WHERE THE DEAD MEN TALK
Only a day by motor lorry from the galvanized iron of Port Moresby, and
untamed Papua was pressing around us--a brute that could throw sudden
tremendous cliffs into tangled drylands that were flat as your hand,
a country where the souls of men seemed forever broken between gross
materialism and fantastic belief in ghosts and magic. Perhaps the black
man’s mystic spirit imparted to his white conqueror a shuddering faith
in the walking dead.
Papua isn’t rich in the things that man needs. Either it is parched
with drought or reeking with wetness that produces giant weedy growths
with no nourishment in them. A hemp plantation, big as a Texas ranch,
was one of a certain development company’s failures; almost every
enterprise in Papua seemed to be on the downgrade. Over yonder, a
closed and battered factory revealed the company’s vain attempt to
manufacture a trade tobacco that would be foul enough to suit the
native taste.
Everywhere in the Pacific trade tobacco is native coin and currency. A
few sticks of it will buy a man’s labor for the week, a woman’s virtue
for the night. Government regulations have set a standard ration: two
sticks a week. But the natives will accept only the stinking twist that
traders import from Virginia. The development company had a bright
idea: they would make a trade tobacco of their own and corner the
business. They spent £50,000 trying to reproduce that exquisite dung
flavor. The black boys put it in their pipes, but couldn’t be fooled.
“Me want tabac!” they yelled. So the company imported an expert from
Virginia. That didn’t work either. Maybe the local tobacco was a grade
too good. The factory shut down and more shillings dropped out of the
pockets of hopeful stockholders.
* * * * *
On one trip to these regions I went with Inspector Chris Kendrick, a
planter named Sefton, and Archie McAlpin, who was chief inspector for
the big development. There was also my “boy,” Ahuia.
In Port Moresby I had designed a uniform for my native interpreters. It
was a jumper and skirt in gaudy blue edged with bright yellow braid,
and on the breast was a large yellow =H=. The =H=, of course,
stood for HOOKWORM; but it made boys throw out their chests and strut
as if it meant HARVARD at least.
Down there they call every male native a “boy”; Ahuia was my chief boy.
Splendid in his new uniform, he had the look of a Malay pirate coming
over the side with a big knife in his teeth. He wore more hair than
I had ever seen on anything, living or dead. On special occasions he
loved to decorate it with lilies. To the natives he was an oppressor,
to me a tender guardian. He could wash clothes, hookworm specimens,
camp dishes. He could cook and sew. He could put the fear of devils
into the gang of carriers who bore our equipment. He spoke Motu
fluently when he interpreted. Motu is the _lingua franca_ along the dry
belt. In remoter villages they didn’t understand Motu. But in every
settlement under government control Ahuia would engage the services
of the village constable, usually a murderer who had graduated with
honors from Port Moresby jail. Jail was the native’s university, where
he could learn more in three years than the home folks could teach him
in a lifetime. The authorities always had a job waiting for a good
jailbird. Ahuia, who was a great traveler, knew that any constable with
a Port Moresby jail degree could speak Motu. A handy boy was Ahuia,
and, like most natives, as afraid of ghosts and magic as a rabbit of a
hound-dog.
* * * * *
At the big hemp plantation, field hands thronged around our lorry to
help us with our load--queer fellows with sloping foreheads crowned
with tight Negro wool. Long beaked noses gave them an ironic look; they
had the appealing eyes of beaten hunting dogs, and were not healthy
men. Some of them showed the dreadful ulcers of that false syphilis we
call “yaws.” Others were too pallid for brown men--hookworm infection
and malaria.
“What name dis fellow?” I asked Ahuia.
“Him Goaribari.” Ahuia spat contemptuously.
Goaribaris! I had heard bloodcurdling stories of these savages. It
must have been a long haul for them--seven hundred miles or so from
the Delta country which they terrorized. Here they labored along with
downcast eyes, or looked up almost fawningly.
The plantation manager arrived and invited me to his comfortable,
balconied house. These planters have the generous hearts of all good
Australians. “And it’s a God’s blessing that you Yankees are jogging
the Government up a bit. Half a million natives, maybe, and not half of
’em fit to lift a bloody hand.” When I asked about the Goaribaris who
had so sedately helped us with our gear, the manager said: “Cannibals?
