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I first heard mention of the “Many-Legged God” while traveling Papua New Guinea in preparation for writing my dissertation in 2010. Seated around a fire with several elders of a remote highland village, our interview had stretched long into the night, and the full moon above cast the tree-shrouded cliffs in an ethereal glow. There was a lull in the conversation, and I allowed my eyes to wander the landscape. When I lingered on the deep ravine below, its path winding through a canyon into some farther valley obscured by the green canopy, one of the elders pointed and shook his head.
Only bad could come of looking upon the home of the Many-Legged God, he had told me. Better to dwell on good things, among friends. They had refused to elaborate in detail, only saying that a much-hated tribe dwelt in the hidden valley, and that they practiced foul customs which the highlanders abhorred.
In a land wracked by inter-tribal conflict with many richly varied beliefs in witchcraft, I took it in stride. Even today, stories about cannibalism and trophy heads are told in the harsh, remote reaches of the massive island. I assumed that this was another case of two clans of ancient enemies feuding with one another, and didn’t give it much thought. I wrapped up my trip over the next month and returned to the states with copious notes on language and customs close at hand.
Only in late 2017 did I happen across that strange name again. The old journal of an armed guard for a surveying expedition had been uncovered in a forgotten corner of Papua’s national museum, and a contact I made during my trips to the country asked if I was interested in translating the document. Given this meant I had first access to the artifact, I jumped at the chance to distract myself from the monotony of teaching.
It’s necessary to dive into the history the journal describes for context, but I’ll keep it brief. Early in 1914, an expedition was dispatched by the German Empire’s colonial government in Papua New Guinea to survey the interior of the northeastern corner of the island, known at that time as Kaiser-Wilhelmsland. The hundred or so men involved would continue their survey despite the beginning of the first world war, avoiding Australian capture in the wilderness long after the colony had fallen into allied hands.
Hermann Detzner, who led the expedition, published a memoir of the experience in the wake of the conflict. Filled with stretched truths, it resembled an adventure novel more than a scientific study. Ethnographers and anthropologists have long held it to be mostly fiction, a tall tale woven by a brave but immodest man. The expedition’s few surviving members were either natives intent on keeping quiet or shocked German youths desperate to forget the hardships of the road, with disease and hostile tribes having taken their toll on the wandering surveyors. No other known accounts have been given of this expedition, making this lone, water-stained journal the last remnant of a long-dead adventure.
Its narrator had been Friedrich Hoetzendorf, a freshly-graduated engineering student from Munich. The account was mostly logistical, dry and boring, listing miles traveled and supplies used. Occasional clashes with hostile locals were usually avoided by negotiation, and the few early pages containing personal musings are spent complaining about mosquitoes and the omnipresent heat. It remained this way until late 1916, when the expedition reached a highland village which Friedrich named as ‘ancient tree’ in German. I recognized the name, though today the title was spoken in Papua’s Tok Pisin pidgin language. Then, Friedrich raised further memories when he wrote of the odd legends villagers told of a Many-Legged God who ruled the lower valleys.
As I drew the connection to my own past wanderings, I read that Friedrich and several younger members of the expedition had gotten a village elder drunk on rationed schnapps. During this night of drinking, they had been regaled with stories by the old man about the twisted inhabitants of the valley and the high civilization they supposedly boasted. The valley-dwellers lived in buildings of stone and wore trinkets of gold, the old man had insisted, unlike anything I’ve ever heard described on the island.
Friedrich ends the account of the night with a depiction of a gold totem the elder produced as proof. Supposedly taken as a trophy of war after a clash with the valley-dwellers, it had been sketched on the following page with careful grace. This drawing resembled a centipede coiled into a spiral, its seemingly eyeless head at the center. The craftsmanship was described as superb, but the expedition’s offers to buy the totem went unaccepted, and Friedrich left the village empty-handed.
The rest of the journal, methodical and meticulous, revealed no more about the Many-Legged God. The valley was fast left behind and worries about Australian pursuit drove away any speculation about what the out-of-place idol might mean. I was far removed from worrying about Australian search parties, however. The nagging feeling that I was at the cusp of something undiscovered would not let me forget so easily.
I droned on through my classes until the summer relieved me of distractions, my mind lingering on that tree-shrouded valley in faraway Papua. Despite how little evidence I had at hand, the whole story which had built up in my mind seemed too tempting to ignore. Moreover, the tale seemed genuine, for the fear in the voices of my old hosts rang clear through my memory every time I looked upon that sketch of the idol in the journal. I wouldn’t be able to convince the university to fund this little expedition, dangerous and controversial as the study of uncontacted cultures could be, but that was alright with me. I didn’t mind tapping into my savings for what might just be the find of my career.
After flying into the capital, I bedded down for several nights to rest up and purchase supplies. The heat was particularly oppressive that June, and the usually hectic Port Moresby seemed almost sleepy beneath its weight. I bought simple provisions, mostly rice and preserves, and tried to enjoy what peace I could before what I knew would be an arduous journey.
On the final night, I confided in several friends from the national museum, showing them where I was headed and giving them a rough timetable for my return. Then, with my equipment studiously packed and laid out at the foot of my hotel bed, I slumbered peacefully for perhaps the last time in my life.
I’ve often dwelt on that final evening in Port Moresby, wondering if the experience which followed would’ve been made more bearable if I had walked a different path. I had wholly abandoned the idea of bringing grad students or professional friends along on my trip. A longtime curator at the museum, excited at the retelling of my story, had offered to accompany me, but I had turned my friend down. The inland regions of Papua could be unpredictable, as we all knew, and I didn’t want to put anyone else at risk.
This was my gamble to make, I reasoned. What a fool I was to make it.
A short morning flight to Lae, a murky industrial port on the northern coast, was followed by a long bus ride up into the highlands. The sun-kissed warmth of the lowland coasts was steadily devoured by the stifling humidity of the conifer forests in the highlands. The towering trees crowded in to cast their shadows over the road, and the ferns and scrub reared up to blot out the spaces between. This blanket of ancient woodland was only broken when the road wound up to the mountainous heights, where grassy rock-strewn cliffs and slopes jutted from the trees down below. When the bus at last rumbled to a stop that night in the highland town of Usino, a local chartered jeep carried me overnight east into the hills, bumping over winding dirt roads and between jagged mountain passes. As the sun rose, I was jolted awake by the driver to find myself in that same memory-haunted village, unchanged by the intervening years and swirling with yet more vibrant mystery than it had boasted in my intrepid youth.
The village of the ancient tree had not forgotten me, it seemed. Jokowa, a gregarious elder nearing a century’s age, greeted me warmly. He remembered my interviews, and the studious interest I’d taken in the region’s many clans. He took me into his home and told me about the many family squabbles and marriages which had filled the intervening years, the woodsmoke scent of the traditional dwelling whisking me away to happier times. We ate a modest lunch, and a much more grandiose dinner, the village going out of its way to make me comfortable. All the while, though, I awaited the perfect moment to produce the old sketch of that strange golden idol.
Only when the grandchildren and great grandchildren had retired and the elders once more ringed the fire did I remove the copy I’d made of that damnable idol’s image. I almost at once felt guilty, for Jokowa recoiled from it, as if it might leap from the page to bite him. Initially, he refused to answer my questions about the old journal and the golden totem, but eventually, he broke into practiced English, ensuring his words couldn’t be understood by his fellow villagers at the fireside.
Jokowa told me that the village’s oral tradition held the idol to be over five hundred years old, and affirmed that it was supposedly the spoils of a raid of some kind. He told me that his grandfather had been the one to meet with the Detzner expedition, and that the elder had sunk the wicked totem in a nearby lake in fear that the Europeans would return looking for those who had forged it. The whole affair had left the community desperate to keep the abhorred valley-dwellers unknown and sequestered in their wooded holdfast, forgotten by all save the highlanders who watched them.
“There were three clans who watched, at first,” Jokowa told me, his solemn eyes on the glowing embers beneath us. “One left in the forties, to find work in the city. The next village moved to the coast, took up farming and fishing. We’re the only ones who remember. We are the last that still believe.”
Jokowa proceeded to tell me that it was much more than comfortable stubbornness which kept his people on the hills overlooking the shadowed vale. It was they who had begun the practice of watching the valley, and they who kept it safe. By long tradition, they posted warriors at the mouth of the crag leading in, and burnt back the brush which guarded the entrance. Sun and moonlight were poison to the pale things in the valley, he said, and the whole clearing in the woodland at the valley’s edge was specifically cut to ward off any wandering the wretches might do in the dead of night.
Long ago, when firearms had made their way into circulation on the island, the valley-dwellers had been brought to heel. The stalemate between the twisted tribe within the valley and the highland villages that contained them had become one-sided. Seldom did the things creep from their accursed dwellings in the dark Earth below, and this was just how Jokowa wanted it to stay. Now, only occasional sweeps of the valley were made, yearly incursions into the shadow to ensure the ancient enemy was kept cowering in the dark.
Jokowa wasn’t shocked when I did what curiosity demanded by asking whether I could try and enter the valley. His expression was pained, more with pity than irritation. He reiterated the dangers, telling me that the tribes I sought weren’t entirely human. They were vicious, heartless devourers of men. He conferred with his fellow elders, who each shared stories in their native tongue of horrible legends passed from father to son about the terrors which lurked in the valley, from cannibalism to twisted rituals and effigies of bone beneath the trees.
Again, I was faced with a chance to disengage, to abandon my scholarly interest in an undescribed and unique culture and settle for a calm and collected week recording legends with Jokowa in the safety of the village. Again, that foolish ivory tower certainty pulled me along towards the undiscovered, and I declined to heed Jokowa’s words.
After a last round of questions among the elders, Jokowa laid out the terms. His people, after all, controlled the sole entrance and exit to the valley, and only with his blessing could I set foot in the hated chasm.
“There will be no recording, no pictures or film,” Jokowa ordered. “Your experience is your own.”
I protested, telling him that documentation of so isolated a group was the purpose of my journey, but he insisted.
“There are dark things beneath the Earth,” he told me, wizened face dancing in the dim firelight. “I will not let you to bring word of them to the wider world. You will sate your own curiosity and, if you survive the Many-Legged God, return home with legends no settled man would believe.”
Jokowa grinned. Again, the gesture was soft, sympathetic. I got the feeling he imagined I wouldn’t return. I mulled it over, weighing my need to find the truth.
“I accept,” I told him at last, my eyes darting for the open end of the hut and the moonlit treetops in the valley beyond.
“Very well,” Jokowa nodded. “We will show you down at sunrise.”
​
I had always known danger was a distinct likelihood, but as I trudged down rough slopes behind seasoned hunters and fighters who jumped at each broken branch while the shadows deepened around us, the drive for discovery which had brought me so far began to ebb. With dawn’s light being swallowed up by sheer rock walls and towering trees, the old bolt-action rifle Jokowa had insisted I carry seemed thin protection indeed.
At length, our band of intrepid intruders came through the suffocating ferns into the open air of a clearing. Opposite us, the jagged stone walls of the chasm leading into the valley loomed out from the morning mist, looking for all the world like some long-abandoned fortress from a dark fantasy novel. Tokua, Jokowa’s imposing grandson, strode forward the last fifty yards or so at my side while the others held back like gawkers watching the condemned.
“Stay above ground,” Tokua urged, his wide eyes meeting mine for perhaps the first time that morning. “You don’t want to get caught in closed spaces. They move fast.”
He shook his head, looking up along the switchback path towards the village. I thought he might try to dissuade me one last time, but he never gave voice to the words. Instead, he simply reiterated the warning of his grandfather, urging me to be out of the valley by nightfall. Then, the group departed in silence, leaving me to gather my courage in the shadow of that ominous chasm.
Only in the absence of other people did I realize how silent the primordial forest had fallen. The quiet was broken here and there by the distant call of some hunting bird far above, but that was small consolation. I glanced one last time at the notebook that contained my writings on the Detzner expedition, rallying my thoughts and reminding myself how fortunate I was to be confronted by so potent a mystery. At last, I hoisted my pack onto my shoulders, readied my rifle as best my unpracticed hands knew how, and strode into the misty-mouthed canyon.
During my education, I’d been fortunate enough to wander some incredibly old megalithic sites in Sumatra and Java, an experience at once intriguing and depressing. The long-dead ambience of those jungle-eaten temples and monuments reared by centuries-dead civilizations can make an onlooker feel as if they stand at the cusp of a mass grave. This chasm was somehow much worse, lonelier than anything I’ve ever experienced.
I pushed past fetishes and totems of wood and bone, produced by Jokowa’s highlanders and placed with ritual caution to ward off the evil said to dwell within. In chalk-like pigment, they had etched glyphs and figures upon the walls, mock warriors poised to throw back anything which might dare stand against them. Overhead, trees on the slopes above the chasm seemed to lean in to devour the sky, drowning the crag in semi-darkness. I produced the powerful flashlight I had brought along, shocked at how blinding the shadow had become, ever glancing towards the distant canopy and never once catching sight of the azure morning beyond. Then, the chasm opened up on the valley proper, and I was greeted with a sight which should never have been seen.
The space was relatively thin, some one or two hundred yards across, but stretched away into the mists for many times that distance. Several small streams fell in babbling procession from the sheer stone walls and pooled in a clear pond at the center, breaking the droning silence of the chasm. Up above, on the battlements of the rough stone slopes, mighty trees twisted and intertwined at obscene angles to form a living ceiling, their bulk and range of growth seeming beyond reason. Despite all this evocative scenery playing out beneath the beam of my flashlight, it was the walls themselves that stopped my heart in my chest.
