Ring of Fire

by Lawrence Blair; Lorne Blaire

  Experience is the name of the game, and surviving the first fight is the hard part. It is more a battle of style and speed than of brawn or luck. They are quick learners, and some cocks go on to vanquish more than a hundred opponents before they themselves miscalculate and die. Losers instantly have their spur leg amputated with a machete, and we were shocked to find that a cock which even for a moment turns and runs has instantly lost. Losers are also eaten. Victors, on the other hand, are wined and dined around the community, given the place of honour at the eating circles, and generally behave themselves insufferably. Occasionally, a cock is such a winner that despite being a potential goldmine for its owner it is reprieved from further battle and enters the mythology of the tribe as a sort of Spartacus Chicken.

  With the continual stench of blood, the din of animals, Ma’badong chants, the roaring crowds and general confusion, the days and nights began to melt into a sort of homogenous limbo, but as the ceremonies moved towards their height we noticed that Ranteallo’s 24-year-old niece, Rala, had begun behaving oddly. She would periodically become possessed with rage, strip off much of her ceremonial clothing, and tear about the Rante beating anyone who would stand still long enough with a knobbly bamboo cane. The children baited her into further wrath until, just as suddenly, she would snap out of it again and return to her former, demure self. The Tominahs and even her uncle seemed to think this behaviour was quite to be expected on an occasion such as this, with so much soul energy flying around.

  Ranteallo himself was looking increasingly unhinged; and, now I come to think of it, so was my brother. We were all being swept into a maelstrom of energy which was beyond anyone’s ability to control or even explain. With so much happening, and no central authority, Lorne and I were constantly harried by the attempt to film only the crucial events, which appeared to erupt spontaneously at any time of the day or night, while conserving the precious little film stock we had put aside for the intended Bugis film. This sense of responsibility was now being seriously eroded by the continuous Ma’badong chants, and by our increasing desire to surrender to, rather than to observe objectively, the wave of history into which we now felt ourselves being helplessly, anxiously, gathered.

  On the final tumultuous day, foreign visitors began arriving: two English girls, daughters of country parsons, who had hitch-hiked round the world and about 10 Japanese tourists who moved cautiously in a close-packed pod bristling with lenses. There were also two French anthropologists, a raggedly effete group of Dutch and American missionaries from opposing Christian denominations politely vying for the Toraja’s attentions, and the splendid Werner Meyer, looking like the Cheshire Cat in safari costume. There was also the party of representatives from the Indonesian President Suharto in Java. The delirious atmosphere hushed slightly as their column of official jeeps snaked its way down into the Rante. The dignitaries were led to a VIP balcony from where they inscrutably observed the goings-on from behind their mirrored sunglasses. It was they who would decide whether such rites should be prohibited as too economically wasteful, or else encouraged as a possible attraction to the future tourist industry.

  Ranteallo had already confessed to us that much of the problem of fixing a date for the rites had also been the laborious process of raising money from the banks in Makassar. ‘Forty times I made that ride there and back – in the bus, not the jeep like you two,’ he told us. ‘But I finally borrowed the money against four future years’ harvests of rice!

  ‘Maybe it has been wasteful,’ he continued. ‘Maybe it’s now time to be wise virgins, and save.’

  ‘How wasteful?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, when my grandfather went, more than a thousand buffalo were sacrificed, and the death-village, which was twice as big as this, was completely burned down. But the Dutch stopped us from doing that at later funerals. They said it was economically stupid and they would only allow us to burn down the death-house after a noble’s funeral. Then the Indonesian government wouldn’t even let us do that.’

  Panoramic visions of the whole village circle going up in flames while our cameras captured the moment danced before our eyes.

  ‘Well, could it be, sir,’ I broached, leafing furiously through my dictionary, ‘that since this is the last Big One it might be, er, acceptable to send these 60 houses to the stars with – his Highness, your dad?’

  The Javanese dignitaries, who would have disapproved of the suggestion, were already stirring to depart in their jeeps for Makassar to catch their plane home. They seemed more than content to skip the final episode – the half-mile procession on foot to inter the king’s body in the death-cliffs. This left just three hours before darkness in which to follow and film the culminating procession to the burial-cliffs, and to return to the Rante to cover whatever pyromanic tendencies we might have managed to rekindle there.

