“Sadly, he had led the men against his will. Tragically, he was beaten for the smile he wore despite his sadness. Wonderfully, the pain turned into glory when Bentari’s blurry eyes beheld his family’s crest above him on that giant stone. No other man or boy would see it. No one could tell that the rough red surface of that tall monolith was anything but weather worn and ancient; that nothing else save wind and rain and baking sun had worked odd patterns into the porous side of that enormous igneous rock. But to Bentari the thing called out. It cried. It sang. It gladdened his troubled heart. It loomed so large, so tall that he could never have missed it nor mistaken its meaning. The thing was like a majuscule, a great capital letter fully flourished and embellished as if by medieval monks upon a parchment scroll. It was the gorgeous letter “B”. He heard his ancestors call out to him from their ancestral home. “Badollet!” they sang.”

(From Bentari, Chapter 22: “The Majuscule”)

Bentari is a sweeping tale set in the panoramic back drop of ancient equatorial forests. The action rushes on the winds of war from an isolated village across plains and woodlands to a valley that surrounds a volcano. Within its caldera, the chambers and vents appear hollow, dark and dead. Yet they still breathe, and the wind from under the earth is deadly—the perfect place for a treasure of untold wealth to be hidden.

For centuries, Africa has been plundered by powerful visitors. Gold, copper, rubber, ivory, even coffee have lured men and nations to this land of beauty where they took, by right of their strength, all that they could carry from the land and the people of Africa. Today, the coltan used in our cell phones and computers is mined in tortuous labor by Africans who live in poverty.

For more about the coltan trade, read the article by Casey Bush and Joshua Seeds that was published on Common Dreams (4/19/08):
http://eco-cell.com/news/details/apocalypse-found

For more about the plight of Congo Women, read A Thousand Sisters by Lisa Shannon and visit her website:
http://www.runforcongowomen.org/congo.html

For an adventure story about a singular time when one tribe battled the odds to protect their land from foreign marauders, keep reading this Blog and follow Bentari’s exciting flight—both above the ground and beneath it!

Photo courtesy of Angus

This is a photo from our neighborhood. Angus and the twins frequently walk past a certain wall on their way to the gym. Until some folks ahead of them pointed to it one day, they had not noticed that a man’s face lay hidden in plain sight among the rocks of the wall.

Please send feedback about this Blog to tim@bentari.com. Please write “About Bentari” in the subject line of your E-mail. Thank You!