Cryptonomicon

Chapter 48 CANNIBALS

Goto Dengo flees through the swamp. He is fairly certain that he is being chased by the cannibals who just cooked up the friend with whom he had washed ashore. He climbs up a tangle of vines and hides himself several meters above the ground; men with spears search the general area, but they do not find him.

He passes out. When he wakes up, it's dark, and some small animal is moving in the branches nearby. He is so desperate for food that he grabs at it blindly. The creature has a body the size of a house cat, but long leathery arms: some kind of huge bat. It bites him several times on the hands before he crushes it to death. Then he eats it raw.

The next day he goes forth into the swamp, trying to put more distance between himself and the cannibals. Around midday he finds a stream—the first one he's seen. For the most part the water just seeps out of New Guinea though marshes, but here is an actual river of cold, fresh water, just narrow enough to jump across.

A few hours later he finds another village that is similar to the first one, but only about half as big. The number of dangling heads is much smaller; maybe these headhunters are not quite as fearsome as the first group. Again there is a central fire where white stuff is being cooked in a pot: in this case, it appears to be a wok, which they must have gotten though trade. The people of this village don't know a starving Nipponese soldier is lurking in the vicinity, so they are not very vigilant. Around twilight, when the mosquitoes come out of the swamps in a humming fog, they all retire into their longhouses. Goto Dengo runs out into the middle of the compound, grabs the wok, and makes off with it. He forces himself not to take any of the food until he is far away, hidden in a tree again, and then he gorges himself. The food is a rubbery gel of what would appear to be pure starch. Even to a ravenous man, it has no flavor at all. Nevertheless he licks the wok clean. While he is doing so, an idea comes to him.

The next morning, when the sun's bubble bursts out of the sea, Goto Dengo is kneeling in the bed of the river, scooping sand up into the wok and swirling it around, hypnotized by the maelstrom of dirt and foam, which slowly develops a glittering center.

The next morning Dengo is standing on the edge of the village bright and early, shouting: “Ulab! Ulab! Ulab!” which is what the people in the first village called gold.

The villagers wriggle out of their tiny front doors, bewildered at first, but when they see his face and the wok dangling from one hand, rage flashes over them like the sun burning out from behind a cloud. A man charges with a spear, sprinting straight across the clearing. Goto Dengo dances back and takes half-shelter behind a coconut tree, holding the wok up over his chest like a shield. “Ulab! Ulab!” he cries again. The warrior falters. Goto Dengo holds out his fist, swings it to and fro until it finds a warm shaft of sunlight, and then loosens it slightly. A tiny cascade of glittering flakes trickles out, catching the sun, then plunges into shadow, hissing as it strikes the leaves below.

It gets their attention. The man with the spear stops. Someone behind him says something about patah.

Goto Dengo levels the wok, resting it on his forearm, and sprinkles the entire handful of gold dust into it. The village watches, transfixed. There is a great deal more whispering about patah. He steps forward into the clearing, holding the wok out before him as an offering to the warrior, letting them see his nakedness and his pitiful condition. Finally he collapses to his knees, bows his head very low, and sets the wok on the ground at the warrior's feet. He remains there, head bowed, letting them know that they can kill him now if they want to.

If they want to choke off their newly discovered gold supply, that is. The matter will require some discussion. They tie his elbows together behind his back with vines, put a noose around his neck, and tie that to a tree. All of the kids in the village stand around him and stare. They have purple skin and frizzy hair. Flies swarm around their heads.

The wok is taken into a hut that is decorated with more human heads than any of the other huts. All of the men go in there. Furious discussion ensues.

A mud-daubed woman with long skinny breasts brings Goto Dengo half a shell of coconut milk and a handful of white, knuckle-sized grubs wrapped up in leaves. Her skin is a tangle of overlapping ringworm scars and she is wearing a necklace that consists of a single human finger strung on a piece of twine. The grubs squirt when Goto Dengo bites down on them.

The children abandon him to watch a pair of American P-38s fly by, out over the ocean. Bored with airplanes, Goto Dengo squats on his haunches and observes the menagerie of arthropods that have converged on him in hopes of sucking his blood, taking a bite of his flesh, eating his eyeballs out of his skull, or impregnating him with their eggs. The haunch position is a good one because every five seconds or so he has to bash his face against one knee, then the other, in order to keep the bugs out of his eyes and nostrils. A bird drops out of a tree, lands clumsily on his head, pecks something out of his hair, and flies away. Blood jets out of his anus and pools hotly under the arches of his feet. Creatures with many legs gather at the edge of the pool and begin to feast. Goto Dengo moves away, and leaving them to it, gets a few minutes' respite.

