by Peter Ryan
Singin left me here, to return to his home village of Wampangan, whose grass roofs could just be discerned through the trees on a mountainside, about half an hour’s walk away. We struck off east, across the little airstrip and into the bush. An hour’s walk found us at Karau, a village of some twelve or fourteen neat and well-made grass houses grouped round an open space. We sat down here while the men came in from their gardens to take over the carrying. Wild yodelling from the surrounding bush told us that they were passing the word along. In the meantime I paid the others with salt and let them go. They set off homeward at a trot, hoping to beat the afternoon rain.
As soon as sufficient Karau men had come in, Buku lined them up and assigned them their loads, and we moved off down the wide, well-graded track to Gumbum.
This village was a singularly pleasant spot. The house-kiap and the house-police were set in a greensward surrounded by breadfruit-trees, and the paths were lined with gay red, green, and yellow croton plants. There we spent the night, first telling the old luluai to have sufficient carriers on the spot in the morning. The police put up my bed, but I was still doing my own cooking, not yet having secured a satisfactory cook-boy. The natives preferred to stay at home because of the unknown dangers and the difficulty of the work we required them to do. I wanted a boy who would accompany me readily, rather than one who required persuading and who would probably desert and go home as soon as we struck hard going.
Next morning we were on the road shortly after dawn. Our route for the day lay through Monakasat and Banzain to a village called Karangandoang. We were climbing high into the mountains now, and the scenery was wildly magnificent in the early part of the day, but by three in the afternoon the hills were often blanketed in cloud, which rose slowly from the depths of the valleys until it covered the whole countryside. The walk between villages meant a precipitous descent into a valley and a backbreaking climb up the other side. In the mornings the grandeur of the country was some compensation for the effort. Later in the day, with the mist shrouding everything, it was unnerving to walk into the valley as the unseen stream roared below, or to make what seemed to be an endless ascent into space, for the tops of the mountains were invisible and one could not see where the track was leading. By the time we reached Karangandoang a misty rain was falling and the red earth of the track was very greasy and slippery. It was cold, and the boys spread a layer of earth over part of the bamboo floor of the house-kiap, so that, native fashion, I could have a fire in the house to cook on, and to dry my clothes. There was no house-police, but the boys arranged accommodation for themselves in the village, a couple of hundred yards away. The natives greeted us with no great affection – for which, I suppose, they could hardly be blamed, because our presence meant only the nuisance of a carry next day. However, they brought us food, asking for salt in return.
A strong wind was blowing through the house, and I had put on dry clothes and an extra sweater and was about to eat my meal when Buka, his eyes and teeth flashing white against the blackness of his face, burst into the hut.
‘One of Master Jock’s police-boys is coming! He says there has been trouble!’ he exclaimed.
A few seconds later a weary, muddy, but grinning policeman, his cap and loincloth dripping wet and his bare torso steaming, appeared out of the night in the weak yellow shaft of lantern-light. He said that his name was Buso, and that he had a message for Les.
‘Give it to me,’ I said. ‘I’ll read it before it goes on to him.’
Buso fished in the depths of his haversack and produced a large sealed envelope. I was glad to see that it had not yet been penetrated by the water, though it was damp. I told Buso to go down to the village to eat and get dry, and to come back in an hour.
The letter was from Ian Downs, describing how he had gone down from the mountains to the coast near Hopoi to reconnoitre a beach on which our assault troops would land to begin an attack on Lae. Unfriendly natives had betrayed him, and he had been chased by a party of Japanese and nearly caught. ‘Managed to climb a ficus-tree and watched the Nips walking round underneath. Fortunately they didn’t look up,’ ran one passage. At another stage the enemy caught sight of him and opened fire, but he managed to shake them off in the bush. He had trouble in fording the swift Bulu River, and apparently injured himself as he crossed from side to side in an effort to cover his tracks from the enemy. Studded through the letter, like a new kind of punctuation mark, was the sentence, ‘Had another swig at the whisky-flask – felt a bit better.’ The whisky kept him going until, on the second day, he reached a remote mountain village, where he was now resting.
I didn’t think the Japs would let Ian get away with this. Although up to this time they had never gone far inland, they must now realize the danger of allowing people like Jock and Ian to continue to live freely in the mountains. A concerted drive by the enemy to hunt such people out of hiding seemed quite a possibility.
I decided that in case there was trouble ahead it would be better to have with us reliable police, and so, when Buso returned, his belly swollen from an enormous meal of sweet potatoes, I told him that the letter would be taken back to Les by Achenmeri, the recruit, and that he, Buso, would guide me to the village where Jock was staying.
The following morning, as Achenmeri turned back towards Boana, the rest of us set out for Kasenobe. It seemed to lie well off the direct line to Samandzing, and I asked the natives whether there was a shorter route. No, they told me, this track was the only one. An hour later we came to a small village, where the Karangandoang carriers handed over to a new line.
