Kon-Tiki Read online

  Our friend from the cargo plane, Jorge, nicknamed “the crazy flier,” belonged to one of the old Spanish families in Quito. He installed us in an antiquated, amusing hotel and then went round, sometimes with and sometimes without us, trying to get us transport over the mountains and down into the jungle to Quevedo. We met in the evening in an old Spanish café, and Jorge was full of bad news; we must absolutely put out of our heads the idea of going to Quevedo. Neither men nor vehicle were to be obtained to take us over the mountains, and certainly not down into the jungle where the rains had begun and where there was danger of attack if one stuck fast in the mud. Only last year a party of ten American oil engineers had been found killed by poisoned arrows in the eastern part of Ecuador, where many Indians still went about in the jungle stark naked and hunted with poisoned arrows. “Some of them are head-hunters,” Jorge said in a hollow voice, seeing that Herman, quite unperturbed, was helping himself to more beef and red wine.

  “You think I exaggerate,” he continued in a low voice. “But, although it is strictly forbidden, there are still people in this country who make a living by selling shrunken human heads. It’s impossible to control it, and to this very day the jungle Indians cut off the heads of their enemies among other nomad tribes. They smash up and remove the skull itself and fill the empty skin of the head with hot sand, so that the whole head shrinks till it’s hardly bigger than a cat’s head, without losing its shape or its features. These shrunken heads of enemies were once valuable trophies; now they’re rare black-market goods. Half-breed middlemen see that they get down to the buyers on the coast, who sell them to tourists for fabulous prices.”

  Jorge looked at us triumphantly. He little knew that Herman and I that same day had been dragged into a porter’s lodge and offered two of these heads at 1,000 sucres apiece. These heads nowadays are often fakes, made up from monkeys’ heads, but these two were genuine enough, pure Indians and so true to life that every tiny feature was preserved. They were the heads of a man and a woman, both the size of oranges; the woman was actually pretty, though only the eyelashes and long black hair had preserved their natural size. I shuddered at Jorge’s warning but expressed my doubts whether there were head-hunters west of the mountains.

  “One can never know,” said Jorge gloomily. “And what would you say if your friend disappeared and his head came into the market in miniature? That happened to a friend of mine once,” he added, staring at me stubbornly.

  “Tell us about it,” said Herman, chewing his beef slowly and with only moderate enjoyment.

  I laid my fork carefully aside, and Jorge told his story. He was once living with his wife on an outpost in the jungle, washing gold and buying up the take of the other gold-washers. The family had at that time a native friend who brought his gold regularly and sold it for goods. One day this friend was killed in the jungle. Jorge tracked down the murderer and threatened to shoot him. Now the murderer was one of those who were suspected of selling shrunken human heads, and Jorge promised to spare his life if he handed over the head at once. The murderer at once produced the head of Jorge’s friend, now as small as a man’s fist. Jorge was quite upset when he saw his friend again, for he was quite unchanged except that he had become so very small. Much moved, he took the little head home to his wife. She fainted when she saw it, and Jorge had to hide his friend in a trunk. But it was so damp in the jungle that clusters of green mold formed on the head, so that Jorge had to take it out now and then and dry it in the sun. It hung very nicely by the hair on a clothesline, and Jorge’s wife fainted every time she caught sight of it. But one day a mouse gnawed its way into the trunk and made a horrid mess of his friend. Jorge was much distressed and buried his friend with full ceremonies in a tiny little hole up on the airfield. For after all he was a human being, Jorge concluded.

  “Nice dinner,” I said to change the subject.

  As we went home in the dark, I had a disagreeable feeling that Herman’s hat had sunk far down over his ears. But he had only pulled it down to protect himself from the cold night wind from the mountains.

