Getting Stoned With Savages - J. Maarten Troost [50]
“This is the water cistern,” said Chief Jamino, speaking through his son-in-law. There was a gaggle of large rocks through which a small stream trickled. Finally, I thought. The water source. We must be close. We hiked on. A half-hour later, just as I was frothing with exasperation—Where the hell is this cannibal village?—we paused in front of a large, flat slab of rock. The chief spoke.
“This is the altar where the pigs were sacrificed.” No event of consequence occurs in Vanuatu without a pig sacrifice. “And this,” he said, reaching into a crevice below the altar, “was a very great chief.”
Hello.
In his hands, Chief Jamino was cradling a skull. “He was a god. He discovered how to make fire. Do you see this stone?” he said, pointing to a boulder. “He make the fire like this.” The chief returned the skull to its place, rather unceremoniously I thought, and hopped on top of the boulder. With a stick he proceeded to exuberantly demonstrate how fire was made. He scraped the wood back and forth through a well-defined groove in the boulder. In a shallow indentation he had placed some kindling, and after five or so minutes of frantic scraping and blowing, smoke appeared.
“When did this great chief live?” I asked.
“A long time ago,” Chief Jamino said. “A hundred years past.”
Well, I certainly didn’t want to take anything away from the great chief, but it did seem to me that he was a trifle late in joining the rest of humanity in discovering how to make fire.
Stepping down, Chief Jamino reached into another crevice below the altar and retrieved another, better-preserved skull. “This was his son. And this was the son’s tusk. He wore it like a bracelet, like this,” he said, trying on the pig tusk. He placed the skull and the tusk back into its crevice, then reached for yet another, even better preserved skull. “This was the son’s son.”
I pondered the skulls for a moment. Very curious, I asked: “How did you get the heads?”
“After they died, we buried them standing up, just up to their necks. And when the heads fell off, we brought them here.”
This was almost too ghastly for me to envisage. How long would it take for a head to snap off? A month? Two? What about the flies? Did anyone trip over the heads? That first skull looked a little battered.
We moseyed on. The village, what remained of it, was densely overgrown. Was it always so? I asked.
“No,” Chief Jamino said. “This was all cleared. The village was abandoned because it was too far from the water source. But we keep it overgrown because we don’t want other tribes to find it. They will disturb it.”
“You mean the Big Nambas?”
“Yes, the Big Nambas.”
Then he related an interesting tale. A few months earlier, the chief of a Big Namba village asked Chief Jamino for a curious favor. His village, the Big Namba chief said, was disturbed. The spirits were unhappy. Ghosts were tormenting the people. The villagers were suffering one misfortune after another. Could they please have some of their bones back? he asked. The chief felt this would appease the spirits. “So we gave him some bones, and now the village is peaceful again.”
“And do you keep many bones here?” I asked.
“Yes, there are many bones. You will see.”
We walked on to what was once the village chief’s throne, a stone-slab easy chair that rested on a rise. “The chief sit here, and the assistant chief stand there,” Chief Jamino said, gesturing. “Like in a parliament.”
Below, in a clearing surrounded by enormous banyan trees, was where the village ceremonies occurred. “This is where