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IN THE WARMTH OF THE RICH MOUNTAIN MORNING, Max Lansing walked home to his village. It lay in a deep saucer-shaped depression between Père Louis’ community and the Lahgi Valley. To reach it, he had to make a wide traverse westward of Sonderfeld’s property and cross two steep saddles before he struck the path that led over the lip of the crater and downwards into the taro plots and the banana groves and the dancing park. He would not reach it till the middle of the afternoon.
He had a water bottle hooked to his belt and a canvas knapsack filled with food from Gerda’s kitchen and a bottle of Sonderfeld’s best whisky. By midday he would have crossed the first saddle and he would rest and eat by the swift water that came singing down over the rocks from the high peaks. Then he would push on, with neither joy nor impatience, to the small bamboo hut on the outer edge of the village—his home for the years of his subsidized exile.
As he topped the rise that overlooked the plantation, he halted a moment and looked back. He saw the blaze of Gerda’s garden, the nestling of the bungalow under its thatched roof, the long, serried lines of the plantation trees. He saw the work boys moving about like leisurely ants and the tall white figure of Sonderfeld standing at the head of the first grove. He saw them all as a symbol of permanence and possession, a mockery of his own rootless, pointless existence.
Long, long ago he had been fired with zeal for knowledge—knowledge for its own sake, knowledge without thought of gain, profitless except in human dignity and spiritual enlargement. But the fire had burnt out years since, and he saw himself, not great among the solitary great ones, but a poor and tattered pedant, piling his dry facts like children’s blocks, while the laughing, weeping, lusting, suffering world rolled heedless past his doorstep. Without faith in himself and in his work, he found himself without strength for dedication. He could no longer walk happy among the scholars, and he had forgotten the speech of the marketplace. Even his love was a pedantry, dusty and dry beside the welling passion of Gerda.
When Sonderfeld had left the house, he had sat with her at breakfast on the veranda and had tried to recapture the brief warmth of their night’s embrace. But Gerda refused to match his mood. She had talked, cheerfully enough, about the dinner party, the guests, the plantation, the news from Goroka. But when he had urged her to discussion of their own relationship, she had refused, gently but with finality.
“No, Max. All that can be put into words has been said between us. I am here, whenever you care to come. I will be with you as I have always been. But I will not talk—talk—talk! Better to kiss or make love, or simply walk among the flowers together. But why rake our hearts with words that mean nothing?”
To which, of course, there was no answer. Take it or leave it. He had not courage to leave it and he lacked the wisdom to take without question. He must itch and scratch and itch and scratch again, until the warm and willing heart was scarred into a running sore.
He had risen abruptly from the table and gathered his things to leave. She had come to him then and kissed him with that maddening maternal gentleness.
“Don’t be angry with me, Max. I am as I am. I cannot change. But before you go, let me tell you one thing.”
“Yes?”
Let her tell him she loved him and he would be happy again. Let her give him one small hope and ambition would soar again, mountains high.
“Be careful, Max, I beg of you. Be careful!”
“Careful of what?”
Her hands made a helpless, fluttering gesture.
“I don’t know. I wish I did. But after what you said last night, my husband—”
“To hell with your husband!”
He caught her to him, crushing his mouth brutally on hers. Then he released her, picked up his knapsack and without a backward glance strode off, a lost and angry man, storming up the hillside.
When he came to the river, he was sweating and exhausted. It was a long walk at the best of times, but for a lonely and unhappy fellow, it was twice as tedious. He plunged down to the water and felt the humid air close round him like a curtain. A cloud of insects enveloped him. He beat at them irritably with his handkerchief and by the time he reached the sandy hollow near the ford he was free of them.
He slipped off his knapsack, took a long pull at the water bottle and flung himself down at the edge of the clear singing water. He was too tired to eat, so he lay sprawled on his back, head pillowed on the knapsack, looking up into the dappled green of the jungle overhang through a cloud of bright blue butterflies. He saw the flash of brilliant scarlet as a bird of paradise made his mating dance on the branch of an albizzia tree. A tiny tree kangaroo peered cautiously between two broad purple leaves. A lizard sunned himself on the rock beside him, and in the undergrowth he heard the scurrying of small animals, rooting for food.
