What the Traveller Saw (11 page)

Further north was Obidos, a beautiful but over-restored walled town, a sort of Portuguese Clovelly. Even in the off-season when we were there and they were not engaged in selling objects to tourists, the inhabitants of Obidos were so muted that one wondered if they, too, had been given the restoration treatment.

North of it, on the coast, was Nazaré, a strange fishing village with even stranger inhabitants, situated in the shadow of a sheer cliff. Here, an entire community lived out its life for all to see, women, children and the aged on shore, the younger, more active men out on the sea fishing, all in costume. The women wore full skirts in big check patterns, inflated by layer upon layer of petticoats, black, fringed shawls and golden earrings. The men wore checked trousers and shirts.

The bringing in of the brightly painted boats to the beach and the hauling out of the boats with the help of oxen was a ritual. Now, in 1969, was it done for the tourists, or for their own, private delectation? Would they have preferred to use tractors instead of oxen? we wondered. None of those we asked could or would say. It was a mystery. Not that they
lacked for words: ‘Gimme cigarette!’ the men said in English in all the bars, these picturesque-looking men in their checks. ‘You give me one!’ I said, fed up with their pestering ways – and sometimes they did.

North of Nazaré and about forty miles south of Oporto, was Aveiro, on the landward side of an extensive labyrinth of lagoons, a town penetrated by canals spanned by humped-backed bridges. It was a place of mirages. In the distance, across the salt pans, some of the big three- and four-masted schooners of Portugal’s cod-fishing fleet loomed up in an unearthly haze. The fleet spent eight months of the year at sea, much of it on the Grand Banks or in the Davis Strait, as ships of the Portuguese fishing fleet had always done ever since the sixteenth century. (Now, since the end of the sixties, this staple food of Catholic countries comes from Scandinavia and the Portuguese fleet is no more.)

Beyond this place where the ships were laid up, a road lined with tamarisk wriggled through the sands which separated the lagoon from the Atlantic, to Barra, a village dominated by an enormous lighthouse which rose up at the end of the main street. Beyond that was Costa Nova do Prado with a church standing alone on the sands on which the surf thundered incessantly.

‘P
ROHIBITED FROM ENTRY
’, warned the Indonesian Customs Excise Declarations which we filled in on the plane, ‘Weapons, narcotics, phornography (without special licence)’. They needn’t have worried. This was one of the places where no one needed phornography, with or without a licence.

When Nehru visited Bali in 1954 he described it as being a place which was like the ‘Morning of the World’, and going there fifteen years later I wondered if this was the sort of oriental hyperbole which statesmen utter when leaving countries in which they have been lavishly entertained, but in this case he was absolutely right. Even before we arrived, flying over Java and looking down into the enormous, reeking maws of 10,000-foot-high volcanoes, one of them hiding a bright blue lake within, we were sure that we were on our way to something extraordinary.

The island itself was beautiful but no more entrancing than many other places in the East. There were other wild shores, equally or even more lovely, on the coasts of Malabar or Coromandel; there were no great, lost cities, buried for centuries in the jungle, such as Angkor Wat or Gaur in southern India, and even the biggest temple – the Balinese are Hindus – was not as stupefyingly large as Borobodur, across the narrow straits in Java, or as extravagant as Konorak, hidden away in the sands on the shore of the Bay of Bengal.

But, even if the temples were not all that big, there were said to be ten thousand in Bali and there may have been many more, for every house had a Hindu shrine and many of them
were large enough to qualify as temples, and Bali is about twenty times the size of the Isle of Wight and much the same shape. They seemed much less frequented than those in India, the little doors of the tabernacles were mostly shut in the day time, and less creepy. Here, as well as in the temples, offerings were made in the dust of the road, on the floor of a shop, in the narrowest part of a bazaar, a rectangle of plaited palm leaf with marigolds and other flowers on it. Even a great cave in the interior, with a monster carved over the entrance who seemed to be splitting the rock in two with his demoniacal strength, had none of the eerie dottiness of the caves in
A Passage to India
, no bats, only a passive statue of the elephant god, Ganesh, in a niche, waiting for someone to illuminate him momentarily with a gas lighter. In Bali I had none of the batty theological conversations I used to have in India, principally because I couldn’t speak the language.

It was the human beings that were so extraordinary in Bali, so small, so finely made. To them a European five foot nine tall must have resembled Goliath. All their lives the women here carried immense weights on their heads and in order to do so they had to stand very upright. This gave them immense grace even when they were carrying nothing but themselves.

