A village consists of three houses, one of them 100 to 150 yards long and 30 yards wide. These are “crocodile houses”; the main entrance is a gaping mouth, the rear narrows to a long tail. A corridor runs full-length; small cubicles open on either side, in the less pretentious dwellings, and each cubicle suffices for an entire family. But the largest of the houses is a sort of clubhouse where the men live and teach pubescent boys the arts of Delta manhood. In this building there is a smaller door halfway down the passage; beside it a niche contains an altar painted with the frightful face of a devil-devil, and in front of it is an offering of human skulls.
I did not quite believe the grisly tales of peddling women’s hacked bodies around the sandspits and offering choice cuts to willing purchasers. They said a lot of things about these miserable creatures. As to cannibalism, the Government had hanged so many of them for it that if they ate “long-pig” at all they must have conducted their banquets with Masonic secrecy. Yet I saw the pile of skulls around the devil-devil altar. The interpreter told me they were “skulls of ancestors.” Perhaps.... I had a mental picture of Missionary Chalmers, whose bones had been very hard to recover, according to one eyewitness.
We were quite unarmed. The man with the cap and cartridge belt seemed to exercise a remarkable control over the other natives. Along the line of publicity he was another P. T. Barnum. After his fireside chats the people came slinking in, droves of them, milling around the imported magician who could take snakes from the belly. We didn’t recover many snakes, for our job was to make microscopic examinations and determine the ratio of infection. However, from a lad named Komo, I recovered 107, and Kenny Fooks did better still. Now and then as I looked over my scrawny audience I would see a man with clean skin and good muscle; and I would know that he had just returned from indentured service on one of the plantations.
Kaimare houses looked more like crocodiles than the Goaribari jumbles. In going through one of their larger buildings I found a sort of sanctum, completely shut off. As I started through the door my guides, who had been pleasant enough, suddenly showed their teeth and attempted to block my entrance. I pushed my way through; perhaps my prestige as a magician saved me from rough handling. Then I jumped back. The room was full of crocodiles, big ones, little ones, on the floor, crawling up the walls. I blinked, and saw what these things really were—woven of some sort of pliable reed, they were artfully modeled; and as I sighed my relief I remembered scraps of what Cushing, who lived among the Zuni Indians, had written: “Primitive peoples generally conceive of everything made ... as living ... a still sort of life, but as potent and aware nevertheless and as capable of functioning....”
There were more human skulls. I decided to get out.
******
In the Bamu country beyond, I saw the most repulsive people in all Papua. The Bamus live in mud, and nature seems to have fitted them for their environment. They are as skinny and long as dead eels, and appear to be split clear to the breastbone in order to give their storklike legs a chance to hoist them out of the muck.
No white man can stay long in this blighted country without a feeling of extreme depression and hopelessness for the ill-favored branches of the human race. It was fortunate for my peace of mind one morning when our canoe swept into a deep estuary and I saw something that blossomed like a flower garden in a city dump: a lakatoi from the Gaile region! A big, seven-canoe one, and a crowd of laughing, gesturing, bargaining Motu men busily trading with the Delta folk. The shore was bright with pots and jars, the water was jammed with loose logs which the savages had floated down from faraway hills, hundreds of miles from Mudland. A curious trading.
There was a carnival air. Even the Goaribaris puckered their jackal faces into a smile. I asked a Motu trader if he wasn’t getting tired of it; and didn’t he want to go home? He laughed and answered in effect, “And how!” Soon the hot December wind would be blowing homeward to fill their coco sails and take them blundering back to their clean little Venice. Then the long truce would be over and the Goaribari would be his old sweet self again.
I was glad when the Purari Delta and I parted company. If professional work had called me back I would have gone, but not without a secret wish for some cleaner, greener land. This is probably the lousiest place that God ever made and didn’t quite finish.