Wednesday Evening: July 16th
I was back in BJ's room working on my paper, and monitoring the radio. There had been no unauthorized transmissions, and, after a full day of monitoring, I wasn't expecting any.
BJ came in, took out a cigarette, lit it, and settled down on his bed to watch me.
“Has anyone ever told you, Henderson, that smoking is bad for your health?”
“Still mad at me, Brooklyn.”
“Who me, mad? Why should I be mad? You don't want me here, but you're stuck with me, at least until the fog lifts. We are at a standstill.”
“And?”
“I propose to break it. I'm going into town this evening.”
He thought about that for a moment or two. “You know, the trouble with you, Brooklyn, is that you got yourself a case of cabin fever.”
I looked around at the battle ship grey contours of BJ's room, and the pin ups on the walls. “Yes, I've got cabin fever. Any sane person would get cabin fever locked up in a place like this.”
“That's true, Brooklyn. But a sane person, at least in our business, doesn't go bonkers simply because he doesn't care for the decorating job.”
“It's not just that, BJ. I have my reasons. I'm going back into town. Don't make me beg.”
He let his head drop back on his shoulders and took a long drag on the cigarette. “Have it your way. Only take Stephen with you.”
“No, BJ, I want to go alone.”
He stood up and walked toward me.
I stood and held my ground. He took me by the shoulders and looked into my eyes as if he could read my intentions there. Then he kissed me lightly and ruffled my hair. “Do you want a dime, Brooklyn, in case you have to call home?”
“No just a clean suit of clothes and my parole papers.”
I started down the long main hall of the DEW Line building half expecting that someone would stop me.
No one did.
The big double doors at the end of the hall were heavier than I remembered them – or perhaps I was weaker – but no one stopped me coming out just as no one had stopped me coming in. I pushed through those doors to freedom.
Freedom is something to savor.
For a few minutes I turned my back on both the base and the town, and just stood looking out to sea.
The fog had settled in, the temperature had dropped, and the world was strangely peaceful. I looked out at the fog shrouded arms of the bay – embracing the sea. The lines of the Arctic had been misted by the fog but not softened. There was no sign of gentleness in the stark geometric rocks of the escarpment. No life. Nothing green. Nothing to a human scale. The Arctic, even in the fog, was profoundly intimidating – but unlike the DEW Line, it was wide-open and free. The Arctic is threatening – but never confining.
Reluctantly, I turned away from the sea, and walked through the gathering mist into the town. The mist had been kind to the settlement. Like the snow that would follow in two or three months, the mist hid the shabbiness, the trash, and the detritus of human habitation.
First I stopped at the post office to pick up the mail. There was a letter from my mother, a note from Sheldon Trachtenberg, and still another letter from Saydie Greenberg. I stuffed my correspondence into my canvas bag and started up the hill to the Lab. I was hoping that Phyll had come in early for her weekly shower – I needed to talk to her.
Phyll wasn't there. Instead I found my lab peopled by the Scandinavian tourists who had flown in from Greenland.
There were about ten of them. They carried back packs and wore long woolen stockings and wire rimmed eyeglasses. I had met people like that in New York often enough – these were members of the morally committed intelligentsia – European Sierra Clubniks. The leader of the group, a tall sturdy blond man named Olav was a Greenlander. His assistant was a Swede named Paul. Olav's girlfriend was a scholarly looking girl named Marianna from somewhere in the North of Germany. There was another German in the group and a few Danes. They all moved with the robust seriousness I associate with northern Europeans – and even the Germans had the clean scrubbed look of Scandinavians.
I introduced myself, but it wasn't really necessary – they already knew who I was. Olav said that the group had spent a day at Kiniktok and helped Phyll with the work – in so far as amateurs could help.
I took the cup of coffee that Marianna had handed me, and said, “Most archaeology is the work of amateurs. The professionals would never have enough hands if it wasn't for armies of amateurs.”
“Fortunately we are benign amateurs,” Paul said pleasantly, “Unlike the vandals.”
“You mean Phyll's axe murderer? Has there been more damage since I left?”
“Apparently there has been a great deal more damage. Miss Allyngham, Phyll, as she prefers to be called, flatly refused to leave the site unguarded.”
Olav smiled over at Marianna with a cool sort of possessiveness that I found vaguely offensive. “We, Marianna and I, will be returning to Kiniktok tomorrow to stand vigil, so that Phyll can come into Inungilak for her weekly bath.”
