True Hallucinations Part 1

TRUE HALLUCINATIONS.

by Terence McKenna.

To Dennis McKenna, who realized that.

"A st.i.tch in Time saves nine."

PREFACE.

SOMETIME DURING THE EARLY 1980s, while visiting the Esalen Inst.i.tute, where I had been invited to partic.i.p.ate in a conference on shamanism, I realized that my innate Irish ability to rave had been turbo-charged by years of psilocybin mushroom use. Aided by my devotion to psilocybin and the experiment at La Chorrera that is the subject of this book, I had apparently evolved into a sort of mouthpiece for the incarnate Logos. I could talk to small groups of people with what appeared to be electrifying effect about the peculiarly transcendental matters that you will read about in these pages.

These verbal performances seemed to me rather mundane while they were occurring, but relistening to them on audiotape I could see the source of other people's fascination. It was as though my ordinary, rather humdrum personality had simply been turned off and speaking through me was the voice of another, a voice that was steady, unhesitating, and articulate-a voice seeking to inform others about the power and the promise of psychedelic dimensions.

Dozens, now perhaps nearly a hundred, of my talks and lectures were recorded, distributed, sometimes pirated, pa.s.sed among friends, and played on small underground radio stations. I began to make my living as a lecturer and teacher at various spas and growth centers. I was discovered by the notorious Roy of Hollywood, whose late-night radio show made me an underground mini-star, at

least among the insomniacs of Los Angeles. Merely by talking about the events at La Chorrera I had become a minor celebrity.

Eventually rumor of my status as a raver and a West Coast underground figure reached even into the great gla.s.s boxes along Fifth Avenue in Gotham itself. Publishers that I had imagined would not give me the time of day were suddenly interested in my work. Let us hope that as you read this, my books-this one and others that have preceded it-are spreading these strange ideas and making my life comfortable and others rich.

There is a strange paradox surrounding all of this: my ideas are now in the public arena and an informal plebiscite is being held on them. If they spread, become popular, and function as catalysts of social change then the hope that they may have a special destiny will be sustained. If, on the other hand, they have their moment in the sun and then fade from public notice, my work and my vision will have been judged to be no more than another fleeting facet of our surreal and paranoia-infected culture. I have no idea where these ideas may lead. Certainly with several books now in print I cannot claim that I was not given a fair hearing. It is apparently the public who will decide if this phenomenon has run its course or if it is only beginning to make itself felt.

I mention all of this not to inform my reader of the less-than-interesting details of my personal effort to feed a family, but because this career of mine is now the only and best evidence that something extraordinary, perhaps something of historical importance, may have happened at La Chorrera. For the loquacious mushrooms encountered there have spun a myth and issued a prophecy, in quite specific detail, of a planet-saving global s.h.i.+ft of consciousness. They have promised all that has happened in my life over the last twenty years, and they have promised much more for the future. If you read onward you become a part of this tale. Caveat lector.

CHAPTER ONE.

THE CALL OF THE SECRET.

In which our cast of characters, including a mushroom, are introduced, and their peculiar interests sketched. The Amazon jungle is invoked and the descent of one of its rivers undertaken.

For THOUSANDS OF YEARS the visions imparted by hallucinogenic mushrooms have been sought and revered as a true religious mystery. Much of my thought over the past twenty or more years has been caught up in describing and contemplating this mystery. Closely guarded by the chaotically jeweled Angels- "Every angel is terrible," wrote Rilke, and at once sacred and profane-the mushroom has risen in my life much as it may rise at some future point in human history. I have chosen a literary approach to the telling of this tale. A living mystery could take any shape-it is master of place and s.p.a.ce, time and spirit-yet my search for a simple form to convey this mystery brought me to follow tradition: to write a chronological narrative of a story that is both true and extraordinarily bizarre.

In early February of 1971, I was pa.s.sing through southern Colombia with my brother and some friends on our way to an expedition into the Colombian Amazonas. Our route led us through

Florencia, the provincial capital of the Departmento of Caqueta. There we paused a few days awaiting an airplane to carry us to our embarkation point on the Rio Putumayo, a river whose vast expanse is the border between Colombia and her two southern neighbors, Ecuador and Peru.

The day we were to depart was especially hot, and we left the oppressive confines of our hotel near the noisy central market and bus station. We walked southwest, out of town, perhaps a mile. Here were the warm waters of the Rio Hacha, visible across rolling pastures of tall gra.s.s. After swimming in the river, exploring deep pools carved by the warm torrent in the black basaltic stream bed, we returned through the same meadows.

