Dreaming a New Myth

sipaliwini basin - We leave our boats on the river and trudge into the Surinamese jungle without speaking. Piha birds shriek two-syllable greetings, and the electric hum of cicadas rises on the late-afternoon air along with the sour stink of wild boar. Soon the trail is blocked by a series of massive boulders. We have arrived at the sanctuary of Werehpai.

Before taking us any further, our Trio Indian guide recounts the story of how he found this place.

“I was chasing a herd of boar when my hunting dog disappeared,” Kamania tells us in Sranan Tongo, Suriname’s matter-of-fact lingua franca. “I looked for him all day but couldn’t find him, so I returned to camp. My wife was very upset. Our dog is a good dog. I went to sleep angry and very sad.”

That night, Kamania dreamt of a voice. The voice described a secret pathway through the forest and told him to follow it. “You will not find your dog,” said the voice. “Instead, you will find pictures of your ancestors carved in stone.”

“I woke before the sun and followed the same route I’d learned in the dream,” Kamania continues. “I secretly expected to find my dog, but by noon I had found nothing, so I sat down to eat my lunch. I was lost. I did not know where I was. Then, on the surface of a stone at my feet, I saw a face staring up at me.”

Kamania looked up and realized he was sitting in front of a towering complex of granite boulders overgrown with moss and vines. He had never seen this place before. “The face told me to explore the stones,” he says.

Among the boulders, Kamania found a labyrinth of seven interconnected caves. The walls of each room were covered with rough petroglyphs, haunting images of faces and rainforest animals carved into the rock. In one room he found an altar stone, its flat surface thick with the bones of boar, armadillo, and monkey – once home to his ancestors, this room was now a jaguar’s lair. The sloped floors were carpeted with shards of pottery, and the sound of them splintering beneath his feet frightened him.

Kamania left quickly. He paddled downriver to Kwamalasamutu and alert­ed the village chief to what he’d found. Soon, government officials and local archaeologists were informed, and the site was declared a sanctuary. An archae­ologist from the Smithsonian came to conduct a preliminary dig. Conservation International, already active in the rainforests of Suriname, quickly began exploring the ecotourism potential of the site. Our expedition is part of that mission.

After uttering a short prayer, Kamania leads us into the caves. The air becomes dank and cold, almost subterranean. The floors are slippery with tropical lichens and dotted with ceramic fragments.

We make our way into the first house and begin to see the carvings: stick-figure bodies with oval heads, their mouths wide open in fear or anger; giant spiders and coiled serpents, threatening to strike; hybrid beings, half man and half butterfly, loosing arrows from the roof. And everywhere, images of men with ornate headdresses, suggestive of Amerindian royalty, and women in simple pigtails.