by Maya Lynch
I was preparing to make a quiet escape when, amongst the flow of foreign words that I couldn’t understand I thought I heard him say ‘Pulemelei’. There was another long pause before I heard a commotion coming from inside the hut. The tattooist arched his eyebrows and gave me an ominous look. I could almost hear his voice in my head saying ‘Uh oh, Palangi. You’re in trouble now!’ He turned his back on me and started tap tapping the bloody pins on the end of the long thin stick into the reclining man’s skin.
I looked over to the hut and saw the owner of the voice I had heard standing in the doorway, a woman, her long thin legs dirty with ash under a blue t-shirt. Her thin face topped with a dark shock of scraggly hair. Clinging on to her was a small child.
‘Hey, tālofa,’ I said. ‘I wondered if maybe you knew anything about a pyramid over there somewhere?’ I pointed back in the direction I had come.
She said nothing.
‘Pulemelei?’ I pushed, finally daring to say it, terrified to hear her answer.
‘Yes, I know Pulemelei,’ she said. Behind me the tattooist let out a long disapproving breath.
‘You do?’ I couldn’t believe it. ‘Can you show me where it is? Can you take me there?’
‘Come back tomorrow.’ she said, simply. ‘I can take you there.’
‘Yes!’ I exclaimed. ‘Thank you!’
I closed my eyes and felt a rush of relief and elation wash over me. I pictured the pyramid drawing closer and considered the series of coincidences that lead to my being here, in front of possibly the only person in Samoa willing to take me to Pulemelei. It was a few moments before I noticed that everyone was silently waiting for me to leave.
‘I’ll see you in the morning then.’ I turned and headed back towards where my friends were swimming.
10
Baba
The following morning, I returned to the little hut near the blue lake to meet my guide. Having slept on it, the whole thing seemed almost too good to be true. As I parked the car and walked around the lake I desperately hoped that she hadn’t changed her mind. For some reason I could easily imagine that she’d not even remember me, that she’d just stare awkwardly at me until I left, or that I’d dreamed the whole thing.
I walked up the narrow pathway that led to the hut and called out. ‘Mālō! Tālofa! Hello-o?’ The young woman came to the door to meet me. She ushered me inside. As I squeezed past her into the doorway I couldn’t help but notice that she didn’t seem at all dressed to go into the jungle. I was wearing my ‘explorer’ clothes, all threadbare, beaten and worn with the dirt and dust of a hundred adventures still clinging to them. My guide-to-be was wearing her pyjamas.
‘I can’t take you,’ she said. ‘I have the baby to look after.’ My heart sank. ‘But my brother will take you. Baba!’ Out of the gloom of the back room a kind-looking young man stepped forward, his hand outstretched to greet me.
‘Hello, I’m Baba,’ he said.
‘Hi. Maya.’ I shook his hand. I couldn’t be sure, but he looked familiar to me. I couldn’t quite place him. ‘So, you know where we are going?’ I asked.
‘Yes, yes, I know,’ he said.
‘How far is it to the pyramid do you think?’
‘Hmmm, a mile?’ he said rather ambiguously.
Baba was a big guy, strong shoulders in a blue vest top and blue nylon sweat pants. He didn’t look like he was dressed for the jungle either, but I wasn’t about to argue with him.
‘Okay, shall we go?’ I suggested.
Baba grinned and immediately I recognised where I knew him from. He was the same guy that had been watching us from the bushes when we were swimming at the lake. Oh no! Why did it have to be him?
Baba and I set out almost immediately. We agreed on a guide fee of 50 tālā, which is about thirty dollars, which seemed like an absolute bargain, as long as he knew where he was going, of course. I picked up my little pack and swung it onto my back as we walked down the dirt track and out onto the coast road. We stomped our way in single file, Baba in front, me following behind, sticking to the hot tarmac road for a good twenty minutes until we came to a little road-side shack where I bought two litres of water and some cigarettes.
I held out the two bottles of water to Baba, ‘Will this be enough do you think? For both of us?’ I asked.
