Solomons Seal (24 page)

He ran the ship straight in to the beach, close under the main part of the town, where a little knot of islanders stood waiting. There always seems to be a sense of anticlimax when one finally arrives in port, the contact with the shore and its officials being in marked contrast to the excitement of the landfall, the sense of achievement at the end of a voyage. On this occasion the change of mood was very noticeable. As soon as the bow doors were open and the ramp down a government official came on board accompanied by a police sergeant. Jona did not go down to meet them. He left that to Teopas, waiting with his sister in the wheelhouse. The two drivers sent to take over the trucks remained on the shore.

We watched as Teopas unfastened the back of each truck. The inspection was very thorough, the police sergeant even crawling underneath the vehicles to check the chassis. The Haulpaks, too, were examined. ‘He'll want to see the manifests now,' Perenna said.

‘Hans has the manifest.'

‘Then how are you going to explain the trucks?'

To my surprise he seemed almost relaxed. ‘Teopas will tell him we shipped them to help the Co-operative. And Hans has kept his promise; Nasogo is from Buka.'

The official was coming up the ladder now, thickset and very black with a little wisp of a beard and dark glasses. He was dressed in grey-blue trousers and a
white short-sleeved shirt that was freshly laundered. Teopas stood waiting close behind him as he shook hands with each of us, murmuring, ‘Joseph Nasogo', in a soft, gentle voice. Then Jona took them to his cabin, and we waited, the heat and the humidity growing all the time.

At length Perenna asked, ‘What happens if he doesn't accept Teopas's explanation?'

I looked at her and gave a little shrug. ‘I'm a stranger in these parts.' I said it lightly, but there was no answering smile as she stood by the open door to the bridge wing staring down at the trucks. The drivers were getting into them now, and the police sergeant was standing on the ramp, talking to a little group that had collected to gaze at what I imagine they regarded as a pretty odd craft.

Perenna never moved from her position by the open door to the bridge wing. She seemed totally withdrawn inside herself, the tension in her affecting me, so that I wondered whether she was still scared of something or merely locked up in her memories of the place. And then McAvoy appeared briefly, swaying slightly as he stood staring for a moment at the green hills behind the port, his eyes screwed up against the glare. ‘Kapa,' he muttered. ‘Bloody kapa.' He turned to Perenna. ‘I suppose you'd gone before this copper thing started?'

She nodded. ‘There was a lot of talk, of course, and they'd started drilling. But I never saw anything of it, nothing had been built.'

‘Well, you'll see a lot of changes now. Not so much
in the rest of Bougainville, and nothing in Buka. But here. Aye, there's been a great change, an' all too dam' quick if you ask me.' His gaze switched to the little group framed in the open bows. ‘The Black Dogs,' he growled. ‘Wouldn't think it to see them now, standing there so peaceable, but this was where they came from. The Rorovana. That was one of the
wantoks
involved. Nasty fighters, all of them.'

‘This was during the war, was it?' I asked.

‘Aye. They were the young men of several family groups, all based on Kieta. Claimed they were for the Japs, but what they were after was independence, from the British, from everybody. Caused us a lot of bother, those bastards did, and now they drive great trucks up at the mine or work in the crushing plant. No independence at all, just slaves to machines. And all in less than a decade.' He shook his head slowly. ‘I don't understand,' he murmured. ‘The world changed, and then again nothing changed, man being what he is and his nature just the same.' He stood for a moment, silent, his body sagging as though bowed down by the weight of his thoughts. And then he was gone, back to his cabin and his drink without another word.

It must have been a good half-hour before Jona came back into the wheelhouse, his manner almost jaunty as he saw Nasogo to the top of the bridge wing ladder. Back in the wheelhouse, he informed the two of us that we should tell the Immigration Official at Anewa that our visas would be issued at the offices of
the North Solomons Provincial Government in Arawa that afternoon.

A few minutes later Nasogo drove off with the police sergeant in a small Japanese car. The engines of the trucks had already been started up. We watched them bump their way down the ramp into the water and up the beach to the road. ‘Well, that's that,' Jona said, and there was a sigh of relief in his voice. ‘We'll be round at the copper port by lunchtime, and tonight we can all have a good lie-in.' The ramp clanged shut, the bow doors closing. He rang for Slow Astern, and the big winch drum aft began winding in the anchor. The crew were so used to this manoeuvre that orders were unnecessary.

