Spirit of Place

The hunting party rose well before dawn. They would use the cool mist-laden air of the early morning to create distance between their village of Hilimeta in the south and their final destination, the Raja’s village in the Gomo River region of central Nias. Farewells were brief. Sar San Gaila, five years old at the time, felt the warm breath of his father’s words caress his face as the warrior chief clutched his son to his chest. Their bond, eternal and undeniable, Sar San Gaila stood shivering and watched his father disappear out of the courtyard and out of his life forever. The party of ten warriors was also accompanied by a shaman, the navigator of the other worlds.

He would communicate with Lovalani, the sprit of the heavens, the god of the upper world who presided over the sun and air, the mountains, gold and birds, light and the life force. The opposing ruler of the underworld was Lovalani’s brother Latura Dano, the god of darkness, earth, the moon and the snake. The constant struggle to maintain balance between the forces of good and evil was left to the shaman who would confer with the ancestor spirits and the Chief to chart a course through the hazardous rainforest. All types of terrain lay before them from fast-flowing mountain streams in steep ravines to crocodile-infested swamps teeming with malaria bearing mosquitoes.

The atmosphere in the hunting party was buoyant. While they took every precaution to ensure their own security as they traveled, they were in fact quite relaxed. This was not a war party seeking heads, they were actually seeking peace; it was a journey of appeasement. The father of Sar San Gaila had led his village successfully through fire, famine and war.
But it was an ongoing demarcation dispute over land, slaves and the taking of heads, with the chiefdom of Gomo that forced him to initiate peace talks with the Gomo village leader. It was the classic struggle between opposing Niasan villages fighting for power and prestige. He had agreed to the Raja’s invitation to a meeting in Gomo to settle all outstanding debts in a peaceful resolution to their hostility.
The light rations that the party carried would sustain them during the four-day journey to Gomo. The Raja’s invitation had made much of the celebration of the peace accord with the corresponding ritual feast. The red-orange color of the sirih nut dribbled down the lips of the warriors as they fell into a light trance state while picking their way along the thin path. The sun was, in some cases, completely blotted out from view by the canopy of the primordial teak forest. This was their homeland where they interacted directly with their ancestral spirits in the most sublime manner. At night, the glow of the waxing moon and the Milky Way allowed them to continue. It was a celestial river of souls that carried them onwards to their destiny.

On the third night, the party camped alongside the swift-flowing Gomo River just outside the village of Sifalago, an area that held great spiritual importance for all Niasans. The village was also known as Boro Nadu, which means “the beginning of ancestor images”. This was where the Niha culture was conceived. Hia, the patriarch of the Niha, which means “man of Nias” is said to have descended from the upper world. His son Sadawa Molo had five sons who fathered the clans that inhabited the entire island. Hia had planted the sacred fosi tree in the center of the megalithic courtyard of Boro Nadu. Legend has it that the tree grew directly out of Hia’s heart. Anyone approaching the tree, other than a priest, suffered dire consequences.

The sacred spirit of Hia filled the peace party with a sense of atonement. Late the following afternoon, the party arrived on the outskirts of the chiefdom of Gomo.

The Raja’s representatives met with the father of Sar San Gaila who was persuaded to accompany them alone to meet their chief. It was to be one on one. Despite the protestations of the Hilimeta warriors who were commanded to stay outside the village, the warrior chief consented. After all, he had come seeking peace; to fear peace was to fear the life force itself. The father of Sar San Gaila was led through the magnificent courtyard of the Gomo village past the large carved stone spirit boats called daro-daro. On each side stood the stone representations of the Nias Cosmos, large oval and rectangular platforms with carved reliefs of crocodiles and hornbills adorning the sides.

The Raja invited the Hilimeta warrior chief to sit on a sacred lasara chair. The large basalt carved chairs were presided over by the lasara, the mythical being which linked the upper and lower worlds in one to represent the universe. Only on symbolic occasions when tribal nobility met was anyone allowed to occupy these chairs.

