Ring of Fire

by Lawrence Blair; Lorne Blaire

  On the ridge overlooking the descent to Poreng stands the cross which marks the spot where the baron who had been on the first expedition, accompanied by Wiesmar, met his unpleasant end. The inscription reads:

  IN MEMORY OF

  Baron Rudolf Von Reding Biberegg

  Born in Switzerland the 8 August 1895 and

  Disappeared on this island the 18 July 1974

  ‘He loved Nature throughout his life’

  The precise circumstances of his ‘disappearance’ are tastefully absent from the inscription, on the principle that the whole truth is not necessarily good for tourism. The full irony of the baron’s epitaph is only apparent on discovering he was a pioneering wildlife conservationist of considerable repute and, much as he demonstrably gave his life to nature, so, too, in the end, nature returned that love with a totally Darwinian devotion.

  Wiesmar describes the tragedy as resulting quite simply from breaking the cardinal rule about never leaving the group.

  ‘More useful,’ he would tell us, ‘if this cross say “Always stick together... then nature no love you back!”

  Although Wiesmar had been accompanying another group on the short walk to Loho Liang at the time, he did take part in the subsequent days of combing the island for the baron’s remains, and he told us the story as he knew it. The baron’s party had apparently reached the ridge and was about to descend the mere quarter of a mile to the valley below when the baron, breathing heavily, had insisted that the others go ahead while he rested and waited for them on the way back. He was clearly in view of the party at all times, and vice versa, until suddenly he was not.

  Despite the extensive search, which turned up a good many aggressive Dragons, all that was ever found was close to the spot where he had last been seen, and where his cross now stands – his hat, his camera and a bloody shoe.

  Though the baron is the most celebrated victim, he was far from the first, and no longer the most recent, human to be devoured by the Komodo Dragons. For, though they were late to awaken to science, they have not been dimmed by its light, and stalk their now protected island with, if anything, a swelling confidence in their immortality. Something of this self-confidence, and the razor’s edge between it and my own, was vividly revealed to me only three months ago, when I returned to Komodo for the first time in years.

  We were on a brief visit with a small film crew and our producer, David Fanning, to reshoot some final connecting sequences for our Ring of Fire television series. The main purpose was to get more of Lorne and myself on camera at the same time – with the Dragons. I had looked forward to it for months, but the encounter itself was not as planned.

  We island-hopped to eastern Flores and chartered a wooden motor-vessel with its local captain and crew to carry us through the riptides and whirlpools to Komodo. It was the captain who broke the disconcerting news that the island now boasted the ‘Komodo Safari Hotel’, built with the support of the World Wildlife Fund and inaugurated by the Indonesian president a few years previously.

  The establishment rose from the beach just where the path for the ‘short walk’ to Loho Liang began. Approaching from a distance, its five elegant barnlike structures looked menacingly modern and opulent, and we could visualize it harbouring Margaritas and swimming-pools. But on closer inspection it proved to be a crumbing façade, and the sole inhabitants were the hungry and extended family of the management itself, who were overjoyed to see us.

  We were led to a splendid-looking bungalow, on high stilts, which had disintegrated so rapidly since it had been built three years previously that it was far more dangerous than sleeping in the bush itself. The veranda, its main attraction, spread out 20 feet above the ground on rickety support-posts as a platform presumably intended for observing, drink in hand, a Noah’s Ark of wildlife cavorting across the dustbowl below. Its planking was so rotten that we were in constant fear of plunging right through it, and its gaping holes suggested that other eager nature-lovers had already done so. The Safari Hotel was clearly but a symbol of preservation – and had been built more as an offering to an idea than as a permanent edifice.

  ‘And are there still Dragons?’ we enquired of our eager toothy maitre d’hôtel. ‘Ah, yes, indeed,’ he replied. ‘Many more than tourists, nowadays. Try Loho Liang tomorrow? Many Dragons. Take a goat!’

  ‘If there are many Dragons, why must we take a goat?’

