A Yankee doctor in paradise

by S. M. Lambert

CHAPTER V

JUST THIS SIDE OF THE MOON

In July I decided to lead my own expedition as far into the interior as possible and get a proper picture of infestation in districts remote from the influence of white traders and planters. I had worked like a beaver along the coast, up rivers, into plantations, sea villages, hill villages. My inspectors were always away, leading surveys and campaigns that spread out fanwise across the country. Communications were crude. Canoes, whaleboats and jiggery launches plied their precarious way among the infinite shoals, or lost themselves under lush palisades where an all-wise Creator saw fit to turn on the shower at the slightest excuse.

I moved ahead of my inspectors, surveyed the districts, turned them over to my men and passed on to the next. Although the Government was inclined to look on me as a secret agent of John D. Rockefeller, they offered me a sort of mild indulgence. Our main handicap was supplies, as the Foundation’s Dr. Sawyer, then my over-director, could not believe that such great quantities of drugs were necessary to treat infected Papua. Where was all the stuff going? In Australia, where treatments had been comparatively few, expenditures had been small. Sawyer simply couldn’t grasp the immenseness of that sick population in the Territory. Yet to treat them en masse would have been the only answer. At that time mass treatments had been tried among laborers in Java; but a wholesale curative campaign was unheard of.

Our work had been so heavy that we had exhausted Central Office supplies. Even in the following year there weren’t enough to go around. We had to carry on with what we had.

******

On July 21 I was more than glad to be setting out for Yule Island, a splotch of land some sixty miles from Port Moresby. This island is separated by a thin gut of water from the prodigious jungle-covered mountains that stalk beyond Mafulu to the mysterious border some still call “German New Guinea.” Again we were jogging along on the little Morinda, with Captain Teddy Hillman and his Gin Club in command. With me I had the two boys, Ahuia and Quai. We took with us a quantity of “gear,” which was our term for the variety of things we must carry with us into the field.

A white man, bent on an excursion straight into the thick of Papua, requires several swag bags—one for his bed, mattress and mosquito netting; another for scientific equipment; a smaller bag to hold incidentals. The number of tucker boxes for food depends on the time one spends in the field. There will be no chance to replace anything after the start is made. These must be included: frying pan, teapot, billy-cans, a tin opener, a lantern with kerosene, an ax and an assortment of tinned food. Absorbing topics around a Papuan campfire are the relative merits of different brands of tinned meats, and cunning ways to disguise the taste of tin.

The tins for hookworm specimens, packed by hundreds, were little half-ounce cylinders about the diameter of a silver dollar. The gear made a load for many carriers, burdened too with their own food for the whole trip. And don’t forget the trade tobacco that must be doled out everywhere as strike insurance. We were prepared for almost anything; the going up to Mafulu would be hard.

Getting carriers for these long pulls was always a part of Papua’s labor problem. Ask a Motu boy to pack and follow you into the jungle and he’d begin to shuffle, roll his big eyes and move away. There was puri-puri, bad magic, in those hills out there. It was not “our fashion” to go among the Mondo or the Kuni people. They have enchantments, you die under a spell. The same fear lay across every district border; we had to change our carriers as we went along.

******

Yule Island, flat and green as a dish of parsley, lay separated by a thread of salt water from the distant panorama of tumbled mountains that climbed the wilds of Papua. It was an exotic and frightening beauty over there, peak after peak, their height exaggerated by closeness to shore. The tallest looked taller than Mt. Everest, and more unattainable.

Three white men waited for me on flat Yule Island beach. I recognized two of my inspectors, the Orr brothers, Jack and Ron. Their food supply had been spoiled by surprise tumbles from canoes. They greeted me with unrestrained shouts of joy; they would eat again! The third greeter was Mr. Connelly, the jolly, hard-boiled District Officer. When I mentioned the giant mountains across the stream he said casually:—

“They’re a bit of a climb. When you’ve finished with Yule Island I’ll show you up, part of the way. Business and pleasure. I’ll have to push beyond Mafulu—after a batch of murderers, you know. Come over to the house and we’ll have a spot of tea or something.”

I was no sooner in Mr. Connelly’s house than I heard a strain of sweet, familiar music. An American accent! It was young Mrs. Connelly saying, “Pleased to meet you.” She was a native of New Jersey. How she came here to be the wife of a man who scaled crags to round up murderers was just another in the grab-bag we call marriage. My own wife, after all, was born in Mexico, educated in California—and was now waiting for me in a Port Moresby bungalow.

Connelly knew the ropes, as needs must be when one man combines the duties of sheriff, judge advocate, postmaster, tax collector and justice of the peace in a country where the people are hard to count as wild pigs. After an evening of bridge he told me, casually, that he’d fix me up with the forty-seven carriers I needed. How? Just leave it to him. “I’m Government, you know”—with a dry smile.

During our week’s survey of Yule Island the Orr brothers and I were lodged in the patrol officer’s house, walls and floors of split bamboo, ceiling of nipa palm thatch. The shower bath was two Standard Oil cans (“petrol tins” over there) hung one below the other. Can Number 1 is filled with fresh water, and when you pull a string a plug comes out and empties it into Can Number 2, which has been drilled full of nail-holes to give a fountain effect. The first time you use this Rube Goldberg invention you soap yourself carefully under the spray—and the water gives out. The next time you try soaping yourself in your own sweat, which can’t be done. The third try you just say “Oh, hell,” and pull the string.

