Paul Theroux - Blinding Light

“They call the mixture changru-panga .”

“You don’t need me,” Nestor said to Manfred. “You are a perito. Hexpert!”

Hernán nodded that he was ready to go, and he turned abruptly and set off, leading with a raised machete. A barefoot Secoya boy wearing a small canvas knapsack followed with a stick. They cut through Joaquina’s maize patch and jumped a wide ditch. They were almost immediately slipping on a narrow muddy path under the tall trees, Hernán slashing at hanging head-high fronds and low thorny branches, the boy poking his stick at the dripping ferns at the track’s side.

The land was level and the path fairly straight, but deeper in the forest the air was inert, hot, sodden, dense with humidity, whirring with insects. Some sunshine, in cones of light, penetrated from torn patches of the tree canopy, yet deep green shadow predominated. The shadow was wet, and the moss on the trees was like green foam.

After half an hour — they had not gone very far on the path — Steadman’s shirt was soaked from sweat and his brushing the big, low-growing, dripping leaves. His shoes were heavy with mud. The bare skin of his forearms was scratched and dirty. Ava smiled at him but she was soaked, too.

“Where are we going?” Steadman called ahead to Hernán.

“ Paseo ,” he said. “Walking only.”

Perhaps feeling that he should be more informative, he pinched some leaves from a bush and showed them to Ava.

“The Secoya use this one for tea, if you have pain problem in you estomach.”

“ Tortuga the Secoya boy called out sharply, and darted past Steadman and knelt in the mud. Steadman saw nothing, but within seconds the boy was holding up a small muddy turtle, its legs twitching and dripping.

“How did he see that?” Ava said.

“He is hungry, so he see everything,” Hernán said.

Farther on, Steadman paused and said, “I always wondered where those flowers came from.”

“We have many like this,” Hernán said.

“I think that’s Heliconia,” Ava said.

The bunches of buds, red and yellow, hung on a long stalk like small brilliant bananas, little nips of color that were vivid among the gray ferns and shadowed leaves.

“You have this one?” Hernán said, and he indicated a tall bush with a profusion of white bell-like blossoms, thick and drooping from every slender branch.

Recognizing it as the mouthy blossom that Nestor had pointed out at Papallacta, Steadman said, “I saw one of those at the hot springs.”

“Is good for this,” Hernán said. He tapped his head and smiled at the Secoya boy, who was nodding eagerly, grinning and showing a broken front tooth. “See? Even he knows. He helps to gather this one.”

“Angel’s trumpet,” Ava said, remembering what Nestor had told them. “What do you call it?”

“It is toé. La venda de yana puma. The tiger’s blindfold.” He smiled and widened his eyes as he said it. “We scrape. We boil the pieces. We drink.”

They walked on for another hour, but slowly, because of the mud and the heat. Toward noon they came to an area where some trees had fallen and littered the earth around them with heaps of dead leaves and the withered trash of dead branches. Some of the trunks looked rotted and infested but one firm trunk remained, the right height for a seat. Ava approached it to sit down.

“Mira. Espera un momentito ,” Hernán said, and slashed the trunk with his knife, and it came alive with large frantic ants and clumps of tumbling ant eggs like furious grains of rice.

“I think I’ll stand,” Ava said.

Hernán took the knapsack off the Secoya boy and distributed bottles of water.

“Paseo is better,” Hernán said, wiping his mouth. “If you sit in the village, you see food and you want to eat. Then, when you take the yaje tonight, you feel sick.”

But Steadman had forgotten the ceremony. He was looking around at the great vaporous hollow of the fly-specked and thick tainted air, everything greenish, soaked and slick under the rain forest roof.

Flourishing in this remote seclusion, unaided by any human hand, was an obscure and eternal thickness of garden beneath the patchy heights of the forest ceiling. In the lowest shadows of the muddy floor were soft dirt-humps marked by the grubbings of tree rats and turtles. Flowering plants grew at every level, banking to the highest tree trunks.

More angel’s trumpet, sallow and succulent, like white downcast funnels, and torch ginger with crimson flower pods, and the Heliconia that Ava had identified, its smooth curved fruit red and yellow and striped black; the labial petals of a rosy blossoming vulva on a bluish stalk; the orange beaks of Strelitzia; and the scalloped and splayed fragility of purplish orchids. Fingers of boiled pinkness pointed from a pendant vine, and on another tiny yellow bells on wing-like leaves. All of it glowed in the feeble light, and from the heights of the boughs immensely long, narrow roots, some of them hairy, trailed past gnats and flies.

He saw struggling butterflies and dangling worms, the crooked symmetry of the blue veins on big leaves, the frail luminous tissue like wadded silk of droopier flowers, the stiffer stems of wet black plants, the pale noodles of wandering tendrils, and the fuzzier knobs, like monster paws of nameless growths — all of this in a place where there was the narrowest path and no other footprints and only the dimmest daylight reached to the bottom of the forest. Here it was possible to believe that, though humans had passed nearby, none had interfered with the place, nor had ever bent a stem, nor plucked a flower. The whole world was blind to its beauty.

“Mira — cuidado ,” the Secoya boy said sharply, and stepped in front of Steadman. Then the boy pointed with his stick, and Steadman saw the threads of a spider web glistening with dew. The whole thing was the size of a wagon wheel but suspended high, the center of it level with his eyes and trembling with the damp breath of the hot forest. If the boy had not spoken, he would have walked into it and wrapped the web across his face and all over his head. Just thinking of that made Steadman take a step back.

“Where’s the spider?”

“Araña,” the boy said, indicating the creature at the edge of the circle of milky filaments.

Steadman saw the spider, and even though he took another step back in fear, he could see it clearly: a big purple fruit with the dusty shine of a plum, highlights of pinky yellow, looking ripe and heavy. It was hunkered on skinny legs, each one ending with a tiny toothy foot. It stayed at the edge of the web, its jaws apart like a pair of pincers. What unnerved Steadman was not its large size or its lurid fruit-like color; he was alarmed by its gaze, its glowing eyes like drops of poison turned on him and fixed upon his own eyes.

“Escucha” Hernán said, tilting his head to listen and look up.

Only then did Steadman awaken from the trance state induced by the spider’s gaze. All that Steadman heard was the racket of insects. The boy and Hernán were straining to hear.

Then Ava said, “What’s that?”

There came a far-off chugging, like a motorboat plowing invisibly through the sky, and when it drew closer it became a more distinct yak-yak-yak.

“Mira! Helicóptero the boy said, his hair in his eyes, the complex word issuing from his smile and the space of his broken tooth.

Hernán said, “Is a chopper.”

A shadow like a big brown cloud passed overhead, a mammoth belching airship, the largest helicopter Steadman had ever seen.

He started down the path after it, but Hernán shouldered past him and then the boy skipped ahead, his skinny brown legs working as he leaped like a fawn. The sound of the helicopter was still loud, not far off, perhaps circling or going lower.