In Search of Primitive Man

Good. Yes. I'm going to the bathroom. Awfully pleasant. High on a hill, in the flowers. The little bush hut is below; then a sea of mountains. Opposite is my tent. Very pleasant. One of the joys of life. Ah, the birds are singing; listen to that. Glorious morning!

I had my bath under the waterfall there in the trees. Smoke is coming out of the bush hut. Sali and Bickie must be up. How pleasant all this is. Yes, we are lost in New Guinea, somewhere near the center of the island, in the Star Mountains, between Fiamuk and the border of Irian Jaya, and starving to death; but how pleasant this is, really--the smoke, the dew, the little pink flowers, the birds.

A man is watching me. I just noticed. "Hello."

I just shouted hello. He is naked. No, he is wearing a penis gourd. You can't notice everything at once. He is 80 yards from me, on a knoll. Came out of nowhere.

"Hello!" I shout.

Well, this is too much. Really. My underpants are down around my ankles. I'm clutching a page of What Every Woman Should Know About Men, by Dr. Joyce Brothers, for toilet paper, and I am shouting hello. Where the hell are Sali and Bickie? OK. He is waving back. Yes, he is waving like a maniac. No, wait, he is motioning. He is motioning that he is going up the hill and is not going to pay any attention to me. That is what he is motioning, I think. I may be wrong. What is he doing here? Where did he come from? We haven't seen another human since Fiamuk. Hold it. He is going away. Should I wave goodbye? What the heck.

I'm waving goodbye.

Now I must get Sali and Bickie and run after him. We'll pay him to guide us toward Munbil, the last village before the border. Oh, my feet. It's difficult to stand up. I can't walk very well. It's the rot--comes from tracking up rivers. What's this? An anthill. A long line of ants on their way someplace. I've probably got them all over me. Big blue ants. Hundreds of them.

•

Yes, I begged the editors to send me here. I told them that modern women run around complaining that they want a primitive man, so I thought it would be fun to come to New Guinea and find a real one. Yes, I blathered like an idiot. And now look at me--in the dim light, please. Mr. Hefner is going to have to pay a fortune to the New Guinea government--which bans his magazine--to find and rescue us.

Sali and Bickie, my guides, are from Telefomin, a little village in the Stars, headquarters of the West Sepik province, the government station where the most recent killing of a white patrol officer took place and one of the most isolated, mountainous and primitive places on an island that is itself the most isolated and primitive place in the world.

Yes, I fly from New York to Sydney, Australia; from Sydney to Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea; from Port Moresby to the Central Highlands of New Guinea, where I hike into the mountains and get attacked at Andowari--oh, not a real attack, a kind of humbug attack: A certain number of people had never seen a white woman, and there was a good deal of screaming, not mine; and from the Central Highlands I take a missionary plane into the last airstrip of civilization, Telefomin.

•

"Your business here?"

"I want to hire a guide," I say.

"To where?" he says.

He is stern with me.

"Well---" I get up and walk over to the wall map. I have just surrendered my passport to him. Your papers! he had said. He is the commander of the Telefomin Rural Police. He checks out my socalled identity, examines my pack and is questioning me in the police station. The village outside is silent. Quiet, at any rate. The mountains almost enclose it. "Well, around here." I swirl my hand in the general vicinity of Tumobil and seat myself.

"For what purpose?" he says.

I don't mention primitive man, so as not to vex him.

"To walk to the border," I say.

"The border!" he cries.

He stands up.

"You want to walk to Tumobil?" he says.

"Yes."

He directs a glance at my legs.

"It's a five- or six-day walk," he says.

He exaggerates.

"I'll do it in 12," I say.

He looks at the map.

"You'll have to build a bridge here." He points to a river. I do not know which. He wears a yellow sport shirt and Bermuda shorts reaching to the middle of his knees. He has a medium-brown face, on the handsome side.

"Right," I say.

"The language changes here. And here." He points.

"Fine."

"You'll need soap and matches to trade for food."

"OK."

"A missionary plane could land at this little airstrip near the border and pick you up."

His face grows more pleasant.

"And the people in these villages will see you and go crazy with delight." He sits down, clasps his hands and cracks his joints. "One white-colored lady, she flew into Tumobil in a helicopter. They went crazy with delight."

"Good. I won't molest anybody," I say.

"What?" he says.

"No, no. A joke. Ha-ha-ha," I say.

