The History Islands: The Virgin and the Mountain
Larantuka, Indonesia; 2010
You can feel the sorrow. A blustery wind is whipping the midday heat into fiery gusts and setting the heads of the palm trees rolling in mournful circuits, but the people waiting outside the seaside chapel of Tuan Maninu are sombre and unstirring, squinting in the fierce sunlight: boys and girls and studious old men. Almost everyone is dressed in black — though here in streetwise eastern Flores, that often means a tee shirt emblazoned with the unholy iconography of death metal. Only the tiny, aging nuns offset the blackness with their grey and white habits. The flags of the Confreria Reinha Rosari, the Brotherhood of the Queen of the Rosary, snap like whips in the wind. A stream of heartbroken plainsong flows out from the chapel. It is Easter Friday in Larantuka.
At noon there is movement. Slow and stately, the congregation emerges from the chapel, old ladies in black blouses and the members of the Confreria, pale soutanes draped over the dark garb beneath. They are upright, middle-aged men. The white of their robes is blinding in the sunlight. They move along the lane which runs from the chapel to the shore. The boys and girls in the death metal tee shirts lock hands and shuffle back to clear the way. Rosaries and candles, their flames whirling like tiny dervishes in the wind, are in every hand, and in the midst of the procession, borne aloft on the head of one of the brethren, is the object of all this mournful attention. It is a wooden box, draped with a square of black velvet and emblazoned with a white cross. Within it, swaddled and unseen, is one of the two holy relics that make for the soul of this hot little town: either an ancient statue or a relic (the story varies); an embodiment of Christ, who goes by the name of Tuan Maninu hereabouts.
At the water’s edge they transfer the box to a waiting outrigger, daubed like everything else in ceremonial black. A kilometre away, the scorched hills of Adonara rise beneath an upwelling of cloud. A flotilla crowds the channel between the two shores: the little wooden ferries that ply between the islands; weather-beaten fishing boats; a tiny speedboat bearing a clutch of blue-clad nuns; a big interisland vehicle ferry. All of them are wildly overladen, top-heavy with passengers. A furious current is charging north through the narrows, and the massed craft lurch and sway drunkenly as they struggle to hold their positions in the flow.
Once Tuan Meninu has been stowed beneath the outrigger’s bamboo awning, ministered by a priest with a purple zucchetto atop his head, a crew of three clambers aboard, armed with great lengths of bamboo. With a strangely muscular delicacy they begin to pole their way southwards through the shallows, a flock of tiny canoes following them like rooks. Backing and lumbering in the flood, the laden flotilla begins to move with them. All along the shoreline the black-clad crowd keeps pace on foot. Here and there they part to make way for figures moving in the opposite direction, men in tartan sarongs and crocheted skullcaps, prayer rugs folded over their shoulders: the Muslims of Larantuka, headed for Friday prayers, against the flow.
***
Larantuka is the end of the road. If you set out by bus or truck or motorcycle from Banda Aceh at the northernmost tip of Sumatra, there is a thread of blue tarmac, leading first southwards to Bandar Lampung, then bending eastwards through Java, Bali and beyond. If you have the stamina to tackle five ferry crossings and three thousand miles, the road will bring you here, to a scrappy dockside at the easternmost extremity of Flores. But Larantuka’s name means ‘on the way’. This is no terminus; it is merely the point where the mode of transport changes. Eastwards, a scattering of small islands lie hard up against one another in a private sea: Adonara, Solor, Lembata, Pantar and Alor, and half a dozen other tiny fragments. What’s more, Larantuka lies at an ancient waystation on the trade routes of the Indonesian archipelago. To the north lay the spice gardens of Maluku, and to the south were the sandalwood groves and slave markets of Timor and Sumba. This is what gave the first Portuguese sailors cause to drop anchor here, a lifetime away from Lisbon in the shadow of the Ili Mandiri volcano.
The Portuguese were the first Europeans to reach Asia by sea, pivoting around the Cape of Good Hope aboard barrel-bellied carracks and fanning out at all angles across the Indian Ocean. They made it to India and built themselves a base of operations in Goa in 1498, a full century before the Dutch and French and English arrived in force. In 1511 they conquered the Sultanate of Melaka, the preeminent entrepôt of Southeast Asia, holding sway over the busy strait between Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula. From there, they struck out into the islands in search of spice.
