Call of the White (35 page)

  It was enough. The stricken look that had flitted across the man's face made me feel horribly ashamed of myself. Shaking off Peter's hand I turned and walked away down to the river, stripping off my shorts and sprawling in the shallows. The mossy green water of the Jari flowed around me, and I stared morosely at the jungle on the far bank while little fish pecked experimentally at my skin, occasionally nibbling an infected scab and making me wince. Reminded of the toothpick-thin candiru fish that likes to dart up human orifices from where they can only be removed by surgery, I wriggled my bottom deeper into the sand, and kept a protective hand over other important bits.

  Would we ever get out of this place?

  We'd had sixteen days of waiting already – sixteen days of hunger, sickness and mind-numbing boredom. A plane might never come. We could wait day after day until we were too weak to paddle the 300 miles downstream to the nearest habitation. If the pilot didn't return soon we'd join Fernando, dying senselessly in the middle of nowhere.

We'd had no choice but to return to this airstrip of Molocopote after we'd failed in our goal to portage the canoe over the hills that form the border between Brazil and Surinam. It was the only place we'd met people in the last four months.

  Peter and I had come the hard way to get here, paddling against the current. At 500 miles in length, the Jari is a modest river in that part of the world where seventeen of the Amazon's tributaries are more than a thousand miles long. It's tiny compared to the mighty Rio Negro which, at 2,400 miles, is the second largest river in the world with a discharge slightly greater than the Congo and three times that of the Mississippi. The Jari is a mere creek when compared with the giant Madeira, Tapajós, Purus, Juruá, Xingu or Araguaia. It's the last major northern tributary of the Amazon, spilling its waters almost into the delta itself.

  Huge it isn't, but there's something wild and untameable about the Jari that sets it apart from other Amazon rivers I know. Rising in the Tumucumaque Hills a couple of miles from the border with Surinam, it tinkles over some small rapids near the source and then settles down to meander along sedately for the next 250 miles, giving every impression of being a mature river; calm and unexcitable. Then it suddenly recaptures its youthful vigour, dropping over two 60-foot waterfalls and seventy rapids in the next 200 miles, only calming down in the last 50 miles before it joins the Amazon.

  This natural barrier of white water is impressive indeed. Peter and I had been in the rapids for weeks, wading day after day, roping up, carrying sacks, and portaging the canoe, with the roar of the river a constant accompaniment. Jagged rocks threatened to rip us to pieces if we made a mistake, and black boulders shone through rainbow-tinged spray. The whole river poured down chutes with barely a ripple but with the power of a dam sluiceway, or fell over sheer cliffs with a thunder that we could hear for twenty-four hours before we got there. And this was the dry season with the river 20 feet lower than it would be in the rains. Eighty-foot tree trunks lay bleaching in the sun where they had been tossed at high water; debris and flotsam hung in the bushes high above our heads; rocky platforms sometimes 100 yards wide separated the reduced river from its jungle banks, polished to a shine by tumbling pebbles, or with deep blow holes now full of stagnant water that the current had reamed out with spinning boulders.

  Malaria had been with us all the way, often forcing us to camp, racked with shakes and sweats and aching bones until high doses of quinine revived some of our strength. When we'd passed Molocopote six weeks before, the place had been free of malaria. The boss of the gold workings had done his best to keep it healthy; giving all his men blood tests to ensure that they were free of the disease. How could he have predicted that two ague-ridden Europeans would arrive out of nowhere, stay for three days and leave anopheles mosquitoes ready to regurgitate their tainted blood into their next victim?

  Our difficulties hadn't ended in the quieter water above the rapids. It was approaching the end of the dry season and hundreds of fallen trees had littered the shallows of the little creek that was to take us into the hills. Each one forced us to lift out our sacks, haul the canoe over and reload. Ten yards later we'd do it again, and again and again – forty or fifty times a day to advance a mile at most.

