Light at the Edge of the World (7 page)

This pact, never spoken about and never forgotten, was, in its own way, a perfect reflection of the Andes, where the foundation of all life, both today and in the time of the Inca, has always been reciprocity. One sees it in the fields, when men come together and work in teams, moving between rows of fava beans and potatoes, season to season, a day for a day, planting, hoeing, weeding, mounding, harvesting. There is a spiritual exchange in the morning when the first of a family to awake salutes the sun, and again at night when a father whispers prayers of thanksgiving and lights a candle before greeting his family. Every offering is a gift: blossoms scattered onto fertile fields, the blessing of the children and tools at the end of each day, coca leaves presented to Pachamama at any given moment. When people meet on a trail, they pause and exchange
k'intu
s of coca, three perfect leaves aligned to form a cross. Turning to face the nearest
apu
, or mountain spirit, they bring the leaves to their mouths and blow softly, a ritual invocation that sends the essence of the plant back to the earth, the community, the sacred places and the souls of the ancestors. The exchange of leaves is a social gesture, a way of
acknowledging a human connection. But the blowing of the
phukuy
, as it is called, is an act of spiritual reciprocity, for in giving selflessly to the earth, the individual ensures that in time the energy of the coca will return full circle, as surely as rain falling on a field will inevitably be reborn as a cloud.

 

ALMOST TWENTY YEARS after first visiting Chinchero, I returned to participate in an astonishing ritual, the
mujonomiento
, the annual running of the boundaries. Since the time of the Inca, the town has been divided into three
ayullus
, or communities, the most traditional of which is Cuper, the home of my compadres and, to my mind, the most beautiful, for its lands encompass Antakillqa and all the soaring ridges that separate Chinchero from the sacred valley of the Urubamba. Within Cuper are four hamlets, and once each year, at the height of the rainy season, the entire male population, save those elders physically incapable of the feat, runs the boundaries of their respective communities. It is a race but also a pilgrimage, for the frontiers are marked by mounds of earth, holy sites where prayers are uttered and ritual gestures lay claim to the land. The distance travelled by the members of each hamlet varies. The track I was to follow, that of Pucamarca, covers some 15 miles (24 km), but the route crosses two Andean ridges,
dropping a thousand feet (300 m) from the plaza of Chinchero to the base of Antakillqa, then ascending three thousand feet (900 m) to a summit spur before descending to the valley on the far side, only to climb once more to reach the grasslands of the high
puna
and the long trail home.

At the head of each contingent would dart the
waylaka
, the strongest and fleetest of the youths, transformed for the day from male to female. Dressed in heavy woollen skirts and a cloak of indigo, wearing a woman's hat and delicate lace, the waylaka would fly up the ridges, white banner in hand. At every boundary marker, the transvestite must dance, a rhythmic turn that like a vortex draws to the peaks the energy of the women left behind in the villages far below. Each of the four hamlets of Cuper has its own trajectory, just as each of the three ayullus has its own land to traverse. By the end of the day, all of Chinchero would be reclaimed: the rich plains and verdant fields of Ayullupunqu; the lakes, waterfalls, mountains and cliffs of Cuper; the gorges of Yanacona, where wild things thrive and rushing streams carry away the rains to the Urubamba. Adversaries would have been fought, spirits invoked, a landscape defined and the future secured.

This much I knew as I approached the plaza on the morning of the event. Before dawn, the blowing of the conch shells had awoken the town, and the waylakas,
once dressed, had walked from house to house, saluting the various authorities: the
curaca
and
alcalde
; the officers of the church; and the
embarados
, those charged with the preservation of tradition. At each threshold, coca had been exchanged, fermented maize
chicha
imbibed and a cross of flowers hung in reverence above the doorway. For two hours, the procession had moved from door to door, musicians in tow, until it encompassed all of the community and drew everyone in celebration to the plaza where women waited, food in hand: baskets of potatoes and spicy
piquante
, flasks of chicha and steaming plates of vegetables. There I lingered, with gifts of coca for all. At my side was my godson, Armando. A grown man now, father of an infant girl, he had been a tailor but worked now in the markets of Cusco, delivering sacks of potatoes on a tricycle rented from a cousin. He had returned to Chinchero to be with me for the day.

