Customer Reviews

Trail of Feathers: In Search of the Birdmen of Peru

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

There are perilous things that can happen if you try to start a collection of shrunken heads. Tahir Shah was "desperate to start a collection of my own," and so he showed up at a secretive, invitation-only auction of eleven such heads under the auspices of a "learned British society." To his dismay, within fifteen minutes, the whole set of heads was knocked down to a Japanese collector who had been "trying to corner the shrunken head market for years." The evening was not a total loss, as an elderly Frenchmen advised Shah to go to Peru. For the shrunken heads? Why, no, for the birdmen. This didn't make any sense, and the Frenchman would not elaborate, but a week later an envelope came from Paris, bearing an old feather and a quotation from a 1638 book that said Incas flew like birds over the jungle. Shah was launched onto research and travels recounted in _Trail of Feathers: In Search of the Birdmen of Peru_ (Arcade Publishing), and they make for frequently hilarious reading. He is a different type of explorer, pursuing an idea rather than going to regions no one has ever seen, and has endured with good humor atrocious travel arrangements and louche characters that would make other people scream.

After some research, he starts, of course, at the current hotspot for archeological tourism, Machu Picchu, which he finds looks from above like a condor. He goes to Nazca, the region of the famous patterns in the desert that only make sense when seen from high above. He is pursued by a Parisienne who is looking for a father for her children, and who comes equipped with a dried lama fetus which can be made, she says, into an aphrodisiac soup. In the village of Trompeteros, he attends with all the citizens the beauty contest sponsored by Inca Brand Condoms. (The master of ceremonies declares that the beauties on the stage were "clean-living girls who always used an Inca condom.") The crowd goes wild over every entrant, especially number six, who for the talent portion performs a dance which includes sucking live tree grubs from the floor and eating them. The search loops around into the upper Amazon regions, when Shah is convinced that rather than physical flight, the birdmen were psychic, or psychedelic, fliers. The experts in such flying were the Shuar tribe, the headshrinkers themselves. He finds a Vietnam vet who is only at home in the jungle, to act as guide and to hire a boat, which turns out to be rotten and full of rats and wolf spiders. After a trip of hellish tortures, they wind up in Shuar country only to be shocked: the Shuars have not only given up headshrinking and other tribal rituals, they have not only become Christians, but they have become evangelists. The missionaries have not, however, taken what would have been the fatuous step of trying to make the tribesmen abstain from ayahuasca, a hallucinogen. Shah's trip on it is the climax of the book. Yes, there were Inca birdmen.

This is a hilarious, picaresque tale which is not without its scholarly moments; Shah has done a good deal of research, and even has appendices to tell about hallucinogens and the theory of shrunken heads. There is a good deal of more-or-less practical information; read this book and you will ever after be able to perform a simple check to tell a good shrunken head from a bad one. His Vietnam vet dispenses the Five Rules of Jungle Travel: "One: chop stems downward and as low to the ground as possible; then they'll fall away from the path. Two: go slow, as speed only snags you on fish-hook thorns. Three: rest frequently and drink liquid. Four: love the jungle, don't hate it. Five: check your groin for parasites twice an hour." Words to live by. And if, by chance, the closest you get to a jungle expedition is to be reading this merry recollection, you will consider yourself lucky.

It's another of Shah's peculiar passions, shrunken heads, that spurs his quest up the Amazon in search of the legendary fliers of Peru. "..." Alas, all the heads at this invitation-only auction ("...") are scooped up and Shah's only consolation is the cryptic remark of a French collector that if he was forty years younger, he'd seek out the Birdmen of Peru.

As it happens, this also dovetails with Shah's interest in flight (...), and after some serious research into scant legends of pre-Wright flight, he takes the Frenchman's advice.

Shah, born into Afghan nobility, brought up in Britain, combines a neophyte's wariness with a a scholar's penchant for research and a dogged will to follow the clues anywhere. As a writer, his gift for capturing the absurd is surpassed only by his ability to laugh at himself, making for an aborbing, educational and hilarious trip through the remoter regions of Peru and Inca culture.

