Empire of the East (30 page)

Whatever the undeclared views on religious matters they may have, the people of Endoman follow the general Papuan custom of these days by going to church. Some may be impelled by genuine fervour, others by a yearning for distraction of any kind. In a village where men and boys would gather for hours on end to watch me washing up dishes or shaving at the edge of the stream, churchgoing was rich in the incidents it provided.

Endoman’s mission hall was devoid of chairs, a plain affair rather like a well-scrubbed cow-shed — but it was at least the centre of some activity, some brief relief, particularly for the menfolk, from the slavery of idleness now the coming of peace had left them with so little to do. The first of the congregation arrived before seven in the morning to take up preferential positions, squatting in rows as near as possible to the platform from which, when the hall had filled up, Engen, having shut up shop for the day, would begin to preach. These early arrivals were properly clothed in accordance with missionary standards. The less important next-to-naked, who had been unable to come by imported finery, were placed as far out of sight as possible at the back. A few women, who were the last to slip through the door, ranged themselves carefully separated from the men along one wall, and were expressionless as ever. By about 9 a.m. I would have said that apart from Chief Yurigeng and his small aristocratic following, whom I suspected of covert agnosticism, the whole male population was in attendance. Nevertheless there were few women indeed. Catan evaded positive explanation. Perhaps no one had quite succeeded in convincing them that the mission hall was not an extension of a men’s house from which by the old religion they had been ritually debarred. Those that had shown up had brought their children, almost all of them, like half the adults present, racked with terrible coughs.

There were men in the congregation I had never seen before, and it was to be supposed that they had come from outlying hamlets, and were to be instantly distinguished by a certain rustic outlandishness in their appearance. At this point I realized that even in such basic and age-old cultures the townee distinguished himself from the countryman. The conservative poor wore nothing in the way of adornment but a necklace of graded boar’s teeth or a few shells. Those who had taken a few paces towards our times sported T-shirts upon which the Disney animals could hardly be made out through the grime. The country-folk, who had set out to trudge here across the mountains before dawn, still thrust any small manufactured objects they could lay hold of, even the occasional key, through the holes bored in the septums of their noses, and forced two-inch plugs into their earlobes, in which trifling articles of value were carried. Eventually, in old age, the earlobes gave way, so that their ruin in the form of little ropes of cartilage and skin hung down each cheek. This was a sight from which the villagers averted their eyes.

What purports to be a religious service conducted in such an environment calls for extreme theological simplification. What possible contacts could the minds of these villagers have with the intellectual subtleties evolved in fourth-century Byzantium shortly after the Emperor Constantine’s conversion to the new faith? How could the preacher Engen, peeping out through the shutters of the Stone Age, explain to them the mystery of the Holy Trinity, Redemption, Atonement, and the union of divine and human natures in the Hypostasis of Christ? Or, if compelled to fall back on biblical stories, what would a people who had always lived for the day, possessed no property, and shared whatever they produced, make of the idea of laying up treasure in heaven, or of the many examples scattered through the Scriptures of admiration for those who advance their own cause at the expense of the community?

The fact is that Engen may have been a first-rate raiser of sweet potatoes, and have learned to cope with trifling monetary transactions in the shop, but as a spiritual leader he was non-existent, reduced to repeating formulae which at best his congregation could accept as words possessing some magical association. It was a case of the blind leading the blind. The service took a liturgical form in which Engen chanted a sentence and the villagers chanted their response. ‘Mathew, Mark, Luke, John,’ trumpeted Engen through his nose, and a responsive roar arose among the coughing of the congregation. ‘Mathew, Mark, Luke, John.’ I was reminded of the experience of Henry and Maria Carradine employed by the Venezuelan government to carry out a census of its Indian population. They were carried by helicopter to a remote Panare community where a native Evangelist was at work with the children, trying to inculcate the principles of Christianity. ‘The village children were made to kneel down in a row. No one could understand what was going on, nor could the evangelist understand. In the end he said, “Every time I say the word Jesus, you must bang your head on the ground,” and this they did.’ Of this experience Carradine said, ‘Know something? They were quite happy about it all. Not much goes on in the Venezuelan savannah. It gave them something to think about.’ And perhaps the service at Endoman did that, too.

