The Western Lands (11 page)

   The effect of centipede venoms has also been investigated by injecting it into various animals. A man named Briot in about 1904 injected the venom of a French centipede into rabbits. Paralysis in the hind leg, edema, then an abcess and death seventeen days later were caused by 2cc of the venom. An injection of 3cc into a second rabbit caused death in one minute. Briot stated that the effect of the venom was like that of a viper's bite, causing almost immediate paralysis and necrosis.

I let a very large example of
Chilopoda
gnaw on my middle finger the other day. I caught it in a rotting stump and held it in my cupped hands, thinking it would not notice that I was a possible enemy. But it did notice, and I was envenomated, though only mildly.

   I have been plagued by strange occurrences, which lead me to doubt my own mind. In the night I wake up and find some of the snakes crawling free about the quarters. A door locked the night before will certainly be found unlocked the next morning. Then there are the dreams: a grotesquely tall figure, thin as a bone and high as the ceiling, stands over my bed and watches me as I sleep. I try to wake up but I cannot. Malaria must be the cause of these visions, unless it's that damnable Atah. I don't know what he could be putting in the food. He seems such a friendly fellow, but you never know with them. He is bringing me some gruel this evening, and perhaps I shall ask him to
share 
in my humble meal. Then we shall see what is the score!

Yours most devotedly, 

Dean Ripa.

The town of Esmeraldas clusters around a small, deep lagoon reached by sea through a narrow channel. The lagoon is encircled by wooded mountains that reach, in places, an altitude of 3,000 feet.

During the six-hour crossing from Trinidad there was a fresh sea breeze, but as the boat turned into the lagoon the breeze died off and a heavy, oppressive heat enveloped the boat. The lagoon, shut in by surrounding hills, was dead calm and stagnant. I searched the hillsides for signs of habitation, but there were none. Certainly it must be cooler in the hills, and there would be a breeze.

The boat glided to a halt. Our luggage was dumped onto the pier. The sailors did not even wait for a tip. They rushed back to the boat, which reversed, turned in the lagoon, and headed out through the channel. I looked around from the rotting pier to the mud streets and the houses beyond, shacks that had been thatched at one time, with galvanized iron nailed on over rotting thatch giving the roofs a patchy, leprous look.

What I felt from my first contact with Esmeraldas was a feeling of depression and horror such as I have never experienced anywhere else.

I have been in high mountain towns in the Andes . . . thirteen, fourteen thousand feet, and bitter cold at midday. Everyone wears a gray felt hat, and after sundown, a scarf around the face, eyes red with smoke. The sod houses have no chimneys, just a drafty hole in the roof. There are strange skin diseases, sometimes confined to a single, desolate valley: great purple growths on the face, or hunchbacks with their soft humps like rotten melons. Guinea pigs scuttle across the earth floors— they eat them, and another source of food is frogs in the icy shallow ponds on the high plains.

I have traveled in villages in the Sahara, the desert flies thick as black cloth on the table at the only hotel. Flies .. . flies ... you couldn't get a forkful to your mouth before the flies were on it. I have seen the cemeteries of the hairy Ainu . . . erect phalluses on the male graves, crudely carved in wood and painted with ochre, the phalluses split apart and covered with the drifting snow. Yes, I have seen many scenes of desolation, but nothing like the dead, inhuman fog of oppression and evil that covered Esmeraldas.

An official descended from a horsedrawn fiacre and slowly made his way toward us. He was a man of fifty, with a contrived slovenliness, like Peter Lorre impersonating a corrupt Chief of Police.

"Pasaportes, senores . . . documentes.
"
The Chief studied our papers suspiciously with his hooded reptilian eyes, of a glazed gray color like a carp's eyes.

"Purpose of visit,
señores!"
he suddenly barked out, glaring at us with insane hostility.

"We are here to study your centipedes. This island is known for its huge centipedes."

The official paled. "But why,
señores?"
His voice was pleading.

"Because we have been paid to do so. We represent the National Geographic Society, the Smithsonian Institution and the Peabody Museum of Harvard."

