I began to feel the warmth of the rising sun on my back. The ground was grassy now. The top of the hill I could see ahead of me, a grassy plain from which I could be able to look in all directions. The sky beyond it was pale blue now. And I had gotten my second wind. I hardly panted at all as I gave the last pull upward that landed me on the edge of a meadow on the top of the hill.
The first thing I saw was the face of a small brown goat that stood looking intently at me, as if it had been expecting me. It watched me for a moment, then in quick leaps crossed the meadow and disappeared.
I turned around and looked toward the horizon behind me. And I felt my breath knocked out of me as no climb could have done. I looked to my left, to my right. I ran—as well as I could stumblingly, limpingly run—across the meadow toward the west and looked. I rubbed my eyes.
Then I walked along the edge of the meadow, circling the entire, flat top of the hill, scanning the horizon in every direction.
When I came back to the point where I had started, I sat down in the grass, sat very still, waiting for the reality of my vision to sink into reality in my mind.
On the horizon, as far as I could see, in every direction, was water. I was on an island.
Two
From where I sat I could look straight down upon the village. At the center of it was the great tent, rising above the huge old tree. The low stone walls started from the tree, spiraling outward in wider and wider circles. Along the wall, at irregular intervals, were tent domes like the one I stayed in. I counted twelve of them. The stone wall ended abruptly at the last one. Then the spiral continued with the little igloo type mounds; there were over twenty of them blending outward irregularly into the fields beyond.
Then suddenly the whole village disappeared. I blinked and it came back. As I focused and unfocused my eyes upon the village it alternately melted into scrubby ground and reappeared in its spiral design, like a shifting optical illusion game or an expert work of camouflage.
Many people were already up. I saw them come out of their tents and move outward from the spiral. Some of them followed the spiraling path, but many simply hopped over the low stone walls. Beyond the outermost stone walls were piles of sticks and bones. People stopped at these piles to pick up a tool and moved outward to the fields where they began to work in irregularly spaced groups. Others came to the very edge of the fields, below me, and worked among the trees in the orchards.
I sat there the whole day, my mind in suspension, but my senses alert. Some people stayed in the fields nearly all day while others went back into the village after only a couple of hours. There was constant coming and going in the little igloos outside the village. I’d have thought they were used as some kind of latrines if I hadn’t been in one, and if the people hadn’t stayed so long—at least an hour—during each visit to one.
Occasionally I saw a group of workers suddenly stop work and begin to move together in a kind of dance. Sometimes they joined hands in a line, but more often they just faced each other, or faced toward the center of a square or circle, and did slow unison movements, bending far backward, swinging their arms in broad waves, stepping long slow strides. However their movements went, they always stopped the same way: erect, hands at sides, heads thrown back. They would laugh and go back to working in the soil, their work taking on the same rhythmic quality.
Children went among them with a bag that must have contained water. They drank, danced and worked.
When the sun was directly overhead many of them went back to the village. Others lay in the shade of trees or went into the little igloos. In the afternoon many of them were back at work in the fields again. I heard the sound of bees, of birds calling, of the breeze rustling leaves and grass. When the wind was right I could hear the faint gushing of an unseen river, and once in the late afternoon, the wind brought me the echo of the ocean waves on some beach out beyond the hill. Mingled with these sounds were the occasional bursts of laughter or singing from the workers in the fields. But the entire day passed without my hearing from them one spoken word.
As the sun moved low on the horizon, the hill cast its shadow over the fields nearest me, and the people, one by one, began to stop work and move toward the village. On the far side of the village, where the fields circled almost beyond my sight, to the next hill, I saw the people as little dots, moving toward the village.
Then I heard a familiar sound, a rattling drone, a whoshing roar. A plane was passing overhead. I looked up into the sky but I could see nothing. It was flying too high. Already the sound was dying away.
As I looked back down into the valley I saw a frozen scene come back to life. I thought my vision was playing tricks on me, for it seemed that all the people had for a few seconds frozen absolutely in the midst of a movement, like a movie that stops to become a still picture and then is animated again. Now that they were in motion again, I felt doubtful that they had stopped at all.
While they had left the village in various ways, they all now entered it the same way. From the point where the low stone walls began, they walked the spiral inward, in the procession which I had seen daily. They stopped at various tents, then moved onward in the processing leading to the great central tent. As the sky darkened, the fields and village looked empty, and I knew that they were all in the cone under the great spokes of the uncovered tent, eating.
I felt weak and cold. I climbed down the hill, stumbling a couple of times, but not hurting myself. At the foot of the hill I reached into one of the trees and picked some of the small green plums. I ate them on my way across the fields, and immediately felt stronger. It was quite dark as I reached the stone wall, and clouds hid the moon. So I followed closely along the low stone walls, rather than stepping over them, following the slow spiral inward as the others had done before me. Keeping one hand on top of the walls I noticed that they were slightly indented, as if a shallow gutter ran along the top. I imagined that when it rained, the water was caught in those gutters, running inward to fill the pool below the great old tree.
