Read Online Voyage By Dhow by Norman Lewis - Free Book Online Page B

years, the padre said, to many of the Indian tribes of North America, but in reality this was a symptom of withdrawal and despair. The Huichols on the other hand were abstemious and disciplined, and they took their peyote like a dose of strong religious medicine. Peyote was a god, and by eating it they absorbed its divine force. The Huichols would have been horrified, he said, to hear themselves described as drug takers. He showed me a nearika by the shaman Ramon Medina warning of the terrible fate, the madness that overtook Huichols who allowed themselves to be induced by sorcerers to indulge in the hallucinogenic Jimson’s weed ( datura )—the methylated spirits of the demoralized Indian.
    Then again, it had to be admitted that the gods of the Huichols were very close to them: cosy intimate figures from the family fireside, all of them seen and addressed as the nearest of relatives—Our Grandfather Fire; Our Mother Dove Girl, the Mother of Maize; Elder Brother Sacred Deer; Great Grandaddy Deer Tail. The padre thought that, by comparison, Christianity might seem abstract. In fact only one Christian saint—St Michael—had had any success, and he was accepted because his wings enabled the Huichols to identify him with the double-headed eagle god.
    I told Padre Ernesto that I would very much like to learn more about the Huichols by visiting them in their tribal area, and he said that this was easy enough to do, but I would have to arrange to go with a Franciscan friar and stay at a mission, where I would be most welcome. ‘Otherwise,’ he said, ‘you will be killed.’ I thought that he meant by bandits, but later I happened to meet a Mexican who had been born in a village on the edge of the sierra, and who said that some of the Huichols could be trigger-happy at times. They had suffered from the incursions of evildoers of all kinds, and a stranger without obvious business was far more likely to be an enemy than a friend.
    Padre Ernesto said that all one had to do was to go to the town of Tepic, in the State of Nayarit, ask at the airfield for Padre Alberto Hernandez, and through him charter the mission plane. This would fly to a landing strip in the sierra, after which, he said, there would be a short walk. I was to learn that the padre had fallen into a habit—common among those who have had long contact with Indians—of vagueness and understatement in matters of time and distance. In these countries people derive a huge and human satisfaction from telling others what they believe they want to know, and a village described as ‘not far away’ may be beyond a horizon of mountains, while anything within several hours’ trek is often quite simply aquicito —‘more or less here’. The alternative to the plane trip, and Padre Ernesto’s ‘short walk’ to follow it, was nine days on the back of a mule.
    The opportunity to return to Mexico and see the Huichols came early this year, and this time David Montgomery went with me to take photographs. We flew to Guadalajara for a last-minute briefing by Padre Ernesto, and from there we travelled to Tepic, down near the Pacific coast, by a Tres Estrellas bus—the heroic Mexican version of the North American Greyhound.
    Early next day we went to look for Padre Alberto at the airfield. Here at last, after the anonymous cities, we found ourselves in a traditional Mexican landscape, illuminated by a bland morning sun. To the south, an eruption had dumped glittering coals on a horizon of lively greens. Eastwards a small volcano tilted its crater in our direction, and beyond it the Sierra Madre rose up in a gentle blue swell. Two Huichols had come to catch a plane that might be going somewhere next day, and they squatted among the gesticulating cactus, faces chiselled with noble indifference, absorbing time through their skin. Vultures were pinned here and there like black brooches on the sky, and presently there appeared among them the glittering insect that soon transformed