Kingdom of Amerindia by Henry Shukman

The engines of the little plane moan in boredom as we duck through airpockets, climbing out of the city. An oily sun winks from the brown meander of an estuary below. Breakers straight as fences drift in across mud flats at the edge of the brown Pacific. Panama’s cluster of white high-rises look drab under the morning clouds. The other passengers stare with sullen fixity at the land below, determined not to be surprised by fear of flying, as we climb up over the central mountains of the Isthmus.

Far ahead, emerging from the limit of sight, a silver sheet stretches away from the green jigsaw of headlands: the Caribbean, the other side. From this height it appears startling as Balboa’s first glimpse of the Pacific in 1516, a sheet of beaten silver dotted with little cloud-shadows, a leopard-skin ocean hidden beyond the hills, tucked into the remotest corner of the Caribbean. A sea lying silent off Darien, last wilderness of the Americas, narrow bridge between North and South, only point between Alaska and Tierra del Fuego that no highway can cross, the missing link in the American chain.

In fact the stippled shadows are islands, little fragments of coconut heaven littered along Panama’s northeastern coast. The San Blas Islands, or rather islets - tiny islands never more than a few hundred yards long, often so small they support only two or three coconut palms - are a kingdom unto themselves. The Comarca de San Blas, a territory within Panama, has its own laws, its own leaders, its own way of life. Arguably it’s the last intact piece of pre-columbian Caribbean, the very world that Columbus, Cortes and Nuñez de Balboa found paddling up to their sloops when they first hove in sight.

There are no maps of San Blas. What would anyone want one for? Each island is walkable in a matter of minutes, in some cases seconds (as long as the heat hasn’t debilitated you) and they lie so close to one another that the next few are always visible. Few outsiders are foolhardy enough to sail their waters, which are laced with reefs (and with the half-rotted skeletons of vessels whose skippers were foolhardy enough).

The islands are unknowable, remaining a mystery even after several days in their waters, under the shade of their palms. They are a complete world, impossible to penetrate, hard to absorb, easy to be absorbed by.

They lie strung along the coast for a hundred miles, from the headland of El Porvenir, the Future, all the way to the Colombian border like stepping-stones into South America. Brochures say there are 365 of them, 52 inhabited, but these tourist statistics grow from the grey area of islands with seasonal camps, of rocks and reefs that break the surface in all but the fiercest storms. Their inhabitants are the 20,000 Cuna Indians.

In 1925 the Cuna revolted against Panamian attempts to force them into a western lifestyle in a much-feted war of independence, which was only quelled by the intervention of America, uneasy at the prospect of armed dispute so close to the Canal. The result of the war was the formation of the Cuna’s own autonomous region where they live the old way - with machetes and dugouts, bamboo and coconut longhouses, stapled on fish and rice. The women go about in their famous molas, brilliantly embroidered cloths, and pierce their noses with gold rings, and the men lounge about each night in the “Congress Houses,” giant communal longhouses, where they discuss tribal matters, recite myths, and smoke up a storm. They live altogether like the most Levi-Straussian of Amazonians - the full monty, everything to make an anthropologist’s mouth water: night-long recitations of myth, panpipe dances, shamans on every corner, matriarchal rules and puberty rites for girls toasted not with home-brew but home-chew - sugar-cane beer fermented with saliva. This is the real thing, ancient life sweeping back to the immemorial origins of man.

Yet the Cunas know all about the other side too. Many of them have go to work in Panama City and the “Zone” (the Canal Zone). They see tourists, sell them molas, they have stores stocked with coke and cigarettes, albeit usually just one brand. (One shop I wandered into had stacks and stacks of cartons on high shelves. 15,000 cigarettes, I worked out, and every one of them a Menthol Doral.) Yet they gracefully maintain their traditions. They chose traditional life seventy years ago but there is nothing self-conscious about their traditions. They simply observe them without question - a little kingdom of Amerindia floating on the edge of the Caribbean, aware of its place in the world but untroubled by it.

Life here is Robinson Crusoe cubed. Man Fridays everywhere, families living all alone on lonely coconut cays, visited by cousins and plantain vendors in dugouts once a week or once a month, subsisting on the fruits of the reef, on coconuts, on yucca from mainland farms, living in palm huts and washing in the sea. In fact, you don't need to be on San Blas long to develop a passionate admiration for the slight and ever-humourous Cunas’ skill with the resources of their world. They make Crusoe look about as dexterous and sensitive to his environment as the loggers of Brazil.

