Ring of Fire

by Lawrence Blair; Lorne Blaire

  It was with an uneasy sense of abandonment and danger that I watched that little plane clear the trees, but it was forgotten on returning across the river to Suleh, where a whole new level of festivity was taking place. With Wiesmar, the shadow of authority, finally gone, these divided limbs of a dwindling people had come together and struck a fiery spark. Throughout the night, to the haunting sound of single stringed instruments, the twin fans of black and white Hornbill feathers were passed from dancer to dancer, so each would reveal his soul by dancing solo before all the rest. Toothless old ladies howled with laughter as Bereyo flirted and waggled his ears at them. Our young guides were looking their best, love affairs blossomed more extensively, couples withdrew into the darkness, some made love in the river like otters, to reappear again hours later, sleek-haired and lustrous-eyed, at the Dance of the Hornbill.

  Bereyo, Leah, all our guides and companions would be leaving, replenished with love and food to help sustain them on their long way back to the edge of civilization. They longed to stay, learn more of themselves, but their families and fruit gardens called them. They would accompany us for one more day – down to the next longhouse of Long Pipa, the Punan community of rattan-weavers and tattoo artists.

  Everywhere people were making the superb shoulder-baskets and sleeping-mats which, for all the Punans’ obscurity, has won them recognition as amongst the finest weavers of rattan in the world. Intricately patterned, and extremely practical, their mats and baskets gradually acquire a lustrous chestnut-like patina from human skin oils, making them resistant to weather, wear and rot. The Punans also appear to have been amongst the first people prepared to harvest rattan – an incredibly tough and slender parasitic vine, hundreds of feet long, which clings to the forest with multiple thorned tentacles and is considered even by modern loggers as the most difficult of all plants to extract. Rattan, for wickerwork, for furniture, hampers, and even headmasters’ canes, became fashionable in Victorian Europe as a symbol of Imperial reach, and is still much prized. But the Punans use only the surgically shaved skin of the rattan vine, with which, in effect, they spin complex three-dimensional fabrics, rather than basketry.

  A nomad’s most valuable material possessions must be easy to carry. Chief amongst these are their beads, of astonishing age and variety, some of which were equivalent in value to an entire bride’s dowry; Chinese, Portuguese, Arabian and Indian beads attested to centuries of contact with the ancient world. There is even a bead now believed by experts to be identical to those extracted from Mesopotamian graves 2,300 years old, except that they are in better condition for having been lovingly worn round the necks of numerous generations of Dyaks. They also wear centuries-old coins which were once traded by the spice-warring nations. These, together with bears’ claws, crocodiles’ teeth and magical amulets, encrust their highly prized baby-carriers which serve to shield their young against both physical and psychic dangers. But the chieftain of Long Suleh pointed out to us that, valuable as these few material objects are, it is really a Punan’s inner memories which are his most precious possession, the shape of his destiny. For the major experiences of a Punan’s life, whether an inner dream or an outer adventure, are commemorated with a ritual tattoo. Most of the men wore tattoos on their chests, throats and arms, and the women on their wrists and legs. Many of our guides, who had shared this hazardous and unexpectedly rewarding search for their own roots with us, were now inspired to submit to being tattooed for the first time, which was a moving experience for everyone.

  The following morning, boldly displaying the fresh symbols of their new-found cultural pride, our companions set out on the long journey for home again, amidst a tumultuous keening send-off and thumping water-music from the girls at Suleh.

  We were left alone to explore the four villages on this unmarked river, the oasis for a dwindling caravanserai of Borneo’s last nomads. Every Thursday we would struggle back to the airfield and anxiously wait from dawn till dusk, but it was to be many weeks before Ted managed to airlift us out. It was our long journey through the forest that prepared us for so easily sinking into the subtle rhythms of the community. With Bereyo and Leah we had learnt something of the Punans’ outer way of life; we were now open to what lay behind the symbol which looked back at us from their tattoos, baskets, beadwork and jewellery – which they called the face of Aping, the Tree of Life.

