Goodbye, Darkness

  Streams, the arteries of commerce, support villages at their mouths, often within sight of the beaches. The typical village has a score of bell-shaped huts on stilts to provide coolness and protection from floods, the thatched roofs rising high, like hives. Approaching one of them, crossing the Yumi River over a shaky bamboo bridge, my companions and I find beached canoes, dugouts, and frail sampans with rattan hoods. Next we hear the squealing of little black pigs and then the sounds of men and women, all of whom, we discover, are wearing lap-lap shorts. The fishermen, their day's catch in, are asleep on woven mats. Other men, and children, are planting taro, pandanus (screw pines), yams, and sago palms, chanting as they do so. Two young women are nourishing baby pigs. Beside a pile of tropical fruit, which resembles a Ghirlandajo picture, a group of older women are busy sorting out huge bunches of bananas, bolts of tapa, kava bowls, and necklaces of shells, beads, bones, dogs' teeth, sharks' teeth, and, incredibly, Pepsi-Cola bottle caps. Other women are working on stalks of the very useful sago palm; the trunk provides flour for cakes and porridge, and the fabric from the huge, branching single flower, twelve feet across, will make bunchy skirts which, dyed in rich, deep colors, are worn for festive occasions.

  One of the indigenes, sleeping in the feathery shade of acacias, stirs, yawns, and approaches his visitors. Evidently he is the headman, or “big man.” He is a tall, striking figure, his wiry hair dyed with lime, his satin skin the color of coffee, a string of red berries at his throat, and, behind one ear, a flower like a tongue of crimson flame. Alas, there is no way to communicate with him. The visitors cannot speak his tongue, and he has no pidgin. One would like to ask why anyone bothers to work at all here. This is the ultimate dolce far niente existence. There is no need for clothing or shelter; the breeze from the water is perpetually steady; and an exotic diet is always within reaching distance. Apart from the yams, pandanus, and sagos, there are fruit and paste from the spreading green bread-fruit trees, coconuts, dried green bananas, sugarcane, arrowroot, dried skipjack (tuna), dried akule (reef fish), and assorted nuts and gourds.

  Of course, the Papuans do not think of themselves as blessed. People never do. Everyone wants something that others have. Rousseau's “noble savage” craves the comforts and appliances of Western technology. Beginning in 1942, Moresby natives have seen what they, with their belief in sorcery, can only interpret as magic rituals. They have observed white men open refrigerator doors and remove delightful containers. So they build imitation refrigerators of wood, paint them white, and peek inside from time to time, looking for snacks and tinned beer. It doesn't work? Never mind; they remember Australians or Americans ordering them to fetch a batch of papers quickly: “Hurry up, chop-chop, me kickee ass bilong you.” Then the white man would riffle through the papers, pick up a tube, and say a few words. As a result, a plane soon landed bearing marvelous freight. The native is no dummy. He can imitate any rite. He puts together a facsimile of a telephone with tin cans and string. He shuffles papers and speaks into the can; then he searches the sky, predicting, “Moni i kam baimbai” (“Money he come by and by”). But the moni doesn't kam, and neither does the plane. So he tries to perfect his ceremonies, building more replicas of refrigerators and phones, convinced that sooner or later he will get it right. Frustrated, a New Hanover tribe formed a “Lyndon B. Johnson cult” in the 1960s. Even in New Guinea people knew that nobody was more effective with gadgets and telephones than Lyndon Johnson. They adopted a motto, “Yumi Lakim Johnson” (“We Like Johnson”). They wanted the President to become their “numbawan bikpela long kantri” — “number one big fellow of the country,” meaning chieftain of their own country. Somehow they amassed sixteen hundred dollars for a one-way ticket from Washington to Moresby and sent the ticket to the White House. Johnson didn't arrive. “Basman ino kam” (“Bossman he no come”), their leader regretfully told them. It seems a pity. LBJ would have made a marvelous king of the blackfellows, and he would have enjoyed the job immensely. There would have been no antiwar demonstrations, no prickly congressmen, no Bobby Kennedy. And like every other foreigner to visit the narrow shelves of land along the beaches of the South Seas, he would have been enchanted by the closest thing to paradise on earth. Even pidgin, once it has been mastered, can be a source of constant delight. The Lord's Prayer begins: “Papa bilong yumi Istap Antap” (“Father on top belong you and me”). Apollo 14 was “tupela igo daun wokabout long mun” (“two fellow he go down walk along moon”). A woman's vagina is “bokis ilong missus” (“box belongs to girl”). Johnson would have loved that, too.

