Ring of Fire

by Lawrence Blair; Lorne Blaire

‘Understand?’ he shouted at me above the hubbub. ‘Nobody understands it – and nobody likes the blood. Besides, there isn’t any blood, or not much. This isn’t our decision, Tuan.’ He went on more calmly: ‘Our traditional greetings are performed by the spirits through us. They chose this for you, and we certainly cannot stop them once they’ve begun.’

  After a while older members of the community intervened to slap and embrace the participants out of trance and the atmosphere thankfully quietened down. Some began helping the performers unstitch their mouths, starting with biting the knots at their corners, like a Dracula’s kiss being administered to standing epileptics, and then drawing the thread out of numerous bloodless holes round their lips. But this proved only to be the first act, and the star turn was yet to come. This required only five men: one shirtless hero, two people to hold him, and two others to wield and repeatedly slam a flattened boulder against his back.

  For a horrible impotent instant I shared with many the chilling suspicion that we might be about to witness an execution as testimony of their seriousness to entertain us. At first he stood upright, but he was shortly bowed over on his knees, presenting an arched spine to the blows. A terrible glottal sound was driven out of him each time but, far from fractured vertebrae and gaping lesions, his skin remained completely untarnished, if slightly darker. When he was finally embraced out of his trance, he opened his eyes with the same misty, enquiring expression of one who has returned from a great distance – from much further away than we ourselves had come.

  It was a fascinating example of pure animist possession in the guise of orthodox Islam, but it was not appreciated as such by many of our passengers, even when I perspiringly attempted to interpret it for them at my interrogation that evening. Wiesmar, who had long since abandoned any attempts of his own to bridge the cultural gulf between the two worlds, was tickled by my efforts and sat smugly in the back row irritatingly grinning at my efforts to explain why it was all perfectly all right and absolutely fascinating, even if not what you’d expect on the croquet lawn.

  ‘The Whizz’, as we called him, was the son of the last Sultan of West Sumatra, and national turmoils had led him to become almost the Indonesian equivalent of a French Foreign Legionnaire – with the same sort of lurid past. He had been a colonel on the wrong side of the Sumatran war of secession and then, dabbling in politics, he had achieved the powerful position of chairman of the National Union of Students. When the tide of power shifted again he took the position of a VIP roving agent for TUNAS, the National Department of Tourism, also doubling as an intelligence-gatherer in the nation’s outlying regions.

  Though he looked like a portly sloe-eyed baby, he was deceptively rugged and alert. It was not merely the fact that we could speak the same language and share the same jokes, but the three of us met on deeper common ground midway in the no man’s land dividing two profoundly different worlds. We were later to share much of our hazardous five-month trek with him into the heart of Borneo (see Chapter 9).

  The Whizz’s sense of adventure was perpetually stoked by his hope of finding clues to hidden treasure which, as everyone knew, still lies throughout this frontier land in many forms waiting to be discovered. It was this which had inspired his present position, as well as those he had held as official ombudsman for some of the earliest foreign sorties off the beaten track permitted since national independence. It was Wiesmar, too, who had been the government representative aboard the TUNAS vessel in 1976 which was the first to carry a whole shipload of sightseeing Europeans to Komodo – including the unfortunate Swiss baron who was to become the first known Westerner to be eaten by a Komodo Dragon.

  It was only a year later, aboard Explorer, that I now paid my first visit to the island, and it was no less impressive than visiting it alone on subsequent occasions.

  The night before arriving, Wiesmar sat enigmatically in the back row of the lecture lounge as our zoologists prepared us for what lay ahead. Their usual tendency to dispel misguided notions of threats posed by certain animals was absent from their discourse on the Dragon that evening. It was unanimously agreed that stalking the Ora, as it is locally called, required the utmost caution. Remarkably little is still known about the reptile. What was known at the time was that there were at least six well-documented human fatalities attributed to them since their discovery barely 60 years earlier.

