Lost Worlds (54 page)

It all happened so quickly I never really felt the pain or the burning. I was amazed by the speed of this apparently ungainly woman.

“
Vinaka—
thank you very much,” I said.

“No,” she said, still grinning but trying to be serious. “No
—vinaka
to you—you would now be covering all of me with this grease if the pot had fallen
—vinaka
.”

There was a ripple of echoed “
vinakas
” in the crowd. Someone patted my back; an old man stepped up, looked me in the eyes, and rubbed my unburned elbow as if it were a kind of good-fortune talisman.

“
Bula, bula
. You were very fast, sir. That was a very good thing for you to do.”

More mumbled agreement from the market crowd. I had suddenly been transformed from a foreign fool with a pepper-scorched palate into some kind of hero-of-the-day. All within a few seconds.

“Are you all right?” I asked the cook.

“Oh, yes—thanks to you.”

“What about your stool?”

“Ah—it was a bad stool. For a year it’s been creaking and wobbling. Now I can get a new one!”

The smiles and laughter began again.

One of the fishermen who had been standing off to the side behind his pile of parrot fish approached with an enormous specimen in his arms.

“This is for you,” he said shyly.

“What—oh, no. No, I don’t need any fish.
Vinaka
. That’s very kind of you, but honestly—I have nowhere to cook it—thank you for a very kind thought.”

He stood holding his fish and looking a little sad. It turned out that he was the husband of the cook and felt obliged to say thank you in the traditionally generous Fijian way of giving something of value.

The cook looked at him sternly as if to say, “That is not enough.” Then she bent down and picked up the beautiful old tapa that lay buckled over the crumpled stool.

“No fish. This is for you.”

She began to roll the tapa slowly.

“This would have been all burned too—just like me!” she said, grinning. “So now it’s yours.”

It was a superb piece of bark-cloth. Altogether different from the stuff I saw in Nandi’s tourist stores. Its stains and discolorations from years of use, and smoothed patches where the cook’s behind had rested for countless hours, made it even more authentic and precious. I was very tempted.

“No—honestly. I can’t accept this. It is very beautiful—but it belongs to you.”

Now she was the one to look sad.

“Listen,” I said, desperately trying to think of a way to avoid offending anyone. “Y’know what I’d really like…some more of your lovely fried fish. It’s the best I’ve tasted in Fiji. I’d like some of that—only without your special sauce!”

The crowd broke into raucous laughter and started applauding. This was all getting a little embarrassing.

“Is that okay with you?” I asked, hoping I’d said the right thing.

She looked at me, and then “into” me—deeply. (Fijians have a special way of focusing their eyes into your eyes that makes you feel as though they’re peering into your soul.) There was what seemed like a long, long silence. And then she laughed.

“I will make you some special fish. You will not need your dinner tonight.”

And she did. The cook and her husband filleted the large fish he’d carried over, cut the large steaks into small cubes, which she rolled in her flour mix (“My secret,” she whispered), and then deep-fried them in the still-bubbling caldron.

I left with enough golden brown fish pieces to feed the whole market and they were, as I knew they would be, utterly delicious.

And—she was right—I didn’t need dinner that night.

Snorkeling—I had to go snorkeling. Overcoming residual fears from the Ningaloo experience in Australia, I decided that as Taveuni had been proclaimed one of the top five diving areas in the world, there was no way I could avoid the experience.

I’d been advised to avoid the treacherous currents of Rainbow Reef and the “bottomless” chasms of the Great White Wall. So I hired a boatman to take me out to the benignly named Blue-Ribbon Eel Reef and swam along its shallow slopes, circling around a couple of fiercely striped (and very poisonous) lionfish, grinning at the fat-tomato clownfish that played among the swaying anemone, and chasing a pufferfish that grew ever larger as it propelled itself through the coral reefs with a tiny, almost invisible tail fin.

