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The cave is spectacular from the outside - a Sibyllic yawn venting smoke and flames and incantations. It's still pitch-dark and from my precarious position the cave hovers miraculously, a gateway to the unknowable, to the mysteries of the universe, a portal to the awe-inspiring energies of the spirit.

I realize how lucky I am to see this. The Huichol use this portal as blithely as a turnstile, but most of us in the West barely know of its existence.

Occasionally in my lifetime I'd felt it open a crack - in the presence of extraordinary beauty, say, or at the birth of my children, or holding my father's hand across the frontier of death - but then it had closed again with a resounding bang and life returned to 'normal' and that indescribable awe, that sense of transcendence and of peace, had slipped through my fingers like sand and I'd returned useless and empty-handed to the frenetic business of the melting-pot.

How ignorant and impoverished we must seem to people like the Huichol, we teiwari who believe ourselves so superior. I know, now, that I'm still - in Cacayari's words – a child.