Word: guinea
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...weird scene even for the Stone Age world of New Guinea. Deliberately, several brown-skinned Melanesian tribesmen made their way down from the top of fog-shrouded Mount Turu. Strapped to the bamboo poles on their shoulders were two concrete survey markers that had been planted on the summit years ago by a U.S. Army team. Behind the bearers trudged 4,000 other natives from New Guinea's jungled East Sepik district, reciting the Roman Catholic rosary and clutching handfuls of precious mud that they had scooped from the mountaintop...
...procession ended at Yangoru, a village four miles from the mountain. The leader, a sometime policeman and Catholic mission employee named Yeliwan Matthias, 42, told the bearers to drop the stolen markers outside the local government post, part of Australia's administrative network in Northeast New Guinea. Then Yeliwan raised his eyes and wailed: "It all depends...
...week's end, neither the birds nor the jets had appeared. But even if they never show, the people of New Guinea's primitive north coast are not likely to abandon the so-called "cargo cult" -a conviction that if only the dark-skinned people can hit on the magic formula, they can, without working, acquire all the wealth and possessions that seem concentrated in the white world. Officials are forever trying to explain how the world uses labor, capital and raw materials to acquire its "cargo," but that is all so much hocus-pocus to the tribesmen...
...cult goes back to the mid-19th century, when Russian explorers and Christian missionaries arrived in New Guinea with a dazzling array of possessions. It really took hold during World War II, when all manner of amazing cargo came from the skies, dangling under American parachutes or carried to earth by huge silver birds...
...Guinea Pig. It was emphatically the wrong time for Kemmler, too. Dr. Alphonse David Rockwell was then advancing the notion that electrocution would be a humane method for executing criminals. Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse were noisily disputing the relative merits of direct and alternating current. Kemmler was a convenient guinea pig, and so became the first man ever to be executed by that new scientific wonder, electricity. Calling his hero-victim Rupert Weber to suit his fictional purposes, Davis takes the reader through the last months of Weber's life-his moods and his memories, fears and dreams...