The Thief at the End of the World Page 11

  One day they entered a stretch of forest dominated by matapalo, or “tree-killer,” the local name for the strangler fig. Henry was reminded of a “vegetable Anagonda (sic):[O]nce it has embraced the trunk of a forest tree, it mounts higher and higher, till its glowing foliage mingles with, and then tops that of its supporter: its supple limbs, now tightly compressed, flatten out, and gradually spread over the whole trunk of its victim, so enclosing it as to deprive it of life.

  In actuality, the pressure exerted by the matapalo’s aerial roots reduce the host’s ability to move nutrients to and from its crown. In effect, it starves. The host dies off, and then the matapalo “stands self-supported, a great tree, bearing aloft a dark green dome.”

  Resting in its shade, Henry studied the parasite fig. If the tree were in fruit, raucous green parrots fed noisily in its upper limits. A troop of spider monkeys passed on their daily rounds. There was a wealth of life on its trunk, every niche occupied. Geckos and anolis lizards fought for territory across a no-man’s-land of bark; army ants and Polistes paper wasps battled for nesting space in the large cavities. The meandering creatures of the forest floor climbed up the surface in the absence of dry ground. Land snails left silver mucus trails behind them; centipedes hunted constantly. Around the roots the men cast their hooks and caught a “caribee,” no longer than a perch, whose sharp, powerful teeth protruded from its jaws and took off the top of Henry’s finger when he spitted it for the grill. Another day Ramón gave a whoop as a cayman steered straight for the canoe prow where Rogers lay dreaming. There was a splash; the cayman moved on.

  This pitiless river was like the matapalo, spreading over the visible world. It drowned men in its molten waters, snipped at their hopes like the crazed abominations that mewled and chattered at the edge of the gunnels, or tore off the tip of one’s finger when by all rights it should be dead. This was the modern world; Henry was a citizen of one of the most prodigious empires the world had ever known. Yet out here that fact counted for nothing, as if Nature herself harbored an animus against civilization and took special pleasure in grinding her representatives into the loam.

  By August 20, they’d passed the mouth of the Caura; by September 1, the Rio Cuchivero, and by September 4, the Apure, the huge tributary heading west into the plains. They rose from the water-soaked world to dry land. Sandy beaches lined the banks; villages dotted the shore. Their mackintoshes were ripped to pieces by the thorns through which they’d forced passage. All was rotten or damp, and they called a halt to dry their clothes. With land came a new plague: zancudos, or sand flies, and clouds of mosquitoes. But there were glories, too. One night as they camped on an island to escape insects, an immense flock of snowy egrets roosted close. “They were very noisy,” Henry wrote, “as the sun went down in a glorious sky.” As they approached the end of each day’s journey, Henry would ask, “Bostante lejos, Ramón?”—Far enough, Ramón?

  And Ramón, whom he trusted, grunted back, “Lejos.” Far enough.

  He’d come far, indeed, and now he was about to step into the Abyss. On September 4, Henry’s fever returned, his calentura as he called it, and that left him vulnerable to the most repulsive thing he’d ever encountered—the zamora vulture, the ubiquitous “turkey buzzard” that glides in great gyres over the sick and the dead. Henry was sick, all right, and he wrote, “When one is unwell, it is especially unpleasant to have a mob of these disgusting birds fluttering and croaking disagreeably in the trees you select for shelter and rest.” In great enough numbers, they rendered a place unendurable with their odor. Sometimes he could no longer stand their presence and, grabbing his rifle, sent a bullet “at one more intolerably impertinent than the others.” They were “half-weird . . . when skulking about a camp, dodging behind stones and bushes, or peering down from the boughs over-head.” If he hit one, its death was sinister and absurd: “If a bird was struck whilst walking on the ground, he appeared simply to lie down suddenly on his side; there was no kicking; the ball drilled a hole through the body, and continued its way.” Like an old man in a stained overcoat, it fell over and lay still.