Ha-ha-ha," he says.

Life lies smiling before me.

"Can I start tomorrow?"

"No problem. I'll get on the radio and call for some guides," he says.

"Great! Wonderful!"

"Now, who do I call?" he says.

He looks at me, tapping his finger on his chin like a woman.

"What?" I say.

"When you get yourself killed," he says.

•

I pitch my tent in the flowers behind the Telefomin jail and eat a bunch of bananas, undress, fold my dress over the pack, place my boots outside to air, put on my nightgown, wash my face with water from the canteen, slather myself with lanolin and sleep at full stretch, with my arms flung out, 12 hours. The next morning, the sun already high, I unzip the bug flap, the tent flap, the rain flap; and a nose, big and fat, with hair jutting out the nostrils, and a pair of eyebrows, also fat and hairy, two eyes, very black and deep-set, a short beard, wide protruding lips, a head with closely cropped hair and another very round head with long, curly eyelashes and dark eyes look in. It is Sali and Bickie.

"Ahk!" I say.

"Yoi! Yoi! Yoi!" screams Bickie.

"Let me get dressed," I say.

•

Yes. The beginning is easy. The first night out of Telefomin, we make Atemkinkim. The second night, Kowoptamin. We pass from the Telefomin language to the Atbalmin ("from the trees") language. We come to the mighty Sepik. How impossible all this sounds."This is the bridge?" I shout. "It's nothing but sticks and vines!"

"Yeah!" shouts Sali, laughing.

"Eeeeeeeeeeee!" screams Bickie, an Atbalmin tribesman, 4'6" tall. He disappears in the trees.

"Well, what do you think of it?" I shout.

"I am afraid in the first place," shouts Sali, laughing. Sali is a Telefomin, big-boned, big-muscled, bighearted, with a tremendous figure, reads and writes English and paid 700 kina, four bows and two axes for his wife. He lowers the pack. "Everything is down," he shouts.

We are shouting over the roar. It is a huge river, one of the great rivers of the world, wide, deep, white-capped, booming and (continued on page 140)Primitive Man(continued from page 89) rapid. The bridge itself is spanned between two high wooden buttresses in two clumps of trees, built at great altitude to compensate for the sag over the water, 65 yards across, with two thick vines on each side holding 200 or 300 small support vines, which in turn hold a runner of bamboo as thick as a high-wire rope. This is what we are supposed to walk across on. Half the small support vines are snapped in two, and the first 20 or 25 yards of sustaining vines dangle above the water.

By God, I think, no one has seen the possibility of her own death till now.

"We'll fix it!" I shout.

"It's very hard," cries Sali. "I don't know to manage."

He shakes his head and frowns full scale. Both eyebrows drop almost to his cheekbones. He has painted his forehead with iridescent-turquoise butterfly dust in honor of the mighty Sepik and has his best outfit on--a pair of dark-blue running shorts sold to him by the Baptist missionaries. He is only 23.

"Right!" he shouts. "Get the rope!"

"Five-kina bonus today!" I shout.

"Bickie! Bickie! Bickie!" yells Sali, laughing. Bickie appears out of the jungle, his face streaked with violet and orange dye, wearing a child's red bathing suit and T-shirt, his chest rounded out, his short, powerful legs in a trot, trailing two long vines he has cut. He climbs the buttress, tears the vines with his teeth and wraps the first support pole back in place.

Two hours later, we are ready to attempt a crossing.

"Concentrate!" shouts Sali.

"Right!" I shout.

"Right. You just come up here, Jean...."

The climb nearly scares me to death. I look down into the bouncing foam. Trees shoot past from a landslide. Jets of water jump 20, 30 feet in the air off the boulders, midstream. The mountains rise 5000 and 6000 feet on either side. A familiar aroma of mud fills the air.

"Concentrate!" shouts Sali. "You are just walking across the river. That is all. You hold the vines at the top. Very firm. You don't have worry about the legs. Right?"

"Right!" I cry.

I am going first. Sali and Bickie have repaired the first 25 yards that were dangling. The last 40 yards are a mystery.

"OK!" shouts Sali.

"!Adios!" I start.

"Wait!" yells Sali. "In case the vine break...."

I stop.

"Yeah?"

I am six or seven feet out from the buttress, arms over my head, holding the left and right support vines, and balancing barefoot on the bamboo runner, while Bickie smiles up at me.

