Rites

The helicopter settled on the dirt like an old man into a recliner, and the weed scraps that had been tossed into the air fluttered back to earth. The villagers had seen us coming from miles away over the flat savannah, and many gathered around to see what prominent figures would emerge. It could have been the president of Mozambique and his entourage, and they wouldn't have known. They didn't even know they lived in Mozambique. It wasn't the president, anyway. It was my uncle Ken and me-two distinctly unimportant American travelers. We brought with us Domingos, our translator, and Tatu, one of the kitchen boys at the café. We wouldn't have thought to bring him along at all, but we had just discovered was actually from the village, so we threw him in.
         Tatu was the first one out of the helicopter, and that surprised the people more than anything. He left his home village of Nhaminga ten years before, and had never returned, let alone with shoes, a cell phone, and from the sky. Nhaminga was only twenty kilometers from the camp at Gorongosa National Park, but in all those years, Tatu had never been back. He was greeted by an ecstatic cousin in his early twenties, who looked to be one of the leaders in the village. He had on a Hawaiian-type colorful shirt with a fist-sized gash taken out of the back, but it was still nicer than most of his colleagues' shirts. He explained to the gathering crowd who his rich stranger friend was, and they lined up to shake his hand, and then ours. Ken and I exchanged humble smiles.
         I had commented before on how kind the people were in Maputo, the capital, and was told that the people get even nicer the deeper you go into the bush. If that was truly the case, I thought, these people must be saints. Our camp was the only habitation of any kind within 30 kilometers of the village, and thick growth made the shoeless trip to anywhere all the more menacing. The small group gathering about us was comprised primarily of children, a couple of young men, and a couple of young mothers. One mother in her early twenties sported a pink bandana and a faded royal blue World Cup shirt with different national flags around the collar. She carried one small child and tethered at least one other in the dirt nearby. Another mother nearby weaned her own toddler unabashedly in front of the strangers on a breast roughly the size and proportions of a plastic baby bottle. At one point in my awkward looking about, she gathered it back into her shirt, at which point the child immediately thrust down his searching hand to retrieve it again.
         Tatu's cousin led us into the village itself, which was a clearing enveloping twelve burnt yellow structures dropped onto the dust floor. I counted them. About eight or nine of them had walls, seemingly of dried mud, and the rest were just open all around. The huts weren't pretty, but the thick blue and green of the background made up for it. And they had a sort of understated majesty. They were just as I had imagined them. In the middle of the scatter of huts was one slightly larger structure with a thatched roof, like the rest, and about twenty knotty wood poles to hold it up. Approaching the center of the clearing, some of the children rushed ahead to set up a circle of chairs and benches in the shade of a lone tree, while the remaining villagers sauntered out of their huts. The benches were rudimentary, but the wood chairs had square corners- a sure sign that they had been created by someone with tools. They offered those to us. My uncle said that priests visit these isolated villages sometimes, and probably brought them these chairs. I wondered what else they brought, noting that the huts of the village didn't seem to have the capacity to conceal much.
         Two of the legs of my chair had steady contact with the ground, and I rocked indecisive about the third as I tried to catch words from the conversation among the men of the village. The regulo, the one older man I saw, welcomed us to Nhaminga and chattered away happily about it. He had an old, light brown shirt on that was too big for him. He was very thin, and was missing most of the teeth that should have been in his shriveled, little head. One younger, stronger man ambled out of his hut late with bloodshot eyes, squinting against the brightness of the sun, and holding a pink hand towel loosely against the right side of his head. He had malaria, they said. He joined the circle, but kept his head down most of the time. I spent my own time in the circle watching the benchful of boys across from me, sitting all in a row, restlessly poking each other and whispering secrets. I yearned to know what they could be talking about. What would you whisper about if your entire life was twelve huts, tall grass, and a river? I supposed that the hunt would make for good stories. I knew for a fact that there were lions, hippos, and all sorts of predators that viewed these humans as no more than another link in the chain. My focus returned to the adult conversation. Domingos told the villagers that we wanted to see the cave, and they agreed to show us the way. We were not the first with such a request. We also told them we would be able to bring in a nurse from the park from time to time to heal their ailments. They seemed pleased, and offered us a chicken in return. We told them we couldn't take it in the helicopter, though, and that we'd eat it together with them the next time we came.
         Satisfied with our dealings to that point, the regulo and a couple of others spoke together and told us that a ceremony was required before outsiders could see the cave. How appropriate, I thought, realizing that on that particular Sunday, civilization around the globe was celebrating Easter. This would not be akin to Easter services I'd attended since childhood, of course, but it would be some sort of spiritual experience, anyway.
The men of Nhaminga eyed down its white American visitors. I tried to capture a couple of candid shots of the council with my digital camera, which I held upright on my left knee. Ken held his hands together on his lap and gauged their faces. Something was being said that was of a different tone than the gentle greetings that had been occurring up to that point. Domingos rose from his chair near the little boy bench. He nervously translated to us that the villagers would be requiring beer, bread, and cigarettes to properly perform the ceremony. We informed them that we had no such supplies with us, aside from the bread in the sandwiches we had brought for lunch. We had packed a small cooler with a number of small dinner roll sandwiches and soda for the four of us. Domingos told them about it, and the adult men conferred with one another and agreed that that would do. It was decided that the ceremony would be performed there, at the cave itself, and so off we went, in single file through the undergrowth.
