Tom Knox - The Babylon rite

Adam gazed at Boris Valentine. ‘OK. Fascinating. But how the hell does that help us? We’re looking for ulluchu, which we presume is the same as ololiuqui. If Schultes identified ulluchu and he’s so good, what are we doing here?’

For the first time Jess spoke; her voice was weak, scratchy. ‘Adam, it shows that ancient and very important drugs can disappear over the centuries, then be rediscovered. Second, Schultes was undeniably a great botanist, but that doesn’t mean he couldn’t make a mistake. Quite the opposite.’

‘So he fucked up?’

It was Nina. She’d approached and sat down on another empty propane keg.

Jess nodded. And her voice was almost a whisper. ‘Schultes is such an authority everyone was, and is, scared to dispute him. But the fact is…’ She coughed. ‘The descriptions of ololiuqui intoxication extracted, with torture, by the Spaniards, from the Aztecs, just do not match the inebriation produced by… Turbina corymbosa.’

Boris interjected, ‘Friar Clavigero said that Aztec priests went to make sacrifices on the tops of the mountains, or in dark caverns. They took a large quantity of ololiuqui, and the burned corpses of poisonous insects, and beat them together with ashes and tobacco, rubbed the resultant mixture on their bodies, and became fearless to every danger. ’ He waved exuberantly at the entire passenger deck. ‘ Fearless to every danger? Like berserkers? That doesn’t sound like our humdrum and quotidian morning glory, like Turbina corymbosa. Does it? It sounds like ulluchu. And that’s the effect it gives you when simply rubbed it as an ointment! Imagine what it would do if ingested as a snuff, or consumed as a distillation, a decoction, a liquid drunk from a Grail, like the Templars of Tomar!’ Boris’s medallion glittered in the hot slanting sun. ‘Meanwhile, other colonial sources talk of terrifying hallucinations induced by the plant: it was also known to deprive one of judgment and make one “act crazy and possessed”. Again this is not the effect of Turbina corymbosa. Not at all.’

‘Also,’ Jess said, her white face shining with sweat, ‘the Aztecs revered ololiuqui above all others, even more than teonanacatl. And they were even keener to protect its identity from the Spaniards.’

‘Very true,’ Boris confirmed. ‘Hernando de Alarcon wrote in 1629 that they venerate ololiuqui so much they do all in their power to prevent the plant coming to the attention of the church authorities. See the evasion? Desperate not to tell a damn word. And they never did. So we are definitely looking for something different, guys. A different morning glory. And if we find it, everything, all this, everything you have been through — will be worth it. Alternatively, and at the very least, I’ll get a Nobel.’

It was late afternoon now, there was a heaviness to the air: the exhaled air of a billion trees. The world was reduced to mile after mile of green, and mile after mile of grey river-water. A silence possessed the boat as they all suffered in the furnace. That was all there was to do on this damn boat. Stare at the endless river, or think about death, or lie in your hammock and get bitten by mosquitoes the size of ravens, or look at the horizon and imagine a speedboat accelerating near, with men, with guns, and tattoos.

He thought of Alicia’s death. And Hannah, and Archibald McLintock. Is that really all it was? Death? Just like a candle, snuffing out?

Jess joined him, leaning on her thin pale arms, gazing at the turbidity, the flash of a tern in the dying light of the Amazonian day. ‘It’s incredible isn’t it?’

‘The immensity.’

She nodded. ‘You know, there’s a story, that when Francisco de Orellana sailed down the Napo in 1541, and became the first white man to reach the Amazon, he went temporarily insane — he was unable to conceive that God’s earth could be so fertile and so vast.’ She stopped, and stiffened, and turned, oddly, on one foot.

Then, like a tree hacked with one swoop, she fell to the decking of the boat, convulsing. Her legs thrashed, her arms flailed. Spittle frothed at the corners of her mouth and then her eyes rolled white and then whiter.

