“Ahuia, what was he seeing?” I whispered, because the natives know so much of devils. Dark eyes were expressionless in the white night. “Maybe he see nothing, Taubada,” he whispered.
In three days I finished dosing two hundred Goaribaris. I had found that newcomers bore the heaviest load of worms, reversing a prevalent medical theory that plantations were infected and villages clean. Labor was bringing disease from the towns to the farms.
The plantation that was sanitated by prostitutes and model latrines, worked by tame cannibals and haunted by invisible things, disappeared in a dust cloud as our lorry rumbled away toward the unbelievable cliffs of Hombrom Bluff. When I spoke of ghosts to Archie McAlpin he turned his steel-gray eyes the other way.
We slept at the little inn at Sapphire Creek, where the specters wailed again, if only in the imagination of the English landlady whom I treated for a slight attack of alcoholism. Poor woman, she had raised two husbands and fourteen children, and had been a rough Florence Nightingale to the sick miners in the last flu epidemic. She stared up from her pillow and said, “No, Doctor, I’m not seeing things—only what’s all around us, all the time. Strange things happen in Papua.” She closed her eyes to shut them away.
******
Hombrom Bluff hangs over the seared scrub of flatlands below. All Papua is like that, a vast bear-rug, shaggy and tumbled in a hundred folds; man is the louse that must crawl up and down, down and up, to cross these endless entanglements. Craning my neck to look up Hombrom’s forehead I saw the change in vegetation from strangling tropic vines at the base to temperate evergreens that shagged its top. Blinking at three thousand feet of it, I said to Archie McAlpin, “How do we get around to the Sogari District?”
Archie said, “We don’t get around. We go over.”
They brought us horses and I mounted clumsily, being thirty pounds too heavy for the little shaggy animal. Then it was up, four breakneck miles of cliffside trail that was seldom more than a yard wide. It would have been a hard scramble for a man, but my Papuan horse must have been bred of a goat. On the one side we were elbowed by monstrous vines; on the other side loosened pebbles flew into empty air. At one high twist the forests were sliding down to Port Moresby harbor, where the reefs were fine spun lace, tattered over the expanse of lapis lazuli sea. Another turn and one of the world’s great waterfalls, Rona, joined diamond necklace to diamond necklace as it met the wild Laloki River, slicing through savage green.
Now at the top we dismounted on a narrow ridge. “What’s that lake over there?” I asked Archie McAlpin. The lake was a Venus’ mirror, framed in the lips of a dead volcano. Archie’s eyes were still as the lake; he stood silent at the marge of a cliff. Then I heard it again, heard the queer babble in Motu. I turned and saw that it was Archie, speaking to the sky. I whispered to Sefton, “Is he a bit off his head?” Sefton answered gravely: “No. But that lake over there is where dead men go. Archie’s saying the invocation. It keeps ghosts from following us. You can’t get a native to go within a mile of that lake. They know what’s good for them.”
Perhaps the lake had put its curse on me too; maybe it didn’t like to be photographed. When I was remounting my horse the saddle slipped and left me dangling in midair. Two hundred and thirty-odd pounds of me hung by a creaking stirrup. Quick-thinking Chris Kendrick caught me in time and shoved me back into the saddle. What I liked best about Chris was his way with an emergency.