by Owen Stanley
Prout’s saliva began to dry up and turn into a thick, white slime that coated the inside of his mouth. It ran down the back of his throat and formed a froth under his tongue. He began to hawk and spit to try to dislodge it, and his breathing became louder and hoarser. The straps of the rucksack cut into his flesh, and his shoulders ached dully with the effort of sustaining its weight. To keep up appearances, he gasped at Fletcher.
“Those rocks up ahead, a very interesting shape.”
“Yeh. That’s where we’ll have a sipelli.”
“A what?”
“A spell, a smoko. Not far.”
The rocks, an outcrop of yellow-grey granite, blasted and splintered by dynamite when the track had been put through, marked the crest of the ridge up whose side they were toiling. Beyond the pinnacles the track turned sharply into the next valley. Prout began to estimate the distance still to be covered—perhaps a mile. At three miles an hour that should take twenty minutes. Thank God, he ought to be able to hold on until then. The path turned right, into another re-entrant, for the umpteenth time; this one was unusually steep-sided, shadowed and echoing, but with no trace of water. They picked their way across the ruckle of boulders at its centre; Prout stumbled badly, and the breath was jarred from his body as he gasped and staggered and barely managed to keep his feet. Before he could recover it, he found the path rising more steeply than ever; his legs drove down like pistons as he dug in his toes, his breath coming in a series of grunts and wheezes. Under his armpits, dark stains spread over his shirt, reeking sourly of sweat and reaching more than half way to his belt, while under the pack his shirt was clinging and sodden. The gap between the police and himself was widening, as they drew away with easy strides, while the carriers, seemingly unaware of their swaying burdens, pressed upon him and Fletcher, who was content to adjust his pace to Prout’s.
As they emerged from the re-entrant and rounded the next corner, the rocks appeared again on the horizon, perhaps a little nearer. The altitude was beginning to take effect, as they were now at more than five thousand feet. He could feel his pulse beating in his temples, and his vision periodically grew dim; the roar of the Ungabunga river, thousands of feet below, advanced and receded like waves on the sea shore.
The path swung into another re-entrant, and the rocks vanished from sight again. A sudden gust of scorching wind from the valley below roared over the path, driving up a cloud of dust and sand. Prout put his hand over his eyes and caught his foot on a boulder, stumbling and almost falling again. His sweat poured out in torrents. The second pair of carriers passed them. The stream bed in the gully was the steepest so far, and the rain of two nights before had produced a considerable spate that had badly damaged the track, tearing away a section until only a narrow ledge was left for passage, and even this was several feet below the level of the path. As Prout, now staggering, came up to this obstacle, moaning and wheezing, the rest of the carriers slipped past and dropped nimbly into the stream bed with their loads, vaulted up onto the other bank, and disappeared round the next corner.
Gasping, Prout sank to his knees, and gingerly put one foot over the edge of the bank. The path here was scarcely two feet wide, and formed the lip of a great dry waterfall, Oiburi-Naiburi, whose precipitous faces were sounded by the rocks which Prout dislodged, crashing and volleying until they were lost in the vegetation far below. Slowly, facing inwards to the cliff, he edged his way across, his knees shaking, the weight of the rucksack unbalancing him all the more easily due to the agony in his feet. The far side was steeper and needed more concentration and agility than he commanded. He put his left foot blindly on what was no hold at all, grabbed for the rim, and as he raised his other leg the gravel gave way and he fell back with a shriek of terror. Fletcher caught him, and pressed him against the side of the cliff. After giving him a moment to regain his composure, Fletcher put his hand under Prout’s foot and heaved him up over the edge. As Fletcher followed him up, their eyes met. Fletcher’s gaze was remote and impersonal.
As they rounded the next bend Prout saw that the rocks had come appreciably nearer, and that the track was level and fairly broad. In another half-hour they reached the resting place, and found the police and carriers sitting and smoking in the shade, or lying half asleep. Prout threw off his rucksack and collapsed like a dead man. It was nearly two hours after he had first seen the rocks.