******

The Mission of the Sacred Heart has a business name which I have remembered accurately: Company of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Ltd. Its holdings ran all the way from Yule Island to a point some 130 miles distant across the channel, up into the wild mountain-heart of Papua, and its practical label was a key to its practical Christianity. The Sacred Heart was, and still is, about the best mission establishment in the Pacific, and should serve as a model for the numerous jarring sects and creeds—Church of England, Calvinist, Wesleyan, Seventh Day Adventist, London Missionary Society and even Mormon—that confused the native mind with conflicting roads to salvation.

I grew to admire these curiously devoted Fathers, thirty-one in all, who usually put aside their priestly robes for the frontiersman’s rough khaki. Fierce beards relieved them entirely of the soft ecclesiastical look. In little convents, strewn along the broken trails up to Mafulu and beyond, there were twenty-six nuns living the same rigorous life.

There was almost every European nationality in this French order: French, German, Swiss, Dutch, one Italian, one Spaniard. They were understaffed, hideously overworked; in faces around the luncheon table I could see the look of men who were not going to last much longer. They were short-lived because they followed their incessant work without considering illness or the demands of a difficult climate. They all died in Papua. With them I visited two cases of typhoid which they said had been brought in from Port Moresby, despite their efforts to quarantine against the germ. I operated on one Father for a bad case of hydrocele, and on others for injuries and infections common to their hard life.

They had solved the food problem troubling the rest of Papua, which was stuffed with American and Australian canned goods. Here they had their own truck gardens, bountifully yielding, so that they could feed their 120 pupils wholesomely and at minimum cost. There were nearly a hundred half-castes in this school. The Sacred Heart method of dealing with mixed blood was practical.

The half-caste too often comes into the world with no father willing to attend the baptism. Bishop Boismenu, a fighting priest, carried this question to the Government; his persistence was responsible for a law requiring the registration of every half-caste child’s white parent. And, my word, what a hullabaloo! Major Jones-Smith and Judge Brown-White had to do some tall explaining when sons or daughters suddenly materialized at the Mission of the Sacred Heart. One high Government official had a hard time facing his wife and his public; one rich American decided that he had loitered too long and had pressing engagements back in the States.

The half-caste problem is increasing in Papua. When the Melanesian was 100 per cent cannibal his women were chaste; the husband carried an ironwood club, and the tribe was never lax in enforcing blue laws. Poaching lovers were firmly lashed together with vines and laid across the liveliest ant-heap in the neighborhood. Or experienced tormentors would hobble the wandering bride permanently; they would just tie a hot stone under one of her knees. Nevada in the early days was almost as rough with domestic incontinence (if female). And look at Nevada today.

It was a strict mission rule that half-caste children should speak no language but English. Britishers they were; the law had acknowledged them. When they came of age the girls and boys were encouraged to marry each other, or to go into orders. They were to have a respectable place in society, and no handicaps.

I take off my old white helmet to the men and women of the Sacred Heart. There was Sister Magdalena, aged seventy-six. I found her sweet old face bent over a busily clicking typewriter. She had been stone blind for two years. “It was hard at first,” she said, “learning the touch system. But it’s like playing a musical instrument. I write poetry when I have time, and letters home. I’m useful too. One of the girls dictates to me, and I keep accounts for the mission.”

And there was Brother Heinrich, the jolly undertaker. Sallow and malarial, he had the smile of the artist who loves his work and has plenty of orders. Papuan fevers never bothered him so long as he had coffins to build. Bang, bang went his lusty hammer, doing a neat hardwood job. “Don’t forget a solid lid,” I said, coming up to him. Brother Heinrich chuckled and said, “I try not to forget anything. For instance, Doctor, you’ll need lots of brass nails on those shoes, if you’re going up to Mafulu. Won’t you send that pair to me before you go? I’m a cobbler too.”

Mother Ligouri, who presided over the neat little hospital, was another jolly one, round and rosy in spite of hell and high water. Her housekeeping was immaculate; she isolated typhoid cases, and was always in comic despair over sanitary arrangements, primitive latrines, flies and mosquitoes that infected her patients. Brother Heinrich was one of her favorite pests. “I have to shoo him away,” she said. “When anybody’s sick he gets the measurements somehow. I never knew him to fail to have a coffin ready, and a perfect fit. That man Heinrich!”

The day before we set out for the mountains I let Brother Heinrich have my shoes, and asked him if he had me on his list of measurements. “Oh, I can tell your size from your shoes,” he said with a glow of professional pride. That night he presented me with a remarkably fine job of hobnailing.

During the week I had talked to the half-castes, and it gave me pleasure to lecture in English. Already I was looking forward to my surveys in New Guinea Territory, where, I was told, the people understood pidgin English. I carelessly believed that pidgin would be easy to pick up. I little knew.

All I saw of that enterprise on Yule Island, and of its far-flung stations among the peaks and gorges of Mafulu, never failed to remind me of what Herman Melville, who didn’t like missionaries as a class, had said of the South Sea Catholics a hundred years ago. They were to him the great missioners. And they are the great missioners still, as long as they live in the purity of self-sacrifice.

