Horror in Paradise (14 page)

Ignoring these, I answered calmly (outwardly I was calm, though I confess I was inwardly rather shaken): “Well, are you convinced now?”

“You bet I am!” he answered with explosive conviction. “But, Bob . . .” and on and on he wandered, asking me questions impossible to answer.

From that night on Tom lost his puzzled look, but he liked less than ever wandering about in the night, and I always had to turn the flashlight on to the path which led to the road before he would leave my house.

Charis Crockett

Charis Dennison, a Radcliffe graduate born in 1905, married Frederick Eugene Crockett. He had accompanied Commander Richard Byrd to the South Pole, and the couple spent a honeymoon among the recently reformed cannibals in western New Guinea. Of her book,
The House in the Rain Forest
(1942), about the experiences of these anthropologists who set up housekeeping in the jungle, Professor Ernest Hooton says in his introduction: “It is jammed with good descriptive writing, excellent anthropology, and good humor.”

This selection asserts the former belief that death among the tribesmen is almost always assumed to be the result of the actions of an enemy, so that the person charged with the duty of revealing the murderer is an important personage.

DOUBTLESS in the tangled growth of the Rain Forest poisonous plants exist, but the most popular method of disposing of an enemy is by a magical plant known only to graduates of the Newun.
Kwi
is the powdered bark of a tree; all that it requires to be fatal is to be placed on someone’s head, preferably while he is sleeping. It has another property which would endear it to the writer of detective stories: it permits the “poisoner” to establish a perfect alibi for the time of his victim’s death. All he need do is murmur under his breath the moment when the
kwi
is to take effect and then arrange to be innocently poking in his garden a respectable distance away at that time.

The force of this alibi is naturally rather diminished by the fact that every Madik knows the idiosyncrasies of
kwi,
and also that every Madik is constitutionally averse to the verdict “death from natural causes.” When a man dies the chances are ten to one that a human or supernatural being has killed him. The murderer is nevertheless protected to some extent. Although the finger of suspicion may point at him, it probably points at a number of others also—anyone believed to have held any sort of grudge against the dead man. The laying-on of
kwi
cannot be traced to him without subsequent thorough investigation.

Sejak told us about a case at which he had assisted. Nakari, his father’s sister’s husband’s brother, had waked one morning feeling very unwell. Nakari’s brother examined him closely and diagnostically. On Nakari’s forehead he saw a small black spot.

“Oh, my brother, it is
kwi,”
he cried, “and the
kwi
is on your forehead. You must surely die.”

Although they had little hope of saving Nakari, his relations rushed out and collected all sorts of medicines, with which they anointed him profusely, while the brother scratched away at his forehead with a loop of rattan in a forlorn effort to draw out the fatal
kwi.
As the day wore on, Nakari turned greener and greener and began to bleed from his mouth and nose in a ghastly symphony of color. By nightfall he was dead.

All the most remote appendages of the family tree were assembled, including Sejak, and the usual verdict was promptly reached of murder by a person or persons unknown.

A list was made of all the people who might feel inimically towards Nakari. There was Yakwo; he had been dunning Nakari for a piece of cloth due him for several generations, and Nakari had been too shiftless to do anything about it. And Dim; Nakari’s son had had an affair with Dim’s niece, but neither father nor son had ever shown any signs of producing the cloth which would have made an honest woman of her. Then Nakari and Shubul had recently had words—no one knew exactly why. These three men were obviously the favorites, but several less likely candidates were added for the pleasure of prolonging the oratorical discussion, airing private grudges, and the assurance of having left no stone unturned.

The cast was now chosen; it remained to decide on the play. The Madik have ingeniously evolved two forms of murder trial, both of which simultaneously reveal and execute the murderer—a vast improvement over the cumbersome paraphernalia of our criminal law. The choice between the two trials depends on the condition of the
corpus delicti
Nothing ever happens in a hurry in New Guinea; to decide on a course of action, to notify the proper people, and to gather a suitable group in a suitable place at a suitable time is not the affair of a Papuan moment. It sometimes happens that by the time the stage is set the murdered man has been some time dead, and only his clean white bones remain.

