that a good belly-ripping chortle once or twice a day can do wonders for the body’s mental and physical processes.’

Kataria points to Yogic texts – over five thousand years in age – which mention laughter as an effective method for breathing control. ‘Laughter has been applied, almost like a tool or antidote, for millennia, he continues, ‘yet it seems that we’re just re-learning its powers now. But, perhaps more importantly, we are now understanding that the effects of laughter are multiple.’

A bout of hardy laughter helps increase the lung capacity and expels residual air. This is good for asthmatics and those with bronchitis. People with high blood pressure and cardiac problems find that blood pressure levels are reduced drastically by the end of a twenty-minute session. Others claim that the laughter drill in the morning cures insomnia that night; or that their complexion improves from the increased blood circulation to the face.’

Mumbai, the birthplace of the Laughter Club, is a city that’s adept at surprising. The thought of several thousand people meeting to guffaw their hearts out for twenty minutes at dawn, is strange. But stranger still is the fact that, at The Laughter Club International, joke-telling is prohibited.

‘When The Laughter Club was founded we used to tell jokes,’ intones Dr. Kataria, looking sombre for a moment. ‘But we soon found out that we were experiencing problems. Some jokes cause dissent when they are aimed at fellow members of society. Others offend because they are dirty. ‘But,’ continues Kataria with a sudden look of worry, ‘the main cause for the ban was that one day the supply of jokes may run out!’

Rather than ever face a world devoid of new wise-cracks, The Laughter Club dealt with the problem right from the start. Forbidding all one-liners (however hilarious), it taught people to laugh on cue instead. Research has proven that even ‘artificial’ giggles have beneficial results. So, Dr. Kataria decided to use synthetic laughter at the start of each session. This, he found suddenly gives way to genuine chuckling, and on to the belly-aching laughter we all know and love.

Another sunrise, and Sanjna is back at Mumbai’s Hanging Gardens, ready for action. Her group – around eighty people – stands in a half circle. The atmosphere is cheerful. Some members break into laughter spontaneously, even before the ‘workout’ has begun. But, despite the intermittent giggles, there isn’t a joke book in sight.

Suddenly, without prompting, everyone’s clapping their hands together. This begins the concentration, and gets the laughers synchronized. The group leader speeds the clapping up. Then, he bellows ‘Ho ho ho, ha ha ha’, sounds which, those serious about their trade, believe are the key components of laughter. As well as acting as an artificial ‘flux’ from which genuine laughter can ignite, the prelude brings people out of their shells, helping them to relax. Seconds later, and with arms high above her head, fingers jarring wildly, Sanjna’s grin erupts into a head-rocking frenzy of laughter. Her long plaited hair waves about wildly; and her gleaming white teeth flash, as her face turns deep crimson.

As the roaring waves of laughter begin to subside, the anchor person initiates the next routine. ‘Giggling without making a noise. A favourite with Sanjna and her friends, it helps rekindle the real laughter. ‘It looks so stupid to see someone laughing in silence,’ whispers Sanjna, pausing for breath, ‘it’s like out of a silent movie – just watching everyone else is enough to make you roll about on the floor!’ And, as Sanjna nears the point of collapse through hilarity, the leader moves on to the next exercise. Known as ‘laughing with the lips closed’, the technique is aimed at increasing the pressure on the lungs.

The exercise, which is recommended for asthmatics, ends with everyone coughing. ‘It brings up all the mucus from your lungs,’ explains Sanjna as she wipes tears from her eyes, ‘you can feel the blood surging round your body and face – it’s wonderful!’

With the exercise class nearing its twentieth minute, the laughers embark on their most strenuous routine – the ‘free-style laugh’. A no limits, no holes barred technique, the ‘free-style’ encourages members to lift laughter to new heights. The eighty members, ranging from small children to octogenarians, suddenly seem paralysed with ecstatic happiness. Their guffaws, which can be heard far away from the park, attract a growing number of avid spectators. ‘We’re delighted when people stop and have a giggle,’ says Shamoli, ‘having a chuckle is where it begins. We may look like a scene out of a Hitchcock film, but so many people who stop to watch, end up joining The Laughter Club themselves.’

Shamoli, a nurse at a large Mumbai hospital, needs no convincing of the powers of laughter. ‘Of course this isn’t the panacea for all ills,’ she continues in a shrill voice, ‘but laughter is undoubtedly one of the best supplementary medicines for any kind of illness. The female members of The Laughter Club find that the exercises help reduce period pains, as well as keeping their skin supple and blemish free. Women take laughter very seriously – I think they take anything seriously that they have one hundred per cent belief in. Laughter is like a magic wand in our stressful lives…it puts a smile on your face and massages your internal organs at the same time!’

As The Laughter Club sweeps India, humour seems to be catching on elsewhere, as well. In Europe, where people are more prone to sneer rather than smile, happiness is catching on in a big way.

‘Laughter is a cheap, ozone-friendly form of energy,’ explains Robert Holden, author of Laughter, The Best Medicine. ‘Since the 1950s well over five hundred medical research papers have been published on the medicinal value of mirth. And psychologists have presented over a thousand papers on the subject since the 1940s. Modern medicine and psychology are at last catching up with ancient schools of common sense!’

Holden, who founded the Britain’s first ‘Laughter Clinic’, now trains over ten thousand health professionals each year. His courses, which stress the medicinal importance of happiness and laughter, preach that we should re-think our medical system. ‘Hospitals tend to be cold, damp, characterless places with the stench of disinfectant,’ says Holden, a man in an ever-jubilant mood, ‘if we want people to laugh and smile, we have to do something about their surroundings first.’

The eminent cardiologist, Dr. William Fry, like Robert Holden, is outspoken about laughter. He believes that one minute of laughter is worth forty minutes of deep relaxation; and that one hundred laughs a day are equal to a ten minute jog. A real belly laugh, he says, exercises not only the heart and lungs, but the shoulder muscles, arms, abdomen, diaphragm and legs. And exercising the major muscle groups is only the start.

Fry’s research has advanced the threshold of laughter therapy, by looking at laughter as a pain-reducer. Recent studies have shown that laughing – whether genuine or ‘artificial’ – pumps pain-relieving, stress-freeing, endorphins into the bloodstream. Hospitals of the future could well offer a choice between a dose of jokes and a shot of morphine. This may sound ridiculous, but it’s already begun…

When Norman Cousins contracted a rare spinal disease, he was given a one in five hundred chance of survival. Cousins, the long-time editor of America’s Saturday Review, decided that after years of prolonged pain from illness, he would give up on drugs. Instead he designed for himself a radical new course of treatment.

The regimen was focussed on laughter as a medical remedy. Whenever the pain became unbearable, Cousins instructed his nurse to switch on the video. He would watch his old favourites – Laurel and Hardy escapades, or the Marx Brothers movies – sometimes around the clock.

Cousins learned that five minutes of laughter would work as an anaesthetic, giving him up to two hours’ of pain relief at a time. In the weeks that followed he quite literally laughed his pain away.

At his small office in the suburbs of Mumbai, Dr. Kataria is planning his next moves. The doctor, who has just heard of Montreal’s Museum of Humour and Laughter, is keen to establish an Indian version in Mumbai.

But, perhaps, before that, he’s eager that Laughter Clubs should be launched in Europe and the USA. ‘We are getting calls from all over the world,’ says Kataria, as the phone rings with another inquiry. ‘Our clubs are simple – we don’t use any expensive equipment… we don’t even need to buy joke books… so we don’t make any charges at all. How can we charge people to laugh?’

Glancing at a folder of press clippings on the Laughter Club, Dr. Kataria smiles with modest pride.

‘The media who have now seen the popularity in laughter therapy were quick to mock it at first. The Laughter Club International, it seems, is saving the last laugh for itself.’

FIFTY-THREE

The Magic of the Ordinary

THE OTHER DAY a man approached me down at the port.

I was waiting for a friend, a friend who is always late. As someone who moved to North Africa from northern Europe, I find it near impossible to be late myself. Punctuality is quite unfortunately in my blood. So, whenever my friend and I arrange a rendezvous, I always spend half an hour or more glancing at my watch, fussing at his tardiness and at my inability to learn from the past.

While I was standing there, a little on edge, and a little irritated at what I imagined to be a waste of time, a short stout figure in a tattered jelaba staggered towards me. On his cheeks was a fortnight’s crop of tattered grey beard, and on his feet were a pair of grimy yellow baboush.

When he was close, his face fifty centimetres from my own, he put down the basket of fish he was carrying, cleared his throat, and began to laugh.

As I had the time to make use of my curiosity, I smiled politely, and enquired what the man found so amusing. He didn’t answer at first. He was too busy wiping his eyes. But then, taking his time, he pressed his hands together, palms followed by fingertips.

‘To understand the extraordinary,’ he said all of a sudden, ‘you must learn to appreciate ordinariness.’

I asked what he meant by what seemed to me like a random remark. The man touched a calloused finger to his cheek. Then he smiled. It wasn’t a big toothy smile, but rather one that was very gentle. It filled me with a kind of warmth, as if something unspoken was being passed on. For a split second I thought the first remark was about to be followed by another. But the man lifted up his basket by the handle, shooed away a pair of cats that were now sitting before it optimistically, and he strode off towards the old medina.

For an instant I considered going after him.

I sensed my weight shifting forward from my back foot. But then, in the moment before stillness became animation, my friend arrived. He spat out an excuse, something about his mother-in-law and a kilo of lamb, and we went for tea.

For an hour, as my friend rambled on about the challenges of his life, and as the waiter circled our table like a tired old shark, I thought about the man with the basket of fish.

I couldn’t get him out of my mind.

At length, when our meeting was at an end, my friend and I exchanged pleasantries once again, good wishes for each other’s families, and we parted. But I was on auto-pilot, because still, all I could think of was the man and the fish, and what he had said: To understand the extraordinary you must learn to appreciate ordinariness.

I have spent twenty years in search of the extraordinary. I’ve written books about my quests for it, and have made television documentaries about it too. I have ranted on to anyone prepared to listen about the glorious energy, the sheer intensity, of the unusual and the unexpected. I’ve risked my life in the mountain ranges of Afghanistan, and in the jungles of the Upper Amazon, and have surmounted all sorts of difficulties, on the trail of oddities and the bizarre.

Through each of those years, the extraordinary has been my currency, one that I have hoarded and squandered, and enjoyed with every breath. And in all that time, the months and years in celebration of the peculiar, I have never given any thought or time to considering the exquisiteness of the ordinary form. It had always seemed like comparing consommé to goulash, a delicacy unlikely to satisfy the appetite of a starving man.

But the stray remark at the Casablanca port changed my outlook in the most unexpected way. It coaxed me to appreciate a secret underbelly of ordinariness, a layer of existence so profound, that it is extraordinary within itself.

I have come to believe that we receive things when we are ready to receive them. Like seeds falling on arable land, the right conditions must be present for them to germinate and prosper. Our ability to appreciate takes place in very much the same way. We see, really see, when we are ready to, and not a moment before.

What I find so bewitching is the way the world slips you a jewel when it knows you are prepared to recognize it as a jewel. Equally, you could say there are jewels all around us, but ones that will only be activated for our particular perception in days and years to come.

The amusing thing for me is that, these days, glossy style magazines the world over devote acres of space to their fantasy of Morocco. It’s a destination that’s regarded as wildly exotic, rapturously appealing because it mirrors – or surpasses – our own imagination. But most of the time the media’s fantasy doesn’t reflect the genuine article at all.

To understand this extraordinary kingdom, you must understand the ordinary, and hold it tight to your heart. Three rusty chairs on a terrace by the sea, the shadow of a man moving quickly across warm tarmac, a fragment of graffiti on a mottled old wall: this is Morocco, real Morocco, the place those of us who live here yearn for when we are gone.

On my travels I have crisscrossed this country. I have visited desert shrines and mosques, palaces, bazaars and citadels. And in the wake of those journeys, I have regaled my audience with tales of colour and mystery. But I have never told them of the silent moments: a thousand meals alone with a worn old paperback, beaches naked of footprints, railway platforms in the rain. Such subtlety is rewarding beyond words if you can catch it, like a whisper on the wind.

This morning when I went to meet my friend, the one who’s always late, I asked him something. I asked him to describe the beauty of his land to a person who had lost the power of their sight.

My friend thought for a long time before answering.

He seemed a little nervous, as if I were asking the impossible. Then he glanced out at the street.

‘The real beauty of Morocco,’ he said pensively, ‘can only be seen from the inside out. Search from the outside in and you will never find the truth or the real beauty held within.’

FIFTY-FOUR

The Mango Rains

I BELIEVE IN ZIGZAG TRAVEL.

Never has there been a route to anything more worthy than one which meanders through twists and turns. Over years and many miles I have tried and tested this zigzag approach, making use of the miscellany of material that presented itself along the way.

Of course, what’s important is to be ready to receive.

Blink, and you miss the hidden signs. But, stay alert, be ready at all times, and the most magical rewards can be yours.

Never had the boon of zigzag travel been greater than in my search for the Mango Rains.

On a sweltering summer day an age ago, I was doing research in the back stacks of the London Library on the secret history of the Yezidis, self-styled ‘People of the Peacock Angel’. It’s a subject that has captured my attention for as long as I can remember, a family obsession – one that has led to all manner of escapades through five generations.

I was sitting at a low desk nudged up against the wall.

One eye was on the patterns of peeling green paint, the other on a rambling Victorian text about the Peacock Angel. I felt myself drift into a kind of psychotic state. Experience has taught me that this separation from reality is the perfect moment to grasp a path.

Rather than forcing my concentration back on the rows of hand-pressed type, I allowed it to meander. My gaze roamed over the shelves above me. Dusty leather bindings, gilt bands and faded script.

All of a sudden, and uncertain why, I reached up and picked out a book. It had brittle calfskin covers and smelled of faintly of beeswax. Opening it at random, I read:

The Mango Rains are an elixir all of their own. Some search their entire lives yet never have a hope of finding them. While others locate them without ever looking for them at all. Without having made a search, those who arrive too easily misunderstand the true essence of the treasure they have found. The best way to come upon the Mango Rains is to never stop looking and to question everything that passes before the eyes.

The book didn’t reveal much more on these elusive rains, except to say that there was the chance to find them anywhere on Earth – so long as the searcher was prepared to recognize them.

For months, I dropped everything and scoured a dozen libraries for any mention of the Mango Rains.

I learned that the people of Suriname regarded them highly for the way they assisted in ripening the mango crop. And, I came to understand that the Portuguese in Goa had claimed they alone could cure those ailing from venereal disease.

As ever, my library research proved one thing: that the only way to reach conclusions was to abandon the books and set off on the open road.

I travelled through Africa and Europe, through the Americas, Asia, and beyond. While on these journeys I wrote about the people I met, and the situations in which they found themselves. Ever fascinated by observation, I found myself ripened, my rawness chapped by a new education, a kind I never thought possible. And, the more seasoned by travel I became, the more I wrote, and the more perceptive I found my observation to be.

Best of all, one horizon gave way to another, and one journey led to a dozen more.

On the savannah of the Rift Valley, I met a Samburu warrior. He was tall as a tree, his nimble form covered in bright beads and scarlet skins.

I asked if he had ever heard of the Mango Rains.

He led me to his village. It was a day’s walk through scrub and long dry grass. When we got there, he took me to meet his grandfather, a man so old his body seemed somehow petrified.

My question was whispered into his ear.

After a long while, his eyes opened half way and he blinked.

‘Does he know?’ I asked.

The young warrior whispered again. And, this time, the wizened old man spoke.

‘The Mango Rains are the Devil’s work,’ he said. ‘Continue to search for them and Death will be your end.’

Undeterred, I set out again, roaming the world.

A chance encounter in Tokyo, led me on a trail that took me to heat-baked Alice Springs. And that journey ended at Manaus, in the Brazilian Amazon. The great city built on the fortune of the rubber barons was a wild rumpus of a place.

In a backstreet bar, not far from the opera hall in which Caruso played, I met a Swiss anthropologist called Frédérique. Sipping a gin and tonic thoughtfully, he told me the Mango Rains were a figment of Man’s communal fear.

I asked what he meant.

‘What I mean is that you should leave the Amazon. Follow your nose and never doubt.’

‘But I have been following my nose,’ I replied. ‘That’s how I ended up here!’

The Swiss wiped a hand to his lips.

‘Very good,’ he said, ‘but believe me, there will be plenty more bounces before the rubber ball comes to a halt.’

Years of travels came and went.

Destinations with names I couldn’t pronounce, and food that challenged my digestive tract. And all the while, I searched for the elusive Mango Rains.

Then, at dawn one morning I was walking along a beach on Mexico’s Pacific Coast when, quite suddenly, it began to rain. It wasn’t the heavy rain of a monsoon, but a gentle drizzle. Best of all, it was fragrant and had the scent of exotic fruit. I breathed it in deep, as if the smell were somehow healing me from the inside out.

As I was standing there, bathed in what seemed like a stream of perfection, a petite woman approached me. She had a postal sack slung over her shoulder, and was going down the beach picking up plastic bottles.

I felt a little embarrassed. But the woman seemed to understand. She laughed, a crazed maniacal cackle of a laugh.

‘It’s good!’ she exclaimed.

‘Yes, yes, it’s wonderful,’ I said.

‘It’s sent by God. Rich or poor, it’s sent to us all.’

I nodded eagerly.

The woman began trudging towards a plastic bottle half buried in sand.

Some distance from me, she turned her head and called out,

‘Thank God for happiness! Thank God for these Mango Rains!’

FIFTY-FIVE

The Mother Teresa Bandwagon

A HUNCHED FIGURE weaves his way through Calcutta’s unending gridlock traffic.

Suspended from his neck is a broad tray, brimming with the usual assortment of tempting novelties with which to entice choking motorists. But instead of peddling fluorescent pink toothpicks or bottles of homemade rat-poison, the hawker is offering far more sought-after merchandise.

His tray is teeming with the latest in Mother Teresa kitsch.

Statuettes and baseball caps, ash-trays and candlesticks, calendars, alarm-clocks and cartons of incense: all bear the unmistakable, saintly image of a frail woman in a white sari with a royal blue hem.

Mother Teresa may be dead, but her spirit lives on, and her name is more strongly linked with Calcutta than ever. But, just as Princess Diana’s legacy is awash with souvenir mugs and signed margarine tubs, Mother Teresa’s memory is falling victim to her adoptive city’s notorious blend of ingenuity. Everyone in Calcutta, it seems, from shoeshine boys to politicians, is clambering aboard the Mother Teresa money-making bandwagon.

In a bustling corner of central Calcutta, big plans are afoot.

S. S. Gupta, the city’s former mayor, is busy co-ordinating elaborate schemes – all with a distinct Mother Teresa bent. A bulky, round-headed man, he defines his devotion to the cause in a silky, vote-winning voice:

‘I met Mother Teresa many times when I was mayor – I even had my photograph taken with her,’ he says. ‘Now that she’s dead, I have founded an organization called the Mother Teresa Memorial Committee.’ He pauses to spit a mouthful of paan into a bucket beneath his desk. ‘We want to mark Mother Teresa’s first death anniversary in a special way. When Mother became a Nobel Laureate she became an icon of the world. As such, she belongs to us all!’

Mr. Gupta’s committee is striving towards numerous big-budget goals. It plans to confer an annual honour – the Mother Teresa International Award – on a person who selflessly aids the needy. It is lobbying for Park Street, Calcutta’s central thoroughfare, to be renamed Mother Teresa Sarani. And a Mother Teresa souvenir publication, replete with innumerable deluxe advertisements, is in preparation.

But of all Mr. Gupta’s plans, the last is the most ambitious. A vast bronze statue of Mother Teresa has been commissioned by the committee and is under construction. If Mr. Gupta has his way, the towering effigy to Calcutta’s most famous adopted daughter will be installed on a plinth in the centre of the city.

Across town at Mother House, the headquarters of Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity, there is unease at the committee’s plans. The Missionaries have reason to be anxious. Within hours of Mother Teresa’s death, the Sisters’ planned funeral proceedings were hijacked.

Instead of a dignified burial, attended solely by the Sisters, the event was turned into a media extravaganza staged by Calcutta’s Municipal Corporation. Mother Teresa’s casket, which was carried upon the very gun carriage used in the funeral of Mahatma Gandhi, was borne for eight miles through the streets of Calcutta. Never before had the city seen such a panoply of red-turbaned Rajput soldiers, immaculate Gurkha warriors, celebrities and statesmen.

Sister Nirmala, Mother Teresa’s successor, is too preoccupied with paperwork to pay much attention to Mr. Gupta and his Committee. But forty years of pupilage under the indomitable Teresa have taught her to be resilient and now, for the first time, she has spoken out.

‘I completely disapprove of this committee,’ she says, ‘and of its having an office and a bank account. In her lifetime, Mother depended totally on divine providence and did not allow any fundraising whatsoever to be conducted using her name.’

Quiet and unassuming, Sister Nirmala appears to have all the qualities necessary to carry on Mother Teresa’s work. She was born in Bihar state of Nepali parents, and only converted to Catholicism in her teens after watching the carnage of Partition. An early disciple, she joined Mother Teresa in May 1958 and has worn the uniform white and blue sari with a crucifix pinned to the left shoulder ever since.

She draws on decades of experience in missions deep in the Venezuelan jungle, in New York’s slums, and in Calcutta. When not dealing with the administration of the charity’s five hundred and fifty-nine missions spread among a hundred and twenty countries – Sister Nirmala spends much of her time praying at Mother Teresa’s tomb. It is set at one end of the meeting hall at Mother House.

‘Mother is not far away,’ she says softly. ‘She might have changed her residence from Earth to heaven, but I can feel her presence and guidance all around me.’

A year after her mentor’s death, Sister Nirmala still seems preoccupied by the loss. ‘My feelings for her death are still so fresh,’ she explains. ‘We knew that she could go any day, but when it happened it was a shock. She died at about 9.30 p.m. She had done a full day’s work and had had dinner. We were all around her when she died. A doctor rushed in, but could do nothing to save her. She wanted to die in her house, in her room – in Mother House.’

Nirmala and all the Sisters are praying that Mother Teresa be canonized. ‘I very much expect her to be made a saint,’ she muses. ‘We all pray for that. Mother wanted to become a saint – indeed she challenged us all to become saints, saying that it’s a beautiful thing! For some it is a long process with many years of wait involved, but,’ Sister Nirmala continues with a glint of expectation in her eye, ‘for some, it doesn’t take so long.’

If Mother Teresa is to be canonized, some of her belongings will have to be taken to Rome as holy relics. For now, her few possessions have been left in her bedroom exactly as they were on the night she died.

Not far from Mother House, in a dingy back-street office, sits Dilip Basu, the self-proclaimed king of Mother Teresa kitsch. No one could be more desperate to lay their hands on Mother’s personal chattels than Mr. Basu.

‘It’s impossible to put a market price on these relics,’ he fawns, stroking his scant waxy beard. ‘There are private collectors in Europe and America with crores of rupees to spend on such items. The Sisters could give me a few of Mother Teresa’s possessions and I would auction them to the highest bidder on eBay. The money would go to charity, of course.’

While his optimistic negotiations continue with Mother House, Mr. Basu has much else to attend to. His desk is cluttered with prototype Mother Teresa products and typed orders. ‘Look at these!’ he shouts, waving a fistful of papers, ‘I’m having orders from all over the world… you see, everyone loves Mother Teresa!’

Mr. Basu’s business is booming. Forty extra staff have been taken on at his factory to keep up with demand. A dozen of them are devoted to the most popular line of all – plaster Mother Teresa statuettes with Mona Lisa smiles. The ruthless commercialization of Mother Teresa’s image may be surprising, but, as everyone in the small plaster knickknack business knows, Calcutta is a world centre.

The future for Mother Teresa kitsch is looking rosy.

Dozens of new products are being developed at Mr. Basu’s factory. The international market shows no signs of saturation. A spectacular range of new products for the coming year – including Mother Teresa soap flakes, shampoo, pencil-cases and lampshades. And the pièce de résistance: an embarrassingly low-quality rendition of a Mother Teresa Barbie doll.

FIFTY-SIX

The Penniless Trillionaire

IMAGINE OPENING A CUPBOARD in your home and discovering a fortune greater than the United States’ defence budget.

Is such instant and incalculable wealth only found in dreams or fairy tales? Perhaps so, or in India, where practically anything is possible.

G. Vidyaraj, an ageing and penniless farmer’s son, lives in a rented flat in Bangalore, southern India. Born some sixty years ago into an impoverished farming family, he moved to the city in his youth to begin a career – determined to seek fame and fortune.

Now an old man, still penniless, and suffering from a catalogue of ailments, he sips a cup of green tea and tells the extraordinary tale of how he became one of the richest men on Earth.

A cautionary tale par excellence, it’s a story in which an immense fortune has brought nothing but worries, obsessions, and envy from those all around.

‘My ancestors were direct descendents of the Vijayanagaran kings,’ Vidyaraj begins, in slow and precise English. ‘Our family was once in the ruling class, and through the Jagirdar lineage their history goes back more than seven hundred years. Heirlooms were passed down from one generation to the next. Seemingly worthless objects, but nonetheless each was worshipped by our family for centuries.’

A special room was set aside in the farmhouse where Vidyaraj grew up. The strange assortment of icons, idols, and other objects that filled it fascinated Vidyaraj as a boy.

‘My father used to worship those things in the puja room,’ he recalls, speaking at a secret location in central Bangalore. ‘Amongst the items there were four odd black lumps. On all auspicious occasions they would be taken down and worshipped with great reverence and devotion. Afterwards they would be hung up on the ceiling again.’

One generation after the next performed rituals in respect of the solid black lumps.

‘Nobody knew exactly what they were,’ continues Vidyaraj with a glint of excitement in his eye, ‘indeed, they didn’t even have any idea what they were made of. All that was known was that the lumps were very special. They were always protected and worshipped as religious and revered objects.’

The years passed.

Vidyaraj went off to Bangalore where he began his career as a legal advocate. He moved into a tiny apartment, where he still resides, above a post office in the centre of the city. He married, had four children and, after thirty-two years of practice, retired because of ill health. His life, like that of so many millions of Indians, was very ordinary. In no way had it prepared him for the astonishing events that were to come.

Vidyaraj had never been a religious man. He had after all left the village in search of an education and a professional career.

‘My horizons were opened when I was educated,’ he says, ‘I was the only one in my whole family who had a real education.’

When at last his parents and his siblings were dead, Vidyaraj inherited the room filled with icons, objects and four black lumps. He remembers how he was far too busy and impatient to perform the pujas, the rites of devotion, necessary to keep the gods at ease.

Instead he shut the heirlooms up in a cupboard and forgot about them.

‘My wife used to nag me for locking the relics away,’ says Vidyaraj recalling her scolding, ‘she has always been much more religious than me. To please her I agreed that we would take the artefacts and four lumps to the great temple of Nanjundeswara at Nanjangud, about a hundred miles from Bangalore. I wanted to donate the whole lot to the temple, as these were venerated religious objects.’

At the temple, Vidyaraj was met with a blizzard of forms and the bureaucracy.

‘Being an advocate,’ he says, ‘I knew how to make an application, and that getting through all the red tape was not worthwhile. I had no intention to get permission from the High Commissioner just to donate some old heirlooms.’

So Vidyaraj took his family back to Bangalore. On the way his wife pestered again, insisting that the objects should be given to the local temple, as it was certainly sacrilegious not to invoke them at all. But Vidyaraj’s mind had set to work and he had other plans.

‘As we made our way home,’ he continues, ‘it struck me that the black lumps were very heavy. Perhaps, I thought they were made of panchaloha, an alloy of five metals that usually contains gold. If one fifth was gold, and was extracted, I would be sure to make some money. My wife was horrified at this thought, fearing retribution from such sacrilege and blasphemy. She pressured me not to melt down the lumps or change their shape in any way.’

The idea of the gold ready to be removed so easily, nagged at Vidyaraj’s conscience. He tried to forget about it, but was unable to do so. Everything reminded him of the possible ore, the gold, the instant wealth. So one night Vidyaraj sent his wife and daughters off to the cinema and set to work.

‘I embarked on an investigation,’ he began softly, speaking in formal English moulded by decades of legal work. ‘There was a thick black crust of soot and grime covering the lumps. I took an old toothbrush and a bar of soap and began to wash. I assumed I was washing metal. The dirt was so hard that only some came away. After a lot of cleaning with the toothbrush, I held the lumps up to the light. In one I could see specks of red, and in another blue specks. It was then that I realized that these were not metal, but minerals, and they might be very valuable indeed.’

For months Vidyaraj kept his discovery secret. He immersed himself in the study of gemstones from books and articles borrowed from a public library. Worries that word of his fabulous fortune would leak out dogged him.

He could trust no one with the secret.

‘I thought,’ he went on, ‘if I took them to a jeweller that I might be hoodwinked and misguided. Such people might try to work for their own benefit. So I studied the geological sciences for a year or two.’

Through dedicated and gruelling studies, Vidyaraj learnt the elaborate experiments necessary to identify a precious stone. In the seclusion of his book-lined chamber he performed the vital tests. It was only then that he could pronounce with certainty the minerals’ true identities.

Three of the stones were rose-coloured double-star rubies, the fourth – a colossal sapphire.

How did four of the world’s biggest gems end up in Vidyaraj’s cupboard? The most plausible explanation is that they were passed down through generations, from his supposed ancestors – the Vijayanagaran kings. For safe keeping the gems must have been dyed black, then covered in soot and dirt.

Vidyaraj began to fear more than ever for his safety and that of his family. Constant anxiety, overwork, and his diabetic condition hampered his health. But still he could confide his great secret in no one. So having read a little bit about lapidary, he bought a small hand-driven grinding wheel. In a darkened room at his home, he set to work with the grinder to remove the top portions of the stones himself.

‘After some time each began to shine,’ he recalls. ‘Each exhibited star lines, and slowly they took on their individual shapes.’

For months Vidyaraj maintained his secrecy.

He would attend to his legal work by day, and study gemology by night. One by one he had the three rubies and the sapphire cut. Then he gave them names. And, over the few months and years, he announced their existence to the world. All the stones were cut in India. Vidyaraj himself admits deep regrets for rushing into having them cut. His knowledge, on how some of the biggest and most priceless gems in the world should be faceted, was very limited indeed.

The largest ruby in the world at the time, read Vidyaraj in the Guinness Book of Records, was the Rosser Reeves ruby of 138.72 carats, kept at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC. The smallest of his own rubies, he named Indumathi after his wife. Weighing two hundred and fifteen carats, it immediately earned an entry in the Guinness Book of Records. Vidyaraj amazed the geological world by producing the Indumathi first.

But he had far better specimens still to come.

His second great ruby, named Vidyaraj, after himself, was the next to be shown to the world. It weighed six hundred and fifty carats, having been cut from the original stone of 1,125 carats. He still grieves at the probably unnecessary loss in great weight when cutting. In height the stone measures about three and a half centimetres and, in diameter, more than four centimetres.

As for the whereabouts of the stones, it’s anyone’s guess where they are. Vidyaraj is keeping his lips tightly sealed, for fear that he’ll be robbed. He says that the huge wealth in his possession has caused everyone he meets – even old friends – to view him with suspicion and greed.

But the biggest problem is not the way in which others covet his gems, but the fact that no one has the funds with which to purchase them. After all, the value of these gems is put at billions of dollars, a fact that seems to have escaped Vidyaraj himself.

‘I am asking anyone with deep pockets to come forward and to make themselves known to me,’ he says, sipping his tea. ‘There are surely plenty of millionaires or billionaires out there who have enough cash. I am certain of it. What about the Arabs for example?’ he asks. ‘We all know how rich they are. They ask if you want cash, cheque or credit card.’

When asked why he doesn’t simply cut the stones up and sell them off in bits, he screws up his face in alarm.

‘Oh my goodness,’ he says wearily. ‘No, no, I could never do that.’

‘But why not?’

‘Because I would lose the Guinness entry of course!’

FIFTY-SEVEN

The Queen of Assamese Hearts

FOR THE LAST THREE DAYS the remote village of Mirza, in southern Assam, has been buzzing with anticipation.

The community, which is known for its tea plantations, is hosting Royalty. As the dank evening air fills with giant moths and fireflies, several senior members of the British Royal Family have been spotted parading openly in public.

Queen Elizabeth, Princess Anne, Prince Charles, as well as courtiers and Coldstream Guards, have caused quite a stir – after all the tiny village of Mirza is generally neglected by State tours. But, to the soft-spoken people of Assam, the Windsors are not the real draw. A far more famous celebrity has eclipsed the presence of even Her Majesty. Dripping with diamonds, and dressed in a shimmering silver wedding gown, a fairy-tale princess has arrived – Diana, Queen of Assamese hearts.

Take a closer look at the regal guests, and you begin to notice subtle inconsistencies. Her Majesty, Prince Charles and, Diana herself, can’t speak a word of English. Their hair is jet black, their skin dark, and their costumes are not handmade. Few Assamese have met Royalty before, which may explain how the regal charade has gone undetected. But the distinguished visitors are not impostors, rather they’re actors in the latest Assamese theatrical sensation The Life and Death of Lady Diana.

With an acting tradition stretching back more than four centuries, India’s North-eastern state of Assam boasts some of the greatest travelling theatres in Asia. More than thirty touring companies crisscross the state, continually providing entertainment to villages where television and cinemas are still unknown.

The plays are celebrated for performing the great Hindu scriptures, along with passing on regional news. Until recently, Assam’s theatre-going public had had very little exposure to Western drama. But all that changed last year when the Koh-i-Noor troupe of players staged an epic, the likes of which Assam had never seen before.

Hauling a colossal plywood steam ship across the state, they dazzled one village after the next with their own theatrical rendition of Titanic.

Rival theatres searched high and low for another story, charged with passion and overflowing with grandeur, to match the astonishing success of the Titanic love story. The director of the Abahan travelling theatre, Hem Bhattacharya, considered his options carefully. ‘Titanic changed everything in Assam,’ he says, ‘before that, people were content with the myths we had been enacting for centuries. But now our audiences are far more demanding. They want new epics. I decided that we would put on the greatest tale of love ever known, even greater than Titanic – the story of Lady Diana.’

Mr. Bhattacharya wanted to capitalize on his people’s inexplicable affection for the former Princess of Wales. For years, local newspapers had recounted the trials and tribulations of Diana’s life in the most minute detail. It’s an obsession that grips the entire Subcontinent, with dozens of original books about her in regional Indian languages.

Once Mr. Bhattacharya had begun research into the Princess’ life, he dispatched scouts to all corners of Assam. ‘They hunted for a woman to play Diana,’ he explains, ‘an actress with her grace and her inner beauty.’

Remarkably, the quest took only two months, in which hundreds of hopefuls were auditioned. One morning in May, Mr. Bhattacharya first set eyes on the radiant figure of Jubilee Rajkumari (literally ‘Princess Jubilee’). Against all odds, he says, he’d turned up a woman so similar in looks that she might be regarded as Diana’s long lost twin.

To our eyes, Jubilee’s resemblance to the Princess may at first be difficult to discern. Aged twenty, she’s a little on the homely side, with a round face, oversized hands, and swarthy complexion. But spend time talking to her, and one quickly realizes how she landed the part – it’s her smile. Even when dispirited, she beams with blinding delight.

Once he had a Diana, Mr. Bhattacharya sought the other key players in the fateful tale. The Queen, Prince Charles and Earl Spencer, James Hewitt, Dodi Al-Fayed and Camilla Parker-Bowles, were all cast with Assamese clones. As strenuous rehearsals commenced, so was construction of an astonishing array of scenery and props.

In the travelling theatrical business, the difficulty lies in the fact that everything has to be lugged from village to village every four days. A thirty-foot backdrop of Buckingham Palace, crafted from plywood, looms down as the main symbol of Britannic majesty.

But the royal residence is just the tip of the iceberg.

There’s Kensington Palace, too (inside and out), St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Royal Yacht Britannia, three speed boats, a pair of helicopters, a jumbo jet, the infamous Mercedes, the paparazzi motorbike and Paris tunnel and, even the Eiffel Tower.

The day before the show, a white Indian-made Ambassador car charges through the outlying countryside whipping up enthusiasm. Battered speakers on the roof announce ‘Lady Diana! Lady Diana!’ Giant hoardings of the Assamese Diana in her most stylish apparel are dotted in key positions around Mirza. But the advertising is hardly necessary, as all the tickets were sold long ago. The insatiable demand has created a thriving black market.

Krishna Das is one of thousands of plantation workers who has staked his family’s savings on a tout’s tickets. He waves the four slips of yellow paper above his head. ‘My wife and daughters are desperate to see the play,’ he says, ‘how could I let them down? This may be the only time my little girls will ever see Lady Diana.’

Across the street, final touches are being made to the stage, constructed on an area of waste ground at the edge of the village. A complex web of bamboo poles and ropes will keep the Buckingham Palace backdrop upright in the strongest winds. This is just as well, as the latest weather reports suggest that an Orissan cyclone is about to strike. An army of barefoot workers in lungis and string vests hurry about ensuring that the theatre is extra sturdy. Three thousand chairs have been laid out in rows beneath an enormous tent, with standing room for many more.

Sitting in the second row, Mr. K. Roy, the producer, is making calculations. Since opening in August, the play has been seen by more than two hundred thousand people in sixteen villages. As the one who stands to make the most money, Mr. Roy is keen to pack in as many seats as possible. The play, which cost about £2,000 to put on, is due to end in April. Although he waves away questions of profit, local rumours say Roy will have made as much as millions of rupees before then.

Backstage the preparations are well underway. Five trunks are unlocked and, with utmost care, the play’s elaborate costumes are taken out. All Assamese theatrical productions are founded on two main components: extensive song and dance routines, and plenty of costume changes.

Lady Diana is no exception.

Prince Charles appears in four uniforms and three suits, while Diana sports a series of colourful cocktail dresses, gowns, and the resplendent wedding frock. Only the Queen is more modest, with a single glittering golden robe.

When all the costumes and Union Jacks have been ironed once and then again, and the miniature shrine’s incense has been lit, the laborious make-up procedures begin. The drawback of using Assamese actors is that all visible skin has to be covered by a thick, blancmange-like grease paint.

Jubilee Rajkumari sits obediently before a naked lightbulb. A stern-looking make-up artist spatulas the salmon-coloured goo onto her cheeks.

‘I felt so miserable when Diana died,’ she declares, ‘the whole of Assam mourned. People adored her. You see, she stood up against the Royal Family, and was a defender of women’s rights.’ Jubilee pauses as a spoonful of the make-up is slopped onto her hand. ‘Lady Diana may have been a princess, but her marriage suffered from common problems, the kind which even ordinary Assamese women are faced with.’ Jubilee breaks off as a voluptuous, fair-skinned young woman enters the tent. Thin as a rake, with high cheek bones and soft pouting lips, she winks at one of the male actors. Jubilee broods with irritation. For the luscious nineteen-year-old is none other than Likuma Sharma, a.k.a Camilla Parker-Bowles.

Until recently, Likuma, who’s regarded as one of the great beauties of her generation, played basketball for Assam. She admits that although she’s never seen a picture of Camilla, she has worked hard at mastering the part. ‘Camilla is so misunderstood,’ Likuma gushes, waving the make-up woman away, ‘She’s a loving, romantic woman who is very attractive to men.’

Outside, the audience is beginning to arrive. The atmosphere is electric. Hawkers are selling paan, popcorn soaked in ghee, and two-foot chunks of sugarcane. Wild dogs and cows amble about searching for food, against a backdrop of noise, a generator rumbling in the distance. The luckiest four thousand people in Mirza trample through the mud to the cavernous tent. Each ticket is inspected carefully because there are forgeries about. Everyone is dressed in their best clothes: women in saris, little girls in tutus and little boys in tight-fitting suits with matching bow-ties.

Tuning their eclectic range of instruments, the band is drowned out by the growl of the generator. In the dressing-room tent the cast is assembled. One at a time, they pause to pray at the shrine, and to gulp down a mouthful of prasad, a holy offering. The Coldstream Guards dust off their scarlet coats and scruffy nylon busbies, which resemble Rastafarian wigs. Jubilee stares into space, going over her lines. Earl Spencer whispers a joke to Camilla, who pouts seductively at the punchline.

The spectators all inside, the house-lights slowly go down, and community officials clamber onto the stage to give speeches. Assamese officials like nothing more than to give long speeches to a captive audience. Four thousand hecklers soon drive the politicians from the platform. Silence.

And then, the extraordinary play commences.

The Life and Death of Lady Diana begins with the screech of a car crash, and Diana’s ghost (in a white night-shirt) roving around the stage. This gives way to a rollicking Cossack-like dance scene, in which the Coldstream Guards wave Union Jacks. The actors are virtually obliterated in pungent sandalwood smoke, which ascends in clouds from beneath the stage. As the routine reaches its climax, the prow of Britannia appears, bearing Charles and Diana, who are on their honeymoon.

All is blissful… but not for long.

Almost from the outset, Charles – portrayed as a friendly, but weak man – has eyes for another. Enter the steamingly seductive Camilla Parker-Bowles (‘Bowles’ pronounced ‘Bowels’). Distraught by her husband’s infidelity, Diana seeks comfort in the dashing, tender war hero, Major James Hewitt (pronounced by the Assamese palate as ‘James Herriott’).

Sitting in the drawing-room of Buckingham Palace, the Queen is kept abreast of the affairs by an obsequious adviser, not dissimilar to Mr. Bean. Her Majesty is strangely eager for the sordid details. She learns how Charles is cavorting around with a woman who has the body of a goddess; while the rather chunky Diana’s being wooed by James Herriot (sorry, I mean ‘Hewitt’). Always caring, with a soft shoulder for the young Princess’ head, Hewitt comes out as the real hero of the show. So much so that you begin to wonder whether the poor chap’s been dealt a harsh hand.

But there’s no time to ponder this…

The palace guards have been bribed by the unscrupulous anorak-clad paparazzi. Meanwhile, Diana has a blazing row with the Queen, and storms out of Buckingham Palace (the audience goes wild with delight). Her Majesty is anything but amused. Over at Kensington Palace, Diana assaults Camilla, who’s strutting her stuff, waiting for Charles. More blue anoraks, as the press tries to get a look-in. A couple of quick dance scenes to lighten up the mood, before Diana capers about with a lost expression to delicate strains of a sitar. Realising that her marriage is over, she gives in to Hewitt’s advances, agreeing to spend the night with him. The women in the audience whoop with glee… this is racy stuff, in Assam at least.

To his credit, the writer has kept away from Squidgy-gate, eating disorders, and obsessive phone calls, perhaps fearing that such material might not be understood in an Assamese village. A cynic might pick holes in the performance but, for my money, there isn’t a dull moment. It’s no less accurate than an amateur version of The Mikado.

After almost three hours, punctuated by power-cuts (one caused when a pye-dog chewed through the generator’s cable), Dodi Al-Fayed slinks onto the scene. He whisks Diana away on a jumbo jet to the Med, where they career about in a speed boat. Then to Paris (with its Eiffel Tower backdrop), where the blue anoraks are waiting.

Backstage there’s pandemonium as a cohort of workers heave Buckingham Palace and St. Paul’s away, and position the Mercedes. Like the motorbike, it’s attached to a trolley, and runs on bamboo rails.

Every now and again there’s a shriek from the sea of dark heads, as anticipation spills over. The crash is coming, and everyone knows it. The Assamese can relate to nothing better than a bloodthirsty car crash. Their roads are a constant theatre of carnage.

Spotting Dodi and Di off-stage, the paparazzi take chase. The stage lights dim. The piercing sound of an engine revving fills the tent. Four thousand mouths gape open with expectation. A drum beats faster and faster. Cymbals clash together. Then, when we can stand no more, the Mercedes – its lights blinding us – shoots forward through a tunnelcoloured backdrop, and smashes onto its side.

The curtain falls.

Without a word, the people of Mirza slink away into the night. No one waits for a curtain call, or even applauds. When asked if this infers that the play has flopped, the producer shakes his head wildly from side to side. ‘Are you mad?!’ he bellows. ‘It means they loved it!’

FIFTY-EIGHT

The Romance of Richard Halliburton

THERE WAS BETWEEN THE WARS a faint aperture of time in which great marvels were still to be found. These holy grails of travel were made reachable through new technologies, and by the boldness and grit of an intrepid band of women and men – a new breed of explorer.

Until then, travel chronicles had been dominated by the great nineteenth century adventurers. Mostly men, they were towering figures of Victorian celebrity – names like Burton, Barth, Livingstone and Stanley. Their accounts of subjugating natives, and hoisting the flag for colonial rule, were at best terse and at worst unreadable, by today’s standards at least.

Great travel writing is all about evoking an atmosphere of adventure. But more than that, it’s about story-telling plain and simple. Far too many works of travel have slipped into obscurity because the writing is lacklustre, dated, or downright dull. Trawl the shelves of the London Library and you’ll find miles and miles of books that are all but forgotten. And many of them deserve to be left there – deep underground.

Yet from time to time you come across an author whose work is a beacon of originality. The American adventurer, Richard Halliburton, whose life was snuffed out at far too early an age, was one such writer.

Although his work has a small but devoted following, his books warrant a far greater readership – and are the kind of travel literature that have withstood the test of time, and continue to inspire the youth to achieve.

With the slaughter of the Great War over, the roaring ’twenties were a gateway to a new realm. Effervescent and frivolous, it was a time to assuage the pain of battle and to uplift the sunken hearts of armchair explorers the world over.

The result was a new kind of work – the birth of the modern travel book.

Quests in their own right, these accounts were less about empire or life and death exploration, and more about engaging the reader through passionate description and a really good yarn.

On the eastern shores of the Atlantic, we like to imagine that to be a worthy adventurer you have to be an European as well. But nothing could be farther from the truth. Leading the field in this genre of new romanticism was a zealous young American named Richard Halliburton.

Born into a middle class home in Brownsville, Tennessee, at the start of 1900, Halliburton was a frail youth who suffered from a heart murmur. Despite an enthusiasm for the outdoors and for sport, he was confined to bed for months at a time in childhood, and even attended the legendary Battle Creak Sanitarium of self-styled nutritionist John Harvey Kellog.

Putting his clinical confinement to use, Halliburton devoured every work of geography and exploration available. Yearning for a time when he could break free, he longed to experience the wild lands of which he had read. A romantic through and through, he had been weaned on the Classics, a fabulous backdrop and a blend of fact and fantasy without equal.

Indefatigable, eloquent, and rip-roaringly upbeat, Halliburton was intensely alluring as a character. Soon after graduating from Princeton, he was well on his way to achieving the celebrity he so desired. Inspired by the intellect of Oscar Wilde, and the glamour of Rudolf Valentino, he was himself a dandy of the time. Impeccably dressed, exquisitely groomed, charming and ambitious, it’s easy to imagine him as a player in The Great Gatsby world of the inter-war years.

For me, Halliburton’s most intoxicating quality was the effortlessness with which he embarked upon a quest. Respectful, yet deaf to his detractors, he followed his gut, and used the media to his advantage right from the start. Certainly, the old guard wrote him off as whimsical, but Richard Halliburton was a man who grasped the pulse of the time better than almost anyone else alive.

The ’twenties were about recuperation, a return to the serenity of the Classical world that had been so obliterated from common culture on Flanders’ fields. By understanding this – and by adoring it – Halliburton rose to astonishing fame. By the ’thirties he was a household name across America.

Daring, jovial, and eccentric, reports of his expeditions filled the news reels of the time, to the delight of a generation of youth. His Boy’s Own style of adventure leaps off the page, the kind of writing that can’t fail to enthuse, inspiring as much as it does entertain. Relying on fledgling aviation much of the time, and never fearful of terrible danger, Halliburton broke new ground, soaring high above wonders that other travellers had only skirted from the ground.

As far as he was concerned, the world was his giant playground, one still unscathed by mass tourism, political correctness, or industry. In this sunset of empire, the suave and fearless young Halliburton could do no wrong. Fêted by columnists and swooned over by adoring young women – and men – he was in a league of his own.

First published in 1928, The Glorious Adventure came hot on the heels of The Royal Road to Romance, an amalgamation of disparate travels through Europe, North Africa, Central Asia and the Far East.

In scope, The Glorious Adventure is certainly far less wieldy than any of the other Halliburton travelogues. By choosing Homer’s Odyssey as his theme – his great childhood love – he embarks on a journey to the theatre in which Ancient Greece was played out. Lyrical, lighthearted and passionate without end, the book must have been a hymn to thousands of young men about to be hammered by the Wall Street crash of 1929.

His reasoning to leave is as spirited as the quest itself. He wrote:

Suddenly I became bored and impatient with everything I had and was: bored with people, bored with knowledge. I realized I didn’t want knowledge. I only wanted my senses to be passionately alive, and my imagination fearlessly far-reaching. And instead, I felt I was sinking into a slough of banality. Adventure! Adventure! That was the escape; that was the remedy.

Seeking out the land of the Lotus Eaters, the Cyclops’ cave, Circe’s lair, and Mount Olympus, home of the gods, Halliburton satiates his need for adventure and his infatuation for the Classical world. Furiously fast-paced, packed with verve, at times it exhausts even the most devoted fan.

Enamoured by the life and legacy of the English war poet, Rupert Brooke, Halliburton seeks out his grave on the Greek island of Skyros. It was there the poet had expired in his prime from fever whilst en route to Gallipoli. But it was another English poet – Robert Byron – who provided the inspiration for the greatest feat of the journey. Following his lead, Halliburton succeeded in swimming the Hellespont, the brutal current almost drowning him.

Of the handful of books he published, there’s one that stands out as a monument to the time in which he lived, as much as it is a chronicle of everything Halliburton stood for. The Flying Carpet is a rare and enthusing tale of Boy’s Own bravado. It’s one of those books that stays with you, not so much because of the intoxicating roll call of adventure, but because of the frantic sizzle of the tale.

Halliburton may have been thirty but he was gripped as ever by the raw enthusiasm of a twelve-year-old. Longing to once again be, as he put it, a ‘footloose vagabond’, he searched for an aeroplane capable of crossing deserts and jungles, oceans and seas. Without hardly any preparation, and almost no background knowledge of flight, he bought one on the spur of the moment – a Stearman biplane. Shiny and small, with an open cockpit, he christened it the Flying Carpet.

The only thing needed now was a pilot.

By a stroke of luck he was introduced to a young Stanford graduate named Moye Stephens, who was employed for flying passengers over the Rockies. Sharing the same lust for daredevil adventure, Stephens readily agreed to pilot them both on a circumnavigation of the globe – ‘to all the outlandish places on Earth’. He was promised no pay, but unlimited expenses.

His only question was when they were to leave.

‘In half an hour,’ Halliburton replied casually.

And, pulling him to the door, they did.

The journey was the kind of feat that people are drawn to recreate today, but with a rigid safety net of support. And yet the alluring thing about Halliburton and Stephens’ epic flight, was the absolute lack of safety, and the child-like zigzagging of wonders of the old world.

Flying by the seats of their pants, and with almost nothing in the way of preparation, the pair set off into the unknown.

Halliburton was dead set on visiting Timbuktu first. Lured by the mystery of the name and by its seeming inaccessibility, all he knew was that it was somewhere in Africa.

To reach it, they traversed the United States eastwards from California, headed south through Europe, and into the mysterious hinterland of Morocco.

Soaring high above the Atlas, they climbed to fifteen thousand feet, to avoid pot shots from the tribesmen eager to bring down a shiny little plane like theirs.

And, then, laden with extra fuel, they began the gruelling flight southwards, with the formidable dunes of the Sahara laid out in an ocean beneath. Warned time and again about sand storms, but taking no notice, they flew headlong into one after the next, their faces and the Flying Carpet rasped raw.

Causing immense excitement as it came to land at Timbuktu, the little biplane assured the two Americans immediate celebrity. They were received by Père Yakouba, the so-called ‘White Monk of Timbuctoo’ – the first of many intriguing locals they encountered.

Flying on eastwards, they reached the Algerian Sahara, where they were welcomed into the folds of the French Foreign Legion, at Colomb Bechar. Amazing all they met with acrobatics and tall tales of their journey so far, they flew back up to Europe.

In an era in which travel was far more leisurely an activity, they took off and landed where they liked, when they liked. Reaching Italy through the Simplon Pass, they made a beeline for Venice, where they spent a month.

Then they wondered where next. Halliburton wrote:

Once more we unrolled our world map. Moye suggested Berlin. I voted for Malta. We compromised on Constantinople. A few hours later the Flying Carpet and its crew were in the air.

Our first stop was Vienna. Then to Budapest – to Belgrade – to Bucharest – through storms, across plains, over mountains – on to Constantinople and the Golden Horn.

On and on they flew – across Turkey, down through the Holy Land, to Cairo and the Pyramids, over the Nabatean ruins of Petra, and eastwards over the great basalt desert to Baghdad.

The frequency with which they landed must have reflected the trying conditions of low altitude open-cockpit flight. Yet always gung-ho in style, Halliburton’s writing brushes aside the air-sickness from what must have been rollercoaster flights.

But their eagerness to land was inspired, too, by a genuine delight in witnessing new realms. At a time when the globe was not yet homogenized by mass media and equally mass travel, Halliburton and Stephens observed first hand the last vestiges of the old world order.

And wherever they went, their celebrity status was enough for the doors of palaces, monasteries, and jungle longhouses to be flung open for them.

No one, it seemed, wanted to be left out.

In Baghdad, they took the young Crown Prince Ghazi up for a ride; and, in Persia, they carried aloft the daughter of the Shah, Princess ‘Flower-of-the-Morning’. While there, they helped out the stricken German aviatrix, Elly Beinhorn, who was flying solo around the world, and had just arrived from Timbuktu. Aged just twenty-three, she was the same age as Stephens. She must have outlived all the other early pilots for whom longevity was at odds with their sport. She finally passed away aged one hundred, in 2007.

Halliburton was a great believer in the wonders of the world.

He understood that associating his expedition with great landmarks would guarantee the media exposure he so desired. Soaring over the Taj Mahal was a natural way to hit the headlines back home, as was the daring flight in the shadows of Mount Everest.

A devoted aficionado of George Mallory, who had perished on that mountain seven years before, Halliburton was desperate to do a fly-by in some kind of tribute. Risking life and limb, and almost freezing solid in the ultra-thin air, they managed, with Halliburton taking the first aerial shots of the mountain with his camera.

The episode is Halliburton description at its best. He wrote:

And then Everest itself, indescribably magnificent, taunting the heavens with its gleaming crown. Her precipice, her clinging glacier shield, her royal streamer forever flying eastward from the throne, her court of gods and demons, her hypnotic, deadly beauty… what incomparable glory crowns this Goddess Mother of all mountains!

Of all the characters and encounters, my very favourite comes a little further, once they had traversed Burma, Indochina, and arrived at the seething, steaming jungles of Borneo. There, they found the fabulously eccentric English aristocrat, the ‘Ranee’ Lady Sylvia Brooke, whose husband ruled Sarawak, a principality the size of Britain, peopled with Dyak headhunters. The author of a remarkable book herself (entitled Queen of the Headhunters), they took her up and did acrobatics over the jungles that were her home.

An astounding success, The Flying Carpet Expedition helped in making Halliburton a household name across the United States. The adventure supposedly cost him $50,000, but he recouped twice that in media deals – a huge amount for the time.

As his meteoric career progressed and, as he crisscrossed the planet, Richard Halliburton became one of the most travelled men alive. Always longing for adventure, one gets the feel he also longed to be remembered, cognizant of the fact it would take one slip up, or act of god, to end it all.

And, ultimately, Halliburton’s daredevil brand of travel ran out of luck. Not yet forty, he had embarked on his most hazardous adventure – The Sea Dragon Expedition, in 1939. Having commissioned a Chinese junk in Hong Kong, he intended to cross the Pacific to San Francisco.

After a catalogue of teething problems, the craft set out. Three weeks at sea, and aloft mountainous waves, they sent their last radio dispatch.

Neither the Sea Dragon, Halliburton, nor the crew, were ever heard of again.

To disappear on the trail of a glorious quest is surely the secret dream of any travel writer. But to vanish in one’s prime – with years of accomplishments still unfulfilled – is our great loss.

Richard Halliburton deserves the celebrity he so enjoyed, and to be remembered as an inspiration from the nascent age of modern travel. His was a time of good manners, genteel delivery and, most of all, of impassioned values. It was an era of biplanes, tramp steamers, and of vast open-topped vehicles, a world in which most of humanity had not yet been exposed to the trappings of the industrial age.

And, of course, all too soon, the technology that made such travel possible for one, made it possible for all – with a result of a homogenized global culture – something Halliburton would surely have despised.

As I see it, what he stood for was as important as what he achieved. A new romantic without equal, Halliburton’s joie de vivre and gung-ho attitude was itself a catalyst that rallied a generation to go out and seek marvels of their own. And, as such, his legacy is not only poignant, but a tangible gift that continues to inspire today.

A contemporary of Hemmingway, the young Richard Halliburton had none of the melancholy and all of the passion. Brimming with charm, good looks and natural charisma, he was the kind of man to which both men and women were drawn.

While others were languishing on the terrors of the Great War, he was setting about making a name for himself by crisscrossing crumbling empires by any means possible. Making use of the media with impressive foresight, one can only imagine the heights he’d have soared to given the technology we all take for granted today.

To grasp Halliburton’s celebrity, one must remember the time in which he lived. His playground was the world caught in a no man’s land between the Wars. The British Empire still ruled the seas, ferocious tribes inhabited the immense African plains and the seething jungles of the Amazon and Borneo; and motor cars were a jeu du jour for tin-pot dictators, Maharajahs, and for anyone else with the means to afford them.

A pioneer, a trail-blazer, not to mention a media junkie, Halliburton understood the power of making a splash. In the vein of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not, he tantalized his readers with jaw-dropping accounts of intrigue, exploration and awe.

His books are a cocktail of key ingredients. They have adventure in great measure, humour, and a smattering of history. But, more importantly, they give the reader the overwhelming sense that just about anyone could follow Halliburton’s lead and embark on a madcap escapade just like him.

And, for me, that’s the really great attraction of all his work.

A fresh young-faced layman with no technical experience, Richard Halliburton surfed a tidal wave of enthusiasm and good old get-upand-go. He wasn’t trying to impress with ground-breaking hypotheses, or by discovering far-flung lands. Rather, his writing was a sympathetic lens through which ordinary people could experience the extraordinary world in which they lived.

FIFTY-NINE

The Sanctuary of Lot

THE PEOPLE OF SAFI speak fondly of the stranger who came to live with them six years ago.

They tell of how the curious Greek man would sneak out of the town before dawn each morning. And they recount how he would amble about on a barren hillside all day for what seemed like no reason at all.

‘Sometimes we would stand at the bottom of the hill and laugh at him!’ chuckles Mohammed Abdul, a local trader. ‘People came from miles away to watch him wandering about in circles in the blazing sun. As you know this is the lowest point of land in the world. It’s damn hot here!’ Mohammed’s smile suddenly disappears. ‘But’, he says gently, ‘who was to know then what the crazy Greek man was to find?’

Constantine Politis, an archaeologist from Athens, was first drawn to Jordan by its rich ancient heritage. Having studied archaeology in Greece, in the United States and in England, he spent years excavating in Greece, Jordan, Oman and in Liechtenstein. His overwhelming fascination has always been for the Holy Land and for the Levant. Yet despite the region’s known Biblical legacy, Politis felt sure that more Old Testament sites were waiting to be unearthed.

So he spent many hours gazing at the fabled mosaic map of the Holy Land, at Madaba, in western Jordan. The map, located on the floor of the Madaba’s Greek Orthodox Church – dates back to the sixth century AD – and provides the most accurate reference guide we have to the Holy Land in Byzantine times. The Madaba map, with Jerusalem at its centre, depicts the locations of over one hundred and fifty Biblical places.

As Politis stared at the soft pastel mosaic of ancient cities, of rivers and forests, he noticed something startling.

On the southern banks of the Dead Sea, above the Biblical town of Zoar, the map showed a small monastery – dedicated to the Biblical figure Lot. The retreat, which seemed to be perched on a mountain, had eluded archaeologists. Using the map and his Biblical knowledge as his guide, Politis went down to the ancient town of Zoar, which is today called Safi.

On a treasure hunt, he pressed on out of Safi for a mile or so. The Dead Sea was on his left and, on the right, was a mountain – the only one in the immediate area. And, as depicted on the Madaba map, there were date palms at its base. He was just a few miles from Qumran – where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in 1947.

For the first time Politis ascended the steep scree slope, with its dramatic views over the Holy Land. He climbed halfway up the hillside and looked around. There was no monastery as the Madaba map had suggested.

But there was something else instead.

‘I kept finding clues, incredible clues!’ Politis exclaims as he remembers that first morning. ‘There were mosaic cubes strewn about on the surface. But they weren’t any old mosaic cubes, instead they were exquisitely fashioned – as if they had come from a palace. Then I started to find other clues – shards of fine pottery, fragments of sculpted stone, things like that. Remember that all this was halfway up a totally barren hillside.’

Intrigued, Politis had a hunch he was onto something – something very important indeed.

And, while the local people of Safi felt sure he was a madman, the archaeologist was certain there was more to the mountain than met the eye.

‘I refused to let myself think the unthinkable,’ recalls Politis. ‘The obvious temptation – to link the site with the Prophet Lot – was too great. So, instead of jumping to hasty conclusions, I proceeded to get modest funding from the British Museum and from the Jordanian government, and I began to excavate.’

Engaging a team of workmen from Safi, and having been joined with a small international contingent of archaeologists, Politis began the laborious process of excavation.

‘We named the site Deir Ain Abata – which means the Monastery of the Abbot’s Spring’, says Politis, ‘you see there’s an ancient freshwater spring at the base of the mountain.’

But despite the rather grand name they found no monastery. The initial work involved making a series of topographic maps and contour plans of the area, collecting shards from the surface, and so forth.

‘Even in those early days it was certain that this was no ordinary hillside,’ says Politis, ‘Why were there so many luxury items? Why was so much effort put into building structures on such a secluded and precarious location? And why were there such high quality architectural pieces strewn about on the ground? Things just didn’t add up. Of one thing we were certain: that this wasn’t just another Byzantine fort or farmstead.’

Every schoolboy knows the story of Lot.

The tale, which is told in Genesis, recounts how God was angered by the depraved antics of the people living at two cities in the Holy Land’s cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Having sent angels to guide Lot – the one righteous man and his family – from area, God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah with fire and brimstone. And, as every school child is well aware, Lot’s wife defied the angelic instructions: she turned around and became a pillar of salt.

Genesis, chapter nineteen continues that Lot and his two daughters left the city of Zoar and sought refuge in a cave overlooking the Dead Sea, which is itself known in Arabic as ‘The Sea of Lot’.

And, as the scriptures relate how Lot’s daughters, fearing that they may never bear children, plied their father with alcohol and seduced him. Both became pregnant. From their offspring – Mobab and Ammon – many of the Arab peoples of the Middle East are descended.

Historians like the eminent Jordanian scholar Rami Khouri suggest a deeper reason for the rather sordid events, which are reported in Genesis.

‘The Genesis accounts in the Bible,’ says Khouri, ‘were written in ancient Hebrew by Jews who were constantly fighting against the Ammonites and Moabites. Depicting the origins of their trans-Jordanian enemies in this manner may simply have been an extension of national combat – into the sphere of literary religious texts.’

Lot has been a popular Biblical figure since before Byzantine times, there being numerous churches, tombs and monasteries dedicated to him across the Holy Land. And, in more modern times there’s been a fascination, too. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries well over one hundred important paintings were created by European artists, illustrating the famous biblical tale of Lot.

With the site carefully charted, Politis’ team removed the topsoil and began the excavations. The first area to be tackled was a sizeable reservoir and elaborate water catchment system. The reservoir itself, which was surrounded by seven-metre walls, was once covered by stone arches and palm trunks – some of which were, remarkably, still in situ.

The discovery of the reservoir answered few of Politis’ questions. Indeed, it raised further questions, and he became more baffled. Why should a large and sophisticated water system of this type have been built on such an abrupt hillside?

Seeking answers, Politis dug deeper.

Ancient ash deposits – when analysed – revealed the remains of creatures as diverse as fallow deer, goats and parrot-fish. This rich diet suggested that the community was anything but impoverished.

Other finds included dozens of oil lamps, drinking cups, marble bowls, inscribed stone jars, coins and glass vessels. But, the further the excavations went, the more bewildered Politis became.

‘You can’t imagine how we felt!’ he exclaims, thinking back, ‘I was tormented by the riddle. Why was there so much in a place so utterly barren? Then we unearthed a superb stone block inscribed in Greek invoking Saint Lot to bless Sozomenou. This was thrilling – it was the first decisive piece of evidence linking Lot’s association with Deir Ain Abata.’

Looking back at the initial excavations, Politis is astonished at how unassuming he and other archaeologists had been.

‘Eventually, working in the tremendous heat, hundreds of feet below sea level, we came across a large triple-apsed basilical church,’ he says. ‘The entire structure had been buried. There had been no hint that it was there at all. It was so exciting!’

But the findings which were to follow shocked Politis and his team far more than the discovery of the monastery itself.

‘On one September evening we went back to our camp house,’ remembers Politis remembers, ‘and that night I had a strange dream. I know it sounds crazy, but I dreamt that the next day we would unearth a cave, perhaps the cave to which Lot and his daughters had fled?’

‘The next day, we were startled by one of the workmen’s cries. He had broken through the east end of the north aisle of the basilica, into a natural cave. Could this have been the holy grotto which the church was built to venerate? Then we found a stone inscribed in Greek which seemed to answer the puzzle. It called on Saint Lot to bless the builder of the church!’

Work continued at fever pitch.

The atmosphere was electric as the floors of the church were cleared – revealing their beauty for the first time in centuries. The first great mosaic, which lead to the cave itself, was decorated with a geometric design of stepped squares and diamonds. At the east end, in front of the entrance to the cave, was an inscription: also in Greek, naming Bishop Jacob as the Abbot of the monastery. It was dated 606 AD.

‘Compared to the other mosaic floors at Deir Ain Abata, says Steffie Chlouverakis, the site’s resident mosaic expert, ‘the one outside the cave might seem uninteresting and ordinary: but for me it’s by far the most extraordinary of all. Notice how the mosaic cubes themselves are perfectly uniform, and how the geometric lines run straight for many metres. This floor was laid by a master of his craft.’

In the chancel of the church another fabulous mosaic was unearthed. Adorned with vines, the frieze depicts a variety of animals, created with the fine pastel shades that are exemplary of the site. Many birds, a lamb, and a peacock, seemed to sleep for a thousand years or more at their vantage point gazing out across to the Promised Land.

Yet there was another mosaic floor – located in the nave of the church – which interested Politis the most.

‘Its long Greek inscription,’ he says, ‘mentions several church and administrative officials by name, and describes the site as a Holy Place and the church as a Basilica. The mosaic text indicates that this was not merely a monastery, but a venerated place to which pilgrims would journey.’

With work on the mosaic floors progressing well, Politis and his team turned their attentions to the cave itself.

‘The discovery of the cave made all those weeks of scratching about the surface worthwhile,’ he laughs, ‘I know people were beginning to think I was crazy – who knows, maybe I am crazy! Years spent on a mountainside like this in the tremendous heat and you need something to keep you going. First we found a few fine mosaic cubes, then the reservoir, then the church itself, and now the cave.’

The entrance to the cave, which had no door, was sided by plaster capitals – decorated with Maltese crosses and painted red. The lintel above the door was also adorned with a cross. To the right of the entrance Politis noticed several lines of graffiti etched into the plaster. The two main portions of graffiti are written in Greek and in Kufic Arabic.

‘Inside the cave,’ says Politis, ‘we came across a lot of ceramic oil lamps. Initial excavations inside revealed a series of steps leading into a very small room paved with fine marble slabs. This natural cave, it seems certain, was chosen by the Byzantine Christians to represent the place to which Lot and his daughters sought refuge.

‘But we were still dogged by questions. Why did the Byzantines decide to venerate this cave in particular? Was there any evidence that this Biblical story actually took place there?’

Politis was well aware that biblical episodes were often not recorded in writing until centuries after they had happened. This word-ofmouth passing on of tales must have distorted the facts. Yet Politis and his team felt confident that they might strike more valuable clues by excavating the cave itself.

Meticulous digging followed in the constricted space of the cave. Every few inches of removed soil, revealed more intriguing and older artefacts. First, a number of early Byzantine ceramic and glass oil lamps were found. The team dug deeper. They came upon early Roman pottery. Still they quarried deeper, and unearthed disarticulated human bones and pottery shards dating back to the Middle Bronze Age II (1750 – 1550 BC). These Middle Bronze Age relics fitted in historically with the thirty or so cairn tombs – which Politis had discovered dotted around the hillside. The evidence suggested that, during the Middle Bronze Age, a substantial community had occupied the area. Some scholars believe that this was the time of Genesis.

Inspired by the Middle Bronze Age finds, Politis excavated still deeper. As if peeling off layers of an onion, he came upon more wonders. Further down the team unearthed a quantity of Early Bronze Age I-II (3150 – 2850 BC) pottery and human bones. And, the most remarkable find at this level, was a complete Early Bronze Age jug with a dipper and drinking cups. Still deeper excavations – at a depth of three metres – revealed the earliest human occupation of the cave, dating back to Late Neolithic times – over eight thousand years ago.