Set into the reddish stone of the valley’s edges, great glowering faces had been carved. They were abstract and elongated, their twisted contours carefully smoothed and rounded. Their mouths and eyes opened onto what I at first took to be small alcoves for display or storage. Upon drawing nearer, I saw that the mouths were doors, awkwardly raised from the ground below and allowing access to the interiors of buildings carved into the rock.
Immediately, I made for my notebooks, sketching their forms as best I could by glow of the flashlight. I might not be able to take photos, but this was too otherworldly a find not to record. Nothing of this sort had ever been found on the island. Indeed, I could think of nothing similar the world over. Turkey’s Cappadocia and Jordan’s Petra come to mind when one mentions underground communities or construction, but these faces were positively chilling.
I could at once understand why the place had such a terrible reputation among the locals. Despite the grace of their construction, the buildings were intimidating, the valley seeming observed from all angles by its unliving guardians. The stonework looked old, to my trained eye, eaten away in places despite the concise cover of the canopy above. Whether the years were measured in centuries or millennia, I could not tell. Given what I was to learn in that time-forgotten hell, I cannot help but assume the latter.
Nearly an hour passed before I mustered up the courage to enter one of those awful carven faces. I wandered the valley, finding it a great avenue of near-identical sculptures, with only the streams and pond to break its symmetrical layout. The remnants of what I took to be gardens of some kind rested here and there among the entrances, empty patches of raised soil perhaps used to raise lichen or fungi in the damp dark of the valley floor. Occasionally, slightly luminescent crickets leapt from my path, the sole sign of life in the unmoving tomb. At last, though, I could stall no longer, and forced myself to clamber clumsily up into one of the open mouths.
The rake of my flashlight across the far side revealed a circular chamber, its walls expertly shaped but left rough and textured to the touch. Its high, domed ceiling grew incredibly low near the floor, which itself buckled inward unevenly like a bowl, making the whole space into a kind of flattened sphere.
At the center, there was a firepit and several raised plinths I took to be stools, and along the curved walls alcoves wracked with dust housed pottery and sculptures of treated clay. Some, upon closer inspection, turned out to be blown glass, speaking to a high proficiency among the craftsmen of this undescribed people. Almost all were shaped like crawling or curling millipedes or centipedes, giving credence to the century-old sketch of Friedrich, with the few outliers generally being insect or arthropod in nature.
Only when I had done several circuits of the room did I accidently bring the beam of my light directly across the sunken firepit. The whole of the room’s ceiling lit up like a signboard, making me jump like a stricken animal. I had to collect myself before I fully realized what had happened and brought the beam back to focus on the pit. Its leaden interior, coated in some sort of dull metal soot-stained by spent fires, reflected upon an unbelievably intricate network of multicolored quartz which had been meticulously inlaid upon the ceiling. The lines formed many elongated men, dancing or posing around a vast coiled centipede, much the same as the one represented in gold those many years ago.
I spent some time sketching the image, marveling at the grace of its contours and the play of my light off the dazzling quartz. I imagined how it must have shimmered in the flickering light of a fire, seeming to shift and waver on a smoke-shrouded ceiling. Then, with a final scan of the stunning chamber, I proceeded through one of several low round doorways set into the wall. The smooth leather divider which had once served as a curtain, chewed to tatters by the march of time, pulled away to reveal an almost identical chamber next door. All around the valley, these dwellings or ritual chambers formed a sort of communal hive, interconnected and accessible, hinting at close clan or familial bonds among the missing inhabitants.
Toward the rear of the dwellings, heading deeper into the rock, small rough-walled tubes had been carved, usually leading into musty, cramped depressions littered with desiccated old rags of a strange, dark fabric. These I took to be bedrooms or meditation chambers, secluded cubbies where the inhabitants could curl up and ruminate on the issues that faced them. Sometimes, though, the tunnels wound off around tight corners, seeming to weave out of view and deeper into the stone below.
Try as I might, I could not bring myself to crawl into these tunnels. The warnings I had received about the darkness which lurked below ground played a part, but I was equally concerned about the claustrophobic awkwardness of the angles and slopes in the tunnel. Fascinating as the valley was, the oppressive mood it inspired was undeniable. The subdued clamor of the waters outside served to coat the shadows in a masking white noise, and the feeling that I was not alone had grated on me more than once as my boots echoed across the stone. I had no desire to become trapped on some slick incline in the dark beneath my feet, my cries for help reverberating down into the unknowable depths.
As it happened, the surface held one final, groundbreaking find for me. When at last I reached the end of the valley, I discovered the building there to be different than the others. It was much larger, with an oval interior soaring cathedral-like overhead, the shadowed floor covered with raised plinths or stools like the ones I’d seen before. The walls were covered in curved shelving carved into the stone, laden with clay tablets in impeccable condition.
On these tablets, a series of elongated triangular depressions formed a language of some kind, its patterns making it unmistakable. Though whatever linguistic tradition had birthed this otherworldly writing was alien to me, I speculate it was legible as both a visual and textural language, allowing its readers to feel its words in the dark, much like braille.
So exhilarated was I by the discovery of etched writing that I made it almost halfway round the room eyeing the shelves before I noticed the effigy looming at the far end. I had at first taken it to be a statue in the shadows, a massive recreation of the smaller clay and glass sculptures the modest dwellings had displayed. When my light played off its jagged form, I realized its contours were of bone rather than stone.
Lashed by leather or skin with meticulous care, femurs and ribs made up the legs and carapace of a great, writhing centipede. It was reared like a striking cobra, its legs outstretched and flailing, its ivory bulk having towered over the raised stone stools that decorated the floor. Protruding from the place where a head should have been was a centaur-like assemblage of bones that preserved the shape of a man, with the long spine bent and its arms outstretched towards the floor below. Its skull, slightly above eye-level with me when standing before it, looked out over the room with unseeing sockets. Something about its proportions struck me as wrong, perhaps speaking to some deformity or birth defect, but I was too unnerved by the structure to draw in for a closer look.
The giant idol was a wicked thing, and I gave it a wide berth. Though as an anthropologist I told myself my revulsion was born of unfamiliarity with the practices of an unfamiliar culture, that student’s mantra didn’t ease the harsh glare of the unseeing skull scanning the room. I focused instead on the shelves and tablets, gathering those which looked most intact into my bag and wrapping them in wax paper, hoping Jokowa would understand my need to preserve these potentially priceless clay tomes. After all, if the highlanders had actually wiped out the valley-dwellers, then these were the last testament to the community which had been built in the darkness of their sheltered, misty vale.
Then, a very different kind of text came into view. It was a modern supply log, many decades old, rotten and torn. This stranger in a landscape of strange texts had been slipped in among the tablets, just one more tome among the collated knowledge of the Many-Legged God. I suppressed my excitement, and removed it as tenderly as was possible, donning plastic gloves to handle the delicate pages within.
By the light of my flashlight, scored by the soft symphony of the slow streams and chirping crickets outside, I saw that the text was in the French language. Though I speak many tongues, my French was mostly garnered in grade school. Still, collating that layman’s grasp with a solid understanding of Latin, I could make out the gist of most of it. A missionary, ostensibly catholic, was keeping record of supplies and funds being used to establish wells, clinics, and churches in the highlands. The few legible dates in the log placed its origin sometime in the early fifties, and its contents seemed mundane. Then, the pages ceased to be lists, and became something altogether more terrible.
In hurried scrawl which demanded herculean effort to decipher, the missionary wrote of a raid on the wagon which had been carrying their supplies. He described the slaughter of their horses and the capture of he and his companion in the shadowy dusk, another missionary named LaSalle. More chilling was the shaky description of his captors, etched in handwriting made jagged by frayed nerves and spiked adrenaline.
The things he described were men, but stretched beyond reason, gaunt and disturbingly tall. They had moved with a grace he described as disgusting, likening the way their elongated limbs and spines worked to the way a spider’s legs skittered. Their faces, he said, were the worst, sunken and marble-pale. Their heads had no ears, instead boasting great sunken pads that vibrated with every snapped twig or soft footfall. Their massive eyes, almost entirely pupils, danced in electric light like those of animals above mouths of needle-like teeth.
They had dragged them away, the narrator wrote, into a valley I took to be the very one in which I stood. The ghouls, as he termed them, had branded and marked the skin of their captives before ritually butchering LaSalle beneath an effigy of bone. What the writer called their ‘monster’ had taken LaSalle, an offering of flesh for a hungry god. The writer, assuming he was being saved for another ritual the following night, had scrawled these words in hiding, hoping his fellow missionaries might learn what had befallen them. They’d obviously never found them, and the fate that befell the log’s owner was easy to imagine.
I turned my gaze to the idol once more, drawing in to examine that malformed skull, the missionary’s words etched into my memory. The stone beneath it was dark and stained, ancient offerings long ago having blackened the ground. Suddenly, the proportions made sense, the saucer eyes and the gaping cavities where ears should sit coming into sharper focus. It was so close to human, yet so abysmally different. Those who look on Neanderthal or the popularly-named ‘hobbit’ and find them uncanny need only look upon the children of the Many-Legged God to experience true repulsion.
As my mind reeled, trying to piece together what I was seeing, I caught a flicker of movement above me, at the edge of my light. I looked up, and at once understood what it was to be an ensnared fly watching the hungry approach of the spider.
Through a decorated crevice high above in the masonry of the ceiling, is gigantic body contoured to examine the room beneath it, a massive centipede had crawled. It was impossibly large, several feet wide and dozens of feet in length, far larger than any such thing should ever be able to grow. Its antennae wriggled mere inches above my head, twitching as it blindly searched for the prey which had so carelessly stumbled into its temple.
I screamed. As I stumbled out from beneath the creature and frantically dashed for the exit, I didn’t have time to consider how foolish that cry had been. My only thoughts were of the pass to the sunlit forest beyond the valley, and the muted clatter of chitinous limbs on the stone behind me as the Many-Legged God gave chase. It was not until I burst from the temple into the near-blackness of the vale that I realized how costly that scream had been.
Skittering from the once-vacant mouths of those glowering faces and through cracks on the cliff face above with a flexibility and ease that seemed supernatural, the valley-dwellers came. They moved on all fours, bent at the back to allow their overextended arms to aid in propelling them along the ground. Their legs jolted like a frog’s, twisting at painful angles, their pallid skin translucent with the purple tinge of bulging veins. Blades of flint or obsidian were clasped in their hands, but it was those glinting, bulging eyes that made my blood run coldest.
I sprinted, the centipede-thing left somewhere behind me as it hesitated to leave its dark temple, its dozens of servants loping in to meet me. I skirted the edge of the pond, moving faster than I’d ever moved, but realized there was no way to outpace the things near the exit. They already closed in across the pass, barring my way, hopping forward to meet me at the pond’s edge. I focused on them as I neared, preparing to fight, considering whether it was too late to swing the rifle down from my shoulder and attempt a shot.
The two between me and the pass shrieked, an awful hyena-like sound made with vocal organs alien to our own. The light of my flashlight’s beam was on them, and they stumbled over themselves to avert their eyes. Glottal and hacking, I thought I heard breaks in their cries, something that I now assume was language. I wheeled around, bringing the light to bear on the things approaching my side of the pond, driving them to their knees and setting the whole mob to shrieking.
I wasted no time, starting up my sprint again, waving the beam at any who drew too close, thrown rocks whistling past my head as the things yowled their fury at the light. As I pressed through the pass, I kept the light angled over my shoulder, ever aware of the coyote-like chorus in pursuit. Only when I stumbled out into the late afternoon sun of the meadow and put a thirty second run between myself and the valley’s mouth did I dare look back. I curse that I did, for I would certainly sleep more soundly if I’d spared myself that last, eerie image.
Deep in shadow, hanging from the rock with tapering fingers as if they had been born to the stone, the valley-dwellers decorated the walls of the chasm. They hung at varying heights, visible as still silhouettes more than solid shapes in the gloom. Their eyes caught the ambient glow of the sun upon the meadow, and gleamed hungrily after the foolish soul they’d sought for prey.
​
In the years since my fortunate flight from that night-cloaked vale, I’ve ceased to be an anthropological interventionist. When the argument arises whether the hands-on or hands-off approach is best when dealing with documentation of uncontacted or undescribed cultures, I always advise the academy to keep far away.
I’ll tell colleagues who ask why so great a shift has taken place in my stances that preservation through awareness has proven fallible in my eyes. I’ll opine that the uncontacted are better protected by their isolation than they could ever be by documentation. If ever the true rationale got out, my academic credibility would go up in smoke.
Delving in the wake of that awful day has dredged up myths about the Vedic Agartha or the Mayan Xibalba. I’ve become keenly aware of how common human mythology about civilizations beneath the rock and stone truly are. I wrack my brain, wondering how deep the tunnels beneath that forgotten crevice in Papua wind. I crack open my books and scroll tirelessly through articles on evolutionary divergence at my desk, taking note of the many close relatives we once had as a species and how widely they vary.
What path, I wonder, might a group driven underground have taken? What twisting of the hominid form might take place if it were dragged from the sunlight into the shadows of the Earth’s winding interior?
