Empire of the East (26 page)

There was no hope of being able to go anywhere that day, so he booked me tentatively for Endoman for the next day, recommending me to talk to one of the pilots to find out what to expect. As it turned out they had all gone home by this time, so I left him and took refuge in a losmen quivering at the edge of the airfield in the noise of the planes. It was a row of rooms tacked together in a wasted flower garden with a frieze of pink geckos, like tiny plastic toys, round the ceilings and the light switches hanging from the walls. The fussy little Indian who owned it promised to brighten the next morning for me with a ‘real English breakfast’.

The night was filled by the sound of the junketings of huge rats, perhaps of the marsupial kind, thumping and thwacking over the tin roof. The calm morning view through tousled flowers was of the rise and fall of fishing eagles over the wide and splendid lake of Sentani. As promised, breakfast arrived, taking the form of fried plantains tasting like glue, and sandwiches with a filling of powdered chocolate. Rejecting this, I hurried over to the MAF office, where the pilots, all of them missionaries as well as pilots, were uncommunicative and aloof. One of them had been discussing the purchase of that day’s food with his wife, and a Dani woman had emptied an assortment of vegetables carried in her head-net to display what she had for sale.

The wife poked disconsolately with her toe at what was on offer. ‘Hon, we need any yams?’ she asked.

‘Not for me,’ the man said.

‘Funny they can’t do any better than this,’ the woman said. ‘Anyone can raise chickens, for example. Why can’t they?’

‘Lack of imagination,’ he said.

‘Don’t you want to take any photographs?’ she asked.

‘Nope, not right now. I have to get a new film.’ He seemed irritated and broke off to talk to me. ‘Yeah?’

‘I’m hoping to fly to Endoman today. Can you give me any idea of what sort of place it is?’

‘What sort of a place? D’ya mean to get in and out of? It’s an all-weather strip. No overnight stay. We drop in there once in a while when there’s a hole in the clouds. What’s the interest in Endoman anyway?’

‘I’m a writer out from England. I was interested to see something of a typical primitive Yali village.’

‘Well, you certainly picked the right place.’

‘I suppose there’s a water supply? And can I buy food?’

‘You’re OK for water. River down in the valley. If you don’t go for yams better bring your own chow. Check on the weight though. Limit’s twenty kilos per person. Anything over that gets left behind.’

Next morning the flight to Endoman was confirmed. It was arranged that I was to be picked up there by a missionary plane when weather permitted and flown direct to Wamena. There was a last-minute rush to buy provisions: biscuits, dried noodles, instant soup, tea, sugar, powdered milk, kerosene and a stove.

John Strawser, the pilot, seemed more relaxed than he had been when I had met him on the previous afternoon. We climbed into the plane, and he became suddenly genial and confiding. I settled in the seat behind him and he raised his baseball cap in a little ceremony that concluded a routine last-minute check, addressing his maker in a strong and cheerful voice. ‘OK, Father, we thank you for this time. We thank you for the beauty you have created here and we are able to see on this flight, and we ask you to protect us and give us a safe flight as we travel. We do pray this in Christ’s name, Amen.’

The beauties of divine creation were imposingly on view within seconds of the take-off. There was a, stunning view of Lake Sentani spread among purple hills, with sea-eagles drifting by, and its many small islands ringed with what at that height appeared as gem-stones in an over-opulent setting but which were in fact circular corrugated iron roofs.

Freed of some earth-bound tension, John opened up. He was proud of his Helios Courier plane and the aeronautical tricks it could be induced to perform if necessary. This short take-off, short landing missionary-special could land at 35 k.p.h. and take to the air in the length of two planes. If you crashed a Cessna you might at best end up with a number of splinters in your skin. The Helios encircled the cockpit with an iron frame. If they pulled you out of it alive you could expect to be intact.

The élite of the Missionary Air Fellowship, John said, were ex-Vietnam. He had just missed out on that great experience due to his youth, and had done what he could to compensate for this by his readiness to take on missions in areas only recently opened up, where a little more effort was demanded and there was a pioneering feel about the work. Take the case of Endoman, he said. It was one of the last Yali villages to be reached, and that made it interesting. The chart he used (Endoman was not yet on the map) showed it on the edge of a swirling contour enclosing what the chart called the ‘limits of reliable relief’. After that there was a certain amount of guesswork in the mapping owing to insufficient exploration on the ground. Places like that had to be more interesting than others where all the work had been done twenty or thirty years ago.

