He was feeling feverish and sluggish the next morning, but saw no point in staying over, hoping that a steady ration of Panadol and a brisk walk would break the fever. Breakfast consisted of smaller portions of last night’s leftover and more tepid tea, and then he hefted his pack, only marginally lighter, and hobbled stiff-legged, down the notched log and started off on the next leg of the journey, on to the neighbouring Long House of Pa Dal’ih. This, Noah assured him, was an easy walk of three hours, as he strode ahead, swinging a trussed up, but very much alive, chicken by its legs. All his joints aching from the sleep on the hard floor and the previous day’s marathon, he set off slowly.
The path through the rolling flatlands surrounding Long Dano was far more scenic than yesterdays, winding between whispering groves of feathery bamboos, down towards and then parallel to the river. This was the upper reaches of the Baram which he had travelled on by express boat to Marudi but it was impossible to recognise it as being the same river. Here the water was crystal and babbley as opposed to Marudi’s sullen brown muddy swirl.
Stopping to tie his shoe lace and to have a few furtive drags from a cigarette, he had to hurry down the windy, rootey trail to catch up with the guides. Stepping up over a log, his leg suddenly froze in mid-air as, slithering over the same log and into the undergrowth beside him was his first snake. It was a brilliant emerald green and was about as thick as his big toe, with a wicked diamond shaped head, the snake began a leisurely climb up a nearby tree to be instantly lost in its leaves. So perfectly did it blend in, that it was only when it moved that he could see it.
On again down the trail and they had already been walking for over two hours when Noah suddenly made a sharp right and crashed through the undergrowth and slithered down a steep bank to the riverside. The beach was flat and rocky for the most part with some impressively large boulders in the river itself. Noah claimed that when the river was full the boulders were completely submerged and busied himself with lighting a fire, while the chicken, realising the game was up, squawked helplessly nearby.
Leaving his sweaty t-shirt on a rock to dry, he stepped gingerly into the river. The water was cold enough to take his breath away so after the most cursory of dips, he went over to huddle by Noah’s fire. He was as pale and goose-bumpley as the wretched chicken, already slaughtered and defeathered. Noah, meanwhile, chopped down some stout, green bamboos and cutting them into sections above their joints he rammed a mixture of chicken bits, rice, salt, pepper and MSG into the tube and sealed the open end with a banana leaf, and then placed the tube end-up in the fire.
“Lunch”, he grinned.
Determined to lessen the weight he was carrying, he rummaged in his pack, and came up with an unopened bottle of Remy Martin. Picking the sunniest spot, he leaned back against a rock, waited for his bamboo chicken, sipped brandy from the measure cap and watched the swarms of little bees cluster thickly as grapes on his shoes and socks. They did land on the other guides’ clothes as well, but for some reason his footwear took the brunt of their assault.
The chicken turned out tough and rubbery and not particularly appetizing so he shared a tin of mackerel fillets in tomato sauce with Noah and succeeded in adding a few fairly gory looking stains to the front of his shirt.
Off up the trail after lunch, and this time it was strictly up hill. The brandy gave him an initial lightness of step but he knew that it would be temporary and he galloped on with all possible speed, red-faced, hot and puffing, making a final lunge for the top of the ridge which he could see silhouetted against the afternoon sky through a break in the jungle canopy.
From the cool of the river forty minutes before, he was now reduced to a filthy, sweaty, stumbling oaf, gasping for breath while the bees maintained a constant halo around his heads and necks, guzzling the rich alcohol sweat that liberally poured from him.
Time to bring out the heavy guns, he thought and he washed down two Paracetemol tablets with a cupful of brandy and water, topped the lot off with a high energy glucose capsule, and a cigarette, and only then was he at last able to sit back and look down the other side of the ridge at Pa Da’lih for the first time.
Unlike Long Dano, which he had just left, Pada’lih squatted right on the banks of a river, and was made up of a collection of straggling shacks, huts and the main long house which ran along the left side of a large field, the opposite side of which is taken up by the village school!
