ABSTRACT
The Pinnacle villagers had warned me about the Earth People. Dangerous and unpredictable strangers to the coast, they were no friends to a White. Immediately I arrived in this fishing village to look at local understandings of health and sickness, I had been told about the community established nine miles away, which its members knew as the Valley of Decision or Hell Valley. A few weeks afterwards I happened to see three of them exchanging sacks of coconuts for a cutlass in one of the village stores; they looked at me with surprised disdain (I was the only White along the coast except for the two Irish Dominicans at Toco), but otherwise ignored me. A few months later I took the opportunity to join some of the villagers on a Government forestry expedition into the bush near the Earth People, both to see the forest and mountains but also, it was evident, to visit the Valley.
