Luckily for him he tracked down dinner in the form of a willing year-old, Bernd Brandes. He was later arrested for murder as cannibalism is not a crime in Germany. Cannibal Rudy Eugene set upon unwitting Ronaldo Poppo on a Florida freeway, leaving him with only one eye and severe facial injuries. Jump directly to the content. Sign in. All Football. Warning Graphic. Seeing me shivering, Boas pulls my body against his for warmth. As I drift off, deeply fatigued, I have the strangest thought: this is the first time I've ever slept with a cannibal.
We leave at first light, still soaked. At midday our pirogue reaches our destination, a riverbank close by the treehouse, or khaim , of a Korowai clan that Kembaren says has never before seen a white person.
Our porters arrived before us and have already built a rudimentary hut. I ask why they've given permission for a laleo to enter their sacred land. At midafternoon, Kembaren and I hike 30 minutes through dense jungle and ford a deep stream.
He points ahead to a treehouse that looks deserted. It perches on a decapitated banyan tree, its floor a dense latticework of boughs and strips of wood. It's about ten yards off the ground.
Korowai are formed into what anthropologists call patriclans, which inhabit ancestral lands and trace ownership and genealogy through the male line. A young cassowary prances past, perhaps a family pet. A large pig, flushed from its hiding place in the grass, dashes into the jungle. Kembaren points to the treehouse.
I can hear voices as I climb an almost vertical pole notched with footholds. The interior of the treehouse is wreathed in a haze of smoke rent by beams of sunlight. Young men are bunched on the floor near the entrance. Smoke from hearth fires has coated the bark walls and sago-leaf ceiling, giving the hut a sooty odor. A pair of stone axes, several bows and arrows and net bags are tucked into the leafy rafters.
The floor creaks as I settle cross-legged onto it. Four women and two children sit at the rear of the treehouse, the women fashioning bags from vines and studiously ignoring me.
Each hearth is made from strips of clay-coated rattan suspended over a hole in the floor so that it can be quickly hacked loose, to fall to the ground, if a fire starts to burn out of control. A middle-aged man with a hard-muscled body and a bulldog face straddles the gender dividing line.
Speaking through Boas, Kembaren makes small talk about crops, the weather and past feasts. The man grips his bow and arrows and avoids my gaze. But now and then I catch him stealing glances in my direction. The fierce man leads the clan in fights. Lepeadon looks up to the task.
After an hour of talk, the fierce man moves closer to me and, still unsmiling, speaks. A youngster tries to yank my pants off, and he almost succeeds amid a gale of laughter. I join in the laughing but keep a tight grip on my modesty. Korowai seemed to have a hard time understanding clothing. They call it laleo-khal , "ghost-demon skin," and Veldhuizen told me they believed his shirt and pants to be a magical epidermis that he could don or remove at will.
Lepeadon follows us to the ground and grabs both my hands. He begins bouncing up and down and chanting, " nemayokh " "friend". I keep up with him in what seems a ritual farewell, and he swiftly increases the pace until it is frenzied, before he suddenly stops, leaving me breathless.
In four decades of journeying among remote tribes, this is the first time I've encountered a clan that has evidently never seen anyone as light-skinned as me. Enthralled, I find my eyes tearing up as we return to our hut. The next morning four Korowai women arrive at our hut carrying a squawking green frog, several locusts and a spider they say they just caught in the jungle. Two years in a Papuan town has taught him that we laleo wrinkle our noses at Korowai delicacies.
The young women have circular scars the size of large coins running the length of their arms, around the stomach and across their breasts. He explains how they are made, saying circular pieces of bark embers are placed on the skin. It seems an odd way to add beauty to the female form, but no more bizarre than tattoos, stiletto-heel shoes, Botox injections or the not-so-ancient Chinese custom of slowly crushing infant girls' foot bones to make their feet as small as possible.
Kembaren and I spend the morning talking to Lepeadon and the young men about Korowai religion. Seeing spirits in nature, they find belief in a single god puzzling.
