Lost in Shangri-la

Chapter 11

UWAMBO

WHEN CAPTAIN BAKER and his B-17 crew reported seeing three survivors in a jungle clearing, they didn’t mention any natives nearby. Even if they’d spotted the tribesmen approaching Margaret, McCollom, and Decker from the surrounding jungle, they couldn’t have done anything about it. They weren’t about to start shooting, they couldn’t land, and they had neither paratroopers nor weapons to drop to the trio.

The Gremlin Special survivors were on their own, and they were about to experience a first encounter with the people of Shangri-La.

MARGARET, MCCOLLOM, AND DECKER had crash-landed in a world that time didn’t forget. Time never knew it existed.

In their isolation, the people of this so-called Shangri-La followed an idiosyncratic path. They had tamed fire but hadn’t discovered the wheel. They caked their bodies with clay when mourning but had never developed pottery. They spoke complex languages—the verb that meant “hit” or “kill” could be inflected more than two thousand ways—but had a single word to describe both time and place: O. Their only numbers were one, two, and three; everything beyond three was “many.” In a world awash in color, they had terms for only two: mili, for black, maroon, dark browns, greens, and blues; and mola, for white, reds, oranges, yellows, light browns, and reddish purples.

They ornamented themselves with necklaces and feathers but created no lasting works of art. They believed the moon was a man and the sun was his wife, but they ignored the stars that hung low in the night sky. Four hundred years after Copernicus declared that the earth revolved around the sun, people in and around the Baliem Valley thought the sun revolved around them. They believed it crossed the sky by day, spent the night in a sacred house, then traveled underground to its starting place at dawn. The moon had a house of its own.

They feared the ghosts of their ancestors but worshipped no gods. They were gentle with children but hacked off girls’ fingers to honor dead relatives. They treated pigs as family—women nursed piglets when needed—but slaughtered them without remorse. They built thirty-foot-tall watchtowers, but their only furniture was a funeral chair for the dead. They grew strong tobacco but never distilled their crops into liquor. They practiced polygamy, but men and women usually slept apart. They valued cleverness but not curiosity. Loyalty had special significance. To greet close friends and relations, they said Hal-loak-nak, “Let me eat your feces.” Its true meaning: “I will do the unthinkable for you.”

The sixty thousand or so natives in the main valley, and tens of thousands more in the surrounding areas, organized themselves into communities consisting of small fenced villages or hamlets. Most had thirty to fifty people living communally in huts arranged around a central courtyard, though larger villages might have several times that number. Men of the hamlet usually slept together in a round hut that was generally off-limits to women. Women lived with children in other round huts and worked together in a long, oval cooking house. Pigs lived in the huts, too, so they would not wander at night or be stolen by enemies.

When they referred to themselves, the natives of the valley might say they were ahkuni, or people. Their enemies were dili. Sometimes they’d identify themselves by the name of their neighborhood or clan, or by the name of the big man, or kain, who held sway over the military confederation to which their neighborhood belonged. They might describe themselves in relation to the river that wound through the valley: Nit ahkuni Balim-mege, or “We people of the Baliem.” Although they were members of the Yali or the Dani tribe, tribal affiliation was less important than neighborhood, clan, and alliance loyalties. Different clans and neighborhoods within the same tribe were often enemies, and Yali and Dani people routinely crossed tribal lines to fight shared enemies.

Dani tribesmen, photographed by Earl Walter in 1945. (Photo courtesy of B. B. McCollom.)

A walk of a few minutes to an hour might take a resident of any one hamlet to ten or fifteen similar hamlets that comprised a neighborhood. Several neighborhoods that joined together for war made a confederation, and several confederations constituted an alliance of four to five thousand people. Native wars, called wim, were fought between alliances. Despite shared language, ethnicity, and culture, alliances nurtured deep, long-standing hostilities toward one another, the original source of which was often unknown. They had always been enemies, and so they remained enemies.

Indeed, hostility between alliances defined the natives’ lives. If covered by a glass roof, the valley would’ve been a terrarium of human conflict, an ecosystem fueled by sunshine, river water, pigs, sweet potatoes, and war among neighbors.

Their ancestors told them that waging war was a moral obligation and a necessity of life. Men said, “If there is no war, we will die.” War’s permanence was even part of the language. If a man said “our war,” he structured the phrase the same way he’d describe an irrevocable fact. If he spoke of a possession such as “our wood,” he used different parts of speech. The meaning was clear: ownership of wood might change, but wars were forever.

