When he woke he was so groggy he couldn’t work out why he had woken. It was still dark: why was he awake? Then he heard the horrible screeching. Everyone else was asleep in the little soldierly cots. Couldn’t they hear this? What was this horrible noise?
A noise rustled on his right; he saw in profile a figure, sitting up. It was Jessica. He could only see her eyes, wet and shining in the light. The rest of her was a phantom blur.
‘God, Adam what was that?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know. ’
The screeching repeated. Human but alien. Horrifying.
It was as if he was a kid again, with his sister; two kids afraid of the dark, scaring each other with ghost stories. Except that this was real: there really were monsters out there.
‘Christ!’
A flash of scarlet in the dark afforded a second of relief. It was just macaws, squabbling in the trees. They sat there, saying nothing. The dark minutes dragged themselves along, and nothing else happened, and at last they slept once more.
The next time Adam awoke he realized at once what he was hearing: silence. The incessant rasping jungle insects had stopped, because it was dawn. The morning was already embroidering, with tints of blue, the pantherine blackness of the sky. Mist rose from the damp, chilly earth.
‘ Buenas dias. ’ It was Boris. ‘Wake the others. Let’s get going right away!’
This didn’t give them time to wash, let alone shower. But Boris was adamant. He wanted to get out of here right away. Nina and Jessica and Adam thanked the yawning scientists; then they shinned down the ladder and climbed on the boat and the stubbled captain turned the engine even as he drank a plastic cup of Jim Beam, and they chugged away, knifing through the dull brown silk of the waters.
The Ucayali jungle was, if anything, even thicker than the Amazon forests. The sun burned down on occasional and abandoned plantings of manioc; all else was seamless wilderness. Only the animal life enlivened the numbing monotony. Hoatzin birds in the trees; the odd pod of pink dolphins. Otherwise the jungle, for all its supposed life and biodiversity, evinced a paralysing and menacing sameness. There weren’t even any flowers. Just an intensity of green and repetitive trees, like the bars of an endless cage.
After six hours the captain pulled up at another pier. They apparently now had to walk. No one spoke. The anxiety and tension was making everyone silent. They were in headhunter territory.
The captain sent one of his noticeably unwilling deckhands along, to help. He was called Jose. He was so scared his teeth actually chattered; or maybe he was ill.
They trekked. The jungle here was pristine, and purely hostile. Every tree concealed something that stung, or pricked, or hissed, or bit. Lianas snagged the path. Adam grasped one liana to vault a fallen bough and immediately he felt the screaming pain of his error.
‘Jesus, Jesus fucking Christ!’ The liana carried a stream of army ants who attacked him, as one, racing on to his body, making him yell, and writhe, as they bit. ‘Get them off me! Please!’ It was a miraculous agony. He’d only touched the liana for a mere second and there were hundreds of them all over him, stinging and biting: he ripped off his T-shirt and flailed at them helplessly. ‘Shit!’
Boris took one big ant between thumb and forefinger and ripped the torso away from the head, which remained pincered to the flesh. Slowly and capably, he pulled several fiercely biting ants from Adam’s arm. Nina and Jessica helped.
‘Natives use the ants for sewing up wounds,’ Boris told them as they worked. ‘They get the ants to bite and the ant heads stay attached, closing the wound, very clever, very clever. Nature’s suture. Hurts like all hell though, doesn’t it?’
It took twenty minutes for all the ants to be plucked from Adam’s bleeding skin. He put his T-shirt back on; his back stung ferociously. Then the hike continued: endless and hot and painful. A sloth glared at them, half-dead, in the trees. Sweat-bees hovered, seeking the moistness of the human eye. Tarantulas reared up, absurdly demonic. Daring them to go further.
Nina said what they were all thinking. ‘This place is a nightmare.’
Boris chuckled. ‘Imagine what it was like for the conquistadors, eh? Hacking through here in full body armour, for months, for years, over thousands of miles. Those damn bastards were crazy. Some of them went real crazy, there was one totally loco conquistador called Perez Quesada: he was a real nice guy; he would slice breasts off the women, and chop off the noses and ears of children, for amusement. He killed babies so their moms could walk faster. As the expedition went on he started impaling the men — mainly because they weren’t scared of being hanged. He went further and further into the unknown, going crazier with every mile, him and his psycho friends, Juan Pedro de Grau — he went on to Mexico, married some wild queen — and Rodrigo de Cuellar: he was even more brutal… You know sometimes I wonder if the conquistadors found ulluchu? Mn? That might explain their extreme cruelty, no? Maybe — hey, look, look!’ He was pointing. ‘See that? It’s flor de quinde, the hummingbird’s flower. Bright red tubular flowers — Bastante bonita — probably psychedelic, but everyone’s too scared to try, and there: that’s the tree of the evil eagle. Borrachero, Brugmansia sanguinea, subspecies vulcanicola. ’
They all stopped to look. Adam was glad to hear Boris talk, to have him pointing out the trees and flowers, because it distracted him from the strange noises behind them. He was sure they were being followed. But the noises could be anything. A tapir. A monkey. A fallen sloth. A drug-running gangster with a big machete. The jungle was oddly dark, the canopy above thick. You couldn’t see far, even by day.
‘Borrachero contains scopolamine, y’know that? That’s a goddamn tropane alkaloid, same as belladonna. Take a big whack, you get total delirium, they used to give it to women in very painful labour; they called it “twilight sleep”. And there, that one there, that’s chibcha, that was the one psychedelic plant you turn to when all else fails, except of course for our sacred ulluchu.’
‘Boris. Shut up.’ Jess sounded tense.
Everyone turned. In the middle of the clearing ahead stood at least a dozen native warriors. They were bare-chested, and exuberantly tattooed, and carrying knives and spears. Several of them wore Adidas sneakers. Three had noses pierced by macaw feathers; and two had small, leathery, grapefruit-sized objects dangling from their belts.
Shrunken human heads.
48
Pankarama Settlement, Ucayali River, Peru
Jessica knew she was dying, now; or rather she knew that she had turned the final curve in the river, that led to the inevitable and unavoidable waterfall. Huntington’s. The fit had been the clinching diagnostic symptom. She had her father’s disease. But when she searched inside herself for tears, or rage, or anger, or grief, they were not there.
Instead, she felt oddly calm, unexpectedly at peace: saddened yet soothed. There was no disputing what she had to do now. She was glad she had made those phone call and emails in Lima: she had prepared the ground well.
But something was wrong. She could sense it. The headhunters were too friendly. They recognized the captain’s mate, Jose, and eagerly embraced him. The Adidas sneakers were all-too-new. And the shrunken heads were old: they had the prognathous quality — the protruding lips and tongue, the wildly bulging eyes — of heads severed and shrunken many years ago.
Jess had encountered authentic hunter-gatherer tribes before: communities almost sealed from the outside world. They had been self-sufficient and therefore hostile; or at the very least indifferent. These guys were far too amiable, and needy, and supplicant.
The Pankarama warriors led them through the forest to their settlement. As Jessica had anticipated, it was not a pristine Neolithic forest hamlet: the scruffy huts and shacks were built from metal sheets and Toyota car parts as much as from palm fronds and river-mud bricks. There was new garbage strewn in old pools that looked suspiciously rainbowed and oily. Fuel oil?
Which meant these rather degraded people had cars or motorbikes or trucks. Maybe even a generator for a
