precipitous ridges like the fingers of desperate climbers, they journeyed into some of the remotest parts of the mountains. Not so remote, however, that news of Michael’s wedding to a white woman had failed to reach them. Women and children swarmed out of the villages to gawk at Quinette, touch her, and ask her questions in dialects that Negev could barely understand.
In every village, while Michael met with the meks and SPLA officers, Fancher and Handy waged their spiritual offensive, evangelizing with a mixture of revival-tent fervor and military efficiency. They distributed hymnals and Bibles in the local language. They powered up the generator and showed videos about the life of Christ. (It was startling to see a TV screen glowing in villages that had no electricity.) If there was a church, they preached in it, encouraging the congregation to remain steadfast in the face of their adversities, reminding them that in the suffering is the glory. If there were soldiers present, they told the stories of Gideon and Joshua and the other mighty warriors of God. They conducted catechism classes with flip charts and audiotapes of gospel messages.
On the sixth day of the journey, they enlisted her. Taking her aside, they explained that Nubans thought it improper for men to minister to women, which was why their audiences were exclusively male. They had observed the numbers of females who were drawn to her and noticed the empathy she had for them. With some coaching, she could take on the task of teaching them about the women of the Bible, about Mary and the virgin birth, the tribulations the mother of God had endured. Would Quinette be willing to do that? She considered the request. God had called her away from her former life for a purpose. Was this it? Eager as she was to say yes, she had to point out that she had no experience or training in missionary work. Fancher expressed approval for her modesty. It normally a took a year to train a fieldworker, he said, but an exception could be made in her case. She’d already overcome cultural biases, the hardest lesson a fieldworker had to learn. If she proved able, she could undergo more formal instruction once they returned to New Tourom. He gave her a cassette recorder, tapes of Mary’s story in five different Nuban tongues, and flip charts that showed it in pictures, then tutored her on how to use the materials and conduct a meeting.
They traveled into the lands of the Masakin tribe, where the crowded mountains of the eastern Nuba gave way to broad valleys offering no sanctuary from air raids and the dreaded murahaleen. Horsemen and airmen had brought tamsit to the Masakin. The Arabic word, Michael told her, meant “raking.” The Masakin had been raked out of their valleys and forced to flee into a range of hills that stretched across the southern horizon: Jebel Tolabi, Jebel Doelibaya, Jebel Tabouli. Tamsit, in other words, was ethnic cleansing; it was scorched earth.
Making for the jebels, the column proceeded through an incinerated landscape, the bones of livestock whitening fields that looked in the moonlight as if they’d been covered by a blizzard of ash. A team of minesweepers went out ahead, swinging their detectors back and forth. The silence was eerie, interrupted only by the crunch of burned sorghum stalks underfoot. Besides landmines, there was the danger of stumbling into an enemy ambush—a government garrison wasn’t far off—and everyone’s eyes and ears were tuned to a high pitch, trying to pick out human forms in the darkness, listening for voices.
Walking behind her husband, Quinette experienced a heightened alertness, a druglike quickening of her senses produced by an amalgam of fear and excitement. The possibility that she might be killed at any moment made her feel intensely alive, and more than ever Michael’s sister-in-arms.
The thumping of a heavy machine gun sent everyone to the ground. Red and green tracer bullets, stitching the skies above the hills, declared that the column wasn’t the target—some trick of acoustics had made the machine-gun sound much closer than it was. Flat on her stomach, Quinette watched the tracers streak, then slow down, appearing to float like dying sparks before they winked out. There was a series of muffled thuds from an indeterminate distance behind her. Artillery shells whooshed overhead. Half a minute later a flickering appeared among the hills, followed by a ragged rumbling, then more machine-gun fire, then a bright flash as something exploded