Along the River
that Flows Uphill -
from the Orinoco
to the Amazon
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Richard Starks
Miriam Murcutt
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Lost in Tibet
Along the River that Flows Uphill - from the Orinoco to the Amazon
by Richard Starks and Miriam Murcutt
Extracts from the book
From Chapter One
I’ve nearly died three times in my life - which is funny in an ironic way, since I was once accused of never taking any risks.The first time was in northern Canada where I nearly died of exposure: the car I was driving hit a passing moose, spun into a ditch, and in the middle of winter left me eighty-five snow-filled miles from the nearest outpost of what locally passed for civilization. The second time was in the Himalayas where I nearly died of boredom: a ferocious blizzard trapped me in a hut for eight interminable days and nights. The third time was in Venezuela where a Yanomami Indian threatened to shoot me with a poisoned arrow. Or maybe it was in Colombia where FARC guerillas tried to take me hostage.
Either way, the third time was on a trip I took up the Orinoco to see a strange river called the Casiquiare.
The chances are you’ve never heard of the Casiquiare. Most people haven’t, even though, like the source of the Nile or the exact location of Timbuktu, it once created so much controversy that the mere mention of its name could spark a physical fight among geographers in Europe. That was back in the eighteenth century when large parts of the world were still blank spaces - ones that map-makers filled with billowing images of a pucker-lipped Wind, or the beguiling words set in Olde English type, ‘Here Be Dragons’.
Travellers who claimed they had peered into those empty spaces came back with tall tales of two-headed monsters, Amazon women, and fire-breathing giants with backward-facing feet. They also came back with tall tales of the Casiquiare - a river so fantastic that it could do the impossible and flow uphill.
From Chapter Two
Half an hour after we land, we are hunched in a doorway exchanging dollars for bolivars, and half an hour after that, we are sitting in the back of a pirata - an unmarked ‘taxi’ - riding through the night and the long, dark tunnels that lead into Caracas.We bounce around on ripped seats, feeling metal springs dig into our backs. Black tape holds the dashboard together, and a crucifix jerks and jangles from a rubber sucker high on the windshield. I watch the driver’s eyes in his rear-view mirror. I am more than a little wary, but his gaze seems friendly enough, and Miriam is able to draw him out by practicing her new-found Spanish.
We emerge from the tunnels and reach the edge of the city. Litter rustles in the gutters so the pavements appear to shimmy and sway. The streets are dark, but high above us, ranchos, or slums, cling to the hills, their lights showing dimly like distant stars. The air hangs heavy with smog, and as we approach the centre, the potholes, if anything, seem to get deeper.
The driver talks about his family - his brothers and sisters, and his six children. Four boys, two girls.
“They are a blessing,” he says, then hesitates a moment, inclining his head to one side. “Sometimes,” he adds.
He reaches up to touch the crucifix on his windshield, but I can’t tell if he’s thanking the Catholic Church for the size of his family - or blaming it.
From Chapter Four
In 1744, a Jesuit priest named Father Manuel Roman was paddling the upper reaches of the Orinoco - far above the Atures and Maipures rapids - when, to his astonishment, he came across a marauding band of Portuguese slave traders. How, he wondered, could Portuguese traders have made their way so far up what was indisputably a Spanish river? The slave traders gave him the answer when they led him even further up the Orinoco - and then down the Casiquiare to the settlements they had established on the Rio Negro. The Orinoco had a back door - a river that connected the Spanish and Portuguese lands.Father Roman was not the first European to write about the Casiquiare. That distinction belongs to another Jesuit priest, Father Christobal de Acuna, who had heard about the river more than one hundred years before, when he travelled the Amazon from its upper tributaries down to its mouth on the South Atlantic. But Father Roman became the first to paddle along the Casiquiare and to publish an account of his journey. His report might have been ignored, but, in 1745, it came to the attention of the French Academie des Sciences in Paris. And suddenly, all of Europe sat up and took notice.