  ‘Better take a goat. Take this goat, only 20 dollars!’ He pointed out a particularly rickety-looking beast from his gaggle of bleating billies scavenging beneath the tables of what passed as the dining room.

  We had known from previous experience that with a little time and care it was by no means necessary to kill a goat to find a Dragon. Circling birds of prey frequently revealed the site of a recent kill, their regular runs and dens are readily identifiable – and anyway they usually find you first. We had a few days, and decided we would try the dried riverbed without a goat.

  The ‘short walk’ was no longer a narrow scrub-fringed gametrack, but a tidy tended path sporting periodic signposts in jocular accurate English such as ‘This way to the Dragons’ and ‘You are now entering Dragon territory’. The accuracy deteriorated as we progressed past humbler signs marked, in one instance, ‘DRUGONS HAIR’, as if the mysterious sign-painter had increasingly lost his mind the further he had receded from the coast. There were, however, only five of us, plus our two young guides from the Safari Hotel filing past the peeling paint, amidst as rich a profusion of life and sound as ever.

  I began to feel unwell – nauseous and dizzy. Too little sleep, perhaps, too much excitement, or maybe I was over-confident, after so long an absence from Indonesia, about going hatless in the midday sun. The shrubs had grown, the topology changed, so I did not at first recognize the riverbank, where we had so often come, alone and with others, with and without goats – sometimes, but not always, seeing Dragons. Our suddenly hurrying guides made so quick a turn that before we knew it we were through a metal gate and inside a barbed wire enclosure which now squatted on the riverbank. With us in our pen were a row of wooden benches with sago-thatch sunshades and a concrete screen, marked ‘Laddies and Genitalmen’, with not so much as a hole in the ground behind it.

  Extending over the bank was a carefully constructed little hoist with a pulley and tackle dangling a meat hook.

  We were regarding this with worried disbelief when we realized that up on the bank with us, leaning against the wires of our enclosure, at least seven goodly-sized Ora were quietly observing us. A few more now rustled stealthily out of the bush, and flicked their scent organs between the wires at us in fingering flames, drenching us with their foul breath. In the riverbed, directly beneath the mechanical goat-crane, at least nine more Dragons were awakening with interest from what had clearly been a long and patient sleep. I had never seen so many at one time, and behaving in such a curiously low-key fashion.

  In this wild spot, where we had once seen Dragons in their pit below us, we were now caged ourselves – and surrounded by them. Visiting ships now brought goat-bearing visitors four or five times a year, and the Dragons were waiting to be fed. We had deigned to approach their lair empty-handed of an offering, and we were now it. Maybe it was because this was so real that I felt ill. Some part of my subconscious had finally caught up with me about the ridiculous way we had chosen to make a living.

  We required two shots – one of myself descending the tree to within a few feet of the riverbed, and the other of both of us walking amongst the Dragons on their own level. We were anxious not to disappoint David, our producer, whose first visit this was to Indonesia, and who was so undemanding throughout that it was hard to avoid going down that tree.

  I hung in the branches, as close to the ground as I dared, with the world swimming. Three healthy Ora immediately got to their talons, ambled over and salivated at me with a sickening stench of excitement. The largest sidled up, cocked his head a few feet beneath my boots, opened his mouth, and embalmed m
e with a rising miasma of suppuration. They say that few intelligent animals will look you directly in the eye. Dragons can certainly be added to that short list, for long and hard he held my bleary eyes with a chillingly knowing malevolence.

  Those Dragons wanted my insides first, and then the rest of me, to eat, and as I hung there above this ravening gang my mind and weakening fingers gripping the tree very nearly released it all to them.

  Eventually I managed to crawl up to the safety of our enclosure before collapsing into the shade.

  ‘Great stuff!’ David shouted encouragingly. ‘Now let’s have the real “ora-show” we came here for. We just need that shot of you two walking with them like Daniels in the riverbed.’

