Lost in Shangri-La: Escape from a Hidden World - A True Story. MItchell Zuckoff

on the C-60’s control wheel. He guided the long-nosed, twin-engine plane over the ridge and down into a canyon. Easing back the plane’s two throttle levers, he reduced power and remained below the billowing white clouds that shrouded the highest peaks. Pilots had nightmares about this sort of terrain. An occupational hazard of flying through what Elsmore called the ‘innocent white walls’ of clouds was the dismal possibility that a mountain might be hiding inside. Few pilots in the Army Air Forces knew those dangers better than Elsmore.

      At fifty-three years old, energetic and fit enough to pass for a decade younger, Elsmore resembled the actor Gene Kelly. The son of a carpenter, he had been a flying instructor during the First World War, after which he had spent more than a decade delivering air mail through the Rocky Mountains. With the Second World War looming, Elsmore returned to military service and, when the war started, he immediately proved his worth. In March 1942, Elsmore arranged General MacArthur’s evacuation flight from the besieged island of Corregidor in Manila Bay to the safety of Australia. Later he became director of air transport for the Southwest Pacific, delivering troops and supplies wherever MacArthur needed them in New Guinea, the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies, Borneo, Australia, and the western Solomon Islands.

      Colonel Ray Elsmore.

      As Elsmore and Grimes flew deeper into the canyon, they could see the walls growing steeper and narrower, steadily closing in on the plane’s wingtips. Elsmore steered around a bend, trying to stay in the middle of the canyon to maximize clearance on both sides of the twenty-metre wingspan. Straight ahead he saw a horrifying sight: a sheer rock wall. Elsmore grabbed both throttle levers. He began to thrust them forward, trying to gain full power as he prepared to veer up and away. But Grimes urged otherwise.

      ‘Push on through,’ the major said. ‘The valley is just beyond.’

      Surveying the situation with only seconds to spare, travelling at more than 320 kilometres per hour, Elsmore chose to trust his twenty-four-year-old co-pilot. He followed Grimes’s instructions, slicing his way over the onrushing ridge and just beneath the overhanging clouds.

      Safely in the clear, Elsmore saw a break in the puffy clouds. Spread out before them was a place their maps said didn’t exist, a rich valley Elsmore later called ‘a riot of dazzling color’. The land was largely flat, giving him a clear view of its full breadth – nearly forty-eight kilometres long and in places more than twelve kilometres wide, running northwest to southeast. Much of the valley was carpeted by tall, sharp kunai grass, waist-high in spots, interrupted by occasional stands of trees. Surrounding it were sheer mountain walls with jagged ridges rising to the clouds.

      At the southeastern end, a river cascaded over a cliff to enter the valley. More than thirty metres wide in spots, it snaked through the valley, interrupted by occasional rapids before, at the valley’s northwestern end, the cocoa-coloured river disappeared into an enormous hole in the mountain wall that formed a natural grotto, its upper arch some ninety metres above the ground.

      Even more remarkable than the valley’s physical splendour were its inhabitants: tens of thousands of people who lived as their ancestors had since the Stone Age.

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      Peering down through the cockpit windows, Elsmore and Grimes saw several hundred small, clearly defined native villages. Surrounding the native compounds were carefully tended gardens, with primitive but effective irrigation systems, including dams and drainage ditches. ‘Crops were in full growth everywhere and, unlike the scene in most tropic lands, the fields were literally alive with men, women, and children, all hard at work,’ Elsmore marvelled.

      Men and boys roamed naked except for hollowed-out gourds covering their genitals; women and girls wore only low-slung fibre skirts. As he flew on, mesmerized by the scene below him, Elsmore watched the natives scatter at the sight and sound of the roaring airplane, ‘some crawling under the sweet potato vines and others diving into the drainage ditches’. Pigs wandered around the compounds, and Elsmore caught sight of a few black dogs lazing about.

      At the edges of large, open fields, Elsmore noticed spindly towers made from lashed-together poles rising some nine metres or more above the valley floor. Each tower had a platform for a sentry near the top, and some towers had small grass roofs, to shelter the sentries from the sun. Elsmore pushed the control wheel forward, to guide the plane lower for a better look. He guessed, correctly, that they were watchtowers to guard against marauding enemies. As the C-60 flew on, the thrumming noise of its twelve-hundred-horsepower engines bounced off the valley floor and mountain walls. Frightened sentries abandoned their posts, climbed down the towers, and ran to nearby huts. Elsmore saw wooden spears more than four metres long leaning against those huts.

      A native village photographed from the air by Colonel Ray Elsmore.

      Elsmore snapped a few photographs, focusing on the people and their huts, some of them round like toadstools or thatched-roof ‘igloos’, he thought, and others long and narrow like boxcars. ‘The panorama of these hundreds of villages from the air is one of the most impressive sights I have ever seen,’ he wrote afterwards.

      He and Grimes had a mission to complete, so Elsmore pulled back on the control wheel and roared up and out of the valley. He pointed the plane southeast and flew some 320 kilometres to another potential site for a landing strip, in an area called Ifitamin.

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      Several days later, Elsmore wrote a secret memo on his findings to his commanding officer, General George C. Kenney. The memo described the survey flights and paid special attention to the valley and the people in it. Major Grimes had called his discovery ‘Hidden Valley’, but in the memo Elsmore referred to it in less poetic terms. He called it the ‘Baliem Valley’, using the name of the river that flowed through it.

      One concern Elsmore expressed to General Kenney about building a landing strip was the reaction of the natives. ‘There is no access into this valley … except by air, and for that reason very little is known of the attitude of the natives. It is known that there are headhunters in many of the adjacent regions and there is a suspicion that the natives in the Baliem Valley may also be unfriendly,’ he wrote. Also in the memo, Elsmore issued an ominous warning to fellow pilots who might follow him there. He described at length how treacherous it could be to fly through the cloud-covered pass into the valley, especially ‘for a pilot unfamiliar with this canyon’.

      As it turned out, by any name Hidden Valley or Baliem Valley was unsuitable for a military landing strip. At 1600 metres above sea level, surrounded by mountains reaching 4000 metres and higher, it was too dangerous and inaccessible. Also, there was a better alternative. Elsmore learned that an Australian missionary had found the natives at Ifitamin to be friendly and eager to be put to work. This was more suitable for Elsmore’s plan. ‘Not only were we anxious to avoid incidents and bloodshed’ – believed to be a strong possibility with the natives of Hidden/Baliem Valley – ‘but we wanted to employ native labor on the construction project.’

      Although the valley could serve no military purpose, news of its discovery spread quickly around Hollandia and beyond. Interest heightened when Elsmore began telling people that he thought the valley’s inhabitants looked much taller and larger than any other New Guinea natives he had seen. Elsmore’s impressions contributed to fast-spreading stories, or more accurately, tall tales, that Hidden Valley was populated by a previously unknown race of primitive giants. Some called them black supermen – handsome models of sinewy manhood standing over two metres tall. Soon the natives were said to be headhunters and cannibals, savages who practised human sacrifice on stone altars. The pigs the natives raised were said to be the size of ponies. The bare-breasted native women were said to resemble the curvaceous pin-up girls in soldiers’ barracks, especially the exotic, sarong-wearing actress Dorothy Lamour, whose hit movies included The Jungle Princess.

      In time, the stories multiplied, largely because no one could contradict any claim, no matter how outlandish. And it seemed as though the stories would remain unchallenged.