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Trail of Feathers: In Search of the Birdmen of Peru | 
 enlarge | Author: Tahir Shah
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Category: Book
List Price: $13.95
Buy New: $9.33
You Save: $4.62 (33%)
New (10) Used (12) from $6.50
Rating:  16 reviews
Sales Rank: 250642
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.2 x 0.9
ISBN: 1559706775
Dewey Decimal Number: 915
EAN: 9781559706773
ASIN: 1559706775
Publication Date: June 16, 2003
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Condition: Brand new Book, ALL days Low Price !
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
A shrunken head from Peru and a feather with traces of blood are the clues that launch Tahir Shah on his latest journey. Fascinated by the recurring theme of flight in Peruvian folklore, Shah sets out to discover whether the Incas really were able to "fly like birds" over the jungle, as a Spanish monk reported. Or were they drug-induced hallucinations? His journey, full of surreal experiences, takes him from the Andes mountains to the desert and finally, in the company of a Vietnam vet, up the Amazon deep into the jungle to discover the secrets of the Shuar, a tribe of legendary savagery.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 11 more reviews...
not quite hot on the trail November 9, 2008
Not quite hot on the trail of the fabled birdmen of Peru, Tahir Shah heads out for Machu Picchu, Titicaca, the Atacama Desert, and the Amazonian outpost of Iquitos in a quest for tenuous evidence at best of these flying humans. Half way through this sometimes sloggy narrative, the reader begins to ask: Is the search for these fabled birdmen a metaphorical journey for one's self? Is this a search for spiritual treasure via the allegories of flight? Well, after Mr. Shah's ingestion of ayahuasca towards the end of the book, a pretty good answer emerges.
Tahir Shah's writing style is the best part of this book - the narration is entertaining, the flow nice and easy on the reader. He has done much research to flesh out the subjects of his quirky quest. And the central part of the book, his boat trip up the upper Amazon river with a shaman and his ex-Vietnam vet guide, struck me as a hilarious rendition of Heart of Darkness.
Shah's sense of humor, both at his own expense and the others he encounters along the way, make the reading all that more compelling. It is the laughs that reflect what is most true in this narrative. Yes, this is a quirky discursive adventure; but as such, it also makes for the best reading too.
Parataxis
The Cloud Reckoner
Extracts: A Field Guide for Iconoclasts
 Immensely entertaining travelogue of weird Peru March 26, 2007
_Trail of Feathers_ by Tahir Shah began at an unusual place; at a London auction of shrunken heads. The author, who had been on the trail of shrunken heads for some time and who had sought to begin a collection, was frustrated by his lack of funds and the limited availability of tsantsas (as they are more properly called, a product of the Jivaro people of South America). However he did come across a mention of something else interesting out of Peru, a group referred to by a cryptic Frenchmen as "the Birdmen." At first dismissing this ("at shrunken head sales, you get more than the usual smattering of madmen"), he meets another (insane?) South American Indian enthusiast, this time a self-schooled authority on ancient flight, an eccentric man who maintained that the Maya, Aztecs, and Incas had all built gliders (along with of course the Ancient Egyptians and King Solomon himself). Like the Frenchmen, this expert urges Shah to go to Peru and do his own research.
After also coming across a brief mention by an early 17th century Spanish monk by the name of Friar Antonio de la Calancha, who wrote "...the Incas flew over the jungle like birds," Shah decided to put together a one-man expedition to Peru and find out the truth himself. Could the Incas or other Andean peoples really fly, or was it just myth and legend?