The excavators discovered a number of freshwater mollusc shells inside the cave itself, perhaps suggesting that the cavern was at one time a spring source. The spring at the base of the mountain – which still contains several varieties of freshwater fish, molluscs and crabs – has survived since before the Dead Sea was ‘dead’. The spring has been cleaned and been cleared of modern debris by the excavation team, who plan to turn it into a model aquatic park.

After the discovery of the cave, excavations advanced on other areas of the site. It was only then that the full extent of the monastic complex of Saint Lot became fully understood.

‘We unearthed a refectory with long benches and a large stone oven,’ reflects Politis, ‘north of the basilica church. Then, further north still, we identified a pilgrim’s hostel: inscribed with the name of its builder – Ioannis Prokopios.

‘Deir Ain Abata seemed to be revealing one marvel after the next. We could never have hoped to find more areas of consequence. But, at that moment, we came across something of tremendous interest!’

The skeletons of well over forty individuals, mostly those of adult males, were unearthed. The remains – presumably those of monks – were found beneath the refectory floor in a communal burial chamber, constructed from a disused water reservoir. As the skeletons were exhumed and studied, it became apparent that one of them was that of an African, and at least one other was a woman.

‘Then,’ continues Politis, ‘we unearthed five cist burials cut deep into the bedrock. They contained three young children, a foetus, and a newborn. If all these were buried before 606 AD of the monastery, their deaths may have been related to the Great Plague which ravaged the Mediterranean world from 541 to 570 AD.

Politis hopes that the site may in time become a model area of focus for visitors to Jordan.

‘Deir Ain Abata has an ancient tale to tell,’ he says, ‘it has exquisite mosaic scenes, a heritage which stretches back ten millennia and, it has one of the finest views westward to Jericho.’

But what of future discoveries on the mysterious hillside overlooking The Sea of Lot?

‘Well,’ says Politis thoughtfully, Deir Ain Abata has revealed so many wonders to us. She has shown us her reservoir, her basilica church with its glorious mosaic floors, the cave – packed with its own artefacts, and the tombs. What could be next? I don’t dare tempt fate, but finding the library of rare scrolls would be the icing on the cake!’

SIXTY

To Tibet

MY CONTACT HAD SCRIBBLED an address in Mandarin on a scrap of paper no larger than a postage stamp.

Nudging a thumb in the direction of a hutong, one of the labyrinthine alleys tucked away in downtown Beijing, he balked.

‘Dealer very dangerous man. You go alone.’

So I did.

After zigzagging down telescoping lanes abundant with life, asking everyone who passed me, I eventually arrived at the dealer’s den. I knocked apprehensively.

Much time passed, then the door slowly slid back.

A stocky waxy figure wearing only an eye-patch and a pair of fake Calvin Klein’s was standing in the frame. He barked something angrily in Chinese. I held up the scrap of paper. The dealer’s good eye glanced left and right subversively, and he yanked me inside.

The contact at my hotel had promised that the dealer could source just about anything – legal or illegal. Having travelled to Beijing to take the celebrated new train to Lhasa, I was getting desperate. Restrictions and astonishing passenger numbers, set against a backdrop of general Chinese railway mayhem, had made tickets a very elusive commodity. Weeks before, I had paid a huge amount of cash in advance to a Tibetan guide based abroad. Despite promising the earth, he hadn’t been able to secure any seats, leaving me ticketless on the day I planned to travel.

Probing a hand down the front of his Calvin Klein’s the dealer slid out a mobile phone, roared into it for a minute and a half, looked at me, then grunted hard. He whipped out the hand and rubbed thumb and forefinger together fast. I counted out a wad of money and left with nothing to show for it, except a smirk from the dealer as he slid the door shut.

Early that evening I had all but given up hope when an envelope was slipped silently under the door of my hotel room. It had dried blood on the front, and a crumpled railway ticket inside.

An hour later I was pushing through the crowds at Beijing’s immense West Station. Oceans of people, most of them clutching sacks filled with their worldly possessions, were shuffling forwards away from the station, as if fleeing a natural disaster. Diving in, I pushed upstream, swimming against the current. And, after terrible difficulty, arrived at the gate of the fabled Lhasa Express.

Pushed up in a kind of holding pen, waiting to board the train, I could hardly believe that the journey I had anticipated for so long was at last about to start. Ever since I had heard of the Beijing to Lhasa railway opening four years before, I’d been desperate to get aboard.

Modern China is a land of tremendous engineering achievement, one in which the word ‘impossible’ simply doesn’t exist. And the cherry on the Cake of Marvels is surely the railway line that spans the route from Beijing to the Tibetan capital, a journey of four thousand kilometres. Known locally as Kien Liu, the ‘Railway to Heaven’, it’s something of which all Chinese are justifiably proud. But at the same time it’s controversial, the easy access it provides for ordinary Han-Chinese to visit Lhasa, has made it yet another nail in the coffin of ancient Tibetan culture.

The frenzied hysteria of boarding was replaced by a silent serenity, as train T27 glided out of Beijing West precisely on time, at nine p.m. The majority of the passengers were Chinese tourists, eager for a glimpse at Tibet, a province that’s become for them a kind of exotic Disneyland, and an extension of their own realm.

From the moment the train slipped through the suburbs of Beijing, to the time of its arrival at Lhasa, my fellow passengers galvanized into a ubiquitous routine: slurping pots of minute-noodles, gambling incessantly, sms-ing each other madly, slugging back small bottles of gut-rot liquor, chain-smoking in the corridors, gorging themselves in the dining car, and embarking on marathon sessions of mahjong.

For two days and nights a hard sleeper berth was my home. Across from me lay a woman whom I never saw move once. She was covered head to toe in sheets of tatty newspaper. An old English teacher from Shanghai named Mr. Ma, on the lowest berth, said she was not to be trusted. He wouldn’t tell me why, but instead spent most of the journey asking how I could help get his son into British university.

Other than some of the more peculiar dishes on offer in the dining car, the hardest thing to stomach on the Lhasa Express were the loos. They quickly became an obsession for all the passengers. Ten minutes from Beijing and every toilet was overflowing with excrement. Those of a fragile disposition took to bottling their pee, and leaving it furtively in the corridors.

Desperate for a clean loo, I roamed the train’s entire length. Clambering from one carriage to the next meant hoisting oneself over the seat-less, their babies, and their bales of luggage and wares. Mr. Ma said those without seats were Tibetan, adding darkly that they were not to be trusted either.

In the middle of the train lay a kind of no-man’s-land, three carriages of hard chair cars, a raucous day and night jamboree of Chinese college students. Seething with hormones and alcohol, iPods buzzing, they spent their time eyeing each other up, playing it ice cool.

Beyond them was the dining car with its ferocious waitresses and bowls of steaming pig-fat stew. And, beyond that, was the Promised Land – the soft sleeper compartment: piped musak, pristine toilets, miniature TVs, and all mod cons.

I got talking to a Chinese student said who her name was Jennifer, and that she was in love with Robbie Williams. I asked her about Tibet. She sighed. At first I mistook it for a sigh of affection, the kind she reserved for Robbie. ‘Shopping in Lhasa very very good,’ she said enthusiastically. ‘Because Tibetans very frightened of us Chinese.’

By dawn of the second day, the train was ascending steeply. With the wheels grinding hard against the tracks all morning, the locomotive hauled us up to the highest point, the five thousand metre Tanggula Pass.

Now wearing a pair of silk royal blue pyjamas, Mr. Ma got a nosebleed that wouldn’t stop. He looked as though someone had stabbed him through the heart. The woman across from him moaned she had a headache. Then she fainted. A minute later there was a gushing sound and we all perked up. The engineers had thought of everything, even pumping oxygen into the compartments through little nozzles built into the walls.

A railway journey gives a fleeting cross-section, a blend of blurred detail against a backdrop of gradual change. We live in a world preoccupied with cities, but it’s the rural landscape that always stays so firmly in my mind. Modern China may be all about the urban, but it’s the rural topography that’s still the heartland. And what a vast, uncompromising place it is: boundless vistas of fields and lakes, little hamlets, forests, and great swathes of emptiness, save for the odd herd of sheep, or goats.

As the train rolled on towards Tibet, the scenery changed. The weeping willows, farmland, and screens of rustling poplar died away, replaced gradually by stark steppe, peppered with thousands of black dots – grazing yaks. And the closer we drew to Lhasa, the more wondrous the feats of engineering and technology – vast dams, power stations, tunnels, road-building and sprawling bridges, beneath great boiling cumulus clouds.

All of a sudden, Lhasa arrived.

Gliding into the station was like slipping into a military encampment on high alert. The platform was awash with stern-looking soldiers in camouflage, marching double-time, automatic weapons held tight over chests, eyes fixed on the middle distance. I watched as an American tourist, trying to take a photo of the station’s name, was tackled for his camera. Photography was against the law.

As he said goodbye, Mr. Ma ordered me to beware of yak meat and of Tibetans, neither of which he said were to be trusted in the least. We shook hands, and he was gone.

Reaching Lhasa at last was for me itself a profoundly moving experience. My obsession for all things Tibetan began in childhood on reading Heinrich Harrar’s classic, Seven Years in Tibet.

A champion skier and mountaineer, Harrar had found himself trapped in Tibet during World War II. His tale was later turned into a movie staring Brad Pitt. Unable to leave, Harrar was invited to become a private tutor to the young Dalai Lama. His writing paints a candid picture of a Tibet, a land quite untouched by the modern world. Seven Years is a time capsule of a book, illuminating in freeze-frame a way of life that changed irrevocably with the Chinese invasion sixty years ago.

Like everyone else watching the mountain stronghold from afar, I had been touched by the gentleness of the society and its Buddhist faith. Yet I had never quite imagined I would actually set foot in the place that has become such a symbol, much more than a simple destination.

Visiting Tibet is a subject plagued in misinformation, and surfing the Internet leads to all sorts of contradictory advice, much of it surrounding the compulsory Tibetan Travel Permit. Despite what you hear, you can apply for the Travel Permit yourself, although most people get theirs through an agency or a guide.

And the business of guides to Tibet is surely one of the great rackets of the international tourist game. Most visitors use one on their journey, although nothing at all says that you must have a guide. As it happened, the one I found online cajoled me into paying top dollar in advance. He turned out to be a crook, a Tibetan sharper forbidden to set foot in his own homeland. He ended up farming me out to a local guide for a small fraction of the money I had paid him.

To anyone interested, my advice is to get the permit yourself, and to wait until you reach Lhasa before looking for a guide, that is if you think you need one at all. Do-it-yourself Tibet pays great dividends.

You don’t need to be an intrepid explorer to visit Tibet. I can hardly imagine an easier or more pleasant land to wander through. From the first instant, there’s a sense that you have arrived at one of those golden destinations, the kind which changes the way a traveller sees the world. The few Western tourists I met there staggered about with a cloud-nine glow wrapped over their faces, as if they had won a jackpot.

The Tibetans are celebrated for their peacefulness and for their resilience, and it’s that which visitors take away – the feeling that dignity prevails in the face of truly terrible adversity.

For those like me, preoccupied by Tibet, the reality is fascinating and at the same time disturbing. It’s like looking at a picture through a kaleidoscopic lens. The picture’s there, yet it’s distorted. Ordinary life continues for the Tibetan people. They pray at the Jorkhang temple, with its gilded bronze roofs, prostrating themselves every few paces until they reach inside. They eat yak-meat momo dumplings in the backstreets of the old town, shop for rancid yak-butter, vegetables, and for second-hand clothes. And they make the pilgrim circuit clockwise around Jorkhang complex, spinning prayer wheels as they go.

All around them is the dark shadow and unflinching gaze of the Chinese system. There are soldiers on every street corner and at every crossing, many of them outfitted in riot dress, batons and shields gleaming in the late afternoon sunlight, tear gas canisters ready to be deployed. There are lookouts, too, on the rooftops, and even on the minaret of Lhasa’s main mosque. Nothing is overlooked, neither by the soldiers, nor by the legions of spies mingling with the general populace. The heightened state of alert is the result of civil uprisings just over two years ago, unrest that left unknown numbers of Tibetan civilians and lamas imprisoned and dead.

Much of my time in Lhasa was spent standing on street corners, staring at the well-honed melody of life. On one street corner, a stone’s throw from the Jorkhang monastery, a street seller stepped up and tried to interest me in a pair of immensely long brass trumpets, adorned with exquisite silver appliqué.

He was a short man, with large hands, and the kind of smile you can’t quite forget. I asked him how I’d ever get the instruments home. They must have been twenty feet long. Without wasting a second, he collapsed the trumpets in on themselves, telescoping them down to the length of a shoebox. ‘Now they are hand luggage,’ he said with a grin.

The military lock-down is what you notice first, but dwelling on it would be to miss the bigger picture. And that is the dilution of Tibetan culture, the ancient circle of life. Everything Chinese is stressed and applauded, and anything Tibetan is frowned upon, ridiculed, and shamed.

The road signs are in Chinese, and many streets have been renamed, the stores are filled with Chinese goods, a great number of them staffed and owned by Han-Chinese, who are making all the cash.

In a suburb of Lhasa known as the ‘Island of Love’, I was taken to a swish art gallery in which an energetic Chinese lady was encouraging foreigners to part with large sums in the name of modern art, pieces including an enormous wooden phallus painted red. She stressed that most of the artists were Tibetan, and that major dealers were at that moment bidding for the works. She motioned to the door and, as if on cue, it opened and a scout from Sotheby’s stepped in.

The local art market isn’t the only one controlled by the Chinese. Tibetan medicine was until recently celebrated in both East and West. But these days few pharmacies within Tibet practice the ancient techniques. Instead they dole out drugs mass-manufactured far away in China. The Tibetans endure it all, existing in a kind of limbo, a limbo that’s slowly sucking their lifeblood away.

On one street corner in the old town, a farmer was standing with his yak. It looked very old, as if it were diseased. One of the shopkeepers saw me wondering whether the animal was for sale. He said to me, ‘Have pity on this old man. Buy the yak, take it back to your own country and nurse it back to health.’ I told him that I lived a great distance from Lhasa. The shopkeeper seemed worried for a moment. Then he said, ‘If you buy the yak I will look after it for you.’

Spend a little time outside Lhasa, roaming around the countryside, and you do glimpse snapshots of a society that in many ways has hardly altered since medieval times.

Farmers and their families out in the fields winnowing the wheat, nomads in their smoky yak-wool tents pounding the yak-butter with giant pestles, a clutch of pilgrims pausing at crisscrossed prayer flags swooshing in the wind. The deafening sound of gongs and elongated trumpets shattering the silence of dawn.

While monitored through a network of spies and informants, the temples, monasteries and nunneries soldier on day to day. The Dalai Lama’s photo and his name are conspicuously absent, although you quickly realize he’s the one person on everyone’s mind. The Chinese authorities have sought to incapacitate the system gradually, from the inside out. And to a large degree, they have succeeded.

Not surprisingly, it is within the Buddhist institutions that the lifeblood of the Tibetan realm remains most in tact. At Lhasa’s Tsamkhung nunnery, prayer books are still hand printed on slivers of wood, as they have been done for centuries. And at the imposing Potala Palace, which looms down over the capital, lines of pilgrims pour ghee on the flickering lamps, their robed forms mingling with Chinese tourists, coutured head to toe in spotless Burberry. The contrast couldn’t be more incongruous.

To enter the actual palace is to descend back in time, through the interleaving centuries of Tibetan life, a life bound unflinching to the calm serenity of Buddhist culture. It’s not easy to say why the cramped halls of the Potala affect all who enter them as they do. As you trail through them, up narrow staircases, down sweeping corridors and through the many shrines, pungent with incense and smoke, you feel a part of something very ancient. It’s as if you’re being bathed in a thousand years of energy, left by supplicants whose names are lost, but whose devotion lives on.

And at a tiny outlying monastery on the road to Nagansey, I met an eighty-year-old hermit-monk crouching in a niche a little bigger than himself, carved out from the rock. He had been in there for three decades. When I held up a camera, he begged me to take the photo to freedom, to Dharamsala.

On one of my last nights in Tibet, I camped in a steep-sided valley, the verdant slopes grazed close by yaks. Either side of it was a glacier. They seemed to hang there between the crags, translucent ice, prehistoric and compacted, the colour of aquamarines. All through the night a freezing wind ripped down from the ice mountains, followed by hail and rain. My tent collapsed completely, leaving me in a wretched stew of tent poles, plastic sheeting and quilts. The driver and my guide, who had slept like kittens curled up in the van, split their sides in laughter when they saw me emerge at first light.

The driver mumbled something and cackled in delight.

‘What did he say?’

My guide wiped a hand over his face.

He said, ‘Only a moron would use a tent not made of yak wool.’

A mile or two away, atop a precipitous slope, with sweeping views of the plateau below, I came to the nunnery set beside a towering stupa and encircled by bronze prayer wheels. My guide had at first resisted making the steep climb on foot. Given the altitude, it was like staggering forwards wearing diving weights. I assumed his reluctance to be inspired by a dislike for physical activity.

But then, when we reached the nunnery – one that’s on no tourist itinerary – I realized that my guide’s apprehension came about for fear of the authorities. Even there, he said, we would encounter spies. And we did. One of the nuns, an old woman with a childlike grin and a shaven head, cocked her creased brow in the direction of a young man sitting in the shade of the central courtyard. When we were out of earshot, she whispered that she didn’t care any longer, at least for herself. ‘We close our eyes,’ she said softly, ‘and we are free.’

As dusk became night, one of the nuns cooked up a thick vegetable broth, and served it with momo dumplings and tea. In the distance there was the sound of a girl singing, a shrill ribbon of tone, mixed with the intermittent clanging of a yak-bell far away. I slept more deeply than on any night I can remember, huddled up on an old rope bed, a patchwork quilt pulled over me.

I was up at dawn, in time to see the nuns with their shaven heads take up their positions for the first chorus. Watching Tibet from a distance, through magazines and photographs, the ritual can appear stiff and even austere. But being there, at the heart of a nunnery as the first blush of sunlight warms the darkness, you can’t help but be moved by the openness, the sense of real conviviality of it all.

As I was about to leave the nunnery, I saw a round loaf of home-baked bread sitting on a wall. I could smell it from quite a distance, fresh-baked and snug. Surprised that something so tempting would have been abandoned, I asked my guide whom it belonged to. He said, ‘The nuns believe that charity should be anonymous, that you should give to benefit someone in need to help them and not to receive thanks. And that is why the bread is on the wall.’

As we descended down to the plateau once more, the villagers streamed out of their homes with pots, pans, whistles and drums. My guide pointed to the sky. It was darkening, as if night were approaching – a solar eclipse.

As soon as the moon slipped over the sun, the villagers banged their pots and pans together, and shrieked for all they were worth.

The only person not straining to frighten away the Devil was a Chinese official. He was standing in a doorway and looked very angry indeed, as if superstition was restraining progress. My guide started clapping his hands together hard. I asked if he too was trying to frighten the Devil and restore the sun. He turned to face the official and clapped even harder.

‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘If I do this for long enough, maybe the Devil will go back to his own home and leave us Tibetans in peace.’

SIXTY-ONE

Where Widows Go to Die

BEFORE DAWN HAS BROKEN over Varanasi, India’s holiest city, a procession of figures wends their way down to the Ganges.

Barefoot and cloaked in simple white saris, they move with slow, deliberate steps through the morning chill. Once at the margin of the sacred river, as the first rays of yellow light touch the mist, they cleanse their bodies in the dark waters of the Ganges. And, with the ancient city stirring to life behind them, the figures – a chain of women aged anywhere between twenty and eighty – stand in prayer. Each has the same invocation. They pray that God will see them, purged by the Ganges’ waters, and they pray that He will grant them their single wish – sudden and immediate death.

Devika is standing at the centre of the group. Her features are refined, her face framed by an abundance of wet black hair. With eyes tightly closed and palms clasped together, she pleads to be lifted to Paradise. Like the other women, Devika, is in good health. At twenty-four, a lifetime stretches out before her. But, like the others, she too yearns for death.

Varanasi is home to at least sixteen thousand such women. Each of them lives in a state of self-enforced limbo, desperate for execution. For, Devika, and the group of women surrounding her, are widows.

Conservative Indian society affords no place for widowhood. As a wife, a woman was traditionally regarded as a chattel, property of her husband. With his death her life is without purpose

Widowhood is a relatively new phenomenon in India. The practice of sati, a grieving widow climbing onto her deceased husband’s funeral pyre, traditionally put an end to the predicament of the surviving partner. But since the British made sati a criminal act in 1829, Hindu widows have lived as outcasts until their natural deaths. After the British law was passed, such women flooded to Varanasi, fabled ‘City of Light’, most hallowed place in Hinduism. They believe that to die beside the Ganges in Varanasi is to guarantee moksha: the release from the eternal cycle of reincarnation. And, they say, with death all sins are annulled as one slips into Paradise.

Banished by their families and shunned by society, innumerable widows have turned to Varanasi since sati was abolished. Travelling from all corners of India, they begin a new existence: a life waiting for death. Scant sustenance is provided by pilgrims who flock to the city’s three thousand temples, and by the handful of charitable hostels dedicated to them.

Take a stroll down the winding lanes that lead down to the Ganges and you see widows all around – stooping, praying, singing, or simply standing in silence. Most are dressed in plain white, or lightly patterned, saris. None wear bindis, the red religious mark on the forehead. None have sindhur, the vermillion dye worn in the hair-parting, sign of a married woman. Instead, they are expected to have their heads shaved once a month. For most, employment is out of the question. Traditionally equated with witchcraft, widows are reviled, resigned to begging for a living.

Some unscrupulous employers take advantage of the desperate widowed women. Paying wages far below the standard rates, they run sweat-shops in the dark back streets at Varanasi’s Chowk. In one such alley, far from the temples and trappings of ritual, Devika crouches at a loom. Her hands are rough from work, her fingernails torn. Three years ago she journeyed to Varanasi from a village near Calcutta.

‘My husband died seven years ago,’ she says in a frail voice, as she pauses from her weaving. ‘He was twenty-two years older than me and died of lung cancer. We were married when I was thirteen. After his death I found myself unwelcome at his ancestral home where we lived. His mother told me that I was cursed. She said that her son had passed away because of me, and she ordered me to leave right away. I wept very hard. I had nowhere to go. My mother-in-law sold my belongings and gave me enough money for a third class single ticket to Varanasi. She swore that if I ever returned she would blind me.’

Her hazel eyes staring in concentration at the floor, Devika cannot forget the ordeal that brought her here. ‘When I arrived in Varanasi, it was as if I were a leper,’ she continues. ‘Ordinary people spat at me. Others shouted insults or crossed the street to pass me. Mothers whispered to their children “Don’t look, she’s diseased!” I begged at a temple dedicated to Kali. Gradually, I have learned how to survive. And the longer I spend, the better I understand.’ Devika sponges a hand over her face. ‘The widows who have lived here for many years are best positioned,’ she adds, ‘it’s they who know where to stand to catch a pilgrim’s eye.’

After eight months of begging, Devika was given a job at the weaver’s shop. Emaciated and recovering from malaria, she now weaves blankets fifteen hours a day, seven days a week. Her wage of just forty rupees (50p) a day, is a third of the going rate. Every month she pays half her earnings back to her employer as rent for the small room she shares with two other widows.

‘The work is hard,’ Devika says stoically, ‘but I thank God for giving me this chance. Each night I pray to Him to let me die soon. I know that He has heard my pleas. I know that He will take me soon.’

When asked if she would ever marry again, Devika looks confused at what must sound to her like a completely inane question.

‘How could I wed a second time?’ she asks in confusion. ‘That’s impossible. I am a widow.’

Although they have flocked to Varanasi only since sati was abolished, widows have sought refuge in the holy city for at least two thousand years. Teenage dowagers and those in their early twenties are not uncommon in Varanasi. Some say that widowed girls as young as eleven can be found eking out an existence in the back streets of the Chowk. Resigned to mourn until the end of their days, they live as beggars.

Like Devika, most believe that their span of life on Earth will draw to a close before long. But decades spent working for a pittance, or bowing with cup in hand, proves such anticipations wrong.

Sixty-three years ago, Gita Sarkar arrived by ox-cart at the City of Light, fleeing after her husband died of typhoid. She had dreamt of cleansing her soul in the Ganges, and yearned for a speedy delivery to Paradise. These days her face is aged, wrinkled like elephant hide, her body rigid with arthritis and wrapped in white. She spends her time at the dying rooms of the Bhavan Hospice. Gita, now eighty-two, was just nineteen when she arrived in Varanasi, newly-widowed and grieving. She had been married at ten. ‘Long, long ago I was a wife, a mother and a daughter,’ she says in a faltering voice, ‘but when my husband expired, what was I to do? His family told me to stop eating – to simply starve myself to death. When I refused, they poisoned my daughter. I ran away and came here to Varanasi.’

As Gita tells her tale, the widow in the next cubicle is pronounced dead. Her slender corpse is wrapped in muslin and laid on the stone floor of the small chamber. There is no ritual, just the echoes of a drum beating monotonously in a courtyard outside. An oversized leather-bound volume is pulled open and the name of the latest deceased is entered in the crowded columns. Gita pauses for a moment from her memories in respect, and then goes on.

‘When I arrived here all those years ago,’ she says, ‘most of the widows were so young, many of them little more than children. It was no surprise I suppose, after all most of us had been married as infants to old men. I prayed for death and expected that it would soon follow. But death has eluded me. Now nearly all those of my generation are dead. They have gone to heaven – they’ve been freed. I shall be with them soon.’

Next door, the body is prepared for immediate cremation. The hospice, which provides free accommodation for almost sixty widows, covers the expenses of the funeral. A simple cotton shroud is wrapped over the corpse, which is then taken through the winding streets down to the ‘burning ghat’ on the western banks of the Ganges.

Just enough firewood is weighed out log by log and a makeshift pyre is assembled. The cadaver is positioned, a few drops of sandal oil are sprinkled over it, and the consecrated flame is applied. Three hours after death, and the ashes of yet another widow are cast into the dark sacred waters. With it, another dream of moksha, entrance to Paradise, is attained.

Director at the hospice, Kunal Bashak, has attended too many cremations to remember. ‘We try to ensure that these ladies – who are so hated by everyone – die with the dignity they deserve,’ he says. ‘Unlike other hospices in Varanasi, we only have space for those who are ready to die. When they come here, widows, often ask for their food to be stopped. Death comes quickly.’

Strolling about the lanes that form the great bazaar is Ravi Gupta, a short, bespectacled south Indian man. While others avert their gaze, to avoid eye-contact with passing widows, for fear of attracting the evil eye, Gupta greets Varanasi’s mourning women.

For six years he has studied widowhood in Varanasi, and is a friend to them all. ‘Don’t listen to people when they tell you that widows no longer come here,’ he says sharply. ‘There are almost as many widows here now as after Partition. And, although pilgrims support most of them, more and more are being used as slave labour in workshops around the town. Young girls, married in childhood and widowed as teenagers, are being tricked into prostitution now as never before. A mafia controls the illegal workshops, the illicit trade, and force beggars to pay rent for their “patch”.’

Gupta has petitioned for an organized government pension for each widow. ‘Red tape and corruption prevent most women eligible to claim pensions from ever getting them,’ he says. ‘People still believe that widows are cursed or diseased; that even by simply speaking to them one will somehow get infected. Others are calling for sati to be reintroduced, defending the idea saying that it’s tradition. It’s not surprising that Indian widows are so desperate to die – they are being treated very unjustly!’

Balancing precariously on a slender concrete platform outside a cobbler’s kiosk, Yaksha Mishra waves out to Gupta. The two have become good friends. Yaksha, sixty-nine, has lived on the slab – measuring two foot by four – since 1976. When it rains she furls herself up in a crumpled plastic sheet. And, when it is hot, she veils her head with the embroidered hem of her sari. The platform costs her ten rupees a month in rent – paid directly to the local dada, mafioso, as protection money.

‘Yes of course I long to leave Varanasi and go to heaven,’ she whispers narrowing her eyes, ‘but for now life continues. I am comfortable with my situation. When people pull their children from the window as I walk by, I smile at them. Decades as an outcast has made me strong.’ Yaksha pauses to accept a rupee coin from a passing pilgrim. ‘Many of the widows who come to Varanasi torture themselves. They compete in their misery. One will cut her legs with a razor blade; another will walk across broken glass. And, although a widow who kills herself will not reach heaven, sometimes a woman is so dispirited that she will buy zeher, poison.’

As the evening draws to a close, there’s the muffled clang of temple bells in the narrow lanes, bustling with priests and sacred cows. Squatting, forgotten against one wall of the passage, are a dozen widows. A middle-aged pilgrim sprinkles a handful of rupee coins to the line of outstretched hands.

‘I am here searching for my own mother,’ he says. ‘She was banished by my Dadi, my paternal grandmother, when my father died suddenly in my childhood. I know there’s almost no hope of ever finding her alive, but I come each year. People think I am mad to continue with the search. But how could I live with myself if she is here, living as a beggar on Varanasi’s streets?’

Nearby, a handful of figures moves once again through the dispersing twilight towards the Ganges, their bare feet pressing into the soft mud of the riverbank. All clothed in white, they stand with their arms outstretched, their fingers splayed wide, and their eyes firmly closed.

As the ancient City of Light hides beneath a curtain of darkness behind them, the widows renew their simple and identical prayer to God.

SIXTY-TWO

Women on Death Row

WHERE HIGHWAY 231 crosses the Tallapoosa River in central Alabama, the sky is inky grey, the panorama cold and forgotten.

A ghostly silence hugs the landscape.

As the road ascends a low hill, you get your first view of the Tutwiler Prison for Women. Square watch-towers loom upwards from the compound, every inch of it encircled by electric fences and razor-wire. Locked down inside the jail’s white-washed walls, Alabama’s five most feared female inmates await their rendezvous with the electric chair.

Myth and misinformation surround America’s women on Death Row – two thirds of them are white, ranging in age from eighteen to seventy-five. In more than sixty per cent of cases the victim was an adult male, most often an abusive partner.

Built in the late ’thirties, Tutwiler Prison has a cramped and ominous atmosphere, one stripped of any comfort.With its old-fashioned no-frills construction, the jail is free from the high-tech features common in more modern penal institutions. The long stone-floored corridors echo to the sounds of steel gates opening for a moment, before slamming shut. Like most of the nation’s female prisons, Tutwiler incarcerates women convicted of petty theft, as well as others condemned for far more brutal crimes.

Turn right off the main passageway, where the general population is housed, and you come to an unmarked entrance. Without warning, the tempered-steel door opens from behind, swinging inwards. A pair of towering women guards in blue uniforms take the signatures of the visitors. There is a different atmosphere here.

Most striking of all is the silence.

Silence that is, except for the high-pitched screams of a deranged inmate. The bars of her cell are fitted with a fine lattice grate to prevent her from hurling faeces at the guards. As her delirious shrieks shatter the quiet, you move down the special corridor. This is the heart of Tutwiler, the solitary confinement wing of Death Row.

Linda Block sits on her bed in a cell at the far end of the isolation unit. With light grey hair, huge olive green eyes and chalky white skin, Linda, forty-eight, is the most recent woman to be sentenced to death in the United States. Dressed in the white prison-issue tunic, bearing the monogram of the jail, she glances around her windowless cell. The walls are a putrid yellow; the floor is bare cement. Linda’s few possessions are kept in a battered cardboard box at the foot of her bed.

‘I have been here since December,’ she says in a calm voice. ‘Before this I was a publisher, a pillar of society. I was known and respected across the country. I hadn’t even ever had a speeding ticket. Then I shot a cop and everything changed.’

Before her conviction, Linda Block published Liberatis, a political magazine. Far from the sort of person you might expect to find residing on Death Row, she hails from the well-heeled end of society. More likely to be accused of white collar crime than murder, Linda’s peers were shocked that a woman of such social standing could end up on Alabama’s Death Row.

‘Now I’m condemned to die in an electric chair,’ she says. ‘I’m regarded as the most heinous criminal of all. Being on Death Row is in itself a dead feeling. You are already dead to the world, to your friends, family and, especially, to the public. The state just hasn’t destroyed the body yet.’

Linda spends a lot of time thinking about the incident that got her sentenced to death in Alabama’s electric chair. A police officer died in the shooting. And, when a cop dies in the Deep South, there’s enormous pressure to press for the maximum punishment – electrocution.

According to her account, Linda was using the telephone at a gas station in eastern Alabama when her husband, George, was approached by a police officer. When asked to show his driving license, he leaned into the car. Fearing that he was reaching for a gun, the officer pulled his own weapon. At the trial, the police contended that the gunfight which ensued was an act of naked aggression on the part of Linda Block’s husband. As she was walking back to the car, Linda saw the officer and her husband exchanging shots.

‘Whatever the reason, am I supposed to stand there,’ she asks, ‘and allow the cop to shoot my husband till he’s dead?’ Without wasting a moment Linda pulled her own revolver and began to fire at the officer as well. Amid the hail of bullets the cop staggered to his car and drove away.

‘Just because a man puts on a badge,’ says Linda, ‘it doesn’t mean he’s superhuman. Nonetheless, we knew that we’d shot an officer and the mentality of the force would be crazed. If you shoot a regular civilian they’ll come after you, but not with the ferocity as when they’re hunting a “cop-killer”.’

As they made their escape from the area, Linda and George hit a massive police roadblock. They thought then and there about committing suicide. But Linda was terrified for the safety of her ten-year-old son. He had been sitting in the back of the car all along. Only when she surrendered, did Linda realize that the cop they had shot was dead. Forensic evidence used later in court showed that it was probably her bullet that killed the officer. She and her husband were charged with murder. Both were sentenced to die in the electric chair, making them the only married couple on Death Row.

During the case that followed, Linda Block dismissed her lawyers and took on her own legal defense. Such an action is unprecedented in a death penalty case.

‘When you hire an attorney,’ she says, ‘you’re signing your life over to him. I fired my attorneys and did a far better job at defending myself than they had done on my behalf. When you are fighting for your life, you begin to understand what’s important and what’s not.’

Expecting a sentence of manslaughter or life without parole, Linda was stunned at hearing she was to die by electrocution.

‘When the judge read the verdict,’ she says reflecting, ‘I sensed the blood drain from my face and I felt faint. I had been sentenced to death by the state of Alabama. But I forced myself to sit erect, to show no emotion, no response. I have become a master of self-control. I wasn’t going to give anyone the satisfaction of seeing how much shock and pain they had inflicted upon me. Although I didn’t expect to get death, I did not want life without parole. I had decided that if they were going to convict me, go ahead and let them give me the death penalty. At least then you get an automatic appeal.’

Linda Block’s apathetic expression was seen by the press as proof that she was nothing more than a cold, calculated killer. She was transported directly from court to Tutwiler Prison.

‘When I arrived here I was given a full strip-search,’ she explains. ‘It’s the most dehumanizing process any woman could ever go through. I hated it and was extremely upset. In Alabama, men can be present at female strip-searches. The warden saw the expression on my face when I had to strip in front of all those people. She said to me “I understand how you feel. We’re not doing this as a punishment… it’s the rules. If you behave, we’ll never do this again. Being here is punishment enough”.’

‘On my first night in this cell,’ Linda continues, ‘I lay on my bed and thought “My God, I have been sentenced to death… how on Earth did I get here?” The first few days were so depressing. Like most women, I cry when I’m depressed. I miss my son more than anything. We’ve changed his identity to protect him from the media, and he’s gone to live with my mother. Being away from him is the greatest punishment of all.’

New Death Row inmates are put on a ninety-day probationary period in total isolation. Psychiatrists watch to see if they’re adjusting to the rigorous regime. The initial short sharp shock determines whether the convict will survive the decade or more she’s likely to spend at the periphery of death. During the three months of solitary confinement the inmate has almost no privileges and is isolated even from the other residents of the Row. Human contact is kept to an absolute minimum.

When the ninety days are up, the prisoner is permitted a little more interaction with the other Death Row women. They have opportunities to gather together in the chapel or in their own exercise yard. Misbehaviour of any kind results in severe discipline and the suspension of any privileges they have earned.

‘At times the struggle is too much,’ says Linda. ‘And I’ve felt like writing a letter to the governor and telling him to sign the form to have me sent to the chair. But although I do get despondent, I’ve decided to fight my situation. My life is now a clock ticking away the minutes. Every moment is part of a race – a race to win my appeal and to win back my life. If I were to accept my situation then, psychologically, I would lose my fight.’

‘For me, the most depressing two days were Christmas and my son’s birthday. I don’t dare reveal my depression to the guards as they’d put me on suicide watch. That’s the worst thing that could happen. They take your sheets and blankets, your toothbrush, shoe-laces and even your soap. People wonder why there are so many suicides on Death Row. It’s because Death Row is so drawn out. It’s like having an axe hanging over your head day and night. It never goes away. You keep waiting for it to fall.’

Alabama’s Women on Death Row are segregated from the general prison population, with whom they have no interaction. Three short blasts on the intercom indicate the rare occasion that a Death Row inmate is being moved.

‘When I am taken out of my cell,’ says Linda, ‘my wrists are handcuffed behind my back. If I’m ever taken outside the building, my ankles are shackled. I still have scars from wearing leg-shackles while at court. When a Death Row inmate is taken through a main corridor, the whole prison is locked down.’

The other convicts are forced to stand behind special grates, watching the Death Row inmate with deep fascination, as if almost with a sense of awe.

‘It gives the impression’, she continues, ‘that we’re so dangerous to society that even our fellow prisoners must be protected from us.’

As Linda Block’s case was going through the courts, the US Senate was passing the controversial new Crime Bill.

The death penalty is something of a magic wand for the American legal system: it pleases the voters, boosts prosecutors’ careers and, conveniently, it disposes of the evidence. Spurred on by public anger at the escalation of violent offences, and the eagerness of politicians to make their mark, the Bill ushered in dozens of new capital offences.

‘The Crime Bill,’ says George Kendall, of New York’s Legal Defense Fund, ‘was the largest expansion of death penalty crimes in the history of the United States. Before it was passed, there were only a couple of offences that carried a sentence of death. Now there are over sixty.’

As public pressure grows to execute violent offenders, hundreds of new female inmates are expected to find their way to Death Row. At present, forty-eight women in the USA have been sentenced to die for their crimes. Spread across fourteen states, they wait for their appeals to be used up and the executioner to summon them. Society’s confusion over whether or not to kill its female killers, has resulted in Death Row’s women lingering in incarceration for years.

Legal experts and lobby groups alike are predicting a long, gruesome spate of female executions throughout America’s Deep South – known locally as the ‘Death Belt’. With Death Rows filled to capacity, politicians and the public are baying for more regular executions of society’s female murderers.

‘Prosecutors work hard to de-feminize a female defendant,’ says Professor Victor Streib of Cleveland University, ‘Lesbianism is one factor often referred to in female capital cases. In the Deep South, especially, lesbianism is abhorred. A woman who’s gay is more likely to get the death penalty than one who’s not. Prosecutors try to prove that the crime was in some way “macho”, performed by a monster. Then it’s easy to sell the jury on the idea that the best way to get rid of a monster is to kill it.’

Empathizing with women who are to be executed is an impossible task. The only ones who can accurately understand what a sentence of death is like, are the prisoners who have had their own sentences reversed. Debra Bracewell, thirty-five, was the first woman in recent times to be sent to Death Row in Alabama. She spent three years on the Row before having her sentence commuted to life without parole. Now, working at the laundry room at Tutwiler, she’s thankful.

‘When I was on Death Row,’ she explains timidly, ‘I thought about God a lot. I would pray about five hours a day and spend the rest of my time reading the Bible. There was no one for me to speak to. I was very lonely. I’ve lived here at Tutwiler for sixteen years. But this is not my home. I would never call this place my home.’

For Alabama’s five female Death Row inmates life is a routine of loneliness. Linda’s day begins at 4.30 a.m. when breakfast, like all meals, is brought to her cell.

‘This is the Row,’ says Linda. ‘No one’s going to do you any favours – they do what’s convenient for them, and feeding you in the middle of the night is convenient. Breakfast is grits and biscuits. I come from an affluent strata of society and was used to eating off nice china with fine cutlery. Suddenly, I had to get used to eating everything with a spoon. After breakfast I take a shower. I’m lucky to not only have the largest cell – it’s about eight feet by ten feet – but I have my own shower as well. I spend the morning reading law books and working on my appeal. Then, at 9.30 a.m. lunch is served. Like most of the meals, it’s a mixture of various kinds of starch. They purposely feed you a lot of starch in jail; it’s cheap, makes you feel lethargic, slows brain activity and it’s fattening. I’m a health food person, at least I was till I arrived here.’

‘In the afternoon I do exercises in my cell, I do push-ups to keep limber. Sometimes I go to the chapel. As I’m in solitary I have to go when its free from other inmates. Most of the time I sit here at the small desk they gave me and I work on my legal defense. At 2.30 p.m. the “evening” meal is served… it’s usually just like lunch: starch.’

‘After dinner, there’s no other food until breakfast. In the afternoons I read, write letters to my family or talk to the guards. Lights are turned out at ten p.m. Death Row is a routine of boredom, but I force myself not to let my mind go blank.’

Despite the isolation and harsh routine, the female prisoners take great pride in looking their best. Make-up has a special value for women in prison, often to the point of being used as currency.

‘It’s very important for women’, says Helen Frick, an independent expert on the US prison system, ‘to look and feel feminine. Jail robs women of so many effeminate things. A simple stick of mascara, a lipstick or pot of nail-polish boosts morale and helps the Death Row inmates in particular to feel like women again.’

When sentenced to death, women tend to deal with the captivity differently from men.

‘They express their grief in their own feminine way,’ continues Frick. ‘There’s little of the physical anguish so often shown by men who’re incarcerated. Instead, women form tightly linked cliques – often with a mother figure presiding over the group. Women on the Row weep, pray and comfort each other when the existence becomes too much to bear. The bond between women sentenced to die is a strong one. Their unwavering support for each other helps them to endure the separation from their children.’

Tutwiler’s general inmates are given activities and training to prepare them for the outside world, but as little time or money as possible is invested in Death Row prisoners. If they are ever allowed to do work for the prison, they are only permitted pay of only a few dollars a month. Most of the time women on the Row are locked up and left to themselves, in solitude.

‘On male Death Rows,’ says Helen Frick, ‘there may be as many as three hundred inmates appealing their sentences, or awaiting execution. Some states have just one or two women on their Death Rows, which effectively assigns the prisoner to a life of solitary confinement.’

‘Here in isolation,’ says Linda Block as the screams of the insane prisoner echo through the hall, ‘the solitude is deadening. I feel forgotten by the world. The loneliest feeling on Earth is being a woman on Death Row in America – particularly in the South where women are still regarded as the gentle flower of mankind.’

‘It doesn’t shock people when a man is sentenced to death, because men are considered more violent in nature than women. But, in the public’s eye, women who have been condemned to death must be monsters – the antithesis of all that women are supposed to represent. As a woman on Death Row, waiting for the Yellow Mama, the electric chair, I am considered a traitor to my gender. Women like me are seen as an embarrassment to our nation. Society is appalled, yet confused. We may be despised, but the thought of killing a woman by electrocuting her is hard for most Americans. So we’re ignored, the forgotten part of the prison system. We’re never discussed and are rarely even thought of.’

In a state of limbo, America’s women on Death Row exist to die. The method of their execution depends on the state they’re in. Alabama only uses the electric chair. If executed, the women at Tutwiler, would be transported to the male Death Row at Holman Prison. The state has only one electric chair. While many states now offer lethal injection, some still employ hanging, the gas chamber or, as in Utah and in some military court-martials, the firing squad can still be used. Lethal injection is becoming the preferred method of execution with authorities, primarily because it is cheap and reliable.

After a sedative has been administered, Potassium chloride is injected through and intravenous drip into each arm. There is no doubt that lethal injection, which was first introduced in 1982, is more merciful than the chair or the gas chamber. Executions by these other methods rarely entail sedating the condemned person. Both electrocutions and gassings have regularly ended in botched executions. The chair kills by sending two thousand volts surging through the body, causing the prisoner’s eyeballs to explode as it does so. In some states, such as Virginia, members of the public can volunteer to watch executions. There are always far more volunteers than there are seats in the execution room.

Sitting in her cell, uncertain whether she is to die or live, Linda Block is adamant on how she would want to be killed.

‘I’m violently opposed to electrocution,’ she says resolutely. ‘The chair is such an indignant method. If my case comes to it, I would opt for the firing squad. There is more dignity in that. If I am going to be killed for something that I feel I’m not guilty of, I want to be standing up when I die. I want to be facing my executioner, to die with all the dignity I can.’

‘As far as the state is concerned women on Death Row are America’s living dead,’ says George Kendall of the Legal Defense Fund. The state wants to put no resources into them, except to keep them alive to kill them.’

Kendall has been present at a number of electrocutions in several states. He campaigns to have the chair abolished, along with the lurid, almost medieval trappings that accompany it.

‘Electrocutions are horrific,’ he explains, ‘because you’re literally cooking the person. They’re always done in the middle of the night. First, the head and the lower right leg are shaved to ensure a good connection between the electrode and the skin. Shaving the head also prevents the hair from catching fire during the electrocution process. Six burly guards place the inmate into the chair and tie down the straps. If the convict struggles, he or she has no chance of escape. An electrode cap is fitted to their bald head, and other electrodes are attached to the shaved right leg. After the inmate has been given the opportunity of making a last statement, a mask is put over their face so you won’t see it contort as they die. Without any warning,’ continues Kendall, ‘the executioner hits the button.’

In recent years several of highly-publicized female capital cases have gone through the courts. The case of Susan Smith, who drowned her two children in South Carolina, shocked America. Three years before that Aileen Wuornos – the only woman regarded by the FBI as a serial-killer – was convicted for murdering at least seven men in Florida. But, as heinous crimes such as these steal the limelight, the majority of women sentenced to death are sent to the Row for killing their husbands after years of abuse.

Guinevere Garcia, thirty-five, a tall, slim woman with dark curly hair, was sentenced to Death Row in Illinois in 1992. Like many the Row’s forgotten women, Guinevere’s story begins in childhood. Aged only six, a male member of her family raped her repeatedly. The identity of the rapist was never disclosed in the trial. Guinevere was brought up by her grandmother after her own mother committed suicide when she was raped by the same man. At eleven years old she started to drink heavily; then at fourteen she was raped by five men. Not long after, she was forced by her grandfather to marry an illegal alien in a sham marriage. But it was her second husband, whom she had met while working as a prostitute, that she shot after his continual beatings.

Now resigned to the fact that she is to be killed by the state, Guinevere Garcia waits in Room Six of Death Row at the Dwight Correctional Centre – one of the country’s most modern Death Rows. She has asked that her appeal be dropped and that she be executed as soon as possible. She waits for the pinprick of a needle puncturing the skin, for the lethal injection to end the purgatory.

Many of the women who have made it to America’s most disreputable address claim to have committed murder out of fear. Such killings divide society. Support groups declare that dozens of women are killed each year for not fulfilling their abusive husbands’ commands. But, particularly in the traditional heartlands of the South, pro-death penalty lobby groups stir the public’s animosity. And when sordid crimes are involved, it’s perhaps not hard to understand the calls for revenge.

The catalogue of crimes committed by women on Death Row includes the case of Deirdre Hunt. She was instructed by her boyfriend to kill a nineteen-year-old man in Florida. Having bound him to a tree, she shot three .22 calibre bullets into his chest. As she fired the semiautomatic pistol, fitted with a silencer, her boyfriend videotaped the killing. Then, as the boy lay slouched, gasping for breath, Deirdre Hunt is said to have grabbed him by the hair and shot him in the head with an AK-47.

In another case, Frances Newton – a petite, reserved woman from Houston, Texas – was convicted of shooting her husband and children (aged two years and seven years) while they slept. Newton, who was sentenced to Death Row, aged twenty-two, was found guilty of murdering her family in order to claim the $100,000 insurance policy.

In the second wing of Tutwiler Prison’s Death Row, Warden Lobmiller is doing her rounds.

‘I control the majority of things which occur in the lives of the Death Row inmates,’ she says. ‘I do not have a friendship with them. They are merely acquaintances. If one of the Death Row women was executed, I would not feel remorse: rather, I think I’d be happy for her. It might be shocking to say that – but if I was one of those individuals, that’s what I would want.’

Like most women who have made it to the Row, Linda Block ponders death with meticulous attention.

‘Being condemned to death is unlike any other feeling one could possibly experience,’ she says. ‘To await death as a convicted murderer is vastly different from knowing you are dying of a terminal disease. Dying of an illness is at least acceptable and prompts sympathy. At least that person will die among friends and family. They may not know the hour when death comes, but there is no dishonour in their passing.’

‘There is a curtain of empathy between the women here on Death Row,’ Linda whispers, ‘facing what few women will ever have to face. Only the strong can maintain hope and faith under these conditions. But I am a survivor. Even if I lose my fight, despite my best efforts, I will accept my fate with dignity.’

N.B. Linda Block was electrocuted on May 10th, 2002.

TRAIL OF FEATHERS

In Search of the Birdmen of Peru

TAHIR SHAH

SECRETUM MUNDI PUBLISHING

Contents

Quote

Flight

ONE - The Feather

TWO - Valley of the Dead Pilots

THREE - Inca Trail Warriors

FOUR - Cusco

FIVE - A Sacrifice

SIX - Tower-Jumpers

SEVEN - Festival of Blood

EIGHT - Susto

NINE - The Trophy Head

TEN - Vampires

ELEVEN - Conspiracy

TWELVE - Guinea Pig Healer

THIRTEEN - The Tsantsa’s Cheek

FOURTEEN - Iquitos

FIFTEEN - Big Bug Business

SIXTEEN - Vine of the Dead

SEVENTEEN - Saigon of South America

EIGHTEEN - Green Hell

NINETEEN - Two Wishes

TWENTY - River of Lies

TWENTY-ONE - Gold Teeth

TWENTY-TWO - Wawek

TWENTY-THREE - Ancient Ballads

TWENTY-FOUR - Trumpets of the Devil

TWENTY-FIVE - Love the Jungle

TWENTY-SIX - The Avenging Soul

TWENTY-SEVEN - Flight of the Birdmen

Appendix 1 - Amazonian Flora-Based Hallucinogens

Appendix 2 - The Shuar

Glossary

Bibliography

Perhaps where Lear has raved and Hamlet died

On flying cars new sorcerers may ride.

Samuel Johnson

Flight.

Did it really begin with the Wright Brothers?

Perhaps.

But the idea that ancient Man flew long before the rise of Occidental society, is something which transfixed me from the day I first heard that the Incas may have flown, or at least glided, with primitive canopies.

Delve into the prehistory of humanity and folklore, and you find dozens of accounts of primitive flight. Almost all societies have their own version. Reading the history books, I found myself drawn in to an idea that seemed to contradict what we all take as rote.

Nothing is quite so sacred to me as the body of material and belief passed down through folklore. It’s one of the reasons I became easily entangled in the idea of Incan flight.

My travels in Peru opened up a new world – one poised between historical conjecture, and cultural fact.

They challenged me in ways I never thought possible. Running a jungle expedition was something I found extremely hard going. Part of the reason was my guide, a burned out Vietnam veteran eking out a living in the margins of the Upper Amazon.

The jungles of Latin America have a power, a darkness, one that’s almost impossible to accurately describe in ink. I first traveled through the Amazon as a student, and remember coming to the conclusion that I was moving through the heart of the Earth.

There was a sense that I was a part of something colossal, and that I was connected in the rawest way. Since then, I have returned time and again to the jungle, and have been touched by the harmony of the natural world. It sounds like an empty cliché, but it’s not. The jungle is perfectly in balance, perfectly choreographed. And, the people who reside there are part of the harmony, never taking more than they need.

During the journey up river on the Pradera, I gleaned for the first time the astonishing value of shamanistic knowledge. In the West, we base almost all our pharmacological remedies on a handful of plants, whereas there are tens of thousands of flora that have never been tested — a great many of them located in the Upper Amazon.

The experience of taking Ayahuasca – the so-called Vine of the Dead – was one that changed me from the inside out. I think of it constantly, even now.

For the Shuar, former head-shrinkers, Ayahuasca is a way by which they can access the “real world”. This world, the one all round us, is for them an illusionary one. Only by taking Ayahuasca do they believe they can fly into the real world, to find answers for problems in this realm.

Whenever I meet someone with problems in life, I suggest a hard journey, away from the comfort zone in which they’re cocooned. There’s nowhere on Earth better for graphic adventure than the Peruvian Amazon.

I wish more ordinary people would see that real adventure is so easily within their grasp. Beyond that, I wish people would get to grips with the notion that you don’t have to be a so-called explorer to get out into the jungle, or to take a great journey.

The business of exploration is packed chock full of twenty-four karat fakes, those who like to keep everyone else down, by insisting they’re not worthy or capable of adventure.

That’s baloney.

Anyone can be an explorer.

It’s not about your equipment or your preparation, but the way you see the world. Appreciate what’s around you with fresh eyes, and an invisible realm materializes.

And so begins an adventure…

Tahir Shah

ONE

The Feather

The trail began at an auction of shrunken heads.

Anxious with greed, a pack of dealers and curiosity-hunters pushed into the library where the sale was about to begin. They had come by strict invitation, as the learned British society was eager to avoid the press. In the current climate of political correctness trophy heads are regarded as an embarrassment, something to be disposed of as quietly as possible. For years I had been an admirer of this unusual handicraft, and was desperate to start a collection of my own. Even though I’d managed to squirm my way onto the underground auction lists, I was lacking the funds of a serious collector. The shrunken head business is a small one, with only a few major players world-wide. I recognized most of them, as they lolled back on their chairs, their wax jackets wet with rain, their hands damp with sweat. All were well aware that such exquisite tsantsas are rarely put up for sale.

Wasting no time, the society’s secretary held up the first miniature head. Framed in a mane of jet-black hair, its skin was gnarled, its facial features distended. The nose was dark and shiny, and the lips had been sewn together with a magnificent length of interwoven twine. The dealers leaned forward, and swallowed hard, as the bidding began.

Fifteen minutes later the auction was over. All eleven heads had been sold to the same Japanese collector. Well-known and equally well disliked, he’d been trying to corner the shrunken head market for years.

As we filed out, I got chatting to an elderly Frenchman. He was wearing a Norfolk jacket and brown suede brogues, and said he’d come from Paris for the sale. Like me, he was going home headless and empty-handed. We shared a mutual interest in ethnographic curiosities. I lamented that, once again, the crème de la crème in tsantsas was going East, to Japan.

The Frenchman looked me in the eye and said that if he were forty years younger, he would drop everything and go to Peru.

“To search for tsantsas?”

“Not for shrunken heads,” he replied, “but for the Birdmen.”

“Who are the Birdmen?”

The man buttoned up his jacket, smiled wryly, and walked off into the rain. I didn’t go after him. For, at shrunken head sales, you get more than the usual smattering of madmen.

A week later a long manila envelope fell through my letter-box. It was post-marked Paris. Inside was a rust-colored feather and a slip of paper. The feather was evidently old. Three triangular notches had been cut into one side. It appeared to have been dipped in blood many years before. On one side of the paper was a crude sketch of a man with wings; on the reverse was a single sentence in classic French script. It read:

“... and the Incas flew over the jungle like birds. Calancha.”

I assumed that the Norfolk-jacketed Frenchman had sent it, and I wondered what it meant. Was there a connection between shrunken heads and men with wings?

While at the British Library a few days later, I looked up “Calancha”. There was only one author by this name, Friar Antonio de la Calancha. A single work was credited to him. It was entitled Crónica moralizada de la orden de San Agustín en el Perú. Bound in dull speckled calf, with dented corners, it was a huge book, as long as the Bible. The tooled spine was embossed Barcelona 1638. Eight woodcuts adorned the title page. They showed Catholic monks civilising a tribal people, whose bodies were decorated in feathers.

Were these the Birdmen?

From what I could make out, the text rambled on about taming peasants and teaching the Catholic message. I could see no mention of Birdmen.

I left the library but couldn’t stop thinking about the flight of ancient man.

We all know the tale of Icarus. When he flew too close to the sun, the wax on his wings melted and the feathers fell apart. There’s an Arab version as well: Abu’l Qasim ibn Firnas, the ninth century “Sage of Spain”, who made a pair of tremendous wings, cloaked himself in feathers... and flew. But like Icarus before him, he crashed to Earth.

The more I ran the Frenchman’s quote through my mind, the more it teased me. Had the Incas glided over the jungles or had flight begun, as we are always told, a century ago with the Wright brothers? Days passed, and I found myself thinking of little else. I tried to contact the Frenchman, but without luck.

An old fixation was coming to life again. As a teenager I had been obsessed with aircraft and flying. At sixteen I nagged my parents into buying me an air-pass valid for unlimited flights around the United States. For a month I flew from one airport to the next, without ever leaving the aviation system. I slept on departure lounge floors or, better still, took night flights across the nation. I lived on airline food, and prided myself on the fact that I never once paid for a meal. I remember thinking that I’d hit upon a new form of existence, and wondered whether in the future everyone would live like me.

A friend suggested that I check for a mention of primitive flight at the library of the Royal Aeronautical Society. At noon the next day, I cycled through the pouring rain up to the Society’s lavish headquarters, a stone’s throw from Park Lane.

By any standards the Royal Aeronautical Society is a mysterious institution. Rather like a gentlemen’s club, it is shrouded from the prying eyes of commoners. Once you’re inside, you wonder how you could never have known about it before. Strangely, the Society was established in 1866, a full thirty-seven years before the Wright brothers made their first powered flight. The eighth Duke of Argyll, its founder, must have known he was onto a winner. Perhaps, I pondered, he had known of flight in more ancient times.

Pushing open the door to the library on the third floor, I slipped inside. A modest-sized room, looking out onto the gates of Hyde Park, it was laid with maroon carpet and cluttered with desks. Half a dozen wintry gentlemen were sitting in silence, poring over picture books of early fighter aircraft.

I trawled the rounded shelves for a mention of the Incas or Calancha. Most of the books were concerned with twentieth century aviation.

A handful of forward-thinking pamphlets about aircraft had been printed during the 1800s. None referred to the Incas, though. Dismayed at the lack of relevant information, I approached the librarian’s office.

From the moment he first saw me, I could sense that the thin, bald librarian had branded me a trouble-maker. He glanced down at a half-eaten Marmite sandwich, in a nest of tin-foil on his desk. Then he looked up and blinked. I explained my interest in the Incas. Had he heard about Calancha’s chronicle? Did he know whether the ancient Americans had actually flown? Was there a connection between ancient flight and shrunken heads?

Spreading a single curl of hair across his polished head, the librarian gnawed at the sandwich, and grimaced.

“Incas?”

“That’s right, I’ve heard they flew... over the jungles of Peru.”

The librarian raised an eyebrow.

“When did all this happen?”

“Oh, um,” I stammered, “ages ago...”

“Before the Wright brothers?”

I did a quick calculation.

“Almost certainly.”

Choking down the last bite of bread, he said he’d see what he could find.

Half an hour later, he stumbled over with a single A3 sheet.

“This is all we have,” he said.

I glanced at the page, a clipping from The Brentwood Review, 8 March 1985. The main photograph showed a moustachioed man hurling into the air what looked like an oversized pillowcase. I scanned the columns. The article focused on a retired cash machine repairman, called William Isadore Deiches. A self-proclaimed expert of flight in ancient times, Mr Deiches, so the article said, had cracked a secret code, and could build a flying carpet. He could even make a doormat fly – for Deiches had deciphered aircraft designs from several countries, including Egypt, Japan, Tibet, Mexico and Peru. And, the piece explained, he had even written a book on the secret lore of the Pyramids.

Mr Deiches was my only lead. Somehow he must have worked this out when I called him. His response implied that only desperate people telephoned the Deiches residence.

A child-like voice answered the phone.

“I know how they built the Pyramids,” it said.

“Is that Mr Deiches?”

“You’ll never guess how they did it.”

“I want to know if the Incas flew,” I said, changing the subject.

“Course they did,” the voice replied easily.

“Are you sure?”

“You’d better come round and have a chat.”

TWO

Valley of the Dead Pilots

William Isadore Deiches opened the door to his Brentwood maisonette no more than a crack. The iris of a single ice-blue eye widened as it observed me. I whispered my name. The door slammed shut. I stood firm and repeated my name. A security chain clattered, and was followed by the sound of unoiled hinges moving slowly. I greeted Mr Deiches. A man of retirement age, he was of average height, with a slender neck, thin lips and an aquiline nose. His hair was concealed by a black Stetson, with a tan leather band; and his skin was oyster-gray, wrinkled like rhino hide.

“Can’t be too careful,” said Deiches, leading the way through the hall, into the lounge, “there are a lot of crackpots out there.”

It might have been a pleasant spring day in Brentwood, but the maisonette’s rooms were frigid, dank and smelled of death. Remembering that I’d come in the name of scientific research, I sat down in a low armchair and braced myself. Around me, the scarlet paisley wallpaper seemed to be closing in. Ring-binders were piled up everywhere, and a clutch of mangy soft toys poked out from under a coffee table. Crumbs from a thousand TV-dinners circled my chair.

Deiches handed me a mug of steaming tea, and swept an arm across the coffee table to clear it.

“The Valley of the Kings wasn’t that at all,” he said, settling into a rocking-chair, “it was really the Valley of the Dead Pilots.”

“Egypt?” I said.

“Of course,” he replied. “Who d’you think taught the Incas to fly?”

I frowned politely.

“Tutankhamen was their best pilot,” he went on, “but he crashed, poor chap, and died of multiple fractures.” Deiches paused to sip his tea. “The Egyptians based everything on watching birds,” he said. “You only ever got a single-seater in Ancient Egypt, because they’d never seen a bird with two heads. Haven’t you ever heard of the Saqqara glider?”

I shook my head.

“In 1898,” said Deiches, “a model of a plane was discovered in a tomb there. No one knew what it was, because the Wright brothers hadn’t done their stuff yet, so it got tossed into a box. Then in the ’70s someone fished it out and realized it was a prototype of a high-wing monoplane.”

“What about the Americas?” I asked.

Deiches’ eyes glazed over. I sensed that it had been a long time since the last visitor had graced his living-room.

“I’m the only man alive who can translate Mayan,” he announced proudly. “It’s a bloody nightmare of a language.”

The expert took a gulp of tea.

“They all had aircraft,” he said, “the Maya, the Aztecs, and the Incas. What d’you think Mexico’s Pyramid of the Moon was for?”

Again, I looked blank-faced.

“For launching gliders, of course!”

A self-schooled authority on ancient flight, Deiches was having a whale of a time. Like a theoretical physicist, he could come out with the wildest ideas and get away with it. Despite my reservations, some of his facts did check out. The Saqqara glider, for instance, well-known to Egyptologists, is on display at the Cairo Museum.

“I’m quite famous in my own little way,” he said, “everyone knows me in Brentwood. Some people think I’m a crank but I’m not half as cranky as the lunatic who’s been calling me with death threats.”

Mr Deiches tugged a tattered folder from an upper shelf and rifled through it. Then he handed me a photocopy. The piece, from a 1934 edition of the New York Times, was headed “Aztec Gliders Flew in Mexico”. I ran my eyes over the article. It reported that an obscure Polish archaeologist, Professor M J Tenenbaum, was claiming he’d found stone etchings of Aztec gliders, which they had called crirs. Not unlike King Solomon’s fleet of aircraft (known as rasheds) the crirs had been made of stork feathers. Tenenbaum, the clipping went on, said that the primitive craft had been mentioned in Friar Clausijiro’s 18th century book History of Mexico, where it said the Aztecs “could fly like birds”. The similarity with the Frenchman’s quote about the Incas caught my attention.

Had ancient American cultures managed to construct a crude form of hang-glider? Surely it wasn’t so impossible for a mountain people to have designed a basic flying canopy? I wondered why such an obvious question was ranked as being on the lunatic fringe. Looking over at Deiches, his face pressed into the tattered file, I began to remember why. But even so, I found it strange that no mainstream scientists had considered the idea of gliding in ancient times.

“I know how they made flying carpets,” winced Deiches, eager to regain his audience.

“How?”

“The designs of Persian carpets... they hold the secret blueprints,” he lisped. “Decode the patterns, and you can make a carpet fly.”

Deiches smiled the smile of a man who had solved this, and many other riddles.

“Your Incas flew all right,” he said. “How d’you think they built the gigantic lines in Peru’s Nazca Desert? Beware of the crackpots – like the ones who say the symbols were landing strips for aliens. That’s nonsense! They were no such thing... they were landing strips for gliders, Incan gliders.”

With a deep sigh, I looked over at William Isadore Deiches, as he bobbed back and forth in his chair. Condemning him as a psychopath would have been too easy. Most of his expertise was beyond me, but he was the one man prepared to accept the idea of American flight in ancient times.

I drained my tea and thanked Mr Deiches for his time.

“You can’t go yet,” he said. “I’ve got to show you this...”

The retired cash register repairman, turned aviation specialist, ripped a fragment of paper from his file. He passed it over. My head jerked back as I focused on the sketch. It depicted a glowering figure with outstretched wings, taloned feet, and a crown covering his scalp. Writhing sea-snakes and trophy heads decorated the motif, which was labeled at the bottom. The label read “Peruvian Birdman”.

Deiches squinted, and wiped his nose with a grubby handkerchief.

“Thought you’d like it,” he said.

“Is it an Inca? Is there a link between the Birdmen and trophy heads?”

“I’m not going to give you all the answers,” he riposted. “If you’re so keen, why don’t you go and do your own research?”

“Where would I go?” I asked. “I’ve already been to the British Library and the Aeronautical Society.”

Deiches wasn’t impressed.

“You can’t do research sitting here in England,” he said.

“But what would I look for?”

The flying carpet expert took another gulp of his tea.

“You have to look for the Birdmen, of course.”

*

A few days after my encounter with Deiches, I took the train down to Purley to visit Sir Wilfred Thesiger, who was living in a residential home nearby. I would always try to meet the veteran explorer before setting off on a journey. He is a master when it comes to advice on planning an expedition.

While on the train, I scribbled what I knew on the back of an envelope: (1) Feather dipped in blood. (2) Spanish monk who may have thought the Incas could fly. (3) Many references to flight in ancient times. (4) Mystery of the Nazca Lines in Peru. (5) Picture of Birdman, decorated with trophy heads. It wasn’t much to go on but, as I stared at the notes, I felt a surge of adrenaline. The puzzle was without doubt cryptic, but I was sure there was a trail leading to an answer, a trail leading to a journey.

The late-Georgian building, set in acres of lush grounds, was a far cry from Kenya’s Samburuland, where I had first met Thesiger a decade earlier. Even though in his ninetieth year, Sir Wilfred was still hard as nails, bursting with strength. Bounding up the stairs to the second floor, he led the way to his room. Knick-knacks from Africa and Arabia were dotted about: a curved jambiyah dagger from Yemen, an Abyssinian talisman, a Zulu shield and assagai.

“So, tell me,” Thesiger said, once installed in his favorite chair, “where are you off to?”

“I’ve decided to go to Peru.”

“Never been to the Americas myself,” he replied. “Peru... was that the Aztecs?”

“Incas.”

“Ah, yes, the Incas,” said Thesiger, staring into space, “and what’s taking you down there?”

Previous discussions with the great explorer had established his aversion to air travel. Most of his journeys had begun with a sea voyage. So it was with unease that I mentioned my interest in Incan gliders.

“I’ve heard that the Incas could fly,” I said casually.

Thesiger drew in a sharp breath.

“Airplanes! Can’t stand the things,” he said. “That infernal combustion engine.”

“I don’t think they were actual planes with engines,” I said weakly, “probably more like gliders.”

Sir Wilfred cocked his head back.

“You’re going to need some good equipment,” he replied. “What’re you taking?”

Until that moment, sitting as I was in Sir Wilfred’s study, I hadn’t given much thought to the technicalities of the trip. A trailblazer of the old school, Thesiger judged expeditions on the quality and amount of equipment taken along. He was a man who’d never been hampered by the stringent luggage restrictions of modern air travel.

“I’ll be taking all the usual stuff,” I said, motioning sideways with my arms.

Thesiger scratched his cheek. He was waiting for an inventory.

“Ropes,” I mumbled, “lots of rope... and some mosquito repellent, a good water-bottle, and of course some tins of corned beef.”

“Rations... very important,” wheezed Sir Wilfred. “But what about transport once you’re there?”

In line with his dislike of aircraft, I was aware of Thesiger’s hatred of all motor vehicles. Stretching in my chair, I announced: “Llamas, I’ll be using llamas.”

“Ah,” he said, slapping his hands together with relish, “animal transport. Can’t beat it. Never used llamas myself.”

“They’re basically camels,” I said knowledgeably, “just with smaller humps.”

“A camel could take you to the ends of the Earth,” he replied dreamily. As someone who had twice crossed Rub” al-Khali, the Empty Quarter of the Arabian Desert, barefoot, Thesiger was a man who knew his camels.

Satisfied with my transport arrangements, he swivelled in his chair. Another pressing question was concerning him.

“What if the rations run out, and you’re starving?” he asked darkly.

My eyes widened at the thought.

Sir Wilfred leaned forward, the shadow of his towering frame looming over me like a storm-cloud.

“You may have to turn the transport into food,” he said.

*

A large-scale map of Peru was unfurled at Extreme Journey Supplies, a trekking shop in north London. The salesman cast an eye across it and shook his head.

“Peru,” he said with loathing, “it’s a hard one.”

“Hard?”

“There’s mountains,” he mumbled, running a thumbnail down the Andes. “Then you got desert over “ere, jungles down “ere, and coastline... lots of coastline.”

“Diverse little country, isn’t it?” I said.

