Free Voyage By Dhow by Norman Lewis Page B

this river was good, and he pointed with relish to locked-away valleys where jaguars abounded.
    At last a narrow tongue of tableland came into sight across a low precipice, with a patch of fabric among its trees that was the landing strip, and we banked to come in and touch down.
    We climbed down from the plane and looked round us. We were in a clearing of a forest of sparsely planted oaks; bromeliads knotted with their thin daggers of blossom among their branches. Harsh sunshine shattered itself on facets of jade and ice on the rocks beyond the runway, and a freezing wind hissed down. Saying something about worsening conditions, the pilot clambered back and made haste to take off. A group of Huichols with painted faces, squatting in expressionless contemplation of this miracle, got up and trotted away into the trees.
    We were carrying a tremendous load of cameras and tinned foods, and the problem that now faced us was how to struggle under this weight to the mission, which the shaman Ramon assured us with a smile that only inspired doubt was only one hour away. Two apathetic and fragile-looking Huichol women now appeared, as if from a hole in the ground, and the shaman immediately enlisted them as porters.
    The loads were distributed, the shaman taking the heaviest package, and we were about to make a start when he asked us whether we had brought arms. He seemed surprised that we had not. Slung over his shoulder was a splendidly ornamented satchel, and from this he took a 9mm pearl-handled Star automatic pistol, which he stuck in his belt. Had he known we were unarmed, he said, he would have brought his Luger as well, and perhaps his bow. I asked why, and the shaman said we might have shot a deer. His explanation surprised me, because I had read somewhere that the deer was regarded by the Huichols as their totemic ancestor, as well as a minor deity. The ordinary people, I had read, ate deer flesh on the occasions of their major feasts, but it was taboo to their shamans. Ramon later admitted that this was so, and that in his case the killing of a deer would involve a complete magic dislocation, which would inevitably bring about his instant death.
    We now set out over a narrow trail up a gradient leading to low peaks ahead, the shaman leading the way, followed by David and myself, and then, at a respectful distance, the two Huichol women with a valise apiece suspended from cords tied across their foreheads. The landscape had become delicately artificial, a piece of chinoiserie carved from ivory and shell for the amusement of the court of Versailles, and the shaman slipping ahead of us through the trees looked like a tartar from a Russian ballet, or an ornamented Polovtsian, rather than the Indian he was. There was no undergrowth in the forest, and great boulders had been artfully arranged among the beautifully distorted firs and oaks. Clouded blue water trickled through a valley over porcelain rocks, which Ramon told us were full of opals. A macaw, indigo and orange, flashed from the high branches and Ramon held it for a moment with a strange ventriloquist’s whistle. There were gay, squawking birds everywhere, and a few years ago, the shaman said, we would have seen wolves along the trail, and might even have had the luck to run into a bear, or a jaguar; but of late more and more Huichols had come to own .22 rifles, and the animals had withdrawn further into the sierra.
    An hour passed and then two hours, and the track became narrower, steeper and more cluttered with boulders. At one point we passed along the edge of a slope looking down over a gorge that was a small version of the Grand Canyon in dour greens, and the women who had been calling to the shaman came up and pointed to a Huichol rancho—the first we had seen—on a hillside a mile or so away. The shaman’s face changed, and when I asked him what was the matter he said the rancho had been attacked by bandits who were active in the neighbourhood—although in