Often, I look from my study’s desk to the chest where those treated clay tablets rest unseen, unknown to all but me, and shudder. It is best, I’ve decided, that I never know the answer to those questions. If the children of the Many-Legged God are anything to go by, I believe it better that no one know the answer to those questions.

hey fucker read this shit hey
MAIN BOARD
4 Exploration
4 Crop Rotation
4 Life from the Loam
3 Punishing Fire
4 Mox Diamond
3 Gamble
1 Sylvan Library
--23 cards that are worse than lands
​
4 Rishadan Port
4 Dark Depths
4 Thespian's Stage
4 Grove of the Burnwillows
4 Wasteland
--20 lands that i want to draw all the time
​
2 Taiga
1 Forest
1 Misty Rainforest
1 Windswept Heath
1 Wooded Foothills
--6 lands that i begrudgingly play because they make coloured mana
​
1 The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale
1 Sheltered Thicket
1 Bojuka Bog
1 Maze of Ith
1 Blast Zone
1 Ghost Quarter
1 Tranquil Thicket
1 Ancient Tomb
1 Karakas
1 Glacial Chasm
1 Field of the Dead
--11 lands i forget i play until i cast Gamble
​
SIDEBOARD
4 Sphere of Resistance
2 Thorn of Amethyst
2 Krosan Grip
2 Force of Vigor
3 Tireless Tracker
1 Drop of Honey
1 Choke
-- 15 sideboard cards
6 things that make it harder to cast nonlands
4 cards i board in because of things i expect my opponents to board in
3 turtle doves
1 expensive purchase i sometimes regret
1 sexual fantasy of mine
it is the morning of the 30th of december 2019. i have taken my first annual leave days since january, i am tired of turkey, i have been drinking every day for a week and my head hurts.
my alarm rings and i am hung over. i have eaten 4 slices of pizza in two days and have largely been subsisting on beer, threesomes and cuddles. it is the dawn of the second-largest annual legacy tournament in australia, and at 8am it is 29C (84F imperial barleycorn fahrenheits for you freedom-lovers). in a few hours it will be 45C (113F). my air conditioner is broken. i grumble, make a coffee and resolve to play some legacy.
time to check my deck. cool - my pride and joy - Lands.
i realise i have a banned card in my list, so i remove the (honestly-lacklustre in this deck) Wrenn and Six in favour of a Sylvan library. i predict a lot of Depthsy-stuff and some small white dudes today (well, larger white dudes, but with little white dudes on their cardboard), so i check Karakas is in the main and cut a Choke for the second KGrip.
seems good. coffee paves the way for me to remember that i've forgotten how Life from the Loam with Sylvan Library works. i read the same forum posts i've read many times before. ah, that's it. easy. (MORE ON THIS LATER)
i throw ten-thousand australian dollarydoos of cardboard into the passenger seat of my two-thousand australian dollarydoo car and make the short trot to the marvellously-well-air-conditioned card store for the some good times.
i pay a small amount of money to a charming man behind the booth for the opportunity to borrow some of his air conditioning and to sit around people that have become close friends and fellow lovers of explaining the exact intracacies of why playing Four Horsemen is sweet, Show and Tell is a lame magic card and that planeswalkers have always been a fundamental design flaw of a company that wants the hobby i love to die because they won't reprint some things that make two colours of mana, despite the fact that they seem perfectly happy to print overpowered hard-to-interact-with permanents which they will then ban in the only format they 'test' and refuse to compensate players that open them at all.
there are twenty-two powerful wizards playing today with a prize structure that is something like store credit of:
1st: 350aud (that's 245 freedom bucks)
2nd: 150aud (105)
3rd: 80aud
4th: 50aud
5-8th: 30aud
9th-12th also get something i think
five rounds, cut to top8.
now i don't remember everything that well because i am hungover, sound like a horse and am quite dehydrated, but i will try.
ROUND ONE: LIAM - GOBLINS
it is round one and i am paired against Liam. we are already at the bottom table.
Liam is a nice young man who seems to have grown the same beard as me. Liam used to play D&T and we've had many obscenely-long 1-0 go-to-time's because Lands vs D&T is a battle of no one getting to do anything meaningful until eventually you Ghost Quarter all their Plains or they find an awfully-designed white creature printed in a supplemental set in the past few years.
unfortunately for Liam, however, he is playing Goblins today. Lands vs Goblins feels like you're a colossal raid boss and they're a series of mid-tier raiding guilds trying to tap lands to play spells.
i win the die roll and make a Mox Diamond and a Life from the Loam to get a fetchland back. Liam makes a Lackey. i start doing the dredge thing, making a Stage and passing. Lackey hits me and puts in some weird Modern Horizons goblin that costs four, is black, makes two more goblins and lets him sacrifice goblins to drain a life. seems neat.
i make a Depths and make a big ol' Avatar token main phase. Liam gets himself up to 21 through this weird new goblin they printed (and i manage to fuck up the life totals for the first time today) but two hits from everyone's favourite lady is still good enough.
i board some of the disenchant effects and take out some of the irrelevant utility lands.
game two sees cap'n Lackey burst forth again. i think i Gamble for a combo piece (with the other in hand, to go with a Loam) off a Grove or something, putting him at 21. Liam's Lackey makes that new Goblin again, coolio. it would go on to make a Ringleader next turn, however Liam runs like shit and pulls zero boys. i make the token in the face of a now-scary amount of boys, Maze it end-of-combat and go on to rip his head off again. a late Piledriver isn't quite good enough, but it does come scarily close.
1-0
ROUND TWO: MILES - ALSO GOBLINS
i take a nervous pee and sit down to face Miles, who has recently shifted from some sorta weirdo-neat BUG Delver thing to... Goblins. time to play the villain again.
game one sees me win another die roll and get some really asinine Tabernacle-Loam-Wasteland crap going versus some Mogg War Marshalls. i get Grove/PFire together to stem the bleeding and somehow get all the way down to 6 before Loam flips what i need and he packs it in.
same board plan.
Miles does some lovely-but-kinda-irrelevant things because i have Exploration Stage Depths and some other cards with type Land and i kill him quickly.
2-0
ROUND THREE: TOM - SNEAK AND SHOW
welp, it is finally time to play Tom. Tom is the resident wizened Sneak'n'Show player who seems to only exist to wryly describe my efforts to win this atrocious matchup as 'rude', and to draw 7 cards.
Lands versus Sneak'n'Show is an appalling matchup for Lands. you usually try and win by hoping they cast Show to allow you to put in your last combo piece (which you don't see much) or cast a bunch of hate-rocks and pray like hell. one time a few years ago i cast Boil, which was, as expected, described as 'rude'.
i once asked Tom once what he thought his worst matchup in the format was. without much thought, he informed me that 'a good mirror pilot is hard to beat sometimes', which is probably evidence enough that they should ban Griselbrand.
i win the die roll and am able to assemble a turn three ice-beast, which is about the best you can reasonably hope for. Tom, however, is able to assemble some fast mana, a Sneak Attack, some red mana, and an Emrakul. i play to my outs, which in this case involve not conceding, resolving the trigger, sacrificing all my permanents and going to 5 life.
a sequence of reasonable draws and sandbagging a Mox Diamond allow me to make another token in a few turns. Tom puts in a Griselbrand, pays 7 life, frowns, pays 7 more life - going to 2 - frowns, casts some cantrips, smiles, puts in an Emrakul and kills me.
winning game one is haaaaard here.
i board in the hate-rocks, KGrips and trackers. i leave Choke behind, keeping another land to help the Diamonds function. unsure if that was entirely correct - it just feels like they have so much silly-mana that the blue lands don't matter that much. probably wrong, which Tom agrees with later on.
anyway, i take out a bunch of irrelevant utility lands, a Loam, and the Library.
game two was probably the most fun i've ever had getting my arse kicked, and i'm into some kinky shit, man.
i make an early Tracker, eating a few life to fetches. 18. feeling pretty good despite no lock-piece. unfortunately, cap'n spaghetti soonafter sneaks into play and causes me to sacrifice all my permanents and drop to 3. i do, however, make sure to note that i am indeed sacrificing Clue tokens and as such would have gotten some Tracker triggers. neat little trick.
Tom is able to snag a dredged-over Stage with a Surgical whilst my mana is down, taking another from my hand. Tom has some Snow-Covered Islands (side-note: i'm never playing Snow-Covered Forest, i don't care, fuck y'all, take your EV) and i have a Port and a growing number of lands, including a Depths.
and so begins... The Thaw. i'm able to keep him to one draw-step-or-cantrip a turn with a Port, leaving enough mana (including a Karakas, thankfully) to tick Depths down to around 6. we draw Tireless Tracker. the boy gets busy, makin' clues and takin' names. with some Tomb action, Tom drops to 14. Fetch. 13. 8. Tracker dies. 6. 5. 4. 2. we draw the last Tracker and play it.
our hero (i am the hero!) is at 2. because of all the main-phase clue-cracking for Tracker damage earlier, and the upkeep-porting, my untapped lands include Dark Depths and Karakas. i have two clues, a 3/2 Tracker and i feel okay despite Sneak Attack still being on the board.
Tom activates Sneak Attack, putting in... Goblin Cratermaker. i establish that Goblin Cratermaker is indeed not legendary, and begrudgingly block.
back to The Thaw. Depths makes it down to 3. Tom has no red sources. a Lotus Petal into Sneak Attack brings spaghetti to play again and i sacrifice a few leftover clues and lands down to 3 or 4 permanents including Depths and Karakas, which bounces Emrakul. hanging in there.
eventually Arcane Artisan happens and Spyglass turns off Karakas. i lose and remark on what a wonderful showing that was for good ol' Lands. we resolved three annihilator triggers in two games and i almost won both.
2-1
ROUND FOUR: MICHAEL - HOGAAKVINECRABSOMETHING
michael seems like a nice player who i don't recognise at all. game one i made a turn two token and kill him, seeing some small zombies and assume this is something like... Zombardment? never played this matchup - but i imagine there's some sorta leylines and Ensnaring Bridges or something coming my way and board in some disenchant effects and Trackers.
game two sees a somewhat slow start from me run into him doing a whole bunch of Hogaak Bridge From Below Altar of Dementia horse-honkey and i feel like i just had sex with my dad. he decks me.
game three i bring in the last Force of Vigor and mull to a weird 6 with a Force and am able to make a token on turn 4. keep. he leylines me and we sit there a bit playing some small boys and an Altar. i Force the Leyline (not remembering that i should also target the Altar, but hey, check me out, i'm a sick wizard) and try to combo. he Assassin's Trophies the Stage in response. i try again with a fresh Stage next turn, but he then manages to deck himself, then deck me, then pass. see what i mean. dad-sex.
he tells me post game that i should have hit the Altar too, and i tell him he should have hit the Stage with the trigger on the stack. we have a bit of a laugh about it but i feel like mine was a larger punt. ah well.
2-2
we are in 11th place and are going to bash.
ROUND FIVE: SIMON - THE OTHER HOGAAKVINECRABSOMETHING PLAYER
simon is a little different to michael. michael owns Bayous. yep, that's right, we lost to Overgrown Tomb last round.
game one sees me Crop Rotation into an early token and kill him.
game two i decide that perhaps i can treat this sorta like Dredge and bring in the Spheres. i'm somehow still not that sure Tabernacle is that good. like... it's fine, but versus Dredge they don't use the dudes to cast dudes, they just sit there dying a lot. i keep it in.
we both mull to 5. he Leylines me and has no land drop. i make some land drops and a Sphere and he can't find a way to do any things before i kill him.
3-2
i have to sit around a while, but am happy to do so as it is still 45 degrees outside and there is an extremely-outside-chance of me top8ing.
i never understand tie-breakers but i think i needed some people to ID and an earlier opponent to win and someone to lose. i go for a pee and expect to sit around watching the top8. apparently there's a grass-fire a few suburbs over. australia stuff.
somehow, i am the only 3-2 to make top8 by 0.1% on OGW% which may as well be Martian to me. cool beans let's be on the draw a lot.
QUARTER-FINAL: TORIN - ELDRAZI
i didn't do enough scouting and didn't know what Torin was on. my 7 is fine and a Mimic shows up.
i take 2 before PFire mops up. Thought-Knot Seer joins the party and gets me to 10. Maze of Ith stops the bleeding for a few turns before Reality Smasher rolls in like he owns the joint and Wastelands on Maze and any given combo piece crowd me out.
i bring in Drop of Honey and the disenchants. perhaps one Tracker.
game two i have the turn two token and we're onto game three.
game three i look down at double Exploration, a Loam and plenty of lands, including Wasteland. being the 8th seed is going to hurt because game threes are always on the draw, and he's playing a Chalice deck. i shrug, and keep.
Torin taps an Ancient Tomb and makes a Chalice. i sigh.
Thought-Knot Seer takes a now-useless Exploration. i am at 16. 12. 8. 4. my board-state includes a Forest, Rishadan Port and Stage. i draw what i believe will be my last draw-step of this round, and find a random untapped land. no good.
i look at my bomb-site of a hand. i have picked up a Crop Rotation a few turns earlier, and i mentally resign myself to the old "play to your outs, man". i tap a Forest and a Rishadan Port, and announce "cast Crop Rotation, sacrificing Rishadan Port, floating a colourless". Torin says yep. i calmly get a Depths, make the token, and pass the turn.
