“[T]he seemingly interminable line of trees before you; the boundless wilderness around you; the mysterious depths amid the multitudinous foliage, where foot of man hath never penetrated…the solitude in which we proceeded mile after mile, no human being, no human dwelling within sight.”
Dublin-born writer Anna Brownell Jameson, while exploring central Ontario in 1837
An Indian woman sat spinning in her doorway, a small child at her side. She smiled without a trace of fear or surprise. Beside the child lay prostrate an emaciated dog, panting catastrophically. The humidity in the Peruvian mountains rested at 100%, supplemented by hot, drenching, unrelenting rain. Travelers like this American were in the clouds and mist most of the time. Christopher Herrington stood at the entranceway, a ghostly voyager from another place and time. He smiled back, his shapeless Mallory fedora melting into his cheeks. He resolved to find another place to rest, his laden donkey in tow.
Owing to the torrential rains, what passed for trails were in a miserable state. In order to reach the camp on the far bank of the Apurimac River, he would need to press on in haste, before the last rays of light dissipated in the mist. There were glimpses of deep green valleys, and hillsides covered with flowers, yet unclassified by Europeans, then intervals of dark nothingness. The slippery path became increasingly treacherous. He preferred to ride the donkey blind at such times as the animal had an uncanny knack for survival and one wrong step for him meant certain death. The Apurimac flows through the Ucayali to the Amazon. It then rises in a lake near Arequipa. By the time it reached this region, it was a raging torrent. The English translation of its Quichua name was “the Great Speaker”.
Herrington was presented by the master of the camp with his route of escape. When the frail little bridge was built, it was 100 feet above the surface of the raging current. All the Quichua bearers had passed, the makeshift huts ready, the donkeys released to seek shelter for themselves. Herrington had trailed far behind to take additional photos in perfect lighting, flat and neutral, of the remnants of an ancient Inca house, with its distinctive eye-bonders and roof-pegs found at the gabled ends. The delay was unfortunate. With the recent heavy rains, the last remaining ‘bridge’ looked to Herrington to have no more than 10 feet to spare about the foaming waters, tossing icy spray hundreds of feet into the air. The bridge was no more than three feet wide, but close to 300 feet long, and sopping wet! It swayed in the wind on four strands of telegraph wire, the other two having snapped. There was no other way to the camp, the master grinned. What was left of the trails were blocked by fallen trees, impassable bogs, swollen currents, avalanches of rock and splintered wood, what looked to be torn animal flesh and stinking, rotting vegetation.
The donkey’s load was placed on a bearer who crossed on all fours, followed by Herrington. The bridge was now impassible to mules. It is said the Inca learned a thousand years ago to build suspension bridges out of cable made of tough lianas, a long-stemmed, woody vine that is rooted in the soil at ground level and uses trees, as well as other means of vertical support, to climb up to the canopy in search of direct sunlight. Herrington plunged into the earth when he reached the far side, rolled on his back, sheets of rain, peeling the mud from his face. “Telegraph wire… SOS.” He laughed. The bearers sneered, mumbled something unintelligible to each other and dissipated in the woods.
“Boss, Boss”, said the master. Your hut is this way.
Christopher Herrington, son of a New England missionary family, spent much of his teenage years at a mission in northern Rhodesia. Fortunately for Christopher, his parents combined fierce religious fundamentalism with an equally keen interest in diamonds, selling a number of small claims in Kimberley in Northern Cape province to a London based diamond syndicate. Returning home to Connecticut, the family acquired a 30-room mansion in New Haven, a beachfront house in Nassau and funded their only son’s new found interest in travel. But it was in South America where Christopher found his undiscovered country, a salve for youthful romanticism, a certain freedom from parental and divine restraint, but primarily what moved him, as on such evenings, a chance to linger in the teeth of the underworld.
Christopher pressed his face next to his camp lantern, better to make out the words impressed upon the sodden pages he pulled from his satchel. The letter was from his longtime fiance Ellen. The porter had delivered her letter to him at his hotel in Cuzco. He shoved it in his pocket. It was his parents’ “hope” that he marry her; daughter of a family friend. On first meeting, he had no particular objection, other than with marriage itself. She was attractive, petite, and reasonably intelligent. He did appreciate that their shared interests would likely keep them apart, perhaps indefinitely. And so there was no particular reason to rush, and plenty of reason to extend the process for as long as possible.
He hoped the letter was still legible, as the warm light produced a magical effect on the paper, a grey mist rising out and up like fairy dust. “Yes, there we go.”
