Back of Beyond Page 5

  “The ants who carry the leaves,” Tin explained.

  “Leaf ants?”

  He nodded and smiled. We watched the procession, like a New York harbor regatta of little green spinnakers tacking in unison. A magnificent display of precision, endlessly parading in front of us, with the participants totally oblivious of our intrusion. Once again that sensation of absolute order-in-chaos, finite patterns in the green infinity. A single-mindedness of purpose that at once amazed and alarmed.

  What a shambles we humans seem to make of our pathetic efforts at coordinated action and social harmony. Ah, you say, but we are given the freedom of choice, liberation from pure unquestioning instinct. We find our higher meanings through trial and error, in freedom. True, to some extent, I suppose, certainly the error bit, but many of the great religions would have us believe that our ultimate destiny is a similar single-mindedness, a similar harmony of “living as one” in mutual tolerance and support. Transferring the great unifying concepts of God into our collective daily lives. Well, if these leaf ants have a god, he must be delighted by their unity. As for me, I’m still well and truly in the error stage of the trial and for the moment at least, that’ll have to suffice. But thank you, little leaf ants, for your reminder of what we all could become one day (one day in the far, far distant future, I hope).

  As we approached our isolated tepui, the view became more elusive. Occasionally it would rear up like a vast totem over the trees. But most times it was hidden behind jungle curtains or thick cloud cover with only its dark base exposed.

  While climbing the lower flanks we lost sight of it altogether. The jungle closed in around us. Tin and Pan improvised a trail through the scratching palm scrub and dangling vines. We were ascending, so at least we were headed in the right direction. But the tepui gave us no clues. Having beckoned us from afar it now ignored us as we flailed around its muddy slopes.

  Then we had our first real moment of contact. Tin was leading us up along a streambed full of tiny waterfalls and still, black pools. It was a wet, tiring slog with no rhythm to it at all—slime-coated rocks, unreliable handholds, and a couple of dousings. I was getting rather fed up with the whole idea of this journey until the jungle drew back, light tumbled into a clearing, and a filigree of waterfalls, like floating gossamer, rained down on us.

  We looked up and there she was, all three thousand feet of her, rising straight into a clear evening sky. There seemed to be no way up. The walls were too sheer. It was a beautiful and very depressing sight. My legs decided they’d had enough and buckled. I just wanted to sleep.

  Then the rock face vanished again, and the dainty waterfalls floated down out of thick clouds. Maybe it was better that we couldn’t see the impossibility of the climb otherwise I might have given up and set off back to the camp. Tin and Pan seemed to have no such reactions. They claimed to have made the journey once before and only failed to reach the top because one of the two elderly Germans they were guiding broke his arm and had to be half carried back to the river.

  Sometimes at night I wake in a cold sweat, remembering that climb. First of all I am not a mountaineer. Ropes and pitons and fancy claw-soled boots hold no appeal whatsoever. I’m a scrambler. Give me boulders and bits of root to cling to and I’ll improvise a way to the top in no time. And, to be honest, most of the climb was precisely that. Edging and squeezing our way up deep clefts in the tepui, cursing the black mossy slime that seemed to coat everything—rocks, trees, bushes, and most of our bodies.

  But there were three occasions when I thought my nerve would snap, and I’d have to admit ignominious defeat. I won’t bother with the details except to mention that you’ve never experienced the essence of helplessness until you begin sliding slowly, horribly slowly, downhill on a slime-coated rock, with no handholds around and no way of stopping yourself, toward the edge of a thousand-foot drop into total oblivion. It was the slowness of it all that still sends tingles to my toes, and the absolute predictability of my fate. I’m still not exactly sure how I escaped except that by rolling slightly to my left I found a pocket of rock uncoated by the slime and used that as a brake. By the time my slide had stopped I could feel the updraught of air on the vertical side of the tepui rushing past my face….

  I decided not to dwell on the possibilities. If my confidence went, then the whole little expedition would have been a wasted effort. So I concentrated on the climb; one more cleft, a narrow ledge swirled in mist, then an easier stretch up a forty-five-degree incline, then a cleft again. On and on and on. I never knew that three thousand feet could seem so far….

