Free Voyage By Dhow by Norman Lewis

itself into the mission’s plane.
    Padre Alberto drove up through the wash of the excitement created by this arrival, in a large American car. He came here every morning for an hour or two to supervise air cargoes flown into and out of the mission at Guadaloupe Ocotán; a neat, quick man in ordinary street clothes, with an important file of papers under his arm, who listened to what we had to tell him, but seemed unimpressed, and even wary.
    Padre Ernesto, comfortably remote from such scenes of action, had been ready to promise anything. It happened that he was a talented photographer, and David, excited by his dramatic enlargements of masked and antlered dancers cavorting round a slaughtered bull, had hoped he would be able to get pictures of this kind. The padre said that nothing was easier. If there didn’t happen to be a fiesta on wherever we happened to find ourselves in Huichol country, what was wrong with manufacturing one? ‘Buy a bull,’ he said, ‘and get them to sacrifice it.’ It was clear that his attitude towards the performance of such pagan rites was a liberal one.
    We mentioned this suggestion now to Padre Alberto, and he shot us an austere glance. A slight chilling of the atmosphere could be detected. ‘Such sacrifices,’ he said, ‘are strictly reserved for ceremonial occasions. I’m afraid that at the moment you would find little to interest you in Guadaloupe Ocotán.’ He then exploded his bombshell. The mission’s plane was too busy carrying urgent cargoes to take us to the sierra. If we still insisted on going, all he could suggest was that we chartered a twin-engined Beechcraft belonging to a local company. This could fly us further into the sierra to San Andres, where there was the only airstrip it could use, and from San Andres we could walk to Santa Clara where the Order had their second mission, and where they would be able to put us up. It would be expensive, and—it had to be pointed out—chancy, because the weather at the moment was tricky, with high winds, so that even if the Beechcraft could fly us in, there was no telling how long it might be before it could pick us up.
    At this point it began to sound to us like nine days on the mules after all, but soon afterwards there was better news. The padre, who had rushed off to inspect packages, give instructions and sign papers, was back to tell us that the Beechcraft would be making the flight to San Andres in any case next morning. This was a Friday, and on the Sunday—which was not normally a working day—the mission’s Cessna could be chartered to fly in and pick us up at Santa Clara, where there was a small airstrip it could use.
    This solution we accepted with huge relief, although San Andres was twice as far away as Guadaloupe Ocotán, and we had heard there were fewer Indians there. A suspicion lingered that the padre might have decided that this was the best way of getting rid of us. Why—it was hard to say. Writers and photographers could be a nuisance in off-the-beaten-track places like this. A Mexican magazine had just published unflattering photographs of the Coras, taken by a visiting journalist, as a result of which the outraged Indians had barred whites from the Cora tribal area of the sierra. As soon as it was quite clear that there was no chance of our turning up at Padre Alberto’s mission, the atmosphere cleared and we parted the best of friends.
    After leaving Padre Alberto, we made a courtesy call on Dr Ramos, of the Instituto Indigenista, whom we found seated at his desk beneath a fine nearika of the doubled-headed eagle. On our enquiring whether this was the work of the shaman Ramon Medina, the director said that it was, and added that the shaman happened to be in Tepic at that time. He thought he might agree to meet us and allow himself to be photographed. This was an almost incredible piece of luck because the last time Ramon Medina had been heard of in Mexico City he had been living on his family rancho,