Ridiculously over-supplied, Shah struggles with his mounds of luggage from campsite to crowded bus and train, from dusty village to timeless ruins to, at last, the jungles of the Amazon rain forest. To start, a four-day backpacking trip across mountain passes brings him to sunrise over the lost Inca city of Macchu Pichu, missed by the gold-hunting conquistadors, but overrun by busloads of modern tourists. Here Shah examines a temple dedicated to the condor, but his guide tells him his obsession with flight misses the point. " 'Whether the Incas flew or not is irrelevant,' she said. 'Instead, you must ask why they wanted to fly.' " Shah takes this advice to heart and incorporates the spiritual element into his quest.

Passing the time with shopkeepers, launderers, expatriates and anyone else who crosses his path, Shah acquires good luck totems and encounters the looted graves of Peru's mummies, the mummies themselves littering the ground. In small museums he finds hundreds of woven birdmen in the mummies' exquisite funerary robes. He pauses in a town famous for vampires (to tourists anyway) and stays in a deserted luxury hotel, haunted by a bloodthirsty ghost. He reaches his own conclusions about the Nazca Lines, ancient desert etchings of animals whose forms can only be seen from the sky. He meets several shaman, one of whom cures Shah's troubled mind with a rite which involves a guinea pig and a prohibition against shaking hands for 40 days. Others use datura or curare.

Meandering, Shah makes his way toward the Shuar, the Birdmen, who live still in the remote jungle. A group of missionaries was murdered only the previous month for arriving with empty hands, he's told. Loaded with gifts as well as his state-of-the-art gear, Shah at last embarks in search of the tribes and their ayahuasca, a mind-altering "Vine of the Dead," their secret of flight.

His guide is a taciturn naturalist and Vietnam vet, an American named Richard, who seldom sleeps. The mysteries of nature are Richard's passion...Their transportation is a half-rotten hulk and after their first night, Shah discovers his shoes have been gnawed by rats. He decrees death to the rodents but the boat is shortly overrun with cockroaches and then wolf spiders - staples of the rats' diet. At a shoreside village, Shah buys new rats.

This is only the beginning. After arriving at his first Shuar village (...) Shah is taken to a shaman in the jungle and his description of the trip perfectly captures the difficulty of the modern traveler: "..." By the time he arrives at the Shaman's village he contemplates taking up life there. "..." But only here, deep in its natural home, can he fulfill his desire and learn the Shuar's ancient secret of flight.

Reader's of Shah's previous book, "Sorcerer's Apprentice" (a quest for magic in India) will recognize his unique affinity for the bizarre and surreal encountered while fulfilling his avid curiosity for the knowledge and traditions of other cultures. His writing is elegant, witty and often enigmatic and his eyewitness information is enhanced with meticulous research, seamlessly woven into the narrative. Shah's travel writing is in a class by itself.

Beginning with the Wright brothers, Tahir Shah spreads his flying carpet for the unsuspecting reader of travel tomes.

There is a legend that a great bird which, if found, would confer ultimate fulfillment for the seeker. It drops a feather within the mundane where an ordinary man or woman may find it, and, from this single clue, find the fabulous bird. This theme was exploited by Stephen Spielberg in "Close Encounters of the Third Time," where Richard Dryfus begins with the slightest hint of a meeting place he must attain for a rendexvous with superior beings beyond earth, then slowly, intuitively builds a model of the site until he recognizes the place and goes there, arriveing just in time.

While TRAIL OF FEATHERS is ostensibly a literal, if zany, hike through the jungles of Peru in search of the reality behind winged men woven into the ancient textiles of the region, it bears all of the elements of a mythic search for ultimate meaning. Several contacts scold the author for his obsession with flying, which, they say, is nothing. All that counts, they tell him, is the reason for flight and the treasure brought back to earth.

The author's search for the flying men of Peru seems akin to the Australian aboriginee "walk about." As Shah again and again chooses the most uncomfortable means of travel and lodging, I could not help suspecting that his was a ritual journey and that the trail, not the feathers nor the flying, was the destination.

Reading what seemed quite similar to Latin American "magical reality," I learned an enormous amount about Peru's real history, geography and its people--far more, I felt, than I could have learned in any other format, unless I went there myself and took the same risks as the author. That he emerged alive would seem to place the whole tale in question but for the Vietnam vet and jungle expert who shows up just in time to guide Shah and to keep him alive in the process. I got the feeling that there was a hidden hand behind this particular journey. I don't mean mysticism. Hints, such as the ease with which Shah could replenish as needed lost money, point to a human infastructure. The book not only solves dozens of mysteries. It's reading was for me a mysterious journey in its own right.