  ‘Not a hope,’ said Ranteallo, but there was uncertainty in his voice. ‘Perhaps,’ he continued, ‘perhaps something should burn. . .

  ‘The death-house, then?’ Lorne queried, referring to the least ambitious of all the structures in the Rante.

  ‘Each one of these big houses costs the equivalent of about two blue-eyed buffalo,’ Ranteallo explained. ‘We can take most of them apart and use the materials again – which is what the government wants us to do.’

  ‘But you’ve already sacrificed hundreds of buffalo,’ I said. ‘Isn’t that the chief waste?’

  ‘Ah, no, although they do represent food and, well, family prestige, all these sacrifices are essentially offerings to the gods. How could such an offering ever be wasteful?’

  ‘How much is the death-house worth, then?’ Lorne persisted. Considerable discussion, interlaced with esoteric mathematics, resulted in the general agreement that it was worth about the equivalent of one very fat sacrificial boar.

  ‘It is like this,’ Ranteallo conceded. ‘If you provide the boar – your sacrificial gift to the funeral – then we will match the gift by burning the death-house anyway, as we used to.’

  We realized this would be an appallingly large slice out of our budget, and certainly a piggish way to treat a boar. It was also, we knew, a slight manipulation of events: in our first test of choosing between the interests of purely ‘documentary’ objectivity, and those of cinematic drama, we came up wanting. Yet we consoled ourselves with what we took to be a furtive glint of triumph in Ranteallo’s eyes as he accepted our pig money, and swore to us that he would not burn the house down before we could make it back from filming the king’s burial in the death-cliffs.

  The boar’s squeals lacerated our conscience. Briefly. And as the dignitaries stiffly walked towards their jeeps and their ride home we prepared again for battle: to film, photograph, and record sound, while keeping up with the uproarious final procession to the cliffs. Keeping up, and close to the sarcophagus, was no easy task, since it travelled along a narrow raised causeway between deep wet rice-paddies.

  Surrounded by the balconies of the Tau-taus, the bodies of the dead lie in rectangular vaults hollowed out of the rock.(LAWRENCE & LORNE BLAIR)

  At the death-cliffs the Tau-Tau lining the balconies were looking appropriately terrible, staring down with their freshly painted eyes.

  Puang Sangalla’s Tau-Tau now carried his ceremonial keris and his cane. Its arms clutched these objects as they were individually passed up the ladder to its niche: followed by its disembodied head, with a physiognomy very close to that of the photographs of the deceased. At the top they were re-assembled again into the macabre manikin which would house his earth-bound spirit. Much higher up, an 80-foot bamboo ladder precariously met the small square opening to the chiselled vault. We were to discover that it was just large enough to hold a corpse and two breathlessly claustrophobic busybodies.

  ‘Come on,’ said Lorne, as I hesitated at the foot of the cliff. ‘Ranteallo said it’s OK, and the ladder is perfectly safe.’

  ‘Yes, but he isn’t going up it,’ I replied sourly.

  Ranteallo was sta
nding nearby at the front of the crowd, urging us on. ‘Yes! Yes! Film for history,’ he was saying. ‘Quite safe. Be careful!’

  The ladder was undulating like a sea serpent as the king’s coffin, already 30 feet off the ground, was arduously borne upward suspended on shoulder-straps between three men. The bamboo rungs, though wide and strong, were loosely lashed with unreliable cordage, and Lorne’s and my first simultaneous step onto the lowest rung resulted in it slipping its knots and depositing us both heavily in the mud – myself for the second time in less than 20 minutes. Everyone went wild with laughter again, except for the three men above us, who received such a jolt that they nearly released their macabre cargo onto our heads.