As the full moon rose in the east, the ritual feast to consecrate the peace pact got under way. Women adorned in elaborate gold headdresses wearing traditional ikat fabrics carried gifts and gold to Sar San Gaila’s father. Many pigs were slaughtered in a show of respect for the warrior chief. The journey had been exhausting and a combination of the festivities and the food and drink caused him to retire early. The terms of the agreement would be brokered tomorrow.
But for the father of Sar San Gaila, there would be no tomorrow. The Hilimeta warrior chief was led to his room in the Raja’s house. The five-meter high teak panelled walls were decorated with elaborately carved ancestor images. The altar was perched high on the wall above a massive horizontal beam called a lago-lago. From where he was lying, looking upwards, the man forever more known only as the “father of Sar San Gaila” could see fresh offerings on the altar.

While he slept heavily, at some point in the stillness of the night, the massive tropical hardwood beam was released from its resting place. Silently plummeting downwards, it crushed the living spirit out of the Hilimeta chief. The Gomo warriors quickly entered the room, and in the splintered light of the full moon, one of them took out his sword and in a single blow, severed the cerebellum cortex of the shattered corpse. Dancing with glee, they charged out into the courtyard singing the praises of their Raja. In the aggressive and violent backdrop of traditional Niasan culture, justice, whether right or wrong, was always swift and severe. The head of the father of Sar San Gaila was then thrown into the turbulent waters of the surging Gomo River. However, the karmic forces of retribution had immediately come into play. The village of Gomo would forever remember this day with dread. The murder of a warrior chief was the ultimate insult, for that person would forever lose the right to have his full name mentioned.

There was also the possibility that this person would become a bechu, an evil ancestral spirit. For Sar San Gaila, who was but five years old, he had lost his father and was sakit hati (broken-hearted) that he could not honor him with the burial ceremony befitting a man of his stature.

The resultant ignominy would live with him every moment of his life until he could avenge his father’s death. An old Niasan proverb “mati sebelum malu” (death before disgrace) was to stick in his gut for thirty years. The year was 1805, and Sar San Gaila’s journey was only just beginning. At this time, Nias was in constant turmoil. The Dutch had involved themselves in the slave trade and had become major players in purchasing and poaching low caste Niasans for sale and distribution in Sumatra and then on to Batavia. The Dutch with their jackboot mentality had been involving themselves in Niasan affairs for some 140 years. The English and Portuguese had also established trading relations with local people at Gunung Sitoli in the north. The Portuguese had a friendlier disposition in their interaction with the traditional Niasan culture. However, this was only to disguise their real intentions of establishing a business and military network through the islands.

By now, Sar San Gaila’s family had moved to a new village called “Hilizondigeasi” which means “village near the waves.” It was situated not far from the present site of the village in Lagundri Bay. One day during a chance meeting with a group of Portuguese traders on the beach near his village, Sar San Gaila seized an opportunity that was to change his life forever. Through an interpreter, it was explained to his mother that the traders were offering to take Sar San Gaila with them to Sumatra to educate him in the ways of the world, and it was agreed that he would go. Standing on board the brig, the little boy with the big heart waved goodbye to his mother and family. He was only eight years old, yet he carried the hopes of the village on his shoulders. Deep within, he also knew that this was a path towards his destiny of honoring his father’s demise.

His early schooling was conducted within the Portuguese community in Padang on the west coast of Sumatra. Sometime later he entered a Dutch military school in preparation for life in the armed forces. The youthful Sar San Gaila was to complete his military training fully adept in the art of killing. For a number of years, he performed as an infantryman in the Dutch corps during their attempts to quell the fierce tribes in Aceh, located in the deep north of Sumatra. It was during this time in Aceh that he was introduced to the shamanic culture of the Acehnese, who were, and still are, the most feared practitioners of this archaic tradition in the Indonesian archipelago. He became initiated into the ways of limu an Acehnese form of magic, which also incorporated a series of self-defense techniques similar to silat. Magical powers were adopted in his rites of passage; he became empowered, and therefore, could not sustain an injury by use of a knife, and a bullet aimed at his body was always destined to miss its target.