Although the sun was fairly high, we were now at such an altitude that the air was quite cool. The country became increasingly rugged and beautiful with every mile. On distant slopes plumes of blue smoke curled slowly up from native gardens – gardens which in this fertile soil produced an abundance of almost all temperate-climate crops. Here and there, like a white ribbon draped over the hillside, a mountain stream plunged hundreds of feet into the valley, and at intervals the brilliant green of the valley sides was broken by the red scars of landslides.
About midday we obtained our first clear view of the enormous central spine of the Saruwaged mountain range, which runs down the middle of the Huon Peninsula. Though about ten miles away, it was almost frightening, it seemed so high and remote. I knew it had been crossed in one or two places, but as I looked at the jagged line its peaks cut across the sky, it was hard to imagine anything as tiny as a human being attempting to overcome such an obstacle. Between the soft blue of the peaks and the sparkling blue of the sky we saw gleaming patches of white. One had the impression that some of the mountains were snow-covered; indeed, the German explorer Detzner, who spent four years of the First World War hiding in the interior from the Australians, described them as snow-bearing. This curious misapprehension is explained by the fact that on these mountains there are large areas of bare, windswept limestone which glistens in the sun and could easily look like snow to a distant observer.
At about two o’clock, when the surrounding country had already vanished into the fog, Kasenobe, perched on top of a cliff, appeared suddenly out of the swirling greyness. As we clambered over the slab stockade which surrounded the settlement, we saw that it was quite a large village for this area, consisting of over thirty houses. There was a big church, its thick, well-thatched roof in sharp contrast to the wretched, poky
dwellings.
The feeling of remoteness became complete here. In the other villages, though I had been conscious that many things were new or strange, somehow they seemed different only in degree from life as I had known it in Australia. But even another planet could have been no more unfamiliar and eerie than this savage village. If I had to convey my main impression of it – and of the many others like it – in one word, that word would be greyness. The fog, the stinking village pigs, the weatherbeaten roofs, the dirty, scaly-skinned, near-naked kanakas – all these were dismal, grey, and dispiriting, beneath a sombre, leaden sky.
Only one man spoke pidgin, and none of them had ever been away from the village to work. There was not a shred of calico to be seen. All the men wore the traditional dress known as mal, which is a strip of rough ‘cloth’ made by beating a section of bark from the wild mulberry until it becomes pliable. It is wound tightly round the waist several times, and then passed between the legs to enclose the genitals. The women wore only a flimsy petticoat, less than a foot long, made of reeds. They were decrepit hags, in keeping with their village; their pendulous breasts reminded me of razor-strops hanging on a barber’s chair. The missionaries, in their efforts to preserve their charges unspotted from the world, had seen to it that no minor amenity of civilization – such as a piece of soap – penetrated to this fastness. Their church, with its rough wooden cross, seemed a pious incongruity among stone-age savagery. I thought of the Indian villages of early North American history, where mission churches had been no barrier to acts of fiendish barbarity.
The men stood glowering as we piled the cargo in the middle of the village. Occasionally, with angry gestures, one would jabber unintelligibly in the local dialect. I noticed that several of the kanakas were armed with bows and arrows.
‘They are wild men here,’ Buso remarked – a trifle superfluously, I felt – as he and Buka unslung their rifles. ‘Master Jock taught them a lesson, though, when we passed through, so I don’t think they will attack us.’
Buka grinned in agreement. ‘Master Jock ’e strong-fella man too much! Kanaka all ’e no can humbug long Master Jock,’ he said happily.
They pointed out the man who spoke pidgin, and I called him over. He came slowly, sulkily, and stood in front of us with his head bowed. I told him quietly that I wanted sufficient food for the police and myself, but he continued to stare at the ground, and would not answer. I suppressed my anger with some effort, and explained to him patiently that we were hungry and must eat. They had plenty of food, and if they brought it to me they would be paid for it. If we had to help ourselves we would take it for nothing. They could please themselves.
He translated this into ‘talk-place’, and the other men discussed the ultimatum. In the end they shouted to their women, and a few minutes later we were supplied with potatoes, sweet potatoes, cabbages, and beans. The women were as timid as the men were aggressive, advancing just near enough to seize the proffered salt at arm’s length, and then dashing back hastily, as though afraid I would bite them. A crowd of ten-year-old brats had gathered behind me, but they rushed away to hide whenever I turned, however quietly, in their direction.
As there was no house-kiap I decided to sleep in the church. It was at the edge of the clearing, so we would have some hope of escaping into the bush if we were attacked. Buso and Buka put up my bed-sail on the dais at one end of the building, and, feeling rather like a sacrificial lamb on the altar, I lay down there to write up my patrol diary. It was still very early, so I spent the rest of the afternoon writing letters home to Australia. It seemed an odd thing to do in this place: I felt that I might as well have been writing to people on the moon. How any letter would be sent I did not know, but I wanted it to be ready in case a runner should be sent back to Bob’s.