For some reason, Noah led him around the back of the longhouse and it looked depressingly slummy and hovel-like. The earth was bare, scraped clean by the innumerable scrawny looking chickens wandering irresolutely about. A small moat, about a foot wide, filled with a rich looking green-black slime, surrounded the longhouse, which was raised on stilts. Mangy pariah-like dogs sniffed at this rather unappetising channel and growled at him. The longhouse itself looked both crude and flimsy as if one good blast of wind could send the whole thing flying. His heart sank a little bit as he realised that he had paid good money for this trip and here he was, traipsing up and down bloody hills all day and sleeping in the equivalent of some high rise tenement lying on its side!
Too late to do anything about it now, so following Noah, he climbed up the notched log and pushed open the door made of scraps of wood planking, and patched sheets of cheap plywood. He began to feel embarrassed by his obvious wealth in terms of his being there in the first place, as well as his expensive backpack and sneakers, but he was too tired, and a little pissed (off), to care.
Once inside the longhouse, he slipped out of his pack and subsided to the floor, against the wall. Almost immediately, a smiling lady wearing, oddly he felt, glasses, a brown v-neck pullover with the sleeves rolled to her elbow, and her hair in a bun, brought him hot tea and he struggled up into a sitting position to look around.
The longhouse – about 200 feet long – was completely bare of furniture except for a plain wooden table to his left, upon which stood a bucket, several bottles and a large tin of Nestle Milo. In front of most of the fireplaces were little stools, each one about six inches off the ground, on which the ladies squatted while tending the fire. Unlike Long Dano again, this longhouse had no fancy louvred windows. Instead shafts of sunlight filtered in through raised flaps in the attap roof. Countless years of cooking fires had smoked and varnished the ceiling rafters and centre beam to a rich reddy-black mahogany colour. Various elderly people hobbled over to him, all of them wishing to shake hands with him.
Sinah Bend, the woman in the glasses, produced a quick snack of fruit (bananas, tarap, and a little round brown thing, quite sour and full of stones) and then got on with the business of preparing dinner for her unexpected guests. He went over to help her and ended up squatting on one of the little stools, plucking leaves off a bunch of twigs while another old lady, also wearing glasses, clucked and nodded approval. An old man wearing a sarong around his skinny waist, his bare feet horny and spatulate came over to shake hands with him. This was Balam Tapan, the headman of the longhouse. Mild mannered looking, despite his mutilated ears with two small oval shaped holes in the top section, and the bottom lobes looking as if a dog had mistaken them for a nice pair of bedroom slippers, he squatted down on the floor beside him and talked to him with the casualness of a long life acquaintance.
“What news with you?”
“Do you have a name?”
“Where have you come from today?”
“Was all well there?”
“Who are the people travelling with you?”
“Where will you stay tomorrow?
Luckily his Malay was well able to deal with conversation at this level as most of the questions, the answers also, were formulaic. Only after all these formalities, like going through immigration, he thought, were over was he able to speak directly to him. He immediately asked him why he didn’t have his ears pierced like so many of the other older men. Apparently, he had, when he was a much younger man. The Christian Evangelical missionaries who had overrun the Bario Highlands after WW II had quickly set about discouraging the ear piercing habit and had managed to – and here he began to lose the thread – either persuade Balam Tapan to cut off the pendulous lobes or else sew them up. Either way, he felt that it was none of the missionaries bloody business.
He fished out a few fishhooks from his pack and they were received with subdued appreciation until the old woman with the glasses, over by the fire, who turned out to be Sinah Bent’s mother, pronounced that the little hooks would be just ideal for catching birds in the fields! After that, everybody wanted some hooks.
He decided to go for a walk to ease the aches in his legs and walked the length of the house being stopped at every fireplace to shake hands with people. Outside on the field, he could see a cluster of kids near the school playing g some complicated game with a bat and al ball. Unable to resist an audience, he had to have a go at the bat, and after a couple of wild swings which spun him round violently, practically corkscrewing him into the ground, he managed to slam the ball right through one of the school’s open glass windows! Enough was enough, and as it looked like rain, ominous black thunderclouds stretching up from behind a distant line of smudged mountains, he walked back to the longhouse, sidestepping a wary looking buffalo or two.