He was tampering with the text – “weekly shit and shower” is what she had possibly said.
I asked if the tour group intended to visit the DEW Line.
Paul answered, drawing in on his pipe. Of the group, he seemed the least Scandinavian. He was too thin and he was darker than the others – less sunny and more intense. “The DEW Line is not one of our priorities. After all, we have military installations where we come from.”
Marianna nodded. “We have come to the Arctic for a different sort of adventure. In fact, we are scheduled to leave Inungilak island Saturday. But the airport says that the fog will delay our departure perhaps for a few days.”
“Then where do you go?”
“We will be travelling across Foxe Basin to Repulse Bay and then to Rankin Inlet and finally to Churchill. But Olav and I hope to return in the winter. We wish to go the same route by dog sled, you see.”
“Dog sled across the Arctic!” I shivered, “Thank God, archaeology is a summer sport. I cringe at the thought of the Inungilak winds tearing away at me at 50o below zero.”
“Centigrade or Fahrenheit?” Paul asked.
“At 50o below zero it doesn't make a great deal of difference. A person would need a space suit. I would need a space suit. You Vikings are a very much more sturdy breed than us Brooklynites.”
Olav shrugged the compliment aside. “And this from you – the intrepid, Miss Solomon. We know your secret.”
“Which secret?”
They laughed.
“We know that you, who boast of no physical endurance, have out-run a polar bear.”
“Who told you that?”
“Phyllida Allyngham.”
“Phyll's wrong. I didn't out run a polar bear. He out ran me. I stayed ahead of him for a while, but I would have been polar bear meat by now if it hadn't been for a friend with a rifle.”
I was not allowed to be quite so unheroic. Phyll had done a great PR job. I was not only Diana of the hunt; I was also – the “great” American scholar. My new-found friends were fascinated by our find at Kiniktok. Schleimann’s discovery of “Troy” was nothing to it. After all, some of those skulls might very well have been Olav and Paul's distant cousins. Some enterprising Vikings from Greenland who had just decided to go dog sledding west – just for the hell of it.
Paul asked if I was convinced in my own mind that the skulls found at Kiniktok were Caucasian.
“Not convinced perhaps, but I am reasonably certain they are Caucasian. I am convinced, however, that they are not North American Indian and that they are not Arctic Mongoloid.” Sometimes it is easier to be convinced of what a thing is not than to be convinced of what a thing is.
Paul seemed to consider this for a moment. “Yes, but do you believe that they may have been Norsemen. I must admit that Olav and I are very partial to that explanation. Are you familiar with the work of Tryggivi Oleson?”
“Yes, but only vaguely.”
“It is his theory that the old Dorset Eskimo and Greenlandic Norse blended racially and culturally to produce the Thule. I realize that Oleson's work has been discredited among Canadian archaeologists, but your discovery at Kiniktok certainly points to the possibility of some blending.”
I nodded. “But even supposing that the Dorset on Baffin Island were Caucasians and that they are the people of the Tunit legends, there is no evidence that they were Norsemen.”
Marianna refilled my coffee cup. “Tunit, Olav, what are these Tunit?”
He explained. “The present day Inuit have legends about an earlier people – the Tunit. From the Tunit they are said to have learned about snow houses, which were not known in Alaska or the western Canadian Arctic. Also they learned about soapstone lamps. The Tunit are described as large people.”
“Yes,” I said. “And while some anthropologists have assumed they were entirely legendary, other anthropologists work on the theory that the Tunit were the Dorset. Our discoveries at Kiniktok would certainly explain the 'otherness' of the Tunit.”
“And, therefore, work to confirm Oleson's theory in reverse, so to speak.” Paul said.
“Perhaps not. We have found no evidence of actual Viking culture.”
I looked at the people around me. They were all so tall and comfortable and well fed. Those people at Kiniktok had seemed far smaller – frailer. But then the people at Kiniktok were no longer people – just bones, and the Vikings of 1000 years ago would not have been so well fed.
“How could you establish if they were Norsemen?” Marianna asked. “How would you ever know?”
I shrugged, “It's not so difficult to prove. That isn't to say that the evidence is easy to find, but once found, it is more or less incontrovertible. We could establish Kiniktok circa 900 as a Norse colony, if we uncovered European artifacts dating back to an appropriate period of Norse expansion.”