In January 1522 a Portuguese fleet slipped into the maze of channels near Larantuka, coming south from Banda. The men were still smarting from the death of their commander, Ferdinand Magellan, ten months earlier in the Philippines. But they had succeeded in their mission: to reach Maluku, the fabled Spice Islands, by sailing west from Europe. Their return to Portugal the following September would complete the first recorded circumnavigation of the globe.
As they neared Larantuka, where ‘a great storm fell upon us’, their master-chronicler, the wayfaring Italian Antonio Pigafetta, recorded. The battered, leaky ships bucked and reared in the short, tumbling sea, and the terrified sailors made a solemn vow that if they were saved they would make a pilgrimage to the hilltop shrine of Nostra Signora della Guardia in far-off Liguria. It was probably the first prayer offered to the Virgin Mary in these waters, but by no means the last.
Magellan’s fleet survived the passage, and others came the same way in their wake. In 1544 a passing Portuguese captain gave a new name to the crooked promontory stretching north from Larantuka. He called it Cabo das Flores, the Cape of Flowers, and in time this name came to refer to the whole island. Two decades later an optimistic band of Portuguese soldier-traders from Melaka built a stockade of palm trunks across the water from Larantuka itself, on the stony shores of Alor. It was sacked by better armed privateers from Java after little more than a year, but they rebuilt it in stone in 1566, and soon the first Dominican friars were turning vinegary wine into the Blood of Christ in the shadow of the smoking volcanoes. There was a Catholic school in Larantuka by 1570.
The Portuguese in Asia belonged to a different epoch to the Hollanders and Englishmen who would come trailing in their wake in later centuries. Magellan’s men, homeward bound for the Atlantic, were the exception to the rule, and for most of the barefoot cabin boys and ruffed commanders who embarked on Lisbon docksides in the sixteenth century, a voyage to the East was a life sentence. Goa and Melaka usurped Lisbon as the focus of the Portuguese imagination in far-flung outposts like Larantuka. No women had sailed with the ships from Europe, and within a few generations the term ‘Portuguese’ became more a badge of religion and language than of nationality. Meanwhile, the priests had been working hard. By the end of the sixteenth century, they were claiming sway over 25,000 souls in eastern Flores and the surrounding islands. Some of the local rajas, too, had become Catholics, and had taken to calling themselves Dom, the Portuguese term for “lord”. An intermingling, a blending, a creolising was underway.
But then the Dutch arrived.
Ships from Holland and England had started turning up in Southeast Asia at the dawn of the seventeenth century, and soon they were bickering amongst themselves for control of the spice trade into Europe. In 1613 the ascendant Dutch captured the fort on Solor, renamed it ‘Fort Henricus’, and evicted the thousand-strong Portuguese community there. Some of the chiefs retreated to Melaka, but most simply crossed the narrow strait to Larantuka. Amongst the refugees were the friars, Caspar de Spiritu Santo and Augustino de Magdalena.
In the decades that followed more Portuguese refugees trickled into Larantuka after the fall of Melaka itself in 1641, and after the conquest of the Gowa Sultanate in Sulawesi in 1667 — victories which instated a new Dutch hegemony on the sea lanes of the archipelago. That the ousted inhabitants of these ports thought only to drift east to Larantuka, rather than to beat westwards to Goa, or even to Portugal itself, is some hint of what it had truly become to be ‘Portuguese’ in the archipelago by the seventeenth century. They were as much a part of these islands as anyone, and Larantuka became home to a fiercely independent mestizo community by the name of the Topasses.
The origins of the term are murky. It may come from the Tamil word tuppasi, ‘two languages’ — some indication of the go-between role of Eurasians across Asia in the colonial centuries. Or it might simply come from the Sanskrit-derived topi, ‘hat’, for the peculiar headgear eternally associated with Christianity amongst peoples more inclined to wear head-cloths and turbans. But it is hard to shake the association conjured by the homonym and not to see the Topasses as topazes, glittering jewels of transculturation, set in the rich green baize of Southeast Asia. The Dutch knew them as ‘Black Portuguese’, and they were to be found everywhere from Java to Ambon, often physically indistinguishable from the other Asian peoples around them, other than in their dress, and indeed their hats.
