The Ragged Edge of the World (37 page)

It was during a meeting with Don Benito that Nunez had an epiphany that caused him to abandon academia. The old priest began speaking to the young scholar in a strange language. “Although I did not understand a word,” says Nunez, “I received images in my mind.” Stunned by the experience, Nunez spent the next ten years as a student of Don Benito, eventually being given what Nunez called “Hatun Karpay,” the initiation ritual of the sacred kings.

Nunez described the Inca beliefs as a powerful system of personal growth, in some ways analogous to Tibetan Buddhism. Their focus is on enhancing powers of perception so that initiates can receive the living energies of the world around them. The physical setting of Machu Picchu abounds in such energies, he explained. The temple complex—which in its entirety has the shape of the sacred bird of the Incas, the condor—functions as a repository of the collective spirit of the Andes. To help tap these energies, Nunez uses the little pouch, or
mesa,
that I saw him holding under the chin of the Italian visitors. Nunez unfurled the pouch and showed me what it held—a shell symbolizing water, a cross symbolizing the male spirit and entrance to the “upper world,” the seal of Don Benito, a coin given by a Buddhist priest, and other
khuyas,
or ritual gifts, that Nunez believes are charged with the powers of the elements and offer a connection to the spirit of the giver. Nunez believes that the
mesa
helps connect initiates to the energies of the hills and to the spirits of the builders of the temple complex and other holy people.

It's easy to make light of such ideas, but the spirit of the quest that draws these seekers is benign if not laudable. Moreover, there is no question that Machu Picchu has a dramatic effect on even the most jaded visitor. For me, the sheer physical beauty of the area is sufficient explanation for its effect.

Awakening at dawn in the Ruinas Hotel, I spent a couple of hours watching a spellbinding moisture-and-light show performed by a cast that included an equatorial sun, the Andes and the Pacific Ocean, with the script written by the laws of physics. At first the view was almost one-dimensional as the pale lumens of dawn light imparted a phosphorescent glow to the canopy of the surrounding cloud forest. Then fog completely sealed the area, to be replaced by a drenching rainfall, which lifted by 7:15. Walking around a little later, I caught the first glimpses of the impossibly high snow peaks that crowd the vast site from the west and east so closely that the view has a two-dimensional flavor. Only on those intermittent occasions when the sky is completely clear can one appreciate the staggering grandeur of the valley Machu Picchu occupies, perched below the high peaks and vertiginously above the rushing Vilcanota River below. The great vault defined by the surrounding mountains forms an inverted cathedral of air. I had no need of rituals or arcana to experience the profound thrall of this magical place.

Those who come to Peru solely to capture the energy of Machu Picchu miss out on another vibration of the region: the pulsing tropical life force of the Amazon rainforest, just a short trip away. While I was intrigued and a little amused by the West's newfound passion for traditional lore, my first inclination has always been to get to the wildlands, and Peru has some of the richest and most intact portions of the vast Amazonian rainforest. After a couple of days in Machu Picchu it was time to travel into the jungle.

Our guide to the rainforest was Charlie Munn, an ornithologist who has worked in the surrounding forests for nearly two decades. We met up with him halfway between Cusco and Machu Picchu, and retracing our route, spent the night in the Monasterio, a converted monastery that aspired to be a five-star hotel. The rooms were ordinary, but the lobby, bar, courtyard and restaurants took full advantage of the stonework and architectural detail of the ancient structure. After dinner we took a leisurely walk (at 11,300 feet, a walk can only be leisurely) through the narrow cobblestone streets in the colonial heart of the city. Worried about muggers in a particularly dark area, Charlie stopped a local and asked in Spanish, “If we go down that street will robbers jump out of the shadows and choke us?” The man laughed and replied, “No, that's gone out of style.”