“Water,” he begged. “For God’s sake, isn’t there any water here?”
“No. Another half-hour,” said Fletcher. “Anyhow, it’ll do yer no good to drink water. Just slop about in yer guts and slow yer down.” He went over to a bag and took out some oranges.
“Have one of these.” Prout took it silently, and ravenously tore off the skin, cramming the segments into his mouth so that the juice ran all down his chin.
“Thanks. That was very good. Would you have another, by any chance?” As Prout ate the second orange, Fletcher rolled himself a short newspaper cigarette, which he puffed luxuriously in between bites of his own orange. From the rocks they could now survey the great valley which opened before them, its higher slopes thickly carpeted in rain forest. Both sides of the valley were broken by spurs which ran down to a river, a tributary of the Ungabunga, and on each of these spurs could be seen native villages, of palm-leaf thatched hovels, bleached almost white by the sun.
But Prout was too dazed to take in any of this. He lay, a broken and disgusting object, in the shade, his belly rising and falling with his stertorous breathing. He did not notice Fletcher’s signal to the carriers and police to be on their way, nor see him point to Prout’s rucksack and a carrier whisk it off to be stowed with the rest of the impedimenta. Some minutes after they had gone, Prout roused himself and began to take a passably intelligent interest in his surroundings. When he had surveyed the valley, he said:
“How far do we go today?”
“We’ll be at the first village by about half two or three. That’s Laripa. We’ll have kai there, and hear the talk, have a kip and go on in the morning. The carriers’ll have the rest house ready by the time we arrive. C’mon, we’d better get movin’.” Prout dragged himself to his feet, his wretched, red-hot feet, and looked around for his rucksack.
“Where’s my pack, my pack?” he said in a bewildered way.
“The carriers took it on.”
“They what? How dare they?”
“Just felt sorry for yer. Anyhow, if they hadn’t carried yer pack they’d’ve ended up carryin’ yer instead.” He forebore to mention that the carriers had taken the pack on his instructions, or that he had told the police before the patrol began to maintain the hottest possible pace to the rocks, with none of the usual breathers on the way.
“But it’s extremely valuable—supposing they drop it over a cliff?”
“Valuable my arse. I wish they’d bloody well drop yer over a cliff. Now for Christ’s sake get a move on,”and he walked off up the track without another word. Prout followed sullenly; the release from the crushing burden of the pack gave his legs a spring-like bounce that made him feel almost weightless, but if he was now spared the encumbrance of the pack, his spirits were weighed down by guilt instead. For, despite his best intentions, he was now an exploiter of native labour and, however unwillingly, he had become part of the vile colonialist machine. He had, at the outset of his mission, endangered that fragile bond of respect which he needed to build between himself and those entrusted to his care. His self-flagellating reverie was disturbed by two rifle shots and the notes of a bugle up in front.
“Is that your police attacking some poor villagers?”
“No, worse luck. Just the bugler letting Laripa know we’re coming, and tellin’ ’em to get firewood cut, and water from the creek.”
“Why the shooting?”
“To remind orly that we’re the bosses.”
“Is that all you can think of—oppression and racial violence?”
Fletcher tossed the butt of his cigarette into the valley below and
walked on in silence, smiling to himself.
Laripa was distinguished among the settlements of the Moroks by the presence of the greatest orator, Malek; the greatest sorcerer, Macardit; and the greatest philosopher, Garang, a twisted, hairless little man with a squint. It was thus a kind of Florence or Paris, a cultural centre where the aspiring young intellectuals of the Moroks came to learn the secrets of their fathers, and, more hidden still, the dark revelations of the Before-Men who, led by Tikame himself, had roamed the mountains when Time itself was not.
