Ring of Fire

by Lawrence Blair; Lorne Blaire

  We could only film, change magazines and go on filming, as violent waves of warriors ebbed and flowed around the field, occasionally charging straight into the ranks of the spectators, tossing their spears with abandon. But after a while a pattern began emerging. For the most part, they rode in two great circles reflecting, it was explained to us, the orbits of celestial bodies. Only where the oppositely rotating circles converged, like the teeth of intermeshing cogs, did the warriors loose their spears at each other.

  I saw a number of riders struck heavily off their mounts by spears, rolling into balls and being cantered over by scores of other horses. They then leapt to their feet and limped hurriedly off the field. Another man was knocked unconscious, and carried off almost triumphantly, only to come to again – rather to everyone’s disappointment – and shout angrily for his horse, mount it and charge off into the fray once more. This was a true medieval pageant, and for the first time in my life, amongst the noise and blood and horse-sweat, I sensed something of those past centuries of warfare in which our own ancestors had fought on horseback to establish the national frontiers of Europe.

  A pause as first blood is drawn in the Pasola battle on Sumba. (LORNE & LAWRENCE BLAIR)

  Thankfully there were periodic pauses, like those natural lulls in conversation, when everyone withdrew to catch their breath for a few moments, before beginning again. It was during one of these that the atmosphere was altered by the arrival of a dozen military jeeps and trucks, with armed soldiers bouncing around in them. Without announcing themselves to the chieftains or the priests, they took up belligerent postures around the field, and watched.

  Lorne was satisfied now with the wide shots we had taken, and was eager for more detail. Perhaps feeling that the presence of the authorities would mitigate the custom of attacking onlookers as well as riders, he suggested we set up his tripod in the centre of the field, with Zac on second camera beside him, and myself reluctantly wielding the tape recorder and still cameras. We were barely installed, when a wall of howling spearsmen charged towards us. While Zac and I blanched and fumbled with the wrong buttons, Lorne contentedly glued his eye to the viewfinder and began shooting. Once the riders had passed, he was surprised to see three spears, closely grouped, protruding from between his camera’s tripod. They had been hurled with such force that, despite their blunted ends, they protruded from the earth like well-grouped darts in a dartboard.

  It was clear by now that these people had no trouble with accuracy, even at a gallop, so it surprised us that relatively few of them were actually hit. This was mainly due to their equal skill at avoiding the spears. They swerved and ducked, and swung almost from the bellies of their horses like the Red Indians of the cowboy films, and a number of them excelled at actually catching the incoming spears, or expertly deflecting them with their forearms.

  Later we interviewed a number of the veteran riders, who insisted that when the government had decreed the use of blunted spears a few years previously the Pasola had actually become more rather than less dangerous. They explained that since the spirits were as satisfied by spilled blood as by a death, and as blunt spears provided little of the former, they had to concentrate on the latter, and therefore aimed directly at such spots as the temple or throat, where the blow alone could kill.

  The Pasola continued throughout the morning, and well into the afternoon. Some blood was drawn, a few limbs were broken, but there were no serious injuries. The participants were all still enjoying themselves, when some of the soldiers began beating a horse and rider whom they considered to be out of control. The Ratu rode up furiously to intervene, and were abruptly pushed back by the uniformed officials. An ugly scene seemed on the verge of erupting, and although it resolved itself, and the Pasola continued, from then on the mood changed and the festiveness had gone.

  Before the game had officially ended, we noticed the chief Ratu trotting surreptitiously away from the Pasola ground. Shortly afterwards, and long before the darkness which usually ends the Pasola, the crowd and the warriors alike began drifting back towards their fortified villages of the Upper and Lower Worlds. The balance between the two, and their deities, even if not between themselves and the brave new world, had been restored for another year.

  The armoured jeeps and soldiers with their battered rifles pulled out past the column of homeward-bound cavaliers, overtaking their own chivalric history. Some of them jeered at a trio of late-departing and scowling Ratu – the priests who could tell, from the moon and stars, as they always had, just when those seaworms would swarm.

