Fear Drive My Feet (31 page)

We left Kiakum with some regret. Our quarters had been comfortable and the people
friendly, and it had been a place of wild, magnificent beauty. We would probably
never see it again in our lives, and we felt sad to think it as we looked ruefully
at the plot of ground we had already turned up to make ourselves a garden. The plot
seemed a symbol of man's incurable optimism, even in the face of every possible reason
for being pessimistic.

We could find no track to Mogom. We struggled round grass-covered hillsides, through
patches of bush and old long-abandoned gardens. Once we descended into a gully, were
unable to climb the other side, and had to retrace our steps several miles and try
a new approach. At four o'clock we reached the spot where the Kiakum boys said they
had found Mogom three years before. None of them had been into this part of the country
since then. Now there was only one house. It showed every sign of being in use, but
its owner had apparently fled at our approach. We checked the place on the map and
found that we were certainly standing on the spot where some years earlier a patrol
officer had put a dot for Mogom village. The kanakas had moved, that was all: in
this wild tangle of
country it would be useless to search for them, who knew every
inch of it and could elude us without effort.

We studied the country farther north for signs of habitation, and for a long while
we could see none. Blue mountains, fold upon fold of them, cold and distant, were
all that met our gaze. Then we found a clear patch of country with just the faintest
wisp of smoke going straight up to the sky, and, almost simultaneously, we picked
out two large gardens. We knew then that there were people living higher up the valley,
and our hopes of reaching the north side rose.

With some difficulty we persuaded our Kiakum people to stay the night with us, so
that they might carry our gear as far as those gardens. Even the prospect of substantial
rewards did not arouse their enthusiasm, so we warned Kari to keep a careful, though
unobtrusive, guard upon them in case they attempted to leave us silently as we slept.

Although we walked all the next day we advanced only another four or five miles.
The country, already rugged and difficult, became increasingly so as we moved up,
but once the higher part of one of these valleys was entered, there was no alternative
but to follow it to its head. To cross the ridges which composed the sides was not
feasible. Notwithstanding the steepness of the ridges there were many gardens, showing
how fertile the soil was and how extensive and uniformly good the native agriculture.
The neatly fenced plots of corn, sugar-cane, and sweet potatoes, terrace-like round
the valley sides, were a remarkable sight. The natives, it seemed, understood the
problem of soil erosion in this country of steep slopes and heavy rainfall, for all
large trees that had been felled were carefully laid across the line of drainage,
to reduce the amount of soil carried off by surface water.

About midday we were astonished to hear someone calling out to us in pidgin from
the valley below. To our joy and amazement we were overtaken about ten minutes later
by Pato, whom we had imagined dead or captured at Wampangan. With a grin all over
his lined old face he told us that after he lost contact with Watute he had tried
to creep away, but had been detected and chased, with shots whistling all round him.
It had taken him a long while to shake off his pursuers, but he had finally made
his way to his home village of Gumbum, arriving there pretty well exhausted. He had
had to rest there for a couple of days.

Pato's return had a wonderful effect on the morale of the party. Dinkila the irrepressible
jumped wildly up and down on the track, giving piercing whoops like a Red Indian.
Pato would be invaluable in negotiations with the natives we hoped to find, for they
would speak the Naba dialect, we supposed, and he would be able to interpret for
us.

In the late afternoon we came upon Amyen village – so far unmarked on any map – at
the end of a track we had been hopefully following for the last couple of hours.
It was built in much the same way as the more ‘civilized' villages – with the houses
grouped about a small clearing. This was better luck than we had dared to hope for:
people who lived in a compact group like this would be easier to find and deal with
than those who lived miles apart in scattered homesteads.

About a dozen men were waiting in the village to receive us. There was no doubt that
they had observed our approach afar off, for all the women and children had been
sent away and the houses had been cleared of all goods and chattels. Since the place
had never been visited before by government officers, there had naturally been no
village officials appointed, but it was not hard to distinguish the leading man.
He was old, and of fine, upstanding carriage,
and he advanced to meet us with dignity
and grace. His was the type of personality that commands respect from anyone, black
or white.

He said something that was unintelligible to us.

‘He wants to know why we are here,' Pato said.

‘Tell him we wish to stay in his village for a while, but that we will not harm his
people or touch his pigs or gardens,' I said.

The old man inclined his head gravely to me, and then turned to Les, who had walked
forward with a large handful of salt. He took it, tasted it, smiled his approval,
and then, not to be outdone in generosity, called to his companions, who hurried
forward with great bundles of sugar-cane cut in two-foot lengths. It was thick, and
dripping with juice, and we tore the skin off it with our teeth and sucked the sweet
sap to quench our thirst.

Formalities were over. Police and natives joined in the eating of cane, exchanged
tobacco, and, though not understanding a word of each other's remarks, chattered
amiably. The old headman took Les and me by the hand and showed us a house for ourselves. When
we pointed to the police and other boys, he indicated a large house for them nearby.

The buildings had been made with great care and cunning. This village we estimated
to be nearly eight thousand feet above sea-level, and a freezing wind blew down at
night from the Saruwaged mountains. To cope with this the natives had built their
houses some four feet off the ground and roofed them with pit-pit grass from eight
inches to a foot thick. The walls were made with strongly laced strips of bark, in
which was a small doorway. Then, round the whole house, another bark wall with a
small doorway in it was built, stretching from the edge of the roof to the ground.
The two openings were carefully placed so that they were not opposite one
another,
and one had to crawl on one's stomach to get in. Not only the cold wind but almost
all air of any sort was excluded, and the huts were quite dark inside. What the atmosphere
was like in there after a fire had been burning is better left to the imagination.

