Dragon Apparent, page 11
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My friends at the post were Ribo, the administrator, and Cacot, an inspector of schools, who was spending a short holiday with him. Ribo had 118 Moï villages, with a population of about 20,000, under his jurisdiction. Both of these young men were well under thirty, genial, expansive, optimistic by temperament and pessimistic by convinction. The post turned out to be not only an outpost of French Colonial domination but of existentialism. On my first evening there, after a full-scale French dinner, with two wines and a liqueur, I was expected to make an intelligent contribution to a discussion on Marcel Aymé’s Le Confort intellectuel which had just arrived from Le Club Français du Livre.
Before this, however, we went out shooting on the lake in a Moï pirogue. The pirogue was very long and narrow. To avoid upsetting it, it was necessary to sit or crouch perfectly still in whatever position one elected to adopt. Cacot, whose intellectual pessimism never extended to such matters as hunting, proposed to return with the pirogue’s bottom covered with duck, but I was beginning to realise by this time that this kind of luck was not to be expected when I formed one of a hunting party.
The pirogue slid over the water, its rounded bottom stroking the matted aquatic plants that lay just below the surface. The mountains had now put on their featureless mantle of dusky blue and brilliant white clouds bulged up from behind them. Swallows kept us company, zigzagging around us, and eagles wheeled in the sky. Large fish jumped occasionally and brought fishing hawks swooping over their position. A village somewhere was playing the gongs – two slow and four fast beats repeated over and over again.
The Moï spotted a large number of duck, lying like a heavy pencil-line, drawn near the lake’s horizon. Cacot became very enthusiastic and suggested that we should go crocodile hunting after dinner. He thought we might get a few deer, too, while we were about it. The Moï was manoeuvring the pirogue towards the duck, taking advantage of the cover provided by the islands and the reeds. We cut lanes through the lotus-beds spreading from the islands and this slowed us up. Cacot could not see the necessity for this, as he said that no one ever went shooting on the lake, so the birds would be tame. We were within about a hundred yards of them when they took off, with a twittering noise, like a flock of frightened finches. They were ferruginous ducks, which I only knew from illustrations. There were about two hundred of them and curiosity was their undoing because the whole flight suddenly turned towards us and passed over our heads, with Ribo and Cacot blazing away at them. Several of them dropped like stones into the lake, but the weeds were so thick that we only picked up one that fell by the pirogue. It was a handsome reddish-brown bird, a little smaller than a mallard, with slate-blue bill and legs. We nosed about the lake for another hour but the ducks would never let us get anywhere near them again. Cacot said that he thought that the Emperor had been shooting there.
Determined to go home with some sort of a bag he now concentrated on the only other birds on the lake which he thought might be edible. These were isolated black-winged stilts, elegant and fragile-looking, which, seeming never to have come under fire before, let us get within a few yards of them. Cacot shot several. They were very tenacious of life and, although severely damaged at close range, dived and remained below the surface for so long a time that it seemed as if they were determined to drown rather than be captured. They were found with great difficulty by the Moï, groping about among the underwater weeds. In flavour they were much inferior to duck.
After supper we went out hunting in Ribo’s jeep. Fortunately Cacot had been talked out of the crocodile shooting expedition on the grounds that we should all get malaria in the swamps. Cacot had a powerful light, like a miner’s lamp, attached to his forehead, carrying the battery in a haversack. We drove along one of the Emperor’s private hunting tracks and Cacot turned his head from side to side trying to pick up a reflection from the eyes of game. Finally this happened. Five pairs of luminous pinpricks shone in the depths of a clearing, belonging, Cacot whispered hoarsely, to deer. Jumping down from the jeep he plunged into the long grass, the beam of light jerking and wavering in front of him. At the end of the glade the deer could finally be made out, awaiting his coming, heads and necks above the grass, immobile as dummies in a shooting gallery. The light steadied, there was a red flash and charging echoes. The deer’s going was not to be seen. The clearing was suddenly emptied. Cacot came back and got into the jeep, saying that he was feeling tired. On the way home he brought down a small skunk-like animal with a long difficult shot. It had coarse, bristly fur, which Cacot seemed to think was of some value. After it had lain in the garage under the bungalow for a day it began to stink and the driver was told to bury it.