Late in the afternoon the whole church building suddenly began to creak and rock, and I could see the beams of the roof heaving and straining against the ridgepole. I sprang off the bed in fear, not realizing for a moment that it was only an earth-tremor – almost a daily occurrence, though this was an unusually violent one. When it had stopped, after about two minutes, and I had calmed down, I wished it had been the volcanoes at Rabaul erupting – we’d have been saved the trouble of clearing out the Japanese.
As darkness drew on I ate my solitary meal. The cold and damp crept into the church, and the whole world seemed to shrink to the dim sphere illumined by my small hurricane-lamp. There was no sound from the kanakas, no sign of cooking-fires. I shivered, checked over my pistol, and crawled miserably into bed.
Kasenobe looked more cheerful in the morning. Bright sunlight warmed the sparkling air, and not a cloud spoilt the clear sky. But the houses were the same grey ramshackles, and the kanakas as sullen as ever. Naturally, in such a place, latrines were unheard of, so I retired to the edge of the bush. While still squatting, I was knocked flying by half a dozen ravenous village pigs, squealing and fighting for the excrement that forms a large part of their diet.
Nine surly Kasenobe boys shouldered our cargo, but they were so unwilling to come that I decided Buso, Buka, and I should watch three of them each, in case they tried the favourite trick of throwing down the cargo in some difficult spot and vanishing into the thick forest. We hoped to be in Samandzing – the village where Buso had left Jock a couple of days before – by nightfall, but I began to doubt our chances when I saw the track. It was both rough and steep, and so badly eroded by rushing water that on the hillside immediately above Kasenobe we found ourselves walking in a ditch three or four feet deep. The map showed that we had to cross two high mountains, and Buso confirmed this. Though they were very steep and difficult, he said, we ought to make Samandzing before dark.
Eleven o’clock found us regaining our breath on top of the first mountain. The carriers seemed to have settled down, and happily accepted tobacco and newspaper to roll smokes. Many aeroplanes passed overhead as we rested, but we could not identify them because of the thick trees that stretched above us. However, within a few minutes the boom of anti-aircraft fire and the heavy rolling thunder of exploding bombs told us that our planes were making a strike on Lae. The noise of the explosions was a healthy reminder that, however isolated it might seem, this country could easily be reached by the Japs from their base at Lae in about three days’ walk.
An hour or so from the top of the mountain brought us to a stream which the natives called Dimini. On the far side of the valley was a ruined village of the same name, whose inhabitants had moved to Kasenobe. We sat down for another rest on a cliff above the stream, where a cleared space enabled me to get a good view of the surrounding country. Looking downstream through the field-glasses I could see in the distance a thatched building which seemed somehow familiar. The more I looked, the more it puzzled me, but I could not identify it. I passed the glasses to Buso, who instantly recognized it as the house-kiap at Karangandoang in which I had slept the night before last. The Karangandoang people had indeed been fooling us when they said that to reach Samandzing it was necessary to pass through Kasenobe. Down this valley Karangandoang was not more than five miles away, and I felt sure that there would be a track, even if only a rough one. I made a mental black mark against the people who had caused us to lose a whole day through unnecessary travelling. We started off again to climb the second mountain. It was not as high as the first one which I had estimated as being about nine thousand feet, but the track was much rougher.
In one place a landslide had carried away a section of it, and we had to scramble round the bare rocky hillside holding on to roots and trees as we went. Every now and then we had to stop to scrape leeches off our legs.
By two o’clock we were trotting down a steep slope into Bungalamba village, where we boiled the billy. Native fashion, I laid a couple of ears of corn in their leaves on the fire for lunch. As I ate I studied the map, finding out where Bungalamba fitted into the general picture. This village was of considerable strategic importance to us, I felt, for it was on a river along whose valley a path led direct to Lae. From where I sat I could see down the river to Mililuga village, which was only two days’ walk from Lae. If the Japanese decided to come looking for people like Jock McLeod, this seemed a likely route for them to take.
Bungalamba was important for another reason: it was the last inhabited point on the southern end of one of the few known crossings over the Saruwaged mountains to the north coast. Jock was well aware of its dual importance, and in a tiny dependent hamlet of the main Bungalamba village, perched high on the far side of the valley, a police-boy was stationed. His job was to watch for any signs of a Japanese move up from Mililuga which would cut us off, and to listen to the gossip of the local natives, reporting to Jock any news he picked up.
As we passed the hamlet, which consisted of three or four miserable grass houses, this police-boy was waiting by the track. He saluted gravely. I saw that he was a small middle-aged man, with the hair receding from his wrinkled brown forehead and turning grey on his temples. His name was Watute, he said, and he came from Pema, at the mouth of the Waria River. He had been in the police force nearly twenty years, and it was not long before I saw why Jock had picked him for this job: he heard everything that was said, shrewdly separated wheat from chaff, the idle chatter from real news, and built-up a complete and accurate picture of the situation, often from the flimsiest of clues, in a manner which would have done credit to Sherlock Holmes.