There were scores of gray and dark red bêche-de-mer among the explosions of coral. We know them by far less graceful names, of which sea slug or sea cucumber are the most familiar. Lovers of Chinese food will have seen them listed on menus in the more authentic restaurants and the Chinese themselves revere them as restoratives of sexual prowess. I can’t vouch for this particular quality and neither can I really recommend them as a memorable dish. Bland, colorless, gelatinous, and resembling floppy slices of dill pickle, they are quickly overwhelmed by other flavors at a Chinese banquet. Even when eaten along with minimal accompaniments I still fail to understand their appeal. And yet vast fortunes were made by the traders who visited here in the early 1800s to supervise their collection and curing. The “black-bêche” were considered the most valuable and formed the basis for a lucrative trade with the Orient.

These mature creatures, a round ten inches long, three inches thick, covered with warty bumps, and coated in a thick sticky goo, were harvested by Fijian fishermen from the reefs. Carried to shore in great straw baskets, they were split, boiled for a few minutes, and then smoked, sometimes for days, over green twigs and branches in a smokehouse, or
vata
. The results were shriveled leatherlike strips which were piled into sacks or baskets, each weighing around 140 pounds (a
picul
), considered to be a reasonable load to be carried on a man’s back. And off the trading ships sailed to Manila and other Oriental ports to sell these odd wizened creatures for ten to twenty times the cost of their processing.

There was only one problem with this seemingly lucrative trade. The Fijian chiefs began to hear of these enormous profits and became discontent with the paltry payments of the traders, usually in the form of iron implements, rusty muskets, and, as the whaling industry increased, the polished teeth of sperm whales (
tabua
). They were particularly incensed by the stinginess of the New England traders, who were notorious for hard bargaining and duplicitous deal making.

On one particular occasion in 1834 the chief of Ono Island reasoned that the sailing skills of his subjects were more than a match for those of the wily New Englanders and that there was no reason for him not to confiscate a trading ship and arrange his own export ventures with the Orientals.

So one warm September afternoon he sent his warriors to the smokehouse on the island, with orders to destroy it and club to death the whole Yankee crew. Ten men were killed within minutes and it was only the shot from a single cannon on the trading ship, the
Charles Doggett
, that prevented the chief from realizing his schemes of easy riches and glory.

A similar attack occurred around the same time on the English brig
Sir David Ogilvie
. The Fijian chief, who was actually a guest on board, suddenly clubbed to death the unfortunate Captain Hutchins with whom he had been chatting on the quarterdeck. This was the sign for attack. Warrior canoes immediately sailed out from shore to complete the rout, only to be driven back by frantic musket fire from a terrified crew. The chief was shot as he sat in the captain’s cabin wearing Mr. Hutchins’s gold-braided hat.

It took regular visits by British and American men-of-war ships to subdue these occasional uprisings. Eventually better terms were offered to the angry chiefs and the trade continued, albeit on less friendly terms.

And there they were—the cause of all these problems—scores of fat, floppy sea cucumbers between the coral sprays, benignly oblivious to the battles that had once raged around these reefs, all for the sake of improving the sexual potency of already overpotent, overpopulated Asian nations.

In contrast to the gray anonymity of these sluglike creatures, the coral itself exploded in bouquets of rainbow colors and effervescent shapes: hard knotty clusters of polyps, delicate fanlike sprays of soft coral, bulbous mounds of brain coral, strange gardens of cabbage coral, the aggressive spikes of aptly named staghorn, fluffy sponges, and a dozen other less familiar species displayed in a welter of golds, jades, crimsons, blues, purples, and pinks.

Snorkeling is a very seductive pastime. No matter how many times or how many oceans I swim in, each experience reveals new wonders of form, color, and texture, new delights at the incredible variety—and intensity—of aquatic life. Even more so with scuba diving, although this time I erred on the side of caution and stuck with my snorkel mask and tube. I was disappointed with myself but gave in to the urge of self-preservation, even though the deep purple-blue depths of the cliffs and canyons below the surface reefs beckoned me with fleeting images of enormous groupers and lithe-bodied whitetip sharks.

