THE SPIRIT OF MT. APO
From the deck of any vessel passing up the southeast coast of Mindanao,the voyager can see the gold-crowned summit of Apo, rising like agilded cone high above the dense vegetation of the island at its base.
Next to Luzon, on which the city of Manila is situated, Mindanao isthe largest of all the islands of the Philippine archipelago. Lying asit does far to the southeast, and near the Sulu Islands, the Moros,as the venturesome Sulus are called, invaded Mindanao more than twohundred years ago, and gradually crept farther and farther along thecoasts and up the river valleys, waging intermittent warfare againstthe Visayans who had come from the west to settle on the island,and against the natives that lived inland, and keeping up constantrelentless war upon the Spaniards who claimed the sovereignty ofthe island. There are few islands of its size in the world whereso many different kinds of people live, and perhaps no other whereso many wild deeds have been done. Until within the last two years,a man's will there has been likely to be his only law.
Nature has done much for the island. The soil is of incalculablerichness. Fruits and grains grow luxuriantly where the ground isturned over, and as if to make the natives laugh at the need of suchlabour the forests yield fruits and nuts with lavish generosity. Deerand buffalo run wild, and numberless varieties of pigeons live inthe trees.
Mount Apo, in the extreme southeastern part of the island, and almostupon the coast, is the loftiest mountain in the archipelago. Itsheight is usually estimated to be not far from ten thousand feet. Aspiral of steam drifting up from the sulphur-crowned summit of themountain shows that fires still linger in its bosom, but for manyyears it has been quiet, and at no time does history show that it hasbroken forth in fury to wreak the awful destruction that is writtendown against some of the volcanoes of these islands.
My work as a naturalist had several times brought me where I couldsee Apo, and each time I had been more and more fascinated by it,and more desirous of climbing to its top.
When I began to talk of making the ascent, though, I found it wouldbe no easy matter. Not only were the sides of the mountain said tobe steep, and the forests which clothed them impassable, but therewere mysterious dangers to be encountered. Men who had gone with meanywhere else I had asked them, had affairs of their own to attendto when I spoke of climbing Apo, or else flatly refused to go.
I was told that no man that started up the mountain had ever comeback. Enormous pythons drew their green bodies over its sides. Man-apeslived in its upper forests whose strength no human being couldmeet. Devils and goblins lurked in the crevasses below the summit,and above all and most terrible of all, there was a spirit of themountain whose face to see was death.
My questions as to how they knew all these things if no man had livedto come back from the mountain had no effect. This was not a casefor logic; it was one of those where instinct ruled.
There is a queer little animal, something like a sable, which ispeculiar to Mindanao. The natives call it "gato del monte," whichmeans "mountain cat." I wanted to get some specimens of this animaland also of a variety of pigeon which they call "the stabbed dove,"because it has a tuft of bright red feathers like a splash of bloodupon its otherwise snow-white breast.
To get these I settled myself in a native village a few miles inlandfrom the town of Dinagao, on the west shore of the Gulf of Davao. MountApo towered just above this place, and I meant to climb its sidesbefore I left the valley.
After the Bagabos in whose village I was living found that all theirtales of the terrible dangers on Apo did not dissuade me from temptingthem, three of the men agreed to pilot me as far up the mountainside as they ever went, and to carry there for me a sufficient supplyof food to last me, as they evidently believed, as long as I shouldneed food. One of them, the best guide and carrier I had found on thewhole island, had screwed his courage up to where he had promisedto go farther with me; but the morning of our start a "quago" birdflew across our path and hooted; and that settled the matter. Suchan ominous portent as that no intelligent Bagabo could be expectedto disregard. The men hardly could be got to carry my luggage asfar as they had agreed, and as soon as they had put the things down,they bade me a hasty farewell and scuttled down the mountain as fastas their legs could carry them.
I slept that night where the men had left me, and set out early thenext morning, hoping to get to the top of the mountain and back tothe same place before night overtook me. The climb was more than hardfor the first mile--harder than I had even feared. The forest grewso dense as to be practically impassable, and I finally took to thebed of a rocky stream, up which the travelling, although dangerous,was not so hard.
In time, though, by scrambling up this water course, I passedbeyond the tree line, and then, where there was only shrubbery,it was fairly easy to get along. I could see above the vegetation,now, and the view even from here would have repaid me for all myeffort. The side of the mountain swept down in a majestic curve frommy feet to the sea. At its base was Dinagao, and farther up the coast,Davao. Beyond them lay the blue waters of the Gulf of Davao, and faracross this, showing only as a line of deeper blue upon the water,the mountain ranges of the eastern peninsula.
