Voyage By Dhow (7 page)

The crowd closed in and we caught a final glimpse of the executioner as he leapt and cavorted in his dance. Nothing more was seen of his scimitar but streaking reflections snatched from the sun. ‘Listen to the crowd,’ the captain said. ‘Now they will call for the end.’ But the only sound to reach us was a faint
ah
, whether of pleasure or despair—like a murmur to be heard distantly on some sporting occasion.

The captain shook his head. We turned and walked back over the deck and I moistened my dry lips. ‘So now we will go to Jeddah,’ he said, and the change in his voice suited his recall to duty.

‘What is it like?’ I asked.

‘Well, it is still Arabia,’ the captain said. ‘At least we may say it is better than this.’

‘That is certainly to be hoped.’

The captain said, ‘In Hodeidah at this time there are three foreigners and all the Arab people are poor. Jeddah has many foreign people who are coming for a better climate, also because they may smoke, drink and maybe even fornicate with women in hotels. The Lord is everywhere in Hodeidah to punish men who do these things. In Jeddah, Almighty God is remaining in the mosque when the cruising ship is in port. That is important for Jeddah. That is why Jeddah is one rich city while Hodeidah is very poor.’

He turned away, then remembered our patient. ‘So Mr Farago will be travelling to Jeddah with us?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘When he next takes his temperature I’m sure it will be normal. He will travel with us as arranged.’

2001

T
HE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA
by the Spanish initiated one of the most calamitous series of events and the most protracted human tragedy the world has ever known. Within a generation, all that remained of the grandiose civilizations of Central and South America were ruins and a wretched collection of plantation slaves, while to the north the impetus of conquest and extermination was only delayed. All the European newcomers were destroyers. The French demolished the nations of the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico. In Canada the British invented germ warfare by distributing blankets from a smallpox hospital among the tribes (a method favoured in Brazil to this day), while the freed American colonists pushed westwards behind a shield of treachery and massacre. The appalling fact is that most of the aboriginal inhabitants have been cleared from what amounts to one third of the world’s surface, and it is perhaps even more depressing that the remnants should have been reduced, by and large, to destitution and cultural nothingness.

These processes of annihilation have been so thorough that it comes as a surprise to learn that in this continent, north of the Amazon, a major aboriginal group—the Huichols of western Mexico—can have survived with their tribal structure, religion, traditions and art intact. Behind the bastion of the high sierra they were beyond the invaders’ easy reach. Had there been gold or silver in the mountains, greed would have found a way to conquer them; but there was nothing in Huichol territory worth stealing, and there is no finer guerrilla country anywhere. The Huichols evaded the large military forces sent against them and defeated the small ones. Only in 1721, through a policy of blockade which cut them off from the sea and deprived them of salt, could they be induced to sign a treaty of peace. By the terms of this, five missions were to be established in tribal territory, but after a few years the missionaries gave up the struggle and went away. They had discovered that the Huichols were unsuitable material for conversion to Christianity.

Ten thousand Huichols have survived, and they have doubled their numbers since the turn of the twentieth century. One would expect this single exception to the rule of dwindling populations, apathy and degradation to be exceptional in every way—and exceptional the Huichols are. They live by hunting deer and growing a little maize—neither of them time-consuming occupations—and the huge surplus of leisure is devoted to the pursuit of the arts. They cover their clothing with elaborate embroidery and produce exquisite pre-Columbian objects in feathers, beads and coloured wools. All Huichol art is devotional. ‘Everything we do in life,’ the Huichol shaman-priest instructs the child, ‘is for the glory of God. We praise him in the well-swept floor, the weeded field, the polished machete, the brilliant colours of the picture—of the embroidery. In these ways we pray for a long life and a good one.’