  ‘Sprinting past them, you must mean?’ Lorne queried. ‘We’ve never seen so many together, and they’re not their usual selves.’ I heard this dimly through my sun-drenched brain, and knew I would still need another half-hour before I could even crawl effectively.

  Carefully choosing our moment, we scampered out of the gate past the more sleepy sentries leaning lasciviously against our enclosure, and reached the riverbed via a circuitous route, to find the Dragons there had been fully aroused by my dangling meat. We trespassed towards them over the riverbed like a couple of tip toeing cartoon coyotes, hoping to God our team was already filming us from their set-up on the other side. Lorne, who is not famed for his sartorial propriety, wore flapping safari-shorts – which sorely tempted the little Dragons to take a provisional peck at his exposed pink shanks. This was to be avoided, since the virulence of their bite is in no way diminished by their size. My own scent seemed instantly recognizable to the large Dragon I’d been baiting earlier on, and he advanced purposefully, flanked by his cronies.

  The shrieked warnings of our guides from the bank above were hardly necessary. We were not anxious to have our stomachs opened and vacated like tins of Heinz spaghetti. But the Dragons converged and began circling and trying to cut off our retreat, angling their tails around in preparation for throwing a few leg-blows to knock us off our feet. We retreated back up the bank. Again and again we tried to walk amongst them for the shot we needed, and each time we were driven back again. The only reason the Ora didn’t pursue us up the bank was because each time, at the last moment, they were drawn back by some magnetic charisma which appeared to be emanating from the dangling meathook. For a moment I wished it held the rickety billy-goat we had shunned at the Safari Hotel. When the Dragons got too close I comforted myself by picking up a large stone in either fist with which, endangered species or not, I intended to make at least one of them look like a panda if they made a determined lunge for me. Our guides must have enjoyed this little ritual enormously, for they later told me that even hurling huge rocks has not the slightest effect on a Dragon which has really decided to go for it.

  We were beginning to despair of getting the shot we had come so far for and staked so much on, when out of the blue, off a local boat, appeared a young Irish couple, attractively fresh-faced and improbable, with a guide – and a goat! At the last moment our sacrifice had been brought for us – by two far-wandering unknown members of our own tribe. From a film-making point of view, it was as fortuitous as Abraham’s discovery of a sheep in a bush. From a personal point of view, it was also a singular relief, for we could now approach to within five feet of the Dragons as they gorged and clawed and fought each other over the rapidly disappearing carcass.

  But it was disturbing to find how much these animals seemed to have changed since we had first visited them, both as glorified tour guides and as independent film-makers. Rather as David Attenborough describes them on his 1950s zoo quest, they had been fairly difficult to locate: solitary hunters which, once found, tended to be shy or instantly ferocious. But now they appeared to have undergone a sinister evolutionary transition. They had become communal half-hearted welfare citizens, lurking lazily for months on the fringes of these spots where they had learnt that, sooner or later, dead or living food would come to provide their next free meal.

  Back in the village of Komodo, the headman was to confess what the manager of the Safari Hotel had denied: that there had indeed been several human fatalities in recent years, one of them a young French tourist. He also reported that for the first time in decades Dragons had begun entering the village in the daytime, and only a month before one had taken a goat from beneath the houses at midday. Whether there were suddenly more of them, or whether they were simply more brazen, he couldn’t say.

  In that Dragon’s eye which looked into me, as I hung precariously above it, I realized I had seen how old and strong is the Dragon’s history – and how much of its history is mine. For long as we may have been humans, and Tarsoids, and mammals and fish, our longest dream was as reptiles.

  Komodo lies there to remind us of this, right now, wherever we are.

  15. David Attenborough, Zoo Quest for a Dragon (London: Lutterworth Press, 1957).

  16. Walter Auffenberg, The Behavioral Ecology of the Komodo Monitor (University Press of Florida, 1981).

  Dance of the Warriors

  South of Komodo, lying alone in the Indian Ocean well apart from the main chain, is Sumba island. About 200 miles long by 75 wide, it has only one potholed track connecting the east to the west.