  At the heart of the arid Lesser Sunda Islands, Komodo is only about 15 miles long by 5 miles wide. The Ora rule supreme at the top of a precariously balanced food-chain, but are hard pressed to thrive on the slender population of wild pigs, deer and goats which form their staple diet. They are also not averse to the odd buffalo and even feral horse, which they dispatch, like all their victims, by sweeping them off balance with a thrash of their powerful tail, then directly opening their stomach with a single can-opening bite, and gulping down the spilled intestines before the animal has had a chance to die. The following morning we were to make a significant increase in the ratio of available warm-blooded flesh on the island by unloading some 60 succulent, slow-moving and heavily scented additions to the Dragons’ larder.

  Approaching the island in the pre-dawn darkness I was awakened as our 500-ton ship began tossing around like a rowing boat, and I quickly joined the captain and officers on the bridge. They were poring over charts, but the information provided by the Nautical Almanac stated that there was no predictable pattern to the sudden birth of powerful whirlpools and ripcurrents which could race around the island at a terrifying 15 knots.

  As a child I had read with fascination David Attenborough’s Zoo Quest for a Dragon, 15 and the scaly denizens, which he had gone to such trouble to capture, had inhabited the imagination of my formative years; but I was not prepared for the charisma of the island itself.

  It is the jagged congealed heart of a sleeping volcano, protected by a raging moat. Its forbidding escarpments towered against the dawn like the walled castle of the Prince of Darkness. The sun sent thin long fingers of gold down into mysterious valleys of prehistoric vegetation, while the ramparts above were silhouetted with Borassus palms, looking like lollipops with Afro hairdos 40 feet high. This seemed precisely the setting of Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, written more than 30 years before the Dragon was discovered.

  At the edge-seam of the world, in no one continent and in no one sea, Komodo was nevertheless to reach out in disguise to touch our Western imaginations. For accompanying the early American expedition to the island in 1926, led by the big-game enthusiast W.D. Burden, was a young pioneering cameraman named Willis O’Brien. O’Brien was so deeply affected by the island’s prehistoric atmosphere, and the struggling human community which barricaded itself against the prevailing monster, that he subsequently went on to make a timeless film called King Kong.

  We pulled into quieter waters, over the pearly coiling surface of Slawi Bay. Whales and manta rays heaved out of the water, in such rich varieties of species that our marine biologists were nearly falling over the rails with excitement and shouting identifications to each other in boisterous Latin.

  Not a soul or footprint marred Komodo’s crescent beaches, but the shells and marine flotsam would have made a malacologist’s eyes water.

  Three miles to the south squatted the only village on the whole island – a sorry-looking clutch of lean-tos on stilts with a population of some four hundred impoverished souls clinging to life at the edge of the sea. They are all the descendants of former subjects of the kingdom of Bima, on neighbouring Flores, whose sultans had gradually banished them, over the centuries, to Dragon Island. It has even been suggested that when the Sultan of Bima declared Komodo and its Ora, a protected sanctuary in 1915 (only three years after it had been classified by science) it was less an enlightened gesture far in advance of its time than an effort to retain the ‘teeth’ in his penal-colony policies.

  The village’s precious few domestic goats and chickens are corralled beneath the houses during the day, and gathered up the vertical step
s into their owners’ homes each night. Their graveyard is encrusted with cairns and coral heads to prevent marauding Dragons from exhuming and eating the corpses. Their only fresh water must be painfully milked via a polyvinyl hose from one minute and unreliable spring.

  The graveyard of Komodo is fortified with chunks of coral to prevent the human remains from being unearthed by the dragons. (LAWRENCE & LORNE BLAIR)

  They wrest their living almost entirely from the sea – their staple diet being the squid which are netted from their elegant twin-masted catamarans. They fear the Dragons, and by and large keep their backs firmly turned to the forbidding crags and primordial glens behind them. Only a few enterprising villagers venture inland as nervous guides for the occasional outsiders.

  On this, my first occasion, with a pile of passengers and a tight schedule, we chose the safer of two promising sites for Dragon-spotting, a ‘short walk’ to Loho Liang, barely a mile inland to a 10-foot observational ledge overlooking a dried riverbed. Here the reptiles might be observed from the safety above, and an adjacent tree extended its branches to the ledge, providing a direct means of descent to stake the slaughtered goat used as bait to the ground. Alternatively, we could have made a four-hour ‘long walk’ up to Poreng, and the open savannah land where the Dragons could be encountered, if at all, on their own level, and where the offering of a sacrificial goat, as putrid as possible, was even more essential for distracting their gastronomic attentions from their observers.

