The Blue Disc

RICK JOHNSON is an anthropology graduate student at Yale who has only his field work and dissertation remaining to get his doctorate and begin his career. His tough-minded graduate Committee sends him to Imaginación in the wild South American rain forest to do his research. Although he is risking his life to live in the jungle for a year, he journeys up river to a secluded valley deep in the interior where he is captured by a previously unknown group, the Euromamo, and held captive in an isolated bunker. Although at first the Euromamo speak an unintelligible language, Rick discovers soon, to his great surprise, that they speak English. In the Euromamo Origins Ceremony the next day, he learns that their forebears were survivors of a 1750 English shipwreck who fought their way up river to the valley where the tribe has been living in privacy ever since. The Ceremony is a prelude to the battle with a neighboring group the next day, a battle fought with paint darts according to...