Larissa squinted against gritty, blowing rain. In every direction of the naked mountaintop where she stood, sandstone boulders loomed out of the slanting downpour, some as small as doghouses and others bigger than barns. A billion years of winds had scoured the rock, sculpting it into organic shapes: breasts and heroic torsos and immense phallic columns; erotic forms everywhere she looked under the swollen sky.
Interesting. An effect of two cups of
yonamayi
tea she'd imbibed with the shaman, Carlos. The flower-seed brew was clearly a hallucinogen, and perhaps it also triggered a flood of dopamine in the hypothalamus. Dopamine was nature's "
Let's fuck!"
molecule—the most potent of the brain's sexual triggers. Was that why she felt so fiercely horny now?
If the old shaman had not refused to let her bring along pen and notebook, she could be recording these observations, instead of hoping she wouldn't forget them once the drug wore off.
Carlos scrambled ahead along the treacherous footpath, oblivious to the cold rain, his long, straight white hair streaming back in the buffeting wind. Larissa struggled to keep up, feeling humbled and annoyed at the same time. The old man seemed to possess twice her energy and stamina—and Larissa worked out four times a week: free weights, Nordic Ski, Row Machine, you name it. Her ass was taut as volleyball, her belly a grid of muscle.
Starting from the village just after daybreak, the two had climbed a fissure that split the mountainside diagonally and formed a rough stairway to its tabletop peak. The ascent had felt like three hours on a Stair Master at highest setting. They would spend the afternoon and night on the mountain and head down in the morning.
The image of herself shivering in a wet knot of gooseflesh all night—possibly even dying of hypothermia—had nagged at Larissa before the tide of euphoria from the tea swept away her tendency to worry. She felt now as if the anxiety function, the very ability to fret, had been disconnected. Besides, she liked and trusted the old man. Obviously, Carlos knew what he was doing; he was the eldest shaman among the Yona tribespeople, and had made this trip many times. Never with a middle-aged black woman from Berkeley, but he'd know how to survive up here. Maybe he was carrying a tent and a kerosene-burning space heater in the woven knapsack on his back. Right, whatever.
No problema, muchacha.
After downing the cups of cloudy tea an hour ago, Larissa had puked twice. She still felt nauseated, but it had become background noise, a mellow gut-ache, to the steadily louder choir of angels singing in her brain and—yes, between her legs. Electric.
I sing the body electric
. She smiled and wished she could jot down the image.
The sun broke through and shone golden on the mountain top. The icy rain slackened to sprinkles. Larissa and the shaman huddled in the arched doorway of a moss-draped reddish boulder with a cathedral-like window at the top. Everything smelled of mushrooms and soaked gravel. Lichens splotched a nearby boulder like furtively sketched dirty pictures on the walls of bathroom stalls. Larissa saw cocks, cunts, naked bodies entangled in an orgy; the pictures melted and moved, the sinners shifted and sighed.
Good grief, she was feeling randy. If the old man wasn't beside her now, she'd tug down her hiking shorts and panties right there and take care of herself.
Carlos tapped her hand and she jumped from the sensation of skin on skin. "
Vamanos, mi amiga.
" Let's go, my friend. They stood and walked on.
Where was Carlos leading her? Earlier, the sun had been to their backs, but now they turned toward the lowering sun that silhouetted the jagged skyline. Surely they weren't retracing their steps—or were they?
The two hiked in the cold drizzle without talking. Larissa wished her Spanish was better, but then what would she say anyway?
"I'm getting
way
high on your 'flower of the soul,'
señor
—but did you neglect to mention that it would turn me into a feverish slut? Because if I don't get a private moment soon to 'finger-fuck' myself, as we say in America, I'm going to jump
you
and hump your old bones."
Larissa laughed softly at her own joke. At least, she thought it was a joke. The old man, whose wrinkled face, an hour ago, had resembled a carved, dried apple, was beginning to look younger and more attractive by the minute. Even his gait, already vigorous, seemed now to become almost sensual, catlike.
Damn, I wish had my notebook. Am I going to remember these hallucinations?
They entered a narrow canyon and the wind instantly calmed to a feathery sigh while gusts whistled overhead. Moss and fungi coated the muscular contours of rock. Many of the large mushrooms looked like thick, heavy cocks. The rain-soaked fungi smelled like fresh semen. Larissa's eyes followed a glistening ribbon of pale algae that snaked up the smooth canyon wall like a long splash of cum on a dark-skinned thigh. Oh, god.
Is that going to be the theme of this trip? Sexual lust. Cunts and cocks, great and small: mineral, vegetable and animal.
The canyon widened suddenly and dead-ended below them in a delta-shaped hollow. A tangled thicket of dwarf teak trees covered a mound at the far end of the hollow. Vines ensnared the tree limbs like silk ropes tying up sex slaves in a bondage scene. The vines displayed dark pink flowers, bigger than magnolia blossoms; their broad petals spread open luridly. Larissa had to laugh. With flowers that looked
that
much like vaginas, was it any wonder they were used in fertility rites?