Back of Beyond Page 3

  Set high above the steamy coastal plain, Caracas overflows the edges of its mountain bowl, bathed in balmy springlike breezes. The temperature rarely exceeds eighty degrees here. The capital of Venezuela is a vigorous place, teeming with traffic on spaghetti strands of freeways, booming (until recently at least) with new oil-cash affluence. Scores of high white towers—real fat-cat architecture—rise above boulevards and formal parks.

  On the green foothills, pantile-roofed minipalaces peep out at the city from behind pruned bushes and elaborate gardens. Lower down, hundreds of tiny houses—the ranchitos—cling together with Greek hilltown audacity on craggy cliffs. Venezuelans tend to dismiss these barrios with their tin roofs and lopsided walls as “places for the immigrants” (newcomers drawn to this progressive Latin American nation by its wealth and political stability). They point instead to the abundant riches of the city—proud European-style churches, an immaculate metro, theaters, world-class hotels, enough fine restaurants to keep a discerning epicure busy for a decade, and the material abundance of the Sabana Grande, a two-mile-long traffic-free shopping extravaganza with outdoor cafés and fountains and always filled with immaculately dressed citizens (the fashion consciousness here far exceeds that of New York’s Fifth Avenue).

  But I hadn’t come for city life, no matter how seductive and cosmopolitan. My only concern were the tepui mountains of the far southeast. I was impatient to reach my lost world.

  At least in that respect I had much in common with the early explorers of this vast country seeking their fountains of youth and their El Dorado fantasies. Venezuela is wrapped in fantasy. Even its name, which translates as “Little Venice,” and is attributed to Alonso de Ojeda, who sailed along the coast in 1499, a year after the discovery of the country’s Orinoco River by Columbus, evokes the romance of Indian coastal villages once built on stilts out in the shallow bays of the jungle-covered coast. It was only much later that settlers discovered the reality, and scale, of this wild and broken land with its towering ranges of snow-peaked mountains, deserts, vast plains teeming with wildlife, huge marshy deltas, immeasurable rain forests, fertile valleys—and the unique region of the tepuis.

  But in those early days of true exploration, the dream was all. And what dreams! Filling the endless jungles not only in Venezuela but all the way down through Brazil and into Argentina. And the dreamers. What splendid lotus-eating adventurers they were, driven on for years and thousands of miles of deprivation, wasting whole armies in the process, carrying their dreams like glorious banners in their minds, tapping the depths of kingly coffers, and always singing the same refrain, “the next valley, the next mountain, the next time men…”

  It all really began in the glorious Elizabethan age with a perfect combination of the avaricious Queen Elizabeth I and her power-infatuated courtiers and privateers, particularly Sir Walter Raleigh. Restless Raleigh first arrived at the mouth of the Orinoco in 1595, determined to find the golden city of El Dorado and the mythical “Mountains of Crystal” (he hoped for diamonds) in the southeast. He planned to return to England in his galleons, bulging with precious metals and stones, to receive his rewards of power, wealth, and fame from the hand of his beloved Queen. His journal captures his enthusiasm: “Spaniards claim to have seen Manoa, the one they call El Dorado, a place whose magnificence, treasure and excellent location outshine any other in the world.”

  But alas for poor Sir Walter, royal patronage and patience ran out eventually as El Dorado proved more elusive than expected, and as a result of his excesses in South America, politicking and plundering, he found himself imprisoned “at the pleasure of the Queen” in the Tower of London and ultimately headless for his troubles.

  His contemporary, the famous Spaniard de Berrio, sought endlessly for his own city of gold in the green hills of Amazonia, and dozens of other expeditions seeking everything from tribes of female warriors to lost youth-giving fountains, eventually floundered and fizzled out.

  Much more recently the notorious explorer Col. Percy Fawcett gained worldwide fame for his Seven Cities expedition deep into the southern jungles. He was convinced he was on the trail of Plato’s Lost City of Atlantis (although if you read Plato’s admittedly vague geographical hints you may wonder why he chose such a dismal place when it is quite obvious—to me at least—that the Greek philosopher was referring to the Azores, way out in the mid-Atlantic between Portugal and the United States).

