A Chance to Die by Elisabeth Elliot (best book recommendations .TXT) 📕

the old woman actually share her room? She was. And if Saral sleeps on the floor, why should I have a bed? was her argument. No, no, they could not hear of it. Amy gave in, for “our quarters are so very close together any vagaries would be speedily detected.”

She carried on with her Tamil lessons, and took Saral out visiting the Kota tribespeople, aborigines who lived as simply as aborigines anywhere, in houses which seemed hovels to the new missionary, eating strange foods, following strange ways. “Not one has as yet, we hear, been brought to Christ, yet He loves them and He died for them.” Saral spoke to them in her simplest Tamil. When a woman of the tribe died Amy and Saral went to the burning.

They had the Death Car there. . . . They piled the faggots round it. They lighted them, and a wild, wild wail rose up to the God who looked down and saw it all. Then the horn blew loud and long, and as the fire flamed, one part and then another caught, and as the terrible sound which they called the head-split cracked through the crackling of the wood, they seemed to put all the dread and horror of it into one intense yell.

Why do I tell it so? Why break through the pleasant scenes of home with this bit of the fiery barbaric? Why! Because it is true! It is true! It has gone on like that for thousands of years. It is going on today. Is there nothing in it which speaks? Has it not a voice for you? A voice, yes, and a Cry. The cry God heard when He said long ago, “The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto Me f rom the ground. Some of you are not much giving, not much caring.

From Kotagiri she went to “Ooty,” short for Ootacamund, another little paradise of English order and cleanliness in the hills, with shaded streets, comfortable bungalows staffed by sashed and turbaned servants, gardens redolent of jasmine, heliotrope, and roses. Here she stayed with Mrs. Hopwood, mother of the Miss Hopwood described by Malcolm Muggeridge when he visited her some twenty years later:

A zealous evangelical lady of some wealth who maintained a house named “Farley” to accommodate missionaries on furlough. . . . We knew little of her own family circumstances, but she spoke sometimes of traveling about Europe with her mother, and attending musical festivals. Music was her only “worldly” interest; otherwise she considered all forms of entertainment as belonging to the Devil’s domain. Hymn-singing was a permissible indulgence of her taste for music, and whenever possible she threw herself into it with tremendous zest, often, in her own house, providing the accompaniment as well on a small harmonium she had. She must have been rather pretty when young, and even in late middle age, when I knew her, she had still a grace and charm and gaiety about her . . . I can see her now with her energetic step, going about the garden and in and out of the house; the chains and bracelets she was given to wearing jingling and tinkling with her movements. Always busy, always breathless, always smiling.2

The young Miss Hopwood, a missionary to Muslims herself, took Amy to visit the Todas, another aboriginal tribe who lived in “a collection of beehives.” The two ladies climbed a tree overlooking the village and talked of the desperate need for workers.

Miss Hopwood, zealous and evangelical, was not more so than her new friend Miss Carmichael. Amy rang the bell one morning to gather the servants for prayers. The cook’s small boy, pointing to the bell, said, “It’s a god.”

I looked at the thing, it had a scratched face on the handle, and the face, he declared, was Ram’s. I think the young scamp meant nothing more serious than a bit of mischief, but I knocked the bell handle off and pushed it into a fire which was burning near. He could never say that again! They all looked on, servants and coolies, and nobody said a word. Would a god let me do that? I asked them, and walked off, carrying the battered bell.

Walking on the hills with Saral she discovered three stones under a tree which Saral said were heathen idols. “To see those stupid stones standing there to the honor of the false gods, in the midst of the true God’s beauty, was too much for us. We knocked them over and down they crashed and over they rolled forthwith. Oh the shame of it! It makes one burn to think of His glory being given to another.”

Naturally there was an Anglican church in Ooty, “depressingly English,” Amy said, with the usual Gothic arches and stiff pews. The governor of Madras, in gray frock coat and top hat, attended when on holiday there, and occupied the front pew which was reserved for him and his ladies. Indians who for one reason or another could not be refused admission were restricted to the pews at the back.

Far more to Amy’s taste than riding to the English church in a proper carriage was trundling in a bullock cart to the convention held especially for missionaries. There she felt at home at once, away from the scenes of “fashionable Christianity” which were to her so strange and saddening. They sang the old Keswick hymns. “There was almost a Keswick feeling in the air. But the best of all was seeing the missionaries, specially the Tinnevellyites. Real Soldier-Missionaries.” Among them was a man Amy had been hearing about: Thomas Walker. “Oh, he’s a man by himself, very extreme, you know, a bit narrow-minded, but a scholar and a very fine man,” was what she heard. She formed a mental picture: white-headed, rather cantankerous with wisdom and learning written all over him. She had taken along her Tamil grammar in case the addresses should be dull. When Walker spoke, her book remained closed. He was thirty-six years old, jet-black hair, dark,