Jungle Thriller

THE RIVERS RAN EAST (366 pp.)--Leonard Clark--Funk & Wagnalls ($5).

A stranger runs well-documented risks in the Peruvian jungleland east of the Andes. Some have had their heads lopped off and shrunken as trophies; others have been eaten alive by ants; still others have been emasculated like steers, fattened on oily berries and served up to cannibals. Leonard Clark of San Francisco is an experienced jungle man who risked these dangers to look for gold and lived to tell about it. In The Rivers Ran East, he has written one of the most rousing adventure yarns of the season.

Cannibal Country. Explorer Clark was fresh from an OSS career in the Far East when he flew to Peru in 1946, in pursuit of a private postwar plan: he had heard of a man in Lima who had a treasure map. Sure enough, Clark found his man and paid him $100 for "a yellowed, badly cracked and very old Spanish parchment." From the little road's-end town of La Merced one July morning, accompanied by a Peruvian guide, he headed into the bush and six months of savagery.

The only path through the jungle was by river. Soon Clark reached a waterway, bought five Indian slaves, built a couple of rafts and launched into the heart of cannibal country. It was not long before flights of arrows from the river banks warned them of their welcome. Cornered one night, Clark and his men beat off raiding Indians hand-to-hand, killing five. But Indians kept after them. Clark and three others were later surrounded and captured, had to watch helplessly while one man was forced to swallow a blazing firebrand: "The smell of burning flesh filled the air. Finally . . . he was still and quiet . . . Thank God the man was dead." Clark and the two others were saved for a banquet, but they escaped. The party had expanded along the way, but before they reached the settlement of Iquitos, seven had been killed, and Clark sent his malaria-stricken guide home to Lima.

Facsimile of El Dorado. Clark finished his trip with a green-eyed American girl named Inez Pokorny, who was hunting gold and was stranded in Iquitos, too. Their quest almost ended prematurely one night when Clark was bitten by a poisonous snake, a nacanaca, and was only saved because his Indian paddlers went promptly to work with the native treatment: a brew of herbs injected near the wound by repeated jabs of a thorn.

In the end, Clark satisfied himself that he had found, on the banks of the Chiriaca River, a far western tributary of the Amazon, a reasonable facsimile of El Dorado. There, he traded all his spare equipment for 50 Ibs. of gold dust and nuggets sifted from the river gravel by friendly headhunters. On the journey out of the jungle, he and his companion were forced to bury about half the gold because it was too heavy to carry farther. Living comfortably in San Francisco now, Clark has never gone back to pick it up.

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