Voyage By Dhow by Norman Lewis

this case the attackers had been driven off. The day was hot now; here we rested, and Ramon, after offering a prayer to the rain god, went down on his hands and knees, blew the scum from the surface of a marshy puddle that had been there since the last rainy season, and drank deeply.
    Three-and-a-half hours after setting out from the airstrip we finally came in sight of the mission. It had been eight miles over hard terrain, and only the shaman showed no signs of fatigue. Coming down the path to the compound we met Padre Joaquin, the Franciscan in charge, who had just arrived in the mission’s Cessna, and we were a little surprised to learn that he had been the only passenger. Our reception seemed less enthusiastic than Padre Ernesto had led us to hope that it might be, and no great intuitive effort was called for to conclude that this was probably the last man in the world to speak to about organizing a pagan fiesta. Ramon had suddenly fallen back and was invisible among the trees, but the father had certainly caught sight of him and it occurred to us that the appearance in these surroundings of a shaman in all his Stone Age trappings might not have been altogether welcome.
    The padre was a man of few words, and little was said until we crossed a stream in which a large, battered metal object lay half-submerged. He told us that this was the remains of the mission’s workshop, which the Huichols had burned down two years before. Speaking with some emphasis, he added: ‘They were hostile to us at that time.’
    To further conversational efforts he replied briefly. The primary function of the mission, he said, was to educate Huichol children, and at that moment they had some sixty pupils of both sexes—all of them boarders, because their family ranchos were too far away for them to return home each day. No charge was made for instruction or board. The children had the afternoon free from study, so we would not see many of them about. He made no offer to show us the mission, but wanted to be quite sure that there was no mistake about the arrangements for our departure. The plane would come on Sunday morning—early, he said, to avoid the high winds. He showed us to the hut, on the edge of the compound, where we were to sleep and quickly made an excuse and left us. A suspicion that he would not be sorry to see the back of us was beginning to grow in our minds.
    Later, sitting with the shaman among the trees in this refined landscape, while woodpeckers with fiery crests scuttled up and down the trunks all round, I made a cautious approach to the topic of the conflict between the two religions, and Ramon set forth his views on the subject with frankness and authority.
    The religious instruction the Huichol children received at the mission, he said, was unimportant. A Huichol soul always remained one and could not be ‘caught’ by the Christians. Whatever the shortcomings, the errors, or the backsliding of this life, he, the shaman, would come for it at death. He would release it from the thorn on which it had been impaled for its sins, draw it through the purifying fires and guide it past the animals that menaced it at the gates of the underworld. Freeing it after its sojourn in the land of the dead, he would escort it on part of its journey to the sun, and if after five years it craved to return to earth he would build the grass shrine to be placed in the family house, where it would live on in its earthbound form as a rock crystal.
    Warming to his theme, his voice pitched in a high incantatory drone, the shaman described the endless after-death saga of the imperishable Huichol soul. And this was the charge that he laid against the missions. Baffled in their attempt to convert the Huichol, their policy was to capture his children by turning them into mestizos through their parents’ intermarriage; the boys and girls at the mission, he said, would be encouraged to marry out of their tribe. The children of such marriages would