Slowly, languidly, a crocodile rose and appraised us with cold green eyes. We decided to go to dinner a little dirty.
Around the mission table with its bare boards and coarse crockery we were gratefully aware of being among Frenchmen; they could have broiled the crocodile out of their pool and given it the flavor of filet mignon. In the kitchen were two Sisters who worked Parisian marvels with taro and yams and a surprisingly good native asparagus. No canned goods here, everything fresh, and that included heart of palm salad pepped up with lime juice. There was some sort of idealized pork, two kinds of birds, a rich, sound claret, and black coffee far too good to come out of a French kitchen. The mission grew its own coffee, and the berries were ground hot from the oven every morning. Incidentally, chicory doesn’t thrive in Papua.
Sipping my share of Australian wine—and it can be good—I was thinking irreverently, “The Fathers manage to do themselves pretty well up here,” when I noticed that Father Rossier had watered his glass to a thin, pale ghost of what every Frenchman must have with his meals or starve. They drank sparingly because wine cost money. They ate well—it cost only labor to raise good crops. On their penny-saving system they smoked trade tobacco, and had learned to love its rank kick. They refused our cigarettes politely.
Father Rossier gathered in the people, and to a scanty audience I gave a lantern-light lecture which Ahuia interpreted to an interpreter. When I lectured the priests on their own infections and commented on the sparsity of the population Father Rossier told me that they were slowly increasing. “And that’s because we have discouraged cannibalism, infanticide and abortions.”
I had heard many stories of some magic weed which the native women used to promote race suicide. I suppose now I wore a cynical smile. “Oh, but it’s so,” he said solemnly. “I have seen it happen too often.” He showed me curled dry leaves powdered in his hand. “Fortunately European women don’t know about this.”
I asked him if he knew the relation between yaws and syphilis. These closely related diseases affect the procreative functions so that abortions are apt to occur. Now these dry leaves that the witch doctors supply might or might not have a mild action. Certainly they could not effect an abortion on a normally healthy woman, because modern medicine has never found a non-poisonous drug that can. I was making up my theory as I went along, but my later observations proved that it was sound.
Next morning, the carriers Connelly had sentenced to serve me took on their loads as Ahuia was going through the last motions of packing my bags. “Look, Taubada!” He held up my extra pair of shoes. One of the priests had spent the night hobnailing the soles.
******
You read of tropic beauty and smile at the flourishes with which a writer attempts to put ecstasy on cold white paper. There are no words in our dictionary too fantastic or farfetched to describe that man-killing climb to the valley of Popo Popo. Milton would have funked it in his blind visions of Paradise, and De Quincey would have given it up for lack of words and opium.
The region takes its name from some jungle-hidden bird that cries “Popo-popo-popo-popo,” a bell-like sound that gives a thrill of music. Paradise as we saw it on those days of puffing and scrambling was always joy to the mind and pain to the body. Thousands of feet up, thousands down, with hardly room for a tiny house on any of the razor-sharp ridges. Down in a Valley of Eden the “Popo-popo-popo-popo” sounded, ringing a welcome to the mission’s resthouse somewhere in the sky.