The Missionaries Read online

  THE MISSIONARIES

  By Owen Stanley

  Copyright

  The Missionaries

  by Owen Stanley

  Castalia House

  Kouvola, Finland

  www.castaliahouse.com

  This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission of the publisher, except as provided by Finnish copyright law.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used in a fictitious manner. Any similarity to actual people, organizations, and/or events is purely coincidental

  Copyright © 2016 Castalia House

  All rights reserved

  Editor: Vox Day

  Version: 001

  Contents

  Cover

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Awake in the Night Land

  SJWs Always Lie

  Castalia House

  Chapter I

  The Piper Aztec flew out of the clouds, and the jagged green mass of Elephant Island appeared beneath the nose, dead ahead. Long ages since, huge volcanic forces had thrust its mountains from the sea bed, their crests streaming lava and plumes of sulphurous smoke in the South Pacific Trades. Then the gentler but no less determined forces of wind and rain had moulded it, bringing and nurturing the seeds that clothed it in luxuriant forests, and the rivers to cut deep valleys through the ranges, washing down the silt of millennia to fill the wide swamps at the eastern end.

  And now, to this indolent and undemanding home of primitive men was coming a force of change mightier than lava and earthquake, fire and landslide. Dr. Sydney Prout, Ph.D London, and sometime Lecturer in Sociology at Manchester, was the Head of the United Nations Mission to Elephant Island. Incredibly emaciated, his gaunt frame was crowned with a bony head whose chief features were a covering of ginger bristles on the scalp and two piercing grey eyes.

  “There she is,” said Ross McLennan, the pilot, “Elephant Island.”

  “But there aren’t any elephants in the Pacific. What a ridiculous name.”

  “There was one once. Belonged to Blackbird McGarvey, old-time skipper. Fell for a chief’s daughter, but her old man sized up his schooner, and reckoned a man with a canoe that big could cough up with one hell of a big pig for his daughter. Blackbird tried every dodge he could think of to get the girl, but it was no go. The chief had it stuck in his head that the white man had everything bigger than the brown man, and wanted his cut. Well, Blackbird was stumped for a time, till one day he was in Sydney when the circus was in town. They had a sick young elephant and wanted to unload it on some sucker, which was Blackbird. He paid a fortune for it, clapped it in the hold, brought it out here, put on his top hat and fancy waistcoat, and let it out on the beach to claim his beloved. The locals took one look and shit ’emselves. Took off into the bush and didn’t come out for a month. He never got the girl, neither—she’d pissed off with her old man. And Blackbird got clobbered by a typhoon and his ship went down with all hands. Unlucky sort of bloke really.”

  “What happened to the elephant?”

  “Dunno. I s’pose the locals kai-kaied it when they’d worked up enough guts for the job. These coastal bastards look good enough on a picture postcard, but one whiff of a mountain man and they’re up the palm trees so fast you’d think there was red-hot pokers up their bums.”

  Prout frowned; the crudely contemptuous racialism of the pilot came as a shock, even though he had read about such attitudes in the Journal of Race Relations. He adroitly diverted the conversation into more strictly sociological channels.

  “These mountain people, are they as ferocious as their reputations?”

  “Oh, yeah, they’re a rough mob all right. They’re called Moroks. But Roj has ’em pretty well tamed. Gets on well with ’em too.”

  “Roj?”

  “He’s the RM—Resident Magistrate. Roger Fletcher’s his name. They call him “Roaring Roger” around here. Good bloke when you get to know ’im. Very practical.”

  Prout pursed his lips. “Practical.” Anyone whom the likes of McLennan called “practical” almost certainly despised sociology and was prone to ignoring proper administrative procedure. “Well, from what we’ve heard in New York he doesn’t seem to have been very successful. That’s why we’re taking over.”

  “Yeah. I heard you blokes were giving Australia the push. You don’t reckon we’re up to the job, is that it?”

  “Oh, not at all. But unfortunately Australia has allowed an unqualified, and really, a very reactionary man, to have his own way with the island for so long that no social or economic progress has been made at all. At this stage in the process of decolonisation, Australia feels it would be less embarrassing for her if the United Nations assumed the responsibility for preparing the indigenous people for independence. That’s why I’m here.”

  Ross digested this information and being, like most professional pilots, a resigned and imperturbable man, he said nothing. He merely cut back the power and put the aircraft into a shallow descent, to take them over the coastline at an altitude of 5,000 feet.

  “The airstrip’s up in the mountains, around 3,000 feet up. Climate’s bloody terrible on the coast—all mozzies and swamp. The Yanks were here during the war and put the strip in up at Ungabunga. But the RM’s always lived there. By the way, we’re just flying over Byron Bay now.”

  “Don’t tell me that Lord Byron came here looking for a wife too.”

  The pilot flashed him an amused grin. “No, nothin’ like that. Just the first RM, Carstairs, a bloody loony. They all seem to end up here. This one had a thing about the great poets. Have a look at the chart. Ruddy poets’ names all over.”

  As they passed over the beaches below, Ross brought the nose of the plane up and boosted the power to check their descent, then levelled out. The great peaks of Shakespeare and Milton rose ahead of them, with Wordsworth a little to the rear. Even at eleven in the morning clouds were drifting near the summits.

