LITMIR.BIZ

       Prelude

      The landscape consisted of dense, often impenetrable jungle, swamps, rivers so broad and deep that they were frequently impassable and aerial walkways created at dizzying heights over the rapids by the primitive tribesmen. Snakes, scorpions, lizards, poisonous spiders and dangerous wild pigs infested the whole area. Though seemingly uninhabitable, the jungle was home to many native settlements, or kampongs, most located either by the river or on a hillside, where the inhabitants tilled the land around them or hunted for fish, lizard, boar, deer, baboon, porcupine or the ever-present snake.

      These primitive peoples were Land Dyaks, Ibans, Muruts and Punans, who lived in longhouses made of atap wood, with sloping roofs of tin or thatch. The longhouses were apt to creak balefully on the stilts that had kept them out of the water for decades. Inside they were unhygienic and usually fetid because as many as fifteen families would live in a single dwelling at any given time, using the slatted floor as a communal lavatory. Small and indolent, the natives wore nothing above the waist, regardless of sex, wore their hair long, often tattooed themselves against evil spirits, and lived off rice, tapioca, vegetables and curried meat. Before being killed for eating, their prey was first stunned by a virulent nerve poison borne on a slim bamboo dart shot from a blowpipe.

      Early morning in the jungle and swamps was often misty. The strong sun did not break through until at least mid-morning and most afternoons brought a torrential deluge of rain, accompanied by spectacular electrical storms. As a result, the water often rose 30 feet in a single day, slopping and splashing around the stilts of the longhouses, making them groan in protest.

      Because certain of the tribesmen, notably the headhunters among them, thought the creaking and groaning were the whispering of bad spirits, they attempted to keep the spirits at bay by stringing up shrunken human heads on the doorposts atop the entrance stairways.

      Many of the primitive Iban tribesmen, being experts in jungle tracking, had been employed by the British during the Malayan Emergency of 1948–60 as Army trackers, and were dubbed the Sarawak Rangers. Now, in 1963, having been trained by the SAS, they had been recruited again as an irregular force, the Border Scouts, used mainly as trackers, but also armed and trained as paramilitaries. Increasingly under the command of, and working alongside, the Gurkha Rifles, they were engaged in the ‘secret’ war being waged to protect Sarawak, Borneo, from the forces

Скачать книгу