Pilgrim in the Palace of Words Read online

  The morning star here is called Tapuitea, pretty close to the word te fetia in Tahitian. The Southern Cross, which I still hadn’t seen, is called Koluse I Saute.

  Most of the people still seem to wear the traditional lavalava, a brightly painted cloth that wraps around the midsection. And most inhabitants are large. Imagine sumo wrestlers and you get the idea. I don’t mean to steal a page from Margaret Mead’s notebooks, but someone told me that body weight has something to do with respect. A person’s girth, apparently, is a direct indication of wealth and therefore the measure of respect one receives in the community.

  So though I won’t stand behind that statement, I’ll say that Samoans are a large people. When I finally got on the plane to leave, I was one of the only foreigners and a skinny runt at that. Among the one hundred and fifty or so passengers, I was sure that only a handful weighed less than a hundred kilograms, with a vast majority clocking in at something nearer one hundred and fifty.

  That made me think of the world’s worst airline again. Had it allowed for this sort of weight? What was the load capacity of our plane? I didn’t want to appear rude, but surely we were sagging at the seams. Given all the trouble we’d had before, I wasn’t feeling particularly safe. In the end, however, all was well, and we took off into the starry night quite safely, headed at last for Fiji.

  Fiji is a scatter of islands in the eastern South Pacific. The people are no longer Polynesian, but Melanesian. Melanesian is a politically incorrect word that basically means their skin colour is darker. It’s clear they’re a different people, perhaps more closely related to the indigenous people of Australia or the islanders of New Guinea, though the Fijian languages remain in the general sphere of Polynesian.

  There are two main islands, Viti Levu and Vanua Levu, though most tourists wind up on the former. The last of my flights with the worst airline in the world arrived there safely, outside the city of Nadi.

  I took a lumbering old school bus down the coast and got off in the middle of nowhere. I’d heard about an eco-lodge there and had phoned ahead to say I was coming. For a few moments I stood with all my stuff by the side of the road, just me, the palms, and the distant sound of surf. Then a jeep appeared on the horizon, rumbling in a cloud of dust up the dirt road behind me. A friendly woman was behind the wheel. “Bula,” she said.

  “You for the Tambua?”

  “That’s me.”

  “Well, hop on in then.”

  By the late afternoon, I was sitting on a wooden chair gazing out over a coconut-strewn beach when something dark broke the surface of the water inside the reef. Then, like the Creature from the Black Lagoon, a hulking shape rose and stood on two legs. He was wearing a black neoprene scuba suit, and in his right hand was a massive spear gun stuck through with a couple of fish. He tugged off his mask. “Hi,” he said.

  “Ah … hello,” I replied.

  “I’m Barry.” He flippered awkwardly onto the beach. “I think you met my wife already.” Barry shook the wiggling fish at me. “Dinner. C’mon up in half an hour.”

  Later that night, after a delicious feast of fresh fish, Barry took me to the nearby Fijian village. “You have to see a kava circle,” he told me.

  “A what?”

  “Do you know what bula means?”

  “Well, I think it means hello.”

  Barry laughed. “That’s right, but there’s a whole lot more. You’ll see.”

  Bula is a word that turns up a lot in Fiji. Literally, it means “health” or “life,” and the one place you really hear it is at a kava circle. No one gets out of Fiji alive without trying kava. It’s a mild narcotic served in a great wooden bowl and tastes something like dishwater, though it’s tremendously rude to refuse it. E dua na bilo? roughly means “Would you like to try a cup?” And the only answer is to brace yourself and say, “Yes, please.”

  As the wooden cup is passed to you, social decorum requires that you clap and enthusiastically exclaim, “Bula Bula!” (something, I suppose, like “To your health”), and swallow it in one foul gulp. When I drank the concoction, I felt my tongue swell and loll around helplessly in my mouth. A strange bit of tingling crept up and down my arms, but it wasn’t unpleasant, and the villagers seemed delighted with my attempt.

  A kava circle can be a real gossip session. It can also be a fairly serious discussion or meeting, but always it’s a social occasion, and I’m told that because of it the incidence of alcoholism on Fiji is actually relatively low. Samoans are much more interested in kava.