  They flew on in silence, and Prout surveyed his new responsibilities as they passed below. Near the coast were a few scattered villages among the mangrove and sago swamps that were cut into fragments of lagoon by the greasy waters of the Ungabunga River as it moved slowly towards the open sea, dully reflecting the sun. Up ahead were the ranges, monotonously green, upon whose flanks was not the smallest indication of human habitation or activity.

  As they reached the point where the Ungabunga debouched from its mountain prison, Ross banked the plane and they turned into a valley which had somehow escaped the literary ravages of the first Resident Magistrate. The spurs began to rise beneath them, and soon Prout could see tiny settlements of leaf-thatched huts and scattered gardens in the forest, and along the backs of ridges he saw spidery tracks of red clay that stood out clearly against the green. In the bottom of the valley foamed the waters of the Ungabunga.

  The walls of the valley were rising steadily around them, and after a few minutes Ross banked to the left and turned into a tributary gorge; soon he pointed to a spur below them, on Prout’s side, and shouted “Ungabunga!”

  Two thousand feet below them the strip could be plainly seen, overshadowed at one end and along o
ne side by the almost vertical wall of the mountainside, with a precipice dropping sheer into the river at the other end, by the wind sock. At the top of the strip under the mountain was a stockaded fort with various buildings inside, while more structures lined the side of the strip along the mountain wall.

  But even at this height it was obvious that their arrival was unexpected, to say the least. The strip was occupied by what appeared to be two ranks of people facing each other, with another group at the fortress end. Ross let down some flap and put the plane into a left-hand circuit, which obscured Prout’s view, but as they circled lower they saw the two ranks charge together and begin hacking at each other with barbaric vigour. By the time Ross had brought the plane down to one thousand feet above the strip, they could see that the parties to the dispute were small, furious, dark-skinned men clad in feathers, busily engaged in battering the daylights out of each other with wooden clubs.

  “It seems that I’ve arrived only just in time,” Prout commented thoughtfully.

  Chapter II

  At dawn, while Prout was still abed in Rabaul, the villagers of Niovoro and Lavalava had already begun the fifteen-mile hike down the track from their mountain refuge to Ungabunga. The path swung down among the spurs and creeks, steadily descending, an even red ribbon of law and order against the jungle above and below it, blasted and hacked under government orders twenty years before, but still wide enough to allow a horse or a motor-bike to pass, and, of course, the silent feet of the Moroks.

  Although it was officially the dry season, there had been heavy rain in the night and the grass beside the track sparkled with unfallen drops that drenched the legs of the men as they thrust their way past. The night air still lay cold in the valleys, and breath came in clouds. They were small men, mountain men, the corded muscles of their legs knotted and stressed by years of merciless exertion on mountainside and track. Their heads were brilliant with the plumage of cockatoo and bird of paradise, and their faces were painted with vivid ochres and stained with the juices of wild berries, but their eyes gleamed coldly beneath heavy and protruding brows. Through their hooked, pendulous noses were thrust the curving tusks of the wild boar, whose points swept up towards those glittering, manic eyes. Around their waists were suspended girdles of human thigh-bones.

  The hurrying files of men bristled with bows; bunches of arrows, some tipped with slivers of scrap iron; quivering spears of the black palm wood, serrated and barbed to rip out the bowels of enemies; and clubs: smooth clubs for braining pigs, knotted and gnarled clubs for settling private scores in a single smashing blow, stone clubs, cut into discs for taking a man’s head off at the neck, or into the shape of pineapples, to splinter limb bones; and many carried bamboo beheading knives, hardened in the fire, and blackened by use.

  Some weapons were new and untried, but others were old companions in many a bloody skirmish and rout, and had names, like trusty dogs. “Skull-Cracker,” “Old Blinder,” “Beg for Mercy,” and “Bloody Ruin,” these were all clubs or spears whose fame had been shouted at a hundred dances or more.

  Little groups of women, each wearing several string-bags of sweet-potatoes and other vegetables on her back that were suspended from her forehead, moved with the men. They were dowdy creatures, as dour as their menfolk, but without the manic gleam that lighted their husbands’ countenances. The breasts of the more mature were flat and sagging, flapping against their chests as they bent forward into their loads.

  As the file of men and women drew near the station, groups of them began to congregate by the streams that ran across the track, washing the mud from their legs and, in the case of the men, attending to each other’s make-up—a finger-full of red ochre for an eyebrow, the juice of the mirima berry to give lustre to a forehead, a streak of white clay for a nose.

  The sun, though now well risen, had not yet driven off the mists from all the ridges; at intervals came the drawn-out cries of men calling to one another from spur to spur along the cliff-side track. Those strange, echoing cries, wailing through the mists and gorges, seemed to have little that was human in them.

  At Ungabunga, Roger Fletcher, the Resident Magistrate of Her Britannic Majesty’s Possession of Elephant Island, Warden of the Goldfields, Justice of the Peace, Receiver of Wrecks, Comptroller of Excises, Coroner, and High Bailiff, leaned over the verandah of his fort and spat on a lizard. He had come to the end of his cigarette, and the rusty-brown, scuttling creature sunning itself beside the steps was the most satisfying target he could find for a fat gob of nicotine-flavored spit. Then he dug into his pocket for a lighter and lit another.