******

Ahuia came to me with the air of a certified cruise conductor; he was wearing his full-dress jumper with the H, and had lilies in his hair. Would the Taubada care to see the natives dance tonight? I wanted to know if it would be any good. Ahuia puffed his chest and shrugged away the commonness of all bush natives. Oh, pretty fair, he admitted, but the girls around here didn’t do a lot of things they did in the East. We passed between aristocratic trunks of betel-nut palms. With each step the drum-pulse was louder, that jungle beat which can stir the same animal-soul that bares its sensuality before the repetitious chant of a camp-meeting revivalist. A slow cadence, tum teetee, tum teetee, tum teetee tum, speeding up to a rapid tum tee-tum tee-tum tee-tum. Light shone above oily shoulders, things moved and tossed like shaggy pillows that had been dyed with every color in the rainbow. Musicians were slapping hour-glass drums.

Then with a gasp I realized what those moving pillow-things were. Headdresses.... Headdresses made of bird of paradise plumes, hundreds of the lovely things flowing and flaming in every bushy ball of hair. Parrot feathers—blue, fire-green and crimson—accentuated the unearthly hues; and cassowary feathers, built up into high crowns like glittering sheaves of wheat....

Men and women danced in two close lines, facing one another. Mouths were red with betel-nut, eyes were fixed, intoxicated. Golden skin flashed through stripes of gaudy paint adorning their hips; golden breasts bubbled through showers of bright shells. Yet this was no blatant exhibition. Each man faced his woman, and if he touched her it was according to the rote and rule of tradition; their passions are never on public show. Bright skins and delicate bodies revealed the Polynesian strain which gives the Motuan his urge to laugh and sin with every change of the moon. Melanesian women drudge at home and let their men wear all the feathers. But the Polynesian wife is nobody’s squaw.

Slim-waisted, straight, demi-nude, more handsome than grotesque in their paint, each man had his girl opposite him. Her arms and ankles were bangled with polychrome shells that tinkled with every suggestive movement. It was sensuality expressed in grace and rhythm. Under the least of grass skirts women’s buttocks wove with sly languor as couples moved in a curious shuffling gait—her hips quivering in retreat, his in attack: the sex struggle, the male forever in pursuit, the female always in flight, yet drawing him on by every allurement within her power.

A voice said, “It’s what Yankees call a Marathon dance. The people of Tsiria are competing with the people of Pinapuka. It’ll last until they drop—into each other’s arms, a lot of ’em.” I looked around to see Ron Orr, my inspector, who had been beating along the coast. “Watch that couple,” he said. A man and girl vanished under the shadowy palms. “They’ll be back after a while, maybe. During the Marathons here it’s the fashion for a man to take the one he picks. But only during this set period. If they forget and break the rule it’s just too bad. Sometimes a married man loses his head and takes his ‘mary’ away for a week end that lasts a month. Then there’s more trouble for the District Officer.”

“What sort of trouble?”

“Well, Connelly’s going up in the hills tomorrow after a bunch of murderers,” Ron said. “That’s the sort of trouble.”

There were no priests hovering about to give the pagan spectacle a disapproving eye. Protestant missionaries, Wesleyans or Church of England, might have broken up the performance, clothed the ladies in Mother Hubbards and sent them home to brood in sanctity—and secrete their vices. The people of Tsiria, possibly, were not among the Sacred Heart’s 8,000 converts; and if not, the Church of Rome, with its balanced system of discipline and tolerance, would bide its time before gathering them in. The people would still dance, maybe with a churchly curb on their orgiac moments—but they would still dance.

Night wore on, drums grew wilder. Everybody was chewing the betel-nut that natives can go drunk on. My good boy Ahuia was chewing, and his eyes were like live coals as he slavered red and gazed hungrily at the dancers. I smacked him on the arm and brought him to his senses. We were starting for the mountains tomorrow, and I didn’t want Ahuia to go native on me.

******

Next afternoon, as a floundering whaleboat took us across the narrow channel toward the looming mainland, I had a comfortable feeling that Brother Heinrich had secretly measured me for a coffin which he’d have to use on somebody else of my size and weight. I might as well say here and now that I have been the undertaker’s disappointment in twenty-one years of knocking about down there. I’m afraid that I offer pretty poor material for Hollywood.

Connelly and I, perched in our whaleboat, were off on a murder hunt; his quarry would be the human type of killer, mine the assassin-worm that yearly laid low more natives than cannibal wars could demolish in a generation. The looming mainland melted to a lace of Papuan bayous; we went on nosing up Ethel River, searching for Bioto Creek, a needle in a haystack of house-high tropical grass. Bloodthirsty mosquitoes welcomed us; we could find the miserable town of Bioto, if we could see it through that buzzing cloud.

Connelly had elaborated on a number of gruesome things which the Fathers had told me. Somewhere along this coast was the Pacific’s only native educational institution, a School of Poisoners, in the remarkably stinking village of Mou. Puri-puri men graduated with honors and knew about arsenic and strychnine to the last dying gasp. They were accomplished in “dead-man’s-poison,” which was a spearhead dipped into a rotting corpse; they made toxic applications by sticking spears through a floor to pierce the sleeper on his mat. If the natives built their houses on stilts to keep out evil spirits, the puri-puri men would crawl under and prong them from below; if they built on the ground, the first malevolent ghost that came along would walk in and do his dirtiest. They were between the devil and the deep blue spear.