The next morning Mary and I headed to the airport for the thirty-five-minute flight to a jungle strip on the Madre de Dios River in the heart of the Manu, one of the most pristine regions of the Peruvian Amazon. It's territory in which Charlie Munn has invested a good deal of time and money. He has studied its flora and fauna, tirelessly lobbied various Peruvian governments for its protection, and dipped into his inheritance to provide loans to local Indians who wanted to start ecotourist ventures. So far, Charlie has helped launch twenty-five such ventures, including a nonprofit travel agency called InkaNatura that brings groups to Machu Picchu and the Manu, and that returns its profits to conservation.

From the Boca Manu airstrip we traveled by motorized longboat up the Madre de Dios to the Manu Wildlife Center, a small ecotourist lodge that Charlie helped launch. In contrast to the crisp air of Machu Picchu, the Manu is all about heat. One either fries in the sun out on the river or is slowly poached in the sweltering, close air of the rainforest.

During the ninety-minute river trip to the Manu Wildlife Center, Charlie pointed out macaws, horned screamers, bat falcons, roseate spoonbills and other birds flying over or picking their way along the banks, and he also described the various stratagems they employed to survive. Most amusing was his description of the zone-tailed hawk, which imitates a vulture by flying with its wings cocked up and rocking back and forth to approach prey. “It flies along saying, ‘I'm a vulture, I'm a vulture,' ” explained Charlie. Once it gets within striking distance of a macaw the hawk folds its wings and swoops down on its unsuspecting victim. The rainforest is full of such trickery. One small songbird imitates the alarm call that other species make when a hawk is in the area, and, when the spooked birds take flight, it steals their food.

The Manu Wildlife Center is a collection of thatch-roofed huts strung along walkways beside the river. There is no electricity save for that generated to refrigerate food, and the facilities are spartan, but Walter, a Piro Indian and former guide who runs the lodge, chose the site for its proximity to the nearby clay and mineral licks that attract some of the most elusive animals in the rainforest. Just downstream, for instance, hundreds of macaws regularly gather to eat clay—the minerals it contains help counteract the acids that build up in the birds' stomachs from eating rubber tree seeds and other hard-to-digest foods—from the exposed banks of the river.

As with any wildlife viewing, getting a look at the local fauna required that one adjust to the rhythms of the forest. We set off at 6:00 one morning so that we could get settled into a floating blind on the river before the birds arrived. We waited four and a half hours before the first birds began gathering in the trees along the banks. They were very skittish, well aware that predators also knew their schedule. They descended lower and lower in the trees, and then finally, at 12:30, the first brave soul found a perch on the vertical bank and began chomping away at the clay. Within minutes the bank was covered with red-and-green macaws as well as their scarlet cousins.

Later that evening, lured by the promise of what Charlie called “the best tapir viewing in South America,” we visited another lick, which lay in the forest a few kilometers from the camp. This lick was a
colpa,
a muddy pool where the giant mammals came to settle their stomachs. On stilts overlooking the lick Walter and his staff have constructed another covered blind. In our
colpa
cabana we curled up in blankets on mattresses, slumber-party style, and awaited the 550-pound tapirs. Just after sunset the first arrived. I have to say that only those aware of the extreme elusiveness of the big animals were likely to have appreciated the drama of the moment.

For most visitors three or four days in the Manu are more than sufficient to get a taste of the rainforest. And, I might add, for the rainforest to get a taste of them. A short swim in the Madre de Dios left me covered with an archipelago of bites as insects vectored in on me during the brief moments my skin was exposed while getting out of the water. I didn't mind. I had gathered energy in Machu Picchu and I left a little bit of myself behind in the digestive tracts of bugs living on the “mother of god” river. This synergistic exchange of the mystical and the corporeal seemed entirely in keeping with the new dimensions of the Machu Picchu region.