"Hold it firm if it break!" shouts Sali. "And then you fly down to the river. So you know, that's fine."

"Right! I just fly down into the goddamned boulders!" I shout.

"Right!"

"Thank you!"

"Tank you!" shouts Bickie.

"OK, so if you want now to take a walk across, Jean..."says Sali. The Kowoptamins had warned us that morning that nobody alive or dead, ghost or human, could cross this bridge.

Ten or 12 yards out, the spray hits my feet and goes up my skirt. This is the last sort of thing I was expecting--a geyser, rising off the rocks with the force of an antiriot hose, aimed directly up my hem. But there is no stopping now. Up my calves, over my knees and into the leg bands of my underpants. Horrible sensation. Twenty yards farther, I hear a pop! Don't look now! I look. A vine holding the bamboo runner snaps in two. Just like that. Pop! Then another. Pop! Pop! And another. And now what? Next the entire bridge! No doubt! It's waffling under my weight. I walk on, not at a great clip, but a clip, every nerve in my body ending in the balls of my feet. The universe turns into a flashing and sparkling fog. I keep going. The deafening noise, the soggy air, the birds swooping, the flying insects, the twinkling splatter, the boulders, the geysers, the bamboo under my bare feet, the pop-pop-pop-pop-pop of the vines; never--my heart seems about to blot me out--not anywhere.... These are the most exhilarating seconds of my life. When I reach the Atbalmin side, Bickie sends up a high, rolling, yodeling, joyful exultation, which even I can hear, and pounds his chest, slaps his forehead, dances on one leg and nearly goes over the side with the food; and when we all are across, with the packs, and toast orange drink in celebration and eat the last crackers, and bid adios, arrivederci to the mighty Sepik and hit the track again up a mountain, Bickie immediately starts talking and laughing about the next river we have to cross.

•

Time to eat dinner.

Sali and Bickie are calling from the bush hut. Yes, getting out of the tent is going to kill me. Eating frogs, that is going to kill me, too, and my feet--in the end, it is my feet that will annihilate me off the landscape. Well, well, I didn't think I could crawl out of the tent so easily with my bad knee. There are two fern beds in the bush hut and a fire with a pot of water on it. Across the fire sit Sali and Bickie. Night is falling. Six o'clock. How festive we are when night falls, laughing and farting around the roaring fire! Yes, farts for me at this time are a real pleasure. Did I say six o'clock? It must be more toward 6:30. Sali is half a page into his nightly reading of Dr. Joyce Brothers' What Every Woman Should Know About Men. About five degrees south of the equator, about 1100 miles north of Sydney, all is dark by seven. And dusk had been coming on when Sali and Bickie finished building the bush hut. The trees they hacked down! "What sentence are you on?" I say.

"The man worry about the size of his penis," says Sali.

"Ah!"

"He worry about whether he satisfy as her previous lovers," says Sali.

"Ah, well," I say.

"He worry about whether she have an orgasm," says Sali.

"Well, well."

"He worry if he is muster booting," says Sali.

"What?"

"Miester booting," says Sali.

"Masturbating?" I say, laughing.

"Yeah, masturbating," says Sali, laughing.

"Do you know what that is?" I say.

"No," says Sali.

I sit down.

"Ahk! Sex without a woman," I say.

"Huh?" says Sali, stunned.

"Just by yourself," I say.

Sali ruminates.

"Now, don't tell me Telefomin guys don't do that," I say.

"No," says Sali.

"They do it all the time," I say. "Don't they?"

"Yeah," says Sali, laughing.

"Yeah," I say, laughing.

"Yeah," says Sali, laughing.

"Let's ask Bickie!" I say, laughing.

Bickie starts giggling.

Sali translates.

"Yeaaaaaaaeeeee!" screams Bickie.

Before we met, Bickie had never talked to a white person. Can you blame him?

A brief silence.

"I'm dying for a pizza," I say.

"He worry there might be some truth in those old beliefs that masturbating sups---"

"Well, really, sups!"

"'Saps a man's vitals,'" reads Sali. "'His very manhood is on the line every time he make love.'"

"Gee whiz," I say. "Is that true?"

"Joyce is telling us the truth," says Sali. "His manhood, you know."

"You mean Star Mountain men in New Guinea are like men in America?" I say.