  Connected by our infernal sound cable, and distributing our weight over as broad an area as possible, we crawled upwards again, like bears pretending to be spiders. By the time we caught up with the three men at the top of the ladder, they were attempting to heave the coffin into its grotto with a series of hefty swings which caused a wave motion to be generated in the ladder, very nearly sending us all to the ground 60 feet below. For breathless, white-knuckled moments the five of us clung there while the rhythm abated, then three of us laughed loudly, one of us scowled, and the other nearly lost his liquids. The king’s body, together with a number of priceless gold and bejewelled kerises attached to the scarlet wrappings, was handed into the grotto, but just as the carved wooden cover was about to be hammered into place behind it, Lorne announced that it was imperative to film the door being closed from the inside.

  The shrill creak of the hinges as we were closed into the suffocating darkness of that cliff-top grave was a terrifying sound. It had something of the squeals of the boar beneath our house a few hours earlier, whose execution we had paid for, but declined to witness. To me, it also rang of the distinct possibility that it would not creak open again – and that the next sound would be that of quickly hammered nails!

  These things always take a bit of time – angles, speed of door closing, creak and so on – but this seemed an eternity. When we finally did make it back to the ground, palpitating and soaked with sweat, there was no sign of Ranteallo, and much of the crowd had already dispersed on its way back to the Rante. The English girls, as I recall, were still faithfully standing by the camera we had set up for long shots, having been asked to press the button at appropriate moments when we were not in frame.

  Anxious to film the final ‘fire’ scene, we desperately tried to overtake the tail of the throng making its way back along the narrow causeway, but our legs were betraying us.

  By now we were amongst a group of riotous children, and I asked one of them if the festival were now over.

  ‘Yes, all finished,’ he chirped. ‘Just burn down death-house.’

  He scampered nimbly ahead through the crowd with his friends leaving us trapped behind a leisurely army of elderly women.

  ‘He did promise, didn’t he?’ Lorne mumbled.

  ‘Well, pasti means something like “for sure”,’ I answered.

  We rounded the final clump of bamboos in a sprint – until my knees gave way completely. Lorne stood rooted to the spot, squinting furiously through his monocle. In front of us was ruin. The death-house had been transformed into a smoking carpet of a few scattered embers. It had been torched quickly, gleefully, unconstrained by any outsider’s opinions of just how or when it should be done. It had been so quick and thorough that only a few people now remained around it, staring glassy-eyed, and the Rante itself already seemed oddly quiet and deserted. In fact many people had turned in and were asleep, before dark, as if in trance; others had already started for home, and would be walking all night.

  Abu was absent, and would not reappear for a further 36 hours, so we had time to watch the painful disintegration of the space-arc village and the departure of lines of subdued barefoot guests, laden with meat and buffalo horns.

  We squatted together next to the ashes of the death-house, surveying the dissolution of the Rante and ruminating on what would have been a uniquely dramatic ending to our sequence. Close by squatted a very young Tominah whom we had often seen behind the older priests but had never talked to. He addressed us now for the first time, in far more lucid Indonesian than we had ever heard from his elders.

  ‘Do you know why Toraja houses are built with those curved roofs?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Lorne said wearily, ‘we do. Your ancestors descended from the stars in them.’

  ‘Ah, perhaps,’ he responded. ‘What about the shape of our buffalo horns?’ He gestured at the dog-eaten hoofs and roots of buffalo horn which stretched before us. ‘We’re a buffalo culture, aren’t we?’

  ‘According to our anthropologists,’ I replied, even more wearily.

  He rounded on us with spirit. ‘Your anthropologists laugh at us for saying we came from the stars. They do not think we may mean the “inner stars”. The old Tominahs say that this crescent-moon shape means the bottom arc of a great vertical circle of our lives – the section at which we are all most deeply plunged into matter. It’s to remind us that we sweep down from the upper world, slide round the bottom of the circle, and sweep up again, no trouble, if we have any sense.’

  Our young Tominah friend had disappeared by sunset, and it was well after dark by the time Abu returned, together with Ranteallo, jerking about in the front seat like a clownish version of his own Tau-Tau. They were all grins and seemed to be on top of the world. A stack of empty bamboo Tuak tubes rattled around in the back.

  ‘Presents for my wife!’ Abu gesticulated wildly. Then, revealing his terrible teeth in his grin-cracked pirate’s face, he went on unconvincingly: ‘Sorry so late. We got lost.’

