Fear Drive My Feet (33 page)

Watute, limping from his pierced foot, his old face screwed up with pain, moved towards
us.

‘Master, look!' he said grimly, pointing beneath a large overhanging limestone boulder.

We followed the direction he indicated. Huddled together were the bones of several
people.

‘What happened? Who are they?' I demanded.

‘Pato 'e talk kanaka – all 'e buggerup long cold (Pato says they were kanakas – they
all perished from the cold),' Watute replied briefly.

It was a salutary, if grisly, warning. It was no use worrying about what might happen
after we got down off the range. The thing to do first was to get down. With an apprehensive
backward look at the pathetic pile beneath the rock, we hurried on.

About half past four we began the descent of the north side. At first it consisted
of a perfectly vertical cliff, down which we had to lower ourselves on the inevitable
vine. This continued for the first three-quarters of an hour or so, and thereafter
it was still almost vertical until we left the grass behind and came to the forest
level. About six o'clock darkness and heavy rain descended on us almost simultaneously.
The old Amyen man who was leading the carriers kept saying ‘Meka! Meka!' and pointing
ahead. ‘Meka' meant ‘house', but when this had been going on for over an hour of
darkness and no house had materialized, we lost patience. We felt sick from the combined
effects of cold, hunger, altitude, and weariness, and had decided to roll up in our
groundsheets and sleep where we were in the bush when Watute hurried up to us.

‘Master, place close to! Master, smell!'

We sniffed, sniffed again. Very faintly, in spite of the rain, and the sweaty reek
of ourselves and the boys, there came the tang of wood-smoke, a smell which hungry
men can detect miles away. Though our shoulders seemed likely to crack with the effort,
we lifted our packs up once more and staggered down the track in the wake of the
carriers, to whom the thought of houses, warmth, and food had given a new lease of
life.

After twenty minutes' hurrying through the rain and darkness we heard excited cries
from the boys ahead and caught sight of flickering lights through the bush. In a
few moments we had pushed our way, stumbling and breathless, through a clump of
thick cane-grass and were in the middle of what appeared to be a fairly large village.

An old man wearing the red-banded cap of a luluai stepped forward into a circle of
torchlight and saluted.

We had no idea that patrols from the north side had penetrated so far in peacetime,
but there was our luluai, as
large as life, giving orders for houses to be cleaned
out to accommodate us. We threw ourselves exhausted on the ground beneath one of
them, too worn out to speak or move for nearly half an hour. Then we hauled ourselves
inside the tiny dwelling, where two of the police, who had recovered sooner than
we had, were already engaged in putting up our bed-sails.

Our first action was to take off our boots, which were sodden, heavy, agony to wear,
and nearly ruined. Then we went over to the other house to see how the boys fared,
whether they all had a dry place to sleep, and if food had been brought to them.
While we crouched round the little fire in the centre of the floor, talking about
the day's walk, some of the village people brought in two huge blackened cooking-pots
full of steaming boiled sweet potatoes, English potatoes, pumpkin, and other vegetables.
The boys squatted round the pots and thrust their hands into the boiling mass. The
smell of food was too much for us: we joined the circle and dived in with the others
two white hands among a dozen or more black ones, and gorged till we felt we would
burst. Then we staggered off to bed. We slept right round the clock, not waking till
ten next morning.

All day it poured with rain, and the cold seemed to creep in on us through every
chink of the house. The ground, the houses, the men – everything looked grey, sodden,
and dispirited. We crouched by the little fire that was burning on a pile of earth
in the middle of the floor, but our aching limbs gave us no rest. When we got up
to stretch our legs we found them almost too weak to support us.

‘ ‘‘Damp rusts men as it rusts rifles; more slowly, but deeper” ' quoted Les. ‘I
can't remember who said that – can you?'

‘No. But he must have been a soldier.'

‘Too right he must have been!' Les said fervently as he drew his knees up to his
chin and then creakingly straightened his legs again.

The village we had come to was called Gombawato, and it was at the head of the Yalumet
River. It had taken us a walk of nearly fourteen hours to reach it, and we had crossed
the range at an altitude of somewhere between twelve and thirteen thousand feet.
We put this information in a brief radio message to Port Moresby, and settled down
to rest again.

We hardly moved from the house all day, for neither of us could stand steadily, but
I was able to dress the bruises, scratches, and cuts of the rest of the party during
the morning. Hardly anyone seemed to have escaped without an injury of some kind,
and Watute's foot was now very painful.

About midday I walked over to the house-police. Through the smoke I could see the
younger ones lying on their blankets on the floor, talking of their adventures of
the day before in the awe-inspiring mountains we had left behind. Dinkila was telling
a story of an argument he had had with an Amyen man. The point of it escaped me,
but it set the others laughing.

Watute and Pato sat together, blankets draped over their heads and shoulders, and
looking like a couple of amiable old chimpanzees as they conversed gravely in low
tones about our best course of action for the future.

Kari sat by himself near the door, sewing up a rip in his loincloth, looking seriously
out into the rain from time to time. I tried, somewhat clumsily, to tell him how
grateful I was for his magnificent work the day before.

He flashed me one of his rare, quick smiles. ‘Something-nothing, master. Me police-boy
– work belong me.' I realized that Kari, in his way, was a truly great person. The
dangers, the difficulties, and the petty annoyances of
our precarious existence never
troubled him: he thought only of his duty and the responsibility which command had
put on his broad black shoulders. I had come to understand why the other boys never
resented the stern discipline he imposed on them. It was not merely his enormous
physical power that maintained his authority: it was an authority which sprang from
a realization by the others that in Kari they had a man who, merely by being what
he was, deserved respect.

