Horror in Paradise (19 page)

At Oriro Petana the constable was a rather portly old chap called Kiali, who bustled about officiously and ordered his villagers around in an effort to get us settled for the night. As a matter of fact, his ideas of what we wanted done were rather hazy and he was somewhat of an annoyance.

Just outside our fly we heard him gruffly taking a small boy to task and Humphries, overhearing their words, went out. Kiali was holding in his hands three coconuts with the ends lopped off and was trying to find out from the youngster who had sent them to us. For some reason a village constable always takes to himself the task of supplying white men with coconuts so that they may refresh themselves with the milk. It gives the constable a chance to stand stiffly at attention, snap up his right hand in a salute, then with a flourish of his knife whack off the end and tender it to the visitors.

Kiali had been away when we reached the village and had been deprived of this privilege. Naturally he was peeved when the urchin came to the tent with three opened nuts. The boy seemed tonguetied with awe, and Kiali wasn’t getting very far with his inquisition when Humphries stepped in.

“Give me a nut,” he ordered. “The boy should be praised, not chided for bringing them.”

Kiali was standing well within the light of a hurricane lamp fastened to a tent pole and he was holding each nut in turn where the light would reveal the amount of milk within. Probably his idea was to give the magistrate the best nut. But suddenly he grew quite excited and hurled the nuts to the ground.

“Why did you do that?” cried Humphries angrily. It looked like a case of insubordination, in which case Kiali would have been in for severe punishment.

The old man’s bare heels came together, he stiffened abruptly, and his fingers touched his forelock.

“Master,” he said, “the nuts were poisoned!”

And so it proved when we had picked them up, broken them open, and examined the meat closely. To it was clinging infinitesimal bits of bamboo pounded almost into a powder. That is the favorite method of murder of the Papuan sorcerer. Mixed with food or drink, the slivers pierce the intestines, set up inflammation, cause a high fever, and prove fatal within a few days.

“Mira-Oa!” cried Humphries, hazarding a good guess, and sent the police corporal to seize the old sorcerer and bring him to us. But Mira-Oa had disappeared, and when we resumed the march next day another man carried his load.

As for Kiali, whose keen eyes had seen the slivers floating on top of the coconut milk and probably saved some of us from great agony if not death, he was rewarded with five sticks of tobacco worth about two cents each. Had he received more than that he wouldn’t have appreciated it, but in his black mind would have concluded that we were simpletons.

Downing and I were properly horrified by the incident, but Humphries dismissed it with a shrug of the shoulders. A man who has been a magistrate in New Guinea for ten years becomes a great deal of a fatalist and he expects such things.

“When we get back to Yule Island I’ll make a report of the affair and send a policeman over to Mira-Oa’s village to pick him up,” he said. “The old fellow probably will hide out in the jungle for a while, then he’ll go back home. I’ll give him a good scare and let it go at that. We can’t connect him directly with the thing, anyhow, even though we are morally certain he is guilty.”

Neither could we connect the old sorcerer directly with another attempt which took place some twelve hours later, but in view of all that had gone before, the theory that he was guilty seems reasonable.

Oriro Petana is built on the east bank of a river and, poring over a rude map that night, we decided to cross it there the next morning.

“The country on the other side will be disagreeable to go through,” said Humphries, “but we had better take it. It will put us on a direct line to where we want to go. Dress lightly, because it will be baking hot in the tall grass.”

When we all had managed to get across in the one or two canoes which were available, the order of march for the day was laid out. Dengo and Waimura were to be the leading police and were to accompany Humphries and myself, as they were our orderlies. The other policemen were scattered through the line to keep the carriers moving, and Corporal Sonana and two men were to bring up the rear. Downing was to go anywhere he wished with his camera. As long as we were not in hostile territory the arrangement would work very well, and would permit us white men to push on ahead of the heavily laden blacks if we wished.

