We didn’t go back by way of Bioto. I’d rather die of one crocodile than a million mosquitoes. We went over to the Aropiquina sawmill and picked up a whaleboat for Yule Island.
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Among the priests of Yule I found Brother Heinrich grinning away his disappointment. I was a pretty tired doctor when the good men put me to bed. Brother Heinrich managed to get hold of my best heavy shoes, and looked ruefully at the soles when he mentioned pulling out the hobnails. In the morning he brought them back. He hadn’t stopped at hobnails. He had resoled them, and beautifully.
All that month of tramping, up to Mafulu and back again, the priests of the Sacred Heart had showered me with these simple kindnesses. They refused all payment and modestly waved aside my thanks. Hereditary Methodist though I am, I honor them as the best missionaries and the best hosts in New Guinea.
CHAPTER VI
A CHAPTER ON CONTRASTS
In Papua the dryest statistician might easily burst into the literary style of Sinbad the Sailor. At the time of year that folks back in Utica call “autumn” I had traversed great areas of ragged mountains and boggy shores, and had done my best to hold on to my statistical mind in a land where census figures were evasive as blowing chaff. Meanwhile my field units had been working all over the Territory, and the inspectors who led them were often lost to me for months at a time. Aside from my fact-finding studies of hookworm I was following the course of malaria, which is Melanesia’s deadliest blight.
Field technique may seem monotonous to the reader, for it is just a matter of making the same tests over and over, moving on and continuing the motion in another tribe or village. But it was never monotonous to me.
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Compare the mountains of Mafulu with the delightful little village of Gaile, not more than twenty-five miles from Port Moresby. The Gaile folk lived Venetian-style, their houses stilted over tidewater. They were gentle, industrious and generous Motuans, and with no evil history behind them. An invading maritime race, they had built over water to avoid their savage enemies; and the water had always been their blessing, for it carried away the bodily waste that breeds so many worms and germs. Gaile I remember as one of the few truly restful spots I have visited in the Pacific. There were no diseases worth worrying about.