  Early British charts still mark Sumba as Sandalwood Island – for the aromatic forests which once covered its hills. During those centuries when the privileged wore silks and damasks, sandalwood clothes-chests were valuable items – but the greatest demand for the fragrant timber was as incense in temples, mosques and churches from China to Europe.

  The rolling grasslands left after the forests had been felled allowed Sumba’s other great natural resource, the unique ‘Sandalwood’ horse, free rein. Small, feisty, nobly proportioned, resistant to tropical heat and disease as well as spectacularly sure-footed, they were much in demand by the cavalry regiments of colonial days. In Britain, specially designed ships were built to transport Sumbanese horses back across the Indian Ocean to India and South Africa as mounts for the Raj. These traders, however, dealt mainly with coastal merchants and feudal chieftains at the arid eastern end of the island, since the wild and desolate coasts of the west presented few safe anchorages.

  Although the Dutch had claimed Sumba as their own for centuries, they made no attempt to colonize it until 1901. Eleven years later they declared that they had tamed the more blatant expressions of slavery and human sacrifice. During the 40 years of Dutch rule, only a handful of administrators actually deigned to live on the island, and after the brief wartime domination by Japan they never managed to regain their control. Christian missionaries failed to convert more than 20 per cent of the population, and Islam, brought by the Arab horse merchants, proved equally unattractive, and the vast majority of the Sumbanese still live by animist beliefs, ritually keeping the balance between the Merapu gods of the sky above, and Nyale, the Sea Goddess, of the world below.

  The arid but more accessible eastern half of Sumba is recognized for producing some of the finest ceremonial ikat textiles of the Far East, whereas the verdant west of the island is known only to a few, chiefly for its unique Pasola rite, which has managed to survive in two villages almost intact up to the present day. The Pasola is an annual war sport in which two teams of several hundred mounted warriors charge each other at a full gallop, hurling javelins from close range with intent to kill. The spectators, by being as legitimate a target as the warriors themselves, are really participants – for the Pasola, as we were to discover, is a veiled form of human sacrifice…

  Lorne and I had spent years trying to see, let alone film, the Pasola, and Lorne had already made one abortive trip to Sumba in the company of the remarkable Zac Saklofsky, who was one of the few outsiders to have spent any time there. Travelling west from the arid Sumbanese capital of Waingapo, they had been profoundly impressed that the desolate tundra characteristic of the east so abruptly surrendered to emerald valleys and sweeping hills still topped with de
nse stands of sandalwood and cinnamon forest. They had talked excitedly of this hidden world, and of the granite megaliths weighing up to 20 tons used to seal the graves of dead nobles who were buried with their valuables including – up to only a hundred years ago – their freshly sacrificed horses and slaves. But, for all Lorne and Zac’s enthusiasm, they had not been able to establish exactly when the Pasola takes place.

  ‘It’s up to the Ratus, the priests,’ Lorne had reported sheepishly. ‘They watch the moon and stars for a few months and then predict the one day a year when the beaches will swarm with wriggling seaworms. The arrival of the worms signals the start of the Pasola – and it is different every year.... But’, he added, when he saw my sceptical expression, ‘the chieftain of Wanokaka told us it has to happen in the first two moons of the year.’

  In fact it wasn’t until three years later that Lorne and Zac claimed to have pinpointed the exact day and made the appropriate arrangements, and I found myself taking a gruelling 12-hour bus ride across Sumba towards an improbable-sounding rendezvous.

  I hoped they knew what they were talking about, and that I was in the right island at the right time. There were 3,000 square miles of territory up ahead of me, and fellow-passengers on the bus told me that no one drove this route at night, for mounted highwaymen armed with shotguns still preyed on it from their fastnesses in the forested hilltops just now coming into view.

  I’d been churning in the bus for about six hours, when it finally ground to a halt halfway across a dried riverbed, and we all had to get out to push it. I was straining away with my fellow-passengers when a jeep veered down from the opposite direction, thundered past in a cloud of dust, braked and reversed.