  Later on I staggered to my feet, and one of the villagers led me outside. We sat for a while on the beach under a great dome of stars. The surf washed in, and I felt warm and happy. For the moment the world seemed a very peaceful place.

  “Kalokalo,” my new friend said, pointing at the heavens.

  High overhead, I made out a pattern of stars. All of a sudden it came into focus, and I almost leaped in recognition. Maybe it was because of my near-death experience on the plane. Perhaps it was because the kava had loosened me up a bit, but there it was — the great Southern Cross, Koluse I Saute. It leaned a little to the right and was bigger than I’d thought, but there it was — four bright stars sparkling in the tropical night.

  This time I created my own meaning for it. Seeing the Southern Cross was, I figured, a sign that I had survived the worst airline in the world. It was a sign that I was truly in paradise. Like Margaret Mead, I had learned that things are often not what you expect, that what you think, especially about other people, is often coloured by your own way of thinking. In other words, I only saw the Southern Cross when I wasn’t looking for it.

  9

  See You at Machu Picchu

  Mount Veronica rises almost six thousand metres above the central highlands of Peru. Its snowcapped peaks hover above the clouds, pushing at the cold blue sky. In the ancient language of the Inca, the mountain is called Waka Wilkay, which translates, roughly, as “Tears of Heaven.”

  Those Inca were onto something because, true enough, when the equatorial sun flashes off the high glaciers, fat tears of ice water plop onto the black rocks of the mountaintop. Trickles of water thread down the slopes, tumbling and combining into creeks. Eventually, these same bubbling streams, a thousand kilometres to the west, swell into the mighty Amazon River.

  We passed over one of these creeks at around four thousand metres. A rickety bridge bent out over the water, and I stopped for a moment, breathing heavily in the thin air. It was our second day on the Inca trail — a four-day march over the High Andes to the lost city of Machu Picchu.

  Behind me I heard the porters coming — the slap of their sandals on the rocky trail. These guys were a pretty rough crowd. Their faces were weathered and toothless, but they scurried up the pathways with huge striped grain sacks tied to their backs by rope. In the sacks were our tents and the camp stove, and all the food for the journey.

  Besides the porters, there were eleven of us: two Israelis, six Poles, a British girl, and myself. Oh, and a guide named René Huaman Callañaúpa. The last two names are Quechua, the language of the Inca. I asked him about the “René” bit, but he smiled and told me simply that his mother had liked the sound of it. It might have come from a French archaeological team a long time ago. He wasn’t saying anything definitive, though.

  René was forty or maybe fifty; it was hard to tell. He wore a baseball cap pulled tight over his eyes. When he turned into the wind, looking down over the mountain passes, I could see his Inca ancestry. He had the hooked nose and high cheekbones of the Inca, just like the porters, though René had had the good fortune to be born in a valley town rather than in the high mountains. So, unlike the porters, he’d had a chance to go to school, to become educated and worldly.

  Our guide spoke Spanish as well as Quechua. His English, too, was quite good, and after leading treks through the Andes for a couple of decades, he could let fly with smatterings of Italian and Japanese, even a few phrases in Polish, which never failed to send
our Polish contingent into fits of astonished laughter.

  There wasn’t a whole lot of time to talk on the trail, however. We were pushing up to Dead Woman’s Pass, and at forty-two hundred metres we were sucking for air. My own pack felt heavy, though I knew it was lighter than what the porters had to deal with. I had a couple of litres of water, a sleeping bag, and a tangle of warm clothes, but it all seemed to be dragging me down. The straps were cutting into the soft flesh between my shoulder blades and neck, and it didn’t seem as if my walking stick, clacking on the stones, was any help at all.

  I stepped aside at the bridge, and three of our porters bounded past, running at a light jog, their cheeks puffed up with coca leaves. To chew coca is to be a Runa — one of the people of the Andes. It’s both an anesthetic and a medicine, and of course it’s the same plant from which cocaine is derived. René, only the night before in the dinner tent, had told us about the pits in the jungle, about the incredible quantity of coca leaves it takes to create a teaspoon of cocaine. As we’d sat long into the evening listening to him, he’d spun tales of government corruption, presidential planes loaded with the stuff, murders, the CIA, and international espionage.