  But there are still those who believe that Col. Fawcett found his destination. Newspapers carried wild speculations for years following his disappearance in 1925, fantasizing about his transformation into a king over untold Indian multitudes, basking in unbelievable riches, fathering whole tribes of light-skinned descendants….

  More recent reports however have suggested his rather messy and inauspicious demise at the hands of irate Indian skull bashers who resented the man’s casual intrusion into their territory, certainly a more realistic assumption and not at all the stuff of which legends are made.

  My only hope was that skull bashing was a thing of the past. I had no desire to make this elusive lost world of the Venezuelan tepuis a lost world for me.

  You could hear the excitement, even in the pilot’s voice over the intercom: “The cloud cover is lifting. We should be able to see the mountains today. I shall be flying as close as possible to the Angel Falls. Please fasten your seat belts. It will be bumpy.”

  That was nothing new. The whole journey had been bumpy. Five hundred miles from Caracas in a small fifty-seat plane bouncing across the thermals thrown up by the dry red plains and brittle ridges below us. Then up through the clouds, into the blue, peering out of tiny windows, seeking signs of the tepuis.

  But he was right about the clouds. We descended through thinning haze, and down below was the jungle. Mile after mile after mile of green sponge in every direction, with occasional flashes of serpentine rivers and streams meandering through this eternity of green.

  Then the first tepui. A huge vertical shaft of dark strata cut by creamy clefts rising abruptly out of the jungle. Its profile seemed familiar at first. We edged closer to the towering rock face. A close encounter. Precisely that—Close Encounters. The Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, that mystical volcanic monolith replicated by Richard Dreyfus in charcoal sketches, then mashed potatoes, then enough wet clay to fill his living room. But not one. A dozen of them here and much larger than the Devil’s Tower, separated by scores of square miles of jungle, their flat barren tops, fractured and split, scraping the clouds; the last magnificent stumps of a vast plateau of sandstone and igneous rock, almost two billion years old.

  Once a part of the great land mass of Gondwana, the plateau was a notable feature of the earth even before South America and Africa were separated by massive tectonic plate movements over two hundred million years ago. Subsequent cracking of the high plateau led to its gradual disintegration by erosion into individual flat-topped tepuis. Rather like the buttes of Arizona’s Monument Valley transplanted into an Amazonian setting.

  “Angel Falls approaching on the right.”

  And there it was. Tumbling in lacy sprays off the summit of Auyantepuy, an uninterrupted drop of 3,212 feet, the tallest waterfall in the world, billowing in a crochet cascade, sheened by the afternoon sun.

  There were more falls. Smaller but no less impressive, spuming off the black cracked top of the tepui and disappearing in a hundred streams far below in the unbroken jungle. And beyond, the hazy silhouettes of other tepuis, stretching out across the green infinity into the 1,500-mile-wide Amazonian basin itself.

  Finally, after years of dreaming, I had arrived at the edge of Sir Arthur’s lost world.

  Base camp at Canaima was more than adequate. A cluster of chalets in a jungle clearing catering to the more adventurous tourists, anxious to catch a glimpse of tepui country and the roaring falls on the Carrao River. For most visitors this was the beginning and end of their journey, a lovely interlude of meals and cocktails on a shady terrace overlooking
the falls, maybe a river excursion to the base of Angel Falls for the explorer types, and then back to the hectic hedonism of Caracas and the coastal resorts.

  For me it was just the beginning, or at least I thought it was, but having bored several guests with my plans to travel deep into tepui country, I found myself no closer to leaving after three days of negotiation with local guides.

  I had almost given up hope. Everyone seemed to consider climbing the outer tepuis to be a ridiculous idea anyway, especially for this rather overweight traveler who sweated like an ox at the first thwack of morning sun.

  Then I met Charles Arkright Gurnley.

  So often in adventures of this kind, something comes up that transforms an apparently hopeless situation. You need to keep your mind focused on your goal and to sidestep setbacks with agile optimism.