That night I was awakened by a prolonged slithering sound in the room, followed by a click. It was not a loud sound by any means but there was a suggestion of danger about it, which evidently impressed the subconscious mind. There was no electric light and it did not seem a very good idea to me to get up and look for the matches, because although I could not account for the click the slithering sound corresponded in my imagination to the noise a large snake would make in crossing the floor. I, therefore, lay quietly under the mosquito net, which I hoped would prove a deterrent to any exploratory reptile. The sound was repeated several times and then stopped. I went to sleep.
Almost immediately, it seemed, I was awakened by a truly hideous outcry, very definitely in the room and coming from a point not more than six feet from where I lay. This was a gurgling peal of ghastly hilarity, ending in the cry, jeck-o repeated several times. Although in the stillness of the night I ascribed this to some kind of predatory monster, it turned out next morning to be no more than the house’s tutelary jecko lizard, a large and repulsive monster of its kind which liked to lurk during the daytime in an angle of the bookcase, switching its tail angrily over the volumes of Jean-Paul Sartre. The jecko, it seems, is only dangerous to the extent that it defends itself vigorously when attacked and is regarded as fateful by the Vietnamese who draw auguries from the number of times it repeats the concluding bi-syllable of its call.
I was never able to account for the slither and the click.
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The sun was well up when we drove out next morning. Out of respect for the conventions of the country there had been some talk of making a dawn start, but many civilised delays had spun out the time. It was a genial morning. We dropped down the spiral road past the shore of the lake, which was still peeling off its layers of mist. There were a few Moïs out fishing in their pirogues, floating, it seemed, in suspension. Moïs were pottering about in the streams running down to the lake, setting fish-traps or washing out their kitchen pots – a job they were very particular about.
Our path was beaten across fairly open country. There were rice-fields on both sides, but the rice had been harvested a month or two before and now they were deserted except for buffaloes mooching about looking for mud-holes, and a few storks. The Moïs, who had nothing much to occupy themselves with at this season, were wandering about trying to find some way of using up the time between one drinking bout and the next. There were families sauntering along the path who looked as if they intended to walk a mile or two until they found a suitable spot for a picnic. The mother would be carrying a fat section of bamboo, with the food packed inside, while the father had a jar of rice alcohol slung on his back. The children ran about loosing off their crossbows unsuccessfully at any small birds they happened to see.
We passed fishing parties, organised pour le sport, more than with serious intent, since a little effort was diluted with much horseplay. The method in favour was for a number of persons to stir up the water of a stream or pool until it became thoroughly muddy and presumably confusing to the fish. Then they stabbed into it at random with a kind of harpoon shaped like a bottle but much larger and made of wicker, with a sharp circular edge at its open bottom. Both sexes took part and the fishing provided an excuse for endless practical jokes, involving duckings. These people were M’nongs, belonging to the same tribal group as those I had seen at Dak-Song, and one of the main divisions of the Moïs, who occupy a large, vague area to the south of Ban Méthuot. They are supposed to be slightly less advanced than the Rhadés whose territory begins a few miles away to the north and who are the strongest and most numerous of the Moï tribes. You could always distinguish the M’nongs by the large ivory cylinders they wore in their ear-lobes. The ones who still lived by hunting and, occasionally, raiding were supposed to carry poison for their arrows in one of these hollow cylinders and the antidote in the other.