‘Yes, that’s enough,’ he said. Baba hadn’t brought anything with him at all apart from a fierce-looking machete. We were about to go into the jungle and climb up the side of a volcano, but Baba seemed completely unfazed by this prospect. I couldn’t decide whether I should find his laid-back attitude reassuring or utterly terrifying. We hit the road again in the sweltering heat. I pulled my baseball cap low on my forehead to shield out the sun and stared down at my shoes as they hit the tarmac. After a while - I forget how long- Baba stopped and pointed to a palm tree at the side of the road.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘there’s the sign.’ It took me a moment to spot it, but sure enough there was a tiny wooden arrow pointing into the jungle nailed to the tree. A simple little arrow, plain, nothing written on it, and only about the size of a matchbox. It wasn’t much, but there it was, a sign.
We jumped over the deep drainage ditch that ran along the side of the road and slipped into a field of tall grass. When I say tall, I mean taller than me. It crossed my mind that I should probably have told someone where I was going, who I was with and how long I might be, but there was no going back now. We pushed on. At last I was heading into the centre of the island. Up ahead I could make out the sound of rushing water.
A few minutes later, we were crossing the river. I stepped, toes first, to feel if the rock under water was slippery through my trainers. It seemed okay so I put all of my weight onto that leg and pushed myself off the rock with the other. Baba did not show the same level of caution, he barrelled across the river without even slowing down. I was starting to lag behind. I watched Baba effortlessly climb the bank and slip into the jungle. He was a natural hiker. I, despite my enthusiasm, was not. My backpack contained the two litres of water, a borrowed Canon camera, a small tripod, a compass, one pack of menthol cigarettes and one Samoan twenty-tālā note. My backpack did not contain a map, a phone, a first aid kit, a flare, a whistle, a torch, a machete, a gun, or a rape alarm.
Half way across the stream I stopped. This was going to be hard. Could I hack it? Teetering on a round river stone, I looked around and, perhaps somewhat belatedly, asked myself ‘Where are you? What are you doing? What the fuck are you doing going into the jungle with this guy?’ I reminded myself that if I was going to find a pyramid in the middle of a jungle, on the side of a volcano, then this guy was my only chance to do that. Was that a good enough reason to follow a total stranger into the wilderness? I hopped across the river and hauled myself up the bank. I could see through the trees that Baba was waiting up ahead. As I approached, he seemed to read my mind. ‘Don’t worry. No rape,’ he said politely, flashing a smile before turning to continue on. I stopped in my tracks. I was stunned. Was my concern that obvious? Or perhaps he’d also belatedly realised how dodgy the situation might seem. Christ Jess, I thought, why’d you have to call him McRapey?
We left the river behind and pressed on into the jungle proper. Soon, the trees were blocking any breeze that might have been blowing from the coast. The heat was stifling and as the jungle canopy closed in on us, I realised pretty quickly that I hated this jungle. It was hot, way too hot. Typically for a jungle it was also wet, so everything was soaked immediately and remained that way. The other thing about the jungle that people don’t always expect is the complete riot of decay. Everything here was dying, or already dead and rotting. The temporary nature of life has never been more obvious to me than when trekking in the jungle. Everything that lives is visibly living on the rotten corpse of something else.
As we pushed our way into the jungle Baba called behind and asked me ‘E te iloa fa’aSamoa? (Do you speak Samoan?)’
‘Ioe, ae laiitiiti, (a little),’ I repl
ied. I must have screwed up the pronunciation because Baba turned and looked at me, eyebrows raised.
‘We can speak English,’ he said abruptly as he turned to walk on. It turned out that Baba spoke excellent English. I lowered my gaze once more and trod on behind him, forcing my way through the trees and branches that blocked our path. Sweat dripped from under my baseball cap and ran down my face, stinging my eyes.
‘Maya, do you know about the starmounds?’ Baba called out.