When compared with the causes of World War II, the motives underlying native wars were difficult for outsiders to grasp. They didn’t fight for land, wealth, or power. Neither side sought to repel or conquer a foreign people, to protect a way of life, or to change their enemies’ beliefs, which both sides already shared. Neither side considered war a necessary evil, a failure of diplomacy, or an interruption of a desired peace. Peace wasn’t waiting on the far side of war. There was no far side. War moved through different phases in the valley. It ebbed and flowed. But it never ended. A lifetime of war was an inheritance every child could count on.

In the Baliem Valley, the inexhaustible fuel for war was a need to satisfy spirits or ghosts, called mogat. The living built huts for them, so the spirits would have a place to rest and a hearth to light their tobacco. The living also designed rituals to please them, believing that the mogat could choose to either help or hurt them, so they had best be kept happy. When a person died in war, his or her friends and family sought to mollify his or her spirit. That required killing a member of the hated enemy—a male warrior, a woman, an elder, even a child. It could happen on the battlefield or in a raid on a sweet potato patch. Until the spirit was satisfied, the survivors believed that their souls were out of balance, and the mogat of the fallen would torment them with misfortune. Once they settled the score, they’d celebrate with dancing and feasting. Sometimes those rituals included cooking and eating the flesh of their enemies. While the successful warriors and their families celebrated, their enemies cremated their dead, held elaborate mourning rituals, and began plotting a turn of events. Because combatants on both sides shared the same spiritual beliefs, one side or the other always had a death to avenge, a retaliatory killing to plan, a ghost to placate. An eye for every eye, ad infinitum.

Pacifying ghosts was the main rationale for war, but it wasn’t the only one. In an isolated valley where people enjoyed generally good health and abundant food and water, a place with temperate climate and no seasons, where nothing seemed to change, war animated communities and bound people to one another. It satisfied a basic human need for festival. War deaths and their resulting funerals created obligations and debts, shared enmities and common memories. Occasionally war led to changes among allies, which freshened everyone’s outlook, for good or ill. War also had a practical benefit for some: warrior deaths meant fewer men, which allowed male survivors to take multiple wives without creating villages filled with unhappy bachelors.

Dani tribesmen, photographed by Earl Walter in 1945. (Photo courtesy of B. B. McCollom.)

The practice of war in the valley was as unusual as its principles. Battles were arranged by calling out an invitation to the enemy across a no-man’s-land. If the enemy declined, everyone went home. They fought only by day, to prevent mischievous night spirits from getting involved. They canceled battles in bad weather, lest the rain smear their war paint. Their war whoop wasn’t a predator’s cry but the hoot of a cuckoo dove. They put feathers in their hair but not on their arrows; when fired, the arrows traced jagged patterns, like birds in flight. During breaks in battle, warriors lounged, sang, and gossiped. They knew details about their enemies’ lives, and hurled insults across the front lines. A nasty remark about an enemy’s wife might reduce both sides to belly laughs. Then they’d pick up their spears and try again to kill one another.

Because success in war was seen as necessary for the well-being of the community, men who succeeded in battle gained social standing. Skilled warriors had access to more potential wives. This was especially valuable in a culture in which married couples routinely abstained from sex for up to five years after the birth of a child. But it would be wrong to overstate the link between war, polygamy, and abstinence. For many men, war was its own reward, a source of pleasure and recreation, a platform on which to find excitement and camaraderie. A sporting good time, with a reasonable chance of injury or death. Paradoxically, when villagers were not waging war, life tended to be serene, punctuated by occasional conflicts over pig theft and marital discord. Among friends and family, the most common way of coping with conflict wasn’t violence but avoidance—one party would simply move away.

War had few apparent benefits for women. It hung over every journey a woman’s male kin made from their village and each trip she and her daughters made to the gardens or to the brine pools to collect salt, where an enemy raiding party might set upon them.

War shaped children from their earliest memories. Boys’ education and play involved mimicking male elders waging war and staging raids. Toys were small bows with arrows made from bamboo or long stalks of grass. Grass arrows routinely found their way into boys’ eyes, leaving them half blind but no less eager to grow into warriors. For girls, war meant having the upper halves of one or more fingers chopped off each time a close relative was killed, to satisfy the dead person’s ghost. By the time a girl reached marrying age, her hands might be all thumbs. An anthropologist who followed the Gremlin Special survivors into the valley years later described the process: “Several girls are brought to the funeral compound early on the second day. One man, the specialist in this practice, is waiting for them. First he ties off a girl’s arm with a tight string above the elbow. Then he smashes her elbow down on a rock or board, hitting the olecranon process, the ‘funny bone,’ in order to numb the nerves in the fingers. Someone holds the girl’s hand on a board, and the man takes a stone adze and with one blow he cuts off one or two fingers at the first joint.”