When I reached the end of the stone wall, I could see the waters of the pool glistening. The clouds had passed and the night was clear. I splashed some water on my face. Then I bent under the branches of the great tree and found my way to the great tent, where I stood on the edge looking down into the cone.
This time, in front of the glowing embers of the fire, there were ten or twelve children, naked, going through what looked like some kind of dance. They joined hands, circled the fire, extended their hands toward the fire, raised their right hands high, then extended these hands toward the people sitting on the first step near them. The people stretched out their hands as if to receive something, then turned and stretched out their hands behind them, as if to pass it on. The motion was repeated, step by step, all the way up.
Over and over again, the children moved silently through the dance; the arms of the audience swung forward and backward. After a few minutes I began to feel slightly dizzy at the waves of motion. Then I thought I saw a slight glow in the hands of one of the children. I blinked my eyes, and it was gone. I started to move forward down the steps, but I felt afraid of the mass of waving arms. Finally I decided to stand on the edge of the cone until the ritual ended. Several times I felt giddy. Several times I thought I saw some shining objects passed from hand to hand in the darkness.
The dance ritual didn’t really end. It just faded away as one by one the children tired and sat down or lay down or returned to a seat on the steps. The last one held his hand above the fire for a moment, then abruptly sat down. All motion stopped and there was complete silence.
Into that silence, I shouted. “Doesn’t anyone here speak English!” All heads turned toward me. My shout sounded so stupid that I expected them to laugh. But no one did. The faces I could see in the semi-darkness looked uncertain, then concerned, then welcoming. Arms reached out to me and led me down the steps. Someone stepped forward to stir up the fire, and it flared into brightness. Then Goldy-lo
cks stepped forward, squinted his slant eyes at me and said, “Chil-sing,” then put his fingers to his chest. He repeated this several times, then looked at me and waited.
I touched his chest with one finger and repeated, “Chil-sing.” He nodded and smiled. Everyone nodded and smiled. Heads were bobbing all around me. They had understood that I wanted to communicate, and they were teaching me their language, starting with names.
Hopelessly I acquiesced. Certainly I could find out nothing about where I was and what was going to happen to me until I knew how to communicate with them. I pointed to my chest and said my name. There was no response at all. Chil-sing just looked at me. Slowly he shook his head. Everyone else started shaking heads. The motion was eerie repeated in the darkness all around me.
“Idiots. I’m telling you my name.”
Chil-sing put his hand on my shoulder and shrugged as if he wanted to change the subject. I pulled my shoulder away from his grasp. He looked stricken. He bowed his head and murmured something that sounded like an apology. Many of the surrounding people did the same. It was exasperating.
“Look,” I said. “Let’s give up the language lesson for tonight. I’m tired. We’re all tired. Let’s go to sleep. Huh? Tired?” I started going through some gestures of sleep, and they finally caught on. People started getting up, but they stood still in their places until one of the old ones stood up before the fire and chanted something, just a phrase or two. Then she said, “Nagdeo, nagdeo, nagdeo.” The whole group repeated the word three times and then they started to file out.
Chil-sing and the bald man waited for me. They started to take my arms, but I shrugged them away. They followed me. Once we got past the tree and the pool I started short-cutting, stepping over the stone walls, and they followed me. I lost my way and couldn’t find our tent, until one of them nudged me and led the way. Then I stumbled into the tent, rolled up in my blanket and fell dead asleep.
The next morning I was up first. The next one up was the black woman. She stood in front of me, reached up her arms, spread them wide and started to clasp them in front. But I interrupted. I reached forward, pointing to her breast, just short of touching her right nipple, and said “What’s your name?” She looked surprised. I pointed again.
“Augustine,” she murmured. Then she clasped her hands and began telling me whatever she was telling. I interrupted her, pointed to the framework of the wall and demanded, “What do you call this?”
She paid no attention to me, but finished her incomprehensible recital. Then she looked where I was pointing and said “Ka.” I pointed to the mat covering the framework, to the floor, to the opening, and she simply repeated, “Ka.”
Then she motioned for me to follow her outside. Others were already on the paths walking outward. No one hopped walls and everyone walked slowly. As they passed trees and bushes they picked a blossom or a twig. I noticed that several butterflies circled the head of the black woman, and one finally lit on her shoulder.
“That’s some trick, Augustine,” I said. “Will you teach it to me?”
She only smiled.
We walked single file now, out across the fields and onto a trail through a thick forest. Then we came to a river and walked along its banks until, widening and slowing, the river too became silent. The next sound I heard was that of the sea. We walked past a large rocky mound, into the sand, and saw and heard the rushing surf, with the sun rising above it.
I fell on the sand, too exhausted to move. The people filed past me and walked straight toward the water. On the edge of the water they pulled off their tunics and left them on the sand.
