The Cloud Forest by Peter Matthiessen

Author:Peter Matthiessen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448139460
Publisher: Harvill Secker

6

Beyond Black Drunken River

WITH ITS MUD Streets, thatch roofs, and raffish waterfront, and its barefoot Shipibos with their nose ornaments and bright clothing, the Peruvian river town of Pucallpa is as colorful as it is hideous. The trading post for thousands of square miles of wilderness, it attracts a motley fleet of cargo craft and long canoes; these swarm like a hatch of flies on the broad brown Ucayali, drawn out of the water courses of the vast selva or Amazon jungle, which, lying there in steaming silence across the river, stretches away for twenty-five hundred miles to the Atlantic coast.

The cultural center of Pucallpa is the bar of the Gran Hotel Mercedes, which serves coffee and liquor and gaseosas, or soft drinks, from dawn until after midnight. From its open doors and windows a splendid view may be obtained of the hogs and vultures which pick over the orange quagmire of the street. Here, in January of 1960, I had first encountered Vargaray, an intense dark man with that South American badge of white blood, the mustache, and the man who first told me of the monstrous fossil jaw near the Mapuya River. The Mapuya does not appear on maps, but was identified as a tributary of the Inuya, which is in turn a tributary of the Urubamba; the latter joins the Tambo near Atalaya to form the Ucayali, which, flowing northward, joins the Marañon about five hundred miles downstream, forming the main body of the Amazon. The Mapuya is located in the flat rain forest, eastward toward the frontier of Brazil, and therefore seemed a most unlikely site for paleontological discovery; in fact, no man in the Mercedes had ever heard of fossil bones found in the open selva. Flood, humidity, and voracious ants were among the numerous factors presented to poor Vargaray to assure him that his fossil could not exist. But Vargaray became very angry when he was doubted, and his passion about the huge mandíbula was impressive.

The plot thickened with the appearance in the bar of a man named César Cruz. Cruz was brought forward by our genial host, Señor Fausto Lopez, as just the man to conduct a search party to the bone. A rancher on the Urubamba, he possessed all the necessary canoas, outboard motors, mosquiteros, guns, and men. Furthermore, he knew of a mysterious ruin on a more distant tributary of the Urubamba, the Río Picha, which no white man had ever seen. Cruz suggested that an expedition—which by now was considered a foregone conclusion in the bar—attempt to locate both mandíbula and ruinas.

The legends of the lost cities, and especially of the Inca El Dorado known as Paititi, die very hard indeed, in part because lost cities are still being found. The most famous of these, of course, is the Inca mountain town of Machu Picchu, which was found in 1911. Since then several other important locations have come to light, and almost certainly there are more.

Nevertheless, the great majority of

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