  We had often been amazed by the degree to which animal sacrifice still held sway throughout Indonesia. The two Brahminy Bulls, for instance, buried beneath the futuristic concrete dome of the Subud ashram in Java; the 200 water buffalo, and our own boar, at the Toraja funeral; the black goat and the white cock slaughtered in Sinar Surya’s hull – all these seemed inextricably part of the human order, and unavoidably beyond the reach of animal rights. It was droll to find that even Lindblad Explorer, microcosm of the enlightened West, was itself no less free of the need to supply sacrificial goats! And here in Komodo, with the sophisticates of my own tribe, we were nailing another beast to the deck – and waiting.

  I had seen Komodo Dragons before: a couple of stuffed ones in various museums, and a few dispirited five-footers in the zoos of San Diego and Jakarta. Both dead and alive they lay on their bloated bellies, their atrophied legs drawn close to their sides. They gave no hint of their wild cousins who now stalked down the riverbed towards our bait. These held themselves fully clear of the ground on thick and muscular legs, moving from their hips with the slightly stilted grace of Olympic weight-lifters. The two large ones in the lead were about 8 and 10 feet long, and their long orange forked tongues (with which they scent their prey) flickered in and out over the ground like flames – giving a strong impression of the fire-breathing dragons of legend.

  They also smelt of death. Their mouths carry a virulent bacteria to which there is still no known antidote. It is their singular evolutionary adaptation which maximizes the use of their barely 70 square miles of territory, for a victim who may escape an initial attack with only a slight wound will within a few days fester and stink so strongly that it is easy for other Dragons to sniff it down with their forked tongues and polish it off.

  The languidly approaching leading monster froze about 10 feet from the bait. It raised its head higher still, then rushed and thrashed the goat once with its tail, before efficiently opening its belly with a single slash of its murderous jaws and swallowing down its intestines. A writhing free-for-all ensued, with moments of extremely swift movement as the smaller Dragons nimbly sought their scraps, while avoiding the jaws of their cannibalistic superiors. The larger Dragons effortlessly sawed through spine and bones, engorging enormous wedges of meat. After each awful swallow they would look briefly and contentedly around them as if waiting for applause, before resuming their meal and finishing off hoofs, horns and polyvinyl rope with equal delectation.

  It was long assumed that the Komodo Dragon was a scavenging carrion-eater, rather than a hunter, and that like most reptiles it was solar-powered, and inactive in the shade or at night. Both these myths were exploded by Walter Auffenberg, the enterprising herpetologist from the University of Miami who, between 1969 and 1971, made the most exhaustive study of the creature so far. 16

  He lived here for 13 months with his wife and child, firmly establishing that the Dragons are both hunters and active round the clock, for it was after dark that his camp was raided and his family driven from their tent while the notorious male, which he labelled 34W, feasted noisily on their clothes and sleeping-bags. Auffenberg also records observing his son being systematically stalked by two Dragons on the beach – and his exhaustive analysis of the island’s eco-system clearly reveals how quickly the Dragons would have become extinct had they been mere scavengers rather than true predators. From my first glimpse of them, they certainly stalked with the confidence of predators.

  The following day I visited the riverbed again with another bevy of passengers and two experienced naturalists. Shortly, a large Dragon had no sooner appeared than it lifted the entire goat, tethering-stakes and all, out of the ground and made off with it. This was after the staff had been briefed that there had been customer complaints about being cheated of their rightful spectacle by Dragons that preferred to eat in private. One of the naturalists, the quick-thinking Robby Hernandez, now stunned us all by shinning down the tree, grabbing the trailing rope and yanking the bait from the astonished Dragon’s jaws. Two of our local Komodo guides then scurried to help him stake the goat back in place again in full view of the passengers, while keeping the temporarily confused reptile at bay with long forked poles. I was much impressed by this selfless devotion to customer satisfaction, and Robby, still shaking, confessed he had been inspired by seeing another naturalist do the same thing on his first visit.