  Next day we were sitting with our own Consul General Bryhn and his wife under the eucalyptus trees at their big country place outside the town. Bryhn hardly thought our planned jungle trip to Quevedo would lead to any drastic change in our hat sizes, but—there were robbers about in those very regions we had thought of visiting. He produced clippings from local papers announcing that soldiers were to be sent out, when the dry season came, to extirpate the bandidos who infested the regions around Quevedo. To go there now was the sheerest madness, and we would never get guides or transport. While we were talking to him, we saw a jeep from the American military attaché’s office tear past along the road, and this gave us an idea. We went up to the American Embassy, accompanied by the consul general, and were able to see the military attaché himself. He was a trim, lighthearted young man in khaki and riding boots and asked laughingly why we had strayed to the top of the Andes when the local papers said we were to go to sea on a wooden raft.

  We explained that the wood was still standing upright in the Quevedo jungle and we were up here on the roof of the continent and could not get to it. We asked the military attaché either (a) to lend us a plane and two parachutes or (b) to lend us a jeep with a driver who knew the country.

  The military attaché at first sat speechless at our assurance; then he shook his head despairingly and said with a smile, all right—since we gave him no third choice, he preferred the second!

  At a quarter past five the next morning a jeep rolled up to our hotel entrance, and an Ecuadorian captain of engineers jumped out and reported himself at our service. His orders were to drive us to Quevedo, mud or no mud. The jeep was packed full of gasoline cans, for there were no gasoline pumps or even wheel tracks along the route we were to take. Our new friend, Captain Agurto Alexis Alvarez, was armed to the teeth with knives and firearms on account of the reports of bandidos. We had come to the country peacefully in business suits to buy timber for ready money down on the coast, and the whole of our equipment on board the jeep consisted of a bag of tinned food, except that we had hurriedly acquired a secondhand camera and a pair of tear-proof khaki breeches for each of us. In addition, the consul general had pressed upon us his big revolver with an ample supply of ammunition to exterminate everything that crossed our path. The jeep whizzed away through empty alleys where the moon shone ghostly pale on whitewashed adobe walls, till we came out into the country and raced at a giddy speed along a good sand road southward through the mountain region.

  It was good going all along the range as far as the mountain village of Latacunga, where windowless Indian houses clustered blindly round a whitewashed country church with palms in a square. Here we turned off along a mule track which undulated and twisted westward over hill and valley into the Andes. We came into a world we had never dreamed of. It was the mountain Indians’ own world—east of the sun and west of the moon—outside time and beyond space. On the whole drive we saw not a carriage or a wheel. The traffic consisted of barelegged goatherds in gaily colored ponchos, driving forward disorderly herds of stiff-legged, dignified llamas, and now and then whole families of Indians coming along the road. The husband usually rode ahead on a mule, while his little wife trotted behind with her entire collection of hats on her head and the youngest child in a bag on her back. All the time she ambled along, she spun wool with her fingers. Donkeys and mules jogged behind at leisure, loaded with boughs and rushes and pottery.

  Kon-Tiki ready to start in Callao Harbor. Like the Indians’ prehistoric vessels on the west coast of South America, our raft had an open bamboo cabin and two masts lashed together with a square sail between. The woman secretary of the expedition, Gerd Vold (inset), named the raft by smashing a coconut against the bow. The raft received the name Kon-Tiki in memory of the Peruvian sun-god, who long ago vanished westward across the sea.

  Erik puts the finishing touch to the raft. A Peruvian sailor helps him to fix a tholepi
n of the hardest wood for the steering oar.

  Thank you and good-by! The tug Guardian Rios turns back and leaves us to our fate.

  Under full sail out at sea. Nature was our only teacher, the last raftsmen having died several hundred years before, and we went through a hard school in our first weeks in the Humboldt Current off the coast of South America.

  The kitchen department. Before our fresh fruit ran out, we had entered waters where fish abounded. We cooked our food on a couple of primus stoves, which stood on the bottom of a wooden box, and generally had our meals on the starboard side of the raft in front of the entrance to the cabin. Like our prehistoric forerunners, we also had with us sweet potatoes and gourds from Peru.

