Ring of Fire

by Lawrence Blair; Lorne Blaire

  There were eerily dark freshwater pools, where we harvested bamboo shoots, asparagus-like water plants, the first edible vegetation we could reach, which, even when boiled, tasted like bitter raw cabbage.

  I saw these again, I thought, by a smaller, clear stream, but was dragged away by a Dyak who pointed out numerous tiny transparent globules clinging to the reeds like glistening droplets of resin. He held his hand over them and they extended towards it like watercress sprouts. These were the disagreeable thread-leeches, which prefer to suck your blood from within and can infest the mouths, nostrils, lungs and oesophagi of unwary drinkers – to say nothing of the urogenital linings of careless splashers.

  On one rare occasion I was actually within a few yards of Bereyo when I noticed a confident colourful little 12-inch snake, coiled in the loam watching us.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked him.

  ‘A snake!’ he replied with an air of authority.

  ‘Yes, but is it a dangerous one?’

  He came back a few paces, hunkered down and squinted closely, then to my amazement began jumping up and down on it with his bare feet, rendering it quite flat.

  ‘Yes, very dangerous. It can bite people dead.’ And he moved on.

  At night round the camp-fire, while Hidjau and Raja meticulously fashioned their blowdarts and mixed their venoms, and Wiesmar lolled in the shadows, Bereyo would enthrall the company with his stories. He told of being a child in Sarawak across the border, and having to flee with his parents from river-borne war-parties of head-seeking Ibans. He described a hidden highland lake, where he and a few companions had watched under a full moon while five or six enormous pythons, so aged that their markings had been replaced by a silvery grey, ‘danced together’ round and round in the water. ‘Old snake religion,’ he said, ‘maybe dancing for Aping, the forest god.’

  We asked about rhinos.

  ‘Sometimes three moons we travelled, just five of us, tracking one rhino. He knows we follow him. He has strong “dream wanderer”. Very difficult.’

  I whispered to Lorne that rhinos were supposed to be very sensitive to vibrations, but that ‘dream wandering’ was not in the literature.

  ‘He hears our soft feet on the ground,’ Bereyo continued, ‘from many rivers behind him. I look in his dirt, and talk to him. Tell him where to go, so we corner him. “You need more bamboo shoots,” I tell him. “You love them. Head east, O Rhino, to the bamboo forest at the end of the Deng gorge.” Or: “River roots, Rhino, so sweet, so tender go back a bit, for a week or so, towards the trap where the great rivers meet.” We can only kill him when he turns towards us in anger.’

  ‘How do you kill him, Bereyo?’

  ‘I used to kill him with a spear, in eye or ear or mouth. But Bereyo is a “modern man” now,’ he said, thumping his chest. ‘I take a gun.’ Closer questioning revealed this to be a sawn-off double-barrelled shotgun, which he had left hidden in his longhouse at Belinau.

  ‘He’s talking about Rhinocerus sumatrensis,’ I remarked to Lorne, of which the World Wildlife Fund says there are only about 170 left anywhere, and only 25 of those in Borneo!’

  ‘How many have you killed, Bereyo?’ Lorne asked him.

  ‘Last year, one!’

  ‘No, altogether... how many?’ the others chorused.

  The old man leant back and wrinkled his face for a long while, then he splayed the fingers of both hands five times.

  ‘Round about... fifty,’ he announced at last with satisfaction.

  ‘Fifty!’ I spluttered. ‘Our people, who fly aeroplanes and things, say there are only 25 of them left!’

  ‘Maybe your people walk through here so fast, counting them, we can’t even see them,’ Bereyo countered. Everyone howled at this reference to our abilities to keep up with the pace.

  ‘Maybe they land their planes in the Kinabalu mountains and count them,’ someone suggested.

  ‘Maybe they learn the rhino’s language and ask one of them how many more there are,’ said another.