Postgraduates of the Mou school had a specialty which required much study, and they prided themselves on it accordingly. It was the snake-in-bamboo trick, worked like this: First get on the confidential side of a certain venomous yellow-striped wriggler, and train him to lie inside a hollow bamboo wand; then look around for a client who wants somebody killed. When the time comes, drop your poison pet into an uncomfortably heated earthen jar; work him up to a frenzy; throw in scraps of clothes or bodily material from the chosen victim. The striking, tormented snake confuses these things with the cause of his pain; so he is ready, he has the scent. Pop him back in the bamboo and turn him loose in the accustomed path of the man who is about to die. The snake, like the elephant, never forgets, according to Connelly and Father Gerbout. By scent he can pick his man from a long file on the trail.

As we fought our way through the mosquitoes defending Bioto Creek the District Officer gestured toward the mountains. The Kuni people were up there—bloody little dwarfs, rather cook a man than fry an egg. The Government holds ’em down a bit, Connelly said, and the priests have tamed a few. But never trust a Kuni behind your back.

Bioto, when we found it, was a tumbledown huddle of huts. At first we couldn’t see a living thing but mosquitoes, then crocodiles, wallowing in the stream or basking on the mudbanks. All the way up the Ethel River we had counted them by half-dozens, too bold and too lazy to roll off the sandspits when we came within thirty feet. Bioto was almost a deserted village because of the mosquitoes. D’Albertis, an early Italian explorer, was the first white man to sleep here; after one night he told his father confessor that he wasn’t afraid to go to hell.

At last a few scrawny natives, naked except for a coating of mud, came ambling in. Their chief made a melancholy speech, but the message was cheery enough. We shouldn’t worry, we’d have our forty-seven carriers in the morning. He repeated this sententiously, as though announcing bad news. The energetic anopheles pecked their way through the netting when we crawled under for protection. Even Ahuia as he cooked our supper looked reduced and crestfallen. He vented his spite by throwing a billycan at a baby crocodile under our house.

Morning blossomed hot and bright; the chief was back with a motley collection of nudes. I saw Connelly marching up and down and telling the interpreter dirty words to say to the chief. “Call him a pig’s tit—no, better go easy on that—but ask him if he can’t count. I said forty-seven and he’s only brought twenty-three. Where’s the rest of ’em?” There was some mysterious form of native strike. Connelly ordered his police to beat the grass for the absentees. When we got up to Kubuna Mission Station, he said, he’d hold court and sentence those bloody runaways to work for me. And at Kubuna that was what he did. The thirteen or so he sentenced might or might not have been the deserters, but they were with me for the balance of that strange month.

We left the bulk of our gear with the corporal’s policeman and went on through reed-grass so tall that it arched over our heads. It was suffocating between those swishing walls, but we were well quit of Bioto. I don’t know whether Ahuia or I was gladder to get away. The priests of Yule had filled me with crocodile stories. The beasts were bolder at nightfall, they said, and they had a bad habit of putting their front paws over the sides of a canoe and grabbing the first native who fell into the water. Once a fifteen-footer, basking in the sun, had challenged Brother George, who was riding a bicycle. Brother George turned his wheel just in time, and for a long span felt the monster’s breath puffing behind. Saint George and the dragon in modern clothes, only this time the dragon had the saint on the run.

Two hours in sweltering grass, then because it was Papua we had to climb 800 feet of ridge and climb down again before we could reach the knoll which was Father Rossier’s mission, all scattered wooden houses around the chapel’s simple cross. Father Rossier, kind, bearded and khaki clad, showed us a little stream down the glen which they had dammed to make a swimming pool. Connelly, Ron Orr and I undressed, cackling that the last one in was a nigger. Then plop! Ron Orr dove into crystal water—and was out again in record time, swearing under his breath. Some bloody fool had left a log in there. Just look at the way it had skinned his wrist. Yes, the wrist was certainly skinned....

Slowly, languidly, a crocodile rose and appraised us with cold green eyes. We decided to go to dinner a little dirty.

Around the mission table with its bare boards and coarse crockery we were gratefully aware of being among Frenchmen; they could have broiled the crocodile out of their pool and given it the flavor of filet mignon. In the kitchen were two Sisters who worked Parisian marvels with taro and yams and a surprisingly good native asparagus. No canned goods here, everything fresh, and that included heart of palm salad pepped up with lime juice. There was some sort of idealized pork, two kinds of birds, a rich, sound claret, and black coffee far too good to come out of a French kitchen. The mission grew its own coffee, and the berries were ground hot from the oven every morning. Incidentally, chicory doesn’t thrive in Papua.

Sipping my share of Australian wine—and it can be good—I was thinking irreverently, “The Fathers manage to do themselves pretty well up here,” when I noticed that Father Rossier had watered his glass to a thin, pale ghost of what every Frenchman must have with his meals or starve. They drank sparingly because wine cost money. They ate well—it cost only labor to raise good crops. On their penny-saving system they smoked trade tobacco, and had learned to love its rank kick. They refused our cigarettes politely.