Paul nodded. “But in a sense your excavation in this area has just begun. You have only just begun to look.”
“We will certainly continue to look, Paul.”
“And Phyll did say that you have found at least one iron artifact. How do you account for that?” Paul asked.
“It could have been the result of a chance migration of tools. We see that from time to time. Iron in the North American Arctic that came from the East. The implement we found was not a distinctively European tool. It was a very crude tool and could even have been meteoric iron in origin.”
Paul shrugged. “Phyllida says the kitchen midden in the area of the finds had been dated to approximately 900 AD. That date, you will admit, is entirely consistent with the expansion of the Norsemen into Greenland itself. There was no prima facie reason they could not have travelled farther westward.”
“No reason at all. Our skulls may even have been sailors – their bodies stripped by the Dorset, or even possibly the Thule, and buried farther up the beach.”
“No.” Paul said, “They were not sailors. We know that now.”
“Has Phyll found something new?” I asked, suddenly on the edge of my chair.
He nodded. “She is almost certain that over half the hip bones are female, and there are children as well.”
“Female!”
She hadn't told the Father. But that was characteristic of Phyll.
“And if they were female, they were not sailors.” Paul persisted.
“No,” I said.
“And the community they came from did not practice female infanticide. The Vikings did not practice female infanticide – we always had better use for our women, didn't we, Olav?”
For a moment, I wondered why Paul and Olav's almost casual sexism offended me so much more than the crude sexism at the base, but it did. Is it because I wanted to hold academically serious-minded Scandinavians to a higher standard than American soldiers?
I shook my head, “We don’t know if they practiced female infanticide. Perhaps most of their men were killed off hunting.” I said. “And remember, although the Thule practiced female infanticide, there is no evidence that the Dorset either did or did not do so.”
Marianna smiled. “So, still you do not yourself believe they were Norse, Naomi?”
“My instincts tell me they were not. I would have found something. Some object that would have identified them. I prefer to believe that they are a newly discovered strain of Caucasian peoples. The result of an earlier influx from Europe. It would be interesting from an historical point of view to establish the outer limits of European migrations into the western hemisphere before Columbus. But from an anthropological point of view, it would be absolutely revolutionary to be able to establish the existence of a non Mongoloid Dorset sub culture dating back thousands of years.”
Paul smiled. “It would mean that our understanding of the patterns of movement in the Americas is radically in need of alteration.” But he was still pushing for the Vikings. “Have you noticed the structure of those houses? They are very much like a Viking long house in design.”
“True,” I said. “And that shape is consistent with other sites that have been identified as Dorset. Many of them were large and rectangular. But the shape of the house could be no more than an accident of history. It doesn't testify even to a mixing of cultures let alone a mixing of people. I won't believe they were Norsemen until I find clearly identifiable artifacts.”
Olav nodded. “You are quite right of course. In all the Greenlandic communities of that period, we have ample evidence of Viking culture.”
“Yes,” I said. “At those sites we have graves and we have well-ordered bodies in the graves, and any number of artifacts that indicate not only that the people in those graves were European in origin but that they had remained, almost to the end, in contact with Europe itself.”
Paul corrected me. “Or at least with Iceland.”
“Which was effectively a part of Europe.”
Olav continued. “In fact, Paul, those first Greenlanders remained too dependent on Europe. We in Greenland think they died because of genetic in breeding. The skeletons that we have found show a high degree of genetic irregularities.”
Marianna smiled. “Ach so. We have finally identified the pure Aryan.”
Olav patted her on the shoulder. “They were certainly pure.”
“And they didn't mix with the Eskimo?” she asked.
Olav seemed to consider that for a moment, “The Skraellings as they called them? No, they didn't mix. At least not in those communities. The Norse were in Greenland before the Skraellings. The Skraellings were seen as interlopers. At least as far as the records indicate, there seemed to have been no mixing of the races. Perhaps there was a taboo.”
Paul shook his head. “Or perhaps the survivors of those villages mated with the Skraellings and left no records. It is, after all, Oleson's theory.”
“In a sense,” I said. “They were at war. The Skraellings seemed to have attacked the Norse communities fairly regularly. The Norse, being farmers, provided sitting targets so to speak.”
Paul laughed. “Surely the Vikings were never merely sitting targets. Our forebears may have been part-time farmers, but they were always very well armed and more than willing to use those arms against anyone and everyone – including other Vikings. But did none of the Thules farm at all, Naomi?”