They waited, standing on the edge of the sea, until all were there, standing in a straight line along the edge of the water, naked, facing the rising sun. Then each took the leaf or blossom he carried and threw it forward into the water. As their blossoms were carried outward in the receding waves, they joined hands and followed them into the water.
When the water reached waist-height I heard squeals and laughter as they began paddling about, washing themselves and one another. They played like any sea bathers on a Sunday afternoon. And, in fact, I learned later that this was their sabbath, which came about every seven days (depending on the weather and the work) and which always started with an ocean bath, even in cold weather, except during the worst of winter.
They came out of the water one by one, put on their tunics and began to organize games and dances on the sand. These went on until the sun was high. Then we started back.
I was too tired to make it all the way. Before we reached the fields, the bushy-haired man swooped me up in his arms, as if I were a baby. “Sbgai,” he identified himself as we jogged along. And that was how we entered the village, leading the procession, his little lamb bleating behind us.
The rest of the day was spent sitting around the village. Small circles formed around single people, usually old ones, who recited long monologues. I joined one group with Sbgai. Every now and then I would catch a word, repeat it to Sbgai and challenge him to translate it. By the end of the day I had learned about twenty words, was more confused than before, and only slightly less bored.
There is no point in detailing the process of my lauguage lessons. I followed people around throughout the next few days, pointing to things and asking their names.
I have always been quick with languages, easily picking up a working knowledge of several. After a few days I concluded that, judging from their language these people were so backward as to be a race of mental retardants. The vocabulary I heard was small and general. I understood that ka meant dwelling place or tent, but all parts of the ka were simply referred to as ka. Similarly there was a word for food, and anything edible was called by that word, with no differentiation. All trees, bushes, plants—anything that grew—had one name. All stones, of whatever color or type, had one name. All animals had one name—even birds and insects were included in it. And the same word (which was only a slightly elongated form of the word for plants) meant people too. I couldn’t see how they could communicate anything at all with a language of such poverty.
And, of course, they didn’t communicate much with words. They seemed to try to avoid speaking as much as possible, using gestures when they needed to tell someone something. This hampered me a great deal because although they would speak when I demanded to know a word, would answer any question I asked, it was really impossible to engage them in conversation.
The younger ones were less taciturn. I began to spend a lot of time with Chil-sing and some of the children. In fact, I developed quite a following. They were willing to talk, and I got them to the point where they would chatter for minutes at a time until some adult came and quietly led them away.
That made me believe that the older ones were trying to hide something from me. For all their smiling and all their care of me, they were holding back, I felt sure of it. Otherwise, why would they take the children away after they had talked to me for a while? What were they afraid the children would tell me?
In a few weeks I knew all of the poor vocabulary they used every day, but I could still not understand much of what they said upon awakening in the morning nor much of what was said around the fire in the la-ka (the big tent) at night. I only caught a word here and there in these long speeches, which contained a large vocabulary of words saved up, as it were, for the occasion.
I intently watched and listened every night in the la-ka. I felt that it was here, in the long monologue, that I would learn the subtleties of their language, if any existed. But more than that I was intrigued with what I saw.
The second time the children acted out their little fire drama or dance, I watched more closely, and this time I was sure that what they passed from hand to hand were rubies.
Another children’s drama took place to spoken words, a chant—the first of the stories told in the la-ka whose words I was able to understand. It was simple enough:
We seek
All seek
Where? Wher
e?
As the chant was repeated a child danced up and down the steps, making motions as if she were hunting for something among the people, while the other children stood behind the fire chanting. When the child reached the top step, the chanters shouted, “There! Where? In you!”
I looked up to see the child’s mouth open wide with joy—and between her teeth I saw a pearl as big as an egg. Then, some quick sleight of hand, and it was gone.
That night, as we left the la-ka, I stopped Augustine and said, “You live a very hard, simple life by day, but at night you display your treasures in the la-ka.” She smiled and nodded. “Is there more than I have seen?”
She turned to face me. This time she did not smile. “Much more.”
I could not read her expression. I decided that these people were a mixture of subtlety and stupidity. They obviously knew the value of the precious gems I had glimpsed, and they prized them, but only as a decoration to their stories and rituals, not as a means for improving their material condition. Could it be possible that they did not know the monetary value of them? That seemed unlikely, yet I saw no sign, so far, that they had any contact or had ever had any contact with my world. I suspected them of trying to avoid contact, of hiding their existence. Why? To keep from having their treasure stolen? Yet, without contact with the outside world how could they know that anyone would want to steal the precious stones?
I saw no sign of any mining on the island. When I asked where the precious stones came from, I was greeted with blank stares. Communication was still difficult, and I gave up in frustration at their ignorance or reticence, whichever it might be. Whatever they were hiding, I felt sure I would find out before long from such simple people.
The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You Page 4