Horror in Paradise (15 page)

One day Sejak’s friend, the walleyed Unsit, was traveling through the forest. Impatient and foolhardy, he had decided not to wait until someone else felt impelled to follow the same route, but to risk the trip by himself. He arrived in Sejut with haunted eyes and a terrible pain in his chest. He had felt the bamboo blade of a Tubwi entering into him and he was a man without hope. His friends called in Sejak, and Sejak said:

“Do not try to run away from the Tubwi yet. First I will see if lean kill it.”

That night after Unsit had laid his
kakoya
on the floor and gone to sleep, Sejak sat up watching on the steps to the house, his spear and a big stick lying beside him.

‘The Tubwi,’ he thought to himself, ‘will be following Unsit closely. Probably he will attack again tonight.’

Now, a Tubwi, as I have mentioned, is invisible to most people, and that is why men like Sejak require very special training to sharpen their eyes sufficiently to see into the unseen world. It was very late and Sejak was beginning to despair when suddenly his well-trained ears heard an inaudible rustling. He stiffened and peered into the flickering shadows; then with a great shout he leapt from the steps and the aroused and astonished household saw him engaging in a wild struggle with nothing at all. After a last tremendous whack at the ground he gave a triumphant cry and returned to the house saying:

“The Tubwi is dead. It came in the form of a snake and I have killed it. Unsit will now be well.”

His trembling friends peered at the spot where Sejak had demolished the snake, but there was nothing to be seen. The following morning Unsit was miraculously recovered, but it was not until several days later that the actual identity of the Tubwi was revealed. Then it was heard that the same night in which Sejak slew the invisible snake, a woman named Malanu had died for no apparent reason at Swailbe. The human female Tubwi cannot survive her alter ego, nor he her. As they came into the world together, so together they must leave it, and when Malanu’s death became known it was obvious that Sejak had truly killed his witch.

Sometimes a dying man is vouchsafed a glimpse of his Tubwi murderer. The woman witch is unmistakably the higher in command—and though she sends her brother out to the preliminary skirmishes, she is apt to take a hand herself towards the end. The last morsel of a soul is supposed to be the most delectable, and frequently she chooses to give the
coup de grace
and avail herself of it. As she lifts her bamboo dagger to plunge it into her victim’s throat, his clouded eyes may clear for one brief and horrible vision, and with a strangled cry he shouts the name of his psychophagous murderer.

One cannot help feeling sorry for the woman who has, by the hallucinations or the spite of a dying man, been branded as a Tubwi. The kin of the man she is supposed to have murdered are prancing for justice against her. If her family stand by her, unconvinced of her guilt, she may be given the dubious opportunity of taking the hot-water test, with a fifty-fifty chance of proving herself innocent. But often her husband and her relations are so appalled at the thought of the dangerous monster they have unwittingly harbored that they hand the woman over without a protest, receiving gratefully in exchange some child recently captured in a raid. For the self-appointed agents of justice the disposal of the Tubwi that they have acquired is no sinecure. They dare not kill her and they dare not keep her alive.

It is here that the San or trading partners come in very usefully again. Her first captor marches the witch as fast as possible to his nearest San and requests, in the name of friendship, that he take her over. This San, anxious to be relieved as quickly as possible of his unwelcome responsibility, sets out immediately with her on the journey to a San of
his.
If anyone is lucky enough to have a San among the wild Mari tribe of the Karon, she is rushed to them, for the Mari have no fear of a Madik Tubwi and murder her without the slightest hesitation. Failing a Mari San, the only hope is that the woman, kept incessantly on the run, will very soon die from sheer exhaustion.

This sounds distressingly brutal, but the Madik, like our own not so remote forebears, believes he is ridding the community of a very present danger, and his method is surely no more inhuman than a well-attended bonfire in which the witch is burnt alive. I am thankful that while we lived in Sainke Doek the Tubwis were quiescent. Just before our arrival, Sassodet had died the sort of death that was apparently suggestive of a Tubwi’s greed, but the flash of second sight was denied to his last moments and, with no clue to the identity of the devourer of his soul, the matter was not pursued any further.