Someone more familiar than I with the appearance of the mushroom Stropharia cubensis pointed out a single large specimen standing tall and alone in an old bit of cow manure.

Impulsively and at my companions' suggestion, I ate the whole mushroom. It occupied but a moment, and then on we trudged, tired from our swim, a tropical thunderstorm moving toward us along the eastern edge of the Andean cordillera where Florencia is located.

For perhaps a quarter hour we walked on, mostly in silence. Wearily I hung my head, almost hypnotized by the sight of the regular motion of my boots cutting through the gra.s.s. To align my back, to throw off my lethargy, I paused and stretched, scanning the horizon. The feeling of the bigness of the sky, which I have come to a.s.sociate with psilocybin, rushed down on me there for the first time. I asked my friends to pause and then I sat down heavily on the ground. A silent thunder seemed to shake the air before me. Things stood out with a new presence and significance. This feeling came and pa.s.sed over me like a wave just as the first fury of the tropical storm burst overhead, leaving us soaked. The eerie sense that some other dimension or scale of being had intersected with the bright tropical day lasted only a few minutes. Elusive but strong, it was unlike any feeling I could recall.

In our sodden retreat, the extended, oddly s.h.i.+mmering moment preceding our frantic withdrawal went unmentioned by me. I recognized that my experience had been induced by the mushroom, but I did not want to let thoughts of it distract me, for we were after bigger game. We were involved, I imagined, in a deep

jungle search for hallucinogens of a different sort: plants containing the orally active drug di-methyltryptamine (or DMT) and the psychedelic brew ayahuasca. These plants were long a.s.sociated with telepathic abilities and feats of the paranormal. Yet the patterns of their use, which were unique to the Amazon jungles, had not been fully studied.

Once I had come down, I dismissed the mushroom experience as something to look into another time. Longtime residents of Colombia a.s.sured me that the golden-hued Stropharia occurred exclusively on the dung of Zebu cattle, and I a.s.sumed that in the jungles of the interior-where I was shortly to be-I could expect no cattle or pasture.

Putting the thought of mushrooms from my mind, I prepared for the rigors of our descent down the Rio Putumayo toward our target destination, a remote mission called La Chorrera.

Why had a gypsy band such as ours come to the steaming jungles of Amazonian Colombia? We were a party of five, bound by friends.h.i.+p, extravagant imagination, naivete, and a dedication to travel and exotic experience. Ev, our translator and newly my lover, was the only member of the group not a long acquaintance of the others. She was an American, like the rest of us, and she had lived several years in South America and had traveled in the East (where I had pa.s.sed her once in the Kathmandu airport at a moment of great duress for us both-another story). She was recently free of a long relations.h.i.+p.

On her own and having nothing better to do, she had fallen in with our group. By the time we reached La Chorrera, she and I would have been together less than three weeks. The other three members of the group were my brother, Dennis, the youngest and least traveled of us, a student of botany and a colleague of long standing; Vanessa, an old school friend of mine from the experimental college in Berkeley, trained in anthropology and photography and traveling on her own; and Dave, another old friend, a gay meditator, a maker of pottery, an embroiderer of blue jeans, and like Vanessa, a New Yorker.

Four months before our descent into the watery underworld of the lower Putumayo, my brother and I had endured the grief of our mother's death. Before that I had been traveling for three years in India and Indonesia. Then I had worked as a teacher in the English

mills of Tokyo and, when I couldn't put up with that any more, fled to Canada. In Vancouver our crew held a reunion and planned this Amazon expedition to investigate the depths of the psychedelic experience. I deliberately do not say much about any of us. We were mis-educated perhaps, but well- educated certainly. None of us was yet twenty-five years old. We had been drawn together through the political turmoil that had characterized our years shared in Berkeley.

We were refugees from a society that we thought was poisoned by its own self-hatred and inner contradictions. We had sorted through the ideological options, and we had decided to put all of our chips on the psychedelic experience as the shortest path to the millennium, which our politics had inflamed us to hope for. We had no idea what to expect from the Amazon, but we had collected as much ethno-botanical information as was available. This data told us where the various hallucinogens were to be sought, but not what to expect when we found them.

