‘You’re late!’ shouted Lorne from one window.
‘And you’re going the wrong way,’ added Zac, from the other.
Disengaging my duffel bag from beneath the sun-stricken chickens and goats lashed to the bus roof, and forsaking my colleagues in the chain gang, I climbed gratefully aboard the jeep, which continued back in the direction from which I had come.
‘So much for the two Pasola only taking place during the first two moons of the year,’ Zac announced. ‘The first moon’s barely begun and Lamboya held their Pasola three nights ago – the government forced them to do it early. Something to do with controlling the event.’
‘We filmed it, by the skin of our teeth,’ Lorne said excitedly. ‘It was unbelievable – I’ve never seen anything like it! We saw one guy killed instantly. He was knocked off his horse by a blunt spear hitting him on the temple.’
I really hadn’t thought it was still going on, and I was outraged at having missed it, but they told me a second Pasola, following the timing of the Ratu priests, rather than the government, was yet to take place in Wanokaka, and the taboo month leading up to it started in five days.
‘Then, why the hell are we heading back east?’ I demanded.
There was a tense hush, then Lorne ventured, with heavy irony: ‘Well might you ask. Zac has had a ‘‘psychic experience’’.’
‘A what?’ I expostulated. ‘You are a rational man, are you not?’
Zac continued looking rather fixedly and uncomfortably ahead of him. He was a pragmatist, inclined to dismiss any sort of psychic phenomena, so his occasional lapses were to be taken seriously. Lorne explained what had happened.
Having filmed the Pasola two days previously, they were relaxing on the street-front veranda of the digs at Waikabubak when they had heard the news about Zac’s greatest friend and benefactor on the island, the redoubtable 85-year-old Raja of the fiefdom of Pau, in East Sumba, a fierce guardian of the island’s traditions. A couple of textile merchants were just telling Zac that the old man had recently returned from medical treatment in Java with yet another 16-year-old wife, to the chagrin of his existing stable of spouses, when Zac, who had been idly scratching his neck, leapt up with blood streaming down his shirt and went indoors. Looking in the mirror, he told us, he had been horrified by the amount of blood still pouring from that tiny scratch, then much more disturbed by what he took to be the face of his old friend Raja Pau behind him. Zac had had two bad nights after that, and had woken up insisting on immediately heading east again to visit the old man in the brief interval between the two Pasola.
It seemed like an exhaustingly ill-timed red herring to me, but we began the journey back to Waingapo, pausing at one of the infrequent petrol pumps and fruit stands. Unbelievably, the proprietor handed Zac a note, having obviously been asked to keep an eye out for a tall white man with a big moustache.
Zac read the note aloud, turning white with fright.
‘Mr Zac, come quickly. Raja Pau died two days ago. You know just what time.’
Pausing in Waingapo just long enough to buy an ikat suitable for a royal funeral, we eventually clattered exhausted into Pau, only just managing to dodge the severed head of a horse on the track.
‘Pau’s favourite stallion,’ said Zac. ‘Its ancestry was as old as his. In the past, when a king died, they used to kill off his whole stable.’
A few yards from the main, high-roofed palace was a low building from which issued a chorus of gut-rending wails. The doorstep was the skull of a water buffalo, with horns spreading as wide as I had ever seen. Inside I discerned a triangular-shaped bundle, about four feet high, draped with a royal ikat. This was solemnly introduced to us as the late Raja Pau. His body was squatting upright, in Sumbanese burial pose, with his elbows on his knees and his palms on his cheeks – beneath not one, but dozens of superb ikat, representing the finest examples of antique royal Sumbanese weaving anywhere outside international museums. But these were to be used for their intended purpose; they would be buried with the Raja beneath a four-ton megalith.