I first heard about the Cuna from reading Levi-Strauss, founding father of Structural Anthropology. He wrote a seminal essay on the songs and chants of the Cuna healers entitled “The Efficacy of Symbols.” Whenever a woman is having trouble in child-birth, the shaman comes and tells her a long, not to say tall, story about a mythical hero who battles his way down into the underworld, negotiates with a chief spirit for some missing part of the newborn’s soul, then fights his way back to this world. By the time he gets home, the woman has invariably given birth. The Cuna come across well in the essay as ingenious, persuasive and good-humoured people. But it was written fifty years ago. If any of their old ways had survived it would surely be on the most outlying islands.

Accordingly, as soon as I stepped off the little tin aeroplane of Cuna Air (which landed on a tiny bumpy strip squeezed in between two beaches), I bent my dugout’s prow towards Chichimen, island of the chichi, a small plum-like fruit. It’s an island not more than 400 yards across, with a population of twenty, and lies a few miles out from the coast, on the fringe of Cuna territory. When the weather is clear, you see the khaki mountains of the mainland far away. Otherwise, they vanish in white haze. A reef lies half a mile offshore, the last reef before the open sea, roaring constantly like a train.

King of Chichimen is Don Ramon. For twenty years he worked as a chef in Panama City then returned to claim his patrimony. He is a small old man with a permanent smile, and three sturdy pegs for teeth either side of an empty gum.

“I haven't left this island in seventeen years,” he told me. “Not a single day. My father died, I came straight back. All my brothers have gone too now,” he says, raising a hand from his cane. “I'm the last.” Soy el ultimo.

He may be the last but he is not alone. His niece Buna lives in the hut next door, a middle-aged woman with the Beatle-bob and permanent smile of Cuna women, and in a third hut across the yard lives Muchacho, “Boy,” her estranged husband. Boy is getting on for the honorific. In his fifties at least, with a face like varnished oak, he walks with stiff determination about his duties, which are liberally showered upon him by Don Ramon. “Boy, fetch fruit. Boy, cut three coconut. Boy, fish.”

Boy rides a dugout like something out of the Flintstones-At-The-Beach, a hefty bole with a sizable shark-bite taken out of the stern and a lump of lava for an anchor. Every morning he shoves it down the beach off its log roller and paddles into the lagoon, pausing to bail with half a cracked gourd every few minutes. You see him bobbing out there near the reef as the sun climbs up. When he paddles back in late morning, another member of the island entourage, Eulogio, comes to the beach to meet him. Eulogio loads the fluttering snappers into a broken clockface that must have once washed up with a tide. (One of the Cuna’s storehouses is the sea, the Walmart of the Waves.)

Boy would like to live with his wife Buna but she won't have him. But Eulogio, who shares her hut, is not the reason why. Cuna have clear-cut dress codes. Men wear shorts or trousers. Women wear wraps and blouses decorated with molas and habitually daub bright rouge on their cheeks.

Eulogio, a youngish man with long wavy hair, uses the rouge, wears a pink singlet and wraps a towel round his waist, a halfway house to a woman’s wrap. For he is not a man but an omegit, a man-woman, a Cuna transvestite.

Tribal people are wild. Everything the explorers used to say about them is true - wild, childlike, crazy, unpredictable. Except that these are all qualities we’d admire nowadays. We don't realize anymore just how stuffy and Victorian we all are, because stuffy Victorians went around colonizing the world ruining all the fun, and now there’s hardly anyone left to compare us to. Imagine, for example, a society where instead of money people valued laughter and myths. No TV, no electricity, so every night is a romance of starlight and flickering oil lamps, and for entertainment the voice of the village chief half-singing, half-chanting about your favourite cartoon character and his adventures in a legendary land. Except that the character really exists, as far as you are concerned. And loves you, wants to help you, is helping you. Where the politicians are elected for their ability to entertain you with stories and remain in power only as long as they do entertain you. Where at night all the men troop off to smoke in their clubhouse and to tell each stories about the gods. Where you grow up with all your cousins and friends in a kind of giant playpen full of swings that are also beds so you go to sleep in a swing. Where no one eats or drinks anything that they haven't caught or grown, except for the odd coca-cola. Where when the village wants to get drunk you all grind, chew and brew the beer together, then drink yourselves blind until it runs out, then lie around in your hammocks groaning ensemble.

We don't know what community means, in our nuclear suburban boxes. But more than that, the loss of the world’s tribes is the loss of mankind’s greatest happiness. What it’s like to live in a world composed of one fabric, a world whose dimensions you know - the underworld, the overworld, this world - where building materials are growing all around you, like food and medicine too, where you know that you’re living in largely the way your great-grandfather’s great-grandfather did, where every night is rich with promise, entertainment and excitement, and comfort, through the very lack of electricity and television - we can only guess how good that must feel.

