The Sorcerer's Stone

by Beatrice Grimshaw

It was dark in the marea, yet not so dark but that the Marquis and I could see about us. We had been inside this New Guinea temple, or club-house, or Parliament building—you might call it a little of all three, and not go very far wrong—for over half an hour, and our eyes were getting accustomed to the gloom.

There were thirty or forty men in it, squatting about the floor, or lying on the bamboo shelves they used as beds. In the brown dusk of the unwindowed building, they seemed to melt into their surroundings like ghosts, for they were brown too, and wore no clothes save a bark loin-cloth. You could see the whites of their eyes, and their bead necklaces, and the halos of colored feathers they wore in their hair—little more. They were smoking, chewing betel-nut, and spitting its blood-red juice out on the floor—grunting, scratching, staring at us. They had heads like a soldier’s fur busby; their bodies were small, according to white men’s standards, but they were notably well-made and muscled, and evenly developed. Most of them had wooden spears and tall war-bows lying on the ground within reach; and the walls of the marea were covered with clubs, shields, spears and bunches of barbed arrows.

The scene was old to me—old to weariness. I had been in these temples, or others like them, more times than I could count, recruiting boys for some island trip, trading, getting food. It was true that I had never been in this especial district of New Guinea, but I did not see much difference between the savages I knew and the savages I didn’t know. And anyhow, I had long since lost interest in them, save as a means of making money.

But the Marquis, I think, felt it to be the moment of his life.

There he sat, on a pile of our baggage, as on a throne, holding his head erect, and swelling out from the chest even more than usual—which is to say something, for the Marquis is six feet four, and weighs near eighteen stone. He had come the whole way from France to study—what do you think? Magic—of which he had heard there was plenty in New Guinea. So there is: it is the greatest nuisance in the country, and I for my part would as soon think of going out to look for red ants or for stinging-tree. But the Marquis took what he called a scientific interest in the occult—which meant that he was bored for want of a little honest hard work to do, and didn’t know it—and I had had bad luck with my last prospecting trip into the interior: lost four carriers (clubbed and eaten) and two mates (blackwater fever) and found nothing.

So I was rather glad to take on the Marquis, when he turned up in Port Moresby wanting a resident of the country to find carriers for him and lead a trip through the country lying about the coast. I thought I might light on payable gold after all—I’ve always had an idea that there might be something in the Kata-Kata country, and I thought, too, that I could do with a quiet, peaceful, easy sort of trip for once, after the kind of thing I had been having.

Quiet! Peaceful! Just wait till I have done.

It looked peaceful enough that evening, at all events. We had had a fairly long tramp to get to the village—which is celebrated all over Kata-Kata as the headquarters of local sorcery—and had not arrived till sundown. The Marquis, on hearing that the Kata-Kata people were not cannibals, had insisted on sleeping in the marea instead of in our tents. It would be better for his purpose of studying the natural man and his connection with the occult—so he said. I thought it might turn out in his seeing a little more natural man than he wanted, since the Kata-Kata folk were by reputation a nasty lot, and had been man-eaters ten years ago, though the Government had sent punitive expeditions in often enough to reform them since then.

Unless the Marquis was asleep, or eating, he never stopped talking. His English was not quite English, but you could understand it all right; at any rate, he did not talk like a Frenchman on the stage. He was talking now, and I was not listening closely; it went in at one ear and out at the other. The village men, crouched on the ground, chewed, and spat red, and looked out at him from under their sullen brows.

They did not like us very much, it struck me. They were not accustomed to white people up there, except with punitive expeditions, which do not exactly smooth the way for those who come after.