Yes, there are moments when I wonder not only where I am and why I've swelled my knee to the size of a water bucket looking for primitive man but whether my manhood, too, isn't on the line. It wouldn't surprise me.

Sali banks the fire.

"Men are men everywhere," says Sali.

•

We hire an expert shot with bow and arrow at Elambil and a bodyguard for him, also an expert shout, to guide us through enemy territory to Yugibil. I do not know what enemy. Does it matter? The people look very refined and elegant. To tell the truth.... The truth! How the hell do I know what I am talking about, let alone looking at, when what I am looking at has been struck dumb at the sight of me, a gigantic white girl, rich enough to pay two (two!) men (men!) to walk to the border? But they look refined and elegant. I may be wrong. Yes, they will kill you and eat you, but in the end, who wouldn't?

All I can say is, the farther we retreat from civilization and the deeper we climb into the mountains, the gentler the people are, and the more elegant, and the happier married. Men are like that, perhaps. Perhaps it is civilization that drives men crazy. I wouldn't put it past you.

•

Once, I take out a photograph of my boyfriend and moon over it, by the blaze. Sighing his name, "John Johnson, John Johnson." What a man. I hold the picture to my bosom. I would press it through my skin into my blood stream if I could. Sali eyes it.

"What does he have for a job?" says Sali.

"He's on television," I say.

"On what?" says Sali.

•

Sometimes it's the mountains; many times it's the rivers; frequently it's the forests, the swamps, the slime, the snakes, the sinkholes, the landslides, the heat, the cold, the rain, the mud, the leeches, the limestone pinnacles, the cliffs, the 500-foot drops that slow us down to a quarter of a mile or even an eighth of a mile an hour. Stunned by this torrent of real estate, even the villagers do not move. Some 700 distinct dialects are spoken on New Guinea--700! Sali and Bickie keep going. They are children at the campfire, men on the mountains and geniuses in the rivers. They are demigods with an ax. They are frightened of nothing. They are more canny than I am, and more intelligent than I am about basic matters, and can take care of a woman in elemental ways that modern man would never dream of. It takes three days to climb from Yugibil to Fiamuk.

•

We trot down the mountain around one o'clock. Six huts and a house kiap. The people come running. When they get a look at me, they think better of it. Not all the men are naked. Some wear penis gourds. I don't know' how they stay put. They are tied on with a little piece of bark around the waist. Holding it up. The testicles hang down. They are bright orange. They smoke green cigarettes. I can't take my eyes off them. I want to bum one.

We leave after 30 minutes. They refuse to give us a guide. Sali dislikes the place. The people shout excitedly about the track as we climb the hill.

"Why won't anyone come with us?" I say.

"Ah-ha-ha-ha!" says Sali.

"It's too dangerous?"

"Ahhhh!" says Sali.

"Why?"

"Somebody poisons."

"But won't they just outright kill you, too?"

"They will."

"With a bush knife?"

"No, with a bow and arrow, then they cover themself in the bush," says Sali.

He stops and takes some tobacco out of his pocket and lifts up his eyebrows. I sit down to change my socks.

"So how safe do you think we are?" I say.

"I don't know," says Sali with his quiet, inward laugh.

"Are you serious?" I say, laughing.

"I am," says Sali.

We are silent.

"We don't have a guide!" I yell. I am in a sweat from the climb. It is pouring down over my sunglasses. The sight is so horrifying when I take off my socks, even I can't stand to look at the rot. The flies close in. Attracted by the pus.

"We're in the roughest part of New Guinea!" I yell. "Without a guide! With the chances ninety to one against us!"

"You can't drop any kaukau skins," says Sali calmly.

"Why?"

He is rolling a cigarette in a page of What Every Woman Should Know About Men.

"They will grab it and make a poison on it," says Sali.

He licks the edge of the paper.

"I've been dropping kaukau skins everywhere!" I say, laughing.

"No, that's in the bush. I'm talk about that village," says Sali.

"Oh. OK. OK. All right."

We start to climb again. Sali stops to relight his cigarette. I want to mop my face with the scarf around my neck, but it is a present from John Johnson and I want to save it. "What's Bickie saying?" I ask.

"He say there a bush hut on the other side," says Sali. "He say if we walk fast, we can use it."

"Oh. Ask Bickie what he thinks the chances are of my walking fast," I say, chuckling.

"OK! OK!" yells Bickie.

We lose the track an hour later.

