true hallucinations.htm - Shroomery

true hallucinations.htm
nowhere and the apparatus rose simultaneously with my query: Would not the wind whipping over the hill cause it to falter? Its white bulk
rushed over us, perhaps only twenty feet above our
heads and then, passing higher, it met the wind and the fate I had anticipated. Turning on its side, it gently came to earth. We ran toward it and
other people [the impression was of children], appeared from the opposite direction, also running toward the rippling white of the now
deflated machine.
Amid our laughing examination of the balloon, we were invited into B's home, now visible as a sprawling, "ranch style" house nearby. [This
was a house not unlike the house in which I spent my childhood.] As we entered the house I paused to examine a large map of the Amazon
Delta on the wall—published, the legend informed me, to commemorate a conference of a French archaeological society which convened on a
small island there in 1948. When I rejoined Dhy anna, she informed me that the children ofB. had told her that one of the densest rainforests in
the world was nearby. I, familiar as only a native can be with Colorado geography, was incredulous. I returned to the bookcase under the map
and, taking out a large atlas, sought the rainfall and forest map of Colorado, opening instead upon Assam— while first rejecting a topological
rendering of Bengal. I heard myself say that Shalimar was the logical jumping off place—then allfaded.
The meaning of this dream was far from clear at the time, and even now it remains obscure. What is clear is that at a given date an event of
importance was to be expected in the delta of the Amazon. I hoped then that the total eclipse of the sun was that long-anticipated event, and
that its totality over the vagina of the world mother anticipated an event of great import for everyone.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
WALTZING THE ENIGMA
In which I flash back to my near recruitment by a band of renegade Nazi scientists while visiting Timor.
A FEW MONTHS BEFORE that precursive dream a strange incident occurred that I now look back on as further proof that I was destined to
travel to the Amazon, and that somehow I had come under the spell of the cosmic giggle:
In February of 1970, a year before I arrived at La Chorrera, my fugitive wanderings had taken me to the island of Timor in Eastern Indonesia.
Under indictment in the States for the heinous crime of importing hashish, I traveled and lived under the dramatic assumption that
international police agencies were combing the globe looking for me. My cover, that of a graduate student in entomology doing field work for
a degree—a butterfly collector—had worked well over the previous six months as I had made my way slowly through Malaysia, Sumatra,
Java, and a host of other less familiar but equally exotic insular backwaters.
A particularly muggy and showery afternoon found me smoking ganja in my room at the Rama, the best and only hotel in Kupang, Timor.
Until that moment, I had been the hotel's only guest for ten days and had pretty much had the run of the place. Not that it was palatial. The
Rama was constructed of cinder block, and the walls of
its eight identical rooms stopped well short of the ceiling. With concert walls and drains installed at the converging slopes of the floors, it had
the cheerful ambience of a new and unused slaughterhouse. However, it was clean, as the manager would hurriedly point out.
As I smoked, sitting cross-legged on my steel cot and reviewing the morning's collecting in the jungle, I became aware of the arrival of other
guests. I could hear what seemed like half a dozen people speaking German and moving luggage about in the lobby, a central space with four
rattan chairs facing each other over a threadbare rug. I presumed that these were travelers off the afternoon plane from Darwin and that they
would presumably fly on to Bali on the next day's regular noon flight out of Timor. What was obviously a couple, to judge by their voices, had
occupied the room next to mine. I recognized some German and the women seemed to speak some other language, one I could not place.
When I went out for dinner the new arrivals were nowhere to be seen. The next morning I was up at dawn to catch an Indonesian Air Force
plane that took me to Flores, the next island on my butterfly itinerary, and I thought no more about the unseen guests in a now-distant hotel I
expected never to see again. I spent a week in the cloud forests on Flores, staying with an alcoholic Dutch priest with a club foot who ran a
mission in the forested interior of the island. Then I returned to the steamy coastal capital, Maumere, a small town down the center of whose
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