  We had come to Sumba for a glimpse of our earliest beginnings, of megaliths and the origins of war, where a warrior still looked his opponent in the eyes, but we had found something more. It seemed there was no animosity here but, rather, a recognition that we are all participants in the interplay of light and darkness, order and chaos, reflected in the life-giving seasons of the planet itself, if we but knew how to interpret them like the Ratu.

  The Dream Wanderers of Borneo

  The summer of 1977 found us blissfully and impecuniously at home in the Balinese highlands. To the sound of the cicadas and the laughter of the village children taking their early-morning bath in our stream, we crawled amongst our charts and files spread out on the tiled ground floor, planning what was to be the silliest of all our Indonesian adventures. An enlightened handful of American investors had offered to finance our next film project, whatever it might be (within recoupable reason), and in Jakarta, only three weeks beforehand, we had bumped into Sutan Wiesmar, the Sumatran ‘Whizz’ of diplomatic paper-wangling whom we had come to know well in Lindblad Explorer. It was perfect timing. The Whizz was going to Borneo as a guest of the governor, he told us, to make a survey for Army Intelligence, and we were welcome to come along with him.

  Borneo! Ever since childhood just the sound of its name had filled me with excitement. Headhunters, poison blowpipes, the ‘Wild Man’…It was about the last place I ever actually expected to explore.

  The third largest island in the world (after Greenland and New Guinea), Borneo covers an area more than twice that of the British Isles. The top quarter of the island is occupied by the two Malaysian states of Sarawak and Sabah, and the independent oil sultanate of Brunei, whereas the sprawling southern three-quarters is now Indonesian Kalimantan, a name derived from the Malay words meaning ‘river of diamonds’. Kalimantan accounts for 20 per cent of Indonesia, but less than 3 per cent of her population – about 5 million people, some 4 million of whom dwell on the coast, in the handful of burgeoning oil and timber cities. The remaining million or so, the indigenous Dyaks of Borneo, live somewhere in the interior, beneath a barely explored forest which spreads wider than France.

  Of some 200 distinct Dyak tribes, virtually all of them, until very recently, were river-dwelling headhunters, with the mysterious exception of the nomadic Punan Dyaks, of whom remarkably little is known or written. They had always fascinated me.

  Some time in the distant past they had withdrawn from the riverbanks, where the headhunters marauded, and struck out on foot to become the free-roving masters of the interior, the ‘dolphins’ of the forest, knowing every plant and creature by name and sound. The shyest, most jungle-wise of all the tribes, they wandered with the migratory seasons of their game, hunting monkeys and flying squirrels with poison blowdarts, spearing pig and bear, making instant shelters at night, and moving on at dawn; men, women and children, scrambling fast and silently through primary forest so dense that no other tribe could follow them. As time went on, the fierce riverine Dyaks began to value the Punans less for the prestigious value of their lopped-off heads than for their skills at obtaining inaccessible plant and animal products from the deep forest. Amongst the aristocratic headhunters it became rather poor sport to pick off a Punan – and almost bad luck. They were also thought of as a fey and ghostly people, barely human, rather like the pixies of Ireland. Some tribes called them the ‘green people’, and early Western explorers remarked th
at their very pale yellow skins, never exposed to the sun, did indeed reflect the forest green.

  The official Indonesian position was that nomadic Punans no longer existed in Kalimantan – they had all settled down like sensible folk, and their children were now wearing shoes to school and saluting the flag. The Whizz, however, was convinced that there were still wild Punans living in the interior – and that we might be able to find them.

  Kalimantan represents a kind of Everest for the independent explorer. The military severely restrict travel passes and film permits, and just getting there is a logistical nightmare, with poor odds on returning, if at all, with anything on film of sufficient value to justify the effort. When questioned about permits the Whizz was surprisingly nonchalant.

  ‘No problem with permits. I’ll get them in three weeks. I’m Army.’

  ‘I thought you were Student Union!’ I said sternly.

  ‘Student Union, Tour Leader and Army,’ the Whizz replied, brandishing and quickly concealing again a number of battered but alarming-looking badges and identity cards.