The thought struck him that in his four-hour walk he had seen not a single human being. This was unusual, for the mountain paths were the highways of the tribes. Since the white man’s law had abolished war and killing raids, there was a modest traffic between the villages in canes and birds of paradise feathers and gum and galip nuts and pigs and the produce of the gardens.
This traffic had been increased of late by the movement of the tribes for the approaching pig festival. Yet today he had seen no one. Because he was tired, the thought nagged at him uneasily. He fumbled for a cigarette, lit it and watched the blue smoke spiral up towards the green canopy.
Then he heard it, distant but distinct—chuff-chuff-chuff—the unmistakable beat of a running cassowary. The sound was unusual enough to interest him. The cassowary bird was native to the high valleys, but the breed was being thinned out by killing and the survivors were retreating into the less populated mountains.
The footsteps carne closer, thudding like the muffled beat of a train on steel rails. Lansing sat up. The bird was corning down the same path that he had followed. He wondered if it would break out onto the beach. He was not afraid, only interested. The big, ungainly bird was easily frightened and would not attack a human being unless it was angered or cornered. The footsteps carne closer and closer. Then they stopped.
He judged the bird was probably a dozen yards away, hidden by the dense screen of undergrowth. He could hear its rustling among the leaves and low branches. Then the rustling stopped, and after a moment Lansing lay back drowsily against the knapsack. He thought he would sleep a little, then eat before he continued his walk. He worked a hollow for his hip in the warm sand and turned comfortably on his side.
Then he saw it.
A yard from his face was a small white snake, dappled with black spots. In the suspended moment of shock he saw the trail of its body in the white sand. It had come from the bush at his back, the deadliest reptile in the whole island. If it struck him, he would die, paralyzed and beyond help within two hours. Cautiously he moved his hand to get purchase on the sand, then, with a single movement, he thrust himself to his feet. In that same moment the snake moved, fast as a flicker of light, to the spot where his head had lain. Its jaws opened and it struck at the stiff canvas of the knapsack. Before Lansing had time to snatch up a stick or stone, it was gone again, a dappled death, slithering into the fallen leaves at the fringe of the bush.
Sick with terror, he stood looking down at the knapsack and the tiny dark stain of the ejected poison. Then he shivered, snatched up the bag and plunged across the ford, heedless of the water that swirled about his knees and hidden stones that sent him half sprawling into the icy current.
Gerda’s parting words beat in his brain.
“Be careful, Max, I beg of you. Be careful!”
Breathless, he scrambled up the steep bank and looked back at the small white beach. It was bare and empty of life. The jungle was like a painted backdrop, motionless in the heavy air.
Then he heard it again—chuff-chuff-chuff—the running feet of the cassowary, retreating into the stillness.
Suddenly he remembered. The cassowary men! They were an old story in the valleys, an old fear among the tribes. They were sorcerers who, by common repute, had power to change themselves into cassowary birds and run faster than the wind. They were the Territory counterpart of the Carpathian werewolves and the jackal men of Africa. The tribes believed in them implicitly and for proof pointed to the claw marks on the soft ground after a nocturnal visit from one of the sorcerers. Newcomers to the mountains scoffed at such rank superstition, but the old hands—traders, missionaries, senior men in the district services—were less skeptical. Each had his own stories to tell of phenomena apparently beyond physical explanation. But all had one thing in common, a healthy respect and a prickling fear of the dim borderlands of primitive mysticism.
Lansing himself had at first rejected the manifestations as pure charlatanry. But the more he studied, the less certain he became; and now, in the eerie solitude of the upland paths, he, too, was gripped by the cold, uncanny fear of the bird-man.
It was late in the afternoon when he came to the village. The mountain shadows were lengthening and the first faint chill was creeping down the valley. He was hungry and tired and trembling as if with the onset of fever. He paid no heed to the curious stares of the villagers but went straight to his hut, crammed a couple of suppressant tablets in his mouth, stripped himself naked and sponged himself with water from the canvas bucket.
When he was clean and dressed in fresh clothes, he poured himself a noggin of Sonderfeld’s whisky and tossed it off at a gulp. He poured another, tempered it with water and stood in his doorway with the glass in his hand, looking out on the village.
