Tom Knox - The Babylon rite

‘Boris?’

‘Aye. Boris! He blethers. One minute he wants to scare us to death about visiting this place, this place with the headshrinkers, then the next it’s all, och, it’s fine we’ll be fine, let’s get goin’. Mm?’

‘Well. He says the captain knows the Pankarama well. That makes sense if he trades with them. He says we’ll be safe.’

‘What if Catrina are there already? Looking for the same drug, like you said? They’ll be expecting us. Them and the headshrinkers. What chance do we fucking have then?’ She paused. ‘Sorry. Must be brave. I know. But it’s just hard, sometimes.’

He wanted to hug her, comfort her, but he couldn’t. Instead, he turned and surveyed. Jess was in her hammock, sleeping; her face was pallid, sweaty. Boris Valentine was talking, animatedly, with the captain in the cabin, eating from a small paper bag of barbecued maggots. He’d been doing this since they embarked. Adam wondered if he did it just to provoke.

The endless Amazon stretched before the boat, a three-mile-wide road of river. The mist had now fled, scorched away by the tropical sun. Mighty ceiba trees, with flocks of green parrots flying between, lined the river like lofty guardsmen on a processional mall, with smaller lemon and moriche palms in between; every so often a clearing fed on to long steep wooden stairs, which led to ramshackle river piers and little riverine beer shacks. Kids stood on the piers selling mangos, guanabana fruit, and flat rounds of bread. Pineapples for a cent. Fried piranhas two cents.

The immensity of the river induced a kind of false serenity. It was as if nothing was happening, nothing was going to happen, nothing could ever happen. Not here, in the severity of the sun that silenced the birdlife, where the jungle stretched for a thousand miles in almost every direction. And yet somehow the jungle also seemed menacing in its silence. Watchful. And steadily drawing them in to the final revelation, the terrible drug. Ulluchu.

By noon it was hot and Adam was scared. The boat was doing ten knots: they wouldn’t reach the next town for six years at this rate. If anyone came after them in a fast boat, and it wasn’t hard to find a faster boat than this, they would be trapped. They could hardly swim for the shore: crossing miles of river, infested with watersnakes and piranha.

Out of nowhere, Nina asked, ‘Adam, do you believe in life after death?’

He didn’t have a clue what to say. He lay in the hammock in embarrassed silence for a few moments, then decided to be truthful. ‘My mum used to say when we die we are… snuffed out like a candle. And that’s it. I guess that’s what I think. It’d be nice to think we go to heaven, or just a different place, with better food. But no. I can’t. I think death is it. What do you believe?’

Her smile was the saddest smile he had ever seen. ‘Ach, I never know. Sometimes I think… yes death is the end, the flick of the switch, like you say. But other times I think that it can’t be the end. That consciousness is like light, it just goes on, the star that produces it may die but light is inextinguishable, it just goes on, it is the essence of the universe itself. Fundamental.’

‘OK.’

She sighed. ‘As you get older, life becomes more dreamlike, don’t you think? It gets stranger. Sometimes ominous, yet, somehow, more beautiful.’ Her eyes were abrim with the potential of tears. ‘Not sure how to put it. I mean I always thought life would make more sense as I aged. It doesn’t. It gets mistier. Scarier. But lovelier, even in its sadness…’ A single tear slid down her face.

‘You shouldn’t think about it, about your dad and… Nina. Just don’t.’

She reached out a hand from her hammock, and took his hand, and this time he didn’t resist or reject — and she stared at him with her green eyes, as green as the jungle out there, and she said nothing. Nothing at all. The only sound was the baritone churn of the boat’s knackered engine.

Then she dropped his hand and turned over and slept almost at once. And he watched her sleeping: her white face, white arms, she looked like a marble angel on a Victorian tomb. For ever sleeping. Not dead, just sleeping. And beautiful.

He shook the foolishness from his head. Jumping from the hammock, he walked across the deck. Boris and Jess were conversing, hurriedly; they turned and looked at him. Adam sat down on an upturned and empty metal keg of propane ‘Tell me about ulluchu. About all of it. This guy Schultes.’

