Empire of the East (29 page)

It was impossible not to think of the naked if charismatic Yurigeng, doing his best to share a radio with approximately one hundred and ninety-five persons, and freezing in his hut at night, as anything but a product of the Stone Age. What else could be said of the aged, toothless, smiling men who squatted all day long outside his hut and had no contact with the products of any age but the far past — with the exception of the ball-point pens stuck through holes in the septums of their noses? What also of the womenfolk of Endoman who did all the work and were hermetically sealed off at the day’s end in women’s houses, debarred from all contact with males except for the purposes of procreation? Only Apina had been wrenched out of the arduous and restrictive past. Catan had taken her to live with him in the hut next door, and she faced the world with an expression of permanent astonishment and embarrassment in the brown and yellow squared-off jogger’s top, which — despite her insistence in concealing her enormous buttocks beneath a grass skirt — admitted her to membership of our age.

Money was the talisman chosen by the missionaries to break the hold of the past, but its uses were still hardly understood in the village and I suspected that what little of it there was in circulation remained in the hands of the five leading personalities. Cowrie shells and above all salt had been the old mediums of exchange. When Stan Dale and Bruno de Leeuw had taken over much of the village of Ninia for their airstrip and calculated it would take ‘a hundred or two Yalis three or four years to complete the work’, salt was the inducement offered. ‘As Stan, Bruno and the Danis (converts the missionaries brought with them) fell to the task of dismantling the nearest Yali
yegwas
and
homias
(men’s and women’s houses)’, Don Richardson the missionary historian tells us, ‘no one paid much attention. All were hungrily nibbling the
duongs’
salt as if they had never tasted true salt before, and might never have the privilege again.’ It was a situation detrimental to trade which was quickly ended. Cowrie shells imported in vast quantities from the Pacific were dumped on the market, and unlimited supplies of salt quickly provided. Communities such as Endoman were to become trading partners with the missions, and all deals were for cash. I noticed that the plane carrying me into Endoman was loaded up with ground nuts for the return journey. Exactly how the partnership worked I was never able to discover, although Catan produced some interesting figures. The missionaries, he said, paid between six hundred and seven hundred rupiah (approximately 20p) per kilo for the nuts, which were resold in the shops at about two thousand rupiah. But did the villagers receive cash for these sales, I asked, and at this point Catan became vague. The missionaries, he said, bought the things they needed, and in addition were paying for a new school. Yet cash was in circulation, as I observed when Catan inadvertently produced a wad of rupiah notes from his pocket. Engen’s shop, too, sold for cash such requirements as soap powder, aspirin, packets of dried noodles, and above all T-shirts. Tiny leaks, I suspected, may have opened up in the mainstream of income, in whatever direction it might be flowing.

The picture Endoman presented was of penury and neglect borne with stoicism. Inevitably the children were worst off, although I only once heard one cry. They had the advantage over the children of civilization in that wherever the mother went, and in whatever posture she worked, her baby was always carried in a net on her back. Many babies’ stomachs were dreadfully distended by parasites, and children as a whole normally suffered from inflamed eyes, sores, a variety of disconcerting skin conditions and incessant coughs. Did they receive no medical care, I asked Catan. He took me to see what he called the dispensary. Evidence of benefits derived from the trading partnership eluded me. With some reluctance Catan admitted that it might have been better had the women spent the whole of their time growing food for hungry people, rather than dissipating so much of their energies in what seemed to be a dubious commercial adventure.

When travelling in Latin America and the Far East I had found that the medical profession of late had developed a new respect for the skills of practitioners of certain herbal and traditional remedies, so much so that in some countries orthodox physicians have openly turned to them for assistance. What had happened in Endoman? Did traditional healers still exist, I asked. The answer was — as I knew it would be — that they had been driven away under the government ban. One or two remained, although hidden deep in the forest, where they were out of reach by those who most needed their services.

The problem of shortages arose. I had concentrated on a supply of powdered soup and dried noodles not because I had any faith in them as nourishment, but because they were practically weightless. The heaviest item was a case of water in sealed plastic bottles. Tea and powdered milk had been remembered but there was not nearly enough sugar.