Well, just a bit. When they’re home they’ll eat anything, from maggots
to raw eels.”
I inquired into hygienic conditions. He said, “When the recruiters
bring these boys in they’re lousy with the diseases they’ve caught in
their blighted villages. The ones you saw are newcomers. Six months on
a good plantation and they’ll pick up.”
He looked at me studiously. “The plantation’s a bit seedy now, but we
have two sanitary features we’re proud of.”
Back of the cabins he led me into one of those latrines designed by
Dr. Strong, the Papuan Chief Medical Officer, who strove so well for
the people and never got a breath of credit. It was built with a rough
wooden rail and the pit was some twenty-five feet deep. Darkness below
was unattractive to the dysentery-carrying fly, the sides too steep and
high for the hookworm larvae to climb.
That was admirable, I said. And what was the second sanitary
improvement in which he took so much pride?
Beyond the hemp fields untidy black women loafed in the shade,
revealing their baggy breasts; they were spitting bloody streams of
betel-juice or smoking short clay pipes. “We have fourteen now,” the
planter said. “We’ve sent some away--gonorrhea, you know. Bring a few
more in this week. Yes, they have the ration of trade tobacco, rice and
tinned food. They’re all married, so it’s just a matter of seeing the
husband.”
Admirable. But what had that to do with sanitation?
The manager held me with clean gray eyes, and said: “Do you know what
happens to men without women? These natives are only animals. You’ve
seen how animals behave, when they can’t get what they want naturally?
Indenturing men, taking them in herds away from the wives and the
whores, teaches them a lot of tomfoolery. Europeans don’t think that
the primitive man goes homosexual. Humbug! The missionaries think the
savages will live like Christ, and they’ve made it illegal to have
prostitutes on plantations. Well, these ladies here are just good
hard-working wives. Ask any of the big planters--and they’re he-men if
ever there were any--ask ’em about the native boys that weave their
hips and ogle at the work-gangs going by. We call ’em ‘queens,’ and
they’re a nuisance we’ve jolly well got to get rid of.”
The planter’s idea was brutal, like Papua. But his object was kindly,
and, in its way, scientific. Since then I have seen much of the
turning of simple people to the ways of perversion. The hard-hitting
Queenslander, manly as a frontiersman can be, was doing his best to
square the vicious circle.
* * * * *
That night I saw my first ghost. We had sat up rather late with the
manager, who mumbled in a corner with Archie McAlpin. Once I heard
him ask, “Is it still around?” Heads were together, voices lowered.
Finally Archie McAlpin, who had finished his share of whisky, and mine,
rambled upstairs. I rambled up too, for I was tired. That evening
there had been a long lecture before an audience of sedate cannibals,
earnestly attentive to what I told Ahuia to say in Motu to a Goaribari
interpreter.
The Papuan servant never wakes you harshly, because when you sleep your
soul has left your body to wander among dreams. Wake the body suddenly,
and where is the soul? Still loitering with a dream. Therefore you
die. When Ahuia wished to rouse me he would move a chair or give a
polite cough. His cough woke me and I saw him, shadowy in a patch of
moonlight. His jittery voice was imploring the _taubada_ to “Look along
veranda.... Devil-devil belong him outside.”
A voice was yammering somewhere. I looked out and saw a white figure
that appeared to float as it gestured. I hadn’t many hairs to stand
up, but they all stood. Yammering, yammering, the voice of the pale
apparition beat out a long speech in Motu, then in English. “_No, don’t
come here again!_”
The specter turned. It was Archie McAlpin. The voice hadn’t been that
of a drunken man; under the white moon his look was sober. He shook his
head, the debate was over. He didn’t see me, he appeared not to see
anything as he went back to bed.
“Ahuia, what was he seeing?” I whispered, because the natives know
so much of devils. Dark eyes were expressionless in the white night.
“Maybe he see nothing, Taubada,” he whispered.
