Lost in Shangri-la

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  When the anthropologist Margaret Mead learned about the people of the Baliem Valley, she saw a connection between “the distant past and the future towards which men are moving.” She wrote: “These are clearly human beings, like ourselves, entrapped in a terrible way of life in which the enemy cannot be annihilated, conquered, or absorbed, because an enemy is needed to provide the exchange of victims, whose only possible end is another victim. Men have involved themselves in many vicious circles, and kingdoms and empires have collapsed because they could find no way out but to fall before invaders who were not so trapped. Here in the highlands of New Guinea there has been no way out for thousands of years, only the careful tending of the gardens and rearing of children to be slain.”

  By evoking the name of the peaceful paradise in Lost Horizon, war correspondents George Lait and Harry E. Patterson had indulged in a calculated fantasy. Their readers longed for a Shangri-La after a daily diet of war news. Yet the reporters couldn’t have dreamed up a more ironic name if they’d tried. The Baliem Valley was a beautiful and extraordinary place, but it was no heaven on earth.

  COLONEL ELSMORE’S SPECULATION about earthquakes notwithstanding, no one knew how people had come to live in the valley or how long they’d been there. One possibility was that they were descendants of people who’d lived on the island’s coast and were driven inland by subsequent arrivals. Equally mysterious was the source of their beliefs and customs.

  Yet clues to the past could be found in oral myths told around their fires. The first lines of a Dani creation myth, translated by an outsider, were: “In the beginning was The Hole. Out of The Hole came the Dani men. They settled in the fertile lands around The Hole. Then came pigs. The Dani took the pigs and domesticated them. Next came women, and the Dani took the women.” People who lived near the agreed-upon location of The Hole called themselves iniatek, the originals.

  Another myth described how, after leaving The Hole, humans became separate from other creatures of the valley. At first, the myth explained, humans came out of The Hole with birds, bats, insects, reptiles, and forest mammals. The assembled creatures asked the first man, called Nakmatugi, to differentiate among them. He organized them by type and gave them individual identities. At first he placed the birds and men together. But the birds thought otherwise, so they flew off and left their brothers on the ground.

  The natives’ belief in an ancient link between man and birds was a recurring theme. The myth of Bird and Snake describes the two creatures arguing about death, immortality, and the fate of mankind. Snake insisted that men should return from the dead, just as snakes could shed their skins and be reborn. But Bird said men should stay dead, like fallen birds, and other birds would smear mud on themselves to mourn. To decide which belief would prevail, Bird and Snake had a race. Bird won, so men, like birds, must die. People took the fable to heart. Women smeared their bodies with mud when mourning, and the weapons, ornaments, and other trophies taken from enemies killed in battle were called “dead birds.”

  In the natives’ myths, mankind’s early existence in the valley never featured an earthly paradise or a Garden of Eden. Violent death and hostile alliances dated to the beginning of time. When people emerged from The Hole, one myth claimed, a fight broke out and killings occurred. The victims’ families joined forces and said, “Let us take revenge on our enemy together.” They did, and when the enemy retaliated, the cycle of war never stopped.

  The people of the valley also had a legend called Uluayek. It told of spirits that lived in the sky over the valley, and of a vine that hung down to the ground. Long ago, according to the Uluayek legend, the valley people and the sky spirits climbed up and down the vine to visit one another. Some said the sky spirits had long hair and light skin and eyes. Some said they had hairy arms they kept covered. No one knew for sure, because the spirits had stolen pigs and women, and the people of the valley had cut the vine, ending contact. The Uluayek legend claimed that one day the sky spirits would replace the vine and climb down again.

  The spirits’ return would herald the End of Days.

  THE CLUSTER OF huts the Gremlin Special passengers saw shortly before the crash was a village the natives called Uwambo. When the plane first roared overhead, the villagers—members of the Yali tribe—were busy with their daily chores. The sound of the low-flying plane sent them ducking for cover in their sweet potato fields or running to hide in the surrounding jungle, which is why Margaret didn’t see any natives near the huts.