The bushes through which I waded were bent down with the ripe berrieswhich grew on them. A herd of small, dark brown deer feeding amongthe bushes hardly moved out of my way. I wondered at their tameness,but thought it must be because no man had ever come within theirsight before.
Above the bushes there was a zone of rock, broken in places into hugeboulders, and then between this and the cone was the sulphur field,glowing, now that I was near enough to see it, with a richness ofcolouring such as no painter's palette could reproduce. From darkestgreen to deepest blue, through all the tints and shades of yellow,the colour scheme went, with here and there a touch of rose.
I had stopped a moment to get breath and to gaze at the wonderfulscene before me when there came into it and stood still between twogreat rocks, as a living picture might have stepped up into its frame,a woman, the strangest to look at that I have ever seen.
She was young and slender. She was dressed in a simple, dark-brown,hemp-cloth garment which fell from neck to feet, and her round youngarms were bare to the shoulder.
It took me a full minute, before I could realize what it was whichmade her look so strange to me.
Then I knew. It had been so long since I had seen a white woman thatI did not know one when I saw her.
This woman's face and arms were as white as mine--much whiter, indeed,for I was tanned by months of Asiatic sun--and the hair which fellabout her shoulders and down below her waist, was white;--not light,or golden, but white.
For once in my life, I am willing to confess, my nerves went back onme; and I could think of nothing but what the natives in the villageat the foot of the mountain had told me. Pythons and man-apes anddevils I had seen no trace of, but here, beyond question, was the"Spirit of the Mountain."
A stout, pointed staff of iron-wood, which I had been carrying tohelp me in my scramble up the mountain, slipped from my hand and fellclattering to the rocks. The woman turned her head toward the spot fromwhich the sound had come, as if she heard the noise of the stick uponthe stones, but although we were only a little way from each other,there was no expression in her face to indicate that she saw me.
Then she spoke.
"Madre!"
There was no answer, and she called again, clearer and louder.
"Ma-dre!"
There was a sound of swift steps on the stones, and a moment lateranother woman--an older woman--came from behind one of the rocks.
As if in answer to some question in the girl's face, the woman lookeddown and saw me.
In an instant she had sprung before the younger woman, as if to hideher from me.
There are some women in the world whose very manner carries withit an impression of power. Such was the woman whom I saw before menow. Not young; dark of skin, clad only in the simplest possiblehemp-cloth garment, there was in he
r face a dignity which could notbut win instant recognition.
"Who are you?" she asked in Spanish. "And why do you come here?"
I told her as simply and as plainly as I could, who I was, and whyI had come up the mountain. She kept her place in front of the girl,screening her from sight during all the time that we were talking.
When I had finished she stood silent for a moment, as if thinkingwhat to do.
"Since you have come here," she said at last, "where I had thought noone would ever come, and have learned what I had hoped no one wouldever know, you will not, I feel sure, deny me an opportunity to tellyou enough of the reason why two women live in this wild place, sothat I hope you will help them to keep their secret. May I ask youto go with us to the place which we call home?"
I said I would be glad to go, without having the slightest ideawhere we were going. I should have said it just the same, I think,if I had known she was going to lead me straight down into the craterof the volcano.
"Elena," the older woman said, speaking to the girl. Then she saidsomething else, in a native dialect which I did not understand.
The girl came out from the place where she had been hidden, andpassed behind the rocks. When I saw her face, now, I saw what I hadnot perceived before. She was blind.
When the girl had been gone a little time the woman said: "Will youfollow me?"
She waited until I had climbed up to where she stood, and then ledthe way around the rock behind which the girl had disappeared. A welldefined path led from that place down into the dwarfed vegetation,and then, through that to the forest beyond. The girl was already somedistance down this path, walking rather slowly, as blind people walk,but steadily, and with fingers outstretched here and there to touchthe bushes on each side.
We followed. Where the trees began to be tall enough to furnishshelter, my guide stopped, pushed aside the branches of whatappeared to be an impenetrable thicket, and motioned me to followher through. The girl had disappeared again. The opening throughwhich we went was so thoroughly hidden that I might have gone pastit fifty times and never suspected it was there, or thought that thepath down which we had come was anything but a deer track.
Another short path led us to a cleared space in the forest in which along, low house of bamboo and thatch had been built. A herd of deerwas feeding near the house. Those directly in our path moved lazilyout of the way. The others did not stir. I knew then why the deerthat I had seen as I had come up the mountain were so tame.