So, having seen the line in motion, we hurried on. Waimura was swinging along with Humphries, myselfc and Dengo following in the order named.

Suddenly Waimura leaped over something in the path between the high grass that rose on every side of us and yelled. I did not know the meaning of the word which he shrieked over and over, but before Humphries could cry out a warning Dengo had seized me by the shoulders, spun me around behind him, and leaped in front of Humphries.

Then it was that I saw coming straight toward us a snake. It was between three and four feet long, and plainly it was very angry. It did not swerve to either side in fright, but seemed bent on attacking us.

“My God, come away!” yelled Humphries, and seizing me by the wrist started to run. It seemed rather childish to me to flee from such a small snake, but his grasp on my wrist forced me along. His eyes and those of the police had seen something that I, a tenderfoot in New Guinea, had overlooked.

As we fled Humphries called back over his shoulder to Dengo to kill the snake.

“Lo, taubada
(yes, master),” replied the policeman, and a moment later the report of his rifle rang out. How much mental anguish it caused Dengo to fire that shot it is easy to guess, for to him it represented the lord of all things. But Humphries was his master and he obeyed that master’s command, although I have no doubt that in his mind there were plenty of misgivings as to what penalty would accrue to him.

It speaks volumes for the training which the government of Papua gives its police. Recruited from savage life, with its freedom and absence of heavy work, and turned into a hard-fighting, competent, loyal upholder of law and order in six months, Dengo in one instant had violated a tradition bequeathed to him by generations of ancestors simply because a white man had ordered him to do so.

Dengo was squatted on the ground beside the reptile, crooning something in the dialect of his people. What, I do not know, but as we approached he rose and stood impassively awaiting further orders.

“I thought so,” said Humphries, as he turned over the dead snake with the toe of his boot. To me he pointed out a noose of pliant vine tightly fastened back of the snake’s head. The free end of the vine was several feet long.

“Mira-Oa,” he said, although how he could tell puzzled me. But he refused to satisfy my curiosity and insisted on going on, after Dengo had tenderly borne the snake’s carcass off the trail and laid it in the grass.

“Unless I’m mistaken I can show you better than I can tell you,” said Humphries. A few yards farther on, around a bend in the trail, we found the other policeman standing beside a bed of hot coals. On the fire was a deep earthenware pot and beside it a piece of wood and a stone, evidently the cover to the pot and the weight which held it down. In the dust about the fire were the prints of naked feet. To one side a peg had been driven deep into the ground, and fastened to it was another length of the same kind of pliant vine which had been tied to the snake.

It was all very mystifying to me.

“Look inside the pot,” said Humphries, although he himself had not done so. With the stick I carried I turned the hot vessel over and fished inside it. What I brought to light was a handkerchief, khaki-colored and unmistakably one of ours, which had disappeared two nights before when the old sorcerer had hung up our clothing to dry.

“I’ll explain it as we go along,” Humphries promised, and after he had given orders that the pot be thrown into the grass, the fire put out and all traces of it removed and the peg pulled up and tossed away, we struck out again.

“If those carriers had been close to us we would have had a nice little mutiny on our hands,” the magistrate told me. “That is one of the favorite methods of a sorcerer to get rid of an enemy whom he cannot poison and dares not face. Old Mira-Oa did steal our handkerchiefs, after all. Probably that one you saw in the pot was mine, as he would want to get rid of me most of all.

“It isn’t hard to guess what happened after you have come to know natives as I do. Mira-Oa fled from the village last night when his powdered bamboo trick was discovered, and crossed the river to this side. Early this morning he took that handkerchief and put it with the snake in the pot after fastening a noose about the snake and tying the other end of the vine to the peg. Then he put the lid on the pot and weighted it down and built a fire under the pot.