Father Rossier gathered in the people, and to a scanty audience I gave a lantern-light lecture which Ahuia interpreted to an interpreter. When I lectured the priests on their own infections and commented on the sparsity of the population Father Rossier told me that they were slowly increasing. “And that’s because we have discouraged cannibalism, infanticide and abortions.”

I had heard many stories of some magic weed which the native women used to promote race suicide. I suppose now I wore a cynical smile. “Oh, but it’s so,” he said solemnly. “I have seen it happen too often.” He showed me curled dry leaves powdered in his hand. “Fortunately European women don’t know about this.”

I asked him if he knew the relation between yaws and syphilis. These closely related diseases affect the procreative functions so that abortions are apt to occur. Now these dry leaves that the witch doctors supply might or might not have a mild action. Certainly they could not effect an abortion on a normally healthy woman, because modern medicine has never found a non-poisonous drug that can. I was making up my theory as I went along, but my later observations proved that it was sound.

Next morning, the carriers Connelly had sentenced to serve me took on their loads as Ahuia was going through the last motions of packing my bags. “Look, Taubada!” He held up my extra pair of shoes. One of the priests had spent the night hobnailing the soles.

******

You read of tropic beauty and smile at the flourishes with which a writer attempts to put ecstasy on cold white paper. There are no words in our dictionary too fantastic or farfetched to describe that man-killing climb to the valley of Popo Popo. Milton would have funked it in his blind visions of Paradise, and De Quincey would have given it up for lack of words and opium.

The region takes its name from some jungle-hidden bird that cries “Popo-popo-popo-popo,” a bell-like sound that gives a thrill of music. Paradise as we saw it on those days of puffing and scrambling was always joy to the mind and pain to the body. Thousands of feet up, thousands down, with hardly room for a tiny house on any of the razor-sharp ridges. Down in a Valley of Eden the “Popo-popo-popo-popo” sounded, ringing a welcome to the mission’s resthouse somewhere in the sky.

Up through the giant mass of lawyer-vine with knotted trunks thick and hard as a walking stick and supple as a morning-glory; from their stems exotic orchids hung so richly that blossoms whipped your face as you struggled through greenish twilight. Tree ferns were fine as cobwebs. The trail was like a slippery stairway running through a tunnel of opalescent gauze. Rain sifted over clothes that were bogged in perspiration. Then a small clearing. An awful shriek—What was that? The air was all trailing plumes and angel wings, flying colors that you can’t believe, even when you see them. Birds of paradise, dozens and dozens of them, whirling away to the mysterious nests which no hunter-ornithologist has ever found.

With every hundred feet of climb we seemed to see a new variety, plumed with white and rose and gold. Much higher were the rare blue ones, which they say are worth twenty-five pounds—if a hunter dares shoot protected game. With every flight there was that fierce, dissonant “Caw-caw-caw.” My eyes were tired of miracles; I was aware of the oozing blisters on my heels, the miserable wetness of my shirt. “Oh, go along!” I scolded. “You’re nothing but a lot of painted crows.” We appreciate beauty best from a padded chair.

One afternoon, dead to the world, we flopped down in the resthouse 2,400 feet in air. These resthouses are among the mercies which the priests have scattered for their own long tours and for the comfort of travelers. Little bamboo huts are closed with combination locks; the Fathers give you the combination before you start on a trip. Houses are provided with chairs and beds, and set at distances that measure off a strong man’s endurance for the day. No Alpine traveler, coming upon a hospice of St. Bernard, could have been more gratified than we, sitting in real chairs while we opened blisters in our heels and covered them with adhesive plaster. Tea revived us, and we squatted around the door.

We were over the clouds. Far above them was the crazy pattern of zigzag points and ridges. Everything was angled into steeps without even a hand’s breadth of level ground. Waterfalls cascaded through the glossy jade and emerald. People go crazy in Papua. Why not? All that journey, we had struggled past cliffs honeycombed with caves that were stuffed with orchids and draped with crimson begonias; birds of paradise flew, arabesques through slanting sun. Now that I am an older man, retired and with time to think it over, I wonder if I really saw it. This was not the land of human beings. When I was a small boy my mother used to scare me, singing:—

Up the airy mountain,

Down the rushy glen,

We daren’t go a-hunting

For fear of little men.

We didn’t meet the little men until the day we scaled a higher ridge toward Dilava. Dark figures were stealing toward us across a breakneck stretch of open ground. “They’re Kunis,” Connelly said. This might have caused a shudder, but these tiny people—the tallest was no more than midget-size—were unarmed and mostly women. They carried loads on their backs, suspended by straps across their foreheads; baskets of vegetables, bundles of firewood piled on top, and on top of that a baby. The women were naked except for a G-string. They had chic, pretty little faces; their bodies were curiosities of distortion: powerful thighs, short legs, pigeon breasts, sway backs. Their feet were stranger still, with toes that spread out like the claws of clutching birds. The few men who were with them showed the same anatomical freakishness, the same G-string.

They made gestures toward their fallen loads and let us know that they had come to sell vegetables and not to eat us. I studied them and learned the secret of their odd shapes. The Kuni people never follow the zigzag trails as other tribesmen do. When they cross a ridge they go straight up it, straight down the other side. The continual strain of hillside walking had thrown their whole skeletal structure out of line. When I saw them walking across one of the few level places in the district I was struck by their clumsy waddling gait. Yet give them a mountainside and they speed up like so many goats. They are a study for evolutionists; the effect of environment on physical characteristics. I wonder if their babies are born that way?