M
any questions cloud the future of Midway, the Manu, the Ndoki, and indeed the future of every sanctuary and refuge on the planet. In recent years I've watched as hard-fought conservation victories have been mooted by global change or simply steamrolled by the juggernaut of the consumer society and its attendant greed and corruption. For a few moments in the 1990s, for instance, I had some hope that enough of Sumatra's main park, Gunung Leuser, could be preserved to maintain a place where orangutans and tigers might persist in the wild. That looks increasingly unlikely, as Indonesian businessmen bribe officials to look the other way as they log forests or illegally convert parklands to a palm-oil plantation.

This list goes on. The Galápagos are under increasing stress, even though they lie over 1,000 miles from the mainland. Ecuador has a hard time managing the Galápagos's population of migrant farmers and fishermen, even though tourists coming to see the islands' flora and fauna are one of the biggest sources of foreign currency reserves that the nation has. The same is true for Kenya and Tanzania, where nature tourism represents a huge cash cow, but poaching and encroachment by farmers continue.

The countdown continues not just for places, but for specific species. The number of animals whose populations have been reduced by more than 90 percent is staggering, as are the consequences. One of the unpleasant surprises in recent years has been an explosion of jellyfish in the oceans around the world. Much has been written about this phenomenon, but far less attention has been paid to the connection between this indication of oceanic distress and the disappearance of jellyfish predators. The giant leatherback turtle, which has patrolled the oceans since dinosaurs roamed the planet, consumes jellyfish as its primary source of sustenance. Having survived asteroid hits and other extinction-level events, however, the turtle is now being driven to the edge by fishing nets, egg collectors and even something so seemingly innocuous as lights near beaches, which fatally divert baby turtles away from the water after they hatch.

In the mid-1990s I wrote a cover story for
Time
on the fate of the tiger in the wild. We did a lot of thinking about the title, and eventually settled on “Doomed.” The usual hedge in journalism would have been to put a question mark after that word, but John Stacks, the editor, and I wanted to make the point that habitat was disappearing at a rate that would crowd the wild tiger out of existence, even if poaching for the traditional medicine market in Asia was completely stopped. The article caused quite a stir, and I attended more than one conference where the title was brought up, snidely dismissed as needlessly pessimistic by conservationists.

Here was a case where I would dearly love to have been proven wrong. Since that article was published in 1995, however, the tiger has almost completely disappeared from Indonesia, China, Vietnam, Thailand and Burma. It hangs on in India, though its numbers are dwindling in almost all the reserves, including the swampy Sunderbans, which until recently had hosted the healthiest populations. In the Russian Far East, the Siberian tiger has a chance because its range is in a thinly populated habitat, and there is some slim hope the tiger can persist in Cambodia, which recently has taken action to slow deforestation.

But confining an animal that once was the keystone predator in a 5,000-mile swath of Asia to zoos and a few tightly guarded small reserves is not saving the species. Still, as with Yellowstone and the wolf, so long as the tiger lives in the wild somewhere there is the hope that someday it might recolonize its once vast territory and restore the balance of the many different ecosystems in which it was king.

The cultural entropy I wrote about in “Lost Tribes, Lost Knowledge” is all but complete, leaving behind thousands of deracinated tribes. Those who have decided that the modern market economy is not nearly as fulfilling as their former life discover they can no longer return, for either the forest and animals that supported them are gone, or the knowledge and rituals that bound them to the wildlands have disappeared. Huge amounts of knowledge are vanishing simply because the young are no longer learning the languages of their elders.

Andrew Vayda, an anthropologist I spoke with during my research in Indonesia, was somewhat sanguine about the loss of knowledge, observing that knowledge is continually lost, just as it is continually gained. Such cultural holocausts have occurred in the past, after all. A trove of wonderful insights and skills certainly vanished when the Neanderthal died out, or when the Library of Alexandria burned, and we have learned to live without that lost expertise and knowledge. We will likely one day miss this knowledge, however, because at a point where we urgently need a better understanding of the ecosystems of the world, the hard-learned lessons of thousands of tribes will no longer be available.