The Love Potion Murders in the Museum of Man_ A Norman De Ratour Mystery - Alfred Alcorn [51]
How simple things must have been back then. Food, clothing, mating, and shelter. Although, I’m sure, back in some cave or other, on some ledge near where the rock face was being used as a canvas, someone had started a collection of discarded, nicely carved spearheads and bear claw jewelry, just for display. And someone had to curate it.
But to the matter at hand. I cannot be too hard on myself. I finally left the public area, let myself into the Twitchell Room, found the right niche for the tape, inserted it, turned it on, and watched.
As expected, the first few minutes of the tape were scarcely exceptional: shots of a dense jungle trail and smallish natives naked except for thongs around their waists and under their buttocks carrying what appeared to be blowguns and bows with great long arrows. The camera bobs a bit even in clear stretches, throwing out of sync the rhythmic walking movements of the all but naked haunches of the natives up ahead. It is clear that for much of the time they are climbing a fairly steep incline.
They stop finally at a small clearing where, through a break in the dense canopy, the camera scans over a great, green, riverine forest. Corny’s voice comes over from the side in a breathlessness reminiscent of that Englishman who narrates nature programs. “Down below to the left you can see where they have clear-cut several hundred hectares, destroying habitat for both man and nature.”
The picture jostles, goes blank. Then we see Corny standing on a log, slouch hat pulled over his balding, cropped pate, face blistered by the sun, stance defiant, every inch the fearless anthropologist of yore. “A lot of the tribespeople are noticeably hostile to outsiders now. I had difficulty recruiting what porters and guides I have with me here. As you can see ahead, even getting into Yomama territory is difficult. There are no permanent trails, and we will now have to cut our way with machetes through dense vegetation that reasserts itself very quickly.
“Ahead of us, in a hidden upland valley, is the sacred village of the Yomamas, where no outsiders have been before, not even Ferdie, who’s been everywhere around these parts. Melvin Bricklesby made it as far as our base camp in 1957 but turned back when his porters wouldn’t go any farther. His account of Osunki, the anthropophagic ritual of the Yomamas, is, as he freely admits, based largely on hearsay. And now our escorts, from one of the small tribes along the tributary, refuse to go any farther. They’ve been getting more and more nervous. They’ve been making jokes, pointing at one another, rubbing their stomachs and laughing.
“Ferdie yesterday made contact with a member of the tribe, and he tells me that the headman has agreed to let me witness and videotape Osunki in exchange, believe it or not, for the video camera taking this footage. An important Yomama I met down at the base camp thought it sheer magic that we could capture the living world in this box. Well, I’m not about to say no to a deal like that. So, at the risk of pomposity, let me say I am setting forth to record the conscience of my fellow humans, to refute once and for all the cannibalism deniers, that legion of the misguided who think the human species too good for the natural behavior of which it is capable.
“Whew. We’ve been climbing along this trail now for several hours and we’ve only now come to the rough part. I’ve have never been in an area so remote in all my life.”
For a while there is no voice-over, only the sound of birds in the canopy, Corny’s heavy breathing, and the slash of machetes as they cut their way through the dense understory of the jungle. The screen goes blank. When it comes back on it’s obviously some time later, though