MV Myona cargo ferry, Amazon River, Peru

Jessica’s fit subsided within minutes; half an hour later she was sitting in her hammock, pale but conscious and apparently unharmed, as the captain gave her water from an old whisky bottle and the deckhands muttered.

‘Un poco de fiebre, senor?’

‘Borracho y sucio.’

‘No no, senor, Solamente un fiebre de dios…’

Jessica insisted she was fine, that she had very occasional ‘epileptiform’ fits, and that she had pills to take for the problem. But Boris looked at her sceptically and insisted, in turn, that they stop at a jungle research station, the UNESCO Biodiversity Research Centre, UBRC, an outpost of First World science in this New World wilderness; there would be a doctor there, and mobile phone masts.

‘Guys, we have to turn there anyway,’ he said, ‘that’s where the Amazon meets the Ucayali, and the captain wants to navigate in daylight, it’s a very tricky operation, muy peligroso, and look,’ he gestured at the lowering glow of the sun. ‘It’s nearly dusk so we can sleep at the Centre then head on tomorrow. Yes?’

By the time they docked at the little steel pier of the UNESCO Centre the sun had drowned itself in the sea of green and the twilight was purple and gauzy. Adam walked down the gangplank on to the pier and he paused, rapt: he could feel the welcome, indeed blissful, change, as the day swooned into evening. The cooled and sweetened air was filled with swifts and flycatchers, skimming the river with cavalier swoops, the trees yielded twinkles of colour and movement after the stasis of the day: jacanas and nunbirds, toucans and kingfishers.

A pair of squirrel monkeys leapt between the palms, a sloth clung, like a baby, to the bough of a cecropia. Jessica and Nina walked quickly past him and climbed the stairs up the steep bank of the Amazon.

The scientists were bespectacled, distracted, intense, moderately welcoming and busy erecting huge silvery nets to catch jungle moths. Elegant laptops were scattered incongruously on coarse wooden tables in rough and prefab metal rooms with no glass in the insect-screened windows. Radar dishes provided TV and phone access. A kitchen stood next to a generator: detailed maps of faunal and floral data adorned the walls.

Jessica was guided to the Centre’s doctor, who turned out to be a vet, but it didn’t seem to matter. For an hour Nina and Adam and Boris sat in tense silence on a wooden terrace in the soft and humming and dim and insect-buzzed electric light, which petered out a few feet from the Centre perimeter. They were like a pitiful oasis of civilization in the Dark Ages, with guards on the battlements watching for Vikings, or dragons.

Now the sun had entirely gone the insects were calling from the blackness of the jungle: rasping and chirruping, clicking and buzzing, a great musical melodrama of angry insect calls. Nina was in shorts and T-shirt and flip-flops; she slapped an insect. She gazed at the large squashed mosquito on her hand. The deadness weighed heavy. Boris broke the terrible silence. ‘You ever wondered how much this drug could be worth if we sold it to armies?’ He grinned, mischievously. ‘Imagine if someone could get hold of ulluchu, and isolated the alkaloid, and gave it to soldiers. No wonder the drug cartels are keen. This is a seller’s market, guys, a seller’s market!’

No one said anything.

‘Personally, I think we should try and sell it to the Germans. Because they are the masters at this caper. You ever thought how weird it is: just how many serious recreational drugs were invented or refined by German scientists, often as part of their general war effort? Take heroin. Heroin was named by a German scientist in 1897, who synthesized it for use by soldiers, so they could be more heroic! That’s why it’s called heroin. And ecstasy? That was invented to help soldiers in the German trenches. True story. And cocaine was perfected specifically to serve as a stimulant for German troops in WW2. My God, even methadone, the heroin substitute, is German. They called it dolophine after one of its users: Adolf Hitler. Because they were running out of morphine to give the Fuhrer so they invented a substitute. Incredible. Ergo, I suggest we should ring the Germans when we’re done, ask for a few million euros for the Bundeswehr and the Luftwaffe, for just a few little seeds — why not make a few bucks to go with the fame?’