Torin draws his card, and then has that moment every tournament player has had before. i never know how to act in these situations, so i accept his handshake, thank him for the games, and say that i'm happy to talk about it if he wants to but if not i totally understand.
Torin, if you're out there mate, i hope this is your one-time. beers on me if you need them.
SEMI-FINAL: MICHAEL - SUPERCRABVINEGAAKDEMENTIA
michael's back. i figure this isn't tooooo bad but i am mildly terrified of this assortment of cards - feels like it's probably good against fair Force decks but not as great against unfair ones? it feels like it needs a setup turn and some favourable mills, but it is pretty explosive once it gets them.
game one sees him Therapy me and Therapy himself, getting the bin going.
so i've made a Sylvan Library. i replace the first draw with a dredge, stack a Depths on top for next turn with a Ghost Quarter under it. all going okay.
Hogaak rocks up remarkably early and takes half my life with a zombie token.
next turn arrives, and i announce that i will be drawing my first card, and replacing my second with a dredge (which i do) and go to look at the third before grabbing the Loam from my graveyard... which isn't there, because i didn't cast it last turn.
i yell "judge!" and go on to explain how much of an idiot i am, and that not only am i an idiot, but i'm this tournament's idiot fucking up a Sylvan Library. somehow, because i have been extremely deliberate with which cards have touched which (including the dredge order), i don't get a game loss and instead some variety of warning. phew. still 0 lifetime game losses from play errors. mise.
then i can't remember but he either 10'd me again or played around Crop Rotation by doing that weird busted legacy thing where you deck yourself, deck your opponent, and pass. either way, i scoop 'em up.
game two i stick to last sideboarding, bringing in the Spheres too. it doesn't matter too much, though, because i make Marit Lage and rip his head off.
game three sees him have some fairly-lacklustre mills - largely lands, so i take a few points to a noble Stitcher's Supplier before getting scared of the Delve mechanic and Bojuka Bog him for value. Loam and Wasteland join the team (without Exploration) and i get to say "Wasteland. target Bojuka Bog, float a black" a few times. if you've never done this to a Dredge player, you have not lived. and if you've never played the Lands mirror, which may always be my favourite match-up in Magic, please do try it sometime. you will get into thinking-puzzles you've never imagined.
anyway, he wasn't on Dredge or Lands, so it was sorta... okay? felt good enough.
he makes Hogaak eventually, although he has to tap all the Bloodghasty/Zombie-dudes and exile a Bridge to do so, leaving zero cards in the bin. i am at 14 and can present the token during the next combat.
an Altar has been exiled and my life total is too high, and we both establish that the only route to victory for him is to draw another Altar and try to deck me.
now, Michael could have been a mooty nerd and played it all normal, but fortunately for everyone involved, Michael is a sick baller. so he reveals his hand, knocks the top of his deck, and flips it. no Altar. i feel pretty lucky to have escaped this match-up and reckon it's a pretty decent deck.
FINALS: HAMISH - MONO-BLUE PAINTER
hamish is the most loveliest person in the universe. i would marry hamish, but i think he is married to someone who i imagine is also tied for loveliest person in the universe, and hamish is probably not that into me. and probably like eighteen more reasons.
game one sees an early Painter off a Tomb. i spin my wheels and am a turn or two too late in making the token to beat out Trinket Mage finding a Grindstone.
boarding against this deck is kinda weird, because it feels like a combo deck (which the Sphere effects tend to be good against) and a Chalice deck (which the disenchant effects tend to be good against).
also, planeswalker design has been atrocious recently and there's this Karn, the Great Creator dude who is in there now too and can go get anything, even if it's exiled, even though WOTC have admitted years ago that printing cards that allow you to wish for cards from your own exile is a design mistake (as the game now effectively has two graveyards). anyway, i hope they've managed to sell some packs of the shockingly-badly-designed standard legal set in which they managed to bastardise the legendary creatures of Magic's early days by turning them into planeswalkers with static abilities. which is, you know, is what enchantments and artifacts are for. except those don't tend to have loyalty abilities and aren't paraded around like a group of tepid Power Rangers in this year's instalment of "Jace and friends go and fuck up another plane where, quelle horreur, Nicol Bolas is back, except this time Jace is a fucking pirate". christ, spare me.
i do bring in a lot of cards, leaving the Choke and Drop behind. i think this was mooostly correct? i didn't dilute the deck too much by cutting too many lands, so i think it was fine. we want to kill anything that can kill us or stop us, and we want to make the token - the deck can still very reliably do that.
i keep a weird 6 with a fetch, a Crop Rotation, and a Thorn in it. no other coloured sources. i didn't want to go to 5.
i fetch a Taiga, Crop Rotation it for Ancient Tomb, and make the Thorn.
hamish goes Ancient Tomb, taps it, and makes a Tormod's Crypt and a Mox Opal i think. most productive response to a turn one hate-rock i've ever seen.
my Port and Tomb go to work on his Tomb for a while, until he makes another Tomb and starts going to work. i haven't been drawing much of note (or coloured mana) and am down to 8. he's down to 10 and has a Trinket Mage (which got Grindstone), an insane amount of Chrome Mox / Lotus Petal / Mox Opal / Tormod's Crypt-type things for having to pay that much to a Thorn, and makes a Karn which gets the Lattice.
he makes it, and i respond by finally fetching and floating three and noog it with a KGrip. Trinket Mage is coming for me. 6. Karn goes and gets Painter. the little wizard is still coming. 4. he makes the Painter. 2.
Painter and Trinket Mage are coming at me.
now, it's important to say at this stage, that i've boarded out the Punishing Fires, the Maze of Ith, and the Glacial Chasm, and i believe i've been on a zero-outer for a few turns now. but it's not often you get to give Hamish the sweats and i'm a gross human being. i go to Force the Painter and pitch... my entire hand, which i then extend to him and laugh.
hamish goes and buys a Trop to replace the one he had to borrow for the day (mono-blue painter is becoming blue-green apparently - this Oko kid is a well-designed Magic card apparently). i buy some fetch-lands, a slab of beer and go home to eat the rest of the pizza in the apartment that's somehow managed to stay 30C for the day because i was the dux of physics in high school and have all sorts of neat tricks to do that.
melbourne legacy is still one of the best things i've ever done with my life. weekly events firing on thursday nights, come say hi. i'll give you a high five. dicks out for harambe.

I first heard mention of the “Many-Legged God” while traveling Papua New Guinea in preparation for writing my dissertation in 2010. Seated around a fire with several elders of a remote highland village, our interview had stretched long into the night, and the full moon above cast the tree-shrouded cliffs in an ethereal glow. There was a lull in the conversation, and I allowed my eyes to wander the landscape. When I lingered on the deep ravine below, its path winding through a canyon into some farther valley obscured by the green canopy, one of the elders pointed and shook his head.
Only bad could come of looking upon the home of the Many-Legged God, he had told me. Better to dwell on good things, among friends. They had refused to elaborate in detail, only saying that a much-hated tribe dwelt in the hidden valley, and that they practiced foul customs which the highlanders abhorred.
In a land wracked by inter-tribal conflict with many richly varied beliefs in witchcraft, I took it in stride. Even today, stories about cannibalism and trophy heads are told in the harsh, remote reaches of the massive island. I assumed that this was another case of two clans of ancient enemies feuding with one another, and didn’t give it much thought. I wrapped up my trip over the next month and returned to the states with copious notes on language and customs close at hand.
Only in late 2017 did I happen across that strange name again. The old journal of an armed guard for a surveying expedition had been uncovered in a forgotten corner of Papua’s national museum, and a contact I made during my trips to the country asked if I was interested in translating the document. Given this meant I had first access to the artifact, I jumped at the chance to distract myself from the monotony of teaching.
It’s necessary to dive into the history the journal describes for context, but I’ll keep it brief. Early in 1914, an expedition was dispatched by the German Empire’s colonial government in Papua New Guinea to survey the interior of the northeastern corner of the island, known at that time as Kaiser-Wilhelmsland. The hundred or so men involved would continue their survey despite the beginning of the first world war, avoiding Australian capture in the wilderness long after the colony had fallen into allied hands.
Hermann Detzner, who led the expedition, published a memoir of the experience in the wake of the conflict. Filled with stretched truths, it resembled an adventure novel more than a scientific study. Ethnographers and anthropologists have long held it to be mostly fiction, a tall tale woven by a brave but immodest man. The expedition’s few surviving members were either natives intent on keeping quiet or shocked German youths desperate to forget the hardships of the road, with disease and hostile tribes having taken their toll on the wandering surveyors. No other known accounts have been given of this expedition, making this lone, water-stained journal the last remnant of a long-dead adventure.
Its narrator had been Friedrich Hoetzendorf, a freshly-graduated engineering student from Munich. The account was mostly logistical, dry and boring, listing miles traveled and supplies used. Occasional clashes with hostile locals were usually avoided by negotiation, and the few early pages containing personal musings are spent complaining about mosquitoes and the omnipresent heat. It remained this way until late 1916, when the expedition reached a highland village which Friedrich named as ‘ancient tree’ in German. I recognized the name, though today the title was spoken in Papua’s Tok Pisin pidgin language. Then, Friedrich raised further memories when he wrote of the odd legends villagers told of a Many-Legged God who ruled the lower valleys.
As I drew the connection to my own past wanderings, I read that Friedrich and several younger members of the expedition had gotten a village elder drunk on rationed schnapps. During this night of drinking, they had been regaled with stories by the old man about the twisted inhabitants of the valley and the high civilization they supposedly boasted. The valley-dwellers lived in buildings of stone and wore trinkets of gold, the old man had insisted, unlike anything I’ve ever heard described on the island.
Friedrich ends the account of the night with a depiction of a gold totem the elder produced as proof. Supposedly taken as a trophy of war after a clash with the valley-dwellers, it had been sketched on the following page with careful grace. This drawing resembled a centipede coiled into a spiral, its seemingly eyeless head at the center. The craftsmanship was described as superb, but the expedition’s offers to buy the totem went unaccepted, and Friedrich left the village empty-handed.
The rest of the journal, methodical and meticulous, revealed no more about the Many-Legged God. The valley was fast left behind and worries about Australian pursuit drove away any speculation about what the out-of-place idol might mean. I was far removed from worrying about Australian search parties, however. The nagging feeling that I was at the cusp of something undiscovered would not let me forget so easily.
I droned on through my classes until the summer relieved me of distractions, my mind lingering on that tree-shrouded valley in faraway Papua. Despite how little evidence I had at hand, the whole story which had built up in my mind seemed too tempting to ignore. Moreover, the tale seemed genuine, for the fear in the voices of my old hosts rang clear through my memory every time I looked upon that sketch of the idol in the journal. I wouldn’t be able to convince the university to fund this little expedition, dangerous and controversial as the study of uncontacted cultures could be, but that was alright with me. I didn’t mind tapping into my savings for what might just be the find of my career.
After flying into the capital, I bedded down for several nights to rest up and purchase supplies. The heat was particularly oppressive that June, and the usually hectic Port Moresby seemed almost sleepy beneath its weight. I bought simple provisions, mostly rice and preserves, and tried to enjoy what peace I could before what I knew would be an arduous journey.
On the final night, I confided in several friends from the national museum, showing them where I was headed and giving them a rough timetable for my return. Then, with my equipment studiously packed and laid out at the foot of my hotel bed, I slumbered peacefully for perhaps the last time in my life.
I’ve often dwelt on that final evening in Port Moresby, wondering if the experience which followed would’ve been made more bearable if I had walked a different path. I had wholly abandoned the idea of bringing grad students or professional friends along on my trip. A longtime curator at the museum, excited at the retelling of my story, had offered to accompany me, but I had turned my friend down. The inland regions of Papua could be unpredictable, as we all knew, and I didn’t want to put anyone else at risk.
This was my gamble to make, I reasoned. What a fool I was to make it.
A short morning flight to Lae, a murky industrial port on the northern coast, was followed by a long bus ride up into the highlands. The sun-kissed warmth of the lowland coasts was steadily devoured by the stifling humidity of the conifer forests in the highlands. The towering trees crowded in to cast their shadows over the road, and the ferns and scrub reared up to blot out the spaces between. This blanket of ancient woodland was only broken when the road wound up to the mountainous heights, where grassy rock-strewn cliffs and slopes jutted from the trees down below. When the bus at last rumbled to a stop that night in the highland town of Usino, a local chartered jeep carried me overnight east into the hills, bumping over winding dirt roads and between jagged mountain passes. As the sun rose, I was jolted awake by the driver to find myself in that same memory-haunted village, unchanged by the intervening years and swirling with yet more vibrant mystery than it had boasted in my intrepid youth.
The village of the ancient tree had not forgotten me, it seemed. Jokowa, a gregarious elder nearing a century’s age, greeted me warmly. He remembered my interviews, and the studious interest I’d taken in the region’s many clans. He took me into his home and told me about the many family squabbles and marriages which had filled the intervening years, the woodsmoke scent of the traditional dwelling whisking me away to happier times. We ate a modest lunch, and a much more grandiose dinner, the village going out of its way to make me comfortable. All the while, though, I awaited the perfect moment to produce the old sketch of that strange golden idol.