Most remarkable of the Huichol arts are the wool-paintings called
nearikas
, which have aroused much interest in Mexico of late, to the point of inspiring imitations of lamentable quality.
Nearikas
have been used from antiquity as votive offerings on all great occasions—such as at the birth of a child, when they are left at the mountain shrines—but until recently few have been seen outside museums. Some of the most striking are produced during the fiesta following the great peyote pilgrimage, which is a feature of the Huichol religion. The shamans, who have led their pilgrims across Mexico from the Sierra Madre to the sacred land of Wirikúta in the San Luis Potosi desert, eat the peyote cactus and create pictures inspired by their dreams, which are then left for the gods of the Sun, Fire and Water. Enlarged versions of such pictures are now being made and are sold in limited numbers to assist the Huichol economy, and last year (1969) in Guadalajara I saw an exhibition of them organized by Padre Ernesto Loéra of the Franciscan order.

What distinguished Huichol
nearikas
from any other Indian paintings I had seen was their exuberance; the feeling they gave of a lack of premeditation, of being the work of talented children. This impression turned out to be an illusion. Nothing in this art follows a mere decorative whim; every line, every curlicue, every blob of colour has its precise meaning. The tufts sprouting from the head of the manikin strutting along a path bordered with icicles and flowers are no mere fantasy, but the feathered ornaments representing antlers worn by the shaman in the exercise of his priestly functions. To have omitted them would have been to deprive the picture of all significance. Most
nearikas
picture the legends of the Huichol race, or deal with the predicaments of the soul after death. They are always executed in brilliant colours because these are the colours of peyote visions, and they are considered so sacred that the Huichols working on them at Guadalajara do not permit strangers to watch them at work.

The pictures on view were largely the inspiration and occasionally the actual work of one remarkable man, the shaman Ramon Medina Silva, who lived for some years in a shack on the outskirts of the city near the shrine of the Virgin of Zapópan, a small-scale local version of Lourdes. The shrine attracts the sick from all parts of western Mexico and pilgrims whose complaints failed to respond to the visit sometimes consulted the nearby shaman, who had a wide reputation for treating psychosomatic disorders—particularly phobias. It was here that Padre Ernesto first met him, and a cordial relationship developed between the exponents of the two religions. Padre Ernesto seems to have raised no more objection to Ramon’s shamanistic cures, achieved with spittle and incantation, than has the doctor in charge of the Huichol region. Both these enlightened men are happy to see the sick restored to health, whatever the means. Padre Ernesto, moreover, became enthusiastic about the shaman’s artistic gifts, and encouraged him in these in every possible way—for example, by procuring wools of better quality than those within the shaman’s reach.

Padre Ernesto had spent time with two recently established missions in the sierra, and it sounded as though their operations had been hardly more of a success than those built after the old treaty. But he was philosophic and indulgent, and however unresponsive to his ministrations the Huichols might have been, his enthusiasm for them kept breaking through.

He attributed the meagre harvest in souls to the Huichols’ bolstering of their indigenous beliefs with the ritual use of peyote. It was a kind of drug-enforced theological brain-washing from which recovery or backsliding—whichever way you looked at it—was virtually impossible. Peyote cults had spread in recent years, the padre said, to many of the Indian tribes of North America, but in reality this was a symptom of withdrawal and despair. The Huichols on the other hand were abstemious and disciplined, and they took their peyote like a dose of strong religious medicine. Peyote was a god, and by eating it they absorbed its divine force. The Huichols would have been horrified, he said, to hear themselves described as drug takers. He showed me a
nearika
by the shaman Ramon Medina warning of the terrible fate, the madness that overtook Huichols who allowed themselves to be induced by sorcerers to indulge in the hallucinogenic Jimson’s weed (
datura
)—the methylated spirits of the demoralized Indian.

Then again, it had to be admitted that the gods of the Huichols were very close to them: cosy intimate figures from the family fireside, all of them seen and addressed as the nearest of relatives—Our Grandfather Fire; Our Mother Dove Girl, the Mother of Maize; Elder Brother Sacred Deer; Great Grandaddy Deer Tail. The padre thought that, by comparison, Christianity might seem abstract. In fact only one Christian saint—St Michael—had had any success, and he was accepted because his wings enabled the Huichols to identify him with the double-headed eagle god.

I told Padre Ernesto that I would very much like to learn more about the Huichols by visiting them in their tribal area, and he said that this was easy enough to do, but I would have to arrange to go with a Franciscan friar and stay at a mission, where I would be most welcome. ‘Otherwise,’ he said, ‘you will be killed.’ I thought that he meant by bandits, but later I happened to meet a Mexican who had been born in a village on the edge of the sierra, and who said that some of the Huichols could be trigger-happy at times. They had suffered from the incursions of evildoers of all kinds, and a stranger without obvious business was far more likely to be an enemy than a friend.