  He was a man in his late thirties, of nearly six foot, and broad, with black hair and beard in which beads of sweat trickled and glistened. His eyes were blue. His hands were thrust into his khaki riding breeches, the fly of which was broken and permanently exposed. The breeches ended in gaitered brown boots, while the upper part of his body was clad in a khaki shirt, topped off by an Army-surplus bush hat. The cigarette, of native tobacco rolled in newspaper, hung from his lips, emitting a smell which most people encounter only at burning rubbish dumps, the unmistakable aroma of smouldering mattresses and blackened tins. But he liked it. Especially on the first Monday in the month, which was land dispute day at Ungabunga.

  “Who’s on the card today, Olly?” he shouted, half turning his head towards the door of the office which led off the verandah. His voice was harsh and grating.

  In the gloom of the office a vast white shape, “like a slug in a bell tent,” as Fletcher described it, slowly stirred. Oelrichs, Assistant Resident Magistrate, was shifting his twenty-three stone bulk in its strengthened tsiga wood chair, the better to consult the schedule of land disputes and see which villages were settling their differences that day.

  “Niovoro and Lavalava seem to be the only ones listed,” he called; “Sapo and Ganipa scratched on account of the dysentery.” He resumed his work on the compilation of some fictitious venereal disease returns for the police, a task which on this occasion called for unusual finesse. Unlike Fletcher, Oelrichs had a marked aversion to physical exercise, dressed entirely in white silk, and had seldom walked a step in the last ten years, preferring the amenities of his sedan chair and its four groaning bearers, recruited from the gaol. There were no shortage of them; to volunteer as bearer for the Assistant Resident Magistrate automatically earned the local law-breakers a half-remission of sentence.

  When in the office, Oelrichs devoted his not inconsiderable intellect to compiling fraudulent returns on every item of station equipment from asbestos blankets to zinc ointment, and fictitious reports on social, political, economic, educational, moral, agricultural, sanitary, religious, and meteorological progress to a mercifully distant Department in Canberra. When not in the office, he devoted the same single-minded attention to eating, either as the guest of Madame Negretti at the Cosmopolitan Hotel, Ungabunga’s only pub, or in his own exquisite quarters, where his furnishings were sumptuous, his cellar catholic, and his hospitality proverbial.

  The Government office was a highly defensible structure of mud and timber, loop-holed for rifle fire in all directions, and surrounded by a high stockade and a ditch. The only entrance, facing the airstrip, was guarded by a timber gatehouse, and closed at night. Within the stockade were storehouses, armoury, and orderly room and guard room, with a well. Above all flew the Australian flag. Below the small hill on which it stood, and to the left, were the gaol, barracks for the police, the pub, a trade-store, a few houses for the European residents, and a clutter of native hovels.

  The airstrip was now rapidly filling with natives from Lavalava and Niovoro, and hundreds of spectators from other villages. The police, resplendent in spiked helmets, were waving cavalry sabres and disarming the combatants as they entered the station at the far end of the airstrip, and piling their weapons in heaps. The weapons were kept under police guard, although the natives received cudgels as replacements and were allowed to keep their shields. The men of Lavalava and
Niovoro, driven by the curses of the police, were separated into their respective groups, facing each other across the strip, from which positions they began bombarding each other with obscene repartee, slapping their bare buttocks in derision. Their women, from the spectators’ area, urged them on to atrocious acts. Four mounted constables on horses patrolled the space between the contending parties to prevent any unsporting attempt to begin the proceedings before the arrival of the umpire.

  On the verandah of the office Fletcher had been joined by Oelrichs, but they were almost instantly interrupted by the thudding of nailed boots up the steps and along the verandah. The sergeant-major was coming to report all correct for the first event of the day, and to request the presence of the Resident Magistrate. Eighteen stone and six feet four inches of Binandere warrior crashed to attention before the Resident Magistrate, hand quivering at the salute, spike of helmet glinting, pace-stick rigid under arm, little piggy eyes glaring into middle distance, the dust settling around the huge black boots at an angle of 45 degrees and casting a faint haze over the winking gloss of the toe caps. Once, he had been a tribesman from New Guinea, but now he was of the tribe of sergeant-majors, found wherever a flagstaff flies the Union Jack, who dream not of crocodiles and sorcery, but of metal polish and fire buckets, defaulters’ parades, and idle kit.

  “All he come, sah. All kanaka on parade.”

  “Very good. Carry on, Sergeant-Major.” Fletcher returned the salute; the sergeant-major about-turned, and signalled to the garrison buglers, who began their flourishes as the RM made his way behind the sergeant-major’s stately tread to the rostrum outside the stockade. Once he was seated under a brilliant canopy fashioned from a cargo of gaudy second-hand underwear intended for a missionary congregation in the Solomons, but piously diverted by Oelrichs as being dangerous to their faith and morals, the buglers fell silent, and the proper business of the day began.