“The snake, tortured by the heat, associated its suffering with the smell that was closest to him, that of the sweaty handkerchief. When we drew near the sorcerer tilted the lid off the pot and let the snake out. Then he cut the vine, knowing that the snake, infuriated by his agony, would make straight for the thing that had the same smell as the handkerchief which he blamed for his pain. In other words, that snake was bent on attacking the person whose scent was on the handkerchief. In this case I believe it was me, but it might have been you, so when I ran I pulled you along too.”

It sounded preposterous then. It sounds that way now, even though I have seen in official reports of the government of New Guinea similar cases narrated.

But that marked the last of old Mira-Oa so far as we were concerned. We made inquiries for him when we got back to the coast weeks later, but he hadn’t been seen for several days. Probably word of our return reached him when we still were a long way off. Such messages travel rapidly by means of “bush telegraph,” and Mira-Oa no doubt decided that a short exile from his village was preferable to facing us.

James Norman Hall

The first collaboration on a book about the South Pacific by the authors who were later celebrated for producing the
Bounty
trilogy was entitled
Faery Lands of the South Seas
(1921).

James Norman Hall (1887-1951), the “woodshed poet” born in Colfax, Iowa, joined Kitchener’s Volunteer Army in August, 1914, and after two years serving as a machine gunner switched to the Lafayette Flying Corps of the French Foreign Legion. Later, when flying for the United States Air Service, he was downed in Germany and spent the last six months of World War I as a prisoner.

After the war he jointly edited
The Lafayette Flying Corps
(1920) with Charles Nordhoff (1887-1947). In 1920 both friends sailed for the Pacific regions and later settled near each other in Tahiti, where they took Polynesian wives and made the South Seas their literary province.
Faery Lands
contains sketches by both authors. Here is a selection from Hall’s contribution to the book—a yam dealing with the atoll of Ahu Ahu in French Oceania.

DUSK came on as we sat over our meal. Ruau sat with her hands on her knees, leaning back against a tree, talking to Crichton. I understood nothing of what she was saying, but it was a pleasure merely to listen to the music of her voice. It was a little below the usual register of women’s voices, strong and clear, but softer even than those of the Tahitians, and so flexible that I could follow every change in mood. She was telling Crichton of the
tupapaku
of her atoll which she dreaded most, although she knew that it was the spirit of one of her own sons. It appeared in the form of a dog with legs as long and thick as the stem of a full-grown coconut tree, and a body proportionally huge. It could have picked up her house as an ordinary dog would a basket. Once it had stepped lightly over it without offering to harm her in any way. Her last son had been drowned while fishing by moonlight on the reef outside the next island, which lay about two miles distant across the eastern end of the lagoon.

She had seen the dog three times since his death, and always at the same phase of the moon. Twice she had come upon it lying at full length on the lagoon beach, its enormous head resting on its paws. She was so badly frightened, she said, that she fell to the ground, incapable of further movement; sick at heart, too, at the thought that the spirit of the bravest and strongest of all her sons must appear to her in that shape. It was clear that she was recognized, for each time the dog began beating its tail on the ground as soon as it saw her. Then it got up, yawned and stretched, took a long drink of salt water, and started at a lope up the beach. She could see it very plainly in the bright moonlight. Soon it broke into a run, going faster and faster, gathering tremendous speed by the time it reached the other end of the island. From there it made a flying spring, and she last saw it as it passed, high in air, across the face of the moon, its head outstretched, its legs doubled close under its body. She believed that it crossed the two-mile gap of water which separated the islands in one gigantic leap.

That is the whole of the story as Crichton translated it for me, although there must have been other details, for Ruau gave her account of it at great length. Her earnestness of manner was very convincing, and left no doubt in my mind of the realness to her of the apparition.

As for myself, if I could have seen ghosts anywhere it would have been at Tanao. Late that night, walking alone on the lagoon beach, I found that I was keeping an uneasy watch behind me. The distant thunder of the surf sounded at times like a wild galloping on the hard sand, and the gentle slapping of little waves nearby like the lapping tongue of the ghostly dog having its fill of sea water