  Our supplies were disappearing fast, and we slowed our pace so our hunters could range around poison blowdarting gibbons and leaf monkeys. We had refused them at first, with their singed baby-like hands and limbs, but now we looked forward to our share with as much relish as everyone else. From our two expert hunters, Hidjau and Raja, we learnt how their darts are smeared with as many as five different kinds of poison, each required for a different prey. The difficulty with monkeys is getting the dose just right. If it is too strong, then the monkey dies clinging to the tree-tops; but just the right amount and it tumbles down and gives you your dart back. Care must be taken only to cook it directly over the fire, for if it is boiled or fried, then the poison which poisoned it poisons the poisoner.

  Bereyo with our best hunter Hijau, mixing poisons for the blow-pipe dart(LORNE & LAWRENCE BLAIR)

  As I hungrily picked the slivers of flesh from between the charred fingers of these primates, Lorne took some relish in pointing out that they were listed as an ‘endangered species’, and that the gibbons we now ate fetched a good 5,000 dollars a mating pair on the black market. At this, our hungriest hour, we were eating by far the most expensive dinners of our lives. Gibbons and the occasional large monitor lizard were now our only protein, yet nobody but ourselves seemed unduly worried. A Dyak blowpipe, which is usually from seven to nine feet long, is far more than a poisonous pea-shooter. Whereas the Kenya tribes had excelled in making them, the Punans despite their shortness of stature – were the undisputed masters of their use. Rather than the hollowed reeds or lengths of bamboo used by certain South American Indians, the Dyak blowpipe also serves as a spear, so consists of a single piece of hard wood, meticulously rifled down the centre, to spin the dart on a straight course. The blowpipe is not straight, but subtly curved to compensate for the downwards sag resulting from holding it by its extreme end. In the hands of a master, it can be accurate to within a range of some 75 yards and is a terrifyingly effective weapon in jungle warfare. Its very silence conceals the source of the dart which delivers an agonizing death by nerve poison – and of course the killers never run out of ammunition.

  It remained a complete mystery as to how Bereyo was finding his way through this pathless tangled universe. I was aware that virtually nothing was known about Punan religion, and many authorities, somewhat puzzlingly, assert that they do not even have a coherent form of animism of their own. Yet they are referred to as being amongst the peoples who claim to ‘psycho-navigate’ their way around, with the help of visions and lucid dreams. Other ‘psycho-navigators’, as they have been called, include the Australian Aborigines, the Dinka of the Sahara, even the Bugis seafaring tribes; but whereas they, like pigeons, it has been argued, may rely on some innate sensitivity to celestial signposts the Punans are divorced from the sky by the forest canopy, and hardly ever see it. When I again challenged Bereyo how he knew where he was going, he replied: ‘We Punans know we have two souls. There’s the physical, emotional soul, this’ – and he smacked his forehead with the palm of his hand – ‘and the “dream wanderer”. In sleep and special trance, the dream wanderer travels, sees with different eyes, sees pathway of wild animals or lost people.’

  Bereyo seemed to recognize the giant waterfalls mentioned by Ted, the mission pilot, and one morning he led us up a high ridge to an astounding sight.

  The forest curved away beneath us to the vertically soaring cliffs, about eight miles distant, which rose to the Apo Kayan plateau above us. Pouring off its edge we saw not one but two mighty feathers of water – as high (and the pilot should know) as any in the world. Both they and their rivers remain to be named – perhaps Teddy Falls, One and Two. Although Lorne, wanting to keep it in the family, thought Two Fools Falls might be appropriate.

  ‘Four days and nights to get there and back,’ Bereyo said. ‘But I don’t feel the Punans there.’

  ‘Then, forget it,’ growled Wiesmar. ‘Let’s keep going.’

  ‘I’ve never been there myself, e
ither,’ Bereyo continued. ‘My grandparents have. They said there’s a cave there. All crystals inside, like diamonds.’

  ‘Just four days and nights?’ queried Wiesmar with more interest.

  We knew where we were all right, barely halfway through the Big White – and the way things were going we’d never make it right through, let alone find our nomads.

  ‘Relax. We find them,’ Bereyo told us. ‘Everything perfect. No rain, no insects, nice day.’

  ‘Sure!’ I gasped to Lorne.

