The Spiral Road is the story of young Dr Anton Zorgdrager and his adventures in the Colonial Health Service of the Dutch East Indies. Reprinted ten times by 1967, this was De Hartog’s second Dutch bestseller. It was translated into English in 1957 and made into a Hollywood film in 1962. An excellent summary of the novel is given in the blurb of the English edition:


‘This is a novel of the Indonesian jungle, conceived on an immense scale. When young Dr. Anton Zorgdrager enlisted in the Dutch East Indies health department, he arrived at a critical moment. Almost at once he was off with a crew of natives paddling three weeks up-river to stamp out a plague epidemic. And when he reached his destination, there was old Brits-Jansen waiting for him, the world’s greatest authority on leprosy and the most formidable personality in the archipelago.


With tremendous vitality, Jan de Hartog moves his story between the dregs of Amsterdam’s underworld and the rivers and forests of Java, New Guinea and Papua. He recreates a whole world of colonial characters and episodes: the old Sultan incessantly playing billiards as plague seeps round his gaudy palace; the heroic Salvation Army Captain whose wife, once an alcoholic prostitute, is now a leper at the end of an agonising martyrdom; Els, the girl who married Anton, little knowing what it is to be a jungle doctor’s wife; and the ghastly story of what happened to Frolick. But perhaps even more memorable than Anton Zorgdrager’s adventures, exciting as they are, is Mr. de Hartog’s account of the spiritual crisis that one man, alone among thousands of hostile natives, can undergo — the excursion into the far more terrifying jungle of the human soul.’


The highpoint of the novel is the tale of tropical madness in the closing chapters. It was separately published as ‘Duel with a witch doctor’ in Reader’s Digest Condensed Books in 1961. Set on the wild coast of New Guinea, it is the spiritual duel between young Zorgdrager and the Papuan witch doctor Burubi, whose black magic slowly drives Zorgdrager insane, causing him to run off into the jungle and degenerate into a naked ape-man, until he is saved by the white magic, the true religion of his friend, the Salvation Army Captain Willem Waterreus.

Willem knelt by the side of the stretcher. He took the hands of the boy in his and looked at him. A dead silence fell in the hut and everyone held his breath, waiting for the magic word. The old man held the boy’s hands and looked at the grey cavernous face without speaking. No one moved, for he was about to speak the magic word against the guna-guna.

But Willem said nothing; he only held the hands of the boy, and looked at him.

When the sun stood in its zenith, he had still said nothing.

When the shadow of the flag had crept up the veranda, he still held those hands in his, and he had still said nothing.

When the evening mist crept towards the hut, and the darkness came, he still knelt, looking at the lifeless face, but the magic word had not been spoken.

When night fell and the dwarf lit the lamp, he still had not moved. He seemed to sleep, staring at the boy’s face, but there was a stillness around him that burnt with strength. (p. 59-60, tr. Jan de Hartog)