MAGDALENA RIVER OF DREAMS

WADE DAVIS Bodley Head, 401pp, £25

The Magdalena is, wrote the Guardian’s Charles Nicholl, ‘the great arterial river of Colombia. Rising in the rugged moorlands of the Andean páramo 12,000ft above sea level, it flows northwards for nearly a thousand miles, carving its way through gorges fringed with cloud forest, skirting the mysterious megaliths of San Agustín, growing fat and turbid in its lower reaches, and finally debouching into the Caribbean at the Bocas de Ceniza (the “ashen mouths”), where its tonnage of silt turns the sea grey.’

Wade Davis, explorer-in-residence at the National Geographic Society among other distinctions, has been visiting Colombia for nearly 50 years. The Spectator’s Hugh Thompson paid tribute to Davis’s ‘love and knowledge’: ‘When Davis tells you about yopo, the seeds of a forest tree that contain one of the most powerful hallucinogenic agents known to man, a tryptamine “that does not distort reality as much as dissolve it”, you know he speaks with authority.’

In the Financial Times, Boyd Tonkin was full of praise: ‘Davis draws on his botanical background to survey the astonishing “biological bounty” of a country with 26,000 native flowering plants and 1,932 bird species. He explains why the longcherished coca leaf, in its unprocessed state, is “more useful and less irritating” than coffee or tea. He plumbs the river’s past as a conduit for music, for myths, for ideas, as well as gold, coffee, tobacco and cocaine.’ It was left to Jenny Coad in the

Times to admire the rugged adventurer but also to wonder if his prose was not a bit much, providing this choice example: ‘To slip one’s hand into the river is to return to the point of origins, to connect across the eons to that primordial moment, impossibly distant in time, when celestial bodies, perhaps frozen comets, collided with the earth and brought the elixir of life to a lonely, barren planet spinning in the velvet void of space.’