A broad porch was built against one side of the house, and underthis were hung fibre hammocks. The woman pointed me to one of thesehammocks, and leaving me there went into the house. When she cameback she brought two gourds filled with some kind of home-made wine,and two wooden cups. The girl, coming just behind her, brought abasket of fruit which the woman took from her and placed upon a bamboostand beside my hammock. Then, filling one of the cups from a gourd,she drank half its contents and set the cup down, fixing her eyes onmine as she did so.
I knew enough of native customs by this time to understand whatthis meant. If I took the cup which she had drunk from, and drank,I was a guest of the house, and bound in honor to do it no harm. IfI poured wine from the other gourd into another cup and drank, I wasunder obligations as a guest only while I was under the roof.
I took the cup from the table and drank the half portion of winewhich she had left in it.
"Thank you," the woman said. "I will trust you."
Then, sitting on a bamboo stool near my hammock, she began totalk. Only, at times, as she told me her story, she would rise andwalk up and down the porch, as if she could tell some things easierwalking than when sitting still.
Much of what she told me I shall not write down here; but enough foran understanding of the strange things which followed.
"My home was once in ----," she said, naming one of the most importanttowns in the island. "My father was a Spanish officer, rich, proudand powerful. My mother was a Visayan woman. When I was little morethan a girl, my parents married me to a Spanish officer much olderthan myself. So far as I knew then what love was, I thought I lovedhim. Afterward, I came to know.
"Among the prisoners brought into my husband's care there came oneday a Moro, whose life, for some reason, had been spared longer thanwas the lot of most prisoners. I told myself, the first time I sawthis man, that he was the noblest looking man I had ever seen, andsince that time I have never seen his equal. Chance made it possiblefor us to meet and speak, and then, in a little while, I came to knowwhat love really is.
"One day I learned that the Moro prisoner was to be beheaded thenext day. Word had come that a Spanish prisoner whom the Moros hadcaptured some time before, and with the hope of whose ransom thisman had been held, had been killed.
"That night"--the woman was walking the floor of the porch now--"Ikilled my husband while he was asleep, set the man I loved free, andwe fled the city. By day we hid in the forests, and walked by night,until we came to a part of the island where the Moros lived. Nicomedisbrought me to the town which had been his home, and we were marriedand lived there.
"Elena is our child. You have seen her."
I realized cow the truth about the girl;--her strange appearance,the color of her skin and eyes and hair. In my travels through theislands I had once or twice seen other albino children.
The woman had sat down again.
"Our life in the Moro town was never wholly comfortable. My husband'speople distrusted me. I was of a different faith, and from a hostilerace. They would rather he would have chosen a wife of his ownpeople. When the child was born things grew worse. Some said the tribewould never win in war while the child lived;--it was a curse. Thencame a year when the plague raged among the Moros as it had never beenknown to do, terrible as some of its visits before that time had been.
"One day a slave, whose life Nicomedis once had saved when hismaster would have beaten the man to death, came to our house andtold us that the people of the town were coming to kill us all,that the curse might be removed and the plague stayed. My husbandwould have stood up to fight them all until he himself was killed,but for the sake of the child, and because I begged him not to leaveus alone, he did not. Again we fled into the forest; and because thetrees and the beasts and the birds were kinder to us than any men,we said we would come up here--where we knew no man dare come--andwould live our lives here.
"Eight years ago my husband died." The woman was walking the porchagain, and sometimes she waited a long time between the sentences ofher story. "We buried him out there," pointing to where the forest cameup to one side of the enclosure. "It is easy for us to live here. Wehave everything we need. We have never been disturbed before. Onlyonce, years ago, did any of the natives come as far up the mountainas this, and it was easy for us to frighten them so that no one hasdared to come since then. You are the only living person who knowsour secret. Shall we know that it is to be safe with you?"
For answer I filled the wooden cup from the gourd again, drank halfthe contents, and handed the cup to her to drink the rest.
"I thank you," she said. "My life has had enough of sin and sufferingin it so that I have hoped it may not have more of either.
"I would not have you think that I am complaining," she said hastily,a moment later, as if she was afraid I would get that impression. "Iam not. I do not regret one day of my life. My hands are stained withwhat people call crime, and my heart knows all the weight which griefcan lay upon a heart; but the joy of my life while my husband livedpaid for it all. To have been loved by him as I was loved, was wellworth crime and grief."
"Why do you not go away from here?" I asked. "Why not leave thiscountry entirely, and go to some new land where you would be freefrom danger? I will help you to get away."
"We know nothing of other lands," she said. "We should be helplessthere. We are better here." "Besides," a moment later, "his grave,"pointing out toward the trees, "is here."