“Gonna cost “ya,” he replied, fishing a check-list from a draw. “What d’you want first?”

“I think I’d better start with a knife.”

“What sorta knife?”

“I’m going to need one with a sharp blade.”

“How sharp?”

“Sharp enough to skin a llama,” I said.

An hour later I found myself inspecting a mass of gear. The shop’s manager had come to attend to me himself. A major journey called for the best equipment money could buy. I surveyed my purchases and grinned, Thesiger would be proud. Like him, I was becoming preoccupied by inventories.

Realising that I was every salesman’s dream customer, the manager went over the check-list. A team of assistants scrambled to pack the gear into bags.

“Water purifying pump, Force Ten high altitude tent,” he began in a baritone voice, “Omega Synergy sleeping bag, mosquito net, half a gallon of Deet, jungle hammock, trekking pole with built-in compass, thermometer, signaling mirror and distress whistle, titanium Primus stove with extra fuel, six carabiners, two hundred feet of caving rope, a four-cell Maglite, self-inflating mattress, wire saw, hypothermia blanket, folding spade with combined entrenching tool, fire-lighting flint, lightweight mess tin, more rope, emergency surgery unit with brain drip, mentholated foot powder, ergonomic water bottle with inbuilt drinking straw, and twenty-two family-sized sachets of Lancashire Hot Pot.”

“What about the knife?”

The manager tapped the sheet with the end of his pen.

“And last but not least,” he declared grandly, “a sixteen-inch, nickel-coated Alaskan moose knife, with a blade sharp enough to...” the manager paused to look at me. “Sharp enough to skin a llama,” he said.

THREE

Inca Trail Warriors

It was well below freezing as I stumbled out of my tent into the blackness, a flashlight in one hand, a soggy roll of loo paper in the other. With the night to cloak me, I went in search of a patch of field in which to purge my faltering digestive tract. Within a week I’d ripened from headstrong adventurer with a quest, to incontinent wreck.

I had arrived in Lima with the intention of picking up the trail to the elusive Birdmen, whoever they might be. I had no idea where the path might lead, or the hazards which might line its route. My modus operandi was to forge ahead, quizzing anyone and everyone for scraps of information. Looking back, I can only marvel that I embarked on such a long journey with so little in the way of concrete data. But, in hindsight, this lack of research may have been my greatest asset.

Weighted down instead with equipment, I made a beeline to the ancient city of Cusco. From there I signed up for the Inca Trail, the trek across the mountains to Machu Picchu. The Incas’ most sacred city seemed the obvious place to pick up the trail in search for the Birdmen of Peru.

The four-day hike was described by my guide-book as “ten times harsher than Everest”. Waving it off as no more than a piffling stroll, I had thrust my trekking pole into the dirt. A man with as much gear as me, I mused, was surely unstoppable.

Since my rendezvous with Deiches, I’d read what little I could find regarding flight in antiquarian times. The line between myth and fact was clouded in uncertainty. Cold hard facts were few and far between. I scrutinized the more reputable ancient texts, hunting for clues.

I read of a man named Ki-Kung-Shi who supposedly built a chariot with wings in the reign of Chinese Emperor Ch’eng T’ang, eighteen centuries before the birth of Christ. The chariot looked rather like a paddle steamer. Another source recorded that two thousand years ago, in the Chinese kingdom of Ki-Kuang, (its people, supposedly, had one arm and three eyes each) flying machines were common. And, in Ancient Greece, Archytas of Tarentum, a friend of Plato, had constructed a wooden dove. When it flew it became one of the wonders of the ancient world.

Dig deep in folklore and you start unearthing examples of primitive flight. Most test the boundaries of belief. Danish legends tell of flying sun chariots over Trundholm two millennia ago; the Indian epics Ramayana and Mahabharata contain references to flight – the most famous being the zeppelin-like Vimana aircraft. Zimbabwe had “towers of the flight”; the Maoris had a tradition of flying-men, as did the English, beginning with King Bladud.

For some reason the notion of Incan flight shone more brightly for me than all the rest. Perhaps because the empire of the Incas rose at a time when a few scientists and free-thinkers in Europe were working on the idea of flight. Roger Bacon, Leonardo Da Vinci and others, gave serious thought to the problem of sustaining a man’s weight in air. But they were lampooned for using hammers and nails rather than magic, alchemy, and other accepted tools of the time.

*

On the third night on the Inca Trail, after a suspect bowl of stewed cuy, which we know as guinea pig, I asked the guide, Patricia, if she had heard whether the Incas flew. A sensitive woman with deep-set eyes and an infectious smile, she’d laughed at my question. Only when I declared that I wasn’t joking, did she become more serious. Like many Peruvians I quizzed, she was capable of extraordinary perception in esoteric matters. And, as with many others, she had a nugget of information to pass on.

“When my grandfather was a young man in Urubamba,” she said, stirring her guinea pig goulash to cool it, “he was walking in the woods near his home. At the foot of a tall tree he came across a young condor. Its wing had been broken. Taking pity on it, my grandfather gave the bird a little meat. He took it home, where he cared for it through the winter. After many weeks, when it had recovered, he let it go free.”

Patricia slurped her stew and stared into the camp-fire.

“From that day on he had wild, vivid dreams,” she said. “He dreamt he was an Inca flying, gliding through the empty sky... he dreamt he was part condor, part man, a man from ancient times.”

*

By the time I had struggled back to my tent from the lavatory field, Patricia was ready to leave. It was just before three a.m. She supervised the porters, two of whom had been assigned to haul my luggage across the passes to Machu Picchu.

Laden down with non-essential knick-knacks, I limped forward on bleeding feet. I cursed myself for giving in to the salesman’s tempting merchandize, and I damned Deiches. If it hadn’t been for him, I would have been tucked up at home dreaming of adventure. The porters scuttled ahead under the weight of survival gear, their sandals biting into the granite-paved path. All around us the jungle slept.

Patricia told me to keep a look out for Cuscomys ashaninka, a new genus of mammal, the size of a domestic cat, which had been discovered in the hills for the first time a few days before. But I was in no mood for nature. I inched forward through the darkness, my hand on Patricia’s shoulder, like a gas victim from a forgotten war.

Four hours later the undergrowth appeared to know that dawn was near. The food chain had woken and was hungry. After breakfasting, one creature would become an early meal for another with wider jaws. A thousand birds nudged about in the foliage, restless to take flight. Each nest sheltered a clutch of mouths waiting to be fed. Darkness lifted by gradual degrees, although there was still no real light. At last the first shades of cypress and olive green came to life.

The track had levelled out, and was now clearly visible. I responded by moving faster, bounding across the neatly-fitting flagstones. A thermometer, distress whistle, and signaling mirror clattered from my coat, like tools hanging from an astronaut’s suit.

Turning a sharp bend, I was struck dumb by the view. Stretching out ahead was a valley. At its centre lay the ruins of a city. The valley was like none other I have ever witnessed, just as the city itself has no equal. The colors, the shadows and the sense of secrecy, were bewitching.

I rested there at Intipunku, the Gate of the Sun, before starting the short walk down into the ruins. The air, which had shed its nocturnal blanket, smelled of fennel, although I could not see that aromatic herb growing among the smooth-edged granite stones. As I descended, the first fragment of dawn rose out over the dark peaks, giving them color. No more than a glow of light at first but, as the moments passed, the glow transformed into a bolt of gold. I watched transfixed and, as I did so, it struck the ancient ruins of Machu Picchu.

The Spanish ravaged the Incan kingdom, stripping away its riches. But they missed this, the greatest jewel of all. Before walking the Inca Trail I had wondered how the sacred city could have eluded the Conquistadors. Far too steep for their horses, the trail – supposedly the original route of pilgrimage – appears to lead nowhere. Only after four days of hiking across mountain passes, do you reach the city itself. The elusive path had kept the Incas’ secret safe.

Current thinking says that Machu Picchu was probably deserted before the Conquistadors arrived. Some experts say it was abandoned after a plague; others that the religious centre may have moved elsewhere.

The American scholar Hiram Bingham is credited with rediscovering Machu Picchu. Leading a Yale University team to the site in July 1911, he claimed to have found the Incan stronghold of Vilcabamba. A historian rather than an archaeologist, Bingham knew how to put together an expedition and his team was remarkably well-equipped. When I read his book Inca Land, I wondered if he’d visited the same mountaineering shop as me. The inventory of his equipment suggested that superior salesmen had been at work.

Bingham’s gear included: a mummery tent with pegs and poles, a hypsometer, a mountain-mercurial barometer, two Watkins aneroid barometers, a pair of Zeiss glasses, two 3A Kodak camera, six films, a sling psychrometer, a prismatic compass and clinometer, a Stanley pocket level, an eighty-foot red-strand mountain rope, three ice axes, a seven-foot flagpole with an American flag and a Yale University flag, four Silver’s self-heating cans of Irish Stew, a cake of chocolate, eight hardtack biscuits, as well as raisins, sugar cubes and mock-turtle soup.

Gazing down across the valley, it was hard to imagine that until Bingham’s arrival Machu Picchu was lost in jungle. The canopy of trees which had hidden and protected the sacred city for centuries has long since been hacked down. Modern times have brought mod cons in abundance, paving the way for the tourist bandwagon. The most notable additions were an exclusive hotel and the railway, which runs from the nearby town of Aguas Calientes down to Cusco. Each year brings newer and more costly comforts. The latest idea is to build a cable-car which will ferry even more tourists up to the sacred city from the valley floor.

But for two hours each morning, Machu Picchu belongs to the weary, stomach-clutching legion of Inca Trail warriors. The ruins are deserted and lie silent. For those who have staggered over the passes, the reward is like slipping into Disneyland before the gates open. You have a chance to breathe deeply, to soak up the textures, and to absorb the lack of human sound. But then, on the dot of nine, as if some invisible gong has been struck, the first of a thousand tourist coaches winds its way up the hairpin bends to Machu Picchu. Within moments, the turnstiles are spinning, the flush toilets are churning, and soft drinks fizzing, as the seething mass of Banana Republic explorers descends.

Tour groups, speaking every language in the world, criss-cross the place like spiders weaving a giant web. Stubbing out their duty-free cigarettes underfoot, rubbing sun-cream into their wrinkles, troupe after troupe of khaki-clothed tourists hustles forward, desperate to get their money’s worth in this, the greatest archaeological theme park on earth.

*

On the western edge of Machu Picchu, we came across a group of seven East Europeans, clustered around a curiously-shaped granite block. The tourists, dressed in matching lilac robes, were barefoot, except for one woman who was wearing purple moonboots. They were chanting some kind of invocation. Patricia frowned, then shook her head woefully.

“They are always doing this,” she said.

“Who?”

“Those purple people. They come from Poland and think they are Incas. They come to take power from the Intihuatana, the Sacred Stone.”

We watched as the Poles, their palms pressed against the granite surface and their eyes tightly closed, sapped the rock’s energy.

“What’s so sacred about that stone?”

“The Incas used to tie the sun to it,” said Patricia. “It proved their power over nature. When the Spanish found those special stones, they broke them up. I wish this one could be broken,” she said, her voice rasping with anger, “then maybe the Polish people would go away.”

Soon after, Patricia’s wish was granted. The sacred stone was crushed to bits during the filming of a beer commercial.

Without wasting time Patricia led me from the holy rock, down through the terraced ruins, pointing out the principal buildings along the way.

Since Bingham, every generation has dreamed up new theories to explain the ruined city. Experts have claimed it was a fortress, a private hacienda, a nunnery, centre of learning or religion, even an observatory.

“Look at this place,” Patricia said, sweeping her arm in an arc over a bluff of rocks, “this is called the Temple of the Condor.”

I entered the shrine.

“To me it does look like a temple dedicated to birds,” said Patricia. “See here, how the wings of the condor are represented by the rock. And here, how the image of a condor has been carved from a piece of granite.”

The guide wiped her neck with her hand. “But has it got anything to do with birds at all?”

“What do you mean?”

“Bingham thought it was the prison, where convicts were chained up or killed,” she said. “Others have said it’s a princess’s tomb, a kitchen, or a place where maize was stored.”

I stepped out of the way as a river of retired Israelis flooded in. Before we knew it they were upon us. We held our ground. The Israeli leader, waving a pink flag – embroidered with the legend Moses Basket Tours – was a force to be reckoned with. He spewed out a couple of lines about the temple, clapped his hands signaling for photography to begin, glared at the Bengalis; clapped again, and led the way to the Temple of the Rainbow.

Every three minutes another wave of white-skinned, blue-rinsed retirees splashed in, and swirled around us. Between the waves, I made a hurried inspection of the sanctuary. The form of the condor was blatantly obvious, lying outstretched on the floor, its wings writhing behind, and its beak lurching ahead. This was no prison block or princess’s tomb, but quite obviously a shrine dedicated to flight.

Patricia pointed out the groove in the bird’s ruff, where sacrificial llama blood might once have run. A rush of energy gripped me as the next swell of Israelis surged into the cove. Surely this, the Temple of the Condor, was connected to the Birdmen?

Patricia noticed my particular interest in this shrine.

“Why are you so interested in birds?” she asked, scrunching her cheeks into a smile.

“I have heard that the Incas glided over the jungles,” I said.

“They may have done so,” Patricia said. “But you don’t understand.”

“Understand, what?”

“You are thinking of the flight itself, which is meaningless,” she said. “And, you’re missing the real question.”

I paused, as another wave of tourists hurled themselves into the temple. A moment later they were gone.

“What is the real meaning, the real question?”

Patricia ran her fingers across the stylized stone wing of the condor.

“Whether the Incas flew or not is irrelevant,” she said. “Instead, you must ask why they wanted to fly.”

Reflecting on Patricia’s words, I recalled that, on a trip to Mexico, I had once come across a fiesta in the small Yucatan town of Ticul. The highlight of the festival was a ceremony, called Volador. It’s said to have been started by the Aztecs. Three men, guised as birds, with papier-maché beaks and feathered robes, leapt off a miniature platform at the top of a towering pole. Each had a cord tied to his ankles, which had been wound around the pole. As the men vaulted from the platform, they swung round and round, unwinding as they flew.

A Mexican friend told me that Volador represented freedom, and the devotion of man to God. For years I had puzzled over this. But it helped me to understand why the Incas might have wanted to fly. It wasn’t about getting from A to B. It was about something far more fundamental, far more spectacular.

The Incas could have had no need to use flight as a means of transport. Such a thing would surely have trivialized what they considered to be a sacred medium. Yet they must have had good reason for yearning to glide, to soar free in the air. Perhaps, like the condor, the Incan Birdmen were messengers to the Gods.

Two hours later I was perched up on the summit of Huayna Picchu, the sugar loaf peak which overlooks the ancient city. The climb is strenuous, especially when you have a bout of the runs. Crawling on my hands and knees up the sheer faces of stone, I began to wish that I’d stayed with Patricia. I had left her in the café down below, with a plate of roasted guinea pig.

Staring out across the valley, down to the Urubamba River, was invigorating beyond words. The light was now a syrupy yellow, bright yet not harsh. A chill wind ripped through my hair, whistling between the crags. I yelled at the top of my voice. But no one heard me. Then, like a cat stuck in a tree, I peeped down at the ruins. The lack of safety devices was unnerving, but at the same time exhilarating. One slip of the heel and Huayna Picchu would have embraced another victim.

The rush of the wind was telling me to thrust away from the rock and jump.

“You will fly! You will fly!” it called.

“But I have no wings. It’ll be suicide.”

“Make a canopy,” urged the wind. “With a sail streaming above you, glide down to Earth.”

I closed my eyes and sensed the current of air on my face. Then I breathed in deeply.

“Trust me, and I will protect you... I will hold you as you fly.”

I opened my eyes a crack, and began to understand the significance of Machu Picchu. Stretching out in symmetrical flanks, on east and west, the ruins were arranged as wings. Once I saw them, I couldn’t get them out of my mind. They gleamed up at me, glinting in the yellow light.

Machu Picchu was laid out in the shape of a condor.

I would have slithered my way back down to the café much sooner. But a refined-looking Peruvian man was watching me.

“It’s a condor!” I shouted. “Machu Picchu’s a gigantic condor!”

The man was dressed in a sheepskin coat, with the flaps of a woolen hat pulled down snugly over his ears. His nose was streaming, and his cheeks were scarlet. In his hands was a tin, and in it were coca leaves.

“The condor is the messenger,” he said in English, offering me some of the leaves.

“Whose messenger?”

Resting the tin on his knee, the man washed his hands over his face.

“The condor links us to heaven,” he said. “Just as it did the Incas. It is the bridge, the bridge between man and God.”

“Could the Incas glide like condors?”

The man twisted the corners of his mouth into a smile.

“We can all fly,” he said.

“All of us?”

The man nodded.

“Si, all of us.”

He paused, to regard me sideways on.

“Todos tenemos alas, we all have wings,” he said, “but we have forgotten how to use them.”

FOUR

Cusco

Long ago, when the Incan empire was no more than a twinkle in the Creator’s eye, the land was dim and untamed. Manco Capac, the son of the sun, and Mama Ocllo, the moon’s daughter, set off to dispel the darkness. Emerging from the still waters of Lake Titicaca, the couple roamed the Andean wilderness in search of a place in which to construct a great capital. When they arrived where Cusco now stands, Manco Capac thrust his staff into the soil to test its fertility. The rod sank deep, verifying the land’s richness. So he told Mama Ocllo to bury a magic pip in the earth. From that seed, Cusco grew...

Some say the city was built in the shape of a puma, others that it was designed to match the harmony of the Milky Way. As with Machu Picchu, we may never know the real secrets of its past. The Conquistadors reported to Madrid that they had set eyes on the most magnificent treasure in the New World. They were not speaking of the fine buildings, but of the gold which lay within them.

Every ounce of that intoxicating metal was turned into ingots for the voyage back to Spain. Sacrificial urns, idols and plates, crowns, exquisite brooches, buckles, and tumi, sacrificial daggers, were melted down and shipped away. Ironically, Peru has once again become the centre of a world gold rush. Multinationals have flooded in, hiring local laborers for a pittance, in the dangerous business of extracting the ore. Hundreds of mines have sprouted up across the Peruvian Andes. But little has changed in the five hundred years since the first Conquistadors arrived in search of El Dorado. The gold mines are still being worked by garimpeiros, local miners, for foreign masters, their precious bounty being shipped abroad as before.

Recently scholars have begun to realize that, while popular with the Incas, gold was never given pride of place. The Incas regarded textiles as far more important. When they first arrived in Peru, the Spanish were presented by the Incas with spans of lavish llama-fiber cloth. Considering the gesture to be nothing short of raillery, the Spaniards began a full-scale invasion, fueled by insatiable greed.

After carving their way across Peru, the Conquistadors found themselves face to face with the Inca, Atahualpa. Covered by sheets of gold, and robed in blue livery, he was borne forward on a litter carried by eighty men. The young Emperor’s head was weighted down by a golden crown; a collar of enormous emeralds choked his neck; his face was shrouded by a long fringe of wool, his ears hidden by disks of virgin gold.

Atahualpa was wrenched from the litter and thrown into a cell, and the slaughter went on. Like his people, he couldn’t understand the conquerors’ fixation. The Incas assumed the Spanish either ate gold or used it in some bizarre medicinal preparation. According to the popular tale, Atahualpa marked a line high on his cell’s wall, offering to fill the room to that mark with gold in exchange for his freedom. The chamber, eighty-eight cubic meters in size, would be filled once with gold, and twice with silver.

The entire empire was mobilized to ferry llama-loads of gold from all corners of the realm. While his people sacrificed their assets to free their sovereign, Atahualpa remained locked up. The prison guards were said to be amazed by the richness of his costume, which included macaw-feathered robes, and an unusual bat-hair cape.

At last almost twelve thousand pounds of gold and twice that of silver were accumulated and handed over. The Inca braced himself for freedom, but the Spanish general, Francisco Pizzaro, had other ideas. Perhaps sensing an Incan uprising, Pizzaro accused Atahualpa of treason, the penalty of which was to be burned at the stake. The sentence was later changed to strangulation. When he was garrotted outside his prison cell in Cajamarca, many of the Inca’s wives and sisters were said to have hanged themselves so as to accompany his spirit into the afterlife.

*

Plaza de Armas, Cusco’s central square, was once the point at which over twenty-five thousand miles of Incan roads converged. Before the arrival of the Conquistadors, it was known as Tahuantinsuyu, The Four Quarters of the Earth, and was laid with soil from the distant reaches of the empire. It has borne witness to battles, executions, mutinies and plagues, to great banquets, coronations and sacrificial rites. These days, virtually every central plaza in Peru is known as Plaza de Armas, in honor of those who died in the 1879 war with Chile.

From the moment I set eyes on that great square, something stirred inside me. Along with the incessant stream of travelers, I realized at once that Cusco was different. Like them, I stopped dead in my tracks, put a hand to my mouth, and held my breath. It was as if I had been let into an extraordinary secret.

Long shadows of the winter afternoon veiled the maze of terracotta-roofs. Cobbled passageways with sheer stone sides led off to the east and the west. Arched doorways hinted at the courtyards which lay behind. Whitewashed walls trimmed in bougainvillea dazzled me as I explored the back-streets of what must be the most enchanting city on the Latin continent.

At almost eleven thousand feet, the vanilla-scented air was frosty with cold. A gang of street-vendors bustled forward, wrapped up in their winter woolies, tilted bowlers pulled down tight. Every Cusquenian seemed to be clutching a shallow basket of goods; hand-woven Alpaca gloves, ponchos and raspy woolen socks; quenas, panpipes, under-ripe lemons, jars of honey and Inca brand cigarettes. For every tray of merchandize there were ten newly-arrived tourists with a little money to spend.

Cusco is a city of bargains. The South American equivalent of Kathmandu, it’s saturated with impoverished adventurers who refuse to leave. Like me, they know that such precious destinations are hard to come by. Stroll down narrow alleys off the main square, and you find rows of shops, selling the effects of the desperate. Half-empty bottles of pink Pepto-Bismol, goose-down sleeping bags, waterproof matches, limp loo paper and tubs or Nivea sun-cream.

It was at the back of one such shop, which doubled as a café, beneath a rousing portrait of Ché Guevara, that I met Sven.

He watched me carefully as I poked about in a display barrel of pawned accessories. I examined the blade of an Opinel pocket-knife, checked the sell-by-date on a slab of Kendal mint cake, flicked through a dog-eared, damaged copy of West with the Night.

“Do you play chess?” he asked with a lisp.

“Badly.”

Before I could stop him, the hunched figure had pulled a board and pieces from his grubby satchel and laid them out. Male pattern baldness had robbed his head of hair, except for a long tuft at the front. His complexion was fair, his eyes an imperial blue, and his forehead was severed by lines. A much-darned gray pullover rolled up to his chin like an orthopaedic neck-brace.

He thrust out a square hand.

“Sven,” he said, “from Bratislava.”

I took a seat in the window alcove, adjacent.

“What shall we play for?” he asked.

“I have no chance of winning, I’m hopeless at chess.”

He pulled a yellow Sony Walkman from his satchel and placed it beside the board.

“You can have it if you win,” he said.

My eyes widened with greed.

“What happens if I lose?”

Sven stretched over and tugged at my scarf.

“Wool?”

“Alpaca,” I replied.

The game lasted six moves. As my king fell on his sword, the Slovak reached over, unwound my scarf, and twirled it around his own neck.

“It’s quite nice,” he said.

“I should hope so, it was a birthday present from my mother.”

Sven swept back the tuft of liquorice hair.

“I have the advantage,” he said softly. “I assume you’ve never been banged up in a Slovak prison.”

The chess-player wouldn’t say why he had done seven years in a high-security jail. But he did reveal, over a cup of mate de coca, that his friends called him Walkman. He was walking around the world in the name of peace and poetry.

“The countries which pass beneath my feet,” he mumbled, staring out the window. “They are the future. Forget Europe, it’s finished.”

“Which is your favorite place?”

The Slovak bent down to loosen his bootlaces.

“How can a father choose between his children?” he asked. “Macedonia was rough like the surface of the moon; Jordan was tender as a baby’s cry; Egypt smelled of jasmine, and the Sudan...” Sven paused to sip his mate. “The Sudan,” he said, “was silent as a prophet’s grave.”

Round the corner from the pawn-shop, Señor Pedro Valentine was holding up a pair of my underpants, stretched out between his arthritic thumbs. Indicating the superior quality of the cloth, to a shop full of female customers, he pouted like a Milanese gigolo.

“That’s the finest cotton I’ve seen in thirty years of laundering,” he said. “I bet they hold your merchandize just right.”

Half a dozen crones cackled. I confirmed that the underpants had served me well, especially during the hazardous days on the Inca Trail.

Once the elderly women had left, Señor Valentine made me a business proposition. He said that if, on my return, I exported him a container of English underpants he’d sell them in Cusco. He could muster a sales force of schoolboys. We’d be sure to make a fortune. The men of Cusco, he said, were sick to the back teeth of abrasive local underwear.

Señor Valentine handed me a stack of laundered clothes. Then he picked out a pair of barberry-red knickers and pressed them to his nostrils as if they were a rose.

“Huele, have a sniff,” he said conspiratorially, “a German girl just brought them in, she was muy bonita, very pretty.”

The old launderer jiggled his hands over his chest suggesting large cleavage.

“My wife shouts at me,” he said, ‘she asks why we don’t have a tourist shop like everyone else. She may be angry, but every man in Cusco is jealous of Pedro Valentine. After all,” he continued, “who else can sniff the fragrance of fresh knickers all day long?”

*

Night falls fast in the Andes, and with it comes bitter cold. A boy of five or six waylaid me as I ascended the cobblestone slope towards my hotel, in Plaza Nazarene. His nose was running, his hair matted with dirt, and his cheeks the color of oxblood; their capillaries ruptured by the daily cycle of fire and frost. He tugged at my trouser-leg, bringing me to a halt. Breaking into a tap-dance, he displayed a box of battered postcards. As I scanned them one by one, the boy advertised the extra-low price, one sol for ten. Cusco’s tourist shops peddle a fine selection of cards, all of them promoting the beauties of Peru. But the young salesman’s were from a different stock.

The cards portrayed a lesser-known side of the nation. The first six showed an assortment of hideous mummified bodies. The next was of an Andean medicinal stall, replete with llama-fetuses, then there were a series of ferocious-looking men in ponchos, balancing guinea pigs on their heads. But it was the last card which gripped me. It was a highlight from a textile. I looked at the image closely. It showed a crazed sub-human figure, with a leering expression, claws, crude wings, and a string of decapitated heads running down its back. The picture resembled the one Deiches had shown me. Its caption read El alado hombre del Paracas: the Birdman of Paracas.

I slipped the child a handful of coins and put the cards in my coat pocket. This last might be the clue I’d been waiting for, for the trail to the Birdmen was growing cold. But for now it was time to rest.

*

Sven had had a productive morning. Piled high on an empty café chair were an assortment of his winnings. A bottle of Jack Daniel’s, a green mohair sweater, six paperbacks, two Frisbees, a canvas rucksack, and a cluster of juggling balls. His expensive Walkman was positioned prominently beside the chessboard – like an unobtainable prize at a fairground stall.

“What about a cup of coffee for a poor Slovak?”

Sven had made an art form out of attracting charity. He considered himself to be above using money. The Queen, the Pope and he had one thing in common – none of them carried cash.

I pulled out the postcards I had bought the night before.

“Wonderful,” he said, “mummies and dried llama fetuses.”

“What about this one?” I pointed to the Birdman.

“El alado hombre del Paracas,” he read, rubbing the tip of his nose with a bishop. “Mummified bodies are one thing,” he replied, “but never make light of the winged-men.”

“Who are they?”

The Slovak glanced through me with his gaze.

“Look at that picture,” he said. “What do you see?”

I studied the image: “A wild creature, half-man, half-bird, adorned with severed heads.”

“Is that really what you see?” asked the Slovak. “Look again. Look beyond the obvious.”

Again, I scrutinized the figure, taking in its wide psychotic eyes, its spewing tongue, the individual stitches of embroidery.

“They flew,” I said under my breath. “I’m sure of it...”

Sven splayed his fingers on the table like the legs of a starfish.

“They glided, they soared,” he said, “like flying squirrels.”

“Were the Incas the first to make a gliding wing?”

“We have a saying in Bratislava,” he said: “The wings of an eagle are the arms of a man.” The Slovak twisted his fingers faster and faster until they blurred. “If you believe they flew, then they did.”

At that moment a tall, spindly woman entered the café. A mane of jet-black hair peaked into a crest above her forehead, before cascading down her back. Silver hoops dangled from her ears, reflecting the light as she walked.

As soon as Sven spotted her, he covered his face with his hand and let out a groan.

“Who’s she?”

“It’s Ariadne,” he said.

On his journey through Eastern Europe, across Africa and the New World, the Walkman had encountered all kinds of obstacles. In Cairo he had been accused of dousing a shopkeeper with petrol and setting him alight. Outside Maputo, in Mozambique, he’d been attacked by a pack of wild dogs and in the back-streets of Santiago he had been accosted by a glue-sniffer with a razor blade. Yet, no scourge, it seemed, had been as great as Ariadne.

“God knows why she fell for me,” he said as she sidled over. “She’s followed me for close to a thousand miles. I don’t know how to get rid of her.”

Without a word, Ariadne put her coffee cup on the table and pressed her hand into mine. She must have been in her early forties, about Sven’s age. The dark rings which circled her eyes suggested insomnia. Her long fingernails dug into my wrist.

“Enchanté,” she said in a Parisian voice. “Sven didn’t tell me he had a friend.”

“We played chess,” I said, faltering.

Ariadne scrunched up her eyes to focus on the postcard. Then she ran her tongue precisely across her upper lip, as if licking an envelope.

“The mystery of the Winged Ones...” she said.

“Do you know about them?”

Ariadne’s face twitched, implying that she did.

“That fabric is from the necropolis at Paracas,” she said. “For two thousand years it covered the dead.”

“A dead Birdman?”

“Perhaps.”

Draping her shale-black sheepskin coat over a chair, Ariadne lit a clove cigarette. Sven nudged the ashtray over. Soon the café was thick with pungent smoke.

“I’m looking for traces of the Birdmen,” I said.

Ariadne inhaled deeply.

“Have you been to Taquile?”

“Where’s that?”

“The sacred island in Lake Titicaca.”

Again, she inhaled, holding the smoke in her lungs until her eyes watered with unease. “They say the cloth which is woven there can fly.”

FIVE

A Sacrifice

Clutching to folklore and fragments of fact, I made for Cusco’s railway station and I clambered aboard the train bound for Puno, on the western edge of Lake Titicaca. With my bags stowed on the luggage rack, I took my seat in Inca Class carriage, and stared out at the platform.

A young Quechuan woman was crouched in the shade, a scarlet blanket spread before her like a toreador’s cape. Spread upon it was a pile of dried coca leaves. She adjusted the torn brow of her hat, stroked a hand across her cheek, and waited. All around the island of her shawl, feet were criss-crossing: porters’ dusty lace-ups, backpackers’ thongs, an official’s brogues, a contingent of matching Japanese Reeboks. With an abrupt jolt the train was alive. It came again, jerking me forward and back, as the wheels gnawed into the tracks.

We rolled through the shanty-towns at walking pace. A line of women were selling guinea-pigs, carrots and fruit; their husbands gambling at cards, their children running slipshod through the dirt, like lambs before the dogs. A barber was clipping at a mestizo’s proud moustache; beside him, a tarot reader was deciding someone’s future. An army of peddlers offered pink plastic combs, dusters and brooms. A pair of fighting cocks lurched at each other in the dust, and a class of school children stood to attention, singing.

Soon we had left Cusco behind. The train pushed its way south-east through the green Vilcanota valley, before climbing steeply towards the 14,000 foot La Raya Pass. The air and vegetation were thin and getting thinner.

In the Inca Class carriage a general state of pandemonium prevailed. The guard was trying to revive an old lady who had passed out. A waitress, wearing an ultra-short mini-skirt, was doing her best to deflect the advances of a rowdy Italian. The little girl sitting opposite me spewed her half-digested lunch onto the table between us. Before her mother had a chance to wipe it up, the girl’s younger brother drew a face in the mess. A group of kids pelted the carriage with stones. I buried my face in a guidebook and prayed for Puno to arrive.

As pebbles continued to ricochet off the windows like hailstones, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I looked up. A figure in a black Afghan coat was looming over me.

It was Ariadne.

“Going to Puno?”

I grunted.

Ariadne thrust her duffle bag onto the rack.

“Then we shall be companions,” she said.

Six hours later I had heard every event of Ariadne’s life. She had overlooked no detail. Right from the start, hers had been a troubled tale. Her father had abused her, and her mother had pushed her pram down a flight of stairs for no apparent reason. As a teenager she’d taken up with the drummer of an underground rock group called Retch!, before joining an order of Scottish Rosicrucians. For the last five years she had roamed the world, in search of herself, and in search of a suitable man to father her children.

Unable to bear another word of autobiography, I asked her about the Winged Ones and about the flying textiles of Taquile Island. Ariadne pulled a stick of raven-colored mascara from her pocket book and applied an even coat to her long lashes.

“Be patient and you will discover the answers you are seeking,” she said.

*

As the Inca Class carriage jarred its way across the Altiplano – the high Andean plateau – where only the hardiest men and beasts survive, I watched the sun dip down behind a copse of polylepis trees. We had stopped a dozen times at inconsequential stations. At each, a crowd had been waiting with their goods. All sorts of dishes were held up to the windows – roast mutton served in a twist of newspaper, stuffed peppers, charqui (beef stew), llama jerky, soft cheeses, and thick fermented chicha. Each village had its own speciality. Some sold alpaca gloves, statuettes of Santa Rosa, quenas or llama-hide drums.

Just north of Juliaca, at Pucara, thirty women leapt from the sidings. They were selling unglazed ceramic bulls painted with symbols – a sign of virility and fortitude, brought to the Americas by the Spanish.

As the train pulled into Puno, a great commotion began. Wild dogs charged headlong at the iron wheels, howling like demons. Old mestizos clapped their hands; their womenfolk whistling through broken teeth. Their sons hurled stones. In any other city, or any other country, the train’s arrival might not have excited the raising of a single eyebrow. But, for some inexplicable reason, the locomotive’s entrance into Puno was an event to be celebrated.

On the platform six llamas, adorned with ponchos and rich brocades, had been positioned as a grand guard of honor. Managers from a hundred small hotels mobbed the mass of backpackers, duelling for their custom. Muttering that his name was Ricardo, a fawning hunchbacked man pulled my luggage onto his shoulders, and led me away. I had no idea who he was, or what his hotel was like. I didn’t even know if he had a hotel. I was sure of the one certainty – that back in Cusco, Sven would be toasting his success in ridding himself of Ariadne.

Puno melts into the oatmeal horseshoe of hills like a North African town. Its square-shaped buildings, pocked with dents from stone-throwing boys, couldn’t have changed much since a Spanish count settled it as an outpost more than three centuries ago. Glinting before it, like a step-cut sapphire, hushed and brooding, lies Titicaca. The massive body of iridescent water keeps its secrets safe. One tale says that the Incas tossed an immense gold chain – weighing four thousand pounds – into the waves, to prevent the Spanish from taking it. Another legend says that only he who has seen his likeness reflected in the waters will know true happiness.

I hurried down to the Titicaca’s edge and peered over the side of the long jetty. A swathe of parrot-green algae masked my reflection. Nearby, an armada of leaking boats bobbed about on the water, ready to take tourists to the islands. A short distance off, a traditional canoe made from totoia, a kind of reed, was heading shore-ward. The craft, a scaled-down version of Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki, was being punted through the algae by a boatman.

I had spent the night at Ricardo’s house, which doubled as a “tourist dormitory”. It had just one bed. When no one was staying at his home,

Ricardo slept in the bed. Even though I agreed to pay the going rate, I felt bad about turfing the old man out. The floor was better for his back, he said, blowing his nose on his hand.

Ariadne, who’d shunned the lodgings, had gone off to find a youth hostel. She suggested I was mad to stay in a place lacking a mattress, blankets, running water and heat. The absence of such luxuries certainly did lead to a cold and unpleasant night. But I was more than happy to endure a little discomfort, for it warded Ariadne away.

*

To the right of the jetty, beside a vibrant orange boathouse, stood a great example of brutish Victorian achievement. Her name was Yavari, and she was the oldest ship afloat on Lake Titicaca. Restored in her original livery of green, black and white, she was cushioned in algae. I climbed her narrow gangplank and learned of her remarkable voyage.

Yavari was built in 1862 in Birmingham by the James Watt shipyard. Together with her sister ship, Yapura (now used as a hospital launch by the Peruvian Navy), she was packed into crates in pieces and sent to South America. Once the 1,383 pieces had got as far as the Peruvian coast, they were strapped to mules and lugged over the western Andes. Each mule could carry no more than four hundred pounds; and Yavari weighed two hundred tons. Not surprisingly, the journey took more than six years.

Unperturbed by the lack of available coal in the Andes, Watt had designed a steam engine which would run on llama dung. The iron-hulled queen of Titicaca plied the lake’s dark waters for a century. The only drawback was the enormous quantity of llama excrement needed to power the vessel at such an altitude. Every time she docked, the entire crew had to scurry out to the fields with baskets to scoop up handfuls of llama dung.

On my return, Ricardo asked if I’d seen my reflection in the lake. When I replied that I had not, he stretched an arm above his head, and poked about in the rafters. The sound of bottle being pulled through a nest of rats followed. A moment later he was blowing the dust from a demijohn. Wrenching out the cork with his teeth, he poured a few drops of the chicha over the stone threshold of the house.

“Para los espíritus, for the spirits,” he said.

I told Ricardo that my fortune had been read by a tarot-reader in Cusco.

“Una bruja, a witch, no doubt,” he declared, rubbing his eyes with his thumbs.

“She said that good luck would follow me like the sun.”

Ricardo pulled up a stool and sat. His head tilted towards me, a result of his crooked spine.

“You have no idea,” he said contritely. “This is a very unlucky place indeed. There are bad spirits in my home.”

Ricardo nudged at the sitting-room.

“Why do you think I have so many amulets?” he said.

Now that he mentioned it, there were a great deal of good luck charms, even by Peruvian standards. The windowsill and mantelpiece, the bookshelf, door-frame, and a dozen niches around the room, were cluttered with the trinkets.

“As a young man I was athletic,” he said. “Local girls fought over me, and my friends called me el suertudo, the lucky one.”

Holding the demijohn to his lips, Ricardo took a swig.

“I was married to the most beautiful woman in Puno,” he said. “Her eyes shone like black diamonds, her skin was tinted like the dawn. We moved into this house, had a pair of sons, good health, and all the luck in the world.”

Ricardo swigged at the bottle a second time. He craned his neck up to look me in the eye. He swigged again.

“What went wrong?” I asked.

“The fortune drained away,” said the hunchback. “Like water swirling from a bath. My wife drowned in the lake, then my boys gave in to fever. Then this!”

Ricardo thumped his back with his fist.

“All of us cursed... cursed by the spirits hidden in these walls.”

“Why don’t you pack up and leave?”

Again, Ricardo swigged at chicha.

“Hah!” he roared. “The spirits... they would hunt me down, just as they hunt any man who steps across the threshold. No one can ever escape them!”

I’m not naturally superstitious, but the prospect of being pursued by my host’s spirits was unsavory. Given the circumstances, I wondered why he invited strangers to stay.

Ricardo crossed the room and foraged in a niche beside the wardrobe. He removed a hand-sized ceramic figurine: it was of a short man, his mouth open with laughter, his colorful costume dangling with belongings.

“Ekeko,” he said, passing it to me. “The god of fortune.”

I had read about Ekeko. Long ago he had been an Aymara deity, carved from stone, celebrated for bringing good harvests. With the colonial influence, he became white-skinned and moustachioed, and was eventually made from clay. Ekeko must never be sold. But when he’s given by one to another, the receiver is blessed with immeasurable fortune.

Ricardo drained the demijohn of chicha, and burped.

“Amigo,” he said gently, “you seem like a good man. You have kind eyes.”

I began to thank him, but he raised a finger to stop me.

“Take this Ekeko,” he said. “Keep him warm and dry, and,” Ricardo paused to burp again, “... and he’ll bring you more happiness than you have ever known.”

*

Next morning, after a second night in Ricardo’s bed, I plucked the bare necessities from my bags and headed down to the jetty. The time had come to search for the flying textiles of Taquile. I strolled through the market en route to the lake.

A little girl was hopping between the crates of guinea pigs; her younger sister dancing after on tiptoes. The rows of Aymara women were preening their stalls, dusting off the merchandize. Chinese-made Barbie dolls and chewing-gum from Vietnam, cakes of prune-colored laundry soap and caps for toy guns, make-up mirrors, light-bulbs, batteries and chain. But the pride of place on every groundsheet stall was reserved for fuchsia-colored fizzy drinks. Peruvians old and young have a great fondness for gaseosas, drinks with so much synthetic dye and carbonation that one sip and your mouth goes numb. I later heard of a street-side dentist who used the beverage as a local anaesthetic when he was pulling out teeth.

On the jetty I made out the familiar outline of Ariadne. She was standing against the railing in her trademark Afghan sheepskin coat. I smiled, but secretly I wished she would leave me alone. She handed me a turquoise slip of paper, and pointed to a clinker-built launch.

The craft was low in the water, skulking down like an Alsatian on all fours. Its captain had taken the cowling away from the engine and was huddled at the stern. First he threatened the delicate machinery with a claw hammer, then struck it six times. The blows were accompanied by a string of Quechua swear-words. Miraculously, the engine was running three minutes later, urging us into the cloisonné-blue waters of Titicaca.

As we pushed away from the shore, towards the centre of the lake, I threw back my head. Cumulus clouds hung above us like floating islands. Huddling in the bow of the boat, a family from Taquile were getting a free ride home. The father was holding a baby llama to his chest furled in a blanket.

Ariadne lit a clove cigarette, pushed her sunglasses onto her head, and foraged in a buckram holdall by her feet.

“I went shopping,” she said, through the corner of her mouth.

“Souvenirs?”

She squinted until her eyes disappeared.

“Love potions,” she sniffed, pulling out a tatty plastic bag. It contained an indistinct object, wrapped in bandages like an Egyptian mummy. As Ariadne held the object between her knees, unwinding the cloth, I caught a whiff of what smelled like rotting meat. It reminded me of a Pakistani morgue in which I had once had breakfast. I gagged into the collar of my shirt.

It was a dried llama fetus. Ariadne cupped the trophy in her hands, bent her head down, and touched her lips to it in a kiss.

“Isn’t she beautiful?” she asked.

The father from Taquile looked over, and clutched his llama foal closer.

“What’s it for?”

“An aphrodisiac, of course.”

“How do you prepare it?”

The Frenchwoman turned to give me a poisoned stare.

“Are you knowing anything?” she said. “You make un potage, a soup.”

I wondered silently why humans feel it necessary to do such strange things with their time. All over the world people are at it: eating fish intestines, mealy grubs and monkey brains, dissecting tarantulas and breeding worms, bungee-jumping, bear-baiting and extracting healthy, unborn llamas from unsuspecting wombs.

I explained to Ariadne that, to most of us, the very idea of swilling down a dried llama bisque was deplorable.

She wrapped up her aphrodisiac, ensuring the legs weren’t poking out.

“What’s wrong with eating fetus?” she said.

I squirmed.

“Surely you have heard of Shenzhen?”

“Shen...!”

“In China,” she said, puffing at her cigarette, “across from Hong Kong.”

The family from Taquile and I exchanged a troubled glance.

“Soup made from aborted fetuses... it’s an ancient remedy.”

I squirmed again.

“It’s delicious,” said Ariadne.

“You’ve tried it... you’ve actually drunk fetus soup?”

“Oh, so many times,” she said whimsically, “when I lived in Hong Kong. It’s good for the liver and the kidneys,” she said, tucking the dried llama fetus back in her bag. “And of course,” she added, “there’s nothing like it for a hangover.”

The villagers of Taquile cluster around when they spot a launch arriving. Few tourists journey out to their island. Those that do are offered reed toys and whistles, alpaca tooth charms, and gaudy blankets embroidered with local scenes. Some locals invite the travelers to watch traditional dances, to go fishing, or to stay in their homes. Keeping change at bay, Taquile has resisted the temptation of building hotels or proper restaurants.

Once he had stepped ashore, I asked the man with the llama foal if he knew of any weavers. At first he was wary, something to do with Ariadne’s fixation for dried fetuses, no doubt. I lied, saying she was a vet, with an interest in medical specimens. Then I explained my own interest – Taquile’s textiles.

The man passed the foal to his wife. I looked at his face closely, taking in the ridge of his nose, his chapped lips and the trace of whiskers at the corners of his mouth.

“Are you a believer?” he asked, cryptically.

I nodded.

“Then you can come with me,” he said. “Héctor, my grandfather, will be waiting.”

We tramped a mile or two inland, breaching low stone walls and jumping ditches, cutting a path across the burnt sienna farmland. Before I knew it, we had almost crossed the island, which only measures two miles by one.

A few tourists might have found Taquile, but very little has changed there in the last three hundred years. The island is still divided into six agricultural sections, called suyos, each of which has been administered by the same family for centuries. The crops grown on Taquile would have been familiar to the Incas – a long potato called oca, broad beans, maize, wheat and quinua, a staple grain rich in protein.

The Spanish treated the island as a great hacienda, where guests could feast on the lake’s inimitable supply of trout. In the years after Peru’s independence in 1821, Taquile served as a penal colony. Now that they are again left to their own devices, the islanders spend their time tilling the dusty fields, weaving, and preparing for the calendar of festivals.

In the shadow of a doorway, propped up against a low wall, or sitting on a clump of rocks, every man and woman is busy making cloth, or precious fragments of regalia. Most of the islanders have three or four separate costumes – for working, festivities, weddings and daily life. Cloth is a sacred material on Taquile, as it was to the Incas, and the civilizations which preceded them. The colors are blazing: reds and scarlets, peacock greens and brilliant blues.

As I took in the array of women’s attire, flowing skirts dyed with cochineal, and jet-black shawls, I was struck by the similarity with the Kalash tribal dress of Northern Pakistan. The costumes of Taquile and of the Kalash – former inhabitants of Nuristan – were both born of a fierce rugged landscape.

Héctor was sitting on a rounded step outside his ancestral home. From the condition of his fine clothing I could tell that he was a man of status. His white muslin shirt, black pants and two-tone vest were impeccably kept. But then, the sleeves of the shirt were neatly rolled up, exposing his dark, muscular forearms. Around his abundant waist was tied a chumpi, a woven belt, not unlike a Japanese obi. On Taquile Island belts have been important for centuries, embroidered with information about the agricultural and social calendar for the year to come. And on his head, Héctor wore a tomato-red pinta-chullo hat, its point flopped down like a jester’s crown, the sign of a married man.

Spread before him was a wak a loom, upon it a half-finished poncho. The old man stood up when he heard us approaching. He kicked on his rubber-tire sandals, wiped his nose with the side of his hand, and ducked his head low in respect.

“Que camine con fuerza y derecho toda su vida – may you walk tall and be strong your whole life,” he said, pressing his hand into mine. “You must sit on my right.”

As I thanked him, I studied Héctor’s face. It was a sea of elephant skin, wrinkled and heavy, with a crag of a nose running down the centre like an outcrop of granite. His lips were plum-red, his cheeks scattered with gray stubble. Both eyes were frosted with cataracts. Héctor was blind.

Ariadne stepped up to be introduced. The old man drew the lids across his opaque eyes, and held his breath. His expression seemed to sour.

“This is an acquaintance from France,” I said.

“Mal de ojo,” whispered the ancient. “Please tell her to leave us. She has mal de ojo, the Evil Eye.”

Ariadne began to laugh.

“He can’t even see me,” she said. “Poor old man!”

Héctor’s grandson stepped in.

“Grandfather, she has come from so far.”

The old man stared at Ariadne, his blind gaze unflinching.

“Her eyes are dangerous,” he said.

Unable to take the humiliation, Ariadne grabbed her holdall, and set off towards the dock. I didn’t try to stop her. But as I watched her stomp back through the fields, I reflected on Héctor’s comment. The Evil Eye was brought to the New World by the Spanish, who had adopted the custom from the Arabs centuries before. In an ultra-superstitious society like Peru, it fits in very well. Across much of the Latin continent, I’ve seen people warding it away. No one remembers that like smallpox, influenza or measles, it’s not native to the continent. As in any North African village or Middle Eastern town, Peruvian children are given amulets to protect them. Everyone is on the lookout for misfortune, ill-health – the signs that mal de ojo is watching them.

Héctor told his grandson to put away the weaving.

“Now the sun has passed the highest point,” he said, “we must not work, but drink.”

A bottle of chicha was brought out by Héctor’s daughter, a woman with a soft, innocent face.

“Respected Señor,” I said, as Héctor downed his third glass of the cloudy liquid. “I have come to your island, drawn by my fascination for los tejidos antiguos.”

The old man put down his glass and sniffed the air.

“The ancient textiles... all handmade textiles, have strength,” he said.

Héctor leaned back, slapped my knee with his hand, and urged me to drink some chicha.

“This will make you strong,” he said. “Strong like the condor.”

I declined the offer.

“Now, we make the fabric for the wrong reasons,” he mumbled. “These ponchos which we weave are made to be sold.” Héctor paused to sip his glass. “To be sold to people like you,” he said. “But when I was a child we understood that this cloth was sacred. We used to sacrifice it to the spirits.”

“Did you burn it... like the Incas did?”

“Yes, yes! We would light a sacred fire,” said the old man, “and throw upon it our most valued work.”

The Spanish invaders documented well how the Inca himself would wear new robes each day. The previous day’s costume would be committed to the flames. I gave thought to the Incas and their ancestors, for whom cloth was a cornerstone of culture. The link between ancient flight and textiles was as unlikely a link as I could imagine. But then, in my travels, I have found that the true answer often lies behind the most improbable door.

Héctor tugged at my arm.

“We no longer make such sacrifices,” he said. “That is why we are so poor.”

“Estimado Señor,” I said, “could I buy a piece of cloth for us to sacrifice?”

The old man’s blind eyes seemed to light up for a moment.

“A sacrifice,” he said gently. “To rid us of mal de ojo.”

An hour later Héctor was weighing a fine, hand-woven chumpi, a traditional belt, in his hands. Made from llama hair, dyed claret-red, and about six inches in width, it was embroidered with vertical stripes. A central band of hexagonal motifs ran down the length of the belt. I had paid one of Héctor’s neighbors an exorbitant sum for the item, and was beginning to regret the decision to burn it.

“It’s a fine one,” remarked Héctor, kindling a fire with some dry leaves and a knob of butter. “The sacrifice will bring us good fortune.”

Once the flames were licking the sticks like serpents’ tongues, Héctor began to sing. It was a solemn song. His daughter opened the windows of the two-room shack, perhaps so that his words could waft into the home. The neighbor’s children watched from a distance as Héctor, still singing, laid the chumpi on the flames.

Harsh, asphyxiating smoke rose from the fire.

“Breathe it,” said Héctor, inhaling.

I took a deep breath, and coughed violently, until I tasted blood at the back of my throat. The colors of the chumpi were washed by the flames – golden yellows and aurora reds.

“The textiles from Taquile have special strength,” said Héctor. “They can make a man invisible.”

“What do you mean?”

“Breathe it... taste what is secret.”

Again I breathed in, filling my chest with the llama hair smoke.

“Once more... breathe it once more...”

I was soon reeling, light-headed, my mind floating.

Héctor poured a few drops of chicha on the flames. More smoke spiralled upward, choking us.

“Nuestros antepasados podían volar – our ancestors flew,” he said.

I turned sharply to look at Héctor.

“They flew?”

“They used the magic of the textiles to fly.”

“How!”

“They wove wings, covered in stork feathers... then they flew to the gods – they were messengers.”

As we sat in the cloud of llama hair smoke, the chumpi still burning ferociously, I tried to make sense of the old man’s words. I thought of the Volador ceremony: of men striving to be airborne, to be in the realm of their gods. I thought, too, of the man I’d met at the top of Huayna Picchu. He had also spoken of messengers. Then I thought of William Deiches with his blueprints for a flying carpet, and about the bloodied feather with its triangular notches.

The smoke seemed to be getting denser.

“Did your ancestors run out of their houses and simply flap their wings to fly? Can you tell me about the Birdmen, Señor?”

Héctor poured a little more chicha onto the fire, before wetting his lips with the bottle’s rim. He shook his head from side to side.

“No, no, they never flew here,” he said. “Isla Taquile is too sacred a place. It was here that mankind was born.”

“Then where did they fly?”

“They journeyed onto the mainland,” he replied.

“At Puno, did they fly at Puno?”

Again, Héctor shook his head.

“From the towers, they flew from the towers.”

“Which towers? Where?”

The old man stirred the flames with his cane.

“They flew from the towers at Sillustani,” he said.

SIX

Tower-Jumpers

Ariadne regarded me with eyes fired by fury on the journey back across Titicaca to Puno. She felt certain that Héctor and I had dreamed up a scheme to keep secret knowledge from her. Gathering the bulk of her hair in her wiry hands, she teaseled it through her long ebony nails. I ignored her, hoping that she would latch onto another unsuspecting traveler.

I trawled my hand through the water and thought about the meeting with Héctor. What had he meant when he said that the textiles from Taquile could make one invisible? Perhaps flight and invisibility were the same experience to the Inca. The boatman jerked me back to the present. He was docking at the jetty and expected payment.

“Señor Héctor is an old fool,” he said as I gave him the fare.

I was taken aback by his remark.

“How do you know that I met Héctor?”

The boatman tied the tether to the jetty in a bowline.

“I am from Isla Taquile,” he said, as if answering my question. “I remember when the Señor was not blind, when he could dance and drink all night.”

He handed me my change.

“His feet no longer dance,” he went on, “but Héctor likes his chicha. It makes his tongue wag like a dog’s tail.”

To step ashore at Puno once again, was to leave the mysteries of the great lake to another boat load of travelers. I wondered whether I would ever stand on its shores again. A stray nerve nudged me in the spine. Somehow I felt certain that I’d never return to Titicaca. I left the boatman with a common phrase, “Hasta la vista”, until we see each other again. As he passed my canvas bag up to me he winked.

“You will not come back,” he said.

Over a dinner of ceviche de trucha, raw trout marinated in lemon juice, I explained to Ariadne that henceforth I would be traveling alone. I did not say it was because she was driving me mad, just as she had done to Sven. Nor did I tell her that I was heading for Sillustani, or that I had already hired a llamateer.

Picking a bone from her mouth, the Frenchwoman said nothing. Perhaps she was thinking of her turbulent childhood, or of the invented pain which encircled her life. When she had finished eating, she removed something from her oversized handbag and placed it on the table. I recognized the tatty plastic wrapping.

“I wish you luck to find the Winged Ones,” she said tenderly. “I’m sure that you will.”

I thanked her. It was an awkward moment.

“You will need strength,” she said. “Make a broth with this and drink it at dawn.”

As Ariadne slid over the dried llama fetus, I felt a jab of pity in my ribs. What a tragedy, I thought, that such a proud person should believe in such nonsense.

*

Manuel arrived, as planned, before the first rays of almond light had broken the horizon injecting life into the Altiplano. His shadowy face was locked in a frown, even when he was laughing. He owned three llamas. They seemed uninterested in the twenty-mile walk north-west to Sillustani. Woken early by their master, they were ready to start grazing. Whipping the largest of the beasts with the back of his hand Manuel demonstrated their sturdiness.

“They’re strong as oxen,” he said, smirking.

“How long to the towers of Sillustani?”

The llamateer cleared his throat and spat at the dust.

“Four hours,” he said, “perhaps less.”

Taking the reigns of Julia, the smaller female, I walked at the rear.

I had left the dried llama fetus with Ricardo, as an extra amulet to bring good fortune to his home. He had put it on the mantelpiece, beside a figurine of Christ.

Most visitors to Sillustani take a taxi or tourist bus. I wanted to slow the pace, to deviate from the beaten track. I had much to think about along the way. Rather than arriving at any solid answers, my journey so far had been a string of irresolvable questions. Stumbling along with llamas would, I hoped, put me in the right frame of mind to notice a breakthrough when it came.

A fog of llama dung smoke hung over Puno. We were soon out of the town, climbing up the escarpment. Higher and higher, above the silent waters of Lake Titicaca, onto the Altiplano itself. Pancake flat and the color of Brazil nuts, it extended forever like East Africa’s Great Rift. The first blend of clouds was stirring, brewed afresh in the limitless sky. Llamas were grazing in small groups, their petulant faces searching for food. Thesiger would have been proud of me, I thought, for making the most of animal transport.

Manuel tugged at the male’s reins. Despite his pretence of machismo he was a kind-hearted man. He told me that his grandfather or great-grandfather, he wasn’t sure which, had worked for Hiram Bingham. He’d been a muleteer in the 1911 season when Machu Picchu was rediscovered.

“Señor Bingham was a good man,” explained Manuel, as we trudged along. “He gave his men good food... American food. And the mules were not beaten. But...” he said, pausing to pee, ‘señor Bingham claimed he found Machu Picchu.”

Manuel scratched his head with a broken fingernail. “I don’t understand it,” he said. “You see, the local people – they had never lost Machu Picchu.”

As we walked along, Julia dragging her feet beside me, I began to understand the fascination for the llama. Camels and men have a mutual loathing for one another, but llamas are different. I put the peculiar bond down to shared height. A llama, which usually stands as tall as a man, will swivel its head and peer at you on the level – psychopathically. I got the feeling that if she had arms, Julia might throw them around me one minute, but stab me in the back the next.

I bragged to Manuel that I had a sixteen-inch, nickel-coated Alaskan moose knife, brought along in case one of the team went lame and hunger set in. He was unimpressed, and used the opportunity to harangue me.

He said that llamas are man’s greatest friend. They keep the people of the Andes alive. Their coats are used for wool, for rugs and for ropes; their meat is eaten, their fat is used to make candles, and their dung is burned on stoves. Slipping me a sideways glance, the old llamateer added that some deranged people even dried their fetuses and made soup.

Eventually, I spied a lake stretching out to the north, its surface shining like watered steel. Known as Lago Umayo, it’s unconnected with Titicaca. On a high promontory in the western quarter were dotted a number of strange cylindrical towers, built from smooth-sided blocks of stone.

“Bienvenido, welcome to Sillustani,” said Manuel.

The chullpas, round-sided towers, are thought to have been constructed by the Aymara-speaking Colla tribe, between the 14th and 16th centuries. Shortly before the Conquistador invasion, the Collas were overthrown by the Incas. Their most celebrated families had been buried in communal tombs, in funereal towers. Some rise up as high as fifty feet, overlooking the pristine waters of Lake Umayo.

Leaving Manuel to tend the llamas, I made my way up to the tallest of the chullpas. The ground was rocky, the grass long and flaxen. The tower’s stone blocks were flush together like mosaics, its funerary contents ransacked by huaqueros, grave robbers, centuries before. It was here, from these great towers, that Héctor said the Birdmen had flown. With the right wind, and a wide canopy of textile as a wing, I could see no reason why a man might not have glided from the greatest chullpa, safely down to the margin of the lake. He might have sacrificed some cloth, breathed its smoke to make him bold, thrust his arms sideways, and jumped. As a messenger he would have been in the air, aloft, if only for a few seconds, to deliver a message to the gods. Perhaps death would await him on landing; maybe that was the point – a suicide flight.

Despite Héctor’s certainty, I have found no written sources to connect Sillustani to the Birdmen. To the experts, the chullpas were merely towers where an ancient people interred their dead. But then again, I pondered, rubbing a hand over the curious masonry, perhaps the Birdmen never existed at all.

History is abundant with tower-jumping episodes. Medieval Europe saw hundreds of respectable young men with home-made wings, or billowing robes, hurl themselves from towers, in their desperation to fly. No one is sure why, but tower-jumping was to medieval man as great a craze as bungee-jumping has been in recent years.

In his History of Britain, Milton records the fate of Oliver of Malmesbury who fixed wings to his hands and feet in about 1070 AD and leapt from a tower. He’s said to have flown for more than a furlong before crashing to the ground. He lived but was maimed. Another famous jumper was the Marquis of Bacqueville. He announced that he would fly from his riverside mansion in Paris’s rue des Saints-Pères, and land in the Tuileries Gardens. A great crowd gathered. The Marquis jumped with wings attached to his arms and legs. He didn’t make it as far as the gardens. But, fortunately for him, he landed on a washerwoman’s barge and only broke a leg.

Giovanni Battista Danti, a contemporary of Leonardo da Vinci, jumped from a tower too. He’s said to have glided over Lake Trasimeno in 1490. A few years later, in 1501, another Italian adventurer called John Damian was taken in as a physician to the royal household of Scottish King James IV. While at the castle he practised alchemy and made a celebrated flight. Bishop Lesley, in his History of Scotland (published in 1578), wrote: “He causet make ane pair of wings of fedderis... he flew of the castell wall of Striveling, but shortlie he fell to the ground and brak his thee bare.”

The early 16th century saw dozens of tower-jumping episodes. It was a time not long after the chullpas of Sillustani were built. For all we know, the Birdmen were jumping at Sillustani at the same time as their tower-jumping cousins in Europe were plunging to their deaths.

While the llamas grazed, I paced around the ruins. Manuel pulled a few coca leaves from a pouch and started to chew them. He was lying on a great slab of trachyte, gazing up at the turbulent mass of clouds.

“What do you think?” I asked.

“About what?”

“Do you think once, long ago, men jumped from these towers and flew?”

I had expected Manuel to laugh at the question. Instead, he put a coca leaf on his tongue and closed his eyes.

“They may have jumped, and they may have flown,” he said. “But why did they wish to fly?”

“As messengers from one world to the next?”

“Of course,” he replied. “They wanted to reach the real world, to leave the illusion.”

“This is an illusion?”

Manuel sucked at the quid of coca in his cheek. “Look around you,” he said, his eyes still closed. “None of it exists at all.”

“That’s a question of philosophy.”

“To reach the real world you must die first,” said the llamateer. “Jump from the chullpa and even with the best wings you’re likely to die,” I added.

“There are other ways to die, other ways to fly.”

“How?”

“In your head, in your thoughts,” said Manuel. “You mean by taking coca?”

“No, not coca.” Manuel let out a breathless chuckle. “Stronger stuff than coca.”

“What about by inhaling the smoke of llama wool?”

“No, mucho más fuerte, much stronger.”

“What could be stronger than llama-wool smoke?”

SEVEN

Festival of Blood

The Israeli couple sitting opposite me on the bus from Puno to Arequipa were locked in a passionate embrace. Their bodies were contorted around each other in a double helix, the sound of their mouths sucking, like Japanese blowfish. The Andean ladies with pigtails and multiple skirts did their best, like me, to avert their gaze. They slurped at cups of orange jelly, soaked up the blaring salsa music, and giggled spontaneously at bumps in the road. And there were many bumps, for the dirt road from Puno to Arequipa is one of the roughest on the continent.

Every twenty minutes the bus driver would slow his vehicle, sound the Klaxon, and grind to an uneasy halt. The entire contingent of old women with bundles on their backs, students and dancers, theologians and salesmen in threadbare suits, would troupe out. All were searching for the same thing – pots of orange jelly. Their demand for it was seemingly insatiable. The man sitting beside me asked whether I might keep an eye on his cardboard box, full of live guinea pigs. As he scrambled for the door, desperate for jelly, he twisted his nose towards the Israeli sweethearts. In the unwritten lore of the Andes, such people were not to be trusted.

Peruvian bus journeys are always eventful. Whereas in other countries a long ride in a disintegrating bus is a vile prospect, in Peru it’s something to relish. Like children ecstatic for a fairground ride, customers fight each other to be the first aboard. They clutch their tickets with anticipation, thrilled at the idea of a jolting, dust-choking, twelve-hour trip.

Part of the hysteria was due to the date. It was the 27th of July – the day before Peru’s day of independence. Everyone was hurrying back to their villages in time for the fiesta.

Digging a white plastic spoon into his sixth tub of phosphorescent jelly, the man thanked me for looking after his cuy so ably. The cunning Israeli guinea pig thieves, he hinted, had been thwarted.

He slapped his hand in mine.

“My name is Manolo,” he said. “We are brothers. Come with me to my village, come to celebrate!”

I explained that I was en route to Arequipa, where I had heard a man was building a glider of traditional Incan design. A throwaway remark, made by a backpacker in Cusco, was gnawing away at my mind. After Arequipa, I was heading up the coast to Nazca, to inspect the desert lines. I was searching for Birdmen, I said.

Manolo seemed displeased by my choice of destination.

“Come to my village,” he urged again. “Come and see Yawar... we have caught the condor!”

At first I didn’t understand what the man was going on about. I feared that the excitement of the bus ride, and so much jelly, had taken a heavy toll on his sanity. But then, as he told me more about the planned celebrations, I realized my good fortune. Yawar was something not to be missed at any price. No other festival in the Americas is as significant to the folklore of flight.

Thanking Manolo for his invitation, I accepted. When he leapt from the bus at the small town of Pati, with his box of cuy cradled in his arms, I too descended.

The village itself was reached after hours of hitching rides. Manolo helped me into the back of a lorry carrying melons. As we fishtailed our way north, up a narrow track, he told me about his guinea pigs.

“They’re the finest cuy in all Peru,” he said. “I bought them from a campesino, a farm worker, near Puno. We’ll snap their necks, marinate them overnight, and fry them on a hot griddle,” Manolo rubbed his palms together indicating great heat. “Cuy chactado,” he said. “It’s my family’s favorite.”

The melon truck dropped us on the outskirts of a small mining community. We must have made an incongruous couple: Manolo with his guinea pigs, and me staggering under so much luggage.

Festivities were well under way. The main street was criss-crossed with banners. An inexhaustible supply of old men lounged on their verandas swigging chicha, in honor of their ancestors. Their wives were snapping the fragile necks of cay, slicing potatoes and preparing estofado, a thick chicken stew. The early evening air was live with music: the sound of flutes, trumpets, drums and, of course, the sound of quenas.

Manolo took me to his house and introduced his family. His wife, four children, two aunts and grandmother shared the modest three-room shack. No one appeared surprised that a stranger had been invited at the last minute. The best chair was dusted down and placed in the shade for my comfort. Refreshments were brought out. Then Manolo quizzed his wife about the Yawar. When she had reported the details, he touched a hand to his heart and thanked God.

“Te lo dije, I told you!” he exclaimed. “A magnificent condor has been lured by the fresh horse meat. We haven’t caught one for three years, and so there was great anticipation.”

Manolo gulped his drink. Like everyone in the village, he could hardly contain his excitement.

Yawar Fiesta, “Festival of Blood”, has been practised for at least four hundred years in southern Peru. The festival is as popular now as ever, an indication that political correctness hasn’t yet reached the Andes. A celebration, held in small towns and villages on the Altiplano, it honors the condor, the king of all birds.

Each year the ritual is the same. First a team of hunters go high into the hills in search of a condor. They abstain from cigarettes and drink as the great birds have a keen sense of smell. When they have come to a spot frequented by condors, they slaughter a pony by strangling it. Offerings are sprinkled around its body. The hunters pray to God to send down a condor. Then they hide among the surrounding rocks, and wait. Sometimes, days pass before a condor lands to feast on the pony’s flesh. All the while the hunters chant prayers and fill their minds with pure thoughts.

Some years no condor descends, and the hunters return to their village with their egos bruised. In a good year, if the condor lands, it gorges itself on the fresh horse meat. With a full gizzard, the bird attempts to fly. But having eaten too much it’s unable to take off. Choosing their moment, the hunters strike. Throwing a poncho over the bird, they trap it, and tie its feet together. They would never harm it, for to do so would be an act of sacrilege. Overwhelmed with joy, the hunters embrace their quarry, and toast its health with chicha. They return homeward, with the bird wrapped tight in a blanket.

As the party returns to the village, trumpets resound, celebrating the capture of the condor. It’s taken away and plied with more food and chicha. By the day of independence it’s ready for the extraordinary festival.

Manolo drank all evening and by midnight he was very drank indeed. He had made sure the cuy were marinated in his secret sauce, and that his wife had pressed his best clothes for the next day. I suggested we go to sleep. Fighting to stand upright, he smacked his hands together.

“How can a man sleep,” he roared, “when there is still chicha to be drunk?”

The central square was packed with people even before the band arrived. No one wanted to miss out on the best seating or, worse still, to miss the main spectacle. They all knew that the Yawai Fiesta comes at most only once a year. I heard the crackle of maize roasting on low charcoal stalls, and saw hawkers with barrows of pastries, ripe oranges, and skewers of beef heart ready to be sold. On every wall children were in position, their short legs dangling down, gob-stoppers rattling in their mouths. The old women, dressed in their finery, were fanning themselves with their bowlers. Laughter rang through the plaza like the click of castanets.

Manolo wasn’t going to let the temperature or a hangover spoil his fun. It was a baking afternoon, in the high 80s, but he wanted everyone to see him in his best clothes. The flaps of his collar stuck out over a green mohair sweater, on top of which he wore a woolen peacoat. Beads of perspiration merged into droplets on his forehead, before cascading down his face. He greeted old friends, bragged about the cuy he’d brought from Puno, and drank toasts to the Festival of Blood.

From the distance came the piercing sound of a piccolo. Then the thunder of a bass drum, trumpets, and cymbals cracking like gunfire. The bandsmen in their tight woolen caps and matching ponchos swaggered towards the plaza. A hundred feet kicked the dust as they danced, hips hula-hooping and hands clapping, as they heralded the arrival of the show.

