The World is Full of Magic

A couple of weeks ago, walking up to the top of a hill where I would be visiting a mine, a sacred lake was pointed out to me on the way. This lake, I was told, was where people from several different communities in the province came to sing and dance in order to ask for rain when there was a a particularly pronounced dry spell. The men I was with suggested that I take a photo of said lake, however, when I went to take the photo my camera lens wouldn´t open. I had been having some problems with the camera ever since I made the foolish mistake a few weeks back of lending it to someone for a few hours and when they gave me it back it was clear as day that they had dropped it on the ground. Once at the mine, by persistently switching the camera on and off again eventually I got it working, and took a few photos of the miners at work. However on the way back down, when again I attempted to take a photo of the lake, with the men accompanying me in the foreground, the lens once more refused to open. The men joked that the lake didn´t want to be photographed.

When the next day I went to visit a Kallawaya in another community and told him of what had happened, he thought it unlikely that my camera had malfunctioned because of the possible displeasure of the lake itself at being photographed. He did though tell me that many of the local lakes were enchanted. For example, he told me, in the lake in the mountain above his community, a man who had gone out fishing one day was driven raving mad after a mermaid appeared to him. He had afterwards tried local remedies to return him to sanity, but according to my Kallawaya friend, these were given to him by quacks, and the only reason he had gone to them were because they were cheap. The man had never found all his marbles again. What he should have done, apparently, and what any right-thinking Kallawaya would have helped him to do, so he told me, was to have been lowered into the lake, with the carcases of five different anmals attached to him (I forget which). The demon spirit within the lake would have taken the animals as offerings and left him alone.

Before leaving my friend`s house, he pointed out to me that the river which I had walked through on my way there had a demon in it. I tried, with great difficulty, to keep this thought out of my mind while crossing on the way back.

My camera still isn´t working, by the way.