From Chapter Five
The boat suddenly lurches. It throws Leo off balance and nearly dumps me out of my chair. I think for a moment that we have hit something lurking in the water, but I look around and see that a military patrol boat, bristling with guns, has snuck up alongside us, rocking the Iguana in its wash. A crew of heavily armed teenagers - kitted out in boots, gaiters, cargo pants, camouflage tee-shirts and wrap-around shades - glares down at us from its deck. The gun-ship edges closer, cuts its engines, and an officer on board gestures for us to do the same.Six of the teenagers swing over the railings and land on our deck. They all have baby-smooth cheeks and rifles that they keep at the ready, and they are backed up by a fixed machine-gun set aft of the turret on their patrol boat. It’s a scene from Apocalypse Now, and I half expect to hear Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries blare out from loud speakers. The soldiers fan out, poking their rifles into cabins and demanding to see papers and identity cards, then search the hold, down near the engines. One of them counts the oil drums, pointing at each one like a teacher taking roll-call. He says nothing to me.
From Chapter Seven
From my secure position behind the oil drums, I can observe the Yanomami Indian we have taken on board. He does not look drugged. Nor does he seem unduly violent or aggressive. If anything, he appears physically fragile, as if he’s deflated - perhaps even depressed. He is not at all like the “burly, filthy, hideous men” that Chagnon saw. Instead, he’s an undersized figure, twig-like and small, with eyes set deep in a gaunt face. He’s dressed only in a torn and dirty tee-shirt, his dark, sinewy neck poking out of the top like a ventriloquist’s dummy’s. I don’t think he has tied up his penis, but when he moves across the deck, I can see that his testicles are dangling down like a couple of Malteezers.Most of the time, he squats on the fore deck - peering into the jungle with a glazed, almost blank expression - but his primary base is one level down near the cooler, just outside Linda’s galley. That’s where he has secreted a small plastic bag that appears to contain his worldly possessions. There is a warm spot on the floor where the cooler dissipates heat, and he spends his nights there, curled up on the rough boards - although why he seeks heat in this climate, I cannot begin to understand.
I do not know the man’s name, but I have learned from Lucho that the Yanomami are usually named for their relevant, kinship ties - ‘brother’, ‘sister’, ‘father’, ‘mother’. I do not, of course, share any of these relationships with him, so for the want of anything better, I decide for the moment to call him ‘Y’.
From Chapter Nine
I well remember the trauma I suffered when, as a child, I moved from England to Scotland, and was forced to exchange mellow, yellow Bath stone for harsh granite and the books of S’r W’lt’r Sc’tt. I cannot imagine how much worse Y must feel. He is, I’ve discovered, on his way back from a trip down the Orinoco as far as Puerto Ayacucho, so in the past few days - for the first time in his life, and all in one sudden rush - he has been introduced to cars, telephones, shoes, beds, watches, electric lights, newspapers, televisions, buildings with doors in them, and water that flows out of taps. Still to come are hedge funds, derivatives, lap-tops, Blackberries, skate-shoes, tooth-bleach, cell phones, Moosehead beer, barbecues and Haagen Dazs ice cream - and all the other indispensable trappings of our modern civilization.At one point, back on the Iguana, I was tempted to show Y my iPod - putting the plugs into his ears and letting him listen to some of my music. But what would he have made of Roll Over Beethoven? Of Heartbreak Hotel? What would he have thought of Tutti Frutti?
More from Chapter Nine
Frank himself is a stocky, sandy-haired man with a face ruddied by heat. He was born about forty years ago in upper New York State, but moved to Tamatama with his missionary family when he was nine. Now, he lives here with his brother, his brother’s family, and two pilots who make dangerous use of the settlement’s bumpy, truncated landing-strip to fly in food and other supplies. Frank is proud of what the mission has accomplished, and tells us about the Indian children who have passed through the school, as well as the two local doctors the mission has helped to train.Christian missionaries have worked among the Yanomami for more than forty years, he tells us, and while they’ve made “progress”, they have been never been entirely welcomed. Like Lucho, the Venezuelan government suspects their motives. At times, it has accused the missionaries of spying for foreign interests: the CIA, mining conglomerates, and pharmaceuticals firms that want to test drugs on indigenous peoples. The government also accuses the missionaries of destroying cultural beliefs, and, with their many competing and conflicting, Christian doctrines, of sowing the seeds of cultural confusion.