Following behind the musicians were a mass of revellers, coaxed into hysteria by a cocktail of adrenaline and drink. Among them, its immense ten-foot wings held outstretched, its beak bound with twine, was the condor. Black in color, with an ivory ruff and blush pink head, the bird was guest of honor. With the horde pressed into the far corner of the plaza, the serious business of Yawar could commence.

A young bull, unable to move in its tiny pen, was readied for la corrida de toros, the fight. A sackcloth saddle was fixed to its back as hands taunted it through the bars. When the saddle was tight, the condor was harnessed to the bull’s back. Facing forwards, its feet were sewn into the cloth.

Only then, as the band’s cacophony ranted around us, did the free-for-all begin. The gate to the pen was hauled aside and the bucking-bronco ran wild. On its back, writhing like a phantom from the limits of Hell, was the condor. As the bull lunged through the plaza, the bird’s tremendous wings heaved up and down, desperate for flight, its beak tearing into the beast’s back. Would-be matadors, their courage bolstered by drink, stumbled into the square, only to be stampeded one by one. In the frenzy of wings and hooves, bovine and bird blended into a single creature from Greek mythology. Neither seemed to cherish the performance, a fusion of two traditions. The bull symbolizes the power of the Conquistadors, and the condor the might of a proud native people.

When the fantasy was at an end, the animals were cut apart. A bowl of chicha was placed at the condor’s beak, and the bull was pushed back into its enclosure. A group of mauled matadors swapped tales of their bravery, and tight-fitting shoes danced once again in the plaza’s dust. Then, with the band romping triumphantly through the streets, the bird was dragged to the edge of the village. Twisting its neck back in horror as it glimpsed the crowd, the condor thrust its mighty wings and soared up into the steel-blue sky.

Another cramped long distance bus whirred west towards Arequipa. Up on the roof a herd of sheep were balancing alongside the bags, their feet trussed, their faces rapt with alarm. They bleated, but no one was listening. Below, in the cabin, a demonic figure with gritted teeth crooned over the controls. Like a schoolboy piloting a make-believe Zero fighter, he mimicked the clatter of gunfire. The bus swerved left, then right and left again, the driver spinning the wheel recklessly through his muscular hands.

In the belly of the bus a little girl had spewed orange jelly down the aisle. The man beside me, a clone of Manolo, slapped his knee. Was he angry at the pools of amber vomit? With the glint of a gold tooth, he laughed at my question. A child is el fruto de la inocencia, the fruit of innocence, he said.

As we jerked about, I found myself thinking about Yawar Fiesta. If the root of the festival was a love for the great bird, why expose it to such torture? The only parallel I could think of was lomante, the Ainu Bear Festival. The Ainu, the original people of Japan, loved bears beyond all other creatures. They considered them to be mothers of the Earth, venerating them just as the Andeans do the condor. In the early spring a male bear cub would be caught in the mountains. It was taken to the village, kept in a small cage, and fed on delicious morsels. If it was too young for solid food, an Ainu woman would suckle it. The little bear was given as much as he could eat, to fatten him up. When mid-winter arrived, and his pelt was thick, he was taken from the cage.

The villagers declared their love for the little bear, praising him as a god. They placed him beside their altar and worshipped him. Then, one at a time, they would shoot blunt arrows at him with their bows, wounding him. Death was agonising and slow to come. Once dead, the bear cub was the focus of a midnight ceremony. Its brain, tongue and eyeballs were hacked from the skull and adorned with flowers. And, as they celebrated the bear’s beauty, the Ainu feasted on its meat.

Back on the bus, the driving was getting worse. We veered to the left, round a hairpin. I joked to the man beside me that the driver must have been a kamikaze pilot in a former life. Another retch of jelly came and went. Then, as we strained to sit upright, the driver aimed the vehicle at an upcoming slope and banged in the clutch. Never before have I experienced such propulsion. On the roof the sheep must have been fumbling to escape. Inside, the rows of passengers blurred together. I snapped for air, my diaphragm distending, my cheeks pushed back by gravitational force.

A drop of three thousand feet sheered away to the right. We might have sailed over the edge, but the road and the bus swerved left in the nick of time. Gradually, the bus came to a halt and the driver stood up. Removing his Fedora, he passed it back, mumbling. The starched hat was handed from one to the next. As it made its way round the bus, even the poorest passengers tossed something in. I was unsure what the levy was for, but even so I threw in a few céntimos. It was given back to the driver. He climbed down from the cab. Facing the precipice, he crossed himself, kissed his knuckle, and hurled the contents of his Fedora over the cliff.

Unfamiliar with the tradition, I quizzed the man beside me.

“Es para los mártires, it’s for the martyrs,” he said.

The White City, as Arequipa is known, nestles at the foot of the snow-capped volcano, El Misti. The peak reminded me more than a little of Mount Fuji, and a year I spent starving on the streets of the Japanese capital: the bad old days, kept alive by a diet of ornamental cabbages, stolen from Ueno Park. But Peru’s second city couldn’t have been more different from Tokyo except, that is, for its fear of earthquakes. Its low buildings were constructed from sillar, a local pumice the color of bleached whale bones.

Arequipenas had the time to be sophisticated. They sat in cafés off Plaza de Armas, discussing politics, reading the papers, having their shoes shined. Gone was the scruffy, honest clothing of the Andes Gone, too, were the dark, furrowed foreheads, born of worry and overwork.

The manager of Hotel El Conquistador offered me a room for a third of the normal price. In many countries I would think twice about turning up at a deluxe hotel and offering a pittance for the best quarters. But in Peru, where wheeler-dealing dies hard, ruthless bargaining is expected. I asked the manager if he’d heard of a local man who was building a glider. He nodded earnestly.

“Sí, sí Señor,” he clamored. “Everyone knows Carlos. I will telephone him for you.”

Once my bags had been dragged to the room by the manager’s son, I inspected the bathroom for spiders. I never quite understood why, but Peruvian bathrooms were awash with them. In one hotel, a cleaner told me they came up from the sewers.

For an hour I waited for the telephone to ring. It did not. There was a delicate tap at the door. I opened it. In its frame was standing a lanky young man with pale skin, sullen eyes, and a mole on his cheek. He looked Russian. He said that his name was Fernando and that Señor Carlos had sent him to collect me. His master was, he confirmed, building a traditional glider. But, he went on in a gravelly voice, his real passion was bringing Juanita back.

“Who’s Juanita?”

Fernando smiled nervously at my lack of knowledge.

“Juanita, the ice woman,” he said.

Once aboard his dilapidated red Lada, Fernando insisted on telling me all he knew about Juanita and the campaign to save her. The story began in 1995 when the mummified body of a young Incan girl was discovered on Mount Ampato, not far from Arequipa. The girl, who was entombed in a block of ice, was thought to have been sacrificed to the mountain spirits, some five centuries before.

But no sooner had her mantle of ice been chipped away than Juanita, as she became known, became a political hot potato. Like a rock star hurled into the big league at a tender age, Juanita began her world tour. For three years she criss-crossed the United States, shuttled about in a giant deep freeze. At an engagement in Connecticut she was even presented to President Clinton. She was currently appearing at venues across Japan.

“Arequipenas have had no opportunity to enjoy their mummy,” said Fernando dolefully. “We don’t understand why she’s in Japan... we want her back!”

The scarlet Lada rumbled east from Arequipa, towards El Misti. The fields, terraced by the Incas centuries before, were thick with garlic. Crooked viejitas, old women, were busy with bringing in the crop, wide hats shielding them from the winter sun. Fernando explained how the soil was suited well to the cochineal cacti as well as garlic. The female cochineal beetles, he said, are brushed from the cacti and pulverized. It takes seventy thousand of them to make a pound of the red dye.

Ten minutes later we were pulling into the drive of a spacious wooden house, encircled by a fence of tall cacti. Before I could get out of the car, an elderly man came out to greet me. It was Carlos.

A pair of bifocals balanced on his nose, magnifying his teal-colored eyes. He must have been over seventy, but had a youthful energy. His face was refined, edged by unwrinkled cheeks and an angular jaw. A bald patch at his crown was expertly concealed by a wave of oyster-gray hair. Like Fernando, whom he appeared to treat as an adopted son, Carlos spoke good English.

He led me into the house. The panelled walls of the sitting-room were adorned with images of Juanita, the local girl turned ice maiden. They showed her in all her finery, wrapped in a funeral cloak, a mouthful of jumbled teeth leering from her noseless face. But Juanita was just one of so many distractions. The walls and bookshelves, tabletops and bureaux were cluttered with mementos. There were framed letters and leather-bound books, a Confederate flag on a stand, a pair of duelling pistols, and six Samurai swords on a rack. One entire wall was taken up with an 18th-century map of Paris, and on another, were a dozen etchings of West African warriors in towering Dogon masks.

Over the fireplace was hung a large section of scarlet textile. The size of a pillowcase, it depicted the now-familiar forms of pre-Incan Birdmen.

“It’s from the necropolis near Nazca,” said Carlos, noticing my interest.

I said that I had come to Peru in search of the Birdmen, but was doubting whether they existed at all.

“Mankind understood the principles of gliding centuries ago,” he replied. “But, incredibly, it took him so long to design a flying wing.”

“They say it began in the 19th century... Otto Lilienthal, the Wright brothers and all that.”

Carlos rubbed his hands together.

“Do you believe that?” he said. “Do you really believe that man was so slow to master something so simple?”

Fernando went out to wash his car.

“What do you know about kites?” Carlos asked me.

“That they’ve been used in China for three thousand years,” I said.

“Exactly,” said Carlos. “They show that man has understood aerial dynamics for centuries. A general in Han Dynasty China flew a flock of musical kites over an enemy encampment the night before a great battle,” he said. “Attached to each kite was a whistle. Thinking the sounds were the voices of angels warning them to run for their lives, the enemy fled.”

“But a kite is just a kite,” I said. “It’s far too flimsy to carry a man.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” Carlos declared. “What about Alexander Graham Bell’s manned kite, Cygnet?”

I hunched my shoulders.

“It was forty feet long,” he said. “Piloted by an army soldier, it flew for seven minutes... that was in 1907.”

Carlos tugged off his bifocals and dabbed his eyes with the corner of his shirt.

“Since my wife died,” he said, leading me to a shed behind the house, “I’ve been tinkering.”

The workshop was in a dreadful state. Wood-shavings, newspapers and tools were scattered about. Carlos flicked on the light. Taking up most of the floor was a wooden framework. I looked it over carefully, making out the single broad wing, and the substructure.

It reminded me of the boy at my boarding school who built an airplane in the woodwork shop. He used to taxi around the grounds in it in his spare time. Everyone was so used to him trundling about the perimeter of the playing fields that they hardly took any notice.

One Saturday afternoon, during a rugby match with another school, a freak gust of wind thrust the fragile craft skyward. The first fifteen watched as it ascended, higher and higher. At five hundred feet it levelled off. Then it nose-dived to Earth. The boy was rushed to hospital, and survived, but his plane disintegrated on impact.

“There’s another six months to go,” said Carlos, “but you get the general idea.”

“A hang-glider?”

“Exactly, or if you like, it’s a kite without strings. I’ve based the project on the Colditz principle.”

“What’s that?”

Carlos ran his hand over the balsa frame.

“You probably know of the glider built at Colditz during the War.”

I said that I did.

“Then you must know that its designers used the simplest materials – cloth and wood, nothing fancy.” Carlos led me back to the house. “I’m not saying this is what the Incas glided with,” he mused. “But I am saying they were advanced enough to have worked it out.”

Like the boy at my school who’d built a plane, Carlos was charged with great enthusiasm for the project. But he had not yet been injured. He was sure that the Incas had a basic knowledge of gliding, citing the existence of the Nazca Lines as certain proof.

“Go to Nazca and walk on the pampa,” he said. “As you walk, look at the ground, and look at the air. Understand the feebleness of man, and sense the spirit which keeps the birds above you aloft.”

EIGHT

Susto

Nazca is a one-horse town set on the edge of the Pan-American Highway. It is encircled by the Atacama, one of the Earth’s driest deserts. The ground is pancake flat, the dust so fine that it burns your throat and blinds your eyes. You might expect tumbleweed to blow down the main street, or a gunfight at the local bar, because this is Peru’s Wild West.

The men are rough and tough. They talk big, drink hard, and walk as if they’re wearing spurs – every man in Nazca is a Marlboro Man. As they swagger about, leaning back into their boots, you get the feeling that the locals realize their luck. And it is luck, the kind which wins lotteries. Every man, woman and child in town is touched by it – a miraculous stroke of fortune.

Imagine that for centuries your ancestors cursed God for a land so parched that crops wouldn’t grow. One generation after the next choked on the dust, and yearned to escape. They lived in a place where travelers never stopped; where there were no proper buildings or money for schools. But then, quite by chance, a discovery was made, which flipped fortune’s coin from bad luck to bonanza. Busloads of tourists started to arrive day and night. They wanted hotels and bars, restaurants, internet cafés and guides. Best of all, they were willing to pay.

The Nazca Lines are one of the world’s great unexplained phenomena. The only certainty is that they’re out there: a series of immense figures and geometric shapes etched into the desert’s delicate face. They are so immense that they can only be seen from the air. Some are outlandish geometric shapes, deciphered as animals – among them a monkey, a whale, a dog, and a spider. But the most sensational figures at Nazca are the birds. More detailed and numerous than the others, they include an albatross, a parrot, a condor and a hummingbird.

The pilot who first noticed them as he flew over Nazca in the “30s, had no idea what he’d discovered. Within years, a barrage of crackpot scientists, mathematicians and free-thinking hippies arrived. For every visitor, there was a new theory. Virtually everything you hear about Nazca is speculation.

The first theorists were remarkably controlled. They said it must have taken a thousand years for the Lines to be etched into the dust; that the procedure had begun four centuries before the birth of Christ. But as time passed, imaginations ran wild. The Lines, they now said, were ancient running tracks, a map of the heavens, a calendar of the seasons, a code to fertility rites, irrigation channels, or patterns for weaving yarn. Those in the theory business know full well that the wackier their idea, the more publicity they’ll get. Perhaps that’s what inspired the young German, Erich von Daniken, who appeared on the scene in 1968. His idea was that the Nazca Lines were high-tech landing strips, left by extra-terrestrials.

*

An eager lady with sallow cheeks and a walnut-whip of gray hair, greeted me to Hotel Hummingbird, located just off Calle Lima. She pranced up and down the reception area, a stout body on nimble feet. Her name was Florence. What good luck it was, she said, that I’d not been trapped by one of the town’s many touts.

“They eat you alive, like piranhas!” she exclaimed, gnashing her dentures.

Before I could protest, Florence had signed me up for the Hummingbird Package. Squaring a stack of vouchers in her hands, she leant over the counter and ran a shiny fingernail down my shirt-front.

“The Hummingbird is for lovers,” she said.

“But I’m alone,” I replied, realising the impropriety of the remark.

Florence coughed with enthusiasm, and pressed her teeth back into position with her thumb.

“Maybe I’ll see you later,” she said, handing me the key.

“What are all these vouchers for?”

Florence flicked through them like a croupier shuffling cards.

“For the Hummingbird suite, a meal in Hummingbird restaurant, a cocktail in the Hummingbird bar, use of Hummingbird’s internet, the Hummingbird city tour, the Hummingbird laundry and discotheque and swimming pool, access to the Hummingbird museum and tourist kiosk, the Hummingbird viewpoint, the Hummingbird bus service, and,” Florence waved the last coupon, “for the flight over the Nazca Lines on Hummingbird Airlines.”

I handed over an obscene amount of foreign currency to cover the deluxe Hummingbird Package. Despite my bitterness, I couldn’t fault the hotel owner’s talent for business. He was cleaning up nicely. It was hard to imagine what he’d think of next. Florence twisted a nail round a long gray curl at the edge of her face.

“Next week we open Hummingbird karaoke,” she said.

The Hummingbird bus dropped me at a small airport, not far from the town centre. Wherever I looked, I saw smooth young men. They all had the same denim jackets, Italian sunglasses and wetted-down hair. Some were selling souvenirs and baseball caps; others were too cool to work.

As he took my voucher for the Hummingbird flight, a, teenage Marlboro Man clicked his fingers at my chest and pointed to the right-hand seat of a single-prop Cessna 172. I scrambled up into the cockpit. The pilot handed me a photocopied map of the Lines. In a single movement, he slipped on a pair of Ray Bans, slicked back his hair, and pushed in the throttle.

At seventeen, I’d somehow managed to talk my parents into sending me to flight school. A pilot’s training, I had assured them, would surely come in useful in years to come. An ultra-relaxed Norwegian had taught me to fly small, high-wing Cessnas. Scanning the controls brought back distinct memories. I’d been an unaccomplished pilot, and had spent most of the time out of control over Florida’s Panhandle.

Soon we were lifting steeply into the sky, flying north-west towards the pampa. The late morning air was choppy, churning with thermals. Down below, the brilliant sunlight played on the sands, accentuating every ditch, every furrow. The black basalt crust of stones, which so reminded me of Iraq’s western desert, stretched from one horizon to the other. Ancient dried riverbeds were quite clear, following the undulations, giving chaos to what was otherwise uniform.

The first image we saw was a whale. The pilot banked into a steep turn. Then on the left were trapezoids, and on the right the “astronaut”. Another turn, and a giant pair of human hands, a dog, and a tree. Every few seconds the pilot would wrench back the column and roll the small plane into another turn. I shouted against the thunderous noise of the engine, asking him to go easy. Banking hard to the right, he pointed out of the window. On the flattened desert floor, its beak pointing south, was the image of a condor. And, a moment later, el colibrí, the hummingbird.

Engraved into the basalt surface, the hummingbird was poised at the edge of a low plateau. Its wings, tail and elongated beak were unmistakable. As I gazed down at the figure, the aircraft surging from side to side, my mind ran free. How and why could such an exquisite symbol have ever been drawn?

Not long after Von Daniken had been to Nazca, an American called Jim Woodman arrived. The year was 1973. Having studied ritual smoke balloons, which are still flown in Guatemala, Woodman began to put together his own theory. The Quechua language, he noted, has a word for a “balloon-maker”. He had discovered fragments of local pottery, too, which showed the crude image of what he said was a balloon.

Woodman saw textiles taken from graves at the village of Cahuachi, not far from Nazca. The weave was impressive (185 x 95 threads per square inch): surprisingly tight considering they were 1500 years old. Woodman felt certain the ancient man had flown at Nazca. A lighter-than-air method was the only way, he said, that would explain the Lines. He asserted that by flying high above the pampa, the designers could have mapped out the shapes to scale before etching them.

Like so many before him, Woodman set out to prove his theory.

He put together a team of engineers and aviation specialists. They designed and built Condor I, an enormous tetrahedron balloon. The gondola was made from totora reeds from Lake Titicaca; the woven envelope had a capacity of 80,000 cubic feet. But instead of air, it was filled with smoke. Dotted on the pampa, Woodman’s team had found the remnants of what they thought were burning pits. These, they said, were used to fill the ancient balloons with smoke. (I saw no such pits, but did find large amounts of charcoal on the Nazca plains.)

On a clear spring day in 1975, Condor I confounded its critics and lifted up into the desert sky. It flew for several minutes, reaching a thousand feet above the Nazca Lines.

For my money, Jim Woodman is more from the Thor Heyerdahl school of science, than from the Von Daniken stable of pseudo-science. He with his balloon and Carlos with his hang-glider were convinced that only a flying man, a Birdman, could have drawn the Nazca Lines. But it seemed as if some fragment of understanding was missing. Surely the theorists were off track: forcing pegs into holes they didn’t fit.

As we braced ourselves for landing, I was still thinking about el colibrí, the hummingbird. I didn’t doubt that the technology existed a thousand years ago to have drawn it, but my thinking had begun to change. None of the theories had taken into account why ancient man would have wanted such gigantic symbols around him.

The more I pondered it, the more obvious it seemed that the Lines weren’t designed to be seen by the eyes of men at all. They must have been intended for the gods, and the gods alone. Why else would they have been so vast? Maybe that was the whole point. They were drawn so large as to be invisible to mortals. It reminded me of a famous Guy de Maupassant anecdote. The author ate lunch every day in the restaurant halfway up the Eiffel Tower, although he was well-known for despising it. When asked why he did so, he replied that it was the only place in Paris where he could not see the damned Tour d’Eiffel.

Perhaps the sheer enormity of the Nazca figures obliterated them from sight in the same way. As for a method of drawing accurately an image which is more than three hundred feet in width, I didn’t see how being above the pampa would help the designers in the least. Surely a basic form of Sketch-a-graph, or a string and a stick, would be the only tool necessary to map out the cryptic Lines.

The best thing about Nazca was the hardware shops. As dusk fell over the town I stumbled on a row of them, tucked away near the bus station. Not since East Africa had I seen such a varied stock of Chinese-made goods: hand-grinders for mincing beef, liquorice and loo seats,-sticks of school chalk, and coal tar soap, nail clippers, fountain pens, and cheap rubber bands. The owner of one such shop was called Pepe. He was a great bear of a man with a pot-belly, a grease-stained shirt, and a week’s worth of stubble on his cheeks. His face was dominated by a pair of drooping eyes. When I entered, he was squinting at a newspaper in the faint light of a low-watt bulb. As soon as he saw me he jumped up, dusted off a stool and beckoned me to sit.

“Usted es muy bienvenido, you are very welcome, Señor,” he said, clapping his hands together. “It is wonderful to have you here!”

I thanked him for his reception.

“iQué alegría!” he called, “your arrival calls for celebration!”

Pepe bent down behind the counter and pulled out a scruffy shoebox. He withdrew the lid, the tip of his tongue clamped between his lips. I leaned forward to see what was in the box. It was a light-bulb. The shopkeeper unscrewed the low-watt bulb and replaced it with the one from the box. The room was filled with an abundance of creamy yellow light.

“I keep it for special occasions,” lisped Pepe.

In the bright light I scanned the shelves.

“This is nothing but garbage,” he huffed. “It’s a terrible shop. I forbid you to buy anything. How could such a fine man be expected to buy such garbage?”

He handed me a mug of tea.

“Hungry, are you?”

I said that I was not.

“Go on,” Pepe replied. “I always have a snack around this time.”

He called loudly for his son.

The child’s feet could be heard behind the counter. He appeared a moment later with a plate of crackers.

I took one of the biscuits. Pepe pointed to a small glass bottle filled with what looked like salt.

“Gone on, have some,” he said. “It’s magic.”

The boy sprinkled a few grains of the mysterious powder onto my biscuit. I took a bite. It tasted savory.

“We put it on everything,” said the shopkeeper grandly.

“What is it?”

“Ajinomoto – it’s monosodium glutimate.”

With three of the crackers inside me, I was converted. It was great stuff. You just had to think of roast beef, meat loaf or a nice rack of lamb, and it was as if you were tasting it. Despite Pepe’s protestations I bought two bottles of the food enhancer, certain that they’d come in useful somewhere down the line.

The shopkeeper asked me what I thought of Nazca. I said how lucky the people were to have the Lines.

“You’re right,” he replied. “Everyone for miles around is jealous.”

“You couldn’t wish for a better tourist trap,” I said.

The shopkeeper scratched his stubble again.

“Are you mad?” he said. “There’s much better stuff than the Lines.”

“What could be more popular with tourists than the Nazca Lines?”

“Las momias, mummies,” said Pepe. “Got thousands of them. We’ve hardly even started with them yet.”

One of the highlights of the Hummingbird Package was a quick stop at the infamous Cementerio de Chauchilla, not far from Nazca. A guide whistled for the driver to stop. He beckoned us to follow him to the graves. This pre-Incan burial ground, marooned in the middle of the desert, is marked by a tattered tin sign. It’s a bleak attempt at tourism. Along with a dozen Germans – retired workers from a ball bearing factory in Dusseldorf – I tramped from grave to grave. Forty or fifty funeral pits had been excavated, looted long ago by huaqueros, grave-robbers. All valuables had been expertly stripped away: jewelry and trinkets, pottery, seashells and funerary shawls. The remains were gruesome by any standards.

Propped up in each pit were a couple of mummified figures, huddled against a wall, knees pushed up against their chins, ragged clothing bundled around them, half-peeled away. Their skin had been seared off by the sun, hanging in patches off the bleached bones. Lower jaws were drooping, eye sockets empty, teeth knocked out, hair matted, and facial features awry, like cadavers from a low-budget horror film.

The German cameras clicked, as the guide pointed out the details.

“Look at that one,” he said. “See how its skull is deformed.”

We peered down into the grave. He was right. The head was unusually long, like comic book sketches of a ‘small gray” alien. Cranial deformations were once popular with the ancient Nazca and Paracas civilizations. They’re so strange that you find a smile creeping over your lips, as if someone’s having you on. The brow is high, leading back to an elongated swathe of skull. Some scholars say the crania were deformed in childhood, in the name of beauty. Others contend that the technique relieved migraines, cured insanity, or may even have been used as a punishment. A pair of boards would be bound tightly to either side of the head, pressing it out of shape.

Working in the 1920s, the celebrated Peruvian archaeologist Julio C. Tello made a special study of the deformed skulls. His work led to a 1929 law, making grave-robbing a national crime. Credited with the first major archaeological finds near Nazca, he claimed to have found babies which still had the deforming boards bound to their heads.

When the Hummingbird bus had screeched back into town, I dropped in to Pepe’s shop before dinner. The room was dim, lit again by the low-watt bulb. The shopkeeper was hunched over the counter, struggling with a ledger. He seemed depressed.

“Is everything all right?”

Pepe looked up. His bloodhound eyes drooping behind a pair of plastic frames.

“I can’t sleep,” he said. “And my head aches as if a great stone’s pressing down. Worst of all is that the numbers never add up.”

The shopkeeper pointed to the page of sums.

“For twenty years,” he went on, “Nazca has boomed. Anything which opens here succeeds. The town’s got more rich people than I can count. Look at that Señor Rodriguez with his dammed Hummingbird Tours. He must be in league with the Devil.”

I vouched for the Hummingbird experience.

“Why am I the only man in Nazca whose business does so badly?” moaned Pepe.

I peered once again at the shelves of his shop. They were crammed with useful stuff, and the prices were reasonable.

“I’ll tell you why things are so bad,” he winced.

“Why?”

The old shopkeeper ran a Bic Biro across the furrows of his brow.

“Susto,” he said.

I’d come across susto in Latin America before. Part curse and part superstition, it’s a regional obsession, which translates literally as “fright”. Thousands put their misfortune down to it. Susto has all the hallmarks of an eastern superstition. I often used to wonder if, like the Evil Eye, it had been brought from North Africa via medieval Spain.

An unexpected bang, a loud noise, or a jerk to the head are all that’s needed. Some say it’s the reason why Peruvian babies are swaddled tightly for so long. The imagined effect of susto is thought to prize the spirit and the body apart.

“How did the susto find you?” I queried.

The shopkeeper glanced down at the floor.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I spend all my time sitting here trying to remember; and the more I think about it, the more the susto bites.”

Most conversations with Pepe involved talk of susto, and invariably ended in the same subject – mummies. He saw the preserved bodies as the real future of Nazca. The Lines, he said, were a mere distraction. Mummies were different. They held answers to all the questions. If only he could rid himself of the susto, he was sure that the mummies would bring him fame and fortune.

“Out there,” he said, “the pampa is littered with graves. Most of them are undisturbed. Why bother with the desert symbols when you’ve got the actual people who drew the Nazca Lines? I don’t know why those stupid scientists keep coming up with new theories, when they could study the mummies.”

Pepe had a point. He leant back in his chair, his mind momentarily drawn away from susto. I told him about my Hummingbird trip to the burial ground at Chauchilla. The Germans and I, I said, had been impressed. Propelling his fist down on the counter like a hammer, he scoffed.

“That’s nothing! Chauchilla’s a child’s playground. Wait till you see Majuelo!”

“Where’s that?”

“Across the pampa, far from Nazca.”

“Can I go there?”

The old shopkeeper hugged his arms around his chest.

“Es un lugar peligioso, it’s a dangerous place,” he said firmly. “Muchos sustos, many frights.”

NINE

The Trophy Head

Were it not for the occasional swoop of a Cessna in the sky above, Nazca’s desert would have been silent. Sightseeing tours, a recent disturbance in a sea of tranquility, come and go as the Nazca mystery is touted to another coachload of foreign tourists. I found it ironic that most Nazcans had never seen the Lines from the air, few could have afforded the flight. But most had no interest anyway in what they considered merely to be tourist bait. In Nazca, everyone was praying for the same thing: that the tourists would keep coming, and that it didn’t rain. One man told me that if it rained for more than two hours the Lines would be washed away.

I set off early in the morning to cross the pampa. At the wheel of the tired old hatchback was Pepe’s eldest son, José Luis. A Marlboro Man in the making, he had the greased back mop of hair, the fake Ray Bans, and had already mastered the wink. José Luis agreed to take me to the vast burial ground at Majuelo if I’d tell him all I knew about English girls. He had heard, he said, that they favoured white handbags, which they danced around at the discotheque.

We veered left, off the Pan-American Highway, down the only route which crosses the Nazca Lines. The even sound of rubber on tarmac was replaced by a grating noise, as the tires cut into the basalt. The car filled with dust. On either side of the track the level planes stretched out like contours of the moon.

As the hatchback jarred along, I thought about Pepe’s obsession with mummies. Although morbid, it wasn’t an unknown preoccupation. The shopkeeper had been right – you can learn a great deal from preserved bodies. But there’s more to mummies than meets the eye. Pepe was probably unaware of the West’s own fixation with mummies. We have all but forgotten their historical role in European medicine.

For centuries nothing was regarded as more powerful a physic than powdered mummy. It was credited with curing all kinds of ailments, including rashes and migraine, palpitations, epilepsy and plague. Throughout the Middle Ages, European aristocrats would tuck a sachet of mummy powder into their sleeve. Any sign of malady, they’d guzzle the contents down. Even as recently as 1908, the German drugs company E. Merck were advertising “Genuine Egyptian Mummy, as long as supplies last, 17 Marks per kilogram”.

Forty minutes after turning off the desert highway, we descended onto what looked like a parched riverbed. The banks were caked in dry compressed mud, as if the river had raged there only days before. But water couldn’t have run in that channel for centuries. We ploughed ahead, José Luis driving at high speed like a getaway driver. He told me of his big plans – his dream was to open a hotel and bar. He’d buy a fleet of planes, he said, and give Señor Rodriguez some competition. Then the English girls with white handbags would be all over him.

He guided the hatchback down an embankment and through a copse of warango trees. Beyond them was a farmstead. We left the car at a distance, and walked towards the low adobe buildings. A dog voiced our arrival from the shade. The campesino and his wife didn’t need the dog’s alarm. They had spotted our trail of dust long before. Emerging gingerly from behind a fence made from the branches of a thorn tree, they came to greet their visitors.

The harsh desert existence had taken a dreadful toll. The man’s face was chapped like rawhide, its skin blistered from a life spent working in the open. The woman, too, was wizened long before her time. I learnt later that she was forty-eight. She looked more like eighty. A decade of pregnancy had stolen her youth. She had given birth to twelve children, five of whom were dead.

José Luis called out his name.

“iAmigo!” cried the farmer. “My friend! ¿Cómo está su padre? How’s your father?”

Pepe was well, he said, despite his bad luck.

“¿Susto?” asked the farmer.

José Luis nodded.

We were ushered inside, out of the sun.

The farmer, Juan, pulled a plastic sheet away from the best chair. Wiping away a residue of dust, he motioned me to sit. The heat made conversation almost too much work. I admired a poster of Princess Diana, pinned up on the cracked mud wall.

“Ah, she was beautiful,” said the farmer softly.

“God takes what He loves most,” whispered his wife.

In the background I made out the atmospheric buzz of a radio. The woman, known to all as Tía, 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 honor 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 honor to the ancestors.

“I’ll get you one,” he beamed.

“Where from?”

Juan’s face erupted in laughter.

“Sígame, 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 fiber. 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.”

Tía 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 color 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.

Tía 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.

“¿Está 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 meager 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 huaqueros. 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?”

Pepe’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 pajama, 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, 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.”

TEN

Vampires

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 tires and a windshield 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. Traveling 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 civilization 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 prize open the mummies’ mouths in their quest for gold. They tear fingers off hands to get at jewelry. Laden with treasure they hurry away into the night.

Thousands of rare textiles have been unearthed in Peru, spanning as far back as 3000 BC. These days they are regarded as more precious than gold, just as they were to the people who made them. No other region on Earth can boast a longer textile history. The work must have called for a communal effort, bringing llama wool from the mountains, dyeing it, designing patterns, spinning, weaving and embroidering. Centuries before the first lump of Latin American clay was worked into a pot, Paracas was a centre for textile production.

With allegorical flight in mind, I studied the textiles, searching for clues. Woven into the fabric were a wild assortment of images, including hundreds of Birdmen. The main figures were comprized of sub-images. In the wings of the Birdmen were rows of trophy heads, serpents and daggers. They had streamers spewing from their mouths and ornamental crowns. All were awash with color, as if inspired by a psychedelic dream.

The flight of these Birdmen wasn’t forced and cumbersome like real flight. It was graceful and easy, like an angel wafting through a dream. A few of the mantles bore rows of “falling” shamans, plunging Earthward with glazed expressions. Perhaps these were clues that the

Birdmen flew, at least within the limits of their minds.

*

Not far from Paracas is the town of Pisco. It is inextricably linked with vampires. Cast an eye across its Plaza de Armas, and you will see members of the vampire cult. They come to the town in their hundreds. Dressed in black coats and matching boots, with lines of kohl circling their eyes, punky hair pushed up in quiffs, they sit on the benches, waiting for the night.

I wasn’t really interested in vampires, but a chewing-gum seller said I’d regret it if I didn’t look into the town’s fiendish tradition. So I hailed an Indian-made auto-rickshaw and told the driver to head for the cemetery on Calle San Francisco.

Standing outside the graveyard was a man selling enormous blooms of chrysanthemums. He asked if I wanted to buy flowers; I replied that I wasn’t sure who I’d come to see.

A few steps further and a guide offered his services.

“Come to see Sarah Ellen?” he asked.

“Um, yes, I think so.”

“She’s over here.”

As he led the way down to the other end of the graveyard, he told me the legend.

“She was a young English girl,” he said. “She died and was buried here in 1913. No one knows much about her... but a few years ago your vampire friends started arriving.”

“But I’m not a vampire.”

The guide looked me in the eye.

“Are you sure?”

I nodded earnestly.

He pointed to a grave set into a wall.

“Perhaps you are telling the truth,” he said. “It’s women who come mostly, from all over the world. From France and Germany, Australia and Japan. They bribe the police, so that they can spend the night here.”

“Do they lay flowers?” I asked.

“Hah!” came the reply. “No, they don’t leave flowers, but they leave other things.”

“What?”

“Bits of meat, strange amulets and dead cats with their heads cut off. Some of them have tried to open the grave,” he said. “I think they want to take un recuerdo, a souvenir.”

“A souvenir?”

The guardian wiped a hand over the plaque.

“A finger, a hand, something like that, something to take away and show to their friends.”

The Ormeno bus from Pisco to the Peruvian capital was so plush that the backpacker sitting beside me took off his shoes and socks and nuzzled his toes into the thick-pile carpet. We glided up the coast road, the triple-glazed windows tinting the light, and muting the sound of the wheels. I stared out at the desert, which stretched to the east like a silvery-gray bedspread of sand. In the few places where it had been irrigated, maize and bananas thrived. Dousing the dust with a little water is like touching it with a magic wand.

The backpacker fished out a crumpled guide to Peru and thumbed through it. From the state of the book, I could see he’d been on the road for months. He seemed on edge, eager to share his enthusiasm for this rare luxury. I knew he was English even before he opened his mouth, because an Englishman abroad is always reluctant to be the first to break the ice. He wriggled his toes and thumbed harder through the book.

“D’you see the deformed skulls in Paracas?” he blurted, “the ones which look like alien heads?”

I replied that I had.

“I’ve just bought one,” he said, pointing to a dented steel box on the luggage rack.

“What are you going to do with a deformed skull?”

“It’s for my museum.”

For the rest of the journey, the shoeless backpacker informed me of his lifelong passion – a museum of curiosities. The collection, built up over twenty years, already boasted a number of important objects: a pickled tumour from a dead woman’s groin, an Eskimo’s seal-intestine coat, death masks from China, and a selection of trepanned skulls. He even had an “exotic mermaid” – half-baboon, half-fish – faked in Victorian England. The man claimed to have turned his Merseyside house into a shrine, devoted to freakery. Modern museums, he said, were fearful places, packed with dreary objects. Building on the foundations of the past, his collection was full of spirit.

His aim was to match the museum of Peter the Great. The Russian Czar’s storehouse had been packed floor to ceiling with oddities. Many of the exhibits were still breathing. There were live children with two heads, sheep with five feet, and a variety of deformed babies. The caretaker was a dwarf with two fingers on each hand and a pair of toes on each foot. When the dwarf died, he was stuffed and plonked on the shelves with the other exhibits.

The coach trundled through las barriadas, Lima’s shanty-towns. Veiled behind high municipal walls, they hid a world of burden, very different from the luxurious bubble that was the Ormeno bus. The interlocking maze of wooden shacks stand testimony to those who’ve come in search of a better life. Lured by the prospect of magnificent wealth, theirs is a life of unimaginable hardship. They survive on less than nothing. Once they have tasted the drug of the metropolis they can never return home.

Lima’s traffic stop-starts its way down the choked highways, jolting forward a few inches at a time. No one questions the lack of speed, they’re used to it. Unwinding their windows, they make the most of the ride. Weaving between the cars are thousands of vendedores ambulantes, street-sellers. Whatever you want to buy, they have it stuffed into their sacks. Bubble gum and baseball caps, playing cards and fluffy dice, posters of Marilyn Monroe and maps of France, light-bulbs and eyelash curlers, ball-point pens and sellotape. In a city where wages are so spectacularly low, even respectable professionals can be found on the streets supplementing their income after work.

I don’t know what manner of lunacy came over me, but I checked in to Lima’s Hotel Gran Bolivar. The old lady of Lima society, built in 1924, the Bolivar was once the place to be seen. It’s a colossus of a building, haughty and proud, with birch-white walls and a formidable entrance on Plaza San Martin. An hour of bargaining secured a grand suite on the third floor, at the knock-down price of $25. The manager appeared anxious for custom, as the place was virtually empty.

The bellboy led the way down a palatial corridor. He stopped at a tremendous doorway, flanked by fluted columns. As he slipped the solid brass key into the lock, my conscience beckoned me. How could I stay in such luxury after seeing shanty-towns minutes before? I was racked with guilt, and was about to deliberate on my fortune. But the tour of the suite had begun.

The hardwood doors were dark with lacquer, their knobs molded with the hotel’s monogram. A study led from the dining-room which overlooked the Plaza. The curtains, which were double-lined, reeked of a time when curtains were a detail of luxury rather than merely an accessory to keep out the light. Like the others, the drawing-room was tiled in herringbone parquet. The veneer of its cocktail bar was chipped, where generations of shakers had been forced down a little too hard. The bellboy pointed out anterooms and cubby-holes, a writing desk with secret drawers, and a vast walk-in closet with an automatic light. Then he rocked on his heels waiting for a tip.

When he had gone, I telephoned an old family friend, living in the exclusive Miraflores district of Lima. She burst into tears when I told her where I was staying.

“Leave at once!” she said. “It’s so dangerous there. Everyone knows the Bolivar’s haunted by the woman with the butcher’s cleaver.”

“But my door is locked.”

“She can enter any room by passing through the walls,” said my friend. “She’ll hack off your head and drink your blood.”

I told her about the monogrammed door handles, the parquet floors, the lagoon-like bath, and the lack of other guests.

“Why do you think the place is empty?” she said. “Everyone knows of la señora con el cuchillo de carnicero, the woman with the meat cleaver.”

“But I’ve paid in advance.”

“I don’t care what you’ve paid,” she said coldly. “But spend a night in that hotel and be dead before morning.”

ELEVEN

Conspiracy

The round bar at Hotel Gran Bolivar was once known as the ‘snake Pit”, because every socialite tongue could be found there, hissing gossip. These days it’s hardly patronized at all. Bartenders are positioned at strategic points around the salon, waiting for the bustle of clientele which never comes. Their bow-ties are tight, their hair groomed back with brilliantine, and their eyes alert. Each evening, the small dance floor at the centre of the room is swept and polished with beeswax. But years have passed since feet last swanned over its parquet.

Despite my friend’s fretting, I survived the night at Gran Bolivar. I’d seen no ghosts, but had woken with an excruciating headache. It felt as if I’d been clubbed with a baseball bat, but the woman with the cleaver had left me alone.

After breakfast, I set out into the river of honking traffic in search of Professor Cabieses. The street corners were jam-packed with moneychangers, clutching rolls of dollar bills. They vied for space with a swarm of hawkers, selling potted plastic flowers and hurricane lamps, frying pans, Zippos and chicks dyed pink. One man ran into the road with his stock of squirming puppies. Anywhere else motorists might be uninterested in snapping up a dog. But in Lima, where there’s a deep mistrust of retail stores, the street is the only place to shop.

The Peruvian capital gets a bad rap from tourists. They say it’s rundown and dangerous, that the sewers stink and that everyone you meet is out to either rob or kill you. It is partly true. I’ve never known another city where a waiter chains your bag to the table, or where the knifings are more common.

At its height, Lima was one of the grandest cities on the continent.

It was rated as more beautiful than Paris, as refined as Rome. Stroll in the backstreets off Plaza de Armas and the flamboyant baroque doorways, heavy with crests and friezes glare down. Like the enclosed balconies of the palacios, the palaces, they signify the opulence of a colonial power with a point to prove. But the high life came to an abrupt end in 1746 when a great earthquake struck. Most of the resplendent villas and colonnades, the plazas and the palacios, were reduced to dust.

In the century which followed, the wars of independence slashed the capital’s population, as Limenos were sent to the front lines. With time, their city was rebuilt, but it never regained its majesty.

A few telephone calls tracked Cabieses to a large teaching hospital near Miraflores. An elite suburb, the area is reserved for those who have made it. In Miraflores rich women walk in Italian shoes. With their hair swirled up like candyfloss, they prowl the sidewalks, flashing off their jewels. The streets are free of vendedores ambulantes. There’s no one touting moss-green lizards or surgical gloves, and the only smell is of espresso brewing on spotless stalls.

Professor Cabieses’ secretary mumbled that he had gone to a neurosurgical conference and would be back in a week. I said that I’d thought the doctor was an authority on drugs. In a secretive voice, the assistant replied that Dr Cabieses was an expert in many things.

Again my journey had been becalmed. With a full week to kill, I cursed myself for conducting a search where any answers proved soon to be further questions. What began as a trail of feathers, was becoming a trial of unfulfilled hope. I went to the concierge of Hotel Gran Bolivar for words of comfort. He pushed me towards a taxi. Museo del Oro, the Gold Museum, was the only thing worth seeing in Lima, he said.

No one was quite certain when Miguel Mujica Gallo founded his remarkable museum, which nestles in the suburb of Monterrico. I cannot think of a greater shrine to the art of collecting. A treasure trove, it’s brimming with loot. Even before I’d got into the main body of the building, I found myself wading through Gallo’s less important collection – several hundred thousand weapons. He had bought up just about everything one might care to look at, from General Custer’s revolver to a set of rare Persian helmets.

The scope of Gallo’s museum was impressive, but the size of the collection was almost irrelevant; it was his collecting spirit that mattered. That spirit, I reflected, had kindled my current journey. Everyone ought to be working on a collection of some kind. I would count myself as a collector of tsantsas, shrunken heads, even though I have yet to afford one. When I was nine my aunt explained to me that a man without a collection was like a house without a roof. She presented me with a triple-edged Malayan dagger-cane, and advised me to collect sword-sticks, which I have done ever since.

Most of Museo del Oro was devoted to artefacts from pre-Incan Peru. There were textiles of Birdmen and funerary dolls, macaw-feather cloaks, Chancay ceramics, ritualistic daggers, mummies, and a dazzling accumulation of gold ornaments. But, for my money, all the rest was eclipsed by four understated objects. Two of them were skulls adorned with yellow and blue feathers. The other two were figurines. About two feet high, they were covered in bright feathers as well, and had crude jeering faces. In their hands were trophy heads.

Back at Gran Bolivar the Snake Pit was still silent. Wringing his hands together, the concierge told me of the good old days. With a week to get through until the Professor’s return, I pulled up a chair and listened.

“Gentlemen used to dress for dinner,” he said. “And their wives would drift through these rooms in sequinned gowns. It was a wonderful sight, like Hollywood.”

“What of the gossip?”

The concierge put a hand to his mouth.

“Ah,” he mumbled, “all those secret rendezvous, all that passion!”

“Affairs?”

“Oh yes, but we never breathed a word,” he said, “we left the hissing to the snakes.”

“What of la señora con el cuchillo de carnicero?”

The concierge’s face dropped.

“She has scared away the guests,” he said, sweeping an arm across the foyer in an arc. “In Peru we are very superstitious...”

Two blocks behind the Hotel Gran Bolivar, beside a kiosk selling under-ripe bananas, a woman was sitting on a stool. Her shoulders were hunched forward, her graying hair pulled back in a single pigtail.

Her mouth was a blinding smile of white and gold. The seat stood on an oriental prayer rug, beside which there was another stool for customers.

I watched from a distance as people would pause from their hurried lives to hear a tale. They came from many backgrounds: businessmen, secretaries, housewives, even manual workers. The lady would tell them stories. The tradition is one I have known well in the East where everyone can make time for a tale.

Wiping the empty seat with the corner of a rag, the woman invited me to sit. She told me her name was Dolores, and that stories had been in her family for fifteen generations. The tales, which came from the mountains, she said, were magical. They would purify my soul. The charge was three soles. I sat down and handed over the coins.

The story was an epic tale of love and honor, compassion and great bravery. Its heroes were Peruvian warriors, caught in a struggle between good and evil. Dolores said the tale had been in her family for three hundred years. Her comment brought a smile to my face. For the story was famous throughout central Asia, and is told in the pages of The Arabian Nights.

“The tale has cleaned your head,” Dolores said when she had finished. “But your mind is still troubled.”

My headache had actually grown worse.

“Tomorrow morning a train will leave Lima for Huancayo,” said Dolores. “If you want to be rid of your problems, take that train. Go and meet a man called Señor Pedro Orona Laya. Tell him I sent you. You can find him at Wali Wasi,” she said, “the Sacred House.”

As I still had a few days to spare, I decided to take the story-teller’s advice. Next morning I made my way to the station on the southern bank of the Rimac River. The train to Huancayo was about to leave. It carries passengers just once a month, a point of which Dolores must have been aware.

Huancayo is a small commercial town set high in the mountains, in the Mantaro Valley, the bread basket of Peru. Reaching it by railway from Lima was a feat of engineering that only the Victorians would have attempted. Like Kenya’s Lunatic Express, which climbs the Great Rift each day, the route was technically impossible. Construction on what became the highest railway line on earth began in 1870. For 23 years the imported Chinese workforce slogged away, boring tunnels and building bridges.

For 11 hours the Huancayo Express ground its way up the rails and into the Andes. The line is famous for its 22 “switch-backs”, a system which allows the double-ended train to ascend a steep incline by slaloming forward and back.

Outside, sweeping plateaux gave way to ice-capped mountains and crystal streams. Sometimes the earth was the color of a doe’s hide, and at others it was red as ocher, or gray like slate. There were dark brackish pools of water, like Welsh tarns, and fields which stretched forever. Dogs with savage, bulging eyes ran alongside, desperate to keep up with the carriages. Women paused from their work in the wheat fields to wave, their faces red-brown like polished mahogany.

We passed an open-top hopper waiting on a slip-track. It was filled with large, uniform ingots of silver. The man opposite watched my eyes widen greedily. His face was masked in a clipped white beard, his cheeks high, his eyes like fragments of coal. A long-time resident of Huancayo, he was originally from Denmark.

His wine-red lips spoke cautiously. “Silver for the Sendero Luminoso,” he said, “for the Shining Path.”

“Surely these are government mines?”

“The government may mine it, but Luminoso will take it.”

Peru’s recent history has been dominated by the Shining Path. Their brutal, pure form of Marxism is sometimes compared to that of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge. Sendero Luminoso may have never got their hands on national power, but all Peruvians have felt their effect. In a campaign dedicated to death, which ran from 1980 until about 1992, they wreaked havoc across the country. More than 25,000 ordinary people were killed by their hand, and a reputed $22 billion worth of property was destroyed. The eventual capture of Abimael Guzmán, the Path’s leader, put an end to the violence.

“But I thought the days of the Shining Path were over,” I said.

The bearded man grinned.

“Don’t believe the propaganda,” he whispered. “There’s a conspiracy going on.”

The carriage swelled from time to time with entertainers hired by the tourist office. A troupe of dancers pranced through, singing folksongs. A pair of adolescent girls hurried behind them with food. Another followed them, pouring chicha, to wash down the plates of carapulcra, a meat and potato stew. After the chicha there was bingo, with prizes – raw potatoes and maize. And after the bingo there was an impromptu lecture on llamas.

The Dane rolled his eyes as the occupants of the carriage applauded.

“It’s always the same,” he said dolefully. “The authorities lay on the party, but behind the façade they’re scheming.”

“What are you talking about?”

He nudged a thumb towards the llama expert.

“Everyone knows the government is supporting the Path,” said my informant, “and that guy’s in on it.”

“Are you sure he is?”

“Of course!” came the reply. “Peru’s in disarray – forces are colluding.”

“Colluding? Who’s colluding with who?”

“I’ll tell you,” said the Dane, “I’ll tell you everything.”

A tap-dancer struggled through the carriage against the movement of the train. Then came another round of chicha.

“The missionaries are opening up the jungle for the oil companies,” he said. “The drug barons are being funded by the CIA; the multinationals are sabotaging their own factories, and President Fujimori’s in bed with MOSSAD.”

“The Israeli Secret Service?”

“Of course!” he exclaimed. “It’s obvious.”

“Is it?”

“My boy,” said the Dane, “you have much to learn.”

I turned to the aisle, where the next entertainer was on. He was demonstrating how to make a whistling sound, by blowing into his shoe.

The informer scratched his thumb across his chin.

“Peru’s teeming with conspiracy,” he said. “It’s been going on for years. How do you think the Nazca Lines got there?”

My eyes left the whistling shoe and focused back on the Danish man.

“What’s your theory?”

“It’s not theory but fact,” he said. “Only Maria Reiche and a handful of Nazcans were in on it...”

“In on what?”

“The Lines!” he declared, “Reiche and the others drew the Lines themselves.”

“But why would they do such a thing?”

“How else do you expect they could have attracted tourists to that hell-hole of a place?”

Trawl through the Sunday markets of Latin America and come across some remarkable things. From Tierra del Fuego to Caracas, the selection is very much the same. There are tarantulas staked out in miniature frames, monkey bone aphrodisiacs, and bottles filled with colored sand; ball-gowns made from magenta nylon and llama skin slippers, sequinned espadrilles and silver poison rings. Like anywhere else on the continent, Huancayo’s wares are invariably marked with the name of the town. Peruvian tourists like nothing more than to amaze their friends with the latest stuffed armadillo souvenir, displayed on a plinth, with “Huancayo” etched neatly underneath.

The town, once crippled by Sendero Luminoso, had entered a renaissance. Everyone had tales of the bad old days, when you had to check under your car for bombs. And everyone could tell of a relative or friend who had stepped out after dark and was never seen again. But with Guzman behind bars life was different, they said. One woman, selling scarves at the side of road, pressed her thumb into the air in celebration.

“Our happiness is all the greater,” she declared, “porque conocemos el sabor de la tristeza, because we have tasted sorrow.”

After an ear-splitting night at the Hotel Disco, where every room had direct access to the dance floor, I flagged down a taxi and ordered him to Wali Wasi. Dolores, the storyteller, had told me to head for the cemetery at Umuto, which I assumed was nearby. I climbed in. The driver’s foot lurched down onto the accelerator and we took off at the speed of light. We passed colonial churches and concrete monstrosities, pensioners crooked over walking canes, and a brigade of children with baskets on their backs. The taxi was gathering speed as we approached the countryside. Forty minutes later, we were still racing along, a great plume of dust following our tracks.

Periodically, the driver would swivel round to face me, his maniacal eyes flashing like a jinn’s, his foot jammed to the magic pedal. He swore that we’d almost arrived. Another hour went by. We careered down a rutted track for a mile or so, and ended up in the middle of a maize field. The driver again turned to face me. The light had disappeared from his eyes. His head ducked with submission. Sinking his teeth into his upper lip, he mumbled an apology, but he had no idea where we were. Could I please settle the bill?

I spotted a child shepherding an alpaca around the edge of the field, and asked him for directions. He pointed to the next field.

“The cemetery is there,” he said. “El maestro, the master, lives just beyond it.”

The driver pretended he had been joking. Perhaps, he hinted, my tip could reflect the high level of service.

A few minutes later, I found myself knocking at the mottled door of what looked like a stable block. The mud walls, recently repaired, were decorated with spiral-like symbols.

A little girl opened the door, which led into a courtyard. I glanced around. Hundreds of faces were scrutinising me, their expressions leering like inmates escaped from an asylum. Most of them were made of cow dung. They were painted in gaudy colors, their gaunt features boiling with rage. Each one bore the same impenetrable eyes, and the same disfigured mouth.

Some were decorated with odds and ends – old bottles and plastic tubs, bleached bones, contorted roots, twigs and driftwood. The walls of the yard were adorned with yet more art. Dozens of paintings loomed down, each more disturbing than the last. Among them, the skeleton of Death was being crucified, and a woman was being raped by a bull. I wondered what kind of disturbed freak could have come up with such work.

At that moment the maestro arrived.

TWELVE

Guinea Pig Healer

Pedro Orona Laya was a cross between Jesus and Chewbacca. He looked like the sort of man who, under more normal circumstances, one might try to avoid. Not since the wilds of the Hindu Kush had I come across such an abundance of facial hair. With his beard and almond eyes the maestro could have passed as a Pashtun, from Afghanistan. But, then again, no Pashtun would be seen in sweeping beige robes, with a home-made cross around his neck.

“Welcome to my imagination,” said the maestro, gesturing for me to sit down.

I told him that Dolores had sent me, and that my mind was troubled. The master cleared his throat and spat at the dirt.

“I can return the harmony,” he said. “Estás poseído por el demonio, you are full of demons. And you are going to need your strength.”

“What for? Why will I need strength?”

The maestro didn’t answer. Instead, squinting, he cleared his throat for a second time.

“First, I will make una máscara, a mask of your face,” he decided.

I followed him out of the courtyard, up the lane to the main road and across into an enclosure. A herd of dairy cows were being milked; the farmer’s wife was scrubbing tne urns with a wad of straw. The master motioned for me to hold my hands out in front of my chest. I thought he wanted to read my palms. But instead he piled a mass of warm cow dung onto them.

“Take this back to Wali Wasi,” he said.

Once sitting on the courtyard floor, the maestro pushed his hands through the fresh dung, breathing in the aroma. He then stirred in a dollop of white glue, and kneaded the mixture until it was smooth as jam. I stood in the shade, watching his expert hands molding my face from the dung. Unlike a conventional sculptor, Pedro didn’t look at me once. I presumed he was making a symbolic mask. When the face was completed, it was left in the sun to dry. The maestro said he would paint it later, but first he would continue with the treatment, which would make me strong.

He led me under the eaves of a veranda, from which were hanging cobs of dry maize. We stood together beside a miniature shrine. At its base was a human skull, a little the worse for wear. Above it was an assortment of lurid dung masks, including one with red light-bulbs for eyes, a femur for a nose and real human teeth set in its mouth.

The maestro told me to wait at the shrine. He disappeared into an anteroom. I heard him poking about, getting the place ready. Clapping his hands, he called me in.

Pedro’s was an imagination without limit. As I stepped into the sanctuary, I was hit full force by the extent of his fantasy.

Much of the chamber was taken up by a home-made totem-pole. An anthropologist might have said it was built in reverence to the land; for it was made from maize cobs, dried corn leaves and strands of feathery pampas grass. There were ribbons too wound around its neck, which led to a face so fiendish that it caused me to miss a breath. Its eyebrows and nose were cobs, and its fangs splinters of bone. On the floor around it were clustered a range of offerings – dried herbs and ears of black maize, sunflower heads, and a postal sack tied with a granny knot.

Pedro pointed to a mattress which lay in the shadow of the totem.

“Get undressed and lie down there,” he said.

I wondered why the healing of a troubled mind might require nudity. But this was a clinic without convention. Stripping down to my boxer shorts, I stretched out and pulled the gargoyle-gray army blanket up to my chin. The totem-pole froze me with a grimacing stare. And the maestro began his work.

He pulled a handful of coca leaves from a pouch around his neck. Touching them to his brow in respect, he put them on his tongue one at a time. The master’s youngest daughter pushed open the door and sat with the offerings. She was given a few coca leaves, and entered the ritual. After the coca there was chicha for the girl and the priest. Reclining on the mattress, I questioned what part I would play.

My attention was drawn to the yard. Although I couldn’t see what was going on, I didn’t need Pedro’s strength of imagination to guess. A sow was obviously fighting for its life, desperate to escape a butcher’s knife. Its last screams were terrible, high-pitched and frantic, as it sparred with Death. The squeals stopped as suddenly as they had begun. A moment later, the sullen figure of a man swept into the sanctuary. He was barefoot and his apron was drenched in fresh blood. Having honored the totem with the hog’s foot, he slunk way. The maestro had paid no attention to the sounds of execution. As I was soon to find out, death was a tool of his trade.

The little girl dragged the postal sack over to her father. He loosened the knot with the tips of his fingers and took something from it. I peered over from the mattress. Pedro was holding a large black guinea-pig. The creature, keenly sniffing the air, was held at arm’s length towards the totem-pole. A bottle of agua de florida, perfumed water used by Peruvian shamans, was sprinkled over it. After which the master coughed a lungful of tobacco smoke along the length of its body.

Still damp with holy water, the guinea pig was wrapped in a sheet of white wax paper. I was surprised that it didn’t wriggle. As with a stage magician’s rabbit, it may have been hypnotized in some way. The maestro returned to his stool and chewed another handful of coca leaves. His daughter bent over the offerings and lit another candle. As the wick flickered with life, Pedro unwrapped the guinea pig, sprinkled more agua de florida, and moved over to the bed.

The shadow of the healer fell over me. He peeled back the coarse gray blanket and went to work. First the cuy was pressed to my face, rubbed over my brow, across my eyes, nose and mouth. I felt its warmth, and took in the scent of its soft damp pelt. The sensation was not unpleasant. Pedro held the creature stretched rigid between his hands. He guided it over my body, as if it were some kind of medical instrument. Every inch of skin was touched by the trembling animal. Over my chin and across my neck, up and down my arms, chest and stomach, groin, legs and feet. I turned over and my back was treated.

Anointing with guinea pigs is a common method of Andean healing and divination, known as Jaca shoqpi. It’s a system of medicine embroiled in secrecy. Despite the influence of Catholicism, cuy has remained a central tool in Andean ritual, just as it has a staple food. The strange marriage between New World and Old is represented by a painting which hangs in the Cathedral at Cusco. Painted in about 1670, by Miguel de Santiago, it depicts Christ and his Apostles at the Last Supper. Placed before them is a dish of cooked guinea pig.

When Pedro had finished, I pulled the blanket over my body once again. It was time for the second phase of the operation. The healer dunked the cuy in a pot of water, immersing it completely until it squirmed. Then, grabbing it by the scruff of the neck, he held it over a bright-red washing tub. His daughter passed over the blade of a penknife. It had been sharpened many times, its cutting edge eroded by years of abrasion. The maestro’s muscular fingers grasped the rodent’s back. With great care, he pressed the blade across its lower abdomen in a single incision.

Over the next fifteen minutes he worked away with the knife, separating the pelt from the white membrane beneath. I’m not certain when the animal died; but I am sure it was still alive during the first part of the ordeal. The process of skinning the cuy was extremely meticulous; every strand of fur was removed, and not a single drop of blood was shed.

Pedro submerged the skinned guinea-pig in water for a moment. I sensed a draught of cold air across my face. The door had been pushed open a crack. Three or four children from the lane had come to watch their favorite part of the treatment – the dissection. The healer didn’t look up, for fear of breaking concentration. An interruption, or takpa, is considered to be the meddling of the Devil.

The blade was pressed to the cuy’s neck. And, in a long sweeping movement, the master carved the steel down the rodent’s body. His hands fumbled to contain the mass of organs and entrails. They glistened, for they had been alive minutes before. I was surprised that during the dissection too there was so little blood, presumably a reflection of the healer’s surgical skill.

Pedro caressed his fingers through the jumble of organs. He inspected the cuy’s heart and the lungs, its liver and spleen, kidneys and intestines. Then he examined the animal’s feet, its head, and the color of its flesh.

“It is no surprise to me you are troubled,” he said dismally. “I can see your illness.”

“What’s wrong with me?”

The maestro rummaged through the guinea pig’s intestines like a priest praying with a rosary.

“Los espiritus malos, bad spirits,” he said.

“How can you be sure?”

“I see them here in las entrañas, the intestines.” He held the entrails up to the candlelight. “Can you not see where it is scarred?”

Pedro replaced the skin on the guinea pig’s body and wrapped it in the sheet of white wax paper. He would dispose of it secretly during the night. I asked whether it could be eaten. The master was disgusted by my question. Not even the most starving wretch of a man, he said, would be tempted by the tainted entrails.

Now that he had reached a diagnosis, Pedro meted out his cure. He moved over to the totem-pole and pulled from it a long cob of dried maize.

“Put this under your pillow when you sleep,” he said. “The demons will leave you and enter the corn. You will be as strong as a castrated ox, ready for what lies ahead.”

Peering into my eyes, he seemed to see my future, the place where the trail led.

“En cuarenta noches... leave the corn under your pillow for forty nights,” he said. “You must not shake any man’s hand for that time. Then bury the maize in the ground and put a stone on top of it.”

“What happens if I don’t do this?”

Pedro stood to his feet and wiped the blade of the knife across his sleeve. His expression soured.

“If you do not do as I tell you,” he said angrily, “the wicked spirits will multiply. They will fill your head like worms, and will crawl down into your body. Every organ will become infected, your flesh will rot, your bones will crack, and your mind with soften, until...”

He broke off abruptly.

“Until what?”

The healer ran a finger round the curve of his ear.

“You would not want to hear,” he said.

THIRTEEN

The Tsantsa’s Cheek

The day after my return to Lima from Huancayo, Professor Cabieses’ secretary called. The doctor, she said, had just arrived back and would see me at four o’clock.

The neurosurgical hospital’s waiting area was a fearful place. Patients hobbled in and out. Some wore bandages wrapped around their heads like clinical turbans; others had retort stands clamped to their spines. The man sitting beside me looked quite normal. But every few seconds he would jerk his head to the left, and wink six times with each eye.

I thumbed through an old issue of Hola!, and watched the receptionist file her nails. The procedure reminded me of a blacksmith, re-shoeing a horse. An hour slipped by. The receptionist completed her manicure and started on her hair. More time passed, and she moved onto her lashes. I was about to edge to the door when a short, balding man in an oyster-gray suit marched out of the elevator and through reception. The injured and afflicted straightened in respect. The squinting man blinked continuously until tears rolled down his cheeks.

The receptionist slid the tip of an eye-liner across the lid of her eye, inspecting the work in a Gucci compact. She turned to me.

“Dr Cabieses will see you now.”

The professor was rifling through his bookshelves, looking for something. I took a moment to glance round the surgery, which smelled of antiseptic liquid. It was cluttered with potted plants, each labeled with an identification tag. The walls were heavy with framed certificates, the windows hidden by Venetian blinds. In one corner was a hatstand on which was slung a sou’wester. To the right of the door stood a San Pedro cactus.

Dr Cabieses removed a slim volume from the shelf and turned to face me.

“I understand you are interested in plants,” he said, in faultless English, extending his arm towards me.

My hand lurched forward instinctively to shake his. Remembering the exorcism in the nick of time, I jerked it back, like a fencer recovering from a lunge. I pressed my hands together in an Indian namaste.

The neurosurgeon retracted his hand, and placed a finger on his lips.

“Seen a Curandero recently?” he said.

I told him about my visit to Wali Wasi and about the exorcism.

“It sounds to me as if you’re having sinus trouble,” he said. “That is, unless you believe in los espíritus malos, bad spirits.”

“As a hypochondriac I find myself believing in all sorts of conditions,” I replied. “I can’t help it.”

Dr Cabieses motioned to a chair at the other side of the broad walnut desk.

“The mind is a curious thing,” he said. “As is the power of belief. Nothing is stronger than a man’s faith.”

“What about the effect of ayahuasca on belief?”

The professor peered through the Venetian blinds, down to the street.

“Ayahuasca is a very serious subject,” he said.

I told the doctor of my journey from Machu Picchu to Titicaca, and on to Nazca. I said I was looking for traces of ancient flight, for the Birdmen.

Starting at the left corner of his mouth, a smile swept onto Cabieses’ face.

“Your travels have already answered the question,” he said. “I don’t know why you have hunted me down, for you have the answers.”

“What answers?”

Again, the professor peered through the blinds.

“Let us lay the pieces of the puzzle here on the table,” he said, slapping his hand down on the walnut veneer. “Pizarro’s monks talked of Incas flying in the air. Clausijiro, too, said the Aztecs could glide. But,” the doctor continued, ‘surely the Spanish opposition for flying men came from how their flight was achieved, rather than from the motion itself.”

“Ayahuasca?”

“Precisely,” said the professor. “It has been used for thousands of years across the region. Monks traveling with the Conquistadors called it the “demonic vine”. They persecuted anyone who used it – which explains why ayahuasca was forced into hiding.”

Cabieses adjusted his tie.

“You see,” he said, massaging his hands together, “ayahuasca, Banisteriopsis caapi, as it’s more correctly known, was a pre-Incan device. Of course it could provide a sensation of flight – the sense of traveling to the gods. But the flight is not the content, but the container.”

Professor Cabieses fixed his eyes on mine, ensuring I was following his words.

“The content,” he said, “the function of the tool, that is what solves problems. Ayahuasca shows a shaman how to cure an illness, or what the future holds. Other hallucinogens have been used in Native American history,” he went on, “virola snuff, the San Pedro cactus, peyote, psilocybe mushrooms, and all the rest, but none’s as important as ayahuasca.”

“What of the textiles, the ones which show Birdmen?”

“The winged cloaks, the feathered head-bands, the streams of vomit from their mouths,” declared the professor, “look at the signs... they lead to ayahuasca.”

Gazing down at the linoleum, I thought back to the burial grounds on the Nazca plain.

“Well,” I said, “with the death of the Incas, I suppose we shall never know the truth of ayahuasca, or the Birdmen.”

Professor Cabieses shook his head in laughter.

“What are you talking about?” he said. “I told you the Spanish forced your Birdmen into hiding. That’s exactly where they’ve gone.”

“Where?”

“To the jungle!”

The professor explained that ayahuasca was still used by various tribes in the forests of the Upper Amazon, in Ecuador, Brazil and Peru. Known by many names – yagé, pinde, caapi, nape, among them; its complex chemistry has astounded Western scientists. How, they ask, could such primitive people have happened upon such a sophisticated formula?

The inner bark of the Banisteriopsis caapi vine is pounded and boiled at a certain temperature for a certain time, along with a selection of leaves from other plants. The hallucinatory effects don’t come from the vine, but from the leaves, the admixtures. Banisteriopsis caapi allows the intestines to absorb chemicals they would normally filter out. As a result, the hallucinogens slip into the bloodstream.

Professor Cabieses leaned back into his chair.

“No tribe in the Western Amazon takes ayahuasca as seriously,” he said, “as the Shuar. They call it natema, and for them it’s the key which gives life meaning. They believe the world around us is an illusion. The birds in the trees, the worms in the ground, and everything in between – none of it exists at all. Only by taking ayahuasca, they say, can you enter the real world.”

“Where are the Shuar?”

“In the Pastaza region,” said Cabieses. “In the borderlands of Peru and Ecuador. You may have heard of them before,” he said. “They used to shrink heads.”

“I thought that was the Jivaro.”

“Jivaro, means “barbarian”,” the doctor replied. “As you can imagine they don’t like being called that. Shuar means “men”.”

I praised the extinct art of headshrinking.

“Ah yes,” said Cabieses wistfully, “tsantsas are wonderful things. But it’s so hard to get good ones these days.”

“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 miniaturized 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 civilization 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 del Diablo, The Trumpet of the Devil,” said Cabieses. “Beware of it.”

FOURTEEN

Iquitos

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 I’d 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 facades, 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 airplane. 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 traveler passing up the Amazon in March 1854 afforded Iquitos a single line in his diary: “A 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 vulcanization.

Paying slave wages, the rubber barons employed thousands of native people as seringueizos, 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 fifty-pound 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 checkered, the chrome tables topped in raspberry-colored 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 favorite. 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.

In Iquitos, casual compliments are taken very seriously. The girl, who said her name was Florita, lamented that she hadn’t a date for Gringolandia, the disco. She would wait for me at ten. I choked out a list of excuses, and got back to my plans.

There was still much to do before my search for the Shuar could start. No time for disco dancing. On a paper napkin I made a list: (1) Guide. (2) Supplies. (3) Boat.