We stopped at the village of Buon Dieo where there was a new school to be inspected, one of the five in the territory. At a distance Buon Dieo looked like an anthropologist’s scale model in an exhibition, a perfect example of a village in some remote and unspoilt South-Seas civilisation. It was all so well ordered that one expected to find litter baskets, and notices saying ‘a place for everything and everything in its place’. There was not a scrap of refuse nor a bad smell in the village. If the long-houses had been a tenth part of their size you could have described them as arty and crafty, with their technical-institute pattern of woven bamboo walls. And the clean, new images at the head of the stepladders up to the houses, the geometrical patterns on the well-scrubbed sacrificial posts and the strings of dangling figures cut out of paper. It was all so much of an exhibit – rather too clean and lifeless – the ideal M’nong village arranged for the benefit of visiting students. But the scale of the thing saved it and made it real. That and the 7000-foot peaks of the Annamite Chain that formed the background. Some of the best cases were a good sixty yards long. The village was lifeless because the people were keeping out of sight until the chief could be brought, and the chief was hastily putting on the European sports-shirt he wore as a badge of authority.
The chief of Buon Dieo had the sad, old, wizened face of a highly successful Levantine shopkeeper with a tendency to stomach-ulcers. Besides his sports-shirt he wore a dark-blue turban, a loincloth beautifully woven with a fine design of stylised flowers, and an ornament in the form of a pair of tweezers suspended from a chain worn round his neck. Ribo had visited the chief only a few days before, so that it was hoped that the ceremonial forms to be gone through would be much less involved than usual. We first visited the school which the whole village had combined to build in ten days. Ribo said that you only had to appeal to the Moïs’ imagination to get them enthusiastic over a project, to make them believe that it had their spirits’ approval, for them to be filled with this kind of Stakhanovite fervour. One of the villagers, who had been in the army and was therefore considered a man of culture, would give three days a week as a teacher. The school had just been inaugurated with the sacrifice of a buffalo and there were a few gnawed bones lying about on the floor. Ribo’s severe criticism of this seemed to me unfair in this model village from a colonial exhibition. In embellishment of the otherwise bare classrooms were several posters of Monte Carlo.
The common-room of the chief’s house was furnished with impressive simplicity. There were benches round the walls, carved out of some ebony-like wood, and clean rush matting on the floor. There was such a complete absence of household odds and ends that one had the impression of his wife going round tidying up after each visit. The principal objects were a battery of gongs of various sizes together with several drums, the largest of which, a massive affair hung with bells, the chief said was worth at least ten buffaloes. Not, of course, that he would ever think of selling it, in view of its sentimental associations. It had been in his wife’s family for several generations, and was only struck on occasions of great solemnity such as the appearance of a comet. The main beams of the house were sparingly decorated with what upon inspection proved to be advertisements and cartoons cut from French and American illustrated journals.
There were seven jars attached to a framework in the centre of the room and as soon as the chief’s sons-in-law had arrived and hung up their crossbows on the beam over the adventures of Dick Tracy, they were sent off with bamboo containers to the nearest ditch for water. In the meanwhile the seals of mud were removed from the necks of the jars and rice-straw and leaves were forced down inside them over the fermented rice-mash to prevent solid particles from rising when the water was added. The thing began to look serious and Ribo asked the chief, through his interpreter, for the very minimum ceremony to be performed as we had other villages to visit that day. The chief said that he had already understood that, and that was why only seven jars had been provided. It was such a poor affair that he hardly liked to have the gongs beaten to invite the household god’s presence. He hoped that by way of compensation he would be given sufficient notice of a visit next time to enable him to arrange a reception on a proper scale. He would guarantee to lay us all out for twenty-four hours.
This being the first of what I was told would be an endless succession of such encounters in the Moï country I was careful to study the details of the ceremony. Although these varied in detail from village to village, the essentials remained the same. The gong-orchestra starts up a deafening rhythm. You seat yourself on a stool before the principal jar, in the centre, take the bamboo tube in your mouth and do your best to consume the correct measure of three cow-horns full of spirit. Your attendant, who squats, facing you, on the other side of the jar, has no difficulty in keeping a check on the amount drunk, since the level is never allowed to drop below the top of the jar, water being constantly added from a small hole in the side of the horn, on which he keeps his thumb until the drinking begins. After you have finished with the principal jar, you move to the right of the line and work your way down. There is no obligatory minimum consumption from the secondary jars. At frequent intervals you suck up the spirit to the mouth of the tube and then, your thumb held over the end, you present it to one of the dignitaries present, who, beaming his thanks, takes a short suck and hands it back to you. In performing these courtesies you are warned to give priority to those whose loincloths are the most splendid, but if, in this case, the apparel oft proclaims the man, age is a more certain criterion with the women.
