Nate was sweating profusely and finally sought shade under the umbrella. Dolores reappeared with a pitcher of lemonade, clear glass with slices of lemon floating in it and poured cool drinks for everyone. Nate hugged her with such familial affection closing his eyes and letting his face adore her with a brotherly caress that Dory was taken anew by this complicated man.So smart but somehow so tragic. Dolores held his cool glass to his head and he signed something to her.
She signed something to Dory and Nina and its meaning seemed obvious: this was a good man.
And Dory was beginning to know this to be true for she had made love to him and he had given all of himself in a way she never knew men could love. He was so focused on the love of their love-making that it was almost too intense for her. What would happen next ? She was certainly going to stay along for the ride as the Americans said.
He drank the glass of lemonade down and Dolores filled it up again.
"You can imagine Virginia Wiggins' surprise and dismay when she returned to her digging spot here ... And saw the tomato plants flourishing everywhere. It ran counter to everything she believed: that a non tropical fruit could thrive in the Amazon. Her dismay was compounded by the fact that the civilisation that she mentions in her notes as "SR will fucking ruin me" became known as the Sacha Runa Culture. Sacha Runa is Kich-wa, the oldest living Indian language for Jungle Man. She named it and slowly she had to make concessions that would destroy her own theory. That the pottery they made was too big to be carried from place to place. That she found a whole system of roads that connected villages and cities to an (Undisclosed) capital. That there were terraced dwellings within the cities which meant hierarchical living with the priests and politicians living on the highest terrace and the worst part which was coming to light in Brazil by farmers who had penetrated the forest and then archaeologists who would just blow apart her theory was this black dirt you see all around you which is called terra preta and maybe the real El Dorado worth more than all the emeralds on earth to anyone who can divine its secret.
Scientists now believe that there is Terra Preta in 10% of the Amazon. Most of it is 6 feet deep and it is made of organic materials,charred vegetable material which is why some people call in black earth, human feces, fish bones,heavily loaded with potsherds and a dozen other naturally occurring substances. It is as fertile now as it was 1000 years ago when it was created and as you can see when you look around you the plants are resistant to disease and insects. It is the best soil ever invented and man invented it. Now here's the really spooky thing. It regenerates itself. If you dig up a pile of this earth and wait some years the hole will again fill with Terra Preta and modern science does not have a clue which of the tens of thousands of species of bacteria and fungi, which unique microorganisms allow Terra Preta to reproduce. The soil is 880% more fertile than normal soil. God knows how much more fertile it is than the red acidic soil that supports the rainforest. The rainforest is an ecosystem that works without using nutrients in the soil for the most part. The black earth is man made.It will not be washed away by rain. It will not die and if it could be synthesized imagine how it would change the planet. That is the real El Dorado waiting for some big agro consortium which will rule the world if they ever figure it out. Or maybe they don't want to figure it out because like a vaccine it would become a gift to all mankind and nobody would make any money out of it.It could be cosmic.
But anyway it was the tomato plants , the black earth and other people finding it other places in the Amazon that ultimately shot Virginia's bigfire theory out of the textbooks.
But for me there was more of a thread of possibility that I could locate her emeralds. I'd been up and down this river 20 times before I met Benicio. Sooner or later everybody shows up at the Hotel Auca . Its the center of the universe for quakers and quackers and a fair share of miners who go upriver to the Rio Payamino to mine placer gold. That's where Benecio was headed.
But he had quite a collection, he said, of Sacha Runa Pottery that he found when he built a camp for Texaco in the 60's, and a funeral urn with the bones of a stillborne baby inside, he conjectured, so exquisite was the piece in the shape of a woman whose arms plastered to her body as if in an offering and -I"ll show you one of these later- she has the most delicate design of head and body and a prominently displayed clitoris which could no way be construed as for arousal and the most amazing thing of all was when he cracked off the bottom where the bones had been sealed he had found an emerald.
He was so busy flying in lobster tail and other delicacies to the Sacha Campaign (as The Oil Company. so enlightened, called their Amazon putsch) heads and other high ranking drill people that all he could do was put it in his kit and when at 110 feet the well was determined dry and the fact that Texaco was paying even back then 50,000 dollars a day with barges brought up all the way from Brazil, they yanked him to build the next camp and he never found the place again. And oh yes he had seen the black earth.