The mountain climate of Endoman seemed to stimulate appetite, and therefore dissatisfaction with chicken or mushroom soup with noodles twice a day. John the pilot had advised on any problem in the matter of provisions that might arise. ‘These guys actually like yams,’ he said. ‘It’s the only thing you’re sure to find. Sago is OK if it’s cooked right, and the same goes for sweet potatoes. Trouble is these people don’t grow too much of anything. Anyway, you’re not going to starve.’

After the third meatless day I spoke to Catan about the possibility of buying a chicken, and he said he would look round for one. Chickens in plenty used to parade with their young up and down the airstrip, but they were exceptionally handsome birds, and kept, I suspected, largely for their ornamental value rather than for food. Catan made it sound as though chickens were rare, although that evening he turned up with a shapeless and partially defeathered black hen. This was instantly killed in my presence. It seemed extraordinary to me that the Yalis, who are known for killing their enemies without compunction, should have shown squeamishness at a time like this. It upset them, Catan said, to have to listen to the squawkings of a dying bird, so they avoided this by a deft manual operation to destroy its vocal cords. With this, appetite for chicken stew left me, and once again it was soup for supper.

Following the growing concern over food was the discovery I had forgotten the replacement torch batteries. My torch was already showing signs of giving up, so for twelve hours at a stretch I was at the mercy of absolute and impenetrable darkness. Being warned of what was about to happen to me I took to switching on a glowworm illumination for no more than two or three seconds at a time to establish my position in the geography of the night and to check the time in the pink halo encircling my watch. The loss of sight sharpened the other senses. The darkness that lay like a bandage on the eyes contained its own repertoire of noises, most of them faint but some remarkably loud, and all inviting interpretation. With every movement of the body the bamboo creaked softly, not only at the point of physical contact but here and there in response to the changes in stress throughout the building. Water dripped constantly from the pipe into the pool on the other side of the wall, but added to this familiar sound there were occasional inexplicable splashes. Something whirred like a tiny electric fan over my head; a metronome ticking started, stopped and went on again. From the sleepers of the Catan household clustered around the embers of their fire and drawing its smoke into their lungs the sound of intense coughing reached me, and, once in a while, a groan. The night, too, brought out new scents, above all the spiciness of mildew in the nooks and corners of the bamboo where the air lay undisturbed.

Morning, as ever, took me by surprise with its fanfare of birds, the orchids which had opened overnight in the ditch by the fence, and a sumptuous evanescence of clouds dissolving as I watched them in the pale vaporous sky. This was the day when I had agreed to accompany a party on a hunt for birds of paradise. I did this with misgivings, falling back, in attempted self-justification, on the argument that with or without me the hunt would in any case go on, that I might at least be rewarded with a good view of one of these extraordinary creatures, and that, as the Yalis ruefully admitted, the chance of shooting a bird was very slight.

The Yalis had always hunted birds of paradise, using their separate feathers as adornments for various parts of the body, or in the case of a powerful chief, incorporating the whole bird into a headdress. The birds had an exchange value against pigs, and it is believed that Chinese traders of old travelled as far as these highlands searching for them, along with kingfishers’ breasts from Cambodia, to embellish the ceremonial attire of leading mandarins. Nowadays, pitched suddenly into a money economy, the Yalis hunted for cash. It was notable that every man in Endoman, when leaving the village for any reason, carried along with his bow not only arrows with a single point to deal with human adversaries but those having three points for small birds, and a third kind of arrow in which the point was replaced with a small plug. This was designed to bring down a bird of paradise without damage to its plumage. Such successes were rare. When, once in a while, the hunters had the good luck to kill one, they would share out and devour the entrails on the spot. These were valued for their magical juices, responsible for the birds’ inexhaustible promiscuity. After that the fastest runner in the group would be commissioned to take on the four-day trek across the mountains to Wamena where the carcase was worth a bundle of rupiah notes.

The potential value of such a bird in terms of money could be enormous, but wealth remains a hieroglyph of language to the Stone Age man. It is not understood, therefore it is not sought, and if by accident, almost — as in this case — it is come by, it is rapidly disbursed. An American I met in Jayapura was emphatic in his agreement that this was so. This, coincidentally too, was apropos of birds of paradise. ‘A native in Biak offered me a Prince Rudolph in perfect shape. They net them and a good one fetches up to a thousand bucks. I started off with two hundred bucks. No deal. He wanted the watch I was wearing. “I don’t want to let it go,” I said. “It was a gift. I’ll make it five hundred and we’ll call it a day.” He still wasn’t interested. “That’s about a million rupiah,” I told him. “You could keep your family in food and clothing for the rest of their lives.” He still wanted the watch, so I had to give it to him.’

