Free Light at the Edge of the World by Wade Davis

described the delta as the most beautiful world they had known. They were right, but it took several days for me to adjust and understand.
    In part, it was a simple matter of the Warao becoming used to our presence, even as we adapted to the transparent privacy that always exists in villages where people live closely together. With Werner’s prodding, I surrendered to the reality of the place, dropping any expectation, for example, that I could walk anywhere, anytime. Our routine literally flowed with the river. By morning, we paddled upstream with the tide, filled the dugout with specimens gathered in the flood forest, then drifted back amidst floating islands of purple hyacinth to the village, where we joined the children on the landing as they frolicked and swam in the stream. Every evening, we sat over the river and watched as clouds billowed in the red sky. It felt like being at sea, though the dark brow of the forest rose just behind us.
    One day, we visited the grave of Don Antonio Lorenzano, a shaman with whom Werner’s father had worked
for many years. He was buried, like all Warao, in a protective canoe, which rested on a raised platform, sheltered by palm thatch and surrounded by the forest. It was from this man that Johannes had learned of the role of tobacco in healing ritual, and how the shaman, hyperventilating smoke from enormous ceremonial cigars, brings himself to the edge of nicotine narcosis in his quest for visions and inspiration. Also from Don Antonio had come knowledge of the Lords of the Rain, the House of the Swallow-Tailed Kite, the heraldic raptor and the dancing jaguar. In a lifetime of study, Antonio had taught Johannes that realms of the spirit could never be extracted from the mundane, that the world of faith and belief was ever constant, like a companion whose shadowy presence is felt even in the darkest night, the most remote backwater, where fish are ever waiting. There was no separation between the spirit and the crude proximity of everyday life. The physical landscape, the material objects of culture, the power of the wind and the lightness of the clouds were all part of the mystic endowment of the Warao.
    â€œAntonio,” Werner explained simply, “revealed to my father the world beneath the surface of things.”
    That world, according to Johannes, begins with the land itself. In the delta, topography is measured by the inch. The Warao know nothing of mountains, save for
the remnants of two petrified world trees, the abodes of earth gods that mark the northern and southern extremes of the universe. One, the Father of Waves, a hillock less than 650 feet (200 m) high, is located in Trinidad. The other, Karoshimo, rises to less than 500 feet (150 m) in the piedmont well to the south of the delta. Few Warao have visited these sacred sites. They have never climbed a hill or felt the ragged edge of granite. There are no stones in their homeland. All their perceptions occur at sea level, and the horizon is but a narrow band of dark earth, a sliver separating the black surging waters of the Orinoco from the limitless sky.
    The Warao view the Earth as a disk scarred by rivers and floating in a sea. Water saturates everything, and the Earth floats only because it is supported by a serpentine monster whose four-horned head points to the cardinal directions. Anyone who doubts that the Earth disk is delicate and thin needs but to dig a hole or watch as the water seeps into the ground at the base of a tree uprooted by the wind. The disk itself is made of clay, and thus, in order to construct a hearth as Lucia had been doing or to make ceremonial ceramics as her mother might have done in her youth before the traders and missionaries came, the Warao must scrape away a small fraction of the foundation of the world.

    From Antonio’s teachings, Johannes came to see that symbols of the metaphysical realm are ubiquitous in Warao life, inseparable from the physical experience of the