Making war and appeasing spirits wasn’t all the native people did. They built huts and watchtowers, grew sweet potatoes and other vegetables, tended pigs, raised families, and cooked meals. Most of the hard work fell to the women. Men built homes and watchtowers and tilled gardens, which left plenty of time to spare. They devoted that time and energy to war—planning it, fighting it, celebrating its victories, mourning its losses, and planning it anew. In between, they talked about it, sharpened their weapons, pierced their noses so pig tusks would fit into the holes and make them look fierce, and wrapped greasy orchid fibers around their arrows to cause infections if the wounds weren’t immediately fatal. They also spent endless hours scanning for enemy movements from the watchtowers on the edge of the vast no-man’s-land that separated their homes and gardens from their enemies’ identical homes and gardens.

When the anthropologist Margaret Mead learned about the people of the Baliem Valley, she saw a connection between “the distant past and the future towards which men are moving.” She wrote: “These are clearly human beings, like ourselves, entrapped in a terrible way of life in which the enemy cannot be annihilated, conquered, or absorbed, because an enemy is needed to provide the exchange of victims, whose only possible end is another victim. Men have involved themselves in many vicious circles, and kingdoms and empires have collapsed because they could find no way out but to fall before invaders who were not so trapped. Here in the highlands of New Guinea there has been no way out for thousands of years, only the careful tending of the gardens and rearing of children to be slain.”

By evoking the name of the peaceful paradise in Lost Horizon, war correspondents George Lait and Harry E. Patterson had indulged in a calculated fantasy. Their readers longed for a Shangri-La after a daily diet of war news. Yet the reporters couldn’t have dreamed up a more ironic name if they’d tried. The Baliem Valley was a beautiful and extraordinary place, but it was no heaven on earth.

COLONEL ELSMORE’S SPECULATION about earthquakes notwithstanding, no one knew how people had come to live in the valley or how long they’d been there. One possibility was that they were descendants of people who’d lived on the island’s coast and were driven inland by subsequent arrivals. Equally mysterious was the source of their beliefs and customs.

Yet clues to the past could be found in oral myths told around their fires. The first lines of a Dani creation myth, translated by an outsider, were: “In the beginning was The Hole. Out of The Hole came the Dani men. They settled in the fertile lands around The Hole. Then came pigs. The Dani took the pigs and domesticated them. Next came women, and the Dani took the women.” People who lived near the agreed-upon location of The Hole called themselves iniatek, the originals.

Another myth described how, after leaving The Hole, humans became separate from other creatures of the valley. At first, the myth explained, humans came out of The Hole with birds, bats, insects, reptiles, and forest mammals. The assembled creatures asked the first man, called Nakmatugi, to differentiate among them. He organized them by type and gave them individual identities. At first he placed the birds and men together. But the birds thought otherwise, so they flew off and left their brothers on the ground.

The natives’ belief in an ancient link between man and birds was a recurring theme. The myth of Bird and Snake describes the two creatures arguing about death, immortality, and the fate of mankind. Snake insisted that men should return from the dead, just as snakes could shed their skins and be reborn. But Bird said men should stay dead, like fallen birds, and other birds would smear mud on themselves to mourn. To decide which belief would prevail, Bird and Snake had a race. Bird won, so men, like birds, must die. People took the fable to heart. Women smeared their bodies with mud when mourning, and the weapons, ornaments, and other trophies taken from enemies killed in battle were called “dead birds.”

In the natives’ myths, mankind’s early existence in the valley never featured an earthly paradise or a Garden of Eden. Violent death and hostile alliances dated to the beginning of time. When people emerged from The Hole, one myth claimed, a fight broke out and killings occurred. The victims’ families joined forces and said, “Let us take revenge on our enemy together.” They did, and when the enemy retaliated, the cycle of war never stopped.

The people of the valley also had a legend called Uluayek. It told of spirits that lived in the sky over the valley, and of a vine that hung down to the ground. Long ago, according to the Uluayek legend, the valley people and the sky spirits climbed up and down the vine to visit one another. Some said the sky spirits had long hair and light skin and eyes. Some said they had hairy arms they kept covered. No one knew for sure, because the spirits had stolen pigs and women, and the people of the valley had cut the vine, ending contact. The Uluayek legend claimed that one day the sky spirits would replace the vine and climb down again.

The spirits’ return would herald the End of Days.

