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When the two journalists and their guide died swiftly and mysteriously, the locals in Palawan knew exactly what had happened to them. After all they had been to Singnapan to do a documentary, and the rest was predictable: they became gravely ill, they were airlifted to hospital, nothing wrong could be found in hospital, tests didn’t diagnose anything, and within days they were dead. It chimed with what the locals knew – that the savages in the mountains possess magical powers, killing the journalists by sorcery or poison.
I was skeptical. I went to see Dr Ray Angluben, an authority on malaria, and I found out that he also wasn’t dismissing sorcery. “The autopsy showed that malaria killed them,” he told me. “But the strange thing is that malaria didn’t show up in repetitive tests, and by the time it was pinned down it was too late. So magic could also have been involved in preventing malaria from showing up.”
Now, five months later, it was our turn to visit Singnapan, where the Tau’t Batu live in caves (Tau’t Batu means “People of the Caves” or “People of the Rocks”), and the closer we got the greater the intensity of fear and rumors. The tourist office told us we were prohibited from visiting, and in the village closest to Singnapan the villagers expressed horror at our impending expedition. “No one here has ever gone there,” told me a village elder. “Everyone is scared of them.” So terrified in fact that people referred to the Tau’t Batu only in generic and vague terms – ‘them’, ‘they’, ‘the ones over there.’
Over there: the place where the mountains meet the clouds, a dark and enigmatic wilderness on which I gazed upon yearningly while Durio made up his mind and we organized the logistics.
I had asked Durio, a native chieftain, if he would take us to Singnapan. He said, “If I take you I have to ensure your safety.”
“Safety from what?”
“From everything,” he said. “I have to think about it.”
Days later we finally set off, led by Durio and Dumlin, a strongman; both were native Tau’t Batu. Durio had moved out of Singnapan to the sunnier slope a few miles upriver from the village, where he had a farm, two wives, and seven children. He performed the role of an intermediary between the Filipinos and Singnapan’s natives. Dumlin was something of a prodigal son: in his early teens he had fled Singnapan and was taken in by a Flipino family in return for farm labor. Eventually, he met a native Pal’wan girl in the forest, married her, and swapped his foster home for a cave – raising his family in Powakam Cave, where his uncle lived. Now he had three children, but he complained that he only had one wife.
Singnapan is about 10km from the Filipino village, but as soon as we hit the slope the terrain morphed into rugged heaps of karst boulders covered in creepers and trees rooting in cracks. We had to climb and crawl and scramble, one boulder at a time, and it got tougher when we reached the beak in the mountain which marked the path of an ancient river when Singnapan crater didn’t exist. The terrain became wetter, we entered a dramatically different climactic regime, and my partner and I had to walk on all fours on the jagged, moss-covered jumbles of boulders. One wrong foot, or one slip, and one could fall into a 10-meter crevice.
I became dizzy, all doubled over, and seeing our companions’ feet flit from rock to rock, light and agile. Durio wore flip-flops, Dumlin went bare-footed – his splayed-out toes, a characteristic feature of some Tau’t Batu, forming grips on the sharp rocks like birds’ claws.
“I can walk to Singnapan with a fifty-kilogram sack of rice in four hours,” Dumlin said.
Us, it took us nine, and we weren’t carrying anything.
***
When the Tau’t Batu were discovered, in 1978, by archeologists searching for caves where the Philippines’ first inhabitants lived 50,000 years ago, it was speculated that these cave-dwellers could well be descendents of those first immigrants, the Negritos. These speculations were never proved or disproved, but what was instantly apparent is that this lost tribe had impressively co-evolved with their treacherous habitat. Singnapan was declared a National Preservation, and a team of researchers set out to document these people who, between May and December when it rains heavily, live in caves in near-Neolithic conditions. They could be linked to the Neolithic: stone tools were found in the caves, people wore clothes made out of bark, a prehistoric-style burial was uncovered, and digging in the caves yielded dateable material 900 years old.
To understand how the Tau’t Batu had evolved you must first understand the freakish rainfall. It’s a bizarre phenomenon: the clouds circle over Singnapan, pouring rain into the basin, where rainfall in one month under study amounted to one meter, or five times higher than the amount outside the basin. Over time the rain eroded the former river valley into a crater about 200 meters deep and its sides riddled with caves. The river then gouged a passage through the mountain, emerging on the other side – Singnapan means “where the river goes down.”
The erosion formed a karst terrain with soil limited to pockets among the boulders. It’s a rich forest, but it supports limited growths of bamboo and palm, the materials that could be used for buildings. Scarcity of building materials, coupled with the incessant storms and treacherous terrain are the main factors that forced the people to hunker in caves between May and December – moving to flimsy summer bamboo houses during the short dry season when they grow crops (mostly cassava and rice). This life, with people marooned in caves high on cliff-faces, then gave rise to a peculiar society and culture.
