Empire of the East (27 page)

All the habitations of Endoman were of roughly the same circular design and appearance, differing mainly only in the matter of size. The very smallest of the women’s huts could have been hardly more than six feet in diameter; an average hut would have been about double this size. All were made of stout stone-hewn planks bound together by rattan, with pandanus thatches drawn up to a central pole. A number of villagers had been able to build huts with double walls. This provided a narrow circular corridor with a floor raised about a foot from the ground, and was for the occupation of the pigs at night.

We climbed a short ladder to enter Chief Yurigeng’s hut, and found ourselves on a circular first floor about sixteen feet across. It possessed a narrow gallery on which we settled ourselves facing the Chief, who was seated on a species of dais, flanked by five notables, who, Catan said, had distinguished themselves in the wars. All were naked except for penis gourds of roughly the same size and colour. I was immediately struck by the fact that, whereas the five notables had recognizably Yali faces, with slightly Mongolian traits, Yurigeng was the image of Haile Selassie, with the Emperor’s small, spare body, his upright posture, his long, thin nose, his downcast eyes, and his faint imperial expression of refined contempt. Catan introduced me and explained the reason for my presence and Yurigeng swivelled his eyes slightly in my direction and repeated the word ‘weh’, meaning welcome, five times. Someone added more branches to the fire smouldering in the hearth, the smoke thickened, and two of the notables began to cough.

There were the questions to be asked, but with what degree of formality or informality, I wondered, and how were they to be framed? Was the subject of cannibalism to be touched on? I decided against it. It was impossible to imagine these Yali patricians, their faces full of reflexion and calm, gnawing human bones. With Catan as interpreter I made an obviously hopeless attempt to discover the Chief’s reaction to the enormous changes to which he and his people had been subjected since the missionaries’ arrival in 1980, their destruction of the old order symbolized by the ritual house in which the hitherto sacred objects had been kept, and the proclamation of the role of Jesus Christ. It was a delicate topic and Yurigeng was well aware that whatever he said would soon reach the ears of those civil and religious authorities to which he was now subject.

Doubtfully I put my question. The answer was mumbled in a liturgical monotone. Yurigeng was supposed to have said something to the effect that things were much better now that the Lord Jesus had taken Endoman into his care.

‘In what way?’ I asked.

Clearly nothing had been prepared to deal with this. The Chief cobbled sentences together as a child might have done following a badly learned lesson. Once again it was only possible to discern the gist of what Yurigeng had to say in the dark verbal labyrinth of Catan’s translation. There followed a garbled and hesitant account of an attack by enemies in the bad old days, in which one of Yurigeng’s two wives had been killed. Jesus had driven these enemies away.

I had the impression that Catan was steering the Chief towards a confession of a blameworthy past that he had now put behind him. ‘He say kill many men in wars,’ Catan said.

‘How many?’ I asked.

Yurigeng’s eyes met mine and suddenly there was an unmistakable flicker of interest — perhaps even the ghost of a patrician smile. He spoke firmly and without hesitation, and I could detect no evidence of contrition in his voice.

‘How many did he say?’ I asked Catan.

‘Twenty-seven,’ Catan said.

It was an insight into an aspect of the Stone Age still surviving here and there in tiny remote pockets of human isolation. Notwithstanding government and missionary efforts, Catan said, there had been battles in the last eighteen months in the neighbourhood of Endoman, with some sixteen deaths among those who had taken part. These were limited wars fought under ancient rules of combat in hard places like this where there was never quite enough in the way of resources to keep pace with the population. In Endoman people were very poor.

By night and at an altitude of nearly six thousand feet and enswathed in chill mists it was a cold place, and fires burned in the huts. I asked Yurigeng why his people did not wear clothes, to which he replied that they would if they had them, adding that he himself did not even possess a shirt.