As befitted its status as the cultural capital of the Moroks, its men’s house was the largest, the best-ornamented, and the most smoke-blackened in all the island. Raised on piles, its rear was low, but the roof-ridge rose into the sky, so that, being more than a hundred feet long, the top of its front end, the formal end, was nearly forty feet above the ground. The boards covering the front of the house were brilliantly painted in the form of a great face, whose mouth was also the entrance. The teeth of this mouth were provided by two rows of bleached skulls, as the boiling and preparation of skulls was one of the arts for which Laripa was celebrated.
Below the men’s house, the hovels of the women formed two parallel lines for a couple of hundred yards down the crest of the spur. At the end of these two lines, a second, smaller, men’s house faced up the yard between the huts of the women, looking directly at the great face of the principal men’s house. The yard was steep and slippery, of shiny red clay, and all around the village ran a high stockade of timbers, whose tops were carved into replicas of simian faces, or barbed to resemble spear points, or hacked and pruned into stranger, even more lethal shapes, curved and twisted like instruments of torture.
The interior of the great men’s house was lit only by those rays that penetrated the narrow entrance, and its natural obscurity was rendered the more impenetrable by the smoke which filled it, rising from the smouldering logs on the hearth of ashes running the entire length of the building. Inside the entrance, in the ashes, smoking his bamboo pipe, sat Nyikang, once the most renowned of the Laripa warriors, now little more than an old bag of bones looking out over his beloved mountains, waiting to die.
Smoking was the last of this world’s pleasures left to him; the government had stopped most of the axe murders at which he had been so proficient, and he had never been much good at sorcery. He’d always muddled the spells at the critical moment. Sex, well, that had been fun, and at least the government hadn’t stopped that yet, but it was a long time since he had felt up to it. The last time, that had been a long time ago, when the great landslide swept away some of his pandanus trees, but all he got for his trouble was a splitting headache, and he had given it up as a bad job ever since. Not that he was missing much as far as Teopo, his last surviving wife, was concerned. She was almost as decrepit as him and never bothered to wash anymore; she was usually covered in dust, like an old gourd abandoned in the corner of a hut.
It was ages, too, since he had led the killing of the pigs at a great dance. His teeth had mostly gone now, and he couldn’t even chew a pig, let alone kill one. Soon he would be a spirit, roaming the forests of the high ranges with his ancestors, without fire, or food, or hope. He still clung to life, not out of love of this world, or fear of that to come, but from habit.
His attention wandered back to Macardit and Malek, who were sitting outside on the verandah, talking.
“A bat’s wing without fresh dog’s blood will blight naught,” said Macardit. “Some say that a frog’s head, crushed with ginger root, giveth more power than the blood of any creature, but that is folly.”
Malek nodded wisely.
“Dog’s blood, thou sayest. I will mind it well.” His fourth and most recent wife had been seduced by his cousin, so he had come to Macardit for a little private tuition in sorcery. The receipt for smiting an enemy’s genitals with gonorrhea cost only a small pig; a larger one, of course, was required if the Master himself recited the spells. Since this enemy was a cousin, the handier and cheaper remedy of the axe was denied him, but a good dose of the clap would suffice to put the fellow in his place.
“Fresh blood, fresh blood,” reiterated Macardit. “If thou but usest fresh blood, the bat’s wing, and the words of power which I have given thee, and well besmear his codpiece with the remedy, there will be one pig that will not root in thy garden for a while.” Macardit drew on his bamboo pipe, but found that in the long interval of conversation it had died.
“O aged one, give us of thy pipe” he said over his shoulder to Nyikang. Slowly, a trembling arm was extended through the hole with the requested pipe.
The Moroks never addressed an old person by name; they smelt of death, and their names were thus tabooed. Men talked freely in their presence, for they were in a sense unpersons, already dead to the social life around them. But all took care to treat them with respect. The elderly would soon be spirits, and their curses were powerful; no one wanted sudden blindness, or his food to choke him, or his pigs to waste and die.
As the three men smoked in silence, passing the pipe between them, Garang approached. Before climbing the ladder up to the verandah, he blew his nose in his fingers and wiped the snot onto one of the posts supporting the house. When he had settled himself, and drawn a few lungfuls of smoke from the bamboo tube, he said:
“Tikame cometh. We have all heard the bugle. Men say he bringeth an aged one, withered and lean-shanked, who came from the sky.”