In three days I finished dosing two hundred Goaribaris. I had found
that newcomers bore the heaviest load of worms, reversing a prevalent
medical theory that plantations were infected and villages clean. Labor
was bringing disease from the towns to the farms.
The plantation that was sanitated by prostitutes and model latrines,
worked by tame cannibals and haunted by invisible things, disappeared
in a dust cloud as our lorry rumbled away toward the unbelievable
cliffs of Hombrom Bluff. When I spoke of ghosts to Archie McAlpin he
turned his steel-gray eyes the other way.
We slept at the little inn at Sapphire Creek, where the specters wailed
again, if only in the imagination of the English landlady whom I
treated for a slight attack of alcoholism. Poor woman, she had raised
two husbands and fourteen children, and had been a rough Florence
Nightingale to the sick miners in the last flu epidemic. She stared
up from her pillow and said, “No, Doctor, I’m not seeing things--only
what’s all around us, all the time. Strange things happen in Papua.”
She closed her eyes to shut them away.
* * * * *
Hombrom Bluff hangs over the seared scrub of flatlands below. All
Papua is like that, a vast bear-rug, shaggy and tumbled in a hundred
folds; man is the louse that must crawl up and down, down and up, to
cross these endless entanglements. Craning my neck to look up Hombrom’s
forehead I saw the change in vegetation from strangling tropic vines
at the base to temperate evergreens that shagged its top. Blinking at
three thousand feet of it, I said to Archie McAlpin, “How do we get
around to the Sogari District?”
Archie said, “We don’t get around. We go over.”
They brought us horses and I mounted clumsily, being thirty pounds too
heavy for the little shaggy animal. Then it was up, four breakneck
miles of cliffside trail that was seldom more than a yard wide. It
would have been a hard scramble for a man, but my Papuan horse must
have been bred of a goat. On the one side we were elbowed by monstrous
vines; on the other side loosened pebbles flew into empty air. At one
high twist the forests were sliding down to Port Moresby harbor, where
the reefs were fine spun lace, tattered over the expanse of lapis
lazuli sea. Another turn and one of the world’s great waterfalls,
Rona, joined diamond necklace to diamond necklace as it met the wild
Laloki River, slicing through savage green.
Now at the top we dismounted on a narrow ridge. “What’s that lake over
there?” I asked Archie McAlpin. The lake was a Venus’ mirror, framed
in the lips of a dead volcano. Archie’s eyes were still as the lake;
he stood silent at the marge of a cliff. Then I heard it again, heard
the queer babble in Motu. I turned and saw that it was Archie, speaking
to the sky. I whispered to Sefton, “Is he a bit off his head?” Sefton
answered gravely: “No. But that lake over there is where dead men go.
Archie’s saying the invocation. It keeps ghosts from following us. You
can’t get a native to go within a mile of that lake. They know what’s
good for them.”
Perhaps the lake had put its curse on me too; maybe it didn’t like to
be photographed. When I was remounting my horse the saddle slipped and
left me dangling in midair. Two hundred and thirty-odd pounds of me
hung by a creaking stirrup. Quick-thinking Chris Kendrick caught me in
time and shoved me back into the saddle. What I liked best about Chris
was his way with an emergency.
Far away across a vertigo of green depths Mt. Victoria, a tall landmark
in New Guinea, was in a misty shroud. On this silent trail the sudden
flutter of a bird’s wing sounded like a shot.
“The mountain’s like a ghost,” I said to Archie McAlpin.
The trail had widened, we could ride closer together. “Along here I
like it best in daylight,” he said. I asked him if he was afraid of
Koiaris--for they were the killers with long spears. No, he wasn’t
afraid of Koiaris. Their country was farther on.
Sefton stared into the pale mountain light. “There’s a trail that leads
down from Jawavere where the Koiaris wait for anything that comes
along. You don’t linger on the Jawavere trail.
