A Long Walk Home: One Woman's Story of Kidnap, Hostage, Loss - and Survival by Judith Tebbutt Page A

procedure. It seemed to me now that this was the likely reason why the men had vanished periodically the day before. They must have retired to some appropriate ‘private’ patch of ground where they could pray.
    They stood, held out their palms upwards, then crossed their arms over their chests, all the while reciting words I couldn’t make out or understand. Then they knelt, placed their hands on their knees, and prostrated themselves, foreheads and flats of their palms pressed to the ground. This I recognised as the customary Islamic gesture of submission to Allah.
    The whole spectacle made me thoughtful. I had always been inclined to respect people’s avowed religious beliefs as an obviouslymeaningful part of who they are. I was never persuaded, though, that ‘being religious’ made one a good person: showing respect and deference to a higher power seemed less important to me than showing kindness to one’s fellow man and woman. And these men, I felt, were making a mockery of their faith. Having kidnapped a defenceless woman in order to sell her for money, they were now prostrating themselves before their god. Was it so that they might be forgiven the offence?
    Their prayers complete, the men turned back to worldly business. They slung the bright orange tarpaulin from the boat between two trees and secured it, making some shade for themselves. The Leader got busy once again with his phone. They boiled water over the fire and brewed tea, all huddled under the shade of the tarpaulin. Suddenly I saw their mistake and grinned inwardly. After all these pains to conceal the turquoise skiff, if a plane passed overhead nothing could have been more conspicuous to it than that orange tarpaulin. Fresh hope arose in me: as long as they all sat blithely under a covering as bright as a Belisha beacon then somebody might spot us from above.
    It was as if my thoughts had been broadcast out of the top of my head. Within moments Money and the Leader stomped from under the tarpaulin and cocked their heads to the skies, as if listening for something. A plane? If so, I couldn’t see it, much less hear it. But in a trice the men had pulled down the tarpaulin, folded it and stashed it. Crestfallen, I clung at least to the notion that it had indeed been a plane they’d heard – a plane looking for me.
    The Leader then strode away from the group down a path that led around a corner and disappeared. I watched him all the way until he vanished from view. Where did the path lead? I had to find out. I signalled for the Navigator, told him I needed thetoilet. By now I had devised two sounds to express and distinguish the need: either a hiss or a grunt. I found that by a grunt I was permitted to walk a little further away from them than by a hiss. This time I selected a reasonably private shrub as near to the bend in the path as I could. But I couldn’t see much of where it led. Escape was on my mind, but with it came the fear that if I tried and failed I might put myself in greater jeopardy. My ordeal had lasted two days – another forty-eight hours and it might be all over. When I got the inevitable signal to hurry up and move back nearer the camp I complied.
    As the day wore on my captors once again spread themselves out on the ground to sleep, rifles by their sides. A fantasy entered my head in which I ran over, grabbed up one of their weapons without their waking, instantly figured out how to fire it, and strafed the lot of them with bullets – the Leader too, whenever he returned. As I was idling in my mind, knowing I was utterly incapable of any such thing, I began too to think about how much more perilous it might be for me to do this than not to.
    *
    The Leader returned after a few hours, toting some plastic carrier bags as though he had been shopping. Marvin came over to me with bottled water, which I drank gratefully, and some biscuits – labelled ‘Encore’, each the size of a pencil eraser, in long cellophane strips. They