In undergoing this spiritual transformation, he had become fearless in the face of death. He had also converted to Islam.
Meanwhile, back on Nias, not much had changed. The Dutch had stepped up their quota of slaves. Records showed some 1500 people’s lives being traded in a year as the Dutch military warred incessantly with the Acehnese pirates for control of the Niasan slave trade. However, a major turnaround occurred in approximately 1835 when the Dutch bowed to international pressure by the anti-slavery movement to halt their trade. But instead, they cunningly used this scenario to mount a full-scale military campaign to take control of the island. Sar San Gaila had by now become a military commander, and at the age of 30, he returned to his homeland on assignment for the first time since leaving some twenty-two years ago. Because of his Niasan heritage and communication skills, it was his responsibility to recruit and organize groups of mercenaries from opposing tribes in the north. This meant for the Dutch that they could conscript these local warriors who relished the idea of settling past injustices with each other, but in doing so, they allowed the Dutch to subjugate their people. For the Dutch, they were simply introducing “divide and rule” tactics that had worked so successfully for them in their other colonial experiences. They were smart enough not to arm these Niasan conscripts with rifles, as they feared for their safety in the event of reprisals. The marauding bands of mercenaries laid waste to village after village in the north, which had already suffered brutally at the hand of the slavers. Looting of the revered gold jewelry became the major incentive in these rape and pillage campaigns. Suddenly the focus shifted to the Gomo River region in the center of the island. The Gomo warriors had barricaded themselves in their uniquely designed stone boat houses, which offered protection and the ability to retaliate while under siege conditions.

However, nothing could have prepared them for the ferocity that descended upon the village in the shape of the son of the Hilimeta chief. Sar San Gaila had dispensed with his army uniform. He wore instead a warrior’s jacket or cuirass made of thick leather and six long iron flaps, which protected the shoulders. The metal strips and leather were fastened together by rattan string. The back was reinforced with a broad rectangular sheet of metal bordered on either side by a row of sharp metal teeth. This strip extended high up to protect the back of his neck. His helmet was composed of sheet iron cobbled together with brass wire. A large plume extended upwards from the front made of tassels of red and yellow cloth and a branch of lagene tree. It was said that evil spirits adorned themselves with the branches of this tree, so that when a person displayed such a branch, the spirits would be confused and believe the person to be one of their own, thus providing protection. In the roll of the ikat lap-lap that he wore, Sar San Gaila had stuffed the petals of the soma-soma flower. This also had the magical properties of providing a connection to and a line between the living and the dead. His sword sheathed at his side had been empowered in a ceremonial communion with Lowalani and Laturo Dano. The 75cm steel blade was attached to a cast brass hilt in the shape of a stylized lasara head. Large boar tusks were attached to the wooden sheath, protecting a small cocoon-type rattan basket filled with shark’s teeth, a fossil stone and an ancestor figure. Sar San Gaila was going to expunge the dishonor of his father’s murder by the complete desecration and destruction of Gomo village and its inhabitants. In the dawn’s early light, he strode into the courtyard brandishing a Dutch-made gatling style machine gun. With a soldier assisting him by feeding the ammunition belts, he commenced strafing the houses and occupants with continual raking gunfire, which lasted for hours on end. The Gomo was awash with blood and bobbing heads when the killing finally ceased late that afternoon.
At some point after this incident, after a period of quiet reflection and contemplation, he resigned his position with the Dutch army and headed south to the village near the waves to an emotional homecoming.

By 1844, Sar San Gaila was nearing the middle stage of his life. Like his father before him, he was seeking the solace of peace. While the battle with his demons had been laid to rest in Gomo, the war with the Dutch raged on. Now it was the Niasan tribes from the south that were under threat. The battle-hardened warrior used his experience gained in guerilla warfare to organize hit-and-run operations against the Dutch expeditionary forces to the south. Using firearms captured from these raids, and also munitions acquired during the slave trade, the tribes in the south were able to repel the Dutch who were again frustrated in their attempts to achieve complete domination of the island. For many years, these skirmishes continued between the Dutch colonial government in the north and the fierce chiefdoms of the south. But finally, Sar San Gaila had finished with war. He had taken a wife and was the father of two girls and a son. In his search for solitude, he moved his family from the “village near the waves” to a house beside the waves. In the intervening years since returning to his village, he had spent much time on the southwest point of the bay called Lagundri. There he meditated and practiced his shamanic rituals communicating with animal and ancestral spirits and traveling in the “other” worlds. Although the village of Botohilitano had been established on the 200-meter high hill above the point some one hundred years earlier, none of the villagers dared live in the pristine natural environment of the point because of its strong spiritual portent. Sar San Gaila built a house at Jamburae on the point, named for his jambu (fruit) crops, and fished the surrounding waters raising his children in the traditional manner. But in 1856, the silence of Lagundri Bay was shattered with the arrival of a Dutch brigantine carrying cannons.