During our last day’s approach into this incredible Kuni country some of the trails were no more than wrinkles across mountain brows that were all but cliffs; the soil, where there was any on the surface, had a greasy texture in the wet, and the least slip might grow into a skid, then a giddy fall into the milky fog. The mountains had a way of breaking suddenly into gaping ravines, a thousand sheer feet down to the pouring river.

At last we saw Dilava mission station, like a collection of birdhouses nailed to the crags. It perched on a mat of ground which the priests had blasted off the peak. Away up there, when we had panted to the height and our sweating bearers had thrown themselves down beside their loads, we could look over range after range, up through thin air to Mount Yule and Mount St. Mary—maybe 100 miles away, looming 12,000 feet into calm evening like tall queens, with cloaks of mist that foamed from the cavernous valleys.

(Note from my diary: “If I stay here a week longer I’ll go stark mad and take to writing poetry.”)

Father Chabot had just come from the valley, where they were setting up a sawmill. He pointed down the slopes where small square gardens stuck like colored rags. Naked Kuni people, forgetful of the days when human flesh was their meat, worked like beavers among their growing vegetables. “It’s good for them to work,” Father Chabot said; an echo of the old monkish Laborare est orare.

It was time to gather them for the lecture, so Father Chabot sent messengers to various high points around the ravines. They yelled from cliff to cliff—high, echoing cries: “Come to the mission station! The Doctor is at the mission station!” Nature’s telephone, connected by the shortest way, took hours to bring the people in; they had to go roundabout, because the cliffs were too steep for even Kuni feet to climb.

Father Chabot said much the same thing that Father Rossier had said in the station below. “Before the mission came this district had dwindled to less than two thousand. The Kunis would have disappeared if we had not discouraged cannibalism, infanticide and abortion.” I wondered if the good priests were not fooling themselves. Abortion and infanticide may reduce a population, but cannibalism and continual tribal warfare may be blessings in hideous disguise. They keep the tribes apart. Warfare is a sort of rough quarantine. In times of peace strangers wander in and out, and bring infections with them. Native races die off not through their own suicidal customs, but through diseases introduced from the outside world.

Lecturing that night, my attention was caught by something that gave my audience a troll-like look: several little pigs followed the women with the affection of lap dogs. When the women sat down the pigs jumped in their laps. And what in the world was that one doing? I stopped talking to look again—one of the women had picked up her pig and was holding it to her breast, nursing it. There was a second woman doing the same thing, and a third. This might have taken a deal of explaining, but its reason was purely economic. A sow had died in pig-birth and left an orphan litter.

Taller, darker people who came in for the second lecture—we gave three that night—were as curious to me as the pig-nursing women. The young bucks were wearing corsets, tight-strapped arrangements of bark that squeezed them to the perfect hour-glass figure. I asked Father Chabot if these were effeminates and he chuckled, “The fellows in this tribe never do a lick of work—the women are the field hands. Well, if a woman sees a man with an especially small belly she says, ‘He doesn’t eat much. He ought to be easy to support.’ But he takes off his corset the day they’re married—and she goes on working.”

I had to change carriers again before we went on to Deva Deva. No use arguing; these fellows knew that there was very bad sorcery over the mountains. I paid them off with three sticks of trade tobacco per man. But the thirteen who had run away and been rounded up again stayed faithfully by me. They had to. Before Connelly pushed on he said, “Hang on to that bag of salt. From now on trade tobacco’s no good.” Everywhere I went I found the people stampeding for salt. They would put it in water, rank, and drink it as you would lemonade. When I doled out a spoonful in payment for something there were always children reaching up in hopes that I would spill some. The priests of Yule had warned me not to be too generous with the precious stuff. I might start a high-price epidemic. A Kuni or Mondo or Mafulu man who had his own bag of salt might retire on what we’d call a million dollars. They say that these mountain people drink themselves sick with sea water whenever they get to it. But the Government has forbidden the practice of recruiting them for labor; most of the few who ever reached the coast died of malaria.

The high-price epidemic had already struck Deva Deva. For an assortment of food which included sweet potatoes, yams, taro, pumpkins, bananas, sugar cane, pawpaws and two chickens they unreasonably asked two tablespoonfuls of salt. That wasn’t right. Last year the price had been one teaspoonful, and glad to take it. They were getting spoiled. But had they known it, I would have given bushels of solid brine for one of the delicious okari nuts which they usually threw in as a bonus. These things, in the husk, are as large as lemons; crack them open and you have something the size and shape of a cigar, with the flavor of an almond, only twice as good.

All along the tumbled way I tried to investigate recent epidemics of dysentery. The germs were probably fly-borne to a large extent; also one might blame the local habit of eating with dirty fingers. Though soil pollution was common enough to cause a large hookworm infection, there was stream pollution too, because like many other Melanesians the mountain folk stand in water to perform their natural functions; otherwise, they tell you, the puri-puri man will get some of their bowel movement for his black magic.