  I was at the local airstrip, a hop, skip, and a bump down the rutted track from my cabin, exploring the possibilities of leaving Canaima early. There seemed little point hanging around only to be told “no” all the time. A few yards from the airline office was a ramshackle place that doubled as a café and souvenir stall selling hammocks, masks, blow pipes, all authentic stuff produced by the local Pémon Indians.

  Mr. Gurnley suddenly appeared, a gaunt figure, tall and jangle-limbed, with thick-rimmed spectacles, neatly trimmed moustache and beard, balding head and jungle-stained shorts and shirt. He was hardly a Hemingway but there was something in the way he carried himself, erect, like one of those Buckingham Palace guardsmen, and with the same distant focus in his dark brown eyes.

  We almost bumped into each other. I apologized and his focus shifted to the tip of my sun-scorched nose. He had a haughty, stiff-upper-lip glance, and my first impression was that of a Britisher, ex-public school (which in Brit-lingo means private fee-paying), almost a caricature of the type. His face was a smother of incised lines, and I couldn’t tell if he was scowling or in pain, the kind of look you get when you take a bite out of a lemon (although why would anyone ever take a bite out of a lemon?). He reminded me of my old school headmaster—acetic, furrowed, stoic.

  “My fault, my fault,” he murmured, and then he smiled, and his smile was remarkably angelic, turning all the furrows into instant laugh lines. I liked him immediately.

  “I’m trying to find a bit of shade,” I said rather uselessly.

  “Yes—it’s hot today. Bit much for this early.”

  “You’re British?”

  “Yes. You are too?”

  “Yes.”

  “Like it here?”

  “I’d like it a lot better if I could find a way up into the tepuis.”

  “Beyond Auyantepuy?” he asked with an incredulous glint.

  “Yes.”

  “They’re difficult to climb y’know.”

  “You’ve been?”

  “Oh yes. Once or twice.”

  “How do I get up them?”

  He laughed and exposed a keyboard of ivory-white teeth.

  “You ask me.”

  “You?”

  “Well you could ask the boys here, but they won’t be very interested.”

  “Why?”

  “They don’t like climbing.”

  “Why?” (I was feeling like a kid with his dad.)

  “They don’t trust it very much.”

  “Frightened?”

  “Yes.”

  “Of what?”

  “Aha!” Another toothy grin. “It’s best you don’t know.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Oh it’s all a lot of guff.” But the way he spoke made me feel I wasn’t getting to the whole truth.

  “So how do I get up?”

  He stopped smiling and looked at me, a little quizzically, with his head on one side.

  “It’s very difficult.”

  “You’ve told me that.”

  “Yes. Yes, I did.” More piercing looks.

  “So?”

  “You really want to go?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  (You’re always tempted to give the standard Edmund Hillary “because it’s there” response, but I didn’t.)

  “Because I’ve never seen anywhere in the world like this place, and I don’t want to leave.”

  “Yes, it can affect you that way.”

  “Do many people climb?”

  “No.”

  “Can I do it?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “So how do I go about doing it?”

  Another long pause.

  “Meet me here tomorrow. About nine A.M., after breakfast. I’ll see what I can do.”

  “All right?”

  “Right then.”

  And he was off, like a giraffe, stiff-backed and long-necked, with a final “Say nine-thirty! That’ll be better for me.”

  “Okay.”

  A quick smile and he vanished.

  I was back at our meeting place promptly the following day, but Mr. Gurnley wasn’t. Instead I was met by two of the most unlikely looking Indians, solemn faced, slightly bowlegged, and very small. Both were wearing old torn shirts, grease-stained shorts, and broad straw hats that kept their faces in perpetual shade. One stepped forward and handed me a note. It was from Mr. Gurnley.

  “I think you will find these two gentlemen adequate for your purposes. They are Pémon Indians. The taller one is named Tin, at least by me, and I call the other fellow Pan. (Their tribal names are unpronounceable.) Tin can speak some English. He will explain about the cost of their hire and the boat. I shall be away for a few days but hope to see you on your return. Bon voyage. CAG.”

