Sepik,

The Pit-Pit is in Flower

And On The

It's Spring

A Cocktail of Fancy and Fact, Compounded hy PETER

England.

WELL, the pit-pit is flowering once again and my boat is ready and the boys have already gone down the hill with tucker box and blankets and mosquito net and shot-gun and typewriter and a few books and half a case of whisky. . . .

Pit-pit is the tall coarse cane grass that grows along the banks of the Sepik River and all its tributaries. Lines them on both banks from end to end; ten thousand, twenty thousand miles — how would I know?

It grows like sugar-cane, ten or a dozen strong stalks in each clump, branching into hands of long broad sabre-like leaves.

And then, and then, when it flowers! From each clump one tall standard shoots up far above the coarse leaves to flaunt a feathery plume of purest silver. How can I describe it?

Finest-fine; maiden-pure; silky soft; proud in its height, sensitive; delicate; splendid—magic! That’s it, magic! , ..

Whether, as some say, each stalk is inhabited by the spirit of a tumbuna ancestor; or, as others have it, the great God Talio has touched it with masalai fingers as he says good-bye for another six months, I do not know.

Dedicated Virgins

Now the motor is turning over and we pull out into the stream; as we gather speed a cool breeze adds to the pleasures of being on a boat and leaving behind, for a few days, all the duties and cares and senseless repetitions of civilised society.

I settle comfortably in a well worn canvas chair, put my feet up on an oil drum, and draw out at random a book from the case at my side:

Letters

writ by a Turkifh Spy Who Liv’d Five and Forty YEARS Undiscover’d at

Paris

My leather-bound edition was printed in 1753, probably the same one of which Johnson gave his opinion that it was “not genuine”.

He could have had no doubts of its ingenuity. When Boswell pro posed a visit to the South Seas,

Johnson squashed him with “What can we learn from savages?” But it’s a pity he never saw the pit-pit.

Now we are turning into the Keram and after a stretch of kunai and a couple of straggling patches of timber, the pit-pit avenue spreads ahead again, a guard of honour emblazed by the bannerets of ten thousand valiant knights; or an endless, double procession of blonde, dedicated virgins.

Presently we enter another patch of timber and one of the boys shouts: “Master! Pigeon, pigeon!”

The engine slows down and we turn in towards the bank and after much pointing and hoarse whispering I finally spot the two goura pigeons walking majestically and scornfully along the water’s edge.

I catch them just as they’re taking off—bang! bang!—we pull into the bank, Wasau leaps ashore and disappears into the bush and in a few minutes re-appears with a blue fanlike crest stuck behind his ear and a prime goura tucked under his arm: Wanfela i ranawe finis!

And so, on up past Simundo, Kambot, where Father Wand in a white cassock waves from the bank, to Bobten, for the night.

The river, which in the wet season floods right over the banks —you can tie your canoe up to the doorstep—is just starting to recede and the dry season’s work is commencing.

A dozen new canoes are being carved out of great solid logs, houses are being repaired or rebuilt, rafts of posts and lirnbon palm lie along the banks, Women are preparing sago in rough troughs at the water s edge, children playing everywhere.

N Guinea Snrinatime New bumea aprmgnme The sun dips down in the west, taking with it the storm clouds which have been rumbling all afternoon and, like a conjuring trick, a full moon appears in the opposite edge of the sky—a Chinese lantern poked up on the end of a giant stick, The night is alive with the shrill chatter of women, the cries of children, the deep voices of the men, and somebody beating out a rhythm on a kundoo drum, It is the Spring of New Guinea; after the long wet Monsoon, the pit-pit has flowered and life has begun again.

Presently the noises die down, and the night creatures take over, the mopoke owl and the other night birds and the frog chorus and — pleasantly from the safety of my large net—the steady hum of mosquitoes, I put down my book, finish my night-cap, throw away my cigarette, and put out the hurricane lamp, As I stretch luxuriously on the canvas cot I think this is the life!