  Yet it hadn't all been grim and joyless. When malaria left us alone we felt stronger, fitter and healthier than at any other time in our lives. We'd fought epic battles with giant catfish and seen most of the Amazon animals, even ones that were nearing extinction elsewhere. We'd seen places that came as near to paradise as any and set off each day into the unknown, curious and excited because our useless maps gave us no idea what to expect around the corner. We'd joked and laughed a surprising amount, and we wouldn't have missed it for the world.

  The decision to quit had been postponed until our food and quinine were almost gone, until our bodies began to fail us in a demand for rest. Peter was complaining of heart palpitations and showing the early signs of mucosal leishmaniasis, a disease spread by sand flies, where the infection begins as a skin nodule at the site of the bite before progressing to severe ulceration of the mucus membranes around the nose and mouth. Severe facial disfigurement can occur if it's left untreated. We both had vivax and falciparum strains of malaria that would kill us once the quinine ran out.

  Our expedition failed because we hadn't been able to find the starting point for the 15-mile portage through hilly jungle to Surinam, using the route of an old Indian trail. By carrying the canoe and gear across the watershed we could reach a river on the other side and avoid returning down the Jari. But our maps weren't accurate enough to be sure of our position, the terrain lacked any distinguishing features that might have aided us, and the Indians had left the region many years before so there was no one around to help.

  So we'd given up and paddled for ten days back to Molocopote, the only place for hundreds of miles where we knew we'd find people. This was the site of a Wayana Indian village that had been abandoned in the late 1970s. The Brazilian Indian protection agency, The National Foundation for the Indians, had cleared an airstrip to bring in supplies and personnel, and for many years the upper Jari was closed to outsiders. The ban was only lifted in 1981. The Indians had gone, but the airstrip remained and the gold prospectors had assured us that in an emergency we could fly out from there in one of their supply planes.

  We retraced our steps with a sense of failure and disappointment at first, but before long we were desperate to escape. Stripped of our goal to cross the mountains, our motivation had gone. The daily routine of physical effort and monotonous chores now seemed so unbearably tedious that we couldn't understand how we'd endured it for so long.

So, sixteen days earlier, we'd run the bow of the canoe up on the sandy foreshore and whooped with relief. No more paddling. In a day or two we could be in the city, getting our malaria treated, enjoying the bustle of the streets in the week before Christmas, gorging on varied, tasty food, getting news from home, receiving more mental stimulation in one day than in a month out in the jungle.

  But Christmas had been and gone – just one more endless day that had passed with ears cocked for the drone of our salvation. One plane had arrived ten days before, but there'd been no room onboard for Peter, Epileptic, Fernando and me.

  And now Fernando was dead.

  I heard Peter calling and dragged myself reluctantly out of the river. A wave of dizziness hit, turning my vision to monochrome, knocking me to my knees where I squatted with my head down until it passed. Time to bury our dead. It was New Year's Eve by our calculations. We couldn't be certain without a watch or calendar, but it must have been within a day or two of that. There wouldn't be much celebration that night.

  Fernando was still in the hammock where he'd died. We pulled back the blanket and glanced squeamishly at his deathly visage, strangely yellow from the malaria that had killed him. Some little black ants had formed a column that ran from the struts of the shelter, down the hammock ropes and onto his skin where a few were disappearing between his parted lips. We brushed them off the cold face with a shudder before we pulled the cloth around him again.

  Epileptic was impatient with the reluctant way we handled the body, and pushed us aside muttering, 'For heaven's sake, haven't you seen a dead person before?'

  Peter and I shook our heads.

  'How the hell can you get to your age and not have seen someone dead?' he asked in amazement. All the differences between the life experience of affluent Europeans and poor Brazilians were held in that question, and Epileptic seemed chuffed that he'd beaten the fancy foreigners at something.

  It was a scruffy funeral procession, the three of us in shorts, barefoot, unshaven and uncombed as we carried the burdened hammock up the slope and laid twenty-year-old Fernando to rest. He'd died quite unnecessarily. The pilot should have given him priority, but none of the other prospectors had been willing to give up their place. Most of them were seriously ill too. Another pilot failed to return and we had no radio to call for help. So the amiable young man who'd hoped to find enough gold to pay for his wedding had died a prospector's death in a jungle clearing far from home, a victim of the mosquito. In my pocket was the phial of gold dust that I would hand over to his fiancée one day. It seemed a paltry amount to die for.