I drifted through the satiny, sun-dappled shallows, among the butterfly fish and golden shoals of anthias, watching the darkgreen tentacles of the sea worm emerge from their white warty tubes and sway ballerinalike in slow graceful dances. I could sense the warmth of the sun on my back and the soft lapping of the water on my outstretched arms. That old familiar feeling of weightlessness eased in—a lovely limbo of effortless movement through a landscape of infinite beauties where fish come up to kiss you and golden wings of lace coral wave at you like old friends and you wonder why you can’t just float on like this forever, buoyed by a benevolent ocean, lost in mushy-minded reveries, where all the plans and perils and petty concerns of life on land dissolve away and you allow your fantasies free rein to play, hour after hour, day after day….

I hadn’t seen the shark.

It must have been trailing me, keeping its distance, mimicking my lazy meanderings. I was moving over a field of cabbage coral, great blue-green sprays of leaflike clusters, when I noticed that my own dappled shadow appeared to be followed by a second shadow, almost of the same length. I thought it must be some trick of the light—some form of double reflection—and then slowly realized that the movement of the shadow behind was not identical to mine. Similar, but not quite the same.

With a quick flap of my flippers I turned…and there it was. A whitetip, almost five feet in length, but similar in almost every detail to far larger—and deadlier—specimens. There was the dullgray smoothness of its streamlined head, the ridge of its nose, the dark pectoral fins like honed knifeblades, the scimitar-shaped mouth slightly open and generously endowed with layer upon layer of razored teeth…and its eyes. God—how I hate the eyes of a shark, any shark, even those of the little puny dogfishlike sharklets. The eyes are always the same. Wide open, metallic, cold, angry, cruel—utterly merciless. Nothing like the cute little button eyes of the tomato clown fish or the bright gold jewel eyes of the anthias or the conical domes of the puffer.

Previously I had been warm, buoying about in the sunny shallows. Now I suddenly felt cold—death cold—as I looked right into the eyes of a killer. Only whitetips weren’t killers…or so I’d been told. But maybe this one hadn’t heard about its benevolent reputation. Or maybe this was the day when it was contemplating a new direction in life, a little human flesh maybe, to enliven an all too regular diet of puny defenseless fish. A nice fat mouthful of thigh, possibly, or a juicy arm.

If only the thing would blink once in a while…a smile would be too much to ask, and anyway, that crescent slit of a mouth seemed to possess a perpetual smile of gustatory anticipation…but a little blink of those deathly, malevolent eyes would be very nice, a little reassuring gesture, an indication that this was something more than just an endlessly avaricious eating machine.

But it didn’t.

So—what to do?

No way was I going to turn my back on it or try to swim around the creature. Maybe a hand gesture? I slowly allowed my arms to drift together until my hands were touching. Then I clapped them together, hoping a sudden movement would persuade it to wander on in search of less aggressive prey. But it did nothing except wriggle its dorsal fin and keep staring right at me.

There were branches of staghorn coral a few feet below me. Maybe I could use one of those as a spear and give him a quick jab on the nose. After all, the tips were supposed to contain some unpleasant poison…but that might make him mad at me and then…well, I’d be a quick lunch and that would be that.

In the end it was a standoff. I kept staring and it kept staring back and then I think it just became bored. With a quick flick of its tail fin it vanished. Off over the edge of the shallow reef and down into the purple depths of a canyon to my left.

I decided not to wait around to see if it had second thoughts and swam back to the boat as quickly as I could, expecting at any second to feel those incisor teeth and that ghastly maw of a mouth closing on one of my flapping legs.

“Oh, no, the whitetips are fine, man,” the boatman assured me. “Never had no problems.”

“Well, that’s what I assumed,” I bluffed. “Never really thought it would do anything.” Fear was easing away; my confidence was returning.

“No, not ’round here,” he replied with a big reassuring grin.

“Right.”

“’Course, if you’d been up in the Solomons…”

“Off Papua New Guinea?”

“Yeah tha’s right, man.”

“Why would that be different?”

“Man, tha’s very different up there. They eatin’ people all the time. Blacktips, whitetips, they all doin’ it. They really like people meat ’round those islands. They got used to it a’suppose. Before all them missionaries, the people’d leave out the bodies of them that died on the reefs for the sharks. Faster’n cremation, man. Few seconds and they’d be gone. So y’see, they got this taste for people meat. No one likes the water up there.”