CHAPTER VI

A CHAPTER ON CONTRASTS

In Papua the dryest statistician might easily burst into the literary style of Sinbad the Sailor. At the time of year that folks back in Utica call “autumn” I had traversed great areas of ragged mountains and boggy shores, and had done my best to hold on to my statistical mind in a land where census figures were evasive as blowing chaff. Meanwhile my field units had been working all over the Territory, and the inspectors who led them were often lost to me for months at a time. Aside from my fact-finding studies of hookworm I was following the course of malaria, which is Melanesia’s deadliest blight.

Field technique may seem monotonous to the reader, for it is just a matter of making the same tests over and over, moving on and continuing the motion in another tribe or village. But it was never monotonous to me.

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Compare the mountains of Mafulu with the delightful little village of Gaile, not more than twenty-five miles from Port Moresby. The Gaile folk lived Venetian-style, their houses stilted over tidewater. They were gentle, industrious and generous Motuans, and with no evil history behind them. An invading maritime race, they had built over water to avoid their savage enemies; and the water had always been their blessing, for it carried away the bodily waste that breeds so many worms and germs. Gaile I remember as one of the few truly restful spots I have visited in the Pacific. There were no diseases worth worrying about.

Then, since I’m dwelling on comparisons, let’s look at Tepusilia, a few miles away. My whaleboat got stranded there on the way to Gaile, otherwise I should never have seen the row of dirty chicken coops that leaned crazily over the inlet. I hadn’t much time to look into their case, but I found the inhabitants covered with tropical ringworm that had turned their skins into a brownish crêpe. But there was no hookworm, because they evacuated into the sea, as the Gaile folk