The Ragged Edge of the World (35 page)

For what happened in the days following, let me again quote from
The Parrot's Lament:

Later Mike Fay called this the signal wildlife experience of his fourteen years in Africa. (I'm sure his subsequent adventures eclipsed this moment.) For me it was the experience of a lifetime. For the chimps surrounding us, seeing humans amounted to an ape version of
Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
The ruckus they raised began with threats and distress calls, but some of them seemed to let out the hoots that chimps use to greet one another. I would like to think that at least some of these chimps were welcoming us apelike aliens into their forest.

With every encounter I became further convinced that this forest, empty of humans, is not devoid of intelligence of various sorts. There is the accumulated knowledge of the elephant civilization that gives this forest its distinctive flavor. There are the chimp bands whose members scheme and forge alliances for their own advancement, who make and use tools to get food, and who cooperate with one another when hunting or in conflict with other bands. There are the gorilla families dominated by silverbacks, who must be alert to treachery in their harems and plotting by ambitious young males. There is some measure of awareness in the leopards, who must learn a host of different skills in stalking and killing in their never-ending search for prey.

At some point during these forays I picked up one of the innumerable diseases lurking in the rainforest. It felt as though every bone in my body was broken. Most likely it was dengue fever, though Mike said that it might be any number of what he called “deadly tick diseases.” Over the years Mike has come down with so many illnesses that he's rather blasé about anything that doesn't immediately do you in. Since we were more than 30 miles from even the most rudimentary medical help, and since we had no idea whether this disease was going to get better or worse, we decided to try to hike out rather than wait here.

The first day we got back to Mbeli Bai, which was the starting point of our venture into “the unknown.” I stumbled along, somehow keeping up. The next morning, June 1, we set out at 7:30, once again a little later than we'd planned. Along the 10-kilometer path that led to the Japanese research camp, we came across five different groups of gorillas. In all we encountered fifteen groups of gorillas during the course of our hikes, as well as buffalo, several species of duikers, forest pigs, chimps, many different monkeys and innumerable birds, not to mention pests like ticks, ants and foot worms (which burrow into you and wriggle their way around until they figure out that you are not an elephant, whereupon they die and rot, leaving behind a nasty infection), as well as the nameless microbe that inflicted misery on me.

We stopped at the Japanese camp, where the lone researcher, Aobe, kindly offered us honeycomb, and then continued our long march. At 1:00 we made it to the edge of the Ndoki River and poled across. By 2:00 we emerged from the swamp, and by 3:40 we were at the camp by the Djeke River where Karen and I had earlier been attacked by ants. Only Seraphim and Joachime kept up with us. Every breath was killing me because of the heart attack/pulled muscle/dengue fever/deadly tick disease, but I didn't dare ask to slow down, because I wanted to get to Bomassa that night.

After a brief stop at the camp, we raced out at 4:15, trying to extract every bit of daylight. Since we had left the batteries behind, we made do with a succession of failing flashlights once the light began to fade at 6:15. By 7:15 we'd groped our way to Wali. During the last few hundred yards of our trek, our only source of light was one of those pencil lights you use to read maps, and finally that failed, too. By this point, though, Mike knew the trail by heart, and we made it to Bomassa in another forty minutes. As we arrived in camp, Mike noted that these nighttime returns (apparently he had had many) were sure to inflame suspicions that he was an ivory trafficker. We'd covered over 30 kilometers that day.

I recovered fairly quickly, but never did get a definitive diagnosis of what it was I had had (and I brought other ailments back with me from the forest as well). It certainly had the symptoms of dengue fever. Or perhaps it fell into the category of Mike Fay's “deadly tick diseases.” In any event, this sickness was a very small price to pay for a glimpse of Eden.

O
ne of the more interesting expatriates I encountered during my forays into the Sangha River region was Louis Sarno. A thin, dark-haired mathematician from New Jersey, he had by the early 1990s already lived with various Pygmies for long stretches over the previous several years. He had taken it upon himself to advance their interests as well as record their music, dance and rituals. On the day he showed up at Andrea Turkalo's cabin in Bayanga, however, Louis was not concerned with Pygmy culture—he was starving.

He'd come into town from a Pygmy village, where he said there had been no food, and he had not eaten in a few days. We rummaged around in Andrea's freezer and found a grizzled bit of meat that she speculated was over a year old. No matter, Louis wanted it, and once it was cooked, he ripped into it with feral intensity.

After partially sating his hunger, he offered a few of his thoughts about the Pygmies. He had a somewhat more idiosyncratic explanation of the persistence of Pygmy culture despite the propinquity of modernity in the form of Bantu villages. Basically, he felt that it was their stubbornness that helped protect the traditional forms. And to hear Louis tell it, the culture itself bordered on the magical.