I have given some thought to how predisposed we might have been to the experiences that would eventually befall us. Often our interpretations of events did not agree, as is common among strong personalities or witnesses to an unusual event. We were complex people or we would not have been doing what we were doing.

Even at age twenty-four, I could look back on nearly ten years of involvement with matters most people might consider fringe in the extreme. My interest in drugs, magic, and the more obscure backwaters of natural history and theology gave me the interest profile of an eccentric Florentine prince rather than a kid growing up in the heartland of the United States in the late fifties. Dennis had shared all of these concerns, to the despair of our conventional and hardworking parents. For some reason we were odd from the start, chosen by fate for a destiny too strange to imagine.

In a letter written eleven months before our expedition I find that Dennis even then had the clearest conception of what might happen. He wrote to me while I was on Taiwan in 1970 to say: As to the central shamanic quest and the idea that its resolution may entail physical death-indeed a sobering thought-I would be interested in hearing just how likely

you consider this possibility and why. I had not thought of it in terms of death, though I have considered that it may well give us, as living men, willful access to the doorway that the dead pa.s.s daily. This I consider as a kind of hyper-spatial astral projection that allows the hyper-organ, consciousness, to instantly manifest itself at any point in the s.p.a.ce-time matrix, or at all points simultaneously.

His letters to me made it clear that his imagination had suffered no atrophy during the years of finis.h.i.+ng high school in our small Colorado hometown. A steady diet of science fiction had made his imagination a joy to watch at play, but I wondered, was he serious?

A UFO is essentially this hyperspatially mobile psychic vortex, and the trip may well involve contact with some race of hyperspatial dwellers. Probably it will be an encounter similar to a "flying lesson": instruction in the use of the transdimensional stone, how to navigate in hyper-s.p.a.ce, and perhaps an introductory course in Cosmic Ecology tending.

He was struggling, as was I, to come to terms with the elf-haunted psychic landscapes revealed by di-methyltryptamine, or DMT. Once we had encountered DMT, in the heady and surreal atmosphere of Berkeley at the apex of the Summer of Love, it had become the primary mystery, and the most effective tool for the continuance of the quest.

Retention of the physical form under such circ.u.mstances would be, it seems, a matter of choice rather than necessity; though it could be a matter of indifference, since in the hyperspatial web all existing physical manifestations would be open. I would say that time is not of the essence for the venture except insofar as the culture-deaths of the tribes we are seeking are proceeding at an appalling rate.

It was not our colorful fantasies alone that were centered on DMT-type hallucinogens.

Our operational approach to discovering the secrets of the hallucinogenic dimension was centered on them as well. This was because, of the psychoactive compounds we knew,

the action of DMT-containing hallucinogens, though very brief, seemed the most intense.

DMT is not an object of common experience, even among psychonauts of inner s.p.a.ce, and so a word must be said about it. In its pure synthetic form, it is a crystalline paste or powder that is smoked in a gla.s.s pipe with nothing else. After a few inhalations the onset of the experience is rapid, fifteen seconds to a minute. The hallucinogenic experience that it triggers lasts three to seven minutes and is unambiguously peculiar. It is so bizarre and intense that even the most devoted aficionados of hallucinogens usually pa.s.s it by. Yet it is the most common and the most widely distributed of the naturally occurring hallucinogens, and it is the basis, when not the entire component, of most of the hallucinogens used by aboriginal tribes in tropical South America. In nature, as a product of plant metabolism, it never occurs in anything like the concentrations at which it comes from the laboratory. Yet South American shamans, by chemically predisposing themselves to its effects in various ways, do find the same levels of reality-obliterating intensity achievable with pure DMT. Its strangeness and power so exceeded that of other hallucinogens that di-methyltryptamine and its chemical relatives seemed finally to define, for our little circle at any rate, maximum exfoliation-the most radical and flowery unfolding-of the hallucinogenic dimension that can occur without serious risk to psychic and bodily integrity.

We thought, therefore, that our phenomenological description of the hallucinogenic dimension should begin by locating a strong DMT-containing aboriginal hallucinogen and then exploring with an open mind the shamanic states that it made accessible. To this end we had sifted the literature on tryptamine drugs in the Upper Amazon Basin and learned that ayahuasca or yage-the brew of Ban-isteriopsis caapi with the DMT admixtures-is known over a wide area,* just as are several kinds of DMT-containing snuffs, but there [* Ayahuasca is a term in general use throughout the upper Amazon Basin. It refers not only to the prepared hallucinogenic beverage but also to its main ingredient, the woody liana Banisteriopsis caapi. This often gigantic jungle vine is pulverized and boiled with a DMT-containing plant, usually Psychotria viridis, occasionally Diploterus cabrerena. The watery extraction is then concentrated through further boiling. Ayahuasca, also called natema, yage, pilde, is the most widely distributed and used of the equatorial New World shamanic hallucinogens.]

was one DMT-containing hallucinogen that was severely restricted in its usage.