In Denpasar, the capital, which at that time had few if any buildings more than three storeys high, the builders’ mates were all women who scaled vertical ladders amongst forests of wooden scaffolding carrying sixty or seventy pounds of masonry on their lovely little noddles. In Denpasar, too, there were congeries of markets, entirely staffed by women, hundreds of them. One of these markets, down by the bridge over the river which bisected the main street, hidden away, huge and dark green, with long shafts of light shining down into it, so that it looked like a city sunk beneath the sea, dealt in spices and three-year-old eggs wrapped in mud. Another sold temple furnishings, exquisite objects made from cane, magnificently painted baskets and beautiful door knobs. On the
other side of the river, in the fruit market, the owners of fighting cocks squatted, cosseting them before the next bloodthirsty meeting that would make bankrupts of some of their owners, while girls trotted by carrying long baskets full of suckling pigs which when roasted became a delicious dish called
babi guling.

There were far fewer breasts exposed on Bali than there had been before the war. It was no longer ‘
L’Isle des Seins Nus
’. Two and a half years of Japanese military occupation and the endless pointing at them of Nikons and Pentaxes had caused a subsequent withdrawal from general view of these beautiful objects but they could still be seen, fleetingly displayed, at bathing places by rivers, in gardens, and were of course always at hand for thirsty infants.

You would have had to have had a heart of stone to ignore the people of this island, or have been stone deaf, for this was a place of constant greeting, so that you were constrained to memorize at least one or two greetings and farewells in the language to use along the way. However, employing them ourselves, we did not always get the enthusiastic response we expected. This was because the universal greeting between visitors and visited was ‘Ullo!’, to which the only possible reply was ‘Ullo!’ No other greeting or response gave such unanimous pleasure.

Here we were ‘Ulloed!’ by delicious girls whose Western counterparts would have given me an icy stare if I had ‘Ulloed!’ them up the junction, by small boys up in the rigging of fruit trees, by men at the bottom of wells they were digging and by cohorts of pot-bellied infants standing in doorways.

Out in the country the Balinese, who were among the most skilful rice growers in the East, had created a wonderful, artificial world of terraced rice fields which followed the contours of the hills and valleys, so that looking at them was like looking at the layered contours of a sophisticated map. The distribution of water to the rice fields, which were filled with
ducks, from the rivers which burrowed down from the mountains, sometimes a hundred feet below ground level, was a complicated business. Water was carried across gorges in bamboo pipes, and along irrigation ditches on the steep sides of valleys. Sometimes it vanished into the sides of hills.

This distribution, and every other sort of village activity, agricultural, social and religious, was controlled by the
Bandjar
, a sort of voluntary village government. It had been so successful that the government was introducing the system to other parts of Indonesia.

The
Bandjar
also owned the tilling equipment, the meeting halls, the instruments belonging to the village orchestras and the dance costumes, some of which were extremely valuable. It was possible to attend a village dance every night of one’s stay in Bali and some people did nothing else.

All the activities of the
Bandjar
were accompanied by religious observances. Scarcely any action took place without some sort of esoteric sanction, whether it was the planting of rice, the filing of teeth, the painting of pictures, or the cremation of the dead.

To the Balinese the cremation of the dead is the most sacred and necessary duty that they are called upon to perform. It is an event so costly that the bodies of less well-off individuals have to be interred in sand, sometimes for years, before enough money can be accumulated by the relatives to bear the cost of the animated, cheerful and beautiful cremation ceremonies.

The day before the ceremony, the effigies of the dead were taken to the house of the priest to be blessed, and there was dancing and the performance of a shadow play, something at which the Balinese are very adept.

Before the cremation the actual remains were watched over by relatives of the deceased who came from far and near. On the day of the cremation the great, tall, extravagantly decorated cremation towers were loaded with these remains and
carried to the burning ground, together with a number of sarcophagi made in the form of bulls and cows. They were accompanied by a long procession of women, carrying offerings on their heads, dancers and an orchestra which played Balinese music which, with its strange percussive effects, resembles bursts of machine-gun fire. Can this be why it is so endearing to Western ears?

The towers, carried by twenty or thirty men, reeled and gyrated as the bearers purposely tried to make the dead lose their sense of direction so that they could never find their way back to the houses from which they came.

Next, chickens were released from the towers and the remains of the dead were transferred to the interiors of the bull and cow sarcophagi which were then filled with offerings by the relatives through a hole slit in the top. Then everything went up in fire and smoke, lit by burning glasses in the afternoon sun.

The following day a great procession escorted the ashes to the sea where they were scattered on the water and the whole host of people bathed in order to purify themselves. This was one of the most exciting and joyous spectacles left to us on earth, not a whiff of formaldehyde. Here, the whole width of the Pacific Ocean separated us from Whispering Glades.

These scenes made it all the more difficult to believe that at least 50,000 Hindu Balinese with communist sympathies had been killed there during the winter of 1965/66 by the Indonesian army with the help of the Indonesian Muslims. Altogether, during this period, the number of Communists killed has been estimated at between 100,000 and a million – the biggest defeat the movement has so far suffered in its history.