  The people of Uwambo had seen planes before, especially during the previous year, as Colonel Elsmore and other pilots made regular flights over their homes. Still, the natives didn’t know what to make of them. Westerners speculated that the natives thought the planes were giant birds, but the people of Uwambo knew how birds soared and turned and rushed through the sky, silent except for song or cry. Planes didn’t look or move or sound like birds. Some native children thought they might be large men with their arms spread. Few if any imagined that they carried people inside.

  One thing the natives knew for certain was the sound the planes made. They used their word for noise, ane, pronounced “ah-nay,” and attached suffixes—woo or kuku—that approximated the engines’ drone. Planes entered the native language as anewoo or anekuku.

  As the passengers aboard the Gremlin Special looked through the windows searching for natives, a Yali boy named Helenma Wandik watched the anewoo from his hiding place in the jungle. He would always remember that this particular anewoo seemed to be flying especially low to the ground. His cousin, a teenage girl named Yunggukwe Wandik, who’d recently been given her first pig, was working in the sweet potato gardens when she saw it. Fearful, she fell to the ground and grabbed the legs of a woman working alongside her.

  Both Helenma and Yunggukwe thought the anewoo circled twice in the little valley, then pointed its nose toward a place they called the Ogi ridge, near a mountain stream they called the Mundi. Neither saw it plow into the trees, but Helenma wondered why he heard thunder on such a clear day.

  WHEN IT GREW dark the night of the crash, the people of Uwambo saw flames coming from the place on the Ogi ridge where the anewoo had disappeared. A village leader named Yaralok Wandik crept through the jungle along the spine of the ridge to see what was happening. As he approached, he caught wind of a strange smell. When he reached the edge of the crash site, he watched unseen from the jungle. He saw creatures that resembled people, but they didn’t look like any people he’d ever seen. The skin on their faces was light, and they had straight hair. The skin on their bodies was strange. They had feet but no toes. Only later would he learn that coverings called clothing shielded their skin and that footwear called “shoes” encased their toes.

  Yaralok left without being spotted. When he returned to Uwambo, he told no one what he’d seen. Several other men did the same. Among them were Nalarik Wandik, whose first name meant “Getting Lost,” and Inggimarlek Mabel, whose name meant “Nothing in His Hands.” Another man, Pugulik Sambom, went up, too, and among the natives he was perhaps the most disturbed by what he’d seen. Yet at first none of them spread the news about the creatures who seemed to have come from the wrecked anewoo.

  Their silence fit a cultural idiosyncrasy among the Yali: the bearer of bad news risked being blamed for it. Rather than spread the word about what they knew, the men kept silent. They joined the rest of their hamlet as the frightened people gathered half-ripe sweet potatoes and fled into the jungle.

  The next day, Yaralok returned to the crash site and saw what he thought were three men and one woman, though in their odd coverings he couldn’t be sure. One man—likely Decker—had a covering on his head that reminded Yaralok of the light-colored markings on the head of a bird. He thought he saw them carrying a body away from what remained of the anewoo. He heard popping noises and the sound of small explosions. After watching awhile he crept off again, certain they were spirits from the sky.

  To a Yali farmer-warrior from Uwambo, that expla
nation fit perfectly. Since boyhood, he’d heard the Uluayek legend, which anticipated the return of spirits whose rope to the valley floor had been cut. The legend described these creatures from the anewoo perfectly—light skin, long hair, light eyes, arms covered. The anewoo made sense, too. In the absence of a rope, the sky spirits had found another way down to the valley. Still, Yaralok was in no rush to share his conclusions.

  As his nephew Helenma explained, “Something cataclysmic was happening. He didn’t want to create panic or be blamed. These were spirits. The legend said long-haired people would come down from the sky. They were horrified. This could be the End Times. It was something they had been talking about and hearing about for generations.”

