Without a Trace

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In 1997 Manser and a friend tried to enter Malaysia from Singapore as part of a plan to buzz the Commonwealth Games, held that year in Kuala Lumpur, with a motorized hang glider. He was recognized at the border and turned back. The two men considered trying to swim across the Johor Straits, says his companion Jacques Christinet, but abandoned the plan when they realized the journey would involve a 25-km swim and passage through a swamp. A subsequent attempt to get into Sarawak by rowing a dingy from an Indonesian island had to be abandoned when Manser's campaign office, the Basel-based Bruno Manser Foundation, received a call from the Malaysian embassy warning him not to try. "Somehow they already knew exactly what we were planning," says Christinet, who now works as a mountain guide in the Swiss ski resort of Zermatt.

Undeterred, they traveled to Brunei the next year and swam across the 300-m-wide Limbang river in the middle of the night. Christinet was almost crushed by floating logs and gashed his leg deeply on a branch. "You could see the muscle and there was a lot of blood," Christinet comments, "but Bruno sewed it for me with a needle and thread." The two men spent three weeks in Sarawak, most of it hiding from police. They also pursued an abortive attempt to order four tons of 25-cm nails for the Penan to hammer into tree trunks, Christinet says. Similar tactics were employed by antilogging groups in the U.S. during the 1990s, sometimes resulting in severe injuries to loggers when chainsaws met the imbedded steel nails.

Christinet was also central to one of Manser's most futileand dangerous"actions," the descent of the 2.7-km-long funicular cable in Zermatt in 1996. The two men reached speeds of 140 km/h while hanging onto homemade riders constructed out of steel wheels and ball bearings. There was no clear purpose other than lodging a vague protest against global warming and the melting of glaciers, says Roger Graf, who was administering the Bruno Manser Foundation at the time. And the only media present was a Luxembourg TV station, which showed footage of the attempt without any explanatory commentary. For Graf, that was the last straw. He left the foundation soon after.

The Zermatt action was an apt precursor to Manser's last stunt, a 1999 flight above the Sarawak capital of Kuching in a motorized hang glider. It was another desperate move by a man who was increasingly becoming irrelevant. His numerous letters to the Sarawak Chief Minister Taib Mahmud pleading reconciliation or offering to fund a mobile dental clinic for the Penan were ignored.

And so Manser put on his brother Peter's wedding suit, found a briefcase and had his hair cut again. This time, he managed to make it into Kuching without being stopped and, on March 29, 1999, he flew over the city carrying a symbolic lamb he had knitted as a peace offering to the Chief Minister. (His original plan to bring a live lamb from Switzerland was aborted when Singapore Airlines refused to give the animal passage. There were also objections from animal rights activists among his friends.)

As soon as he landed, Manser was arrested and deported. Media coverage was spotty. While awaiting deportation in a Kuala Lumpur prison, his jailers were amused to see that Manser spent his time playing with the knitted lamb. A serious campaign for the rights and livelihoods of the Penan had descended into farce.

And so, Manser decided that he would make one last trip to see his Penan friends. "His goodbye was very different from other times," says Vosscer. "It was very open ended about how long he would have to stay in Sarawak. He said he was very tired."

Manser and John Kuenzli, the administrator of the Bruno Manser Foundation, spent several months in desultory travel around northern Kalimantan, gradually approaching the route that Manser would follow into Sarawak. They talked of various actions Manser might take when he came out, Kuenzli says, but never resolved anything. None of the schemes they discussedbringing a group of Penan to confront Malaysian politicians at an international timber conference, for exampleseemed sufficiently dramatic or effective.

Finally, the two men parted and Manser headed for Sarawak. His first intended stop: the holy mountain of Batu Lawi. After failing to climb it the first time, he told friends, he was determined to reach the summit.

The last two people to see Manser alive were a Penan named Paleu and his son. When the group of three came within view of Batu Lawi, Manser asked Paleu to leave him there. Manser said he was heading to Batu Lawi.

Melai Beluluk was a member of two of the five expeditions the Penan subsequently sent out to look for their friend. "We tracked him to the last sleeping place. We followed his machete cuts into the thick forest until the trail reached a swamp at the foot of Batu Lawi. There he disappeared. He didn't go back. We could find no trace of him in the swamp." Nor could they find any trace of anyone else coming through the area, such as possible assailants.

The Bruno Manser Foundation organized its own search party, which penetrated to the foot of Batu Lawi; a helicopter circled the rock. The expedition found nothing. One major gap in all the searches still remains, however: none of the search teams was ableor willingto follow Manser and scale the murderously difficult last 100 meters of sheer limestone that forms the tip of Batu Lawi.

Along segar needs help. a long time ago, he's not sure exactly when, he stepped on a rusty nail. The pain forced him to take a long trip to the nearest town for an injection. But now the pain is back, shooting up from his legs to his sides and chest and throat.

Forced out of the forest and into the baking sunlight of the logging road, the confident warrior has transformed into a weak and confused old man. He has put on a purple T shirt and blue shorts to hitch a ride with his wife Iot in a pickup truck to get some medical help. Usually voluble, Along falls silent, his face clenched in anxiety as they approach town. Now and then he inquires aloud whether there is any cash to pay for the hotel and the doctor. Along has no money; he never does. That's the way of the Penan.

The pickup driver, a native Dayak called Jake, says the two-ton logging trucks, each loaded with four or five huge logs, make a combined total of 168 trips a day. Each time a truck passes them, the open bed of the pickup is enveloped in a choking cloud of yellow dust. Along buries his head in his wife's white T shirt. He keeps his head pressed down long after the truck has passed, and several others have taken its place, refusing to watch, clinging onto Iot's shoulders. Perhaps it is better that Bruno Manser disappeared: the logging trucks have surrounded his best friend among the Penan, and they're not going away. Perhaps, that is exactly why Manser isn't here.