Festive Vertebrae

CANNIBAL CARAVAN--Charles ("Cannibal") Miller--Furman ($2.75).

Sunk in the plateau that surrounds the Sterren Mountains, snow-capped backbone of Netherlands New Guinea, is a triangular-shaped, 40-acre swamp with no visible outlet. On hands and knees, Charles Miller gazed down into its reeds. A quarter mile away something moved. Charles Miller's blood froze. Lashing across the swamp was a dinosaur. It was 35 feet long, a yellowish color, with scales laid on like armor plate, a bony-flanged head, and snappin--turtle beak. Half blinded by cold sweat, Charles Miller pressed the release on his camera.* The dinosaur reared up on its hind legs, its small forelegs dangling, hissed roaringly, shot its snaky neck in his direction and slithered out of sight. Concluding that his rifle would be "about as useful as citronella," Explorer Miller fled.

Ex-barnstorming aviator and Hollywood cameraman, Miller tells as many tall ones as Trader Horn, makes some of them sound convincing. The first white child raised in Netherlands New Guinea, he began his jungle jaunts at five, and while still an adolescent became a blood brother of the Marind-Anim tribe. He returned to his native islands to make a travel film, having married the expedition's backer in Java and taken her along for the honeymoon. He says that some day he is going to bring back the dinosaur he saw and confound his skeptics. Meantime, he has brought back a passel of tales which raise the hair and eyebrows as high as any published since William Seabrook's 'jungle Ways.

Author Miller took cannibalism much more easily in his stride than did Seabrook. On one occasion he says he led a highly successful head-hunting expedition to save his own neck, spares few details in describing it and the three-day orgy which followed. As other races use lanterns, flags and bunting for celebrations, the natives of New Guinea string up their victims' vertebrae.

Adventurer Miller tells how boys' noses are bored to take inch-wide bamboo plugs in each nostril, how a native village smells two days' travel away ("an acrid odor . . . like smoke from a bonfire of rubber boots"), how a trail-cutter can die from a cobra bite before hitting the ground. His accounts of jungle sex are more colorful if less accurate than an anthropologist's. For squeamish readers there is always the dedication: "To Mother and Dad."

*This shot is not among the 33 reproduced in his book.

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