  The farther we went, the fewer the Indians who spoke Spanish, and soon Agurto’s linguistic capacities were as useless as our own. A cluster of huts lay here and there up in the mountains; fewer and fewer were built of clay, while more and more were made of twigs and dry grass. Both the huts and the sunbrowned, wrinkle-faced people seemed to have grown up out of the earth itself, from the baking effect of the mountain sun on the rock walls of the Andes. They belonged to cliff and scree and upland pasture as naturally as the mountain grass itself. Poor in possessions and small in stature, the mountain Indians had the wiry hardiness of wild animals and the childlike alertness of a primitive people, and the less they could talk, the more they could laugh. Radiant faces with snow-white teeth shone upon us from all we saw. There was nothing to indicate that the white man had lost or earned a dime in these regions. There were no billboards or road signs, and if a tin box or a scrap of paper was flung down by the roadside, it was picked up at once as a useful household article.

  We went on up over sun-smitten slopes without a bush or tree and down into valleys of desert sand and cactus, till finally we climbed up and reached the topmost crest with snow fields round the peak and a wind so bitingly cold that we had to slacken speed in order not to freeze to bits as we sat in our shirts longing for jungle heat. For long stretches we had to drive across country between the mountains, over scree and grassy ridges, searching for the next bit of road. But when we reached the west wall, where the Andes range falls precipitously to the lowlands, the mule track was cut along shelves in the loose rock, and sheer cliffs and gorges were all about us. We put all our trust in friend Agurto as he sat crouched over the steering wheel, always swinging out when we came to a precipice. Suddenly a violent gust of wind met us; we had reached the outermost crest of the Andes chain, where the mountain fell away sharply in a series of precipices to the jungle far down in a bottomless abyss 12,000 feet beneath us. But we were cheated of the dizzy view over the sea of jungle, for, as soon as we reached the edge, thick cloud banks rolled about us like steam from a witches’ cauldron. But now our road ran down unhindered into the depths. Always down, in steep loops along gorges and bluffs and ridges, while the air grew damper and warmer and ever fuller of the heavy, deadening hothouse air which rose from the jungle world below.

  And then the rain began. First gently, then it began to pour and beat upon the jeep like drumsticks, and soon the chocolate-colored water was flowing down the rocks on every side of us. We almost flowed down, too, away from the dry mountain plateaus behind us and into another world, where stick and stone and clay slope were soft and lush with moss and turf. Leaves shot up; soon they became giant leaves hanging like green umbrellas and dripping over the hillside. Then came the first feeble advanced posts of the jungle trees, with heavy fringes and beards of moss and climbing plants hanging from them. There was a gurgling and splashing everywhere. As the slopes grew gentler, the jungle rolled up swiftly like an army of green giant growths that swallowed up the little jeep as it splashed along the waterlogged clay road. We were in the jungle. The air was moist and warm and heavy with the smell of vegetation.

  Darkness had fallen when we reached a cluster of palm-roofed huts on a ridge. Dripping with warm water, we left the jeep for a night under a dry roof. The horde of fleas that attacked us in the hut were drowned in the next day’s rain. With the jeep full of bananas and other tropical fruit we went on downhill through the jungle, down and down, though we thought we had reached bottom long ago. The mud grew worse but it did not stop us, and the robbers kept at an unknown distance.

  Not till the road was barred by a broad river of muddy water rolling down through the jungle did the jeep give up. We stood stuck fast, unable to move either up or down along the riverbank. In an open clearing stood a hut where a few half-breed Indians were stretching out a jaguar skin on a sunny wall, while dogs and fowl were splashing about enjoying themselves on top of some cocoa beans spread out to dry in the sun. When the jeep came bumping along, the place came to life and some natives who spoke Spanish informed us that this was the Rio Palenque and that Quevedo was just on the other side. There was no bridge there, and the river was swift and deep, but they were willing to float us and the jeep over by raft. The queer contraption lay down by the bank. Twisted logs as thick as our arms were fastened together with vegetable fibers and bamboos to form a flimsy raft, twice the length and breadth of the jeep. With a plank under each wheel and our hearts in our mouths we drove the jeep out onto the logs, and though most of them were submerged under the muddy water, they did bear the jeep and us and four half-naked chocolate-colored men who pushed us off with long poles.