The Cuna live like this. They are happy. So it doesn’t occur to them not to accept that some boys gravitate towards women’s things - needle and thread, the cooking hut, the babies. They make no attempt to get them to conform. They don’t know disapproval. They allow these men to grow up as omegits because that’s evidently what nature intended. They say the omegits make the best molas.

Eulogio, Chichimen’s omegit, carries the catch to the cooking hut behind Don Ramon’s house. Ramon sits in his doorway watching the goings-on. Soon Buna will put more coconut stems on the fire and start deep-frying the fish for lunch, or else will heap up the coconut husks and smoke the fish.

Meanwhile a fifth friend, Señor Jose, is hard at work grating copra to make coconut milk for the rice. (No rice is decent without a generous dollop of coco milk.) Having grated up a bowlful he ladles in some wellwater (wherever you dig on the island you find water) and inserts his mahogany hands in the pulp, squeezing the mix through a perforated gourd, making the rich white juice flood out.

Señor Jose is Ramon’s age, bow-legged and light-headed. Every evening he comes past my hut with a raggedy towel over his shoulder and announces that he is on his way to the well to wash. “It’s good to wash in the evening,” he declares, toppling on his stiff legs. “In the evening and in the morning,” he adds.

Four dogs live in the compound too: the puppy Suzuki, the barker Negra, of whom they agree that she’s a buena watchiman, and Tambourin, an elegant young bitch who likes to sleep under my hammock. The fourth “dog” is Achu, which means Dog, although in fact he’s a young man. His name causes peals of laughter each time it is uttered. No one will tell me how he earned it.

The weird thing about living in all this Nature is how it reminds you of cities. First there’s all that industrial noise from the reef - a constant resonance in the back of your skull. Then this house I’m staying in - it’s a palm shelter with only one wall, a kind of gazebo in which you sling up your hammock from the beams, opening onto a grove of coconuts that lead down to the sea some forty feet away. With the drifting shade of the fronds, it feels just like a pillared patio, and has an air of proportion and calm that an architect would die to recreate. And the sea just here is swimming-pool green, and comes round the side of the island in a warm channel four feet deep and maybe ten yards wide, before rising further out in coral heads and underwater grasses. It’s like a dream pool, always clean, naturally plumbed and filtered and heated, just at the end of the patio.

I look straight out to that roaring reef. Sometimes you see the black faces of breakers rising like shark fins above the horizon, then unfurling like mirages. (There are no real sharks in Kuna Yala, Cuna Land. Many years ago a shaman turned himself into a shark and lured them all away, then devised a metaphysical fence to keep them out. So far none have penetrated it.) All around lies broad sea, with a dozen or so distant islands jumbled on the skyline in smoky blue, murky grey, deep green.

You fall asleep with the wind stirring the folds of your hammock and the thunder of the reef resonating at the deepest pitch of hearing like infrared sound.

Only the pots, machetes and me are intruders in this paleolithic paradise. It’s a wonderful thing to live in the midst of nature and natural things, but it’s hard to say exactly why. Something happens. At first you just feel: this is a nice place. Then, after a day, you find a warmth has spontaneously arisen within. The first night, sleeping in the open wind, is a stirring, restless experience, but you wake at dawn excited and ready to give yourself to the island. You will walk round it, explore, maybe go fishing with Boy or Achu. Is there any phrase that holds a greater promise than explore the island? You can't help but imagine living here. What it would do for you! All your reasoned defences melting in the heat, Nature entering your mind and body and rearranging them, performing its subtle surgery on your soul, relieving you of the ability to worry. Then you think: why not stay? Why not live like this? There’s really nothing stopping you. You could enter the Stone Age dream of harmony here, where your conscious and subconscious melt into one another, and stay forever. Life here is one deep dream of easy motion. The rock of the dugout, the swing of the hammock, the glitter of palm fronds, the scintillations of the lagoon - nothing stops moving. As if the world had become a great lung filled with a rhythmic breathing.