Dear Christopher:
Hope you are well. I received your letter with great joy and will attest I read every word seated at my writing desk at the Hotel Karnak, your words illuminated by ancient Egyptian sunlight lapping through my window. Looking up, I see now the white sailed ships passing by on the Nile, call them my silent witnesses. I am not sure when you will be reading my words in return, and whether they will be lit by desert sun, or the light of a warm fire in a fine hotel or a faint, flickering, candle in an Amazon lean-to, the rain pouring down outside. I know you will be happy in any case, loving your work as you do. I also know that it will be some time before I can get away. I expect to be on a dig at Hierakonpolis for several more weeks and then off to Argentina on a personal matter. If you still plan to pursue another “lost city” in Peru, perhaps we can meet in Lima. Or at your mother’s house in Nassau. That would be lovely. …
Christopher read on in silence, with a marked lack of enthusiasm, mildly irritated by the quotation marks inserted by Ellen around one of his more recent areas of interest, namely, whether indeed Machu Picchu was the last refuge of the Incas from the Spanish invaders. The story goes, that another, greater, lost city lies east of the Andes, hidden somewhere within the remote rainforests of southeast Peru, northern Bolivia or northwest Brazil. Some accounts call this legendary city “Paititi”. Christopher read on through a further page or three of Ellen’s handy work of niceties, admiring her handsome penmanship, which recorded a lengthy list, all irritatingly numbered, of Ellen’s more interesting findings in the Yucatan and Egypt. But then a curious “Nota bene” drew him quickly to the bottom of the last page.
As I mentioned, I was briefly in Rome this past spring. I thought you might be interested in the report of the missionary Andres Lopes I managed to retrieve from the archives of the Society of Jesus in the Vatican with the help my friend Professor Ludvig. A full transcription is attached. You were right! Perhaps there is something to that mysterious stone square formation and nearby square lake, with the four twin lagoons, the ones you uncovered two years ago. Might there be further ruins in the Meseta de Pantiacolla, perhaps.
“What?” he yelled pulling out the attached pages and drawing them closer to the light. “A city of gold…?” In a flash of blinding sun, and dry burning heat, Herrington was back next to the broken man on the side of the dusty trail, his clothing torn and bloody. He was delirious. Dying of thirst and exposure or the soroche, the mountain sickness that Europeans were susceptible to at high altitude.
“We nursed him back from the brink but his mind was gone. A light skinned fellow, possibly a German or Swiss,” he had written to Ellen. “In his delirium he spoke of being trapped by a rock slide in a cave, filled with Inca mummies and, in desperation, following a light. He spoke of crossing a river in a basket on a cable, greeted by a masked man in a headdress of plumes of many colours and silver plate on his breast, a golden shield and a lance of gold in one hand, a dagger in the other. He wore garters of feathers and fastened to them were small wooden bells. On his head a diadem, another around his neck. And then, in such fierce agitation he had to be held down by two of our bearers, he described what could only have been an Inca Temple of the Sun, and by his description, an adjoining convent for the beautiful priestesses, both holy places, into which no other man or women may enter, on pain of being hurled from the mountain top into perdition. Facing east to the rising sun, the priest blew it kisses and then prayed:
Oh Sun! Thou who art in peace and safety, shine upon us, keep us from sickness, and keep us in health and safety.
Oh Sun! Thou who has said let there be Cuzco and Tampu, grant that these children may conquer all other people.
We beseech thee that thy children the Incas may be always conquerors, since it is for this that thou has created them.”
“Mad as a hatter, don’t you think?” he wrote to Ellen. “It is amazing what high altitude can do to a college professor, not excluding death.”
Turning back to the account of Father Lopez, his lantern failing, he lit a fresh candle and read aloud, this time with a lover’s patience and attention:
Report of a miracle that happened for the grace of God in the Indies of Peru, or better to say in the Kingdom of Paÿtiti near Peru.
When Father Andrea Lopez arrived in this city of Rome to our Father General [of the society of Jesus] as a procurator from those lands [i.e. as a representative of the Jesuits order from Peru], he made a report about a miracle, that the Lord in his mercy showed in those lands. The aforesaid Father Andrea Lopez, as a rector of the College of the Society of Jesus in Cusco in those Indies of Peru, says that there were few Indians (three or four) in that city, who—despite being Christians baptized by his own hand—got angry by maltreatment of several soldiers of the presidio [a small fortress with a garrison inside]; they decided to depart from that place to go to another Kingdom in ten days from this Peru, which is called Paÿtiti and has the size of thousand large Spanish leagues [6694 km] which makes three thousand Italian miles [5553 km], and they [Paÿtiti residents] are as white as Germans, very warlike and civilized in their life and governing. The king is very powerful and keeps the court in the manner of the Great Turk [Turkish sultan] with great majesty; his Kingdom is very richly decorated with gold, silver and many pearls in the way that they use it for pots and pans as we use iron here …. the king gave orders to the son, and the other six cavaliers, to watch over the law of the Christian, and not only that, but also to spread it in his Kingdom, asking the father Andrea to go along with his son in his Kingdom, to plant the faith, promising to build a magnificent сollege, and especially a сhurch, where walls would be of solid gold; from these words we can feel the great piety and zeal that the good king had towards his Kingdom.