  Tin and Pan! How could I refuse such a combination even though I was a little doubtful about their ability to lead me deep into the unknown. I had no choice anyway. We agreed terms, their terms, and I asked when they could be ready. They turned to each other and smiled. Tin held up a small canvas bag, Pan shrugged. Apparently they were ready right now. Well—so was I. The comforts of Canaima were beginning to pall.

  The river is placid and oily-surfaced. The ripples made by our wooden dugout canoe or curiara powered by a modest outboard motor, hardly ripple at all; the water moves reluctantly in thick undulations toward the jungle shore. The sun hammers its surface into submission. Even at full acceleration (not particularly fast in our case, especially against the current) there’s hardly a breeze to cool my pumping pores. I’m biting off lumps of limpid air and trying to swallow them, and trailing my hand in the river. It’s as warm as a hot tub. Then I remove my hand remembering all those tales of subsurface creatures awaiting the unsuspecting novice—the giant Cayman alligator whose bite will snap off an arm fast as a die-cutter; the notorious anaconda, a huge river-dwelling boa said to reach fifty feet in length and more; the piranhas, with a hundred teeth of honed glass set in bulldog jaws, driven into communal frenzy by blood and capable of shredding a fifty-pound capybara to the skeleton in a few frantic minutes.

  Worst of all is the candiru, like a bit of broken string, said to have a fondness for man’s lower orifices, whence inserted, it spreads its body spikes into flesh to prevent extraction. A barbed arrow of destruction that blocks passages and bursts bowels and bladders with insidious ease. And overhead, the ever-watchful, ever-ravenous black vultures, circling silently, waiting vigilantly for rich pickings. All the jungle contradictions: peace disguising panic; order in the midst of chaos; horror hovering over the happiest of moments, mellowed by complacency. I keep my fingers to myself, gripping the side of the canoe.

  The jungle eased by, a solid exuberant mass of green, edged in parasol-topped palms. Taken in small sections it was a senseless tangle of vines, dead limbs out of which soared new limbs, fallen trees still standing half straight in the gloom, fresh perky foliage striving for the sun, masses of dun-colored leaves, ferns, and palm fronds sinking back into the pulpy floor of the forest. Taken in larger sections, you could see the calm, changeless form and structure of the jungle, the striated tiers defined by the varied species of trees, ferns, and
bushes, peaking in hundred-foot treetops where breezes made the branches frisky in the freedom of space and air and endless sunlight.

  It was at once dull and full of endless variety. It tantalized with the partial transparency of its riveredge fringes and threatened with the impenetrable gloom a few yards in. It invited and repelled. Its scale was impossible to imagine. Hundreds of miles of the same stuff in every direction, an infinity of contradictions, a complete and separate living entity needing nothing save itself—discouraging all but the most cursory of explorations, keeping all its mysteries well hidden, safe in those endless sanctuaries.

  And yet vulnerable—as the rape of the Brazilian Amazon is now showing us. An elephant being destroyed by a mouse. Easily decimated forever, leaving behind weak soils incapable of protracted cultivation. The “green hell” of white man’s legend or the last true earth lung? A graveyard for the uninitiated, rife with malaria, yellow fever, beriberi, dysentery, or a lost world in need of safekeeping? A humid, fetid hot pot of mosquitoes, chigoes, jejenes that turns even the best-sprayed white torso into an overnight battleground of whelts, bites, and festering sores, or a place of magic and mystery where the body can learn to develop unimagined immunities, find salve in its natural medicines, and discover the secrets of the stars from its potent hallucinogens. A place to end terribly in the whirligig flailings of a Cayman’s body, locked in locked jaws, being beaten to a pulp on river rocks as the alligator does its ritual somersaults of death in the muddy depths—or a place to touch the harmony of Gaia herself and sense the great slow rhythms of the earth, eternally beating, eternally steady, and, with our understanding and participation, eternally strong.

  We wriggled on up the river, avoiding the stronger currents in the center, keeping to the calmer water near the bank. For such a small outboard motor, it seemed to be making a surprising amount of noise. Conversation was almost impossible. The sun was hammering in spite of the breeze made by our zigzagging movements; I found it hard to think, and my brain kept whirling off into half dream states.