The stamping out of yaws is largely a matter of intensive campaigning. But what will happen when the fight is won? Will syphilis slip in to take the place of the spirochete it could never meet—on equal terms? That is another doctor’s dilemma.

******

The morning after we heard the planters’ ghost stories I sent Kendrick to ride ahead for preliminary inspection of the rubber plantations. On a rough sea or a jungle trail, Chris was at home. I made short surveys along the trail, resting my raw posterior when I could. Then horseback again, clenching my teeth at every bump on the saddle-sores. Imagine a Coney Island roller coaster magnified a hundred times, and you have our slide and scramble, up and down, down and up, to attain an elevation of 3,000 feet. Down, down would go the coaster on a grade so steep that a fly, if he tried it, would fall over on his nose; and I marveled again at the adhesive footing of my horse. On the final upgrade I spared my buttocks and skinned my heels, for even the horse surrendered.

Now the rubber trees were all around, above and below me, their coarse, hard leaves like green glass that blinded the eyes in afternoon sun. Underneath was a grotto of soft light, upheld by pale trunks like pillars of snakeskin. Naked men worked in silent preoccupation, sharp knives making incisions in the bark; neatly they would rip down paper-thin slices, and the tree’s milk-white blood would trickle into cups. Watching, I was thinking: they are natural surgeons. Down the ages they have learned so much, dissecting human flesh with the razor-edges of split bamboo. Train men like these to use the knife to save instead of kill, and what couldn’t they accomplish for their people?...

The man nearest to me turned. His wooly hair, his sloping brow, his long, hooked nose told me that he was a Goaribari. I looked at his companions. All Goaribaris, with that undeniably Hebrew profile which gave them the name “the Lost Tribes of Israel.” But these were different from the scrawny cannibals I had seen on the hemp plantation. They were fatter, better-muscled, and their brown skins were beginning to show silk. They were not newcomers, and the planters had taken care of them. Back home, where they pursued the jolly business of going to war and dining on the enemy, they hadn’t eaten very regularly. On the farms the white man had fed them, and done his best to teach them sanitary ways; an uphill job among primitives who were naïve as cattle in their bodily functions. In subsequent surveys all over the Territory I could tell, almost at a sweep of the eye, the men who had been on plantations. They were the upstanding, healthy specimens.

Rubber plantations have a smell of their own, something like the aroma of fried overshoes. It drifts from the factory where the sap is being smoked and reduced to the wide, dirty-gray ribbons that go forward to market. Here my cannibals worked like hiving bees, swarming in and out of the door on the commonplace business of supplying crude material for the raincoat trade. I looked around and saw Chris Kendrick, smiling and self-assured, pushing his way through the throng.

“You missed something yesterday afternoon,” Kendrick said. “The Koiaris came down and staged a raid on the Goaribaris. A lot of workmen were loafing in a field, then a naked devil was in the midst of them, poking away with a long spear in either hand. There was just one of him, mind you, and there must have been twenty Goaribaris. They may be tough bastards in their home towns, but here they were taking it like frozen lambs—till somebody ran in with a shovel and a hoe handle. Next you knew the Koiari was making for the woods, naked and howling, shaking his long spears.

“But the Goaribaris caught him and—what do you think?—turned him over to the management! What the hell did he care? He’d got his man.” Like so many of the fiercer tribes, Koiaris kill because murder is a proof of manhood, and a warrior who has not bloodied his spear is laughed at, even by the women.

“I got a snapshot of the fellow he left behind,” Kendrick said, and showed me the print he had developed. A broken body lay in the scrub. The plantation manager came up just then and grinned, “We buried him deep. His brother Goaribaris might take a notion to eat him, you know. Of course, they’re pretty well fed, but.... Yo-hum, farming’s so full of little problems like that!”

******