  With this second bout of malaria, things went a little mad. By September 5 and 6, the fever was so bad that Henry could no longer paddle. He fell into deep sleep, only to be jerked awake by a squall that threatened to drown them all. The night was “pitchy-dark,” and he could only see Rogers and Ramón by the “rapid flashes of vivid lightning. Ramon looked really terrified and was yelling out something,” which Henry could not hear above the tempest. Everything in the canoe was lost, drenched, or in shreds. They landed at a village, and an old Indian named Cumane was so alarmed by Henry’s condition that he “wanted to take me home with him to be doctored by his women for a few days.”

  But Henry refused, insisting that they push upriver. When they left the next day, they passed Cumane’s rancho high on the riverbank. Cumane called out, begging him to stay, but Henry refused, conceding to accept a drink of sugarcane juice before pressing on. Toward noon, the fever hit again in full force. He pulled to a shady spot, but the calentura felt as if it would burn him to cinders, and he tried to walk back to Cumane. “I managed to control my legs just long enough to stumble into the rancho, where there were two pretty Spanish-looking girls.” He fell at their feet and they screamed for their father. “I did not remember anything until the fever lessened,” he said.

  He stayed with Cumane six days, until September 15, the fever recurring the same time each day. He drank hot fluids when in a sweat and cold when the fever broke. The girls fed him soup and a decoction of a medicinal plant he called frigosa. This was apparently the mimosa frigosa, or mimosa pudica, the so-called sensitive plant native to South America that, when touched, closed up on itself. “Stay longer, do not be in a hurry,” Cumane urged, pointing out the richness of the soil of his farm, the abundance of game in the forest and manatee in the river. “All of this, but I am old,” hinting also that he’d saved much silver. Henry realized what he suggested: A young fellow like him might take a fancy to one of his daughters and stay with him forever, working and inheriting this corner of Eden.

  The next day Henry said good-bye. In two days, his band reached Urubana, sheltered beneath a rocky hill overgrown with trees. Several rocks had faded inscriptions etched upon their face; they were entering a land of cultures that were ancient or dead. Secure at the dock was a lancha large enough to house twenty-four men and women under the palm-thatched toldo (awning) built on-deck. It belonged to the Governor of Amazonas, the state beyond the cataracts, and was bound for the Rio Negro. Henry arranged with the captain to take him and the supplies beyond the falls, while Ramón and Rogers took the canoe on ahead.

  The land took on an ominous air. The falls at Atures and Maipures denote a major declination between the llanos of northern Venezuela and the forests of the south. The llanos were the home of over two million cattle, the feudal ranchers, and traditional Spanish culture as represented by Acting Governor Della Costa; the forests were unknown, and outposts of civilization seemed fewer and more fragile. On September 23, they crossed the mouth of the Meta River, flowing into the Orinoco from the west; in the grasslands to the horizon “myriads of fireflies sparkled like gems low over the surface, seeming to give an undulating motion to the misty plain.” But as they drew closer to the Atures and its brutal three-mile portage, the river around them grew brutal, too. On the 25th, they made a landing at which the vultures rustled around them in a great flock. An oarsman baited a fishhook and caught one, and what happened next was very strange. The man plucked out two of the vulture’s long tail feathers and thrust them through the bird’s nostrils in its beak, forming “a pair of ferocious moustaches.”

  Released with a kick, the unfortunate bird . . . endeavoured to regain the mob of his companions, which had been gravely looking on; but the more he tried to do so, the more they edged away from him, and at last took themselves off altogether.

  Part of the brutality was inspired by fear. This was the haunt of t
he “dreaded Guahibos [or “Guaharibos”], who appear to be perfect Ishmaelites, whose hand is against every man.” Today the tribe is known as the Yanomami, dubbed the most violent people on earth. Now they’ve been pushed back into the upper Orinoco and the forest around the Siapa, a tributary of the Casiquiare canal, but in Henry’s day their range extended to the cataracts, and Europeans and local Indians alike were terrified of them. They were fair-skinned and green-eyed, and some anthropologists think their ancestors were the first Indians to reach South America from the north, linking them to the warlike island Carib. Although they cultivated plantain, they were primarily hunter-gatherers, and there was not always enough food to go around. During lean times they killed newborn girls, which created a vicious cycle—since there were never enough women, the men incessantly fought for them. Within the tribes, these fights were ritualized—combatants hit each other over the head with ten-foot poles. But between tribes, they raided for women, killing rivals with six-foot arrows tipped with curare. They had no concept of natural death, attributing it instead to black magic—which had to be avenged.

