VICTOR PAUL BORG IS THE FIRST OUTSIDER TO LIVE WITH LEGENDARY PALAWAN TRIBE, THE PEOPLE OF THE ROCK — WHOSE CULTURE HAS WITHSTOOD THE TEST OF TIME
The swift death of three journalists was fresh in everyone’s minds. While in Singnapan Valley to fi lm a documentary on the Tau’t Batu tribe, they had fallen ill to a mysteriously undiagnosed illness. Even at a top hospital in America, their illness remained unspecifi ed. Within days, they were all dead.
Now, fi ve months later, rumors swirl in Palawan. Some believe the Tau’t Batu had poisoned them. Others say it was a magic curse – the Tau’t Batu are notorious for their voodoo prowess – and others maintain they had died because they had visited the realm of the gods that is forbidden to humans.
“Malaria killed them,” said Dr Ray Angluben, an authority on malaria. “But the strange thing is, repeated tests did not diagnose the disease. It was only detected after they died – so it may have been magic in a sense that something prevented the disease from showing up before their death.”
WHERE NO MAN HAS GONE
Now after lengthy negotiations, it was my turn to visit Singnapan as a journalist, and the closer we got, the greater the intensity of fear and rumor.
People exhorted us to abort our expedition. In the village closest to the isolated gorge of the Tau’t Batu, locals expressed their horror.
“No one here has ever gone there,” decared a village elder with trepidation. “Everyone is scared of them.”
So terrifi ed, in fact, that people referred to the Tau’t Batu only by generic vague terms: “them”, “they”, or “the ones over there”.
“Over there” is the enigmatic place where the mountains meet the clouds – I had been gazing at it for days while we organized the logistics.
When we fi nally began our journey, we were led by 49-year-old Durio, one of the rare Tau’t Batu to have moved out of Singnapan. He lives on the sunny slope a few miles upriver from the village, where he has a farm, two wives and seven children. He performs the role of intermediary between the lowland Filipino villagers and the natives of Singnapan.
Our other guide – and the strongman of our party – was 30-year-old Dumlin, an affectionate man who had acquired a reputation as a fearless wanderer. He had disappeared from his parents’ Tau’t Batu cave when he was very young, and lived with immigrant Filipinos before fi nally settling with a girl he met in the forest – producing four children in eight years.
With us was Rose, my Filipina partner who could communicate with the Tau’t Batu in the local dialect, and who had needed much goading and cajoling to join the expedition.
Treacherous Terrain
In terms of distance, Singnapan wasn’t all that far, but rocks in the karst forest reduced our pace to a hesitant crawl. The jumbled heap of rugged and jagged boulders were covered in creepers, moss and trees rooting in cracks or ravines.
It got tougher still when we reached the beak in the mountain and entered the realm of Singnapan. This beak marked the path of an ancient river when Singnapan Valley didn’t exist; it was formed by the region’s unusually high rainfall that gouged the valley into a huge hole like a volcano’s crater.
Now, past the beak, the karst forest became wetter and denser – the rocks swathed in thick moss so slippery it forced Rose and I to clamber on all fours. My mountain boots were useless (some days later, the sole came off), and I envied Dumlin’s far-superior bare feet: his toes were splayed out, forming a tight grip on the uneven rock surfaces.
“I can walk to Singnapan with a 50kg sack of rice in three hours,” he said. It would take us nine hours, and we weren’t carrying anything.
PeoPle of The rocK
When the Tau’t Batu – meaning People of the Cave – were discovered in 1978, no one had seen anything like them before. This outlandish sub-culture of people living in an extraordinary milieu had, over hundreds of years, co-evolved with their habitat so completely that they had become an inextricable part of it.
Immediately, Singnapan was declared a National Preservation (visitors had to obtain permission from the National Museum), and a large team of scholars set out to study these people who, between May and December when it rains heavily, live in caves in near-Neolithic conditions. They can be directly linked to the Neolithic: many stone tools were found in the basin, a prehistoric-style burial was uncovered, and digging yielded material 900 years old.
a river runs
To understand how the Tau’t Batu evolved, it is first necessary to understand the freaky rain that drenches Singnapan.
It is an impressive phenomenon – the clouds circle over Singnapan, emptying their load into the basin, where rainfall is five times higher than anywhere outside it.