Where were these famous birds to be seen? The answer to this question was that they put in a regular afternoon appearance round about 4 p.m. in a clump of tall trees mysteriously spared by the gatherers of fuel at the top end of the village, to which birds were attracted by the small fruit they bore. Experience had taught them that in the topmost twigs they were out of bow shot, and next day, placing myself at a discreet distance from the trees, I waited in hope. I had visions of the Emperor of Germany’s Bird of Paradise that begins its courtship display the right side up, then tilts backwards until it hangs upside-down among its cascading plumes, of the Enamelled Bird of Paradise flying a series of between twenty and forty miniature flags from the two-inch plumes sprouting from its head, of the Twelve-wired Bird of Paradise extending an iridescent bib of bluish throat feathers up to and around its bill, before opening this to reveal the brilliant lining of its mouth, and of the Magnificent Riflebird, which, having spread its purple wings shaped like a Japanese fan, also displays the coral interior of mouth and throat, before uttering a call that sounds like the whistle of a bullet.

The reality of the experience was unexciting. At a couple of hundred yards — which sensibly enough was the nearest approach the birds would permit — distance had demolished any possibility of appreciating these splendours. The supposed birds of paradise tumbling anonymously through the trees’ high branches might have been crows — to which they are closely related.

It was no more than a foretaste of what was to follow. My route with the hunting party was through a shallow valley continuing the slope of the airstrip along a path around enormous fern-embedded boulders to the river, overshadowed by substantial trees. At five thousand five hundred-odd feet, Endoman was placed above the level of the rainforest, although here and there an interesting mix of jungle trees had survived. Inevitably the demand for firewood and building materials had described a circle possibly two miles in diameter round the village in which most trees had been chopped down by the wielders of stone axes. A great influx of sunlight had replaced them largely with underbrush and scrub. Irian Jaya was supposed to possess an unparalleled richness of fauna, much of it extraordinary and unique, including tree kangaroos, the flightless cassowary, capable of disembowelling a man with a single kick, goliath frogs, giant marsupial rats, bird-eating spiders, a pigeon nearly as big as a goose and seventy thousand species of butterflies and moths. They all inhabited the rainforest which spreads its shade through the largely uncluttered spaces between the tall trees. By comparison the secondary forest of Endoman was largely devoid of wildlife and the best it had to offer were the great owls flapping through the mists as night closed in.

Coming down from its source in the Snow Mountains in the south, the river, which was full of orange silt but quite empty of fish, ran brightly over porcelain rocks. It curled endlessly, sometimes almost doubling back upon itself in this rocky terrain. Where there were pockets of earth that tributaries feeding into the main river had been unable to leech away there were small groves of casuarinas and firs, most of them stripped of their lower branches. We saw no birds of paradise.

The one interesting feature of this unfruitful enterprise was a brief encounter with the moss forest. It is a phenomenon delicately adjusted to altitude, temperature, the swaddlings of fog and an absence of wind, and is widespread in a patchy fashion throughout Irian Jaya. In this case it covered a lodgement of flood-subject soil squeezed in between the river bank and a tall hill overshadowing it, and although elsewhere the morning had long since dried out, the mist still hung in strips among these sepulchral trees. We were confronted with a miscellany of tangled branches and wasted trunks under a vast, grey cobwebbing of moss through which lianas hung like hangmen’s ropes. The mosses were of many kinds and they grew here in competition with one another. They invaded and fed upon sickly wood, flayed away coverings of bark, and climbed to hang in terminal bunches among the topmost twigs. When one growth that had sucked the nutrients from a colonized area died back, laying an inert blue carpeting between the trees, another broke surface to feed on its predecessor’s decay. Fallen trees had turned over the years into ridges or banks without solidity, or fragile cylinders of embalmed wood; and scrambling over them they squelched and collapsed like pastry-crust underfoot. Whichever way you turned the moss hung in tattered curtains over the path. Mitton was much impressed by this speciality of the Irian Jaya landscape, but in carrying out his geological surveys he found it more of an obstacle than the rainforest; even of the highest mountain ranges.