You walk around your domain: so isolated, so protected. You may never have felt this safe. You begin to notice patterns everywhere: in the stars of the palms fronds, in the pelicans’ endlessly repeated glide and plunge, glide and plunge, in the little grasses that sprout up in long straight rows off buried roots, in the starred perforations of a sand dollar. You begin to wish you too could be infused with a similar patterning, then realize that you are, you’re just unschooled in seeing it. The veil of civilization tears. Beneath, you glimpse a different person: simple, strong, awake, brown-shouldered. A man who would take pleasure in beaching his own dugout, in hanging up a bleached board he found washed up on the beach to serve as a shelf. In bailing his craft with a gourd. In fuelling his own fire, cooking his catch. In cutting palm fronds and bending them over a rack of poles tied with string to make a roof. In making a table out of four forked sticks planted in the ground, and two cross-pieces laid from fork to fork. In strolling the beach in the afternoon to look for useful pieces of wood, old plastic plates, bottles, a broken frisbee, whatever might be handy round the house. A man for whom money - coins, bills - would be funny and interesting, nice objects to get hold of just for themselves. Who would never again wear a tie in his life. Who would learn stories by heart and relate them to his neighbours or their children and they would listen with pleasure. For whom paper would become more precious than clothes.

You feel that in normal life you have never known what simple meant. Natural, too, is a new discovery.

Paradise? Eden is an inappropriate analogy. There is toil here, plenty of sweat and uncertainty. But there is innocence too. We suffer from millennia of indoctrination that innocence must be lost, paradise forsaken. Swinging in the firm embrace of my hammock, that now seems a dangerous falsehood, one that has propelled the world into disaster. Here, innocence is not negotiable. How can it be with that reef thundering within your skull and the coconut fronds shivering overhead?

Yet each morning in the dug-outs your fingers reek of death: of fish oil, fish blood.

We could be in deepest Amazonia. The pleasure here is akin to the model railway: seeing a complete world intact. Our global world can never be seen in its entirety. But this is a whole universe replete with its spirits and Creator and ancestral sages, its coconut currency (they come in bunches of four tied at the stems) and its own indigenous technology. It is woven of a single fabric, the palm.
Panama may be a banana republic, but this is a coconut culture. A handful of the palm’s uses:
1. Drink the nut’s water.
2. Eat the fresh copra.
3. Chip off a piece of husk for use as a spatula.
4. Smoke fish over the dried husks.
5. Grate, soak and sieve the copra for coconut milk.
6. Grate, heat and skim to get coconut oil:
a. for frying.
b. for lamps.
c. for skin lotion.
7. Burn old palm-stems for firewood.
8. Weave fronds for roofing.
9. Lop trunks for house-posts.
10. Roll logs for wheeling dugouts into water.
11. Strip spines off the fronds and tie together for brooms.
12. Lie in shifting shade of the trees.

Then you get the rash. Even here a little rain must fall.

Achu takes me fishing. We paddle out, tipping alarmingly in his log. Water seeps in around the tin patches that have been nailed over the leaks and around the nail heads in the patches. Every few minutes one of us has to stop paddling and bail.

The reef’s roar grows louder. A hundred yards off, Achu ties his yellow rope to his anchor rock and chucks it over the side. We bait our hooks with the little “sardinas” we caught earlier off the beach and start dangling for snappers and young parrotfish. After a few lost bites Achu dons his mask and performs a curious lolloping headfirst exit, developed specifically for use in precarious dugouts, and disappears with his snare in search of lobster.

He is away a long time. Now and then I see a distant head bobbing in the water. I carry on fishing, missing bite after bite, working my way through the bait. The wind seems to pick up. Achu told me there were two winds here, brisas off the sea and viento from the land. Today, being the third day after the new moon, the wind is supposed to change from sea to land, which would mean quieter water. So far he seems to be wrong. The rippled lagoon is becoming choppy. I begin to appreciate the full implications of the dugout: it really is just a log, eminently rollable. I bail like mad but the water keeps coming in. Every time a wavelet slaps our prow, a jet of foam spurts through a knot in the wood.

And the sun is high now. The gathering breeze keeps me cool, but I am taking a lot of rays on my un-acclimatized limbs and cranium.

By the time Achu returns and we paddle back to the beach I feel distinctly light-headed. I follow the path through the palms back to our hut and swing myself into a hammock. Achu was right: the wind has shifted to the land now. At last I understand why mine is the only house on the northern shore. Here, in the lee of all the palms of the interior, the breeze dies almost completely. Firstly, the island becomes fantastically hot, as if the very ground were red-hot iron. Secondly, all the insects God has raised against man wake from their graves. I slap six dreamy mosquitoes in as many seconds on my legs. Horse flies circle my head. Tiny house-flies dart around my face. Now and then a sharp prick has me searching leg or arm, where I find a microscopic life-form, a mere grain of life smaller than a sand-grain, that crumbles under my attempts to brush it away - far too small, one would think, to deliver such a sharp stab. I sweat; I itch. I fan at the marauders. The hut becomes an entomologist’s fantasy, a marvellous in situ lab. How can so many man-molesters coexist in such a small space?