I first encountered Shah via, Sorcerer's Apprentice, his wonderful book detailing his search for magic in modern day India, and subsequently read his most recent book about searching for King Solomon's Mines in Ethiopia (which is also excellent). This middle book, about his search for for a tribe of flying men in the Amazonian jungles of Peru isn't quite as captivating as those two, but still makes for excellent armchair travel. The adventure begins with a scene somewhere between Indiana Jones and Tintin, as Shah attends an underground auction of shrunken heads in London. There, a mysterious stranger delivers a cryptic remark about the "birdmen of Peru", and a few weeks later, Shah arrives in Lima with far too much baggage and an intrepidness not often encountered in contemporary travel narratives.

Once in country, he bounces around the place, sniffing at the legend and trail of the birdmen, who are plentifully depicted on Incan textiles and are well-known in local lore. His travels take him to the overrun tourist mecca of Machu Picchu, an island on Lake Titicaca, into the Atacama Desert to see the spectacular Nazca Lines from the air, into the big city of Lima, the wild frontier town of Iquitos, and finally, upriver into the Amazon. Along the way, he meets an astonishing array of characters, from llama drivers, snake handlers, shamans, and grave robbers, to mad professors, European vagabonds seeking spiritual enlightenment, a lovestruck waitress, and finally, his guide, a grizzled Vietnam vet.

Early on it seems evident that the flying is metaphorical, and is accomplished by ingesting some industrial-grade hallucinogens distilled from tropical plants, but Shah manages to keep the quest interesting nonetheless. He manages to combine wide-eyed enthusiasm, curiosity and eagerness, with scholarly research and a brusque wariness. He's also quite self-deprecating and knows just when a touch of humor is needed to liven up the narrativeówhich often involves his meals. As in his other books, his trip is an engrossing one, and he ends abruptly upon reaching his goal.

This is not your typical travel book! The author describes a long journey through Peru as he searches for the origins of a myth about people flying in Pre-Columbian Peru. This search involves his discovery, and imparting to us, lots of information about textiles, mummies, shrunken heads, and many, many colorful characters that the author encounters. Honestly, in reading Mr. Shah's books, I can only think that the dreadful places I have stayed in were oases of tranquility and cleanliness when compared to his places: For example, a hotel that keeps its chickens in his bathroom, a hotel that has no other guests because a story is circulating that anyone who stays there will be beheaded by a ghost, a boat so rank that a stay in a pit toilet might be more pleasant, etc. But somehow, when he tells it, you just have to enjoy and laugh. I recommend this book highly to anyone who enjoys travel writing, adventure writing, or simply a great story. As an aside, I should mention that if anyone doubts the possibility of the final scenes (and I do not want to ruin this book for anyone), a beloved relative of mine actually did a similar trip (and I am SO glad I didn't go along! And the only reason I didn't, at the time, was that I thought I would be needed to retrieve her body [which thankfully didn't happen] after such a crazy trip). The physiological experience of the native drug was absolutely perfectly described (and many a jolly laugh we have had over my relative's story at her expense)! So, don't doubt this book is possible. But whether or not it is, read it and enjoy!

Take a shrunken head from Peru and a feather with traces of blood and you've intrigued author Tahir Shah, sending him on a journey through themes of flight in Peruvian folklore which also involves a real journey to the Andes and the jungles of the Amazon in search of the legendary 'birdmen'. Trail Of Feathers: In Search Of The Birdmen Of Peru is lovely armchair traveler's guide which is very highly recommended for adventure readers and armchair explorers.

This is the second of Mr. Shah's books I have read. I will probably end up reading them all. It's hard not to like a book whose opening sentence is "The trail began at an auction of shrunken heads." He is an excellent author and his tales are fascinating. If you read this book to the end you will be able to shrink heads, but only practice on sloths.