The men in the hut arrive at some sort of agreement. The tension is broken. There is laughter, even. He wonder what counts as funny to these guys.

The guy who wanted to impale him earlier comes across the clearing, takes his leash, and tugs Goto Dengo to a standing position. “Patah,” he says.

He looks at the sky. It is getting late, but he does not relish trying to explain to them that they should simply wait until tomorrow. He stumbles across the clearing to the cooking fire and nods at a pan full of brain stew. “Wok,” he says.

It doesn't work. They think he wants to trade gold for the wok.

There follows about eighteen hours of misunderstandings and failed attempts to communicate. Goto Dengo almost dies; at least he feels like he might. Now that he is not on the move, the last few days are really catching up with him. But finally, in the middle of the next morning, he gets to show his magic. Squatting in the nearby stream, his elbows unbound, the wok in his hands, surrounded by skeptical village fathers still keeping a tight grip on his rustic noose, he begins to pan for gold. Within a few minutes he has managed to summon a few flakes of the stuff out of the riverbed, demonstrating the basic concept.

They want to learn it themselves. He was expecting this. He tries to show one of them how it's done, but (as Goto Dengo himself learned long ago) it is one of those harder-than-it-looks deals.

Back to the village. He actually gets a place to sleep this night: they stuff him into a long skinny sack of woven grass and tie it shut above his head—this is how they keep themselves from being eaten alive by insects while they are asleep. Malaria hits him now: alternating waves of chill and heat swamping his body with the force of riptides.

Time goes out of whack for a while. Later, he realizes he has been here for a while now, because his broken forefinger is now solid and gnarled, and the abrasions that he got from the coral head are now a field of fine, parallel scars, like the grain in a piece of wood. His skin is covered with mud and he smells of coconut oil and of the smoke that they fill their huts with to chase away the bugs. His life is simple: when malaria has him teetering on the brink of death, he sits in front of a felled palm tree and chips away at it mindlessly for hours, slowly creating a heap of fibrous white stuff that the women use to make starch. When he is feeling stronger, he drags himself over to the river and pans for gold. In return they do what they can to keep New Guinea from killing him. He's so weak they do not even bother to send a chaperone with him when he goes out.

It would be an idyllic tropical paradise if not for the malaria, the insects, the constant diarrhea and resulting hemorrhoids, and the fact that the people are dirty and smell bad and eat each other and use human heads for decoration. The one thing that Goto Dengo thinks about, when he's capable of thinking, is that there is a boy in this village who looks to be about twelve years old. He remembers the twelve-year-old who was initiated by driving a spear through his companion's heart, and wonders who's going to be used for this boy's initiation rite.

From time to time the village elders pound on a hollow log for a while, then stand around listening to other hollow logs being pounded in other villages. One day there is an especially long episode of pounding, and it would seem that the villagers are pleased by what they have heard. The next day, they have visitors: four men and a child who speak a completely different language; their word for gold is gabitisa. The child whom they have brought with them is about six years old, and obviously retarded. There is a negotiation. Some of the gold that Goto Dengo has panned out of the stream is exchanged for the retarded child. The four visitors disappear into the jungle with their gabitisa. Within a few hours, the retarded child has been tied to a tree and the twelve-year-old boy has stabbed it to death and become a man. After some parading around and dancing, the older men sit on top of the younger man and cut long complicated gashes into his skin and pack dirt into them so that they will heal as decorative welts.

Goto Dengo cannot do very much except gape in numb astonishment. Every time he begins to think beyond the next fifteen minutes, tries to formulate a plan of action, the malaria comes back, flattens him for a week or two, scrambles his brain and forces him to start again from scratch. Despite all of this he manages to extract a few hundred grams of gold dust from that stream. From time to time the village is visited by relatively light-skinned traders who move up and down the coast in outrigger canoes and who speak yet another different language. These traders begin to come more frequently, as the village elders start trading the gold dust for betel nuts, which they chew because it makes them feel good, and for the occasional bottle of rum.

One day, Goto Dengo is on his way back from the river, carrying a teaspoon of gold dust in the wok, when he hears voices from the village—voices speaking in a cadence that used to be familiar.

All of the men of the village, some twenty in all, are standing up with their backs to coconut trees, their arms secured behind the trees with ropes. Several of these men are dead, with their intestines spilling down onto the ground, already black with flies. The ones who are not dead yet are being used for bayonet practice by a few dozen gaunt, raving Nipponese soldiers. The women ought to be standing around screaming, but he doesn't see them. They must be inside the huts.

