The Samoan Pyramid

by Maya Lynch

  I thought about how I could explain to him that killing me now would really put the kibosh on my pyramid story. Flustered, I snatched my glasses off and continued trying to explain what I was doing there. My hands were shaking, Baba was watching me with an open mouth. Eventually I ran out of things to say and the sound of my jabbering English gave way to the noise of the jungle. The man studied me for a few seconds, bemused, and then he softened visibly.

  Slowly, he produced a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, took one out and lit it. He gestured towards the volcano with his cigarette, and in a completely different voice he said: ‘Ok. You can go.’ Then he almost, almost smiled, turned and wandered off into the jungle.

  I was rooted to the spot. I turned to look at Baba, who shrugged and made to move on as if nothing had just happened. No chance. I sat down right where I was. Baba stopped and looked at me. I waved him over and took the cigarettes from my backpack. I tore the plastic wrapping, flipped open the top, pulled off the little piece of silver paper, and took out one white stick for me, and one for Baba. I lit first his cigarette, then mine. Wordlessly, we sat on the forest floor and smoked.

  I was wrapped in the relentless pull of the pyramid. There was no way to go but forward. But I was completely exhausted. Cigarette finished, butt stuffed back into the box, I laid back on the jungle floor and drained the last of the water from my bottle. That was it, we were out.

  Some time later, we emerged through a break in the tree line onto a wide elevated plateau. The sunlight blazed down on a beautiful meadow of long grass and wild flowers that stretched far over the hillside. It was a welcome relief from the darkness of the jungle, but I was still in shock from our encounter with the giant man in the jungle.

  ‘Baba, what was that all about? Who was that guy?’ I felt that enough time had passed that I could ask. That the threat was over.

  Baba recounted a puzzling story about the land we now walked upon. A story about ownership, about colonisers: ‘It’s is a complicated story, Maya.’ he said. ‘The government say this land belongs to the Nelson Corporation. [the real name of the company claiming ownership of this land, I later discovered, is the Swedish company O.F. Nelson and co Ltd, but everyone here refers to them colloquially as ‘the Nelson Corporation.] About a hundred years ago, a Swedish trader called August Nelson came to Samoa. He fell in love with the local chief’s daughter and so they were married. The chief gave his new son-in-law, August Nelson, some land to work. This land.’ Baba pointed to the ground we stood upon. ‘The people from the local villages came here and worked the land with August Nelson and for a long time everything was fine. But after August Nelson died, the Nelson Corporation closed the plantation, and they stopped the local villagers from working the land. That’s when the problems started.’ He shook his head. ‘The word “ownership” means something different here than it does to Europeans. In Samoa you never really own land in the way Europeans think. If I give you some land, I only give it to you to look after. Yes, it is “your” land, but it is yours to care for, not yours to ruin, you must look after it. It is a great responsibility. So yes, the land was given as a dowry to August Nelson, but only for as long as he worked the land and looked after it. When the Nelson Corporation stopped doing that, the land should have been given back to the local villagers, so we could work the land ourselves. Now the plantation is closed and the corporation post armed guards in the jungle to stop us from coming here. We have no work to do and no way to make a living.’

  I could understand how this state of affairs would almost certainly lead to conflict.

  ‘Why don’t the government do something about it?’ I asked.

  ‘Ha!’ Baba’s face contorted into a disgusted sneer, ‘The government and the Nelson Corporation? They are one and the same! The head of state is on the board.’

  ‘Wow, that’s… tricky.’

  Baba shook his head again. ‘Come on, let’s keep going.’

  We continued in silence across the wide sunny plateau. From here I could see the delicate clouds of mist burning off the tree tops high up on the volcano. We had been walking in the dank heat of the rainforest for hours, so the sunlight on the plateau was a welcome change, but we didn’t seem to be getting any closer, the volcano looked as far away as ever.