Dinner that night was quite a feast with Sinah Bent displaying an extraordinary culinary talent. The rather unappetising leaves that he had been stripping had been transformed into a most delicious spinach type dish. In addition to the vegetables, Sinah Bent, displaying a profound knowledge of the tastes of Europeans, had actually produced a small plate of potato chips. Noah had contributed several tins of corned beef and curried beef rendang, and the only thing the meal lacked, he felt, was a couple of buckets of local rice wine.
After dinner most of the people wandered off to attend an evening church service, which he found to be yet another example of culture shock. To be in the Borneo hinterland, so far away from everywhere and have people traipsing off to what amounted to evening mass, was just weird.
Sitting around in the shadows of a smokey, brass oil lamp, he asked Balam Tapan if the longhouse had any music or dancing, or had they and similar culture traditions been axed by the missionaries. Sinah Bend, hearing his question, slipped away and came back with a small, double deck, Sharp tape recorder and some cassettes. He had had the ancient, breast shaped, brass gongs, the two stringed sape guitar-like instrument in mind, but beggars couldn’t be choosers.
“How many people can still dance”? he innocently enquired, feeling around in the dark for his brandy bottle. Since their Evangelical conversion, he was well aware that the Kelabits no longer took heads, smoked, drank alcohol or indulged in the base habits of corrupt yesterdays, substituting attendance at church several times a day instead. But he had also been told – and had every reason to believe – that old habits die hard and that among the older people, the odd sip of liquor wouldn’t go amiss.
Producing the bottle of Remy, he apologised for the fact that it wasn’t full and he carefully set it down, beside an opened packet of Benson and Hedges on the straw mat in the middle of the circle of people. Sinah Bent started the cassette player and an old woman stood up, and gracefully began to gyrate her lower body while her arms and hands fluttered in a different direction. The only light was from the dying embers of the fire and the tiny flickering flame from the single oil lamp. The music was simple but no less beautiful for that, while the old lady became transformed – in his eyes – into a shapely pagan goddess dancing for the first white visitor to their previously unvisited longhouse. Looking around at the rapt faces of the old people, and the bored, contemptuous faces of the few younger people who had joined them, attracted, no doubt, by the music, the cigarettes and the novelty of the visit, he noticed that the brandy must be evaporating as the level in the bottle had dropped quite sharply since he had placed it there.
Almost without warning, the old woman was bowing to him while another old woman hobbled to her feet to, again, become transformed by the magic of the music and the dance. Reaching for the brandy, he discovered that there was barely an inch left in the bottle – some left for Mr. Manners, no doubt? – so he rummaged in his bag and brought out his last bottle of fine old Scotch. Balam Tapan, with a ridiculous looking old straw hat, the front brim unfinished and unwoven, the straws sticking out like a crude visor, a rattan pack on his back, got up and did a humorous dance of a honeybear looking for honey and finding trouble. The audience howled with appreciation as he continually scratched his arse, smelt his fingers, padded around the floor and finally discovered the bee hive half way up the main ridge pole. Clambering up this he was suddenly attacked by bees and with clumsy swipes of his paws he dropped to the ground, and rolled around, pawing dementedly at himself. Then, as the music changed it’s tempo, so too did he change his mime, becoming the stealthy hunter, the wicked looking parang clutched in his hand. With a thump of his horny old calloused heel on the bare planks of the floor, Balam announced the presence of a mighty warrior and then, with a howl, he leapt towards his enemy. Spinning into the air, the long blade of the parang gleaming in the lamp light, arms outstretched, he strutted and swaggered around the floor, accepting the admiring, coy looks of the girls as he displayed his victim’s head.
His clapping faltered and his enthusiasm waned when the old man approached him, helped him to his feet and placed the straw hat on his head. Assisted by the internal liquid fuel and his own super ego, he pranced wildly on the floor and succeeded in losing the hat in seconds which rolled perilously close to the fire before one of the kids retrieved it. Finishing off with a leap in the air, half a spin and a Cossack style knee manouevre, he sat down, panting and sweating, and gulped at his whisky.
- With apologies to Eric Newby for copying part of his title – A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (1958)
Red Branch Chronicles 
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