I
N THE AUTUMN OF
1969 I received an invitation from John Power, a writer about the Canadian outdoors, to make a canoe trip with him through the wilderness of north-eastern Ontario, paddling down the Yesterday River to the North French, then into the Moose River and down to Moose Factory on the shores of James Bay. ‘I expect a rough go,’ he wrote, and I knew him to be tough, ‘with as many as a dozen portages a day.’

We flew to a place called Timmins with a mountain of gear. Gold was struck there in 1907. In 1964 it became a boom town for the second time when the Texas Sulphur Company made a major ore strike, and prospectors staked every inch of ground with more than twenty thousand claims in a wild mêlée.

When we got to Timmins I still had no boots, because I had just come from Bali. All the shops were shut but eventually I emerged from a cellar to which I had been guided with a pair of bright orange size twelves with steel caps, made especially for the locals, who are always dropping lumps of ore on their toes, by the Gorilla Boot Company – ‘Brutally Strong’.

Then we flew in a tiny Cessna to Cochrane, where there was an 8 p.m. curfew for people under sixteen. The weather was bad: ragged, smoking clouds spread across the horizon and there were violent rain squalls. Below us was the Boreal Forest, the Taiga, which extends without a break in a four-thousand-mile arc from Newfoundland to Alaska.

Next day we flew to what we were told was Rainy Lake on
the Yesterday River in a De Havilland Beaver float plane. Down below rivers stretched away northward like steel springs under a mournful sky. But which was which?

At the lake, disembarkation took place on a boggy foreshore and during it the bag containing John’s cameras and an immense back pack fell in the water.

There were four of us now: two Cree Indian trappers and food for an estimated ten-day journey down a river few people remembered anyone descending.

The two canoes had been flown in already, lashed to the floats of a plane. They were 17 feet long, built of chestnut with canvas skins and were not in good condition. One had been gnawed by a bear and the other had been holed in many places and not very expertly repaired.

Out on the lake a loon, a bird as big as a goose which can dive at 90 m.p.h., uttered an awful, demented cackle. It began to rain heavily and it was very cold. ‘Going to snow,’ one of the Crees said.

The Crees were phlegmatic, adept at overcoming disaster. Mine was called Johnny Smallboy. He had been a member of a Canadian tank crew at Cassino. John’s was called Obadiah Trapper Junior. He was five feet tall and weighed fourteen stone, which meant that he was rectangular, and preferred to be called Spike.

The rations, put aboard at Cochrane at the last minute, were notably lacking in substance. There were only 2 lbs of jam, two tins of condensed milk, 4 lbs of sugar, no flour, except pancake mixture, no oatmeal, only one carton of matches. To make up the weight, however, there was an incredible quantity of fruit juice, potato mayonnaise and ketchup. The supplier had made what could possibly have been a fatal boob. Johnny Smallboy chose this moment to announce that neither he nor Spike had any tobacco. I told him that I would give them twenty cigarettes a day until supplies ran out. They ran out on the seventh day because they exceeded this ration.

The river was about fifty feet wide, the water black as jet and only about four feet deep. There were no sounds except the splash of the paddles and the cold north wind sighing in the tops of the spruce. There were no animals, no birds, not a sign of a fish. If this was the Yesterday it looked like its name; ghostly, gone. But after about five miles the Crees said it wasn’t the Yesterday. We’d been landed on the wrong lake. This was the Wakwayowkastic which no white men and no Indians in living memory had ever been down so far as they knew. It went into the North French. Its name was a Cree word which meant ‘River that Ends in the Sands’. The only stable thing on the map was the Seventh Base Line, a long, straight swathe cut through the forest for hundreds of miles from east to west by surveyors. If and when we ever crossed it we would know what latitude we were in.

The first camp was much like any other. The canoes were unloaded, run up on the foreshore and turned over. The Crees would fell a couple of dead trees with their 2½ lb axes and get a fire going in under five minutes, using wood shavings and one match. In thirty minutes Johnny had cooked dinner. Meanwhile, Spike lopped spruce boughs to make a soft bed under the groundsheets of the tents.

We wrote our journals by the light of a lamp made from the lid of a bully beef tin with melted lard in it and a piece of rag for a wick, the outfitter having omitted to provide oil lamps or candles.

The first night we had four speckled trout for dinner.

Dawn was about six-thirty, pale streaks of light against cobalt clouds. This was the time I liked best, warming myself by the fire, waiting for the tea, while Johnny told me about his life in the woods.