         The path to the cave was visible only directly surrounding my old, white Nikes. Above my feet, the tall grass weaved itself across the dirt from both sides, ending well over our heads. The villagers seemed to rush through with great ease. Even the man with malaria took off ahead all of a sudden. I walked a little way in front of our non-native pack, preferring the guise of solitude in the wilderness to Ken and Domingos's louder-than-necessary joking. I wanted to unite myself with Nhaminga.
         At the mouth of the cave, the regulo spread a thin, white cloth on the ground, and knelt down in front of it. The crowd followed, kneeling or sitting in their places. About twenty different people came to the ceremony with us, though most would not be proceeding down into the cave, and many, again, were children. The regulo began to speak slowly and resolutely as he sprinkled flour-the one ingredient the village provided-onto the cloth in a perfect little mound. He then took one of the 300mL glass bottles of Coke, which one of the others had opened with his teeth. He poured a little into a mangled plastic cup on the cloth, a little onto the ground between himself and the cloth, and then propped the remainder in its bottle up against the rock. He did a similar thing with one of the Fantas, only more hastily. We still had plenty more for lunch after the cave. A thin scar of light pushed through the trees on the surface and reached the cloth as the skinny old man pleaded with his ancestors first for permission to enter the cave, and safety once inside. The light smiled upon the little ceremony for an instant, then moved off the cloth to a nearby rock. I waited for the tokens to be passed around, or consumed by the regulo, or something, but they remained, and the ceremony ended. His first words to us as he looked up from the ground: "Next time, don't forget the beer."
         Eight of the men and older boys of Nhaminga accompanied Ken and me down a guano-sloshed ladder into the main cavern. The ground was equally springy with untold inches of deposit, and thousands of bats lined columns rising up toward, but not reaching the sky. Ken and I waved our flashlights about and pointed out pathways and corners to each other, anticipating what was surely to come. Ten minutes more of traversing rocks, swimming through cold cave water, and looking out over unreachable pools, and we were there. The corridor opened into a hollow where actual sunlight poured in and reflected off the wet rocks. It was an underground lagoon. Roots and vines from trees on the surface hung down and looped around a tree, somehow growing out of a rock in the middle of the lagoon. Other vines hung down and pleaded to be swung on. The whole room was like a Disneyland ride, only more perfect than man could have ever hoped to create on his own. Water from an underground river cascaded down levels of weathered rock, collected in a series of pools, and flowed out the other end of the room and out of sight.
A shout echoed down from the sunlight, and the man with malaria, standing on the surface, waved to his friends. Ten minutes later, he was with us. Ken said matter-of-factly that he didn't think the man actually had malaria. I had to admit that he sure was bouncing around a lot for being deathly ill. In fact, he seemed to be getting better as the day went on. No longer waiting for our guides, Ken and I climbed ahead and explored the lagoon. After a few minutes, though, we returned to where the villagers squatted on some rocks near the water's edge. "Where to next?" I asked, anxious to see what else the cave had in store. Domingos relayed the question to Tatu's cousin on my behalf. I received the short response on my own. This was it. "They told us this would take three hours!" I started, a little perturbed. "The helicopter won't be back until 4:30." I persisted that there must be something else to do in here. They pointed out a room up high on the rock and sent one of the more silent natives to guide me there. I climbed up, having to take my shoes off halfway there for better traction, but there was nothing special up there. Ken watched with trepidation as I climbed and then descended the rock face.
         "It's not worth getting hurt," he cautioned, but I almost wouldn't have minded. I was desperate for action of some kind. Down on a rock in the lagoon, the village boys had found an injured bat, and were jabbing it with sticks and fingers. The men sat nearby and watched. Ken urged Domingos to tell the boys about a disease worse than malaria, but they didn't seem too concerned. The little bat screeched in pain with each prod. Ken and I started back toward the mouth of the cave on our own.
         We weren't far before the natives started following us. It dawned on me that most of them didn't have any way of generating their own light down there in the abyss. We ascended the guano-soaked ladder, and returned to the site of the ceremony, where our lunch cooler sat open. The sandwiches and drinks were gone. A single bottle of water remained, which Ken and I split between us. Ken picked up the cooler, and we made the trek back to where the helicopter would pick us up over two hours later. Ken dropped the cooler onto the dirt, sat upon it, and began watching two ant colonies down between his knees. Domingos found a sharp ramp of dead tree branch, and offered it to me for a chair. I thanked him, but I wasn't even sure where on it I was supposed to sit. I improvised, and the villagers followed and sat in the dirt nearby, talking amongst themselves. Domingos joined them and began taking notes about their history. I tried to doze off on the huge, wooden Swiss Army knife, knowing full well that my slowly-burning neck and arms would continue to sizzle if unchecked. I didn't care, though. More than anything, I just wanted to take off my sopping wet shoes and socks, but I knew it would have been a bad idea, what with all the ants.
         I slept for a little while, I think. The next thing I remember, Ken had a short stick, and was attempting to transplant ants from one colony into the other, without much success. He sensed my movement and asked if I was hungry. He told me he still had some of that weird South African jerky from the plane in his pocket. The unidentifiable meat wasn't that great, but this wasn't a time to be picky. We two stood up and turned our backs to the villagers of Nhaminga as Ken worked the vacuum-packed jerky cylinders free as discreetly as possible, transferring exactly one half of the meat from his closed hand to mine.