So over his sinchicara I asked him if there was a stream or a waterfall nearby and yes he said he thought there was and we looked at maps and I plotted the progress of Virginia's digs according to her field notes and her published accounts although I found evidence that she tried to cover her tracks and it was presisely that unfinished dig across the lake that led me here because by character she was sone of those leave no stone unturned people,and I narrowed it down to 15,000 hectares from there. All the land I could afford to buy.
And the urgency to buy the land was not Benecio's it was mine.The news in the wind was that the socialist President of Ecuador ,Umbato, was about to give all the amazon lands to the indigenous, mostly Kich-was, but, Cofanes, and Shuars and Secoyas as well ,and I had one chance to zero in on my 15,000 hectares where my research from Virginia's work had convinced me I would find this place, and I bought it: ten thousand for the land and ten thousand for the bribe. And I cut Benicio in because he said he was connected to the emerald business in Columbia, because he knew everything about the rain forest and because without knowing it he had , I thought, actually been to the place where Virgina had found the stones in the stream. So he and I drank Sinchicara and took Ayahuasca which gives you an out of body experience and slowly we divined-call it horsehit- that it had to be on a lake and far from the Napo River to have gone undiscovered and first at the mouth of the stream we found the Oil Company Sign , Rusted but legible, the way we came in with remnants of the camp Benicio had built, then we found Wiggins unfinished dig site just offf the lake with the all the tomatoes and When I saw the huge mound that we are sitting on which looks so obviously man made: I TOLD BENECIO THAT THIS WAS IT ! And the rest as they say, is history.
Now as to my personal theory about this specific place, I found a narrow trench that covers the whole backside perimeter and I believe it held palisades-like a pointy fence to keep people out.They probably used pambil the same fence and posting palm people down here use now with sharp points. I figure A small number of people lived here and lived well, perhaps they were priests who controlled the wealth. There is evidence maybe of soldiers quarters on one edge to your left and we've unearthed very fine burial urns perhaps for the aristocracy of this society that would be buried on the hill down near the lake. So while it's not important it is my theory that this was the fucking Fort Knox of this civilization meant like in all societies for a small percentage of the population to get very wealthy while the rest of the population was either poor or maybe they had it a middle class. These people were as sophisticated as the Egyptians in engineering and could easily have built a pyramid if that had been a goal, but they liked wide avenues and canals to paddle tranquilly from place to place and the unit of monetary engagement was the emerald. Hell I can see emerald barons speculating on land that they know will soon be populated. And what provided the intense labor needed to produce Terra Preta- green stones ! Can You imagine? A full fledged cynical capitalist system like our own a thousand years ago in the Amazon.
"What is this Fort Knox? " asked Dory.
"That's where the Americans keep most of their Gold in an underground vault and nobody has ever been able to steal it from there!"
"So the world will one day have the real El Dorado..."She said Hopefully,"Terra Preta."
"Hell, yes ,and we've got esmeraldas up the yinyang!"
"When can we see this place?"
"Right now young lady."
And they all stood up and began to walk out of the garden by a different path than they came in by.And Nate stopped them. He seemed to Dory almost Messianic:
"So ultimately,this guy Francisco de Orellana, the Conquistador who discovered the Amazon, did find El Dorado. He told everyone in Spain about the abundant crops and the large cities and the highways and canals and he was the first and last European to see the great cities of the Amazon with the exception of Solis de Holguin in 1617 who made it to the Bolivian amazon and brought with him the same gifts that Orellana had: Measles, and influenza and small pox and these great civilizations ,over a period of perhaps two hundred years , millions of people died out in their Amazon Paradise like dry straw in a wildfire ...never to return.
But as fast as the native peoples died out so fast, so slow was the notion of El Dorado to loose its fascination on the Spaniards. What had begun as a search for gold,somehow changed-not to emeralds- but to something abstract and many years after Orellana they came from the north of the continent still searching for El Dorado.For Conquistadors like Berrio and Albujar in what is now Colombia and along the Orinoco river, it became something much more. It was the search, to borrow from another culture ,for shangri-la that they desperately wanted, the unviolated paradise which by their presence they violated and destroyed...for such worlds had existed. But we are destroying nothing and have found everything."
"But Benecio?" asked Dory.
"Benecio,"said Nate," Benecio is a violacion."
VISIT http://www.laselvajunglelodge.com/
