Father Fastre could smile at evil spells, but Papua was getting him. One night he stood in front of his mission and looked down over a veil of moonlight. He seemed to be talking to himself. “Ten years ago I could count ten thousand people along those hills. They are gone. Sometimes I hear their voices.”
He told me that he often heard voices. The Bishop had better send him home for a while, I thought.
******
We were a hundred miles inland when I decided that the mountains beyond would offer no new health problems. We had found hookworms enough for ten years. There were plenty of mosquitoes, but no malaria, although conditions were ideal for it. But the Anopheles punctulatus of the coast had not penetrated so far inland. There were no enlarged spleens. Only one reasonable conclusion offered itself—malaria must be a recent importation to Papua.
How Father Fastre’s big Mondo boys could sing! What a splendid chorus of rich, deep voices, the only really native harmony singing I heard in the South Pacific. In other tribes, and on other islands, too often they chant monotonously in unison; or they borrow syrupy chords from mission hymnals and Tin Pan Alley. Here among the Mondos their ballads and war songs were beautiful, soul-stirring things. One of the priests, Father Morin, who was an able musician and a nobleman in France, tried in vain to set down these songs; he failed because the Mondo has quarter-notes which the European scale does not recognize. But it is true harmony—I say this in the face of many learned anthropologists who have decided that there are no chords in primitive music. A troop of naked Mondos, war dancing, swinging sticks as they used to swing spears, filling the air with their big organ-notes, is a sound and a spectacle that fills the heart with rapturous fear.
They marched with me to their boundary singing and holding both my hands as we swung along. I could have done without the hand-holding, for I had heard of a certain honored custom: two men hold the stranger’s hands while a third steals up behind him with a club. Not so these merry fellows, who left me with a cheer and marched away, still singing.
When I left the tuneful Mondos my stride was snappy and sure-footed. The priests had put a brand-new set of hobnails in my shoes.
******
I have snake stories to remind me of that mountain trail. The last three feet of an anaconda was visible in the slippery mud; my foot missed him by an inch; if I hadn’t stopped suddenly with one leg in air, he might have squeezed out my life. Again, when I wandered a little ahead of my carriers—they usually thrashed around so that they scared gaigais away—I felt a whirring under my foot, and something like a tack-hammer struck my leg. It was one of those deadly little striped fellows that the puri-puri men train to bite. Fortunately I was wearing heavy leather puttees....
A crocodile bade us farewell at dusk as we were swinging downriver in a frail canoe. We were moving philosophically along when a native paddler pushed me flat. A scissor-like snout horned up, a foot from where I had been sitting. He had been attracted by my white shirt, extremely tempting bait. Brother Heinrich might have used my coffin after all.