Now, in our first night in Singnapan, my partner and I couldn’t climb the cliff to Ugpay Cave. We had to wait until bamboo and creepers were affixed to the cliff, and that meant waiting until the storm subsided. We waited for two days, huddled in a rickety summer hut that leaked water, and Durio recounted the Tau’t Batu epic, an archetypal of the diluvium. Once, it goes, it rained so much that Singnapan became a lake and the inhabitants climbed to the caves. They made bamboo rafts, and floated out of the caves to fetch food, but many rafts capsized and many people drowned. It was then that the survivors learned to subsist in caves.
***
“These are the real Tau’t Batu,” Durio said. “They are very dirty; they don’t wash.”
We had arrived at Ugpay Cave, after climbing some seventy meters upcliff from the river. We found thirteen inhabitants in four nuclei families, each family’s home consisting only of a raised platform of bamboo. The largest belonged to Tumyhay, chieftain of the cave and possessor of the largest family, one wife and six children. Next to it was the family of Tumyhay’s nephew, and on a ledge at a higher level sat the abode of Tumyhay’s elder brother and wife, and next to theirs the tiny platform of their single son.
It was a setup that had changed little since 1978. At the time, anthropologists lamented that this circumscribed subgroup of Pal’wan natives would be quickly assimilated by the immigrants who began to settle en masse in Palawan. But their predictions have not come to pass, and although the most inaccessible cave has since been abandoned, there were now more cave-habitations – twenty according to Durio – than the ten recorded by the researchers in 1979.
Why did the Tau’t Batu remain firmly stuck in their old way of life? Why continue to live in damp caves when they could go outside Singnapan and live in wood and bamboo huts like other Filipino peasants, or like Durio? After four days of interviews and explorations, I began to see that the Tau’t Batu perceive the cave as a place of safety and refuge from the vagaries of the world outside.
To start with, the world outside is besieged with rainstorms. And fear of storms has taken divine meaning: the Tau’t Batu believe that thunder and lightning are the creator’s agents, and laughing or shouting during or after a storm amounts to insolence towards the creator. The world outside is also full of specters, the multitudes of spirits, animist and ancestral, that have to be appeased by diligence and ritual. For example, a hunter who mistakenly kills a long-tailed macaque monkey that is possessed by a powerful spirit is doomed. These allegories depict the forest as a dangerous place, and the cave as a cocoon. “We pray for the Unseen’s protection every time we leave the cave,” Durio said. (The Unseen, whose name can’t be invoked, is the creator and possessor of everything.)
In that kind of life, where people only leave the cave when absolutely necessary (for defecating and urinating, wooden logs jut from the caves’ mouths akin to a springboard), the social fragmentation has become entrenched. The extended family members that inhabit each cave – collectively called bulun-bulun – constitute a closed social unit, and the Tau’t Batu never developed a sense of larger community with its political and organizational hierarchies. Interaction between bulun-buluns is largely limited to marriage – a strictly-defined exchange, the bride’s parents getting “two plates, a sarong, and a machete to compensate them for the girl’s upbringing”. Each bulun-bulun controls a piece of adjoining territory for hunting, gathering, and cultivation; members of other bulun-buluns cannot stray into others’ territories without permission (which is communicated by hoots, a remnant of their former mono-syllabic language). The tenuous relationship between bulun-buluns, wrote Jesus Peralta, the anthropologist leader of group of researchers in 1979, follows “no clear organizing principle other than that of kinship structure.”
“Those people came looking for the hidden gold,” told me Tumyhay, talking about the researchers. The Tau’t Batu thought that the newcomers were gold hunters, a perception reinforced by the archeologists’ habit of digging in the caves. “But they didn’t find any,” Tumyhay added.
This perception was partly why the Tau’t Batu had acted evasively and deceptively. Three extended families had even vacated the caves while the researchers trampled around, and Jesus Peralta deplored his subject’s deceit. Their five-month study, he lamented, is “incomplete and preliminary… to a certain degree unreliable due to the artificial conditions created by the presence of a large group of strangers and the Tau’t Batus’ shock in encountering an alien culture.” The caves on the cliffs, he fretted, “are selected precisely because of their inaccessibility… to avoid contact with others not of their kind.”
Ugpay Cave was intensely studied in 1979, largely because it holds a profusion of ancient petroglyphs. These animal and human figures are drawn with charcoal in simple outlines, yet they’re moody, eerily enchanting. The inhabitants told the researchers they were “children’s scribbles”; they told us they were made by the “ancestors”, but they didn’t want to divulge more than that – they claimed the paintings “mean nothing.”
Tumyhay instead wanted to draw my attention to the gold allegedly buried in the caves. Some claimed the bounty amounted to 60 tons, and Tumyhay invited me to return to Singnapan with a metal detector and digging tools so we could find the gold. He claimed that he had seen some of the gold that was retrieved when he was young.
I didn’t believe in, or care about, the gold; my interest was anthropological. But my enquiries often came to nothing. When I tried to plot their personal life histories, I realized that the ages they kept giving me weren’t matching up. “Our people don’t keep track of time and years,” Tumyhay explained in the end. “I don’t really know how old I am.”
The watches some wore didn’t work, they were only for decoration. Materially in fact the changes were little since 1978: tattered clothes had replaced bark cloth, they have some kitchen implements, all men have machetes and some have airguns. But they can’t always afford lead-shot for their guns, and in many ways they remain reliant on their old ways – hunting with blowgun and spear, starting fires with flint-stones, smoking dried leaves.
