Getting Stoned With Savages - J. Maarten Troost [13]
We continued on our excursion, and the farther we traveled from Port Vila, the more treacherous the road became. After a rather exhilarating slide down a hill with my foot pressing the brake as far as it would go, we probably ought to have listened to our more sensible instincts and turned around. We drove on, however, partly because I am constitutionally incapable of backtracking, but mostly because the scenery was so alluring and each curve and every crest promised another vista of paradise. There were coconut palms with their fronds moving like languorous fans, and I was feeling tremendously pleased to be among them again. The hillsides were impressively dense and green, exuding an air of primordial wilderness. Those woods, I had read, contained a multitude of lizards, including the banded iguana, a fearsome-looking dragon that grows upwards of three feet in length. There was also the Pacific boa, an eight-foot-long snake that I hoped never to encounter. It is said that the Pacific boa is harmless, but I didn’t believe that for a moment. Raised as a Catholic, I still find it difficult to have warm and mushy feelings toward snakes. We stopped here and there, never encountering another vehicle, and listened to the quiet buzz of insects and the lazy calls of birds slumbering in the midday sun. There was a torporous serenity to the island, and the lingering small pressures that remained of our lives in Washington, the urge to hurry on, to check e-mail, to do errands, evaporated with the rising heat.
On the north shore of Efate, the views took a sudden turn toward the dramatic. There, offshore, were the volcanic islands of Nguna, Pele, and Emao, and farther in the distance, the Shepherd Islands, jagged green domes that rose precipitously out of the sea, the only visible remnants of a single island, Kuwae, that exploded—as islands in Vanuatu are wont to do—in a titanic fifteenth-century volcanic eruption. What remained of the island soon receded into the sea, leaving only the crests that today constitute the Shepherd Islands.
Remarkably, local legends spoke of one man who survived the catastrophe, Ti Tongoa Liseiriki, who, when he died, was buried wearing three round pig tusks around his arm. Even today, curved pig tusks are highly prized in Vanuatu, much to the consternation of the islands’ pig community. The tusks curve after a pig’s upper teeth have been yanked out. Subsequently, the animal must be fed by hand. The tusks continue to curve until they loop back through the snout and upper jaw, completing the circle. A really unfortunate pig will finds its tusks completing two or, very rarely, three complete circles as its owner celebrates his good fortune. The possessor of a triple-circle tusk is a wealthy man in Vanuatu. Less valuable than the pig tusks, however, were the wives and many of the men who had proclaimed fealty to Ti Tongoa Liseiriki. They too were buried alongside him. All had been killed for the occasion. In the 1960s, a French archeologist, José Garanger, took heed of the legend and, shovel in hand, proceeded to dig up Mr. Liseiriki, complete with pig tusks and entourage.
This wasn’t the only legend Monsieur Garanger chose to investigate in this corner of Vanuatu. There was also the tale of Roy Mata, a chief who counted northern Efate and the Shepherd Islands as his domain. In the mid-thirteenth century, Roy Mata—just Roy to his friends—violently conquered the region, and once he was recognized as the preeminent chief, he very sensibly declared that henceforth warfare would be forbidden. Every five years his subordinate chiefs held a grand feast to celebrate the peace, which endured for a long fifteen years until, very sadly for the chiefs,