The Island of the Colorblind

It was an uncanny feeling, as Robin gave us vivid details of life as it once was in the city around us – I began to feel the place breathing, coming to life. Here are the old canoe docks, Robin said, gesturing at Pahnwi; there is the boulder where pregnant women went to rub their stomachs to ensure an easy birth; there (he pointed to the island of Idehd) is where an annual ceremony of atonement was held, culminating in the offering of a turtle to Nan Samwohl, the great saltwater eel who served as a medium between the people and their god. There, on Peikapw, the magical pool where the ruling Saudeleurs could see all that was taking place on Pohnpei. There, the great hero Isohkelekel, who had finally vanquished the Saudeleurs, shocked at seeing his aged face reflected in the waters, threw himself into the pool and drowned, a Narcissus in reverse.

It is the emptiness, the desertedness, finally, of Nan Madol which makes it so uncanny. No one now knows when it was deserted, or why. Did the bureaucracy collapse under its own weight? Did the coming of Isohkelekel put an end to the old order? Were the last inhabitants wiped out by disease, or plague, or climatic change, or starvation? Did the sea rise, inexorably, and engulf the low islands? (Many of them, now, are under water.) Was there a feeling of some ancient curse, a panicked and superstitious flight from this place of the old gods? When O’Connell visited 160 years ago, it had already been deserted for a century or more. The sense of this mystery, the rise and fall of cultures, the unpredictable twists of fate, made us contemplative, silent, as we returned to the mainland.[25]

The return journey, indeed, was difficult, and frightening, as night fell. It started to rain again, and this time the rain was driven violently, slantingly, by a strong wind. In a few minutes we were utterly soaked, and began to shiver in the chill. A dense, drizzling mist settled over the water as we inched in, with extreme circumspection, fearing every moment to be grounded on the reef. After an hour in this thick, soupy, blinding fog, our other senses had adapted, sharpened – but it was Knut who picked out the new sound: an intricate, syncopated drumming, which gradually grew louder as, still blinded, we approached the shore. Knut’s auditory acuteness is quite remarkable – this was not unusual in achromatopes, he told us, perhaps a compensation for the visual impairment. He picked up the drumming when we were still half a mile or more from shore, even before Robin, who, expecting it, was listening intently.

This beautiful, mysterious, complex drumming came, we were to discover, from a trio of men pounding sakau on a large stone by the dock. We watched them briefly when we landed. I was eagerly curious about sakau, especially as Robin had expatiated on its virtues as we returned from Nan Madol. He drank it every night, he said, and with this the tension of the day drained out, a peaceful calm came upon him, and he slept deeply and dreamlessly (he could not sleep otherwise). Later that evening Robin came along to the hotel with his Pohnpeian wife, bearing a bottle of slimy greyish liquid; it looked, to my eyes, like old motor oil. I sniffed it gingerly – it smelled of licorice or anise – and tasted a little, uncouthly, in a tooth glass from the bathroom. But sakau is supposed to be drunk with due protocol, from coconut shells, and I looked forward to drinking it in the proper way, at a traditional sakau ceremony.

Pohnpei was one of the first of the Carolines to be colonized by humans – Nan Madol is much older than anything to be found on any of the outlying atolls – and with its high terrain, its size, and rich natural resources, it is still the ultimate refuge when disaster strikes the smaller islands. The atolls, smaller, more fragile, are intensely vulnerable to typhoons, droughts, and famines – Oroluk, according to legend, was once a thriving atoll, until most of it washed away in a typhoon; it now consists of a fifth of a square mile.[26] Moreover, all of these islands, with their limited size and resources, are liable sooner or later to reach a Malthusian crisis of overpopulation, which must lead to disaster, unless there can be emigration. Throughout the Pacific, as O’Connell observed, islanders are periodically forced to emigrate, setting out in their canoes, as their ancestors did centuries before, not knowing what they will find, or where they will go, and hoping against hope that they may find a new and benign island to resettle.[27]