Larantuka, for a time, was the Topas stronghold. To the southeast, in East Timor, the vestigial stump of the Portuguese empire in Southeast Asia endured, complete with a bedraggled governor and a battered allegiance to the crown of Portugal. But the Topasses owed allegiance to nothing but their own genealogy — a faded portrait of long-dead, white-ruffed ancestor, and a name handed down from generation to generation through the endless role of Sunday masses amidst the palms.
For a time, the Topas community of Larantuka was a force to be reckoned with, wielding a good deal more power than the beleaguered official Portuguese outpost in Timor — so much so that on two occasions the governor of the Dutch garrison on Solor fled across the water to join the Black Portuguese — and presumably to join their church as well. At one point, the Topasses even attempted a concerted attack on the Dutch port of Kupang in West Timor. But as the last vestiges of Portuguese power and prestige crumbled, the Topas community shrank back, faded to little more than a memory, historical reality beginning its slow unravelling into myth. And by the eighteenth century, long forgotten by Goa and Rome, they lacked even a priesthood.
***
It’s hard not to search for the glitter of the Topasses amongst the faces waiting for Tuan Maninu to come ashore a mile to the south of the seaside chapel. Sometimes, perhaps, there’s a glimpse of a fairer highlight amongst the dark curls, or a pair of eyes a paler shade of brown. But many centuries have passed and it’s hard to be sure.
The seaborne journey ends beside a scrappy park housing Stations of the Cross in whitewashed concrete. The revered casket is borne ashore through the candle-clasping crowds to another chapel, this one capped with glittering steel domes of the kind that more often top out the mosques in Indonesia. It is here that Tuan Maninu is joined by the Holy Mother herself, Tuan Ma. No enigmatic casket-enclosed fragment this; she emerges from the chapel, lurching down the steps on the shoulders of four strong men, a life-size wooden statue of the Virgin, cloaked head to toe in star-spangled royal blue velvet. The robe falls from her crown — backed by a halo of mournful Latin, Mater Dolorosa Ora Pro Nobis — fanning out to a broad, circular hem to make a dark cone of her figure. Only her face and a single supplicating hand emerge from the cloth. The face is that of a consumptive princess of medieval Europe, eyes set deep in hollows of sickness or sorrow, brows arched in infinite sadness. A crack, rent by the tropical centuries, runs across her face from her chin to her ear. The emerging hand, too, has suffered over the centuries. The fingers and palm are bound with grubby tape, like those of a man at hard labour. It as though it is the mother, not the son, who bears the stigmata.
Slowly, like a tide beginning to flood, the procession moves off, Tuan Ma and Tuan Maninu borne in its flow. There are thousands of people now, all shuffling in near silence but for the thin skeins of prayer drifting over their heads. Candles flicker the length of the town. This atmosphere is quite unlike that at other mass ceremonies in Indonesia. There is no noisy chatter at the fringes; no boisterousness or compressed hysteria. Great gouts of sadness seem to come off the crowd. Maybe, just maybe, this is something more that the customary grief for the Saviour’s sacrifice. Maybe there is something here of the sorrow of a priestless congregation, marooned for mildewed centuries amidst the palms and banana trees in a place called ‘on the way’ which seemed, in the end, to lead to nowhere…
***
In 1859, Portugal finally abandoned its lingering claims to the patches of territory it had once occupied throughout the eastern regions of the archipelago. It would give up everything, bar the stony eastern half of Timor, and leave the field to the Dutch. To be fair, had they wanted to the Dutch could have taken the last Portuguese fragments for themselves decades earlier. But they simply had no reason to do so. For a mercantile project — which the Dutch operation in Indonesia undoubtedly was — places like Flores offered little attraction. By the standards of Java, they were singularly infertile. The prospects of a lucrative cash crop economy here were scanty. And the commodities of centuries past were no more: the sandalwood forests of Timor and Sumba had been logged out generations earlier; the spices of Maluku no longer commanded eye-watering prices on the world markets; and slavery had been outlawed in European-held territory. What compelled the Dutch finally to get involved, was high nineteenth-century mission creep — the slippage from commercial endeavour to ideological empire, the impetus for what they liked to call rust en orde, ‘peace and order’.
The Portuguese did manage to leave one crucial clause in the deeds as they departed. Flores, they argued, had been a Catholic island for three hundred years; it should remain so forever more. The Dutch, who had rarely displayed any missionary zeal in their efforts in Asia, agreed, and handed the spiritual side of things to the Jesuits. The new priests were generally horrified by what they found — an island of ‘baptised heathens’ according to one of their number — and in most places the thatched shrines of ancestral spirits earned far more attention than any church. But not in Larantuka, for there something quite remarkable had survived the long centuries of neglect.