Under these conditions, and with such a reliable representative of the deceased available, the ensuing proceedings take place by the rack whereon his relics repose. While the guests wait uneasily at one side, the family build a fire. Over the coals they place big flat leaves and on them arrange a layer of the murdered man’s bones garnished with raw sago and green bananas. Once properly roasted, this macabre goulash is passed around to each of the unenthusiastic suspects. As they start to eat, the ghosts of the vicinity are called upon to see that the bones, having penetrated to the stomach of the murderer, dispatch him on the spot. And so, according to all accounts, they infallibly do. In the meantime the pure in heart, undeterred by the unusual ingredients, are one more meal to the good, sufficient recompense for any trouble to which they may have been put.

There was no dining off bones in the case of Sejak’s father’s sister’s husband’s brother. Sejak was about as unprocrastinating as a Madik could be, and he was eager to clear matters up as soon as possible.

“We will have the ‘Undashulko’—the trial of the knife in the bamboo,” he said. “Blit and I will go to tap the saguer tree and you and you—go gather rattan to make the
‘guns.’ ”

A gun
is a strip of rattan which serves as the Papuan calendar, and by which meetings and future events are arranged. A knot is made for every day before the specified date. The recipient cuts off one knot each morning. When there is no knot left to cut, he realizes the set day has dawned. For a large gathering they are sent out in all directions, carefully tallied with the mother
gun,
which the expectant host keeps at home for his own information.

Yakwo, Dim, Shubul, and the other suspects received their rattan invitations for the Undashulko. Such an invitation cannot very well be refused; failure to put in an appearance would be construed as an admission of guilt. The chance of supernaturally invoked punishment would immediately be replaced by a very certain volley of spears hurled by human hands.

Sejak’s eyes always began to dance with excitement when he recounted the Undashulko. All the guests had arrived promptly and sat in a circle on the floor of Nakari’s brother’s house. In the comer stood an enormous bamboo node brimming with the liquid and mildly intoxicating results of Sejak’s labors on the saguer tree. Grouped around it were several cane saguer-drinking tubes, incised with crisscross lines and gaily stained with red. Sejak was convinced—or so he said afterwards—that it was Dim who had killed Nakari.

“If someone’s son had an affair with my niece and never paid me for it, I think I would kill him,” he explained with gentle logic. “Or the son,” he added reflectively.

“So,” he said, “I filled one of the cane tubes with saguer, and in it I placed a new sharp knife I had bought from a Moi man. Then I called in a very loud voice to the ghost of Nakari. I told him: ‘The man who killed you with
kwi
is here somewhere. When he drinks the saguer from this tube, do you, with your ghostly hand, plunge the knife into his insides and kill him.’ Then I gave the tube to him to drink. Dim’s eyes were rolling like this” (it was almost impossible for Sejak’s eyes to roll any more in demonstration) “and his hands were shaking like leaves in the wind, but he tipped up the tube and drank the saguer while we all waited and watched. Suddenly,” shouted Sejak, throwing his comb on the floor with a clatter, “he dropped the tube like this and doubled up like this and he vomited blood, pools and pools of blood, from where the knife had cut his insides. And then he died.” Sejak slapped his thighs and rocked back and forth in retrospective enjoyment. “Nakari’s ghost had killed him; he knew his murderer. You can’t fool a ghost.”

“That must have been very satisfactory,” we said, impressed. “What happened then? Was Dim’s family annoyed?”

“Oh, no,” said Sejak, “How could they be? Dim had killed Nakari and it was justice.”

We mulled over this for a while until we heard Sejak give vent to several heavy sighs. We looked at him in surprise.

“Were you, after all, sorry to see Dim die?”