•

Everything is wet. Everything is cold. Everything is slippery. You can't grab hold of the trees, because they are covered with spikes. My boots won't stick to anything. My hands are bloody from grabbing the trees. My head is an organ of sweating. My body is freezing.

As for Sali and Bickie, they could survive a hailstorm in the arctic. I am succeeding, however, in getting into such a bad mood, my temperature is going up. Any other woman would throw herself into the mud and refuse to budge. Not I. The mountain itself could come down on me and I would crawl on, snorting icicles and blaspheming creation. And when the sun comes out, I am going to curse it, too.

I am taking my mirror out to see how thin my face is getting. Two days without food and working on the third. Well, well. I don't look so bad. Mud is caked in the creases of my neck; I have dirt hanging out my nose; my mouth is greenish-brown; my teeth are yellow; my left eye is black, I have mucus in both eyes; my hair is sticking to my neck; petroleum jelly is running down my forehead; and I am sweating like a pig. I don't look so bad. I don't understand it. While I have the mirror out, I may as well look at the backs of my thighs.

•

I've just seen the view. I may or may not be sitting on a brain-frying strip of a taro field on ahill above the village of Illunbil, about half a day from Munbil, close to the border. I can't see the village. I see the mountains. Here and there, mist. Three huts across the valley, a bush hut behind me. I am overlooking a garden of pineapples. My eyes won't focus. There is food growing around me. I can't move to get at it. Sali and Bickie have left me.

The walk may be over. My knee. The leg is swollen, the knee. The flesh on my feet has been eaten away. Sali and Bickie have left me here, in the sun. The sun! If there is one thing I loathe, it's the sun. The solar block I consume! I would inject it into my veins with the greatest pleasure.

Sali and Bickie are going to scout down to the village. Try to get some food. Find out where we are. They said they would be back before dark. I really can't move. I'm in the open out here. An easy shot. No water. I'm thirsty. I don't have much saliva left.... Wait--is my paranoia out of control, or is somebody actually calling my name?

Sali?

Sali and Bickie are coming up the mountain. There is a procession behind them. Fifteen, 20 people. They are all carrying food. In a line. They have tremendous amounts of food. They are singing and beaming with kindness. There must be 30 or 40 of them. Bananas! Corn!

"How do you do?" I scream.

"Matches!" says Sali, laughing.

"Yes, give them the matches!" I shout. "Give them the beads! Give them my lighter! How do you do? Give them the entire backpack. Oh! Tobacco!"

I try to stand.

"Careful, Jean," says Sali softly.

"I'll be better by tomorrow!" I shout and drop to the ground.

The people stop in shock, daintily moving only their eyeballs. But their faces grow tender when they see my feet. They are tiny individuals, gold-red-brown-colored, elegant, reserved, the ladies in cloth skirts and the men wearing nose quills and penis gourds.

"I just arrive and tell them," says Sali, laughing. "And this lady here [pointing], she ran and get kaukau."

"I'm so glad!"

I reach up and shake the lady's hand with such force, her entire thin little golden person vibrates.

•

We have arrived at Munbil. There is an airstrip, nine or ten huts, a short-wave radio and an aid-post hut run by a Telefomin tribesman named Robin.

Sali refuses to go on to the border. So does Bickie. I have offered Sali the pack and the tent. He still refuses to go on. We are in Robin's hut, negotiating. The villagers are standing quietly outside. Robin says no men will go, because of the curse on the river. I walk over to the door of the hut and shout outside.

"Anybody want to go to the border? Sixty kina!"

The people step backward and gape at me, a mammoth female, red as a crab, in a turd-green dress, smelling of rotting flesh, smeared with petroleum jelly and shouting, "The border! Sixty kina! Big bucks! You're all extremely good-looking! Sixty kina!"

A handsome little man with a red headband, red earrings, cane calf bracelets, a nose quill and a bathing suit with red and blue flags on it holds both his hands on his forehead in shocked contemplation.

"They're not jumping at the offer," I say to Sali, laughing.

Naturally, I am filled with spite at Sali.

"I am thinking of my life, see?" says Sali. He is all dressed up. He and Bickie have groomed each other and pinched the lice out of their hair, and Sali has taken the butterfly dust off his face and is wearing the blue-and-white shirt I gave him.

"The bridge is not good," he says. "The river is high. It is bad weather."

