by Ted Dekker
That night the bag was again removed from my head in a heavy downpour. Again a gourd of water was tilted to my lips, and again I sucked at the water in long, deep drafts. For the second time since my capture I was able to see the leader, who tended to me. It was he who first gave me food.
I say food, but at the time I wondered if it was the mud scraped off the bottoms of his feet. The gray paste that he held in his fingers and pushed into my mouth tasted like a flour glue that had started to rot. Something squishy was mixed with the starchy compound. I know now that it was a sago grub—a thick white worm half the length of a finger that feeds on the pith of the sago palm.
My mother had always claimed that I was the pickiest of eaters. I was the last of her daughters to try fish, the last to taste escargot—and then only once, after my uncle coaxed me into it with a bribe of twenty dollars. I liked my meat well done and my hamburgers plain. I could barely handle biscuits and gravy, and mashed potatoes were passable only as long as they weren’t too smooth. With these exceptions, no gooey thing ever went into my mouth.
But I hadn’t eaten in nearly three days, and so I stared into the man’s brown eyes and swallowed his offering whole, desperate for any kind of nourishment.
The leader returned my stare without interest before pushing another handful of the paste into my mouth. He then pulled the sack over my head and left me free to breathe without the gag.
Despite the heavy rain, I slept that night.
The next morning my caretaker repeated the procedure. Off with the leeches. On with the mud. He replaced the gag, this time over the hood. Back in the canoe. Up the river.
No speaking, no chanting, no laughter, nothing but the steady breathing and gurgling of paddles as they were drawn through the water.
I was only half-alive. Deadened by sorrow over my child’s fate. Suffocated by self-pity. Barely strong enough to lie still, knowing that any attempt to change my predicament would surely worsen it.
The men had come a very long way—that much was now clear. I found moments of comfort in the likelihood that they would only carry very important cargo for so many miles into the jungle. They didn’t act like warriors celebrating any great feat, nor like mindless savages given to causing disturbances.
They carried themselves with utmost assurance and purpose, sure of their every move, contained and unruffled. They dominated their world without fear. Indeed, they seemed rather bored with it all.
When it seemed to me that nothing would ever change, our journey upriver came to an end sometime after noon on the third day.
For the first time since I’d joined them, my captors began to speak freely as they pulled the canoes up the bank with me still aboard. Their tones were low, and the speed of their speech rather than its volume expressed a new enthusiasm among them.
I’d surrendered my exhaustion to the unceasing murmur of paddles dipping into water, and to the gentle, musical quality of their voices, comforted by the fact that they had not killed me. But now any semblance of peace ended and my skin prickled with the uncertainty that faced me.
Two men hauled me out of the canoe and dropped me onto firm ground. I landed with enough force to knock the wind out of my lungs.
One of them gently nudged me with his foot and spoke what I assume were instructions. When I failed to respond, he nudged me again and presumably asked if I’d understood him.
Still gagged, I offered him the only thing I could, a mere grunt.
This seemed to satisfy him. My hands and feet were loosed, then strapped securely to a pole. In less time than it took me to grasp their intentions, they had me hanging from the pole between them and were marching into the jungle.
My sore neck couldn’t support the weight of my head, so I let it hang. My skull struck objects on the ground twice. Both times I cried out into my gag. Both times the carrier at my feet expressed surprise and lifted the pole higher for a moment before setting it back on his shoulder.
This is how, in August of 1963, I came into the valley known as Tulim: strapped to a pole like a bag of beans, carried like a bundle of bananas, swinging above the ground like a slain pig.
Surely I had been presumed lost at sea along with Stephen. Someone would find the shattered pieces of sailboat, and after a cursory search along the coast my sisters would weep and hold our funeral in the graveyard behind the First Baptist Church. My father would weep, my mother would cry.
But my father and mother were already dead.
And now so were my son and I.
I knew by distant cries that we had reached a village. At first there was only one utterance, a long whooping call that I briefly mistook for that of a bird.
Within moments the single cry was joined by a dozen more, and then by hundreds of voices whooping in unison, and a stampede of bare feet. They began to pound the earth with their heels, carefully in time with the chanting, making a kind of music of its own.
Uhm, uhm, uhm, uhm.
Deep and guttural, the sound shook me to my bones. This was the warriors’ welcome home.
Inside the bag my eyes were wide and my breathing was frantic. Imagined or not, I could feel hundreds of eyes staring at my cocooned body as my captors marched me through the throng.
A single voice silenced the others, calling above them in a long, melodic string of words. Within a few seconds the caller stopped and the chorus resumed.
Uhm, uhm, uhm, uhm.
We marched on.
I began to tremble in my sack.
Then the solitary melodic voice again, followed by the chorus and the pounding agreement. Uhm, uhm, uhm, uhm.
Children ran alongside us, whispering and giggling. Women joined in with high cries between the lower chants, like cymbals between drumbeats.
And then the pinpricks of light vanished from my hood. The rhythmic mantra fell away. The darkness deepened and the air grew slightly cooler, thick with an earthy scent. A door or a gate of some kind was closed, muting the voices to a distant burble. I was marched deep into the earth and dropped into a large hole in the ground.