  Days later we were deep in the forest again when we came upon a Punan message-stick – which required highly trained vision to distinguish from its surroundings. A four-foot stick was notched with six curling spirals of bark, and hung with two circular and one semicircular scale of bark, topped with a leaf woven back on itself. Leah explained this Punan code to us.

  ‘Six people passed this way,’ he said. ‘They’ve been travelling for over two months – these bits of bark tell us. And this bent leaf’, he said, pointing out a refinement of the message, ‘means they’re hungry, like us. Not much game. Punan professionals. Only about a week ahead of us.’

  Our spirits soared, but within a few hours we were halted by a river dangerously swollen by a highland storm somewhere ahead, and which presented no suitable tree for felling across it as a bridge. We barely had time to find the ingredients for a camp before the storm broke over us, too, crushing us to that sodden clearing at the river’s edge for eight days. We were down to the last of our salt and rice, but it could no longer be cooked. We could neither advance, nor retreat, nor stay where we were for very long.

  The rains sometimes dropped as solid lumps, making it hard to breathe. On the first night our hammocks’ roofs and banana nets collapsed, and we crawled like rats into the community shelter where morale was high, despite the dark and asphyxiating atmosphere.

  Bereyo remarked that the nomads didn’t like this weather, either, and they’d much sooner squat in an abandoned longhouse until it was over. In fact they were squatting there now, just half a day down this angry river. He had seen them clearly, he announced. The longhouses, built and abandoned by Kenya tribesmen, he had seen as a child, with his own nomadic parents. He had seen them again 20 years ago, he said, empty and falling back into the forest like dead trees. But the Punans were there now!

  It would be days before the river abated enough to cross it, but as soon as the rain stopped Bereyo sent a six-man scouting party along the banks to verify whether the longhouses were more than a dream, while we endured the anxious days of waiting. A science-fiction sun, looking more like the moon, emerged and peered down on our clearing as if through a giant polarizing lens surrounded by a halo. With it came the insects again, and there was no escaping them now.

  Only about half of them were there for our blood, for the rest had different tastes. Some came for our eye mucus or urine stains. There were minute bluebottles which liked earwax and crawled around in the mines, making it hard for us to hear each other above their amplified buzzing. A few, a flying black beetle in particular, were content to divebomb in from nowhere, sting for the hell of it, and drone adroitly off. Many arrived just for the party – to eat each other. By far the most nerve-racking were swarms of tiny brown bees with an exceedingly virulent sting. They were solely after the salt in our sweat, and settled softly all over us, like fur coats of venom, causing us to move, if at all, with the ridiculously exaggerated self-awareness of puppets. Since the greatest danger is getting them caught, and peeved, in the folds of one’s clothes we followed the sensible Dyak procedure of going naked except for shorts (which items were preserved not for modesty, but for security against unlawful entomological entry). ‘You can feel their mood, and where they are, with no clothes,’ Hidjau the hunter told us. ‘Remember, as with the leeches, just surrender what they want to them. If they feel happy, you will, too.’

  There had been a frightening occasion several weeks earlier, on the trail, when Lorne had been stung so viciously on the back of the neck that he thought it was a tree snake. He was completely blinded for almost an hour. The man behind him had identified the culprit as this same species of bee – and now there were thousands, and we studiously avoided getting them trapped behind our knees or under our arms.

  Then came the magical morning when both the river and the insects had subsided, and our missing scouts came jubilantly poling upstream to us towing a train of almost toy-sized canoes.

  ‘They’re there!’ they shouted. ‘Some have lived there for years, but the others are there, too. They’re frightened. They think we may be from the government, sent to track them down and put them in prison.’

  ‘I’ll put them in prison if they aren’t there!’ Wiesmar growled.

  Perched in these precarious canoes we now thundered down into a hidden fairyland. After a few hours the river slowed and broadened beneath a cathedral-like archway of interlocking trees. Then we heard it: an eerily hollow drumbeat seemingly coming from the river itself.

  ‘That’s it, Tuan,’ our companions shouted. ‘The famous Punan water-music.’