Padre Ernesto said that all one had to do was to go to the town of Tepic, in the State of Nayarit, ask at the airfield for Padre Alberto Hernandez, and through him charter the mission plane. This would fly to a landing strip in the sierra, after which, he said, there would be a short walk. I was to learn that the padre had fallen into a habit—common among those who have had long contact with Indians—of vagueness and understatement in matters of time and distance. In these countries people derive a huge and human satisfaction from telling others what they believe they want to know, and a village described as ‘not far away’ may be beyond a horizon of mountains, while anything within several hours’ trek is often quite simply
aquicito
—‘more or less here’. The alternative to the plane trip, and Padre Ernesto’s ‘short walk’ to follow it, was nine days on the back of a mule.

The opportunity to return to Mexico and see the Huichols came early this year, and this time David Montgomery went with me to take photographs. We flew to Guadalajara for a last-minute briefing by Padre Ernesto, and from there we travelled to Tepic, down near the Pacific coast, by a Tres Estrellas bus—the heroic Mexican version of the North American Greyhound.

Early next day we went to look for Padre Alberto at the airfield. Here at last, after the anonymous cities, we found ourselves in a traditional Mexican landscape, illuminated by a bland morning sun. To the south, an eruption had dumped glittering coals on a horizon of lively greens. Eastwards a small volcano tilted its crater in our direction, and beyond it the Sierra Madre rose up in a gentle blue swell. Two Huichols had come to catch a plane that might be going somewhere next day, and they squatted among the gesticulating cactus, faces chiselled with noble indifference, absorbing time through their skin. Vultures were pinned here and there like black brooches on the sky, and presently there appeared among them the glittering insect that soon transformed itself into the mission’s plane.

Padre Alberto drove up through the wash of the excitement created by this arrival, in a large American car. He came here every morning for an hour or two to supervise air cargoes flown into and out of the mission at Guadaloupe Ocotán; a neat, quick man in ordinary street clothes, with an important file of papers under his arm, who listened to what we had to tell him, but seemed unimpressed, and even wary.

Padre Ernesto, comfortably remote from such scenes of action, had been ready to promise anything. It happened that he was a talented photographer, and David, excited by his dramatic enlargements of masked and antlered dancers cavorting round a slaughtered bull, had hoped he would be able to get pictures of this kind. The padre said that nothing was easier. If there didn’t happen to be a fiesta on wherever we happened to find ourselves in Huichol country, what was wrong with manufacturing one? ‘Buy a bull,’ he said, ‘and get them to sacrifice it.’ It was clear that his attitude towards the performance of such pagan rites was a liberal one.

We mentioned this suggestion now to Padre Alberto, and he shot us an austere glance. A slight chilling of the atmosphere could be detected. ‘Such sacrifices,’ he said, ‘are strictly reserved for ceremonial occasions. I’m afraid that at the moment you would find little to interest you in Guadaloupe Ocotán.’ He then exploded his bombshell. The mission’s plane was too busy carrying urgent cargoes to take us to the sierra. If we still insisted on going, all he could suggest was that we chartered a twin-engined Beechcraft belonging to a local company. This could fly us further into the sierra to San Andres, where there was the only airstrip it could use, and from San Andres we could walk to Santa Clara where the Order had their second mission, and where they would be able to put us up. It would be expensive, and—it had to be pointed out—chancy, because the weather at the moment was tricky, with high winds, so that even if the Beechcraft could fly us in, there was no telling how long it might be before it could pick us up.

At this point it began to sound to us like nine days on the mules after all, but soon afterwards there was better news. The padre, who had rushed off to inspect packages, give instructions and sign papers, was back to tell us that the Beechcraft would be making the flight to San Andres in any case next morning. This was a Friday, and on the Sunday—which was not normally a working day—the mission’s Cessna could be chartered to fly in and pick us up at Santa Clara, where there was a small airstrip it could use.