No parting words of instruction, no encouragement, no sign my carriers either cared or did not care that I’d been brought into their village.
They simply left.
I was in my new home.
I was in hell.
Chapter Five
AN UNCLE had taken me and my sisters camping once. I’d spent only one night on the lumpy earth before deciding that I hated tents. The ground was hard, the smoke was rank, the night was cold, the bugs were everywhere, and I was not a happy camper. Only my sisters’ willingness to brave the harsh environment convinced me to stay the second night.
Compared to the dank holding cell into which I’d been thrown, that tent was a palace.
The air was cool underground, but I couldn’t appreciate the reprieve from the oppressive heat. At least in the boat I’d had gentle rocking and birdcalls to settle my thoughts.
In that dungeon I had nothing but my own mind to keep me company, and it was clogged with impossibilities that had somehow, through the most cruel twist of fate, become certainties.
The sea had taken my life. The jungle had stripped me of my dignity. The gods of the earth had taken my soul.
During those three days on the river, my mind had frequently gone to God, begging him to deliver me, clinging to the vaguest hope that there might be more to my faith than mere fantasy. But there in that hole, a seed of bitterness took root deep in my heart.
The dream that had drawn me across the ocean felt like a smudge on the edge of my consciousness. I cringed every time it slithered back into my memory, though the dream itself had not returned since I’d left Atlanta.
Destitute, I lay still and tried to shut down my mind. In the wake of my son’s death, filled with fear and anger, I began to believe that no distant God who would allow such suffering would rescue me.
I had left my home in good, obedient faith, eager to discover and offer wholeness and light. And I had found
only wretched anguish and darkness.
It was the first time that I’d dared curse God for my misfortune.
“Hello?”
My eyes snapped wide.
“Is anyone there?”
The voice was male. Raspy. It spoke English. My mind refused to process the sound as a reality. I was hallucinating.
But then it spoke again, in a hushed tone from another cell that seemed not so far from my own, this time in a broken form of the language the natives spoke. I knew then that the man was not a figment of my imagination.
I cried out, but I couldn’t form any words around the gag.
The prisoner must have assumed I was a native, because he mumbled something in their tongue before falling silent. I cried out again, and then again, until my throat was raw. All to no avail.
But I was no longer alone.
My body began to tremble with hope. I lay there, bound like a cadaver awakened from death, flooded with life. Waves of elation washed over my mind.
I was not alone!
I was alive.
Even more, the man spoke their language, which could only mean he’d been alive long enough to learn it.
They say that once broken, a person often willingly subjects himself to the master who has broken him. My ordeal had shattered my strongest resolve. The men who had taken me had become my gods, and I their slave. But now I had heard the voice of another slave.
I wanted to rush out and throw myself into his arms. I wanted to kiss him and beg him to tell me that everything would be OK, that this small interruption in my life would soon fade into the distant past, that my son was still alive and my sisters eagerly awaited my return, that my family and friends were preparing a sprawling lawn party for our reunion on the far side of the world. I would tell them of my most magnificent adventure and they would all cry and hug Stephen and me. Then they would beg me to sing for them.
I refused to listen to the other voices whispering in my mind. The ones that asked why, if the man had been here long enough to learn the language, he was still captive in this pit. The ones that wondered if these gods would treat a woman as kindly as they had treated a man.
I tried to rouse the man’s attention again. And yet again. It was pointless. Maybe his voice had been a hallucination after all.
THEY came for me several hours later and woke me from a heavy sleep full of indecipherable dreams. Two men pulled me from my hole, then hefted me over one of their shoulders. The realization that they were taking me away from that place of safety near the man who spoke English jolted my mind. I made a pathetic protest into my gag and tried to kick, but I was nothing but a squirming pig in their grasp.
It was dark outside, and a chorus of insects announced my passing. Bare feet slapped at the earth as I bounced over my carrier’s shoulder. No rain—that was new. Night had always seemed to bring rain.
Even then my mind was beginning to register perceived facts about my new life. Such as that I was a pig. That it rained most nights. That the man’s shoulder under my waist was powerful and his stride strong under my weight.
We must have traveled a mile before the man ducked through a doorway and set me in a sitting position on a hard floor. Soft voices were exchanged, and the men who had brought me left.
A fire crackled. The air was hot, but a chill tickled my flesh with anticipation—of what, I could not know.
When I didn’t think I could hold still in that silence for a moment longer, the bag was lifted off my head and I found myself staring up at a man I immediately recognized by the long scar on his left side: the tall leader on whom my eyes had first fallen in the ocean fog. His skin looked even blacker by the dancing flames. The fire pit was at the center of a round hut with a low, charred ceiling. His dark eyes studied me, still emotionless.
He was dressed more stately and his skin glistened clean now. But when I say dressed, I mean only as the gods can dress, naked except for what could be called jewelry. Thatched golden arm- and thigh bands. A yellow-and-red collar nearly an inch wide wound around his neck. Two white bone hoops through his earlobes. No longer covered by the furry headdress, his hair was longer than I’d imagined, and wet with some kind of oil. The orange light cast deep shadows between his muscles. I was sure that this man could snap my neck with a simple, quick twist if he was so inclined.