“I have a station on the trail,” he said, “and always look for anybody
passing to have a drink with me. It’s a bit lonesome. About four one
afternoon, a native runs in and says he saw a _taubada_ (white man) who
had been riding along there, taking his time, just staring ahead. His
horse didn’t make any noise, the bush didn’t flutter. I thought that
was a lot of native humbug, and was annoyed that the man didn’t drop in
for a drink. I asked around among the other plantations. Yes, they’d
all seen the rider, and at about four o’clock the same afternoon--in
places miles apart. Finally we searched the bush and found the bones
of a man and a horse, around some smoky stones. The Koiaris had done
him in, weeks before we saw him riding.”
Archie said thoughtfully, “Yes, and there was the woman dressed in
white. I couldn’t sleep one night, and there she was in the garden,
bending over picking flowers. I spoke to her, but she didn’t look up.
She was the Englishwoman who married that chap from Cairns. She made
a little English garden, but it never suited her. Always wanted to go
home; you know how the English are. Her man thought Papua was good
enough for her, until she died. Then he shot himself.”
“Do you ever see his ghost?” I asked.
“No. He’s too deep in hell, I fancy, to get out.”
They believed earnestly in the horseman who rode over the bluff. They
believed that lights appeared in the deserted house from which another
woman had run away with her baby.
We were riding along silently when our horses stopped, snorted and
sat on their tails. At first I thought it was a fallen vine, then I
saw it wiggle. I slid off and threw a handy stone at eight black feet
of snake; which was a diplomatic blunder, for the thing made straight
at me. Sefton broke its back with a whip. “Venomous?” I asked. I hate
snakes. “Rather,” Sefton said, and poked the poison sacks.
We rode on. Ghosts were real, snakes only a nuisance in a country where
anything could happen. Except mules. According to the planters there
was just one mule in Papua; and his long ears waved over a fence at
the Seventh Day Adventist Mission. Natives marveled and fed him votive
yams; because he was a member of God’s house, locally presided over by
a missionary they called “Smiling Charley.”
The first time his celebrated animal strayed away, Charley organized
his black men to search for it. They hunted until they were tired out.
Smiling Charley went on over the brow of the next hill, and there
was the mule. Charley thought this was an opportunity to demonstrate
the power of prayer, so he went back and said, “Boys, let’s pray for
guidance.” They prayed, and in a few minutes overtook the mule. A week
or two later it strayed again, much to the chagrin of the boys who had
to do all the carrying when it wasn’t there. Smiling Charley tried to
organize another search, but the boys were unwilling. He questioned
them and they said, “More better you pray first time, Taubada.” So
Charley had to pray, but it didn’t work so well, for it was a week
before the mule came home.
Dusk was falling when we left Smiling Charley’s Seventh Day joyfulness.
After shadows began blackening the hills, Archie McAlpin said, “We’re
in the Koiari country now, and we’d better push along. On the slope
there, you can see the graveyard.” Stones were like skulls among the
scrub. “Those are planters that the jungle got the best of.” Everybody
who’s been a week in Papua knows how the jungle defeats all but the
strongest--malaria, accidents, bites and infections, all take their
toll of the pioneering white.
A mountain chill blew from the pale stones. A tall horseman came toward
us, and I tried to forget the mounted ghost. But Archie McAlpin sang
out, “Hello, Sam!” The horseman stopped. Archie said, “Seems to me,
Sam, that you’re not giving this graveyard a very wide berth.” “Me?
Archie, I never see ghosts.”
“Then I suppose, Sam, you wouldn’t mind sleeping among the graves?”
“I may be crazy,” Sam said, “but I’m not a bloody fool. If I see any
ghosts there’ll be one more horseman riding over the Bluff. He won’t be
back, either.”
He galloped on. No, people don’t loiter on the Jawavere trail. I was
still thinking of the lonely Englishwoman who couldn’t go home; her
poor shadow was earth-bound to Papua.
How about the ghosts of indentured natives, confused spirits that can
never find their way back to the villages they loved because they were
born there? Here’s a scrap from my diary, written from a survey which I
made a little later:--
On Saturday P.M. gave lecture to natives. Back of the boys’ houses
found evidences of gross soil pollution ... natives must be educated
to some idea of sanitation.... Seem well fed and contented, save for
a lot from the Dutch border, some of whom have died for no apparent
cause, other than homesickness....