But they too recognize a powerful spirit, named Ginol, who created the present world after having destroyed the previous four. For as long as the tribal memory reaches back, elders sitting around fires have told the younger ones that white-skinned ghost-demons will one day invade Korowai land. Once the laleo arrive, Ginol will obliterate this fifth world.
The land will split apart, there will be fire and thunder, and mountains will drop from the sky. This world will shatter, and a new one will take its place. The prophecy is, in a way, bound to be fulfilled as more young Korowai move between their treehouses and downriver settlements, which saddens me as I return to our hut for the night.
They divide the day into seven distinct periods—dawn, sunrise, midmorning, noon, midafternoon, dusk and night. They use their bodies to count numbers. Lepeadon shows me how, ticking off the fingers of his left hand, then touching his wrist, forearm, elbow, upper arm, shoulder, neck, ear and the crown of the head, and moving down the other arm.
The tally comes to In the afternoon I go with the clan to the sago palm fields to harvest their staple food. Two men hack down a sago palm, each with a hand ax made from a fist-size chunk of hard, dark stone sharpened at one end and lashed with vine to a slim wooden handle. The men then pummel the sago pith to a pulp, which the women sluice with water to produce a dough they mold into bite-size pieces and grill. A snake that falls from the toppling palm is swiftly killed.
Lepeadon then loops a length of rattan about a stick and rapidly pulls it to and fro next to some shavings on the ground, producing tiny sparks that start a fire. Blowing hard to fuel the growing flame, he places the snake under a pile of burning wood.
When the meat is charred, I'm offered a piece of it. It tastes like chicken. On our return to the treehouse, we pass banyan trees, with their dramatic, aboveground root flares. The men slam their heels against these appendages, producing a thumping sound that travels across the jungle.
My three days with the clan pass swiftly. When I feel they trust me, I ask when they last killed a khakhua. Lepeadon says it was near the time of the last sago palm feast, when several hundred Korowai gathered to dance, eat vast quantities of sago palm maggots, trade goods, chant fertility songs and let the marriage-age youngsters eye one another. According to our porters, that dates the killing to just over a year ago.
Lepeadon tells Boas he wants me to stay longer, but I have to return to Yaniruma to meet the Twin Otter. As we board the pirogue, the fierce man squats by the riverside but refuses to look at me. When the boatmen push away, he leaps up, scowls, thrusts a cassowary-bone arrow across his bow, yanks on the rattan string and aims at me.
After a few moments, he smiles and lowers the bow—a fierce man's way of saying goodbye. In midafternoon, the boatmen steer the pirogue to the edge of a swamp forest and tie it to a tree trunk. Boas leaps out and leads the way, setting a brisk pace. Dominating it is a treehouse that soars about 75 feet into the sky.
Its springy floor rests on several natural columns, tall trees cut off at the point where branches once flared out. Boas is waiting for us. Next to him stands his father, Khanduop, a middle-aged man clad in rattan strips about his waist and a leaf covering part of his penis.
He grabs my hand and thanks me for bringing his son home. He has killed a large pig for the occasion, and Bailom, with what seems to me to be superhuman strength, carries it on his back up a notched pole into the treehouse. Inside, every nook and cranny is crammed with bones from previous feasts—spiky fish skeletons, blockbuster pig jaws, the skulls of flying foxes and rats.
The bones dangle even from hooks strung along the ceiling, near bundles of many-colored parrot and cassowary feathers. The Sentinelese are a tribe that live on North Sentinel, an island off the eastern coast of India, and are among the last truly uncontacted people in the world. They have been described as a Stone Age tribe, and are believed to have lived on the island in isolation for up to 60, years. In , the group killed US missionary John Allen Chau with bows and arrows after he landed on the island as part of an attempt to convert its inhabitants to Christianity.
Speaking at the time about planned attempt to recover Chau's body, Survival International's Director Stephen Corry said: "The risk [to the Sentinelese] of a deadly epidemic of flu, measles, or other outside disease is very real, and increases with every contact. Jump directly to the content. Sign in.
0コメント