More branches were laid over the embers in the hearth, blue smoke curled up, eyes watered and soon the coughing became general. The moment had come to present the Chief with the radio set I had brought him. He took it, was assisted to remove it from its box, twiddled with the knobs, found a snatch of Indonesian rock from Wamena, and after a moment of indecision passed the set to a friend at his side, after which it went the rounds. I wondered if this could be the first present he had ever received, and whether this little ceremony of giving and receiving marked yet another step, along with the putting aside for ever of his spear, in Yurigeng’s transition to the new culture of possessions and the accumulation of wealth. The Chief owned nothing but his reputation, his hut and his now obsolete weapons. Any pigs belonging to him could hardly be defined in terms of sole ownership because when a customary celebration called for a pig to be killed, the flesh would be divided between the members of the community, and by supplying the pig Yurigeng did no more than add to his prestige. It was my impression that the Chief was totally at a loss what to do with his radio, which he would have been happy to cut into small pieces and share out like a pig. Thereafter one or another of the villagers — never the same man — could be seen tinkering with the set. Perhaps Yurigeng’s turn came round again in the end.

When I left, Yurigeng came with me, and as we walked, his child’s hand in mine, down the hill, across the stream and the airstrip to the black shed, where he left me, I wondered in what circumstances had this tiny black Alexander of the White Mountains killed so many of his enemies.

Endoman and its setting were exceedingly beautiful. The necessity to keep fires going in the huts meant that fuel was constantly in demand and this must have modified the original landscape, for few large trees were left. Instead, there were secondary growths of all shapes and sizes, spindly saplings often of enormous height, lianas dangling avalanches of tangled stems, plants with huge leaves patterned like medieval banners, and vigorous pandanus palms providing excellent thatching as well as tolerable fruit in season. Strangely enough, the crisp green rectangle of the airstrip seemed by no means out of place among this rich assortment of jungle colours, and the vast black shed did no more than add an acceptable touch of theatre. The airstrip had become a sort of promenade where young males put themselves on display with their bows and arrows and their spears and above all a missionary handout of a T-shirt featuring Donald Duck, and naked babies tumbled about the close-cut grass in perfect security. There were no orchids to be seen on the kind of trees left in the jungle by the village wood-cutters, but full sunshine on the strip had encouraged the appearance of a spectacular terrestrial variety ranged along the grass verges and growing to a foot in height. Endoman was spruce and clean. There was no mess anywhere because nothing was thrown away. Every single component of what we regard as litter would have been seen in this village as valuable.

The most striking features of these mountains were its mists and clouds. They surged up suddenly from the valleys or toppled over the mountain tops, diaphanous and brilliant and constantly in motion. Within minutes they dismembered a landscape, leaving a peak afloat in the whiteness here, a patch of forest there. A moment later these vanished and other scenic features appeared briefly in windows in the vapour before being blotted out in turn. During the night it rained steadily, but by day there were no more than spasmodic, freakish spatterings, and once I was showered by heavy droplets from a clear, lemon sky. Most days the sun shone but there was always a lurking dampness that took over at sundown and the insides of my sleeping bag were never quite dry to the touch. On my first morning in the schoolmaster’s house I found that a billowing white fungus like moulded rubber had grown overnight all along the base of the fence, and this nightly growth proved to be a regular phenomenon.