“Rather vague, I think?” smiled Herrington. The rain had stopped when he rose at dawn. “A short delay boss,” explained the master. “The bearers are catching our mules, who have strayed up into the mountain pastures.”
“Did I hear you say Paititi in your dreams?” said a lone voice.
“Why yes, but not in my dreams. I was reading an old account of a Jesuit missionary. Who are you?”
“No one, Sir. I live nearby,” said a young Peruvian mestizo. The city of the Inca you are seeking was called “Espiritu Pampa”.
“City of Ghosts” in English. “Do you know where it is? Have you heard of its ruins, perhaps in the jungles beyond those peaks to the east?” The man shrugged.
That evening the young mestizo’s wife prepared Herrington a fine meal of roasted Guiney pig, while a dozen or so surviving Guiney pigs, those lucky enough not to be butchered and piked for today’s feast, continued to run about, family pets, on the floor of the family home, utterly oblivious to the reason for the absence of their brethren, and equally oblivious to their eventual fates.
After dinner on his way back to camp, twirling a tooth pick in his mouth, Herrington looked up to see a huge black condor, surveilling the trespassers upon his domain below. The beast descended steadily directly above him, in silent, concentric circles, its black beak and terrible talons darkness visible, its wingspan Herrington estimated, “wing tip to wing tip, at least 14 feet”. Nearby shepherds appeared as if out of the earth itself and crags in the rock, trying desperately to still the descent, with cries and, rocks and pointed sticks. They well knew a condor could take an adult sheep, or a small child, with ease. For reasons all its own, the great bird did eventually, and with painful subtlety, start to rise again, and away, eventually vanished like thin air into and amongst the mountain peaks.
The Eastern Townships (or Cantons de l'Est French) is a region in southeastern Quebec, Canada, known historically as the home of the English population of Quebec, many loyalists who fled the American revolution, others religious groups like the Quakers. The region lies between the St. Lawrence Lowlands and the American border, and extends from Granby in the southwest to Drummondville in the northeast. Following the Quiet but no less Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, and then the introduction of draconian language laws in the 1980s, prohibiting the use of English and restricting access to an English education, the writing was on the wall. As Quebec’s great social engineering program hit full steam, a great exodus of descendants of the old loyalists occurred, especially young professionals, to English Canada, many to the multicultural hell of Toronto, where the last vestiges of identity and connection to the past were subsumed and forgotten. The cultural genocide of the English in Quebec was well underway when JP sat next to Professor Brearley on his back porch, at his summer home in Austin, Quebec. He was one of the “old ones”.
“Well, that would make Professor Caron your grandfather’s brother!” said Brearley, slapping both knees. “You say your grandfather was Michel Caron. I met him. It all makes perfect sense. He was Caron’s youngest brother, a bit of a rogue I heard.”
“I wouldn’t know,” said JP. “I never met him. I never met my father for all that matters. He returned to Iran when I was three. They never married, My mother raised me. She died needlessly when I was in high school. What interests me is Caron, and if we’re related that would make a good story don’t you think? Perhaps for Halloween?”
“Yes, I think it would. Well, I mean he was a great professor and I studied under him. He was a great mentor for me. Oh, by the way, I think I may have figured out why he left me the clock. I was a repeat offender, always late for his lectures on “security on immovables” and “successions”. He would throw a chalk at me and then ask the class if anyone could please buy me a clock. So he left me a clock, the biggest one he had.”
“A good theory. The time is sooner than you think,” quipped JP. “I hope not,” said Brearley who was then in his mid 60s, and withering slightly. “Well, let me get something I think belongs to you then.”
Outside the main McGill lecture hall, emblazoned over the doorway, it read, “Audi Alteram Partem”, from the Latin: “Listen to the other side”. This had long ceased to be the law or the custom in Quebec, or anywhere else in Canada or the West for that matter, where any number of beliefs or thoughts or wrong thinks could easily lead to persecution, prosecution, expulsion, loss of career and closure of bank accounts. There was little discussion in law school anymore. Rather, what occurred was an exchange of acceptable opinions. Brearley had however managed to survive somehow, and was engaged in a topic he most enjoyed, the British Constitution and the British tradition. There were no boycotts this year, but the lecture was sparsely attended, again no surprise. JP was nursing a hangover, made worse by breaking up with his girlfriend again, after another one of her psychotic episodes, this time persisting in repeating word for word everything JP said for hours until JP threw her out the door of his apartment. He sat slouched in the back row of the auditorium.