Overcome by these words of power, the official collapsed onto a cane seat. "Of course, of course, I should have known." He wiped his face with a dirty silk handkerchief.

"You should indeed. We have, incidentally, letters from Trinidad—"

Completely cowed, the official sat mopping his brow.

"—letters to the Mayor and the Governor of this island."

"I am both,
señor
,
and the Chief of Police."

"Good. Then these letters of safe conduct are for you. Does this town boast a hotel?"

"We do not boast, but there is the Hotel Splendide."

"Can you find someone to carry our luggage?"

"That may be difficult"

Several men lounged nearby on the pier in the gathering twilight. The Chief beckoned and pointed to our luggage. The loiterers made a strange whispering, hissing noise and scuttled away. Suddenly a snaggle-toothed, wiry man with a bristling black mustache was there.

"I José!" He jabbed a thumb at his chest. "Plenty bad people here." He spat at the retreating shadows, and piled our luggage onto a cart.

The Hotel Splendide is built around a courtyard where a few sickly banana palms and avocado trees grow. Since the patio is used to dispose of slops from the kitchen, there is the continual reek of stale garbage. Pigs and chickens forage noisily at dawn.

The manager is an old Chinese. He gestures to the room-key board. Obviously we are the only guests. We select a room on the front of the hotel, overlooking the street and the lagoon. There is a huge gray spider in one corner.

"Him velly good. Keep away centipedes and black widowers," the manager tells us.

We decide to settle in with Arachnid, as we have named our good gray spider.

It is a large room on the second floor, with hooks for our hammocks, the window screened with mosquito netting. Seated on our small trunks, for there is no place else to sit, we lighten our spirits with rum and a soft drink called Coca-Cola, which is said to contain a goodly quantity of cocaine, an ingredient devoutly to be wished. And it does go well with the light dry rum, which I prefer to the heavy black-molasses rum.

There are five in our party: Doctor Schindler, whose specialty is botany; Doctor Schoenberg, whose knowledge of spiders and scorpions is encyclopedic; Doctor Sanders, a wiry young sandy-haired English lad, is the chemist; and Chris Evans is our photographer.

And I? I am the chronicler of this expedition. I have also some knowledge of the others' specialties, superficial to be sure, but enabling me to see connections that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. We are here to collect centipede specimens, to obtain samples of the venom and carry out what analysis and breakdown we can with our limited facilities. We can, of course, easily obtain small animals for experimental purposes, to assess potency of the venom. That is no problem in such a wretched and poverty-stricken area.

Let me confess that I
hate
centipedes, above all other creatures on this horrid planet. And I am not alone in this aversion. Many others have confessed to me that they hold a special antipathy for this creature, which is so far removed from the mammalian mold. And certainly an important aspect of our mission is to ascertain to what extent the centipede merits the horror and loathing in which he is, so far as I know, universally held. There may be people who like centipedes. I have seen people handling tarantulas and scorpions, but never a centipede handler. Personally, I would regard such an individual with deep suspicion.

I have just petted my cat: "And how is this good little cat beast?" Now what sort of man or woman or monster would stroke a centipede on his underbelly? "And here is my good big centipede!" If such a man exists, I say kill him without more ado. He is a traitor to the human race.

Late that night we were awakened by scrabbling noises, and in the lantern light we saw Arachnid locked in mortal combat with the biggest centipede I have ever seen. Not knowing how to intervene without endangering our dubious ally, we cheered on the sidelines. We watched until Arachnid had overcome the centipede, which was writhing and twisting in the most atrocious manner, showing its awful, yellow underside—and this with the head severed from the body.

Arachnid then settled down to make a meal of his victory. Sleep after that was impossible.

We were up at first light. Obviously we must find more impenetrable quarters. In this we were fortunate.