It had grown dark as we talked; the thick, dead darkness of
aPhilippine forest night. The deer on the ground outside the porchhad lain down and curled their heads around beside them and goneto sleep. Enormous bats flew past the house. We could not see them,but we felt the air which their huge wings set in motion. The womanlighted a little torch of "viao" nuts. Elena came out of the house,walked across the porch and disappeared in the darkness, going towardthe forest.
"Ought she to go?" I asked. "Will she not be lost, or hurt?"
"Did you not understand it all?" the girl's mother said. "She isblind only in the day time. At night she sees as readily as you andI do by day."
In a few minutes the girl came back with her hands filled with freshpicked fruit. She gave me this, and her mother brought out from thehouse such simple food as she could provide.
"You will sleep here, tonight," she said, and left me.
The next day I went to the top of the mountain, and after that, bymaking two trips to my camp, brought up all the articles which hadbeen left there, including some blankets a gun and ammunition, somefood and some medicines. These I asked "the woman of the mountain,"as I called her to myself, to let me give to her. She took them, andthanked me. I stayed there that night, and the next day said good byto the two strange women, and went down the mountain.
When I reached my house in the village I found my neighbors gettingready to divide my property among themselves, since they were satisfiedI would never return to claim it. They did not think it strange that Icame back empty-handed. That I had come back at all was a wonder. Forthe sake of the security of the two women I let it be known that I hadseen strange sights on the volcano's top, and that it was a perilousjourney to climb its sides.
I planned to stay in the village some weeks longer. My house, likemost of the native habitations, was built of bamboo, and was set uponposts several feet above the ground. I lived alone. One night abouta month after my return, I woke from a sound sleep, choking.
Some one's hand was pressed tightly over my mouth, and another handon my breast held me down motionless upon my sleeping mat.
"Don't speak!" some one whispered intomy ear. "Don't make a sound! Lie perfectlyquiet until you understand all that I amsaying!
"The natives have banded themselves together to kill you tonight. Theybelieve the village has been cursed ever since you came down fromMount Apo, and that you are the cause of it."
I could see now that there had been a growing coldness toward me onthe part of the people ever since I had come back. And there hadbeen evil luck, too. The chief's best horse had cast himself andhad to be killed. Two men out hunting had fallen into the hands ofa hostile tribe and been "boloed." Game had been unusually scarce,and a "quago" bird had hooted three nights in succession.
"They are coming here tonight to burn your house," the same voicewhispered, "and kill you with their spears if you try to escape theflames. No matter how I knew, or how we came. There is no time tolose. You cannot stop to bring anything with you. Come outside thehouse at once, as noiselessly as possible, and Elena will lead us towhere you can escape."
The hands were taken from my mouth and body, and I felt that Iwas alone.
A few moments later, outside the house, when I stepped from the ladderto the ground, a hand--a woman's hand--grasped mine firmly.
"Do not be afraid to follow," the same voice whispered. "Elena willlead the way, and will tell us of anything in the path."
The hand gave a tug at mine, and I followed. We were in absolutedarkness. Sometimes the frond of a giant fern brushed against mycheek, or the sharp-pointed leaf of a palm stung my face, but thatwas all. The girl led us steadily onward through the forest.
"Stop!" she said, once, "and look back."
I turned my face in the direction from which we had come. A ray oflight shone in the darkness, and quickly became a blaze. It was myhouse on fire. With the light of the fire came the sound of savagecries, the shouts of the men watching with poised spears about theburning house. In the dim light which the fire cast where we stood,I could make out the forms of my two companions. A black cloth boundaround the girl's head hid her white hair. In the dark, her eyes,so blank in the day light, glowed like two stars. She held her motherby the hand, and the older woman's other hand grasped mine. I lookedat the girl, and thought of Nydia, leading the fugitives from outPompeii to safety.
Before the light of the fire had died, we were on our way again. Itseemed to me as if we walked in the darkness of the forest for hours;but after a little we were following a beaten track. At times thegirl told us to step over a tree fallen across the path, or warnedus that we were to cross a stream. At last we came out on the hardsand of the ocean beach, and reached the water's edge. Freed fromthe forest's shade the darkness was less dense. I could make out thesurface of the water, and out on it a little way some dark object. Thegirl spoke to her mother in their native tongue.
"There is a 'banca,'" the woman said, pointing out over the water tothe boat. "No matter whose it is. Swim out to it, pull up the anchor,and before day comes you can be safe."
I tried to thank her.
"I am glad we could do it," she said, simply. "I am glad if we coulddo good."
Then they left me; and went back up the beach into the darkness.