The Missionaries

by Owen Stanley

  Treadwell nodded vigorously.

  “Bad housing is one aspect of the traditional approach to life that we must root out here, but the arduous nature of indigenous cooking must be another. Imagine having to heat a pile of stones over blazing logs and then bury them in the ground before you can even have a little roast pork! Just think what it would mean for the outlook of these people to have neat modern houses, and be able to cook their meals over gas rings!”

  “That’s crap,” snarled Rebeccah, “Only you Brits could be crazy enough to come up with an idea like gas! Who ever heard of gas? Let ’em have electricity like everyone else, for Christ’s sake!”

  “We’ve already been over the social and technological implications of electricity, Rebeccah,” said Prout. “I thought the advantages of gas as a source of power were obvious to all of us.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know. I’m only a dumb female. Gotta leave all that technology to those big male intellects. Wake me up when ya’ get to the babies’ bottles and diapers.”

  After an uneasy pause, Treadwell said:

  “I see no reason why gas shouldn’t be able to provide an extensive service in outlying villages. We’ll be able to have sub-stations in the villages themselves. Get the cylinders charged at Ungabunga.”

  “True. Well, lets take that as settled. We’ll have the fort destroyed as soon as possible, and set up your gas works there as soon as the equipment can be flown in,” said Prout. “Now, there are one or two other matters to address. Latrines, number one. When I was on my patrol, I was disgusted by the lack of any regulations for the disposal of human waste. Here again, we must use an improvement in the people’s material conditions of life as part of our drive to develop rational attitudes to social reforms. I think the obvious person to instruct the people in the digging of latrines would be Dr. Smith. I’ll have him go out on a patrol and explain the necessity of sanitation. There seem to be a few shovels in the villages, so there should be no problem about digging them. Now, Tristram, what was this about traps?”

  “Oh, er, yes, Dr Prout,” said Daubeny. “Well, I’ve been looking around a bit, I mean, not like you, right up in the mountains, but at the people here, and it seems that they are a bit undernourished. It’s rather difficult to say for sure.”

  “Oh, do get on with it, lad, or we’ll be ’ere till tea time,” laughed Treadwell.

  “Well, I’m trying to. What I’m getting at is that they seem to be short of protein in their diet, and I was wondering if we couldn’t help them to catch game and so on in the forests. There must be plenty there. What made me think of it was seeing all those boxes of gin traps in the Number 2 warehouse. If we gave them to the people, they’d be marvellous for helping them obtain more protein in their diet. But, er, perhaps you’d already thought of that, or wanted them for something else?” He looked more confused and embarrassed by his own words than by Treadwell’s impatience.

  “I think, to be honest, Tristram, that the traps you mention came here due to an oversight on someone’s part. Oelrichs and I were wondering what to do with them. You’ve solved that for us. If you like you can arrange the distribution of them yourself. It’ll help you get to know the people.”

  “That would be absolutely wonderful!”

  “Good. Now we come to the issue of education. As you know, Fletcher has done nothing whatever to promote schooling in all the years he has been here, and I know that Tristram and Rebeccah are particularly concerned–”

  “Yes,” broke in Tristram, “Surely, since we are going to be learning Pidgin we could at least have some classes for the people in that.”

  Prout winced.

  “Please, Tristram, try not to use old colonialist terms like ‘Pidgin’. The correct name is Neo-Melanesian. These little details matter, you know.”

  Tristram looked suitably embarrassed, but Rebeccah interrupted.

  “Ya’ can call it what ya’ like, but it’s still a shitty language. The people have a goddam right to learn English.”

  “I totally agree,” said Treadwell.

  Prout raised both his hands to silence them.

  “I quite understand your feelings,” he said, “but there is a basic issue of principle here which must take precedence over everything else. We must not assume that when the people attain independence, they will necessarily want to learn English, because that has profound political implications. They may wish to become non-aligned and learn Swahili, or possibly Esperanto, or even French. We really must respect their human rights in this and leave them to take their own decision as a sovereign people at independence!”