As our eyes adjusted to the darkness, we could make out the throng of family and royal retainers. Some squatted and wailed, softly and deeply in their throats. Others sat chewing rouged wads of betel nut, gossiping comfortably as if at the market. The dead Raja himself was flanked by two youths with little red and green flags brushing away the flies which were attracted to the rank and costly bundle, and to the offerings of food and cups of tea at its feet. He would be ‘fed’, like the Toraja kings of Celebes, every day, sometimes for many years, until his funeral could be properly prepared. Zac was greeted warmly by a number of his friends, who confirmed that Pau had indeed died at exactly that sunset time when Zac’s throat had bled so profusely. Apparently the surgeons who had operated on Raja Pau in Java had failed to sew his throat up properly – and it had suddenly opened up again after his return home. In fact the reason why these normally secretive and suspicious East Sumbanese accepted us so readily was due largely to Zac’s story having preceded us here. To them it indicated that a genuine connection existed between Zac and their late king, the great lover of their traditional arts.
The Raja’s brother then formally introduced us to yet more ikated bundles with offerings at their feet, which we had missed amongst the shadowy crowd. This party was attended by three generations of unburied Paus squatting in the living room. There was his mother, father, brother, wife and sister-in-law. Some had been waiting for more than 20 years. Every time Raja Pau had painstakingly managed to assemble the required herd of sacrificial-quality buffaloes, the neighbouring Kingdom of Rindi had rustled them, forcing the postponement of the funeral yet again.
On Sumba, three generations of Pau's patiently await burial. (LORNE & LAWRENCE BLAIR)
The Rindi explanation, as we heard it from them later, was that in the 1920s, when Pau’s father had been a brash young chieftain, he had orchestrated the theft of the Rindi clan’s most magical and powerful golden heirlooms. Until these were returned, the Rindis had sworn that no dead Pau would enjoy the pleasures, indeed necessities, of a proper burial. Since the treasures were long since scattered about the private collections and museums of the world, we were witnessing the perpetuation of an Edgar Allan Poe-like curse which seemed to have no end in sight. Our present host, heir to the much diminished family assets, but a still larger kitty of unburied remains, was too preoccupied with the present to anticipate the future.
‘The last of our real treasures’, he said, ‘must be buried, not sold, with my family.’
‘You mean those fine ikat draping them now?’ Zac asked.
‘No,’ replied the new Raja, ‘these ones.’ In a corner of the darkened room he opened a large rattan basket, patina’d with age, containing hundreds of what Zac later described as the finest single collection of ikat anywhere in the world.
With permission we pulled them out, and filmed them, yard by shimmering yard. Layer upon layer of multi-coloured creatures danced on indigo backgrounds. The pattern is dyed into the stretched-out warp threads before the textile is woven. A few threads at a time are tightly tied with grasses which will leave a pattern when the ikat is dipped in the dye. This is repeated many times. A four- or five-colour ikat, all of natural dyes, can take two years to produce, mainly due to the need to wait for the proper season for each of the required plants.
Certain patterns and symbols are the unique prerogative of specific kingdoms and clans, and experts can instantly detect where an ikat comes from. They differ from the family crests or tartans of Scotland, for instance, in that no two ikat are ever the same. Many of the symbols are also magical ‘power-shapes’, whose secrets are understood only by the elders of the clan, and jealously guarded from neighbouring households. It is through these powerful motifs that each clan maintains what it sees as its unique political and mystical contribution to the whole. The best ikat are not only powerful magical ‘runes’ but, like Buddhist or Hindu Tankas and mandalas, are also maps of a hidden cosmol
ogy.
It was a remarkable piece of good fortune to have seen these finest examples of the famed East Sumbanese art and much more than we had bargained for, but we were more concerned with what was about to happen in the west of the island. After a little difficulty in persuading Zac to tear himself away – for none of these ikat had ever been seen by outsiders – we withdrew from the scent of death, and the shadowy intrigues of the dwindling house of Pau, and headed towards our original destination.
Topping the final ridge before Wanokaka we entered one of the greenest valleys I have ever seen. About five miles deep and three wide, it swept down from lush hills to yawning wild beaches, contained between high cliffs. Here we were greeted warmly by the chieftain, Haba Kodi, whom Lorne and Zac had met three years earlier.
A slim and energetic man in his mid-forties, Haba Kodi was Christian for convenience, but an animist at heart, and a cosmopolitan type who had roamed as far as Java. He informed us with obvious pleasure that the previous year’s Pasola had been a great success.
‘We had only one death, but that was really quite enough, and anyway the omens were good.’