What I could never have anticipated was the excitement and the rush of adrenaline, the sensation of imminent flight as the entire assembly of men, prompted by some unspoken signal, began to surge toward the end of the plaza. With a shout, the waylaka sprang down through the ruins, carrying with him more than a hundred runners and dozens of young boys who scattered across the slopes that funnelled downward toward a narrow dirt track. The
trail fell away through a copse of eucalyptus and passed along the banks of a creek that dropped to the valley floor. A mile or two on, the waylaka paused for an instant, took measure of the men, caught his breath and was off, dashing through thickets of buddleja and polylepis as the rest of us scrambled to keep sight of his white banner. Crossing the creek draw, we moved up the face of Antakillqa. Here, at last, the pace slowed to something less than a full run. Still, the men leaned into the slope with an intensity and determination unlike anything I had ever known. Less than two hours after leaving the village, we reached the summit ridge, a climb of several thousand feet.

There we paused, as the waylaka planted his banner atop a
mujon,
a tall mound of dirt, the first of the border markers. The authorities added their ceremonial staffs, and as the men piled on dirt to augment the size of the mujon, Don Jeronimo, the curaca, sang rich invocations that broke into a cheer for the well-being of the entire community. By this point, the runners were as restless as race horses, frantic to move. A salutation, a prayer, a generous farewell to those of Cuper Pueblo, another of the hamlets, who would track north, and we of Pucamarca were off, heading east across the backside of the mountain to a second mujon located on a dramatic promontory overlooking all of the Urubamba. Beyond the hamlets and farms of
the sacred valley, clouds swirled across the flanks of even higher mountains, as great shafts of sunlight fell upon the river and the fields far below.

We pounded on across the backside of the mountain and then straight down at a full run through dense tufts of ichu grass and meadows of lupine and rue. Another mujon, more prayers, handfuls of coca all around, blessings and shouts, and a mad dash off the mountain to the valley floor, where, mercifully, we older men rested for a few minutes in the courtyard of a farmstead owned by a beautiful elderly woman who greeted us with a great ceramic urn of frothy chicha. One of the authorities withdrew from his pocket a sheet of paper listing the names of the men and began to take attendance. Participation in the mujonomiento is obligatory, and those who fail to appear must pay a fine to the community. As the names were called, I glanced up and was stunned to see the waylaka, silhouetted on the skyline hundreds of feet above us, banner in hand, moving on.

So the day went. The rains began in early afternoon, and the winds blew fiercely by four. By then nothing mattered but the energy of the group, the trail at our feet and the distant slope of yet another ridge to climb. Warmed by alcohol and coca leaves, the runners fell into reverie, a curious state of joy and release, almost like a trance.

Darkness was upon us as we rushed down the final canyon on a broad muddy track where the water ran
together like mercury and disappeared beneath the stones. Approaching the valley floor and the hamlet of Cuper Alto, where women and children waited, the rain-soaked runners closed ranks behind the waylaka to emerge from the mountains as a single force, an entire community that had affirmed through ritual its sense of place and belonging. In making the sacrifice, the men had reclaimed a birthright and rendered sacred a homeland. Once reunited with their families, they drank and sang, toasting their good fortune as the women served great steaming bowls of soup from iron cauldrons. And, of course, late into night, the waylakas danced.

 

EVERY CULTURE FACES the same fundamental challenges. Men and women come together, children are brought into the world, nurtured and sheltered; elders are led into the realm of death as fearlessly as the imagination allows. To be human is to know the terror and splendour of a night sky, the crush of storms, the blood cries of enemies sweeping in with the dawn. Such is our common experience. To bring order to chaos, sense to sensation, we have created rules, which cross-culturally are remarkable in their consistency. The behaviour prescribed by the Ten Commandments, for example, would be readily endorsed by peoples throughout the world, because the rules work and allow us to survive as a social species. It is a rare society indeed that
tolerates murder, thievery, the violation of established patterns of marriage and procreation. Without such laws, the thin veneer of civilization would be shattered, the veil of culture reduced to tatters.

