Man with a Brass Neck

DANGER MY ALLY (278 pp.)--F. A.

Mitchell-Hedges--Little, Brown ($3.75).

The Maya Kekchi Indians furtively examined the big, bearded explorer in his Bedford-cord riding breeches and decided that here was the man to revitalize their dying tribe. They led to his jungle hut the fairest of their maidens, eyes downcast and breasts bare, and delivered a proposition from their chief: the girl was his, but if there were no sons, the explorer must give his breeches to the chief. "To refuse point blank would have insulted the whole tribe," explains doughty British Explorer "Mike" Hedges. "On the other hand, I obviously could not accept." What to do in this social dilemma? Mike turned to Lady ";Mabs" Richmond Brown, a venturesome British aristocrat who had accompanied him to the Central American wilderness. Lady Mabs, Mike told the headman of the tribe, was already his bride, so that he could not "by the laws of my gods" oblige the Indians. The emissaries regretfully took the maiden away, and the intrepid explorer kept his sense of propriety as well as his pants.

Wall Street to Villa. Explorer F. A. Mitchell-Hedges, now 72, zestfully recalls a good bookful of such tall tales for gin-and-tonic reading. "Life without adventure is a state of being half dead," is Mike Hedges' philosophy, and in 1900 he turned from "staid old lady" London to seek fortunes in Wall Street and buried ruins in Honduras. Armed with a letter of introduction to Financier Jules Bache, Mike made tens of thousands on the Street and soon got close enough to the imperial J. P. Morgan to be able to inquire at a dinner party: "Railroad deal, Mr. Morgan? What's all this about?" Mike gleefully quotes a Morgan man on Adventurer Mike Hedges: "Goddamit, I never saw a youngster with such a brass neck." Moving on to Mexico, Mike Hedges fell afoul of Guerrilla Leader Pancho Villa, and--as he tells it--narrowly escaped execution as an American spy. To prove his English nationality, he flashed Villa an orthodox Guardsman's salute and sang God Save the King--whereupon Villa delightedly conscripted Mike for ten months' service as a guerrilla leader. But Mike was soon heading south again for gleaming Panama Bay and the 20-ton yacht Cara. He spent years prowling the jungles and deep-sea fishing grounds with his like-minded ally, Lady Mabs, who made a hit as a healer by dosing the tribesmen with Epsom salts ("Most primitive tribes suffer from constipation").

Lost City to Crocodiles. By his account, Hedges' biggest moment as an explorer came when he led an expedition to find the Lost City of Lubaantun, built around seven acres of Mayan monuments buried in the Honduran jungle. Mike characteristically uncovered the city by setting a spectacular forest fire: ";We watched the rolling sea of flame ... A small hill would be seen covered with a tangled mass of branches, vines and small trees. Next moment it was gone and in its place was revealed a smouldering incandescent pyramid . . . walls, terraces and mounds . . .The fallen city showed indistinctly through a veil of bluish smoke." It was fun in the jungle that Mike Hedges was after, and he had 15 readable years of it. One jungle night Mike saw the secret mating dance of the Kruta Indians, their tom-toms booming, conch-shell horns shrieking, snakeskin-clad witch doctors tossing naked girls into the arms of naked boys, all screaming and swaying together in the light of brushwood fires till they dropped. "I do not remember feeling so exhausted since the night we shot the crocodiles in the Patuca River," Mike Hedges sighs. Then for breathless readers Mike tirelessly rattles on, and that's "a story which is worth recalling . . ."

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