There is pathos in the fate of the starved and weary woman, powerless to prove herself an ordinary human being, driven like a pariah through the jungle until she dies. But she is not the only pitiful figure. There must be compassion, too, for those enslaved by the beliefs that cause her fate, for the natives who live afraid, never daring to be alone, haunted by the specter of unseen presences hungering to gobble up their souls. To the Madik the soul is an integral necessity; with its loss his body dies. His fragile soul-substance is as much at the mercy of attack from the invisible world as is his bare brown body vulnerable to the enemy’s spear. It is small wonder that he has developed a philosophy of resignation, of casual acceptance of the march of life and death, that he lives only in the present moment with the future so insecure.

Don Blanding

Donald Benson Blanding (1894-1957), sometimes called “the poet laureate of Hawaii” was born in Kingfisher, Oklahoma, but lived for some years at Laston, where his father was deputy sheriff. He graduated from The Chicago Art Institute and first came to Hawaii in 1916. In these early days he wrote advertising copy for a Chinese shop in Honolulu. He was a popular lecturer and the author and illustrator of seventeen books. In 1928 he proposed, along with Grace Tower Warren, that May 1 should be celebrated as “Lei Day” in Hawaii.

Blanding died of a heart attack in Los Angeles but his ashes were scattered at sea. His only marriage was to Dorothy Putnam, former wife of George Palmer Putnam, whose later wife was Amelia Earhart. “Gods and Old Ghosts” is part of a chapter in his prose volume,
Hula Moons
(1930).

ON one of these nights I met the Old Man of the Mountain. He was reputed to be a kahuna. A kahuna is a sort of astrologer, philosopher, doctor, and unwritten history of Hawaii. He is a survival of the powerful clan of priests who ruled the kings and the kingdom in the days of the monarchy. Ignorant
haoles
call them witch doctors; but the term is incorrect, although they are credited with the ability to put good or bad kahuna (spell) on people, and pray individuals to death if they choose. They are respected and feared by most of the Hawaiians, who are quite superstitious, as are any people who live in close touch with nature.

The Old Man (I never heard him called any other name) looked like an inspired prophet who had survived through the ages from the beginnings of the islands. In repose his features were lost in a tangle of crossing and crisscrossing wrinkles. He had no teeth, and so his face collapsed into folds, resembling a brown lichen. When he spoke, the black gape of his mouth and the dim fires of his eyes identified him as human.

I
never saw him arrive.
In the midst of chatter and laughter he’d suddenly
be
among us, looking like a gnarled root at the base of a hau tree. On the first night that I met him, he made this grown-from-the-ground appearance. All of the Hawaiians fell silent, even the children. He sat for half an hour, his old eyes watching the stars unwinkingly. Pua brought him a cup of okolehao. He drank it with relish but without comment. After the corrosive fire of the liquor percolated and filtered through his aged bones, he broke into speech, half chant half talk, lifting his face into the light. With the muscles of his long throat quivering and the strange quavers of his voice, he looked like an aged wolf baying the moon.

Although I could not understand much Hawaiian, I saw at once that he was speaking in a different manner from the conversational tongue of my friends. A
th
sound which is not in the modem language softened the hard
k,
giving a smoother slur to the unbroken flow of words which continued for half an hour. I don’t know when or how he breathed.

He told a dramatic tale full of gestures. His pantomime was so vivid that I could get the larger drawing of the story.

“He talks
old-style
Hawaiian,” Aunty Pinau whispered. “These keikis (children) do not understand.”

After he had finished his story, Aunty Pinau translated what he had told. It was the legend of the demigod, Maui, whose exploits resembled those of Hercules. It related his colossal feat of lifting the sky, which was crushing the earth, and placing it on top of the mountain so that the trees could grow and the people go about the business of living. He told also of Maui’s mother Hina, a famed tapa maker, and her difficulty in getting the bark-cloth dried, owing to the shortness of the days. She appealed to her son for aid. He climbed to the top of Haleakala, lassoed the sun, and broke off some of its rays so that it couldn’t roll across the sky so swiftly, thus lengthening the days and allowing his mother to complete her beautiful tapa robes.