  Why, then, does the mere mention of the southwest Pacific cause the men who fought there to shudder? Why does so genteel an author as Herman Wouk, whipped into a white-lipped rage at the mere thought of Guadalcanal, write that it “was and remains ‘that fucking island’”? Why was combat there considered — correctly — worse than Stalingrad? These days Peace Corps volunteers on the islands, believing they are dwelling in an idyll, are baffled by the area's reputation. Over and over they ask me for an explanation. But my words are inadequate. Plainly they are unconvinced. Therefore I tell them to do what I did in my Papuan explorations: “Move a thousand yards inland. Just be sure you take a compass and leave a Hansel-and-Gretel trail behind you. If you don't you will die.”

  That is literally true. Indeed, the distance may be, not a thousand yards, but fifty feet. You lose all sense of direction, and the chances of a successful return are virtually nonexistent. In the 1960s an airliner crashed in Puerto Rico's celebrated rainforest, which was used to film the Tarzan movies. It took three years for search planes to find the wreckage. If the jungle has seduced you into entering it — and it is seductive — you are so bewildered by the masses of green enfolding you that you are, in effect, blinded. During the war infantrymen sat between the buttresses of banyan roots and watched Japanese patrols passing within eight feet. Unless Japs stumbled over them, they were quite safe. The jungle was helpful then, but there is little else to be said for it. Having lived in it, I can understand why Papuans believe in witchcraft and seek to ward off evil spirits by wearing enormous headgear with bird of paradise feathers, or tattoos, or tusks in their pierced noses, or by plastering themselves from head to toe in gray mud, or by painting their faces in red and blue stripes with dyes extracted from New Guinea shrubs. One will do most anything to put a hex on the jungle. And the Papuans, of course, have lived in it all their lives. One of their valued wartime skills was the gift of telling, from the snap of a twig, whether an intruder was an animal or a Jap. Australians swore, and still swear, that the natives are born with this sixth sense. At all events, they had it in 1942 and the Allied soldiers didn't.

  Leaving a Grimm brothers' spoor in our wake, blazing a trail, so to speak, for the time when we shall retrace our steps, my two companions and I plunge into the wild verdure and presently find ourselves in a green fastness. I am struggling through festoons of vines and the bramble hooks of creepers which reach as high as my bush jacket and ensnarl me, again and again, while I wade between soaring kanari trees overgrown with vines and moss. The sunlight can barely filter through the foliage to the rotting leaves and mud beneath my boots. The luxuriant, entangled undergrowth is both pestilential and sinister. The Yumi is somewhere near — I can hear echoes of its rapids, but cannot guess where they are coming from. As we blunder onward, one of the indigenes steers me away from the quicksands of a herbaceous swamp. The heat is unbelievable. Rain falls briefly, only making the air steamier. As the sun reappears you have the impression of being in a hothouse, sultry, humid, breathless, and seething. You have the feeling that everything around you is growing rapidly, with a savage violence.

  This is virgin jungle, the climax forest, the primeval slime. In the time of Tacitus all Germany was covered by a vast Hercynian forest, so dense that a man could walk from Poland to the Rhine without once glimpsing the sun, but wooded Germany at least had a net of trails. There are few here, and if unattended they are quickly reclaimed by t
he relentless foliage. In Papua the pathless green masses stretch in all directions among the mangroves, nipas, and kanaris. We progress slowly through the buttressed grandeur of the trees, cross a little glade of scrub and sharp kunai grass — less humid here, but the sun is brutal — and take a break in the shade of a bamboo marsh, where shoots rise in their slender elegance to great heights, and the green filtered light speckles the riotous growth. Then, having caught my breath, I become conscious of the rainforest's endless noise.

  There is the inevitable myna bird, of course, making a terrific commotion. Next comes the harsh chatter of the insects, kept out of reach by our smelly Cutter ointment but buzzing and snapping just the same. In nearby treetops I hear the twittering of sunbirds delicately coquetting with the parasitic flowers that grow upon the boughs of the kanaris. Cicadas are singing their grating song. Bullfrogs croak. The chik-chak gives its harsh; penetrating, and chillingly human cry. Finally the chorus is led by the shriek of a fever-bird, rising like an endless oriental melody to which one listens with growing exasperation.

