“It’s time we go back. I have evening services.” Abruptly he turned and led Nicholas Marten back down the trail the way they had come.

Some twenty minutes later they neared the end of the trail. They could see the dirt road they had walked up from the village and the steeple of Willy’s small wooden church reaching over the tree line. Overhead, a monkey swung from tree limb to tree limb. Another followed. Then both stopped and looked down at the men below, chattering wildly as they did. Tropical birds screeched in reply, and for a moment the entire rain forest seemed to come alive at fever pitch. As quickly it stopped. A few seconds later heavy rain began to fall. Another thirty and it became a torrential downpour.

Then they were at trail’s end turning onto the road that had now turned to mud. For the first time since they left the cascade of falls Willy spoke.

“I trusted you, Mr. Marten, because I had to. I could not give you the photographs because there is no way to know who you might run into when we part. Hopefully, you have clear memories of what you have seen and what I have told you. Take that information with you and leave Bioko as quickly as you can. My brother is in Berlin. He is a very capable man. I hope that by the time you reach him neither he nor your American politician friend will have need for you to tell them any of this. Tell them anyway. Perhaps something can be done before it is too late. Purposeful war is being made here, Mr. Marten, for reasons I don’t know. There will be more of it, and with it will come terrible bloodshed and immense suffering. Of that I am certain.”

“Padre! Padre!” The voices of alarmed children suddenly rang out of nowhere. The men looked up to see two tribal boys, maybe ten or twelve years old, running toward them down the mud-slick road.