  “Balsa?” Herman and I asked in the same breath.

  “Balsa,” one of the fellows nodded, with a disrespectful kick at the logs.

  The current seized us and we whirled down the river, while the men pushed in their poles at the right places and kept the raft on an even diagonal course across the current and into quieter water on the other side. This was our first meeting with the balsa tree and our first trip on a balsa raft. We brought the raft safely to land at the farther bank and motored triumphantly into Quevedo. Two rows of tarred wooden houses with motionless vultures on the palm roofs formed a kind of street, and this was the whole place. The inhabitants dropped whatever they might be carrying, and black and brown, young and old, appeared swarming out of both doors and windows. They rushed to meet the jeep—a menacing, chattering tide of humanity. They scrambled on to it and under it and round it. We kept a tight hold on our worldly possessions while Agurto attempted desperate maneuvers at the steering wheel. Then the jeep had a puncture and went down on one knee. We had arrived at Quevedo and had to endure the embrace of welcome.

  Don Federico’s plantation lay a bit farther down the river. When the jeep came bumping into the yard along a path between the mango trees with Agurto, Herman, and me, the lean old jungle-dweller came to meet us at a trot with his nephew Angelo, a small boy who lived with him out in the wilds. We gave messages from Don Gustavo, and soon the jeep was standing alone in the yard while a fresh tropical shower streamed down over the jungle. There was a festive meal in Don Federico’s bungalow; suckling pigs and chickens crackled over an open fire, while we sat round a dish loaded with tropical fruit and explained what we had come for. The jungle rain pouring down on the ground outside sent a warm sweet gust of scented blossoms and clay in through the window netting.

  Don Federico had become as brisk as a boy. Why, yes, he had known balsa rafts since he was a child. Fifty years ago, when he lived down by the sea, the Indians from Peru still used to come sailing up along the coast on big balsa rafts to sell fish in Guayaquil. They could bring a couple of tons of dried fish in a bamboo cabin in the middle of the raft, or they might have wives and children and dogs and fowl on board. Such big balsa trees as they had used for their rafts would be hard to find now in the rains, for floodwater and mud had already made it impossible to get to the balsa plantation up in the forest, even on horseback. But Don Federico would do his best; there might still be some single trees growing wild in the forest nearer the bungalow, and we did not need many.

  Late in the evening the rain stopped for a time, and we went for a turn under the mango trees round the bungalow. Here Don Federico had every kind of
wild orchid in the world hanging down from the branches, with half-coconuts as flowerpots. Unlike cultivated orchids, these rare plants gave out a wonderful scent, and Herman was bending down to stick his nose into one of them when something like a long, thin, glittering eel emerged from the leaves above him. A lightning blow from Angelo’s whip, and a wriggling snake fell to the ground. A second later it was held fast to the earth with a forked stick over its neck, and then its head was crushed.

  “Mortal,” said Angelo and exposed two curved poison fangs to show what he meant.

  After that we thought we saw poisonous snakes lurking in the foliage everywhere and slipped into the house with Angelo’s trophy hanging lifeless across a stick. Herman sat down to skin the monster, and Don Federico was telling fantastic stories about poisonous snakes and boa constrictors as thick as dinner plates when we suddenly noticed the shadows of two enormous scorpions on the wall, the size of lobsters. They rushed at each other and engaged in a life-and-death battle with their pincers, with their hinder parts turned up and their curved poisonous sting at the tail ready for the deathblow. It was a horrible sight, and not till we moved the oil lamp did we see that it had cast a supernaturally gigantic shadow of two quite ordinary scorpions of the size of one’s finger, which were fighting on the edge of the bureau.

  “Let them be,” Don Federico laughed. “One’ll kill the other, and we want the survivor in the house to keep the cockroaches away. Just keep your mosquito net tight round the bed and shake your clothes before you put them on, and you’ll be all right. I’ve often been bitten by scorpions and I’m not dead yet,” added the old man, laughing.