  Examining our charts on the floor in Bali, we began to realize what an awesome undertaking a search for the Punans might be. This would certainly be our first large-scale expedition, and we would have to be responsible for a lot more than ourselves. The most striking thing was how little difference exists between the earliest and the most modern maps of Borneo. Only the shape of the coastline has changed, but the interior still remains astonishingly blank.

  I now produced an encouraging paper I had found, by an anthropologist named D.B. Ellis, who in 1972 had spent some time in Malaysian Sarawak amongst a group of now sedentary Punans (or Penans as they are called north of the border) attempting to learn from their elders something of their migrations within living memory. They had told him that several decades earlier they had broken away from a group of their kinsmen which they believed still wandered in Kalimantan somewhere on a line between the coastal town of Samarinda on the east coast and Long Nawan 900 miles away in the highland interior. Right in the middle of this imaginary line, according to our latest edition of the International Aviator’s Chart, lay a large empty patch representing an area 350 miles long by 200 miles wide, its virgin whiteness marred only by a few hesitant dotted lines hinting at the presumed courses of jungle-hidden rivers and the boldly printed ‘RELIEF DATA IRRECONCILABLE’, which is the modern equivalent of ‘HERE BE DRAGONS’ or ‘HERE YOUR GUESS BE AS GOOD AS MINE, CHUM’.

  We hoped we could learn more from people in Samarinda itself.

  It was to be three exasperating months, mainly spent haggling for permits between Sydney and Jakarta, before – much poorer than we had begun – we finally ground to a halt on the heat-shimmering airfield of Samarinda. The beauty of her name belies the town’s dark history of piratical sultans and internecine blood-letting, though much of its flavour emerges in Joseph Conrad’s steamy masterpiece Almayer’s Folly (1895) for which Samarinda was the model. Crumbling Dutch colonial mansions and exotic Chinese temples crowned the low hills, which gave way to rambling bougainvillaea and wild vegetation descending to the stilted homes at the river’s edge. Nobody here had the slightest clue as to what might go on in the deep interior.

  Because of its long pink nose and silly face, Indonesians call the proboscis monkey "Belanda", or white man.(LORNE & LAWRENCE BLAIR)

  Although the Chinese unquestionably traded with Borneo for rhinoceros horns and hornbill ivory before Christ, the first outsiders in more recent times were Malay and Chinese pirates who were attracted to the coastal rivermouths by the funeral canoes of the inland Dyaks which came floating downriver with headless corpses, accompanied by their treasures of beads, gold and even diamonds. Yet efforts to ascend these rivers to the source of the wealth were for centuries thwarted by the fierce tribes which ruled them. Today, there are still no roads into the interior, and the only means of access remains the great rivers, now controlled by a handful of frontier barons. They now float downstream not the valuable corpses of their dead, but jungle trees by the million to container ships waiting in the rivermouths. The great headhunting tribes the Iban, the Kayan, the Kenya – were the sophisticates of their race. They forged their own bronze and gold jewellery, and filigreed steel mandaus – the decapitating swords of Borneo. They also developed unique forms of musical and artistic expression, and these most creative exponents of their culture were also the first to succumb to the great bore of change which is rolling up the very rivers they once ruled.

  We checked into a naked-lightbulb boarding-house on the waterfront, changed our clothes, and set off up the hill with Wiesmar to present ourselves and our permits proudly to his friend, the governor of East Kalimantan. Unfortunately, communications had somewhere gone awry, and the present incumbent was a brusque stranger, in a spotless safari-suit, smelling heavily of Cologne. He glanced at our papers, which contained the signatures of at least 14 separate government ministers and department heads, and tossed them back to us.

  ‘Don’t these ministers know there are no more nomads left in Kalimantan?’ he asked with some vehemence. ‘What century are they living in? You’re wasting your time. Look!’ He pointed out of his broad window overlooking the bay. ‘See all those floating trees being loaded? The Dyaks are all doing better cutting those down now than wandering around. They’re all working for Sumber Mas now, the biggest timber company round here!’