“They never grew crops. There is some evidence in the interior of Baffin of the Thule herding animals. They may have engaged in a sort of proto herding.”
“Do you mean that they raised caribou?” Paul asked.
“Not necessarily,” I said, “But some Thule seemed to have herded caribou. Either they were domesticated animals or they were wild animals that were herded through only part of the year.”
Paul grinned. “I am determined to visit those 'herding' areas. I think they were discovered by a number of archaeologists who don't themselves hunt. Do you hunt, Naomi?”
“No.”
“Well, I do. And I think that those 'corrals' the Canadians have discovered are nothing more or less than areas for ambushing migrating herds. They are marked by Inukshuks of one sort or another which are, after all, nothing but piles of stones which seem in a distance to resemble men. They are not anything like the fences of a corral. The Eskimo were not farmers, and they were not herdsman. But these quasi Dorset you have discovered, they may have been both.”
I grinned. “You still are convinced they are Norsemen.”
“Why not? It is not impossible. And you have not convinced us otherwise.”
We had come to a friendly impasse, and Olav changed the subject. “I am sure, Paul, that most things are possible. Tell me, however, is it possible to launder clothes in Inungilak?”
I laughed. “Possible but exceedingly difficult. Is washing clothes, like dog sledding, perceived to be part of the authentic Arctic experience?”
“Only when one becomes exceedingly dirty,” Olav explained. “It is only then that the precepts of modern civilization intervene. You see how very decadent we Vikings have become. Our forefathers, I believe, gloried in their dirt.”
“Oh you needn't be decadent. Cleanliness in and of itself isn't decadent – it's the washing machines that eat away at a man's soul. You could heat some water over a whale oil lamp – that would combine the best of both worlds.” I suggested.
“Do you have any idea, Naomi, how much whale oil is required to heat a kilo of water to 100oC? It is simply not to be thought of,” Olav said.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because we are all chartered members of Greenpeace.” Marianna grinned.
“That makes a difference,” I said. “As an alternative to the use of whale oil, you might try asking George, the Inuk in charge of the lab, if he'll allow you to use the wringer washer. But it may be against the Lab rules. . . Where will you be sleeping?”
“In tents.”
“Why not move into the transient center – it’s a sort of barracks the hamlet maintains for visiting Kabloona – then you could use their machines.”
“I think I would rather find this George. There is a limit to our decadence. A limit to what our self image will tolerate. The transient center is not a part of our self image of Arctic explorers. Would Perry have stayed at a transient center?”
“Would Perry have used a washing machine?” I countered.
After the Scandinavians left, I stayed on to write some notes for Phyll, brew myself more coffee, and check through my mail. There was another letter from Saydie Greenberg filled with praise of dear sweet Yehuda. I dashed Saydie off a note telling her that I probably wouldn't make it home for Rosh Hashana. I was very sorry, but it didn't look like my work would be completed in time.
I was getting really good as a liar.
In fact, I thought I was developing a gift for it.
But I was also getting too old for Saydie's games. I was going to have to get married just to end it all.
Then I opened my mother's letter. I had written my mother every week since leaving the south – careful to leave out any suggestion of my clandestine work. This letter was subtlety different from her usual response. It was a letter in Yiddish about a mother's love. There were prayers for my safety, and the safety of my brother who was called up on reserve duty in Israel. My mother was proud of all her children. With God's help all would be well. Then, on a lighter note, she told me not to worry about Saydie Greenberg – she'd take care of Mrs. Greenberg.
I folded the letter away. There went my career as a liar.
My mother knew I was in danger. She may not have known the nature of the danger but she knew I was in danger. My mother was a very wise woman, and I had never been able to keep my fears from my mother.
I sat there at the window thinking about my parents – missing them – and staring, rather absentmindedly, out over the town to the sea. The fog had lessened and it had begun to rain. I could see the settlement quite clearly. I could see all the shabbiness and the hidden desperation of the place.
My eyes strayed to two men walking into the town. They weren't Inuit. I could tell from the way they walked. I opened one of the kitchen counter drawers and lifted out a pair of binoculars.
So, as it turned out, even by BJ's rather peculiar standards, my visit into the settlement hadn't been a complete waste of time. One of the men was William Schmidt – the other was Anthony Morrel.