As we headed north between the high green slopes of Bakawari Island and the Kieta Peninsula, I wandered round the ship, mingling with the crew. No solemnness now, the Buka men all smiling. But they weren't singing at their work, and they didn't talk. I couldn't figure out what the mood was, except that I was conscious of an undercurrent of excitement, all of them locked up inside themselves and the bared teeth not so much a smile as a grin of expectancy. I thought I must be imagining it, but when I spoke to Luke, he evaded my questions. All he would say was: ‘Buka pipal bilong old days. For them this mine and all the great development here and up in the mountains is a kind of Cargo.'

We cut north-west through the narrow passage inside the small island of Arovo, and then we were heading just south of west direct for Anewa Bay.
Already it was too hot to con the ship from the upper bridge. We were all of us in the shade of the wheel-house, and as we came clear of the Kieta Peninsula, the broad curve of Arawa Bay began to open, with the modern township spread out on the flats behind it, a pattern of buildings and palms all hazed in heat. ‘Used to be a big expatriate plantation,' Jona said. ‘Now it's got the largest shopping centre and superstore in the South West Pacific' And behind the town, merged now into the jungle green of the mountains, were the faint scars of blasting where the highway to the mine hair-pinned its way up to a gap on the skyline. ‘The mine is just over the other side. In a car it takes about quarter of an hour, maybe twenty minutes, from Anewa. It's low-grade copper mixed with gold and some silver.' And he added, ‘The taxes paid by that mine are what keep the new state of Papua New Guinea going. Without it they'd be broke.'

‘How do the Bougainville people feel about that?' Perenna asked.

He glanced quickly over his shoulder, then said, ‘I'm not sure how they feel about it down here, but in Buka they don't like it.'

‘Rather similar to the attitude of the Scots on North Sea oil,' I said.

‘No, not at all similar.' His voice was suddenly sharp. And then to his sister he said, ‘It's not a question I would make a habit of asking if I were you; some of them are very sensitive on the matter.' He lapsed into silence then, staring straight ahead, no longer relaxed, the tenseness back in him as though reminded of something
he had temporarily forgotten. Abruptly he said, ‘The Provincial Government is over there.' And he indicated the eastern end of the small bay. After that he seemed to withdraw into himself, and I became conscious again of the oppressive heat building up in the wheelhouse. Even the air blowing in from the open bridge wing doors was heavy and humid. Wisps of cloud were beginning to drift over the green heights as the forest growth gave up moisture to the air.

Anewa Bay was opening up ahead of us, and soon it was possible to make out the details of the shore buildings. The storage sheds and loading wharf for the copper concentrate were on the northern arm of the bay; the power station in the centre and the fuel storage tanks showed as silvery roundels to the south. The only vessel in this very modern-looking port was a small tug moored alongside the wharf. Jona straightened up from the chart table, glanced at his watch and picked up the microphone for the ship's loudspeakers. ‘Attention, deck crew. Stand by for berthing twelve-thirty hours. I repeat, twelve-thirty stand by.'

Anewa was very different from Kieta. This was the Company port for one of the biggest copper mines in the world, everything mechanically sophisticated, from the pipeline that carried the liquid concentrate across the Crown Prince Range from the mine 16 miles away at Paguna, to the filtering plant and drying kilns. The power for everything, including the mine, even the electricity for the new township of Arawa, came from that one power station with its Japanese turbines
humming away close under the green slopes at the head of the bay.

By the time the formalities of our arrival had been dealt with, it was the hottest part of the day, and with no ship loading at the wharf the port fell into a deep sleep, nobody stirring and only the steady roar from the power station turbines and from the drying plant to indicate that the giant up in the hills beyond the Crown Prince Range continued in full production. Just before 15.00 the crew began straggling in twos and threes up the slipway on which our ramp rested to assemble on the quay, waiting for transport into Arawa. Their jet-black skins and fuzzy mops of hair identified them as Buka men. Perhaps that was why Jona refused to let his sister go with them. ‘I'll have a word with the power station engineer. There'll be somebody going into Arawa who can give you both a lift to headquarters.'