The women were coming up from the taro gardens, naked except for the pubic belt, their thick bodies bowed under the weight of string baskets full of sweet potatoes which they carried suspended from their broad foreheads and supported on the small of their backs. In the far comer of the compound a young girl was feeding the pigs. They were blinded so that they could not run away and tethered to stakes of casuarina wood. They grunted and snuffled and squealed as she passed among them with fruit rinds and bananas and taro pulp.
The pigs and the gardens and the children, these were the charges of the women—and in that order. A woman would suckle a child at one breast and a piglet at the other. The men would make the gardens, laying them out, breaking the first soil, marking each patch with the small blunt mound of the phallic symbol crossed with the cut that represented the female principle. But it was the women who tilled them and dug the big ripe tubers that were the staple diet of the tribe.
As for the men, they sat as they sat now, one making a ceremonial wig of fiber and gum and flaring feathers and green beetle shards, another plaiting a cane socket for his obsidian ax, this one chipping a round stone for the head of his club, that one stringing the short cane bow which would bring down birds and possums and the furry cuscus, whose tail made armlets for the bucks and the unmarried girls.
Looking at them there, bent over their small tasks, Lansing thought how like children they were, intent, mistrustful, jealous of their trivial possessions. The second thought came hard on the heels of the first. They were not children. They were adults, intelligent within the limits of their knowledge, bound by sanctions older than the Pentateuch, preoccupied with the problems of birth, death—and survival for the years between.
To the outsider their tasks were trivial, but in the small stringent world of the tribal unit they were of major importance. Let a blight come on the taro patch, the whole village must move to new territory. If the pigs should be stricken with swine fever, they would have no protein in their diet—the ancient island of New Guinea is poor in all but the smallest animal life.
They went naked because there were no furs to give them warmth. They practiced abortion and birth control because there was a limit to the crops that could be raised in the narrow gardens, and because the pigs were decimated at festival after festival by a meat-hungry people, bound, moreover, by the primal need to propitiate a hostile Pig God in whom lay the principle of fertility. They had no written language. They had never made a wheel. Their traditions were buried in ancient words and phrases that even the elders could not translate.
In their narrow, uncertain world, love, as the white man knew it, did not exist. The girl who made the love-play in the kunande would be raped on her wedding night, and her husband would scowl if she wore any but the simplest ornament. In certain villages a man chose his bride by firing an arrow in her thigh—an act of hostility and enslavement.
In this climate of fear, behind the closed frontiers of the razorbacks, superstition flourished like a rank growth and the old magical practices of the dawn people were the straws to which the simple clung for security and the clubs which the ambitious used to bludgeon them into submission.
As he sipped his whisky and watched the small but complex pattern unfold itself, Lansing was conscious of his own inadequacy. Two years now he had lived among these people. His notebooks were full of careful observations on every aspect of their life pattern, yet he was as far from understanding them as he had been on the day of his arrival. It was as if there were a curtain drawn between him and the arcana of their secret life, and unless he could penetrate the curtain, his work would be without significance.
The missionaries did better. The old ones, like Père Louis, did best of all. They came unabashed to make commerce in souls and spirits. They had secrets of their own to trade. They offered protection against the sorcerers, an answer to the ambient mystery of creation.
But when you didn’t believe in the soul, when you were committed by birth and training to the pragmatic materialism of the twentieth century, what then? You were shut out from the sanctuary, condemned to walk in the Courts of the Strangers, denied access to the mysteries and the sacrifice.
He tossed off the dregs of his whisky, rinsed the glass carefully and set it on the table. Then he walked out into the compound.
There was a girl in the village whom he had trained to look after him, to wash his clothes and tidy his hut and prepare his food with moderate cleanliness. He had not seen her since his arrival; he was going to look for her.
First he went to her father’s hut. The girl was not there. The old man was sitting outside the door sharpening a set of cane arrows. When Lansing questioned him, he gave him a sidelong look, shrugged indifferently and bent over his work. Accustomed to the moodiness of the mountain folk, Lansing made no comment but walked over to a group of women bending over a fire pit.
They giggled and simpered and exchanged smiles of secret amusement, but they would tell him nothing. He was irritated, but he dared not show it for fear of losing face. He hailed the women coming up from the taro gardens. They shook their heads. They had not set eyes on the girl. He tried the children, but they drew away from him and ran to hide their faces behind the buttocks of their mothers.