No one in Gombawato spoke pidgin, so our only way of talking to the people that day
was to get Pato to put our questions into the Naba dialect, and have the Amyen carriers
put them into the language of Gombawato. The answers, of course, came back through
the same channels. However, the problem was solved by the arrival during the evening
of a young man from another village some hours' walk farther down the valley. He
spoke pidgin English and had been summoned by the Gombawato people as an interpreter.

Our Amyen carriers also spent the day in the village, resting instead of hurrying
back, as we had expected them to. During the afternoon we paid them, in salt, razor-blades,
and lengths of cloth, for their two days' hard work, and told them that they should
have, of course, all the stuff we had been forced to abandon on the range. All in
all, they had no cause to complain of their bargain, but I wondered what they really
thought of these two curious white men who insisted on crossing the Saruwageds in
the wrong season and who had only the vaguest idea of where they were heading. I
suppose that is a question which will never be answered.

I remember these Amyen carriers with affection. They were manly, dignified, and utterly
unaffected. They treated us from the first as equals, unaware of the white man's
traditional arrogance with native peoples. The great
est boon I could wish for them
is that they be left alone for ever in their wild, fantastically beautiful mountains.

Towards evening we set up the radio to see if there was any reply to our message
of that morning. There was, and we decoded it breathlessly, for it would tell us
what our future was to be. To our disappointment it instructed us to withdraw altogether
from the Huon Peninsula, since headquarters considered the risks of remaining there
not commensurate with the value of any information we might be able to secure. It
seemed that things had become just as grim for parties like ours on the north side
of the range as we had found them in the Wain, for of the two men we had hoped to
meet they could tell us only that one had disappeared and the other was at that very
moment withdrawing. The message ended by telling us to use our discretion about
the route we chose to escape by, and suggesting that we should either try to get
back across the Markham where we had crossed it, or make our way to Bena Bena in
the Central Highlands. There was a landing-strip there, and an aircraft would be
sent to fly us out.

To go to Bena Bena we would have had to pass through the country of the Markham headwaters
– country neither of us knew – so we resolved to try to cross the Middle Markham
and return to Wampit, whence we had set out. If we failed in this, we would try to
walk up the Watut Valley to Harry Lumb's camp, and thence to Wau.

The following morning there was another wireless message, which disturbed us a good
deal. It read: REPEAT INSTRUCTIONS TO WITHDRAW OF MY PREVIOUS MESSAGE STOP HARRY
LUMB KILLED BY ENEMY NEAR KAIAPIT STOP MOVE QUICKLY STOP GOOD LUCK.

As we decoded it, letter by letter, our hearts sank. We looked at each other grimly.

‘Well,' Les said at last, ‘they don't put “good luck” in radio messages unless they
think you're pretty much in need of it!'

We sent for Watute and Kari and told them the bad news. They clicked their tongues
with vexation, and looked glum.

‘If Master Lumb was killed in the Upper Markham we had better keep clear of that
country,' Watute said. ‘For Master Lumb knew that country better than anyone else.'

Kari started to speak, and then hesitated.

‘Go on. What were you going to say?' I prompted him.

‘I know,' Watute said abruptly. ‘He was wondering if it was the same party of Japanese
who surprised Pato and me at Wampangan. They said they were going to Kaiapit.'

Les and I looked at each other.

‘It could have been,' Les said.

‘I wish we had put a warning to him in our message.'

‘Well, we have no way of knowing that he wasn't warned, if it comes to that. You know
what Harry was like. He never seemed to be afraid of anything. He was quite capable
of staying over there regardless of warnings.'

I thought of the last time I had seen Harry, when we parted cheerfully on leaving
Wau a month or so earlier. It was a pathetic memory now. We would never keep our
assignment to drink the remainder of the case of beer.

We made it clear to Kari and Watute that our work was now ended, and that our orders
were to save ourselves if we could. They, as the senior men, would have to see that
there was no deterioration in the morale or discipline of the others. They replied
gravely that they understood their responsibilities, then saluted and withdrew.

Despite the injunction to move quickly, we made no attempt to travel that day. We
still could not stand steadily, and would only have collapsed on the track.

The following day we made our first move, to Imom village. It was only five hours'
walk away, but the country was rough and we seemed permanently short of breath. Walking
downhill was more difficult than climbing, our knees frequently giving way and bringing
us to the ground. Watute was still suffering a good deal from his injured foot, which
had been made worse by the roughness of the track.

We found that Imom was under strong mission influence – which is tantamount to saying
that we found a non-co-operative attitude among the people, if not open hostility.
When the war with Germany broke out, a number of German Lutheran missionaries had
been interned; apparently the idea had been conveyed to their congregations that
this was a blow at the missions as such, rather than a legitimate rounding up of
enemy aliens. Then, at the outbreak of war with Japan, when all missionaries were
evacuated, the native mission teachers – or ‘black missions', as they were called
– fled from their stations to their home villages. During this period the native
situation from our point of view was satisfactory, and the black people were friendly
and helpful. After a time the black missions began returning to their work, and the
attitude of the natives changed. When we found them aloof and disagreeable, it was
a pound to a penny that a black mission teacher was resident in the village. The
contrast, for instance, between the helpful courtesy of remote, heathen Gombawato
and the churlish behaviour of Christian Imom is only one illustration which could
be multiplied many times.

Mission interests in Australia have vehemently denied that the German Lutheran mission
played an unhelpful role in New Guinea. The evidence, I feel, does not support them.
After all, the Germans, with their mission, were
established long before Australia
took charge of the Territory. Again, as rivals with the civil authorities for ascendancy
over the natives, they had no particular reason for supporting an alien government
which, at best, merely tolerated them. Something of this attitude communicated itself
to the natives, and some of them talked openly, though not very intelligently, about
a return to German rule.

At Imom we made a tolerable meal from locally bought food, but Dinkila brought our
tea to us with a long face.