He recalled a recent experience to illustrate the everyday magic of Pygmy life. There was no food in the village, explained Louis, because the Pygmies had stopped hunting, preferring to stay home and smoke pot. It was only when Louis goaded them to go out and get some game that they slowly roused themselves. As a first step the men organized a dance to summon the forest spirits and ask their permission to hunt and collect plants. The men would go into the forest and return possessed by a forest spirit called Enanyi. They gathered around a pile of raffia leaves on the ground in the center of the village. A young boy walked over to the leaves and held them up to show that there was nothing underneath. Then, however, as the men started singing, the raffia leaves composed themselves into a mask and somehow popped up from the ground.

Louis told this story in all seriousness, and over the years I'd heard many such accounts of supposed magical abilities possessed by indigenous people. In West Africa, Janis Carter, an American woman who spent years trying to teach an American-raised chimpanzee named Lucy how to be a wild chimp, told me of getting lost in the southern Liberian forest. At the precise moment she realized that she was lost (the exact time was later reconstructed), her African guide, who was sitting with one of her expatriate colleagues some miles away, suddenly announced, “Janis is lost,” and then went and found her.

I have, in fact, had my own experiences that, at least so far, defy reductionist explanations. The denguelike fever had disappeared by the time I returned from the Ndoki in 1992, but I also brought with me a stomach ailment that defied both diagnosis and treatment. I may have gotten the bug from drinking from the elephant footprint, or from tasting the fruits the gorillas had discarded. Whatever its source, it was now living the high life in my stomach. I first went to Dr. Kevin Cahill, a leading specialist in tropical medicine, who tested me for all sorts of diseases but came up with nothing conclusive. At last he said, “I may not be able to diagnose you, but I think I can treat you.” He put me on a course of Flagyl, a very powerful parasite-slaying drug. It helped, but some months later, the ailment returned.

Then, in the fall of 1992, I was invited to meet with two celebrated brothers named Sydney and Tacuma Sapaim, who were shamans from the Xingu tribe in the Brazilian Amazon. They had been flown to the United States by a wealthy student of shamans and healers named Kamal Benjalloun so that they could participate in United Nations events celebrating the “Year of Indigenous Peoples.” I'd written a bit about healers and shamans for
Time,
so when I was contacted and asked about whether I'd like to interview the brothers, I immediately said yes, and then asked whether they might be willing to treat me as well. I was told they would, and to bring a $100 bill. (For all its ties to the world of spirit, shamanism has its practical and materialistic side.)

I was eager to see the brothers because I had previously had good experiences with other healers, notably an Israeli named Zev Kolman. Zev called himself a “bioenergist,” and to paraphrase Kevin Cahill, while I may not have known what that meant, I did know what it felt like. Zev passed his hands over you, holding them several inches above your body, and at some point you began to feel a very pleasant tingling in your skin, interspersed with what seemed like mini-flashes of lightning between his hands and your body. It felt different from static electricity, and the energy seemed to gravitate to injured or weak areas. Even though I was in good health, I took the opportunity to experience what it was that Zev did. At my first session with Zev, witnessed by several people, my back audibly popped even though I was lying still and his hands were at least a foot above me.

I have had several subsequent sessions with Zev, and I still can't explain what it is that he does. I can rule out chicanery—between patients he does not disappear into a closet to charge up his hands with static electricity. Nor can the energy be explained by some supercharged version of the placebo effect.

I always left sessions with him feeling absolutely terrific, though I can't say whether improvements in the ailments that led me to see him were the result of natural healing or bioenergy. One thing I do have a hard time accepting is Zev's explanation for his powers: He claims that his abilities suddenly appeared after being visited by aliens in the Negev Desert when he was in the military. Whatever the case, I don't have a more logical explanation. He does seem to be a conduit for some form of energy, and I am not one to insist that something doesn't exist simply because I can't explain it.

This attitude left me open to seeing what Sydney and Tacuma might be capable of. We met at an apartment in Manhattan, where the brothers, with broad Indian faces, were dressed in Western clothes—jeans and shirts. I began by asking them—through an interpreter—questions about how they had become shamans. Sydney told the story.

Becoming a Xingu shaman, in Sydney's version, was a case of “don't call us, we'll call you.” As a young man he began to have dreams. “Something happened, something special,” he said. He smoked a “special” cigarette, and after the dreams he woke up feeling sad and afraid, and worried that he might die. So he went away to think about it. The next night a spirit he called Mamae came to visit him. The spirit instructed him to go to the woods and build a house. Once he was installed in the house, Mamae said, he/it would pay a visit.