Death is all-pervading in this jungle

Death is all-pervading in this jungle drums.jpg (30626 bytes)

Chapter Five - Part Two

The next day was Govardhana Puja. I fell out of bed to attend mangala-arati after which I lay down on the floor on the second deck. The captain's wife brought me a jungle brew to drink. She promised me that the hot and salty drink would cure my stomach. I wondered where in the world she had gotten the ingredients, but in desperation I drank it down. Half an hour later I woke up. I felt no more burning or cramps. It occurred to me that the Amazon must hold the key to curing many diseases and wondered if anyone had ever seriously investigated this.

While the devotees were preparing the feast, I heard a big commotion coming from the deck. The devotees were throwing pieces of bhoga into the water while fish with vicious sharp teeth were jumping out and catching them. The captain told us that these fish are a deadly cousin of the piranha.

The devotees really threw themselves into preparing a wonderful feast for Giri-Govardhana. The women devotees started cooking before mangala-arati and the men took over at eight o'clock in the morning. At the offering, Giri-Govardhana looked especially blissful while all the devotees enjoyed dancing around the hill.

Just as we finished the feast, a boatload of about twenty people passed by. I told the devotees to call them over, to tell them that we had free food. They paddled over immediately. They were completely at ease in accepting prasadam. We handed out one plate after another of the Giri-Govardhana Hill and all of the maha-prasadam that He had eaten. It was really Govardhana Sila's mercy. One lady in particular just kept laughing and laughing as she ate more and more prasadam. Prasadam has a naturally intoxicating effect.

Two more boatloads came by, the people also receiving Giri-Govardhana's prasadam. It was incredible distributing prasadam out there in the middle of the Amazon River. One lady came in a boat simply to ask for medicine for her dying child. We only had the medicine of prasadam which she readily accepted. When I asked her if she wanted more to take with her, she said, "As much as you give, that much I will eat." She left with ten plates.

When we came upstairs the captain's wife was frantically chasing some insect out of her room. Finally she succeeded and trapped it in a plastic bag. I was standing by wondering, "What is all the fuss about?"
She brought it before my nose in the plastic bag, crying, "Tiranobia! Tiranobia!"
It was an ugly looking creature, something like a moth, but with a big stinger and a pouch on the front of its nose. I thought it looked more like some kind of monster. She explained that it was a deadly killer. One sting and you die within three minutes. I nervously asked her if there were more around and she said, "Yes. This is one of the reasons for the high death rate in this area."

I thought, " My dear Lord Krsna, there's danger in the air, land and water. Death is all-pervading in this jungle."

Because the Tiranobia were attracted to light, at night we couldn't light anything. And when we woke up in the morning, we found them on the floor and on the way to the bathroom. Sometimes we had to remove them from the bathroom. Getting rid of tiranobias became part of our devotional service for the day.

After Giri-Govardhana's feast, everyone washed pots and then took rest for a few hours. Around four-thirty we left by the small boat in three different trips to a village along one of the tributaries. It took about twenty minutes to get there. It was a beautiful ride across very pretty lagoons. When we arrived we started chanting as we walked into the village. It was a very charming place with wonderful people. As we started going down the main street, literally hundreds of children appeared. They seemed to come from everywhere. Soon they were singing and dancing along with us. It was so different from the village we had been to the night before. Everyone here was bright-faced and happy. Most people came out to embrace Krsna consciousness. Like the Pied Piper, we chanted and danced down the street, with what seemed like thousands of children following us. It was a transcendentally wonderful experience and I again related it to the special nature of the day - Giri-Govardhana's Appearance Day.