Free The Shark God by Charles Montgomery Page A

volcano. He told everyone he is the Messiah and he would take them to heaven if they followed him. But they still haven’t gone to heaven. Lies!”
    I spent the afternoon lounging in the bathtub-warm waters of the creek and trying to clear the kava from my head. At dusk a drum sounded, and I followed it back to the plaza in the middle ofthe village. The John Frum Sabbath was beginning. Boys poked at a bonfire. The pilgrims from Port Resolution shuffled quietly across the dirt, carrying four guitars, a homemade banjo, and a couple of bongo drums. Stanley was with them, still wearing his tequila T-shirt. The people settled onto palm mats. The women made a circle around the men. Then the band started to play, slowly at first, softly; then the women joined in and sang a song tinged with an autumnal sadness that made me homesick. The night sped on, and Stanley’s band gave way to three others. The rhythm quickened until the chorus rose in great triumphant arcs, suggesting a time of flowers and love and smiles and cumulonimbus clouds touched with sunset gold. “Namakara! Namakara! Namakara!” The people chanted the name of the village over and over again to the stars.
    Now more than a hundred figures had emerged from the shadows: men, women, and children, all swaying in loose formation around the band. The women had glitter paint around their eyes and wore rainbow-painted grass skirts. Some of the men wore skirts, too, over their rolled-up trousers. As the music rose toward a crescendo, those grass-skirted bums began to shake. Boys jumped and writhed. The air filled with whoops, chirps, and rhythmic hissing. Stanley bobbed beside me, smiling broadly and touching my elbow: “Come on! Come on! Sssst! Sssst!”
    I saw Isag Wan in his grass skirt and camouflage T-shirt, cigarette burning in the corner of his mouth, his frail frame shaking, his eyes rolling ecstatically. I was struck by the thought that there was nothing very strange going on in Namakara. Whatever its beginnings, the John Frum movement was no more audacious now than any church. The cult had gone mainstream. Frummers have been elected to Vanuatu’s national parliament, and government ministers have attended the annual Frum marches at Sulphur Bay. Ralph Regenvanu, the director of Vanuatu’s National Cultural Center, told me that John Frum was not a ghost or a foreigner or acrazy man. Frum knew exactly what he was doing, and so did the chiefs who have invoked his name—and changed his story—for sixty years: their promises of cargo are simply window dressing for a sophisticated attempt to halt the spiritual disintegration that they feel Christianity causes.
    If that was so, it was almost beside the point that Isag Wan claimed to receive the occasional dispatch through the fiery gullet of the volcano. The chief didn’t pray for the diversion of the white man’s wealth. He wasn’t asking for anything particularly radical from his people. His cargo was the spiritual riches the world would share when churches and governments stopped fighting each other. Or something like that. This, I thought, is what happens to cults when they mellow over time. They become religion.
    Isag Wan didn’t claim to be a prophet. He wasn’t the chosen one. Not like the mysterious Fred, who, depending on whom you asked, was either in direct communication with God or was working a terrible kind of black magic on all who opposed him.
    Above Namakara’s huts and flagpoles, past the darkened folds of jungle, flecks of magma arced like ocher fireworks through the night sky. The mountainside was illuminated, and for just a moment, I was sure I could make out a hint of campfire smoke rising from a distant ridge.

4
The Prophet Raises His Hands to the Sky
    The mountain is awake, with utterance
    Of flame and burning rock and thunderous sound—
    Abode of the ancestral spirits who dance
    In blissful fire! Tremors run through the ground
    And