At the height of the rainy season, one meter of rainfall a month is normal, and it is this volume that eroded what was formerly a river valley into a hole, similar to a volcanic crater, about 200 meters deep, its sides riddled with caves. The river bored right through the mountain, emerging on the other side – Singnapan means “where the river goes down”.
This basin is rich and diverse, reverberating with birdsong, but it has little of the nipa palm that is used for roofing. Scarcity of nipa, savage storms and cultural factors (the people’s trepidation of outsiders and forest spirits) forced them to live in caves between May and December – moving to the summer bamboo houses only during the short dry season.
The caves, hollowed out by the rain and set high in the cliffs, gave rise to a peculiar society – one that had no villages or community. Instead, it comprises social units whittled down to extended families inhabiting each cave. Within the cave, there is a chieftain and each extended cave-family controls a piece of land outside, where they hunt and grow cassava, tobacco, rice and sweet potatoes.
At the time of our visit, there were 20 extended families of between seven and 15 members living in 20 caves.
Interaction between the caves is mostly limited to intermarriage; there is no sharing or wandering into another family’s territory uninvited.
Marriages are arranged, but after it takes place, there are no regular social meetings between the families and the children don’t visit their parents. This is strange: a sub-group of a few hundred individuals – who speak their own specific dialect and are all related – yet remain so socially fragmented as a whole.
TradiTions and Trappings
On our first day in Singnapan, as the storm lashed at the flimsy hut, we had to wait for Tumyhay to invite us before we could seek shelter from the treacherous weather in the family cave. Durio recounted the epic story of the diluvium.
“Once this entire land became flooded,” he began. “The water was up to the level of the caves. The people in the caves needed food, so they made bamboo rafts to drift out to fetch food. But the rafts sank and many died. Afterwards, the survivors learned how to live and be self-sufficient in caves.”
Life in The Cave
We had arrived at Ugpay Cave, 70m upcliff from the river, home to 13 inhabitants in five nucleus families. Each family had its sleeping space – a bamboo platform – the largest one belonging to Tumyhay, chieftain of the cave and possessor of the largest family: one wife and six kids. Next to it was the family of Tumyhay’s nephew – one wife and three kids – while Tumyhay’s elder brother and his wife had their abode on a ledge at a higher level, and next to them was the tiny platform that belonged to their unmarried son.
I tried to plot their personal life histories with the information I had, but the ages they gave me didn’t match up. They married early, sometimes before puberty, but time meant nothing to them. “Our people don’t keep track of time and years,” Tumyhay explained.
And the watches I had seen some people wearing didn’t work – they had simply scavenged them in the village for decoration.
The men wore ragged shorts and T-shirts, although some still adorned T-shirts over loincloths, to which they festooned a pair of bamboo containers – one holding tobacco and leaves for rolling cigarettes, and the other for metal, flint and tinder for starting fires when they go hunting in the forest with blow-guns, for birds, bearcats and rodents, and spears for fish and wild pigs. The women were clad in sarongs, sometimes T-shirts, more regularly topless, and vernacular necklaces made from beads of colored seeds, sometimes a pendant of flat shells.
Links To The pasT
When it was discovered, Ugpay Cave became one of the world’s most extensively studied caves – largely because it had the most profuse cluster of ancient petroglyphs. The paintings, etched with charcoal, cover the cave walls and ceilings: comical primitive figures, as if prancing or dancing, enchanting the inhabitants. No one knows the age of the petroglyphs – they are identical to ones found in Sarawak, Borneo and the Tau’t Batu claim their ancestors painted them.
The ancestors had thought of everything – laying down rigid rules and rituals for every human endeavor, need, and interaction; a complex system of taboos and codes of conduct that govern everything, as we kept on learning. Shouting is forbidden, for example – the people who are in the forest communicate with coded hoots, the only vestiges left of their former monosyllabic language.
They have strict designations for defecation – the common toilet in the cave is a walkway of logs jutting out of the cave with a raised square frame at its end on which to sit, in full view of everyone, the turds dropping into the forest below.
Some of the ancestors could be resting deep inside the cave, as the custom was to dress the corpse (avoiding red or black, which symbolize lightening and clouds respectively), then wrap it in a bamboo bed with personal possessions, and place the package deep inside the cave.