"O men, up from you I fly.
I am not for the earth, I am for the sky.
I have soared to the sky as a herald,
I have kissed the sky as a falcon,
The essence of a god, the son of a god,
The messenger of a god am I."
(Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts)

It seems to me these beautiful, evocative opening lines of an ancient poem belong somewhere in Tahir Shah's powerful work on the Incas and Birdmen of Peru, the best book in the travel genre I've read to date. (And, indeed, early in the author's research into the question of actual flight by ancient man, an expert whom he consults reminds us of the model airplane, or glider, which was found in an ancient Egyptian tomb in Saqqara in 1898.)
This book is much more than a fascinating and often hilarious travel book; to me it is more akin to a narrative of an unfolding spiritual journey. In addition to the usual points of interest of a Peruvian tour, this author's 'nose' for uncovering the 'underbelly' of a given culture allows him to get right to the heart of a matter he is investigating. And, true to his Sufi upbringing, he is not afraid to seek knowledge wherever it takes him; by means of itself, by experience, not content to be a mere observer (or as the proverb goes, "He who tastes, knows.")
Thus, his ocular experience of El Colibri (the Hummingbird), and the other symbols of the Nazca Lines from a Cessna, prove to be only a prelude (almost like a facsimile from the past), a metaphor, for the riveting experience which is to follow, as, undaunted, the trail leads him into the heart of the Upper Amazonian jungle to find the descendants of those who occupied the coastal Nazca plain when the Lines were made, before they and their shamans were driven into the interior by the Spanish Conquistadors.
Loose your grip on your analytical, Western mind and get ready to "kiss the sky"!
Early in his quest, perched precariously atop Huayna Picchu, looking directly down on Machu Picchu, the author recounts a conversation which hints of ancient memories of a forgotten and glorious past:
"I opened my eyes a crack, and began to understand the significance of Machu Picchu. Stretching out in symmetrical flanks, on east and west, the ruins were arranged as wings. Once I saw them, I couldn't get them out of my mind. They gleamed up at me, glinting in the yellow light.
Machu Picchu was laid out in the shape of a condor.
I would have slithered my way back down to the cafe much sooner. But a refined-looking Peruvian man was watching me.
'It's a condor!' I shouted. 'Machu Picchu's a gigantic condor!'
The man was dressed in a sheepskin jacket, with the flaps of a woollen hat pulled down snugly over his ears. His nose was streaming, ad his cheeks were scarlet. In his hand was a tin, and in it were coca leaves.
'The condor is the messenger,' he said in English, offering me some of the leaves.
'Whose messenger?'
Resting the tin on his knee, the man washed his hands over his face.
'The condor links us to heaven,' he said. 'Just as it did the Incas. It is the bridge, the bridge between man and God.'
'Could the Incas glide like condors?'
The man twisted the corners of his mouth into a smile.
'We can all fly,' he said.
'All of us?'
The man nodded.
'Si, all of us.'
He paused, to regard me sideways on.
'Todos tenemos alas, we all have wings,' he said, 'but we have forgotten how to use them.'

This wild adventure, filled with zany characters, takes place in the Peruvian Amazon. It's a page turner you won't be able to put down because you will be laughing so much. Tahir and his comic book hero, Richard Fowler, take you on a mystical trip into the depths of the Amazon where only the dinosaurs are missing. To the urbanite living in a developed country, it's a great escape from reality. For us in Iquitos, Peru, who know our "action pal" richard and the the other characters, it's a great laugh about our own reality.

Not quite hot on the trail of the fabled birdmen of Peru, Tahir Shah heads out for Machu Picchu, Titicaca, the Atacama Desert, and the Amazonian outpost of Iquitos in a quest for tenuous evidence at best of these flying humans. Half way through this sometimes sloggy narrative, the reader begins to ask: Is the search for these fabled birdmen a metaphorical journey for one's self? Is this a search for spiritual treasure via the allegories of flight? Well, after Mr. Shah's ingestion of ayahuasca towards the end of the book, a pretty good answer emerges.

Tahir Shah's writing style is the best part of this book - the narration is entertaining, the flow nice and easy on the reader. He has done much research to flesh out the subjects of his quirky quest. And the central part of the book, his boat trip up the upper Amazon river with a shaman and his ex-Vietnam vet guide, struck me as a hilarious rendition of Heart of Darkness.

Shah's sense of humor, both at his own expense and the others he encounters along the way, make the reading all that more compelling. It is the laughs that reflect what is most true in this narrative. Yes, this is a quirky discursive adventure; but as such, it also makes for the best reading too.

Parataxis

The Cloud Reckoner

Extracts: A Field Guide for Iconoclasts