In the nights that followed he told many other stories. They were delightful, embroidered with poetic metaphor and classical references too intricate to follow. The Hawaiians are natural orators, after the William Jennings Bryan style of silver-tongued eloquence.

The simple sagas differed only a little from the folk tales of Grimm and Andersen and the Bible. There were the brave princes of remarkable accomplishment, and the villains with low and scoundrelly sculduggery in their hearts, the Cinderellas, the giant killers and Jonahs.

During those long, pleasant hours, the civilized world became very remote. It was difficult to realize that, just across the channel, Honolulu buzzed with activity, with chittering tourists, honking motors, and the confusion of progress. My mind rested in the simple, unroutined current of life that flowed so aimlessly through the uncounted days and nights.

My unfeigned enjoyment and interest in the legends were richly rewarded. I did not realize that I was being studied and weighed, and that I had passed critical inspection, until one day the Old Man appeared in the door of the palm-leaf lean-to which I used for studio. Nalani was with him.

“He want you come along,” she said. “He show you something. I go too.”

I put aside the sketch that I was making and we started out along the beach. The Old Man took the lead. I had to realize shortly that the ancient gargoyle was a better man than I was. Although he seemed to stumble and waver, his stride was long and steady, as we wove through guava and lantana thickets and tangled jungle growth, over sand and broken lava. I soon saw that we were going in a tortuously devious way and that the Old Man wanted to confuse me. I stopped Nalani.

“Tell Old Man I no look see.”

“He taking you sacred place,” she explained.

“Tell him go straight. I lost now. I no can find again.”

Nalani spoke to our guide. He measured me with his squinting eyes and made decision. We started off across a desolate field of lava, among sharp, broken fragments that chewed my tennis sneakers to ribbons. Nalani and the Old Man wore Hawaiian fiber sandals which seemed to protect their feet. I was soon a mass of scratches and gouges up to my knees. Sweat poured into the abrasions and smarted mightily, but I suspicioned that it was all worth while. The wildness of the setting promised well for adventure.

Finally we came to a large well about thirty feet across, a dark hole in the center of the lava flow. Down twenty feet, among ferns, roots, and mosses, lay a pool of water, so still and clear that every detail, of rock, cloud, and our peering faces was reflected. No breath disturbed the glassy surface.

The Old Man spoke.

“Wai-tiapa-napa.”

“Mirror-water,” Nalani translated, deeply impressed.

As I peered into the water-mirror I had a ghostly feeling that many brown faces of long-dead Hawaiians stared over my shoulders; there were warriors and women, maidens and young men. Was this an oracle, a crystal in which one read the future? What had brought them; what had they found in the dark pool?

We scrambled down the steep sides to a ledge near the water, descending from the warm sunlight into a grave-cold shadow. The Old Man stripped off his shirt and trousers and stood in short, spotless drawers. (Drawers, in a spot like that!) Nalani kept on her flimsy shift, I improvised a breechclout from the sleeves of my shirt. Having gotten down to essentials, I waited, prepared for anything.

Although the Old Man, with his withered, wrinkled flesh hanging in loose folds on his spare frame, looked like a molting condor, I could see that he had been a grand figure in his youth (some time b. c. if one judged by appearances).

The Old Man took several deep breaths and dived, groping his way down the black wall of the pool. Quite startlingly he started to disappear, first his head, then shoulders and trunk, finally legs. We had a last pale glimmer of the soles of his feet . . . and he was gone; into the face of the rock apparently. He “went out,” as frogs “go out” down the gullet of a snake. The sight was not comforting.

“Where Old Man go?” I asked Nalani anxiously.

“Inside,” she replied briefly, poising for a dive. “You come.”