Without a priesthood to minister to the local Catholic community — into which the original Topasses had largely been absorbed by 1859 — religious affairs had fallen to the rajas, and to the lay brotherhood, the Confreria. It was they who clung to the catechism and handed down the formulas of prayer, and when the Jesuits arrived they found that the Larantuka mass was still held in something which sounded a little like Portuguese, warped through the Chinese whispers of generations into a mantra, potent but unintelligible.
What was more, the people of Larantuka had a most peculiar focus for their enduring faith: a cult around two strange objects, the obscure fragment of Tuan Maninu, and the dolorous statue of Tuan Ma. On Easter Friday, the Jesuits discovered, they would parade them around the settlement in a slow flood of devotion and sadness. There was a story to go with the statues too: they had been washed ashore in Larantuka, from no known provenance, in 1510, twelve years before Magellan’s fleet came lurching past, and decades before the first priests disembarked at the palm-trunk fort on Solor. Where they really came from — and when — is anyone’s guess, but after five centuries it scarcely mattered. They existed; they belonged here as much as the Topasses had once belonged.
***
The procession — a ribbon of whispers through the town — drifts to Larantuka’s barnlike cathedral in the slow heat of the afternoon, and loudspeakers carry the bishop’s sermon out over the rooftops and palms and and papaya trees. There is a scent of sweat and massed breath on the air, and a great, sober quietude among the thousands listening, seated on doorways and pavements where they cannot squeeze into the building itself. The local papers will claim a congregation of fifteen thousand in their morning editions tomorrow.
The sermon quavers on as the dusk comes down hot and heavy, and as bats flicker in the mauve-coloured air. And then, finally, the procession reconvenes — another silent, saddened turning of the tide. Tuan Ma is now borne by men dressed in the tall, pointed white hoods of the penitents of Easter processions in far-off Spain and Portugal even today (long after the mode of dress was misappropriated by the Ku Klux Klan).
They drift dazed through the town, quiet thousands, candles bobbing gently in the current, susurrations of prayer and shuffling feet lifting into the night. Across the water Solor and Adonara loom, darkly. It is long, long after midnight when the statues are finally carried home to their chapels — Tuan Ma to the south, Tuan Maninu to the north — and the ribbon of worshippers frays, thins, and vanishes. Underfoot, the streets of Larantuka are greasy with candlewax.
***
I had already scouted out a spot to sleep for the night — behind the Third Station of the Cross in the scrappy seaside park, a coarse concrete rendering of Christ’s first fall close enough to the water’s edge, I hoped, to be free from mosquitoes. I had arrived in Larantuka — the last bus in relay of long rides all the way from Java — three days before the Easter parade, but every room in town was already full with pilgrims, so I had crossed instead to Waiwerang — ‘Water from the Land’, named for a hot spring above the jetty — on Adonara. It was a tiny, tin-roofed township, smelling of goats and fish, and I found a place to stay in a dusty losmen where the electricity was out twelve hours of the twenty-four.
I had crossed back to Larantuka on the morning of the parade, a little white ferryboat cleaving the bright water and families in their Sunday best squinting in the sharp light. The ferryman told me that there would be no boats back to Adonara after sunset, and I had resigned myself to a night in the open. But now, pondering the patch of rough grass behind the Third Station and glancing at the pallid outline of a stray dog, eyeing me with apparent hostility from behind the concrete image of Veronica, tenderly proffering her veil to the bloodied Saviour a few steps to the south, I decided that I might check at the harbour one last time before accepting my fate. I got there just in time to hitch a lift with Waiwerang’s wealthiest family. They had chartered a boat to carry them across to the nearest landing spot on Adonara where their driver was waiting in an SUV with the air-con running. I was asleep under my own mosquito net within the hour.