  Baba broke the silence after a while, clearly he’d been thinking about the same topic all the while: ‘My village sued the Nelson Corporation. We said, “let us work the land. Pay us for the land or let us work it.” You know what happened? We got nothing and the judge banned us from even coming here.’ Baba spread his arms in a gesture of outrage.

  I thought for a moment. ‘So, are we trespassing Baba?’

  ‘Yes, that is correct.’

  We crossed the plain and headed back into the dark soaking furnace of the rainforest. We walked for ten minutes before Baba stopped, silently turned around and headed back in the direction we had just come from. A few minutes later he turned around again and lead us through fallen trees and rotting debris into an area where the jungle became completely impenetrable. There was no way through. All we could do was re-trace our steps and try anther approach.

  Uh oh, I thought. Don’t get lost, Baba. Not now. The words of Howard Sterndale thrummed in my head: ‘A man might wander for weeks without finding his way out.’ I’d suspected that Sterndale had been exaggerating when he gave his testimony to the New Zealand government. Now I wasn’t at all sure. The look on Baba’s face didn’t fill me with any confidence, he was on edge and he wouldn’t look me in the eye. The water was all gone. I was exhausted, worried. I prepared myself to suggest that it might be time to turn back.

  We squeezed through a tight knot of bracken and dead ferns that scraped against my skin. The dead branches and twisted vines left deep welts in my arms. I felt the ground change beneath my feet, from soft mud to something altogether different. Harder. How could that be? I dropped to my knees and hurriedly swept the leaves from the jungle floor. And there it was.

  ‘Cobblestones!’ I shouted. ‘Cobblestones, Baba!’ It was an old road, the kind of road that Noah had told me would be here. The kind of road that was designed for traffic, like trade caravans and marching armies. The kind of road that might lead into an ancient abandoned city. ‘My god Baba, this is it!’

  Narrow shafts of sunlight pierced the darkness. Crawling on my hands and knees I traced the cobbles across the jungle floor, pushing aside the leaves and dead vines until I could see that this road was a good twenty feet wide and raised at least two feet off the ground.

  I lifted my head and just a few meters ahead of me I saw a great stone wall rising out of the jungle. The ancient wall was smothered by hanging vines, I almost hadn’t noticed it, camouflaged against the deep green of the jungle as it was. I rushed ahead to get a closer look, overtaking Baba for the first time. A dry stone wall made of basalt blocks, dragged here from miles away and stacked one on top of the other by some unknown, ancient master builder. The walls of an ancient city, just as the old surfer had predicted.

  Baba and I followed the route of the cobbled road and soon we were walking between two great walls, ramparts enclosing this ancient causeway that cuts through the jungle. This was my first view of the ancient settlement. The first time I felt sure that I was going to make it.

  I knew from the map that Noah had shown me that this once thriving city had snaked its way inland and uphill all the way up to Pulemelei, the great ancient pyramid, on the edge of the volcano. We were inside the boundary of the ancient city. Just follow the road, I thought. Not far to go now.

  Baba set his typical brisk pace. The heavy, wet heat of the jungle, amplified by my growing expectation, made my heart pound. The whole journey to Pulemelei is no more than a few miles as the crow flies, but even in these short distances it would be easy to get lost in the rainforest, never to be found. The vegetation became thick again and visibility dropped to a just a meter or two in any direction. In the dense green jungle, everywhere amongst the flora, I caught
glimpses of the remains of the ancient settlement; walls, fire pits, starmounds and entire abandoned villages.

  We arrived at an area that looked for all the world like a natural cathedral. The jungle canopy lifted high up above us. Coconut palms on either side of us stretched high up into the sky, thirty meters or more, their leaves curved at the top to form a golden-ratio arch high above the jungle floor. In-between the two rows of palm trees, a long precessional pathway opened up in front of us, cutting straight through the jungle like the aisle of an ancient basilica.

  ‘How beautiful is this?’ I whispered. ‘How beautiful?’