Catan had been with me and seemed to have been revived by the chanting. I would have supposed from all accounts that a similar meeting conducted in the vicinity of the spirit-house in the old days might have been more dramatic, but this was entertainment of a kind. I took advantage of his evident euphoria to risk bringing up the subject of his own conversion and how it came about.

‘They tell us’, he said, ‘to take Christ or burn in big fire of God.’

When the first white man in an aeroplane drops out of the sky to deliver this ultimatum, little but instant compliance is to be expected.

Next day the Helios Courier was to fly in to pick me up. There was no certainty about this arrangement, for the weather in these inconstant mountains followed no pattern and barometric probabilities were to be measured by hours rather than days.

On about one occasion in three a visiting missionary plane in search of an airstrip might be called upon to circle for a while before locating a hole in the swirling clouds, and on this day of my departure for Wamena in the Baliem Valley the prospects were at first dubious. An otherwise luminous night had spread great charcoal smears across the sky, translated by the dawn into mists. In the first hours they spread about the village like outpourings of smoke but then the sun broke through and tore them apart, and shortly the air-sleeve was run up by the strip to signal that the plane was to be expected.

With this the women responsible for the airstrip’s maintenance scuttled into position, babies on shoulders and machetes in hand, and began to chop away with all possible speed at fast-growing weeds that had appeared on the surface of the airstrip during the few days I had been there. Following this, a stream of villagers was seen to be approaching for the ceremonial leave-taking. They were led by Chief Yurigeng holding the radio set in his hands like a sacerdotal object. This had long since fallen silent from battery exhaustion. Following Catan’s suggestion my rubbish had been piled up within the fence, ready for removal. One by one my visitors bounded over the stile and began to examine opened sardine tins, powdered milk cans, and plastic bags. Every single constituent of this tiny pyramid of junk down to the last tin lid was found to be of value. Calmly, quietly and equably the division of the detritus was carried out, and I was thanked by universal smiles.

One of the grass-cutters waved her machete at the sky, and little high-pitched laughter broke out, with which our visitors showed their excitement as the Helios Courier turned almost on its side to round the mountain, levelled out, lowered itself on its enormous wings to the runway, and touched down with extraordinary grace.

Yurigeng passed the silent radio to a servitor, took my hand and, with two of his notables following with my bags, we walked together hand in hand towards the plane. Round this the villagers — including now even the women — had formed a wide, absolutely motionless semi-circle. John the pilot received me with a congratulatory smile. He had been a little doubtful if he could make it. He raised his baseball cap in prayer. ‘Lord, we thank you for opening up the weather this morning and for the success of our friend’s mission. Right now we’re taking off for Wamena. Happens there’s a scheduled flight from Sentani to Wamena this morning with more passengers I’m aiming to pick up, and I ask you Lord to make their connection possible.’

The take-off was exhilarating. Endoman’s neat assembly of beehives were suddenly snatched up and dragged away to the rear out of sight. Coming in to land the pilot had had to make his cautious turn round the base of the mountain with a wing almost brushing the tops of the pandanus, but the take-off was a full-throttle charge straight at the mountain, then an easy lift up over the low trees and the great white limestone crags at the top into the mist-free, crystal clear air, with the forest lying crinkled at its bottom like weed on the bed of the ocean. A single white cloud, swollen and bulging at its base, had settled on the top of a peak; gorges and waterfalls were spaced like a geographical exhibit on the mountainsides, and yellow rivers curled through the valleys. Somewhere, shortly beyond Proggoli, a mountain range with an eleven thousand-foot summit ridge had to be crossed. On a bad day, John said, we would have to zigzag to get over, but everything was right with the weather to go straight at it, and this he did. A million or two years of alternating sunshine and frost had shaved the ridge to a series of cutting edges that flashed back at us as we skimmed over them. There followed an alpine flatland with its crabbed and stunted and moss-laden trees only two hundred feet below.

