We were now in the midst of the high ranges, and there was no level anywhere—not so much as one could use to lay out a tennis ground. Every hill clasped hands with the next; torrents, foaming white and furious among the ferny green, cut up the ranges into a gigantic pattern of “ridge and furrow.” The mountains nudged and crowded one another; their shoulders, their hips, their elbows were massed like the shoulders, hips and elbows of a human crowd. The peaks ran up into needle points like incredible pictures in geography books; they stuck out battlements, roofs and buttresses into empty air; they sloped at every angle, into every shape. It was the world run through a chopping machine and thrown out at random. And in this place, without a spot where you could set down the sole of your foot in comfort, men lived who had not wings!
The village crowned the impossibility of the scene. It was exactly like a clump of enormous brown toadstools, and it was bracketed—one could not say set—on to the sides of a needle-point peak more like a church spire than anything else. The houses were mere semicircular roofs of thatch, placed upon bamboo floors that were stuck to the mountain by piles in some incomprehensible fashion. Up the peak of this amazing place we were guided by the Koiroros, who kept unpleasantly close about us and seemed resolved that we should not get away from them. As nothing unprovided with wings could have got away from the mountain men in their own country, we did not think of trying, even though it began to be unpleasantly clear that we were in reality not employers of these people, but prisoners.
The Koiroros began to sing as they approached their homes, chanting loudly and triumphantly, with an indescribable undertone of something that—as we understand the word—was not human; something that harked back the ages very near to them and very far from us.
The Marquis heard it too. Tired as he was, he managed to gasp out as we toiled up the frightful slope:
“Flint, if you desire a proof that this Darwin of yours had reason, listen then—listen to the wild beast howling over its preys!”
“We aren’t going to be any prey,” I snapped, being a little cross with fatigue. “And anyhow, the less you talk, the better. They can guess a lot from one’s tone.”
But I must say, when we got into the village itself, onto the slope that seemed to take the place of its Plaza, or Place Royale, or Unter den Linden, I began to feel that we were in a tighter place than I had thought. For I saw something that I had not quite expected to see.
Dug out in the side of the hill and lined with neatly fitted stones, were certain long, coffin-like holes that I knew at once for the stone ovens of the main range people. They seemed to be nearly six feet in length. Now there is only one kind of game that needs a stone oven six feet long to bake it in—man.
Of course, the greater number of Papuan inland tribes are cannibals now and then. I was accustomed to that sort of thing, and had even seen human joints made ready for cooking—not, of course, the killing of the game, which I shouldn’t have allowed for a moment. But cannibalism, among most of the tribes, is not at all an every-day affair; it is the sequel of a big, victorious raid or the end of some unusually bitter private quarrel.
There are tribes, however, who eat man whenever and wherever they get the chance; and it is those tribes who go to the trouble of building big stone ovens, especially designed for cooking human beings. That is why I was not too well pleased to find that we had got into the Stone Oven country without expecting it. I wondered if we should ever get out again. I trusted a good deal to our revolvers: firearms will go far among men who have never seen them—but the mountain tribes are good fighters, for Papuans, and I did not anticipate that it would be easy to get away, if we had occasion to try it.