There’s only one safe place: the swimming channel off the beach. I run down just in time to see a large dugout filled with a family from a neighbouring island come sailing by, the sail a collection of rags stitched together. They all stare at me with fixed bewilderment. Bashfulness gets the better of me. I return to the hut, wrap in a sheet, pray for wind.

Buna and Eulogio bring over the evening meal: an aluminium pan of rice and plantains; an old frisbee serving as a platter for the fried fish. Buna greets me with her usual smile, puts down her load, then raises her eyebrows, emits a whoop of surprise, and takes hold of my arm.

I had not noticed, but it is covered from wrist to bicep in an angry rash. The other arm too, and now that I take a look, my legs have also been colonized. Sunburn? Salt rash? Prickly heat? Some medley of insect venoms?

Buna, who speaks no Spanish, strokes my arm and says something she knows I’ll never understand, echoed by Eulogio.

I have a troubled night. Whether the rash worsens or just seems to now that I'm aware of it, the cocktail of sun, salt, insect and rash works up a good head of itch. Not only that, but a storm approaches. After supper I sit on the beach watching the lightning’s display a few islands away. Out of the black sky sudden dreamscapes of gold and mauve erupt. Half a minute late long grumbles interfere with the even roar of the reef.

It is quite a storm. It spreads either way round the island, embracing it. Clatters of firecrackers fall down the sky. I retreat to my hammock. Minute by minute the flashes encompass more and more of the sky, the thunderclaps intensify. The wind drops completely. For five minutes all is quiet: a sickly overheated lull. Then suddenly the wind is racing in again, sucking through the open hut, hissing in the palms. The rain arrives with apocalyptic decisiveness, a sudden roar. It’s not long before the thatch gives way, dribbling into my face in the dark. I cocoon myself in the hammock. I haven’t been this scared of a storm since I was a child camping in the garden. I feel as breakable as bamboo. The thunderbolts shake the wicker frame of my chest. The wind flaps around my balsa-wood legs.

The wind dies but lightning flickers silently long into the night.

In the morning Achu pays a visit. He sweeps back his long hair and says what a storm, what relampagos. “Luz-boom! Luz-boom!” he says, in case I don't know what relampagos are, throwing his hands apart like an explosion on each boom!

The next day help arrives in the form of Henry Harrison. Henry, a Cuna who speaks a garbled English half-remembered from his twenty years in the Zone, arrives with two companions from El Porvenir in a dugout with a small engine. They are all on their way to Rio Tigre, an island half way to Colombia, some fifty miles away, where Henry has business to attend to.

He wears thick glasses and slacks, a shirt with a breast pocket from which protrudes a biro cap: the garb of the intellectual. Henry is conducting “investigations” into his people.

“Yeah when I eight a got a big dream a man with a beard come and tell me I live to a hundreds and meet peoples from all over the world. Then a cargo boat take me to Panama. I cry and cry, and that really happen you know.” His conversation skips nimbly from autobiography to native philosophy and back. Henry has visited most of the Cuna islands and knows his people well. He draws me into his friend Don Ramon’s hut and launches into a speech on the wisdom of the Cuna elders and healers. Before he jumps onto some other topic, I jump first, presenting him with my left arm. Does he know of a healer who could do something about this?

Indeed he does. Rio Tigre, the very island he is heading for, is home to the finest Cuna medicine-men.

It’s hard to leave Chichimen. The island has become a womb, a place of gestation, a cuna, or cradle. But soon the waves have taken hold of my dreaminess. As we tip and loll through the waters, the many islands trundle back and forth like beetles along the horizon, rearranging themselves so just when you think you know which is Achutupo, which Corbiski, you realize you no have idea at all. The mountains of the mainland move closer, fuming like an old fire.

Our first stop is Rio Sidra. This is one of the 20 or 30 village-islands, covered in palm-thatch houses with sandy alleyways threaded among them. It has a plaza with a basketball court, a “Congress” house, a few shops.

On the plaza four boys are kicking around a football that sounds like it’s made of lead each time it connects with ankle or skull. Naked toddlers play a game of tag in one corner, occasionally getting stranded in the middle of an intense piece of ball-play, whereupon they either freeze in terror or flock to the other end of the pitch.

It becomes clear that we are to spend the night here. Henry conducts us to the longhouse of Señor Jorge Carpintero, George the Carpenter, a mild-mannered, self-possessed man, far calmer than the excitable Henry, who slings up extra hammocks in his longhouse and decides to go fishing for the extra dinner.

I join him. Soft sunspots float across the blurry mosaic of the water, bringing with them the sounds of an ancient settlement - voices, the knock of wood on wood, children’s excited cries, the gurgle of distant laughter, a child’s call - Nini! Nini! - sounding like a faint mosquito whine. The sounds of a village without gasoline or electricity.