He is wearing a pair of boots. I have never seen his feet covered before. He is sitting across the hut beside Robin, carving an arrow point with a cuz cuz jaw.

"But, Sali!" I cry. "Think of the adventure! Think how much money you and Bickie will have! Chicken day in and day out! Cigarettes! Survival knives! Lighters! Sanitary napkins for your wives! My God! Plus the pack!"

Sali shakes his head.

"It won't save my life, you see."

A long look passes between us.

"Oh, Sali," I say.

"We will get on the radio and call Telefomin," says Robin. "You are very strange to us, Jeanie. There are enemy across the river. The plane will come on the meadow and take you back."

By habit, I glance back at the man in whom I still have boundless faith.

"Give it up, Jean," says Sali.

•

The radio is not ready, because it runs on solar energy. "We wait for it to get heat," says Robin.

I step up and take a long look.

"Can we build a fire under it?" I say.

•

The village leader, Amos, a short, powerfully built man, comes with his bow and arrows to sit in Robin's hut with us. He makes his wife stay outside and settles down beside me. He nods to Sali with respect, then fixes his eyes on my legs.

"He say he glad to see you come here safe," says Robin.

"Thank you."

"But he say one thing," says Robin.

"What?"

"He say you got a lot of sores on your body."

"Oh!" I say, laughing.

"That is thing he really worried about."

"It's OK."

"He say to get a man and stop running around in the bush like a crazy person."

•

I am sulking in my tent. Should I describe the village? On high cliffs, above a fast river, at the end of a meadow, surrounded by high, jungly mountains, thick air, a power of tranquillity about it, quiet, beautiful. It is getting on my nerves. I have found primitive man. Now what? Do I strike you as having the disposition of an anthropologist? No matter. It is they who watch me. The village sits outside my tent around the clock, very pleasant, pattering, very friendly, throwing great style into it, everyone very short, very tender, golden-pancake-colored, looking like Edith Wharton but finer, more elegant, slimmer, eight or nine earrings, high cheekbones, wideset eyes, bad teeth, elegant gestures, voices like violas; and I am inside, in a rage at Sali, sitting still, listening to the sweat drop off my face onto the tent floor.

•

I am not a serious person. My disposition is sunny. My vocation is to have a good time. I've chosen writing to make my money and need hardly say that running sores, a burning groin, causing an entire village to ejaculate in astonishment when I take off my hat and these kinds of things are completely out of my sphere.

Afternoon. Two o'clock. Time to wash my feet. I hobble down to the stream. Sixteen or 17 people come with me. "Sing for them, Jean," says Robin. "Make them laugh." I sing Hark! The herald Angels Sing, and my listeners just lie on the ground and howl. I have come 8000 miles, swum torrents, clawed up mountains, hacked through jungle, crossed through enemy territory, taught two innocent, brave men to swear like thugs in a bawdyhouse and cut my legs to such ribbons that opaque panty hose loom disproportionately large in my future, to arrive at last in an Atbalmin village to entertain a clan of primitive men who live in paradise, hunting, raising pigs and being very happy with their wives and children, and whose real lives I can't see, for as God is my witness, all they do is sit in the shade and stare at me in amazement.

•

I am within a couple of minutes of hobbling out of here with two not-so-bright, money-crazed Atbalmin tribesmen I have hired from across the river, and the radio comes on. Julian, the commander of the Telefomin Rural Police, is sending in a plane. It will cost 520 kina ($540) to fly Sali, Bickie and me to Telefomin. I say we'll go if they will take my check.

Things couldn't be worse. They are going to take my check. There is only one pilot in New Guinea who knows where Munbil is and he is on Christmas vacation, so Julian says he himself is coming in with a young pilot and will show him the way through the mountains.

We are going to crash. No doubt of it.

•

I strike the tent, pack up and am all dressed and sitting under a tree in my eye make-up for the young pilot, with all the people around me going through one another's hair, looking for lice. Wives and husbands. It's nice--the flowers, the wind going through the leaves, the clouds coming over. I only like it now because I am going somewhere.

•

The plane is not coming. Julian could not get a pilot who had government clearance to fly to the border. I am putting the tent back up. The radio has just come back on. The plane is coming. It's sundown. The clouds are thickening. I've struck the tent again. And put my make-up back on.

The villagers are all standing in the meadow, deadly silent. Watching.

And here comes the plane!