Then, suddenly, he became aware that the whole village was watching him. They had not paused for a moment in their work, but they were following his every movement, eyes slanting and secret, their smiles a silent mockery. They were not hostile, they were simply amused. They were watching a dancing doll, jerked this way and that by forces beyond his control.
Anger rose in him, sour and acid from the pit of his belly. He wanted to shout at them, curse them, strike them at least into recognition of his presence. He knew he could not do it. The loss of face would be final and irrecoverable.
He turned on his heel and with elaborate slowness walked back to his hut. He closed the door and lit the lamp. His hands were trembling and his palms were clammy with sweat. This concerted mockery was new in his experience. Sullenness he had met and had learnt to ignore. Suspicion had been rasped and honed away by the daily, familiar intercourse. This was something different. It was like—he fumbled for a tag to identify the strangeness—like being sent to Coventry. But for what?
He knew enough of ritual and custom to make him careful of their observance. He had crossed no one of the elders. He was aloof from village scandal. There was no reason why they should turn against him. Then he thought of Sonderfeld and of Kumo and of Gerda’s cryptic warning, and he was suddenly afraid.
He thought of Père Louis and the dappled snake and the sound of the unseen cassowary bird, and his fear was a wild, screaming terror. He was alone and naked and defenseless among the secret people in the darkening valley.
Desperately he struggled for control. At all costs he must show a brave face to the village mockery, must maintain the simple order of his studious existence.
He broke out Gerda’s package of food and tried to eat. The cold food gagged him, and he thrust it away. He lit the spirit lamp and tried to work over his notes, but the letters danced confusedly before his eyes and his trembling fingers could not control the pencil.
Then, with the abrupt coming of darkness, the kundus began their maddening climactic rhythm. He felt as though they were throbbing inside his skull case, thudding and pounding till his brain must burst into wild, incurable madness.
Then he knew what he must do if he were to get through the night. He set the whisky bottle and the water canteen on the table in front of him, broke out a fresh packet of cigarettes, pushed the lamp to a safe distance from his elbow and began carefully and methodically to get himself drunk.
He drank slowly at first lest his empty stomach revolt and cheat him of relief. Then, as the liquor warmed and relaxed him, he poured larger tots and used less water, until finally he was drinking neat spirit and the level of the bottle was below the halfway mark.
Long before the drums were silent, long before the singers were dumb, Max Lansing was slumped across his table, with his head pillowed on his unfinished manuscript, one nerveless hand lying on an overturned bottle, the other dangling over a broken glass and a pool of liquor that soaked slowly into the earthen floor.
Then Kumo came in.
All through the solitary orgy he had been squatting outside the hut watching Lansing’s slow collapse into insensibility. He was dressed in the ceremonial costume with the tossing plumes and the clattering ornaments of pearl shell. His long, crescent nose ornament gave him the air of a tusked animal. Tucked in his fur armband he carried a small closed tube of bamboo.
For a long moment he stood over the unconscious man, then with a sudden gesture he lifted his head by the hair and let it fall with a thump on the table. Lansing made no sound. His head lolled into equilibrium on one cheek and one ear. Kumo grunted with satisfaction and took the bamboo tube in his hands.
First he rolled it rapidly between his fingers, then tapped it rapidly on the edge of the desk, making a dry, drumming sound. Finally he held it a long time against the hot glass of the lamp, so that the warmth soaked through the pithy wood and into the hollow center.
Now he was ready.
Carefully he took up his position between the edge of the table and the open door of the hut. Then he bent over Lansing, holding the butt of the tube in one hand, in the other its cap—pointing downwards, six inches from Lansing’s face. With a sharp movement, he pulled off the cap and stepped backwards. There was a soft “plop” and a small dappled snake fell onto the desk.
Maddened by the noise and the movement and the heat, the snake struck and struck again at Lansing’s cheek. Then it slithered off the table and disappeared in the shadows of the hut.
Anesthetized by the liquor, Lansing felt no pain and made no movement. Kumo stood a moment looking down at his victim and at the twin punctures just below his cheekbone. Then, as silently as the snake, he, too, went out into the darkness, and soon, over the beat of the drums, the villagers heard the thudding feet of the cassowary bird.