We catch fifteen little fish then return. As we climb into the alley at the back of Jorge’s house all the women of the household come out to greet us, Jorge’s mother-in-law and four sisters-in-law. One of them attempts to bring down a sheet drying on a high line in the breeze. As she releases the line, the sheet floats away like a kite, until Jorge reaches for it with the poles of the sardine net and pulls it back to earth.

Jorge kneels on the floor in front of a kerosene lamp. First it emits clouds of black smoke, then the whole thing is enveloped in a single yellow flame, which finally settles down into a blinding dazzle of white light, throwing most of the longhouse into blackest shade.

There’s nothing like night in a longhouse. This one must be forty yards long, twenty feet tall. Its rafters are completely filled, like a clothing store, with children’s clothes, all folded over the beams in great long rows: knickers here, blouses there, trousers up above. A troupe of kids run around, periodically flocking the table where Jorge, Henry and I sit. A feast arrives: lobster, fish, fried plantains, yucca, coconut rice, all washed down with bottles of Pepsi Cola. The children gather to watch, until a loud squealing sounds out in the alley, and they all flock outside as one, just in time to see a pig go by, dragged by its hind trotters. Its front feet leave long twin lines in the dirt. The sight elicits peals of hilarity from everyone.

Later, in the dark, kerosene light tiger-stripes the whole interior, shining through the bamboo slats of the walls. The structure groans with the weight of twenty filled hammocks. Soft chatter continues late into the night. Two or three houses away you can hear two girls laughing, the laugh becoming a long dreamy moan of sleepiness: a final note for the day. The entire village is permeable, each house a soft-walled cell breathing into its neighbour. Swinging, swinging in the hammock, I wonder: can this place really be as good for the soul as it feels?

I wake up itching in the middle of the night. The darkness is heavy with slumber.

Nescafe and freshly baked rolls. The Cuna like their bread rolls. They buy great sacks of flour off the Colombian peddlar barks that call in from time to time, and roll out long thin sausages of dough with their hands, to bake in clay ovens.

The boat’s engine is not well today. As we churn along, the waves sloshing and slapping over us so in a matter of minutes we are drenched as if just hauled on board, the motor occasionally interrupts its even roar to break into a series of moans: no no no!...no no!...no no no no! it pleads. And sure enough, soon it can take no more.

We drift in silence, relieved for a while not to be bucketed by the waves. The rest of the journey we have to limp along at quarter speed. Every time the driver tries to increase the revs, the outboard gasps, loses its stride, rattles and dies. What should have taken an hour takes five.

Rio Tigre is another village of thatch adrift in time, unanchored to any century, barely to a millennium. How long has mankind been making dugout canoes and palm shelters and scraping out fields of crops in the jungle? Since the dawn of the neolithic, whenever that was.

As we coast up to the dock Henry again becomes his busy, nervous self. It’s like arriving in the middle of Chapter 21 of a Graham Greene novel: a scene of quiet desolation. A dilapidated Colombian boat creaks at the dock, draped with supine peddlars taking siestas amid piles of knick-knacks and vegetable sacks. A concrete quay gives onto a concrete square where four or five individuals rest in the thin shade of roofs. A young woman, apparently a friend of Henry’s, charges me three dollars’ “island tax.” She goes into a room with a table and chair, extracts a receipt book, and painstakingly writes one out for me. Without the breeze of motion the heat is intolerable. And with the boat the way it is, we are stuck here.

We idle away the afternoon in a shop, drinking orange sodas, then in the schoolteacher’s house, swinging in hammocks.

When darkness falls Henry conducts me straight to the Congress House to see the sahila, or chief. In the twilight of the giant longhouse two men at the front sway side by side in white hammocks. One keeps up a stream of high-pitched emphatic chanting, punctuated every so often by a decisive note from the other: Nabiri! Nabiri!

“He is telling for the history of Cuna peoples and cultures,” Henry tells me, making no attempt to keep his voice down. I realize then that quite a number of men are seated on the rows of benches. They maintain a low babble of chatter. Apparently no one is expected to listen too closely to the lengthy recitation going on. It forms an aural wallpaper to the assembly room, a Cuna muzak. A backdrop to life continually at the fringe of consciousness, just where history should be.

The sweet smell of tobacco fills the room. A hurricane lamp hangs in one corner, making the whole scene tender with its weak light.

