処分しようと思ったリーダース・ダイジェストに出ていた記事。以前はこういう内容のものは苦手だったなぁと思いつつ、読んでみた。
難なく読み進めることができるし、密林の秘境を掻き分けていくときの筆者の不安と期待の入り混じった気持ちが手にとるようにわかった。
雑誌を購入した17年前にはできなかった読み方を、今は簡単にできる。
つまり、英語の文章を頭から順番に、日本語に訳すことなく、単語の意味も文脈に沿いながら理解していくという読み方だ。
いつごろからそれができるようになったかは、はっきりしない。
どういった内容のものか、ここで引用してみる。ブログに一気に載せるには少々長すぎるので、何回かに分けて引用する。
まずは冒頭部分から。
THE PEOPLE THAT TIME FORGOT (Reader’s Digest October 1996, p28 to p35)
Since first light our expedition has been pushing through a swamp in the New Guinea rain forest, struggling through mud and evil-smelling black water up to our waist at times. Above us arches a canopy so dense that it casts a cathedral gloom across the soggy earthen floor. Armies of giant malarial mosquitoes are swarming around us when the jungle suddenly echoes with yodeled war cries.
Agung, my 30-year-old guide, grabs my arm. “Korowai.” He whispers. We press on, the terrifying sounds shadowing us. It’s taken a week to reach the remote land of this tribe that lives in tree houses and eats human flesh. Now it’s too late to turn back.
I’ve journeyed here to visit the closest thing to the Stone Age while it is still possible. Irian Jaya, the western half of New Guinea, is a province of Indonesia. Fortune seekers and others looking for a better life are pouring in from hopelessly overcrowded Java and other islands under a government-sponsored relocation program.
The government has also targeted Irian Jaya’s treasure-trove of natural resources. Vast forests have already been cut down, and primitive tribes like the Korowai, isolated from most of mankind for thousands of years, are under threat.
From Jayapura, Irian Jaya’s capital, a chartered Cessna flies 250 miles south before it thumps down on a dirt strip hacked out of the jungle near the coffee-colored Ndeiram Kabur River. A dugout canoe takes us north to the village of Mbasman for the night.
“From here on,” Agung says with a grin, “the tree people make the laws.”
“Keep walking or we’ll never get there,” Agung shouts. I press on. To witness people still living as our ancestors might have tens of thousands of years ago makes the risk bearable.
As we enter a small clearing a hard-muscled figure leaps form behind a tree, obstructing our path. Naked except a leaf covering his private parts, he brandishes a bow and several barbed arrows. Bat bones flare from holes pierced into his ebony nose.
The warrior shouts in a threatening voice. My guide tries to placate him. “He demands to know why we have come here,” says Agung.
Agung tells him he’s been to this clan before. Glaring, the Korowai rattles his bow and arrows, then turning and disappears.
“He’s gone to alert his people,” says Agung.
Two hours later we reach a clearing. A large hut, about 40 feet long and 20 feet wide, is perched 60 feet up in the trees. The decapitated trunk of a massive banyan tree holds up the floor, and the thatched roof rests on slatted walls lined with bark. A notched climbing pole dangles from the veranda.
“Is Agoos here?” Agung shouts in Bahasa Indonesia, a language known to some of the Korowai. His voice echoes unanswered through the forest.
Many Korowai hate outsiders and will shoot us full of arrows if they get the chance. Agung knows just one Korowai here, a warrior named Agoos.
A child’s shriek shatters the silence. “Laleo!”
“All outsiders are laleo,” Agung says warily. “It means ‘ghost demon.’”
Suddenly there’s a yodeled shout and a small, ebony-colored man who looks to be in his mid-20s lopes into the clearing. Clad in rattan belly strips and a modesty leaf, he clutches a bow and several arrows. Agoos greets Agung without taking his dark eyes from me.
Agoos has hurried form a beetle-larvae ceremony at another tree-house cluster. It’s a sacred ritual where hundreds of tree people from the dozens of Korowai clans gather to cement alliances, seek brides and exchange gossip while they feast on grubs. That morning Agoos became embroiled in a dispute over a pig with a rival clan, and their warriors threatened to come here to kill and eat everyone. “Agoos has run for six hours through the forest to warn his people,” says Agung.
上記引用部分で、斜字体にしてある語句は私が知らない単語だ。