And there was no doubt that even from the air the magnificence of this pristine jungle of Irian Jaya set it apart. It was impossible to withdraw the eyes from these instant changes from peak to ravine, from the savage conflict of colours, the black alpine forest stifled with moss, the razor-sharp mountain ridges glinting with malachite and quartz, the yellow rivers, the dark, rancid greens of the swamps. ‘Know something?’ the pilot said. ‘Whenever I come over this run I give thanks to the Lord.’

There was a rent in forest texture surrounding a rectangle of a soft green, quite alien to the hard colorations of the jungle. Tiny straw-coloured cells clustered at its edge to form a new pattern, but of a natural kind, at one with the environment. The nose of the plane dropped towards a sagging ridge-line between two peaks ahead, forming of this mountain the outline of a tent. The airstrip passed out of sight to the rear as the plane lifted itself over the ridge, and dropped to the left into a tight valley wooded with high trees. Here it banked sharply to the left again round a ferny, sugar-loaf hill, then faced upwards towards the airstrip which suddenly swung into sight, clean and sharp in an up-slope with a black shed and a couple of huts, and motionless black figures along the edge of the grass.

We bumped up to the top of the runway where more black figures awaited us. These I at first took to be teenage boys — perhaps even pygmies — but they turned out for the most part to be grown men, although considerably smaller than the Papuans of Jayapura and Sentani. Most of them were naked except for curving yellow penis gourds. There was a surprising absence of excitement. Three women, bare-breasted with swinging grass skirts, approached in single file and passed without so much as turning their heads. I unloaded my gear from the plane’s hold and the pilot told me to carry it down to the black shed. At this point some of the watching Yalis, who up to that moment had hardly moved a muscle, came forward to help with the packages and bundles.

With that, a group of men made a slow and dignified appearance. These were the village chief, who was the smallest and most dignified of them, and his notables. The chief was an unsmiling man, very straight and slim, who could have been in his sixties. I shook hands with him, and he said most politely in Yali, ‘I prize your faeces.’ Each man of this group wore nothing but a penis gourd of identical length, and slanted slightly to the right.

‘Well this is it,’ the pilot said. ‘Apart from us missionaries you’re the second white man they’ve ever seen.’

‘Would you describe this as being still part of the Stone Age?’ I asked.

‘Well I guess so. In a way,’ he said. ‘They still use stone tools to chop around in their fields. They’re sure backward here.’

At this instant there was a brief glimpse of colour at the back of the little group of naked bodies as a grubby T-shirt came into view.

The pilot said, ‘As soon as you get fixed up, you should ask for a meeting to be arranged with the Chief in his house to get his permission to stay in the village. Right now give him and the other fellers a hank of that tobacco you brought along. You’ll find the Chief’s OK. He killed a lot of men in his time, but he’s a nice guy these days.’ I handed out the tobacco, which was received with no evidence of emotion other than slight smiles. The Chief and his retinue then withdrew, moving in step slowly and gracefully across the close-cropped greensward of the airstrip towards a high stile in the fence closing off the main part of the village. This, despite the bow and sheaf of arrows carried by each man in his right hand, they vaulted weightlessly, one after another, to pass out of sight.

Catan now took over. He was a Yali trainee-schoolmaster speaking fragmentary English and by virtue of his government post one of the authorities in the village. He and the headteacher, who hovered in the background, were the only males in view to wear Western clothes: track suits in extreme contrast with the otherwise general nudity. He was a more substantial man than the villagers I had so far seen and there was something in his complex expressions as well as the garments that hinted at a fairly successful detachment from the inconveniences of the Stone Age.