I watched as Schmidt and Morrel separated at the Hudson Bay Store. Bill went into the Bay. He came out five minutes later with someone else – a woman – who?”
The woman's face was half hidden in her rain slicker. It took me a few minutes of adjustment with the binoculars to identify her.
It was Lucy Jones.
Lucy? Had Bill Schmidt been slipping into town just to be with Lucy?
It was not that they made an unlikely couple. In fact, it was the sort of pairing one would expect. But why were they hiding their association? In a settlement like Inungilak every southerner is privy to the sex life of every other southerner. And there was no one in Inungilak who would be critical of an affair between those two.
It was difficult enough to suspect Bill of treason.
To suspect Lucy was ludicrous.
But that's what I was being paid to do – measure skulls and suspect people.
I watched as Lucy and Bill Schmidt walked together, and yet apart, to the door of one of the houses. They were in the house less than ten minutes before they reappeared and headed toward the Inungilak Community Center.
The community center on Wednesday night?
What was going on?
I remembered that Wednesday was a movie night, but Bill Schmidt would not have left the comforts of the DEW Line only to take in a movie at the Community center. In my one attempt at sitting through a community center movie, I had left in the middle in a state approaching traumatic shock. The Inuit love horror and violence in their movies. That movie at the community center had begun with a haunted house and the massacre of 27 perfectly innocent women and children in an otherwise idyllic little village set in the New England country side. The Inuit taste in cinematic art makes Japanese creature features look like Winnie the Pooh. In fact, it was only after coming to Inungilak that I began to understand the Japanese love of cinematic horror. Those horribly gruesome movies seemed totally at odds with one's picture of the reserved and perfectly controlled Japanese housewife. Freud would have called it displacement. Someone told me that the year before, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was the hottest seller in the Arctic. In fact, movies were one of the places where the Inuit stored away their aggressions in much the same way as the body temporarily stores glucose in the liver. For a people known for their aversion to violence, the Inuit had a wild taste in motion pictures. They loved blood and gore on the silver screen. I didn't. But, like it or not, I was going to the community movie center.
The community center of Inungilak was a long low-slung wooden structure that somehow had survived untouched through the last few years of government sponsored urban renewal. The government in Ottawa had not gotten around to rebuilding the community center in the pastel colored steel plated image of the school house or the nursing station. It had been constructed before the truly massive government intervention in the North. The interior was shed like and divided into two distinct parts. As you walked in the door, you passed what was euphemistically called the “recreation room.” The only recreational feature in the recreation room was an antiquated, pock marked pool table. The pool table stood surrounded by cases of candy bars and soda pop imported from Montreal by airplane. And sitting on top of one case of Pepsi was the Inungilak community motion picture projector. In Inungilak, the pool hall doubled as a projection room and candy stand. The motion picture was projected through a hole in the wall to a mottled screen set up, precariously, at the other end of the larger of the two rooms.
The theater itself, like so much of Inungilak, was almost devoid of furnishings. Instead of row upon row of well ordered seats or chairs, the theater was furnished with an assortment of long, thin, uncomfortable benches arranged in a seemingly haphazard way around the room.
The arrangement was not as haphazard as it looked. The roof of the community center leaked.
The government, being government, would eventually build a brand new community center, but neither the Inuit nor the government had much interest in fixing the leaks in the roof of the existing facility.
Leaks are a fact of life in the Arctic. The ceiling of an igloo begins to drip if the interior living space reaches 33o F. In an igloo you must choose between living at sub freezing temperatures or getting soaked. Either way you risk dying of hypothermia. In an igloo, the sub freezing temperature is the lesser of two evils. In the community center we were wet, but we weren't cold – the government made certain the center was heated.
When I walked in, the water was falling steadily onto the floor of the “theater” with a staccato persistence that served as a counterpoint to the audio portion of the movie.
Resigned, I paid my two dollars to the lady at the pool table, plunked down an extra dollar for a can of Coca Cola, found myself one of the few remaining seats along the wall, and sat down in a puddle of water. It wasn't that I had expected fewer leaks along the wall. Ten minutes into the movie, any unoccupied seat was presumed to be well irrigated. But the rain didn't bother me as much as the lack of support for my spine on those benches. I propped my back up against the wall so that I would remain relatively comfortable for the duration of the movie.