Only when the grandchildren and great grandchildren had retired and the elders once more ringed the fire did I remove the copy I’d made of that damnable idol’s image. I almost at once felt guilty, for Jokowa recoiled from it, as if it might leap from the page to bite him. Initially, he refused to answer my questions about the old journal and the golden totem, but eventually, he broke into practiced English, ensuring his words couldn’t be understood by his fellow villagers at the fireside.
Jokowa told me that the village’s oral tradition held the idol to be over five hundred years old, and affirmed that it was supposedly the spoils of a raid of some kind. He told me that his grandfather had been the one to meet with the Detzner expedition, and that the elder had sunk the wicked totem in a nearby lake in fear that the Europeans would return looking for those who had forged it. The whole affair had left the community desperate to keep the abhorred valley-dwellers unknown and sequestered in their wooded holdfast, forgotten by all save the highlanders who watched them.
“There were three clans who watched, at first,” Jokowa told me, his solemn eyes on the glowing embers beneath us. “One left in the forties, to find work in the city. The next village moved to the coast, took up farming and fishing. We’re the only ones who remember. We are the last that still believe.”
Jokowa proceeded to tell me that it was much more than comfortable stubbornness which kept his people on the hills overlooking the shadowed vale. It was they who had begun the practice of watching the valley, and they who kept it safe. By long tradition, they posted warriors at the mouth of the crag leading in, and burnt back the brush which guarded the entrance. Sun and moonlight were poison to the pale things in the valley, he said, and the whole clearing in the woodland at the valley’s edge was specifically cut to ward off any wandering the wretches might do in the dead of night.
Long ago, when firearms had made their way into circulation on the island, the valley-dwellers had been brought to heel. The stalemate between the twisted tribe within the valley and the highland villages that contained them had become one-sided. Seldom did the things creep from their accursed dwellings in the dark Earth below, and this was just how Jokowa wanted it to stay. Now, only occasional sweeps of the valley were made, yearly incursions into the shadow to ensure the ancient enemy was kept cowering in the dark.
Jokowa wasn’t shocked when I did what curiosity demanded by asking whether I could try and enter the valley. His expression was pained, more with pity than irritation. He reiterated the dangers, telling me that the tribes I sought weren’t entirely human. They were vicious, heartless devourers of men. He conferred with his fellow elders, who each shared stories in their native tongue of horrible legends passed from father to son about the terrors which lurked in the valley, from cannibalism to twisted rituals and effigies of bone beneath the trees.
Again, I was faced with a chance to disengage, to abandon my scholarly interest in an undescribed and unique culture and settle for a calm and collected week recording legends with Jokowa in the safety of the village. Again, that foolish ivory tower certainty pulled me along towards the undiscovered, and I declined to heed Jokowa’s words.
After a last round of questions among the elders, Jokowa laid out the terms. His people, after all, controlled the sole entrance and exit to the valley, and only with his blessing could I set foot in the hated chasm.
“There will be no recording, no pictures or film,” Jokowa ordered. “Your experience is your own.”
I protested, telling him that documentation of so isolated a group was the purpose of my journey, but he insisted.
“There are dark things beneath the Earth,” he told me, wizened face dancing in the dim firelight. “I will not let you to bring word of them to the wider world. You will sate your own curiosity and, if you survive the Many-Legged God, return home with legends no settled man would believe.”
Jokowa grinned. Again, the gesture was soft, sympathetic. I got the feeling he imagined I wouldn’t return. I mulled it over, weighing my need to find the truth.
“I accept,” I told him at last, my eyes darting for the open end of the hut and the moonlit treetops in the valley beyond.
“Very well,” Jokowa nodded. “We will show you down at sunrise.”
​
I had always known danger was a distinct likelihood, but as I trudged down rough slopes behind seasoned hunters and fighters who jumped at each broken branch while the shadows deepened around us, the drive for discovery which had brought me so far began to ebb. With dawn’s light being swallowed up by sheer rock walls and towering trees, the old bolt-action rifle Jokowa had insisted I carry seemed thin protection indeed.
At length, our band of intrepid intruders came through the suffocating ferns into the open air of a clearing. Opposite us, the jagged stone walls of the chasm leading into the valley loomed out from the morning mist, looking for all the world like some long-abandoned fortress from a dark fantasy novel. Tokua, Jokowa’s imposing grandson, strode forward the last fifty yards or so at my side while the others held back like gawkers watching the condemned.
“Stay above ground,” Tokua urged, his wide eyes meeting mine for perhaps the first time that morning. “You don’t want to get caught in closed spaces. They move fast.”
He shook his head, looking up along the switchback path towards the village. I thought he might try to dissuade me one last time, but he never gave voice to the words. Instead, he simply reiterated the warning of his grandfather, urging me to be out of the valley by nightfall. Then, the group departed in silence, leaving me to gather my courage in the shadow of that ominous chasm.
Only in the absence of other people did I realize how silent the primordial forest had fallen. The quiet was broken here and there by the distant call of some hunting bird far above, but that was small consolation. I glanced one last time at the notebook that contained my writings on the Detzner expedition, rallying my thoughts and reminding myself how fortunate I was to be confronted by so potent a mystery. At last, I hoisted my pack onto my shoulders, readied my rifle as best my unpracticed hands knew how, and strode into the misty-mouthed canyon.
During my education, I’d been fortunate enough to wander some incredibly old megalithic sites in Sumatra and Java, an experience at once intriguing and depressing. The long-dead ambience of those jungle-eaten temples and monuments reared by centuries-dead civilizations can make an onlooker feel as if they stand at the cusp of a mass grave. This chasm was somehow much worse, lonelier than anything I’ve ever experienced.
I pushed past fetishes and totems of wood and bone, produced by Jokowa’s highlanders and placed with ritual caution to ward off the evil said to dwell within. In chalk-like pigment, they had etched glyphs and figures upon the walls, mock warriors poised to throw back anything which might dare stand against them. Overhead, trees on the slopes above the chasm seemed to lean in to devour the sky, drowning the crag in semi-darkness. I produced the powerful flashlight I had brought along, shocked at how blinding the shadow had become, ever glancing towards the distant canopy and never once catching sight of the azure morning beyond. Then, the chasm opened up on the valley proper, and I was greeted with a sight which should never have been seen.
The space was relatively thin, some one or two hundred yards across, but stretched away into the mists for many times that distance. Several small streams fell in babbling procession from the sheer stone walls and pooled in a clear pond at the center, breaking the droning silence of the chasm. Up above, on the battlements of the rough stone slopes, mighty trees twisted and intertwined at obscene angles to form a living ceiling, their bulk and range of growth seeming beyond reason. Despite all this evocative scenery playing out beneath the beam of my flashlight, it was the walls themselves that stopped my heart in my chest.
Set into the reddish stone of the valley’s edges, great glowering faces had been carved. They were abstract and elongated, their twisted contours carefully smoothed and rounded. Their mouths and eyes opened onto what I at first took to be small alcoves for display or storage. Upon drawing nearer, I saw that the mouths were doors, awkwardly raised from the ground below and allowing access to the interiors of buildings carved into the rock.
Immediately, I made for my notebooks, sketching their forms as best I could by glow of the flashlight. I might not be able to take photos, but this was too otherworldly a find not to record. Nothing of this sort had ever been found on the island. Indeed, I could think of nothing similar the world over. Turkey’s Cappadocia and Jordan’s Petra come to mind when one mentions underground communities or construction, but these faces were positively chilling.
I could at once understand why the place had such a terrible reputation among the locals. Despite the grace of their construction, the buildings were intimidating, the valley seeming observed from all angles by its unliving guardians. The stonework looked old, to my trained eye, eaten away in places despite the concise cover of the canopy above. Whether the years were measured in centuries or millennia, I could not tell. Given what I was to learn in that time-forgotten hell, I cannot help but assume the latter.
Nearly an hour passed before I mustered up the courage to enter one of those awful carven faces. I wandered the valley, finding it a great avenue of near-identical sculptures, with only the streams and pond to break its symmetrical layout. The remnants of what I took to be gardens of some kind rested here and there among the entrances, empty patches of raised soil perhaps used to raise lichen or fungi in the damp dark of the valley floor. Occasionally, slightly luminescent crickets leapt from my path, the sole sign of life in the unmoving tomb. At last, though, I could stall no longer, and forced myself to clamber clumsily up into one of the open mouths.
The rake of my flashlight across the far side revealed a circular chamber, its walls expertly shaped but left rough and textured to the touch. Its high, domed ceiling grew incredibly low near the floor, which itself buckled inward unevenly like a bowl, making the whole space into a kind of flattened sphere.
At the center, there was a firepit and several raised plinths I took to be stools, and along the curved walls alcoves wracked with dust housed pottery and sculptures of treated clay. Some, upon closer inspection, turned out to be blown glass, speaking to a high proficiency among the craftsmen of this undescribed people. Almost all were shaped like crawling or curling millipedes or centipedes, giving credence to the century-old sketch of Friedrich, with the few outliers generally being insect or arthropod in nature.
Only when I had done several circuits of the room did I accidently bring the beam of my light directly across the sunken firepit. The whole of the room’s ceiling lit up like a signboard, making me jump like a stricken animal. I had to collect myself before I fully realized what had happened and brought the beam back to focus on the pit. Its leaden interior, coated in some sort of dull metal soot-stained by spent fires, reflected upon an unbelievably intricate network of multicolored quartz which had been meticulously inlaid upon the ceiling. The lines formed many elongated men, dancing or posing around a vast coiled centipede, much the same as the one represented in gold those many years ago.
I spent some time sketching the image, marveling at the grace of its contours and the play of my light off the dazzling quartz. I imagined how it must have shimmered in the flickering light of a fire, seeming to shift and waver on a smoke-shrouded ceiling. Then, with a final scan of the stunning chamber, I proceeded through one of several low round doorways set into the wall. The smooth leather divider which had once served as a curtain, chewed to tatters by the march of time, pulled away to reveal an almost identical chamber next door. All around the valley, these dwellings or ritual chambers formed a sort of communal hive, interconnected and accessible, hinting at close clan or familial bonds among the missing inhabitants.
Toward the rear of the dwellings, heading deeper into the rock, small rough-walled tubes had been carved, usually leading into musty, cramped depressions littered with desiccated old rags of a strange, dark fabric. These I took to be bedrooms or meditation chambers, secluded cubbies where the inhabitants could curl up and ruminate on the issues that faced them. Sometimes, though, the tunnels wound off around tight corners, seeming to weave out of view and deeper into the stone below.
Try as I might, I could not bring myself to crawl into these tunnels. The warnings I had received about the darkness which lurked below ground played a part, but I was equally concerned about the claustrophobic awkwardness of the angles and slopes in the tunnel. Fascinating as the valley was, the oppressive mood it inspired was undeniable. The subdued clamor of the waters outside served to coat the shadows in a masking white noise, and the feeling that I was not alone had grated on me more than once as my boots echoed across the stone. I had no desire to become trapped on some slick incline in the dark beneath my feet, my cries for help reverberating down into the unknowable depths.
As it happened, the surface held one final, groundbreaking find for me. When at last I reached the end of the valley, I discovered the building there to be different than the others. It was much larger, with an oval interior soaring cathedral-like overhead, the shadowed floor covered with raised plinths or stools like the ones I’d seen before. The walls were covered in curved shelving carved into the stone, laden with clay tablets in impeccable condition.
On these tablets, a series of elongated triangular depressions formed a language of some kind, its patterns making it unmistakable. Though whatever linguistic tradition had birthed this otherworldly writing was alien to me, I speculate it was legible as both a visual and textural language, allowing its readers to feel its words in the dark, much like braille.
So exhilarated was I by the discovery of etched writing that I made it almost halfway round the room eyeing the shelves before I noticed the effigy looming at the far end. I had at first taken it to be a statue in the shadows, a massive recreation of the smaller clay and glass sculptures the modest dwellings had displayed. When my light played off its jagged form, I realized its contours were of bone rather than stone.
Lashed by leather or skin with meticulous care, femurs and ribs made up the legs and carapace of a great, writhing centipede. It was reared like a striking cobra, its legs outstretched and flailing, its ivory bulk having towered over the raised stone stools that decorated the floor. Protruding from the place where a head should have been was a centaur-like assemblage of bones that preserved the shape of a man, with the long spine bent and its arms outstretched towards the floor below. Its skull, slightly above eye-level with me when standing before it, looked out over the room with unseeing sockets. Something about its proportions struck me as wrong, perhaps speaking to some deformity or birth defect, but I was too unnerved by the structure to draw in for a closer look.
The giant idol was a wicked thing, and I gave it a wide berth. Though as an anthropologist I told myself my revulsion was born of unfamiliarity with the practices of an unfamiliar culture, that student’s mantra didn’t ease the harsh glare of the unseeing skull scanning the room. I focused instead on the shelves and tablets, gathering those which looked most intact into my bag and wrapping them in wax paper, hoping Jokowa would understand my need to preserve these potentially priceless clay tomes. After all, if the highlanders had actually wiped out the valley-dwellers, then these were the last testament to the community which had been built in the darkness of their sheltered, misty vale.
Then, a very different kind of text came into view. It was a modern supply log, many decades old, rotten and torn. This stranger in a landscape of strange texts had been slipped in among the tablets, just one more tome among the collated knowledge of the Many-Legged God. I suppressed my excitement, and removed it as tenderly as was possible, donning plastic gloves to handle the delicate pages within.