  The summit was all I had hoped for and more—a barren black wilderness of worn rocks, as remote and bleak a landscape as you can imagine. Another world, another planet.

  We floated in limbo. Above, nothing but blue in all directions; below, a cotton-ball landscape of low clouds, cutting out views of the jungle. And rising like fantasy castles in the distance, the great tepuis themselves, enormous islands in the sky, all flat topped, each one unique in bulk and profile, ancient keeps of ancient life forms, untouched and unexplored since the beginning of time. I thanked Sir Arthur Conan Doyle again for bringing me here, to the solitude and majesty of this amazing lost world.

  According to my map, the summit of our tepui was roughly circular and only a couple of miles across from one rim to the other, a relatively modest island compared to many of the others we could see. I’d hoped to spend a couple of days up here but hadn’t realized how cold it would be. In spite of the open skies and brilliant midday sun, it was hard to keep warm in the biting wind that screeched across the rocks.

  Tin and Pan showed little interest in exploring. They found a small hollow behind one of the eroded pillars and, using their hammocks as blankets, huddled together, looking frozen and forlorn.

  I was too excited to sit and told them I’d be back shortly after a little alfresco exploring among the black clefts. They nodded glumly and huddled closer together.

  Based on cursory studies of this virtually unexplored region, botanists estimate there may be as many as four thousand plant forms unique to these summits. No dinosaurs, no pterodactyls, no wild tribes of missing-link apemen such as Conan Doyle fantasized, but at least he was right in principle. The isolation of the tepuis has given us a living laboratory of hitherto unknown species.

  At first I saw few signs of life anywhere. The clefts between the eroded pillars were damp, puddled, and bare. At one point I had to squeeze sideways to pass between the monoliths only to find myself peering straight down a deep fissure that seemed to have no bottom. A small stream trickled off a ledge and disappeared, doubtless reappearing as a lacy waterfall out of the side of the tepui hundreds of feet below. Here I found a rich little grouping of lichen and minisucculents and a cluster of brilliant red flowers, only an inch or so across, with yellow-edged petals. Although I’ve never taken much interest in botanical matters, the idea of being the first human ever to see a new plant species filled me with awe. And there were more. Fifty yards on from the murky pit I almost crushed a group of green and pink flycatchers, only a few inches high and coated with sticky residue on the uppermost leaves. An ant was stuck in the top of one of them, very dead, but apparently undigested by the plant. Obviously it had larger prey in mind and in a strange way that was reassuring. At least that meant I wasn’t completely alone up here. And there were miniature orchids, tiny purple and lemon extravaganzas, nurtured by clumps of dark green moss.

  Moving on deeper into the labyrinth I lost track of time. Carelessly I’d left my watch back in my rucksack with the guides and was so enamored with the possibility of being the first explorer of this unknown world that I’d failed to notice a change in the weather. It became much darker. The blue sky had been replaced by clouds, not the happy puffball variety, but that cloying mist again, wrapping its chilly tentacles around the tops of the black pillars and sinewing through the clefts.

  I’d mentally registered a series of distinct rocky landmarks into the
labyrinth, but suddenly it all seemed very different. I decided to go back to the starting point on the rim of the tepui and see how bad the cloud cover really was. The idea of having my explorations cut short by a bit of mist was ridiculous.

  I found the flycatchers without any problem but couldn’t see far enough ahead to the next reference point. Somewhere in the gloom was a protrusion shaped like an ape’s head. At least that’s what it looked like from the other side, but from here…

  One cleft on my right seemed familiar so I edged my way between the rock walls for a hundred feet or so until it ended abruptly. There were enough handholds to scale the wall. Maybe I’d be able to see my starting point from the top.

  Covered in moss and mud I eased myself up into a world of whirling mist and nothing else. I retreated into the cleft and back to the reassuring clump of flycatchers. Only they weren’t my flycatchers. There were only three of them and they were the wrong color.

  Okay. Hold on. No reason to panic. Just a slight error of orientation. If only I could find the ape’s head. I can’t be more than a hundred yards from the rim.