In giving out tins to these villagers I encountered a kind of shyness new to me. They hadn’t the least prejudice or tabu against our form of examination, but when Ahuia asked this man or that what name should be written on his specimen he would simper and wriggle and shut up like a clam. Ahuia told me grimly, “He shamed to tell name belong him.” Finally he would manage to cajole the reticent one into whispering his name to his neighbor, who passed it on, whispering. In the land of ghosts frightened men will change their names, often two or three times, to fool the evil spirits of their dead relatives who come searching in the dark. Fiend-haunted natives have so many aliases that they can’t remember the last one, if asked suddenly. I lost a great deal of time trying to pump the name from one blushing warrior. Finally a mission boy bawled out, “Oh, Joni!” (meaning Johnnie)—and the man stepped up.

I found the Kunis only too anxious to listen and obey instructions. They were firm believers in the “se-nake in bell’” theory, and we were magicians who had come to relieve their bellies. There were old women, they said, who could remove the snake by sucking it from your ears, your nose, your navel. Did anybody ever see the snakes? No, Taubada, such magic only removed “the ghost of a snake”—and the serpent was so very tabu that you would surely die if you even looked at him as he crawled out of you.

Jestingly one of the Sacred Heart priests said that the witches were working in competition with the Rockefeller Foundation. That sounded funny; but I discovered that it was true.

******

Ahuia told me that a magician was coming to a house “over there” and had asked to have me see him cure a woman of her snake. It was like a call to a medical consultation. The house over there was a leaf-thatched hut, spooky with faint lights through mountain dark. Among the branches queer birds croaked like frogs.

Inside the dirt-floored room, lit by a hurricane lantern, a nude woman lay on her back. Her abdomen was puffed; it looked like a gastric case, superinduced by intestinal parasites. There were other witnesses, men in the all-prevalent G-string, and among them the black local constable whose services I might appreciate. Dead silence reigned, except for the woman’s painful breathing.

A wizened little man came in quietly. He wore no paint or feathers, and his air was professional, as if he intended to put on rubber gloves and lecture before a class in surgery. A small boy followed with an earthen pot and a basket; he set these near where the woman lay. The witch doctor was businesslike, striking a trade match and dropping it into the pot, his face lit by the red flame. Daintily he reached into his basket and took out dried leaves, which he scattered over the fire. The room was fragrant with smoke. He crouched and said an incantation. Even though he was speaking in the strangest of strange languages his voice had a thick sound, as if he were talking through a mouthful of yams. Suddenly he sprang to his feet, went over to the patient and put his mouth tightly on her navel. There was a series of sucking sounds. He lifted his head and out of his mouth fell a little brown snake. It wriggled across the swollen abdomen, then glided to the floor.

The wizard rose and turned to me with a professional bow. “How was that, Doctor?” “Very good indeed, Doctor,” my eyes replied. The native constable asked the woman how she felt now, and she said, “Oh, so much better!” Even in the dim light it was easy to see what the sorcerer had done. It isn’t hard to carry a small snake in your mouth, if you don’t mind understudying Bosco.

The next day I was giving my own exhibition of magic. We had lingered here long enough to administer chenopodium and Epsom salts and to wash the specimens for observation. In the throng I recognized my rival physician, and he was a long time studying the slides. At last he turned away with a stony face. Was he convinced that my method was superior to his? I doubt it. It takes a great deal to change the mind of an old-school doctor.

******

I was surprised to find that Dilava, Deva Deva and Mafulu ran over 90 per cent infections. This upset all my previous convictions, but when I stopped to consider it, this was not so remarkable. One carrier, coming in from the outside world, could easily infect a village, for these settlements were perched on narrow ridges not over twenty feet wide. In Okaka, for example, there was barely elbow room and no attempt at sanitation. Here, when the natives left home, they must all follow the same trail. They lived like animals, and like animals they died.

If I were a sentimentalist I would think of Father Fastre with a smile and a tear. He was the giant priest who presided over Popolo Mission; he was all brawn, with the great red beard of a bush frontiersman. Sometimes a fey look would come into his eyes; for here is tremendous loneliness for a white man, which neither work nor prayer can quite banish from a mind that consorts with spirits and grows more morbid year by year. But Father Fastre had a sense of humor which saved him, I hope.

When he first talked to me he braced his big shoulders against the guest house porch and told me about the sacred G-string. The G-string is not only a stingily concealing garment; in these mountains it is the mark of a “true man.” With it he is respected, a tribesman in good standing; without it he is a pariah—he isn’t properly dressed, that’s all. With Biblical simplicity they say of the G-string wearer, “He is a true man and belongs to the true people.”

Now Father Fastre and a colleague were the first white men to penetrate this Kuni country, and they were great curiosities because they came in their priestly robes, to impress their faith upon the savages. At Deva Deva they were shown to a native house which was about as private as a goldfish bowl; they were no sooner in it than the dwarfish Kunis came crowding in, gibbering and peering at the strangers in the long skirts. After a spell of whispering one of them stole up behind the priest, who had just leaned over to tie his shoelace. Slyly the little savage lifted Father Fastre’s robe, and went suddenly across the room, propelled by the Frenchman’s big fist. The situation was tense. The onlookers were all armed killers. A dread silence fell. Then the crowd burst into a gale of laughter.

“They were trying to find out if I was a man,” Father Fastre grinned.