Florita swanned over with a huge banana split. Its bowl was as big as a geranium’s pot. I rooted around with the long spoon, hunting for bananas. There were none. I asked what was going on. Florita said the bananas had been blended up.

Back to the list. Getting a guide was the main worry. I needed a man who knew the Pastaza region, where the Shuar lived. He would have to be adept at diplomacy as well as jungle survival; a knowledge of ayahuasca would be useful as well.

Florita told me that I shouldn’t look for a guide. If you want something in Iquitos, she said, you wait for it to come to you. Hang around, she pouted, and a guide would turn up.

Exactly thirty seconds later a sleek young man slipped easily onto the chair beside mine. He pulled a Marlboro from a soft pack, slid his tongue down the edge, and lit the end.

“I heard you were looking for a guide,” he said.

“Yes, I am, but how did you know? I haven’t told anyone but Florita.”

The man, Xavier, squinted as the smoke furled up into his eyes.

“It’s my job to know what’s going on,” he said.

If Ari’s Burger was Arnold’s Diner, then Xavier was its Fonz. His hair was a number one on the sides, sheered with electric clippers, an oily quiff crowned the top. He wore his own self-styled uniform – ripped jeans and a white tee-shirt with the arms torn off. As far as Xavier was concerned, arms were for wimps. Under the shirt, he confided, lay a tattoo of staggering size and imagination: a dragon savaging a mermaid, surrounded by angels. The sting of the needle, he said, had been excruciating.

“Can I see it?”

Xavier swept back his quiff.

“Are you kidding? The girls would go wild.”

Florita tiptoed over and nuzzled a note under my glass. It declared her undying love for me.

“Let’s get down to business,” I said. “Do you know the Pastaza region?”

“No man,” said Xavier, “I’m not a guide... I’m a fixer.”

“Well can you fix me up with a guide? I need someone who knows the Shuar tribe.”

Xavier’s ice-cool expression cracked.

“Shuar?” he murmured, miming a round object with his hands.

“Shrunken heads,” I said. “But they don’t do that any more.”

“It’s not going to be easy. No one goes up there.”

“Well, I’ll have to get another fixer who can find a man brave enough for the job.”

Xavier thumped his breast.

“Give me until this time tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll find you a guide so brave that he could walk through fire.”

*

In the late afternoon I explored the streets leading onto Malecón de Tarapacá, the road which runs along the waterfront. Tourism didn’t seem to have taken off in Iquitos. Despite this, the backstreets were littered with tourist kiosks. Each one sold the same range of curiosities. There were blowpipes seven feet long, spears and snuff-pipes, feather head-dresses and stuffed piranhas, jaguar teeth necklaces and masks made from caiman skin. Frames panelled the walls of every kiosk. In them giant insects were pinned out.

I sipped a tall blended drink on the porch of a restaurant called Fitzcarraldo. It had once been home to the legendary rubber-tapper and explorer of the same name. Werner Herzog’s film Fitzcarraldo had made a great impression on me years before. I never thought that one day I might be sitting in the rubber-tapper’s headquarters, looking out over the swollen waters of the Amazon.

Fitzcarraldo’s story echoes the trailblazer spirit and the wild excesses of the rubber boom years. Born Brian Sweeny Fitzgerald, the eldest son of an immigrant Irishman, he was known in the jungle as Fitzcarraldo. He fled into the Amazon in his early twenties, after being accused of spying during the war between Peru and Chile. Two years later, in about 1877, he had made a fortune as a rubber-tapper, and was one of the richest men in Peru. The money was soon spent.

After watching Enrico Caruso perform at Manaus’ £400,000 opera house, Fitzcarraldo swore he’d lure the great tenor to the Peruvian jungle. His dream was to bring opera to the natives. What better way to entice Caruso, he thought, than to build an opera house to match the one in Manaus?

To raise funds, Fitzcarraldo came up with a plan. He would make use of the vast rubber-tree forest on the Ucayali River, where 14 million trees lay untapped. To succeed, he first had to get a boat beyond Pongo das Mortes, the Rapids of Death. Everyone said he was mad, which he probably was. He sailed his steamship up a parallel river and forced his laborers – all of them Shuar – to haul it over a hill and down to the Ucayali.

Once the steamer was on the Ucayali, Fitzcarraldo and his companions celebrated with drink. As they did so, Shuar laborers cut the mooring ropes, sending the boat charging towards the rapids. From the start they had planned secretly to sacrifice the vessel, to appease the spirit of the waterfall. The boat plunged over the rapids. Somehow, Fitzcarraldo survived but never lived to build his opera house. He died soon after, in 1889, drowned in the Urubamba River. He was just thirty-five.

Night falls quickly over the jungle. The patina of dusk diffuses into darkness, a signal for the nocturnal world to wake. In Plaza de Armas the street-lights seethed with insect life; mosquitoes, moths and hornets among them, hurling themselves at the orbs of brilliant white glass. The restaurants and bars, bright with neon lighting, were haunted by them. No one but me was in the least bothered.

The only place in Iquitos free from insects was Ari’s Burger. Every few minutes one of the bubbly waitresses would float through, spraying poison gas from an aerosol. I sought refuge there, preferring the gas to the bugs outside.

Even before my backside had met the chrome chair, Florita was standing over me. She had missed me during the afternoon, she said, but would miss me even more later in the night. Three other guys had already asked her to the disco, but she’d rejected them in favour of me. She exclaimed that she would never look at another man. Murmuring more excuses, I ordered another banana split.

I closed my eyes as the poison gas rained down. When I opened them, a robust-looking man was sitting across the table. His skin was tanned, his hair expertly cropped and parted at the side. He had an honest face that seemed out of place in Ari’s Burger.

“Iquitos is the best kept secret in the world,” he said in a west-Texan drawl, “but there’s a lot of bad people down here. But we’re cleaning it up.”

I was on the lookout for conmen, I said.

The Texan tapped his index finger on the raspberry vinyl.

“Don’t let down your guard,” he replied. “The bandits see tourists like you as game... game to be hunted.”

FIFTEEN

Big Bug Business

An Englishman buttonholed me in the corridor of Hotel Selva. Dark circles lined his eyes; his face was as white as Dover chalk. In a Liverpudlian accent he asked me what I thought of the hotel.

“There’s no electricity, running water or glass in the windows,” I said, “the mattress is rotting, and the bathroom’s full of chickens. And there are a pair of nymphomaniacs in the next room.”

“Why don’t you find somewhere else?”

Making a fist, I rammed it into my palm.

“I’m going into the jungle,” I said. “Going to need a lot of toughening up. Even the jungle couldn’t be as rough as room 102.”

The Liverpudlian walked down to the reception and asked for a room just like mine, leaving me to wonder what kind of lunatic he was.

Later that day, Xavier strolled into Ari’s Burger and winked.

“Got you a guide,” he said.

“Is he brave?”

“Like a kamikaze pilot.”

“Bring him over, and we’ll have a chat.”

“He won’t come to Ari’s,” said Xavier, winking again.

César was squatting behind the door of his friend’s house, in a shanty town called Punchana. As a successful jungle guide he was, he said, hiding from bad, jealous men – the very same kind of people he’d protect me from were I to hire him.

“If you’re going to protect me, you’re not going to be able to hide behind doors,” I said.

César paced over to a rocking-chair, made from steel construction poles. He was about thirty, chubby with a big head and a nervous twitch. From time to time his face would erupt in a broad, anxious smile. The more he smiled, the more he twitched. Rocking back and forth nervously on the chair, he told me of his life.

“My brother was killed by Sendero Luminoso,” he began in a voice inspired by gloom. “His body was dumped in the river near Pucallpa, and was eaten by piranhas. Then three months ago my sister died of cancer. My three brothers and I carry on the family name, living however we can.”

“What experience have you as a guide?”

César revived from his fit of melancholy.

“I’ve been taking tourists into the jungle for twenty years,” he said, ‘since I was a child. I speak eighteen languages – German, French, Arabic, Japanese... and I can navigate by the stars.”

“What about ayahuasca?”

He smiled, then blinked as if a bright light were shining in his eyes.

“Taken it hundreds of times,” he said. “I’m a shaman. I was taught by a maestro on the Napo River.”

“When were you last up in the Pastaza region, with the Shuar?”

“Shuar?” he mouthed. “Yes, I know the Shuar. If you look them in the eye they’ll slit your throat. If you see their women they’ll hack off your head with a machete. And if you show any signs of illness, they’ll drown you.”

“Dangerous people, the Shuar,” said Xavier, wincing.

“Only last month a group of missionaries flew up to the Pastaza in a seaplane,” said César. “They landed on the river. When the Shuar elders came out, the missionaries greeted them. The tribe seemed friendly, so the Christians camped on the river-bank. But in the night the Shuar warriors attacked and killed them all. They chopped off their heads for trophies, and cut up the bodies.”

“Why did they murder them?”

César rocked back and forth tersely.

“No gifts,” he said. “They came with empty hands.”

Although his nervous disposition worried me, I hired César as a guide. His good English, claimed knowledge of Pastaza, ayahuasca and jungle medicine were the credentials I was after. We negotiated a fee and a budget for equipment and gifts. It was a lot of money. Xavier said I could rest assured, for I was hiring the best in the Upper Amazon. César suggested I employ his three younger brothers as porters, for an additional $600. All the money, a total of $3,100, would have to be paid in advance, he said. I handed over a wad of used banknotes.

To save time and fuel, César proposed that we take a river ferry up from Iquitos to San Ramon, at the base of the Pastaza. The journey up the Amazon and its headwater, the Maranon, would take about ten days. We would take food and supplies with us, as well as a small outboard motor and fuel. Upriver we would hire a dugout and fix the engine to it.

César was just about to write me a receipt when there were shouts from the street. Without flinching, he ran out the back door and over a neighbor’s fence, taking my money with him.

“What’s the problem? That man was shouting ¡La policía!”

Xavier lit a cigarette and inhaled.

“Someone must have got robbed,” he said. “The crime’s terrible in Iquitos.”

*

My head was heavy on the foetid pillow that night, under which was the magic cob of maize. I had a dream in which César was laughing demonically. He was about to say something when I woke up, startled by the sound of the bedhead banging on the other side of the wall. I stumbled into the bathroom where the chickens were roosting, and tried to coax a single drop of water from the tap. As usual, it was bone dry.

The cook started slaughtering chickens early the next morning. Over the racket, I heard the manager’s wife screaming for me down the corridor. César had sent his brother, Gonzalo, to meet me. I noticed at once the familiar trait of delivering a blink with a smile. He had instructions, he said, to take me to the floating market at Belen.

As we walked the mile or so down Calle Putumayo, Gonzalo told me tales of evil, depraved men, who were hell-bent on destroying his family.

“Iquitos is a dangerous place,” he said. “People will rest only when you are dead. They use black magic to make you ill, so you die slowly, and with pain.”

“Who are these people?”

Gonzalo blinked, but he was not smiling.

“They are the Mahicarís, the Devil Worshippers,” he said.

Beneath the tranquil veneer of daily life, there lurks an underworld of sorcery and superstition. The entire Latin continent is founded on a bedrock of magical belief. But nowhere else, except perhaps for Manaus, had I come across such a fear of the occult. The Brazilian Amazon has a history of Macumba, a religious system blended from West African belief and Catholic iconography. African slaves were never brought to the Upper Amazon, and so Macumba, and its sister faith Santeria, are unknown in Peru.

Instead, a shamanic tradition has grown up, which touches every member of society. It heals illness when people are sick, and solves problems; for, as I was constantly reminded, everyone in Iquitos had problems.

I asked Gonzalo about the Devil Worshippers. I wanted to meet them.

He bit the corner of his lip and blinked.

“You can’t go to the Mahicaris,” he said. “You have to wait for them to find you.”

Belen was buoyant with activity, even though the shops on Calle Putumayo still had their shutters closed. The market area extended down to the sludge-brown water and the floating village. Thousands upon thousands of balsa wood shacks were slotted together. When the water was high, as it was then, the houses simply rose on the tide. Children were splashing, avoiding lumps of raw sewage; their mothers busy washing clothes, and everyone else was doing their ablutions.

In the market, all kinds of products were for sale. We pushed through the crowds, peering at the merchandize, which was offered on makeshift stalls. Meat was being sold at the first area. Fresh caiman legs and jungle pig hooves, chunks of water eel, giant snails, and turtles hacked from their shells, sold along with their eggs. There were other creatures from the river, too, including a piraruca, a giant, prehistoric, freshwater fish.

We pushed forwards through the crowds and came to a line of stalls selling live jungle animals. There were three black spider monkeys tied to a pole, $3 each; a young ocelot pacing in a cage ($35); three toucans with yellow bills ($15); a baby anteater ($20), and a curious species of primitive turtle, called a matamata ($4).

Gonzalo led me to an area roofed in blue polythene, where chonta, the heart of palm, was being shredded into what looked like tagliatelle. No meal in Iquitos is complete without a great pile of it. Beside the chonta was a line of tables selling mapacho, black tobacco, used in every shamanic ceremony. The leaves are brought from the deepest regions of the jungle, rolled tight into cylindrical batons, like candlesticks at church. The stall keepers, all women, sat on high stools clipping the tobacco and rolling it into oversized cigarettes.

A little further on a teenage girl with red hair and freckles was selling guajes. These fruit are best described as looking like rust-colored hand-grenades. The flesh beneath the carapace, a popular snack, is light orange in color. It’s said to have thirty times more vitamin C than citrus fruit.

Beyond the blue polythene roofs was another market, where medicaments were sold. We always hear in the West how the Amazon is an untapped storehouse of remedies. It’s undoubtedly true. But not until you walk through an emporium of raw jungle medicines, can you comprehend the range of plants involved.

Piled high on the tables there were roots, barks, oils and tinctures, each with a specific use. Gonzalo held up a section of uña de gato, a vine celebrated for its ability to stop cancerous tumours. Beside it was a heap of coja bark, used for arthritis; and beside that siete raíces (seven roots) a bronchial dilator and aphrodisiac in one. At one stall the owner held up a jar. In it was a boa constrictor’s head pickled in brine – a remedy against rheumatism. Another table was arranged with dozens of miniature bottles filled with beads – amulets as powerful to the believing as any drug.

Before we left Belen, Gonzalo took me to meet a friend who sold guajes at the water’s edge. His table was in the shadow of an impressive bandstand, designed and built by Gustave Eiffel, in the good old days. Gonzalo’s friend employed a woman whose face was hideously disfigured. She was shy, reluctant to give the usual sales banter. As we looked for a motocarro to take us back to Plaza de Armas, I asked Gonzalo if he knew what had happened to her.

“Everyone at Belen knows the story of Rosa,” he said.

“What story?”

Gonzalo wiped his mouth with his hand.

“She used to be the most beautiful girl in Iquitos,” he said. “Every schoolboy dreamed of having her. Then, when she was about fifteen, a maestro said he had seen a vision, in which Rosa was raped by five men. The dream was a premonition.”

“But what happened to her face?”

“Rosa’s mother didn’t want the dream to come true,” continued Gonzalo. “The maestro said there was only one thing to do – to turn her beauty into ugliness. So one night Rosa’s parents dipped her face in acid.”

At noon the next day César sent word for me to come to his friend’s house in Punchana. As before, I found him crouching behind the door. This time he said he was looking for beetles on the floor. The sitting-room was now filled with equipment and goods. There was enough stuff to kit out an entire shop.

Rocking back and forth on the chair, César publicized what he had bought for the trip: “Eighty pounds of sugar and two hundred bars of soap,” he said, “eighty cans of tuna fish, sixty of sardines, thirty tins of butter, three hundred rolls of toilet paper, two hundred pounds of cooking salt, and forty of salt for preserving fish; a sack of rice and another of flour, a box of detergent for washing clothes, two boxes of bleach sachets, twelve dozen eggs, six gallons of cooking oil, a box of cocoa, coffee and tea, forty fishing hooks, three propeller blades and three sacks of used clothing.”

“Why do we need so much stuff?”

César smiled wide and blinked twice.

“Gifts,” he said. “Without gifts the Shuar will butcher us.”

When he had finished with the manifest, César asked me for an extra $600. He had overspent on the food and was running short. Cash was still needed to hire a 15-horsepower outboard and to buy fuel. I went into the corner and unzipped my money-belt. Only the emergency money was left.

“Sorry, but I don’t have any more dollars,” I said.

César rocked up and down a couple of times.

“Then we won’t be going anywhere.”

I handed him the emergency money, and again asked for a receipt. Another excuse was knocked back at me.

In addition to taking clothes, fishing hooks and food, César said the Shuar would expect other things. He hadn’t budgeted for these, but advised me to go to the market and get what I could. Gonzalo would accompany me and, afterwards, we could pick up an antidote for snakebites.

“What gifts shall I get?”

“The Shuar like shiny things,” said César. “Combs, mirrors, beads, that sort of thing.”

Back at Belen, Gonzalo and I trawled through the hardware shops. Like the ones at Nazca, they were piled floor to ceiling with Chinese-made merchandize. I bought a box of plastic combs and another of hand held mirrors, with colored backs. After hearing Cesar’s story of the empty-handed missionaries, one couldn’t be too careful.

When the adventurer Lewis Cotlow went into the jungle in the early 1950s, he took lipsticks, mascara, and elaborate cosmetics. Warriors, he said, always needed warpaint for their faces. After Cotlow came a New York socialite, Nicole Maxwell, who spent years in the Peruvian Amazon. She hit upon a novel gift item. Before leaving the United States, she bought dozens of glass eyes in her own eye color. Indian chiefs were amazed when she brought them out. I thought hard to come up with something as original as glass eyes.

It was then that I remembered the film The Gods Must be Crazy, in which a Coca-Cola bottle finds its way into a remote Botswanan village. For the Khoikhoin people the bottle was an invaluable tool. They used it as a rolling-pin, a musical instrument, for pounding grain and even as a weapon. Eventually, fights broke out because everyone wanted to use the bottle. The only way to ensure peace was to take not one Coke bottle, but two dozen.

Gonzalo thought it was a ridiculous idea. He said the Shuar would hit us over the heads with the bottles and then slit our throats. It worried me that any story told by Iquiteños, involving the Shuar, ended with everyone getting their heads hacked off. I had a gut feeling that the Coke bottles would go down well. After hunting for more than an hour, we ended up with twenty Fanta bottles. They would have to do.

Gonzalo said it was time to get the antidote for snake bites. But it wasn’t sold in the market, he said.

“Where do we get it, then?”

“From Anaconda Man.”

We climbed aboard a dugout canoe near Eiffel’s bandstand and headed out through the floating village. Anaconda Man lived a short distance from Belen. Gonzalo said that no one would dream of going deep into the jungle without a remedy for snake bites. A boy of about seven sat at the bows, stabbing his oval-ended paddle into the water. The canoe was precariously low in the water. Gonzalo said this was normal, a result of advanced wood-rot. We ducked every few seconds, to avoid the walkways that bridged the channel. Soon we were out past the maze of houses. With a constant rhythm we jerked forwards through beds of water hyacinth.

A few miles out of Iquitos, the young boatman punted the craft skilfully towards the river-bank. Gonzalo helped me out onto the mud. As I slid up to the grass-roofed shack, its occupant came out to greet us. He was average in height, but had extremely muscular shoulders, stocky thighs, and a maniacal laugh. When he walked, the mud shook. This, Gonzalo whispered ominously, was the Anaconda Man.

We sat on a log and watched as Anaconda Man wrestled a fifteen-foot anaconda. His bravery was fortified by a swig of chuchuhuasi, a strange jungle liqueur made from aguardiente and the bark of the colossal chuchuhuasi tree. It was impressive to see the snake coil around his back and arms, constricting.

When it came to reptiles, Anaconda Man was a show-off. First he posed with his collection of giant snakes. Then he stuffed a baby black caiman in his mouth, and sucked a lizard’s head like a lollipop. I told him to stop, but ignoring me, he rammed a larger caiman down his trousers.

Keen to get down to business, I asked him what snakes we might expect on our journey to the Pastaza. Anaconda Man broke into hysterical laughter. There were too many to name, he said, yanking the caiman’s tail from under his belt. My tropical medical kit included a list of dangerous Amazonian snakes. It was a long list. The main ones to avoid, it advised, were pit vipers, bushmasters, lanceheads, coppermouths, parrot snakes, as well as boa constrictors and anacondas. The leaflet went on to say that, without the correct anti-venom, you hadn’t got a chance of surviving a snake bite.

Gonzalo slapped his hand on Anaconda Man’s back.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “this man has one anti-venom for all snakes.”

It sounded like powerful stuff.

Anaconda Man went into his shack and returned a minute later with a wide-mouthed jar. It contained dull green oil and what looked like anatomical specimens.

“How many do you want?” he asked.

“All of them,” said Gonzalo.

“Cuarenta soles, 40 soles,” replied the snake expert.

I dug the money from my pocket. Gonzalo put the jar under his arm and led the way back to the boat. I asked Anaconda Man how to use the remedy.

“When you get a snake bite, rub one of the pieces onto the fang marks. Then swallow it.”

“What are they?” I asked. “What is the medicine?”

Anaconda Man helped me into the boat.

“Son corazones de serpiente, they’re snake hearts,” he said.

*

Breakfast at Ari’s Burger was always a somber affair. Each face was drawn, reflecting the previous night’s debauchery. The scent of Nescafé and cigarettes lingered in the air. Every so often a stray curio-seller would bluster in and tout tarantulas in frames. No one ever bought them. The giant spider market never heated up until at least noon.

One old American was downing his third cup of black coffee. There were four unopened packs of Marlboros stacked up on his table. He had a long day at Ari’s ahead of him. Nearby, at the front of the café, a pair of immaculately dressed women were nibbling toast. They were coutured in identical gray and white uniforms, the livery of the Peruvian airline, Tans. They were fresh and alert. And, unlike the rest of the Iquiteños, they were too sophisticated to stare. In Iquitos everyone stares as much as they possibly can. Lecherous old men stare at teenage waitresses with curls, waitresses stare at foreigners, and foreigners stare at busty local women, who stare at the lecherous old men.

Florita served me a cup of Nescafé. She’d been fighting off the advances of an Australian man, she confided. He was very handsome, she said, with a broad chest and dimples in his cheeks. He had asked her to Gringolandia, and he had bought her a bouquet of flowers. Pausing to apply a coat of pink gloss to her lips, Florita pouted harder than I had seen her pout before. All the weary hungover heads turned in slow motion to watch. Even the air hostesses looked over.

“I have two left feet when it comes to dancing,” I said.

“I’ll teach you to dance, mi amor.”

“I go to bed by ten.”

“Then, we’ll set off for Gringolandia extra early,” she said.

“But I’m married.”

“So?”

When Xavier turned up I asked him to take Florita aside and set things straight. While I was flattered, there was no way I could go disco dancing with her. I don’t know what he said, but later in the day Florita came over to my table. With tears welling in her eyes, she handed me another note.

It read: “Lo lamentarás. You will regret your decision.”

Xavier had come to take me to meet César. As we drove towards Punchana, he started bragging again about his tattoo. He went on and on about the pain, and about the size of the dragon. If I were to see the beauty of the mermaid and the angels, he said, I would go mad. I asked if I could see it. As before, he refused. So, without warning, I pulled up his tee-shirt. He thrust his arms across his bare chest.

“I can’t see the tattoo,” I said. “Where is it?”

Xavier pointed to a pair of parallel lines, about half an inch long.

“There!” he said.

“That’s not a monster.”

“I haven’t got the dragon yet,” he said, squirming, “but I’ve got the dragon’s fangs.”

Nineteen nylon sacks of loot were blocking the entrance of the Punchana house. They were tied up with yellow string. César was sitting on the concrete floor making calculations. All the food was ready, he said, and an outboard engine had been hired and tested.

César climbed onto the rocking-chair and smiled apprehensively.

“I have to go into the jungle on a quick trip,” he said.

“Can’t it wait?”

He shook his head.

“Got an urgent order.”

“An order for what?”

“Insects.”

As well as being a celebrated linguist, healer and navigator, César had a profitable sideline, in the giant insect business.

“I have customers all over the world,” he said, “they pay hundreds of dollars for the big ones.”

“How big?”

César motioned something the size of a small cat with his hands.

“Titanus giganticus, the biggest beetle in the world. They grow up to seven inches.”

“What are they worth?”

“Collectors in the USA or Japan pay $800 for them, dead or alive,” he said. “I have a friend in Canada who’s a very serious collector. His largest specimen is worth $500,000.”

The idea of collecting bugs didn’t appeal to me at all. But I remembered how, in Japan, the big department stores would sell live beetles once a year. School children kept them as pets. I even found a vending-machine which sold ten different varieties of live beetle.

Iquitos is a world centre in the big bug business. The Amazon has more than 8,000 species of known insect. Through middlemen like César you can order just about anything you like – from the giant Morpho hecuba butterfly to hissing cockroaches, to the Hercules Beetle and even Titanus giganticus. In these times of political correctness, where hunting animals is off-limits, insect dealing is still considered acceptable. The bugs are injected with poison, wrapped in tissue paper, and shipped out from Iquitos to insect-lovers everywhere. Thousands more are packed up as live freight in what’s a multi-million dollar business.

As far as César was concerned, big bugs were money for nothing. A couple of nights with a bright light and a giant net and he’d be assured of a valuable catch. As soon as he got back to Iquitos we would leave for the land of the Shuar.

When I returned to Hotel Selva the police were searching the place. The manager’s wife was answering questions. She looked very frightened indeed. I asked what was going on. One of the police officers said it was to do with a young Englishman who had been staying at the hotel. I remarked that I had met him, although only once, in the corridor. The officer frowned until his forehead buckled. It was a sad case, he said, and not good for Iquitos. The young man had slit his wrists in the night.

SIXTEEN

Vine of the Dead

A long-awaited event was taking place at an electrical shop on the main square. The most eminent members of Iquitos society were present, sipping cool guaje milkshakes. They had come to view an exhibition of American food blenders. Across Peru people were passionate about the machines, nowhere more so than in Iquitos.

Along with the other guests, I toured the displays, making appropriate exclamations of awe. But with prices that started at $70, the new stock was out of reach of most Iquiteños. For the climax of the show, a bare-breasted woman, bedecked in feathers, trouped through the shop doing a war dance. I recognized her. She was one of the Boras from the airport.

When the blender show was over, the party moved on to Casa de Fierio, the Iron House. Set on the corner of Calles Próspero and Putumayo, it’s a solid open-fronted building made from reinforced girders and sheets of steel, painted silver. The building was designed by Gustave Eiffel for the 1889 Paris Exhibition. Like Eiffel’s bandstand at Belen, it was brought to the jungle by rubber barons.

On the upper floor of the Iron House was the Regal Bar and Restaurant, run by Bill Wilkins and his Peruvian wife. An Englishman by birth, Wilkins first came to the Amazon to work on a gold mining project. His restaurant was famous for its catfish. As well as serving food, it doubled as the British Consulate.

I told him about my planned trip and where I was staying. When he heard the words Hotel Selva, he screwed up his face and took a big gulp of his Bacardi and Coke.

“I’ve just been dealing with the lad who topped himself there,” he said. “Nasty business altogether.”

“I heard it was suicide.”

“Slashed wrists,” whispered Bill. “Had some trouble with the morgue... They threatened to throw the body out on the street if they didn’t get payment up front.”

“Couldn’t the British government take care of this one?”

Bill shook his head.

“There’s a lot of red tape,” he said. “We got in touch with the boy’s parents in Blighty. They sent a check. Had him shipped up to Lima in a box this afternoon. He went by DHL.”

*

With César out searching for Titanus giganticus, Gonzalo offered to take me to a healing session. One of the most famous Curanderos in the state, an old ayahuasquero called Flavio, was going to treat the sick. Some said he had magical powers. He hadn’t performed in his native Iquitos for almost a year, as he’d been touring the United States.

Gonzalo said that Flavio had a following across the Americas, and was popular with not just Peruvians. From Vancouver to Tierra del Fuego people knew his work. He had helped the lame to walk, cured the blind simply by touching his thumbs to their eyes, and he’d even brought the dead back to life. When I asked if he believed the stories, Gonzalo seemed confused. Of course he believed them, he said, they were true.

As dusk fell over Belen, we hired a canoe and paddled down the waterways of the floating village. The blue flicker of televisions flooded through the open doorways of some shacks. In others, women were cutting up vegetables or stirring pots of mashed yuca, manioc, preparing the evening meal. There was laughter, the sound of bottles clinking together in a toast, and the ubiquitous screaming of babies waiting to be fed.

“There are so many fake shamans,” said Gonzalo, as we continued downstream. “They pretend to have special powers, telling people lies and taking their money. They say the spells will heal only when they have been paid.”

“What about Flavio: are you sure he’s genuine?”

“Of course he is!” exclaimed Gonzalo. “Not like my neighbor.”

“Who’s your neighbor?”

“He’s a maestro, but a fake. No one goes to him.”

“How do you know he’s a fraud?”

Gonzalo ran his fingers through the water.

“We know he’s a fake because of his wife,” he said. “You see, she’s got a horrible rash on her face. It’s terrible, so ugly.”

“What’s that got to do with the shaman?”

“Well, if he was any good, he’d cure his wife first.”

A paraffin lamp guided us to the rendezvous point. The jungle grew right to the water’s edge, making disembarking even more difficult than usual. Three or four other canoes were docking nearby. I heard the sound of a peki-peki, a motorized canoe, in the distance. Gonzalo said healing sessions were held in the jungle because it made the magic stronger. There was also the small problem of the police. While taking ayahuasca isn’t against the law in Peru, practising medicine without a license is.

I paid the boy who’d paddled us downstream, and asked him to stay until we returned. I had no idea how long the healing session would last. We followed the trail of people walking eastwards into the undergrowth. High above, the full moon was bright, illuminating the path through the banana trees. No one carried a flashlight, and so I refrained from using mine. There was a general sense of expectancy, the participants chatting away as they walked. Like the others, Gonzalo knew the route well.

“Not much further,” he said. “You can see the fire through the trees.”

He pointed to the glimmer of flames about fifty yards ahead.

“Has it already started?”

Gonzalo made a click with his tongue.

“Aún no, not yet,” he said. “We have to wait until Flavio comes. That may be hours.”

The bonfire was being tended by two boys. They were the only children present. Heaping the pyre with wood, they called for everyone to sit down. The rich blend 01 smoke and sparks spiralled into the sky. I shielded my face from the fire and scanned the assembly. About forty people had already arrived. Their silhouettes were lit up from time to time, as the breeze punched the flames in their direction. Everyone was in their best clothes, men wearing long-sleeved shirts and their wives in dresses. Some of the women unfurled sheets of plastic to sit on, as the ground was damp.

The air smelled of mapacho, jungle tobacco, and of burning banana leaves. No one was very bothered by the foreigner present. They were more concerned about the ailments they had come to have assuaged. Gonzalo told me that Flavio would only heal if the atmosphere was appropriate. Sometimes he had come to the clearing but had not treated anyone at all.

“Flavio’s power depends on us,” he said. “Without the right mood, the ayahuasca won’t work, and he will tell everyone to go home. Think of pure things.”

“Like what?”

Gonzalo choked as the fire’s smoke engulfed us.

“You must think of a bird flying over the trees,” he said, “or of water running over stones in a stream.”

The ritual began long before Flavio turned up. A trio of women sang hymns. The songs spoke of moral values, of truth and sincerity. When they were over, it was time to pray. The congregation gave thanks to their ancestors, and they prayed for their families. With their hands pressed together in supplication, they urged God to charge Flavio’s healing hands with power. May the spirit of Jesus fill him, they said, and may his strength overflow.

“He will be here soon,” said Gonzalo.

“Flavio?”

“Yes... the atmosphere is almost ready.”

My mind wandered as the sound of the prayers melted into the trees. I tried to focus on pure thoughts, but instead could only think of Sven, the Slovak I’d met in Cusco. I wondered whether Ariadne was still tracking him across the continent. As I thought of him, his face dissolved into the darkness, and was replaced by the haunting, mummified trophy head which Juan the grave-robber had offered me.

Gonzalo nudged me back into the present.

“He is here,” he said. “Flavio has come.”

Three figures were walking towards us through the undergrowth. The first was carrying a hurricane lamp. As it swung in his hand, it bathed the forest in platinum light. The next man was taller than the first; after him came a woman. She was clutching a bucket and a bag. The man with the lamp greeted the congregation. His cheeks were pocked, his complexion dark. He spoke in a soft, melodic voice. Holding his palms out towards us, he prayed.

“That is Flavio,” Gonzalo said softly, “he’s praying for our souls.”

A series of songs followed, to which one of the women danced. It was less of a dance, and more of a gyrating shuffle. When she had finished, she left the clearing and went off into the forest. She didn’t come back.

The hymns subsided, and the Curandero’s assistant unfolded a green quilt. He took care to ensure there were no creases in it. As he pegged out the corners with stones, his master addressed the audience. He had come to heal, he said, by the powers which had been given to him. But the true power was not himself, it was not human, but divine. If we respected the invisible forces, he said, they would heal. As mere mortals we could never understand the nature or the method of the healing energy. Anyone who questioned the miraculous cures, he went on, would be afflicted with illness forever. His words took me back to India, where I’d heard godmen give similar warnings.

By the time Flavio started healing, it must have been past midnight. The hurricane lamp was thick with insects long before then. They swarmed over it suicidally, desperate to get to the source of the light.

Gonzalo pointed to the bucket, which had been placed beside the quilt.

“That’s the ayahuasca,” he said.

He motioned for me to watch. The shaman’s assistant went over to the hurricane lamp and turned it off. Flavio swept a white enamel mug into the liquid, and drank its contents. He held out his hands, and the afflicted approached him one by one.

The first person to step forward was a young woman. She couldn’t have been more than about twenty. Flavio asked for details of her condition. The man she loved was in love with another, she said. She had come to gain his affection. The healer asked whether she had brought anything which belonged to the man she loved. She handed him a shirt and a few hairs from his brush. Flavio then asked if she had taken ayahuasca before. She replied that she had not. The enamel mug was dipped into the bucket and presented half full to the woman. When she had drained the liquid, the shaman told her to sit on the quilt.

Next came an old man. He claimed to be plagued by bad spirits. They had already killed his wife, he said, and his son, and they were now coming for him. When asked about ayahuasca, he replied that he had drunk it many times. The mug was filled to the brim and the old man drank. He sat beside the woman on the quilt, and waited.

One after the other, people stepped forward to drink ayahuasca. About fifteen came to the maestro for his help. Their problems ranged from obscure curses and susto, to medical afflictions, such as diabetes and pustules, migraines and malaria. Flavio told three people, all men, that he could not treat them. He didn’t say why.

I noticed that each of the patients had brought a trusted friend or relative with them. The reason for this became clear as the ayahuasca began to work.

The young woman who was out of love threw up first. Her retching was followed closely by the aged man. One by one, the participants gagged or vomited. Several of them clambered off the quilt to defecate. No one was concerned about embarrassing themselves. They were drunk, their movements unsteady, their expressions delirious. The friends and relatives were at hand to soothe them, and to lead them back to the quilt if necessary. The vomiting lasted only for the first hour or so.

Once he had heard their problems and provided ayahuasca to all the afflicted, Flavio took a chacapa from his satchel. The tool, a rattle made from dried leaves, is one of the two most important props used by shamans in the Amazon. The other is the tobacco, mapacho. Shaking the chacapa near the faces of his patients, Flavio began to chant incantations. The endless stream of sound continued for hours. There were no clear words. I was awed by his sheer stamina. The only break was when he lit a wooden pipe, plugged with the mapacho. Drawing deeply on it, he inflated his lungs with smoke, blowing it over the patients.

I asked Gonzalo what was happening.

“The maestro is leading the sick people through the land of spirits,” he said.

“Are they flying?”

“Yes, some have grown wings.”

“Where are they going?”

“On a journey over the jungle, to search for answers to their problems,” said Gonzalo. “Flavio is leading them. He might look like a man, but in his mind he’s a stork.”

“Doesn’t he give them actual medicines?”

Gonzalo grunted.

“Ayahuasca’s stronger than any medicine.”

I was startled by a sound in the trees. A sudden shriek as a predator found its prey. The noise disturbed a nest of howler monkeys, which in turn woke up half the jungle. I looked back at Flavio and his patients. They hadn’t heard the commotion. The chacapa was still shaking, echoing to the rhythm of the chant.

“How could they not have heard that noise?”

“They are flying over the jungle,” said Gonzalo, “they are far away.”

The session continued for about four hours. By the end of it I was used to the nocturnal jungle sounds and was almost falling asleep. Flavio’s patients were regaining their composure. Some of them were still unsteady. Unlike me, their trusted friends were alert, sensitive to the needs of the person in their care. Before they drifted away, back to the river, the Curandero counselled each patient in turn.

“What’s Flavio saying?”

“He’s telling them to drink tobacco water,” said Gonzalo, “and explaining how they must act from now on. They will only be cured if they do as he says.”

As they filtered off, some of the patients handed the healer’s assistant wads of tobacco, a little money, or other gifts. Gonzalo and I made our way back to the canoe, silent like all the others.

The moon was now blanketed by cloud. 1 was fearful of paddling upstream in pitch-blackness. Dugouts are unstable at the best of times. Gonzalo called out to the young boatman, who was curled up asleep on the bank. In one movement, he leapt up and pushed the stern into the water.

Gonzalo sensed my fear.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “if you drown, go to heaven.”

Back in Iquitos, there was no sign of César. I spent my time going back and forth from Ari’s Burger to the Regal Restaurant. Everyone in town seemed to know who I was. The old American, who used to sit at Ari’s all day, every day, motioned for me to join him at his table. Like most of the other foreigners in town, he was gray-haired, with a pot belly and a taste for nicotine.

“Heard you’re going up to Jivaro country,” he said, swigging a Cusqueña.

“They don’t like being called Jívaro,” I said. “It means “savage”.”

“Mighty dangerous up there.”

“Oh?”

He mimed a chicken having its head pulled off.

“A friend of mine went up there back in ’73,” he said. “Took a boat up the Tigre and the Corrientes, right up to the backwaters of the Pastaza.”

He swigged his beer. I waited for the punchline, to hear how the Shuar had gone on a head-hacking spree.

“Did your friend meet any Shuar?”

“Sure he did,” he said. “And he swapped his Oyster Perpetual for one of those tsantsa things.”

“Didn’t he get his head chopped off?”

“No way, man,” he said, “but he did have an AK-47 strapped to his chest.”

Just as I was giving up hope of ever seeing César again, he sent word from the safe-house at Punchana. I was to get there as quickly as I could. Braving the torrential afternoon rain, I rushed over to meet him. The motocarro had to drop me at the end of the road, which had become a morass of mud.

César was sitting beside a stack of white Tupperware boxes.

“Did you get any big bugs?” I asked.

He pointed to the boxes.

“Two Titanus giganticus,” he said, “and a load of others, too.”

“Does that mean we can go on the trip now?”

“We’ll leave in the morning,” he said.

I ate my last meal at La Gran Maloca, literally “the great hut”. It is generally regarded as the best restaurant in the Peruvian Amazon. From the moment I arrived in Iquitos, I’d heard people going on about it. One man had said that the chef used to work for Fernando Belaunde, the former President of Peru. But after disgracing himself by giving his boss a severe case of food-poisoning, he’d had to escape the presidential palace for the jungle.

A gaunt young waiter with watery eyes showed me into the dining room. He was dressed in a Tuxedo with a black bow-tie. Fine original paintings enlivened the walls, and coy carp moved restlessly in a large tank. The waiter placed a linen napkin squarely on my lap. He spoke English with an unusual accent. He said he was from Hungary. His name was Laslo.

I ordered Paiche a la Lozetana, a filleted piece of piraruca, served with roasted manioc. Between bites, Laslo would scamper over and check that the fish was satisfactory.

“I must tell you something,” he said, as I praised the chef’s skill for the twentieth time. “I haven’t been a waiter for very long. Circumstances have made it necessary for me to take this job.”

“Circumstances?”

Laslo’s eyes watered a little more.

“I was working in Dallas,” he said. “While I was there, a man offered to sell me some land. He said it was in the Amazon. I’ve always loved the idea of jungle, ever since I was ten years old. So I agreed to buy the land. It’s only fifteen hectares... just a little bit of Amazon.”

“It sounds nice.”

Laslo shook his head.

“I paid far too much,” he said. “I gave him all my savings. Luckily the Polish millionaire who owns this restaurant, gave me a job. The big problem is that I don’t speak any Spanish.”

Laslo invited me to his shack in his little bit of the jungle. If I gave him enough notice, he said, he’d cook up a big pot of Hungarian goulash. Early next morning he sent a pair of books to Hotel Selva for me. The first was called Jivaro: Among the Head-shrinkers of the Amazon. The other was called Head Hunters of the Amazon. Writing of a century ago, its author said: “Iquitos contained so much human driftwood that there was always some new freak to be met, with a strange tale to tell and a still stranger outlook on life.” Nothing seemed to have changed at all.

I had been worrying that we had too much luggage. As well as my own bags, we now had the gifts and the supplies which César had bought with my money. But in Jivaro, I’d read the highlights of the inventory taken by the Frenchman Bertrand Flornoy on his three-man trip into the jungle in the early 1950s. Even by Hiram Bingham’s example, it was an impressive one.

Amongst many other things, Flornoy had packed up three-quarters of a mile of blue and white cloth; 10,000 feet of cinemagraphic film; 220 rolls of regular film, 8,000 pills of quinine sulphate; 160 phials for intra-muscular injections; a complete surgical outfit, a selection of dentists’ instruments; 400 lbs of concentrated bread, 220 lbs of manioc flour, 220 lbs of rice and 900 tins of various foods. The entire lot weighed more than 4,500 lbs. Flornoy even took a taxidermist along.

In the good old days of Iquitos’s rubber barons, the fine buildings on the water’s edge would resound with riotous soirées. Tycoons would out do each other wasting money, to prove their wealth. They held Babylonian parties, with bucket-loads of Sevruga caviar and fountains of vintage Champagne; they lit cigars with £10 notes, and gambled $50,000 on the toss of a coin. If anything, Iquitos’s night-life had grown even wilder over the decades. But the fine wines and dinner dress had been replaced by a culture founded on warm beer and watery milkshakes.

The few foreigners living there, had a methodical routine. If the day belonged to Ari’s, staring at buxom local women, then the night was the preserve of the Gringo Bar. I had passed it a hundred times, but with a name like that, it had seemed too obvious a place for a gringo to go.

Before going to bed I had buried the maize cob in the dirt behind the hotel, and pulled a flagstone on top of it. Forty nights had passed since I’d been treated by the maestro at Wali Wasi. Furling the foam rubber pillow around my head and ears like a bonnet, I tried to sleep. But the sounds of unbridled passion from next door, and the banging of the headboard, kept me awake. I got dressed and went across the main square to the Gringo Bar.

My curiosity was soon satisfied. Dozens of scantily clad local girls were prancing about, jumping in and out of a jacuzzi, into which cascaded a mock waterfall. Most of them had on what the Brazilians call “dental floss bikinis”. Some were wearing even less. In a town which is said to have eight women to every man, a gringo with a little hard currency goes a long way. The handful of men, all over fifty, were wearing Hawaiian shirts, shorts and flip-flops. Lounging back on cane chairs, they sipped beer from chilled glasses as doting young ladies fondled them. It was gringo heaven.

A giant Scandinavian called Lars tried to befriend me.

“Going to Jivaro country?” he asked, pushing a girl off his lap.

I nodded, impressed that even he, a complete stranger, knew my travel plans.

“Hope you’re taking gifts,” he said.

“We’ve got all sorts of things – food, clothes and lots of Fanta bottles.”

Lars flinched.

“What about Vicks Vapour Rub?”

“What about it?”

“You’d better stock up with it.”

“Why?”

Gulping a mug of Cristal lager, Lars looked over earnestly.

“The Jivaro warriors rub it into their genitals,” he said. “They think it gives them more stamina with women.”

*

A fleet of motocarros were needed to ferry the nineteen sacks from Punchana down to the docks. César and his three young brothers met me at the quay. The rusting hulk of a ship was being mobbed by a throng of people. It was a scene of utter desperation. Hundreds of passengers were fighting to get up a narrow gangplank. They were carrying everything they owned like refugees – wicker chairs and chests of tools, wheelbarrows, stepladders, pots and pans and, of course blenders.

César’s brothers pushed their way onto the boat, and formed a relay to get the loot aboard. César and I followed. Greasing an official’s palm with a few extra soles secured us two cabins. They were located beside the main lavatories, but were still a far better option than sleeping out on the decks, like everyone else. I stowed my bags under the bed, chaining them to its frame. Then I barged into César’s cabin.

One of the boys was lying on the bed, naked. César was standing over him with his pants down. I looked at them. They looked at me. Time seemed to stop. I opened my mouth, but no words came out. Somehow I managed to get out of the cabin, and shut the door behind me.

SEVENTEEN

Saigon of South America

I leant on the river ferry’s railing, looking out at the pandemonium on the quay. Even more passengers than before were fighting to get aboard. As I stood there, staring, still in shock, I considered what seemed like an unreal situation. How could I set off in search of a wild tribe with a paedophile as a guide? Worse still, this was a paedophile molesting his own brother. The decision was an easy one. I returned to César’s cabin. Although almost unable to look such a degenerate in the eye, I said that we would not be going into the jungle together.

To my surprise, he didn’t seem at all perturbed. He told me to take the supplies, and that he would return the money I had paid. He’d be glad to pass up such a dangerous journey, he said.

Feeling as if a prize-fighter had punched me in the face, I rattled back to Hotel Selva with a convoy of motocarros. The receptionist supervised, as the sacks were taken to my old room.

Words cannot express my sense of defeat.

I told the receptionist what had happened, what I had seen on the ferry.

“Bueno sí, oh yes,” she said freely, “everyone knows that Señor Vargas likes his little boys.”

“Do they?”

“Of course they do,” she replied, “there are no secrets in Iquitos.”

“But they’re sus hermanos, his brothers!”

“Is that what he told you?”

I admitted it was.

“That’s a lie. They aren’t his brothers, but sus novios, his boyfriends.”

Over at Ari’s Burger, I was in no mood for Florita’s pouting. She must have sensed this, because she brought over a banana milkshake and hurried away. I sat in a corner facing the wall, unable to speak.

The old American chain-smoker came over.

“Heard you just found out about César,” he said.

“Why didn’t anyone tell me César was a paedophile?”

He thought for a moment.

“You were so happy with him,” he said, “no one wanted to spoil your trip.”

The fact that César liked children was bad, but it was just the tip of the iceberg. He was the most wanted man in town. He had been convicted dozens of times for ripping-off tourists and acting as a pimp, for theft, drug dealing and a range of sex offences.

“César Vargas,” he said, snorting, “he’s the Dennis the Menace of the Amazon.”

In the afternoon I sat on a bench in Plaza de Armas with my head in my hands. The usual scrum of boot boys and chewing-gum dealers hung well back. Word had spread of my misfortune. Whatever the circumstances, I couldn’t allow myself to do business with a known paedophile.

The first drops of rain splashed onto the tiled surface of the square. In the Amazon, where it pours almost every day, the rain can drench you in under three seconds. But it isn’t seen as the scourge of nature it is in the West. Rain is the lifeblood of the jungle.

I left the bench and sought refuge in the Gringo Bar.

A smattering of young women were carousing with older foreign men, to the sound of the Bee Gees. As I entered the bar, there was silence. Everyone turned to look at me. The girls stopped fondling, the glasses ceased clinking. Even the Bee Gees fell silent.

The barman, an old American with a bald head and a Hawaiian shirt, slapped a tumbler of guaje juice down in front of me.

“It’s on the house,” he said.

I thanked him and sat down in the corner. A middle-aged man asked if he could join me. He had gray hair, fleshy white legs and a sunburned nose. He was an American called Max. Everyone would tell you behind his back that he was CIA, an “active cell”. He said he had retired from the Agency, and that he bred snakes. Like most of his fellow countrymen lying low in Iquitos, I suspected he had been lured by the cheap beer and the inexhaustible supply of available jungle women.

As far as Max was concerned, I was now one of the boys. I’d been bitten by the jungle, as he put it. I’d been initiated.

“But even if I can get some more money sent,” I said, “I haven’t got a guide. I need someone who knows the jungle, someone who has no fear of the Shuar.”

Max called out for another drink.

“You need a man who can trek through the rain-forest in the dead of night,” he said. “A man who can kill an anaconda with his bare hands,-who can live on a diet of tree grubs washed down with his own urine,-a man who’s taken ayahuasca a hundred times, who’ll protect you if it means sacrificing his own life...” Max paused, “a man who has no fear.”

“Does such a man exist?”

Wiping the froth from his mouth, Max glanced at the wall clock.

“He should be here in five minutes,” he said.

The Texan I’d met at Ari’s swept in out of the rain and slapped a soggy dossier on the table.

“The police have been after César Vargas for a long time,” he said. “He’s at the top of their list, he’s a prime target. We’re going to clean up this town. This place is the best kept secret on Earth, and we ain’t gonna have it tainted with paedophile scum.”

“He’s dealing in insects, too,” I said limply.

The Texan screwed up his face.

“Low life scum!” he barked.

At that moment, the door of the Gringo Bar swung back with such force that it almost broke free from its hinges. Standing in the frame was a ferocious-looking foreigner. A shade over six feet, he was as lean as a race horse, with a back so straight as to be unnatural. He was drenched with rain and dressed from top to toe in camouflage. His boots, his khaki fatigues, and torn ninja singlet were caked in fresh mud. A bandanna had been tied tightly over his head. His unshaven face was daubed red in warpaint, its long chin etched with a diagonal scar. Around his neck were military dog tags.

His searing malachite-green eyes scanned the bar with robotic precision. Then he made for our table.

“Here’s your man,” said Max under his breath, “Richard Fowler: Vietnam vet”, jungle expert, and occasional guide.”

The soldier pressed his callused hand into mine. My first handshake since Huancayo. His palm felt like coarse grade sandpaper.

He sat down and drank a mug of Pilsen in a single draught. I asked him what had brought him to Iquitos.

“Been living in the woods for a long time,” he said, in a voice molded by Marlboros. “Signed up for “Nam back in “68. I was with 101st US Airborne Division Jungle Operations – long range reconnaissance. Tet Offensive, Battle of Hue, Hamburger Hill, all that shit.”

Richard lit a cigarette, sucked hard, and expelled a jet of smoke through his nose.

“The jungle’s my turf,” he said. “I tried livin” back in the US, but it doesn’t love me, and I sure as Hell don’t love it.”

“Do you know anything about ayahuasca?” I asked.

Richard cackled menacingly.

“Ayahuasca, sanango, chacruna, datura, I’ve done “em all.”

“What are sanango and chacruna?”

The Vietnam vet gulped down a second beer in one.

“They’re nerve agents.”

“What about the Shuar, the Jivaro?”

“Jivaro?” he echoed, lighting another Marlboro. “They make the Vietcong look like pussy cats.”

“Would you take me to them... to the Pastaza?”

“Can I bring Francisco?”

“Who’s he?”

“My shaman.”

“You can bring anyone you like, as long as there’s no paedophilia or insect dealing.”

Richard looked deep into my eyes, his pupils dilating in a sea of green. It was not a conventional Iquitos stare.

“I promise you one thing,” he said.

“What?”

“I promise that if you hire me, I will keep you alive.”

The Vietnam vet” loosened his laces and leant back on his chair.

“The Amazon isn’t a kid’s playground, you know,” he said. “If you come with me you live the jungle, you breathe it... you eat it.”

“Eat it?”

He sucked at a dried callus on his hand.

“If you don’t eat it,” he said ominously, “it’ll eat you.”

“But I’ve got lots of canned food.”

“Screw the canned food,” said Fowler, “I’m talking about fresh chow... peccaries, caimans, larvae, anacondas. You can leave your supplies behind. They’re dead weight. In the jungle you only need one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“A sharp knife,” he said, tugging a collapsible Ka-bar blade from its sheath on his belt.

I boasted about the size of my nickel-coated Alaskan moose knife.

The Vietnam vet scoffed.

“Leave that behind, too,” he said.

Fowler needed two days to put the jungle expedition together. He suggested we hire our own boat and take it right up to the Pastaza. That way we wouldn’t have to rely on the river ferries. But before he could do anything, he’d need to catch up with his belle, Señorita Jane. Like the other foreigners in Iquitos, he had succumbed to the unrealistic gender ratio. Jane would be due out of high school in a few minutes.

“How old is she?”

“Sixteen,” he sniffed, “but she looks old for her age.”

“Isn’t that rather young?”

The Vietnam veteran slipped his knife away.

*

At eight the next morning I found myself sitting at my usual table at Ari’s. With my back facing the wall, I had a clear sweep of all the staring faces. The first die-hard patrons were already sipping Nescafé, black as crude oil. Florita’s colleague was mopping the floor. Noticing me, she mopped her way over to my table. She said that Florita was sick. It wasn’t an illness caused by disease, but one derived from true love. Florita was getting weaker all the time. A trip to Gringolandia was the only antidote. When she was strong enough, if she survived, she’d travel with me to Europe.

“Her bag is packed already,” said Florita’s friend. “You must buy her a ticket. Then you can be married.”

“But I’m already married!”

“So?” she said, “you can have two wives.”

The waitress slunk back across the room, probing the mop between the legs of the chrome chairs. A salesman slipped his way over. He was offering a new range of tarantulas in frames. They came in sets of three – small, medium and large, and were designed to be hung together on a wall in order of their size. I asked him about Titanus giganticus. He looked nervous.

“Expensive,” he mouthed.

“How much?”

“Seven hundred dollars each, maybe more.”

“Why so expensive?”

“Hard to get,” he replied. “There’s only one man in Iquitos who can get them.”

“Who’s that?”

“A man called César Vargas,” he said.

The salesman broke off, grabbed his tarantulas, and scurried out of Ari’s. I looked round to see what had scared him away. César was coming towards me.

He sat down and began to berate me.

“Why did you say you were going to have my legs broken?”

“I never said such a thing!”

“Well, everyone in town’s saying it.”

“César, I don’t want to harm you.”

“God will judge you,” he said, “He knows how bad you are and how good I am.”

César had stopped eating. It was his own form of hunger strike. He wouldn’t swallow another mouthful of food until his name had been cleared. Meanwhile, he’d turned to God for guidance. His conversation was heavy with religious remarks. César had been born again.

“Meet me tonight at the bandstand in Belen,” he said, “and I will give you the money I owe you.”

*

Since hiring Richard, my confidence had been bolstered. He looked like the sort of man one could do with having along on a dangerous mission. I admired his devotion to the jungle, and was secretly jealous of him. Even with the most rigorous military training, I would never be as hardy. He was from different stock – tough as nails, with honed muscles, a foul mouth and an iron gut. He was the kind of man who could live on mealworms and termites, with no fear of insects with more than six legs. I was thankful Richard had turned up, and that César had been exposed in the nick of time.

At nine o’clock sharp I felt a muscular hand on the base of my neck. The Vietnam vet” had crept up, and was looming over me. He was chewing on the end of a cigar.

“You love this town, don’t you?” he said.

“It’s all right,” I replied. “It grows on you.”

“All right? It’s more than all right,” said Fowler, slapping his hands together. “It’s the Saigon of South America!”

Three men were standing to attention beside him, waiting to be introduced.

“Meet my buddies,” Richard said.

I shook their hands.

“This is Cockroach.”

He motioned to a teenager with an innocent face. “He’ll be the cook. And this here is Walter, he’s your motorista, he owns the boat.”

“Who’s the third man?”

Richard moved the cigar to the left corner of his mouth.

“That’s Guido.”

“And what does Guido do?”

“He’s an odd job man.”

We left Ari’s and went down to the floating market at Belen. A battered speedboat was waiting to take us down river, where the Pradera was waiting to be inspected.

“She’s as sturdy as any craft on the Amazon,” Richard bragged as we bounced our way downstream. “she’s got a big engine and the space we’ll need for a long river trip.”

“She’s very strong,” said Walter, the boat’s owner. “She’s only six months old. You will not regret hiring the Pradera.”

Two hours later, with the afternoon rain lashing down, the speedboat swerved off the Amazon and down a tributary. The current was much slower, the river-banks abundant with wildlife and breadfruit trees. We veered into a backwater off the river. The craft’s aluminium hull sliced through fields of water lilies. Then, taking a right hand bend widely, the pilot brought the speedboat to a sharp halt. Bobbing in the wake was a rotting monstrosity of a riverboat. It reminded me of the African Queen shortly before she was destroyed.

Forty feet long, it was clinker-built, with open sides and a flat roof. The lime green paint was chipped, and the woodwork was in a pitiful state. An unskilled hand had daubed in red paint at the bow the name, Pradera.

I climbed up and had a look at what would be our home for weeks, possibly months. From the moment the soles of my shoes touched the floorboards, I knew this boat was trouble. The beams were covered in cobwebs; like all the other timber, they were rotten to the core. The problems were not only structural – the battery was dead, the steering mechanism was held together with fragments of string, and the engine wouldn’t start up. Rats could be heard dashing about in the cavity between the boards and the hull.

At the stern there was a medicine cabinet. I opened it optimistically. It was filled with giant red beetles, and had no medical supplies. Beside it was a Johnson 6 5-horsepower engine with a damaged propeller and, beyond that, was a makeshift toilet... a hole in the floor.

Richard sucked on the end of a cheap cigar.

“Great, isn’t it?” he said whimsically.

“What do you mean? Could it get us to the Pastaza?”

“Course it could.”

“There’s no way this boat’s six months old,” I said. “It’s falling to bits. The wood’s all rotten, it’s leaking like a sieve, the battery’s flat, its engine doesn’t even work... and it’s infested with rats.”

The Vietnam vet” struck the motorista on the shoulder-blade with his fist.

“It’s a fine boat,” he said. “We’ll take it!”

*

Richard dropped by my room at Hotel Selva later that day. The Pradera’s owner would bring it to Iquitos at night, he said, ready to set off at dawn. The rotting vessel was going to cost $25 a day, plus petrol. I regarded it as highway robbery.

Once he had picked his way through the nineteen sacks of loot, Richard swore violently.

“César said we’d need all that stuff,” I said. “I admit the Fanta bottles were my idea. They’re an invaluable tool.”

Fowler froze me with his green eyes.

“You gotta understand something,” he said, “people in the jungle don’t want pretty little combs and mascara, they don’t care a toss about mirrors, beads or fuckin’ Fanta bottles. They only want one thing...”

“What’s that?”

“Sixteen gauge shotgun shells,” he said, “that’s what they want.”

Lugging some of the gifts and tins away to swap them for ammunition, Richard said that he’d catch us fresh meat during the trip. Canned food, he said, was for wimps.

A little later, when the evening air was ringing with the buzz of miniature wings, I made my way to Eiffel’s bandstand at Belen, to wait for César. Squatting nearby was Rosa, the woman whose face had been dunked in acid. She smiled shyly when she saw me, covering her cheek with her hand. I bought a peeled guaje from her and sunk my teeth into its yellow flesh.

Why wasn’t she at home with her husband?

“Esposo, husband?” she replied, “what man would marry someone as ugly as me?”

“I’m sure many men would,” I said.

Rosa offered me another guaje.

“Tómalo, take it, I have so many and no one wants to buy them.”

I asked about the maestro, the one who’d had the premonition.

“He was not a good man,” she said tenderly. “He seduced young women. He often made them pregnant and said the Devil was the father. He would try to get me to sleep with him. He was disgusting. So I scorned him. But my parents believed in his magic.”

“The maestro’s dream?”

“Si... my mother threw acid on my face when I was sleeping. He told her to do it.”

César arrived at the bandstand an hour after Rosa had gone. He said he couldn’t stay long. The police were after him.

“They’re saying I’m a criminal,” he said weakly. “They want to throw me into jail and beat me up, and rape me. They want to break my legs.”

“Why did you tell me the boys were your brothers?”

“They’re like brothers,” said César. “Our friendship isn’t a crime.”

“Please give me the money back and I’ll leave you alone.”

César sat on the edge of the bandstand. He was very frail, no doubt a result of his hunger strike. He was holding a pair of Tupperware boxes. They were white and familiar.

“Is the money inside them?”

César ducked his head subserviently, and blinked.

“Not money,” he sighed. “I’m still waiting to be paid, and all the money you gave me was spent. Debts, so many debts.”

“So what’s in the boxes?”

César held them out towards me.

“Have a look,” he said.

Somehow, I knew what the Tupperware boxes contained even before I prized off their lids. In each one, paralyzed with fear, was an enormous black beetle. They were over five inches wide.

“Titanus giganticus,” said César proudly. “They’re little more than babies. I’m giving you them in place of the money,” he said. “They’re worth $800 each.”

EIGHTEEN

Green Hell

I do not know why, but the Pradera was supposed to meet us alongside the dance-floor of an Iquitos disco. The nightspot stood precariously at the Amazon’s edge, beside a quay. In the middle of the night Richard, Cockroach, Guido and I ferried our sacks through the disco to the water. A wild Brazilian salsa band was in full swing. We weaved in single file amid the throng of sweaty dancers. Richard had bought 300 gallons of pure drinking water, 100 gallons of petrol, and almost 1,000 shotgun shells. They had to be shuffled through the disco along with the rest of the supplies. The motorista, Walter, had promised to be there dead on 5.30 a.m.

I had tried to find someone to look after the giant beetles in my absence. Max, the CIA snake man, said he didn’t look after anything with legs, Florita said it was against her religion to babysit beetles, and the receptionist at Hotel Selva said her husband would feed them to the chickens. So, with great reluctance, I took the two Tupperware boxes down to the quay, along with all the rest of the goods. The pair of baby Titanus giganticus would just have to come along with us to meet the Birdmen.

By about 9 a.m. the band had packed up their instruments and sauntered off home. A handful of people stayed to dance even though there was no music. They were salsa fanatics.

Quite suddenly Richard picked a fight with Guido, the odd-job man. He accused him of lying, stealing and general dishonesty. Guido ran away with his knapsack. When I asked Richard why he’d disgraced the man so publicly, he replied: “It’s a warning to the others. If I don’t make my mark right at the start, they’ll take us for all we’ve got.”

Richard treated Cockroach to a few drinks. I was touched by his generosity. He said it was also important to keep the men watered. Well-watered men had high morale. And without it the journey would end in disaster.

At three o’clock that afternoon we were still waiting for the Pradera. I sensed myself losing control of the trip again. I was about to march back to Hotel Selva with the beetles, when I spotted a dark green hulk fifty feet out. It was heading towards the quay, low in the water, moving in slow motion. It could only be the Pradera.

Once she had docked, I moored the guy-line to the disco’s bar, and supervised the loading. We struggled to haul the sacks, the water, and the barrels of petrol on board. Only then did I throw my own bags up, before climbing aboard, with the beetles’ boxes tucked under my arm.

The departure from the disco quay at Iquitos lacked pomp and circumstance. But then, some of the greatest expeditions in human history, I mused, must have had no send-offs at all. As we ventured out, into the beds of water hyacinths, I made a solemn oath. I would not return to Iquitos until I had spent time with the Shuar, with the Birdmen of Peru.

I gave Cockroach the Tupperware boxes and explained what was inside. The valuable jungle commodity was being entrusted to him, and him alone. He would have to establish what Titanus giganticus liked to eat. Under no circumstances was anyone else to be permitted access to the precious insects. Cockroach nodded his head repetitively, indicating that he had understood the instructions. He cleared the common red beetles from the medicine cabinet, and stowed the plastic cartons inside.

The Pradera bobbed along up the right bank of the Amazon, heading upstream towards the great river’s source. The size and current of the river were truly daunting. Even in the Upper Amazon, it’s at least a mile wide. Richard said that, at any one time, a fifth of the Earth’s fresh water is flowing through the waterway.

Gradually the log dugouts, the shanties, and the fishermen’s canoes fell away. The grumble of the outboard motor broke the silence. I sat on the roof, filled with elation. The journey had at last begun.

Richard smoked three Marlboros, and drank four cups of cold Nescafé. I sensed that his body needed fueling up with toxins before it was ready to take command.

“We’ll go up to the village of Tamshiyacu,” he said, “that’s where we’ll pick up Francisco, my shaman.”

Cockroach dragged the cooking gear and some of the food to the front of the boat, next to the driver’s seat. He and the others were busy staking out their space. I wondered where to sling my top-of-the-range, British-made, jungle hammock. I didn’t want to be too close to the engine, the toilet, or the cooking area. Eventually, I found the perfect spot, put it up and climbed in. A second later there was a distressing ripping sound, and I flipped onto the floor. Richard led the others in a bawdy round of laughter.

“That’s English tourist shit,” he said. “I told you to leave that crap behind.”

Cockroach probed about in one of the sacks. He pulled out three tins randomly. They contained tuna fish, butter, and condensed milk. I watched from a distance as he opened them with a steak knife, tipped the contents into a saucepan, and cooked for twenty minutes. Then he filled the pan to the top with water, cracked in five eggs, stirred, and announced that the soup was ready.

As it was dished out, I asked Richard if Cockroach had cooked before.

“He’s used to fresh food, not this tinned shit,” he said.

Just before dusk, the Pradera moored at the jetty of Tamshiyacu. A man was standing there ready to catch the rope. He was about five feet four with a mop of tangled hair, spindly legs and an over-sized mouth. It was filled with the kind of joke teeth you get in a Christmas cracker. He looked like a child, but must have been in his forties, and was naked except for a pair of Y-fronts and a buttonless shirt. Piled up next to him was an assortment of pots, cloth bags, and a metal-framed rocking-chair. He tossed up his belongings, the chair, and came aboard.

When he had greeted the American, he lit a home-made cigarette. It was as thick as a cucumber. The lower deck was engulfed in smoke.

“Meet Francisco,” said Richard.

“How did he know to rendezvous at the quay?”

Richard took a puff of the giant cigarette.

“He saw us coming in a dream,” he said.

I was about to make some condescending remark, when the shaman handed me a package. It was wrapped in newspaper. I opened it up. Inside was a hammock. Francisco whispered something to the Vietnam vet” and pulled up his underpants. Their elastic had gone.

“What did he say?”

“He saw your crap limey hammock in his dream too,” said Richard, ‘so he brought you a new one.”

Having seen many awe-inspiring feats of illusion performed by Indian godmen, I am suspicious when it comes to suggestions of mind-reading or one-in-a-million coincidence. But, grateful for the hammock, I told Cockroach to unload some canned food and supplies for the shaman’s family.

“Does he want to wear some of the clothes we’ve brought as gifts?”

“Francisco doesn’t need clothes,” said Richard, coldly. “They cramp his style.”

I told the Shaman of our planned route up to the Pastaza region, in search of the Shuar. He obviously hadn’t seen our journey in his dream. I know this because he grasped his unshaved cheeks, and emitted a high-pitched shriek.

“¡Muy peligroso! So dangerous!” he yelled.

“That’s why we’ve brought them gifts... we’ve got lots of shotgun shells,” I said.

“The Shuar don’t use guns,” riposted Francisco. “They use poisoned darts and black magic. Everyone knows they eat the brains of babies and shit on the bodies of their victims. They’ll murder us and shrink our heads!”

Making excuses, the shaman hurried from the boat. As he scrambled to the jetty his Y-fronts fell down. Richard watched, disappointed at the sight of a grown man fighting with his underwear.

“If he’s so frightened, let’s leave him behind,” I said.

“We’re not going another inch without Francisco,” Richard replied. “The Shuar have no respect for anyone who travels without a shaman. And besides, he can cook up some nerve agents along the way.”

The veteran disappeared into the darkness of Tamshiyacu, returning an hour later with Francisco. I was unsure how he’d tempted the shaman to join the expedition. It may have had something to do with the food.

Cockroach squatted over my titanium Primus stove, cooking meals back to back. As soon as the pot of buttery tuna soup had been gobbled down, he set to work on another creation. Like an artist experimenting with color, he dolloped equal amounts of corned beef, porridge oats and strawberry “Fanny-brand” jam into the pot. Then, gritting his teeth, he stirred the concoction over a moderate heat until it bubbled.

Before serving, he threw in a handful of uncooked rice.

As we choked down the dish, the Pradera moved away from the jetty, heading upstream once again. It was now pitch dark. High above us, the stars glinted like light shining through the holes of a sieve. I lay on my back on the boat’s roof and gazed upwards. The Southern Cross heralded the way into uncertain waters. I cannot remember ever feeling so overcome with expectation. And I was filled with fear. The realm of giant insects, venomous reptiles and die-hard tribes, the jungle and its kin prey on the ignorant. I was dreading the journey ahead, but the trail of feathers had brought me here. And, besides, Richard Fowler – who seemed to roar with laughter in the face of danger – had promised to keep me alive.

At least, I pondered, we were now steering a clear and definite course. I had come far on my haphazard route since the auction of shrunken heads: across the mountains, the desert, and into the jungle. I cautioned myself to have courage, and to take the jungle in my teeth. Soon, I hoped, we would meet the Shuar, and fly with them... and reach conclusions.

Francisco and Richard climbed up onto the Pradera’s roof and smoked another giant cigarette. The shaman thanked me for the food which, he said, was the best meal he had ever eaten.

“This is for you,” he said, taking a string of beads from his neck. I held them in the candlelight. They were curious, odd-shaped beans, flame-red on one side and black on the other. Richard explained that the beads were from the bean-pod of a jungle tree, and that shamans prize the spot where they fall to earth. There is no place, they say, more sacred to take ayahuasca.

“They’re wayuro seeds,” said Francisco. “You must wear them until you reach your home. They’ll protect you. Do not take them off.”