My saviours owned Adonara’s main general store — an old-fashioned, open-fronted place with long glass-topped counters and stacks of disparate items in a glorious mishmash: wheelbarrows and gas cookers; beauty products and diesel generators. They were — as is so often the case — ethnic Chinese, and though their family had been in business in this part of Indonesia for several generations, they carried an unmistakable aura of cosmopolitanism. They invited me to a post-mass Easter dinner the following evening, and up the bare concrete stairs from the back of the shop all sense of small-island isolation vanished amidst polished marble work surfaces, and soft furnishings. There was a huge flat-screen TV mounted on the wall, and a small army of servants bringing plate after delicious plate of tender meats and fresh vegetables. The younger members of the family all spoke good English. One son was studying medicine in the Philippines, and was facing a long journey back to school after the Easter break. The conversation was all hearty bonhomie and tales of international airports, but when it came time to leave one of the daughters — a doctor in Surabaya with the entry stamps of Australia and Europe in her passport — whispered to me in a tone of dark warning. The family owned another house on the waterfront, she said, but they didn’t sleep there: it was too vulnerable to the black magic curses commissioned by their countless debtors amongst the islanders.
***
The following morning I went into the hills. My companion was a young man called Herodus, lean and wiry with a head of tight curls. He was a junior civil servant and I had met him in the street at dusk the day I arrived in Waiwerang. Today he was travelling inland to his ancestral village where his grandmother had recently suffered a stroke and where the family had been quietly gathering. He collected me outside the losmen and we rode inland on his motorbike.
Away from the sweltering literal, Adonara was surprisingly damp and green, ridges folding in against one another and the thin blueish strip of the road writhing up palm-swaddled slopes. Behind us the hulking volcanic cone of Ile Boleng pushed up out of forest. The crater rim was 1,500 metres up in the clear air; it was cleaved at its western edge, and the rent pulled the rim low to reveal the sheer wall on the far side of the inner void. Herodus had told me that a deference to the mountain — which was quiet now, but which had erupted well within living memory — lingered in the surrounding villages. There were certain taboos on the upper slopes, certain forbidden topics of conversation, most relating to the sea, it seemed: whales and boats were not to be mentioned up there above the treeline; salt, too, was not to be mentioned, though at a push you might refer to it cryptically as ‘grey stuff’. Some said that the summit was the dwelling place of ancestral spirits, and sometimes people climbed the slopes and tossed offerings of food and livestock down into the crater — I had heard that story before, everywhere from Dempo in Sumatra to Rinjani on Lombok.
There were wild goats on the upper slopes, and men from the villages hunted them with packs of skinny dogs, harrying them back and forth across the cliff faces of the crater until they panicked and tumbled to their deaths. The hardiest climber of the hunting party would then descend into the belly of the mountain, and return, scaling the rocks barefoot with the bloodied carcass borne across his shoulders like a cross.
Herodus’ ancestral village was called Koli, up in the high centre of the island with trees all around. There were churches and mosques here, and the Muslims and Christians lived hugger-mugger, often bonded by marriage and with little sectarianism. Both parties buried their departed in their front gardens in tombs faced with bathroom tiles. There was a dampness in the air here and the heads of the palm trees were bowed like penitents.
The ailing grandmother — a tiny, birdlike scrap of skin and bone under a frizz of yellowed hair — lay on a narrow bed in a backroom of a brick house while a young woman gently spooned rice porridge between her dry lips and the rain pattered on the tin roof overhead. There was the usual soft bustle of callers and returning prodigals about the house that come with any family event — it could have been a birth or a marriage as much as a vigil. Herodus’ uncle presided. He was a faintly roguish man with tattoos, a smoky laugh and a string of broken marriages. He was an emigrant construction worker, and the young woman tending the dying grandmother was his latest wife, met amidst the uneasy currents of the migrant workforce in Malaysia. She came from Blitar in Java, and when she had finished feeding the old lady, she laid out a lunch of nasi pecel for the house guests. She had a certain roguishness of her own. There was an image of Tuan Ma on the wall. I had seen this piece of simple iconography elsewhere: in the wheelhouse of one of the ferries at the Larantuka harbour; above the sticky plastic tables at a warung in Waiwerang, and above the door in the losmen; the Virgin rising out of a shining sea, her face burnished with heavenly light.
After we’d eaten, the men started drinking tuak — palm wine, naturally fermented, faintly fizzy and poured into half coconut shells from a plastic jerry can. I left them too it and wandered outside. The rain had thinned and a new sunlight was setting the packed earth between the houses steaming. The old part of the village — Lama Nepa — had a modest clutch of thatch and bamboo rumah adat, ceremonial buildings of bamboo and sagging thatch. A plump, sweating man called Antoni showed me around.