Make Like a CaveMan
It was something I was keen to explore, but the inhabitants dismissed my request. I didn’t insist; among the Tau’t Batu, one has to probe sensitively. Already, we had gone further than most – Durio told us we were “the first outsiders to sleep with the people in the cave”.
They had even made us a bed – a mat of bamboo – which Durio and Dumlin didn’t want to share as, they said, it was prohibited to sit, step or sleep on the sleeping-platform that belonged to another family.
It was a torturous initiation – besides being cold and damp in the cave, the hard floor gave me a neckache, I felt filthy, and there was no respite from the small cockroaches that wedged themselves into dark creases in my shoes, bags and clothes.
And life in the cave was numbingly monotonous. The Tau’t Batu rarely left the caves in the rainy season; they have sufficient rice, cassava, and potatoes to last a year; they have swifts and bats (brought down by a bamboo pole affixed with bushels of thorny twigs of rattan); and they have also water constantly dripping from the stalactites.
So the days are generally spent talking, eating or staring outside, always shadowed by dark clouds. It was a life that could be measured in storms.
Modern encroachment
The fearsome reputation for violence and dark magic the Tau’t Batu has acquired is largely the result of misunderstandings.
In a way, it is a reflection of the lowland villagers’ own complex of guilt and superstition – immigrant colonizers, usurping the land since their arrival in the 1980s.
The immigrant villagers feared harm from the “uncivilized” Tau’t Batu or their spirits; while the Tau’t Batu felt an existential threat from the villagers’ encroachment. This has only increased – 20 years ago, it took three days to walk to Singnapan; now it only takes one.
These perceptions have created mutual wariness as witnessed in the village: the Tau’t Batu act rather evasively, and the tricycle drivers refuse to give them rides or ask for inordinately high prices.
I found the Tau’t Batu shy and reticent – and their children inconsolably terrified of us – and suspicious of outsiders’ intentions. Jesus Peralta, an anthropologist, wrote about this seclusion: “… caves selected precisely because of their inaccessibility… [for] security from intrusion, the people limiting involvement with the outside world, going to great lengths to avoid contact with others not of their kind.”
Reconciling Religions
Durio had lied to us about God at first, claiming that they worshipped the Christian God. The missionaries who introduced the Christian God visit every two years, buying the Tau’t Batu’s attention with gifts.
“We listen to them,” Durio said later, changing his story, “and agree with them in everything, but when they go away, we continue to believe in what we have always believed.”
The missionaries’ attempt to build a chapel was also rejected. The Tau’t Batu god, called Ampo, is the creator and possessor of everything, and the highest god among a multitude of spirits and deities that inhabit the realm of Singnapan.
“Each time we leave the cave,” Durio explains, “we ask 'the unseen’ for protection.” (The people referred to Ampo as “the unseen” – another custom, the avoidance of referring to someone by name, whether divine or human, away from his presence.)
The Tau’t Batu also conduct many rituals to exorcise or appease the spirits, including the spirits of the ancestors.
The journalists, the Tau’t Batu explained, had died after offending many spirits by shouting, laughing, defecating in the river, and other insolent behavior.
“They even laughed,” one of the men said, “when there was lightening and thunder. We told them that lightening and thunder are servants of 'the unseen’, but they laughed at us, and 'the unseen’ was insulted.”
The arrogant journalists had also committed the mistake of taking an outsider as a guide. This, at a place where the natives are fiercely territorial even among their own kind, represented an intrusion and an affront. Seven years before, an American couple had also made the same mistake, and they too, had perished – presumably murdered.
Safety in tradition
I got a sense of the threat the Tau’t Batu felt from outsiders one day when they were practising a protective incantation. I had read about these incantations, including the one that neutralized the venom of snakes, which Durio had confirmed: “I was bitten on my forehead. My face became paralysed and I could not speak. A chieftain recited the incantation and it cured me.”
For this practice session, “Tumyhay is teaching us an incantation that would deflect bullets fired at us,” Durio explains.
So, as the outside world – with its violent ways – closes in around them, the Tau’t Batu become more closed and secretive, inventing magic spells to protect themselves from bullets.
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