I found it difficult to breathe in his presence.
He wasn’t alone. Behind me hands carefully unwound the wide lengths of woven fibers that that had secured me for the last three days. The yellow of my sleeveless blouse had turned brown, and my canvas shoes were gray with mud. My black capris were torn at one knee.
I sat on a bark floor surrounded by thatched walls lined with no fewer than thirty human skulls.
I turned my head to see who was behind me. A woman, perhaps in her late teens, knelt at my back. I could not see her face in the shadows.
Like the man, she wore bone earrings and woven bands around her neck and arms. She was naked except for a lap-lap, flaps of red- and yellow-dyed fabric that hung from a string around her waist.
Having completed her task, the woman stood up, squared her shoulders, and stepped to one side.
“Mitnarru.” She motioned for me to stand.
I slowly pushed myself to my feet and stared at the woman’s face, struck by her beauty. Her dark cheekbones rose high, brightened by two streaks of a light blue paste or mud that wrapped around her brown eyes and rose like wide, pointed vines on her forehead. Her shoulders and breasts were accentuated by woven bands of blue and yellow.
Both she and the man were clean despite the environment. From what I could see, other than the hair on their heads, both had either plucked or shaved every strand from their bodies.
The man nodded at the woman. “Bo purack.”
She motioned for me to remove my blouse. When I stared back, unsure, she repeated the man’s order.
“Bo purack.”
To say that I was not given to public displays of nudity would be to grossly understate my disposition at the time. Even in the face of terrible danger, human pride is not easily sacrificed, at least not among those with refined character. Being made to disrobe in front of them suddenly struck me as inhumane.
The man mumbled a short word and spat into the fire. When I still did not move, the woman stepped up and began to pry at the buttons on my blouse.
I hated myself in that moment. I hated that I stood trembling with neither the strength nor the resolve to resist. I hated being forced to disrobe.
It’s strange how the simplest things, like nakedness, can be so debilitating. How the fear of being seen for what she really is can render a person so powerless. We humans protect what is ours to the bitter end, and when it’s forcibly taken from us, we no longer feel human. This is an absurdity.
Even so, I was given a small gift in the hut. The woman trying to undress me was as unfamiliar with buttons as I was with public nakedness. Before she or the man resorted to more strenuous means, I made the decision to help her. I would undress for them, of my own free will.
Pushing back my anxiety, I lifted my hands and unbuttoned my blouse for her. She slipped my shirt off, then stepped back and stared at my bra, blinking.
The man’s eyes settled on my chest. It was as if neither of them could quite believe that I was encased in yet another layer of protection.
I was too dense at the time to realize that their curiosity was motivated by incomprehension as to why any woman would want to hide her femininity and perhaps be mistaken for a man. In their eyes I was not unlike a cross-dresser. An outer garment was bad enough—surely they’d seen Western clothing before. But from their expressions I gathered that they’d never seen a bra.
For several long moments, neither seemed to know what to think of it.
The woman reached out and plucked my shoulder strap. Then she pulled one of the bra’s cups aside to make sure it wasn’t attached to my flesh.
She giggled and turned to the man, who shared no
ne of her amusement. He mumbled something that elicited a high-pitched diatribe and unbelieving scoffs from the woman. The man let her rave for several seconds, then cut her off with a single word.
She nodded and waved her arms at me, motioning me to take it off. “Bo purack.”
Needing no further encouragement, I quickly removed my bra and handed it to the woman, who examined it carefully. When she motioned to me to keep going, I took off my shoes and pants.
I stood naked except for my underwear, once yellow, now brown. They continued to stare at me. Once again the woman broke into an amused diatribe. Once again the man silenced her.
The man shoved his chin at me. “Peked.”
She began to inspect me as if I were something from the market. Without any regard for whether I might care, she examined my hair and my scalp. She pulled open my lips and flicked my teeth, then peered into my mouth. At this both of them mumbled in amazement.
Satisfied, she moved on to a cursory examination of the rest of my body. There was no mistaking the matter: I was not her equal. I was her lesser, her slave.
In a strange way the realization gave me strength as she examined my belly, my thighs, my toes. When she’d finished, the man stepped forward and gently squeezed my mouth open again. He stared at my teeth for a few seconds, then grunted and stepped back. It was my teeth that impressed him the most. In fact, he seemed interested in nothing but my teeth.
Then he released my face, spit one last time into the fire, mumbled something to the woman, and left the hut.
I could not know it at the time, but I had just been touched by one of the three most powerful men in the Tulim valley, and he’d left me unscathed. His name was Kirutu, fearless leader of the Warik, one of three valley tribes coexisting in a fragile balance.
Never again would I be so fortunate.
As soon as he left, two older women entered the hut through the same door. For a brief moment the three women stared as if unsure what to make of me. Then they approached and touched my skin, expressing their astonishment.