‘Yeah, I’ve read about them!’ I called back. In fact, the starmounds, called Tia Sui Lupe in Samoan, were what first piqued my interest in Samoa. Starmounds are large stone structures, each between 1 to 2 meters in height and around ten meters across, shaped something like stars or starfish, hence the name. There are dozens of these stone mounds scattered about the island. I was excited by Baba’s question as it suggested to me that I might get to see one for myself.
The starmounds offer a researcher an intriguing opportunity. The climate on Savai’i doesn’t lend itself to the preservation of archaeological remains. What you really want if you’re looking the perfect conditions for preserving ancient artefacts, is a cold and dry climate. What you get in Savai’i is, of course, the total opposite; it’s hot and wet. Over time countless priceless artefacts have simply disintegrated and have been lost to history forever.
However, some things do survive in the hot and wet conditions. The Lapita pottery that was discovered at the port in Mulifanua, is one prominent example. Another is the stone structures of the starmounds. With these artefacts we can touch history. They provide us with our only tangible experience of the ancient past of the islands. But perhaps the most wonderful thing about the starmounds is this: Because they date from relatively late in the archaeological record, being built as recently as only five hundred years ago, stories about their use and purpose still survive today, preserved in the folk tales and oral histories of the islanders. Armed with these stories and with the ancient starmounds themselves, we can begin to get a sense for what life might have been like on Savai’i in ancient times.
We clomped on for a few minutes before Baba stopped and looked around. He veered off to his left, clambered over the roots of a tree and beckoned me over. ‘Here,’ he said, as he pulled back the long grass. ‘This is a starmound.’
He wasn’t kidding. Right in front of us were the ruins of an ancient Tia Sui Lupe, an enigmatic starmound. In all honesty, the starmound was less impressive than I had hoped. The mound came up to the top of my thigh and I would estimate it was about five meters across, the structure had certainly seen better days. It looked to be not much more than a pile of rubble. Possibly sensing my disappointment, Baba began to tell me a story about the ancient ritual festival that used to take place here.
‘Tia Sui Lupe is the Samoan name for the starmounds,’ he said. ‘It means “the grave of the pigeons.” In ancient times, they used to have a pigeon catching festival here at this starmound. They would build huts on top of the mound and the then chiefs from all the villages would come here to compete to see who could catch the most pigeons. In one hand they held a tame pigeon tied to a long piece of string, and in the other hand they held a long-handled net which they would use to catch the wild pigeons that flocked overhead. Some people say that the chief who caught the most pigeons was allowed to take wives from the other villages.’
The more he told me about the Tia Sui Lupe festival, the more it seemed to me that the whole thing was about much more than just catching pigeons. It sounded like some kind of ancient rave.
‘The Tia Sui Lupe festival was a Venus festival,’ Baba continued. ‘It only happened in the months when the planet Venus rose as the morning star.’
This all made sense to me. Of course, I remembered the Samoan myth of Tapituea that says when the planet Venus rose as the evening star it would watch over you as you ate your evening meal, and when it rose as the morning star it would watch over you when you went pigeon catching. But I hadn’t realised that Venus rising as the morning star was the astronomical signal, the trigger if you like for the Tia Sui Lupe festivals.
‘This was an important time,’ Baba said. ‘Imagine, everyone had been getting ready for the pigeon catching festival for months. The whole island had been preparing. Everyone is going to be at the festival and finally the special day would come. On this day you would see Venus rise as the morning star.’
I could imagine the scene. Awoken in the the night, just before dawn, the air would be sweet and cool. Looking outside you would see the flickering light from a thousand fire torches as the parade snaked its way into the jungle. The sounds of the whole island trooping their way to the starmound, the excited crowd chattering, laughing and singing into the cool darkness. They carried with them pigs tied up on sticks, squealing through the throng. And overhead, baskets brimming with food passed hand over hand through the crowd.
Baba moved his arm in a great sweep ‘Everywhere here would be full with thousands of people, all of them here to see the rising of Venus.’
‘Do you know that some archaeologists think that Pulemelei is a starmound?’ I asked.
‘Nobody with any sense believes that,’ Baba replied grumpily. ‘Only people looking for a simple solution to the questions they can’t answer.’ He had a point. The starmound explanation for Pulemelei just didn’t make sense.