A man with a belly - rare here - slouches on a bench at the front. On seeing Henry and me he leans over and reaches through the hammock strings to shake hands. Henry and he start talking, ignoring the solemnities a few feet away. Then Henry tells me this is the sahila and I may present my petition. “He speak Espanny.”

I get a sudden attack of shyness. There are a lot of men in the room, and more keep arriving. I am in their meeting-house. An old man nearby, his face glistening like walnut wood in the light of the lamp, stuffs his pipe full of aromatic tobacco and lights up, softly sucking, half-listening for what I will have to say for myself.

After a greeting elaborate enough to make a courtier of the Siglo de Oro blush, I express my hope that I may be treated by one of his village’s far-famed curanderos.

The sahila tells me to take a seat. I sit on the bench beside him, the nearest available spot, wondering if I am committing a sacrilege by sharing his throne with him. He stands up and talks out loud in Cuna, seeming to address no one in particular, talking into the empty darkness ahead. Then he sits down and lights a cigarette. Meanwhile the low chanting at the front continues uninterrupted.

Immediately a man somewhere behind me stands up and launches into musical speech. His voice is at times gravelly, at others high-pitched and incisive. It glides, swoops, plunges, climbs musical stairs towards emphatic points. He goes on and on, long enough that I become comfortable that he cannot possibly be talking about me. How could I occasion such rhetoric?

Finally he stops. Beside me, Walnut Face’s pipe bubbles softly as he sucks. He seems to be enjoying the performance. He pulls his pipe stem from his mouth, leans back and starts to talk, softly and thoughtfully, though humorously too, it seems. Soon the whole longhouse erupts in laughter. I can feel the bench shaking as the sahila rocks back and forth up at his end. The old man, warming to his theme, rises to his feet and keeps up the show, his old voice sounding muffled like someone talking next door, yet carrying well enough to cause rumbles of delight in the audience.

By now I am quite sure the business of the Congress has moved on. At some point later, perhaps in some kind of final summing up, some closing remarks, the sahila will pronounce his verdict on my case.

The old man winds down, sits back on his seat with his elbows crossed, the pipe back in his mouth, contentedly puffing away. Once again the sahila lifts himself to his feet. He delivers a short decisive speech, then rests again.

Henry says, “OK, OK, let’s go.”

I get up and follow him into the street, riddled with puddles from rain earlier. “So you haves to pay three dollars and you can’t carry photograph,” he says.

“Carry photograph?”

“Right. We go to the inadule in the morning for seven clocks, eight clocks.”

Inadule is another word for curandero, healer.

Another paraffin-lit longhouse night, full of women sewing till two in the morning. Rio Tigre is said to be the most traditional island, though the village looks just like Rio Sidra. But the inhabitants still know the full pharmacopeia of ancestral herbs. Every day they drink forest potions and need only four hours’ light sleep a night.

A muggy, sticky dawn. Outside, an aluminium pan hanging on a wall catches the sun like a bronze gong. It startles me. The bathroom, just off the longhouse, concealed by a plastic curtain, is cool. A straw cubicle open to the sky, a floor of pebbles so the water can drain, and several tubs of wellwater, a gourd for scooping up the water floating in one of them. I wash off last night’s sweat and sleep and yesterday’s salt. My skin is rough as sandpaper.

An old woman with a giant gold nose ring and a face wrinkled by decades of smiling has me hold my hand over a metal bowl full of a cold black liquid like tea. She scoops up one palmful after another, bathing my arm in it. It feels cooling, like camphor. The itch I woke up with disappears.

We are in the impromptu courtyard between a cooking hut and a longhouse. The woman’s grandson stares at me from behind a pink toy plate with which he shields his face. I can see he’s grinning. He is two and a half years old, a special child. He is already a shaman. Shamans are born not made. They come into the world possessed of such power that their mothers invariably die in childbirth. Shamans grow faster than other children. By three they can already talk like adults. By ten they already know the properties of the many medicinal plants on the mainland. They eat and drink more than other kids. This boy looks like a typical Cuna six year-old.

He, along with a little crowd of other family members, is watching his grandmother at work. She is a curandera, a proto-pharmaceuticist. She grins and lets out satisfied grunts as the black fluid trickles down my arms. Occasionally she chats to me in Cuna, and one of her sons, a man in shorts and an orange baseball cap, translates into Spanish.

“This medicine is very strong,” he says. “If it touch your tongue it kill you dead. You have to wash your hands before eating.”

I have had no breakfast and am relieved that this lotion seems to be the extent of the curing session. I had imagined a long smoky séance. I’ll be back at the longhouse eating fresh rolls, drinking thick, sweet chocolate, before long.