  We hoist our packs and tunnel onward under the breathless flush of the late afternoon. By now my bush jacket is drenched, my vision obscured by my own sweat. The stench of rotting vegetation is nauseating. Progress is slow; the effort it exacts is exhausting. Again and again I pass gigantic trees swathed in luxurious ferns and lichen like bridal veils cascading down, and echoing, wind-haunted ravines, and wet green ridges, and treacherous morasses. The jungle is mysterious, trembling. I become obsessed with the illusion that some evil animal is six feet to my left, crashing as I crash, awaiting his chance to pounce. Since one of my guides would have heard any creature there, my fear is probably groundless, but it is not entirely unreasonable. Stealthy cannibals still flourish in Papua. And New Guinea's animal life would give the bravest man pause. Hideous crabs scuttle underfoot. Reptiles are coiled around tree limbs. And somewhere in this green hell lurk scorpions, bats, baboons, spiny anteaters, ratlike bandicoots, cassowaries, wild boars, and crocodiles: an awesome menagerie which seems to justify the irrational conviction that a menacing beast is close, and coming closer. This is the kind of jungle I learned to fear and hate in my youth, a soggy miasma of disease-bearing insects, snakes, precipitous slopes, mire, swamps, heat, humidity, landslides of falling rock, and rushing rivers to cross, rivers whose creatures include bloodsucking leeches with circles of tiny teeth, like lampreys, who feast on your anus and your genitals. There is horror everywhere, everywhere, and angst.

  And thirst. Above all, thirst. Ordinarily it is odors that are most evocative of the past, but here, with me, it is a raging obsession with water. We always left on patrol with two full canteens hanging from our web belts. During breaks, when you could have gulped down a quart, you had to limit yourself to two sips. That was called “water discipline.” I didn't forget it in planning this return to the Pacific. Abercrombie and Fitch having chosen this extremely inconvenient time to go out of business, I assembled my equipment at Hunting World and L. L. Bean, and I included canteens. But a man in a rainforest, unable to collect more than a few drops during cloudbursts, can never fully slake his thirst. So now I beg my two guides to lead me to “wara,” and after a heroic surge through a prickly thicket of ferns, we approach the banks of the Yumi.

  Already I am swallowing dryly, anticipating relief; if I try to speak, I think, I will bark. But first I must master a little piece of tricky footwork. Sharp rocks stand between me and the rapids. One misstep, one misplaced grasp, could mean a slide down to oblivion on the land side, or into the torrent on the other. Helped by one Papuan in front and one behind, I make it, drop prone, and plunge my face into a turbulent eddy, drinking and cooling my face at the same time. I feel foolish until I see that my blackfellows are doing the same. Then I loll wearily against a sheet of stone, gasping and enjoying my first real view since entering the forest. The creek is pleasant, restless, rippling. In the distance I can see what was obscured in the bush, a blue outline of the mountains, lying range upon range, as far as the eye can see. Our rest here, as vitality once more surges through me, is enhanced by a diversion. One of the Papuans chuckles and points. On the far bank, in a patch of muck, a drove of Leaping Lennies has assembled to entertain us. These bizarre creatures, resembling pancakes with big eyes, are the color of the muck they live in. They scuttle about, gamboling on their flappers like an unorchestrated parody of Busby Berkeley choreography. There is just one problem. The comic relief leaves a bitter afterthought. You turn away with the queer feeling that the mud itself has come alive, and that eerie impression lingers and lingers.

  Overhead three puffs of cloud grow, merge, and darken. Huge drops of rain begin to pelt us. Scarcely dry from our perspiration, we are soaked as, at my urging, we continue upstream. The water, which until now has been throwing back a thousand flickering reflections of sunlight, is gray, turbid, rocketing over its stony bed with tremendous force. Dusk is almost upon us. Soon we must camp. But our progress is interrupted by the lead guide, who holds up a warning hand. Around the bend an enormous kanari tree is swaying. Its roots having been undercut by the current, it is held tipsily erect by a weakening cradle of creepers. Approaching it at this point is out of the question, so we watch for an hour, riveted, until the creepers give way and the massive trunk crashes through puny bush and scrub and hits the Yumi with a booming roar, forming a shallow dam. Behind it the water builds and builds, and, in minutes, flows over the bole. The indigenes take a deep, hissing breath, then laugh. I don't laugh. At Cape Gloucester we lost a hundred Marines to huge falling kanaris. I wondered then, and still wonder, how this was phrased in Marine Corps records. “Killed in action” was an honorable end, meaning that a Marine had died for something, but how do you officially describe the end of a man who died because a tree fell on him?