After consultation with the pilot it had been proposed that I be put up in the black shed by the airstrip, the dwelling of the first missionary who arrived in Endoman in 1980, which had latterly served as a schoolhouse and was now rapidly approaching dereliction. It was made from woven bamboo, with floors that flexed and creaked loudly under the tread. Catan showed me through its darkly theatrical interior and I settled myself in a cubicle which might once have been the headmaster Mattius’s study. A notice in sprawling capitals,
ORA ET LABORA,
had been fixed to a wall; a number of the kind of random curiosities that schoolboys collect were shoved into corners, and a narrow three-legged desk held a dozen or so exercise books that were to be, or had been, corrected. Two of the subjects taught at Endoman, simple arithmetic and the Indonesian language, were to be expected. The third, moral philosophy, came as a surprise. The headteacher’s problem, Catan said, was that so far he had been unable to learn the Yali language, and while attempting to remedy this he had removed himself to an Indonesian-style house built for him outside the village.

‘Big house. Very modern,’ Catan said of the black shed as we crossed its swaying floors to inspect the amenities. It possessed, he claimed, aiding speech with grimaces of satisfaction, Endoman’s most reliable water supply. Nearby a tiny stream trickling down from the hill above fed through a spout into a pool. It was available for drinking, washing sundry articles, or personal ablutions, and apart from a faintly sulphurous odour in its vicinity, which might have been all to the good, I noticed a yellow sediment the water carried. A more pressing problem was that of the latrine. The house was surrounded by a fence of stone-hewed palings, enclosing in addition to the building a strip of uneven land about fifteen feet in width. This sloped more and more steeply, eventually becoming a precipitous climb down a hillside, leading in the end to a length of ragged planking over a ravine. To attempt to negotiate this at night, I believed, would have been a perilous adventure. It was a problem aggravated by what I had read somewhere of the intricate inhibitions of Yali society, and the taboos imposed upon the desecration of a holy place (which could be anywhere) by faeces, urine or blood.

With the inspection at an end Catan reminded me of my interview with the Chief the next day. ‘You come morning.’ It was impossible to fix an hour when I was expected, and at that moment I realized that for the Papuan peoples clocks had not been invented, and time as we understood it did not exist. As I later discovered there was a first part of a day and an end of a day, and no more than that. Thereafter, even the days that followed, so uneventful in their unchanging routines, settled into a simple compost of things past, and I suspected that from dawn until midday at least, the Chief would await me without impatience.

Catan went, and suddenly I was terrifically alone. I made tea and sat outside the black shed scanning the valley, feeling myself in a species of quarantine. The first thing I had learned about the Yali was their capacity for total, purposeful inaction. A hundred yards away three boys had placed themselves against the village fence, and the positioning of heads, arms and legs had not changed since the plane touched down. Further away still on the slope of the airstrip, Catan and the headteacher stood together, garish in the poster colours of the track suits against the soft, green monochrome of grass and jungle. I turned my head, and with two hours to go until sundown, saw the slow steady encroachment of the fog, moving down towards the village through the trees. The silence was absolute.

T
HE SPECULATION
as to the best time to call on the Chief ended with the appearance of Catan shortly before sunrise. I had failed to realize that he lived with his wife and child in a conical thatched hut within yards of the end of the black shed, but now remembered vague disturbance in the night through the sound of coughing, and the outcry of someone — probably Catan — troubled by a nightmare. He had brought water boiled up by his wife, and I made tea, and we munched biscuits from Sentani, which set his eyeballs rolling with pleasure. Dawn was dramatic. There was a great combative upsurge of glowing mist from the darkness, and a greenish aurora overflowing through a cleft in the eastern peaks. In the interior gloom of the black shed, luminous stars shone on Catan’s shirt. ‘Let us take biscuits for Chief,’ he said. I grabbed some, and we set out to see Yurigeng.

Endoman, which had frequently been attacked in the course of never-ending ritual conflicts, had been built for reasons of defence on the slopes of a steep hill, with the Chief’s house near the top. It was reached by narrow, precipitous and circuitous paths involving, in addition, the negotiation of slippery stepping stones placed in a stream. These obstacles to easy access were designed to complicate an assault by surprise attackers. A minor aspect of the long catalogue of village protocol was that the Chief’s
yegwa
could only be approached from below, and those attempting to reach Endoman from the mountain slopes above were assumed to be enemies.