Their explanations often boiled down to “the ancestors”. The ancestors had established a rigid system of social codes and taboos, all designed to avoid conflict, preserve resources, and engender health – for example, it’s prohibited to defecate or urinate in the river or in the caves (the children giggled when it was my turn on the wooden plank, where I squatted down wobblingly, the faeces dropping into the valley below).
Each time I asked why things are like they are, the ancestors would be invoked. Why continue to live in damp chilly caves? “It’s the life our ancestors taught us” or “It’s the life we know” – these answers were invariable. Even Dumlin, who had known life in a brick house, had willingly returned to habitation in a dark and dank cave.
Internment of the dead still followed the old way: quick burial during the hut-living dry season, and prehistoric-style internment when in the caves. Corpses would be dressed, avoiding red or black (which are symbolic of lightning and storm clouds), then wrapped in a curtain of bamboo with personal possession and placed deep inside the cave. Could I see one of these? My question only elicited evasive eyes.
There were times when I worried about our safety. Climbing the cliffs comes with the risk of being bitten by snakes coiled in crevices, and I was anxious during livid discussions when my partner couldn’t understand what was being said. Afterwards, asking about the discussions, we got short untruthful answers. One day the men walked inside the cave – the cave is hollow and long, and the draft that wafted from the back suggested that it was open at the other end of the mountain. I wanted to follow, they waved me back, and when they returned hours later they said they had gone to see the stalactites. It was a lie, one of the women told my partner, but no further explanations were offered.
Other times I also wondered if they were fooling me, as they had deceived so many others. Apparently, we were “the first outsiders ever to sleep with the Tau’t Batu in the cave” – if only because we were foolish enough not to take tents – and they certainly became franker once they realized that my interest was innocuous. At first, for example, Durio told me they believed in the Christian god. That’s a god that had been introduced by the missionaries, who visit erratically and gain a reception by gifts and medicine. Later, he said: “When the missionaries come here, we agree with everything they say, but when they go we continue to believe in what we have always believed.” The missionaries’ attempt to build a chapel was flatly rejected; instead, the Tau’t Batu forfeited the wood and nails and tools the missionaries had hauled to Singnapan, and the missionaries scampered back to the village empty-handed.
Whether dealing with missionaries or others, the Tau’t Batu act with extreme insularity; they become deceptive, reticent, and culturally intransigent. It’s these traits that have allowed their culture to survive in limbo, insulated from outside influences, and this was crucial to their survival, for their culture is so tuned to their environmental conditions that any loosening would diminish their ability to subsist and live harmoniously.
We spent four days in the cave. It was cold and damp; sleeping on the bamboo gave me a neckache; I felt filthy; there was no respite from the small cockroaches that wedged themselves into dark creases in my shoes and bags and clothes. And life in the cave is numbingly monotonous. The Tau’t Batu rarely leave the cave in the rainy season; they have caches of rice and cassava from the annual harvest; they grill swifts and bats (which they bring down by a bamboo pole affixed with bushels of thorny twigs of rattan), and they collect water from dripping stalactites. So the days are spent staring at the dull vista of the crater outside – a life that could be measured in storms.
***
The death of the three journalists had intensified the Tau’t Batu’s reputation for sorcery and violence. Their death was indeed mysterious: maybe there is some kind of obscure scientific explanation, but it’s improbable that three individuals contract malaria simultaneously at a place where, in six days, we didn’t encounter a single mosquito. The Tau’t Batu’s take is that the journalists’ insolent behavior incurred them a death curse from the spirits.
Everyone in the mountains lives in fear of the ‘others.’ This could partly be the result of territorial conflicts: the immigrants, who have plundered much land, fear retribution from the Tau’t Batu or their spirits, while the Tau’t Batu feel an existential threat from the immigrants’ voracity. I had seen the suspicion in the village, where Tau’t Batu and villagers evade each other, and tricycle drivers (tricycles are the local taxi service) refusing to give rides to Tau’t Batu.
Other visitors had also perished, including an American couple presumably murdered for their possessions. The journalists and the Americans had taken an outsider as a trekking guide, and that’s extremely foolish at a place where the natives are territorial even among themselves. It could also have happened to us. Once, walking in the forests, we heard hoots – coded communication – and Durio froze. An ambush was being laid, he started yelling, and the hoots ceased.
The Tau’t Batu are scared of outsiders (young children yelped and ran off when we approached), and it’s a small step between fear and violence. Durio was worried in reverse: that he would be attacked by the villagers, and he was preparing for the eventuality by magical incantation. They have several such incantations, including one that allegedly neutralizes snake venom. One evening we heard them practice an incantation in their language, and I had asked Durio what it was.
“Tumyhay,” he told me, “is teaching me an incantation that would deflect bullets fired at me.”
Article © Victor Paul Borg
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Itineraries that go into the back regions, beyond the tourist circuits
Light adventures, cultural immersion, interactive holidays
Experience, sensitivity and passion 
Pockets 
Craft Asian accessories or implements from bamboo, rattan, and other natural materials