  On the bank about a hundred yards upstream, among nipa palms, mangroves, and sagos like huge bunches of ostrich feathers, we find a shelf of moss and break out our packs. My gear includes a waterproof sleeping bag, and after bolting down a prepared meal of curried rice — cold, but vastly preferable to C rations — I change clothes under the shelter of a beetling rock. The blackfellows don't mind the wet. Sogginess is a norm for them. Darkness falls swiftly in the tropics; I am still squirming in my bag, beneath jury-rigged mosquito netting, searching with my haunches for hip holes in the lichen, when we are abruptly plunged into total night. I cannot even find my pipe, but I am too tired for that anyway. In my weariness I expect to drift off quickly, but the day has brought back too many bad memories, each to be sorted out, rewrapped, and tucked back in its sheaf of sorrow and rationalization. And then, just as I am beginning to doze, the moon appears and the jungle's night shift starts to waken. At first the only sound was the quick water of the serpentine river below and the dripping rain among the trees overhead. Otherwise I lay in the silence of centuries, undisturbed even by a breeze in the cassias. Now the rain stops. The sky clears. I spot the Southern Cross and a three-quarter moon tracing its broad path on the river. A tree is delicately silhouetted against the sky. The air is fragrant with the scents of flowers on boughs, and fireflies, sparkling dimly, dart here and there in their silvery flight.

  Suddenly my whole body is whipped taut in a single spasm: nearby some marsupial, probably seized by a snake, shrieks in panic. The shriek is succeeded by the loud singing of a bird, mellifluous and rich, and for an instant, with a catch at the heart, I think of a New England thrush. Moments later a humming grows around me: cicadas and mosquitoes are testing my netting. In the lunar light a huge cockroach stalks leisurely among them. Unalarmed, they continue trying to home in on me, pitiless and menacing, their cumulative drone having the effect of a note drawn out on a distant organ. Above them, night birds pass with a whirring of wings. One of them settles on a nearby branch. It is again a fever-bird, and from its perch it starts its solo, first blaring three notes in a descending chromatic scale, then four, then five. The varying notes of the scale succeed one another with
infuriating persistence. Against my will I feel I must count them, and because I have no way of knowing how many there will be, listening becomes an ordeal, filing my nerves. Then, running under this psychic agony, there is a growing awareness of something hotly passionate in the jungle, a sense that the whole rainforest is watching me, that just a few yards away in the lush wilderness a macabre war is being waged, and that I, defenseless, will be the winners' prize. Suddenly I recall my Virginia nanny threatening me with the bogeyman — “the yamayama man” — in a Victorian music-hall song:

  If you don't watch out, he'll catch you without a doubt,

  If he can!

  Maybe he's hiding under that chair, ready to pounce on you anywhere; Oh, run to your mama, here comes the yama-yama man!

  The child within us never vanishes. And neither does man's atavistic fear of the dark. Buried in our memory banks, too deep to reach by reason, lies the conviction that hideous, hairy specters, black robed and carrying bloody scythes, lurk beneath treetops, writhing in the night, waiting for the dark of the moon, when they will pounce, and shred with their jagged teeth, and devour. And this barbaric apprehension grips me here, in peacetime, in the company of friendly Papuans. In battle, darkness can strip men of their sanity. With a start I remember that it was on just such a night as this that Sergeant Major Michael J. Powers, USMC, lost his mind.

  Periodically our skipper, Captain “Buck” Rogers — an Englishman whose parents had been tortured to death by Japs in Hong Kong, and who bore an astonishing resemblance to the comedian Terry-Thomas — would break out the company, and, while we stood at rigid attention in the compound, would read us the findings of certain courts-martial arising from sexual indiscretions in the U.S. Navy, of which, of course, the Marine Corps is a part. Typically he would inform us that, “in violation of Specification Seventeen, Chapter Two, Naval Courts and Boards, one John Smith, boatswain's mate first class, U.S. Navy, did indecently, lewdly, and lasciviously convey to one William Jones, a private, U.S. Marine Corps, an indecent, lewd, and lascivious proposal, as a result of which the said John Smith did take the penis of the said William Jones in his, the said John Smith's, mouth.”