  While the meeting dragged on, the cargo handlers getting the last crates from the plane were astonished to find, in a nook behind the pilot’s cabin, a sleeping constitutional lawyer, reeking of wine. After a few minutes, aroused by their babble, albeit deferential babble, he opened an eye and surveyed them.

  “I presume you are not the President and his cabinet come to welcome me, since I haven’t invented them yet. So I’ll assume that you’re harmless porter chappies, and disemplane accordingly. Toodle-oo!” He smiled broadly on them, picked up his chianti bottle and clapped a wide straw hat on his head, covering the mass of brilliant red hair that glowed like a blaze in a distillery. Followed by the goggling eyes of the natives, he ambled up the edge of the strip until he spotted the pub. Reaching the bridge over the drainage ditch, he sauntered over to where Fletcher and Oakley were standing by the door.

  “Good afternoon to you. Can I get a refill here?”

  “G’day. I dare say there’s a drop inside, let’s go and see. I’m Roger Fletcher, by the way, and this is Ned Oakley.” They turned to go inside.

  “How do you do. Michael Moncreif. Aren’t you the Resident Magistrate?”

  “Yeah. What’s yer line?”

  “Oh, I’m the Destroying Angel, as far as you’re concerned, I’m afraid. Come to sweep you into oblivion with a stroke of my pen. I’m drafting the new constitution.”

  “The new what?” They had reached the bar, and Fletcher called for beers all round. “What did yer say yer were?” he repeated.

  “I’m a lawyer, constitutional draftsman. Come to draw up the new constitution. Though from what I’ve seen of the inhabitants of Elephant Island so far, if you gave them the vote, they’d stick the ballot papers up each other’s bottoms. Cheers!”

  “Cheers!” For a few minutes only the gurgle of ice-cold lagers from stubbies into parched throats broke the silence, until Moncreif addressed them.

  “Have you met my colleagues? I suppose you must have done. God! aren’t they a shower?”

  “Speakin’ for myself, the biggest load of no-hopers I ever clapped eyes on,” said Oakley. “How did such a reasonable feller like yerself get mixed up with ’em?”

  “Hundred thousand dollars a year, tax-free. Unlimited booze, unlimited screwing. Who wouldn’t? To be fair, these constitutions I write are absolute cock, but since none of the little charmers they’re written for can understand a word of them, I don’t suppose they do much harm. This one’ll be a two-chamber legislature job, unless I’m much mistaken. Sounds like privy-building, doesn’t it? I did have some notes on what they wanted, but I must have dropped them at the airport. Never mind, get them tomorrow from old Snout, or whatever he calls himself.”

  “There’s a conference been going on all afternoon.”

  “Oh, sod them and their conferences. My turn for a round.”

  That evening, and several crates of stubbies later, Moncreif accepted his old mate Fletcher’s invitation to come up and live at his residence, to which both men were shortly carried by the police, singing a regimental lullaby.

  Chapter VII

  The path from Laripa would have taken Prout still deeper and higher into the mountains, to Dolivi, which controlled the pass at the head of the Loma valley. Here one spur of Mount Wordsworth joined another of Mount Shakespeare, or Karama, as the Moroks knew it, and on either side of this watershed gushed the headwaters of th
e Ungabunga and the Loma rivers. The pass, at about eight thousand feet, was submerged in the gloomy luxuriance of the ancient forest, but the government road, combined with landslides, had thinned some of the vegetation, so that it was just possible, through a screen of trailing vines, and the spiky, mop-like heads of young pandanus trees, and the giant ferns, to gaze out beyond the forest on either side.

  On the Ungabunga side, through breaks in the ranges, could be distantly glimpsed the sea, hardly separable from the sky. The Arafura Sea, which none of the mountain men had ever seen up close, was as remote from their experience, and as mythical, as the surface of the moon. On the Loma side the view was more constricted. The torrent which was to become the Loma took a crooked, cloistered course from the very beginning, winding down a narrow valley which turned at right angles to the pass after only three miles, blocking a watcher’s view with the twelve-thousand foot mass of Mount Shakespeare. This was a closed valley, closed to the sun, which only illuminated it in the hours around noon; closed to the winds; and closed to the sight and sound of other villages. Even the pin-point lights of their fires could not be glimpsed in the darkness, and the wailing cries by which the Moroks of the valleys called to one another were blocked by some trick of acoustics from penetrating here. Only the rain fell in vertical abundance, and the mists and dank airs rolled down from the high peaks to blanket the valley of the Dolivi men at nightfall.