The women did all the hard work in this village. They hacked the turf off patches of jungle, dug the soil with their digging sticks, planted, tended and harvested the sweet potatoes and yams. It was they, squatting on their haunches and with their babies miraculously balanced on their shoulders, who slashed away at the grass with their machetes to keep the airstrip almost as smooth as a bowling green. It was a task for which I was never able to find out if they received a reward. The menfolk’s function was little more than decorative now that the government, at least in theory, had put an end to the chronic inter-tribal warfare that had plagued these parts. Until recently they had been kept busy planning surprise attacks and ambuscades and keeping their warlike skills up to the standard called for by these affrays. Now, when such encounters were unpublicized and rare, they had time on their hands. I came to the conclusion that the first Yalis to settle in Endoman had only chosen to tuck themselves away in this narrow valley for reasons of defence. Otherwise it had little to offer. The zone was one of recently formed mountains prone to earthquakes and landslides that had destroyed many villages. The soil was poor and the climate harsh, and it was said to take twice as long to grow a crop of vegetables in this unfavourable environment as in the fertile valleys. Even then the results were small and poor. The men hunted in the jungle but killed little more than small birds and the occasional forest rat. These they ate themselves on the spot, because the vital essences of a living prey sharpened the eye of the marksman and toughened the spirit of the warrior. The women had to resign themselves to an unremitting diet of starch which no more than developed a fraudulent corpulence that concealed undernourishment. It was the spartan qualities developed in ritual warfare, the taboos outlawing all things endangering survival, and subservience to the rule of the ancestors that had ensured the Yalis’ continued existence for unimaginable thousands of years. The government, with missionary aid, had released them from the ancient bondage, but it was hard to see what would become of them now.

Conflict was inseparable from the emotional lives of these Papuan mountain peoples. Three to four days on foot away to the west, the Danis of the Baliem had based their prosperity and developed their extraordinary gardening techniques on a forty-mile sash of alluvial soil approaching in its richness that of the Nile Valley. Dani families fill themselves on sweet potatoes, either steamed in leaf-bundles or baked, several times a day — an apparent vegetarian excess which can only have contributed to their fine physique. Their neighbours, the Yalis, who are obliged to eat much less of roughly the same thing are by comparison puny and unimpressive. There was food in abundance for everyone in the Baliem in an egalitarian system, with no internal dissent or fear of outside invasion. No necessity existed for warfare, yet this was — and is — a warrior society purely because racial memory harked back a few thousand years to the days before the Baliem, when the Danis had once battled with unyielding nature and numbers had to be trimmed to match meagre resources. Limited battles staged between clans were invented to accomplish this.

It is not quite the same with the Yalis, who share an almost identical culture. The Yalis are poor and still living in the hard times from which their neighbours successfully extricated themselves perhaps ten thousand years ago. The Yalis cultivate pockets of soil in largely barren mountains containing little in the way of game. They need the battle casualties which the Danis certainly do not, and the families of no more than the two children to which most Yalis limit themselves. In their case it is something more real than a cultural hangover that drives them into battle. Now that such conflicts are virtually at an end, life has lost its point for warriors trained in the belief that the only honourable occupation is war.

It was against this background of boredom and restlessness that Catan took me by surprise with a proposal that the unemployed village warriors should stage a mock battle to be followed by a mock victory dance. This was by no means entirely for my entertainment. Mock battles were an accepted feature of Dani and Yali culture, a better-than-nothing opportunity for keeping warlike capabilities up to the mark with no more than accidental bloodshed, thoroughly enjoyed by participants and spectators alike. The authorities looked on them with a jaundiced eye, because a percentage developed into the real thing, and hey were banned by most provincial governors, in particular the Bupati of Wamena, in whose territory most of them happened. ‘It is forbidden,’ Catan said. The clandestine encounter he had already mentioned had started as a sham of this kind, but resulted in the death toll of sixteen. Nevertheless, all the able-bodied males in the village, Catan assured me, would be happy to take part, and he seemed to suggest that it was an occasion when such persons as Mattius the schoolteacher might be induced to look the other way. By general agreement, then, the mock battle was to be staged on the following morning.

That evening brought about a change in the weather. A mist overbrimming suddenly like a sea of swansdown set all the conical thatches of the village afloat before unrolling itself down the airstrip, then spreading its tissues into all the gulches and gullies in the neighbourhood of the old schoolhouse. With the gathering of dusk huge moths settled around us, of a purple so dark that until a torch was shone upon them I assumed them to be black. They were of a kind I had already seen, attracted to the effluents of decay dribbling from under the supermarket in Sentani. Here they packed themselves, wings spread but absolutely still, under the overhang of thatches offering protection from what I supposed were eagle owls that flapped just above my head after dark.