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]
But Pohnpei’s satellite atolls are able to turn to the mother island in such times, and thus there are separate enclaves in the town of Kolonia, Pohnpei’s capital, of refugees from other islands – Sapwuahfik, Mwoakil, Oroluk, and even the Mortlock Islands, in the neighboring state of Chuuk. There are two sizeable Pingelapese enclaves on Pohnpei, one in Sokehs province, the other in Kolonia, first established when Pingelap was devastated by the 1905 typhoon, and enlarged by subsequent emigrations. In the 1950s there came yet another emigration from Pingelap, this time in consequence of extreme overcrowding, and a new enclave was established by six hundred Pingelapese in the remote Pohnpeian mountain valley of Mand. Since then the village has burgeoned to a population of more than two thousand Pingelapese – three times the population of Pingelap itself.
Mand is isolated geographically, but even more ethnically and culturally – so that forty years after the original settlers migrated here from Pingelap, their descendants have avoided, largely, any contact or marriage with those outside the village, and have maintained, in effect, an island on an island, as homogenous genetically and culturally as Pingelap itself – and the maskun is, if anything, even more prevalent here than on Pingelap.
The road to Mand is very rough – we had to travel in a jeep, often slowing down to little more than a walking rate – and the journey took more than two hours. Outside Kolonia, we saw occasional houses and thatched sakau pubs, but as we climbed, all signs of habitation disappeared. A separate trail – traversable only by foot or by four-wheel drive – led off from the main road, climbing steeply up to the village itself. As we got higher, the temperature and humidity diminished, a delightful change after the heat of the lowlands.
Though isolated, Mand is a good deal more sophisticated than Pingelap, with electricity, telephones, and access to university-trained teachers. We stopped first at the community center, a spacious, airy building with a large central hall used for village meetings, parties, dances. Here we could spread out our equipment and meet some of the achromatopes of the community, and distribute sunglasses and visors. Here, as on Pingelap, there was a certain amount of formal testing, and we explored the details of daily life in this very different environment, and how much this might be helped with proper visual aids. But, as in Pingelap, it was Knut, quietly open about himself, who could do the deepest, most sympathetic probing and counselling. He spent a good deal of time with the mother of two achromatopic children, five years and eighteen months old, who was deeply anxious that they might go completely blind – fearful too that their eye condition might have been her fault, that it was something she had done during pregnancy. Knut did his best to explain to her the mechanisms of heredity, to reassure her that her daughters would not go blind, that there was nothing wrong with her as a wife or a mother, that the maskun was not necessarily a barrier to receiving an education and holding a job, and that with the proper optical aids and eye protection, the proper understanding, her daughters could do as well as any other child. But it was only when he made clear that he himself had the maskun – she suddenly stared at him in a new way at this point – that his words seemed to take on a solid reality for her.[28]
We moved on to the school, where a busy day was in progress. There were twenty or thirty children in each class, and, in each, two or three were colorblind. There were a number of excellent, well-trained teachers here, and the level of education, sophistication, was clearly far better than on Pingelap; some of the classes were in English, others in Pohnpeian or Pingelapese. In one class of teenagers, we sat in on a lesson in astronomy – this included pictures of earthrise from the moon and close-ups of the planets from the Hubble space telescope. But admixed with the latest astronomy and geology, the secular history of the world, a mythical or sacred history was given equal force. If the students were taught about shuttle flights, plate tectonics and submarine volcanoes, they were also immersed in the traditional myths of their culture – the ancient story, for example, of how the island of Pohnpei had been built under the direction of a mystical octopus, Lidakika. (I was fascinated by this, for it was the only cephalopod creation myth I had ever heard.)
Watching two little achromatopic girls doing their arithmetic lessons with their noses virtually touching the pages of the book, Knut was reminded powerfully of his own school days, before he had any optical aids. He pulled out his pocket magnifying loupe to show them – but it is not easy, unpracticed, to use a high-power magnifying glass to read with.