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All is lost.
The world of the Tungu could not be preserved.
The grand attempt of saving these last truly primitive people from the effects of our time has failed.
The power of our care has proved to be violent helplessness.
The Tungu tribe live in a secluded valley high up in the rain forest.
It was the fate of isolation, which helped retain the Tungu dance culture: The only pure body language cult on our planet.
The Tungu knew neither image nor sign.
Not even the simplest body painting had been invented.
They knew no ornament.
Skin, bark and the clay by the riverbank remained unscathed.
Everything signifying pleasure and despair and the cycle of life, the tribe expressed through daily dance.
To us, the word TUNGU seemed to represent the meaning of WE and the meaning of DANCE without recognisable distinction.
Touchingly simple and yet monumental, the dance of the Tungu appeared before our eyes and our science as the last unbroken account of primeval man.
We arrived in the valley after 36 months of absence at the end of the last rain season.
We had returned to resume our highly sensitive monitoring task for the World Organisation for the Preservation of Endangered Peoples.
And we found the scene completely changed.
For the first time in their tribal history the Tungu worshipped the image of a terribly explicit deity.
The tribe produced small and large versions from bones, wood, clay and resin.
They had even dug out the ancestor's skulls.
With hair and plant fibres stuck to them the skulls resembled and served the new god.
The sculpture we discovered on the once empty dance area, ...
... assembled on a wooden structure from more than one hundred brownish skulls, was at least 5 metres tall.
In the bare, trodden down dance circle, nothing of the previous variety of expression was displayed. Only a few shocking rudiments remained.
The sudden impact of the new cult seemed to have robbed the old danced of any sense.
Watching the pitiful jumping about brought tears to our eyes.
When we attempted to take a look at a newly built temple hut, the previously peaceful hunters denied us access.
It was a riddle.
However, from the darkest corner glimmered the light of revelation.
At first, it seemed impossible to determine the origin of the ornamental art the tribe had associated with their first deity.
From out of nowhere, the Tungu had developed five seemingly abstract symbols, ...
... which they painted on large leaves, scratched into their jars and tattooed onto their bellies and faces with natural dye.
Something within us refused to accept the stunning simplicity of the answer.
Most likely, deciphering the code was simply too easy to be achieved right away.
They derived their form neither from the shape of animals nor plants, neither from the bend in the river, nor the ridgeline of the mountains.
In their composition, stroke and curvature are nothing short of fairly true representations of Latin letters.
Five of our capital letters provide the new, cultic stock of the tribe: C, E, I, M and R!
As single letters, in pairs, groups of threes, fours and fives they are used.
And even though we were certain we had made the final breakthrough in understanding, ...
...amazingly it took us one more day before we realised that one combination of fives occured particularly often.
We wanted to know it all.
Satellite phones. Reinforcements. Special ops. Blend grenades. Tear gas.
We followed in to do our work.
We took samples of the sanctum that was kept in a shrine made of polished bones.
With our bounty our helicopters rose towards the safe darkness of the sky.
Now we know.
What triggered the skull cult was a printed piece of paper.
Nothing more than the ripped off cover of a cheap paperback book.
A skull-face with blowing hair.
The word CRIME to be read above it.
The first part of the title of that piece of pulp.
Our chemical analysts investigated the paper sample we robbed from the Tungu temple.
They found mummified traces of human excrement and distinct crystallised urine.
The kind that only develops when urine is shock-frozen in extremely thin air.
What a defeat!
What a disgrace.
We cannot wash our hands of responsibility.
The Tungu dance culture collapsed through a gift of the heavens.
Through the waste of our atmosphere contaminating soaring.
Still, in bashful, semi-concealed expectation, we are already rubbing our moist fingers.
"Time will tell!" goes the old global saying.
Even the dead centre moves.
Crime Tungu!
Even from the manure of this destruction a pale seedling will sprout towards our *** for fostering, our worldwide cultivating and caring:
The future of a great historic adventure.
Translation: Alex Leask