The old woman leaves me for the cooking hut, wiping her damp hands on her bare arms. In the gloom within I see her ladling from a big pan. She comes out with a glass of chicha, a nonalcoholic maize drink. It’s for me, a cool milky glass half full of milled corn husks. In many Cuna kitchens you see piles of corn heads on racks above the fires, drying out before being milled for chicha.

The real session has yet to begin. We all troupe into the longhouse, where the old woman conducts me to the hammock of the Divine Child, recognizable because behind it, against the bamboo wall, are piled all the accoutrements of the shaman’s art: gourd-bowls full of dried roots, powders, rocks, a box of hollow flutes, knives and pots, and most conspicuous of all, a great entourage of neles, the wooden dolls which assist shamans in their work. They range in size from five inches to five feet, and all wear little bowler hats and have simple Mr Men faces. Spirits live in them. When the wood gets old and splits you know the spirit has left. Some have red paint on their cheeks, indicating they are female. They are like voodoo dolls but benign. The Golden Child sleeps with one at his side in the hammock like a teddy bear.

The old woman’s husband, Don Ignacio, is a shaman. He brings in a little pile of hot coals from the kitchen on a palm stem and tips them on the floor. Then he fetches a gourd full of white cocoa beans. He starts chanting, emitting long phrases on a high, even note, inhaling audibly between them. I look about and realize he and I are alone. I am hot, a sticky oppressive heat fills this longhouse. Its ceiling must be too low. It is untidy too - children’s cast-off clothes, old crisp packets, plastic toys litter the dirt floor. The old man’s singing suddenly seems to become clearer. My ears prick up. His voice is pure and sharp like a boy’s. He starts dropping the cocoa beans on his bed of coals. A strong, bitter smoke fills our corner of the house. The smoke is the incense on which the neles feed. He is nourishing them for the work ahead.

He gives my hammock a push. I swing easily, feeling lulled by the motion and by his voice. Then, after a while, something changes in me, as if I had been tense without realizing it and now relaxed; as if a nail holding up a bag had been removed and now the bag slumps on the floor; as if I have unexpectedly returned to a childhood happiness. I feel unaccountably safe, content. I could be in my old home with a sunny day unfolding outside and nothing to do except swim in the river with friends.

The chanting continues. Gold light presses on my eyelids. I have no idea what the old man is saying. His voice a clear stream on a Scottish moor. I wonder why I feel so at home, why I know I will rise from this hammock into a life of unalloyed happiness.

At one point the old man leaves me rocking gently and returns with a hardcover ledger. He scans through the pages. Inside, over the margins and lines, someone has painted rows of symbols, some hieroglyphic-like, others, full-scale paintings of animal figures done in bright, strong watercolours. In my suggestible condition they look wonderful, and familiar. Where have I seen sunny images like these before? I can’t think. But I could look at them all day.

I must be high, I think suddenly. A vague dread weighs in. Was that chicha laced with something? Is there some hallucinogen in the cocoa smoke? Then I think: what the hell, even if there is, it’ll wear off.

But there are no drugs here. Cuna shamans don't use them. Their work depends on the wisdom of myth. Don Ignacio and his troop of dolls have gone on a long journey up the River of Life to the land where the spirits live. It seems the spider-spirit stole some part of me and after a long battle and much diplomacy, he managed to persuade the spider to give it up.

I had always thought spiders were on our side in the war against mosquitoes. But such was the stuff of his narrative, I later learnt.

Afterwards the sunlight seems yellow as egg-yolk, the sea blue like smoke. Ignacio’s son Fidel, the widower father of the Divine Child who can already see the future, gives me a small wooden doll, which he tells me is called Maniwite: he who favours money. I realize that I have completely forgotten that the ceremony was supposed to have been all about my rash; it felt like something far more important.

It is an arduous two-day task to find boats back to Chichimen. I sit soaked in dugouts under the sun for long hours, propelled in turn by paddle, engine and ragged sail. I learn to let the rocking of the waves lull me like a hammock. I no longer tell time by my watch but the sun.

It is a glorious silver evening when we motor into the lagoon between Chichimen and its neighbour. The coconut palms look wet, the sea green like fresh paint.

Don Ramon steps out of his hut to welcome me back. Buna, Eulogio, Jose, Achu all appear grinning broadly, then laugh with delight when I step from the prow of the canoe with my shoes on straight into a deep wave.

In my sun-struck state it feels like coming back to close friends. I will be living here forever, I think, watching my shoulders grow brown and lean under a coconut sun.

Buna and Eulogio pull up the cuffs of my shirt and start crowing over my arms: all gone, skin smoother than ever. I feel like a lizard, a snake, a cricket risen from its old husk.