  Then came the thunder. It began as a gentle stomach rumble way off among the tepuis, then headed straight for the labyrinth with ground-cracking fury, and climaxed in a shattering roar right over my head.

  Enough! Time to panic.

  I matched the thunder blow for blow. Between the booms I roared out the names of my guides into the mist. (Tin and Pan. How ridiculous can you get?) Nothing. Another boom. More name calling. Boom! Tin! Pan! More nothing.

  I was angry with me, with my guides, with the thunder, with this stupid maze of rocks. I was so angry I almost stepped into the fissure with the little disappearing stream.

  What a wonderful fissure! What a lovely little stream! Now at least I knew where I was.

  The guides were just where I’d left them, fast asleep, oblivious of all the din and the cold mist swirling about them.

  “Tin, where’s my bag?”

  I was a bit rough in waking him but was peeved he’d been peacefully dozing while I was losing my marbles in the labyrinth. He’d been using the bag as a cushion and handed it to me sheepishly. I decided not to tell him about my lousy sense of direction and fumbled instead for my watch. It was 2:00 P.M. We had five maybe six hours of light left. I wanted to stay on the summit but felt decidedly unwelcome now.

  “Can we get back down to the trees in five hours?”

  Two sleepy heads nodded enthusiastically. Their hammocks were rolled in seconds, stuffed into their bags, and they were ready. Eager. If it had been a cultural norm, I think they might even have kissed me.

  One last look. The mist still swirling around the black rocks. So much to learn up here. So much to discover. These islands in the sky don’t relinquish their secrets easily. The careless will be punished, and I’d been too careless by half already. I prayed for a safe descent and an uneventful return to the comforts of Canaima camp.

  A soft bed, a decent meal, and a few cold beers with Charles Arkright Gurnley suddenly seemed very appealing….

  2. HAITI

  “Behind the Mountains, There are Mountains”

  It’s Africa, Arizona, and the Caribbean all rolled into one.

  I was way out on Haiti’s wild northwest peninsula, a place unknown to most Haitians and, except for a brief visit by Columbus in 1492, rarely seen by whites (or as Haitians say in their Creole version of French, blans).

  A high scrub desert of rolling hills, dry and parchment-colored, with occasional flurries of cacti, some almost tree height, clustered in gullies. To the north and east the land seems to go on forever, purpling with distance, receding into the evening haze.

  Immediately below, the gentle undulations end abruptly as eroded cliffs and rain-gorged gashes which flatten into rocky washes and then become a sudden oasis of palms and mangoes and bananas. The vegetation, so sparse on the high open slopes, is transformed into a tumult of greens and bronzes; clusters of bright fruit sparkle in the evening light; you can see the outline of every leaf defined in an orange halo. It’s a Rousseau painting—an orgy of color and form, full of deep shadows, suggesting something almost too rich, too mysterious, to be real.

  And then the tiny huts. African-style daub and wattle “kays” with palm thatch roofs and smooth mud walls, all a delicate peach shade in the setting sun. Smoke curls slowly from half a dozen fires. Little children, naked and black as lava, play among the trees at the edge of the clearing. A fat pig wallows in a sandy pit watched by a couple of scrawny brown goats. A dog barks for no reason, then rolls over and goes back to sleep.

  A stream eases past the huts; two old women are washing clothes there with a slow rhythmic pounding on flat rocks while a young girl, naked from the waist up, gathers water in a large gourd shell. The stream flows on, hidden for a moment by palms and fruit trees and tight patchwork gardens of manioc and millet, then emerges in a small blue lagoon edged by more tall dry cliffs, and beyond those, the ocean itself, wide and shimmering.

  There’s a beach, pink-silver, and a pool of Caribbean turquoise-blue water before the reef, then a vast expanse of the richest purple-blue water I’ve ever seen anywhere. A color so deep, so intense, so translucent, it makes my eyes ache.

  All this I see in a few seconds. The silent high desert, the hidden oasis, and the village and the ocean, stretching south six hundred miles to the coast of Columbia.

  It certainly isn’t what I thought Haiti would be like when I decided to come here a few days ago.

