Getting Stoned With Savages - J. Maarten Troost [61]
“C’est paradis,” he said. Like most of them, he spoke only French.
“Perhaps you could help us understand something,” I said. “Why are you there? Or rather, why are the French still in New Caledonia? The nickel that you mine does not come anywhere close to matching the subsidies that the French government sends you each year. And as far as I can tell, France has no particular strategic interests in the region.”
“It is our patrimony,” he said. “After Algeria, we said never again.” The others nodded. “New Caledonia was France yesterday. It is France today. And it will be France tomorrow.”
Vive la France!
They’re mad, I tell you. But the answer pleased me, for now I felt free to truly despise them, a feeling that peaked sometime after midnight as we lay awake, groaning to yet another loud, drunken rendition of “La Marseillaise.” I mean, really now. Who on earth stays up deep into the night singing the national anthem of a faraway motherland? They’re nuts, and I had for them nothing but ill will. Okay. Enough. But the next time Germany invades…Okay, I’ll stop now…well, it’s not going to be me saving their ass.
MOUNT YASUR is often described as the world’s most accessible volcano. It rises to no great height, a mere one thousand feet, and a four-wheel-drive vehicle can easily deposit you within three hundred feet of the summit. It will tolerate, now and then, the presence of drunken paleo-nationalist Frenchmen. It even lent its name to one of the tribes on Survivor: Vanuatu, the television game show, which was filmed on the island of Efate, on a beach a short distance from the comforts of Port Vila. These facts may lull some—until, that is, they find themselves in Yasur’s fiery presence. The landscape of Tanna is flamboyantly green, a veritable Eden, and so to come across the Ash Plain, a grim, forbidding, lifeless savannah of desolation, is to be reminded that Mount Yasur is very much alive. Indeed, the volcano has been continuously active, rumbling and emitting great torrents of magma and lava bombs, for more than eight hundred years. Near the base stands Lake Isiwi, a large, poisonous pond containing scores of uprooted trees, deposited there by cyclones. Already, here, one can inhale the sulfur and feel the trembling of the ground whenever Mount Yasur flares. Ash is continuously expelled from the crater, and as these plumes of dirt rise and billow from the summit, it occurs to you that standing on the rim is perhaps not the most reasonable or prudent thing to do.
It took a while for this last thought to find us. When we awoke, in darkness, to the insistent tap-tap of William knocking on our hut, my first thought, as I remembered why we had slept so little, was to wonder whether I could hit the yachts anchored in the bay below us with a few well-aimed rocks. The lights on their boats presented an appealing target. And then I felt an overwhelming need for coffee.
“No coffee,” William declared. “The guides are here. Here are your flashlights.”
We stumbled onward, following the glare of the flashlights. A light drizzle fell. Our guides were Simi and Joseph, two men from a nearby village, one of several that claimed to be the traditional landowners of Mount Yasur. Sylvia joined Joseph in the cab of the truck, and I hopped in the back with Simi. I cannot say I had any great enthusiasm for sitting on the cold, wet metal rail of a pickup truck. It was 4 A.M. I was shivering. It is rare to feel cold in the South Pacific, but that is the state in which I found myself. We gingerly made our way toward the volcano, following a muddy trail illuminated by the truck’s headlights. We crossed the barren Ash Plain. Above, I could see the red blaze of Mount Yasur reflecting off wet clouds that swirled low above its rim. The air had begun to smell strongly of sulfur, like a million extinguished matches. The truck slowed, and Simi jumped down to unlock a gate that crossed the path leading up toward the rim.