The Shaman Heals Larissa

Larissa squinted against gritty, blowing rain. In every direction of the naked mountaintop where she stood, sandstone boulders loomed out of the slanting downpour, some as small as doghouses and others bigger than barns. A billion years of winds had scoured the rock, sculpting it into organic shapes: breasts and heroic torsos and immense phallic columns; erotic forms everywhere she looked under the swollen sky.

Interesting. An effect of two cups of yonamayi tea she'd imbibed with the shaman, Carlos. The flower-seed brew was clearly a hallucinogen, and perhaps it also triggered a flood of dopamine in the hypothalamus. Dopamine was nature's "Let's fuck!" molecule—the most potent of the brain's sexual triggers. Was that why she felt so fiercely horny now?

If the old shaman had not refused to let her bring along pen and notebook, she could be recording these observations, instead of hoping she wouldn't forget them once the drug wore off.

Carlos scrambled ahead along the treacherous footpath, oblivious to the cold rain, his long, straight white hair streaming back in the buffeting wind. Larissa struggled to keep up, feeling humbled and annoyed at the same time. The old man seemed to possess twice her energy and stamina—and Larissa worked out four times a week: free weights, Nordic Ski, Row Machine, you name it. Her ass was taut as volleyball, her belly a grid of muscle.

Starting from the village just after daybreak, the two had climbed a fissure that split the mountainside diagonally and formed a rough stairway to its tabletop peak. The ascent had felt like three hours on a Stair Master at highest setting. They would spend the afternoon and night on the mountain and head down in the morning.

The image of herself shivering in a wet knot of gooseflesh all night—possibly even dying of hypothermia—had nagged at Larissa before the tide of euphoria from the tea swept away her tendency to worry. She felt now as if the anxiety function, the very ability to fret, had been disconnected. Besides, she liked and trusted the old man. Obviously, Carlos knew what he was doing; he was the eldest shaman among the Yona tribespeople, and had made this trip many times. Never with a middle-aged black woman from Berkeley, but he'd know how to survive up here. Maybe he was carrying a tent and a kerosene-burning space heater in the woven knapsack on his back. Right, whatever. No problema, muchacha.

After downing the cups of cloudy tea an hour ago, Larissa had puked twice. She still felt nauseated, but it had become background noise, a mellow gut-ache, to the steadily louder choir of angels singing in her brain and—yes, between her legs. Electric. I sing the body electric. She smiled and wished she could jot down the image.

The sun broke through and shone golden on the mountain top. The icy rain slackened to sprinkles. Larissa and the shaman huddled in the arched doorway of a moss-draped reddish boulder with a cathedral-like window at the top. Everything smelled of mushrooms and soaked gravel. Lichens splotched a nearby boulder like furtively sketched dirty pictures on the walls of bathroom stalls. Larissa saw cocks, cunts, naked bodies entangled in an orgy; the pictures melted and moved, the sinners shifted and sighed.

Good grief, she was feeling randy. If the old man wasn't beside her now, she'd tug down her hiking shorts and panties right there and take care of herself.

Carlos tapped her hand and she jumped from the sensation of skin on skin. "Vamanos, mi amiga." Let's go, my friend. They stood and walked on.

Where was Carlos leading her? Earlier, the sun had been to their backs, but now they turned toward the lowering sun that silhouetted the jagged skyline. Surely they weren't retracing their steps—or were they?

The two hiked in the cold drizzle without talking. Larissa wished her Spanish was better, but then what would she say anyway?

"I'm getting way high on your 'flower of the soul,' señor—but did you neglect to mention that it would turn me into a feverish slut? Because if I don't get a private moment soon to 'finger-fuck' myself, as we say in America, I'm going to jump you and hump your old bones."

Larissa laughed softly at her own joke. At least, she thought it was a joke. The old man, whose wrinkled face, an hour ago, had resembled a carved, dried apple, was beginning to look younger and more attractive by the minute. Even his gait, already vigorous, seemed now to become almost sensual, catlike.

Damn, I wish had my notebook. Am I going to remember these hallucinations?

They entered a narrow canyon and the wind instantly calmed to a feathery sigh while gusts whistled overhead. Moss and fungi coated the muscular contours of rock. Many of the large mushrooms looked like thick, heavy cocks. The rain-soaked fungi smelled like fresh semen. Larissa's eyes followed a glistening ribbon of pale algae that snaked up the smooth canyon wall like a long splash of cum on a dark-skinned thigh. Oh, god.

