"It had been fifteen years since the plane in which she was leaving China crashed in the mountains near Tosun
Nor, killing all on board but herself. Now, as if decreed by fate, another had come, and this one landed intact."
The opportunity to escape for a woman and her son who have been trapped in the remote Ngolok country near the
great mountain Amne Machin in western China creates tensions that threaten to split the tribe that has taken her
in. Stranded for years, since the civil wars of the 1930s, she married a local chieftain and raised their son. |
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Ngolok Warriors |
"...Many go to die, but those who remain will remember
that I spoke the truth." |
"Yet, how long had she dreamed of going home! Of luxuriating in a warm tub, conversing in English for hours on
end, and the good, fireside talk of people who were doing things in the larger of art, science, and scholarship.
She longed for a life where she did not have to live with the fear that her son might die from something as silly
as a tooth infection or as serious as the bullet from the rifle of a Communist soldier."
Now, with her husband’s recent death, she must choose between the good of her husband’s tribe, the future of her
son …
“Here he is a king. Ours is a small king, but even a small king is still a king.”
… and whether or not she will ever be able to return to civilization.
"The sky beckoned, and beyond the mountains lay India, the threshold to home."
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