  We entered a pool of dream time, in which one event melted into another as we passed from household to household, to be spoilt, cross-examined and passed on again. When our novelty wore off, our medicines ran out, and our total inability to contribute food or any other useful social activity became fully apparent, we continued to be tolerated with affectionate sensitivity and inquisitive humour. I became very close to a middle-aged couple called Gajet and Mera, who were still shaken by their encounters with the overland Indonesian missionary scouts earlier that year, who had even carried paint-pots and brushes through the forest to leave murals of hellfire on their longhouse walls. On our journey inwards, the mysterious Punan water-music, which few had heard and none could describe, had become for ourselves and for our bearers an alluring symbol of the lost forest maidens. Now, each dawn and dusk, the almost frog-like booming rhythm produced by the girls’ skilfully cupped hands beating the surface of the river sent a hypnotizing heartbeat through the jungle and ourselves. After dark, several other musical instruments were passed around to add their haunting sounds to those of the forest. There was the nose flute, and two strange stringed instruments, the satung and the sapeh. The former is merely a cunning resonating cylinder of bamboo, with thin slivers of its own skin stretched over it to provide a murmuring, lilting hum. The sapeh, or Dyak ‘mandolin’, is carved like a miniature canoe, with three vine strings. The top string is used for the melody, while the lower two act as drones, as with the Indian sitar. This instrument produces a rousing light-footed sound which, for its similarity to hillbilly music of the southern United States, we called ‘Borneo blue-grass’. It was the sound of these instruments, perhaps more than anything else, which gradually awakened us to the realization of having actually reached the scent of paradise, a scent which had guided us through so many Indonesian adventures, and quite suddenly one morning, like our guides before us, we both wished for our own tattoos.

  Gajet, with his bamboo poison dart quiver at his belt.(LORNE & LAWRENCE BLAIR)

  We approached the two couples who had earlier suggested we be tattooed along with our guides, and were glad to find that their offer still held firm – though they reminded us that this was a serious matter. We could either choose from the glossary of Punan symbols, or else give free rein to the shamanic art of the tattoo master, whose hand would be inwardly guided to draw the design. Long past any sense of self determination in the matter, we both surrendered the responsibility of choice to the tattooists, rather as one might to a hairdresser.

  They always work as a couple – a man (for whom it is taboo to draw blood, except in anger) to trace the symbol, and a woman laboriously to open up the wound and hammer in the dye. Our tattooists took less than half an hour to paint the design on our chests, but their partners took closer to six hours to make it permanent. I thought it was finished after the first three, when I was asked to stand up and wash the blood off my chest, but there was only a patterned pink wound, an eighth of an inch deep, into which she went on meticulously to beat the carbonized wood dye. This was achieved with a strip of bamboo tipped in Lorne’s case with two semi-straightened fish-hooks, and in mine with two rusty nails, which were tapped by a secondary hammer with the unwavering precision and regularity of a sewing machine. During the more painful moments, our skilled tormentors would cluck commiseratingly in our ears, without altering their tempo. The ache, when we’d recovered from the psychological impact, came not from the wound itself, but from the glands beneath the armpits.

  In our dazed state, and freshly instructed in how to surrender to, rather than fight, the insect bites of the forest, it was a surprisi
ngly painless experience. It was with some astonishment that we afterwards stared at each other’s angry carbon-stuffed wounds. Being the rather forgetful ‘doctor’ of the outfit, I now realized that our once quite sophisticated medicine chest had long since been emptied of even its last plaster and anti-malarial tablet. An extensive rummage through all my mildewed pockets, however, revealed a few errant capsules of antibiotic powder, which we superstitiously dusted over our chests as a magical potion against infection. I had never been the slightest bit interested in having a tattoo – or anything else which couldn’t be changed – yet the very permanency of the act now seemed to exert its own irresistible attraction, stronger even than the flattery of accepting the high honour of a Punan tattoo, which is so seldom granted even to other Dyak tribes. Yet it has neither faded nor worn out its welcome, and several years later, when I was to rush from my burning home in Los Angeles, thinking that my tattoo and the body it marked were all that remained of my eastern adventures, it was still a comforting reminder of the dream wanderers.