  In the trees high above us the birds whistled and crowed from their perches, while a riot of cicadas roared in serenade as we walked down the long natural aisle. I stopped to take it all in, a sense of sanctity washing over me.

  Baba put his hand on my shoulder. ‘You feel the spirit of the mountain here, don’t you?’ he smiled.

  I looked at Baba and I could see the life force pulsing through him. Light glowed and surrounded us. I laughed, and looking up, I blazed an almighty hallelujah from the pit of my stomach, high up into the jungle canopy. Embraced in the sound of laughter the jungle shimmered, sparkled and shone. The spirit of the mountain was alive. Rapture, I thought to myself as we walked down the aisle of the natural cathedral and into the dark, dense jungle. What an amazing place. It felt like we had reached a point where the profane day to day of the modern world butts hard up against the edges of a certain ancient magic.

  12

  A New Approach

  Archaeology has its origins in the colonial world - as a rag tag band of treasure hunters and grave robbers, drawn from the ranks of the aristocracy. We know that the early archaeologists in the Pacific, when faced with a culture without gold and precious metals, were reluctant to even put a spade in the ground. Likewise, the early anthropologists were more interested in measuring and categorising the people they met than in hearing their histories. But all of this began to change in the progressive hotbed of avant-garde ideas of the 1960s.

  The 60s was a radical time. It was the time of the counter-culture movements; hippies, beat-poets, peace-nicks, civil rights, feminism and psychedelia. It seemed as though anything was possible and everything was up for grabs. An essential exploratory mood permeated every part of society and even leached its way into the sciences.

  At the beginning of the 60s Harvard University was the polestar of the counter culture movement. The ‘Psilocybin Project’ was in full swing. This project, which involved administering consciousness-expanding psilocybin mushrooms to research subjects, had brought together, under one roof, three major players in the American counter culture movement; Timothy Leary, Huston Smith and Richard Alpert (aka Ram Dass). According to the Harvard daily newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, it was ‘perfectly hunky-dory for professors to give LSD to their students’ as long as it was for purely scientific purposes, of course. The 60s, you might say, began at Harvard. It wasn’t until Timothy Leary and Ram Dass were fired from the Ivy League school that the party shifted gears and moved to San Francisco. Against this backdrop of radical re-invention and infused with as much dynamism and deep thought as the famed Agora of ancient Greece, new approaches to archaeology were being developed in the ivory towers of Harvard University.

  A young graduate student called Roger Green, somewhat plump, always happy and with the boundless enthusiasm of someone who had just recently ‘turned on’, found himself in the position of agent provocateur at the centre of a debate that was reshaping the sciences. A new archaeological method was evolving called the ‘settlement pattern’ approach. Whereas earlier archaeologists had concentrated only on artefact-rich archaeological sites, which was a hangover from the colonial days of the archaeologist as treasure hunter, the new approach was to record entire archaeological landscapes. By carefully mapping and recording all of the sites in an area, ranging from the smallest shrine to the largest temple, from a simple house to a large agricultural complex, Roger Green believed it might be possible to gain new insight into how ancient societies and populations had been organised. Changes to settlement patterns over time could give important clues to how the society itself had evolved. In this way the archaeologists believed they could change the question they were asking from ‘what can we find?’ to ‘what can we find out?’ This was the the beat generation come to archaeology and in 1962 this radical new group turned their attention to Samoa.

  The team leader and driving force of the expedition was Roger Green, the young graduate who had so energised the archaeology department at Harvard. Green had an ambitious plan, he wanted to bring the ‘settlement pattern’ approach to the South Pacific. He planned to map the entire archaeological landscape of Western Samoa. It was a colossal task.

  With huge ambition but without the budget to match, Green drummed up support for his project with all the flair and zeal of a modern-day P.T. Barnum. He hand-picked his archaeological dream team and assembled the best and brightest young talent from Universities around the world. Now, fifty years later, looking back, the talent that Green managed to amass is astonishing. If I was to write a who’s who of Pacific archaeology every single member of Green’s team would be in the top ten.