The first buildings were a pair, standing side by side, the Koke-Bale. These were places of war. In times of trouble, Antoni said, the village elders would gather in the Koke and make offerings of tuak to the ancestors; then they would move to the neighbouring Bale to make practical preparations.
‘Does this still happen?’ I asked.
‘Sometimes.’
I had seen men on their way to the fields down by the coast and along the road into the hills. Each carried a long spear, tipped with steel. There were no dangerous animals on this island.
The roof-ridge of the Bale was capped with a carved dragon figure, its long body painted yellow and black, a blood-red tongue flaring between its jaws. Alor was only three islands east of here and I had been staring at it all the while that Antoni was speaking. But it was no ancestral deity or guardian spirit here, he said; it was a symbol of the village founders — a pair of brothers named Patti and Beda. These hero-siblings had come ashore on the north coast of Adonara and slayed a dragon that had been troubling the locals, who, in gratitude helped them to find this cool and fertile spot in the hills. Beda was particularly associated with the Koke-Bale; Patti was commemorated in another building nearby, the Lango Belen. Antoni said that Belen meant ‘big’, as in ‘first-born’. It was a simply wooden building with a dirt floor, but it was the place where Patti’s spirit was guarded and appeased, and it was occupied in heredity fashion by the senior clan line, passing always to the first-born son. I thought of secretive Wetu Telu ceremonial houses in Lombok, with their hereditary family guardians.
The current guardian had taken a job in Sulawesi and left the Lango Belen in the care of his brother — a frightened-looking teenager who peered out from the gloom within and nervously lifted a rusting machete, said to have been the sword of the dragon-slaying Patti. While his older sibling was away, it was his job to make an offering of food and tuak each evening in the corner of the house.
There were other adat buildings too — a modern pavilion, the Sebaung, used, it seemed, like the bale in a Balinese village as a general ceremonial gathering place, and the mossy foundations of another two structures. These, Antoni said, were only used during specific ceremonies, when temporary wooden structures were erected over the stone platforms — a kitchen where rice was cooked in search of ancestral blessings (I thought again of Lombok and the ceremonial kitchen beside the Berugak Agung), and the Lango Mameng-Barek, the “boy-girl house”, used for wedding ceremonies when an outsider married into the village. There were also little piles of stone between these main sites, altars, Antoni said, where individual ancestors could be fed. And beside the foundations of the rice kitchen was a bamboo corral, and within it a particularly imperious billy goat. He eyed me balefully, a bunch of fodder switching swiftly between the corners of his froggy mouth.
‘It is like a mascot for the village,’ Antoni said. ‘He can heal the sick.’
I thought for a moment of Herodus’ grandmother, caught in a narrowing circuit of breath in her damp backroom. But Antoni said that it took time for the sacred goat to accumulate the necessary power. The previous incumbent had died at a great age just eighteen months earlier. There had been a grand ceremony to invest his replacement, but he was still a neophyte, and it would be a few years yet before he was turned loose to wander at will, carrying his blessings from house to house, a pale Pan lording it over this village in the hills.
It was five centuries since Magellan’s men made that first prayer to the Virgin somewhere off the coast of Adonara. Larantuka was little more than an hour away. Endless Easters had unfolded in the shadow of these mountains. But all this was still here in the twenty-first century, even with the migrant jobs in Sulawesi and Malaysia.
There was a little cave shrine to the Virgin Mary at the edge of the clearing, the only obviously Christian site in this place, but it lay beyond the corral with the billy goat blocking the way.
I asked Antoni where he thought the ancestors of the Adonara people came from.
‘People say they were from Java,’ he said with a shrug. ‘But look at us!’ he laughed a little sadly and made a strangely hopeless gesture up at his own dark, sweating face. ‘We look like Timor people.’
***
It was late by the time we left the village. The gathering that I had thought would be a sad prelude to mourning seemed to have turned into a full-blown tuak party while I was wandering the old buildings with Antoni, and Herodus rode a little unsteadily back down the greasy road through the palms. Here in the east-facing valleys dusk was already gathering, and men with spears across their shoulders were heading home from their forest gardens. But 1,500 metres above us, the crown of Ile Boleng blazed in the last of the sunlight, coming low through a sky washed clean by the rain of the afternoon. The mountain’s slopes were a velvety cloak, specked with single trees, and the light was pouring through the cleft in the western side of the crater and burnishing the great cliff wall beyond so that it glowed like a face in adoration.
© Tim Hannigan