Above the shimmering green of the rainforest the clouds had thickened, lying heavy over the heights. Teopas joined the little cluster of men on the quay. It began to rain, big heavy drops that seemed to be squeezed out of the humidity that hung over us. Seaward the sky was still a blinding white haze. The truck appeared, one of the two we had put ashore at Kieta. Teopas got in beside the driver, the rest of the crew scrambling into the back for shelter as the rain increased. The truck splashed off down the road past the power station, and ten minutes later Jona came hurrying back along the empty quay under the shelter of a borrowed umbrella. One of the engineers would
be going into the hospital at Arawa to visit a patient in about an hour's time and would give us a lift.

He arrived in a heavy downpour of rain, driving a company car and wielding a large umbrella. ‘Standard equipment at this time of day,' he said as he escorted Perenna from the bridge to the car which he had parked halfway down the slip. His name was Fred Perry. ‘Same as the old-time tennis star,' he said without a flicker of a smile. He was Australian, thirtyish and thickset, with sandy hair and sharp features that reminded me of a fox terrier I had once known. He had been with the Company since the first steel girders of the power station had been erected and, with no prompting at all, began telling us the story of its building as he backed up the slipway and headed out on the road to Arawa.

‘You must like it here,' I said.

He half turned his head. ‘No worse than Tom Price or Parraburdoo. I had a two-year sabbatical up in the iron cauldron country of Western Australia. But I'd rather be in Sydney any day.'

‘You come from Sydney?' Perenna asked.

‘No, Wagga Wagga.' And he went on to tell us about the building of the port, all the cargoes of massive machinery that had been shipped in. Once we were clear of Anewa Bay, the forest closed in on us from either side, the rain bouncing on the tarmac, steaming between the primordial green walls, and frogs everywhere – they turned out later to be toads – squat and motionless, soaking up the moisture.

We came to an intersection and turned left. ‘If
you're going up to the mine, that's the road you take,' he said. ‘As good a piece of highway engineering as you'll see anywhere in the world.' He talked about that for the rest of the way into Arawa, how it had had to take a fifty-wheel transporter to get the 80-ton crusher up to the ore treatment plant. ‘Remember that when you're driving up. This whole operation is on such a massive scale it's difficult to imagine what it was like when we started. It was all very primitive then, the people, too. Now we've got training and recreational centres, a technical college, everything they could possibly want. The whole concept, right from the very beginning, was that the indigenous people would eventually take over. The concentrator, for instance. It's the largest in the world and almost entirely operated by local men. The power station, too. They've been very quick to learn, though we do lose a lot of them after training. They're ambitious, and they seem to like doing their own thing. Transport, shops, engineering, construction work, even import-export, any service operation where there's a demand and they can make money seems to appeal to them. Funny, isn't it, when you consider that they had very little experience of money before we began this monster operation. Like I say, they've caught on bloody quick.'

The forest fell away, the road opening out to a rain-drenched view of buildings widely spaced on the flat of a valley floor. ‘Arawa.' He pointed out the shopping centre and superstore as we turned right off the Kieta road, left by the swimming pool, then skirted
the edge of the residential area till we came to the hospital. The rain was still bucketing down, and when he had parked, he turned to me. ‘It could go on like this for a couple of hours or more. You've got a licence, have you? Then you'd better take the car.' He gave me directions to the Provincial Government Headquarters. ‘Pick me up when you're through.' He was seeing a fellow engineer who had been operated on for appendicitis and didn't seem to mind how long he stayed. ‘Eddie is pretty well recovered now. Eddie Flint. They'll know at the desk where to find me. And I'll leave you the umbrella. You'll need it.'

He ran for the entrance, and I moved into the driving seat beside Perenna. He had told us where we could get instant pictures taken in the shopping centre, and when we had them, I drove to the Provincial Government offices. By then it was near their closing time, but even so the waiting room was still crowded, and we were the only whites.