The village is so excited! People are running around! The plane is huge! Dogs are barking. The pigs are galloping for the huts. Everybody is screaming for everybody else to get back. We're all about a mile back. Oh! The plane is cutting very sharply to miss the back end of the mountain. Goddamn! Whooo! It's an enormous twin-engine Otter. It's tilting very sharply. Oh--Christ! It almost just crashed! Judas God. It almost crashed on the meadow. I am laughing hysterically. The roar of the engines is terrific. The entire village has broken into wild applause. The plane is taxiing up the meadow; the propellers are throwing up a great wind. It is circling. Whooo! Everybody is getting blown. Oh, my Lord, the plane door just opened. Not one but three pilots are stepping off the plane. Oh, Lord. A very tall pilot in reflectors and bush shorts is coming toward me!

"Bruce is my name."

"How do you do?" I shout above the roar of the propellers. "Jean."

"Jean? Pleased to meet you!" he shouts.

"You're not the fool who's taking my check, are you?" I shout.

"No," he shouts. "This is Wayne!"

The second pilot, also in reflectors and bush shorts, but blond, strolls up.

"How do you do?" I yell.

"We must board immediately," shouts Bruce. "We haven't much light."

"Sali and Bickie!" I scream. "Where are Sali and Bickie?"

Sali comes forward. Bickie is having no part of it. The village leader is pushing him toward the plane and everyone else back, so we can board.

"Now, where do you want to go?" says Bruce, climbing in after Bickie.

"Telefomin," I say.

Bickie is just staggering around inside in terror. Sali is running and sitting in one seat after the other and yelling out the door to Robin. The villagers are smiling and crying and waving without letup.

"What are you doing in this place?" says Bruce from the pilot's seat.

"I walked in," I say.

"Walked!" he says. "Where from?"

"Telefomin," I say.

He is silent a moment.

"Yeah?" he says. "Wow."

They rev up the engines.

"Bickie!" I cry. "How do you like this?"

Bickie is strapped in on all sides, clutching the hand rests, though we haven't even closed the door yet.

"Sali!" I say.

"We have a trip, Jean!" shouts Sali, and we make up in a glance. The third pilot shuts the door; the propellers roar; the villagers, in their little excited clump, are nearly blown off their feet; and, with everybody waving, we rocket at tremendous speed down the meadow, lift into a cut between the mountains and soar away into the heavens.

•

It is dark. I hobble out of the tent to get some water. Something grips my foot. It climbs all around and under the flesh. I start to stumble. I put my hand on the ground, and something goes up my arm. I start screaming; not screaming but saying, "Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!" Sali comes out of the bush hut. He picks me up in his arms. He screams; I am screaming; and he carries me out of the grass and puts me down and turns on the flashlight. Small, hairy, shiny, blue-black spiders are burying themselves in our flesh.

No, it's not just a nightmare. It happened. At Illunbil. But I wake up in my apartment on 26th Street in New York, with my dog on my chest in a hirsute ball, dreaming of it again.

Sali! Bickie! You had such an effect on me!

It was not your manly valor, or your physical courage, or your genius in fast water, or your primordial humor, or the way you turned your heads when I came down a mountain so you would not look up my skirt, or your flatteries about my cooking, or the time you hauled me across the Dagiam River, or any of the other 100,000,000 things you did to save my life and make me grow to love you and esteem you; no, it wasn't any of that.

It was something elemental, something about how you and I got along, something that changed my mind, something you taught me--that under this sky and upon this earth, men and women are truly meant to be together.

A fine thing to find out at my age!

I go into the forest in search of primitive man with one idea about the order of things and come out with an entirely different idea. Yes, under the ulcerations on these legs, I am a different woman. My brain has been cleared of the trivial and superfluous. My gray areas have been wiped out by the white spaces of the map. I now understand the significance of civilization. I see the path toward grace. I have developed a new philosophy--Get married.

Naturally, John Johnson is a tad surprised, but he is holding up well after a histrionic scene at four in the morning in the Food Emporium at 18th and Park, where I forced him to propose to me in front of the fresh-flower case; and very shortly now, we'll be making a little trip down Broadway to City Hall. The track has been cleared of all vegetation; the path is downhill; the way is smooth; the buildings grow tall and magnificent; and there is happiness without end.

"A vine holding the bamboo runner snaps. Pop! Then another. Pop! And another. Next the entire bridge!"