In my day job I work as a strategist. I work for big brands, NGOs, politicians, people like that. I work with data every day, digging into it, swimming in it even, resurfacing after a few days with a new (and hopefully winning) strategy. Whenever I look at a data set I’m always paying attention to the outliers, the weird standouts, the fringe dwellers. I do the same thing with people, which is probably why none of my friends are what you might call ‘normal’.
A few years ago, when I first started researching the Samoan starmounds, it was just a hobby, nothing serious. While looking into starmounds, I quickly discovered that archaeologists have a tendency to categorise things in a way that can sometimes strip away the magic, which is to be expected, their trade is a science after all. But then I noticed something else. I had downloaded a report that recorded all of the known Samoan ‘starmounds’ and categorised them as either ‘small mounds’ (less than three meters across), ‘medium-sized mounds’ (between three and ten meters across), and ‘large mounds’. Anything over ten meters across was categorised as a ‘large mound’.
As I read through the archaeologists’ reports and dug into the data set I realised that not all ‘large mounds’ were created equal. The list of mounds showed the categorisation (small, medium, large) along with the actual measurements of the mound. Most of large the mounds were clustered around ten meters across and a meter high, but there was one that jumped out at me as an outlier. A place called Pulemelei on the island of Savai’i. At sixty meters across and over twelve meters high, it was massive by comparison. So much larger than all the other starmounds that, in my view it merited it’s own category: ‘Ludicrously Huge’. What’s more, this anomaly in the data didn’t look like other starmounds. Pulemelei was not shaped like a star at all, more like a giant step pyramid. Flat-topped and square. It formed part of a complex made up of a main step pyramid structure and a smaller satellite structure to the north. It was huge, so much larger than all of the other starmounds that I felt it just didn’t fit. To be honest I was shocked it could even have been included in the same category. That was when I began to wonder: If Pulemelei isn’t a starmound, then what is it?
I handed Baba a bottle of water. He took a large gulp. ‘Come on,’ he said, wiping his mouth. ‘We should move on from here. It is not safe.’ He picked up my backpack and quickly slipped into the tree line. I followed on behind, trying to keep up, but Baba set a brisk pace.
‘What do you mean it isn’t safe?’ I asked, jogging slightly to catch up. But Baba was too far ahead to hear and moving too quickly. I was exhausted and beginning to wonder again if I’d made a mistake. I took another swig of water and whe
n I scanned the trees ahead I could see no sign of Baba. I rushed, clambering over vines and fallen tree trunks, and caught sight of him a few meters further ahead.‘What do you mean it isn’t safe?’ I called out again. ‘For fuck’s sake man! Slow down will you?’
11
Giant at the Gates
We pushed on. I began to repeat a mantra under my breath; ‘I love the jungle. I love the jungle. I love the jungle.’ A lie to gee myself on. The undergrowth came up to my knees and with each step I had to raise my feet high to avoid getting tangled in thick vines. My feet were soaked and my lungs burned. I took another large gulp of water, pausing and looking around. Did I just hear something? I’d gained on Baba somehow, he was only a few meters in front of me. I was about to call out when something moved in front of me and I coughed down the water in my mouth with shock and terror. Standing just a meter in front of me was a man. He was a giant- tall muscular and hanging from a strap on his wrist was the shining blade of a very large machete. Slung over his shoulder was what looked to be an AK47 assault rifle.
Baba spotted the man half a second after I did. Immediately a conversation in shouted Samoan began. I didn’t understand a word, they might as well have been speaking in Polari, but I could tell by their surging voices that the situation was deteriorating quickly. The next thing I remember is standing between them and talking about the pyramid, how I’d come all this way just to see the pyramid, that I really just wanted to see it with my own eyes, that it had become incredibly important to me. I blurted out any phrase that I could think of that contained the word ‘pyramid’, figuring that if I said ‘pyramid’ often enough it might translate. Unsurprisingly, this just seemed to anger the big man even more.