  A Komodo dragon enthusiastically devouring a dead goat. (LORNE & LAWRENCE BLAIR)

  Six weeks later, when the ship returned with fresh passengers flown in to Bali on the second of her annual Indonesian cruises, I found myself leading my own party of about 30 people on the short walk to Loho Liang’s dried riverbed. With us were Des and Jenny Bartlett who were coming along to film. We had waited for some time and were beginning to worry, when again perhaps the same large and solitary Dragon arrived, immediately uprooted our goat and disappeared behind the undergrowth with it. Sensing a chance to show off and liven things up a bit, I shot down the tree in hot pursuit. Out of sight of the others, I came across the stake and its nylon rope at the point of vanishing beneath some bushes. I gripped it and was dragged, powerless, into the full-body embrace of a thorn tree.

  Held fast, like Gulliver, by every part of my body, I had a few still moments to contemplate the proximity of the unseen Dragon ahead, before realizing that barely 20 yards away behind me an entire gang of late-coming lizards were fast advancing. I debated the merits of tearing myself loose and leaving my skin hanging on the thorn tree, but despite my convulsions I remained firmly transfixed.

  My act of showmanship had gone awry and, pilloried on this cross of briars, I howled for help. Eventually one of the Komodoese guides reached me and unshackled me, like a maiden in distress, barb by barb.

  Des Bartlett, in the meantime, had descended and approached the opposite side of the undergrowth, where he had accurately located the thief, fooled the goat from its jaws, and marched back to the cheering crowd holding it triumphantly aloft, like Jason returning with the Golden Fleece. I am glad to say his heroic pose was short-lived, for hurrying up behind him on one side came the now distinctly irritated first Dragon, and on the other the guide and my bleeding self, hotly pursued by a swollen throng of hungry giant lizards. It was no longer a matter of how to stake the bait down again, but of who could get up the tree first – and it wasn’t a pretty sight.

  The advantage of this short walk to the riverbed at Loho Liang over the long walk to the elevated plains of Poreng was that the Dragons could be observed f
rom the safety of a vantage-point above them. It is the longer walk, though, which really takes one into the heart of the island, and a fairyland of prehistoric beauty. The trees swarm with six inch flying dragons, Draco volans, the ‘flying Dracula’ lizards which unfurl their wings and glide through the air. Beneath the towering Borassus palms spreads a diorama of exotic vegetation, which is more reminiscent of the dry savannah lands of Africa than of Indonesia, with grasses and ferns and prickly palms, and the absurd Kapok trees, their shiny synthetic-looking trunks sporting clustered pouches bursting with fluffy white cotton. Bizarre butterflies flap through the slanting light of what looks like a museum display of the Cambrian age. Megapodus birds can be seen fussing with the thermal controls of their enormous incubating mounds. Green jungle fowl and drongos add their cacophony to that of Sulphur-Crested Cockatoos – the pure white parrots with vivid yellow retractable crests, which fetch well over a thousand dollars apiece on the open zoo market.

  After a serpentine climb 800 feet to a ridge, the grasslands sweep down again to Poreng, the open valley where Dragons and their observers meet, if at all, face to face. Or perhaps posterior to face, as in our case, when filming alone on a later occasion; for the Dragons are drawn to the bait from all points of the compass and, while concentrating on the feasting Dragons ahead, others, unannounced, came upon us abruptly from behind. Some, not unnaturally, concluded that we were the source of the putrefying aroma – and it was tree-climbing time!

  Once, on an independent expedition to the island, we found the two guides who accompanied us on the long walk almost as worrying as the Dragons. They had been so forcefully warned by the authorities of the consequences of losing another visitor to a Dragon that their fear of the beasts was hysterically contagious. At one point Lorne was prostrate on his belly, and at last had a superb monster in his viewfinder approaching him to within 15 feet, when both guides cracked and, with the forked sticks they carried as ineffectual discouragements to charging Dragons, began beating ‘the one-eyed one’ and his camera into the ground instead – much interfering with his usual good temper!