Is that going to be the theme of this trip? Sexual lust. Cunts and cocks, great and small: mineral, vegetable and animal.

The canyon widened suddenly and dead-ended below them in a delta-shaped hollow. A tangled thicket of dwarf teak trees covered a mound at the far end of the hollow. Vines ensnared the tree limbs like silk ropes tying up sex slaves in a bondage scene. The vines displayed dark pink flowers, bigger than magnolia blossoms; their broad petals spread open luridly. Larissa had to laugh. With flowers that looked that much like vaginas, was it any wonder they were used in fertility rites?

Carlos pointed to the flowers. "Yonamayi."

Larissa nodded. So this was it. They'd arrived at the entrance to the sacred valley—the deep cup of rock down there was the only place the yonamayi vine grew. The Yona people had been trekking here for generations to harvest the flower seeds to prepare the potent tea.

Larissa turned around to look back up the canyon. Forget it; she'd never be able to retrace their route to this hidden site. Too many switchbacks, scrambling over rocks without a marked trail. The shaman touched her elbow. "Venga." Come. They squeezed ahead through a tight bottleneck and began the descent into the hollow itself.

Chunks of rose-colored jasper and shards of obsidian littered the path like sparkling broken glass. Larissa stepped over an amethyst crystal the size of a mailbox. "I know some New Agers back in Berkeley who would cum in their panties to see this," she said, knowing Carlos didn't understand English. When she said, 'cum in their panties,' she felt an abrupt pang of sexual hunger, like someone had flicked on a current between her thighs. Note to self: Investigate yonamayi tea as a definite source of aphrodisiacs.

Her research project was to collect and analyze medicinal plants of the Yona Indians in hopes of developing useful new pharmaceuticals. She'd been inserted by river boat a couple months earlier in one of a constellation of Yona villages. Just before the relentless winter deluge, the boat would return to take her back to Paguay; horseback from there to Boa Vista, where she would hole up in the stinky, mildewed hotel until a helicopter arrived to carry her out of the Amazon rainforest and back to civilization in Caracas, Venezuela.

She followed her guide down the cleft between tall slabs of rock. Less than a hundred miles away, on another of the mountains the natives called tepuis, Angel Falls plummeted three-thousand feet over the sheer face of a cliff. Adventure tourists flocked to the world's tallest waterfall by riverboat or helicopter, but no outsider had ever climbed Yona-tepui, and Larissa felt proud. Her doctorate was in botany, but her undergraduate minor had been anthropology. If her former professors could share this rare opportunity, they'd be creaming in their jeans. She gasped at the sexual image. And to think Calvin Klein calls his stuff "Obsession."

Yona-tepui was a colossal mesa, shaped like the vertical-sided tabletop mountains of the American Southwest, but ten times taller, jutting high above the clouds that hid the emerald roof of the Amazon forest. Far below, rain dribbled through the canopy, turning into jungle steam. But up here, at ten-thousand feet, rain was more likely to freeze into sleet or hail.

A few hundred more tepuis dotted a broad belt that stretched across the border region of Venezuela and Brazil. More humans had walked upon the moon than upon most of these remote jungle mountains. Like islands in the sky, the flat peak of each tepui, isolated for eons from the rainforest below, had evolved flora and fauna not found on other tepuis and nowhere else in the Amazon.

For two months, Carlos had been teaching Larissa about the everyday medicinal use of native plants that grew near the base of the tepui. Almost none of the plants had been familiar to the botanist, and the expedition already had been a success. But Larissa kept hearing about yonamayi. The Indians would mention the flower-seed tea and pass knowing smiles and glances, reminding her of the 1960s, the way hippies at Harvard had raved about acid. She had told Carlos she wanted to learn about the tea, and at first the old man had refused.

"Solomente lo es para los iniciados." It is only for initiates.

Larissa pleaded, and with the help of a Timex sports watch and a pair of Wal-Mart reading glasses—she'd brought along fifty of each item, for bartering—Carlos had relented. But he had insisted that Larissa go through the full rite of initiation. So much the better: her chance to learn firsthand about the intriguing drug, while gaining an exclusive view of a key aspect of Yona culture.