  After other villagers began talking about the flames they’d seen in the jungle, Yaralok broke his silence. To his relief, no one blamed him. They were too busy worrying what the visitors’ arrival might portend. One village leader, Wimayuk Wandik, listened especially closely to Yaralok’s story.

  One option for the people of Uwambo was to welcome the spirits, even if their arrival meant the end of their world as they knew it.

  The other option, more natural to a warlike people, was to kill them.

  Chapter 12

  WIMAYUK WANDIK, AKA “CHIEF PETE”

  THE NATIVE MEN approaching the survivors, residents of Uwambo and nearby villages, had all danced to celebrate the deaths of foes. They’d grieved the loss of family and friends as casualties of war. Some had shed blood in battle and drawn the blood of their enemies. Some had taken a life, or several. All could recount where those deaths had occurred and the names of their fallen foes. Some might have butchered dead enemies and tasted human flesh as a spoil of victory.

  “When we killed somebody we’d have a victory dance,” said Helenma Wandik, who was a boy at the time. He accused his enemies, a clan called the Landikma, of eating the entire bodies of battle victims. He considered that barbaric. By contrast, Helenma Wandik said, his people only ate the hands of their enemies, severed after death and cooked in a pit with hot rocks.

  The bad news, then, was that at least some of the bogeyman stories that Margaret, McCollom, and Decker had heard about the natives eating the flesh of their enemies were true. The nearly naked, adze-wielding men who emerged from the jungle had no qualms about killing. And they had every reason to consider it wise to strike first at strangers.

  The natives sorted the world into three useful categories of people: themselves, their allies, and their enemies. They lived or cooperated with the first two. They routinely tried to kill, and avoid being killed by, the third. Margaret, McCollom, and Decker obviously didn’t belong to the first two categories. But they also didn’t resemble the natives’ usual enemies. The survivors didn’t know it, but their best hope would be if the people of Uwambo continued to think they were spirits.

  One piece of good fortune for Margaret, McCollom, and Decker was that the Yali people of Uwambo weren’t among the natives who’d come into contact with the Archbold expedition. They owed no payback to appease the spirit of the man killed by gunshot seven years earlier.

  STANDING IN THE native sweet potato garden, separated by a gully and ten thousand years of what’s commonly called progress, the survivors and the natives waited for someone to make the first move.

  In every immediate way, the natives had the upper hand. They outnumbered the survivors by more than ten to one. They were healthy and well fed. None suffered burns, head injuries, or gangrene. None had lived for three sleep-deprived days on sips of water and hard candy. Their sharpened stone adzes made a joke of McCollom’s Boy Scout knife.

  Beyond Shangri-La, of course, the situation was different.

  By conventional measures of wealth, education, medicine, and technological achievement, the world represented by Margaret, McCollom, and Decker far surpassed the natives’ Shangri-La. Yet looked at another way, the survivors’ civilization hadn’t advanced all that far from the culture of the Stone Age warriors wearing penis gourds. The crash survivors were parts of a military machine engaged in the largest and deadliest war in history, one that was about to become far deadlier.

  As the survivors faced the natives, American political leaders were considering the use of a new super weapon, a bomb that could level a city and plunge any survivors into a primitive existence. The bomb’s makers were still uncertain whether it would work, but if it did, it would eerily fulfill the warning in Lost Horizon of a future in which “a single-weaponed man might have matched a whole army.”

  Albert Einstein once said, “I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” Viewed in that light, the people of Shangri-La were the most advanced warriors on earth.

  At the moment, though, Margaret wasn’t thinking about the moral and practical relativity of modern and traditional warfare. She stared at the men with the stone-and-wood axes, their dark skin glistening from a coating of pig grease. As she waited for orders from McCollom, a thought ran through her mind: how awful to have survived a plane crash only to end up in a native stew.