His wife was forty-four. She had had nine children and was now expecting another. When she had four children he used to take them up the North French by canoe to spend the winter at the trapping grounds. One child was born in the bush.
He delivered it. In a good winter he reckoned to trap about 125 beaver, a dozen mink, 50–60 foxes, 60 marten and 75 muskrat. They lived off moose, snowshoe hares, grouse and beaver.

On the second day we came to the first rapids, a series of ten, three of them big ones, more than a mile long and very fast, with more rocks than water in them. Running them was exhilarating, going down at 20 m.p.h. in a haze of spray, the Crees in the sterns using big paddles, or long poles, and we in the bows pulling or paddling left or right to miss the rocks. We had to take care. As Spike said: ‘Long walk Moose Factory. Maybe month, maybe more.’

When a canoe was holed we beached it and the Crees lit a fire, dried the bottom with a piece of burning wood and then plugged the holes with patent cement. When that ran out they used resin.

This was mid-September, the rutting season for moose, and on the second day we saw two magnificent bulls with antlers at the fullest stage of their development, called up by the Crees who could imitate any beast or bird. The third day was tougher. We made a portage over big falls, carrying the gear down on pack frames. As we went, everything we had began to collapse; rucksacks disintegrated, fibre boxes warped, cameras ceased to work, or were lost overboard.

In the forest there were red spruce now sixty or seventy feet high, and in the semi-darkness below, fallen trees lay like giants entombed in the deep green moss. The forest was inhabited by cheerful Canadian jays and we saw osprey, kingfishers and falcons. Beavers were splashing happily outside their lodges. At night the owls hooted madly and Canada geese rocketed upstream against the moon. Also on the banks were blood-sucking insects called no-sec-ums, giant mosquitoes and hordes of black fly.

We lost count of time and distance. It was difficult to know whether three miles or eight miles had been covered
in a day when half of it was spent cutting a way through the bush, not on water at all. We never saw the Seventh Base Line.

The fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth days were the days of the long portages. Already, by this time, we had crossed three major falls and gone down 32 sets of rapids.

With their axes the Crees cut a path through the spruce and pine five feet wide and anything up to one and a half miles long, according to the length of the falls and rapids we were bypassing. Then they transported the canoes upside down with the paddles lashed inside, so that they could take some of the weight on their shoulders. Each canoe weighed 100 lbs, and they carried them fifty or sixty feet up the bank which had a gradient of about 1 in 3, then along the portage without stopping. After this they came back to help carry over the packs which weighed up to 120 lbs each.

It poured all through the day and night of the seventh and the portages were awful, but that night we dried out, more or less, before a big fire of cedar logs.

The big, final portage took one and a half days, out of sight of the river. We were very short of food now. Lunch on the eighth day was a slice of bread and bacon fat; dinner, soup made from ketchup with a slice of bread. We had little left now apart from tins and tins of orange juice and mayonnaise. There had been no time to hunt with the continual portaging and trout were elusive. That night Johnny took a shot at a beaver in the moonlight but missed.

The ninth day was better. After a breakfast of tea with orange juice in it and the last potatoes, the Crees, in spite of spending three hours cutting the last of the long portage, managed to kill three spruce grouse, two of them falling to Spike’s catapult. That night we ate grouse stew.

On the tenth day we reached the mouth of the real Yesterday at noon, and in the afternoon came out in the North French, which was enormous in comparison with the Wakwayowkastic.
Here we had a thin lunch – a spruce grouse between four of us.

The next morning, we set off while it was still dark, in a bitter wind which was coming off the Arctic Circle, down endless reaches with the islands in the river swathed in fog but with the tops of the trees looming above, like finials in a Gothic cathedral. Finally, after six hours, we rounded a bend and saw the Moose River stretching away to Moose Factory Island, Moosonee and the sea.

We landed at an Indian settlement where there were some dilapidated plywood huts on the edge of the forest, occupied by a few Cree families. It was a sad place, with all the squalor of Western civilization but none of the amenities. Inside one of them Richard Angus Chechoo, aged seventy-four, one-time chief of a band of Crees, entertained us to tea, bread and butter and Spam. He had spent the first war in a Forestry unit at Virginia Water and he, too, like Johnny Smallboy, had spent his leave in Aberdeen.

We paddled on down into the beginning of the flood along the shores of interminable islands covered with scrub, with the wooden spire of the church on Moose Factory Island shining in the sun in the distance.

Then we had a long slog across the flooding tide in the main stream, towards Moosonee on the mainland. And then we were in by the jetty among the float planes and the now all-motorized canoes. No one paddled anymore.

As we landed a Canada goose came honking in over the little town, whose only communication with the outside world was by rail or air. Just like Spike, every Indian boy in Moosonee old enough to hold a catapult was out, and from all over the town came the honking of the children as they called to the goose to come down.