Desolation, Episode Two

  I was genuinely surprised by the woman's choice to leave her "unreachable" husband's journal in my custody. I was even more baffled by the manuscript's contents. As it turns out, the events that were recorded in it were stretched out on a period of 13 months, but I specifically recalled that the preacher's residence in the Nubian tribe was longer than a year and a half.
  I immediately began the study of the manuscript...And to this day I curse the dark tidings that brought me to open that Pandora's Box...
                                                                                                    *
  The preacher's name was John Barry Bowers, he worked as a religious colonist for the I.C.A - The International Conservative Association.
His job was to help the few remaining members of the North African tribes to adhere to the nearest urban or rural areas and to help them understand how the world works around them while conserving and recording their traditions and rituals.
He was supposed to focus on the last untouched Nubian tribes, and record their behaviour; to teach them about Christianity's 'unmovable' truths.
 
  His first four months were spent in the presence of a bigger tribe. He carried on recalling the initial accommodation and reception that the ICA voluntaries had received upon their arrival.
 
  The only thing that was worth a second look within the up-mentioned recordings were three days in April in which the whole tribe most suddenly entered a state of complete idleness that, in the course of but a day, evolved into a very aggressive, berserk fever.
The records state that in those two days the tribesmen were acting like savage beasts for exactly three hours, followed by another three hours of idleness and so on, every eight hours a sixth of them fell into a deep, comatose-like trance from which they couldn't be revived.
Never have I hear of anything like this, the recordings presented something which hinted at an epidemic of some sort, mass-hypnosis or even daemonic possession...I have heard of a similar event happening before...Of course, it was a result of drug consumption in some kind of elusive, if not decrepit and degenerated cult, but in that case, the mood changes and patterns of bipolarity were far from being as systematic and precise as Mr. Bowers described the presently treated ones.

  One day one of the savages attacked him during one of the berserk fits, Mr. Bowers was able to react and to immobilise the tribesman until the 'idleness' sequence of the cycle began again.
After the second day of madness ended, the tribesmen who were engulfed in that deep trance awoke.
None of them would recall anything that happened in the previous two days, not even the Nubian whom so brutally attacked John.