Yet within this common fabric, this cloak of humanity, lie the individual threads of specific and highly specialized ways of life, distinct cultures, each with its unique and wondrous dream of the Earth. Unravelling the cloth and holding the strands to the light is the practice and contribution of ethnography.

The Kogi dream of the Earth, for example, as revealed by Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, represents at least in part a societal and spiritual ideal, a metaphor linking the living and their everyday reality with the promise and hope of higher possibilities. The sacred laws of the Great Mother provide the Kogi with an image of a perfect way of being. A close examination of village life would no doubt turn up contradictions, for such is the nature of human behaviour, but the Kogi remain remarkably true to the dictates of their religion. Ultimately what matters, however, is not how closely they follow a set of rules but rather what those rules say about how the Kogi perceive their place in the world. The full measure of a culture embraces both the actions of its people and the quality of their aspirations, the character and nature of the metaphors that propel them onward.

The significance of an esoteric belief lies not in its veracity in some absolute sense but in what it can tell us about a culture. Is a mountain a sacred place? Does a river follow the ancestral path of an anaconda? Do the prayers of the Kogi actually maintain the cosmic balance? Who is to say? What matters is the potency of the belief and the manner in which the conviction plays out in the day to day life of a people. A child raised to believe that a mountain is the abode of a protective spirit will be a profoundly different human being from a youth brought up to believe that a mountain is an inert mass of rock ready to be mined. A Kwakw
a
k
a
'wakw boy raised to revere the coastal forests of the Pacific Northwest as the abode of Huxwhukw and the Crooked Beak of Heaven, cannibal spirits living at the north end of the world, will be a different person from a Canadian child taught to believe that such forests exist to be logged.

Herein, perhaps, lies the essence of the relationship between indigenous peoples and the natural world. Life in the malarial swamps of New Guinea, the chill winds of Tibet, the white heat of the Sahara, leaves little room for sentiment. Nostalgia is not a trait commonly associated with the Inuit. Nomadic hunters and gatherers in Borneo have no conscious sense of stewardship for mountain forests that they lack the technical capacity to destroy. What these cultures have done, however, is to forge through
time and ritual a traditional mystique of the Earth that is based not only on deep attachment to the land but also on far more subtle intuition—the idea that the land itself is breathed into being by human consciousness. Mountains, rivers and forests are not perceived as inanimate, as mere props on a stage upon which the human drama unfolds. For these societies, the land is alive, a dynamic force to be embraced and transformed by the human imagination. This sense of belonging and connection, noted by ethnographers working among traditional societies throughout the Andes, is also the invisible constant of the Amazon.

IF THE ANDES DRAW ONE TO THE LIGHT AND shelter of a radiant sky, the tropical lowlands seduce with the promise of raw fecundity. Lie flat on the forest floor and see how long it takes to be colonized by fungi, tormented by insects. Put your mouth to the ground and breathe on a raiding column of army ants and see what happens. They are chemical beings, with eyes incapable of discerning images. They respond to odour. The scent of your breath excites their taste for flesh.

At night, the canopy comes alive with a familiar cacophony: frogs and cicadas, the roar of howlers, the unexpected bark of a jaguar. But at midday, the voices come from below, from the surface of the ground. Sit still and you can
actually hear the crunching sound of long-horned beetles chewing through wood, the rustling of termites, the trundling steps of millipedes. Butterflies with translucent wings flutter and fight over a bead of sweat. Relieve yourself in the forest and observe the race for the spoils: metallic flies and stingless bees, fifty or more species of scarab beetles in precise sequence, converge in an intense struggle that within hours disperses your human waste into the food chain. Scat reduced to shadow. Imagine what happens to a corpse.

The Indians know, just as they know that the trees sway out of time in order to snap the grip of clinging lianas and slough off great sheets of bark to rid themselves of epiphytes competing for the light. Watching the forest for signs, they anticipate the flowering and fruiting cycles of plants, recognize the preferred foods of animals, exploit the healing power of leaves. Their principal food is derived from the flesh of a toxic root. Poisons from plants enable them to fish and hunt. Their children can track the flight of birds, follow the footsteps of jungle cats. They know, too, of bats that draw blood at night, of fish that enter the urethra and with their spines become lodged in the organs of men and boys, a pain that can scarcely be imagined.