Oo-koo-he is made from the resin of certain trees of the Myris-ticaceous genus Virola mixed with the ashes of other plants and rolled into pellets and swallowed. What was eye-catching about the description of this visionary plant preparation was that the Witoto tribe of the Upper Amazon, who alone knew the secret of making it, used it to talk to "little men" and to gain knowledge from them.

These little people are one bridge between the motifs of alien contact and the more traditional strange doings of woodland elves and fairies. The worldwide tradition of little people is well studied in The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries by W. E. Evans-Wentz, a pioneering study of Celtic folkways that was influential on UFO researcher Jacques Vallee's quest as well as our own. The mention of little men rang a bell, since during my own experiences smoking synthesized DMT in Berkeley, I had had the impression of bursting into a s.p.a.ce inhabited by merry elfin, self-transforming, machine creatures.

Dozens of these friendly fractal ent.i.ties, looking like self-dribbling Faberge eggs on the rebound, had surrounded me and tried to teach me the lost language of true poetry. They seemed to be babbling in a visible and five-dimensional form of Ecstatic Nostratic, to judge from the emotional impact of this gnomish prattle. Mirror-surfaced tumbling rivers of melted meaning flowed gurgling around me. This happened on several occasions.

It was the transformation of language that made these experiences so memorable and peculiar. Under the influence of DMT, language was trans.m.u.ted from a thing heard to a thing seen. Syntax became unambiguously visible. In searching for parallels to this notion I am forced to recall the wonderful scene in the Disney version of Alice in Wonderland, in which Alice encounters the hooka-smoking caterpillar seated on a mushroom. "Who R U?" the caterpillar inquires, spelling out his question in smoke above his head. There has always been a suspicion of psychedelic sophistication a.s.sociated with Lewis Carroll and his nineteenth-century story of a self-transforming wonderland. In the hands of Disney's animators, the synesthesia-like blending of sense perception is exaggerated and made explicit and literal. What the caterpillar intends to communicate is not heard but seen, floating in nearby s.p.a.ce; a visible language whose medium is the convenient smoke that the caterpillar possesses in abundant supply.*

Which is not to say that DMT is to be thought of as a stimulus for mere inner cartoons. It is not. The feeling that radiates from the DMT encounter is hair-raisingly bizarre. It is as much as one can stand without the categories of consciousness becoming permanently rewritten. I am occasionally asked if DMT is dangerous. The proper answer is that it is only dangerous if you feel threatened by the possibility of death by astonishment. So great is the wave of amazement that accompanies the dissolving of the boundary between our world and this other unsuspected continuum that it approaches being a kind of ecstasy in and of itself.

The sense of being literally in some other dimension, which these bizarre DMT experiences had provoked, had been the focus of our decision to concentrate on tryptamine hallucinogens. After reading all that there was on psychoactive tryptamines, we came eventually to the work of the pioneering ethn.o.botanist Richard Evans Schultes.

Schultes's tenured position as a professor of botany at Harvard had allowed him to dedicate his life to collecting and cataloging the world's psychoactive plants. His paper on "Virola as an Orally Administered Hallucinogen" was a turning point in our quest. We were fascinated by his description of the use of the resin of Virola theiodora trees as an orally active DMT drug, as well as by the fact that the use of this hallucinogen seemed to be limited to a very small geographical area. Schultes was an inspiring voice when he wrote of the hallucinogen oo-koo-he: Further field work in the original home region of these Indians will be necessary for a full understanding of this interesting hallucinogen.... Interest in this newly discovered [* That a Disney film should be a showcase for this notion is not as surprising as it might first appear. One has only to recall the carefully ch.o.r.eographed dances of Oriental mushrooms in Fantasia to wonder whether some portions of the Disney production group might have been shamanically inspired. After all, Fantasia was a very serious and ambitious effort to make synesthesia a motif for popular entertainment. Rumors persist that many of the European animators whom Disney hired for his extravagant projects were aware of the psychedelic experience. Among the Czech animators who joined the Disney group during this period were some who probably knew of the vision-producing power of peyote and its chemical const.i.tuent, mescaline.]