One afternoon he told me to take a good look at an approaching native. “A few years ago he brought his little boy to our school and we dressed him up for mass in clean European clothes. His father saw him and flew into a frenzy. ‘I want to take him home,’ he said, ‘he’s not properly dressed.’ When I asked what was indecent about a nice white shirt and trousers the man gasped, ‘But where’s his G-string?’ and made a terrible scene. He wasn’t going to let neighbors say that his son wasn’t of the True People.”

The Mafulu folk divide the world into three parts, Missionaries, Belitan (British) and True People. Up here crocodiles have been killed at an altitude of 5,000 feet and the natives “know their name.” True People have an annoying way of high-hatting unfamiliar things. They merely say “We do not know its name.” They have a name for salt, which is ama. Once they ate it the way native traders from the coast palmed it off on them, mixed with sand. When white salt came they “did not know its name”—but brine hunger got the better of them and they learned to love it. In their gardens mere women are not allowed to plant yams because these are “true gardens,” and women are considered too dirty either to plant or eat the precious vegetable. They are permitted to plant taro, but yam work and yam eating are for True Men. It’s all very confusing, and as ridiculous as some of our civilized conventions.

Ahuia was never quite the man of the world among these stranger tribes. Father Fastre’s jolly Mondos were piling lumber, down below Popolo. The first night we stopped there Ahuia and Quai came creeping up to my door. “Taubada,” they whimpered, “we scared, we like sleep along you.” With no further explanation they curled up on the floor and slept the velvet sleep of the native.

When I asked Father Fastre about this he laughed. “My Mondo boys acted the same way last night. They wouldn’t come within a mile of your boys. You know why that is, don’t you? Witchcraft. They ‘do not know the name’ of strange people, and keep away from them for fear they’ll cast some evil spell.”

Father Fastre could smile at evil spells, but Papua was getting him. One night he stood in front of his mission and looked down over a veil of moonlight. He seemed to be talking to himself. “Ten years ago I could count ten thousand people along those hills. They are gone. Sometimes I hear their voices.”

He told me that he often heard voices. The Bishop had better send him home for a while, I thought.

******

We were a hundred miles inland when I decided that the mountains beyond would offer no new health problems. We had found hookworms enough for ten years. There were plenty of mosquitoes, but no malaria, although conditions were ideal for it. But the Anopheles punctulatus of the coast had not penetrated so far inland. There were no enlarged spleens. Only one reasonable conclusion offered itself—malaria must be a recent importation to Papua.

How Father Fastre’s big Mondo boys could sing! What a splendid chorus of rich, deep voices, the only really native harmony singing I heard in the South Pacific. In other tribes, and on other islands, too often they chant monotonously in unison; or they borrow syrupy chords from mission hymnals and Tin Pan Alley. Here among the Mondos their ballads and war songs were beautiful, soul-stirring things. One of the priests, Father Morin, who was an able musician and a nobleman in France, tried in vain to set down these songs; he failed because the Mondo has quarter-notes which the European scale does not recognize. But it is true harmony—I say this in the face of many learned anthropologists who have decided that there are no chords in primitive music. A troop of naked Mondos, war dancing, swinging sticks as they used to swing spears, filling the air with their big organ-notes, is a sound and a spectacle that fills the heart with rapturous fear.

They marched with me to their boundary singing and holding both my hands as we swung along. I could have done without the hand-holding, for I had heard of a certain honored custom: two men hold the stranger’s hands while a third steals up behind him with a club. Not so these merry fellows, who left me with a cheer and marched away, still singing.

When I left the tuneful Mondos my stride was snappy and sure-footed. The priests had put a brand-new set of hobnails in my shoes.

******

I have snake stories to remind me of that mountain trail. The last three feet of an anaconda was visible in the slippery mud; my foot missed him by an inch; if I hadn’t stopped suddenly with one leg in air, he might have squeezed out my life. Again, when I wandered a little ahead of my carriers—they usually thrashed around so that they scared gaigais away—I felt a whirring under my foot, and something like a tack-hammer struck my leg. It was one of those deadly little striped fellows that the puri-puri men train to bite. Fortunately I was wearing heavy leather puttees....

A crocodile bade us farewell at dusk as we were swinging downriver in a frail canoe. We were moving philosophically along when a native paddler pushed me flat. A scissor-like snout horned up, a foot from where I had been sitting. He had been attracted by my white shirt, extremely tempting bait. Brother Heinrich might have used my coffin after all.

We didn’t go back by way of Bioto. I’d rather die of one crocodile than a million mosquitoes. We went over to the Aropiquina sawmill and picked up a whaleboat for Yule Island.

******

Among the priests of Yule I found Brother Heinrich grinning away his disappointment. I was a pretty tired doctor when the good men put me to bed. Brother Heinrich managed to get hold of my best heavy shoes, and looked ruefully at the soles when he mentioned pulling out the hobnails. In the morning he brought them back. He hadn’t stopped at hobnails. He had resoled them, and beautifully.

All that month of tramping, up to Mafulu and back again, the priests of the Sacred Heart had showered me with these simple kindnesses. They refused all payment and modestly waved aside my thanks. Hereditary Methodist though I am, I honor them as the best missionaries and the best hosts in New Guinea.