A man in a lieutenant's uniform swaggers out of a hut, smiling broadly, wiping blood off of his penis with a rag, and almost trips over a dead child.

Goto Dengo drops the wok and puts his hands up in the air. “I am Nipponese!” he shouts, even though all he wants to say at this moment is I am not Nipponese.

The soldiers are startled, and several of them try to swing their rifles around in his direction. But the Nipponese rifle is an awful thing, nearly as long as the average soldier is tall, too heavy to maneuver even when its owner is in perfect health. Luckily all of these men are clearly starving to death and half-crippled by malaria and bloody flux, and their minds work quicker than their bodies. The lieutenant bellows, “Hold your fire!” before anyone can get off a shot in the direction of Goto Dengo.

There follows a long interrogation in one of the huts. The lieutenant has many questions, and asks most of them more than once. When he repeats a question for the fifth or thirteenth time, he adopts a grand magnanimity, as if giving Goto Dengo the opportunity to retract his earlier lies. Goto Dengo tries to ignore the screams of the bayoneted men and the raped women, and concentrate on giving the same answer each time without variation.

“You surrendered to these savages?”

“I was incapacitated and helpless. They found me in this condition.”

“What efforts did you make to escape?”

“I have been building my strength and learning from them how to survive in the jungle—what foods I can eat.”

“For six months?”

“Pardon me, sir?” He hasn't heard this question before.

“Your convoy was sunk six months ago.”

“Impossible.”

The lieutenant steps forward and slaps him across the face. Goto Dengo feels nothing but tries to cringe anyway, so as not to humiliate the man.

“Your convoy was coming to reinforce our division!” bellows the lieutenant. “You dare to question me?”

“I humbly apologize, sir!”

“Your failure to arrive forced us to make a retrograde maneuver! (18) We are marching overland to rendezvous with our forces at Wewak!”

“So, you are—the advance guard for the division?” Goto Dengo has seen perhaps two dozen men, a couple of squads at most.

“We are the division,” the lieutenant says matter-of-factly. “So, again, you surrendered to these savages?”

When they march out the following morning, no one remains alive in the village; all of them have been used for bayonet practice or shot while trying to run away.

He is a prisoner. The lieutenant had decided to execute him for the crime of having surrendered to the enemy, and was in the act of drawing his sword when one of the sergeants prevailed upon him to wait for a while. Impossible as it might seem, Goto Dengo is in far better physical condition than any of the others and therefore useful as a pack animal. He can always be properly executed in front of a large audience when they reach a larger outpost. So he marches in the middle of the group now, unfettered, the jungle serving the purpose of chains and bars. They have loaded him down with the one remaining Nambu light machine gun, which is too heavy for anyone else to carry, and too powerful for them to fire; any man who pulled the trigger on this thing would be shaken to pieces by it, the jungle-rotted flesh scattering from jittering bones.

After a few days have gone by, Goto Dengo requests permission to learn how to operate the Nambu. The lieutenant's reply is to beat him up—though he does not have the strength to beat anyone up properly—so Goto Dengo has to help him, crying out and doubling over when the lieutenant thinks he has landed a telling blow.

Every couple of days, when the sun comes up in the morning, this or that soldier is found to have more bugs on him than any of the others. This means that he is dead. Lacking shovels or the strength to dig, they leave him where he lies and march onward. Sometimes they get lost, march back over the same territory, and find these corpses all swollen and black; when they begin to smell rotting human flesh, they know that they have just wasted a day's effort. But in general they are gaining altitude now, and it is cooler. Ahead of them, their route is blocked by a ridge of snow-capped peaks that runs directly to the sea. According to the lieutenant's maps, they will have to climb up one side of it and down the other in order to reach Nipponese-controlled territory.

The birds and plants are different up here. One day, while the lieutenant is urinating against a tree, the foliage shakes and an enormous bird runs out. It looks vaguely like an ostrich, but more compact and more colorful. It has a red neck, and a cobalt-blue head with a giant helmetlike bone sticking out of the top of its skull, like the nose of an artillery shell. It prances straight up to the lieutenant and kicks him a couple of times, knocking him flat on his ass, then bends his long neck down, shrieks in his face, and runs back into the jungle, using its head-bone as a kind of battering-ram to clear a path through the brush.

Even if the men were not dying on their feet, they would be too startled to raise their weapons and take a shot at it. They laugh giddily. Goto Dengo laughs until he cries. The bird must have delivered a powerful kick, though, because the lieutenant lies there for a long time, clutching his stomach.