  Henry heard them described as a kind of human army ant, which nothing could stop. They spread out on march, their sole purpose to pillage, building bridges of palm leaves when they swarmed across a stream. In 1853, Richard Spruce suggested they had good reason for ferocity, considering the depredations of the slavers:Shortly after the separation of Venezuela from the mother country . . . the Commandant of San Fernando was sent with a considerable body of armed men to endeavour to open amicable relations with the Guaharibos. He reached the Raudal de los Guaharibos with his little fleet of fifteen piragoas, and as the river was full, the whole of them might have passed the raudal, but it was not considered necessary, and his own piragoa alone was dragged up, the rest being left below to await their return. A very little way above they encountered a large encampment of Guaharibos, by whom they were received amicably, in return for which they rose on the Indians by night, killed as many of the men as they could, and carried off the children. Treatment such as this of course, is calculated to confirm, and perhaps it was the original cause, of the hostility of these Indians. . . .

  Henry soon witnessed such casual enslavement first hand. On September 27, they reached the deserted pueblo of Atures, an abandoned Spanish mission over which hung “an unpleasant air of mortality.” The ancient footpath connecting the Lower and Upper Orinoco passed through this ruin. The last four inhabited houses surrounded an overgrown square, their sides fallen in and rafters exposed. The villagers reminded Henry of London chimney sweeps, “their faces being covered with black spots, that are left after the attack of the mosquitoes.” The bones of the tribe, for which the town was named, were interred in a nearby cave. Once stored in large baskets, or mapiri, the bones lay scattered on the floor, along with a horse’s skull. Henry gazed at the plains below, stretching out of sight, and noted the silence. “Whilst I gazed into the tomb,” he wrote, “a beautiful little humming-bird flitted by, and hovered over the white bed of bones.”

  That night, their journey took an even coarser turn when they met “Señor Castro,” the Governor of Amazonas. The governor’s rum flowed freely as he waited for his lancha to take him above the falls. Soon everyone in Atures was drunk, singing his praises in inebriated falsettos. Castro sang back, his own voice shrill. The festivities continued into the next night, even after they left Atures, and annoyed Henry as much as anything he’d encountered. “It is singular,” he groused, “that these people endeavour to render their voices as ridiculously effeminate as possible whenever they attempt to sing!”

  The besotted revelry continued, around the Upper Falls at Maipures, through the nearby pueblo and beyond. Whether from boredom, fear, or discomfort, Castro’s behavior assumed a desperate tone. “Drunken carousels continued without intermission,” Henry wrote. “Wishing . . . to make a forced march, El Governador plied his men with so much rum” that three paddles were lost, and they returned to Maipures for more. “Castro at length reduced himself to such a pitch of nervous . . . phrenzy, that I thought it advisable to give him an opiate, which had the desired effect.”

  The next morning, they tried to leave at sunup, but the men were hung over. The governor exploded. “I was sorry to see Castro bend his bright toledo in thrashing the first offender that appeared,” Henry said.

  They rowed through groves of giant thorny palms, past the mouth of the Vichada River, on to San Fernando de Atabapo, the last sizable outpost of civilization, situated at the confluence of three tributaries where the Orinoco veered east into the forested mountains. There was no stop to rest. It was the first wakeful night for the rowers, and Castro fueled them from a demijohn of Málaga by his side. “Row!” he screamed. They dropped asleep in midstroke, still keeping time to the chants, though sometimes “the stroke might be taken in air.” One man dropped his paddle and kept rowing until he woke from his coma and looked “round with a stupid grin.”

  A canoe filled with cassava appeared in the river; a “good-looking matron” sat beside the produce while her two sons rowed. Castro pulled aside to buy cassava, but suddenly pressed the two boys into service as oarsmen and stole the cassava for his own. The mother began to cry, but to no avail—she was left in the curiara alone.