Frank rejects these charges when I gently put them to him, and instead echoes the Pope’s recent claim that the native people of the New World were crying out for salvation when the Europeans arrived and gave them small pox.
From Chapter Ten
I step forward and present the headman with the braids of tobacco that we bought in Puerto Ayacucho. The tobacco is still damp, just as it should be, and since the shopkeeper we bought it from assured us that it’s of the best quality, I am confident it will be well received.The headman snatches the braids from me and holds them in both hands under his nose as if he’s about to gnaw on a bone. Then he hurls them to the ground at my feet. He makes a noise of disgust that needs no translation, and for a long moment, there’s a strained silence. I’m not sure how to proceed, but then I remember the Number Ten fish-hooks and pull a small bag of them out of my pack and extend it towards him. He again snatches at the bag, peers inside and examines the fish-hooks, one by one, before he passes them on to the man on the floor with the machete and the heap of papaya.
He grunts then, and dismisses me with a flick of his hand. Lucho smiles. And so, finally, do I.
From Chapter Thirteen
I am sure that in a hundred, small and unknown ways, I am violating Y’s unwritten cultural rules, thereby causing him deep and lasting offence. I am not familiar with all of his society’s standards, but I do know that along with defecating on a deck, many of the practices that are acceptable to him would not be acceptable to me. For example, among the Yanomami, it is socially - and morally - permissible:- to rape available women;
- to treat wives as chattels;
- to poke fun at other people’s physical defects;
- to abandon malformed babies; and
- to consume the ashes of the dead.
At the same time, it is not permissible:
- to leave unavenged the deliberate killing of one of your clan; and
- to climb into your hammock without wiping your feet.
From Chapter Fifteen
We step out into the slime and try to keep our balance. We’ve been in jungles before, but none as dense as this. It’s dank and surprisingly cool, like a burrow. Lucho pushes ahead and hacks a hole in the creepers with a sharp, wide-blade machete. He can’t cut a path, but he can make a tunnel. We follow him through, into a dim world of lurking danger. Bent double, we weave our way around screens of lianas and vines, step over roots that cut across our path, and sink ankle-deep into the spongy mud. The mosquitoes land and bite. It’s not raining, but it might as well be. Water drips from the canopy above, plopping onto thick leaves armed with stickle-back spines that claw at our eyes.As we edge forward, the jungle closes in behind us. We make some twists and turns as Lucho cuts a route. We’re so focused on the trip wires of roots that snag at our ankles - and the daggers of thorns that stab us from above - that we soon lose all sense of direction. Twenty feet from the river, and we’d be hard-pressed to find it. Lucho presses on, slashing left and right, and manages to navigate his way to the base of the manaca tree he saw from the river. He turns to us with a grin.
“So which way back?” he says, knowing we have no idea. To us, the jungle is the same in every direction - a stockade of plants, spiked like barbed wire, which reaches clear to the sky.
From Chapter Nineteen
When Lucho comes back, he does not look happy. He sits down and stares at his hands, clasped on the table in front of him.“Did you talk to him?” I ask.
Lucho nods.
“And? So what did he say?”
“He wants money,” Lucho says. “Ten thousand dollars. For each of you.”
Miriam and I look at each other.
“He wants twenty thousand dollars? How the hell are we meant to get that kind of money?”
Lucho shrugs. “It’s not his problem. He’s already called his commander. And he’s brought in some of his friends. He tells me I should take my boat - and Leo, too - and leave the two of you here. He says he’s going to keep you prisoner until you come up with the twenty thousand dollars.”
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Richard Starks
and Miriam Murcutt
Yanomami man with machete