“Why not?”

Francisco spat into the water.

“Take them off and you will meet death,” he said.

My first night on the Amazon was among the most uncomfortable I can remember. Part of the problem was getting used to the hammock. But far worse was the jungle night-life. The boat was tethered to a low-hanging tree in the early hours. I shone my flashlight into the water and made out the eerie orange reflection of alligator eyes. But the caimans were not an immediate danger, unlike the nest of furious hornets hanging above the boat. As they struck, we desperately untied the boat and sought a safer spot upstream.

Slouched in my hammock, I tossed from side to side, thinking about the entire food chain’s eagerness to consume me. As I tossed, the wayuro seed necklace choked me. I would not have taken the shaman’s threat seriously, but I’m a sucker for superstition.

Pulling my sleeping bag over my head, I prayed for daylight. But Cockroach’s plat du jour was surging through my intestines at an alarming pace. My bowels were warning of impending catastrophe. I had to relieve them without delay. In one distraught movement I unfurled myself from the sleeping-bag, put on my shoes, and shuffled down the boat.

Getting from my hammock to the loo involved a complex obstacle course. First, there were the hammocks, which criss-crossed the body of the boat like nets on a tennis court. After the hammocks lay the oil drums and water barrels, which had to be scaled. Beyond them was the Johnson 65, which was passed by walking a narrow plank of wood running beside it.

After the plank, you found yourself in a snug, faeces-caked corner alive with cockroaches. This assault course was made even more difficult by the lack of light, and the uncertainty of a rogue bowel. Once squatting in that vile privy, you had to avoid falling down through the hole into the water. Flick on the flashlight and you’d be dive-bombed by insects.

On that first night I made the somber pilgrimage to the end of the boat five times.

Long before dawn, Cockroach began preparing breakfast. He switched on my yellow camping lantern and banged about with the pots. I think he wanted to show his enthusiasm for the job. Richard got everyone else up before 6 a.m. The Vietnam training must have had something to do with his insomnia. He disliked it when people slept too much. He’d sit on the roof all night, rocking back and forth in a chair, smoking Marlboros.

I unzipped my sleeping bag, and checked the air for insects. All was clear on the bug front, so I dangled my legs over the hammock’s edge and fumbled for my shoes. Rats had feasted on the left one in the night. I told Cockroach to get rid of the rats at all costs.

Up on the roof, Francisco was gulping down his second helping of tuna and jam casserole. He said he’d had good dreams. The river mermaids would leave us alone.

“Mermaids!”

“Sí, las sirenas, the mermaids,” he said, licking the bowl with his tongue. “They are evil. But I will keep them away.”

“What are they like, these mermaids?”

Francisco lit his pipe and looked over at me in surprise. I must have been the only person on the Amazon who didn’t know about the mermaids.

“They have blonde hair and teeth made of gold,” he said. “If they fall in love with you, they lure you to their kingdom under the water. You can never escape. There are so many fishermen who live down there.”

I asked Walter if he’d heard of the mermaids.

“Por supuesto, of course, Señor,” he said, “everyone knows of them. One of the fishermen who worked on this very boat fell in love with la reina de la sirenas, the queen of the mermaids. She sent hundreds of fish for him to sell, then she took him.”

“Where is he now?”

Walter pointed over the edge.

“Ahí abajo, down there,” he said.

Every so often we passed a cluster of thatched houses set back from the water’s edge. Children skipped through the grass, their mothers ground clothes against the rocks; their fathers checked the fishing nets. They used green nets at night and white ones during the day, as the latter reflected the moonlight, making them visible to fish.

The main body of the Amazon carried an endless stream of flotsam. Entire tree trunks and branches frequently careered towards us. I had been keen to travel by day and by night, but the risk of running into a submerged tree trunk made night travel very hazardous indeed.

Walter said we had already got through ninety gallons of petrol, and that we’d have to load up with more at Nauta. It was impossible for so much fuel to have been used in less than a day of travel, but I couldn’t prove any wrongdoing. When we reached the small village of Nauta in the early afternoon, I said I would spend my remaining money on petrol. After that it was Walter’s job to get us to the Pastaza and back. I passed around my empty wallet. If we ran out of fuel up river we would all suffer.

Richard told me that pilfering supplies on a jungle expedition was considered as a perk. César, he said, had bought nineteen sacks of merchandize for a reason.

“You’d find a few cans of tuna missing here, a sack of salt or a load of soap there,” he said, “and before you know it you’d have nothing left. César would have had it all skimmed off and sold en route.”

The theft of supplies has been the bane of expeditions for centuries. When Stanley, the 19th century explorer, set off on his great African voyages, he’d take enough food and supplies to sink a ship. He knew very well that within months, even days, eighty per cent of the stocks would have disappeared. Only a regime of total ruthlessness, he said, could prevent failure. Any man found stealing was slapped in chains and fed on gruel. Taking Stanley’s example, I proclaimed that anyone found stealing would be left on the river-bank.

While waiting for fuel at Nauta, I sent Cockroach to spend my last ten soles on a high quality mosquito net. The one I’d brought from London was no good for the Amazon, where anopheles mosquitoes are unusually small.

When we had loaded aboard 430 gallons of fuel, Walter climbed into the pilot’s seat and started the engine. A crowd came to the quay to see us off. It was made up of Nauta’s football team, dressed in their blue and green strip, five or six prostitutes from the local bar, and a class of schoolchildren. One of the kids ran down to the boat and handed me a chicken as a gift.

I stayed on the roof for most of the morning. The Amazon had become the Marañón. Near Nauta the Ucayali River merges with the Marañón to form the Amazon proper. It has 2,300 miles to run before reaching the Atlantic. The water had already traveled so far from the snow-capped Andes that its reserves of oxygen were depleted. As a result, some species of fish had adapted. We saw them jumping out from the river to breathe the air. One large fish even jumped onto the deck. I said we should throw it back. But Walter took it down below where Cockroach was cooking a great pot of bony stew. The fish was cleaned and tossed in. I couldn’t understand how the crew could so enjoy such disgusting smelling fare.

“This is much better than that tuna fish,” said Francisco. “It’s fresh food. We like fresh food.”

When I asked Cockroach what he’d cooked up, he pointed at my feet.

“Las ratas que se comieron sus zapatos. The rats which ate your shoes,” he said.

*

From the roof of the Pradera there was a fine view of the jungle. The trees were laden with creepers, their overhanging branches shrouded in moss and lichens. God knows how far back the undergrowth extended. It was as alien to me as it must have been to the Spanish Conquistadors when they first sailed up the Amazon, four and a half centuries before.

The plants, the animals, and the people they found, defied all that the Spanish understood. They had come in search of El Dorado, a fictitious metropolis, rumored to be made from gold.

They had heard the legend of a great monarch, called El Dorado, whose kingdom lay in the Andean Cordillera, in what’s now Bolivia. At festivals, he would adorn his naked body with gold dust, before washing it off in Lake Guatavita. As he bathed, his adoring subjects would scatter jewels and sacrificial offerings into the water. From 1538, the Spanish combed the area, but found no trace of El Dorado. For some insane reason they moved the search to the New World’s most inaccessible region, the Amazon jungle.

At the same time as the frenzied search for the golden city was taking place, the Conquistadors came upon another legend. Francisco de Orellana was traveling down the Amazon River in 1542 when his party was attacked, he said, by an army of wild women, wearing grassy Hawaiian-type skirts. The Greek poet Homer had been the first to record the myth of a ferocious tribe of female warriors, known as Amazons. They were thought to reside in the Caucasus. But over the centuries the myth moved westward. Some said the Amazons lived in Scythia and Cappadocia, then Africa and, after that, the Americas. Of course we now know that Orellana wasn’t attacked by warrior women at all, but men in grass skirts.

When Orellana reported to Phillip II of Spain, the King assumed he’d been attacked by the Amazons he had read about in Herodotus’s narrative. Accordingly, he named the waterway after them, and not Orellana.

With their armour, horses and heavy weaponry, the Spanish must have been a hopeless sight in the jungle, a place they knew as El Infiero Verde, The Green Hell. Hundreds were struck down by terrible diseases and were left where they collapsed. Around them the jungle seethed with life, waiting to devour those who survived. The imaginations of tortured European minds ran wild. Few expected to escape with their lives. Cannibals and poison arrows were just two of many fears. No one had ever seen people as savage.

Sir Walter Raleigh’s work The Discoveríe of the large, rich and bewtiful Empyre of Guiana contains a startling woodcut illustration of two headless figures, with faces on their chests. Raleigh said they were “Ewaipanoma” people, whose “eyes were in their shoulders and their mouths in the middle of their breasts.”

Such legends persist. In her book Witch-Doctor’s Apprentice, Nicole Maxwell wrote of a common belief – that the USA was conspiring to take Indians from the jungle. Their bodies were melted down, and their fat, which was skimmed off, was taken away as a key ingredient in making atomic weapons. The practice, she said, was known in Peru as Pishtao. Maxwell’s book was first published in 1961, about the time when nuclear weapons were on everyone’s minds.

But she links the story to a much earlier legend. In the 16th century, lard was used to polish the Spanish armour, to ensure that rust didn’t set in, especially important for soldiers in a tropical climate. One tale, passed from generation to generation, told how the Conquistadors were unable to find any pigs to make lard. Instead, they captured some Indians, killed them, and melted down their corpses to obtain fat. I was impressed that the legend could have continued for more than four hundred years, transmuting over time.

When Cockroach had finished washing out his cooking pot, I asked him if he’d ever heard tales of Indians being boiled up for fat.

“Yes, it is true,” he remarked earnestly, “my mother told me when I was a child not to go in the jungle after dark. She said the Sendero Luminoso, the Shining Path, took children and boiled them up. They dipped their bullets in the fat.”

NINETEEN

Two Wishes

Two days further up the River Amazon we reached New York.

Despite the ambitious name, it was little more than a collection of thatched long-houses, with a tin-roofed church. The hamlet was a short distance north-west of the Marañón, up the River Tigre. We got down onto the muddy river-bank and greeted the chief. He was a fragile looking man with rounded shoulders and a pronounced limp. I told him we were going to the Pastaza, in search of the Birdmen.

“A Shuar man used to live near here,” he said, “in a maloca in the jungle. But he disappeared, about three months ago.”

New York was arranged around a square of grass, at one end of which stood a home-made goal post. Most villages we visited were laid out in a similar way, with a football pitch in the middle. All Amazonian men were football mad. On the Tigre, Sunday-best no longer consisted of feathered capes and grassy skirts, but of a Manchester United football strip. No one asked why I, who had so much, didn’t wear football gear all the time. But I knew that in their heart of hearts they were desperate to know.

The chief said he would take us to the Shuar’s maloca, but first he directed us to his own home. It had a raised bamboo floor, open sides, and a densely thatched roof. His hunting dogs sounded the alarm as we approached, but with a whistle he called them to heel. Three or four stools were borrowed from neighbors’ houses. Thanking the chief, Richard, Francisco and I sat down. Cockroach and Walter had instructions not to leave the Pradera under any circumstances.

A meal of roasted meat and yuca, manioc, was set before us. The chief shouted at his wife to bring more food. She was a lazy woman, he said, and had been nothing but a burden since the day of their marriage. In time he hoped she would drop dead. Then he would find another wife, a woman with big breasts. The chief picked out a hoof. He passed it to me. I gnawed at it spiritedly. Had he been married long?

The chief thought for a moment or two.

“Demasiados años, so many years,” he said. “I cannot remember how many. But our wedding was before we built New York.”

“You built the village?”

“Yes, with the missionaries’ help. They have given money for so many villages along the Tigre – Brussels, Egypt, Los Angeles, Great Britain and others, too.”

Glance at any detailed map of the region and many familiar names jump out at you.

Richard chewed a chunk of the roasted meat. He asked our host what he knew of the Shuar tribe. The chief spat through a hole in the floor.

“Shuar will cut off your heads,” he said. “They’ll eat you, just like you’re eating that meat.”

“Are they cannibals?” I asked.

“Caníbales, cannibals? They’re much worse than cannibals. The Shuar are Devil Worshippers.”

“Even the Shuar man who lived here,” he said, “he pretended to be a good man, but we all knew the truth.”

Richard, Francisco and I waited to hear that truth. The village chief called his wife to bring more meat. He cursed her for being so slow, for having small breasts, and for bearing him no sons.

“Señor Rogerio was seen talking to the Devil,” he said with wide eyes. “He would walk in the jungle at night. He had no fear because Satan was protecting him. It’s fortunate that he disappeared.”

“Where did he go?”

“He vanished one night,” said the chief subversively. “I think the Devil took him to Hell.”

After the meal our host swore at his wife again. She was ugly and no better than a thief, he said. Were he not a Christian, he would have slit her throat years ago. Lucky for her, the missionaries had converted them. He put on his Wellington boots and led us across the football pitch, with its lop-sided goal post, and into the jungle.

Wellingtons have a special place in an Amazonian man’s wardrobe. Although far below a Man United football strip, they are regarded highly. No one could understand why I chose to wear handmade leather hiking boots when I could obviously afford Wellingtons.

The curtain of green descended with tantalising effect. Twenty feet beyond the football field we were lost in another world. A realm of fallen tree trunks and shadows, bottle-green moss, lichens and leaves the size of louvre doors, spanned out before us. High above the canopy shielded out the rain, pierced by only the harshest streams of light.

Francisco and the chief tracked expeditiously through the undergrowth. Richard, too, moved swiftly. Clearly an expert in jungle matters, his confidence mirrored my unease. He was a walking pharmacopoeia as well. There wasn’t a single plant or creature he couldn’t identify by both Linnaean and dialect name. At first I’d mistaken his camouflage dress and military background for signs that he enjoyed the ways of war. But, although he had been trained as an élite soldier, I soon realized that he was a naturalist at heart. He would only ever kill an animal for food, and he delighted in the preservation of life. Above all, he basked in the mysterious ways of nature.

“It’s stuff you just can’t make up,” he often exclaimed.

“What is?”

“Nature!”

He pointed to a tarantula cowering on a branch.

“It looks like just another tarantula, doesn’t it?” he said, “but it’s in a coma, paralyzed by the venom of a tarantula wasp. The wasp lands on the top of the spider and bores a hole into it, in which it lays its eggs. When the eggs hatch they’ll feed on the live tarantula.”

I had to agree that even my over-vivid imagination was stumped by such nature.

Taking my place again behind Richard, I struggled forward, tripping clumsily like a convict bound in chains.

After five minutes of stumbling I had lost my bearings altogether, and was gripped by a great thirst. Sweat drenched me. Richard called back, telling me to lift up my feet, and to not fight the forest, but to become part of it. Every twig, every branch, vine, and pool of stagnant water, every ant, spider, and rotting trunk of wood, he said, were part of the system. Each element was linked to and dependent on the next.

How could I ever become part of such a thing? A European is an intruder in the jungle. He can’t help it. He’s ignorant of the sounds, the smells, the sense of unity – just as the precise detail of a modern city would be lost on a tribesman from the forest.

As we tramped through the undergrowth, Francisco gathered leaves, flowers and sections of vine for his potions. He squirrelled them away in a cotton bag, tugging up his Y-fronts as he walked. I asked why he was only taking a few leaves from each plant.

“Lore of the jungle,” said Richard, “take only what you need. Anyway, that shit’s so strong it’ll blow your mind.”

“What is it?”

“Hallucinogens,” he said dreamily, “lots of hallucinogens.”

Eventually we reached the hut where Rogerio had lived. It was set in a narrow clearing, edged with banana trees. The roof was tattered and had let in the rain, causing the floor to rot and grow moss. An enormous termite mound had developed nearby. The chief said that it was a sign.

“A sign of what?”

“That el Diablo, the Devil, has been here.”

In all his years in the jungle, Richard hadn’t heard of the superstition. To him termites were an invaluable commodity. He strode over to the mound, kicked off its top with his boot, and grabbed a fistful of the insects.

“Rub “em on your skin,” he said, “and you’ve got yourself a natural insect repellent. They live on tree resin which keeps the bugs off.”

He ground a handful of termites onto my bare arm. Their mashed wings and bodies soon rubbed away, leaving my skin smelling of the sticky resin.

Richard led me to the house. We climbed up onto the raised stage. A few of Rogerio’s belongings were still in the house. His machete, a blue and red checked shirt, a box containing ammunition, and a pair of Chinese-made Wellington boots. His gun appeared to be missing.

“Those are good boots,” said the chief.

“Why don’t you take them, or any of the other stuff?”

He laughed.

“We do not need the possessions of Satan,” he said.

“Are you certain he was a Devil Worshipper?”

“Of course,” said the chief of New York, “that’s why he disappeared.”

“Maybe he died while out hunting, after all his shotgun isn’t here.”

The chief jumped down from the house.

“His gun might be missing,” he said, “but no man would go hunting without his rubber boots.”

Back on the Pradera, Cockroach reported that the Titanus giganticus beetles had been fed. He had put them on a diet of rotten wood, scraped from the underside of the boat’s floorboards. The chicken had been tied to the ledge, with her bottom pointing over the edge. She was being fattened up to eat. I named her Rosario. She was, after all, now a member of the crew.

We gave the chief of New York some old clothes, some rice, soap and sugar and a couple of tins of tuna fish. He and the other villagers came to see us off. A last request was that we drop one of the young men off at the next village, so that he could play football there. He climbed onto the boat, dressed in a luminescent green and yellow outfit. He was barefoot and carried a wicker basket. In it were his precious football boots.

From New York, we had decided to continue on the River Tigre, before journeying west up the Corrientes River to the Pastaza. This route would act as a shortcut, taking us deep into the backwaters of the region. The Amazon’s tributaries had much more wildlife than the main river. But my route planning came out of worry over the fuel situation. As ever, we were getting through far more petrol than expected.

I spent the afternoon sharpening my Alaskan moose knife. One never knew when it might be needed. Richard swore loudly when he saw the nickel-coated blade.

“It was very expensive,” I said. “It’s sharp enough to skin llamas.”

He swayed back and forth on his chair.

“Seen any llamas around here?”

I changed the subject.

“What about Vietnam?” I asked.

To anyone else it might have been a strange question. But to a man who’d lived through the Tet Offensive and the Battle of Hue, it was a subject of endless possibility. Richard never volunteered his tales of battle but, if asked, he would talk.

“I volunteered for “Nam,” he said, “cos I wanted to be in the deep jungle. As far as I was concerned it was an all expenses paid, two year snake hunt, with unusual and additional hazards thrown in.”

“Weren’t you frightened?”

“You bet your ass,” he said. “I was shit-scared. On the first day I was dropped into a combat situation. It was early “68, just before Tet. I knew the only way I was going out of there was in a body-bag. The first two weeks on the ground were the worst of my life.”

Richard paused to light a Marlboro.

“Then I came to a realization,” he said. “As I was gonna die I’d better make the most of the time I had left. You bet I was sorry when buddies were killed but, hey, all I can say is that I’m glad they took the bullet rather than me. We all went to “Nam with the same fuckin’ odds of survival. Sure I was brainwashed,” he said. “Too much John Wayne shit.”

Our conversation was interrupted by Cockroach, who said dinner was ready. He had cooked a pot of spaghetti. Like virtually everything else prepared in his kitchen, it was boiled in oil. He served my helping in my lightweight aluminium mess tin. I’d spent hours teaching him to disinfect the tin and my green metal cup with rubbing alcohol. Richard had shown me the merits of 70 per cent clinical alcohol. He washed his hands and toothbrush in the liquid all the time. It protected him, he said, from common jungle diseases, as well as from chiggers.

The six-legged chigger fly was a constant threat. It burrows under the skin of an unsuspecting victim where it reproduces. The larvae hatch under the skin, causing excruciating pain. Dousing the body in alcohol prevents visits from the chigger fly. Nicole Maxwell had her own special way of keeping the pest at bay. She would dab bright red nail varnish on her skin, to prevent the larvae from hatching out. God knows what she was doing taking nail polish into the Amazon.

For a squeamish landlubber like me, life aboard the boat was one of hardship. But before I knew it an entire week had gone by. I had no idea how much further we had to proceed. Nor did anyone else. As the days passed, life on the Pradera entered a well-structured routine. Richard would sit up on the roof, rocking back and forth, smoking. When his supply of Marlboros ran out, he turned to Francisco’s stock of mapacho. Most nights the shaman and he would smoke themselves senseless. Then Francisco would lead him on a spiritual journey, with the aid of some jungle decoction. They hardly ever slept. Before dawn,

Richard would be up, prancing back and forth on the roof, practising ryuku kempo, an Okinawan martial art based on pressure points. He rarely came down into the body of the boat. He liked to watch the jungle, which he called “the biggest widescreen TV in the world.”

Walter was usually at the wheel, although everyone took turns from time to time. Throughout the day and late into the night, Cockroach spent his time cooking. The others regarded his cuisine as nothing short of Amazonian Cordon Bleu. They mistook quantity for quality. I was constantly worried that the supplies would run out. Some of the meals used more than twenty cans. Richard was keen to give the crew fresh food. He didn’t want them becoming even bigger wimps than they already were. The thought of fresh food, which meant roasted jungle rodents, made my stomach turn. It was my greatest worry of all.

One day mingled into the next, each one a cycle of rain, heat, and darkness, filled with animated insect wings. The boat became infested with cockroaches. The cook said it was my fault, as the rats had always eaten the roaches. When the rats were turned into stew, the boat’s fragile food chain had been broken.

Safe in the medicine cabinet, the precious Titanus giganticus beetles were growing even bigger, weaned on their diet of rotting floorboard. Rosario the chicken was getting plumper as well, a fact frequently drawn to my attention by the crew. I refused to let them kill her.

Hour after hour I lay on my hammock, staring zombie-like at the rot above my head. I’d never come across such decay. But the floorboards were not the only thing to be rotting. The nightly storms had drenched us, and the boat’s limited size meant that airing out belongings was near-impossible. Fungus and mildew now covered everything. All my stuff was decomposing – my clothes and sleeping-bag, my self-inflating mattress, hammock, and the Force Ten high altitude tent, were all scarred with mold.

When I was not watching the rot, I was sprinkling my feet with powder. Most of the jungle expeditions I’d read about had failed as a result of trench foot. Another concern was genital infestations. The best explorers have been stopped dead in their tracks by genital lice. So I doused the area frequently in 70 per cent medical alcohol, and hoped for the best. With time, I got used to the burning sensation.

Each night I would cocoon myself in the mosquito net, and dream of a fast food restaurant far away from the Amazon. I’d almost given up ever coming to a firm conclusion about primitive flight. Such thoughts were the preserve of a well-fed person wearing clean clothes.

Now we were on the Rio Tigre, there was a wider variety of fauna to be seen. The jungle was flooded – higher than at any time in living memory. Hundreds of trees on the river-bank had fallen, the soil softened by the high water. Many of the mammals had moved inland to higher ground. But in the trees howler monkeys, three-toed sloths and brightly colored birds were abundant.

Cumulus clouds hung above the jungle, growing darker until they could hold not another drop. When they ripped open, they drowned us in rain. As afternoon became dusk, the coral-red sky was reflected in the water, heralding nightfall. Before the last rays of sunlight had dissipated, Venus became visible. Although so far away, she was a companion, a point of familiarity.

Like those who lived on the river’s silent banks, I started to go to bed at dusk, waking at dawn. The idea of staying up past 7 p.m. seemed insane. Only a madman would have wanted to expose himself to the night’s onslaught of bugs.

One evening, as he steered a course along the right bank of the Tigre, Walter told me about a wish that had come true.

“Nine years ago,” he recounted in his brusque voice, “Yo era muy desgraciado, I was a very unhappy man. I had no work. My family were almost starving. Then my wife left me, taking our sons. She’d found out that I was going to prostitutes, and wanted a divorce. I didn’t know what to do.”

Walter steered the boat to the opposite bank.

“I had even thought of killing myself, or running off to Lima. But a friend suggested I visit a shaman who was known to him. He lived in the floating village at Belen. As he owed my friend a favour, he said he’d give me a consultation for free. So, one night I went to see him. I explained my problems: that I had no work and a wife who was angry. The maestro told me to take two beans and bury them in the dirt under the floor of our house. I was to water them every morning with lemon juice. When a month was over, he told me to dig up the beans and eat them one at a time. But, before doing so, I was to make two wishes.

“Although it sounded mad, I did as the shaman had told me. I had no other choice. A week went by. Then another. I was just going to curse the maestro’s name, when a remarkable thing happened.

“My wife came back home with our three sons. She said an angel had come to her in a dream and told her that I was a good man. The angel said she should give me another chance,” continued the motorista. “But the next week,” he said, “an even more incredible thing happened.”

He stopped mid-story to steer the boat across the river.

“What! What happened?”

“Well, I used to go to the market and sell bracelets made of beads and that sort of thing,” he said. “It made me almost no money, but kept me occupied. One day, an American woman from Tennessee asked me for directions. We started talking and she bought all my necklaces. She was very friendly. Before she went back home, I gave her my address. The next month she wrote me a letter. She said she wanted to help me. She asked that I write to her once a week, and in return she promised to send me a check every month. That’s how it’s been for nine years,” said Walter. “Her checks come as regularly as clockwork. It’s meant I’ve been able to send my boys to school instead of having them work with me. But best of all,” he said, “it meant I could buy the Pradera.”

“I thought you said this boat was only six months old!”

Walter swept back his hair with his hand.

“She’s six months and a few years,” he said.

*

Since the first night, when I had experienced the trauma of the Pradera’s loo, my digestive tract had seized up. We had now been on the boat for nine days, and my colon was plugged with an assortment of wretched meals. My medical kit – supplied by London’s Hospital of Tropical Medicine – didn’t contain anything to relieve constipation, only diarrhoea. At first I kept the problem to myself. After all, it’s a private matter. But Richard and the others were fascinated by my lack of bowel movements. On a close-knit river expedition, one man’s bowels are another man’s business.

Cockroach brewed me a cup of coffee, made with seventeen tablespoons of Nescafé. I slugged it back in a single gulp. The crew clustered around me. The only reaction to the coffee was a surge of adrenaline. Walter suggested I drink a pint of vegetable oil. Holding my nose, I did so. Still no result. Francisco said I was a fool for resorting to caffeine and oil as laxatives. He could, he said boastfully, cure my dysfunction with a simple two-part treatment.

First I was to drink a strong tea made from the bark of a tree. He called it mololo. Only later was I able to have the bark identified. Known in the West as “Cramp Bark”, it’s been used medicinally for centuries in North America. Tribes like the Meskwaki and the Penobscot once prescribed it to cure chronic constipation. It’s curious that Francisco used a North American plant.

The mololo tea, which was quite pleasant, warmed me to the shaman’s expertise. I was rather looking forward to the second half of the remedy. He said it would take time to prepare, but should be ready some time that afternoon. I went to my hammock to stare up at the rot.

In the early evening the shaman came down from the roof. He was holding my green mess mug. It was full to the brim with a hot liquid. Francisco said he’d just finished making the medicine and I was to drink it at once. Following his instructions, I took a deep draught of the liquid. It was very salty and had undertones of tobacco.

“¡Bébetelo! Drink it up!” said Francisco impatiently. “If it gets cold it will not work.”

I asked him what the beverage was made from.

He didn’t reply.

“Quickly, finish it,” he barked.

“Tell me what’s in it?”

Still the shaman refused to answer.

“If I tell you what it is, you won’t drink it!”

Cockroach looked up from a pot of boiling oil.

“Es su orina. It’s his urine,” he said blankly, “you’re drinking Francisco’s urine.”

TWENTY

River of Lies

After the coffee, the oil, the mololo tea, and half a cup of the shaman’s urine, I spent most of the night huddled over the Pradera’s putrid hole. It was unpleasant, but I was very pleased that the state of constipation had been reversed. Richard was on the roof lying out under the stars. He had taken an extra-strong dose of sanango, his favorite nerve-agent.

“You oughta try it,” he said cheerfully, next morning. “I’ll get Francisco to make you up a batch. It clears your head like nothing else.”

“I’ve had enough of Francisco’s medicine,” I replied, “and, after all, I’m saving myself for ayahuasca with the Birdmen.”

Richard wasn’t listening. Sliding his knife from its sheath, he poked at something in the rot above my hammock.

“That’s all we need!” he exclaimed.

“Horrendous damp rot,” I said. “Never seen anything like it.”

“Not the rot... the nest.”

“Nest?”

“Arachnid. Looks like it’s just hatched. In a day or two this boat’ll be running with wolf spiders. It wouldn’t be a problem if we had some fuckin’ rats on board!”

Some say that these hairy brown spiders get their name from their wolf-like technique of chasing and hunting their prey. Few others of the species can match their extraordinary speed. Richard showed me how to identify them by their unique arrangement of eyes. He was an arachnophile of the first degree. Wolf spiders have three rows: the lowest has four small eyes, the middle has two much larger, and the upper row has a pair of medium-sized ones.

The plague of spiders was bad news, but was just one of many problems. Our stores of food were going down fast, largely because the crew were eating five cooked meals a day. A valuable sack of flour had mysteriously fallen overboard in the night. And a bottle of bleach had ruptured, ruining most of the sugar. Meanwhile, Walter was complaining that the Johnson needed a new propeller. Without one, he said, we’d be scuppered upstream.

In the cooking area, Cockroach brought another problem to my attention. The boat was sinking. A two-foot crack had developed in the starboard side. I suspected endemic wet rot had something to do with it. I ordered the crew to take it in turns to bail water. They’d have to bail day and night. Fortunately, Richard had a roll of industrial tarred tape in his pack. He said it was “core” equipment. The bailing and the tarred tape kept us afloat. But they were a short-term solution.

Vietnam training had taught Richard the importance of core equipment. His few possessions were super-durable military issue. Army stuff was cheap and tough. He scorned anything made in the private sector, calling it “civilian shit”. All my luggage fell into that category. In his book, civilian shit was for wimps, like canned food. Everything he owned from his watch-strap to his underpants was army issue, and came in camouflage green. Camo’ mimicked nature, he said, and nature was all that mattered.

When he was digging out the tape, Richard emptied the contents of his canvas pack onto the boat’s roof. I was struck by the cleanliness and good condition of his gear. He had a US army flashlight with a Morse code button, a fork which doubled as a knife and can-opener, a US army water bottle filter system with drinking straw attached, and a pint of medical alcohol. There was a chipped tin cup as well, and an 18-inch carbon steel machete, a coil of nylon rope, a condom, and two fishing hooks.

“The condom’s for carrying water,” said Richard sternly. “That is, unless I meet a cute Señorita in the jungle.”

I asked about his boots. He rarely took them off.

“They’re standard US army Altama jungle boots,” he said. “They’ve got a valve which pushes out the water when you walk. They’re the only boots worth having out here.”

“Is US army gear the best?”

“Some of it,” he said, “but the French make the best clothing. Look at these pants I’m wearing, they’re herringbone, with reinforced knees and double-lined pockets. They’re fuckin’ handmade!”

Richard had found a last packet of cigarettes at the bottom of his pack. He tore off the cellophane wrapper and was soon inhaling the air of Marlboro country. The shaman was squatting nearby. He had been working on another batch of sanango, but now he was going through his own bag of loot.

Francisco was the Pradera’s magpie. He’d scoop up any unwanted junk he could find, and tuck it into his voluminous duffel bag. Amongst other things, he was collecting empty tin cans, dead batteries and strands of my used dental floss. When I asked why he needed such things, Walter murmured “Para la magia”, for magic. Francisco’s unconventional dress sense and his strange behaviour had made a great impression on Walter and the cook. They were terrified of him.

The Vietnam vet” had great respect for Francisco, but he didn’t fear him like the others did. They were an odd couple. The shaman would sit at Richard’s feet in his droopy Y-fronts, talking about the shamanic world. He would scowl when Richard lit up a Marlboro. To Francisco, tobacco was a sacred product. He was disgusted that such a hallowed plant could have become an icon of addiction and branding. Francisco despised Marlboros and everything they stood for. But he viewed me with even greater contempt. As far as he was concerned, a man who didn’t smoke at all had no soul.

On the thirteenth day, with the boat going slower and slower against the current, the crew begged Richard for some fresh food. They were, they said, sick of eating canned gruel and spaghetti boiled in oil. They hated each meal more than the last, they claimed, and were only choking them down to please me. This failed to explain why they were eating so much. Richard told Cockroach to fetch an empty sack. He then instructed Walter to tether the boat on the river-bank. Taking his machete, the sack, and a bottle of drinking water, he set off into the jungle.

Cockroach abandoned bailing duty and slunk down the boat to slaughter Rosario. I managed to wrestle him to the ground just before he snapped her neck. She would remain alive as long as I was there to protect her. Francisco was sprawled out at the back of the boat on the drums of petrol. He lit his pipe and was soon lying in a fug of smoke. I kept to the other end of the Pradera, hunting for wolf spiders, which were now crawling everywhere.

Three hours after setting off, Richard marched back out from the jungle, the white nylon sack strung over his shoulder. Thanking him, the cook dragged it below. I sat on my hammock and watched as the contents were pulled out one at a time. First came a black-feathered bird. I wasn’t sure what it was. Then, a paca, a giant nocturnal rodent, with bucked front teeth and clay-colored hair. It had been gutted with Richard’s knife. Swishing away the flies, Cockroach delved again into the sack. He pulled out a pig-like peccary, then a mahasse, a rodent whose meat is a delicacy in the Upper Amazon.

That night Cockroach cooked up a rich stew made from fresh meat. Walter had six helpings of it, and Francisco ate so much that he had to throw up over the side. I’d been concerned that the meat would go to waste, but it was soon finished. Cocooned in layers of mosquito netting I resisted the stew. Instead, I boiled a pan of water and cooked up a sachet of Lancashire Hot Pot.

Walter went on and on about the propeller and the crack in the boat’s side. But I ignored him. There was nothing I could do except to commandeer Francisco’s cauldron for bailing. The shaman asserted that the pot was a magical tool. If it were used for bailing we would, he said, end up at the bottom of the river. As it was we were heading that way, so I told him to leave me alone. The village of Grande Bretagna, Great Britain, was marked on the map. With a name like that, I hoped it might have a resident mechanic. I buried my head in Flornoy’s book Jivaro: Among the Head-shrinkers of the Amazon, printed in 1953, and tried to forget about my troubles.

Before the Spanish arrived in the Americas, I learned, the Incan Empire bordered the Shuar land on its west. Just before the Conquistadors arrived, the Inca, Huayna Capac, led his armies against the Shuar. The year was 1527. The Incas were routed so fiercely that they were forced to flee back to the Andean highlands. As a way of saving face, the Inca declared the Shuar unworthy of being his subjects.

A few years later, in 1549, the Spanish commander Fernando de Benavente made the first European incursion into the Shuar territories. He had heard of the jungle’s abundance of gold, and was still eager to find El Dorado. His party is thought to have followed the Rio Upano, south from its Andean headwaters, down to the junction of the Rio Paute.

Benavente had planned to establish a town in the region, but fled when he realized that the locals were about to butcher him. However, another Spanish expedition did found two settlements nearby, in about 1552. Crazed with gold fever, they came across some gold deposits. Soon they had built mines, enslaving local tribesmen to work them.

The Spanish forced the Shuar laborers to pay a tax in gold dust which, supposedly, was to be sent as a gift for King Phillip III’s coronation. The levy grew greater and greater. Finally the Shuar could stand no more.

One night, in 1599, a group of them slunk into the Governor’s house and pulled him half-naked, from his bed. They dragged him by his hair into the courtyard, and said it was time for them to pay their taxes, as they had been told to do. Emptying the Spanish gold reserves, the Shuar leader, Chief Quirruba, ordered his warriors to melt down the gold in small crucibles.

Meanwhile the Governor was stripped naked and tied hand and foot. Once the gold was liquefied, his mouth was prized open with a bone and, one at a time, the crucibles of molten ore was poured down his throat. At first the Governor screamed, but his tongue was soon burnt away. The liquid gold passed through his body and out via his bowels, killing him in agony.

All around, the Shuar went wild with delight. They slaughtered most of the Spanish contingent and danced until dawn.

From then until the 1850s almost no white man dared to enter the Shuar lands. In 1767 a group of Spanish missionaries strayed into the region. They were presented with the skulls of their Catholic brethren, slain in a previous attack.

Francisco’s shouts drew my attention away from the book.

“¡Gran Bretaña!” he called. “We have arrived at Great Britain!”

I popped my head over the edge of the hammock. A boy was running along the river-bank. All he was wearing was a tattered tee-shirt decorated with the triumphant face of Mohammed Ali. But I could see no sign of Great Britain. The shaman pointed to three dilapidated shacks, one of which was missing its roof.

“That’s Gran Bretaña,” he said.

“But it doesn’t even have a football pitch.”

Ten minutes after mooring at Great Britain, we had established that no mechanic lived there. In fact, it was home to only two families, each with six sons. They had no work, they said.

“If only the oil mining company would come here,” said one youth, “like it has come to Trompeteros.”

“Where’s that?”

“Arriba, up river.”

“How far?”

The young man snatched at a fly.

“A day or two from here,” he said. “In Trompeteros everyone’s rich. The oil company gives them money, and the women are very sexy. They wear pink lipstick. And...” he continued, making sure his parents were out of ear’s reach,”... at Trompeteros they have a disco.”

As I thanked the young man for his information, his father came over. The man was in his forties. He had a wispy moustache, bucked teeth and an unusually flat nose.

“Life here in Gran Bretaña is very difficult,” he said softly. “We are poor people. There’s no school and no doctor. And the neighboring villages laugh at us, because we don’t have a football field.”

I sympathized with the man.

“We do not need help,” he said proudly, “but there is one problem which needs attention. We were expecting the missionaries to come, but they have forgotten us.”

I braced myself to be asked for money.

“My youngest son has a lump on his head,” said the man. “It has been growing very big, and we don’t know what to do.”

“If you would cut it off,” said his wife, “we would pay you what we can.”

We asked for the boy to be brought. Shyly, he came out of the house and into the sunshine. His name was Juan, and he was about six. Although shy, he was smiling. That is, until he saw our expressions. Nothing could hide our shock at seeing such a tremendous tumour. The skin around the growth had been shaved. Juan started crying when he saw how worried we looked. I told his father that it wasn’t anything too serious.

“Then will you cut it off?” asked the mother. “You must have a sharp knife on your boat.”

I suggested that we take Juan and her up-river, to Trompeteros, where the oil company would surely help. The boy’s mother was hesitant. She pushed her husband forward. He would come with us, she said.

Father and son stepped aboard the Pradera and we set off up the River Tigre once again.

The blurb on the back of my map said it was the crème de la crème of Amazonian maps. Richard and the others made great fun of it. They didn’t trust maps. As the days passed, I began to understand why. The few places which were plotted, were way off the mark. Most villages weren’t featured at all. I insisted that we stop regularly and get the locals to sketch us maps from their own knowledge.

Once I got back to Europe, I’d mail their drawings to the map company. The crew thought it was a crazy idea. They knew something I did not. In the Amazon no one has a clue what lies more than five miles in any given direction. More importantly, no one cares. The idea of mapping out an entire region or, for that matter a country, is an example of the Western mind working on overdrive.

The lack of accurate maps did not, however, prevent the art of speculation. Ask someone in the remotest village where Lima is, and they’ll give you an answer without flinching. “It’s two hours that way,” said one man motioning up stream. “Three days after Nauta,” said another, pointing the opposite way. No one would ever admit they hadn’t got the faintest idea. As in India or Central Asia, an Eastern form of hospitality was at work. To admit ignorance was considered impolite.

The end result was that this made navigation and budgeting for fuel virtually impossible. Worse still was the elasticity of truth. The goalposts never stopped moving. One minute Walter would boast he had plenty of fuel to get us back to Iquitos, and the next he’d say that we were down to the last drum. Cockroach claimed his grandmother was a Shuar chief’s daughter, then a few days later he was bragging she came from Guatemala. And Francisco was no better. At first he said he had four children, but then changed it to six.

Walter spoke for the others: “Mucho naka-naka, so many lies,” he said, running the wheel through his hands. “In Peru lying is a national hobby, it’s something to be enjoyed. Peruvian women like a man who can tell a big solid lie.”

“Why?”

Walter put his hand on his chin.

“They think it’s sexy,” he said.

Juan’s father said the lies were bringing disaster to the jungle.

“People have learned from the politicians,” he said. “They’ve learned that lies protect them... that the truth is a dangerous thing.”

I was touched by the man’s perception. He hugged an arm around his son’s shoulder, coaxing him to be brave.

“The missionaries taught us to believe in God,” he said. “They told us God will cure all our problems. Well, look at Juan, look at his head. Bibles and hymns haven’t helped him.”

Again, I tried to reassure him that the oil company would take care of little Juan. They would have a doctor who could treat his tumour.

Richard jumped down from the roof. He cast a disapproving eye over Cockroach and Francisco who had deserted their bailing stations and were playing cards. The shaman was taking alternate drags from a pipe and a mapacho cigarette. He cheated mercilessly and everyone knew it. But fear of his magical powers kept the cook from protesting.

While Juan and his father enjoyed a bowl of stew, made from the rank-smelling legs of a jungle pig, I sat on the roof with Richard. We watched the sun set. And, as we did so, Walter guided the Pradera west from the Tigre, down a narrower waterway, the Rio Corrientes. Its name meant “current”, although the river’s surface was as smooth as glass. Twisting and turning like a snake on its back, its banks were veiled in the thickest jungle we had yet seen.

“It’ll be a miracle if this is the right fuckin’ river,” said Richard. “Walter’s never been this far away from Iquitos before.”

“The boat’s leak has got worse,” I said. “If we don’t get to Trompeteros soon we’ll be in trouble.”

The Vietnam vet” put his hands to his mouth and made the solemn call of the squirrel cuckoo.

“Aukcoo! Aukcoo!”

As he rocked back and forth, the faint sound of a female echoed through the twilight.

“She’s in love,” said Richard. “You can always tell when a female’s in love. But they’re foxy little suckers – they like to keep you guessing. Just like women. You think you understand them and they go and do something stupid.”

Long before meeting Señorita Jane in Iquitos, Richard had been married. In the short time he’d lived in the United States since Vietnam, he had been married twice. His second wife, twenty years younger than he, was a former stage magician’s assistant.

“She did all that stupid shit with the doves and the juggling balls,” he said. “She had the tight skirts and the blinding smile. We’ve got the cutest little girl. We named her Harmony. That’s what our marriage was, Harmony. I delivered her. She popped out like a little paratrooper.”

Richard called out to the squirrel cuckoo again.

“Harmony’s all that matters,” he said under his breath.

Juan’s father asked which engine was powering the boat.

“It’s a Johnson 65.”

“A Johnson,” he said quietly, “a Johnson could get you to the end of the world.”

“We’re going to the Pastaza, to meet the Shuar,” I said.

The man replied without turning his head: “They’re dangerous people.”

“That’s what I’ve heard.”

“They’re the Antichrist,” he said curtly. “When they kill a man they drink his blood, and eat his kidneys. It’s human kidneys they like most. If the kidneys taste bad, they carve out the eyes and eat them.”

“Have you met any Shuar?” I asked.

The man didn’t reply. He hadn’t finished his rundown of Shuar cuisine.

“They like to eat caimans’ gall bladders, and dogs’ tongues boiled in urine,” he said with revulsion. “If you don’t eat the food they give you, they’ll poison you with ampihuasca.”

He asked why I was so interested in the Shuar.

“They fly,” I said. “They are Birdmen.”

Juan’s father swatted a baby wolf spider on his cheek.

“Ayahuasca... you are speaking of ayahuasca?”

I nodded.

“Es una medicina muy potente, it’s very powerful medicine,” he said. “Take it and fly like a great white jabiru stork. Your wings will take you to the other world. see wonderful visions. But ayahuasca can be dangerous,” he mused, “be careful, you must be careful!”

“Of what?”

“Cuidado con el aterrizaje, be careful how you land,” he said.

TWENTY-ONE

Gold Teeth

Trompeteros is a small town in the Upper Amazon whose reputation beats all the rest. Nestled on the north bank of the Corrientes River, the community surpasses even Iquitos when it comes to vice and depravity. Ask at the remotest jungle village and they’re sure to have heard the legends. They will tell you of the underdressed women, the chuchuhuasi liquor, and the discotheque.

For three days Walter, Francisco and Cockroach spoke of nothing but Trompeteros. They harped on and on about the taste of its gut-rot brews, the mapacho, and the supply of seductive under-age women. There was no question that their speculation couldn’t answer. Remarkable, I thought, considering none of them had ever been near Trompeteros before. I wasn’t interested in the vices available, but I’d heard that the town had one of the finest hotels in the Amazon.

As the Pradera navigated the remaining few miles up river, Francisco imparted a last piece of valuable lore. Go for the girls with gold teeth, he said. The more gold they have in their smile, the better they can satisfy a man in certain carnal ways. White teeth were a sign of frigidity. Walter agreed – sexual acumen and teeth went hand in hand. His wife, he boasted, had no white teeth at all.

We had been on Pradera for too long; shore leave was well-deserved. With the crew running wild after the gold-toothed women, I was uneasy that the boat might be robbed. Although much of the food had been ruined or already consumed, there was still valuable fuel and equipment, not to mention the Johnson 65. As well as guarding the Pradera, someone would have to look after the Titanus giganticus beetles, and Rosario, who needed regular feeding. Until the repairs were done, bailing also had to be done constantly.

The crew would take it in turns to stay on the boat. I drew up a roster and pinned it to the medicine cabinet. Anyone found abandoning bailing duty would go without food for two days. Richard and I were exempted. He wanted to go walkabout in the jungle, and I planned to spend my time ashore, ordering room service and taking hot baths. But before getting too comfortable at the hotel, I promised to take Juan to the oil company for treatment. I gave him a cherry-flavored lollipop with bubble gum inside.

Cockroach took the first shift to bail and keep watch. I’d cautioned him to protect the giant beetles beyond all else. Nothing was so important as their survival. If there were any problems, he was to defend himself with my moose knife. Walter went to look for a man to repair the hole in the boat’s side. He was desperate to get the repairs done quickly, so that he could hunt for gold-toothed women. Tying a bandanna over his head, Richard set off into the undergrowth. I asked when he would be back.

“When I’m ready,” he replied.

After making inquiries, I learned that Plus Petrol, the oil company, had its offices on the southern bank of the river. I took Juan and his father across in a dugout. We were received at a steel-framed jetty, and escorted into the plant. All Plus Petrol employees had identical yellow construction helmets and American-made Wellington boots. Everything they wore, or held, carried the gleaming Plus Petrol logo. They looked as if they’d stepped out of a TV commercial for their firm.

The oil plant was bordered on three sides by the jungle, and on the fourth by the Rio Corrientes. Three giant satellite dishes were clustered at one end of the area, beside the low tin-roofed residential quarters. Opposite stood offices, and beyond them an industrial complex. The man with a yellow helmet and rubber boots wrote our names on a clipboard. When he saw Juan’s tumour, he called his superior.

Two minutes later we were sitting in the reception area. A single door divided the two worlds. Outside lay the jungle: suffocating, damp, seething with life. Inside there was central air-conditioning, thick pile carpets and neon lighting. An American water cooler stood in one corner of the room, beside a potted jungle plant. On the coffee table were crisp copies of the New York Times, and Newsweek. In the background I recognized the hum of a photocopier.

Juan and his father were as threatened as I was comforted by the surroundings. They stood to attention when the bearded plant manager greeted us. He said that their doctor would take a look at the boy. A biopsy of the tumour would be rushed to Lima. When I thanked him, he pressed his hand into mine.

“Thank God you didn’t go to a doctor in Trompeteros,” he said.

“I didn’t expect there to be one.”

“Everyone in town is suffering from the same thing,” he said, “the quack rubs toothpaste on the infected parts.”

He roved a hand through his beard, muttering: “I doubt he’s ever treated a patient’s head.”

A concrete path formed the main street of Trompeteros. It being in the middle of the jungle, there were no cars. The path ran the length of the town, a total of about four hundred feet. Either extremity ended in foliage. At the path’s westernmost edge stood Hostal de Milagros, Hotel of Miracles. A man with leathery cheeks and swollen eyes stumbled from the entrance and down the steps. He was doing up his flies. On his face was a broad grin and, on his arm, a young woman. Her hair was pushed up in a bouffant style, her heels were high. All her front teeth were gold.

The hotel’s reception was decorated with a number of moth-ravaged leopard, panther and snake skins. A display cabinet above the counter was stocked with dark bottles of beer. I told the man in charge that I needed the best room in the house.

“¿Dónde está su mujer? Where’s your woman?” he snarled suspiciously. “Do you need one?”

He clicked his fingers and, before I could blink, three scantily-clad girls with gold teeth were standing in the doorway.

“You don’t understand,” I said, “I just want to sleep.”

The local beauties protested for a moment or two, before slinking away.

Room number three was basic, but a welcome change from a hammock infested with wolf spiders. The stench from the blocked lavatory, the lack of sheets, and the pool of dried blood in the far corner, were hardly worthy of mention. I sat on the bed, flicking the light switch on and off. Electricity was a great novelty.

In the stifling heat of the early afternoon, I found Walter and Francisco spending their savings at Trompeteros’s small emporium. It was packed from floor to ceiling with shiny merchandize. Everything was wrapped in crumpled cellophane. The usual supplies of Nivea cream and oxblood-colored boot polish were complemented by an array of more enticing products – imitation Barbie dolls, pink plastic hair clips, ping-pong balls and tubes of superglue. But the boat’s crew weren’t interested in cheap trinkets. They’d come for ingredients.

When I asked them what they were making, they looked at each other and cackled subversively. Walter said a man was mending the boat’s leak, but the work would take three days. This gave them some time. He turned to the shaman. They pooled their money to buy half a dozen bottles of Chinese ‘shanghai brand” body lotion, and a tin of Colman’s English mustard powder. Then they hurried away into the shadows behind the shop.

At the centre of the concrete path, past the boss-eyed barber’s stall and a makeshift bar, lay Trompeteros’s most celebrated feature – the disco. Widely acclaimed as the sleaziest establishment in the Upper Amazon, its bamboo swing doors were never closed to business. The single ultraviolet light never wavered, and the distorted music never waned. In the moist atmosphere a horde of lascivious gold-toothed women hunted for custom.

Outside the nightspot a boy of about five was sucking on a syringe. He said the doctor had given it to him. When his mother exited the surgery, opposite the disco, she cursed the physician. She said the medicated white cream he prescribed to all his patients didn’t do any good at all.

Further down the concrete path I came across a man touting giant Amazonian snails. He was cutting them up live to make ceviche. Beside him, another man was trying to sell some daffodil-yellow lingerie. He said it was imported specially from Paraguay.

I was admiring the size of the snails when a well-dressed man strode up to the salesmen, and handed them each a dozen red sachets. All over town the tomato-colored packets were being passed around. You could have as many as you wanted for free. Indeed, the more you were seen to take, the more praise you attracted. The sachets contained condoms.

The people of Trompeteros were a wily lot. Privately they frowned on using the prophylactics, but this didn’t stop them grabbing as many of them as they could. Men, women and children alike had found that a condom had a thousand uses. Food could be stored in them, and liquids carried; they made fine markers for fishing nets when filled with air, and they could be burned to keep insects away, or roped together to form a lightweight clothes-line. Some women used them to tie back their hair. And no child was without a home-made condom whistle.

The electricity, the running water, the condoms and the disco of Trompeteros were all made possible by the oil company. Without the multinational, the town would have shrunk back to being another insignificant village on the Rio Corrientes. And yet, everyone in Trompeteros despised the oil workers and their production plant. One man told me that they were low life workers from Argentina; another that they were polluting the river and killing the fish. A third, a haggard man resting on the steps of my hotel, revealed another reason to hate the oilmen. They were so snobbish, he said, that they wouldn’t sleep with the local women.

Back at the Hotel of Miracles, a line of beauties were waiting in the corridor outside my room. There must have been about thirty of them. All had mouths checkered by gold teeth. I feared that news of a foreigner had tempted the most infected of Trompeteros’s femmes fatales from the humid confines of the disco. But, as I edged down the hallway, none of them even looked at me.

They had been lured by room number four. Thinking no more of it I went into my room, flicked on the light, and got ready to go to bed. I tried to hang my shirt on a hook mounted high on the wall. But, to my surprise, the hook snapped off and fell onto the cement floor. It was then I realized that it wasn’t a hook at all, but the chrysalis of a giant moth.

I lay on the mattress coaxing my back to embrace the flat surface. Occasional sounds disturbed me from next door. I could have sworn I heard Francisco’s raspy voice through the wall. The thought of the chrysalis twitching with larvae disturbed me, too. But before I knew it, I was asleep.

By the time the sun had risen above Trompeteros’s pair of street lamps, a stage had been constructed at the centre of town. The boards of the podium were made from yellow mahogany, its backdrop was a screen of woven banana leaves. Once the stage was prepared, it was decorated with inflated condoms. Nearby, another team were rigging up speakers, and scrappy red bunting, strung together with yet more prophylactics.

I asked the barber what was going on. He looked at his watch.

“It must be carnival,” he replied, vaguely. “In Trompeteros it’s always carnival. Prepare yourself... the fiesta is very wild.”

An hour later, a horde of people was massing at the far end of Trompeteros, dressed in a multiplicity of costumes. Mothers and wives were prodding the menfolk into line, as the last stragglers arrived. Peruvians like nothing more than to put on a fabulous parade, which they can do at the drop of a hat. It’s a way of showing off their finest clothes, and is a great booster of morale.

A band shuffled forward, their home-made uniforms tattered by years of wear, the dents in their instruments reflecting the light. As they assembled, silence prevailed.

Then, with the clash of cymbals, the jamboree began.

The theme was the jungle. Many had dressed as tribal warriors. The painted faces, feather crowns and blowpipes suggested that it wasn’t fancy dress at all. There were animals, too. One man had dressed as a toucan, another was wearing a panther skin, and a skinny woman was wrapped in a cape made from sloth skins. Behind her was a sinister young man. He was dressed as a giant rodent.

After the rodent came a clutch of gold-toothed girls in seductive clothes. They had come as themselves, day and night dancers from the disco. And, after them, followed a wave of men and young boys dressed like Rambo. They wore the ripped black clothing of guerrilla fighters, and carried home-made guns. Their faces were blacked with charcoal, and they had bandannas tied around their heads. They had come as members of the Sendero Luminoso.

At the front of the crude parade, was a little girl of about nine. She was set apart from all the others, for she’d spurned the pageant’s theme. I recognized her as the type of little girl that every normal child loathes. Her hair, adorned with pearls, was neatly tucked behind a silver comb, and her prim little ballet shoes were free from dirt. She wore a velvety alabaster tutu, lace gloves, spotless white stockings and bright red lipstick. As she marched, her miniature hands juggled a silver baton faultlessly. I prayed that the giant rodent would nudge her into the mud.

When the parade ended, the tribal men paced off into the jungle to go hunting; the loose women slunk back into the disco,-and the giant rodent meandered away home. The little prima donna pulled the lace gloves tighter up her wrists. Then she barked a string of orders to her brow-beaten father. I wondered what her future might be in Trompeteros.

I took a stroll down to the Pradera, where a robust carpenter was at work fixing a brace into position over the crack. Cockroach still hadn’t been relieved by Walter or Francisco. He said they were up to no good. Even before stepping off the boat, they had been hatching a plan to woo the sleaziest women in town.

“No sensible girl would be interested in them,” I said, “They’re both uglier than Quasimodo.”

“This isn’t like other countries,” said Cockroach, apologetically. “Here in Peru, the ugliest men get all the most beautiful women. It’s a fact.”

This may have explained why I had attracted advances from so many Peruvian women. As I pondered the thought, Cockroach suggested we let the beetles out of their boxes for a few minutes, to stretch their legs. I commended him on the idea, after all they had been locked away inside the medicine cabinet for days. I stood well back as he tapped out the huge specimens into a shallow cardboard box. Although still juveniles, their size was truly astonishing.

When I got back to the hotel, the queue of women waiting outside room four had grown. It now snaked round the corner, up the stairs and through the reception. I asked the manager what was going on. He put a hand on his groin and murmured “¡Milagros! Miracles!”

Having been unable to find Walter or Francisco, I slumped on my bed. That night a jungle beauty pageant was going to be held, I’d been told, in the centre of Trompeteros. I knew that the event would be sapping to the senses.

As my cheek pressed deep into the stocking-stuffed pillow, I heard noises radiating from room four. Sounds of arousal were mixed with instructions from a rasping, familiar voice. It sounded like Walter.

But, as I reasoned it, no self-respecting woman would have given him the time of day. Then Cockroach’s words came to mind. I stepped out into the corridor and called Walter’s name. The sea of gold-toothed girls parted as the room’s door opened no more than a crack. A frenzied eye jerked about, straining to focus. It was Walter’s eye. Before I could ask how he was attracting such large numbers of local women, he volunteered his ruse.

“Una cura, a cure...” he whimpered, “we are curing the women.”

“We?”

“Francisco and me.”

“He made a medicine, a cream... and I’m giving it to the women.”

I asked if, by any chance, it contained ‘shanghai-brand” body lotion, and Colman’s English mustard.

Consulting with his accomplice, Walter said that those were just two of the many ingredients. Francisco’s head poked up.

“We’re curing the disease,” he said, proudly. “These women all have a disease.”

“And what good is Chinese body lotion and mustard powder at curing their afflictions?”

The shaman slapped his hands together and spat.

“Una cura milagrosa y gratis, it’s a free miracle cure,” he said, beaming, “after all, this is the Hotel of Miracles.”

I might have dismissed Francisco’s potion as a sham, but the last free miracle medicine I had come across had miraculously cured me of asthma. It was being dispensed in the old city of Hyderabad, India. On the first day of the Monsoon each year, the Gowd family, who live there, hand out a remedy to anyone suffering from chest infections. Having developed asthma myself, I took advantage of the physic, along with more than half a million others, from all over India.

Everyone who turns up for the miracle cure makes their way to the Gowds’ two-storey whitewashed house. They each bring with them a live murrel fish. After days of queuing, they hand the fish to one of the Gowd brothers, who fills the creature’s mouth with a glob of foul-smelling yellow paste. The afflicted person opens their own mouth very wide and, before he knows it, the amateur physician has stuffed the live fish down his throat. Words cannot adequately describe the hateful nature of the experience.

Despite the lack of medical evidence and basic hygiene, I have not suffered from asthma since gulping down that innocent fish. Perhaps,

I thought to myself as I left the hotel, there might be something in Francisco’s miracle cure as well!

An old woman moved between the rows of chairs, wiping each one with a rag. Her hands were trembling, her brow beaded with sweat. Nearby, her granddaughter was skipping with a home-made condom rope. Last minute preparations for the beauty pageant were underway. A great banner was suspended over the stage, colored lights and a crude sound system had been rigged up. A thousand condoms were strung in clusters, as balloons, adorning the stage. And, now that the audience’s chairs were clean, the woman hurried home to change into her best clothes.

A hard-boiled egg seller could hardly contain his eagerness.

“The women of Trompeteros are the most beautiful in Peru,” he imparted with a toothless smirk. “But beware! You may go mad when you see their soft skin, or when they seduce you with their eyes.”

My informer displayed his eggs in a wicker basket, putting the freshest ones at the bottom. Licking his broad tongue over his palm, he mimicked the local beauties’ seductive skill.

“After tonight forget your wife and your country,” he disclosed, “want to live here forever. That’s el embrujo, the spell... the spell of Trompeteros.”

As the blood-red riot of dusk defused over the Rio Corrientes, the audience slipped from the shadows and took their seats. So familiar were they with the ritual, I suspected beauty shows to be a common feature of Trompeteros life. Gone were the wild costumes of the parade, replaced by respectable clothing and wetted-down hair. In my grubby, half-rotting shirt I felt distinctly under-dressed.

The hard-boiled egg man edged up and handed me a free egg. He asked me to advertise its good taste loudly. If a foreigner was seen enjoying his wares, he said under his breath, everyone would want one. I sunk my front teeth into the egg and groaned with pleasure. Then the show began.

An officious man swept up onto the stage and grabbed the microphone. He went through an elaborate routine of testing the acoustics. This involved pressing his lips to the microphone and making bird calls. When the technical tests were at an end, the official announced the evening’s program. The most beautiful women from the state of Loreto had been gathered, he said, and were waiting on the other side of the banana leaf screen. They would show off two costumes – formal wear and natural. But first, as a warm-up, members of the audience were invited to take part in an amateur talent show.

Thirty gold-toothed women pushed their offspring up towards the podium. Even in the jungle the glare of the limelight is strong. The compere selected a dozen children at random and lined them up. Before they demonstrated their talents, he introduced the pageant’s sponsors. A luscious woman in a scarlet sequinned top swaggered onto the stage. She held up a tomato-colored sachet, and announced the benefits of Inca-brand condoms. When it came to protection, she said, Inca-brand was the only name to remember. Tossing a handful of the sachets to the crowd, she made way for the young actors.

Were they not starved of even amateur entertainment, the audience might have protested at the performances which followed. There were a series of gawky song and dance routines, three mimes, two Michael Jackson impersonators, and a boy of about six attempting to walk on his hands. Instead of hissing the performers from the stage, the spectators applauded with great verve. They voted the Michael Jacksons as the winners.

After another word from the sponsors, the insect-loaded light-bulbs were dimmed. A backing track of savage, techno music echoed around us, as the first of the beauty queens stepped from behind the screen. In Trompeteros formal wear meant swimsuits. The first belle was wearing a striped gold bikini, her slender legs ending in a pair of white stilettos. Across her chest was a sash bearing the name of her village, Cuchara, which means ‘spoon” and from her wrist dangled tag number one. As soon as they saw her, the audience went wild. The men whistled, and the women whooped.

The second girl prowled like a panther onto the stage, blowing kisses to her admiring fans. Her leopard-skin print swimsuit was complemented by a cowry shell necklace, and a pair of dangerously high-heeled white shoes. Behind her, contestant number three emerged. Unlike the others, she was thick-built and bulky, with a tremendous neck, and hands the size of pudding bowls. The hard-boiled egg man tapped me on the knee and pointed. She was one of his best customers, he said. The audience appreciated the display of obesity. They applauded furiously.

The contestants kept coming, ever more seductive in their swim-suits and white high-heels. When all nine beauties were on the stage, they marched in a circle pouting, and blowing kisses to the swooning men below. Every few minutes, the compere would lower the music and proclaim the high quality of Inca-brand condoms. The beauties on the stage, he declared, were examples of clean-living girls who always used an Inca condom.

After the formal wear, the girls slipped away to change into something a little more casual. Contestant number one reappeared a moment later dressed in a real leopard skin, with red face paint and a spear. Gone were the white high-heels, replaced by bare feet. The next contestant modeled a fiber skirt, her hair embellished with a simple feather crown. As they paraded round the stage, each one would mime out a jungle scene – gathering water, carrying bananas on her head, or hauling in a fishing net. The formal costumes had been a big hit, but nothing like the natural wear.

To the audience, every girl was a sensation. But the routine of contestant number six mesmerized them beyond words. First, she danced across the stage, wriggling her hips and stroking her thighs. Then, dropping to her knees, while still dancing, she pulled a leaf pouch from her back and emptied its contents – a smattering of white-specks – onto the stage. I craned my neck to catch sight of what was going on. The others knew the routine. It was their favorite. Clasping her arms behind her back, the girl writhed forward like a limbo dancer, lowering her face until her lips touched the boards. As I watched entranced, she sucked up the white specks and swallowed them. The spectators were ecstatic. Unsure of what she was eating, I asked the man sitting beside me.

“¡Gusanos vivos!” he exclaimed. “She’s eating gusanos.”

I made him explain what a gusano was exactly.

He scrunched up his face, disturbed at my lack of basic Spanish.

“Gusanos vivos,” he repeated, “live tree grubs.”

TWENTY-TWO

Wawek

Seven days after disappearing into the undergrowth, Richard arrived back at the Pradera. His fatigues were caked in mud, as when I had first met him. On his walk in the woods he had, he said, tasted the scent of nature on his lips. He had drunk water from the cipó d’água vine, had eaten fresh brazil nuts, and had spotted a young ocelot prowling through the trees.

“A man who has trod softly on the jungle floor,” he said with uncharacteristic poetry, “has the blinkers pulled from his eyes. His lungs breathe purity, and his mind is honed to right and wrong.”

So surprised was I that Richard had uttered such a sentence, that I jotted it down. As I scribbled in my notebook, Cockroach handed the veteran a boiled mahasse’s leg. The dish was one of Richard’s favorites. He clambered back into position in the rocking chair, and chewed at the wild pig’s hoof.

The week-long sojourn at Trompeteros had given me time to dry my clothes and regroup. I was ready for another bout of tortuous river travel. With the beetles stowed in the medicine chest, Richard on the roof, and Cockroach frying tsampunta, grasshoppers, in a pan of oil, things were getting back to normal. Only Walter and the shaman were missing, unable no doubt, to prize themselves away from the Hotel of Miracles. I sent Cockroach to hunt down his shipmates.

When Walter finally slunk back onto the Pradera, he was boasting of his philanthropic work to rid Trompeteros of venereal disease. I dreaded to ask how many women he had ravaged in the process. The oil workers’ liaisons with the gold-toothed girls were, he said, responsible for the spread of great disease. Similar claims had been made against the rubber barons and their laborers, a century ago.

But thoughts of the girls were now far from Walter’s mind. He was more interested in getting me to foot the repairman’s exorbitant bill. I let him inspect my empty wallet. In the Amazon, a journey’s financier is responsible for covering every cost.

“No one keeps money in their wallet,” Walter said knowingly. “In Peru everyone puts their cash in their shoes.”

I tugged off my rat-gnawed shoes. He and the others poked about under the insoles. Nothing. They searched the bottom of my sleeping bag. All they found was mildewed underwear.

Reluctantly, Walter called for Francisco to fire up the engine. On the tenth jerk of the starting-cord, the Johnson 65 lurched into life. The river-bank was soon masked in dense, oily blue smoke. As it dispersed, I made out three figures standing at the water’s edge. They were each holding laundry bags. All three were young women. The youngest one, who couldn’t have been older than fifteen, was asking for Walter.

She and the others begged the motorista to take them on the journey. They would work aboard the boat, they said, and would tolerate any discomfort as long as they could be with him, the man they loved. I wondered if I was hearing right. Walter was hardly a fine example of manhood. Cockroach nudged me in the ribs.

“See what I was telling you,” he said, “the most ugly men in Peru get all the women.”

Walter told the girls that he would return. He didn’t know when, or how, but he would come back to Trompeteros. Nothing would stand between them. It was a poignant moment. I was almost touched by Walter’s promises. I asked Cockroach to give the girls a couple of mahasse legs each. It was one way of disposing of the vile-smelling meat.

Without pausing any further for pleasantries, Walter pulled back the throttle and steered the Pradera towards the left bank of the river. Three black vultures circled above us, a grim omen of things to come. Cockroach and the others had no interest in such signs. They waved back to the gold-toothed girls, and wished them luck. I sensed that the disco’s depraved atmosphere would soon erase their memories of Walter.

The boat was now so infested with wolf spiders that you had to check every spoonful of food before putting it in your mouth. The cockroaches tended to keep back, but the wolf spiders – wolfies as we called them – would jump suicidally onto your spoon when it was raised to the lips. The rafters were swarming with them. There were so many that the shaman suggested reintroducing rats back onto the boat to curb their numbers.

Two days after pushing off from Trompeteros, Francisco jumped from his string hammock and ran up and down the roof, squealing. I supposed he was just having a bad reaction to the food. But Richard recognized the outburst.

“He’s seen something,” said the vet”. “He’s had a premonition.”

“About what?”

The shaman froze and plunged his fingers into the front of his underpants. “The Shuars,” he said. “We are near them. There’s danger The Shuar have sent a dart to harm us.”

I would have ignored the warning, that is if I hadn’t already read about the Shuar’s bewitching techniques. In their society, bewitching shamans are called wawek. The reference books said they were usually the richest people in the village, as everyone gave them gifts. You can’t do too much to stay on the good side of a wawek. Usually, a Shuar shaman could swallow a little tobacco water, then regurgitate a tsentsak, a magical dart. Part live and part dead, such darts are the most feared of all shamanic tools. If hurled at someone, they can pass right through his body. Oblivious that he’s been bewitched, the victim drops dead soon afterwards.

When a shaman wants to bewitch someone from a distance, he can use the help of the wakani bird. Acting as a spirit-helper, it will carry the dart and toss it at the victim on the shaman’s behalf.

Most shamans in the Upper Amazon conserve one aspect of their power as a thick white phlegm. Kept in the upper part of their stomachs, the phlegm is said to contain magic darts and spirit-helpers, used in curing or bewitching. It can be regurgitated at will, and can even be drunk by a shaman’s pupil, when a master wants to transfer power to the apprentice. Francisco boasted that his phlegm was more powerful than any other; he could create limitless supplies of it. Given the amount he smoked, this seemed hardly surprising.

He said that he’d seen the Shuar’s darts pierce our bodies. To us they were invisible, but he – with his special shamanic perception – could see them lodged in our chests. The darts were in all of us. When

I asked him what he could do, he stuffed a pipe with mapacho and filled his lungs with its sable-colored smoke.

“He’ll smoke the darts out of us,” said Richard. “And later, when the boat is lost in the darkness, we’ll take sanango.”

The thought that we were at last entering the country of the Shuar, boosted my own morale. I kept thinking back to Dr Cabieses’ office, with its fine shrunken head, and the talk of allegorical flight. Had the doctor not coaxed me to continue, to seek out the Birdmen, I would not have been sailing up the Corrientes in a rotting, spider-infested boat. Nor would I have been duped by César, or have crossed paths with a Vietnam vet.

