Dangers on the land

Dangers on the Land drums.jpg (30626 bytes)

Chapter Two - continued

In our travels we frequently heard of the many mysteries of the Amazon. The sightings of unidentified flying objects are a daily occurrence. Everyone seemed to have a friend or relative who had seen one. Particularly common is a cluster of thousands of little stars moving together that hover just above the river. It travels along in the shape of a flying saucer. Many people have reported being guided to safety by this particular U.F.O. The Governess herself has said that this U.F.O. once saved the lives of her and her husband when they were traveling up the river during a violent storm.

Apart from the mysteries, there are the realities of the dangers of living on the river. The very name of our boat, "The Piraiba," means the great fish big enough to swallow men whole. Many people warned me of the large carnivorous fish that have sometimes eaten those unlucky enough to have fallen into the river. The piraiba weighs up to three hundred and fifty pound, has a huge mouth and likes to swim along the shore. They are particularly nasty fish.

A relative of the piraiba is the candiru, a tiny catfish, with a snout like a corkscrew. He swims into a humnan's orifices and because of barbed gills, lodges until removed surgically. These are quite common.

The Indians taught us how to walk in the jungle to protect us from snake bites. The forest trails are narrow, so groups of people have to walk single file. A sleeping snake may be disturbed by the first person in the file. The second person passes by but the third person often gets bitten. So we would walk one person. another person, a space, and then the third person. Since I was the leader of the group, I was the third person in the party. On three occasions that I can remember, I saw a coiled snake ready to bite.

There were some creatures that we never really saw but we heard about, such as the big lizards. I never had any real proof of them but in over half of the fifty-eight villages we visited, we heard talk about the big lizards. They would warn us to be caredful if we were going to where the big lizards were.The nomadic people of the Amazon River estimated the big lizards were about seven feet high and fifteen feet long. These people travel into the jungle to areas where the white man has never been. The jungle is very very vast and very deep. The lizards are reputed to be able to eat big plants and trees at one time.

When I first heard these stories I thought, "O this is just the Indians. They are only simple people and these are merely folk tales." But so many people told us about the lizards. They were nice, very simple and God-fearing people who lived close to the land. Generally there was no corruption and people mostly spoke the truth. We never had an instance of being tricked, so I had no reason to disbelieve that dinosaurs were existing somewhere in the Amazon.

By eight-thirty that first night we were all asleep, except for our captain who steered our boat quietly through the water as we headed west up the river and into the unknown.

Early the next morning I entered the temple room and was amazed at the beauty of the deities in this wonderful setting. There were windows all around the boat and as the sun rose I saw the jungle scene around us for the first time.

I wrote in my diary, "We seem to be in a swamp with thousands of different types of insects everywhere. One amazing thing that I am experiencing here on the river is that I'm seeing so many species of wildlife that I've never seen or heard of before. It seems odd that I've never seen any of these animals, birds, or insects in any of the books that I've read throughout my life. Even in the zoos of America or Europe I never saw them, yet here evrything is just outside your window when you wake up. And I don't feel any fear. It all seems to be orchestrated in a natural way and being right here in the middle of the jungle has a calming effect on me. I seem to be in a bygone age - Satyayuga or Treta-yuga or, in modern scientific estimation, pre-historic times. Nothing has changed in this jungle in thousands of years. The penetrating arm of civilisation is far away from here.....

As I began to dress my deity I felt particularly dependent upon Him, The risks are obvious here in the jungle and I know I need His mercy. As the boat is drifting down river, I am awed that I am dressing God in this scene."
After class I had a long talk with the devotees, "If we are to be successful," I told them, "we must work like a military crew."

After two and a half days, the reality of what we were doing became apparent to us. We had come to the Amazon to preach and when we left Manaus we left civilisation behind, that is, we knew that there was no law and order in the jungle. When we visited the villages, we knew that there were going to be no policemen to protect us, no army, nothing. Of course the Indians were not like the Indians of hundreds of years ago because many ships have gone down the Amazon and traded with the people. Many of them even wore Western clothing. But there's a saying, "Yiu can take the man out of the bush, but you can't take the bush out of the man." Their contact with the Western world had been minimal. So generally speaking they have remained as they were for thousands of years.