By the light of my flashlight, scored by the soft symphony of the slow streams and chirping crickets outside, I saw that the text was in the French language. Though I speak many tongues, my French was mostly garnered in grade school. Still, collating that layman’s grasp with a solid understanding of Latin, I could make out the gist of most of it. A missionary, ostensibly catholic, was keeping record of supplies and funds being used to establish wells, clinics, and churches in the highlands. The few legible dates in the log placed its origin sometime in the early fifties, and its contents seemed mundane. Then, the pages ceased to be lists, and became something altogether more terrible.
In hurried scrawl which demanded herculean effort to decipher, the missionary wrote of a raid on the wagon which had been carrying their supplies. He described the slaughter of their horses and the capture of he and his companion in the shadowy dusk, another missionary named LaSalle. More chilling was the shaky description of his captors, etched in handwriting made jagged by frayed nerves and spiked adrenaline.
The things he described were men, but stretched beyond reason, gaunt and disturbingly tall. They had moved with a grace he described as disgusting, likening the way their elongated limbs and spines worked to the way a spider’s legs skittered. Their faces, he said, were the worst, sunken and marble-pale. Their heads had no ears, instead boasting great sunken pads that vibrated with every snapped twig or soft footfall. Their massive eyes, almost entirely pupils, danced in electric light like those of animals above mouths of needle-like teeth.
They had dragged them away, the narrator wrote, into a valley I took to be the very one in which I stood. The ghouls, as he termed them, had branded and marked the skin of their captives before ritually butchering LaSalle beneath an effigy of bone. What the writer called their ‘monster’ had taken LaSalle, an offering of flesh for a hungry god. The writer, assuming he was being saved for another ritual the following night, had scrawled these words in hiding, hoping his fellow missionaries might learn what had befallen them. They’d obviously never found them, and the fate that befell the log’s owner was easy to imagine.
I turned my gaze to the idol once more, drawing in to examine that malformed skull, the missionary’s words etched into my memory. The stone beneath it was dark and stained, ancient offerings long ago having blackened the ground. Suddenly, the proportions made sense, the saucer eyes and the gaping cavities where ears should sit coming into sharper focus. It was so close to human, yet so abysmally different. Those who look on Neanderthal or the popularly-named ‘hobbit’ and find them uncanny need only look upon the children of the Many-Legged God to experience true repulsion.
As my mind reeled, trying to piece together what I was seeing, I caught a flicker of movement above me, at the edge of my light. I looked up, and at once understood what it was to be an ensnared fly watching the hungry approach of the spider.
Through a decorated crevice high above in the masonry of the ceiling, is gigantic body contoured to examine the room beneath it, a massive centipede had crawled. It was impossibly large, several feet wide and dozens of feet in length, far larger than any such thing should ever be able to grow. Its antennae wriggled mere inches above my head, twitching as it blindly searched for the prey which had so carelessly stumbled into its temple.
I screamed. As I stumbled out from beneath the creature and frantically dashed for the exit, I didn’t have time to consider how foolish that cry had been. My only thoughts were of the pass to the sunlit forest beyond the valley, and the muted clatter of chitinous limbs on the stone behind me as the Many-Legged God gave chase. It was not until I burst from the temple into the near-blackness of the vale that I realized how costly that scream had been.
Skittering from the once-vacant mouths of those glowering faces and through cracks on the cliff face above with a flexibility and ease that seemed supernatural, the valley-dwellers came. They moved on all fours, bent at the back to allow their overextended arms to aid in propelling them along the ground. Their legs jolted like a frog’s, twisting at painful angles, their pallid skin translucent with the purple tinge of bulging veins. Blades of flint or obsidian were clasped in their hands, but it was those glinting, bulging eyes that made my blood run coldest.
I sprinted, the centipede-thing left somewhere behind me as it hesitated to leave its dark temple, its dozens of servants loping in to meet me. I skirted the edge of the pond, moving faster than I’d ever moved, but realized there was no way to outpace the things near the exit. They already closed in across the pass, barring my way, hopping forward to meet me at the pond’s edge. I focused on them as I neared, preparing to fight, considering whether it was too late to swing the rifle down from my shoulder and attempt a shot.
The two between me and the pass shrieked, an awful hyena-like sound made with vocal organs alien to our own. The light of my flashlight’s beam was on them, and they stumbled over themselves to avert their eyes. Glottal and hacking, I thought I heard breaks in their cries, something that I now assume was language. I wheeled around, bringing the light to bear on the things approaching my side of the pond, driving them to their knees and setting the whole mob to shrieking.
I wasted no time, starting up my sprint again, waving the beam at any who drew too close, thrown rocks whistling past my head as the things yowled their fury at the light. As I pressed through the pass, I kept the light angled over my shoulder, ever aware of the coyote-like chorus in pursuit. Only when I stumbled out into the late afternoon sun of the meadow and put a thirty second run between myself and the valley’s mouth did I dare look back. I curse that I did, for I would certainly sleep more soundly if I’d spared myself that last, eerie image.
Deep in shadow, hanging from the rock with tapering fingers as if they had been born to the stone, the valley-dwellers decorated the walls of the chasm. They hung at varying heights, visible as still silhouettes more than solid shapes in the gloom. Their eyes caught the ambient glow of the sun upon the meadow, and gleamed hungrily after the foolish soul they’d sought for prey.
​
In the years since my fortunate flight from that night-cloaked vale, I’ve ceased to be an anthropological interventionist. When the argument arises whether the hands-on or hands-off approach is best when dealing with documentation of uncontacted or undescribed cultures, I always advise the academy to keep far away.
I’ll tell colleagues who ask why so great a shift has taken place in my stances that preservation through awareness has proven fallible in my eyes. I’ll opine that the uncontacted are better protected by their isolation than they could ever be by documentation. If ever the true rationale got out, my academic credibility would go up in smoke.
Delving in the wake of that awful day has dredged up myths about the Vedic Agartha or the Mayan Xibalba. I’ve become keenly aware of how common human mythology about civilizations beneath the rock and stone truly are. I wrack my brain, wondering how deep the tunnels beneath that forgotten crevice in Papua wind. I crack open my books and scroll tirelessly through articles on evolutionary divergence at my desk, taking note of the many close relatives we once had as a species and how widely they vary.
What path, I wonder, might a group driven underground have taken? What twisting of the hominid form might take place if it were dragged from the sunlight into the shadows of the Earth’s winding interior?
Often, I look from my study’s desk to the chest where those treated clay tablets rest unseen, unknown to all but me, and shudder. It is best, I’ve decided, that I never know the answer to those questions. If the children of the Many-Legged God are anything to go by, I believe it better that no one know the answer to those questions.

I first heard mention of the “Many-Legged God” while traveling Papua New Guinea in preparation for writing my dissertation in 2010. Seated around a fire with several elders of a remote highland village, our interview had stretched long into the night, and the full moon above cast the tree-shrouded cliffs in an ethereal glow. There was a lull in the conversation, and I allowed my eyes to wander the landscape. When I lingered on the deep ravine below, its path winding through a canyon into some farther valley obscured by the green canopy, one of the elders pointed and shook his head.
Only bad could come of looking upon the home of the Many-Legged God, he had told me. Better to dwell on good things, among friends. They had refused to elaborate in detail, only saying that a much-hated tribe dwelt in the hidden valley, and that they practiced foul customs which the highlanders abhorred.
In a land wracked by inter-tribal conflict with many richly varied beliefs in witchcraft, I took it in stride. Even today, stories about cannibalism and trophy heads are told in the harsh, remote reaches of the massive island. I assumed that this was another case of two clans of ancient enemies feuding with one another, and didn’t give it much thought. I wrapped up my trip over the next month and returned to the states with copious notes on language and customs close at hand.
Only in late 2017 did I happen across that strange name again. The old journal of an armed guard for a surveying expedition had been uncovered in a forgotten corner of Papua’s national museum, and a contact I made during my trips to the country asked if I was interested in translating the document. Given this meant I had first access to the artifact, I jumped at the chance to distract myself from the monotony of teaching.
It’s necessary to dive into the history the journal describes for context, but I’ll keep it brief. Early in 1914, an expedition was dispatched by the German Empire’s colonial government in Papua New Guinea to survey the interior of the northeastern corner of the island, known at that time as Kaiser-Wilhelmsland. The hundred or so men involved would continue their survey despite the beginning of the first world war, avoiding Australian capture in the wilderness long after the colony had fallen into allied hands.
Hermann Detzner, who led the expedition, published a memoir of the experience in the wake of the conflict. Filled with stretched truths, it resembled an adventure novel more than a scientific study. Ethnographers and anthropologists have long held it to be mostly fiction, a tall tale woven by a brave but immodest man. The expedition’s few surviving members were either natives intent on keeping quiet or shocked German youths desperate to forget the hardships of the road, with disease and hostile tribes having taken their toll on the wandering surveyors. No other known accounts have been given of this expedition, making this lone, water-stained journal the last remnant of a long-dead adventure.
Its narrator had been Friedrich Hoetzendorf, a freshly-graduated engineering student from Munich. The account was mostly logistical, dry and boring, listing miles traveled and supplies used. Occasional clashes with hostile locals were usually avoided by negotiation, and the few early pages containing personal musings are spent complaining about mosquitoes and the omnipresent heat. It remained this way until late 1916, when the expedition reached a highland village which Friedrich named as ‘ancient tree’ in German. I recognized the name, though today the title was spoken in Papua’s Tok Pisin pidgin language. Then, Friedrich raised further memories when he wrote of the odd legends villagers told of a Many-Legged God who ruled the lower valleys.
As I drew the connection to my own past wanderings, I read that Friedrich and several younger members of the expedition had gotten a village elder drunk on rationed schnapps. During this night of drinking, they had been regaled with stories by the old man about the twisted inhabitants of the valley and the high civilization they supposedly boasted. The valley-dwellers lived in buildings of stone and wore trinkets of gold, the old man had insisted, unlike anything I’ve ever heard described on the island.
Friedrich ends the account of the night with a depiction of a gold totem the elder produced as proof. Supposedly taken as a trophy of war after a clash with the valley-dwellers, it had been sketched on the following page with careful grace. This drawing resembled a centipede coiled into a spiral, its seemingly eyeless head at the center. The craftsmanship was described as superb, but the expedition’s offers to buy the totem went unaccepted, and Friedrich left the village empty-handed.
The rest of the journal, methodical and meticulous, revealed no more about the Many-Legged God. The valley was fast left behind and worries about Australian pursuit drove away any speculation about what the out-of-place idol might mean. I was far removed from worrying about Australian search parties, however. The nagging feeling that I was at the cusp of something undiscovered would not let me forget so easily.
I droned on through my classes until the summer relieved me of distractions, my mind lingering on that tree-shrouded valley in faraway Papua. Despite how little evidence I had at hand, the whole story which had built up in my mind seemed too tempting to ignore. Moreover, the tale seemed genuine, for the fear in the voices of my old hosts rang clear through my memory every time I looked upon that sketch of the idol in the journal. I wouldn’t be able to convince the university to fund this little expedition, dangerous and controversial as the study of uncontacted cultures could be, but that was alright with me. I didn’t mind tapping into my savings for what might just be the find of my career.
After flying into the capital, I bedded down for several nights to rest up and purchase supplies. The heat was particularly oppressive that June, and the usually hectic Port Moresby seemed almost sleepy beneath its weight. I bought simple provisions, mostly rice and preserves, and tried to enjoy what peace I could before what I knew would be an arduous journey.
On the final night, I confided in several friends from the national museum, showing them where I was headed and giving them a rough timetable for my return. Then, with my equipment studiously packed and laid out at the foot of my hotel bed, I slumbered peacefully for perhaps the last time in my life.
I’ve often dwelt on that final evening in Port Moresby, wondering if the experience which followed would’ve been made more bearable if I had walked a different path. I had wholly abandoned the idea of bringing grad students or professional friends along on my trip. A longtime curator at the museum, excited at the retelling of my story, had offered to accompany me, but I had turned my friend down. The inland regions of Papua could be unpredictable, as we all knew, and I didn’t want to put anyone else at risk.
This was my gamble to make, I reasoned. What a fool I was to make it.
A short morning flight to Lae, a murky industrial port on the northern coast, was followed by a long bus ride up into the highlands. The sun-kissed warmth of the lowland coasts was steadily devoured by the stifling humidity of the conifer forests in the highlands. The towering trees crowded in to cast their shadows over the road, and the ferns and scrub reared up to blot out the spaces between. This blanket of ancient woodland was only broken when the road wound up to the mountainous heights, where grassy rock-strewn cliffs and slopes jutted from the trees down below. When the bus at last rumbled to a stop that night in the highland town of Usino, a local chartered jeep carried me overnight east into the hills, bumping over winding dirt roads and between jagged mountain passes. As the sun rose, I was jolted awake by the driver to find myself in that same memory-haunted village, unchanged by the intervening years and swirling with yet more vibrant mystery than it had boasted in my intrepid youth.
The village of the ancient tree had not forgotten me, it seemed. Jokowa, a gregarious elder nearing a century’s age, greeted me warmly. He remembered my interviews, and the studious interest I’d taken in the region’s many clans. He took me into his home and told me about the many family squabbles and marriages which had filled the intervening years, the woodsmoke scent of the traditional dwelling whisking me away to happier times. We ate a modest lunch, and a much more grandiose dinner, the village going out of its way to make me comfortable. All the while, though, I awaited the perfect moment to produce the old sketch of that strange golden idol.
