A day at Iguazu Falls

I have never been so terrified of the blank page as when reflecting on the waterfalls of Iguazu. I felt something of Dante beholding God in Paradisio. Arriving in the park at dawn in a vain bid to escape the tourist hordes, I shunned the ‘main event’, the Devil’s Throat in favour of the less heralded trails that I could experience with a semblance of peace. The tangle of trees and vines were alive with flashes of toucans, rustling of possums and animated by the electricity of insect wings. I was jerked from my contemplation of this singing panoply of life by silver smoke rising from the emerald boughs of the forest, pure, shimmering and dancing in the sunlight.

The falls, from the first panorama resembled nothing so much as an amphitheatre, a stage of tumbling ribbons of molten silver set against a cloth of emerald. The broiling, swirling water disoriented my senses. Once a point is focused on, it has already foamed into the ether. The brilliance of each rivulet is enhanced by the verdant backdrop, each thread glowing against the greenery as it descends the three terraces. These tiers of stone toppled upon each other give Iguazu a quality of how I imagine the Hanging Gardens of Babylon once looked. Yet that wonder of the world was landscaped and sterile against the desert, while Iguazu’s chorus of birds and butterflies mean that this living work of art far surpasses any human imitation.

Refusing to take the passenger train, lest this spectacle be reduced to a theme park ride, I trudged along the tracks to the Devil’s Throat, the main draw to tourists the world over. In spite of the mass of jostling limbs and selfie sticks, I gazed awestruck at its majesty. A sheer, vertical slate of water tumbles, hurtling into the void, its bottom not even visible for the volume of churned water. It utters a colossal roar and a crashing like thunder, echoing with the primal forces of nature that tear asunder continents or crumble plates into mountain ranges. It seemed as if all the world’s water broke at its base.

The void of vapour left the most enduring impression on me. Just opaque whiteness without even an indication of a bottom. It beckons as a gate to another world, one unified, devoid of the tapestry of colour and complications of materiality and time. Enamoured by this world of forms, I had a sudden, fleeting desire to hurl myself through this portal and flail into the true realm. Needless to say, I do not lie crumpled and gored on the daggers at its base, and it is actually a fairly common, spooky phenomena dubbed ‘The Call of the Void’.

Feet firmly on solid ground, I found myself pondering a lot of how the first humans beheld the site. It is intuitively unique and a symbol of immense power. The natives of Zimbabwe called Victoria Falls, ‘The Smoke that thunders’, and it is a concept that recurred in my thoughts as I turned that question over in my head. Something elemental, but still an incomprehensible anomaly, a smoke possessed of the power of a tempest. I cannot conceive that it was not held as a focus for worship and contemplation of the divine. Even today, the river bed is lined with votive offerings of coins. Whether for good fortune or marking a visit, the godless of today still retain a sense of a portal between worlds. A medium where the supernatural can be invoked to weigh in on earthly affairs. With this still lingering in the air of even calm stretches of water, the thundering, seductive void of the devil’s throat must have received a plethora of gifts before the coming of the Spanish.

The name ‘Devil’s throat’ illustrates how the first Christians saw it. Dubbing it devilish is understandable - the harm it could render onto a human and the fear of such a monument of rare sublimity in the heart of a savage continent undoubtedly led to its name. I think though that the missionaries were blinkered by their battles with mosquitos and fever, and overlooked God. It is omnipotent, destructive, strewing boulders across the valley bed, and gouging a cavern from the earth over aeons. But it is endlessly creative, nurturing a beautiful nature and painstakingly chiselling a living work of art. Moreover, it does so as a trinity, one material, yet ever-shifting and present everywhere in all states. By not calling it the ‘God’s eye’, the bad-temper and dismissiveness of the Jesuits in this region is writ large.

Today though, it lives very much in the material realm. Iguazu, particularly on the Brazilian side, is a theme park. Visitors are transported, deposited in waves by gimmicky trains to behold a curated, choreographed view, memorialised in identical photographs. Yet, the wreckage of past viewing decks and the religious offerings made demonstrate the Fall’s resistance to the commodification of such an unearthly shrine. Shorn of any Christian lens, it still offers parables to existence. A fish swimming circling in the placid, serene river before it arrives at the flailing, gaseous oblivion is an enduring image. Its horizon is seemingly limited to the ten feet around it, is it aware of the incomprehensible smoking horrors just metres away? I suppose it is no more aware as we are to the Iguazu falls that life contrives to throw our way, of which we are blind until we too spiral into the watery void.