Finally one of the sergeants regains his composure and walks over to help the poor man. As he draws closer, he suddenly turns around to face the rest of the group. His face has gone slack.

Blood is fountaining out of a couple of deep stab wounds in the lieutenant's belly, and his body is already going limp when the rest of the group gathers around him. They sit and watch until they are pretty sure he is dead, and then they march onwards. That evening, the sergeant shows Goto Dengo how to disassemble and clean the Nambu light machine gun.

They are down to nineteen. But it seems as though all of the men who were susceptible to dying in this place have now died, because they go for two, three, five, seven days without losing any more. This is in spite of, or maybe because of, the fact that they are climbing up into the mountains. It is brutal work, especially for the heavily laden Goto Dengo. But the cold air seems to clear up their jungle rot and quench the ravenous internal fires of malaria.

One day they break their march early at the edge of a snowfield, and the sergeant orders double rations for everyone. Black stone peaks rise above them, with an icy saddle in between. They sleep huddled together, which does not prevent some of them waking up with frostbitten toes. They eat most of what remains of their food supply and then set out towards the pass.

The pass turns out to be almost disappointingly easy; the slope is so gentle that they're not really aware that they've reached the summit until they notice that the snow is sloping downwards beneath their feet. They are above the clouds, and the clouds cover the world.

The gentle slope stops abruptly at the edge of a cliff that drops almost vertically at least a thousand feet down—then it passes through the cloud layer, so there's no way of knowing its true height. They find the memory of a trail traversing the slope. It seems to head down more frequently than it heads up and so they follow it. It is new and exciting at first, but then it grows just as brutally monotonous as every other landscape where soldiers have ever marched. As the hours go by, the snow gets patchier, the clouds get closer. One of the men falls asleep on his feet, stumbles, and tumbles end-over-end down the slope, occasionally bounding into free fall for several seconds. By the time he vanishes through the cloud layer, he's too far away to see.

Finally the eighteen descend into a clammy mist. Each sees the one in front of him only when very close, and then only as a grey, blurred form, like an ice demon in a childhood nightmare. The landscape has become jagged and dangerous and the lead man has to grope along practically on hands and knees.

They are working their way around a protruding rib of fog-slicked stone when the lead man suddenly cries out: “Enemy!”

Some of the eighteen actually laugh, thinking it is a joke.

Goto Dengo distinctly hears a man speaking English, with an Australian accent. The man says, “Fuck 'em.”

Then a noise starts up that seems powerful enough to split the mountain in half. He actually thinks it is a rock avalanche for awhile until his ears adjust, and he realizes that it is a weapon: something big, and fully automatic. The Australians are firing at them.

They try to retreat, but they can only move a few steps every minute. Meanwhile, thick lead slugs are hurtling through the fog all around them, splintering against the rock, sending stone shards into their necks and faces. “The Nambu!” someone shouts. “Get the Nambu!” But Goto Dengo can't fire the Nambu until he finds a decent place to stand.

Finally he gets to a ledge about the size of a large book, and unslings the weapons. But all he can see is fog.

There is a lull of a few minutes. Goto Dengo calls out the names of his comrades. The three behind him are accounted for. The others do not seem to answer his calls. Finally, one man struggles back along the path. “The others are all dead,” he says, “you may fire at will.”

So he begins to fire the Nambu into the fog. The recoil almost knocks him off the mountain, so he learns to brace it against an outcropping. Then he sweeps it back and forth. He can tell when he's hitting the rock because it makes a different sound from hitting fog. He aims for the rock.

He spends several clips without getting any results. Then he begins walking forward along the path again.

The wind gusts, the fog swirls and parts for a moment. He sees a blood-covered path leading directly to a tall Australian man with a red mustache, carrying a tommy gun. Their eyes meet. Goto Dengo is in a better position and fires first. The man with the tommy gun falls off the cliff.

Two other Australians, concealed on the other side of the rock rib, see this happen, and begin cursing.

One of Goto Dengo's comrades scampers down the path, shouts, “Banzai!” and disappears around the corner, carrying a fixed bayonet. There is a shotgun blast and two men scream in unison. Then there is the now-familiar sound of bodies tumbling down the rock face. “God damn it!” hollers the one remaining Aussie. “Fucking Nips.”

Goto Dengo has only one honorable way out of this. He follows his comrade around the corner and opens up with the Nambu, pouring it into the fog, sweeping the rock face with lead. He stops when the magazine is empty. Nothing happens after that. Either the Aussie retreated down the path or else Goto Dengo shot him off the cliff.

By nightfall, Goto Dengo and his three surviving comrades are back down in the jungle again.