  Our new protectors shared with us everything they hunted or gathered: lizards and snakes, flying squirrels and monkeys, sago and bitter ferns. They even fed us the occasional egg, usually reserved for young children and requiring considerable labour to discover in the nests of their semi-wild jungle fowl. Yet we were weakening now, and we both knew that, even if any of these people could be persuaded to lead us the remaining 150 miles on foot out to Long Nawan, we no longer had the strength to follow them.

  Another Thursday came and went with no Ted, and we decided to risk making the five-day return journey to Long Huruk, the furthest of the four villages and the occasional abode of Nanyet the high priest. We went in a single canoe, with six powerful young men, including the interpreter son of Long Suleh’s chieftain.

  We felt strangely vulnerable now, with such a small party, but the beauty and ease of the downstream journey softened our apprehensions about making it back up again without rainstorms or mishaps to delay our appointment with an airlift to safety.

  It was at Long Huruk that we encountered the vortex of the dream time of which we had so far only touched the periphery, for this was the semi-nomadic community of mystics and dream wanderers. As we tottered up the bank towards the crumbling longhouse, Nanyet came purposefully down and embraced us both – an unheard-of greeting between Indonesian strangers. He was as impressive a figure as one might hope to see at any international gathering of wise men. Perhaps 60 years old, tall and fine-faced, it was not so much his dramatic countenance of tattoos, bronze earrings and priceless beads which placed him apart, as the quality of his gaze and his voice. In addition to being the philosopher and shaman of the community, he was also the possessor of the healing touch, which he laid briefly on the heads of each of our grateful boatmen after embracing us. When he later laid his palm on my scalp, too, I felt a warm current trickling through my head and down my spine.

  ‘Tell us about Aping,’ I asked, after we had been sitting comfortably in the shade for a while.

  ‘You bear the symbols of his face, I see, the leaves of the Tree of Life,’ he replied, clear as a bell, through our awed young interpreter from Suleh. ‘In trance and in sleep, or even awake, our dream wanderers can ascend the Trunk, the Kayu Abilau, to talk with Aping.’

  ‘What else can the dream wanderer do?’

  ‘You have walked through the forest with Bereyo,’ he said, clearly well informed of our movements. ‘How did he know we were here? We might have been across the border in Sarawak, or sheltering in other hidden longhouses many moons from here. With Aping’s help,’ he went on, ‘our dream wanderers can direct our way not only through the forest, but also at the major crossroads of our inner lives. Most of us spend our lives wandering amongst the roots of the world but our dream wanderers, once awakened, can move amongst the upper branches of the Tree of Life, encompassing all things.’ It is this dreaming, flying body, he told us, which knows our beginning and our end and which binds all times and tribes and creatures together as one.

  That evening, he said, he and the community would be sending up their dream wanderers to move amongst Aping’s branches, and he invited us to attend.

  To retain our already dangerously slender safety margin over making our regular Thursday appointment with the elusive Ted, we would have to leave almost immediately and travel through the night. But when darkness had fallen, and the moon was playing games with the river, we were still there. About 50 men, women and children sat cross-legged around Nanyet, who crouched by the glimmer of a single oil-lamp on the longhouse floor. After some throaty personal murmurings, he began to ‘speak in tongues’, a sort of canting glossolalia, which was soon taken up in different forms by the surrounding throng. It was a language with no meaning, they told us, except for those with fully awakened dream wanderers. It was called the tongue of ‘before being born and of after dying’.

  We were well aware of how little was known of the Punan religion, and here, on the eve of our hoped-for departure, we found ourselves with the unique opportunity of capturing a moment of it on film.

  Our hitherto stalwart cameras, lights, tape-recorders and generator now all embarked on a succession of cardiac arrests, and while Gajet’s and the assembly’s unperturbed dream wanderers floated amongst the branches of Kayu Abilau, Lorne and I carried on like Laurel and Hardy, stumbling amongst our machinery, blinding them with our lights, and tripping over our cables.