  For our simple porters, though, the coca leaves were an age-old tradition. They provide minerals and nutrients not found in the corn and bean crops of the high mountains. The leaves contain large amounts of calcium. They also have various catalysts that help break down hydrocarbons such as the ones found in corn and beans. Besides the nutritional benefits, coca leaves have quasi-medical properties. They dull hunger and alleviate fatigue, so our porters chewed the leaves relentlessly.

  The porters boiled warm cups of the stuff in the morning. They made it into a sort of tea, and just after dawn, at about six, there would be a tap on our tent poles and rough brown hands would push in the cups of coca tea. We drank it gratefully. It didn’t taste all that great, but it sure got us going.

  A Swedish group was moving along behind us on the trail. We’d already bumped into them once or twice. One of the men wore huge black loafers on his feet. “Comfortable,” he said, frowning with disdain at my thick hiking boots. “I got them two sizes too big.” He grinned like a kid. “They’re big, so they won’t give me … ah …”

  “Blisters?”

  “Yeah, blisters.”

  His face, I noticed, alternated at different times of the day between a blushing red and a sickly white. By the second day, we knew why. He was drinking incessantly. I wasn’t sure where he got the alcohol. It was possible he’d secreted it in his pack, but by mid-afternoon he was plainly drunk and was racing along the trails, trying to keep up with the porters, his big black shoes flapping and slapping around his feet. Then, when the altitude and the prevailing hangover caught up with him again, he’d slow to a groaning shuffle. The other Swedes tsk-tsked him, but he became a sort of landmark on the trail. You could almost tell time by his states of inebriation.

  We’d already gone a couple of days without showers and two nights with bone-chilling temperature drops. René explained that the trail we were following was probably a route of pilgrimage, a sort of sacred journey from Cuzco, one hundred kilometres to the west. We still had another twenty-five kilometres to hike to Machu Picchu, but just beneath the second high pass we came to the first set of Inca ruins. It was a guard post, René said, and a tumba — a resting point for pilgrims.

  This network of flagstone roads that we were on was dotted with such rest points. The road itself was one of the hallmarks of the Inca Empire. These roads — twenty-five thousand kilometres of them — wound through the High Andes like strings of thread. They ran from what is now Colombia down through Ecuador, Peru, Chile, and even a little way into Argentina, connecting the farthest outposts of the Inca Empire.

  I should say here that Inca isn’t really the right word. The word Inca actually refers only to the ruler, a godlike figure not unlike an Egyptian pharaoh. He was always a direct descendant of the first leader of these people, the Inca Manco Capac.

  Names are tenuous things. Of all the bits and pieces of language, they’re the words that are most completely social constructions. They’re words that we’ve agreed upon, symbols that refer to specific persons or places.

  The people here — what we call Inca — are properly named Runa, and their language Runasimi — the people’s mouth — is what we usually label Quechua. René himself called the language Quechua. He’d been born in the village of Chinchero, not far from Cuzco. As we talked about Quechua, he had some fun trying to get me to pronounce their famous glottal stops. These are a sort of hiccup or gulp that turn up in the middle of some Quechua words. Words like q’inko, which means “to zigzag” (the apostrophe marks the glottal stop). I’d asked René about that when I noticed that the porters didn’t usually run straight up the stone steps on the trail. Instead, they performed a series of miniature switchbacks, zigzagging up the steepest of the long steps.

  Some words in Quechua even have a double glottal stop, and René tossed off a few of these, sounding as if he were downing a pint of beer all in one go. He taught me one hell of a word — huacunaillaihuanhuagracacunacayarcanchu — which means “Bulls get hungry without grass.”

  Quechua, like many of the indigenous languages of the Americas, is an agglutinating language. It tacks on word ending after word ending until a single word becomes a whole sentence. Sentences about bulls eating grass, for example. Not that there were any bulls on the Inca trail. There were llamas here, but no bulls. Nor was there much grass, just a sort of dull shrubbery found above the tree line in the high mountain passes.

