Andrew Gray's travel tales

2nd October

"You smell'em strong blood?" Smith asked me.

I sniffed. There was a hint of something unusual in the air, but it was hard
to say whether or not it was the smell of clotting blood.

"Time smell here ee come, ee mean'em one man ee dead."

You think it's the smell of a dead body?, I asked.

"No, I-think one man ee dead on-top, 'long bush." He gestured in the
direction of the mountains. "But ee got smell here, time him ee come-down
long saltwater, belong swim."

"Spirit belong him ee come?"

The boy nodded.

The smell of blood from the passing ghost of a dead person, on his way down
to the sea for a last wash. I glanced uneasily through the open door of the
kava bar. It was black outside.

I sniffed again. The odour had gone.

"Me no-more smell'em," I said, relieved.

"You wait. By-and-by small wind ee come, by-and-by smell ee come-back."

With eerie timing, a little breeze hit the kava bar, ruffling the thatch,
and once again there was the strange smell in the air. It was too faint to
tell exactly what it was, but definitely something organic, and not quite
fresh. It could have been blood.

"Smell here ee come too, time way dwof all-ee born'em pickaninny."

"Dwof?"

"Yes. You savvy?"

"No."

"All short-short man?"

"Dwarf? Dwarf all-ee born'em pickaninny?"

Smith nodded.

So there were now two possible explanations for the scent. Either a dead man
was walking past the kava bar, or the dwarfs were reproducing.

"You believe ee got dwarf 'long bush?" I asked. I'd heard stories of dwarfs
in the forest before, told by people from North Pentecost - Smith's part of
the island.

"'Long place here, no got. But 'long place belong me, 'long North, ee got,"
Smith told me, with complete seriousness.

The dwarfs were found only in North Pentecost. I wasn't sure whether to be
disappointed or relieved.

"But suppose ee no got dwarf long place here, smell here ee no come from
dwarf," I said. The smell can't be from the dwarfs if they don't live in
this part of the island.

"True," Smith nodded. "Smell belong one dead man, I-think."

"Nah," I said, dismissively. "I-think smell belong one tree, no more." There
are plants on Pentecost capable of producing fairly putrid smells. "Or smell
belong saltwater." The breeze seemed to be coming from the direction of the
sea.

A shout came from the house across the clearing from the kava bar. Smith
ducked outside, leaving me alone in the shadowy hut. A minute later he
returned.

"Worm all-ee come now!" he told me excitedly. "Worm belong saltwater. Worm
ee make'm smell here."

It was five days after the spring full moon, I realised: the night when
palolo worms all over the South Pacific rise in billions to spawn at the
surface of the ocean. It was the worms that were causing the unusual smell.

"You-me-two go-down 'long saltwater?," Smith asked. "You want'em look?"

"OK."

Smith blew out the candle, and we left the bar. We rounded the side of the
house, and scuttled down the steep dirt path that led to the sea.

"Look-out here. Go slow-slow," Smith called out, as I skittered on loose
stones and fallen sticks.

Cracking through twigs and vines, we emerged onto the stony little beach.

"You hear'em smell?" Smith asked. (In the languages of the ni-Vanuatu,
smells are heard.) I nodded. Down here the smell was fresher and more
saline, less menacing than it had seemed inland, where it was mixed with the
funk of decay from the forest.

Smith's mother and sister were already down at the sea, standing a little
way out in the water in a rippling circle of torchlight. One was holding a
big tin bowl, and the other was straining at the water with a scrap of wire
mosquito netting, scraping her catch off the netting and into the bowl.
Smith and I waded out to join them.

"You look worm?" he asked.

I looked down.

"Try'em shine'm torch."

I shone my torch down into the ripples, and there they were. Hundreds of
worms, bigger than maggots but smaller than earthworms, wriggling in the
water. Half of them were a brownish orange, the other half were a bizarre
shade of greenish blue. The effect of them all moving together was like an
animated piece of abstract art.

"All-ee come, time you shine'm torch." The light was attracting them.

"You never look something here before, uh?" Smith's mother asked me.

"Ee no got 'long England," I explained. I peered into the tin bowl, where a
couple of hundred worms writhed in a puddle of milky grey liquid. It wasn't
a big catch, and it didn't look particularly appetising.

"You-fella ee kaekae?" I asked. Are you really going to eat those?

"Uh-huh."

The worms were soft and squishy, and the bluish ones had a poisonous look to
them.

Eat them how?, I asked.

"Cook'em with'em cabbage."

"But all-ee small," I said. When I'd heard of people eating palolo worms,
I'd imagined them being bigger.

"Yes, him-here small kind," one of the women explained. "Ee got 'nother
kind, who ee big more."

I tried using my fingers to sift one of the worms from the water. It was
difficult, but after three or four tries I succeeded. Out of the water, the
creature hung limp and helpless from my finger. Its body was round and
segmented in narrow bands, like that of a leech or an earthworm, but with a
strange translucent tip at either end.

"All-ee come where?", Smith's mother asked. Where do all the worms come
from?

I shrugged. "Deep sea, I-think."

The small patch of water highlighted by our torches contained hundreds of
worms. In the whole of the South Pacific the number must have been
astronomical. It was hard to believe that such a mass of living organisms
could exist in complete hiding for all but one night of the year.

Smith and I waded ashore, and I sat on the beach for a while waiting for my
feet to dry before putting my sandals back on. (The three pairs of sandals I
brought to Pentecost are all broken, and that night I'd opted to wear the
pair that's held together with sticky tape rather than the one held together
with safety pins or the one held together with superglue. The sticky-taped
pair is the most comfortable of the three and the least likely to come apart
without warning, but has to be kept dry.)

The women had left an old rice sack on the beach, tied shut with twine.
Something was moving about slowly inside.

What's in there?, I asked.

"Black crab, I-think," said Smith. He opened the sack and tried to pick up
one of the crabs, which lunged with its pincers. Smith jumped and the crab
fell, catching itself by one of the frayed ends dangling from the sack. With
a twig, Smith tried to coax the angry crustacean back inside.

An orange light flared behind us, and Smith's older brother emerged from the
trees, carrying a flaming coconut frond. He waded out into the water and
joined his mother and sister, fishing for worms in a pool of light. The
little group shuffled back and forth, sieving the water as they went. Beyond
them, the water was black, silvered very faintly in places with the light of
the stars.

Along thousands of miles of island coastlines, a similar scene was being
enacted that night. Families and friends were out in the water, taking
advantage of this bizarre delicacy that welled up once a year from the
depths of the Pacific. Yet their impact on the worm population would barely
be measurable. The people and their lights were tiny dots in an
incomprehensible volume of ocean.