The women and children started to drift back into the village in twos and threes,
and we were pleased to see them, for it showed they trusted us. Despite the cold,
they looked healthy – fat and well fed, and with clean, glossy skins. Very few sores
were to be seen, and I did not notice a single case of yaws. These natives had a physical
peculiarity we had noticed before among people in the highest mountains – namely,
extreme muscular development of the buttocks and thighs, which gave them a slightly
deformed appearance. There was not a single piece of cloth to be seen, but the men
wore a strip of beaten bark cloth round their waists and enclosing the genitals,
while the women wore a very short petticoat of rushes. Both sexes had capes of beaten
bark. I tried one on, and found it as soft as a blanket, and very warm. The only
disadvantage I could see about it was the vermin that infested it.

The old man was very reluctant to help us in our trip across the range. It was the
wrong season, he protested, and if a big storm came up while we were on top we would
all assuredly perish. However, after more than an hour's session with him, Pato translating,
we persuaded him to let us have a try, and lined up his men to pick out the fittest
for use as carriers. We selected fifteen fully developed men who seemed to be in perfect
condition. Anyone with signs of a physical defect we rejected, lest he should prove
a liability on the mountain.

Since we would have only fifteen carriers, it was clear that we would have to abandon
a large part of our gear, so we rewarded our Kiakum carriers with tinned meat, cloth,
knives, and other things useful to them, with
such liberality that they were staggered.
They were really sorry to see the last of us when we sent them off home. All the
next day was spent preparing for the journey. The natives cooked large quantities
of sweet potatoes for themselves, and parcelled them up in leaves, explaining that
it was often impossible to light fires up above, so they always took the precaution
of cooking their meals in advance. I felt sorry for them having to depend on food
like sweet potatoes for a journey such as the one that lay before us, for the water
content was so high that one had to eat a prodigious quantity to get an adequate
meal, and after an hour or two on the track one felt empty. One might be distended
at twelve o'clock, and starving again at one.

We took stock of our own rations and found that the only things we had plenty of
were tinned meat and powdered milk. There were practically no biscuits, jam, or
flour left, and the tea and sugar were almost exhausted too. Dinkila made a couple
of dozen pancake-like objects out of the remaining flour and some powdered milk,
and these, with the tinned meat, were to be our rations for the crossing, with a
few tins of Marmite from the medical kit.

We sent a radio message to Moresby saying that we were going to make our big effort
in the morning, and then packed the wireless very carefully into its box. If anything
happened to it we were finished. We knew, of course, that it would get a certain
amount of rough treatment on the mountains.

At about four o'clock, the clearest hour of the day, Les and I walked up to a gentle
rise behind the village, to search the Saruwageds for any secret we could wring from
them. Remote, cold, incredibly high and distant-seeming, they frightened us. Their
icy stillness possessed a secret no human heart could share. No wonder the natives
held superstitious beliefs about these mountains. It would have been better if they
had remained always mist-shrouded –
never showed themselves morning and evening in
this fashion, naked in all their inaccessibility. We realized with fearful hearts
that our lives, and the lives of our natives depended on whether we could master
the range.

As we stared into the distance the faintest vapour of cloud appeared in front of
the highest peak, became thicker, and was joined by others. Before we realized it
the whole range was covered in a swirling mist, thickening every second into black
clouds. We turned to walk back to the village, and saw the lightning flash, while
thunder rolled and echoed down the valley. Outside the house the police were watching
the storm too, their black faces expressionless. But I could not bring myself to
ask what they were thinking.

VIII

WE LEFT
Amyen early next morning. The first couple of hours led through gardens,
some planted with sweet potatoes and sugar-cane, others abandoned. The system of
shifting agriculture employed by these people necessitated clearing a new patch of
ground every few years and letting the old gardens revert to forest to recover their
fertility. We also passed many tiny lakes, like fishponds in a landscape garden.
They had been formed when water collected in depressions dissolved in the limestone.

Then began our approach to the range itself. We were off the foothills and advancing
upon the Saruwageds, using as our route a long steep razor-backed ridge which climbed
ever up and up. In less than an hour we had left the open country behind and entered
the moss forest. It was like going out of the sunlight into a dark cavern. The trees
were encased in green spongy moss that oozed moisture. The moss festooned the branches
and encrusted the trunks – in some places it was up to eight
or ten inches thick.
There was no soil at all in the accepted sense of the word – just a spongy moss-covered
mass of rotting vegetable material into which we often sank to the thighs. Even at
its firmest the ground felt like sponge-rubber under our feet. How deep this mass
went we could not tell, but we pushed a sharpened eight-foot pole full length into
the ground without encountering any resistance. The silence was unearthly. There
were no birds or insects – the only living things we saw were possums and little
kangaroo-rats. The footfalls of the party made no sound; and even a shout sounded
flat and dull. A curious effect of this atmosphere on both the natives and ourselves
was a tendency to speak only in whispers.

In places the ridge, maintaining its north-north-easterly course, became so narrow
that we were forced to straddle it and work ourselves forward on our hands. How the
carriers managed remains something of a mystery to me to this day. In some parts
we took half an hour to move forward a hundred yards. And it seemed that worse was
to follow – for each Amyen man had a length of vine rope over his shoulder, for use
‘when the road became hard'.

As we advanced, the timber, still moss-festooned, became more stunted and twisted.
All the time we were crawling either over or under it, or squeezing between branches.
This was exhausting enough for Les and me who were carrying only our packs and Owen
guns, but it must have been almost unendurable for the carriers, with their awkward
loads slung on poles between them. We saw with apprehension that the wireless, in
spite of the greatest care, was knocking against tree-trunks and branches.