Boris finished his bag of barbecued maggots, looked quickly at Jess, and nodded. ‘Richard Evans Schultes, Harvard professor, born 1915, died 2001, el principe de la selva! He was the greatest ethnobotanist of the century. He dedicated his life to discovering new plants in the Americas, especially in Mexico, and Amazonia. He was the first person to identify and collect specimens of teonanacatl, the sacred mushrooms of Mexico, the so-called flesh of the gods.’

‘How?’

‘By deduction, mi amigo, by deduction. All the scholars who had examined Aztec records believed teonanacatl was, well, a psychoactive snuff, or perhaps datura, maybe a nice chocolate McFlurry. No one even believed there were psychedelic shrooms in America! Yet Schultes as a very young man had researched the Kiowa of North America, and he knew they used peyote mushrooms in their ghost dances. So then he went back to the records.’ Boris sat forward, engaged, his silver medallion swinging gently like a pendulum against his chest hair. ‘There are several documents like Codex Vindobonensis in the Spanish colonial archives, which refer to sacred mushrooms. Lots of other Aztec codices make similar references, if you know what to look for. One of them describes a mushroom teonanacatl — as being served up at the coronation of the Aztec emperor Ahuitzotl in 1486.’

A macaw swept past the boat, red feathers vivid in the pointless blue sky. Boris smiled, and continued, ‘Indeed the Spanish were obsessed with discovering the identity of this mushroom, a mushroom so muy importante it was dished up for an emperor. What could it be? What purpose did it serve? During and after the conquest, they tried to torture the truth out of the Aztecs.’ Boris’s small eyes sparkled with glee; then he reached for his apparently bottomless bag of snacks and pulled out an egg. ‘Iguana egg. Very nutritious. And muy sabroso. ’ Carefully he peeled the egg, then munched the white softness.

‘So. Here we see the crucial obsession of the Spanish seeking out the truth of the entheogenic substances of the New World: they wanted to get high, like any gringo — like the ayahuasca-addled backpackers in old Iquitos.’

He swallowed some egg. ‘But the Spaniards, of course, never did discover the true identity of teonanacatl. It remained a riddle. But there was enough in the archives to guide the gifted and determined modern explorer. And Harvard scholar Schultes was just such a man: he had cojones of tungsten and a steel-tipped mind. He spent months in the summer of 1938 searching the wild Mazatec hills and valleys near Oaxaca, where he had heard that a mushroom cult, which sounded very much like the old teonanacatl cult, had survived. By talking with curanderos in Mazatec country, he narrowed down the options. He went to little towns like Huautla, where the sacred use of fungi was still quite intense, and then, finally, in July Schultes was invited to witness a ceremony in which the cunning men took a psychedelic mushroom.’

The MV Myona tooted as it passed another Amazon river ferry. The larger ferry tooted back, and burped a friendly puff of exhaust smoke. It was heaving with passengers, leaning over the rails, sleeping on the roof; screaming babies in slings and old women in rags.

‘Except it wasn’t teonanacatl. The way the priest reacted did not match the accounts. Ten days after the ceremony, back in Oaxaca, Schultes was preparing to leave. He had failed. So he went for a final resigned and defeated walk in the city streets — and there, at the last moment, a native shyly approached him. The Mazatec man pulled out a tiny package wrapped in newspaper and offered it gently to him. Inside the newspaper were three species of mushroom. The first was a kind of panaeolus, which Schultes immediately recognized; the second was smaller, brown-and-white, and unknown; but it was certainly not black. But then the Mazatec man pointed to the third black mushroom and said “Colores”. He meant he had taken the mushroom and seen colours, visions! Schultes, of course questioned the old guy a lot more — and the hallucinations matched, exactly, the ancient descriptions of teonanacatl intoxication. Richard Evans Schultes of Harvard University had finally identified and discovered the sacred mushroom of the imperial Aztec, the very flesh of the gods.’ Boris paused, as if on stage. ‘That afternoon he went for a walk in a nearby meadow and found hundreds of ’em. They’d been there all the damn time.’