  ‘Then, we’ll film the highest timber camp on the river,’ Wiesmar announced archly. ‘And we’ll show the world what a good job our nation’s doing. How do we get up there?’

  ‘I haven’t a clue,’ the governor told us. ‘I’ve never been, thank you. But I can tell you it’s easier to get the missionary pilots to fly you in than to persuade those secretive Chinamen to take you. But you’d better be a very powerful Christian, or very sick...’

  With these discouraging words we returned to our lodgings for the night, and resumed the customary procedure of terrorizing the bedbug community by tiptoeing into the darkened rooms, violently ripping the thin kapok mattresses off their plank frames, switching on the light and quickly flattening as many of the scuttling multitudes as possible before they vanished between the cracks. The few inevitable survivors would exact a bitter revenge on us during the night in order, it would seem, to spawn parthenogenetically their entire tribe again by the morning.

  The mission pilot was away, but the Whizz’s brazen manner, battered identity badges and silver tongue now worked wonders with the local timber lords, and we were shortly aboard one of their powerboats and roaring hundreds of miles westwards along the Mahakam river and then northwards up its tributaries to where various logging camps were scattered along the southern edge of the big white patch on our chart, which Wiesmar had christened Punan Putih – ‘the Punan White’. But at each of these moonbases of heavy machinery and deafening trauma, at the very shores of the unknown, we found ourselves as isolated from our nomadic Punans as if we’d been back on the coast. Even here, few people knew anything about them, and the local populations of riverine Dyaks, newly hypnotized by the rewards of aiding and abetting the slaughter of their environment, were neither interested in nor capable of taking us inland on foot. We got a number of responses about the Punans: ‘All gone’; ‘Cannibals’; ‘Sure they’re back there, where nobody goes’; ‘You mean the Orang-Utans?’

  Where we could, we commandeered the powerboats and explored deep up the other tributaries bordering on the Punan White searching for guides or ways inwards. Our pilots shattered our propeller shafts on submerged obstacles, our welcomes with the logging lords waned, and yet again we found ourselves forced to return to where we had started, taking the 600-mile two-week downstream chug on the regular riverbus system to Samarinda, packed cheek by jowl with livestock and humans, all patiently rotting beneath permeable tarpaulins in thundering rain. I decided to comfort myself by catching up on my already disintegrating Borneo research material. As a tonic, it was a mistake.

  The only
way to get in to Borneo is during the rainy season, when the inland tributaries are swollen enough to be navigable. Between downpours, this is also Insect Time. There are appalling accounts by the early explorers of the hostility of Borneo’s insects. Phenomena like the Ant Marches, when glistening rivers of warrior ants, eight miles long, hundreds of yards wide and a foot deep, arise from apparently nowhere, consume everything in their path, then mysteriously dissolve again, are credited as being one of the main reasons for Borneo’s long isolation.

  Back in Samarinda, four months after we had called our investors from Sydney to tell them we were heading back to Jakarta and thence Borneo the following day, we rustled up one last desperate chance.

  Sumber Mas, the dominant monopoly, was Wiesmar-warbled into taking us 300 miles west along the infernal Mahakam again, then 150 miles north up the Belayan river, to the remote seedling logging camp at Tabang from where it was the shortest direct line – just 200 miles across the Punan White to Long Nawan. If we could cover the distance, even if we didn’t see a single nomad on the way, at least we could return with a film about a lost tribe which remained lost!

  It would be a dangerous gamble, so before leaving Samarinda we decided to visit Ted, the mission pilot for Christ. Tall, stooped and awkward, Ted was remarkable for combining a distinctly hazardous profession with a singularly narrow world-view. Despite his and his teenage wife’s three years of residence in their box-like billet, not a thing in their living-room gave any clue that we were outside Kentucky. Their walls were bare, and the bookshelf contained only a bible and flying magazines. We distrusted each other on sight. His charter was to ferry Church bigwigs and occasionally sick Dyaks around the island, though he was occasionally prepared to moonlight for an exorbitant fee.