‘You mean it doesn’t matter if somebody dies?’ l asked in surprise.
‘Oh, it’s not terrible if nobody dies, just better if they do. What is important is that blood is spilled.’
‘Then, it’s true that the Pasola is a human sacrifice!’ Lorne said with increasing interest.
‘Not exactly. Not like the sacrifices we used to make for the Andung Tree.’ Haba Kodi pointed to the bleached tree with truncated branches, propped upright in the village graveyard of megaliths.
‘There was still a human skull on that when I was a child,’ he said, ‘but those sacrifices were asking the Merapu gods for something. The Pasola is different: in it we are offering ourselves to the gods, to be used in their task of keeping a balance between the Upper and the Lower Worlds.’
He pointed out that the entire valley was organized to reflect this duality, with the inland villages of Upper Wanokaka representing the Upper World, and the coastal villages of Lower Wanokaka representing Nyale, Goddess of the Lower World of the sea. The Pasola, in which these two sections of the valley fight each other, is not so much a reflection of the cosmic conflict, he explained, as an actual part of it.
He had arranged to have us stay in Puli, one of the most spectacular Lower World villages, close to the Pasola action, and overlooking a wild and sweeping beach, book-ended with great green-topped cliffs. We were to spend two months there altogether as guests of the chieftain, Malira, and his wife, both hard working rice farmers, part-time fisherfolk and horse-breeders, with whom we got on famously. The house we shared with them was tiny, and we slept cramped into little bunks around the central cooking fire, but it was as near the centre of things as we could have hoped for.
Our first exploration of the village revealed that every hilltop behind us appeared to be crowned with dark clusters of rocket-ships awaiting liftoff from alien launchpads. These were the high, pointed roofs of traditional Sumbanese houses, ringed by fortifying stone walls, and a clear reminder of the very recent days of neighbourly warfare and human sacrifice.
A spacious roofed-in porch ran all the way round the square foundations of the house. The gently sloping ceiling and intricately carved wooden pillars were almost completely covered with the jawbones of sacrificial pigs. The slightly raised central living area was reached by stepping over the skulls of four water buffalo – their horns spanning more than five feet across.
There are several levels of windowless attics above the main living area, beneath the high, steeple-like roofs. In the lower ones are stored the family’s rice and working tools, while the highest are reserved for their most cherished treasures: the ceremonial ikat, totemic effigies, and gold jewellery beaten from the sovereigns once used by colonialist nations to pay for their sandalwood horses.
Almost every square foot of space between the houses was occupied by carved gravestones weighing many tons. Even my host had no idea how his forefathers had managed to drag them up to the hills.
‘Since before my grandfather’s day,’ Malira told me, ‘there’s been no more room for them up here. We’ve been burying people under stones down in the flatlands since then. Even that takes a great effort to haul the stones 10 kilometres from the sacred quarry.’
‘Trucks must make that easier now?’ I ventured.
‘Oh, no! That wouldn’t do at all. Once the blocks have been hewn from the quarries with the right ceremonies, hundreds of our friends must help us drag them on rollers. It takes many days, and we must give our friends much palm alcohol or they lose all their strength!’ He went on to explain that the few people who had tried technological short-cuts had become the objects of popular scorn.
It wasn’t long before we met the Ratus, mysterious, shrivelled old men, jangling with amulets. They crouched beneath the Andung trees, uttering incantations, and slitting the gizzards of live chickens to observe the omens in the fall of their entrails. They had been carefully observing the night sky for several weeks before our arrival, and now announced that the official month of taboo leading to the Pasola itself had begun. We were mortified to learn that this put the dramatic beach beneath the village out of bounds, for it would now become the most sacred piece of coastline on the island, and Nyale, the South Sea Goddess, would tolerate no swimming, fishing, levity or rowdiness until the Pasola began.
We slipped comfortably into the rhythms of Puli, crawling out of our hammocks each morning to the rhythmical pounding of rice, and to the operatic strains of our host’s wife calling the pigs to breakfast, and lovingly feeding them, one by one, with individual ladlefuls of food. The village dogs were the politest we had met anywhere in Indonesia, but the probable explanation for such charming manners revealed itself at dinner that first night, with the arrival of a bubbling dish of chillied hound. The Sumbanese cuddle, pamper and eat their dogs with the same alacrity as they do their pigs and goats and chickens. We were in fact to eat more dog meat than anything else – it tasted somewhere between rabbit and goat, but richer in protein than either, and tended to make one sweat while eating it.
