Mandy was sweating so much the back of her khaki shirt was dark brown and stuck to her skin. The back of her khaki shorts were wet from the waist down, and the center seam had crept between her ass cheeks. It was almost like seeing her ass naked. She stopped walking and turned around to face me. The front of her shirt had a brown stain on the front that spread from the buttons outward almost to the center of her breasts. The front of her shorts had the same brown stain where the legs were sewn at the crotch.
"How much longer do we have to walk in this heat? I need to stop and cool off."
Biabo, a Nanti man who had been taught English by Christian missionaries and served as the guide and interpreter for the expedition, answered her question.
"We are a day from the beginning of Rio Pequino. We will camp here tonight and go on tomorrow."
Mandy used a handkerchief to wipe the sweat from her forehead and then put the floppy hat back on over the long blonde hair she'd done up to keep it off her slender neck.
"I'm going to sit in that river and wash off this sweat, and then stay there until I feel human again."
Biabo grinned.
"No, Miss Mandy, you can't. The fishes will eat you."
"So I have to stay like this? I smell like I don't know what."
"I will have one of the men bring you a bucket of water."
Just then, there was a shout from one of the men ahead. He dropped the bundle of supplies he carried, pulled the machete from his belt and ran ahead. I heard a thunk, then another before he came walking back to the caravan. The large snake over his shoulder still writhed even though it had no head, and the man was jabbering away in Paolin. Biabo grinned.
"We will have fresh meat for our dinner."
}|{
The year was 1978 and was a year that changed my life more than I thought possible in such circumstances and in such a short time.
This had all started out with a patient I was treating as a resident in a Chicago hospital. The old man I was treating at the time was near death. He was a hundred and two according to his reckoning of the years. One day as I listened to his failing heart, he said he would confide to me a secret he'd kept nearly all his life.
"Young man, I won't live to see Mauga O Le Ola again, so I'll tell you the secret I've kept since I was twenty. You're a doctor and you'll understand the value. It's because of the natives there I've lived so long. Before my supply of their powders was exhausted, I was as strong as when I was there eighty two years ago."
I had smiled to myself. I had heard his story several times before. Like many older people, he'd lost the capacity for short-term memory and often repeated himself. Upon hearing his tale the first time, I'd spent hours at the library searching for Mauga O Le Ola in Peru, the country he had indicated as it's location. I found no reference to such a place, but his tale was intriguing enough I continued my search.
He had begun his working life as a sailor at the age of sixteen, but in 1896, he had been part of an expedition to Peru to search for the gold rumored to be there. None had been found by prior expeditions, but the leader had discovered a text written by a Spanish explorer of less renown than most. In the text, he described the location of a vast treasure in the eastern foothills of the Andes. The treasure was in a cave at the source of a small stream that flowed into the Rio Camasea and then to the Amazon River. By consulting the maps of the day, the leader had determined a probable location.
The expedition had attempted to cross the Andes from the Pacific side, for that way appeared to be much faster than trekking up the Amazon River and then through the rainforest. Their plan did not consider the difficulty of crossing the high peaks of the Andes, and the members of the expedition were near death from starvation and fatigue when they reached the eastern foothills. They were found by a tribe of natives and carried to their village.
All of the members of the expedition had succumbed to the rigors of the mountain crossing except this man. He was given a remedy of some sort by the natives, and eventually made a complete recovery. According to his tale, he left the natives with a large bag of the same remedy and followed the stream and then the river until he came to a town frequented by river craft.
He secured a passage down river by agreeing to serve as a deck hand on the boat. After several weeks, the craft docked at a seaport in Brazil. He sought and found a ship bound for Europe, and after signing on as a crewmember, made his way there. From Europe, he again crewed on a sailing ship and finally landed in Norfolk, Virginia.
He did not again go to sea, for he had had his fill of the damp, cramped sailor's quarters aboard a sailing vessel. Using his knowledge of ships and rigging, he began work in a shipyard in Norfolk. His powders kept him fit and able to work until he was in his nineties, or so he said. He required only a tiny amount of the powders each day, but at that point they were exhausted. He aged in one year so quickly he was forced to ask his niece in Chicago to care for him. When the niece passed on, his care was taken over by her daughter who put him in a nursing home. When he became ill, she brought him to my hospital.
His tale piqued my interest, but not for the promise of gold. I knew there would always be such tales and that those tales were most likely only myth. I was interested for another reason. By 1974 when I graduated from medical school, modern medicine had done much to cure and prevent disease and infection, but very little to postpone the aging process. Some of those cures had been derived from the medicines of various primitive tribes throughout the world. It was entirely possible and indeed probable that more cures and preventions were stored in the minds of the tribal healers of the Amazon rain forest.
I was not particularly interested in finding medicines to maintain the appearance of youth, though I knew finding such would certainly have been profitable. My interest was in finding a way to stave off the aging of the brain and internal organs that eventually fail and result in death. At the time of his first telling, I was twenty-eight, fresh from my internship and full of hopes for the future. I wanted to believe he might be telling the truth.
Since the man had been a sailor and was somewhat confused in his memories, I contacted the language department at the University of Illinois in Chicago and asked if they could determine the language in which Mauga O Le Ola was written. I had assumed it to be Spanish as Peru was initially conquered by Spain and excepting for tribal languages, Spanish was the language spoken. My own research indicated this was not the case. I had then tried Portuguese because Peru borders on Brazil and the language of Brazil is Portuguese. There were no such words in the Portuguese language either.
After much searching, one professor at the university identified the language. The words were Samoan, and translated to "mountain of life".
I thought the use of the Samoan language to name a place in Peru to be quite a stretch. While it had been theorized that peoples from Polynesia could have made the voyage across the Pacific, it was also generally acknowledged they would have settled on the coast since they would have been people of the sea, not of the land. They would probably not have moved inland and certainly not to the other side of the Andes. Doing so would have forced them to reinvent their entire culture. I concluded the old man was confusing two places where his ship had made port.
He told me the same story nearly every day. I listened, but by that time, had discounted it. That changed on the day before he passed away.
I was making my routine rounds and stopped by his bed. He was in bad shape by then, gasping for every breath, and he looked as pale as the sheets. I was sure he wouldn't last the night.
I listened to his heart. The regular thump was weak, and at times slowed almost to stopping and then resumed the tired sounding thud-thud. I looped the stethoscope around my neck and asked how he was feeling.
"Not good, not good at all. If only I had some of those native powders again, but I know that can't happen. You'll call my grandniece when I go, won't you? She won't come to see me, but I understand. She's young and just starting out in life. I'm just slowing her down."
I said I would, but I didn't think he needed to worry about that happening any time soon. He just smiled.
"When you get as old as I am, you'll know when it's going to happen. Oh...in the drawer over there is something for you. I don't know why I didn't remember it before. It's the pouch I carried the powders in. You take it. My grand-niece will just throw it in the trash."
I walked out of the room with the pouch. It was of some sort of leather and was so old it was beginning to crack in places. When I got back to my office, I opened it.
Inside, I could see a residue of fine, yellow powder. The old man apparently hadn't made up that part of the story. I inverted the pouch over a sterile surgical tray and tapped it. A small amount of the powder dropped onto the tray. There wasn't much, but it would be enough for Dale, one of the chemists in the hospital lab, to analyze with the mass spectrometer the hospital had just purchased.
