Rick found his voice. "I've seen pictures, but they didn't tell even part of the story. This is fantastic!"
"It's the most wonderful job of engineering I've ever seen," Scotty agreed. "And when you think that the engineers are primitive people, with only hand tools, that makes it even more wonderful."
Angel Manotok had seen the terraces before, he said, but added, "I'm glad to see them from the air. You can understand now why Santos said there was no place to land."
Rick certainly could understand. The only level places in the entire valley were the flat surfaces of the terraces, and no terrace was large enough to land on. In fact, most terraces were too small even for a carabao, the native water buffalo, to drag a plow across them. The Ifugao rice planters had to farm their terraces by hand.
There was no use looking for a landing place in the immediate vicinity of Banaue.
"We'd better take a swing down the valley, just to get a good look, then head back for Baguio," Rick said.
"Good idea," Scotty agreed. "We need to lay some plans and then get busy. Can you fly fairly low?"
"Yes. There's room enough in the valley to make turns, so we won't get trapped. Let's go down and look."
The town of Banaue was easy to find. A double row of stores was situated on a single unpaved street atop a slight plateau in the valley bottom. The Sky Wagon sped over it, bringing the storekeepers and their few customers running out to look.
"The Ifugaos live in villages around the valley," Angel said. He pointed to one or two of them, clinging to the mountainside between terraces. The huts were of straw bundles, discolored by smoke and dust. "The stores have kerosene, thread, matches, tobacco, salt, oil, perhaps a little cloth. The Ifugaos do not need much—or, if they need it, they do not know that they do."