While we waited out the taboo month, we took sacrificial gifts of chickens, and our own questions, to the wizened Ratu who dwelt at the furthest reaches of the valley. We did not find them forthcoming, but they ate all our chickens with relish. We even tried riding the famous sandalwood horses, which were as game as ourselves, although our feet tended to drag along the ground, and on one occasion, while trying to persuade his mount to turn left, Zac was actually bitten on the foot by the horse.
Instead of a gradual build-up to a frenzy of anticipation, our community became more and more sleepy and withdrawn as the taboo month progressed. On the night preceding the Pasola, however, a strange fear seemed to grip everyone. We remained wakefully silent and crouching indoors, to avoid the spirit entities which prowled outside. Our household was electric with anticipation, with the family, like all their neighbours, reading chicken entrails and trying to remember if they had offended the spirit world over the previous year. Only the Ratu ventured out, those of the Upper World villages wandering downwards to be joined by those of the lowland villages to assemble together on the beach. At the first hint of dawn, we all descended to join them and stood very still as the chief priest chanted to the fading stars.
‘Nyale! Nyale!’ the crowd began shouting, as the first rosy glow of dawn began creeping across the sea. But as I looked closer I realized the redness was more than the dawn – the seaworms were swarming, wriggling multitudes staining the beach with every wave. The high priest was the first to wander sedately into the surf to sample a mouthful of this ‘gift of the Sea Goddess’s body’, and to announce its portents to the waiting throng. Our host whispered to us that from the colour and condition of the ‘Nyale’ – the seaworm and the Goddess share the same name – the Ratu could tell us what to expect of the coming rice harvest.
‘If the wor
ms are healthy and plentiful, it will be a good year,’ he said. ‘If they fall apart at the touch, then enough rain can be expected to rot the rice on its stem. And if they are pitted and damaged, then a plague of rats or insects is probable, and we can take precautions in our planting methods.’
This year the worms suggested the latter diagnosis, but no one seemed too perturbed at the time, since the day of the Pasola was upon us. As soon as the high priest had given his verdict, the crowd rushed into the surf themselves to scoop up the seaworms in their cupped sarongs or woven baskets for a holy breakfast, which they quickly cooked over small driftwood fires and ate.
With a growing sense of excitement we joined the throng now climbing up to the Pasola ground, dramatically perched above and to the west of Puli. Several hundred magnificently bedecked horsemen were already cantering around in tight circles, working themselves and their mounts into a preliminary frenzy. This sweeping battlefield overlooking the Indian Ocean was edged with scattered burial megaliths, but these were now mainly hidden by a milling swarm of enthusiastic spectators who had gathered from miles around.
As we waited, a great hush descended and even the horses stood still. All we could hear were a few bird calls and the surf beating below. Suddenly, the two high priests of the Upper and Lower Worlds broke their ranks and galloped their horses at full speed towards each other into the centre of the field, waving their spears and invoking the energies they represented to come and join the battle. Then, with unexpected violence they hurled their javelins from a distance of about 15 feet intentionally missing each other by a hair’s breadth.
This was the signal for the battle to begin, and as they withdrew from centre stage they were engulfed as the first thunderous onslaught of spearsmen charged each other at the gallop, their vivid orange, red and green turbans and ribbons streaming in the breeze.
We had tried these horses ourselves, and seen them being ridden home through the fields, or next to the road, but now I realized something of what was meant by the spirit of the sandalwood breed. Small, but as heroically proportioned as the Arabian horses to which they are believed to be related, they moved, as unshod as their riders, with sure-footed exuberance. They were ridden bareback, and stirrupless, their riders gripping far forward with their knees, while manoeuvring expertly at full speed in unbelievably tight curves. Their bits and reins were mainly of hemp and cloth, rather than of leather – for they were very gentle-mouthed, and responded better to pressure from their riders’ knees than from their wrists.
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