  Afterwards Nanyet informed us that the whole ceremony had been for our benefit, not for posterity but to awaken our dream wanderers. We would know whether the rite had been effective, he predicted, if within a few days one or both of us had an unmistakable dream.

  We were all a little shaken when we set out after midnight on the long punt up to Suleh. We climbed the hill at dawn, dizzy, weaker than ever, and waited with our companions until night fell. But no Ted.

  We would have to wait another week, or perhaps longer.

  Our hosts at Suleh were sensitive, and left us to retire early to our hammocks, strung on the longhouse veranda. They talked quietly, and for a while a one-stringed ‘Borneo blue grass’ refrain reached out to us, and we slept – heedless, now, to anything but the patience to make it through another week, and the prayer that Ted would come.

  ‘Lawrence! Wake up!’ Lorne’s voice came urgently from the dark.

  ‘What the hell is it?’ I jerked awake in alarm.

  A couple of cocks crowed, and a dog briefly barked.

  ‘I’ve just had a dream. A damn good one.’

  ‘It had better be,’ I said.

  ‘It’s so vivid. I was in a massive tree which stretched from coast to coast of Borneo. One Tree. There were creatures in it, all around me, some of which should have been afraid of me, and others which I should have been afraid of. There were enormous praying mantises, and tiny orang-utans, yet none of us was in the least bit frightened. It was… as if I saw myself in all of them, and they saw themselves in me.’

  I heard the enthusiasm in his voice from a long way off, as I drifted back to sleep. I had expected something more dramatic from a dream which couldn’t wait to be told over a healthy breakfast of scrambled monitor lizard.

  I next awoke to the sound of an engine. It was Friday, not Thursday, for God’s sake! But we were packed, across the river and up the ridge in a flash.

  Ted was kicking his wheel with his back to us when we came up to him, trailed by our panting helpers with our gear. He turned sharply.

  ‘Can’t get all that on board, boys. Soft runway. What’s it to be, you or the film?’

  ‘Both!’ we said quietly, with one voice.

  We reached a quick compromise by giving our bewildered friends, who were still totally unaddressed and even apparently unnoticed by Ted, everything but our essential footage and equipment – generator, hammocks, clothes and precious reference-books. After very brief goodbyes, Ted was grumpily lifting us over the tree-tops into another world, and we watched that hitherto hidden
oasis of Punans dwindle behind us into the one great tree.

  ‘What kept you, Ted?’ Lorne asked at length.

  ‘Mission convention,’ he replied, pulling a large sandwich out of a paper bag and munching into it. ‘Kept me real busy. Marvin, the third pilot in this island, dropped his bird up by the Kayan river a few weeks ago. Just broke bones and the aeroplane. So there was just two of us to ferry the priests around. Did you see my waterfall?’ he asked between mouthfuls. ‘Let’s go take a look at it, shall we?’

  I was much more interested in ripping the rest of the sandwich from his grip, but Lorne reckoned he had another 30 feet of film left in the camera, and wanted to hang out of the window with it.

  ‘There it is!’ Ted announced at length, and welding our diaphragms into the roofs of our mouths he plummeted down the edge of the Apo Kayan shelf, right next to the mighty cataract. But it was not it at all. It was indeed only one, rather than the two we had seen, and it poured from a differently shaped ledge; nor, we thought, was it as high. So Bereyo had shown us something else – not Teddy Falls, as these were, but Two Fools Falls after all. The cruel irony we were experiencing of having covered what we estimated to be more than 800 miles by canoe and on foot to reach a spot with a new airfield was now softened. The walk had been worth it after all.

  I looked beneath my shirt to see if my tattoo was still there. Nanyet’s last words to us had been: ‘Remember, from now on, wherever you go amongst the tribes of man, you will bear the mark of Aping, as a reminder that all life forms are part of a single tree.’

  As we settled back into the long straight flight over the flat forest to find Wiesmar amongst the gambling-dens of Samarinda, I felt distinctly ill and very happy.