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  v

The Serpent and the RainBow-The Jaguar

A map of the world covered most of one wall of the cafe, and as i huddled over a cup of coffe I noticed David staring at it intently. He glanced at me, then back at the map, then again at me, only this time with a grin that splayed his beard from ear to ear. Lifting his arm towars the map, he dropped his finger on a piece of land that cut into Hudson's Bay well beyond the Artic Circle. I looked over at him and felt my own arm rise until it landed me in the middle of the upper Amazon.

David left Cambridge later that week and within a month had moved into an Eskimo settlement on the shore of Rankin Inlet. It would be many months before I saw him again. For myself, I have decided to go to the Amazon, there was only one man to see. Professor Richard Evans Schultes was an almost mythic figure on the campus at that time, and like many other students both within and ouside the department of Antropology I had respect for him that bordered on veneration. The last of the great plant explores in the Victorian tradition, he was for us a hero in a time of few heroes,a man who, having taken a single semester's leave to collect medicinal plants in the northwest Amazon, had disappeared into the rain forest for twelve years.

Later that same afternoon, I slipped quitely onto the fourth floor of Harvard's Botanical Museum. On first sight the Spartan furnishings were disappointing, the herbarium cases too ordered and neat, the secretaries matronly. Then I discovered the laboratory. Most biological labs are sterile places, forests of tubes and flashing lights with preserved specimens issuing smells that could make a fresh flower wilt.

This palce was extraordinary. Against one wall beside a panoply of Amazonian dance masks was a rack of blowguns and spears. In glass-covered oak cabinets were laid out elegant displays of the world's most common narcotic plants. Bark cloth covered another wall. Scattered about the large room were plant products of every conceivable shape and formvials of essential oils, specimens of Para rubber, narcotic lianas and fish poisons, mahogany carvings, fibre mats and ropes and dozens of hand blown glass jars with pickled fruits from the Pacific, fruits that looked like stars.

Then I noticed the photgraphs. In one Schultes stood in a long line of Indian men, his chest decorated with intricate motifs and his gaunt frame wrapped in a grass skirt and draped in bark cloth. In another he was alone, perched like a raptor on the edge of a sandstone massif, peering into a sea of forest. A third captured him against the backdrop of a raging cataract in soiled khakis with a pistol strapped to his waist as he knelt to scrutinize a petroglyph. They were like images out of dreams, difficult to reconcile with the scholarly figure who quitely walked into the laboratory in front of me.

"Yes" he inquired a resonant Bostonian accent. Face to fact with a legend, I stumbled. Nervously  and in a single breath I told him my name, that I came from British Columbia, that I had saved some money working in a logging camp, and that I wanted to go to the Amazon to collect plants. At that time I knew little about the Amazon and less about plants. I expected him to quiz me. Instead, after gazing for a long time across the room, he peered back at me through his antiquated bifocals, across the stacks and stacks of plant specimens that littered the table between us, and said very simply, " So you want to to go to South America and collect plants. When would you like to leave?"

I returned two weeks later for a final meeting, at which time professor Schultes drew out a series of maps and outlined a number of possible expiditions. Aside from that he offered only two pieces of advice. Ther was no point buying a heavy pair of boots, he said, because what few snakes  I was apt to find generally bite at the neck; a pith helmet, however was indispensable. Then he suggested enthusiasstically that I not return from the Amazon without experimenting with ayahuasca, the vision vine, one of the most potent of hallucinogenic plants.

Three months to the day after leaving Boston, I sat in a dismal cantina in northern Colombia facing an eccentric geographer, an old friend of Professor Schulte's. A week before he had asked me to join him and a British journalist on a walk across "a few miles" of swamp in the northwestern corner of the country. The journalist was Sebastian Snow, an English aristocrat who, having just walked from Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America, now intended to walk to Alaska.

My hair was blond, she said, my skin golden, and my eyes the color of the sea. Before I had a chance to savor the compliment she added that it was too bad that all these features would be yellow by the time I reached Panama. That same night, to make matters worse, the geographer, who knew the region far better than I, somewhat mysteriously dropped out of the expedition.