  The village of Dolivi stood a few hundred feet below the head of the pass, on a flat place close to the torrent. It was usually an undistinguished group of hovels, with the standard men’s house and stockade, but it was now, despite the gloom of its setting, transformed into a festive arena. The squalid old huts had been cleared away, and replaced by two lines of imposing dwellings, still made from dried pandanus-palm leaf, but of leaves that were crisp and shiny, and golden brown, instead of the limp, bleached things that had coated the old huts. The new houses formed two parallel lines a hundred feet apart that swept down from the forest in a gentle curve for about three hundred yards. Fifty-foot palm trees had been felled and uprooted, and their trunks stripped of bark, and they had been carried back to the village with songs and shouts of triumph. There they had been re-erected down each side of the village beside the houses, and to their trunks were bound the fruits of the earth: yams and taro, sweet-potatoes and cucumbers, and marrows, and bunches of sugar cane, and bananas, and at their bases were heaped smoked pandanus nuts, and game from the forest.

  At the head and foot of the village were two huge men’s houses facing each other down the length of the courtyard, their great painted faces shouting silently in frozen rage. In the centre of the courtyard, to one side, was a tall platform raised about thirty feet from the ground, reached by a ladder, and from which skulls and other bones swung in net bags; it had been decorated in red, yellow, blue, and other less-definable tints until no square inch was left unadorned.

  For the men of Dolivi were the hosts in a great feast, in honour of their fathers’ bones, and the spirits of their ancestors. Every ten years or so, when the men of the village had accumulated enough pigs, they built a dance village and invited their neighbours to dance and display themselves before the unmarried girls, until on the final day they killed all the pigs in an orgy of slaughter.

  Some guests had been living there for weeks, dancing every night and sleeping during the day, but the climax of the festival was tonight. The Dolivi women were down in the valley cutting cane for the torches to be used through the night, or helping their menfolk lure the pigs with sweet-potatoes so they could be caught and trussed for the morrow. The children ran through the forest, seeking flowers and berries with which to adorn themselves, and the old men sat in the men’s houses, cracked nuts, smoked, and reminisced.

  The people of Laripa came thick upon the track, and the inhabitants of Ganipa and Sapo, Niovoro and Lavalava, Mivana and Tolava, and many others, flowed over the narrow pass above Dolivi. Some paused here, in and around the government rest house that had been erected long since by Fletcher for the benefit of travellers caught by the rain, which at these altitudes could soon kill a native by exposure. Here they smoked or slept, waiting for friends in other parties to catch up with them. Whenever a Morok stopped upon the road for more than a minute or so at a time, he lit a fire, compulsively, and without necessarily seeming to enjoy it, or even to notice it. And here, too, many little fires were smoking and crackling, made of small heaps of debris collected from beneath the trees and mixed with the oily leaves of the pandanus palm to obtain a blaze. The Moroks huddled around them, smoking and chatting, squatting on their haunches, with their bundles of finery for the dance that evening by their sides.

  Among them sat Fletcher, for he enjoyed nothing so much as these private walkabouts, without the encumbrance of police and carriers, when he could roam at will in his mountains, passing unseen by a sleeping hamlet in the dim radiance of early dawn, or coming in the night upon some little hut, half hidden, from which came a low murmur of voices and the occasional flurry of sparks as someone stirred the fire. There he would sit, gazing into the flames, and eating a roasted sweet-potato, listening to talk of gardens, and hunting, and the ways of pigs, until sleep overtook him. He was a familiar sight to the people as he forded the sparkling waters of a torrent, or ate a meal of fruit in the shade of some rocks by the track, or sat on the verandah of a men’s house talking of nothing in particular with the chiefs. On these expeditions he made no arrests, and needed no police or bodyguard; the aura of his personality was safeguard enough for Tikame.