Phyll and the Inuit had that in common as well. They didn't need the backs of chairs. The Inuit can sit for hours with their legs stretched out perpendicular to their bodies, and with no back support. I couldn't sit like that for five minutes. I was reminded, as if I needed reminding, that physically I was a pretty sorry specimen compared to any of the Inuit or to Phyll. My body was not the honed and disciplined servant of my soul. At best, my body seemed only the foam packaging for my soul. I am the sort of person who flops into chairs, and I like to be physically comfortable in boneless formless ways. So I made myself as comfortable as I could with my legs tucked up Indian style, my back wedged into the wall studs, and the rim of my hat oriented in such a way that most of the rain water arched over me to fall into a neat puddle at my feet.
After my eyes adjusted to the dark, I noticed that there were really quite a few southerners in attendance that night. It was a regular convention. The Scandinavians seemed to have come en masse – perhaps to show their community spirit. And Anthony Morrel was there. I had expected him. I hadn't expected Scott Whitman, however. Lucy Jones and William Schmidt were sitting about fifteen feet away from me. They were not, however, seated together. Bill was off by himself, and Lucy was settled on a bench with John Idlout's five grandchildren. Although Lucy and Bill glanced at each other from time to time, they did not have the look of lovers.
I managed to catch Bill's eye. He forced a smile and looked away quickly. Several minutes later I caught Lucy's eye. She shrugged her shoulders and smiled a greeting. She didn't look the least bit ill at ease. Bill had seemed ill at ease, but that might easily have been the effect of the movie.
The film that night featured death and grue set in the Thirty Year War. Even Berthold Brecht's Mother Courage had given the Thirty Year War better press than this movie did. I had come to Inungilak expecting Sleeping Beauty not Bonny and Clyde. And this movie didn't even have the Bonnie and Clyde advantage of slow motion ballet like death. Within fifteen minutes of my sitting down, I had estimated that at least five hundred people bit the dust. With that many deaths the film makers didn't have time for ballet. Not only should the movie that night have been X rated for violence, it wasn't a flick that said a whole lot of positive things about Western Civilization. Short of picking a movie on the Spanish Inquisition the Inuit couldn't have found a more gruesome period of European history.
Poor Welche would have said that the Inuit had chosen the movie as a statement about the decadence and depravity of the South. It seemed to me that the Inuit simply found blood and gore in Technicolor really fun. Sort of like watching football.
I suppose the movie had a message of sorts. There was this idyllic little village – did all these movies begin with idyllic little villages? I suppose they did. This particular village didn’t stay idyllic for long. Its people fell victim to the black plague, massacring armies, witch burnings, and mad priests. All of this suffering was graphically and vividly displayed. The cast included Michael Caine and Omar Sharif as two very unlikely Germans. The message was that idyllic rural villages are something close to heaven, and that war is pure hell. Every once in a while a little spot of heaven is preserved, but hell wins out in the end.
I don’t have a great deal of natural sympathy for any of the warring sides in the Thirty Years War, since one of the few things they all were agreed upon was killing Jews. But even I found it difficult to watch the murder and mayhem for more than about three minutes at a time. In comparison to that movie spying seemed a relatively pleasant diversion.
I let my eyes shift from Omar Sharif back to the audience.
Morrel and Whitman looked as if they were trying to avoid each other. At least Whitman was looking like he was trying to avoid Morrel. But as Morrel walked back through the crowd to buy another Coke, I noticed him exchanging a few words with Whitman, and then with the tourists, and finally with Schmidt. Later, with the Coke in his hand he took a seat beside Whitman. Whitman seemed to edge away, but Morrel seemed totally oblivious to the gesture. Together, they sat with their eyes directed toward the screen.
For a few minutes I did the same.
I chalked those few minutes up to my anthropology paper.
The Scandinavians, showing some sign of taste, had gotten up and left the theater – picking up Lucy on their way out.
A few minutes later Bill Schmidt slipped out.
Morrel and Whitman were still talking.
My attention was fairly evenly divided between Morrel and Whitman and the end of the epic. The good girl was being tortured and burned as a witch. By the greatest stroke of good fortune her lover, Caine, arrived just in time to plunge a knife into her and spare her even more agony. The priest objects to this little bit of Christian charity, and he too gets zapped. Murder and mayhem all around and everyone except me and possibly Morrel and Whitman were having a great time watching it. I didn't even know if the good guys had won.
It ended, I think, back in that idyllic little village with Caine dead and Sharif back to wandering.