I lay out on the roof. On a long journey, I mused, the line between resounding success and unimagined failure is no broader than a hair’s breadth. I prayed that the Shuar, my beloved Birdmen, would welcome us, and initiate me with a flight on ayahuasca. I prayed, too, that the crew would stick by me. Their loyalty was always in question. But my greatest fear was of offending the proud warrior tribe. For this reason, I read and re-read the two books about the Shuar, and memorized as many points of etiquette as I could. The list of don’ts was long: don’t mix with the Shuar if you are sick; don’t refuse to eat their food, however grotesque; don’t ask too many questions, touch a child’s head, discuss the river, or show the soles of your feet.

Between the 1930s and “50s, a wide variety of books and publications were written about the Shuar. Most dwelt sensationally on the tribe’s achievement in shrinking heads. Some masqueraded as works of anthropology, but even they contained pictures of their tall, white authors posing with a tsantsa.

For thirty years, any amateur explorer worth his salt hurried down to Shuar country, to pass around Lucky Strikes and get his hands on the shrunken heads. Such men came from all kinds of backgrounds. Some were socialites or treasure hunters, others former insurance salesmen or bankers’ clerks. I had long since resigned myself to the fact that, as a collector without a collection, I wouldn’t come across any tsantsas in the jungle. There were none left.

Despite the collective obsession for head-shrinking, very few explorers – amateur or professional – bothered to understand Shuar society. It wasn’t until decades later that anthropologists grasped why heads were shrunk at all. The trailblazers had come for a freak show – a true life Ripley’s Believe It 01 Not: shrunken heads for the sake of shrunken heads. They claimed to have found rare examples, too, including Caucasian, Negroid, and Chinese tsantsas, and even entire shrunken bodies. While the world yearned for newer and stranger shrunken exhibits, taxidermists’ workshops worked overtime.

Thousands of fake tsantsas clutter the shrunken head market, today. Take a look at one of the internet auctions and you find them. Most are crudely made from goat or monkey skin. Study the real thing carefully and you soon notice the tell-tale signs of a fake. Most have skin which is too leathery and hairy to be human; their noses lack nasal hair, and their ears are poorly sculpted. But at the turn of the last century a few taxidermists across the Americas were making superior fakes.

Procuring heads from morgues in the poor parts of town, they shrunk them expertly. This probably explains why there are so many fake Negroid tsantsas. Later they invented a provenance and sold them as rare artefacts to leading museums and private collectors. Genuine tsantsas always have the lips sealed with thorns or by pins, made from the chonta palm. Those which have been honored at tsantsa feasts, and are fully complete, have long cotton strands hanging down from the mouth (different from the scrawny strands of twine on fakes). Most also have a hole at the apex of the head, for a cord. Genuine examples tend to have oily complexions, and are lacking facial hair. This gets singed off during the shrinking process.

Up De Graff, in his book Head Hunters of the Amazon, talks of an expert taxidermist in Panama who had shrunken human heads, and even entire bodies. One of them, he said, measured no more than twelve inches in length. Flornoy also mentions a shrunken body, that of a Jesuit monk. The story goes that the friar upstaged a Shuar shaman by healing patients whom he had been unable to cure. In a ‘sacred frenzy, drunk with naterna, the Shuar denounced the Christian, murdered him with ‘savage passion”, before shrinking the man’s entire body.

As far as the Shuar are concerned, it would be sheer folly to shrink the head of a foreigner. There would never be occasion to do so. The reason is the soul. The head of a victim is shrunk so that the man who cut it off isn’t followed by the victim’s musiak, his “avenging soul”. The tsantsa itself isn’t regarded with much reverence for it is a means to an end. The Shuar traditionally believed that only they and neighboring tribes had souls. Foreigners were soul-less and so, as far as the Shuar were concerned, you didn’t have to protect against an avenging spirit if you killed one. The idea of a genuine white man’s tsantsa, is therefore unlikely in the extreme.

As we progressed at walking pace north-west up the Corrientes, the river became increasingly narrow, twisting more with every mile. The banks were abundant with flora. Giant punga, kapok trees, clung to the water’s edge, their branches spread-eagled over the river, their red pods ripe and ready to fall. Some still had their magnificent ivory flowers, which Richard told me were pollinated by a species of fruit bat.

The sunshine of mid-afternoon was so bright that I was unable to sit on the roof. I lay in my foetid hammock, trying to ignore the wolfies, which scurried across my chest like rats running from a cage. At my feet, Cockroach was boiling up a toucan he’d traded with someone. Although uncertain why, I was surprised to see that the bird’s meat was blue.

Richard wasn’t discouraged by the bright light. From his vantage point on the roof he broke the silence, calling Walter to bring the Pradera to an immediate halt. At first I thought he’d spotted a sandbank, although this was unlikely as the river was so high. I shouted up to him.

“Dolphins,” he called back. “Dolphins at three o’clock.”

I climbed up onto the roof, screwed up my eyes and peered off the starboard side. Through a break in the kapok trees, Richard had glimpsed a lagoon. In it he’d seen the ridge of a dolphin’s back.

There was only one thing the crew feared more than mermaids – dolphins. As soon as they heard the word delfin, they started pleading. Cockroach protested we’d all die if the creatures saw us,-and Walter cried out that his brother-in-law had been taken by dolphins on the Rio Nanay, while trying to kill one. Many fishermen wear love charms, he said, made from the dried genitals of a female dolphin. If the fisherman touches a woman while wearing it hidden under his shirt, she’ll fall in love with him. His brother-in-law had been taken by the dolphin princess before he could kill her and make a pendant from her genitalia. Now he lived under the waves, a prisoner in the dolphin realm.

After Walter’s outburst, Francisco piped up, urging us return to Iquitos.

“The Shuar have sent dolphins to kill us,” he blurted, “they’re a sign, un mal augurio, an ill-omen.”

“Nonsense!” I barked. “I’m sure learn to like them.”

The shaman froze me with a deranged stare.

“They’re demonios, demons,” he said. “They will kill us.”

Richard delved into his camouflage bag.

With the crew still protesting, he told Walter to take off his precious Wellington boots, and steer the Pradera through the waterway into the lagoon. With great reluctance the motorista complied.

From his camouflage bag, Richard had taken out a large black Walkman with a built-in speaker. He seemed abashed at owning such a thing. I had never seen him using it.

“What do dolphins love most?” he asked me.

“Fish.”

“Well, other than fish?”

I shrugged.

“They love ZZ Top,” he said.

Once the boat’s engine had been cut, and the frenzy of ripples had calmed, Richard clicked on a ZZ Top cassette, set the Walkman at full volume, and dropped it into one of Walter’s Wellington boots. Leaning over the edge of the boat, he held the boot’s foot under the surface of the water.

“Waitin” for the Bus”, a hit ZZ song, vibrated out through the water. By the third track, Cockroach was frantic. He had taken the miniature silver crucifix from around his neck, and held it to his lips. Francisco was crouched over the titanium Primus stove, setting fire to toucan feathers. Dolphins abhor the smell, he confided.

But the burning feathers did little to keep the animals away. By the fifth track, the slender dorsal fin of a gray Amazonian dolphin was cutting through the water towards us. A moment later, Richard noticed another swivelling about on the port side.

Had I not witnessed it myself, I would not have believed the extent of the crew’s terror. Walter poured a cup of petrol over his head. He suggested I do the same. Dolphins, he claimed, hate petrol even more than burning toucan feathers. But I didn’t want to escape from them.

Richard and I eased ourselves into the cool water. Despite my fear of piranhas, I swam towards the middle of the lagoon. The smaller of the pair circled me, diving below the surface time and again. It swooped through the water like a swallow darting through the late summer air. Again and again it passed us, racing at full speed with the other, before peeling away and doubling back. The force of its sweep, and the vacuum which followed it, sucked me down below the surface. As it brushed me I felt its sleek rubbery skin on my hand, and saw the rows of scars which covered its back. Like scratches from a set of long fingernails, the scars marked the dolphin’s place in the group’s hierarchy. I was struck that anyone could equate such a peerless creature with evil, or would want to cut out its genitalia and wear it as a pendant.

We had left the Walkman aboard the Pradera. Even though the music had stopped, the dolphins continued to play. The smaller one charged me repeatedly, careering to a stop inches from my face, cackling through its blow-hole. A third one appeared. It was not like the first two – it wasn’t gray, but pink.

Much larger than the gray dolphins, it didn’t have a dorsal fin, only a low ridge along its arched back. River dolphins once thrived in many of the world’s great rivers – including the Mississippi, the Ganges and the Nile. But the pink variety of the Amazon, known to fishermen as boutu, are regarded as the most ancient species of river dolphin. Their color, still a mystery, may be derived from their diet, like that of the flamingo, which turns pink through eating shellfish.

Richard and I swam across the lagoon, the dolphins lunging through the water either side of us. Their movements, precision, and urge to communicate, were captivating. With the sun so brilliant above us, shining on the lagoon’s mirror-like surface, I could have swum there all afternoon. The veteran eventually called me back to the boat. It would be dangerous, he said, to stay in the water too long.

“Piranhas?”

“No,” he riposted, “not piranhas, they’ll only come if they sense blood.”

“Then what’s the danger?”

“The camero fish. It’s very inquisitive... it swims up the body’s orifices and that attracts piranhas.”

Once back at the boat’s side, I tried to pull myself up onto the deck, but was too weak to do so. There was only one solution. I had to dive down and swim up the lavatory hole, which was lower, but slippery with excretion.

The moon was full that night. It hung above the jungle like a tremendous ring of gypsum. By its ivory light we navigated a passage up the right side of the river. Walter was fearful that the Shuar might attack. After all, we were now firmly in their territory. Rather than pull in and spend the night nestled up to the trees, I insisted we continue to the next village.

Shortly after nine p.m., Cockroach spotted a row of shacks in the distance, set high above an embankment. I gave the order for the gifts to be made ready. I took warning from Fitzcarraldo’s example: when dealing with the Shuar, be prepared. Cockroach trawled through the bags. He took out a selection of clothing, odds and ends of food, shotgun shells, Fanta bottles, and the Vicks Vapour Rub. He made up three or four individual gift bags.

Once we were in line with the village, Walter killed the engine and drew the boat up to the bank. Unease gagged us all. We had heard so many stories of the Shuar and most ended with the visitors getting their throats slit. Now we had arrived at our first Shuar village. I wondered how we ought to progress. Richard said the best course of action would be to lie low during the night.

I climbed onto the roof. My Maglite was at the ready, but I dared not use it. As I scanned the shacks, the dark roofs absorbing the moonlight, I heard something. It was singing, shrill and harmonious. I motioned to Richard.

“The ancient Shuar songs,” I croaked. “I’ve read about them! They sing of the heads they’ve taken and the glorious battles they’ve fought.”

The Vietnam vet” rubbed a hand across his face. Even he appeared to be moved by the songs. He was just about to say something, when I noticed the slender form of a man running down the steep embankment towards us. I strained to see him clearly. He was carrying something. I asked Richard to get his revolver ready; he retorted that threatening behaviour would be suicide.

“Let’s wait and see what happens,” he said.

The man called out to us well before he reached the boat.

“What’s he saying?”

Richard didn’t reply to me, but called out to the man in Spanish, inviting him to come aboard. Cockroach put the boarding plank down. Stooping his head in respect, the young warrior welcomed us to the village, which was called San José. He had brought us a gift, he said in broken Spanish. The villagers would be honored if we accepted it.

The warrior passed something to Richard. It was about the size of a small dog and was covered in scorched fur.

“What is it?”

Praising the man’s hospitality, Richard ripped off an arm and handed it to me. It ended in a miniature hand, with fingers that were scrunched up into a fist.

“Get your teeth into that,” he said, “and make it sound like you’re enjoying it.”

“What is it, though?”

“Roasted monkey.”

TWENTY-THREE

Ancient Ballads

During the night I had a dream. Actually, it was more of a nightmare. I dreamt that the chief of the Shuar village was displeased with our gifts. Canned food, Vicks Vapour Rub and Fanta bottles were, he said, useless products from a world preoccupied with comfort. He craved a commodity far rarer than the ones in our nylon sacks: he was longing for a set of American dentures. The chief had seen a poster for Gone with the Wind and wanted Clark Gable’s smile. American was best, he said. So angry was he that we’d not brought dentures, that Richard, Cockroach, and I were tied up with ayahuasca vines. Then our heads were chopped off with a flint-edged axe. Francisco and Walter only managed to escape the brutal treatment by promising to treat the village’s venereal disease.

I woke from the fantasy as water gushed through the rotting roof onto my hammock. Torrential rain was cascading down, flooding the decks. Cockroach was doing his best to lower the blue plastic sheets which acted as primitive blinds.

Three hours later, with the rain still lashing down, I woke again. This time Francisco was bending over me. He was spitting saliva onto my face. Before I could tell him to back off, he spoke.

“You will need my protection,” he said. “The tribe have been singing all night. I have heard them.”

“The ancient Shuar ballads,” I replied, stirring from my hammock.

“No,” said the shaman. “Not ballads, but war songs. They’re going to kill us, with stone axes. I have seen it in a dream.”

I knew that mention of my own nightmare would have led to mutiny. One word and the crew would swing the boat round and head for Iquitos at full speed. So I bit my lip and asked what was for breakfast.

Cockroach served me a chunk of toucan on a bed of sticky rice. The rubbery blue meat had no taste at all. I had learnt to overcome the dullness of his cooking by sprinkling Pepe’s Ajinomoto powder liberally over the food.

When I had swallowed as much of the toucan as was physically possible, I crawled up onto the roof to discuss the plan with Richard.

I asked if he’d had nightmares.

“Slept like a fuckin’ baby,” he said, rocking back and forth.

“Aren’t you worried that we might have our heads chopped off? After all, everyone’s warned us of the Shuar.”

The Vietnam vet” leant over and tapped me on the knee.

“No one messes with Richard Fowler,” he said.

I looked at him in silence. He was stripped to the chest, his dog tags reflecting the morning light. His torso was lean, rippled with muscle and pocked with scars.

“Did I ever tell you “bout the bear at the zoo?”

“Don’t think so.”

“I was wavin” my ice-cream through the bars,” he said, “taunting this great fat grisly. He came over, lurching at the ice-cream. He wanted that sucker bad.”

“Did he get it?”

“He would’ve done, if...”

“If what?”

“If I hadn’t grabbed his fuckin’ tongue in my fist. I pulled that sucker till his face was pressed up against the bars.”

I tried to draw morals from the story, but Richard had more to impart: “The monkey last night was a sign,” he said.

He slung one of the gift bags over his shoulder and jumped ashore. I followed in his footsteps. The crew made excuses why they couldn’t accompany us. There were suddenly pots and pans to be scrubbed, floorboards to be repaired and spells to be cast.

“They’re a bunch of fuckin’ girls!” Richard shouted as we headed up the steep embankment. “Rule number one of war,” he cautioned, “keep the floozies behind the front line.”

I had donned my best moldy clothes, powdered my feet and doused myself liberally with Eau Sauvage. But even that couldn’t mask the scent of rot. As we walked up through the tiger grass, Richard reminded me not to rush the tribe.

“Don’t mention ayahuasca or shrunken heads until they’ve accepted us,” he said. “And make sure you eat whatever they serve.”

A few minutes later we had conquered the bank, and gained our first glimpse of the village. Rectangular in shape, the four sides were edged with malocas, traditional houses, about fifteen in total. A communal field stood at the centre of the village. The dwellings were raised on stilts, their irapai thatch roofs supported by central posts. Typically, all four sides were open, allowing the air to move freely, and neighbors a view into each others’ lives. A morass of mud lay around every maloca. Chickens and ducks rooted about in the slime, scratching for whatever they could find.

The village seemed abandoned. Smoke was spiralling from fires in one or two huts, but there were no other signs of life. I feared that the villagers had hidden and were waiting to mount a surprise attack. A pair of hunting dogs were tethered at the far end of the quadrangle. They sounded the alarm, but no one came.

“We’ll go to the chief’s house and wait for him,” said Richard.

He led me through the grass square and up to what he supposed was the leader’s dwelling. He explained later that the floor of the house was higher than the others, indicating elevated status. We stood outside the house and waited.

After almost an hour, the villagers appeared from a large building on the edge of the jungle. Its walls were made from banana leaves and bamboo, and its floor was at ground level.

Like the other people, the Shuar chief was wearing simple Western clothes. An old man, his complexion was amber-brown; his eyes almond shaped, their whites flecked with blood. Flame-red lines ran across the lower part of his cheeks, like a cat’s whiskers. The oily paint derived from the achiote seed, which is said to protect the wearer from demons. On his head, he wore a crown, made from the breast feathers of a scarlet macaw.

With warm greetings, he welcomed us to his maloca. We ascended the plank ladder and sat cross-legged upon the bamboo floor. I cast an eye around the room. It was about thirty feet long and half as wide; its rafters were masked in cobwebs. At the far end of the room, a fire was burning on a flat stone. Three equal lengths of wood met on the stone in a triangle. The floor was clear, except for a few wooden bowls and a blackened cauldron. All other possessions were stowed in the rafters.

We sat in silence for ten minutes or so. Only when his wife had filled the two largest wooden bowls with a white beverage, and stirred them with her hand, did the chief begin to speak.

“You must be thirsty,” he said in rudimentary Spanish, “¡beba!, drink!”

Richard took the bowl in his hands and pressed its rim to his lips. It had been a long time, he said smiling, since he had been honored with masato. He took a deep draught of the milky liquid, draining the bowl. I assumed the drink was milk, although we had seen no cows in the area.

The chief’s wife took the empty bowl and filled it, and stirred the mixture again with her fingers.

“Drink up,” said Richard sternly. “Every drop.”

I put the rim to my mouth and took a sip. The moment it touched my tongue, I realized it was not milk. I couldn’t make out the exact taste, except to say it contained a trace of alcohol. Richard and the chief watched as I gulped down the bowl’s contents. When I had finished, I licked my lips.

Richard smiled at the chief, and thanked him for the refreshing beverage.

Soon after our arrival in San José, I discovered the cryptic process by which masato is made. The women peel and wash a number of yuca, manioc, at the river-bank. They then grate the roots and wash water through the coarse mixture, sieving it thoroughly. This removes a poison, a form of hydrocyanic acid, which occurs naturally in the tuber. After grating, it is cooked and crushed with a wooden spoon. Two or three women often sit around the pot, mashing while they chat.

As they mash, they pull out handfuls, chew, and spit them back into the pot. The enzymes and bacteria in their saliva cause the yuca to ferment. After four days the paste has fermented. It’s mixed with water, then served. The drink, a weak alcohol, is traditionally consumed in enormous quantities. In Shuar society, masato is presented to guests before any conversation takes place. To refuse it would be an unthinkable insult.

Once Richard and I had each downed a second bowl of masato, the chief introduced himself. He said his name was Enrique. It struck me as an odd name for the leader of a proud, head-shrinking tribe. He welcomed us formally to San José, and said he hoped we would stay in the village for many months. I pointed to the white nylon sack.

“We have brought you a few things,” I said. “They are tokens of our gratitude.”

My basic Spanish, and Enrique’s own unfamiliarity with the language hindered our conversation. But he smiled, bowed his head, and opened the bag.

He pulled out the box of shotgun cartridges first, and held the box up to his nose.

“Good,” he said, “they are dry ones, very good.”

“They’re 16 gauge,” I replied, but Enrique was too busy looking through the sack.

He pulled out the assorted packets of salt, rice, flour, tea, the cans of tuna fish and butter, the soap, loo paper, and fishing hooks. He praised each item for a moment, thanked us, and called for his wife to bring more masato.

Then the Shuar chief thrust his right hand back into the sack. He fished out a small tub made of blue glass.

“Vicks Vapour Rub,” I said. “I’ve heard you all like it.”

Enrique narrowed his eyes, prized off the lid, and sniffed the oily cream. He asked what it was used for.

“For coughs,” I said. “But I’ve heard you have another use for it.”

I chuckled. Richard chuckled. But Enrique didn’t understand. I wondered whether the Scandinavian in Iquitos might have been having me on. I hoped not, as I’d spent a small fortune on thirty tubs of the mentholated cream. Enrique looked over at me quizzically, then sniffed the ointment a second time.

“You know,” I said casually, pointing to my lap, “it’s for rubbing down there. It’ll make you strong.”

To put an end to the awkwardness, I fumbled in the bottom of the sack, and pulled out one of the Fanta bottles.

“This is a very special object,” I said, “with so many uses. It’s a rolling-pin, a pestle for crushing bananas, a musical instrument, and even a weapon.”

The Shuar chief straightened his macaw-feather corona, and licked his thin tongue across his lips.

“¿Pero de qué habla? What are you talking about?” he said. “That’s a Fanta bottle.”

“You’ve seen one before?”

“Por supuesto, of course,” Enrique replied. “The missionaries bring us Fanta whenever they come here.”

Richard and I exchanged troubled glances.

“Missionaries?”

“They’re our friends,” said the leader. “They taught us about God.”

“You’re Christians?”

“Evangelists,” he corrected.

“What about the ancient beliefs of the Shuar?”

“The traditions were important in my childhood,” said Enrique, “but with time they disappeared.”

He passed Richard more masato.

“We used always to be at war with other tribes,” he said. “A Shuar would never sleep without his knife, or walk in the jungle without watching for attackers. Life was very dangerous. But then the missionaries came.”

Enrique paused to take a draught of the white, creamy liquid.

“They told us that killing was wrong,” he said. “God doesn’t want us to kill. He wants us to pray, to pray for Jesus.”

When all the masato was over, a roasted paca was brought out. The creature, which had obviously been shot, was peppered with lead pellets. The Shuar don’t serve food until the masato has been finished.

Enrique took us on a tour of the village. He showed us the water tank which the missionaries had built, and the rustic church at the end of the village. When we arrived, the villagers had been praying there, as they did every Sunday morning.

Every villager received us with hospitality and more masato. As we drank it, they welcomed us with the same line: “We thank Jesus for sending you”. There was no mention of killing, feuds, war, or of shrunken heads. I wondered if these people really were the Shuar. Were they my fearless Birdmen?

Unable to stand the suspense, I asked the chief about ayahuasca. Now they were evangelists, had they any use for it?

“Natema,” he said, through his clenched teeth. “Es muy importante. That is very important. Of course we use it. How do you think we get into the other world?”

“The world of the spirits?” I asked.

“No”, said Enrique softly, “the world of Jesus.”

Remarkably, the missionaries hadn’t outlawed ayahuasca. They must have known that its prohibition would have led to revolt. But the more I saw of their evangelistic faith, the more disturbed I became. In little over a generation the core elements of Shuar society had been stripped away. Virtually everyone I met in the region had a Spanish Christian name, although their spoken Spanish was frequently limited. From the loss of Shuar names to the knowledge of medicinal plants, ancient ways were disappearing fast. Perhaps it was right that the culture of taking and shrinking heads had gone. But to replace elaborate rituals with evangelism, or any alien religion, seemed insane. By making subtle changes, the old ways collapse, like a house of cards.

With shotguns, there was no longer a need for fibrous shields, once carried by every warrior to protect against axe attacks; or manguaré, log drums, as a shotgun blast carries further over the jungle. Without tsantsa raids, there was no need for lookout towers either. Traditionally built on the roofs of houses, they doubled as missile posts when the village was under attack. And, with the cessation of tsantsa raids, there wasn’t a need for tsantsa feasts, which were crucial in transferring folklore and songs from one generation to the next. With the introduction of Western clothing, ancient methods of weaving died out. I asked if traditional textiles had ever been embroidered with designs of men with wings and trophy heads, but gained no definite answer. Even if there had once been burial chambers with textiles, there was little hope of finding them intact. Unlike the ultra-dry sands of the Atacama desert, anything buried in the Amazon jungle is devoured by its acidic soil.

Enrique introduced us to his daughter and son-in-law, who lived nearby in a maloca overlooking the river. I recognized their son as the man who had brought down the monkey the night before. I thanked him.

“Please stay with us,” said the man, whose name was Ignacio. “Your boat must be very damp.”

Richard and I accepted the hospitality. Ignacio’s own son, José Días, took a message down to the boat for me. It asked Cockroach to send up a gift bag and a few of my things.

Ignacio’s wife put her newborn baby into the hammock, suspended across the room. Like many of the other Shuar women, she wore a faded red skirt, and a tee-shirt. She welcomed us, saying they were honored to give strangers shelter in their Christian home. The Bible, she said, tells us to care for visitors as if they are your own kin. She hurried off to fetch a bowl of masato and some meat.

Fifteen minutes later she returned with a gourd of the beverage and a shallow wooden tray, which held a large quantity of rodent meat. As before, the masato was drunk first. Then the meat was passed to me. Ignacio’s wife had a flare for cookery. She had decorated the rim of the dish with the rodent’s tail and feet. I wondered whether I was supposed to eat them. Perhaps, I suggested to myself, they had another purpose. We have all heard of how the Bedouin of Arabia serve camel and sheep eyeballs to important guests. The tradition of eating the eyes came about as a result of a misunderstanding. They were not a delicacy to be eaten at all, rather the eyes were an indication of the freshness of the meat. In a desert climate animal flesh goes bad quickly. A bright eye is a sign that the meat is fresh. British dignitaries visiting Bedouin encampments mistook the eyes for choice morsels, and gulped them down.

Thankfully, everyone steered clear of the rodent’s feet.

“Tonight we have a special prayer meeting in Church,” said Ignacio, once we had eaten, “we hope that you will join us.”

At San José, the busy cycle of village life came to a halt on Saturday night, and didn’t start again until Monday morning. Sunday was for prayer, and prayer alone. Christian evangelism might have come to the land of the Shuar, but some things hadn’t changed. The young men would still creep from the village long before the sun had brought the dawn. With their weapons at the ready, and a little masato paste packed in a leaf, they’d go hunting, dogs at their heels.

Although shotguns were the most sought after product from the outside world, they were expensive. And shot had severe disadvantages. It ripped the prey’s flesh to pieces, peppering it with lead. Worse still was the sound. One blast from a gun and all the surrounding wildlife was frightened away.

Ignacio reached up into the rafters and took down his preferred weapon. It was a blowpipe, about ten feet long.

“I use this to hunt monkey,” he said, holding it to his lips. “I tip the darts with curare, and make a notch just before the end. When the monkey tries to pull out the dart, it breaks there, leaving the poisoned end in the animal.”

A quiver of darts could be made in a few minutes, tipped with curare and with a band of kapok as a flight. The high quality of the weapon was matched by the warrior’s accuracy. The Shuar are regarded as great masters in making and using blowpipes. Most can hit a bird or mammal at a distance of up to a hundred feet.

One story tells of a prominent American ornithologist who was collecting jungle birds in the 1960s, for a museum in the United States. The local people were keen to help him catch specimens, which would later be stuffed. One morning they brought him a selection of dead birds. He refused them politely, explaining that he required specimens without dart holes. Next day the hunters returned with more examples. There were no marks on them at all. The warriors had shot the darts through the birds’ eyes.

At dusk we escorted Ignacio and his wife to the church. My aversion to missionary practice led to a sense of unease. As far as I was concerned, an alien faith was eroding the traditions which had enabled the Shuar to survive for millennia. As we strolled down to the tin-roofed house of worship, Ignacio agreed that there was more illness now, than before.

“In the old days,” he said, “with feuding between one tribe and another, only the strongest people survived. The Curandero could save some people with powerful jungle plants, but anyone with a very bad wound died. The missionaries told us not to use plants, but to take the pills which they bring. Now people are forgetting which plants cure which illness. And,” Ignacio continued despondently, “there’s so much illness.”

I asked what kind of afflictions.

“Last year tuberculosis came to the village, and then whooping cough,” he said. “More than ten children died. Soon after that, three more died from malaria.”

Ignacio’s wife looked at the ground, and wiped her fingers over her eyes.

“Our eldest son died two years ago,” she said. “He was so weak that nothing could save him.”

We entered the church. A number of uneven benches were laid out in rows on the mud floor, facing the front of the room. Although there was no electricity in the village, an expensive-looking hurricane lamp was hanging from the central beam; a gift from the missionaries. As no one else had yet arrived, Ignacio took the lamp down and lit it. Outside, dusk was turning to darkness, and the jungle’s nocturnal creatures were readying themselves to feast.

Gradually, as darkness cloaked the village, the congregation gathered at the church. The benches were soon crammed with honest faces. I could almost hear the missionaries bragging. They’d civilized a tribe of head shrinkers, and made God-fearing evangelists out of them.

Dressed in their best clothes, some in Wellington boots, the congregation of San José began their evening service with a prayer. They asked that the Devil keep away from their community. Then they thanked God for sending Richard and me to them. That night, as every night, they praised the Lord, fluttering their hands in the air, crying, “Hallelujah! Hallelujah!”.

With the hurricane lamp roaring in the rafters they ran about, jerking their arms hysterically, just as the missionaries had taught them to do. Only then, as a tambourine marked out a hypnotic rhythm, did they begin to sing.

They pounded out one hymn after the next, some in their Shuar language, Achuar, others in Spanish. The parts I could understand, spoke of truth, justice, temptation and of Jesus. Pausing between hymns, they shrieked in unison, over and over: “Hallelujah! Hallelujah!”

The tambourine stirred back into action. The church was soon resounding to a Shuar translation of When the Saints Come Marching Home.

Sitting beside me, Richard rolled his eyes.

“The ancient Shuar ballads,” he whispered...

TWENTY-FOUR

Trumpets of the Devil

After late morning prayers Enrique took us to meet the village shaman. He lived away from the other houses, in a clearing on the edge of the jungle. It surprised me that such enthusiastic evangelists would still find a role for the maestro. Perhaps, I reflected, he was needed for his knowledge of ayahuasca. The missionaries had replaced natural remedies with little white pills, but had turned a blind eye to the Vine of the Dead. Mixing mind-altering flora with religion is nothing new. Many faiths throughout history have incorporated hallucinogens into their creed. Among them, the Zoroastrians of Persia, who once used the mysterious plant-based hallucinogen haoma in their rituals.

Christianity has accepted hallucinogens, too. I’d heard of the Native American Church, which was founded on the ritualistic use of the peyote cactus. It has more followers today than at any time in its history. The Church’s practitioners believe that the cactus enables them to cure sickness and to speak to Jesus.

Richard told me of a Christian ayahuasca-using sect, called Santo Daime.

“It was started in the 1920s,” he said, “when a rubber-tapper called Raimundo Irineu Serra was invited to take ayahuasca by Indians in the Brazilian Amazon. In a vision he saw a beautiful woman. Supposedly she was the Virgin Mary. Irineu called her “Queen of the Forest”.

“Through visions she taught him hymns,” he went on. “She told him to base a religion on her songs – which became his church’s doctrine. And she ordered him to spread her message to others. Santo Daime is enormously powerful over the border in Brazil,” said Richard. “It’s swept across the US and Europe, too.”

“But the Shuar’s faith is different,” I said. “Evangelism and ayahuasca don’t mix, but coexist.”

The Vietnam vet” swiped a furry caterpillar from his leg.

“Those missionaries are clever as shit,” he said. “Ayahuasca’s been around a lot longer than they have. Screw with it and they’ll be kicked all the way back to Tallahassee. They know that.”

Richard’s emerald eyes shone with anger.

“When they messed with the Shuar,” he said, “the Spanish and the Incas had their butts kicked. But the evangelists have won the battle, and without a single death. They didn’t need weapons. Theirs was a different kind of war,” he said, tapping a finger to his brow. “They fucked with their minds.”

Bolts of sunlight ripped through the surrounding canopy, blinding me as I walked. A few feet into the undergrowth and I was gripped by the jungle thirst again. I put it down to dehydration brought on by the overpowering humidity. As I stared up at the light, I glimpsed a mossy branch of a carapanuaba tree. On it were growing a dozen orchids with rich yellow petals. Richard identified the alluring flowers as Mormodes rolfeanum. He said that each one represented a bird in flight. High above them, a nest of spider monkeys were calling. I wondered if it was their relative whose arm I had eaten two nights before.

Enrique pointed to a long-house in the distance.

“That’s where Alberto, the shaman...”

Before he could complete his sentence, a slender man slipped from behind a cecropia tree. He was holding a sloth by the armpits. At first I didn’t look at the man, the shaman, as I was so captivated by the sloth. It moved in slow motion, wielding its wiry, hair-covered arms through the air like sickles reaping wheat. Its expression was haunting, wide-eyed with dimpled cheeks. Never had I come across an animal with a face so trusting, in circumstances so uncertain.

As we tramped down the path towards Alberto’s maloca, I took my eyes off the sloth, and looked at the shaman. Like the other Shuar, his features were delicate and exact. Had I met Alberto, or any of the other villagers, on the Mongolian Steppes I wouldn’t have looked twice. The only difference was the ring of macaw feathers which crowned him. His face was typically East Asian, testimony to his ancient ancestors’ march across the frozen Bering Straits ten millennia ago. His hands were curiously scarred, their skin checkered with uneven lines.

When Enrique introduced us, I asked what would become of the sloth.

“I am taking him to Ramón,” said the shaman, “my teacher. He lives two days up the river.”

“What will he do with it?”

“Ramón needs its head,” said Alberto.

Richard silenced me before I could protest.

“Is your teacher an ayahuasquero?” he asked.

Alberto snapped a cecropia twig as he walked, stowing it under his arm.

“Of course Ramón’s an ayahuasquero,” he replied. “He’s known throughout Loreto. He’s old, with many children, but his visions are strong. When he takes ayahuasca, his spirit flies across the jungle.”

“He flies?”

“Yes,” said Alberto, “he flies... over the trees, across the water, like a bird, to the other world. To the real world. There is no greater ayahuasquezo alive. Some people say that at night he flies...”

“In his mind?”

“Not only in his mind,” said Alberto. Por el aire, through the air.”

A rush of blood warmed my back. Although I disliked the idea of taking the sloth’s head, the thought of the great ayahuasquero was uplifting.

The shaman welcomed us to his house. He led the way up the ladder onto the bamboo floor. I climbed up behind him, followed by Enrique and Richard. The sloth was deposited in one corner with the cecropia branch. He curled an arm around the leaves, drowsily hooking them up to his mouth.

No masato was served at the shaman’s maloca. He was not married and so had no one to prepare it. I thanked God for his bachelorhood. A pot had been left in the middle of the room. Inside it were a dozen or so long flowers, yellowy-orange in color. I recognized them as datura, the plant of which Cabieses had forewarned me. He had called datura’s tubular flower “The Trumpet of the Devil”. I learned later that, in Europe, they are sometimes known as “Angels’ Trumpets”.

Alberto noticed my interest in the flowers.

“The missionaries bring bottles of syrup and pink and white pills,” he said, “but they have nothing as powerful as toé, datura. Their medicine is like a child before it has learned to walk. It has hope, but is so young and frail.”

I made note of Alberto’s remarks. But it wasn’t until I read a book by Mark Plotkin weeks later, that I realized how right he was. Plotkin (in Tales of a Shaman’s Apprentice) says that of the world’s 250,000 or so plant species, only about 5000 have been screened in the laboratory to determine their therapeutic potential. There are, he says, 120 plant-based prescription drugs currently on the market. They are derived from only 95 species.

The shaman picked one of the datura flowers from the pan and held it in his fingers.

“Toé,” he said, “it can give life or take life. Like ayahuasca, we trust it and have learned from it. And we have used it to travel, to fly...”

“To fly to Jesus,” said Enrique.

Alberto regarded the chief with a poisoned stare. I sensed his hatred of the missionaries, and all they had brought. He invited me to take datura with him,-he was about to prepare some. Richard, a die-hard test pilot when it came to hallucinogens, backed away. He added to Cabieses’ warning.

“Half a cup of the stuff and be dicing with the fuckin’ Devil,” he said. “It’ll send you flying up through the trees, over the clouds, to Lalaland.”

Sitting there in the shaman’s maloca, looking at the datura flowers, I was naive about the plant’s effects. Only with further research, did I find an astonishing connection, linking datura with Europe’s medieval tradition of flight.

The Shuar took datura very seriously. Everyone was aware of its ability to kill or its tendency to dAve sane men mad. Despite its extraordinary potency, the Shuar have always had a place for this hallucinogen. At one time, a child who didn’t behave might first be spanked with a nettle. If he continued to be disrespectful to his father, the parent would prepare a weak solution of datura, called maké, and feed it to him. Falling into a trance, the child would hang between life and death. Supposedly transported to the nether world, he’d learn that he was wrong, and his father was right. There are reports, too, that hunting dogs would be fed datum to imbue them with supernatural powers.

Datura is a member of Solanaceae, the potato family. Occurring in both the Americas and Asia, it contains the powerful alkaloid atropine. The compound is credited with a sensation of flight, similar to the one provided by ayahuasca. So powerful is the atropine, it can be absorbed through the skin. This explains why preparations made from it are frequently taken by rubbing an ointment onto the skin.

The Algonquin once made a beverage with it, called, wyoccan, which they gave to those entering puberty rites. The Zuni Indians of New Mexico applied the ground-up roots of datura to their eyes. They said that it allowed them to see at night, and to commune with spirits and birds. Like civilizations before and since, the Incas used datura to fly.

The plant’s natural history is linked firmly with the Americas. But its initial arrival in Europe is both curious and intriguing. On their triumphant return to Madrid, after a long voyage of exploration, the Conquistadors brought with them all kinds of exotic species. Potatoes, tomatoes, tobacco, and other Solanaceae were presented to the king. Among them was datura.

One can only imagine how the alluring trumpet flowers were received. Flirting as they do with the ignorant observer, it wasn’t long before society found a use for the flowers.

Witchcraft and magical flight have always gone together. While the tower-jumpers and the likes of Roger Bacon, and others, were trying to fly by understanding physics, European witches were resorting to magic. The battery of New World flora fueled what was undoubtedly the most active period of witchcraft in Europe’s history.

These days, witches appear quite unaware of how their ancestors used psychotropic plants. Covens across Europe and North America still cling to the ritual and ceremony, but have lost their knowledge of hallucinogens. The besom, a twig broom, commonly ridden by witches, is today nothing more than a symbol.

Many medieval flying ointments contained Brugmansia arborea, a tree-like datura species brought from Peru. A variety of herbs and solanaceous compounds would be mixed together and rubbed on an area of the body where the skin was soft. Sometimes the salve was rubbed under the arms, on the face, or on the inner thighs. One theory is that a witch would apply the ointment liberally over her inner thighs and genital area, before climbing onto the besom. The action of riding the broom rubbed the cream into the skin.

After a few minutes, the datura’s potency would take effect. The witch would usually pass out. When she came to, she would assume that she had flown. Some writers in the 16th century realized that magical flight was all in the mind. A colleague of Galileo, Giovanni Porta, wrote a detailed account of a witch rubbing flying ointment on herself. She soon collapsed. When she was revived, the woman insisted that she’d actually been on a magical flight. Medieval witches habitually claimed to have transformed into a bird, such as a goose or an owl. Similarly, when the Shuar take datura, and even when drinking ayahuasca, they profess that animal transformation has occurred.

A number of recipes for medieval flying ointments survive. Some include human and animal extracts, and ingredients like, “the fat from a baby freshly dug from its grave”. In the early 1960s, the German anthropologist Dr Will-Erich Peuckert prepared a flying ointment from a I7th-century witch’s formula. As a folklorist, he was interested in social use of datura, and its role in the illusion of flight. The recipe he used contained deadly nightshade, henbane (both members of the potato family) and datura. Peuckert rubbed the salve on his forehead and armpits. Very soon he was experiencing a sense of flight, interspersed with falling sensations. Then he fell asleep for twenty-four hours.

Two days after climbing the embankment up to the village, I went down to check on the boat. Ignacio’s wife had been trying to drag me to a special prayer reading in church. Visiting the Pradera was an easy excuse. Ignacio’s family, Enrique, and the other villagers were eager to pray for their shaman’s soul. They appreciated the ayahuasca he made, as it took them to Jesus. But they strongly disapproved of his hostility towards the missionaries.

On board ship, Walter, Cockroach and Francisco were on the lower deck playing cards. They were surprised I was still alive. I told them that I’d prayed for their souls, for better food on board, and for an end to my constipation. My soul had been saved by the Shuars, I said, but Richard hadn’t been so lucky. His head had been chopped off by a crazed Shuar warrior. Walter cackled demonically.

“That means I can have his Walkman,” he said.

No words of comfort could get the crew to leave the boat. They refused even to jump down onto the river-bank, let alone come to the village. The Shuar, they said, would cut out our tongues and eat them with salt. Francisco was in charge of spreading the lies. He’d had another dream. A panther had emerged from a violet mist. Right away he’d grasped it was no ordinary cat.

“It was wawek,” said Francisco, “the bewitching shaman. He’d come to kill us with anamuk, the bewitching dart.”

“Who did he kill first?”

Francisco tossed four aces onto the table.

“We all died together,” he said. “The wawek threw the special dart into the river, as we were going down stream. The dart was made from armadillo bone. As it touched the water, it turned into a giant boa constrictor, which flipped Pradera upside down.”

“Nos ahogamos todos, we all drowned,” said Walter, coldly, peering up from his cards.

I am not sure what Richard said to Alberto to gain his trust. I had expected the shaman to be mistrustful of white men, especially after the destructive visitations from foreign missionaries. But Alberto agreed willingly to introduce me to his teacher, the ayahuasquero, who lived two days up the Corrientes. His willingness may have stemmed from the fact he would receive a free trip up river. As usual, I couldn’t establish if – by two days – he meant two days by dugout, or by a boat powered with a Johnson 65. In the Upper Amazon, any suggestion of time is nominal. Alberto cautioned me not to mention missionaries if we met his teacher, Ramón. The great shaman despised evangelism, a fact that endeared him to me even before we had met.

Clearing a space on the bench for Alberto, I made an announcement to the crew. We would leave at once, I said. They applauded. Walter dealt another hand of cards in celebration. Then I told them that Alberto, the Shuar shaman, would be joining us along with his sloth. Anyone who didn’t approve would be left on the river-bank.

Back in the village, Ignacio wanted to show me something. As his wife prepared a fresh batch of masato, he pulled a manila envelope from the eaves of the house. Inside were three color photographs. Damp had stuck them together and, as a result, their emulsion was rubbing off. The last picture was so badly damaged I could hardly make out the central figure, a child.

“It was my son,” said Ignacio, “the one who died from malaria. This is the only picture we have of him. The missionaries took it with their camera.”

When a bowl of masato had been passed around, Ignacio suggested we say a prayer. He, his wife, Richard and I stood in a circle holding hands. Ignacio led the invocation. He prayed for the souls of the ones we love. Then he prayed for Jesus to lead us through times of uncertainty.

“Cuidado con Ramon, beware of Ramón,” Ignacio said after the prayers. “He is not an evangelist like us. He’s wawek, a bewitching shaman.

Some people say he is Iguachi, the Devil.”

*

Alberto came aboard the Pradera with the three-toed sloth and a basket brimming with cecropia leaves. Zombified as before, the sloth didn’t appear disheartened at the prospect of coming along. At the end of the boat, nestled up against the fuel tanks, the crew were playing cards and sharing a pipe of mapacho. They pretended that the bewitching shaman’s presence didn’t bother them. Francisco had encouraged the others into a frenzy of hostility. Walter said he couldn’t be responsible for any Shuars who joined us. Cockroach was equally unfriendly. He said he would feed everyone and everything aboard, including the Titanus giganticuses and the chicken. But not a morsel from his pot would be served to the wawek or his sloth.

Just before we pushed off from San José, Enrique hastened down the embankment. A pair of hunting dogs were tearing alongside. His prized blowpipe was at hand, held like a javelin above his head. He asked if he could join us, as the hunting was better further upstream.

Enrique and the dogs scrambled aboard. A few seconds later the engine was fired up, and we pushed off into the dazzling waters of the Corrientes. Behind us, the village rang out with another evangelist ballad. The God-fearing community had met in church to pray for our journey.

Leaning into his rocking-chair, Richard inhaled on a fat mapacho cigar, back in position on the roof. Down below, the deck had become Noah’s Ark. The beetles, Rosario the chicken, the three-toed sloth, and the ferocious hunting dogs, all had their assigned places. There were three rats, too, which I had reintroduced from the village. They set to work hunting the wolf spiders. The only problem now was that Enrique’s dogs tore about in a whirlwind of teeth and claws, trying to kill the rats.

Francisco curled up in his hammock, muttering under his breath. He loathed having competition, especially from a Shuar. As Cockroach had refused to cook for the guests, I ripped open a few packets of Lancashire Hot Pot and served them up. The chief bowed his head to say grace before starting. He and Alberto liked the food so much they requested seconds. After the meal, Enrique took one of the empty packets. He said he’d tell the missionaries to bring lots of Lancashire Hot Pot, when they next visited San José.

I asked Richard what we could do to break the ice between the two shamans.

“Teamwork!” he yelled, “get them on some exercises together. In “Nam,” he said, “you learned to look after the next guy’s butt. It was as simple as that. You watch his butt and he’ll watch yours. I learned that on Hamburger Hill.”

“Was it anything like the movie?”

Richard cupped his head in a camouflage bandanna.

“Fuckin’ movie,” he said. “They made it seem as though the Vietcong really wanted the hill. The fact was they were trapped up there like rats. They had no place to fuckin’ go.”

“What about the battle?”

“It took thirteen days,” he said. “There was rain, logistical problems, casualties, all that shit. But we kicked ass. You never saw a bunch of Americans lying around dead like in the movie. It didn’t happen like that. We hammered their asses.

“Hamburger Hill was a mountain which straddled the line between Laos and Vietnam,” he continued. “I was in the 1st Brigade LRRPS – Long Range Reconnaissance, 101st Airborne Division. Before the actual battle, we got intelligence that the place was crawling with Commies. Six guys from our team were put on the hill. Picture it. They can’t move. There’s trails with Gooks all around them, like they fuckin’ own the place. When our team radios in, they’re told to hold still.

“During the night there’s a severe fuckin’ storm. On an operation like that you sit back to back, put up trip wires and Claymore mines. So in the night, lightning hits the fuckin’ radio. Blows the fuckin’ thing up, igniting the grenades on some of the guys’ belts. Kills three of them right off. The other three are deaf, they’ve got broken bones, these guys are fucked up.”

“Did they die?”

“No, no, no,” said Richard sharply. “We sent in another LRRP unit and got their asses out of there.” He inhaled on the crude cigar, staring out across the jungle. “That, my friend, was teamwork.”

TWENTY-FIVE

Love the Jungle

Morale on the Pradera had never been high, but when the Shuar came aboard, it plummeted. There was hostility in the air. The crew had become so embittered that they shunned me as well as our guests. Sensing mutiny to be a real possibility, I dug out my Alaskan moose knife and strapped it to my thigh. For the first time, the crew had started complaining about the boat’s miserable living conditions. I was just as uncomfortable as everyone else. The Pradera stank of human, dog, chicken, sloth and now rat excrement.

Enrique’s incessant praying was getting on everyone’s nerves. When he wasn’t thanking Jesus for saving our souls, he was spitting over the edge. His dogs went for the heels of anyone trying to cross the middle area of the deck. It had become their territory. Getting to the loo in the night was now far too dangerous to attempt.

From time to time the craft came under fire from a barrage of pebbles, thrown no doubt by wicked boys. Enrique shouted out at the invisible attackers. He blamed their parents for not instilling in them Christian morals. If they were his children, he said, he’d feed them datura.

Two days after pushing off from San José, Cockroach said we needed fresh meat. Enrique volunteered to hunt a monkey or two, but the others didn’t want anything caught by a Shuar’s hand. In the early evening, as the cacophony of bird cries rang out over the canopy, Cockroach and Francisco jumped down and scurried off in search of meat.

Richard and I had no faith in their ability to hunt. So the surprise was all the greater when they returned with the body of a young capybara. The creature, which had short brown hair and a blunt-ended snout, must have weighed more than fifty lbs. It’s said to be the biggest rodent in existence, thriving near the water on aquatic vegetation. Cockroach hacked up the animal and washed its meat in the river. He said that he’d speared the creature, having spotted it hiding at the base of a tree. I found this strange, particularly as he hadn’t had a spear with him. It was far more likely that Cockroach had discovered the creature already dead – jungle road kill. Francisco, too, had found something in the jungle. It was a dark resin, scraped from a tree. He said it was curare.

He assumed I didn’t know what the substance was. But my enthusiasm for detective thrillers had introduced me to curare long before. One of the tranquilizers most favoured by Amazonian tribes, Indians have smeared it over the tips of their arrows and blow-darts for millennia. By interfering with electrical impulses, it stops the muscles from working, causing the diaphragm to relax. Coma through suffocation follows. Hunters prize the resin for hunting monkeys. Hit one with a curare dart, its grip loosens, and it falls from the tree. The animal, which is only tranquilized with a speck of curare, is quite fit to be eaten.

Francisco wrapped the resin in a damp cloth, and hid it under the floorboards. When I asked him whom he was going to tranquilize, he squirmed, stuck his hands down the front of his underpants, and giggled nervously. I cautioned him. If the Shuars or their animals were found in a comatose state, I said, he’d be the first suspect.

The morning after he had cooked up the capybara, Cockroach climbed up onto the roof. His expression was taut, his eyes swollen with worry. One of the beetles had stopped eating flakes of rotten wood, he said. He feared for its life. A moment later, Alberto said we’d arrived at Ramón’s.

The famous ayahuasquero lived nearby on another river. I wasn’t going to take any chances with the Titanus giganticuses, so I packed them in my rucksack, along with key equipment. The crew had no intention of venturing through the jungle to Ramón’s village. They volunteered to guard the boat and its remaining supplies.

Richard bundled up a sack of assorted merchandize and threw it onto the river’s bank. The dogs, the sloth, Enrique and Alberto followed. We bid farewell to the others, and pushed into the undergrowth. I had no idea how long we would be gone.

Alberto had advertised the journey through the forest as a ‘short walk”. He said that we would follow a path to the village, one which he knew well. The route was severely overgrown, forcing us to hack a way through with our knives. I suggested to Richard that no one could have visited Ramón for a very long time. He replied that in the jungle plants grow fast. Someone could well have hacked the route a week before, and we would never have known it.

After five hours trekking beneath triple canopy, I was wondering how much further there was to go. Although by far the youngest in years, I handicapped the rest. My jungle technique was non-existent. Alberto led the way with the sloth in one hand and his machete in the other. He cleared a slim path. Behind him was Enrique. So skilled was he at moving through the undergrowth that he had little need for a machete. I’d unsheathed my Alaskan moose knife, proud at last to have a chance to use it. But its extraordinary weight made it a very clumsy tool.

Richard had cut an awkward figure on the paved streets of Iquitos. Even on the boat he was restless. But as soon as his US army boots stepped into the fierce undergrowth, he was at ease. No moment went by without him pointing out the detail, the kind which was not naturally revealed to my anxious, amateur vision. He pointed to the smooth lichen-free trunk of the capiruna, explaining that the tree had evolved to shed its bark to keep parasites and lichens away. He showed me how to make a poultice for cuts with the leaves of tropical mistletoe, which we often saw high in the trees. Then he taught me how to tell termite and ant nests apart; and said that leaf-cutter ants, which follow a chemical trail, are blind.

Most tourists who venture to the Peruvian Amazon love the idea of the jungle. They want it just like they saw it on TV – a place which can be muted or switched off by a remote control. Some expect nothing less than air-conditioning, a mini-bar, laundry service, and satellite television. Fortunately for them, there are a variety of “jungle” lodges with such amenities a stone’s throw from Iquitos. Few foreigners are willing to endure the kind of exacting expedition which Richard Fowler leads. The rough reality of his journeys wards away most civilians. He said that the US military sometimes ask him to train élite SEAL units in jungle survival. Infrequent adverts placed in Soldier of Fortune bring him a few more battle-hardened adventurers, tough enough to withstand what he calls the real jungle.

The difference between Richard and the others, and me, was that they understood the rain-forest. They loved it. They were a part of it. As far as I was concerned that abyss of green was something to fear; something to despise. From the moment I took my first jungle steps, it sensed an intruder had violated its boundary. I was soon drenched with sweat, my mouth cold and rasping, parched beyond words. I followed in Richard’s size 11 footprints, focusing on them and nothing else.

Let your eyes strain too closely at a branch or twig, and you start seeing the hideous detail. With fear, the jungle closes in, the insects get bigger, magnified by the mind. How could Richard have prowled through the forests of Vietnam, hunting and being hunted at the same time?

When I asked him, he told me to concentrate on the five rules of jungle travel. One: chop stems downward and as low to the ground as possible; then they’ll fall away from the path. Two: go slow, as speed only snags you on fish-hook thorns. Three: rest frequently and drink liquid. Four: love the jungle, don’t hate it. Five: check your groin for parasites twice an hour.

Our Shuar companions must have thought t was mad. Whenever we stopped, I’d pull down my pants and forage about in my boxer shorts. The area was inflamed by chafing and sweat. But there were no bugs. To tell the truth, I didn’t really know what parasites to expect. I’d seen some cocoons which Richard had eaten, and plenty of “roaches and wolfies, but surely they were too big to nestle comfortably in my crotch. Richard said any self-respecting grub would want to burrow into my private parts – it’s what they are programd to do. I told him of the inflammation and the chafing.

“The rawer and bloodier it is down there,” he said, “the snugger the larvae will be.”

We marched on, but the chafing only got worse. I tried lubricating the area with Vaseline. Then I sprinkled it with mentholated foot powder. But a dark purple rash developed. Alberto asked to see the inflammation. While Enrique held the sloth, the shaman scraped a fingernail over the rash. He made a clicking sound, tramped off into the jungle, and returned with a mass of foliage. Then he rubbed the thin milky sap from the leaves onto the inflammation. The itching was soothed immediately. A couple of hours later, the rash was gone.

“Huayra caspi,” said Richard. “It’s a tree with red bark; the milk eases irritations. It’s especially good for venereal disease.”

We moved forward for another hour or so, until about four o’clock. Then Alberto said we should camp for the first night.

“First night? How far is Ramón’s village?”

The shaman fed the sloth a clump of cecropia leaves.

“Two or three nights more,” he said.

I sat on a sheet of plastic while Richard built a basic shelter from branches of yarena palm. I dared not move. The Shuars had never been to a city, but they knew I was a city type. My hands weren’t scarred like theirs, and I jumped at any sound. They enjoyed my reaction to giant spiders most. I whimpered when I saw them. All around in the darkness spiders’ eyes reflected my lamp’s light, thousands of them, glinting like pearls. Pink-toed tarantulas were everywhere. They were out hunting. Richard caught one and tried to make me watch as it scurried over his face and his back. He drew my reluctant attention to the tips of their legs, which looked as though they had been coated neatly with pretty pink nail varnish.

I wondered how I would go on. Nature had become my tormentor. I had begun to regard it with absolute loathing. But then I spotted something wonderful squatting on a low branch. It was a frog, like none I’d seen before. Its skin, which glistened as if coated with lacquer, was indigo-blue, marbled with splotches of black. Most of the other animals I had come across were timid, expecting imminent death. The indigo frog was far more self-assured. He sat on his branch, looking out at the green world.

So impressed was I with the little creature’s confidence, I told Richard to come and have a look. He wiped his machete on his fatigues and peered down at the frog.

“Dendrobates azureus,” he mumbled, “they’re fuckin’ wild suckers.”

“What’s wild about “em?”

“Poison arrow frogs,” he said. “When they get stressed they secrete nerve toxins onto their skin. Any predator not warded off by the bright colors gets floored.”

As far as Richard was concerned, the indigo frog was dangerous but not unfriendly. The reptile’s yellow cousin, living over in the jungles of Surinam, was another story altogether.

“They call it Phyllobates terriblis,” he mumbled, “the terrible one.”

“Terrible!”

“They’ve got enough toxins to kill 20,000 mice. They look like glazed lemons. They’re kings of the jungle.”

While we were admiring the indigo frog, Enrique strode over. Before I could stop him, he jabbed a sliver of sharpened stick through the reptile’s neck, until it came out its back. The creature didn’t die, but exuded a thick foam onto its back. Mindful not to touch the frog, the Shuar chief dipped three or four darts into the foam. Then he headed away into the jungle with the dogs.

By the time the shelter was completed, it was getting dark. The fluorescent green of glow-worms glimmered in the undergrowth, hinting at secret life. Alberto helped me find some rotting wood to feed the beetles. The smaller one looked very forlorn. Its powerful mandibles uninterested in crushing any food. I considered tossing the Titanus giganticuses back into the jungle then and there. But, unfortunately for them, they’d become pawns in a despicable human game. Too much money was at stake, and I still hoped to recoup my funds. I whispered to them that in Tokyo or in New York a big bug lover was waiting to pamper them.

Alberto told me to skewer the beetles on a spike and roast them. He said they tasted nutty, like Brazil nuts. At that moment Enrique stepped from the undergrowth, his blowpipe in one hand, a young paca in the other.

We lit a fire and roasted the paca on a spit. The flames lit up the night, shooting sparks into the trees. The smoke, and the smell of charred meat, kept the insects away. I was in no mood for another rodent meal, so I sprinkled a few grains of Ajinomoto powder onto my tongue and thought of roast beef. As I had expected Ramón to live close to the river, I hadn’t brought much equipment. With no insect repellent or sleeping-bag, and little drinking water, I prepared myself for a tortuous night.

I hunkered down beneath the shelter, praying for the giant insects, the snakes and the poison-arrow frogs to keep away. Richard slept soundly, snoring beside me. Alberto and Enrique bedded down on a natural platform in a lapuna tree, making mattresses of its dark green foliage. As I tried to sleep, I cautioned myself never to return to the jungle. This, the real experience, was the preserve of the professionals. People like me should stay at home and watch it on TV.

The morning was slow in coming. Only when the last shadows had been wrung from the night did the first stream of sunlight break through the canopy. I started the day by checking for genital intruders. The tips of my fingers had mastered the art of probing for maggots and chrysalids. I poked about, still half-asleep. Something was lodged there. As I tried to extract it, it turned into mush.

“Hope it wasn’t burrowing,” said Richard. “If there’s still some in there, you’re up shit creek.”

Reluctantly, I allowed the Vietnam vet” to inspect the area. The last thing I wanted was a grubby GI rooting about in my boxer shorts.

Richard identified the problem. He said something had indeed been burrowing into my upper thigh. He suspected it was the larva of a chigger mite (the organism that Nicole Maxwell had dabbed with scarlet nail varnish to destroy). Alas, we had no nail varnish. I asked Richard for more information.

He gave me an uneasy glance and looked away.

“Of course, there’s always the possibility,” he said delicately, “that it’s not going in, but coming out.”

I grimaced.

“It might be a guinea worm boring to the surface,” he said. “But let’s hope it’s not that.”

“Why? What’s wrong with guinea worms?”

“By the time they’re boring to the surface,” said Richard, “they’ve reproduced, filling you with millions of larvae.”

We dabbed the area with clinical alcohol and foot powder, and hoped for the best. Then it was time to move on.

*

For two more days we hacked our way through the jungle. Our odd procession made slow progress. My moose knife was blunt, but I wasn’t much of a trailblazer anyway. I swung the great blade from left to right in an arc, pretending to cut. The sloth was kept satiated with a ready supply of kapok leaves. Fortunately, no more of the hole-boring parasite reared out from my thigh. My worries returned to the smaller of the beetles which was tucked away in my pack. It was still refusing food, making me fear for its life.

In the jungle, life was cheap. Our own world hides from death, and considers it as an unnatural condition. In the Upper Amazon nothing could be more natural. On the third night, as we gnawed at the bones of another oversized rodent, Enrique told of life fifty years before, in his youth.

“There was much killing,” he said, his cinnamon eyes reflecting the firelight, “my father was a great kakaram, a warrior. He had taken so many heads. I remember when they came back to the village with the heads. They held them high, and would sing. Then we would have the tsantsa feasts.”

“Did the villagers make the heads into tsantsas?”

“The warriors started making them on the way back through the jungle,” Enrique said. “The skin was peeled from the skulls and boiled in water. Then it was filled with hot pebbles, and after that with sand. But there was danger...”

“What danger?”

Enrique threw the rodent’s leg bone to one of the dogs.

“Warriors from the village which had been attacked,” he said, “would be chasing my father and the others through the jungle. The tsantsas had to be started. They couldn’t wait till they were back at the village.”

“Why not?”

“The musiak,” said Enrique, “the avenging soul. It seeps out from the dead warrior’s mouth and will avenge his death. First it kills the warrior who killed it, and then the others. The only way to destroy the musiak is to make the head into a tsantsa: the soul goes inside the tsantsa and is trapped there.

“As the head-taking party runs through the forest, the avenging soul goes with them. The warriors would rub charcoal on the head’s face, to blind the avenging soul.”

The old hunter fell silent, as the demoniac screeches of a monkey echoed from the tallest branches of a nearby tree.

I asked Enrique about the avenging soul.

“A warrior could only get an avenging soul, when he had an arutam soul,” he said. “The arutam was important for a Shuar warrior. It kept him alive. Without it, he could have perished easily. When I was just a boy my father took me to the waterfall and he waited for me to see the arutam.”

“Where do you see it?”

“In the mist,” said Enrique, “in the spray which comes from the waterfall. It’s there. The soul entered me as I slept. It came as a jaguar. It stared into my eyes, challenging me to kill it. I was not frightened, for I wanted to be a warrior like my father. So I stared back and, drawing near, I stabbed it with my knife.”

Enrique puffed his chest full of air.

“That was many years ago,” he said. “But I will not forget that night, the night I became a warrior.”

The old Shuar’s tales were from another time, a time before missionary Bibles and makeshift churches flooded the Pastaza.

“There was so much killing,” said Enrique, repeating himself. “And when one of our clan was killed, we would have to avenge the death. It led to a cycle of death. There were assassins everywhere. They waited until night, then attacked the village. Children were snatched for slaves, and young women as brides. They set fire to the malocas, driving everyone into their trap.”

Again, the hunter paused, as he recalled the gruesome scenes of butchery.

“When the raiding party came to attack our village,” he said, “I was protected by my arutam soul. When they struck, everyone was asleep. I remember the hunting dogs howling at the dark. Then the first screams, as the assassins ran into houses and started to kill. They were wild, desperate to take heads. They were hacking people who weren’t even dead.

“My father was one of the victims that night. We buried his headless body under the floor of our house,” said Enrique. “Of course our village raided theirs and took more heads. Soon after that the missionaries came. They taught us that evangelism was right, and that cutting heads of our enemy was wrong. They baptized me, Enrique, and made me a Christian.”

The hunter touched a callused hand to his brow.

“We no longer need to fear an enemy,” he said softly, “for we have something very good – even better than an arutam soul.”

Enrique looked at me through the flames of the campfire. His cheeks were flushed.

“We have Jesus,” he said.

TWENTY-SIX

The Avenging Soul

Richard said the jungle was the womb from which all men had come. Emerging from it was like being reborn. Few sights could have been so welcome as the thatched roof of a maloca peeking out from between the rosewood trees. As we walked into the clearing in single file, I thanked God for delivering me from the green hell. The thought of traversing it again was almost too much to take. Perhaps, I mused, I would live out my days with Ramón, and become an honorary Birdman.

The village was well-proportioned, and set in a sprawling grassland. Along one edge, it was bordered by a small river, its water dark brown, like tea. A huddle of women were washing clothes on the bank. A rag-tag band of children and hunting dogs were darting about, enjoying the late afternoon sun.

Alberto, still holding the sloth under its arms, led us to a proud, towering long-house at the far end of the village. It was the tallest one I’d seen, lying east-west, and roofed with kampanaka palm thatch. A space of more than four feet stood between the raised bamboo floor and the ground. Unlike those at San Kose, and elsewhere, the malocas at Ramon’s village were oval in shape.

In the days of head-taking raids, no one would have dared enter a Shuar house until welcomed by the host. Unexpected guests were sometimes mistaken as assailants and killed. Indeed, in the Shuar world any action out of the ordinary could be regarded as hostile gesturing. My own Afghan ancestors, from the wilds of the Hindu Kush, are famed for their love of bloodshed. They were once known for dressing their women in red, so that they weren’t killed during “friendly” bouts of warfare. But the Shuar made my own progenitors seem tame in comparison.

Without waiting to be invited into the longhouse, Alberto led us up the tree trunk ladder. The central chamber was about seventy-five feet long, with a sturdy bamboo floor and plenty of light from the open sides. The roof had been newly thatched, but was already lined with cobwebs. At the far end, a separate area was set aside for cooking. There was no furniture, save for a simple cloth hammock, strung at the near end of the room. A few possessions had been stowed under the eaves; and a large number of bottles and bowls lined one of the walls.

The house was empty, leading me to wonder whether Ramón was at church. But, as Richard pointed out, the village bore no signs of Christianity.

“They are not evangelists,” said Enrique ruefully, “the Word of the Lord has not come here yet. But with the help of Jesus, they will see the light. They will build a church, a big one, with a great cross on the roof. And the sound of hymns will be heard.”

Enrique might have endured a Shuar childhood, complete with tsantsa feasts, but it had been swamped by the wooly-speak of the evangelists. His elation at the thought of a missionary crusade, was matched by our disapproval.

“Screw the missionaries,” said Richard, “they think they’re spreading religion, but what they’re spreading is a disease.”

Before I could add my own vitriolic remarks, the great ayahuasquero climbed the ladder into the house. He received Alberto first, thanking him for the sloth. Then, he welcomed the rest of us to his maloca.

As he extended his hand towards me, I regarded Ramón’s face. It was mischievous, adorned with flame-red lines painted with achiote. His cheeks were unwrinkled, despite his age, which was certainly the far side of fifty. A shine of sweat lit up the end of his nose, and his teeth were darkened by the black nut nushumbi. Upon his head was the finest feather corona I had seen. Crafted from a single scarlet macaw, its wings wrapped around the shaman’s head, like the winged head-dress of Apollo. Ramón’s wife, a large-boned woman, with a broad face and a square jaw, sported a smaller crown made from feathers and porcupine quills.

I admired his crown. He replied that great care is needed to make such a thing.

“If you cut the bird open,” he said, “the feathers will start falling. So, when you have killed the bird with a single dart, you place it in an ants’ nest. After five days all the flesh has been eaten away, leaving the bones and the feathers.”

When the creamy masato had been passed around, I opened my pack and withdrew a selection of gifts. I had brought some old clothing, some flour, rice, and a box of shotgun shells. The cartridges were clawed away, and stuffed in the eaves of the roof. Pleased that they had gone down so well, I gave Ramón’s wife two of the Fanta bottles. She was so delighted that she brought out more masato. When I commented on the beverage, she invited me to watch her prepare it. In the cooking area, I looked on as she chewed handfuls of boiled manioc, spitting them back into the bowl. The woman’s deteriorated dentistry severely hindered the process.

I illustrated the merits of the Fanta bottle as a kitchen appliance, making random crushing and rolling movements. Ramón’s wife was very pleased with her new tool. She spoke no Spanish, but explained in sign language that she would make a toad and turtle stew for dinner. She was an adventurous cook, with a well-stocked larder. Her kitchen contained a number of animals, some live, some dead, others hanging in limbo between the two. They included the giant turtle, which had retracted its head and limbs; a gold and blue macaw, a pair of dead peccaries, and the hind legs of an unidentifiable hoofed mammal.

Sitting miserably beside the fire was a baby red-faced monkey, tethered by a short string. Its hands were furry, the size and shape of tarantulas. Richard identified it as an extremely rare Red Uakari. He said it hadn’t had malaria, as the illness tends to bleach the redness from the face. The creature, he went on, would probably be kept as a pet for a while, then cooked for food.”

Suspended above the fire from rattan hooks were three heads. I assumed they were being dried. They weren’t human, but sloth heads, and had been shrunk. Despite their dreadful state, I recognized them immediately. For I’d seen sloth tsantsas before in Oxford’s Pitt-Rivers Museum. They’re no larger than oversized key fobs, with scrunched up features and a mass of wooly hair.

The Shuar supposedly regard sloths as their cousins. As such a close relative they’re said to be capable of having a musiak, an avenging soul. Kill a sloth and, in revenge, it will send a falling tree to crush you in the jungle. Some say sloths can even acquire an arutam soul as well; others insist that they cannot, and that’s why they are easy to kill.

Fearing that Alberto’s sloth would shortly be served up by Ramón’s wife, and his head turned into a tsantsa, I cajoled Richard to come to his rescue. The sloth, he told Ramón, had been a valuable companion during the journey from San José. And, as a weary traveler, he deserved freedom.

The shaman called his son. He told the boy to take the sloth to the edge of the forest, and to free it.

“Take what you need and there will always be enough,” he said.

I thanked him for his generosity of spirit.

“I killed another sloth this morning, when I saw it swimming in the stream,” he replied. “Later, we will eat it.”

A second round of masato came and went. Keen to get down to business, I asked Ramón about ayahuasca. The old maestro was seated on a block of wood, carved in the shape of a turtle. He held his palms out at arm’s length, and whistled through his blackened teeth.

“Aya-hu-as-ca is the key to life,” he said. “Drink it, and you will find answers.”

“Will I fly?”

Ramón lit a pipe of mapacho and rearranged himself on the stool.

“You will fly if that is what you want,” he continued, “but flying isn’t important.”

I felt my lower lip tighten with worry. Was the chief of the Birdmen telling me to forget about flight?

“The flight is the journey...” said Ramón, “the journey from this world to the other world.”