It seems that some years ago (these people are vague about time), there was a workers' rebellion on the island. A revolutionary named Dolores, who had been educated in England, led the rebellion. It was, the Chief told us, very mysterious. Quite suddenly the peons took up arms, and would have seized the entire island, except for the intervention of British troops. The rebels dug in and occupied the southern area, where they exacted tribute and dug fortifications and tunnels that can be seen to this day. This stalemate went on for some two years. Finally the rebels were routed and their leader Dolores was publicly hanged.

The old jail was expanded to contain the prisoners brought in by the British, and a walled courtyard with watchtowers was added. Five of the ringleaders were tried and hanged. The others were deported to Trinidad and forced to work out long sentences on the plantations. The rank and file were held in prison for some months, and later relocated to different islands.

I learned from the Chief that ordinary crime is not possible. The island is a small place, and everybody knows everybody else. The Chief put a finger to his eye. This continual watching of everybody by everybody else is one of the specialties of Esmeraldas. Field glasses and telescopes are the most coveted luxuries, and your status is determined by the surveillance equipment you can afford. The whole town is steeped in a miasma of blackmail. All the children will inform, for pennies and sweets. The inference is obvious: the Chief is the head blackmailer of Esmeraldas.

It was during the revolution that every citizen became an informer, since no one knew how many revolutionary agents had infiltrated the coastal towns. The trial of the rebels turned into such a maze of contradictory testimony that the British transferred the proceedings to a military tribunal in Trinidad.

The jail was now ours for a moderate rent. The prison compound was built to accomodate the masses, and so was fairly commodious. Three of the watchtowers, which were wooden structures, had fallen down, but one was still in fair condition.

We reminded the Chief that we had come to study the centipedes.

"There is a man here who know much of these animals . . . too much," the Chief told us. "He lives inland." He made vague gestures indicating his low opinion of anyone who lived "inland."

A helpful scientist could be a real asset, and it couldn't be far. The island is only about eight miles wide. In a place like this everyone knows where everyone lives, and certainly where any foreigner lives. But the people we approached pretended they knew of no such person: It was too far—they had other business—he went away.

Finally José agreed to guide us to the house, for an outrageous fee.

"They have fear." He thumped his skinny chest.
"
May macho,
not scared of centipede peoples. This all horseshit."

W
e took provisions for the day and armed ourselves with machetes and double-barreled 410 pistols, loaded with number six shot. This I have found to be a most effective load when the only danger one is likely to encounter is from snakes or humans, and quite sufficient for either one. In Malaya once I downed an amok in his tracks, firing both barrels directly into his neck at ten feet.

The mud street ended quite abruptly in weeds, scrub and jungle. This was not at all like the rain forests of South America, there being no large trees. Here were palmetto and scrub and coconut palms, banana plants, some hardwood. The path was hard to follow, and we had to clear the way with our machetes in some places.

I attempted to get some information out of our guide about the centipede cult.

"Who are these centipede people?"

He spat. "Bad people . . . plenty crazy . . . worship fucking bug."

I was reminded of the Egyptian scarabs, the scorpion Goddess and the frequent pictures of centipedes in Mayan pottery. One page of an ancient Mayan codex, of doubtful authenticity, shows a man tied to a couch, threatened by a huge centipede, six to eight feet in length.

"Do they hold meetings?"

His eyes narrowed with calculation. "Perhaps."

I decided to shelve this for the time being.

The path wound steeply uphill and the heat was suffocating. But I was even more fatigued than I would normally be in the course of such a walk. It was as though a heavy weight were pressing down on us with a persistent malevolence. Several times the guide lost his way, and we had to retrace our steps. His dog, an Airedale-terrier mix, ran ahead yelping.

It seemed as if we had been on the road for hours, but looking at my watch Isaw it was only an hour. Suddenly we heard wild yelping from the dog, and thought he must have treed something. But when we reached the scene, I saw a hole with palm fronds around it and heard the dog's anguished screams. Looking down into the hole, which was about six feet deep, I saw that the dog was writhing, impaled on bamboo spikes. Obviously a trap set by the rebels.

"Dios,
"
said José, in a perfunctory manner.
"Pobrecito
. . . it is best you shoot him,
señor.
"