Earlier that afternoon, as soon as they'd reached the summit, Carlos had peeled sticky scarlet casings from a handful of almond-sized seeds, plunked the seeds into river water and brewed a milky red tea over a small fire. While the tea thickened, he'd asked Larissa to meditate on "una pregunta para la flora"—a question for the flower. He'd explained that the spirit-power contacted with help of the tea could bring about miracles and that Larissa should prepare herself by asking for a particular healing. Larissa had replied that she was in very good health and didn't request anything from the flower, except scientific knowledge.

But now, as she hiked down to the floor of the deltoid gorge, Larissa realized her earlier reply had been too offhand. Her sexual arousal reminded her that she did have a healing she wished for. Since she'd reached menopause a few years earlier, her vagina had refused to produce enough lubrication. Even when she felt fiendishly horny, as she did now, her lubrication was often inadequate—and she was a woman who once had taken secret pride in how wet she became when aroused.

In her younger years, the hyperbole about getting so wet you had to wring out your panties had been no exaggeration. Get her hot enough, and pussy juice would stream down her inner thighs like clear broth slopped over the lip of a bowl. She remembered one time, sitting naked on a closed toilet seat lid, giving her boyfriend head, when she had literally slid off the seat on her own puddled slick. Not only was her copious flow a turn-on for her, but it drove her lovers wild when they discovered her abundant readiness.

Then menopause happened. At first, the towels she'd placed under her bottom during sex to prevent wet spots became unnecessary. Before long, she found it difficult to get wet enough to make sex comfortable. It was damned frustrating, and it made her feel old. She was only 54, with a body a lot of 30-somethings would kill for: tall, slender and muscular—a jazz dancer's body. She hated to think her glory days of fucking were gone.

Drug stores sold slippery stuff in a bottle or tube, and those products helped, but despite their claims to be "flavorless," their chemical taste was a turn-off. Eduardo, her current boyfriend, didn't eagerly lap and slurp K-Y Liquid, and she couldn't blame him.

Then there was the problem of the loss of fragrance. Larissa had always found the scent of fucking enormously arousing. Sometimes her pussy would perfume the whole bedroom. Yum! She could never get enough of that aroma. One of her favorite sexual fantasies was of a dozen women making love together in a small room, so that the air would become saturated and humid with the rich tidal-pool smell of wet and happy cunts. But without her pussy juice flowing, her sexual fragrance was easily overpowered by store-bought lubes.

So yeah, if she had a wish, a "question for the flower," that would be it.

"I want to get sloppy wet when I'm turned on," she said.

Carlos glanced back over his shoulder. "Qué?"

"I want to get so wet my pussy juice gushes out of me."

He didn't understand her, of course, but he smiled and nodded, teeth surprisingly bright in his old head. Old head? His hair was no longer white. It hung like a spill of shiny black enamel down his broad back. Larissa guessed that her hallucinations were peeling away layers of age, revealing the wizened shaman in his youthful splendor. Fascinating. She automatically patted her hip pocket and remembered: No notepad.

The two reached the floor of the deep gorge, where a wide, shallow stream had rubbed the pink sandstone smooth and shiny, like mother-of-pearl. The pocket of rock concentrated the moist scent of the yonamayi blossoms. Larissa inhaled deeply and shuddered with a sudden rush of sexual desire. The flowers not only looked like wet pussies, they perfumed the air with a musky, buttery fragrance that was nothing like rose, or lilac, or gardenia, but was simply pure, sweet cunt. It was Larissa's fantasy come true—except that it would take a thousand women dripping with lust to produce so strong an aroma of hot pussy. She could taste the damp air on her tongue, and the flavor matched the scent.

Carlos kicked off his sandals and waded into the center of the shallow stream. He raised his arms overhead like a priest and called out in a youthful voice that bounced around the gorge: "O Concha Divina, usted que hació el rocío primero en la dia primero del mundo, perfumarnos ahora con sus liquida gloriosa."

His words stunned Larissa. "Oh, Divine Conch, you who made the first dew on the first day of the world, perfume us now with your glorious liquid."

A fire sprinkler went off between her thighs. She was wet.

And so was the ground on which she stood. The little stream had suddenly leapt its shallow banks to trickle around her boots. On impulse, she bent to touch the water. It was hot.

The stream filled swiftly from hot springs that flowed down the walls of the gorge. Hot water now splashed over her ankles, still rising. She felt an instant of panic, remembering something she'd read about flash floods in canyon lands. But Carlos was obviously delighted; he was stripping off his tattered T-shirt and ragged pants. He flung the clothes high up onto a dry rock shelf, beside his hemp sandals.