Forty miles of the Baliem Valley lay ahead, coming into sight as a glittering snakeskin of fields through which the river corkscrewed, narrowed to a thread and was blotted out in mist. The valley’s bottom held gardens by the thousand created in the depths of prehistory. For the Danis are accepted as being among the world’s most skilful and sophisticated horticulturists, although they are almost certainly cultivating their gardens in these days as they did thousands of years ago. Following what must have been a huge period of trial and error they succeeded in deciphering the secrets by which certain jungle root plants could be transformed into edible forms. Thereafter the brand of intelligence and ingenuity displayed by the Mayas and their development of corn was applied in this case to the sweet potato. The Danis devised a complex system of irrigation ditches giving the plants’ roots constant access to water, combining this with the perfect drainage provided by raised beds. They enriched the soil by potash obtained by burning of underbrush, by mulches from compost heaps of weeds, and by the mineral-rich soil dredged up from the bottom of the ditches and spread over the beds. Apart from utilitarian ends they were and are concerned with appearances. The tops of Dani vegetables sprout from the ground in perfect line, each plant at a precise distance from the next. The beds’ geometry will have won the approval of a critical eye, and, seen from above, the bold, black scrawlings of the ditches among sparkling vegetation recall the designs of an archaic vase-painter rather than the prosaic labour of men concerned only with harvests. Archbold, leader of the 1938 expedition who first viewed this astonishing prospect from the air, was inclined to believe that they might have stumbled upon an ancient civilization, a Conan Doyle-style lost world that had remained hidden away here. For how could primitive people in the mere tillings of their fields have possessed such an enthusiasm for pattern and form? ‘From the number of gardens and stockaded villages we estimated the population to be at least 60,000,’ Arch-bold wrote.

He was increasingly amazed by these Stone Age experiences. So overwhelming, for example, was the Dani hospitality that when on a subsequent expedition on foot his party reached their first village the villagers refused to let them pass, and the convicts supplied by the Dutch as bodyguards had to shoot two before they would move aside. ‘Never in all my experience in New Guinea have I seen anything like it,’ Archbold said. And there was nothing comparable in those days — and very little since.

As we came in to land villages drifting into sight spoke of inflexible planning, and the exact placing and alignment of paths radiating from their nucleus recalled the linked molecules of a diagrammatic chemical formula. The arrival by air gave us glimpses of Wamena at its best: two naked men waving from a rattan suspension bridge over the river, fifty children circling hand-in-hand in a pre-historic ring-a-roses, a newly built compound with a man on each roof-top trimming the thatch, a garden burnished with squares and diamonds of vegetables, irrigated fields with emerald reflections skipping from ditch to ditch, then Wamena’s line-up of tin roofs and the small blustering whirlwinds whipped up by the propellers on the airport.

Wamena produced so far nothing but excellent vegetables so everything from a steam-roller to the altar for the Catholic Church, and thence down the scale to a one-inch nail had to be brought in — in some cases in many parts in the hold of a plane. All round us these imports were stacked up, providing useful material for a study of Papuan development along the road to a future in a new age.

A massive delivery of lavatory pedestals had been invitingly lined up — which even I was ready to accept as an advance over Endoman’s plank over a ravine. Behind them were piled lengths of drainpipe, and in the background the ends of privacy and exclusion were to be served by innumerable rolls of barbed wire. A small tree with big, glossy, unnatural leaves and root-ball in sacking was ready to be dropped in its hole in some upper-class patio garden. The Danis who worked at unloading the planes were examining these objects with the greatest possible interest, and the occasional outcry of wonderment. They were at least a head taller than the Yalis, and of exceptional muscular physique. The prodigious hospitality we had read of still existed. The Danis carried it to such lengths that they were accustomed to visit the airport in the hope of running into newly arrived visitors with nowhere to go, whom they would invite to their homes.