What followed was a two part journey through the mountains, deserts, jungles, cities, and tiny villages of Peru. During the first half of his expedition Shah was largely alone and traveled from Machu Picchu to Lake Titicaca across the Altiplano through Nazca and on to Lima. On his quest for something - anything - that could shed light on whether there was flight among the Andean peoples Shah introduces the reader to the many unusual sights and people of Peru. Among the author's many encounters were the textile weavers of Taquile (an island in Lake Titicaca), who bemoaned that the once sacred cloth was mostly sold to tourists now instead of more properly being sacrificed to spirits, the chullpas (round-sided towers) of Sillustani (did the Incas once jump off of them; Shah recounted how there was a medieval fad of sorts, tower-jumping); and the famous Nazca Lines, huge geometric and animal shapes, so immense that they were only first noticed by a pilot in the 1930s. Shah wrote that this fact lead an American by the name of Jim Woodman in the 1970s to speculate that ancient man had in fact flown in balloons, citing the fact that ritual smoke balloons were used in Guatemala and the Quechua language had a word for "balloon-maker" (Woodman later built a working balloon he dubbed _Condor I_ and flew it). Shah found images of Birdmen in a museum containing Paracas textiles (Paracas being a pre-Incan culture of the Peruvian coast that existed between 1300 BC and 200 AD and was noted for the exquisite textiles they used to wrap their mummified dead, found in immense cemeteries in the desert).
After consulting with various people in his trip, Shah came to the conclusion that Incan and pre-Incan flight was likely more metaphysical, allegorical, or mental. One local urged him that in order to understand the Birdmen one had to understand the drugs that they took while they were alive. He stated that they drank a tea made from a vine, known as ayahuasca or "the vine of the dead" (scientifically it was two species, _Banisteriopsis caapi_ and _Banisteropsis inebrians_), which gave the user the feeling of growing wings and flying. A professor he met told Shah that ayahuasca was still in use by various tribes in the jungles of the Upper Amazon in Ecuador, Brazil, and Peru, including coincidentally, the Jivaro (which means "barbarian;" though that is their most famous name, the proper name for them is the Shuar, which means "men").
The second half of Shah's expedition becomes an often frustrating trek to find brewers of ayahuasca among the Shuar, an expedition that begins in the jungle city of Iquitos and takes him hundreds of miles downstream the Amazon River and its tributaries. After a series of adventures in Iquitos Shah manages to finally find a reliable guide, a very colorful man by the name of Richard Fowler, a Vietnam veteran (who volunteered for Vietnam, saying "As far as I was concerned it was an all expenses paid, two year snake hunt, with unusual and additional hazards thrown in"), who promised Shah only one thing, that he would keep him alive. Putting together an unusual team (including a local man by the name of Cockroach and a shaman) on a rickety, rotting wooden, rat-infested boat (infested by still worse things when Shah ordered the rats removed), they do make contact with the much feared Shuar, something many people had warned the author would do various dire things, including slit his throat, decapitate him and shrink his head, or eat him.
This was a very enjoyable book, as the author was an excellent writer and really did a good job of describing what he saw and the people he met. I loved how he contrasted his earlier expectations of the jungle and what "experts" in London said he would find with the real thing and found him often funny without trying to hard to be so (as some travel essay writers are prone to doing). He clearly did a good amount of research, as he had a several page bibliography and two appendices, one detailing the science and history behind ayahuasca as well as several other Amazonian flora-based hallucinogens and a number of Old World ones as well (some authors he said speculated that hallucinogenic content of Syrian rue might have given rise to the vivid geometric designs of Oriental carpets as well as legends about flying carpets) and the other the history and culture of the Shuar (going into detail about the how and why of the tsantsas).
quirky journey March 13, 2007
This is the second of Mr. Shah's books I have read. I will probably end up reading them all. It's hard not to like a book whose opening sentence is "The trail began at an auction of shrunken heads." He is an excellent author and his tales are fascinating. If you read this book to the end you will be able to shrink heads, but only practice on sloths.
A powerful book! September 17, 2006
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
"O men, up from you I fly.
I am not for the earth, I am for the sky.
I have soared to the sky as a herald,
I have kissed the sky as a falcon,
The essence of a god, the son of a god,
The messenger of a god am I."
(Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts)
It seems to me these beautiful, evocative opening lines of an ancient poem belong somewhere in Tahir Shah's powerful work on the Incas and Birdmen of Peru, the best book in the travel genre I've read to date. (And, indeed, early in the author's research into the question of actual flight by ancient man, an expert whom he consults reminds us of the model airplane, or glider, which was found in an ancient Egyptian tomb in Saqqara in 1898.)
This book is much more than a fascinating and often hilarious travel book; to me it is more akin to a narrative of an unfolding spiritual journey. In addition to the usual points of interest of a Peruvian tour, this author's 'nose' for uncovering the 'underbelly' of a given culture allows him to get right to the heart of a matter he is investigating. And, true to his Sufi upbringing, he is not afraid to seek knowledge wherever it takes him; by means of itself, by experience, not content to be a mere observer (or as the proverb goes, "He who tastes, knows.")
Thus, his ocular experience of El Colibri (the Hummingbird), and the other symbols of the Nazca Lines from a Cessna, prove to be only a prelude (almost like a facsimile from the past), a metaphor, for the riveting experience which is to follow, as, undaunted, the trail leads him into the heart of the Upper Amazonian jungle to find the descendants of those who occupied the coastal Nazca plain when the Lines were made, before they and their shamans were driven into the interior by the Spanish Conquistadors.
Loose your grip on your analytical, Western mind and get ready to "kiss the sky"!
Early in his quest, perched precariously atop Huayna Picchu, looking directly down on Machu Picchu, the author recounts a conversation which hints of ancient memories of a forgotten and glorious past:
"I opened my eyes a crack, and began to understand the significance of Machu Picchu. Stretching out in symmetrical flanks, on east and west, the ruins were arranged as wings. Once I saw them, I couldn't get them out of my mind. They gleamed up at me, glinting in the yellow light.
Machu Picchu was laid out in the shape of a condor.
I would have slithered my way back down to the cafe much sooner. But a refined-looking Peruvian man was watching me.
'It's a condor!' I shouted. 'Machu Picchu's a gigantic condor!'
The man was dressed in a sheepskin jacket, with the flaps of a woollen hat pulled down snugly over his ears. His nose was streaming, ad his cheeks were scarlet. In his hand was a tin, and in it were coca leaves.
'The condor is the messenger,' he said in English, offering me some of the leaves.
'Whose messenger?'
Resting the tin on his knee, the man washed his hands over his face.
'The condor links us to heaven,' he said. 'Just as it did the Incas. It is the bridge, the bridge between man and God.'
'Could the Incas glide like condors?'
The man twisted the corners of his mouth into a smile.
'We can all fly,' he said.
'All of us?'
The man nodded.
'Si, all of us.'
He paused, to regard me sideways on.
'Todos tenemos alas, we all have wings,' he said, 'but we have forgotten how to use them.'
Adventure! June 16, 2006
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is not your typical travel book! The author describes a long journey through Peru as he searches for the origins of a myth about people flying in Pre-Columbian Peru. This search involves his discovery, and imparting to us, lots of information about textiles, mummies, shrunken heads, and many, many colorful characters that the author encounters. Honestly, in reading Mr. Shah's books, I can only think that the dreadful places I have stayed in were oases of tranquility and cleanliness when compared to his places: For example, a hotel that keeps its chickens in his bathroom, a hotel that has no other guests because a story is circulating that anyone who stays there will be beheaded by a ghost, a boat so rank that a stay in a pit toilet might be more pleasant, etc. But somehow, when he tells it, you just have to enjoy and laugh. I recommend this book highly to anyone who enjoys travel writing, adventure writing, or simply a great story. As an aside, I should mention that if anyone doubts the possibility of the final scenes (and I do not want to ruin this book for anyone), a beloved relative of mine actually did a similar trip (and I am SO glad I didn't go along! And the only reason I didn't, at the time, was that I thought I would be needed to retrieve her body [which thankfully didn't happen] after such a crazy trip). The physiological experience of the native drug was absolutely perfectly described (and many a jolly laugh we have had over my relative's story at her expense)! So, don't doubt this book is possible. But whether or not it is, read it and enjoy!
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