Larissa quickly tugged off her hiking boots and tossed them up the steep bank next to the other clothing. One of the boots bounced and rolled back down into the stream with a splash. She was too drunk to care. She took off her long-sleeved T-shirt and sports bra and L.L.Bean hiking shorts, but kept on her cotton panties.

She waded into the stream up to her waist; it felt wonderfully hot, like bath water, but slippery, almost oily. It reminded Larissa of spa waters in Baden-Baden that contained a high content of melted mineral salts. She eased down into the water and moaned with pleasure as the moist heat soaked into tired muscles. After hours of trekking in chilly rain, this was heaven.

But the hot, buttery scent of fucking that filled the air was driving her loco. She couldn't wait any longer to satisfy her pussy hunger. She plunged a hand down the front of her panties. Carlos couldn't see, could he?

The deep cleft in the rocks formed a large, natural hot tub. While she secretly rubbed her clit, Carlos floated languidly on his back, openly stroking his thick cock, which stood up like a mahogany mast. Shouldn't she be feeling offended, or frightened, instead of lusting for him?

Carlos turned toward her and laughed; sucked water into his mouth, spit it out. In her hallucination, he looked Apollonian, a youthfully muscled Indian warrior, skin like weathered bronze. She swallowed hard and goose bumps dotted her flesh in the hot water. She was sure Carlos could read her horny soul and knew what she wanted. Again, he tasted the water, this time lapping with his tongue, never taking his eyes off hers.

Curious, she tasted the water, too, and cried out in surprise. The slippery water tasted musky and sweet, like—what else?—like pussy. She was soaking up to her breasts in hot, slippery, pussy juice.

Wait a minute...No way!

Larissa looked around at the landforms, taking it all in at once from a new perspective. The anatomical analog was so obvious, how had she missed it before? The delta-shaped gorge with its deep central cleft; the mound at its broader end, covered with tangled shrubbery; the smooth, pink canyon walls, the unmistakable aroma and flavor.

It was as if she and Carlos were bathing in the very cunt of Mother Nature, hot slippery liquid still streaming down the glistening canyon walls. Concha. He'd said, "O Concha Divina." Concha was the Spanish slang equivalent of cunt.

She laughed out loud. What an outrageous trip. Please remember this later, she told herself.

Carlos had dived under and when she turned back, he startled her by surfacing suddenly in front of her and pulling her to him, kissing her mouth. The softness of his lips contrasted with the firmness of his belly and the hard rod between his legs. He hooked his thumbs in the waistband of her panties and yanked them down and off her feet.

Free and naked in the hot, slippery water, she felt suddenly possessed by an intoxicating mix of sexual desire and awe for nature's power: such wild erotic vision from a handful of flower seeds!

In that moment, she knew exactly what she wanted: to make love with the Earth Mother herself. She broke off the kiss and grinned drunkenly at the hungry look in the young warrior's eyes. "Venga conmigo," she told him. Come with me.

She swam across the pool and lifted herself onto the labia-shaped banks. She climbed to a central, hooded rock that had to be Mother Earth's clitoris. Her eyes feasted on the shaman's lithe body as he climbed out of the pool; dark skin gleaming in a coating of oil. She stood several inches taller than the young Indian, but his strength was amazing, and his cock was as fat as the huge mushrooms she'd seen earlier.

She kept three dildos in her bedroom at home: slender, average and Elephant Man. Carlos was not nearly as long as Elephant Man, but if anything, he was even bigger around. It looked like she might have trouble accommodating his formidable girth. Oh, boy!

He stood nearby, watching her, eyes heavy-lidded with lust. She straddled the giant clitoris, broad as a mare's back, and rode it, humping back and forth, rubbing her own clit against the slippery smooth post. In her drug-induced state, the rock between her thighs seemed to throb and vibrate as Larissa trembled with pleasure.

Carlos stepped behind her and grabbed her ass. He pushed the head of his cock against her cunt and its lips spread wide, but sure enough, he could not slip in all the way on the first thrust. She relaxed and sat back on his rod and stuffed it in a little deeper. With his hands, Carlos pulled her ass cheeks as wide apart as they would spread, stretching the mouth of her pussy. He drove his pelvis forward and his heavy cock crammed into her on a slick film of lube. Now he was tucked deep inside her in a tight squeeze as if she were being fisted with a smooth, round fist that filled her completely.