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conservatively, peering across several large stacks of dried herbarium specimens. Introducing myself as one of his undergraduate students, I mentioned that I was from British Columbia and that I wanted to go to the Amazon and collect plants, just as he had done so many years before. The professor looked up
from his desk and, as calmly as if I had asked for directions to the local library, said, “Well, when would you like to go?” A fortnight later I left for South America, where I remained during that first sojourn for fifteen months.
    There was, of course, method in Schultes’s casual manner. He took for granted the capacity of anyone to achieve anything. In this sense he was a true mentor, a catalyst of dreams. Though not by nature a modest man, he shared his knowledge and experience with his acolytes as naturally as a gardener brings water to a seed. Sometimes his faith in a student would lead to disappointment, but not often. His own achievements were legendary, and merely to move in his shadow was to aspire to greatness.
    In Schultes, I found the perfect complement to Maybury-Lewis, my anthropology tutor. Whereas Maybury-Lewis awakened the soul through the sheer power of his intellect, the wonder of his words and ideas, Schultes inspired by the example of his deeds. In all the years I was formally his student, we never had an intellectual conversation. It was not his style. He was a true explorer, and the very force of his personality gave form and substance to the most esoteric of ethnobotanical pursuits. He would pass along these thoughts that were both gifts and challenges. “There is one river that I would very much like you to see,” he would say, knowing full well that the process of
getting to that river would involve experiences guaranteed to assure that were you able to reach the confluence alive, you would emerge from the forest a wiser and more knowledgeable human being.
    Typical of the way Schultes operated was his suggestion, offered casually just before I left for South America, that I look up one of his former graduate students, Tim Plowman, in Colombia. Tim, who would become a close friend, was Schultes’s protégé, and the professor had secured for him from the U.S. government the dream academic grant of the early 1970 s, $250,000 to study a plant known to the Inca as the Divine Leaf of Immortality, the most sacred medicine of the Andes, coca, the notorious source of cocaine.
    It was a remarkable assignment. Though the drug had long been the focus of public concern and hysteria, and efforts to eradicate the coca fields had been underway for nearly fifty years, astonishingly little was known about the actual plant. The botanical origins of the domesticated species, the chemistry of the leaf, the pharmacology of coca chewing, the plant’s role in nutrition, the geographical range of the domesticated species, the relationship between the wild and cultivated species—all these were mysteries. No concerted effort had been made to document the role of coca in the religion and culture of the Andean and Amazonian
Indians since W. Golden Mortimer’s classic History of Coca , published in 1901. Tim’s mandate from the government, made deliberately vague by Schultes, was to travel the length of the Andean Cordillera, traversing the mountains whenever possible, to reach the flanks of the montaña to locate the source of a plant that had inspired an empire. Eventually, Tim and I would spend over a year on the road, a journey made possible by the great professor and infused at all times with his spirit.
    We knew, of course, that coca was the most revered plant of the Andes. The Inca, unable to cultivate the bush at the elevation of the imperial capital of Cusco, replicated it in fields of gold and silver that coloured the landscape. No holy shrine in the land could be approached unless the supplicant had a quid of coca in his mouth. No field could be planted, no child