Only when the grandchildren and great grandchildren had retired and the elders once more ringed the fire did I remove the copy I’d made of that damnable idol’s image. I almost at once felt guilty, for Jokowa recoiled from it, as if it might leap from the page to bite him. Initially, he refused to answer my questions about the old journal and the golden totem, but eventually, he broke into practiced English, ensuring his words couldn’t be understood by his fellow villagers at the fireside.
Jokowa told me that the village’s oral tradition held the idol to be over five hundred years old, and affirmed that it was supposedly the spoils of a raid of some kind. He told me that his grandfather had been the one to meet with the Detzner expedition, and that the elder had sunk the wicked totem in a nearby lake in fear that the Europeans would return looking for those who had forged it. The whole affair had left the community desperate to keep the abhorred valley-dwellers unknown and sequestered in their wooded holdfast, forgotten by all save the highlanders who watched them.
“There were three clans who watched, at first,” Jokowa told me, his solemn eyes on the glowing embers beneath us. “One left in the forties, to find work in the city. The next village moved to the coast, took up farming and fishing. We’re the only ones who remember. We are the last that still believe.”
Jokowa proceeded to tell me that it was much more than comfortable stubbornness which kept his people on the hills overlooking the shadowed vale. It was they who had begun the practice of watching the valley, and they who kept it safe. By long tradition, they posted warriors at the mouth of the crag leading in, and burnt back the brush which guarded the entrance. Sun and moonlight were poison to the pale things in the valley, he said, and the whole clearing in the woodland at the valley’s edge was specifically cut to ward off any wandering the wretches might do in the dead of night.
Long ago, when firearms had made their way into circulation on the island, the valley-dwellers had been brought to heel. The stalemate between the twisted tribe within the valley and the highland villages that contained them had become one-sided. Seldom did the things creep from their accursed dwellings in the dark Earth below, and this was just how Jokowa wanted it to stay. Now, only occasional sweeps of the valley were made, yearly incursions into the shadow to ensure the ancient enemy was kept cowering in the dark.
Jokowa wasn’t shocked when I did what curiosity demanded by asking whether I could try and enter the valley. His expression was pained, more with pity than irritation. He reiterated the dangers, telling me that the tribes I sought weren’t entirely human. They were vicious, heartless devourers of men. He conferred with his fellow elders, who each shared stories in their native tongue of horrible legends passed from father to son about the terrors which lurked in the valley, from cannibalism to twisted rituals and effigies of bone beneath the trees.
Again, I was faced with a chance to disengage, to abandon my scholarly interest in an undescribed and unique culture and settle for a calm and collected week recording legends with Jokowa in the safety of the village. Again, that foolish ivory tower certainty pulled me along towards the undiscovered, and I declined to heed Jokowa’s words.
After a last round of questions among the elders, Jokowa laid out the terms. His people, after all, controlled the sole entrance and exit to the valley, and only with his blessing could I set foot in the hated chasm.
“There will be no recording, no pictures or film,” Jokowa ordered. “Your experience is your own.”
I protested, telling him that documentation of so isolated a group was the purpose of my journey, but he insisted.
“There are dark things beneath the Earth,” he told me, wizened face dancing in the dim firelight. “I will not let you to bring word of them to the wider world. You will sate your own curiosity and, if you survive the Many-Legged God, return home with legends no settled man would believe.”
Jokowa grinned. Again, the gesture was soft, sympathetic. I got the feeling he imagined I wouldn’t return. I mulled it over, weighing my need to find the truth.
“I accept,” I told him at last, my eyes darting for the open end of the hut and the moonlit treetops in the valley beyond.
“Very well,” Jokowa nodded. “We will show you down at sunrise.”
​
I had always known danger was a distinct likelihood, but as I trudged down rough slopes behind seasoned hunters and fighters who jumped at each broken branch while the shadows deepened around us, the drive for discovery which had brought me so far began to ebb. With dawn’s light being swallowed up by sheer rock walls and towering trees, the old bolt-action rifle Jokowa had insisted I carry seemed thin protection indeed.
At length, our band of intrepid intruders came through the suffocating ferns into the open air of a clearing. Opposite us, the jagged stone walls of the chasm leading into the valley loomed out from the morning mist, looking for all the world like some long-abandoned fortress from a dark fantasy novel. Tokua, Jokowa’s imposing grandson, strode forward the last fifty yards or so at my side while the others held back like gawkers watching the condemned.
“Stay above ground,” Tokua urged, his wide eyes meeting mine for perhaps the first time that morning. “You don’t want to get caught in closed spaces. They move fast.”
He shook his head, looking up along the switchback path towards the village. I thought he might try to dissuade me one last time, but he never gave voice to the words. Instead, he simply reiterated the warning of his grandfather, urging me to be out of the valley by nightfall. Then, the group departed in silence, leaving me to gather my courage in the shadow of that ominous chasm.
Only in the absence of other people did I realize how silent the primordial forest had fallen. The quiet was broken here and there by the distant call of some hunting bird far above, but that was small consolation. I glanced one last time at the notebook that contained my writings on the Detzner expedition, rallying my thoughts and reminding myself how fortunate I was to be confronted by so potent a mystery. At last, I hoisted my pack onto my shoulders, readied my rifle as best my unpracticed hands knew how, and strode into the misty-mouthed canyon.
During my education, I’d been fortunate enough to wander some incredibly old megalithic sites in Sumatra and Java, an experience at once intriguing and depressing. The long-dead ambience of those jungle-eaten temples and monuments reared by centuries-dead civilizations can make an onlooker feel as if they stand at the cusp of a mass grave. This chasm was somehow much worse, lonelier than anything I’ve ever experienced.
I pushed past fetishes and totems of wood and bone, produced by Jokowa’s highlanders and placed with ritual caution to ward off the evil said to dwell within. In chalk-like pigment, they had etched glyphs and figures upon the walls, mock warriors poised to throw back anything which might dare stand against them. Overhead, trees on the slopes above the chasm seemed to lean in to devour the sky, drowning the crag in semi-darkness. I produced the powerful flashlight I had brought along, shocked at how blinding the shadow had become, ever glancing towards the distant canopy and never once catching sight of the azure morning beyond. Then, the chasm opened up on the valley proper, and I was greeted with a sight which should never have been seen.
The space was relatively thin, some one or two hundred yards across, but stretched away into the mists for many times that distance. Several small streams fell in babbling procession from the sheer stone walls and pooled in a clear pond at the center, breaking the droning silence of the chasm. Up above, on the battlements of the rough stone slopes, mighty trees twisted and intertwined at obscene angles to form a living ceiling, their bulk and range of growth seeming beyond reason. Despite all this evocative scenery playing out beneath the beam of my flashlight, it was the walls themselves that stopped my heart in my chest.
Set into the reddish stone of the valley’s edges, great glowering faces had been carved. They were abstract and elongated, their twisted contours carefully smoothed and rounded. Their mouths and eyes opened onto what I at first took to be small alcoves for display or storage. Upon drawing nearer, I saw that the mouths were doors, awkwardly raised from the ground below and allowing access to the interiors of buildings carved into the rock.
Immediately, I made for my notebooks, sketching their forms as best I could by glow of the flashlight. I might not be able to take photos, but this was too otherworldly a find not to record. Nothing of this sort had ever been found on the island. Indeed, I could think of nothing similar the world over. Turkey’s Cappadocia and Jordan’s Petra come to mind when one mentions underground communities or construction, but these faces were positively chilling.
I could at once understand why the place had such a terrible reputation among the locals. Despite the grace of their construction, the buildings were intimidating, the valley seeming observed from all angles by its unliving guardians. The stonework looked old, to my trained eye, eaten away in places despite the concise cover of the canopy above. Whether the years were measured in centuries or millennia, I could not tell. Given what I was to learn in that time-forgotten hell, I cannot help but assume the latter.
Nearly an hour passed before I mustered up the courage to enter one of those awful carven faces. I wandered the valley, finding it a great avenue of near-identical sculptures, with only the streams and pond to break its symmetrical layout. The remnants of what I took to be gardens of some kind rested here and there among the entrances, empty patches of raised soil perhaps used to raise lichen or fungi in the damp dark of the valley floor. Occasionally, slightly luminescent crickets leapt from my path, the sole sign of life in the unmoving tomb. At last, though, I could stall no longer, and forced myself to clamber clumsily up into one of the open mouths.
The rake of my flashlight across the far side revealed a circular chamber, its walls expertly shaped but left rough and textured to the touch. Its high, domed ceiling grew incredibly low near the floor, which itself buckled inward unevenly like a bowl, making the whole space into a kind of flattened sphere.
At the center, there was a firepit and several raised plinths I took to be stools, and along the curved walls alcoves wracked with dust housed pottery and sculptures of treated clay. Some, upon closer inspection, turned out to be blown glass, speaking to a high proficiency among the craftsmen of this undescribed people. Almost all were shaped like crawling or curling millipedes or centipedes, giving credence to the century-old sketch of Friedrich, with the few outliers generally being insect or arthropod in nature.
Only when I had done several circuits of the room did I accidently bring the beam of my light directly across the sunken firepit. The whole of the room’s ceiling lit up like a signboard, making me jump like a stricken animal. I had to collect myself before I fully realized what had happened and brought the beam back to focus on the pit. Its leaden interior, coated in some sort of dull metal soot-stained by spent fires, reflected upon an unbelievably intricate network of multicolored quartz which had been meticulously inlaid upon the ceiling. The lines formed many elongated men, dancing or posing around a vast coiled centipede, much the same as the one represented in gold those many years ago.
I spent some time sketching the image, marveling at the grace of its contours and the play of my light off the dazzling quartz. I imagined how it must have shimmered in the flickering light of a fire, seeming to shift and waver on a smoke-shrouded ceiling. Then, with a final scan of the stunning chamber, I proceeded through one of several low round doorways set into the wall. The smooth leather divider which had once served as a curtain, chewed to tatters by the march of time, pulled away to reveal an almost identical chamber next door. All around the valley, these dwellings or ritual chambers formed a sort of communal hive, interconnected and accessible, hinting at close clan or familial bonds among the missing inhabitants.
Toward the rear of the dwellings, heading deeper into the rock, small rough-walled tubes had been carved, usually leading into musty, cramped depressions littered with desiccated old rags of a strange, dark fabric. These I took to be bedrooms or meditation chambers, secluded cubbies where the inhabitants could curl up and ruminate on the issues that faced them. Sometimes, though, the tunnels wound off around tight corners, seeming to weave out of view and deeper into the stone below.
Try as I might, I could not bring myself to crawl into these tunnels. The warnings I had received about the darkness which lurked below ground played a part, but I was equally concerned about the claustrophobic awkwardness of the angles and slopes in the tunnel. Fascinating as the valley was, the oppressive mood it inspired was undeniable. The subdued clamor of the waters outside served to coat the shadows in a masking white noise, and the feeling that I was not alone had grated on me more than once as my boots echoed across the stone. I had no desire to become trapped on some slick incline in the dark beneath my feet, my cries for help reverberating down into the unknowable depths.
As it happened, the surface held one final, groundbreaking find for me. When at last I reached the end of the valley, I discovered the building there to be different than the others. It was much larger, with an oval interior soaring cathedral-like overhead, the shadowed floor covered with raised plinths or stools like the ones I’d seen before. The walls were covered in curved shelving carved into the stone, laden with clay tablets in impeccable condition.
On these tablets, a series of elongated triangular depressions formed a language of some kind, its patterns making it unmistakable. Though whatever linguistic tradition had birthed this otherworldly writing was alien to me, I speculate it was legible as both a visual and textural language, allowing its readers to feel its words in the dark, much like braille.
So exhilarated was I by the discovery of etched writing that I made it almost halfway round the room eyeing the shelves before I noticed the effigy looming at the far end. I had at first taken it to be a statue in the shadows, a massive recreation of the smaller clay and glass sculptures the modest dwellings had displayed. When my light played off its jagged form, I realized its contours were of bone rather than stone.
Lashed by leather or skin with meticulous care, femurs and ribs made up the legs and carapace of a great, writhing centipede. It was reared like a striking cobra, its legs outstretched and flailing, its ivory bulk having towered over the raised stone stools that decorated the floor. Protruding from the place where a head should have been was a centaur-like assemblage of bones that preserved the shape of a man, with the long spine bent and its arms outstretched towards the floor below. Its skull, slightly above eye-level with me when standing before it, looked out over the room with unseeing sockets. Something about its proportions struck me as wrong, perhaps speaking to some deformity or birth defect, but I was too unnerved by the structure to draw in for a closer look.
The giant idol was a wicked thing, and I gave it a wide berth. Though as an anthropologist I told myself my revulsion was born of unfamiliarity with the practices of an unfamiliar culture, that student’s mantra didn’t ease the harsh glare of the unseeing skull scanning the room. I focused instead on the shelves and tablets, gathering those which looked most intact into my bag and wrapping them in wax paper, hoping Jokowa would understand my need to preserve these potentially priceless clay tomes. After all, if the highlanders had actually wiped out the valley-dwellers, then these were the last testament to the community which had been built in the darkness of their sheltered, misty vale.
