Fear Drive My Feet

by Peter Ryan

  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 ran
ge. 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.

  About half past two light rain began to fall, and our carriers at once put down their loads.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Les asked. ‘I hope we’re not going to have an argument about wet and dry pay at a time like this!’

  We called to Pato to catch up with us: an argument, if there was to be one, would have to be conducted through him. We pointed out what had happened, and he crossly asked the old man to explain the delay.

  The headman answered in about three words, and Pato turned to us with a smile.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘They are just going to put their raincoats on!’

  The Amyen men were rapidly undoing bundles which had been slung across their shoulders. We were amused to see them donning curious tent-like coverings of laced pandanus-leaves, which went over their heads and the upper parts of their bodies. As they moved off again, they looked like a row of houses on legs, with high-pitched thatched roofs.

  Half an hour later, about mid-afternoon, we reached a spot on the side of the ridge where the carriers said we were to camp for the night. We guessed the altitude at something like nine and a half thousand feet. There was a small cave here, which was partly natural and had been partly hollowed out by the natives on their periodic trading trips across the range. Apart from possum-hunts, these were the only occasions when they went on the mountain. There was of course no permanent habitation higher than Amyen, and we knew we would not find any villages until we got down to about seven or eight thousand feet on the north side.

  The carriers were to sleep in the cave, and since there was not enough flat ground outside for even one man to stretch out, the police built one rough platform of boughs for themselves on the slope above, and another for Les and me.

  We badly wanted a drink, but though we could hear water rushing far undergroun
d, beneath the rocks and moss, all our attempts to discover a spring were in vain. The carriers said there was no water, but several of them were subsequently seen drinking from a bamboo receptacle, and after a good deal of persuasion they led us to a small trickle which they had carefully covered with stones.

  Enough firewood was found for the police and the carriers to have some sort of fire all night, and to make a hot drink. We issued a pint of hot Marmite to all our own boys, but when we offered it to the carriers only one or two accepted. Les and I, wet through, crouched in our ground-sheets while we ate cold bully beef out of tins, and spread with Marmite the ‘pancakes’ Dinkila had made in Amyen. Then came a drink of tea which Tauhu had contrived to brew. We cupped our hands round the mugs, holding them close to our bodies to keep the rain out of the tea, and warming our frozen fingers at the same time.

  Darkness would soon be approaching, and Les and I erected our only shelter – half a one-man tent – over the platform of boughs, and prepared our beds.

  Before turning in we paid a visit to the cave where the carriers were housed. It was almost underneath us, and Les referred to it as the basement.

  The sight that met our eyes as we peered into the cavern mouth might have been a scene from the Inferno. In the smoke-laden, stifling interior grotesque black figures squatted round a fire, gobbling food. Occasionally, when the flames leapt up, unearthly shadows danced on the walls, and eyes and teeth flashed through the dimness. The carriers were all quite naked, having taken off their bark coverings to dry them. When they noticed us looking in upon them the talking ceased, and with an air of acute embarrassment they cupped their hands over their private parts to hide them from us.

  ‘Shall we go in?’ I asked.