“Oh, no,” he said again. “But I was remembering that then we left the house with the big bamboo full of saguer and we drank it all up. It had little red peppers in it. It was the best I ever tasted.”

Sejak was a patriotic and important member of his tribe. In the present degenerate days there are few men as well educated as he, for Sejak had not been satisfied with the preliminary general instruction received at the Newun. With a few others he had pursued a postgraduate course under the tutelage of the wise old teacher of the young men’s house. This advanced curriculum had one rather peculiar characteristic. The pupils were instructed in the art of curing a number of complicated diseases which could only be contracted by those who had learned these cures. It would really seem that these ambitious students made very little actual forward progress save in the business of indefinitely checkmating themselves. Why learn to cure smallpox, for instance, if you were immune to it until you knew the cure?

There was one compensation for this mass of ambivalent information. It was only a postgraduate who knew how to kill a witch.

Sejak was modest about his accomplishments. It was not from him but from some of his admirers that we were first told the tale of how he slew a witch and saved a human life. When we first commented on the subject to him he blushed becomingly and shrugged his shoulders as though to say, “Of course, anyone can kill a witch.” But he would have been deeply hurt had we appeared to agree with this attitude.

Angry ghosts, bad words, broken tabus lead often to disaster and occasionally to death. But not even the battle cry of men with spears so congeals the hearts of the people with fear as the very thought of a witch, the terror that stalks by day and by night through the forest and through the houses of sleeping men.

A great advantage to a Madik witch is that she remains incognito, exhibiting none of the insignia of her profession. More wily than her sisters of the western world, she conducts her nefarious business entirely through the agency of her familiar spirit, thereby obviating any necessity for mumbling spells, harnessing broomsticks, or exposing herself at a coven.

This familiar spirit is always of the male gender, a twin brother of the witch born either in material or ethereal form at the same time and of the same mother witch. If he appears as a human baby his mother hastily disposes of him, for he is an incarnate accusation of witchcraft against both herself and her daughter. But even as she presses the breath from his tiny body, she is consoled by the assurance that his powerful spirit will never wander far from his sister’s side.

The reason that this semi-supematural brood is such a menace to society is not because they are activated by malice or ill will towards their fellows; it is purely a question of dietetics. Ordinary mortals may be tempted to dine off the bodies of their acquaintances, but the sublimated palates of the Tubwi and her brother crave the titillation of a meal of human souls.

It is appropriately the disembodied male twin who sets out on the quest for food, armed with a barbed spear or a sharpened bamboo as invisible to human eyes as he himself. Several men described to us having been attacked by a hungry Tubwi—the sensation of a sharp stab in the chest followed by the agonizing wrench which they knew meant the slicing off of a piece of soul. The huntsman nibbles off this as he heads for home, but he is careful to save a presentable portion for the sister who awaits him.

“I have found a good edible soul,” he says to her, “that will last us for some time. As soon as we have finished this, I will go back for more.”

For the Tubwis skillfully preserve their food supply in the same manner accredited to some of the South Coast Papuans, who are said to tie their victim to a tree and cut off a steak whenever they are hungry, solicitously tending the wounds to keep him alive and the meat fresh in between meals.

The wounded soul meanwhile is in a torment of apprehension. It knows that it is marked as Tubwi food; that unless it can escape unseen by its vigilant enemy it will be gradually hacked away to nothing. In the hope of eluding its persecutor, its human habitation may make a dash for obscurity. Crawling under creepers, doubling in its tracks, stealing silently along unfrequented paths, it seeks to dodge its lynxeyed hunter, to find somewhere a far-off shelter unknown to him. Sometimes it is successful and the angry Tubwis, balked of their prey, attack another soul with redoubled energy and viciousness, eager simultaneously to satiate their whetted appetites and revenge themselves against mankind. More often the hunted soul is run to earth, for swift and clever beyond the power of ordinary mortals must he be who can outwit a spirit, who can hide from invisible eyes and guard himself from unseen weapons.