  The Inca, however, were masters of this landscape. Their empire, or what’s properly called Tahuantinsuyu, centred itself in these mountain ranges bounded on the west by the Pacific Ocean and to the east by the vast Amazon jungle. Tahuantinsuyu derives from the word tawa, which is the number four. It means that there were four provinces radiating from Cuzco, the capital city, like a cross. The suffix ntin means “together,” and it’s followed by another suffix, suyu, meaning “region” or “province.” So Tahuantinsuyu means something like “Four United Provinces.”

  At any rate, this empire — Tahuantinsuyu — lasted less than a century. By about 1450, the ninth Inca, Pachacuti the Earth Shaker, finally united the separate tribes of the Andes into a cohesive republic. In 1532, though, the Spanish arrived, just in time to witness a civil war between two of the great-grandsons of Pachacuti. There was a terrific power struggle between Huáscar (meaning “Gentle Hummingbird”) and Atahualpa (meaning “Heroic Turkey”). Predictably, the heroic turkey trumped the gentle hummingbird, but the whole royal mess left the empire in confusion. And that was the state of things when the Spanish entered the scene.

  The conquistadors, of course, saw their advantage, so with a kidnapping here and a murder there, the whole Inca Empire collapsed within a single generation. The Inca call this time the Yawar Cocha — the “Ocean of Blood.” And for them the world was never the same.

  The Swedish guy was walking slowly in the morning. He was wearing his white face, and we passed him up beyond the ruins. He gave us a weak grin, and I said, “See you at Machu Picchu.” This was to become, literally, a running joke. When he passed us again later — revved up once more on the sauce — he called out the same thing: “See you at Machu Picchu.” Inevitably, a few hours later we passed him yet again and threw the same taunt back at him.

  At the top of the high pass René gathered us together. We were able now to gaze upon a small set of ruins — a tumba — below us. “What do you see there?” René asked. We had already become familiar with this game.

  At the first pass — Dead Woman’s — René had stopped us to point out the rock formation that supposedly made up the Dead Woman. It had looked like any other clump of rocks. The only clearly recognizable feature was a mound of rock with a tiny spur on top — what René had claimed was the poor woman’s breast. “Look up from there,” he’d said. “Do you see her shoulder? Look, there’s her ch
in and her face above it.”

  We couldn’t see anything. Tomir, the Israeli, delighted in at least spying the Dead Woman’s breast. Later, because this pausing to see shapes in the rocks happened a lot, Tomir started spotting breasts in everything. Now, when René asked us what we saw in the ruins below us, Tomir offered timidly that it could again be a breast.

  “No, it’s not a breast.” René was a bit indignant. “Use your imagination.”

  “The walls are in kind of a mushroom shape,” I said. The outer walls did indeed form a semicircle, with a hallway coming out from the bottom.

  “No.” René turned slowly from Tomir to me. “But you’re closer. He swept his arm toward the ruins. “These ruins are in the shape of a ceremonial knife. The blade is the half-circle. The handle comes out of it.”

  “I still see a breast,” Tomir whispered, but his girlfriend shushed him.

  “In Quechua a ceremonial knife is a tumi, so the whole thing down there might be a sort of, what do you call it … a pun. It’s a tumba and a tumi.” René chuckled. “The Inca, you see, often made their buildings into certain shapes. Back in Cuzco did you see that?”

  I nodded. The entire city had been planned in the shape of a puma, the mountain lion of the Andes. You could see it in aerial photos. Postcards even depicted the shape, outlined in black to make it clear for gringos. At Ollantaytambo, another town in the Sacred Valley, the street plan approximated the shape of a llama. And Machu Picchu, still two days away, had at its centre a rock-and-wall formation in the shape of a condor. These were giant symbols the size of whole cities.

  Symbols are funny things. Sometimes we physically construct them — like building an entire city to represent an animal. That’s a pretty big metaphor. Words are much smaller, but we build them, too. They’re socially constructed, by which I mean that the society as a whole has generally agreed that such and such a symbol represents such and such a meaning. That’s largely how it works. So it’s not surprising that we take our symbols from the world around us. A condor, for example, happens to be a magnificent bird, a huge raptor, and it’s native to the Andes. It was only natural that the Inca took something like that and affixed it with a meaning. We can only work with the materials at hand, the world immediately around us. For the Inca that was largely a mountain world, a rarefied realm of snowbound peaks and high alpine meadows.