[London, 1890] The rain outside fell in a gentle patter against the high, arched windows of the Murray estate in London. Inside the spacious drawing room, the air was thick with the scent of old leather and polished mahogany. Shadows danced along the walls, cast by the flickering gas lamps and the roaring fireplace. It was a room meticulously designed to dis...
I was 43 years old when I volunteered to live with the Kamula tribe in a remote village in western Papua New Guinea after the church asked for someone to translate the Bible into the local language. I took my husband and children and set out leaning the language from scratch. Many of the Kamula people had never seen a white person until the late 1970s. The...
Augustus Mansfield, Ph,D had resided in Manaus, the capital of the heart of Amazonia, Brazil, for the last ten years. No one knew as much about the thirty areas where tribes lived that had never seen a white man, contained in the 20 million acres of Javari valley, as he did. As an anthropologist, and accomplished naturalist, he often ventured into the untouc...
Chapter One Rodrigo de Toledo brushed his eyes. He was lying in the small boat where he had jumped in the middle of the tempest that had broken the caravel's masts the night before. He shivered at the memory of the huge waves pushing the men into the ocean, while the ship inclined dangerously and the thick curtain of rain made it impossible to see two yards...
The job of a good father is to take care of his offspring. No matter what. More and more I found myself pondering the meaning of this as I look back at deciding moments of my nine-thousand-year existence. I first saw the light of day in what would later be called Somalia, long before Islam, and the conflicts that follow wherever followers of that faith tread...
************************************************* Copyright Oggbashan December 2010 The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. This is a work of fiction. The events described here are imaginary; the settings and characters are fictitious and are not intended to represent specific places or living persons. **************...
For the first time since establishing a relationship with the man called Randy, the preacher's wife was beginning to fear him. He had taken her miles away from her resort and somewhere deep into the forest. Thoughts of never leaving here began flashing through her mind as the shadows of nightfall cascaded around the island especially deep here in the forest....
Comments are welcome, and indeed encouraged, but do be aware that I am writing in UK English and what you think is a typo may not be. * * * Mark stumbled over a rock and pushed the branch of a tree out of his face as he tried not to lose sight of Amanda. They had been in South America as part of the research team for three weeks now and Amanda was impossib...
Willow Creek, Arizona 1800 Rebecca Temple was in the middle of teaching her class when one of her students...a young boy of 13 years..burst through the doors of the modest old church building which housed the school during the week. A 28 year old woman..her blonde hair tied atop her head and dressed in a long sleeved baggy dress which flowed all the way down...
Rain blearily returned to consciousness with a groan. His eyes stung painfully as blood had seeped in, dried, and crusted over. He tried to wipe and clear them as best he could with the back of his paw but it just made it worse. Scrabbling around blindly he managed to find the edge of a ragged blanket and rub his face with it. It helped, a little bit. With...