THE CLUSTER OF huts the Gremlin Special passengers saw shortly before the crash was a village the natives called Uwambo. When the plane first roared overhead, the villagers—members of the Yali tribe—were busy with their daily chores. The sound of the low-flying plane sent them ducking for cover in their sweet potato fields or running to hide in the surrounding jungle, which is why Margaret didn’t see any natives near the huts.

The people of Uwambo had seen planes before, especially during the previous year, as Colonel Elsmore and other pilots made regular flights over their homes. Still, the natives didn’t know what to make of them. Westerners speculated that the natives thought the planes were giant birds, but the people of Uwambo knew how birds soared and turned and rushed through the sky, silent except for song or cry. Planes didn’t look or move or sound like birds. Some native children thought they might be large men with their arms spread. Few if any imagined that they carried people inside.

One thing the natives knew for certain was the sound the planes made. They used their word for noise, ane, pronounced “ah-nay,” and attached suffixes—woo or kuku—that approximated the engines’ drone. Planes entered the native language as anewoo or anekuku.

As the passengers aboard the Gremlin Special looked through the windows searching for natives, a Yali boy named Helenma Wandik watched the anewoo from his hiding place in the jungle. He would always remember that this particular anewoo seemed to be flying especially low to the ground. His cousin, a teenage girl named Yunggukwe Wandik, who’d recently been given her first pig, was working in the sweet potato gardens when she saw it. Fearful, she fell to the ground and grabbed the legs of a woman working alongside her.

Both Helenma and Yunggukwe thought the anewoo circled twice in the little valley, then pointed its nose toward a place they called the Ogi ridge, near a mountain stream they called the Mundi. Neither saw it plow into the trees, but Helenma wondered why he heard thunder on such a clear day.

WHEN IT GREW dark the night of the crash, the people of Uwambo saw flames coming from the place on the Ogi ridge where the anewoo had disappeared. A village leader named Yaralok Wandik crept through the jungle along the spine of the ridge to see what was happening. As he approached, he caught wind of a strange smell. When he reached the edge of the crash site, he watched unseen from the jungle. He saw creatures that resembled people, but they didn’t look like any people he’d ever seen. The skin on their faces was light, and they had straight hair. The skin on their bodies was strange. They had feet but no toes. Only later would he learn that coverings called clothing shielded their skin and that footwear called “shoes” encased their toes.

Yaralok left without being spotted. When he returned to Uwambo, he told no one what he’d seen. Several other men did the same. Among them were Nalarik Wandik, whose first name meant “Getting Lost,” and Inggimarlek Mabel, whose name meant “Nothing in His Hands.” Another man, Pugulik Sambom, went up, too, and among the natives he was perhaps the most disturbed by what he’d seen. Yet at first none of them spread the news about the creatures who seemed to have come from the wrecked anewoo.

Their silence fit a cultural idiosyncrasy among the Yali: the bearer of bad news risked being blamed for it. Rather than spread the word about what they knew, the men kept silent. They joined the rest of their hamlet as the frightened people gathered half-ripe sweet potatoes and fled into the jungle.

The next day, Yaralok returned to the crash site and saw what he thought were three men and one woman, though in their odd coverings he couldn’t be sure. One man—likely Decker—had a covering on his head that reminded Yaralok of the light-colored markings on the head of a bird. He thought he saw them carrying a body away from what remained of the anewoo. He heard popping noises and the sound of small explosions. After watching awhile he crept off again, certain they were spirits from the sky.

To a Yali farmer-warrior from Uwambo, that explanation fit perfectly. Since boyhood, he’d heard the Uluayek legend, which anticipated the return of spirits whose rope to the valley floor had been cut. The legend described these creatures from the anewoo perfectly—light skin, long hair, light eyes, arms covered. The anewoo made sense, too. In the absence of a rope, the sky spirits had found another way down to the valley. Still, Yaralok was in no rush to share his conclusions.

As his nephew Helenma explained, “Something cataclysmic was happening. He didn’t want to create panic or be blamed. These were spirits. The legend said long-haired people would come down from the sky. They were horrified. This could be the End Times. It was something they had been talking about and hearing about for generations.”

After other villagers began talking about the flames they’d seen in the jungle, Yaralok broke his silence. To his relief, no one blamed him. They were too busy worrying what the visitors’ arrival might portend. One village leader, Wimayuk Wandik, listened especially closely to Yaralok’s story.

One option for the people of Uwambo was to welcome the spirits, even if their arrival meant the end of their world as they knew it.

The other option, more natural to a warlike people, was to kill them.