  Green chose as his co-author for the project the young New Zealand archaeologist Janet Davidson. A bold choice considering that Davidson was a woman in what was still a very male dominated world. Second in command was Jack Golson, a cool head and counterpoint to Green’s ‘full-tilt’ approach. Jack Golson already had several years experience working in Samoa. He seemed to have found himself on the vanguard of Pacific archeology rather reluctantly. In an interview I listened to, he described being horrified when he heard that he would be working in the Pacific. Golson had been trained to to excavate the medieval villages of England, but the academic powers that be thought better of that and sent him to the other side of the world instead. Unlucky for Golson, but very fortunate for us.

  The third member of the team was a young man called Stuart Scott, an American veteran of the Korean war and a Fulbright scholar at the university of Auckland, where Green and Golson now held tenure. There were others of course, notably A.G. Buist, who became famous for developing a radio carbon dating sequence of Samoa and even Roger Green’s wife went along to run the cook house and play the role of camp mother. They were young and idealistic, bursting with new ideas and with an unstoppable drive to get things done. They weren’t going to let something like a lack of funding get in their way. So in October of 1962 with little money and only a handful of favours the team set out for Samoa on a great adventure to survey the ancient ruins.

  13

  Heart of a Lost City

  ‘Is this it?’ I asked.

  ‘Huh?’ Baba cast a glance over his shoulder at me. I was following, red-faced and exhausted, as he cut a path through the muddle of fallen trees and thick vines.

  ‘Is this it?’ I asked again.

  ‘One mile,’ Baba said. It’d been one mile for an hour at least. My high had vanished. How could it still be so far? I wondered if Baba even knew what a mile was. One mile, he says. One mile. Liar! I began to despair. Was I to be trapped here, endlessly hiking behind this supernaturally fit Samoan guy forever? The Scottish Sisyphus, endlessly huffing and puffing her way through the jungle, parched, hallucinating and looking for a pyramid that might not even exist.

  The going only seemed to get tougher. Soon I was finding it impossible to catch my breath. I started counting my steps. We’ll be there in a hundred steps, I’d say to myself, and I’d begin to then count them off, one, two, breathe, three, okay breathe, four, five, six… When we weren’t there after my count was finished, I’d start all over again. It was an age since the water had run out, I wished passionately that I’d brought more, or knew at least where we were in relation to the rivers so I could fill up the empty water bottles. But I was lost. In fact, if Baba took off, or if I lost sight of him, I’d have no chance of finding my way back out of h
ere.

  We followed a narrow clearing through the trees. Our one sign of progress: I’d noticed a change in the land we were walking on, the ground here was paved with huge basalt slabs. This was very different to the paths we had followed on our way up the mountain, those wide cobbled causeways. The jungle had forced its way through cracks in the stones here, carpeting the whole area in thick green vines, but this was a man made platform for sure. I could tell we were already in what would have been a main ceremonial ‘high status’ area. The blocks here were much larger and each one had obviously been shaped individually by hand to fit perfectly with the block next to it, laid like a vast interlocking jigsaw puzzle. Yes, maybe we were getting close.

  In June 1965, after more than two years spent surveying the island of Upolu, it was finally time for for Roger Green’s team to turn their attention to the island of Savai’i. The young American Fulbright scholar Stuart Scott was dispatched to the island. He had just celebrated his thirtieth birthday.

  Scott had followed the clues left by the early missionary John Stair and the plantation manager Howard Sternadale, just as I had done. These clues had taken him on the same adventure as me, to the district of Palauli, in the south east corner of Savai’i. Scott, weighed down with a heavy pack, carrying his tent and provisions, would have entered the jungle at the same point I had. He would have crossed the same stream that I had hesitated my way across and into the same area, bounded by two rivers, the same area that I found myself tramping through now.