  AFTER THE B-17 stopped waggling its wings and flew off, McCollom had relaxed for the first time since the crash. Now, as the natives approached, he leaped back into action, barking orders at his companions.

  “We haven’t any weapon,” he told Margaret and Decker, wisely discounting the value of his little knife. “There is nothing we can do but act friendly. Smile as you’ve never smiled before, and pray to God it works.”

  McCollom told them to hold out their hands with their remaining Charms—they were sick of the candies by then, anyway. He added his knife to the paltry peace offerings.

  “Stand up—and smile,” McCollom said.

  For the previous hour, since their discovery by the search plane, Margaret and Decker had been sitting in the dirt of the garden clearing. Exhausted and in pain, Margaret was unsure she could stand again. But with McCollom commanding her to rise, she struggled to her feet, as did Decker.

  McCollom watched as the natives began to line up behind a fallen tree, perhaps twenty-five yards from where the survivors stood. By McCollom’s count there were about forty of them, all adult males. Margaret, possibly exaggerating in her fright, put the number at more like one hundred. Over their shoulders they carried what she called “wicked-looking stone axes.” At least one carried a long spear.

  Margaret felt her hand shaking, rattling the Charms like dice. As she put it, “The bottom had long since dropped out of my stomach.” She wrote in her diary: “Black heads began to pop out from behind jungle trees. ‘Smile, damn it!’ rasped McCollom. We smiled. Oh, we smiled to high heaven. We smiled for our lives. We smiled and held out the candy and the jackknife and then we waited as the black men advanced.”

  McCollom heard one of his companions darkly muse: “Well, maybe they’ll feed us before they kill us.” He didn’t recall who said it, but it sounded like Decker.

  The noises the survivors had thought resembled dogs yapping stopped. After a brief pause, the silence was replaced with what Margaret called “an excited and frantic jabbering, accompanied by much gesturing. We couldn’t tell whether that was a good sign or bad. We could only fasten the smiles on more securely.”

  A gully separated the survivors’ clearing and a knoll at the edge of the jungle where the natives emerged. A long, fallen tree served as a bridge across the gully. An older man stepped forward. He was wiry and alert, naked except for a necklace with a narrow piece of shell that hung over his sternum and a penis gourd more than a foot long that pointed toward the sky. McCollom and the others took him to be the chief.

  He beckoned the survivors forward toward the log bridge. No one moved. He waved them toward him again, more forcefully this time.

  “I think we ought to go,” McCollom said. “We’d better humor them.”

  Margaret didn’t move. Her feet and legs hurt so badly that she could barely stand. She was sure she’d fall off the slipp
ery log. But that wasn’t her only hesitation. She despaired at the thought that, having survived the crash and the march down the mountain, and having just been spotted by a rescue plane, she was being asked to deliver herself to men she thought were savages and, worse, cannibals.

  “Honest, McCollom, I can’t walk it,” she said, “Truly, I can’t.”

  “I know, Maggie,” he replied. He considered the situation briefly then decided: “Let ’em come to us.”

  The survivors used their candy-filled hands to motion the natives toward them. After a brief discussion with his troops, the native leader stepped alone onto the log. McCollom thought it wise to meet him halfway, man to man. If McCollom felt afraid, he’d never admit it. As he inched forward on the log, he called back to Margaret and Decker, demanding that they keep smiling.

  The natives on the other side of the gully continued talking and staring at the survivors, until they again fell quiet. “Their silence seemed a thousand times more sinister and threatening than their yapping or their chatter,” Margaret wrote. She and Decker stretched their arms forward to more submissively offer their gifts.

  The two leaders edged closer on the log bridge. When they met in the middle, McCollom reached out and grasped the native’s hand. He pumped it like a cross between a politician, a car salesman, and a long-lost relative.

  “How are you? Nice to meet you!” McCollom said repeatedly.

  In Margaret’s recollection, the native was the one who held out his hand first, and McCollom, “weak with relief, grabbed it and wrung it.”