  But then that’s the problem with Haiti, a tiny nation, the world’s first declared “Black Republic,” tingling with contradictory images, plagued by vociferously opposed opinions about its nature and condition. AIDS, violence, political unrest, rampant poverty—you name it, Haiti’s either got it or had it or very soon will, according to conventional wisdom. Haiti’s horror stories are popular press fodder.

  What amazes me, even after a few brief days on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola (Haiti occupies the western third; the rest belongs to the Dominican Republic), is the resilience and the bamboche (partying) vitality of the people themselves in the face of strident poverty and political uncertainty. I read an abbreviated history of this nation of 6.5 million people in Amy Willentz’s book The Rainy Season and was left punch drunk at the tales of shattered dreams, conniving schemes, the duplicity of major world powers, the gory demise of most of its leaders, the terrible era of the Papa Doc and Baby Doc Duvalier dictatorships, and the chaos of its most recent series of takeovers by frustrated generals and their still-existent supporters, the Tontons Macoute (Papa Doc Duvalier’s notorious secret police force).

  My decision to explore this beautiful and battered little nation generated an unusual amount of ridicule.

  “You’re joking!” My friends were not at all supportive.

  But I wasn’t joking.

  “Why not Jamaica, St. Barts, Saba—anywhere?!”

  No. My mind was made up.

  “You’d better not walk around after dark. And what about AIDS?”

  I’d checked out the latter. Far less danger here than a ramble through Greenwich Village, and I had no intention of doing drugs or developing illicit relationships. As for all the walking at night guff, I do it everywhere I go and had no plans to change my habits now.

  “You’re crazy!”

  True. Crazy for a Caribbean island that’s not cheek-to-cheek tourists (both sets of cheeks), rum-punched to terminal catatonia and priced in the stratosphere for gullible “we’ll take anything ’cause it’s a vacation” visitors. How often do you read of “Real Caribbean” promises in the glossy brochures? In an age of mass migrating to “unspoiled beaches” I wanted truly unspoiled beaches, honest local culture, and a sense of adventure-travel well away from the pablumed pleasure pits.

  So, Haiti it was to be. Poor, rejected, ridiculed Haiti? No—proud, resilient, untrammeled, inexpensive Haiti. Or, maybe something else…

  The plane was half empty but, then,
it was off-season. My fellow passengers were almost all Haitian, with a handful of New Jersey Baptists off to some global gathering there, well stocked with guitars, songbooks, and bottles of purified water.

  The mood was quietly festive. Many of the Haitians were returning home after years of diaspora during the chaotic era of Papa Doc and Baby Doc. “Things,” they assured me, “are much better now. Not perfect—but much better.” They were willing to trust Haiti again and give their homeland another chance.

  I smiled. I suppose, in a way, I was doing the same thing. Ignoring all the negative imagery and giving Haiti a chance.

  The images piled up fast.

  For a country notorious for its poverty, I was amazed by the amount of traffic in the capital, Port-au-Prince. It took me an hour just to get through town and up to my hotel in the mountainside village of Pétionville. Enormous battered trucks piled high with green bananas competed for narrow road space with a public transport system made up of hundreds of gaily painted Nissan trucklets—the appropriately named “tap-taps”—crammed with passengers inside, on the roof, and dangling off the back. Mercedeses, BMWs, and Accords swooshed past, treating the road as their own private racetrack. (Auto prices here are triple U.S. prices but new dealerships open up all the time.) Mix all the traffic with impromptu street markets (everything from daily staples to concrete blocks and second-hand TVs to bamboo furniture and fried pork grillots, fried plantain péses, and fried blood sausage stands), free-roaming pigs, mangy dogs playing bite-a-truck, groups of neatly uniformed schoolchildren returning home along the muddy edge of the road, and gracefully gliding women carrying ridiculously large loads of laundry or plastic water containers or straw shopping baskets on their heads.

  Mix all this with the ear-maiming racket of traffic horns, the din of the markets, the thump and clatter of tap-taps bouncing through the potholes, and the brayings of half mad donkeys (plus the heat, the molasses-thick fumes of trucks, burning charcoal, and stagnant mud pools) and you begin to understand how driving through Port-au-Prince can be one of the world’s most exhausting experiences.