The landing party had made its intentions clear by commencing immediately with the construction of a fortress and jetty facilities off the beach in the middle of the bay. In the face of this threat, the shaman of the point sent his wife and children north to her family’s home. Their security was utmost in his mind. With the garrison nearing completion and the arrival of more troops, anything could happen. And it did. A year later, the earth cracked open consuming the garrison and its occupants in a powerful display of retribution. The effects of the severe earthquake caused a re-think of Dutch military plans and a complete relocation back to Padang in Sumatra.

Peace had finally been achieved in Sar San Gaila’s life. It is said that he possessed an affinity with the power that was situated on the point; he was drawn to it by its magic. The thundering detonations of wave after wave, when the big swells were running, provided the trance music by which he relaxed into old age. He had entered the final stage of his life in this natural bardo by achieving complete harmony with the lush tropical surroundings of Lagundri point and his shamanic traditions.

The son of the Hilimeta warrior chief had been a witness to much change throughout his life. His respect for the power of the natural world was immense. But what he experienced on that day in August 1883, was to leave him spellbound. The lead up to the cataclysmic event had begun three days earlier. The ocean had suddenly begun to surge up the beach and back out in a continuous motion. The warning signals were obvious. Impending destruction was at hand. Sar San Gaila, at this stage, a spry 83 years of age, along with most other residents of the Muslim village in Lagundri, evacuated themselves and their belongings up to Botohilitano, the village on the hill behind the point. And there they waited. During the evening of the 26th and 27th, it finally came; the resultant volcanic eruption of the Island of Krakatau in the Sunda Straits off the west coast of Java produced one of the loudest noises in the planet’s recorded history. The massive bang shattered the calm resolve of the villagers sending them into a frenzy. Then came the rumbling of the ocean. The explosion of Krakatau was accompanied by a submarine earthquake of such epic proportions that the ensuing tidal waves were eventually felt in the Thames River in London. But at the epicenter, 50’ high walls of water caused death and destruction as they impacted along the coasts of Java and Sumatra. In Teluk Lampung, in south Sumatra, it was reported that a tidal surge had measured 15’ in height, 30 miles inland. In Lagundri, in the early hours before dawn, the rumbling grew louder, as the tsunami, while smaller in volume and height offshore, grew tremendously, rising to some 25’ as it surged over the remnants of the old Dutch garrison and carried all before it. The tidal wave was still 10’ high when it was finally halted by the escarpment at the back of Lagundri village, some 1 1/2km inland. As dawn broke, the devastation was revealed in its entirety. Fortunately, there had been minimal loss of life, and in a miraculous effort, a 70 year-old woman by the name of Tanomi survived the full impact of the surges by climbing a huge kapok tree to escape. The sky remained clouded in dust, blotting out the sun for three days.
Sar San Gaila lived out his days on the point in the company of his remaining family. His constant aide through the latter years was a shaman by the name of Kanowi, an Acehnese possessing deep magical powers to communicate with the upper and lower worlds. Kanowi assisted his mentor to prepare for his new journey. His incantations were rhythmic and spoken with compassion directly to the guides.
The son of the warrior chief of Hilimeta, the custodian of the point, was now ready, and Sar San Gaila gently exhaled for the last time, as Kanowi helped the shaman’s soul climb aboard his ancestor spirit boat and watched in awe as he paddled into the light.

This story appeared as part of Kevin Lovett’s ‘Custodians of the Point’ story in The Surfer’s Journal Volume 7 No. 1