Then, a very different kind of text came into view. It was a modern supply log, many decades old, rotten and torn. This stranger in a landscape of strange texts had been slipped in among the tablets, just one more tome among the collated knowledge of the Many-Legged God. I suppressed my excitement, and removed it as tenderly as was possible, donning plastic gloves to handle the delicate pages within.
By the light of my flashlight, scored by the soft symphony of the slow streams and chirping crickets outside, I saw that the text was in the French language. Though I speak many tongues, my French was mostly garnered in grade school. Still, collating that layman’s grasp with a solid understanding of Latin, I could make out the gist of most of it. A missionary, ostensibly catholic, was keeping record of supplies and funds being used to establish wells, clinics, and churches in the highlands. The few legible dates in the log placed its origin sometime in the early fifties, and its contents seemed mundane. Then, the pages ceased to be lists, and became something altogether more terrible.
In hurried scrawl which demanded herculean effort to decipher, the missionary wrote of a raid on the wagon which had been carrying their supplies. He described the slaughter of their horses and the capture of he and his companion in the shadowy dusk, another missionary named LaSalle. More chilling was the shaky description of his captors, etched in handwriting made jagged by frayed nerves and spiked adrenaline.
The things he described were men, but stretched beyond reason, gaunt and disturbingly tall. They had moved with a grace he described as disgusting, likening the way their elongated limbs and spines worked to the way a spider’s legs skittered. Their faces, he said, were the worst, sunken and marble-pale. Their heads had no ears, instead boasting great sunken pads that vibrated with every snapped twig or soft footfall. Their massive eyes, almost entirely pupils, danced in electric light like those of animals above mouths of needle-like teeth.
They had dragged them away, the narrator wrote, into a valley I took to be the very one in which I stood. The ghouls, as he termed them, had branded and marked the skin of their captives before ritually butchering LaSalle beneath an effigy of bone. What the writer called their ‘monster’ had taken LaSalle, an offering of flesh for a hungry god. The writer, assuming he was being saved for another ritual the following night, had scrawled these words in hiding, hoping his fellow missionaries might learn what had befallen them. They’d obviously never found them, and the fate that befell the log’s owner was easy to imagine.
I turned my gaze to the idol once more, drawing in to examine that malformed skull, the missionary’s words etched into my memory. The stone beneath it was dark and stained, ancient offerings long ago having blackened the ground. Suddenly, the proportions made sense, the saucer eyes and the gaping cavities where ears should sit coming into sharper focus. It was so close to human, yet so abysmally different. Those who look on Neanderthal or the popularly-named ‘hobbit’ and find them uncanny need only look upon the children of the Many-Legged God to experience true repulsion.
As my mind reeled, trying to piece together what I was seeing, I caught a flicker of movement above me, at the edge of my light. I looked up, and at once understood what it was to be an ensnared fly watching the hungry approach of the spider.
Through a decorated crevice high above in the masonry of the ceiling, is gigantic body contoured to examine the room beneath it, a massive centipede had crawled. It was impossibly large, several feet wide and dozens of feet in length, far larger than any such thing should ever be able to grow. Its antennae wriggled mere inches above my head, twitching as it blindly searched for the prey which had so carelessly stumbled into its temple.
I screamed. As I stumbled out from beneath the creature and frantically dashed for the exit, I didn’t have time to consider how foolish that cry had been. My only thoughts were of the pass to the sunlit forest beyond the valley, and the muted clatter of chitinous limbs on the stone behind me as the Many-Legged God gave chase. It was not until I burst from the temple into the near-blackness of the vale that I realized how costly that scream had been.
Skittering from the once-vacant mouths of those glowering faces and through cracks on the cliff face above with a flexibility and ease that seemed supernatural, the valley-dwellers came. They moved on all fours, bent at the back to allow their overextended arms to aid in propelling them along the ground. Their legs jolted like a frog’s, twisting at painful angles, their pallid skin translucent with the purple tinge of bulging veins. Blades of flint or obsidian were clasped in their hands, but it was those glinting, bulging eyes that made my blood run coldest.
I sprinted, the centipede-thing left somewhere behind me as it hesitated to leave its dark temple, its dozens of servants loping in to meet me. I skirted the edge of the pond, moving faster than I’d ever moved, but realized there was no way to outpace the things near the exit. They already closed in across the pass, barring my way, hopping forward to meet me at the pond’s edge. I focused on them as I neared, preparing to fight, considering whether it was too late to swing the rifle down from my shoulder and attempt a shot.
The two between me and the pass shrieked, an awful hyena-like sound made with vocal organs alien to our own. The light of my flashlight’s beam was on them, and they stumbled over themselves to avert their eyes. Glottal and hacking, I thought I heard breaks in their cries, something that I now assume was language. I wheeled around, bringing the light to bear on the things approaching my side of the pond, driving them to their knees and setting the whole mob to shrieking.
I wasted no time, starting up my sprint again, waving the beam at any who drew too close, thrown rocks whistling past my head as the things yowled their fury at the light. As I pressed through the pass, I kept the light angled over my shoulder, ever aware of the coyote-like chorus in pursuit. Only when I stumbled out into the late afternoon sun of the meadow and put a thirty second run between myself and the valley’s mouth did I dare look back. I curse that I did, for I would certainly sleep more soundly if I’d spared myself that last, eerie image.
Deep in shadow, hanging from the rock with tapering fingers as if they had been born to the stone, the valley-dwellers decorated the walls of the chasm. They hung at varying heights, visible as still silhouettes more than solid shapes in the gloom. Their eyes caught the ambient glow of the sun upon the meadow, and gleamed hungrily after the foolish soul they’d sought for prey.
​
In the years since my fortunate flight from that night-cloaked vale, I’ve ceased to be an anthropological interventionist. When the argument arises whether the hands-on or hands-off approach is best when dealing with documentation of uncontacted or undescribed cultures, I always advise the academy to keep far away.
I’ll tell colleagues who ask why so great a shift has taken place in my stances that preservation through awareness has proven fallible in my eyes. I’ll opine that the uncontacted are better protected by their isolation than they could ever be by documentation. If ever the true rationale got out, my academic credibility would go up in smoke.
Delving in the wake of that awful day has dredged up myths about the Vedic Agartha or the Mayan Xibalba. I’ve become keenly aware of how common human mythology about civilizations beneath the rock and stone truly are. I wrack my brain, wondering how deep the tunnels beneath that forgotten crevice in Papua wind. I crack open my books and scroll tirelessly through articles on evolutionary divergence at my desk, taking note of the many close relatives we once had as a species and how widely they vary.
What path, I wonder, might a group driven underground have taken? What twisting of the hominid form might take place if it were dragged from the sunlight into the shadows of the Earth’s winding interior?
Often, I look from my study’s desk to the chest where those treated clay tablets rest unseen, unknown to all but me, and shudder. It is best, I’ve decided, that I never know the answer to those questions. If the children of the Many-Legged God are anything to go by, I believe it better that no one know the answer to those questions.

Source: https://www.sidehustleschool.com/
[More ideas in the comments below too.]

• CLASSROOM: Four Ways to Identify Moneymaking Ideas ...
• CLASSROOM: Goals, Agenda, and Your First Assignment ...

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213. Second Grade Teacher Earns Second Income
214. Serial Business Builder Creates Digital Checklist Tool
215. Should I hire a lawyer and get a patent?
216. Side Hustle Turned Full-Time Job Disrupts Car Rental Industry ...
217. Sisters Find Puppy Love After Launching Dating App
218. Social Worker Bakes Cupcakes for The Walking Dead
219. Software Engineer Scavenges For Profits
220. South African Writer Launches Accidental Acting Career
221. South Carolina Man Learns to Make Candles by Watching ...
222. Speech Pathologist Sells Turkish Tea Towels By the Seashore ...
223. Sports Writer Wins Big Gambling On His Own Book
224. Squeaky Clean Couple Raise the Bar with Online Soap Sales ...
225. Store Manager Makes Micro Gainz For Macro Profits
226. Stressed-Out Mom Gives Up TV to Launch Her Hustle
227. Student Bytes Into Lucrative Web Host Biz
228. Student Gets Paid to Help People Rent Adventures
229. Stylish Clothes Reseller Becomes Fashion Consultant
230. Super Fan Scores Big in the Football Community
231. Tailor-Made Teas Brew Steamy Steeped-In Profits
232. Teacher Hustles to Pay Off $100,000 in Student Loans
233. Tech Broker Moonlights as Luxury Lifestyle Artist
234. Teenage Fitness Fan Jumpstarts Athletic Apparel Brand
235. Tennessean Meets Nepalese Sherpa on Lyft Ride, Sells ...
236. Texas Couple Turns Test Scores Into Treasure
237. That's the Spot! Dog Lover's Hustle Becomes Fur-ever Biz ...
238. The 10-Year Quest for Must-Have Mustard
239. The Battle of the New Zealand SpeedCubers
240. The Hero's Journal Helps You Make Progress Toward Your ...
241. The Paleo Bagel: No Wheat, No Worries
242. The Rise and Fall of BirdSupplies.com
243. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Digital Nomads
244. The Snuggle Is Real: Architect Moonlights by Selling Designer ...
245. Think Like a Lawyer: An Underground School For Lifelong ...
246. This Standing Desk Costs Just $37
247. Toronto Startup Employee Bakes Custom Cakes
248. Tote-ally Functional Bags for Women on the Go
249. Trip to Europe Inspires Adventurous Blanket Biz
250. Turn It Up to 11! Musical Mash-Ups Provide Passive Income ...
251. Tuscan Vacation Inspires Leatherworking Hustle
252. Twelve Months of Experiments Leads Coach to Clarity
253. Two Women Create Swimwear Brand for D-Cups and Up ...
254. Un-Tours Of Myanmar Offer Adventure and Unpredictability ...
255. University Director Turns Draining Problem Into Profitable ...
256. Vegan Food Lovers Sprout Plant-Based Festivals
257. Vintage Clothing Shop Sells Retro Jeans for Modern Money ...
258. WEEKLY RECAP: 3 Priorities to Keep You Focused
259. WEEKLY RECAP: All the Things You Want to Do
260. WEEKLY RECAP: Barking Up the Right Tree
261. WEEKLY RECAP: Before Beginning, Prepare Carefully
262. WEEKLY RECAP: Do You Have to Be Passionate About What ...
263. WEEKLY RECAP: Does Your Idea Pass the Grandmother Test ...
264. WEEKLY RECAP: Going from Hobby to Hustle
265. WEEKLY RECAP: Government Shuts Down, Your Life ...
266. WEEKLY RECAP: Health Coaches May Need to Be Certified ...
267. WEEKLY RECAP: How to Design a Profitable Online Course ...
268. WEEKLY RECAP: If You Ever Feel Insecure, Don't Miss This ...
269. WEEKLY RECAP: Keeping Up With What Matters
270. WEEKLY RECAP: Pay Attention to the Ideas In Your Head ...
271. WEEKLY RECAP: Scavenger Hunts, Bow Ties, & Horses ...
272. WEEKLY RECAP: The $0 Startup, Sign Hustles, and Ways to ...
273. WEEKLY RECAP: The Conversion Problem
274. WEEKLY RECAP: Tiny Houses, T-Shirts, and Romance Novels
275. WEEKLY RECAP: Understand Your Ideal Working Conditions ...
276. WEEKLY RECAP: What Prevents You From Making Progress ...
277. WEEKLY RECAP: Why Do a Product Launch Only Twice a ...
278. WEEKLY RECAP: Why You Should “Return Every Handshake ...
279. Wedding App Founder Exchanges Vows for Coding Book Biz ...
280. Wedding Bells Ring Brighter if the Bride's Not Broke
281. Weekend “Book Registry” Site Earns Passive Income from ...
282. Weekly Recap: All You Need Is Luck and a Million Dollars ...
283. Weekly Recap: Don't Compete with Amazon
284. Weekly Recap: Find a Community to Support Your Goals ...
285. Weekly Recap: Food Trucks, YouTube Makeup, and Marijuana
286. Weekly Recap: How to Identify Side Hustle Ideas in Your ...
287. Weekly Recap: How to Stop Procrastinating (Really!)
288. Weekly Recap: Making Time for What Matters
289. Weekly Recap: Should You Ever Buy Someone Else's ...
290. Weekly Recap: Starting a Coffee Delivery Service
291. Weekly Recap: Starting and Ending a Seasonal Side Hustle ...
292. Weekly Recap: Weekly Recap: Finding a “Hook” as a Dietitian ...
293. Weekly Recap: What Kind of Profit Margin Should You Have ...
294. Weekly Recap: Will People Pay for History Lessons?
295. Weekly Recap: Winning the Side Hustle Lottery
296. Weekly Recap: “This Time, It's Different”
297. What's In the Box? Low-Carb, Low-Sugar Snacks
298. When Fashion Flops, This Designer Follows a Shiny Object ...
299. Yoga Enthusiast Stretches B-School Education Into Fair-Trade ...
300. Yoga Teacher Cleans Up with Home Organizing Business ...
301. Zombie Apocalypse Prevention Podcast Earns $200,000/Year ...
302. “Bendy Straw” Idea Raises $1.8M on Kickstarter
303. “Fun Guy” Becomes Spore-Adic Mushroom Farmer
304. “Random Acts of Kindness” Project Earns Non-Random Cash ...
305. “SwitchPod” Camera Tool Raises $415,748 on Kickstarter ...
306. “Teachers Against Humanities” Card Deck Unites Educators ...