  Sweeping round the bend we surprised a circle of seven all-but- naked nomadic Punan girls, up to their waists in the river, beating out a superbly syncopated rhythm with their cupped hands on the water. They scrambled up the bank faster than monitor lizards, and were gone.

  Then the dilapidated longhouse came into view on our left, silent as a grave, without a soul to be seen. ‘They’re here,’ Bereyo said. ‘They wouldn’t have left the girls behind. But let me go first.’ He stepped ashore. We had waited for perhaps 10 minutes, when the longhouse began to erupt with the keening wail of a traditional Punan welcome, and strange and wonderful faces began to reveal themselves. The older men and women came cautiously down to the bank to greet us. They wore vivid loincloths, were latticed with tattoos, and great clusters of hoop-earrings dangled unashamedly from their elongated earlobes.

  At first they were aloof as we squatted together in the strangely empty longhouse, but as the evening wore on the population silently expanded. Sinewy, exquisite, bare-breasted women crept in like does to peer at us from the edge of the circle, their wide-eyed babies cradled on their backs peering over their shoulders.

  Our own Punans, who throughout our journey had become increasingly more interested in finding these lost relatives, were now enthralled. Their different dialects found common ground, love affairs blossomed instantly amongst the young, while the more senior citizens sat down to lengthy and rewarding comparisons of each other’s genealogical trees. A tremendous bond of love seemed to unfold around us, as all of our porters were adopted by individual families to be taken in and spoiled as their own.

  There were about 35 families here, each with their individual compartments opening on to the long communal veranda. To avoid being eaten alive, we had to be individually introduced to all the hunting dogs. About 10 of the families had been living here for five years, yet still relied more on hunting and gathering than on their rudimentary experiments with growing dry rice. The rest spent most of the year still wandering freely through the forest, sheltering during the heaviest rains at any number of abandoned longhouses, such as these, scattered through the jungle.

  A Punan maiden(LORNE & LAWRENCE BLAIR)

  Surprises came thick and fast. The first was to learn that Suleh, here, on the Long Eut river, nowhere near any of the pencil marks we had cribbed from Ted’s chart, was just the first of three other such communities, all within a day’s canoe-ride of each other. The second surprise was the news that Suleh had been reached several times the previous year by a team of zealous young Indonesian missionary scouts, led by ‘treacherous Punan guides from the north’. Suleh, with no help from any of the other three villages, had obeyed precise instructions and built a landing surface just atop the hillock on the other side of the river. It was an astonishing coincidence. The old chief spoke little Indonesian, but his son was an enthusiastic interpreter.

  ‘We’re very moder
n,’ he explained. ‘We finished it just two moons ago. Got our first plane just before last big rain, maybe 10 days ago. We all rushed over the river and climbed up the hill. It never landed, just fly around and went away again. Didn’t even drop a banana!’

  We were dumbfounded. Could it be Ted? Could this really be one of those landing-spots he was talking about, right on our doorstep, and hadn’t even been landed on yet?

  We had to fish out a watch from deep storage to see what day of the week it was. Thursday was just two days away, and the appalling thought of having to be suddenly airlifted out before having a chance to film the people we had come so far for conflicted with the awful suspicion that we might not get flown out at all.

  Nor could we walk out, unless we returned with our porters the way we had come. They would have to leave within a few days, to return to their families. If we stayed, the plane might not come, and we would have no sure means of escape.

  Next morning the sound of an engine sent us roaring across the river and panting up to the airfield, to find it was indeed Ted, nonchalantly waiting for us to catch up to him.

  ‘Hi, guys,’ he said humourlessly. ‘Fun walk?’

  With never a word to the amazed Dyaks who had sweated so long to build this field, and who had never seen a plane so close before, Ted took off 15 minutes later. With him went a very thankful and much slimmed Wiesmar, agreeing to meet us in Samarinda, and taking much of our valuable footage. Ted’s last words to us were: ‘God willing, I’ll pick you up next Thursday – or whichever subsequent Thursday I can.’