Brearley explained that liberty properly understood is closely related to the tradition of political practices in England since the 17th century and that the English tradition of liberty is not ideological and is not based on an appeal to abstract or transcendental conclusions about natural rights or utility but is instead rooted both in the concrete practices of English political life and the understanding that compromise and consensus are at the heart of English life. Ordered liberty leaves maximum amount of freedom to the individual, while appreciating his imperfections. Tradition preserves within it answers to questions we may not yet been able to formulate.
“Very Augustinian,” thought JP. We are intrinsically precious but imperfect.”
“Certainly,” Brearley cautioned the class, “Abuses are to be reformed, but their removal must be postponed if it would involve a great tear in the social fabric, or if it would provoke vested interest to desperate measures.”
“Here we go, for you,” said Brearley.
“What is it?”
”Caron’s papers, taken from his desk by the police. They returned them to me, or at least I ended up with them somehow, and I’ve kept them ever since. I mean, you should have them. Maybe you’ll find something interesting.”
It was not a large stack. Perhaps three inches thick, tied together with string. JP cut it with his house key. On top of the stack was a letter sized manila envelop, unopened. Scrawled on the letter, handwritten in black ink, was the single word:
“Ellen”.
JP was blinded in that instant by a ball of fire, as Caron’s car smashed into the wall of the garage. The ball of fire blew threw JP as he stood there in the darkness. Covering his face, he waited for the searing pain that never came. A shadowy figure moved in his peripheral vision, seeming to make its way to the exit. JP turned but whatever it was was gone. Turning back, time had passed and the fire was out, but Caron’s Peugeot remained, a smoldering wreck, a burnt human arm hanging out the passenger side window.
“Jean-Phillipe,” said his mother. “It will be fine.” JP was three years old and wore a tiny grey trench coat and little black leather shoes. He had a white plastic toy dog in his hand. His mother said he was allowed one toy. The procedure was a simple one and he would be home the next day. Turning to see his mother walk away, the hospital doors slammed shut. In the pitch of night, lying beneath a white web of netting designed to cover the crib and keep the occupant inside, he whimpered.
“Shut up!” screamed the nurse, sending shudders through his body. “Everyone else is sleeping. It’s late. Shut up and don’t make me come back again.” JP tried to keep his eyes on the hallway light, and to ignore the ghastly skeletal figures he perceived to be next to him in the crib. In time, he would recognize those dim figures as the Peruvian mummies from the Andes in the latest issue of the National Geographic. He tried against everything to hold it all inside and fix his eyes on the reflected hallway light that provided some hope the sun would rise in the morning. He grabbed the netting in his right hand and formed a first, and held on for dear life, like, JP would reflect many years later, the captain of the fated whaling ship, the Essex.
The interiors of the Brearley home were warm and colonial. Stepping into a rotunda entrance, JP and Sarah stood shoulder to shoulder beneath a 22-foot-high ceiling, on a black and white checkerboard floors. Antique doors lead into the main living area, where a dining room and living room overlooked the beautiful Lac Memphremagog, so-called home to locals of a famous lake monster. JP glanced over at Sarah and that mass of red hair. He could lose himself in there.
“Take a look at that,” said Scott, Sarah’s boyfriend, trailing behind. “Oh right,” added JP.
Over the fireplace was a painting by Carl Rasmussen, the Danish painter who made a name for himself with his nautical themes, many based on sketches made during a visit to Greenland in 1870-71. Brearley had acquired the “Yacht Shipwreck”, a grey and bleak painting, depicting two sailors hacking at the collapsed sails of their doomed vessel, desperate to keep it afloat amidst the waves just a little longer. In the distance, a sail approaches, relief perhaps, perhaps too late, while the sea laboured frantically to engulf them.
“Yes, interesting,” noted Brearley from the back of the room towards his guests.
“Why so?” asked Sarah.
“In 1893, the painter was returning from Greenland on the brig Peru when he apparently fell overboard and drowned. I read he was last seen by the helmsman, standing aft with his easel. Next time the helmsman looked, Rasmussen was gone. The vessel turned back, circled and searched. Nothing. He had vanished into the sea without a trace.”
This is a work of fiction. Although its form, content and narrative may at times suggest real people, real documents and records, autobiography or that the work is historical non-fiction, it is a product of the imagination. Space and time have been rearranged to suit the convenience of the book, and with the exception of public figures, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental. The opinions expressed are those of the characters and should not be confused with the author’s.