“Aye. Is it he who was foretold, the bringer of riches?” asked Macardit.
“Who knoweth? We must put him to the test. For if he is that bringer of riches, he is surely one of us, a Morok, returned from the dead, from the great mountains, where the spirits wander for ever. So, my test is this. If there be one among us upon whom he smileth with special favor, like a loving father upon the son in whom he taketh delight, he is that man’s begetter, or his sire’s begetter, or his grandsire’s begetter. For no man smileth in such a fashion upon a stranger, upon any who is not bone of his bone, his very kindred. So if this aged one, this spindle-shanked one, should show love to any of us, love, I say, and not the passing smiles of deceit, he claimeth that one as his very own, and we shall know that he is in truth that bringer of riches foretold by our fathers.”
The others, including Nyikang, were deeply impressed by the insight which Garang displayed. The matchless intellect that made Laripa respected and envied throughout all the land of the Moroks seemed only to burn brighter with the years.
“Our men come from the forests with wood, our women from the gardens and creeks. When we are all met together, I shall speak,” said Malek, “and reveal thy words, O Garang.”
“Aye,” said the philosopher. “Strictly charge the men, the women, the wenches and the lads, even the little children, to watch this stranger, to look for the sign. For if it haply pass unseen, or go unrequited, he will be angered, and forsake us, never to return.”
Chapter V
Against Fletcher’s advice, Prout had filled his belly with water at the first stream they came to, so that it slopped and gurgled and made him feel thirstier than ever, draining the little energy he had left. Although it was only half-past two, the sun was heavily clouded over, and the valleys were in deep gloaming. As they drew nearer to their goal Fletcher pointed to Laripa, clearly silhouetted on the ridge across the narrow gorge up which they were moving. In his debilitated state Prout looked across at that menacing skyline, of jagged stockade and crouching, beastlike men’s house, with feelings of dread.
His academic success, his professional accomplishments in the service of the underprivileged, even the recent publication of his paper, “The Racist Implications of Air-Conditioning in the Tropics,” for which he had been complimented by the Secretary-General in person, did not, in this wild and barbaric land, give quite that boost to morale which a rational man might have expected. He was not looking forward to meeting the Moroks.
As the track penetrated farther into the heart of the gorge, the wall
s above and below it grew more precipitous, until they were great slabs of rock, in some places overhanging the path, dank, fissured, streaked with green slime where seepages of moisture broke through. The thunder of the torrent at the head of the gorge grew steadily more penetrating and overwhelming, magnified between the encroaching walls of the chasm, while the air grew steadily colder.
When the two men came round a corner a couple of hundred yards from the falls, the noise was deafening, and an icy, clammy wind, carried down by the water in its descent, blew fitfully upon them. A group of police awaited them. Having long since escorted the carriers into the village and setting them to preparing the rest house, some had returned with Cpl Barigi to assist their officer and his guest, and to provide them with a guard of honour for their formal entrance. They were huddled in the lee of a great rock, sheltering from the spray that drifted off the falls, and from this rock there led a native suspension bridge of plaited lawyer vines, that dipped across the gorge in a shallow catenary and rose to a similar anchorage on the opposite side. The bridge was of the simplest construction—two parallel hand-ropes, with a third rope below for the feet, slung from the hand-ropes by thinner vines. To its right, the cataract of the Limilimi thundered into a huge cauldron of black rock, in which great boulders were tossed and spun by the scouring action of the water; their ceaseless rumbling and grinding shook the walls of the gorge, emitting a note so low in register that it was felt rather than heard.
“This is the spot the maries jump from to spite their old men,” shouted Fletcher, pointing to the bridge. Beneath it, the tail race from the cauldron flew in a chaos of foam and churning green waters.
“What? Who are the maries?” asked Prout, close to Fletcher’s ear.