“At least you have something to read, to take the curse off this grottsville,” Janey said.
“Are you hot?”
“Not half,” Janey said.
“I wouldn’t put that drug in my body anyway,” Sabra said. “It’s like a pact with the devil, drinking the magic potion so you can get visions. I’m glad I brought this.” She tapped the book. “None of that tricky stuff in here. I mean, the whole point of this book is that you can test your limits without putting crap like that in your system.”
Steadman stared, his lips pressed together, and felt Ava’s eyes on him.
Nestor said, “Anyone who wants to go on a jungle walk, Hernán will take you.”
“That’s us,” Ava said.
They left after breakfast, just Ava and Steadman. Seeing them approaching the path with Nestor and Hernán, Manfred smiled at Steadman and said, “I would like to come with you.” He sounded sincere, but more than that he sounded familiar, using a tone with Steadman that he never used with the others.
Ava said, “I’m sure you have something more interesting to do here.”
“Yah. I want to see the cooking, for my notes. How the ayahuasca is prepared. How it is stewed. You say ‘to stew’? The yajé”
Nestor said, “We say hervir. We also say reducir. They mix in some other plants.”
“Of course, I know. I have read. They add other species of special plants. This I would like to see. You would like to see this?”
He was speaking to Steadman, but Steadman was so puzzled by the man’s unexpected friendliness he just shrugged.
“They call the mixture changru-panga.”
“You don’t need me,” Nestor said to Manfred. “You are a perito. Hexpert!”
Hernán nodded that he was ready to go, and he turned abruptly and set off, leading with a raised machete. A barefoot Secoya boy wearing a small canvas knapsack followed with a stick. They cut through Joaquina’s maize patch and jumped a wide ditch. They were almost immediately slipping on a narrow muddy path under the tall trees, Hernán slashing at hanging head-high fronds and low thorny branches, the boy poking his stick at the dripping ferns at the track’s side.
The land was level and the path fairly straight, but deeper in the forest the air was inert, hot, sodden, dense with humidity, whirring with insects. Some sunshine, in cones of light, penetrated from torn patches of the tree canopy, yet deep green shadow predominated. The shadow was wet, and the moss on the trees was like green foam.
After half an hour — they had not gone very far on the path — Steadman’s shirt was soaked from sweat and his brushing the big, low-growing, dripping leaves. His shoes were heavy with mud. The bare skin of his forearms was scratched and dirty. Ava smiled at him but she was soaked, too.
“Where are we going?” Steadman called ahead to Hernán.
“Paseo,” he said. “Walking only.”
Perhaps feeling that he should be more informative, he pinched some leaves from a bush and showed them to Ava.
“The Secoya use this one for tea, if you have pain problem in you estomach.”
“ Tortuga the Secoya boy called out sharply, and darted past Steadman and knelt in the mud. Steadman saw nothing, but within seconds the boy was holding up a small muddy turtle, its legs twitching and dripping.
“How did he see that?” Ava said.
“He is hungry, so he see everything,” Hernán said.
Farther on, Steadman paused and said, “I always wondered where those flowers came from.”
“We have many like this,” Hernán said.
“I think that’s Heliconia,” Ava said.
The bunches of buds, red and yellow, hung on a long stalk like small brilliant bananas, little nips of color that were vivid among the gray ferns and shadowed leaves.
“You have this one?” Hernán said, and he indicated a tall bush with a profusion of white bell-like blossoms, thick and drooping from every slender branch.
Recognizing it as the mouthy blossom that Nestor had pointed out at Papallacta, Steadman said, “I saw one of those at the hot springs.”
“Is good for this,” Hernán said. He tapped his head and smiled at the Secoya boy, who was nodding eagerly, grinning and showing a broken front tooth. “See? Even he knows. He helps to gather this one.”
“Angel’s trumpet,” Ava said, remembering what Nestor had told them. “What do you call it?”
“It is toé. La venda de yana puma. The tiger’s blindfold.” He smiled and widened his eyes as he said it. “We scrape. We boil the pieces. We drink.”
They walked on for another hour, but slowly, because of the mud and the heat. Toward noon they came to an area where some trees had fallen and littered the earth around them with heaps of dead leaves and the withered trash of dead branches. Some of the trunks looked rotted and infested but one firm trunk remained, the right height for a seat. Ava approached it to sit down.
“Mira. Espera un momentito,” Hernán said, and slashed the trunk with his knife, and it came alive with large frantic ants and clumps of tumbling ant eggs like furious grains of rice.
“I think I’ll stand,” Ava said.
Hernán took the knapsack off the Secoya boy and distributed bottles of water.
“Paseo is better,” Hernán said, wiping his mouth. “If you sit in the village, you see food and you want to eat. Then, when you take the yaje tonight, you feel sick.”
But Steadman had forgotten the ceremony. He was looking around at the great vaporous hollow of the fly-specked and thick tainted air, everything greenish, soaked and slick under the rain forest roof.
Flourishing in this remote seclusion, unaided by any human hand, was an obscure and eternal thickness of garden beneath the patchy heights of the forest ceiling. In the lowest shadows of the muddy floor were soft dirt-humps marked by the grubbings of tree rats and turtles. Flowering plants grew at every level, banking to the highest tree trunks.
More angel’s trumpet, sallow and succulent, like white downcast funnels, and torch ginger with crimson flower pods, and the Heliconia that Ava had identified, its smooth curved fruit red and yellow and striped black; the labial petals of a rosy blossoming vulva on a bluish stalk; the orange beaks of Strelitzia; and the scalloped and splayed fragility of purplish orchids. Fingers of boiled pinkness pointed from a pendant vine, and on another tiny yellow bells on wing-like leaves. All of it glowed in the feeble light, and from the heights of the boughs immensely long, narrow roots, some of them hairy, trailed past gnats and flies.
He saw struggling butterflies and dangling worms, the crooked symmetry of the blue veins on big leaves, the frail luminous tissue like wadded silk of droopier flowers, the stiffer stems of wet black plants, the pale noodles of wandering tendrils, and the fuzzier knobs, like monster paws of nameless growths — all of this in a place where there was the narrowest path and no other footprints and only the dimmest daylight reached to the bottom of the forest. Here it was possible to believe that, though humans had passed nearby, none had interfered with the place, nor had ever bent a stem, nor plucked a flower. The whole world was blind to its beauty.
“Mira — cuidado,” the Secoya boy said sharply, and stepped in front of Steadman. Then the boy pointed with his stick, and Steadman saw the threads of a spider web glistening with dew. The whole thing was the size of a wagon wheel but suspended high, the center of it level with his eyes and trembling with the damp breath of the hot forest. If the boy had not spoken, he would have walked into it and wrapped the web across his face and all over his head. Just thinking of that made Steadman take a step back.