  On this occasion, it was not only his love for the wild land which he had ruled for a decade that brought him to Dolivi, but a desire to escape from Ungabunga. It was not so much that he resented the changes there—as he’d anticipated, they were pathetic and laughable—but after two months he needed to get away to collect his thoughts, especially on the subject of police morale, which was suffering severely under the constraints of the new regime. Earlier in the day he had met Smith coming in the opposite direction, from Laripa, who gave him the news about the latrines.

  “I do not think the people will listen, Roj, but I tell them. If they do nothing, who cares? The climate is good, the water is clean.” He shrugged his shoulders.

  “Yeah, well, you’ve done your job, Smithy. Get any good specimens?”

  “No, Roj, very dull. Only an enlarged thyroid, a prolapsed rectum, and dental caries. I am wasting my talents here. But I must hurry, there is an autopsy at Ungabunga waiting for me. You will miss it, I think?”

  “Yeah, I’ll be up here a few days yet.”

  “Ah, a pity, and I have some excellent sherry just come special for the autopsy.”

  “Never mind, there’ll be others.”

  They parted then, and Fletcher had shaken his head. Smithy was a decent bloke, all right, but he was sure as hell more than one brick short of a load.

  But their meeting had been hours ago, and now the sun was well below the peaks. Already Dolivi was deep in shadow, and fires in the houses could be glimpsed from the head of the pass. Fletcher and his companions rose, suddenly cold and hungry, and began the last stage of the descent to Dolivi.

  The moon had risen, though it was frequently obscured by clouds, and when the dance began, a strong wind blew down from the peaks. The coming of darkness cast a powerful spell over the village; it was no longer an ordinary space between two lines of houses, but a limitless stage whose borders were as wide as the natives’ imaginations. The Beings in their great feather head-dresses who entered upon this stage were not the stunted little men of daylight, but moving idols, superhuman monsters towering to the height of the houses around them, and lit by the torches of blazing cane waved by the women who danced adoringly before them. Great clouds of smoke from these brands swept across the dance yard, blown by the strong wind, and in the fitful yellow glare, the incredible figures of the night dancers seemed to reach up to the ragged clouds.

  Tossing and lashing in the dance, th
ree hundred giants thundered upon their drums, and their song bellowed out like the notes of a mighty organ, reverberating down the gorges above the tumult of the waters and the forest, until even in distant Laripa the old men stirred among the ashes and dreamed of their youth. As the dancers stamped and pounded with tireless fury, they seemed to have taken on the qualities of the culture-heroes, the Before-Men, when time itself was not, beautiful as birds, with the endurance and virility of giants, melodiously exulting in their strength and roaring their triumphs across the ranges.

  Not all their songs were of warriors and blood; some were melancholy, the infinitely sad laments of bewildered and primitive men who found themselves in a world they had not made, and could not unmake again. Fletcher, whose cigarette had long since gone out, sat on the verandah of the men’s house, held in the grip of these mighty forces, staring, his eyes unfocused.

  Towards one o’clock, the storm, whose flashes and rumblings had been growing steadily nearer, burst upon the village and the mountains above in all its fury. But though the dancers were scattered by the lashing rain, and awed by the searing strikes of lightning, they were not disheartened, for Nature herself had taken up and surpassed what they had begun. The ancestors were pleased.

  Under the dripping eaves of the houses men struggled in the darkness with their great head-dresses, trying to remove them before the feathers were irreparably damaged by the rain. The men’s houses were packed with naked bodies glistening with rain, sweat, and ornamental grease; the fires down the centres of the houses had been replenished with long dry timbers drawn from the stock beneath the floor, so that in the foetid heat and press, smelling of hot wet bodies and animal odours it was like being in the warm churnings of a great beast’s innards. The wind-driven rain slatted furiously against the roofs, some of which were stripped away in a rattling hail of leaves. The men waited nervously for each gust of wind to come roaring through the streaming darkness, like a huge wave, surging through the forest, to crash upon the houses which quivered and groaned under the successive shocks.