Ululations

Disaster fiction

The aircraft, bigger than we ever could have expected, flamed past the crescent moon, curved downwards toward the forested mountainside and impacted there in a splash of flame orange and green, a burst of quick color in the dull silver night. The noise came on after that: first the descending howl of an engine, then the crack and ripple of an engine on fire, then the far-off thud of the impact, heavy and low but sharp like a roll of thunder curtailed.

The guitars and singing on the village square all ceased, and we took a moment to catch up with our shock.

That was an event. That was the death of hundreds of strangers intruding on our little village festival. We are not a vociferous people and so very few of us screamed or even exclaimed. Mostly there were muttered oaths and rapid whispered prayers for the passing of the dead. Parents sent their children to inform their grandmothers of what they'd seen. They would be in charge of the services, the ululations.

Then we chose delegations to trek up the mountain. I was picked to lead one party of twenty-five younger men and women, so I led them as far as I could up the trail, then we got to machete-hacking a path in through the jungle. If we locals didn't find the wreckage of the plane, nobody else would. This is a forgotten and a forgetful land, and there was always the danger that we would reach the site of the accident having let the purpose of our expedition slip our minds. So there was a certain urgency; that is, as much urgency as could be mustered in a people like ours.

Ours is a remote province in the south-west of our country, a poor country that is in the south-west of our continent and is the colony of a colony of an empire that is itself the colony of a colony. The tiny colony that is the master of that great empire is still in the process of carving itself out of a far barren land very much unlike ours. This requires for them a great effort of hate, a superhuman piling up of emnity.

We, an old colony that has settled into a forgetful slumber in humid jungle lands, are quite the opposite. We hate nobody because we know nobody. No outsiders come to disturb our autarky of the soul. Our own bloods have mingled and we've ceased to recall who was once the master and who the peon.

The first corpse was found still strapped to his airliner seat in a self-made clearing about halfway up the mountain. He looked like one of the totem figures carved by the tribespeople, our remote cousins who dwell in the deep interior of the land.

There was no visible damage to this dead man, no flame char or bloody severance of members. He was intact, alone, and solemn. His face looked mildly worried, wrinkled with vague anxiety, which was a considerable understatement of what had been his final predicament.

I'm the village doctor, so I pronounced on him an official death and detached a small group to bury him and mark the grave. We continued, thinking now of our gods that had fallen also from the skies and how the next things to come must be the black jaguar of consuming night and a smoking mirror betokening sorcery. Some speculated aloud that these gods would not fail to haunt a place of great catastrophe, but those voices were quickly hushed and we went on hacking through the forest.

When we found the wreckage it was the early dawn and the accidental fires had all gone out. A great gouge there and a multiple splintering of trees. There were metal fragments everywhere, jagged pieces and small square panels, and there were rags and garments burst from out of cases and scattered in the remaining trees.

The unbroken rear part of the fuselage stacked out of the furrowed mountainside and stood into the sky at an angle like a collapsing tower frozen in the moment of its tumbling. Inside it, the bodies hung down from their seats and dripped their libations of blood to propitiate the jaguars.

I clambered up through the fuselage and I checked each one for life and found none living there. I had never seen so many people all in one place, and all of them dead. It was like finding a whole new city in an exploration to an unknown land and finding it inhabited entirely by silent motionless wraiths.

Finally I decided that we must bury them here, at the foot of this broken tower. We had no means of taking them back with us, and we didn't want the jaguars to gnaw them. But jaguars never came. Neither the black jaguar god not the god of the smoking mirrors manifested at this place. Nor the god of the Christians, and it’s well-known that he loves to lurk around places of great death.

Other parties arrived from my village and we organized groups to write down details from wallets and purses and passports, and to pass the bodies into new-dug graves. The dead carried strange money that we threw away, but I cannot swear that none of my people took away their gold and jewels. If they did, they kept them hidden forever, because they knew that the god of the smoking mirror would covet what they had.

We lived on, speaking little of this disturbance to our small lives. As I've said, we have almost no contact with the outside world. At length, after a year or two, or three, a man arrived from the capital. He'd been sent by the authorities at the instigation of the great empire to look into rumors of their crashed aircraft. We have nothing to hide; we led them there, to the crooked tower on the mountainside in the deep jungle mist.

Money. He offered money for the bodies. So we gave him bodies. Though we had little use for their money, nothing much to buy except rum and guns. I had the lists of names and the places marked for the graves. He paid us to hike up and down the trail carrying the bodies in rubber sacks to the village square, where men from the city in all-terrain vehicles would stack them up and take them away. We burned incense and spoke incantations to remove the sour smell and their curse.

We included some of our own departed to travel with these strangers so the outsiders wouldn't be lonely on their journey. And so that our dead could see the land outside our land and tell us what they'd seen when we came to meet them in the next place.

And our grandmothers sang again their ululations as the army ambulances pulled out of town with their sirens sadly wailing. The sounds mingled in the mist of the air and drifted away into the jungle.

================== ULULATIONS/END ======================

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Written in response to a prompt at Fictionistas that included the following elements:

a castle tower, or a rook; comedy and tragedy masks; an arrow pointing in a south-west direction; a flame; a crescent moon; an airplane; a die; a worried face; a house

A die or dice is not included in the story itself but was used to compose it.

Inspired to some extent by the J.G. Ballard story “The Air Disaster” from 1974 for the setting and mythology, but also to an anecdote from my father and uncle about trekking up the mountain outside their remote Irish village to an aircraft wreck during World War II. In total six aircraft crashed on this mountain during the war, five British and one German.

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