hallucinogen does not lie wholly within the bounds of anthropology and ethn.o.botany. It bears very directly on certain pharmacological matters and, when considered with the other plants with psychotomimetic properties due to trypta-mines, this new oral drug poses problems which must now be faced and, if possible, toxicologically explained.*

Based on Schultes's paper, we decided to abandon our studies and careers and to pay our own way to the Amazon and the vicinity of La Chorrera in search of oo-koo-he. We wanted to see if the t.i.tan-ically strange dimensions that we had encountered in the DMT trance were even more accessible via the DMT plant combinations that the shamans of the Amazon had developed.

It was of these shamanic sacraments that I had been thinking when I had dismissed the Stropharia mushroom encountered in the pasture near Florencia. I was eager to press on with the quest for the exotic, barely reported, Witoto oo-koo-he. Little did I imagine that soon after our arrival at La Chorrera the search for oo-koo-he would be all but forgotten.

The Witoto hallucinogen became totally eclipsed by the discovery of psilocybin mushrooms growing abundantly there and by the strange power that seemed to swirl around the fog-bound emerald pastures in which they were found.

My first intimation that La Chorrera was a place different from other places came when we arrived at Puerto Leguizamo, our proposed point of embarkation on the Rio Putumayo. It can be reached only by airplane, since no roads make their way through the jungle to it. It is as tired and oppressive a South American river town as you could ever hope to see. William Burroughs, who pa.s.sed this way in his search for ayahuasca in the fifties, described it then as "looking like some place after a flood." By 1971 it had changed little.

We were scarcely installed in our hotel, having just returned from the ritual registration of foreigners that goes on in the frontier areas of Colombia, when the matron of the hotel informed us that [* R. E. Schultes, "Virola as an Orally Administered Hallucinogen," in the Botanical Leaflets of Harvard University, vol. 22, no. 6, pp. 229-40.]

a countryman of ours was living nearby. It seemed incredible that an American could be living in such an out-of-the-way and thoroughly rural river town in Colombia. When la senora remarked that this man, El Senor Brown, was very old and also a black man, it became all the more puzzling. My curiosity piqued, I left immediately in the company of one of the loutish sons of the hotel woman. As we walked along, my guide could hardly wait for us to get out the door of the hotel before informing me that the man we were to see was "mal y bizarro."

"El Senor Brown es un sanguinero," he said.

A killer? Was I on my way to visit a murderer, then? It seemed unlikely. I did not believe it for a moment. "?Un sanguinero, dice?"

The horror that the rubber boom brought to the Amazon Indians in the early years of this century has lived on, a memory for the oldest people and a terrifying legend for younger Indians. In the area surrounding La Chorrera, the Witoto population had been systematically reduced from forty thousand in 1905 to about five thousand in 1970. I could not imagine that the man I was to meet had any real connection to those distant events. I supposed that this story I was hearing meant that I was about to meet a local bogey man around whom extravagant stories had grown up.

We soon reached a ramshackle and undistinguished house with a small yard hidden behind a tall board fence. My companion knocked and yelled and soon a young man, similar to my guide, came and opened the gate. My escort melted away and the gate closed behind me. A large pig lay in the lowest, wettest part of the yard; three steps up was a veranda. Upon the veranda, smiling and motioning me forward, sat a very thin, very old, much wrinkled black man: John Brown. It is not often that one meets a living legend and, had I known more about the person I confronted, I would have been more respectful and more amazed.

"Yes," he said, "I am an American." And, "Yes, h.e.l.l yes, I am old, ninety-three years. Me hee-story, baby, is so long." He laughed dryly, like the rustle of roof thatch when tarantulas stir.

The son of a slave, John Brown had left America in 1885, never to return. He had gone to Barbados and then to France, had been a merchant seaman, and had seen Aden and Bombay. Around 1910, he had come to Peru, to Iquitos. There he had been made a

work-crew foreman in the notorious House of Arana, which was the main force behind the ruthless exploitation and ma.s.s murder of the Indians of Amazonas during the rubber boom.