“But if you fly, you are with the spirits,” I said.

Shaking his head slowly, the maestro drew on the pipe. The quid of burning tobacco crackled in its bowl.

“You do not have to fly to be with them,” he said. “The spirits are all around us in the air, they are the air.”

*

The toad and turtle stew sat heavily on my stomach. So fearful was I of offending our hosts, that I consumed three helpings of the curious dish. It tasted like a greasy, gamey coq au vin.

Before we turned in for the night, Ramón went behind the long-house and broke off a section of dry termite mound. He placed it under the floor and set fire to it. The resins in the nest burned, keeping away insects. Richard told me to sleep away from the walls. The blood sucking assassin beetle, which carries Chagas’ disease, would sure to be lurking there, he said. The disease, which brings faintness, swelling and vomiting, is reputed to have killed Charles Darwin.

Ramón agreed to prepare a special batch of ayahuasca. Residing so deep in the jungle as he did, he could get his hands on mature vines. The older the vine, the stronger the ayahuasca. No shaman ever grows the vines near his house, for ayahuasca vines are too powerful.

Soon after first light, Ramón took me into the jungle to search for a suitable piece of caapi vine. He told me to beware of falling trees. The avenging soul of the sloth he’d killed the day before may come after us. All around animals and insects were feeding. I felt fortunate to be at the top of the food chain.

Early morning was the best time to cut the ayahuasca vine, the maestro said, as the juices are concentrated in the bark. Selecting an old gnarled liana, he started to chop. Like other shamans I met, Ramón was an expert with a machete. His arms seemed wasted of their muscle, but they could strike with an immense force. Until a century ago, metal blades were almost unknown to the Shuar, who still hacked off heads and cut vines with stone axes. I would always see the hunters carefully cleaning and sharpening their machetes before going into the jungle. All their weapons were kept in a state of readiness, perhaps a legacy of the head-hunting days.

Cut into foot-long sections, the vine looked very ordinary. Its thin mottled bark and cornsilk-colored wood hardly smelled of anything. The jungle abounds with plants, some no bigger than a light-bulb’s filament, others stretch up two hundred feet. Every leaf, every tree trunk and seed pod are quite unique. Most are more attractive than the caapi vine. So how on earth did the peoples of the Upper Amazon ever come across it, and work out the process of brewing ayahuasca”! It’s one thing to break off the leaf of a plant and chew it for particular relief, like coca. But it’s a giant leap to mix it with other plants, for an entirely new effect. The reductionist theory, wheeled out by intellectuals, says that centuries of trial and error explains it all. Just as infinite monkeys with typewriters could come up with Hamlet, the Amazonians had worked out ayahuasca.

Ramón must have cut about six feet of the liana. He kept repeating that such mature vines were very powerful. But perhaps even he didn’t realize the enduring strength of Banisteriopsis caapi. In 1851, the first botanical specimens of the ayahuasca vine were taken to Kew Gardens by the celebrated British explorer Richard Spruce. In 1969 they were tested, and found to still contain high levels of the active ingredient, harmaline.

An alkaloid, harmaline is similar to mescaline, the active ingredient in many other hallucinogens (including the peyote cactus, the psilocybe mushroom, as well as LSD).

When he had collected enough caapi, Ramón gathered leaves from other plants, careful not to take more than he would require. These admixtures contained the actual hallucinogens which would enter our blood thanks to the effects of harmaline on the digestive tract. The specific hallucinations depend on the blend of admixtures used by a particular shaman. There are more than seventy-five plants commonly used as admixtures in the region. Most contain tryptamine derivatives which, as I understood it, lead to the sensation of flight.

Ramón wrapped the leaves and chunks of caapi vine in a cloth, before leading me through the labyrinth of trees and vegetation, back to the village. He was a man of few words, not given to idle chatter. Only once on the way home did he speak.

“We will take the ayahuasca,” he said. “We will take it together. And we will die. The ayahuasca will kill us.”

I didn’t know what to make of the remark, but hoped he was referring to allegorical death.

As soon as we returned to the maloca, the shaman’s wife collared me. Sheepishly, she held out an enormous gourd. It was filled to the brim with the usual vile saliva-based beverage. Thanking her, I took a sip. I had sometimes managed to offload the drink on Richard. He had a far stronger stomach than me, and was always mindful to respect hospitality. But he had gone spear fishing with Ramon’s youngest son. I explained that I felt a bout of malaria coming on. I’m not sure why, but as all Shuar know, you must never drink masato if you have malaria.

It was then that I remembered about my precious beetles. They were still in my pack and hadn’t been fed in two days. I opened up the Tupperware containers. Thankfully, both were still alive. Ramón’s wife showed great interest in the insects. She motioned with her hands, admiring their size.

I should have looked after them myself; they were my responsibility. But given the woman’s enthusiasm, I asked her if she could take them to the kitchen, indicating in sign language that they were partial to rotten wood. She whisked the beetles away.

At the far end of the maloca, the maestro began to make the ayahuasca. Using the end of a Fanta bottle, he smashed the chunks of vine. The harmaline is contained just beneath the bark, and it must be crushed in order to release the alkaloids. Ramón was meticulous. He counted out five chacruna leaves (four inches in length, oval in shape), four leaves of sanango, and a few bobinsana leaves, and eight roughly made mapacho cigarettes. When the ingredients were ready, he laid a few pieces of vine in his cauldron, layering on top a few leaves. Then another layer of caapi and more leaves, more of the vine and, lastly, a handful of scrapings from the sanango root.

We carried the cauldron down to the water, filled it up and placed it on a special fire. Ramón did not use the cooking area in the maloca for making ayahuasca. The concoction was left to brew and the shaman turned his attentions to another matter.

The sloth he had killed the day before was being made into lunch by his wife. Its meat was considered a delicacy. Many Shuar, he told me, no longer ate sloths, for they feared retaliation. Unlike others, Ramón had not forgotten how to capture the creature’s avenging soul – by making a tsantsa from its head. He said that one must never go out to hunt a sloth, but if one crosses your path, you’re entitled to kill it.

Ramón fetched the head from the kitchen, and held it in his hands, gazing at it. He observed the lifeless features, the copper-brown hair, and the hole where its neck had been severed. Using a home-made blade, a sliver of steel, he started to peel the skin away. The shaman was skilled in the art of scalping, just as the Andean maestro had been in skinning the guinea pig. As the sloth had been dead for some time there was no blood. The skin came away from the bone remarkably easily.

The shaman said he always used the same red earthenware pot to boil sloth heads. He lit a fire behind the house, kindling it with banana leaves. The pot was dipped into the river.

When the water was boiling, the head was carefully dropped in. Raiding parties would sometimes carry a smoldering hornets’ nest with them, to light fires. The smoke had the added advantage of keeping other insects at bay. The Shuar could also light a fire quickly using a bow and a hardwood stick. Ramón demonstrated the technique. But the other Shuar I met, had lost the art, since the missionaries had brought them matches.

The sloth’s head was pulled from the water after about ten minutes. Longer than that, Ramón said, and the hair would start falling out. I saw none of the oily yellow grease which is said to exude from a human tsantsa. The sloth’s head had shrivelled noticeably, and was ready to be sewn up.

Taking some fiber and a splinter of wood, the shaman darned the two flaps of skin together. A sloth is far smaller than a human, so its head requires far less shrinkage to turn it into a tsantsa. Ramón had heated a pan full of sandy gravel on the fire. When it was sufficiently hot, he funnelled it through the sloth’s neck. Time and again, the sand was replaced. As Ramón agitated it inside the tiny pouch of skin, a smell of burning hair and meat mingled with the banana leaf smoke.

Satisfied that the sloth’s musiak had been controlled, Ramón went to the maloca to hang the head up with the others. He left them above the fire for a week or so, he said, after which he buried them in the jungle. On the few occasions that missionaries had cut their way through to the village, they had offered to buy the heads. As Ramón saw it, tsantsas, whether human or sloth, had no intrinsic value, and could therefore not be sold.

During the afternoon, the cauldron of ayahuasca boiled down. The shaman refilled it with water and placed it back on the fire. Richard returned from the river with seven good-sized fish. They were flat fish, similar to plaice. He gave them to Ramón’s wife, who hurried to the kitchen.

Soon after, she ferried several dishes into the main room of the maloca. Richard, Alberto, Enrique and I waited for the famous shaman to sit. He came up the tree trunk ladder, and said that, if I was to take ayahuasca that night, I should not eat. The stomach had to be empty. Even masato was off limits.

I edged back from the food, thankful that I could pass up the bowl of sloth goulash. Richard wolfed down two helpings of the stew. He picked at one of the roasted fish. Ramón’s wife then offered her guests the third dish. It was common at a Shuar meal to have no idea what the food actually was. But the dish, which was sitting on a cactus-green banana leaf, was unlike any other jungle food I had come across. It consisted of two hard black lumps, a little smaller than golf balls. Richard passed up the dish, saying he could eat no more. Alberto ate one of the lumps, after peeling off its shell. Ramón’s wife popped the other one into her mouth. When she had swallowed it, she looked over at me. And, in sign language, she thanked me.

I was just about to ask Richard what was going on, when it hit me. I sensed a jabbing pain in the base of my stomach, and acidic saliva in my throat. Ramón’s wife had mistaken my precious Titanus giganticuses for food.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Flight of the Birdmen

Just before he died, Ramón’s father had called his young son to where he was lying. The old man had been in a trance for many days, getting weaker and weaker. Even though he was a respected shaman and a healer, his family knew he was about to die. He had finished his work in this illusory world.

Moments before he slipped away, he filled his lungs for the last time, and blew into Ramón’s face.

“That breath...” said Ramón, squinting, “that breath passed on to me la sabiduría de la ayahuasca, the knowledge of ayahuasca.”

“How long ago did your father die?”

Ramón thought for a moment.

“Hace mucho tiempo, a long time ago,” he said. “I was no more than a child. I still had much to learn.”

“Without your father, who taught you?”

“The ayahuasca taught me,” he said, “and it told me to speak to the trees and plants in the forest. They welcomed me, telling me how to use them. Ayahuasca is the pass which opens all secrets,” Ramón said. “It’s the most powerful medicine there is.”

When the third batch of water had more or less evaporated from the cauldron, Ramón filtered away the remaining liquid. It was the color of caramel.

“We will leave it to cool,” he said, “and when there is darkness, we can drink.”

I asked Ramón about the rumor that he could fly.

He widened his eyes and put a hand to the nape of his neck.

“Ayahuasca is very strong,” he said. “I have already told you that. It can be used in many ways – as a purger of evil, as a medicine, a solver of problems... It can take you back in time, or into the future, show you miracles, transform you into a boa constrictor or a leopard.”

“What about flying... if you take ayahuasca can you actually fly?”

Ramón looked through me with his gaze, but said nothing.

I found myself thinking about ayahuasca and hallucinogens. I knew that my friends would give me pointed looks if they heard I was about to consume a mind altering substance. In the West there’s an extraordinary misunderstanding. Most people forget or merely ignore the link between plants and society. They may be condemning you while they’re smoking a cigarette, or drinking a bottle of beer – both, of course, are made from plants which when smoked or fermented alter the state of the mind.

In our world we have grown away from the land and scorn natural preparations. Hallucinogens have a bad reputation, and rightly so. They are constantly misused by us in societies which are almost incapable of using anything correctly. Active ingredients are stripped out from plants and taken in massive doses for stimulation’s sake. But the Shuar’s use of ayahuasca is different. It is a medicinal plant used in the context of a specific culture. It is employed in unison with a rigid structure of ritual, which supports it as a framework. It is taken for answers, not to get high.

In the West people are preoccupied with the vision or sensation they may get by taking a drug. They don’t give thought to the role of the concoction in healing, or its use as a tool. The shamans of the Amazon only take ayahuasca or any other hallucinogen when there’s a reason to take it. When I hear of people in Europe experimenting with ayahuasca, it turns my blood cold. The plant-derived experience is only part of the equation, the other part being the ritual.

Our short-sighted approach is not entirely our fault. Compared with Asia or the New World, Europe has very few plant species. North America has a wide variety of remarkable species but, tragically, when the Europeans slaughtered their way across that continent, they destroyed the Native American knowledge which understood them, and replaced it with a crippled European system, touted by snake-oil salesmen. It must have put American medicine back centuries.

On a moonless night, a clearing in the jungle is very dark indeed. Save for the glint of the fireflies, or the odd flicker of a home-made wick burning in kerosene, there is blackness. Those who are not evangelists and have late night prayer sessions, go to sleep soon after dusk. They rise long before it gets light.

Alberto sloped away to find a place to sleep. He had been feeling queasy since eating my beetle. The misunderstanding had cost me a great sum but, as I pondered it, I had got my just deserts. I should have released the insects when I’d had the chance.

Once Enrique had prayed quietly for our salvation, he followed the others to bed. Richard said to call him if I became distressed during the ayahuasca session. It struck me then that he had always appeared reluctant to talk of his own ayahuasca experiences while, at the same time, regarding the brew with the utmost gravity. I think he felt that ayahuasca was something which had to be tried to be understood. There was no point in him offering his own tales until I had been initiated. Without another word he wandered down to the tannin-brown water to swim. Only a man of Richard’s resolution would have dared swimming there in the darkness.

Ramón and I were suddenly alone. We were sitting at the far end of the maloca. It was a still night lit by a crescent moon. A pair of candles were burning before us, their flames perpendicular. In their light I saw the objects of ritual lying by the shaman’s knee. A gourd of ayahuasca, a white enamel mug, a cloth bag, and a chacapa, the dried leaf rattle which I’d seen being used near Iquitos.

Ramón lit a pipe of mapacho, and drew on it until his chest was filled to capacity. He blew the smoke at me. I tried to relax. The maestro opened up the cloth pouch and fished out a skull. It had such long, threatening fangs at the front. I recognized it as a jaguar’s skull. Sucking on his pipe a second time, Ramón blew down onto it. I watched as the swirls of gray smoke swept over the bone, before diffusing into the night.

Then, wiping his mouth with his hand, Ramón dipped the tin mess mug into the ayahuasca. He stirred the liquid with the cup, filling it almost to the top. I swallowed hard. The shaman put the mug to his lips and, taking small sips, drank the liquid. He leaned back, closing his eyes for a moment, breathing in through his nose. Stirring the cup in the brew a second time, he filled it again. I watched him in the dimness. With the brilliant macaw feather corona wrapped around his head, his face painted red with achiote, and the jaguar skull at his ankles, he made for a fearful sight.

He looked across at me, and then tipped a little of the dark liquid from the cup, back into the gourd.

“This ayahuasca is special,” he said softly. “I have made it with toé, datura. Volarás muy lejos, you will fly far.”

“But maestro,” I faltered, “datura will kill me. It is too strong.”

“I told you,” he replied, “when you take ayahuasca, you die.”

He handed me the cup. I drank it in sips, as he had done. It tasted bitter, like the sap of a tree. Although not pleasant, it was bearable. As the last drops of ayahuasca made their way down into my stomach, the shaman blew out the candles. There was no light now, only the glow of his pipe when he inhaled.

Taking up the chacapa, he rattled it; at the same time breaking into a soft whirring chant. The tone was like an old gramophone player stuck on a single note. I knew it took time for the ayahuasca to take effect. At first I tried to keep up with the chemistry of the reaction. The harmaline would be inhibiting the monoamine-oxidase, I thought, allowing the hallucinogens to enter my blood. The illusions would begin shortly.

I took a series of deep breaths, relaxing my shoulders and arms, leaning backwards. Then I focused on the sound of the leaf-rattle and the smell of the mapacho smoke. My senses were heightened. I could hear the sound of Ramón’s youngest child snoring at the far end of the maloca. The sound was almost deafening.

A few more minutes drifted by. I tried to think of the chemistry again. But I was no longer alert. The base of my spine felt warm, as if a hand was pressing on it. I could not focus my mind now, and I was losing a sense of space. A few more minutes passed, filled with the hum of the shaman’s chant, the smoke, and the rustle of dried leaves. With every second I became more disorientated. My eyes had adjusted to the darkness. I gazed up at the eaves of the thatch, which seemed bowed inwards and cruely distorted. So I peered out from the long-house, up at the stars. They were bright; and they were constant. I thanked the stars for being there.

Then the ayahuasca took effect.

My stomach was signaling to my mind. I was about to be violently sick. I had been poisoned and had to get out of the long-house.

Scrambling on my hands and knees, I crawled haplessly to the ladder. I was beginning to panic. My chest muscles were tense with fear. I could no longer trust my eyes. What they showed me was a distorted mess of colors and shapes. I closed them, feeling my way down the tree trunk ladder.

My bare feet were now treading in the mud. Rejoicing that I was on the ground I staggered, crawling, stumbling, into the undergrowth. Poison was in my blood. It was killing me. I was dying. The ayahuasca had tricked me. Fear took over. My chest sucked in air and I retched. I retched like I have never retched before. A flood of liquid spewed from my mouth. Panting hard, I reassured myself. The ayahuasca had been a mistake, I told myself. As soon as it was light I would hurry away from Ramón and the jungle. Within a few days I’d be back in a big city.

The reassurances did nothing to stop the reaction. I retched again, my stomach twisting itself in knots to purge the hideous brew. As I retched, my mind warned of more purging. This time from the rear end. In the nick of time I ripped down my shorts, just as my bowels opened.

Crouching there in the undergrowth of a Shuar village, unable to control my alimentary canal, I felt that this must be as bad as life can get. As I vomited, I crapped. And, as I crapped I vomited. All the while the undergrowth’s night-life was wondering what was going on. Frogs were jumping up, touching my buttocks with their heads. Moths and other winged insects were impaling themselves on the flow of faeces.

Yet, while in the undergrowth, I knew I was safe. There may have been frogs and moths, but I could lie low there and regroup. I coaxed myself to relax and, when the worst of the purging was over, I crawled back through the mud and up the ladder.

Ramón’s chanting hadn’t waned. The rustling of his chacapa and the low platform of his voice dispersed. I took my place again, cross-legged on the hard bamboo floor. Soon after, a second bout of purging overcame me. Scurrying fitfully across the floor, down the ladder and through the mud, I found sanctuary back with the frogs. I glanced up at the stars, drunk and off-balance, questioning how they could allow such a predicament.

Back on the bamboo floor, as Ramón’s smoke enveloped me, I sensed the ayahuasca moving on to the next phase. The hallucinations had begun. I leaned back, my eyes closed, my lungs breathing the dastardly mapacho smoke. It began with my arms sensing warmth, as the base of my spine had done. I questioned how anyone could take ayahuasca for pleasure. As I lay there, wondering, my body changed.

My shoulder sockets were growing warmer, as my arms evolved. They transformed from being feeble, feckless limbs. The bones altered first. I could see them. I watched astounded, as they grew more delicate, shedding themselves of my sunburnt skin. After the bones, came the muscles – colossal ones, like those of a body builder. Only then, when my arms were fleshed with tremendous arteries and veins, did the final covering emerge – feathers. White, fluffy feathers.

I might have panicked, but the shaman’s chanting gave a framework to the experience. His song was mournful, like the dirge at a funeral. Appropriate, for I was dead. I could not distinguish the words, the individual sounds. But, despite this, they made perfect sense. The incantations were beyond a language. They were protecting me... comforting, teaching. I breathed in the sound, inhaling it until my diaphragm was taut.

The song was speaking to me in a language without a voice. It was ordering me to thrust my wings outwards, to soar up, high into the air. I called back that I did not know how to fly. The sound of the chacapa touched my wings and dragged them up on a cushion of air. I laughed maniacally. I was flying. My wings moved with unequalled ease. There was none of the frantic, feverish motion of a man emulating a bird in flight.

This flight was natural, an obvious sensation. Glancing down, I saw the desert far below. I saw el colibrí, the hummingbird. I was at Nazca. Circling round the symbols on that plain I understood the stupidity of the Western mind. Ayahuasca was the key which decoded the etchings, just as datura explained the witches’ flight. Without one, the other had no meaning.

I flew on, guided by the chacapa’s sound, soothed by a spray of saliva from the shaman’s lips. The colors were bright – purples and blues, yellows and pinks. I was on the far side of a magnificent wall, flying in a no man’s land of illusion. I felt the rush of air on my face, and learned to control my wings by tilting their edges up and down. Ramón was with me. He said this was no illusion, but was the real world. We had died and come to life. I was alive for the first time. I was meant to fly, to be a part of the air. I sensed the shaman’s energy, the force of his knowledge. I could not see him, but I knew he was there. I was Icarus and he Daedalus. But our wings were not made of wax and feathers. They were living. We were birds, yet we were men, we were men, but birds.

*

We flew for many hours. I do not remember when the journey ended, or the moment I awoke. Sunlight streamed through the morning rain. I strained to open my eyes, retched and rolled onto my back. The maloca’s chonta palm floor was as hard as quartz. At my sides, my arms ached, as if they had been flayed with a whip. I roused the fingers of my left hand. They were grasping something. Still lying on my back, I raised the hand to my face. In its grip was a long feather. Three triangular notches were missing from the leading edge. It had been dipped in blood.

Appendix 1

AMAZONIAN FLORA-BASED HALLUCINOGENS

Few native medicinal preparations have caught the West’s imagination so strongly as ayahuasca. The deluge of recent publications on the use of this mysterious hallucinogenic decoction, reflects its unique role in an Amazonian shaman’s arsenal. Traditional healers revere the Banisteriopsis caapi vine for its ability to transport them to another spiritual dimension. They brew it up with a mixture of leaves from other plants, using it to provide answers to questions and to effect cures. The Western preoccupation with ayahuasca is derived less from its curative capacity, and more from its extraordinary pharmacological formula.

The Banisteriopsis caapi vine is not itself a hallucinogen. Rather, it is a matrix which allows hallucinogens and other compounds to be absorbed by the body. The active ingredient contained beneath the vine’s woody surface is harmaline. It’s not dissimilar to mescaline, the active ingredient in the peyote cactus, the psilocybe mushroom and LSD. The harmaline alkaloid is a monoamine oxidase (MAO) inhibitor. Essentially, this means that it stops the digestive tract from screening out a range of toxic chemicals and, as a result, allows the hallucinogens to enter the body.

For the anthropological community, the main question regarding ayahuasca is how a supposedly primitive people could have ever deciphered the harmaline alkaloid. The range of admixtures added to the ayahuasca brew varies enormously in the Upper Amazon. Most contain tryptamine derivatives, such as DMT. The number of admixtures implies that considerable experimentation must have taken place throughout history.

Western chemists are interested in the possible uses for ayahuasca in formulating consumer drugs. A number of ayahuasca analogues have been prepared in the laboratory, most of which are free from the severe side-effects existent in the majority of ayahuasca brews. They contain DMT or similar alkaloid, together with an MAO-inhibitor, such as harmaline. One popular analogue is pharmahuasca. Other pharmaceutical corporations are attempting to take control of Banisteriopsis caapi itself. On 17 June 1986, a patent was granted to Loren S Miller of Palo Alto, California, for Banisteriopsis caapi. The patent’s citation, which alludes to Loren as the “inventor”, notes that the plant is a “new and distinct Banisteriopsis caapi plant named Da Vine which is particularly characterized by the rose color of its flower petals which fade with age to a near white, and its medicinal properties”.

Generally speaking, ayahuasca is a shamanic concoction used in the Upper Amazon – encompassing jungle regions of Peru, Colombia, western Brazil and northern Bolivia. More than 22 species are known, the two most common being Banisteriopsis caapi and Banisteriopsis inebrians. In addition, species have been found to occur in southeastern parts of the United States, as well as in Mexico. The vine is usually cultivated, although rarely grown in the vicinity of residential dwellings. It is customarily boiled to form a tea-like drink with a variety of admixtures. The vine can also be chewed by itself. But adding a variety of other leaves is thought to make the decoction more potent, and to bring on hallucinations.

Through my research, I have found myself wondering whether the Spanish chroniclers, or their assistants, might have tried ayahuasca. I think it’s more likely that a general devolution and mis-translation took place, occurring over centuries. Their research-gathering process must have led to gross inaccuracies, especially with the endless rewritten drafts and so forth. Perhaps an informant had told the chroniclers’ assistants that there existed people who could actually fly, just as I was told by the shaman Alberto that Ramón could fly through the air. The chroniclers, like me, may well have not believed the claim. To the informant there could have been little or no difference between true and allegorical flight. After all, historically, flight meant different things to different people.

Ayahuasca is one of the best known hallucinogenic compounds used by shamans in the New World. It is, without doubt, one of the strongest and easiest ways to embark on a spiritual journey. Plotkin (1993) has made note of the “giant leap” between chewing an individual leaf, and mixing it with one or more leaves to alter the specific effect. The scope for a shaman to manipulate the range of visions, by altering the combination of admixtures, is another reason for its popularity. Visions depend on the chemicals present in the ayahuasca. Common admixtures include chacruna (Psychotiia viridis), Lantana flowers (Lantana camara), bobinsana, and tobacco.

Some people experience bright colors and frequently gain a strong sensation of flight or levitation. Many of the hallucinogenic sensations incorporate a sense of the mind being detached from the body. Some see wild creatures, or sense themselves transforming into a particular animal. Others see places or people they are acquainted with at a great distance; others see their own death, or are taken back in time. Some users have mentioned seeing places or people which they have not encountered before, but which do exist. After viewing a place, or “meeting a person in their vision”, they encounter it for real soon after. We must, of course, remain skeptical with regard to such assertions.

Manuel Villavicencio (1858), the Ecuadorian geographer, was the first “outsider” to study ayahuasca and to publish a report on it. He speaks of the ability to give the sensation of flight, of having been “lifted into the air”, saying, “I’ve experienced dizziness, then an aerial journey in which I recall perceiving the most gorgeous views, great cities, lofty towers, beautiful parks, and other extremely attractive objects.” Harner (1973) writes of the Conibo-Shipo Indians of Peru’s Ucayali River, who take ayahuasca before turning into a bird and flying away with the intention of killing a victim. Before committing the murder they return to human form. Harner himself wrote of meeting “bird-headed” people when under the influence of ayahuasca.

The Chilean psychologist Claudio Naranjo conducted exhaustive trials with ayahuasca. The speed of the flight in his studies seems important. A third of the patients reported the sensation of flight and soaring. One man said he had the sensation of growing wings,-and instead of fear, he sensed the freedom which goes with flight. He was no longer “imprisoned to the ground”.

The English botanist Richard Spruce was, like Villavicencio, one of the first scholars to study and identify Banisteriopsis caapi. His important two volume work, Notes of a Botanist on the Amazon and the Andes (edited by Alfred Russel Wallace and not published until 1908), includes Spruce’s initial report on ayahuasca, written for Geographical Magazine in 1853. He explained how a cold infusion was made, saying, “the taste is bitter and disagreeable”. He also remarked that just two minutes or less after taking the brew the “effects begin to be apparent. The Indian turns deadly pale, trembles in every limb, and horror is in his aspect”. This speed seems implausible. Perhaps Spruce had been witnessing ayahuasca mixed with datura or another strong admixture, which may have brought on such fast effects.

Spruce goes on to explain how he guzzled down half a dose of caapi, when the chief eagerly sent over a large calabash of caxiri (mandioca beer, similar to masato) of which he took a copious draught: “as I knew the mode of its preparation, it was gulped down with secret loathing.” Then immediately after this “a cigar two feet long and as thick as a wrist” was given to him, a confirmed non-smoker. Spruce never completed the ayahuasca ceremony though, because he had only taken half a dose. He says that, in May 1857, he reached the “great forest of Canelos, at the foot of the volcano Coptopaxi, where he saw caapi again.

Spruce admitted that “I regret being unable to tell what is the peculiar narcotic principle that produces such extraordinary effects. Opium and hemp are its most obvious analogues, but caapi would seem to operate on the nervous system far more rapidly and violently than either.”

Ayahuasca is true to the ancient systems of shamanic healing, in that one preparation can treat virtually every ailment. In many cases, the ayahuasquero will take the ayahuasca himself, when searching in the other world for a solution to the patient’s problem. Illness is not seen merely as the result of a medical disease, but it is the result of a curse or some supernatural affliction.

Dobkin de Rios (1972) shows surprise that traditional societies use ayahuasca or other hallucinogens for a wide range of situations (eg for healing, religious practices, black and white magic, pleasure and initiation). In my view, there are no boundaries between magic, illness and other parts of community life: all these areas are one and the same in a primitive society.

Some anthropologists have noted the limiting of ayahuasca rites to the male members of society. One report states: “ego [ie ayahuasca] is the only mind enhancing concoction that has been absolutely taboo on occasion for women. When a trumpet signaled the start of the puberty rites for the Yurupari, female members of the tribe fled into the jungle to avoid a death penalty for their seeing the ceremony or even the drink. In other regions it was thought that if a woman set eyes on prepared caapi, it would be rendered “ineffective”. My own experiences are quite the opposite of this. Women know all about the preparation and partake freely. The prohibition may have surrounded male puberty rites rather than the brew.

The use of ayahuasca in cities and urban areas across Latin America is increasing rapidly. A number of religious sects have incorporated the hallucinogen into their systems of belief. Many of these were established initially in Brazil. The most recognized is currently the Santo Daime faith; others are the Barquinia and Hoasca religions. As with Santo Daime, other ayahuasca faiths have developed a myth which explains how they came to understand the hallucinogenic brew.

In using ayahuasca, the shaman will tend to say that the vine’s spirit draws their attention to its medicinal and healing uses. I have been told that the trees whispered, telling the curandero how to prepare the drink. Ayahuasqueros believe that it’s not the plant which actually heals, but the spirit of the plant. Through his songs, known as ícaros, the shaman invokes the spirit of the vine, requesting that it heal or provide a solution.

Although Banisteriopsis caapi is a plant of the New World, it has been likened to Syrian rue (Peganum haimala), which grows throughout western Asia. Known for millennia for its powers, its seeds also contain harmaline. There is evidence that DMT-rich plant admixtures were added to the Syrian rue brews, in antiquity, to bring on the hallucinogenic effects.

Rudgley (1998) notes that Syrian rue’s seeds, which produce a rich red dye, may have been used to dye carpets in Persia. He wonders whether the geometric designs of the carpets might have been inspired by the hallucinogenic content of Syrian rue (harmine and harmaline). He also points to the legends of “flying carpets”, questioning whether the link can be taken further. Textile designs have undoubtedly been inspired in various cultures by hallucinogens. The ecstatic representations of shamans and Birdmen in the Paracas and Nazcan textiles are one example of this. Andrew Sherratt (1995) has also queried whether the patterns of central Asian carpets and the idea of flying carpets might have derived from hallucinatory visions.

There is nothing new about hallucinogenic preparations. Ayahuasca is one of many which has been employed for millennia. Devereux (1997) talks of the discovery of a cave in northern Iraq, in 1975, containing a Neanderthal skeleton. Along with the 60,000 year old remains were “clusters of pollen from 8 kinds of flowering plants”. At first they were thought to be funeral offerings, but later it was realized that they – e.g. ephedra – were known nerve stimulants and had been used in herbal curing in the region millennia before. Both Hofmann and Schultes have discussed the role of hallucinogens in the ancient Old World, from a cultural point of view. Despite this, the number of known Old World hallucinogens is limited when compared to those in the New World.

Schultes (1992) says that there are about 150 species of plant hallucinogens. 130 of them are located in the New World, especially in its tropical region. Some experts contend that they have played a key role in the development of New World religious beliefs.

Like the Incas, the Aztecs made use of numerous hallucinogenic plants. Not all provided visions. For example, the shrub Sinicuichi (Heimia salicifolia) gives intense auditory hallucinations. Sounds are distorted or seem far away. The plant has also been credited with supernatural powers. The Sinicuichi bird appeared on the Aztec statue depicting Xochipilli, the Prince of flowers.

The Aztecs were also known to use a certain “round pellet” to achieve states of ecstasy. They called it Ololiuhqui, and attributed to it divine status. It was addressed with songs and the seeds were put on altars, and made into drinks. Hallucinations and delirium followed. The Spanish tried to prohibit the use of the plant, and largely succeeded in doing so. Schultes identified the seeds as Morning Glory (the species Rivea cozymbosa). They have been found to contain a form of LSD.

Psychedelic mushrooms were also used by the Aztecs. Encyclopaedia Britannica records that the Spanish priest-historian Bernardino de Sahagun wrote of his disapproval of the cultic use of mushrooms in Mexico in the 16th century. There were reports of widespread use of hallucinogenic mushrooms during the coronation of the Aztec Emperor Montezuma in 1502.

Psychoactive snuff was thought to be the first native American hallucinogen discovered by the Spanish. Snuff has been found in 1200 year old mummy bundles in the New World. Virola snuff is made from the inner bark of various species of the virola tree, in the western Amazon. Its snuff contains trypamines, and is similar to nutmeg. The bark is stripped off the tree trunk in the early morning. (The resin exuded from the inner surface of the bark can be used as an arrow poison.) The exudate is a resin which darkens when exposed to the air, becoming reddish-brown. The bark is cut into slivers and is boiled for an hour or more, creating a paste. Some tribes ingest the virola orally, but most take it as snuff.

The fly agaric mushroom (Amanita muscaria), with its bright red cap, is another strong hallucinogen. It has been used by the nomads of Siberia for millennia, and leads to potent hallucinogens, as well as increasing strength and endurance. It may be the basis of the mysterious beverage Soma, drunk in antiquity in south Asia. Others think it may be the secret of the Hoama elixir of the Zoroastrians. Fly agaric is thought by some scientists to be the answer to the petroglyphs on the north-east coast of Siberia, found in the 1960s. They show humans and “human-mushroom” figures with mushrooms growing out of their heads. Lapps in Scandinavia’s Arctic Circle have traditionally used hallucinogenic mushrooms as well.

One remarkable quality is that the active ingredient in fly agaric passes through the bladder into the urine. Plotkin (1993) says that in 4000 bc the Aryans in southern Iran developed a ritualist fraternity based on the hallucinogen. They believed, as some Siberian peoples still do, that it would transport their souls into another realm. Two thousand years on, when the Aryans’ descendants invaded northern India, they took the mushrooms with them. Once again the mushroom cult came to prominence and burgeoned in India. Various ancient Hindu texts, such as the Rigveda, give mention to the hallucinogenic properties of fly agaric.

For as long as they have been known, the West’s establishment has persecuted the use of mind altering flora. Witches in Europe were using various solanaceous plant-hallucinogens like datura in the 16th and 17th centuries. Just as the Spanish Conquistadors persecuted the Incas and native peoples for their plant hallucinogen uses, the European Christians (Spaniards included) persecuted the medieval witches in Europe and in North America, because these people had visions which (a) couldn’t be explained and (b) were at odds with Christian dogma.

We tend to overlook the extraordinary knowledge and experience that ancient society relied on. Much of this must have been deduced through experiences with hallucinogenic flora. Their encounters, which are so distinctly out of the ordinary, are absorbed into their lore and myth, often with the catalyst – the psychotropic substance – being lost in the process. Hallucinatory substances may well have contributed to the epic and fantastic tales extant in religious and cultural texts.

Ethnobotanists have suggested that the reason jungle plants have had to develop such an astonishing array of defences from fauna, is that they exist in highly threatening environments. Predators come in all forms: fungi, mammals, insects and viral diseases. Thousands of years of evolution has provided plants with extraordinary characteristics, none more so than the hallucinatory flora.

With the destruction of the rain-forests and the even speedier obliteration of tribal plant knowledge (a result of rampant westernization, missionary activity and so forth), the race to learn ancient medications is being lost. A few companies, such as Shaman Pharmaceuticals, are actively attempting to learn from indigenous peoples about the plants in their societies, and their medicinal uses. One of the problems they face is that, since the early 1980s, there has been a decrease in fieldwork and an increase in plant medicines synthesized in the lab”, as scientists learn to control genes etc. Shaman Pharmaceuticals sends teams of trained ethnobotanists into the jungle to work with and learn from indigenous shamans. They compensate indigenous groups who teach them about medicinal plants. The problem is time: plant cures take years, even decades, to get to the market.

One ethnobotanist, Mark Plotkin (1993), has developed a small-scale solution, called the ‘shaman’s Apprentice Program”. His notes, which are based on tribal knowledge, are translated back into the tribal language and are studied by a young member of the tribe. Once written down, they are less likely to be lost, despite the fact that the plants themselves are liable to be made extinct if things continue as they are.

Appendix 2

THE SHUAR

Dozens of tribal societies worldwide have historically taken trophy heads. But the curious practice of shrinking heads has set the Shuar apart from other tribes. No other known peoples have treated their trophy heads in this way, with the possible exception of the ancient Nazcan, and other coastal civilizations of the Atacama. As discussed in the text, the reasoning for making tsantsas was clear. It was a means of controlling the musiak, the avenging soul. The tsantsa itself had no intrinsic value and was discarded once made and honored, that is, until western souvenir hunters came looking for them.

The ability to shrink human heads has brought the Shuar widespread attention. While being captivated by the tsantsa-making technique, the outside world has often classified the Shuar as a barbaric people. From the earliest interaction with the tribe, Western observers dubbed them Jivaro, their own word for ‘savage”.

There is no doubt that, until the post-war era, the tribe lived by an ancient tradition of warfare and tsantsa raids. But despite their eagerness to take heads, the Shuar were historically a people with a strong sense of ethics and a well-developed social framework. The ancient ways of the tribal society have almost entirely come to an end in the last handful of years. Small-scale petroleum projects in the deep jungle are one reason for this. But the overbearing responsibility must be assumed by a variety of missionary groups who have sought to cast the Shuar into the modern world, and to save their souls.

Landing in remote jungle enclaves, in flying-boats, the missionaries have wrought change on an unknown scale. Their intentions may be worthy, but they have led to the stripping away of a distinct tribal identity. Like a house of playing cards, a traditional Shuar community was extraordinarily fragile. Small changes affected the entire unit, causing it to collapse.

As mentioned earlier, the missionaries seem to have steered clear of prohibiting or condemning the use of ayahuasca. This point gives hope in the face of absolute uncertainty. With the continued use of ayahuasca, the shamanic tradition – although diminished in strength – can remain in place. The continuing existence of shamans ensures that, for the time being at least, the ancient knowledge of medicinal plants is able to survive.

Further weakening of the community occurred in the early years of the 20th century. The Shuar peoples have been devastated by the white man’s introduction of Old World diseases, like whooping cough, measles, tuberculosis, venereal diseases such as gonorrhoea, and so forth. Malaria, generally classified as an Old World affliction, has decimated Shuar numbers since the 16th century. In addition, the common cold has culled the Shuar’s numbers. The only positive factor in terms of population, is that the cessation of tsantsa raids has led to a reduction of death through warfare.

It is fortunate that a range of scholarly ethnographic studies were made of the tribe before the curse of change ravaged the Shuar lands. By far the best and most accurate published study is Michael Harner’s (1972). Many of the other works fell victim to the pitfalls of poor ethnographic research. However fascinating one finds the tsantsa tradition to be, it is a shame this one facet of Shuar life has been grasped by western observers virtually to the exclusion of all else.

Thankfully, the Shuar’s use of ayahuasca allows them to continue with their central belief: that the world is an illusion, and that only by taking the hallucinogen can they enter the real world. One wonders how this fundamental philosophy would change if Banisteriopsis caapi was prohibited by missionary groups in the region.

Until the 19th century, when explorers came searching for the head shrinking people, the tribe had been largely left alone since the initial Spanish incursions into the region. The Spanish, of course, had no interest in tsantsas or the Shuar. They were concerned only with finding gold. The tribe’s partial enslavement and subsequent rebellion, mentioned in the text, occurred in 1599. The size of the Spanish casualties may have been (in my opinion) grossly exaggerated. But, without doubt, the Shuar insurrection dissuaded the Spanish from exploring the area further. Harner (1972) notes that perhaps no other tribal people on the Latin continent has had so much written about them, with so little still known of them.

In traditional Shuar society every man, woman and child, was on constant guard, watching for raiding parties. The tsantsa raids were their raison d’etre. They proved a warrior’s bravery and the community’s superiority. Feuding kept the tribe strong and alert. Like animals in the wild, those who were incapable of keeping up, were picked off.

A visitor was always in fear of being butchered. For this reason, guests would never enter another’s maloca, without being expressly invited to do so. And, even then, they would never travel to an acquaintance’s abode unarmed. A bowl of masato might be pushed aside, until the hostess – the woman who had prepared it – had taken a sip.

During the night the house would be barricaded against attack. Anyone wishing to defecate or urinate would do so within the house, and remove their waste in the morning. After reading the standard works on traditional Shuar society, I was surprised to see for myself the openness of the houses. There are no barricades now, nor are there watch-towers. People leave their malocas at night and wander freely through the village.

These days, when a man dies, he is buried in a cemetery area at the edge of the village. Traditionally the Shuar would bury dead members of the family (especially the head male) under the dirt floor of the house. In some cases, the maloca was then abandoned out of respect. The dead man was buried in a shallow grave, not more than about two and a half feet from the surface. If married, his widow would cut her hair short as a sign of mourning.

In cases where the house was to be abandoned because of its owner’s death, the body may have actually been interred in the house at ground level (the Kafirs of Nuristan had a similar tradition of above ground burials). The body would be inhumed in a kanu (from which we derive our word “canoe”), a balsa wood coffin made from a hollowed-out log, erected on a scaffolding. Some of the tsantsas he had made during his lifetime may have been buried with the warrior. These would be placed in the small of his back. Also buried with him would be clothing, weapons and other artefacts and his monkey skin traveling bag. The tradition is almost identical to the Nazcan and Paracas funeral techniques, discussed in the text.

Many of the Shuar’s thatched malocas that I encountered were much like any other Upper Amazonian houses. The traditional oval design has been largely forsaken for a simpler open-sided square house. But malocas are still built on high ground, near a river, surrounded by a garden area. They tend now to face inward to a football field. Houses are of course communal, with one area belonging to the women, and one to the husband. With less polygamy (which is frowned on by missionaries) there is more commonly only one wife, and so the house is less often subdivided along gender lines.

In the past, in addition to barricades, there was frequently a secret passage leading to the jungle, for escape in times of attack. Houses were routinely abandoned after about ten years,-partly because the house would be rotting by then, and partly because the gardens would be overworked, and the hunting grounds depleted. With more permanent missionary-built schools, water tanks, churches and other communal buildings, villages are now less likely to be abandoned.

Until head-taking feuds were eliminated, houses had to be large enough to hold the tsantsa feast. Garden areas, growing yuca and other vegetables would also have to be big enough to grow sufficient food for the feasts.

The Shuar did not wage war to gain territory. Feuding was regarded as a means of taking as many heads as possible, or to capture women. Revenge would help to select the village targeted which, in all likelihood, would have made an attack of their own previously. A kakaram, a great warrior, would usually lead a warring party. To be considered a kakaram the man must have taken at least three or four heads. Before the raid, spies would be sent to stake out the enemy village. Men were recruited for the attack: usually about thirty took part. One problem of a warring party was that some of its warriors would invariably be the enemies of others. So parties were loosely arranged into pairs, mutual friends covering each other’s backs.

Warring groups would first combine forces to attack one or two houses in the enemy village, often setting the thatch alight to drive the occupants out. The enemy were butchered regardless of age or sex. If a man snatched a girl as a wife, she may well have been butchered en route home by the rest of the group, in order to make another tsantsa.

The world of the Shuar was based, as we have seen, on the premise that apparent reality is illusion. The importance of the soul to this premise cannot be over-emphasized. Only by understanding this complex idea, can one gain a rudimentary grasp of the working of traditional Shuar society. The belief was founded on the notion that one could enter the supernatural world by using ayahuasca, and acquire a soul there.

Three distinct types of soul could be acquired, known accordingly as arutam, musiak and nekas wakani. The soul depended on the person and his circumstance. Once someone had attained a single soul, he was immune to all murderous forces, such as sorcery, assassination and poisoning. However, he wasn’t immune to the scourge of contagious disease brought by the white man. But when he had acquired two souls he would be immune to even these Old World afflictions.

Nothing, traditionally, was so important to a Shuar man as acquiring an arutam soul. It ensured his survival. It was not so important for a woman, largely because females were not exposed to such danger during their lives. They did not take part in tsantsa raids. Harner (1972) asserts that an arutam soul was sought when a son was as young as six years. The child was taken by his father to a waterfall (considered as a sacred place), where he paced up and down, in the hope of attracting an arutam soul. The soul was thought to exist in the spray at the base of the waterfall. If, after several days the boy had not seen an arutam soul, he was given datura, Brugmansia arborea, juice. The father would take datura as well as giving it to his son to drink.

In the dream which followed, the seeker would behold a pair of creatures, two giant anacondas, jaguars or even a pair of fire-balls. Taking all his courage, he had to go up and touch one of the creatures. Once he had done this they would explode and disappear. He spent the first night on the river-bank. While sleeping there, the arutam soul would come to him as an old ancestor warrior. The soul entered the child and resided in his chest. Imbued with great self-confidence, the arutam soul would give him inner strength.

The musiak (the avenging soul) could only be acquired by someone already possessing an arutam soul. The musiak was only manifested when the possessor of an arutam soul was slain. The avenging soul seeped out of the dead warrior’s mouth, and set about avenging his death; i.e. killing the person who killed him. The Shuar believed that as the head-hunting expedition retreated, the slaughtered enemies’ souls hovered alongside the party. The only way to dispose of them, to deactivate them, was to turn them into tsantsas. This forced the avenging musiaks or souls into the shrunken heads.

One of the processes in making a tsantsa was to rub charcoal into the skin so as to blind the avenging soul. When the shrinking itself was concluded, three consecutive tsantsa feasts were held: at the end of which the musiak spirit would be expelled from the tsantsa and sent on its way.

In the confusion of a tsantsa raid, the warriors would have to hurry to remove heads as carefully as they could. With a knife, the victim’s skin was peeled back from the upper part of the chest, the shoulders and the back. Then the head was chopped as far down the neck as possible, close to the collar-bone, traditionally using a stone-edged axe. The warrior would remove his own headband and thread it through the neck and out of the mouth, making it easier to carry, slung over the shoulder. Heads had to be decapitated with great speed, as the tsantsa party was usually under attack at the time.

Once they were a distance from the village, the assassins would cut the skin away from the bone and throw the skull into a river, a gift for pani, the anaconda. The skin was boiled in plain water. Within half an hour it was removed. Any more time than that and the hair began to fall out. The skin had already shrunk by about half. It was allowed to cool and dry. Then it was turned inside out, and any flesh on the inner edges was cut away. After this, the fold of skin was turned the right way again, and the slit in the back was sewn up with string made from vine. The lips were sealed with pins made from chonta palm, or vine.

Small stones (no more than about two inches wide) were heated in a fire and, one at a time, they were rolled around the sack-like envelope of the tsantsa. Gradually it would reduce in size. When too small for stones, sand was heated and put inside. The tsantsa may have been wrapped in a large leaf to insulate the heat, keeping it in.

The party of assassins would pack up the heads after about an hour of hot-sand treatment, and run off into the jungle towards their village. Each day they would stop for three or four hours to work on the tsantsas. It was in their interest to complete the first stages, because of fears that the musiaks would attack them.

A machete blade was heated and pressed against the lips to dry them. Then the facial skin was repeatedly rubbed with balsa-wood charcoal. Sometimes a large red seed was placed beneath the eyelids, filling the hole, preventing the musiak from seeing. Between four and six days of treatment were needed for the basic tsantsa to be completed, at which time it was about the size of a man’s fist. A hole was made at the top of the head, and a string was tied to it, so that the warrior could wear it around his neck at the tsantsa feast.

The feasts were huge occasions. To honor a tsantsa correctly, three separate feasts for the entire village would be held. In order that there would be sufficient food and drink for the celebration, crops of yuca were planted once the raiding party had returned. The first tsantsa feast may not have taken place until a year after the raid. Pigs would be raised, and the host may have even built a special new house for the occasion.

Several hunters would go out into the jungle to kill game. The Shuar would use unripe bananas to keep time. They and the guests would be given an unripe banana from the same stalk. Once it was ripe, they knew it was time to get to the feast. The celebrations would each last for as much as five days, the third feast being the longest. Up to about 150 guests would turn up. Only after the third banquet were the chonta palm pins removed from the tsantsa, and replaced with the long, intertwined cotton strings.

I felt fortunate to learn the ancient rituals first-hand from Enrique, the Shuar chief at San lose village. He must be one of the last to remember the full spectrum of lore, ritual and hunting techniques.

Hadingham (1987) cites a report from 1527 by Miguel de Estete, who accompanied Pizarro on his third voyage. He described head shrinking on an island off the coast of Ecuador, and at first assumed that the heads were from a tribe of dwarfs on the island. This substantiates the probability that head shrinking was once practised throughout the Peruvian coastal area. Nazca pots and textiles are well known for their depictions of trophy heads. A tsantsa taken from a tomb at Pisco was supposedly presented to Queen Victoria’s consort Prince Albert in the 19 th century.

Missionary activity may have brought rampant change, but one aspect of Shuar life which appears to have altered little is a belief in witchcraft. The belief strengthens the need for a shaman. The Shuar still apparently believe that witchcraft is the source of almost all misfortune, including illness and death. Their society appears to still possess two distinct types of shaman – those who bewitch and those who cure. All shamans are either one or the other.

All Shuar shamans have tsentak, spirit helpers, who abide by their instructions. Bewitching shamans can enlist the help of the wakani spirit bird, as we have seen. The shaman calls these birds and he blows on them. They fly to the victim’s house and circle, terrifying him. Death from madness can follow. Of course, if a member of society drops dead in accidental circumstances, it may be inferred that he died as a result of a shaman’s magic.

Just as there was an unwavering faith in the soul, the Shuar traditionally believed in jungle spirits. For example Yacumama, the mother spirit of the river, was thought to exact revenge on any woman in menstruation who paddled across her. Yacumama could send a dolphin to upturn her boat. The spirit was only warded away if the woman wore a clove of garlic around her neck or arm. The river spirit was omnipresent. She could take many forms, including that of a Christian European. Her victims were carried to the bottom of a river, unable to ever escape from this realm: an enormous land populated with strange creatures. A reverse image of our world, it was thought to be upside-down. All the inhabitants had their heads on backwards. The spirit of the river lived in a crystal palace with walls fashioned from mother of pearl. She sat on a turtle throne fashioned from feathers, with one eye closed and the other open, always watching for the crocodile. Beliefs in such spirits of nature appear to continue, even alongside the belief in Christianity.

One aspect of life that has not changed, is the Shuar love of hunting. No longer does a warrior embark on raids for enemies’ heads, but hunting for game is as popular now as ever. From the time that a male child can walk, he is encouraged to hunt. The boy would traditionally have been permitted to fire arrows or darts into the corpse of a slain victim, to give him practice.

Peccary and monkey are hunted, prized for their flesh and their skins. The armadillo and agouti are only valued for their meat. Most types of bird – with the exception of carrion-carriers – are hunted, especially parrots, toucans, doves and macaws. Harner (1972) asserts that rabbits and deer are never hunted for their meat. Rabbits are supposedly considered too much like rats; and deer are not hunted for they are regarded as human demons with supernatural powers. The Shuar believed that by eating a deer they may be eating a dead man’s soul, which would then enter them. The Shuar hunters whom I met appeared to have no scruples about killing other rabbits or deer.

A 16-gauge shotgun is the ultimate status symbol for a Shuar man. However, the ubiquitous lack of ammunition ensures that blowpipes are still in constant use. Unfortunately, the younger generation are forgetting the skill of blowpipe use, considering the weapons to be old-fashioned.

These days the blowpipes are used mainly for tree-dwelling animals. The Shuar are regarded as great experts with blowpipes and poisoned darts. Most pipes are about seven feet long (those sold to tourists in Iquitos and elsewhere are shorter so they can fit in overhead lockers of jet airplanes). They are split down the middle, grooved and bound back together with fiber strips and a natural resinous glue, with a black beeswax coating.

When aged about four boys are given a hollow reed. They learn to blow small darts at insects, such as butterflies. A few years later they are given a miniature blowpipe. The child shoots hummingbirds, and progresses to larger birds. When he’s about sixteen he kills his first sloth and would traditionally make a tsantsa from its head.

Women had their own special way of killing. They would poison their victims with a natural toxin, such as ampihuasca, mixing it in the masato they served. In addition to the two poisons mentioned, Shuar hunters also use poisons derived from various species of poison arrow frogs, and are experts in blending toxins. Mumatatchi ants are sometimes cooked over a low heat until they produce a poisonous juice, which is added to ampihuasca.

Most poisonings were traditionally done at tsantsa feasts. The big problem was locating the person responsible for the poisoning. The list of suspects was never a short one: everyone had a secret enemy who, given the right moment, he or she might want to slay. The matter fast became complex, framed by a hierarchy of death. If for example one couldn’t kill an adulterer, because he had fled, one could kill his father, brother or cousin. If a relative had been killed by witchcraft, one would go after the perpetrator seen in an ayahuasca vision. This person, of course, was more than certainly innocent, as were the witches burned at the stake during the European witch trials. So, with a little time, it’s not hard to see how everyone in such a society would be trying to avenge the death of others!

Glossary

Achiote: Plant whose oily red seeds are used as facial paints by Shuar and other Upper Amazonian peoples.

Agouti: See Mahasse.

Agua de florida: Perfumed water, used in shamanic ceremonies and for ritual purification.

Aguardiente: Potent jungle alcohol derived from the sap of the aguardiente palm.

Ajinomoto: Brand name of monosodium glutimate powder, popular in Peru.

AK-47: Russian-made Kalashnikov assault rifle.

Algonquin: Native American people of the Ottawa river valley.

Alpaca: Domesticated llama, prized for its wool.

Altiplano: High plateau of southern Peru and northern Bolivia.

Amazons: Legendary tribe of warrior women, once thought to reside in the South American jungle.

Amigo: Spanish for “friend”.

Ampihuasca: Jungle vine used as a poison, for hunting fish etc.

Anaconda: Large semi-aquatic species of boa constrictor.

Anamuk: Magical bewitching dart sent to destroy by a bewitching shaman.

Anopheles: Species of malarial mosquito.

Arutam soul: Most important of the three Shuar souls, it is acquired in childhood and protects a warrior from death.

Assagai: Short spear favoured by the Zulu tribe.

Assassin cult: Secret order of murderers once operating in the Middle East, under the effect of hashish.

Atacama Desert: South American desert, ranging from Peru to Chile on the Pacific seaboard.

Atropine: Powerful hallucinogenic alkaloid present in datura and other Solanaceous species.

Avatar: Incarnation of a Hindu deity; a holy man.

Ayahuasquero: A shaman skilled in the use of ayahuasca.

Aymara: Native American people of the Peruvian Andes, and their language.

Aztec: Nahuatl-speaking people of Mexico, and their empire.

Azulejos: Blue glazed tiles introduced to Peru by the Portuguese.

Banda: Round hut, common in East Africa.

Banisteriopsis caapi: Vine containing harmaline used in preparing ayahuasca.

Banisteriopsis inebrians: Species of liana used for making ayahuasca; similar to Banisteriopsis caapi.

Barriada: Shanty-town; as found on the outskirts of Lima and other large cities.

Besom: Broom made of twigs, supposedly ridden by witches.

Bobinsana: Admixture sometimes added to ayahuasca.

Bora: Native Indian tribe residing close to Iquitos.

Boutu: Local name for the pink Amazonian river dolphin.

Brugmansia: Latin name for datura.

Brujo: Spanish for “witch”.

Caapi: Alternative name for ayahuasca.

Caiman: Amazonian species of alligator.

Campesino: Spanish for “country person”.

Capybara: Largest known rodent, it measures up to four feet and lives in the Amazon region.

Cassava: Edible starchy tuber native to the Americas; used to make flour, porridge, alcohol etc. Also called yuca and manioc.

Cecropia: Leafy jungle plant which induces drowsiness when eaten by sloths.

Céntimo: One hundredth of a Peruvian Sol.

Ceviche: Dish of raw fish marinated in lemon juice,-popular on the Peruvian coast.

Chacapa: Ritualistic rattle used by Amazonian shamans.

Chacruna: Admixture often added to ayahuasca, regarded as important in providing colorful visions (Psychotria viridis).

Chagas’ disease: Infection carried by the Assassin beetle, causing heart palpitations and death.

Chancay: Pre-Incan civilization of coastal Peru, famed for its pottery.

Charqui: Beef stew, popular in the Peruvian Andes.

Chicha: Maize-based liquor, popular in Andean communities.

Chigger mite: Six-legged fly which burrows beneath the skin to lay its eggs.

Chonta: Jungle palm, the heart of whose inner stem is regarded as a delicacy.

Chuchuhuasi: Intoxicating jungle liquor made from the chuchuhuasi tree.

Chullpa: Ancient funeral tower.

Chumpi: Ornamental woven wool belt, worn by people on Taquile Island, Lake Titicaca.

Cipó d’água: Vine containing fresh water.

Cochineal: Red dye made from dried cochineal beetles.

Colibri: Spanish for “hummingbird”; one of the major images at Nazca.

Colectivo: Shared Peruvian taxi.

Corona: Spanish for “crown”; sometimes referring to Native Indian feathered crowns.

Crir: Ancient Aztec glider.

Curandero: Healer,-one who practises ayahuasca.

Curare: Resinous extract of the Stiychnos toxifera vine, used by Amazonian tribes as a tranquilizer for hunting.

Cuscomys ashaninka: Recently-discovered Andean mammal the size of a domestic cat.

Cuy: Spanish for “guinea pig”; a popular dish in Andean communities.

Datura: Brugmansia arborea, member of the potato family, whose leaves are a powerful hallucinogenic, used in the Amazon and by European medieval witches.

Deet: Synthetic insect repellent.

Dendrobates azureus: Indigo-colored species of poisonous frog, used by native peoples for hunting.

Ekeko: Ancient Aymara deity whose image is considered to bring good luck.

El Dorado: Mythical land thought to be made of gold.

Estofado: Thick chicken stew, popular in Andean communities.

Fly agaric: Poisonous hallucinogenic mushroom with a bright red cap.

Garimpeiros: Local self-employed gold miners.

Gaseosa: Peruvian word for a soft carbonated drink.

Guaje: Hard-shelled fruit, high in vitamin C, with yellow-orange flesh, popular in Upper Amazon.

Hacienda: Spanish word for a “property”, a villa.

Hardtack: Hard savory biscuit once popular fare with expeditions.

Harmaline: Alkaloid compound found in Banisteriopsis caapi.

Hashish: Narcotic resin collected from the female hemp plant.

Huaquero: Spanish word for “grave-robber”.

Icaros: Shamanic songs sung during an ayahuasca ceremony.

Iguachi: Shuar word for the Devil.

Jaca shoqpi: Andean divination technique based on the dissection of a guinea pig.

Jambiyah: Curved Yemeni dagger, traditionally with a handle fashioned of rhino horn.

Jivaro: See Shuar.

Kakaram: Shuar warrior.

Kapok: Tropical tree whose seed pods contain a silky fluff traditionally used for mattress stuffing etc.

Macumba: Brazilian religious sect founded on West African tribal beliefs.

Maestro: Master; a traditional healer or shaman.

Mahasse: Medium-sized tropical rodent, popular as food.

Mahicaris: Slang term for “Devil Worshippers”.

Mal de ojo: Evil Eye, popular superstition brought to the New World by the Spanish.

Maloca: Traditional thatched hut or long-house.

Mandrake: Plant of the Deadly Nightshade family, once used by European witches in flying ointments.

Manguaré: Pair of hollowed logs used as signaling drums over the jungle.

MAO-inhibitor: (Monoamine oxidase) Chemical substance (such as harmaline) which restricts the body’s natural ability to filter out specific toxins.

Mapacho: Strong jungle tobacco used in shamanic ceremonies.

Masato: Masticated cassava beverage prepared by Shuar tribe.

Matamata: Species of “prehistoric” turtle found in the Upper Amazon [Chelus fimbriatus).

Mate de coca: Tea made with coca leaves.

Maya: Ancient civilization and their language, who resided in Mexico and Central America.

Mescaline: Hallucinatory alkaloid contained in the peyote cactus.

Mestizo: Person of mixed European and Native American ancestry.

Mololo: Local name for an infusion of Cramp Bank.

Mormodes rolfeanum: Species of jungle orchid thought by some to resemble a bird.

Motocarro: Three-wheeled motorbike taxi, as operated in Iquitos.

Motorista: Man in charge of driving a boat.

Mumatatchi ant: Species of jungle ant which secretes a toxin when disturbed.

Murrel: Oily sardine-like freshwater fish, commonly found in South Asia.

Musiak: Said by the Shuar people to be a warrior’s avenging soul.

Naka-naka: Amazonian slang for “lies”.

Namaste: Traditional Indian greeting.

Nape: Alternative name for ayahuasca.

Natema: Shuar name for ayahuasca.

Native American Church: Religious organization founded on the ritual use of hallucinogenic peyote cactus.

Ocelot: Medium-sized wild cat, found in the Amazonian jungle and elsewhere in the Americas.

Paiche a la Loretana: Grilled fillet of piraruca, commonly served with roasted cassava.

Pampa: Extensive flatlands of western Peru, as at Nazca.

Peki-peki: Local name in the Peruvian Amazon for a dugout canoe driven by a crude motor.

Pele: Large balls of cured latex.

Peyote: Cactus-based hallucinogen; used in Native American Church rites.

Phyllobates terribilis: Most toxic species of poison arrow frog; resides in Surinam’s jungle.

Pinde: Alternative name for ayahuasca.

Piraruca: Large primitive freshwater fish, found in Upper Amazon and prized for its meat.

Pisco: Grape brandy made in the coastal town of Pisco.

Pisco sour: Whipped beverage containing Pisco and egg white.

Pishtao: Mysterious – possibly erroneous – practice of melting human corpses to acquire fat.

Psyilocybe: Mushroom (Psilocybe mexicana) from which is derived a hallucinogen called psilocybin.

Punga: Local word for kapok.

Quechua: Ancient Andean language, supposedly predating the Incas.

Quenas: Pan-pipes,-popular Andean woodwind instrument.

Quinua: Weed found in the Andes whose seeds are ground and eaten.

Rashed: Flying vehicle thought to be possessed by King Solomon.

Rub” al-Khali: The Empty Quarter of the Arabian Desert.

Ryuku Kempo: Style of martial art, originating in Okinawa.

San Pedro: Andean cactus used as a hallucinogen.

Sanango: Hallucinogenic nerve agent; sometimes taken alone as an infusion, or mixed with ayahuasca.

Santo Daime: Religious organization of Brazilian origin, founded on the ritual use of ayahuasca.

Saqqara glider: Model of a supposed glider found in an Egyptian tomb, kept at Cairo Museum.

Selva: Spanish word for “jungle”.

Sendero Luminoso: Shining Path, Marxist organization which terrorized Peru from about 1980 until 1992.

Seringueiro: Traditional rubber tappers in Peruvian Amazon.

Shuar: Native tribe residing in the Pastaza region, near the Peruvian-Ecuadorian border. Formerly known as Jivaro which means ‘savage”.

Siete raices: Amazonian tonic made from seven roots.

Sillar: Volcanic stone light in color.

Sinicuichi: Hermia salicifolia, shrub used as an auditory hallucinogen.

Sirena: Spanish word for “mermaid”.

Sol: Currency of Peru.

Solanaceae: Family of plants, which includes numerous hallucinogens and the potato.

Soma: Hallucinogenic beverage drunk in South Asia in antiquity.

Spider monkey: Agile South American monkey with slender limbs and long prehensile tail.

Susto: Literally “fear”; idea that a sharp fright splits one’s soul from the body.

Suyos: Agricultural and administrative divisions of Taquile Island.

Syrian rue: Middle Eastern plant containing harmaline.

Takpa: Ominous interruption during an Andean shamanic ritual.

Tía: Spanish word for “aunt”.

Titanus giganticus: Enormous species of beetle with very powerful mandibles, growing up to 2.0 cm.

Tobacco water: Bitter water flavored with an infusion of tobacco; used in shamanic ceremonies.

Toé: Shuar word for datura.

Totora: Type of reed found at Lake Titicaca, woven into simple boats.

Trachyte: Pale volcanic stone.

Tsantsa: Trophy head taken in a Shuar raid and shrunk to the size of an orange.

Tsentsak: Invisible magical dart regurgitated by a shaman.

Tumi: Sacrificial Incan dagger, sometimes fashioned from gold.

Uña de gato: Literally “claw of the cat”; a potent Amazonian aphrodisiac and healing potion.

Vimana: Mythical flying machine said to have flown in ancient India.

Virola: Hallucinogenic snuff related to nutmeg, taken in the Upper Amazon.

Volador: Aztec ceremony in which Birdmen swoop down around a towering pole, simulating flight.

Vulcanization: Process which makes raw rubber malleable.

Wak’a loom: Traditional collapsible loom found near Lake Titicaca.

Wakani: Spirit helping bird, faithful to a Shuar shaman.

Wawek: Bewitching shaman.

Wayuro seed: Red and black bean, acquired from the pods of a jungle tree, credited with mystical powers.

Yagé: Alternative word for ayahuasca.

Yarena: Common palm with long slatted fronds, commonly used for building jungle shelters.

Yuca: See cassava.

Bibliography

FLIGHT

The Prehistory of Plight, Clive Hart, 1985, University of California Press, Los Angeles

Interpretive History of Plight, M. J. B. Davy, 1937, Science Museum Press, London

Men in the Air, ed. Brandt Aymar, 1990, Wings Books, New York

Nazca, Plight of Condor I, Jim Woodman, 1977, John Murray, London

Vimana Aircraft of Ancient India and Atlantis, ed. David Hatcher Childress, 1991, Adventures Unlimited Press, Illinois

Flight Before Flying, David Wragg, 1974, Osprey Publishing, Reading

Wings, ed. H. G. Bryden, 1942, Faber and Faber, London

The Inventions of Leonardo da Vinci, Charles Gibbs-Smith, 1978, Phaidon Press, London

The Dream of Flight, Clive Hart, 1972, Faber and Faber, London

PERUVIAN HISTORY

The Conquest of Peru, William H. Prescott, 1896, George Routledge and Sons, London

In Search of the Immortals: Mummies, Death and the Afterlife, Howard Reid, 1999, Headline, London

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TRAVEL & GUIDES

Exploration Fawcett, P. H. Fawcett, 1953, Hutchinson, London

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THE INCAS

Highway of the Sun, Victor Von Hagen, 1956, Victor Gollancz, London

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TEXTILES & ART

Ancient Andean Textiles, Rebecca Stone-Miller, 1994, Thames and Hudson, London

The Weavers of Ancient Peru, Moh Fini, 1985, Tumi, London

Culturas Precolombinas Paracas, 1983, Banco de Crédito del Perú en la Cultura, Lima

Textile Traditions of Mesoamerica & the Andes, Margo Blum Schevill, 1996, First University of Texas Press, USA

Arts of the Amazon, Barbara Braun, 1995, Thames and Hudson, London

Art of the Andes, Rebecca Stone-Miller, 1995, Thames and Hudson, London

Early Nazca Needlework, Alan Sawyer, 1997, Laurence King, London

SHUAR

Off With their Heads, Victor Von Hagen, 1937, The Macmillan Company, New York

Jivaro: People of the Sacred Waterfalls, Michael Harner, 1972, University of California Press, Berkeley

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AMAZON & ITS TRIBES

Across the River of Death, Jorgen Bisch, 1958, The Scientific Bookclub, London

People of the Amazon, Lilo Linke, 1963, Robert Hale, London

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FLORA & FAUNA

Insight Guide to Amazonian Wildlife, Hans-Ulrich, 1992, APA Publications (HK), Hong Kong

Poison-Arrow Frogs, Ralf Heselhaus, 1992, Blandford, London

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AYAHUASCA

Amazon Healer, Marlene Dobkin de Rios, 1992, Prism Books

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The Alchemy of Culture, Richard Rudgley, 1993, British Museum Press, London

Vine of the Soul, Richard Evans Schultes, 1992, Synergetic Press Inc, Arizona

The Cosmic Serpent, Jeremy Narby, 1998, Victor Gollancz, London

HALLUCINOGENS & SHAMANISM

Plants of the Gods, Richard Evans Schultes and Albert Hofmann, 1992, Healing Arts Press, Vermont

The Long Trip, Paul Devereux, 1997, Penguin Aricana, New York

Phantastica, Lewis Lewin, reprinted 1998, Parkstreet Press, Vermont

The Shaman, Piers Vitebsky, 1995, Duncan Baird Publishers, London

Hallucinogens and Shamanism, ed. Michael Harner, 1973, OUP, New York

Wizard of the Upper Amazon, F. Bruce Lamb, 1974, North Atlantic Books, Berkeley

Dance of the Pour Winds, Alberto Villoldo, 1995, Destiny Books, Vermont

Dreamtime, Hans Peter Duerr, 1985, Basil Blackwell, London

Tobacco and Shamanism, Johannes Wilbert, 1987, Yale University Press, New Haven

The Encyclopaedia of Psychoactive Substances, Richard Rudgley, 1988, Little Brown, London

Consuming Habits: Drugs and History and Anthropology, ed Jordon Goodman, Paul E. Lovejoy & Andrew Sherratt, 1995, Routledge, London

Narcotic Plants, William Emboden, 1972, Studio Vista, London

Tales of a Shaman’s Apprentice, Mark J. Plotkin, 1993, Penguin Books, New York

A Witch-Doctor’s Apprentice, Nicole Maxwell, 1962, Victor Gollancz, London

The Healing Journey, Claudio Naranjo, 1975, Hutchinson, London

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