  Later in the morning, Castro ordered a stop for breakfast. When they put to shore, the boys disappeared into the trees. “It is a wonder that these simple people do not even more seclude themselves in their mountain forests,” Henry concluded. Whole tribes would disappear like the boys: “No one had seen them go, but they were nowhere to be found.”

  On the morning of October 9, the lancha rounded a bend and, nestled in a grove of cocoa palms, lay the thatched roofs of San Fernando de Atabapo. The air was heavy and close. Without warning, the sky turned overcast, and a torrent came down. Castro was home and installed Henry in the empty house next to his. The door and windows were riddled with bullets, evidence that even here, in what the Venezuelans called Ravo de Venezuela, the tail of the country, the endless faction fights could erupt at any time.

  Henry stayed in San Fernando for two and a half weeks, reduced to debility by the heavy atmosphere and a constant diet of “fish, fish, fish!” he said. He longed to return to his tiny curiara on a breezy river, potting with his rifle the contents of a simmering stew. Birds flitted across his window—a lively finch of a deep russet color and sky-blue finches that perched in guava bushes and orange trees. He paid them little mind. He was in a funk, a deep, incapacitating depression that had not appeared in his journals but would be repeated in his history. He’d considered dropping south along the Rio Atabapo until reaching the nine-mile Pissuchan portage to the Rio Negro, but what would that accomplish? He wouldn’t duplicate von Humboldt’s route; he wouldn’t do anything but survive. He was too broke to pay the passage back to London; his clothes were in tatters, his future more so. In the South Pacific, he’d be labeled an “island bum.” Here there weren’t even balmy beach breezes to cool him or tropical women for consolation. A bad case of malaria was the only thing he could call his own.

  Then another stranger arrived, like Watkins in Ciudad Bolívar, this one bearing fantastic tales. Although Henry never seemed tempted by mineral wealth, we now see the buds of a lifelong pattern: He’d rush headlong into any scheme that might turn him into a planter, with all the prestige and power that implied. A “Venezuelan Spaniard” named Andreas Level, a young friend of the governor, regaled Henry with sagas of the Upper Orinoco. Level had traveled three days above the supposedly impassable cataracts of Maguaca. He’d seen Indians with skin as white as Wickham’s, and red hair. He’d married the daughter of a local chief and hoped to corner the market in balsam and Indian hammocks, which he’d sell to export houses at Ciudad Bolívar and on the Amazon. He’d start a trading empire in this corner of the jungle. He’d grow rich before his thirtieth birthday.

  But more than anything else, Level described rubber, miles of untapped rubber trees growing along
the banks of the Upper Orinoco between the old Spanish mission of Santa Barbara and Esmeralda, deep in Yanomami country. The Indians had tapped trees for centuries, but they were lazy, not like a European, a man of daring whose vision stretched beyond this fevered river to the commercial heart of the world.

  Henry was sold. On October 24, Ramón and he left to go scouting, leaving Rogers behind. “The air was heavy with the odour of the flowers of the water-loving gica tree, when the sun rose over the rolling bank of mist,” he recalled. They headed east toward the Serra Yapacini, the mountain range that lay across the river like an immense blue bar. They passed the ruined mission of Santa Barbara, overgrown with guava, a lonely wooden cross standing at the water’s edge.

  By November 3, the river curved into the mountains’ shadow, splitting into the Ventuari, which angled north, and the Orinoco, which angled southeast toward Brazil. Several people were already at work in the area, collecting rubber, or goma, as it was locally called. This was not the Hevea of the Amazon basin, but Siphonia elastica, a similar tree that produced latex of an inferior grade. Two days upstream they found the camp of a “Señor Hernandez,” a white Creole from the coast who’d fled to the forest to avoid the wars. He was glad to see a friendly face and showed Henry how to tap the rubber trees that dotted the island where he made his camp. The trickle of latex was slow, he said, apologetic, but he lived in hope of better things when the dry season set in.