  We began to fill in the red clay and a rather macabre scene took place that had Peter and me giggling hysterically, much to Epileptic's disgust. He'd done nothing to help when Fernando was alive but was a stickler for protocol now he was dead. After cooling in the hammock, Fernando's body had adopted a stiffened banana shape that wouldn't lie quite flat as we placed him face up in the bottom of the trench. As we began to shovel the soil over his feet, the weight pushed them down, causing the head and torso to rear up by a corresponding amount at the other end. Only when we shovelled earth over the head did we keep him down. When all the earth was replaced we each muttered a prayer, and Peter picked some wild flowers to lay on the top.

  I looked around at the grassy clearing, with its fruit trees and bushes that the Indians had planted – some for gourds, some for decorative berries, some for arrow shafts – at the river that curved around in a large loop below, at the blue sky with the constant progression of fluffy cumulus that rolled in from the east, at the yellow and black oropendolas that flew around their basket nests in a nearby tree uttering a repertoire of cheeps, whistles, bubbling song and merriment. It could be worse. A smoke-blackened urban cemetery in England would certainly be worse than this.

  'One down, three to go,' I joked as we walked back to camp, and Peter scowled at my poor taste.

We were finally rescued five days later. I doubt if we'd have been able to stand much more. Lethargic from hunger and sickness and with our quinine gone, we'd have died within two weeks anyhow, but worst of all was our mental deterioration. After months of constant activity and movement, with a high degree of excitement and motivation, we were bound to feel a sense of restlessness and loss. An end followed by three weeks of total and absolute nothingness had driven us to the edge of insanity. With nothing to do, nothing to read, and nothing to keep us remotely occupied, each day had seemed like ten.

  Our saviour was a taciturn individual who believed in collecting his fares in advance. Peter and I had no money, but the pilot seemed satisfied with the two shotguns that we offered, even though one had a broken stock. Epileptic had no gold and nothing of any value, so the pilot refused to allow him on board.

  'I'm not a charity,' he said. 'You wouldn't expect to get on a bus or train without paying so why should my plane be different?'

  Epileptic's face crumpled in tears, and for a moment we felt the compassion and sense of solidarity that our joint predicament should have forged long before.

  'I'll be getting some money sent from Switzerland in a few days,' said Peter. 'I could pay you his fare then.'

  I glanced at my saintly companion in awe. Feeling sorry for Epileptic was one thing, but I couldn't switch from loathing to such charity in the space of a few minutes. I thought I'd better offer something nonetheless.

  'We've got some medical equipment that you'd be able to sell to prospectors, some knives, hammocks, cooking pots, blankets, fishing tackle…' It didn't sound a very enticing package, and the pilot stared at me through his mirrored sunglasses, unimpressed.

  'What about that gold dust?' Epileptic remembered suddenly, eagerly turning to me. 'That gold that Fernando gave you!'

  'He asked me to give it to his fiancée,' I protested. 'It was one of his last requests.'

  'I need it more than she does,' he argued. 'Fernando was my friend, he'd want me to have it.'

  I doubted that somehow.

  'What do you think?' I asked Peter, keen not to make this decision alone.

  'I think you've really got to follow Fernando's wishes,' he said. 'He entrusted you with that task, didn't he?'

  'His fiancée need never know! Don't tell me you were actually going to seek her out!' protested Epileptic, unerringly choosing the one argument that hardened our hearts against him.

  The pilot was growing impatient. 'Come on or we won't make it to Santarém before dark.'

  'You can't leave this guy here all alone with nothing to eat!' Peter protested.

  'Oh yes I can,' he replied. 'Some of his mates are coming back in a week or so to continue prospecting, and they'll bring supplies. When he's earned his fare like everyone else he can leave. I know this son of a bitch. He's always broke and always begging favours. I don't like him.'