The M’nongs are matriarchal and it is to the relatively aged and powerful mothers-in-law that all property really belongs. Although the women hold back for a while and it is left to the men to initiate the ceremonies, the rice-alcohol, the jars, the gongs, the drums and the house itself are all theirs. It is therefore, not only a mark of exquisite courtesy but a tactful recognition of economic realities to gesture as soon as possible with one’s tube in the direction of the most elderly of the ladies standing on the threshold of the common-room. With surprising alacrity the next stool is vacated by its occupying notable to allow the true power in the house with a gracious and impeccably toothless smile to take her place. This toothlessness, of course, has no relation to the lady’s great age and arises from the fact that the incisors are regarded by the Moïs as unbearably canine in their effect and are, therefore, broken out of the jaws at the age of puberty.
The chief’s wife at Buon Dieo possessed, in spite of her years, a firm and splendid figure. She wore a gay sarong, probably obtained from a Cambodian trader, and in the intervals of drinking smoked a silver-mounted pipe. Her ceremonial demeanour was slow and deliberate as befitting her station and it was some time before the wife of another dignitary could be invited with propriety to join the party. A small group of these awaited their turn and at their backs hovered a row of solemn, Gauguinesque beauties, the chief’s daughters, whose husbands, if any, being of no account in the social hierarchy of the tribe had been sent about their business while such important matters were being treated. No more than seven or eight leaders of Buon Dieo society separated us from these bronze Venuses, but each one would have to be entertained with protracted urbanity.
With a great effort, the two or three dowagers were disposed of, and we were down to the nursing mothers, who, removing their babies from the breast and passing them to onlookers, tripped lightly towards us. Although the rice-alcohol, with its queer burnt-cereal taste, was weaker than usual, my friends said, it was beginning to take effect. The Moïs had slipped into an easy-going joviality and the nursing mothers received some mild familiarities, for which they exchanged good-natured slaps. Their capacity for alcohol, though, was greater than that of the elder ladies, and they were not to be deceived by a mere pretence of drinking on our part. Calling for beakers they sucked up the alcohol, spat libations, syphoned off liquor until the beakers were filled, and presented them to us. Taking stock of the situation we saw that we had drunk our way to within two nursing mothers of those perfect young representatives of the Polynesian race, the chief’s daughters, who flung us occasional glances from between sweeping lashes. But we were all flagging, dizzy with the alcohol and the stunning reverberation of the gongs. And the morning was wearing on. It would have been difficult to imagine our condition by the time we had drunk our way down to an interesting social level. The Moïs encouraged us with smiles and gestures, but we could do no more.
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It was at a village in the vicinity of Buon Dieo, where two years previously an extraordinary affair had taken place. A family of eight persons were suspected of magic practices to the detriment of the village. According to local custom a representative was chosen as accuser and a trial by ordeal arranged. This consisted of the villagers’ champion and the head of the accused family plunging their heads under water, the first to withdraw his head, in this case the accused, being held to have lost the day. According to the rulings of customary law governing this rather unusual case the charged persons were found to be possessed by certain minor demons, located in each case in a bodily organ. The general attitude thus was a sympathetic one. The prisoners were regarded as dangerously sick and only curable by the removal of the affected organ. After this was done they would be once more regarded as entirely normal members of society. The fact that death quickly followed the operations was entirely incidental and most sincerely regretted by all concerned. This was all the more so since the eight were regarded as having, quite accidentally, died the ‘bad’ death and therefore certain to be converted into revengeful ghouls unless propitiated by the most costly sacrifices, spread over a period of two years. In conformity with this obligation every animal in the village was soon slaughtered and the rice reserves converted into alcohol. The villagers then borrowed from neighbouring communities until their credit was completely exhausted, after which they settled down to starve.
