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"Gone," he told us. "All modern now." By which he meant that the people had come down out of the trees and that they now lived in clapboard houses with tin roofs. The children all went to school, the adults went to church, and everyone wore missionary-clothing-drive T-shirts and shorts. It wasn't that my book was incorrect: All this had happened in the five years since it was published. "Change is very fast now," William said.

So Cahill introduces us to one of the streaming themes of his piece -- and then immediately takes that theme from the particular to the universal.

That change -- the homogenization of humanity -- seems to be the direction of history. There is a certain sad inevitability about it all. For the upriver people in the Asmat, it happens like this: Missionaries come, followed by the government in the form of soldiers and policemen and bureaucrats. And then the multinational developers arrive, hard on the heels of the government, and they promise a better life to anyone who wants to log the forest and farm the waste. Perhaps the development would involve mining or petrochemical exploration, but the result has always been the same. Everywhere. The living culture is entombed within museums.

The history of the world, in a few sentences. Cahill presses on:

Still, William explained, if we wanted to go farther upriver, deeper into the swamp, he knew of some people who still lived in the trees, people who used stone tools and were largely ignorant of the outside world. If this was, in fact, the case -- the irony wasn't lost on me -- I would be an agent of the changes that offended my romantic notions of human diversity. I would personally entomb some of the living cultures in prose, and Chris [the photographer accompanying Cahill] would document it on film. Perhaps, several generations down the line, young people in the Asmat would study his photographs in an attempt to understand what had happened to them.

So there you have it, in three paragraphs: the history of the world and the paradox at the heart of adventure travel -- and at the heart of Tim Cahill's chosen quest.

What Cahill is creating here is rings within rings, like the trunk of a tree. There is the ring of the town, the ring of soulless art and genuine art, the ring of Michael Rockefeller, the ring of human societal evolution. One ring leads to another, which leads to another -- each one containing its own little story and message, and each one deepening the meaning and significance of the ones that preceded it. In this way, he is crafting an exceedingly rich and complicated tale, of overlapping layers.

We journey with Cahill upriver and arrive at a village where the houses are set on stilts. The visitors are received in an atmosphere of distrust -- remember the missionaries, the government -- and when the travelers ask the chief if he has any human skulls, there is a silence pregnant with suspicion. For a fee, he says, he will look for them, but he returns empty-handed. He's misplaced them, he says; he just doesn't know where they are.

The incident prompts Cahill to recall an earlier visit to another stilt village where a skull had been shown them, and where the owner had demonstrated how men use the skulls as pillows, for they are the most potent deterrents to evil spirits.

Rings within rings.

The journey, the narrative, continues. And as on any journey, the longer we look, the more we see.

When they first begin their voyage, Cahill writes: "The forest overhung the river and it seemed to me, in my ignorance, all of a piece: unvariegated greenery."

Now, some days into the journey, he writes:

William spent several hours teaching me to finally see the swamp. The tall trees? The ones over there that grow from a single white-barked trunk and have elephant-ear-size leaves? Those are called sukun, and the Karowai eat the fruit, which is a little like coconut.

Stands of bamboo often grew on the banks of the river, in a green starburst pattern that arched out over the water. Banana trees also grew in a starburst pattern of wide flat leaves. They reached heights of seven or eight feet, and yielded small three- and four-inch-long bananas.

Rattan, a long tough vine used to lash homes together, to string bows, or to tie off anything that needed tying -- the local equivalent of duct tape -- was identifiable as a slender leafless branch, generally towering up out of a mass of greenery like an antenna.

Sago, the staple food, was a kind of palm tree that grew twenty to thirty feet high, in a series of multiple stems that erupted out of a central base in another starburst pattern. The leaves were shaped like the arching banana leaves but were arranged in fronds ...

So -- sukun, rattan, bamboo, banana, sago -- the forest was no longer a mass of unvariegated green. Naming things allowed me to see them, to differentiate one area of the swamp from another. I found myself confirming my newfound knowledge at every bend of the river. "Banana, banana," I informed everyone. "Sukun, sago, sago, rattan, sago, bamboo ..."

So, in clear, admirably precise and simple prose, Cahill teaches us his lessons about the forest. But he isn't content to leave it at that. He takes the process one step further:

William, like any good teacher, seemed proud enough of my accomplishment for the first half hour or so, then the process began to wear on him. I was like some five-year-old on a drive in the country, pointing out every cow in the pasture to his weary parents.

With one deft observation, Cahill wonderfully brings this exotic lesson back into a human context all of us can understand -- and embodies those exemplary qualities of humor and humility that allow him to enter into the heart of the swamp.

Next page | Up in a tree with Tim Cahill