  ‘Sorry about death-house,’ Ranteallo joined in, flapping a hand and exhaling a miasma of fermented rice. ‘I lose all control when people know it will burn. Nearly burn down some other houses as well.’

  ‘We rest for a week now,’ he went on. ‘We sleep and dream. And then we dismantle the Rante and sell or use the materials – I don’t know quite how or what for yet but, first, sleep and dream.’

  We returned to spend our last night on the top floor of the now abandoned community house, in what was now the distinctly eerie Rante. Abu, as was his unshakeable wont, slept rotundly upright, like a benevolent corpse, behind the wheel of his jeep.

  Early the following morning we loaded our equipment aboard, and left that ghostly cluster of space-arcs embracing the reddened circle of standing stones. The most persistent image is of the forgotten yellow crane. Weeks earlier, around the advent of the Ma’badong dancers, it had been abandoned by its relay of inexpert operators, and had ceased to scream. It now stood motionless, upright, next to the stone which it had still failed to raise, and which lay forlornly dangling over its hole.

  That monolith to Lasso Rinding Puang Sangalla, the last great king of the Star Children, was still lying in the same position when I next visited the Rante – 11 years later.

  After eight miles of rough driving, we reached the local highland town of Makale, and the only petrol-pump for 100 miles. We had filled our tank, and were eating at the open food-stall, or warong, just across the street when a dilapidated petrol-truck pulled in to top up the filling station’s reservoir. Its Toraja driver had left the job to the attendants, and had sat down at our warong for a meal, when I witnessed a carelessly tossed cigarette-butt from a passing cyclist ignite the concrete floor surrounding the pump and the petrol-truck with flickering blue flames, like those on a Christmas pudding. The various attendants and hangers-on departed at great speed, and Abu, Lorne and I rose abruptly and began backing away into the warong. The truck-driver, on the other hand, tore across the street, through the rising blue flames, and leapt into his cab. After a few heart-stopping moments the old engine coughed into life, and he managed to accelerate the loaded vehicle through the flames out to safety. The blue flames were quickly quenched with buckets of earth by the attendants, who crept back sheepishly, and the driver was soon calmly ea
ting his soup with us again. It looked like a Hollywood film stunt – until we realized with chilling certainty that none of us anywhere near the petrol-pump would have survived if the truck had gone up.

  So, at the very last moment of our very first film, we nearly got the fire we didn’t want, and we began to feel more sanguine about the pyromania we had tried to incite the night before. We may not have watched the Toraja dynasty ascend through a flaming village circle, but we had witnessed one of its sons, very close, leap through a flaming hoop and land on his feet.

  It was with a certain sense of foreboding – as if we had seen an omen – that we descended from this mountain fastness to the domain of the Bugis, where we knew we had just two months left to find a prahu to carry us eastwards before the monsoon set in…

  9. Joseph Conrad, Almayer’s Folly (Harmondsworth: Penguin,1984), p. 9.

  Spice Island Saga

  The Bugis were amongst the great seafaring tribes of Southeast Asia. Mentioned by Melville and Conrad, they were the scourge of the East Indiamen seeking the treasures of the Moluccas archipelago. They were the bejewelled and silken-turbaned villains who coloured the pirate archetype of our Western imaginations, wielding their blades and their sea-skills like demons, and bequeathing us their name for our nightmares. Yet, long before we clashed, the Bugis had possessed a highly complex written language, in which every letter looks rather like the cross-section of a different but closely related spiral seashell. They also had tales which recounted the trials and explorations of their Sea Prince heroes who, through numerous incarnations, led their tribal fleets through unknown waters and kingdoms of dragons and witches, whirlpools and man-eating birds, and forests of half-beasts and half-men. In length and breadth these sagas belittle our Iliads and Odysseys, yet few scholars understand them and few have ever been translated.

  For a millennium or so the Bugis have followed the monsoon trading cycle – surging east on the west monsoon all the way to Aru, at the forbidding lip of New Guinea’s swamps, and west again on the east monsoon beyond Borneo all the way to Sumatra.