I spent several hours that day with E lSenor Brown. He was an extraordinary person, at once near and yet ghostly and far away, a living bit of history. He had been the personal servant of Captain Thomas Whiffen of the Fourteenth Hussars, a British adventurer who explored the La Chorrera area around 1912. Brown, who is described in Whiffin's now rare work, Explorations of the Upper Amazon, was the last person to see the French explorer Eugene Robuchon, who disappeared on the Rio Caqueta in 1913. "Yes, he had a Witoto wife and a big black dog that never left him," mused Brown.

John Brown spoke Witoto and once had lived with a Witoto woman for many years. He knew the area into which we were going intimately. He had never heard of oo-koo-he, but in 1915 he had taken ayahuasca for the first time-and at La Chorrera. His description of his experiences was an added inspiration to continue toward our goal.

It was only after I returned from the Amazon that I learned that this was the same John Brown who had exposed the atrocities of the rubber barons along the Putumayo to British authorities. He first spoke to Roger Cas.e.m.e.nt, then the British Consul in Rio de Janiero, who had gone to Peru in July 1910 to investigate the atrocity stories.* Few remember, so strewn with horror is the history of the twentieth century, that before Guernica and Auschwitz the Upper Amazon was used as a rehearsal stage for one of the episodes of mechanized dehumanization so typical of our age. British banks, in collusion with the Arana clan and other laissez-faire operators, financed wholesale use of terror, intimidation, and murder to force the Indians of the deep forest to harvest wild rubber. It was John Brown who returned to London with Cas.e.m.e.nt to give evidence to the Royal High Commission investigation.+ [* For details, see W. E. Hardenburg, The Putumayo: The Devil's Paradise (London, 1912). Extracts from Cas.e.m.e.nt's report are reprinted there as well. Also see Michael Taussig's Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wildman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

+John Estacion Rivera, a Colombian historian, has told the story differently and implicates Brown in the murders, thus providing the basis for the san-guinero story.]

I returned to talk with him the next two days while preparations were made for our trip downriver. I was impressed by Brown's sincerity, by the depth of his understanding of me, by the way that Roger Cas.e.m.e.nt and a world nearly forgotten-a world known to me only from its brief mention in the pages of James Joyce's Ulysses-lived and moved before me in those long, rambling conversations on his veranda.

He spoke long and eloquently of La Chorrera. He had not been there since 1935, but I was to find it much as he described it. The fever-haunted old town on the lowland across the lake no longer stood, but the dungeons for the Indian slaves could still be seen, crumbling iron rings set deep in sweating basaltic stone. The notorious House of Arana was no more, and Peru long ago abandoned her claims to that area to Colombia. But the old town of La Chorrera was ghostly indeed, and so was the old rubber trail, or trocha, that we would shortly use to walk the hundred and ten kilometers that separate La Chorrera from the Rio Putumayo. In 1911, up to twenty thousand Indians gave their lives to push that trail through the jungle. Indians who refused to work had the bottoms of their feet and their b.u.t.tocks removed by machete. And for what? So that, in a surreal act of hubris typical of techno-colonialism, a motorcar could be driven the entire length of the trail in 1915. It was a ride from nowhere to nowhere.

Walking those gloomy, empty trails, I seemed often to hear a grumble of voices or the rustle of chained feet. John Brown's rambling monologues barely prepared me for its strangeness. On the morning that our boat was leaving to carry us downriver, we stopped at his house on our way to the landing. His eyes and skin shone. He was the gatekeeper of the Plutonic world downriver from Puerto Leguizamo, and he knew it. I felt like a child before him, and he knew that too.

"Bye, bye, babies. Bye bye," was his dry farewell.

CHAPTER TWO.

INTO THE DEVIL'S PARADISE.

In which Solo Dark and Ev are introduced and the past history of each of our party is outlined. Philosophical musings during a languid descent of the Putumayo River.

DID I SAY WE WERE a party of five? We would be five when we arrived at La Chorrera, but we were six departing from Puerto Leguizamo. Ev and I were living together as much as a couple can live together when they pile off a boat every night with four other people to hang their hammocks in the trees. But he was with us too. Solo Dark.

I must explain Solo. He was part of a fringe religion happening in South America, which I had not found in India, called the New Jerusalem. Devotees, who seemed to be primarily fruitarian, were a tribe of mostly Americans who since 1962 or 1963 had been drifting down through Latin America, chiseling on each other, living with each other, hating each other, and weaving intrigues. They communicated through Ouija boards with ent.i.ties they called "Beings of Light." An entire mythology had been constructed around reincarnation. According to them, everyone was a reincarnation.